“I’ll do it,” I said, clapping my hands.

“Do what?”

“Like you just said. Go on a vacation. What a great idea!”

Tom paused. “You will? Just like that?”

“It’s brilliant, Tom,” I said, standing to do a little shuffle-foot dance. “I’ll start making plans.”

Tom nodded and turned back to his corner office, stricken mute. I could tell he’d prepared an entire lecture on Why Carson Ryder Should Take a Vacation.

Tom paused at his doorway, fingers tapping the frame. He turned.

“You’d planned to take some time off, right, Carson? Is that it?”

I did cherubic innocence. Tom waved the question away and went inside his office, his long face heavy with puzzlement.

Which explains, in a roundabout way, how I ended up in Eastern Kentucky, hanging off the side of a mountain while being yelled at by a gnome.

6

“Hey Carson!” called a voice from way below my feet. “You get lost again? Yoo-hoo, Earth to Carson Ryder.”

“I hear you, Gary,” I called over my back. Above me I saw two hundred feet of Corbin sandstone, the leavings of untold millennia of alluvial flooding. I was climbing through the compressed floor of an ancient sea that flowed during the Mississippian era, 400 million years ago. My fingers clutched small handholds. My toes were wedged into clefts. At my back lay nothing more than air.

“Others are waiting their turn, bud. Come on down.”

I pushed away from the rock face, dropping a foot until the rope through the bolt jolted me to a stop and I was lowered thirty feet to the ground. Gary, the twenty-five-year-old rock-climbing instructor, a diminutive guy who was part gnome, part mountain goat, grinned as my feet hit the ground. Pete Tinker, the other instructor from Compass Point Outfitters, grabbed the control rope and launched another aspiring climber up the cliff face. Gary patted my back.

“You seem to get lost up there, Carson. How was it?”

“I’m sweating like a sprinkler,” I said, pulling my soaked tee from my chest to put air over my skin. “My muscles are quivering. My fingers ache. But I’m ready to go back up right now.”

“I’m not surprised. A lot of folks don’t have the physicality for rock climbing, the strength and elasticity. You do. But even more, you have an intuitive feel. You don’t waste motion.”

“I’m surprised to hear that. I feel clumsy as a first-step toddler.”

Gary grimaced toward the young woman just sent up. She’d lost her grip and was spinning in the air as Tinker belayed rope and shouted instructions.

“These folks are toddlers, Carson. Four days of lessons and you’re up and running. But you’ve done this before, I take it?”

I grinned. “I dated a climber a few years ago. She gave me the basics.”

“She done good. But you’re ready to move past the basics. You’re coming back, right?”

“Try and keep me away.”

I packed up my rented climbing gear and began coiling ropes. The eight other climbing students did the same under Gary and Pete’s watchful eyes. We heard the labored grind of an engine and turned to an SUV arriving on the old logging trail connecting the main road to our cliff face. The insignia on the door read US Forest Service. We were on their turf, inside the Red River Gorge Geological Area of the Daniel Boone National Forest.

The high-sprung vehicle crunched to a stop and two occupants exited, a big, square-built county cop about my age, mid-thirties. His face was a broad, flat plain centered by a button nose, as if a normal nose had been sectioned and only the tip pasted to his face. The man’s eyes were a gray wash and his mouth so lipless and tight I couldn’t imagine it smiling. His belly rolled three inches over a wide belt hung with police implements. The cowboy boots were alligator and the hogleg pistol he carried would only be standard issue in a Wild West wet dream. His uniform was too many hours from an iron.

Beside him, in visual opposition, was a trim and tall older guy in a hard-creased green uniform that looked ten minutes from the dry cleaners. It took a second to register that he was a forest ranger. He had a relaxed and dreamy smile on a tanned and ruggedly pleasant face, leaning back to stretch his spine. But I noted his half-closed eyes vacuuming in his surroundings. It was interesting.

The cop went to talk to Pete and Gary. I carried on coiling rope and watching from the corner of my eye. The ranger had nodded to the instructors before leaning against the trunk of a hemlock, whistling to himself and studying the sandy ground.

I looked up and caught a hard and cold appraisal from the sheriff, like he found something offensive in my bearing. I feigned indifference and walked my coil of rope to the van. Turning, I saw the ranger cross my path to pick up a tiny foil wrapper, as if collecting errant litter. He tucked the foil in his pocket, looked down again, headed back toward the SUV.

I knew what he was doing, and it had little to do with litter collection.

“Sheriff Beale,” the ranger said.

The cop turned from Gary, pushed back his hat. “E-yup?”

“We’re done.”

The big cop shot me another hard glance, then nodded and followed the ranger. They climbed in the Forest Service vehicle, pulled away slowly, the ranger at the wheel. As he passed in front of me, I smiled.

“Not the shoe prints you were looking for, right?”

His eyes held mine for a two-count. Then the eyes and the SUV were moving away and I tossed my second coil of rope in the van with the gear of the other students. They’d driven six miles from the outfitters in Pine Ridge. The cliff we’d been using for practice was only three miles from my lodgings, so I’d driven over on my own.

Gary shot a thumbs-up out the window, said, “See you later,” and the van rattled away.

I stared up the wall of rock – for a brief moment wondering how far up I could get on my own – then came to my senses and climbed into my pickup, pausing to enjoy the view and the strange journey that had led me here, a pas de deux with fate, or perhaps blind luck.

After talking with Lieutenant Mason, I had been sitting at home and shuffling through a lapful of travel brochures snatched from rest stops over the years. They were heavy on entertainment-oriented venues: Branson, Orlando, Gatlinburg, and other places that made me break out in a cold sweat. I was wondering if I should just put Mr Mix-up in the truck and start driving à la Steinbeck when the phone rang.

“Mr Ryder? This is Dottie Fugate at RRG cabin rentals up here in the Kentucky mountains. Feel like a little vacation getaway?”

“I, uh … What?”

“You stayed with us a while back, right?”

My family had lived in the area for four months when I was a child of seven, following my father in his job as engineer and bridge-builder. Then, almost a decade ago, at age twenty-seven, I’d returned before joining the MPD, a self-imposed weekend retreat to sort out a jumble of warring factions in my head. It hit me that I must have stayed at an RRG cabin.

“The last I was in your neighborhood was nine years ago, Miz Fugate. You keep records that long?”

She laughed. “Yep. An’ ever’ year we drop all the previous guests’ register cards in a hat and my daughter pulls out a winner of free use of a cabin. She plucked out your name. I sure hope you can come back and stay with us.”

Clair Peltier, a pathologist for the state of Alabama and my significant sometimes other, believes in the concept of synchronicity, thinking a webwork of logic underlies the fabric of the visible world, a fluid and spiritual mathematics with a sense of humor. She would have explained that my seeking a vacation spot and one arriving via phone was synchronicity: it was not luck, but an item on the universe’s to-do list.