to the trailhead and parked. Then he either took her life here and carried her up the trail or else forced her to walk up there with him and then did it.

Took her life.

The boy stood remembering another shaded hollow in the woods. A cold bench and white crooked headstones. A tarnished metal plaque that promised forty days and all of it attended by the white statue with her maimed blessing and all of it so long ago.

What do you think will happen this time?

Nothing. Let’s go.

The path followed the mountain’s edge with only a thin median of pines separating the climbers from the gorge and the open sky. The going was steep, yet for every step there appeared a stone or a thick knee of root made bone smooth by time and weather and the treads of hikers, and the men ascended these crude steps single file, the sheriff in the lead and the deputies bringing up the rear, giving Grant and the boy the look and the feeling of two men on their way to some high alpine arraignment. Through the trees and not fifty feet off in the blue sky, two brown eagles rode the updrafts wing tip to wing tip, without effort or urgency, absolutely soundless, their hunter’s eyes searching.

Above the climbers, on a level stretch of trail, two more men in uniform stood waiting, peering out through the trees into the sky. They saw the eagles bank suddenly, pinions riffling, and dive down into the gorge like Messerschmitts.

“Oh, they saw something,” said one of the men. “They saw dinner,” said the other, but when they heard the climbers they said no more and waited for them to come over the rise of the trail: sheriff, father, son and deputies, all winded and all ready for the level strip of trail, crowded though it was with the seven of them clustered there. The two waiting men were the Boulder County sheriff and one of his deputies. Introductions were made and the Boulder sheriff, whose name was Price, tipped back his hat and said that this was where the hiker had spotted her. She was hard to see, said Price, you had to step through the branches, right up to the edge, and look straight down.

“What made the hiker do that?” said Kinney.

“I asked him the same thing, Sheriff.”

“What’d he say?”

Price glanced at Grant, the boy, and then at the ground.

“Said he was relieving himself.”

Within the trees there was only one place where a man could stand like that and Kinney stepped into it and looked down. After a moment he stepped back and stood with his hands on his belt, not quite yielding the spot to Grant. He seemed to be in argument with himself. Then he moved back to the trail and let Grant pass.

Grant stepped between the branches and all of his vision and all of his heart spilled over the bluff and fell to the rocky outcrop some forty feet below, a dun-colored shelf piled with tumbled scree and sun-bleached wood and rimmed around by stunted, clinging pines. South-facing, there was no snow or even any trace of thaw on the shelf, and at first he saw nothing but a gray and dry twist of fallen tree on which someone, or the wind, had hung faded rags of cloth. Then he saw the sweep of black hair, the back of her head, and his mind corrected the image and he was tottering in space. One of his legs back-stepped of its own accord and his arm came into a strong grip and he turned to see who held him and it was his son.

He looked into Sean’s eyes and the boy looked back with his matching eyes.

“I don’t know,” Grant said. “I can’t tell.”

He stepped back and the boy took his place at the edge of the bluff. Leaned out and looked down.

“I’m sorry, Grant,” said Kinney. He glanced at Price and his deputy. “I shouldn’t have brought you up here. I thought you’d be able to see. Why don’t you go on back down and—” He stopped. The other sheriff and the deputies were staring.

“Be damned,” said Price, and the others turned to see the boy going over. He’d taken hold of a branch at the edge of the bluff and swung his leg out over the lip and was climbing down.

“Sean,” said Kinney, “don’t do that.”

“Sheriff, he can’t do that,” said one of the deputies. “That’s a crime scene.”

“I said don’t do that, son.” Kinney came forward to take hold of the boy and Grant put out his hand.

“It’s all right, Joe.”

“Hell it is. He’s got a broke hand and a bum leg. I wouldn’t let a healthy man climb down there.”

“It’s all right,” Grant said.

“It ain’t all right, Grant. Son,” said the sheriff to the top of the boy’s head, “I want you back up here. That’s an order.”

The boy went on. Backing steadily down the face of the bluff by way of tree root and rock and fissure. He knew that under the cast the bones would hold and that it was the cast itself that opposed him, and his progress was slow; finding a foothold with his good leg, reaching down and finding a handhold with his good hand, lowering himself to the next foothold and This is your plan, then, to make him watch you fall to your death? and with every movement sending small rockslides of talus chattering down to the ledge below. When he was perhaps twenty feet from where she lay, he looked over his shoulder and saw only the green void behind him and he turned back and said aloud, “Don’t do that. Do not do that.” A few feet farther down, his bad leg slipped and for a moment he scouted the place where he would land below on the ledge, but his boot, scrabbling at the rock face, found purchase and he continued on.

Five or six feet above the ledge his strength gave out, or he allowed it to give out, and he pushed off and fell clear of the wall and landed good leg first and the leg skidded out from under him in the tailings and he came down violently on his back in a cloud of dust beside her.

High above him through the haze of dust was his father’s face.

“You hurt?” he called down.

“I’m all right,” the boy answered. Up there, one of the men said something about evidence and the other sheriff, Price, said, “I know, Deputy.”

The boy coughed and got to his knees and turned to her. Under the veil of what was once a plaid flannel shirt her back was wrapped in a colorless leather, the leather so tight it showed every rib and every vertebra. Where her waist had been was a pebbled stretched material like the webbing of a duck’s foot. One arm lay under her and the other lay tangled in the roots of the clinging small pines, more root now than arm. There was no smell but the dry smell of the pines and the dusty, chalky smell of the scree.

He reached and gathered a handful of black hair and it was like the hair of any living person except that when he moved it, it shed twigs and pine needles and small moltings as if it were some derelict nest and he thought maybe it was. He lifted the hair aside and leaned to see her face. What had been her face. The drawn gray mask of it in profile. The empty slit of eyelid deep in its bowl. Cheekbone like an elbow. Fallen nose. The toothy ghoulish half smile.

“Sean?” called his father.

He looked at this face, this maybe-sister. Maybe-daughter. He looked along the wasted length of her and saw nothing he recognized. The clothes were like none he’d seen on her before. The remains of the shoes were not the remains of running shoes but of some kind of hiking boot. He looked again at her clothes. A fallen threadbare flap of backside pocket trembled in a breeze. Something glinted dully in the talus where it had piled up against her, and he grubbed there with his forefinger and brought forth a key and pulled on the key and following it out of the pebbles was a short length of chain and at the end of that, popping loose with a tug, swung a small gray clump. He stilled the swinging clump and held it close to his face and blew on it and a dingy white fur stirred in his breath.

There was something else in the debris below the pocket. He dug again and unearthed a thin plastic wallet folder. He prized a finger into the folder and it fell apart and the cards spilled out. Two faded credit cards and an ID. At one corner of the ID the lamination had curled away and the paper inside had been soaked and dried many times over, yet the picture and much of the printing had survived. Her name was Kelly Ann Baird. She had been a student at the University of Colorado. He could not read the date of her birth.