“Yeah. There was an accident on Denali last night. High winds on the pass and apparently an entire roped team fell. They think they’re in Peters Glacier, but they’re still looking for them. Dad brought in an NPS team from Anchorage to help.”
Orion had stilled on her words, spoken with sadness, but with the cool-edged solemnity of a seasoned Alaskan.
“What team? Do you know if it was Kit’s group?”
She glanced at him. “I don’t know.”
He drew in a breath and glanced at the range. He’d experienced those high winds, had barely hung on to the mountain, and he’d been anchored in. So much of the time roped teams didn’t carry the gear to the summit they needed for self-rescue—ice screws, descenders, belay systems—preferring a light run up the mountain to preparing for the worst.
Kit, however, wasn’t that kind of guide. She would have made her crew at least take provisions to spend the night trapped in weather.
Or, looked at the skies and not gone at all.
He settled back in his seat. That’s what the NPS rescue team was for—it wasn’t his problem.
He pressed his hands over his gurgling stomach.
Larke set them down at the Copper Mountain FBO where Ham had left his rental car. They unloaded the gear into Orion’s Ford Ranger, also parked in the lot.
“I’m headed to the motel to shower up. How about I pick up a couple steaks and we meet at your place?” Ham said to Orion. Jake lingered by the rental car.
“Still not finished trying to convince me to join your little SAR group?” Orion tossed his keys in his hands.
“C’mon, Ry. That thing inside you that you can’t keep dodging, that pull to do something more with your life? You think it’s about Royal, but it’s not. It’s about the fact that God isn’t finished with you yet. He’s calling you to something—I know it, and so do you. And I think it’s Jones, Inc. Join me, Ry. Let’s do good things together. Help people. Bring the lost home.”
Orion glanced out toward the hazy, gray peaks to the north. “God doesn’t want a bitter, angry guy like me, Ham.” He looked at him. “And neither do you.”
“Yes, I do. And yeah, you’re right about God—he doesn’t want the darkness inside you to win. But maybe helping others is the first step to letting it go. To healing.”
Orion shook his head. “It’s not something I can let go. I’m not even sure I want to.” And maybe it was because he’d nearly died with the guy, but Orion let the truth spiral out, even as he looked away, across the tarmac, watching Larke tie down her plane.
“Thing is, right now I’m like this guy holding on to a tree in the middle of a tsunami. There’s dark, lethal water all around me, and at least as long as I hold on to the tree, as desperate as that is, I’m safe.” He squeezed his keys in his palm, letting them bite. “I let go into that mess of betrayal and grief and who knows where I’ll end up.” He opened his car door. “Trust me, this is safer for everyone. Me, alone with my darkness.”
Ham’s mouth tightened. “Warm up the grill. I’ll be over with the steaks.”
Orion lifted a hand to Jake and climbed into his truck. He took the highway north, back toward the park where his family had homesteaded over a hundred acres of pristine pine forest, running dogsleds and snowmobiles as his father worked the park.
His father had rescued so many people off Denali, it was practically in Orion’s gene mix to think about where the climbers might have gotten lost. Maybe an avalanche had ripped out the fixed ropes to the pass, taken them all down. Or, like Larke had said, maybe they’d all blown off, careening into Peters Glacier.
He turned onto the dirt road that led back to his place, built on the edge of their property. Originally a hand-crafted two-room cabin, the house had been upgraded by two generations of Starrs to include timber framing, a grand wraparound porch, and a two-story great room that faced the park.
Denali, of course.
He got out and headed inside, toeing off his boots by the door before he went upstairs to the lofted bedroom—once his parents’, now his—and right into the shower.
He took off a layer of grime so thick he thought he might be de-scaling. But when he emerged, he felt human again, his smell no longer offensive. He shaved too, just because, and changed into a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt before he padded barefoot down the stairs.
The timber framing and the shadow of the looming pines that surrounded the property sent a chill into the house. He built a fire in the soaring rock fireplace, let it crackle its warmth into the house, and went into the kitchen to scrounge up some food.
He hoped Ham would keep his word, because he had nothing but an old piece of cheese and some spoiled milk in the fridge.
Orion scrounged up a half bag of stale chips from the pantry and walked out to the picture window. Stared at Denali, at the gray hood that hovered over the peak.
Be safe, Jacie.
His words found him, and he drew a breath, but not fast enough to press Ham out of his head, too. “That thing inside you that you can’t keep dodging, that pull to do something more with your life? God isn’t finished with you yet. He’s calling you to something—”
A knock came at the door and he turned, seeing Ham pulling open the screen to step inside. He was carrying a paper bag in one hand, his cell phone in the other.
Jake was on his tail, holding a six-pack of dark bottles. Maybe craft root beer, because he knew Jake didn’t drink alcohol.
He set the bottles on the counter. They’d both showered and shaved, dressed in clean clothes.
Ham put the paper bag—groceries, Orion hoped—on the rough-hewn table in the kitchen. Then he put his phone down and looked at Orion.
“Okay, what’s going on?” Orion asked.
“It’s time to join the team, bro,” Jake said.
“We need you,” Ham added. He walked over to the picture window. “I just got off the phone with my buddy Lucas McGuire.” He pointed to the mountain. “His wife went to the summit yesterday. And she didn’t come back down.”
Orion looked at him.
“Her guide had access to a sat phone and was supposed to call him from High Camp after their ascent. And when she didn’t, he started to worry.”
Orion’s gut was grinding again. “Don’t tell me—”
“Sorry, but she was on that team of all women. Jenny Calhoun and Aria Sinclair. They’re all three missing.”
Orion turned back to the window, to the gray cap hovering over Denali.
“We’re going back on the mountain,” Ham said softly as Jake came to stand beside them.
Orion nodded, his appetite gone. “We’re going back on the mountain.”
CHAPTER FIVE
JENNY HEARD GEESE.
Which of course couldn’t be right.
Geese, and the smell of fresh-cut grass, and the taste of the ocean on her lips, salty and dry. So dry. She swallowed, and her saliva stuck like lard in the back of her throat.
She couldn’t speak, her voice a common casualty in her dreams, but the world opened and for a moment she recognized the memory. Mount Rainier poking its glorious white dome up from a layer of clouds, the deep blue of Puget Sound rippling out along a rocky shoreline. The occasional breaching of a whale.