Remains Read online

  “I’m sure you already have experts far more qualified than I am.”

  “I have a group of scientists poring over microscopes and slides, giddy with the prospect of publishing and naming these little bugs after themselves, and a cold case for which the department can’t spare any more manpower.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to help me find my sister,” Cavenaugh said. Fire burned behind in eyes. “And yours.”

  November 10 th, 2013

  Wednesday

  Gabriel hung up the phone and leaned back in the chair. His heart was pounding and his palms were damp. He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to go through with this. After nearly a week had passed without word from Cavenaugh, he had begun to think that he might never hear from him again, which had sounded better and better as time had passed. It had taken planting the cross on the peak of Mount Isolation to truly come to grips with the fact that his little sister was dead. Granted, not knowing how she had perished ate him alive inside, but worse was the prospect of learning that she might have suffered. Finding a single disarticulated bone didn’t bode well in that regard. Of course, the authorities had until recently speculated that she was still alive somewhere out there, that she and the others had formed some sort of cult and were now living safely in some apocalyptic compound praying for the Rapture. They apparently believed that there was a fine line between a believer and a zealot, and that anyone who disappeared into the wilderness looking for God had long since crossed it.

  But that wasn’t his sister. Not his Stephanie. Hers was not a blind faith, but a carefully orchestrated search for a higher power.

  He supposed that was what he had been doing all this time, too. In the years following their parents’ death, they had both embarked upon a quest for answers. He had only been sixteen years-old and Stephanie fourteen when the car accident had uprooted them from their stable lives in Hartford, Connecticut and moved them to Denver to live with their maternal grandparents. It wasn’t right for any God to orphan two children on what felt like a sadistic whim. In retrospect, Gabriel understood that their individual searches had diverged long ago. He had thrown himself into a science lab where he worked through a microscope, not necessarily to disprove the notion of God, but to prove that man held power over Him, especially when it came to life and death, while Stephanie had turned her eyes to the heavens.

  None of that mattered now. He had promised, if only to himself, that he would never let any harm befall her, and he had failed. Maybe they hadn’t found her body, but deep down, he knew. His little sister was dead.

  Gabriel swiped away the tears and rose from the chair. He walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The discomfort in his stomach told him he was hungry, but nothing looked remotely appealing. He finally settled on another bottle of Rolling Rock and returned to the living room of the small apartment, where he sat in front of the desktop computer. For the last six days, he had felt its inexorable pull and had resisted through sheer force of will, but now he knew the time had come.

  Cavenaugh had made all of the arrangements, just as he had promised he would. The cabins were rented for two weeks, and four of the others would be meeting them there on Saturday morning. Gabriel had already arranged his leave with the university by cashing in every last one of his accrued vacation days, while secretly hoping he wouldn’t have to use them. The short notice was going to cost him two classes over the summer session, but if he managed to gain some measure of closure, then it would definitely be worth it. Until now, the trip had been something of an abstraction, the kind of plan that never really materialized, but now he was faced with the reality of the situation: in two days he would return to the last place where his sister had been seen alive in hopes of discovering how she had died.

  He set aside the beer, which seethed like acid in his gut, and typed in the web address.

  After a moment, the home page opened and he stared at the image on the left side of seven smiling men and women, barely out of their teens. Their faces were flushed with the prospect of adventure. Gabriel was certain that was how they would have chosen to be remembered. Stephanie stood in the middle, her blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, her blue eyes like twin sapphires. She was wearing the yellow sweatshirt with the CU buffalo across the front that he had given her three months before on her twenty-third birthday. Had he known that birthday would have been her last, he would have given her something special, something meaningful. The cross she always wore hung over the collar: gold with five diamonds, one in the center and another at each end. She had been so vibrant, so beautiful, the kind of person who naturally became the center of attention whenever she entered a room. To her right stood Jenny Cavenaugh, who had short dark hair and her brother’s stocky build. She had eyes a shade of shamrock green so intense they looked computer-altered. Beside her were Levi Northcutt, who was tall and gangly, and had yet to outgrow his adolescent acne, and Nathan Dillinger, an average-looking guy with a Rockies cap pulled down over his eyes, and both femora still seated firmly in their sockets beneath his dirty jeans. To Stephanie’s left was Grant Farnham, who reminded Gabriel of Peyton Manning. He was discreetly holding his sister’s hand, which confirmed what Gabriel had suspected for several months leading up to their disappearance. Beside Grant were Chase Evans, a short, chubby boy with moppish red hair and a crooked smile, and Deborah MacAuley, a frumpy brunette with thick glasses and a palsy hand she held close to her chest. And rubbing his flank on Stephanie’s shin was her rescued orange tabby, Oscar, named for his frequently rotten disposition. Even he had vanished without a trace, leaving behind his empty food and water bowls, a used litter box, and his traveling crate amidst the collection of clothes, personal effects, and the food none of them had bothered to collect in their hurry to join the supposed cult.

  Gabriel felt a rush of anger at the thought and realized he was grinding his teeth. After more than a year of dissociating himself from his emotions, the last six days had broken the floodgates and left him at their mercy. He wanted to scream, cry, lash out, collapse into bed and sleep forever. But he hadn’t opened the website simply to view the photograph. Though he could probably recite the video blogs by heart, he needed to watch them again.

  A link on the right side of the home page led him to the “Diary Page,” which listed all of the dates of entry in columns beside the rectangular video screen in the center. The seven had each taken turns. His sister had been first in the rotation. He clicked the first link and Stephanie’s frozen image appeared in the viewer. His heart caught and a lump rose in his throat. With a shaking hand that caused the cursor to tremble on the screen, he clicked the triangular “PLAY” button.

  “Well, here we are, Day One,” Stephanie said. She wore the same smile she generally reserved for birthdays and Christmas morning. She was so happy she positively glowed. Her hand moved back and forth in the lower periphery of the image, soliciting a contented purr from her lap. Behind her, the window had been opened on a wall of pines and whatever forest creatures chattered in the canopy. The walls were paneled with wood so coarse it could give splinters just by looking at it. “We would all like to thank our families for being so supportive of our little adventure. So, thank you.”

  Stephanie blew the camera a kiss and there was a chorus of assent from somewhere off-screen.

  Gabriel smiled, even as the tears rolled down his cheeks.

  “So, as you all know, we’re here in the middle of nowhere searching for Proof. Maybe we’ll find it. Maybe we won’t. Either way, it’s going to be an exciting summer that none of us will ever forget. Another year of grad school and we’ll all have our master’s degrees. Some of us will continue on and pursue doctorates, while the rest of us will venture out into the real world and try to make a living in this primarily theoretical discipline. I guess that makes this our final hurrah.

  “And now our statement of mission for posterity. We’re here on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, nearly an
hour’s drive from the nearest indoor plumbing, because this is where the scriptures have led us. When we say we’re looking for proof of the existence of God, we understand that no such thing can ever be found. God must be taken on faith. However, what we can find is corroborative evidence to support the verses in the Bible, peripheral proof if you will. Like Porcher Taylor found what we believe to be Noah’s Ark on the top of Mount Ararat. Astronomers have recreated the night skies to validate the presence of the star that led the three wise men to the stable where Jesus was born, and the lineages of the Caesars can be factually dated to correspond with those in the Bible.

  “I would like to read a few verses now.

  “This is from the Book of Revelation, chapter twelve, verses seven through nine. And there was a war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world; he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

  “There’s another from Second Peter, chapter two, verse four: For God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment.

  “And that’s why we’re right here, right now. We believe that somewhere, hidden in these hills, we will find where the nephilim, the dark angels cast out of heaven with Lucifer, landed on earth, and provide incontrovertible proof that angels do exist. And by inference, we will be one step closer to finding God.”

  November 13 th, 2013

  Saturday

  All mythology is rooted in fact.

  Those six words returned again and again to the forefront of Gabriel’s mind as he drove westward along the winding highway, higher into the mountains. Throughout its history, mankind has always sought to explain what it doesn’t understand. Wild stories have been fabricated and deities created to rationalize events that are now easily justified. Thunder was caused by Thor’s hammer, lightning by Zeus’s hand. Sickness was the result of angering the spirits and natural disasters were the vengeance of the gods. While Gabriel didn’t subscribe to the Christian notion of God, he couldn’t help but think the same principles applied. How did man come to be? Why, God birthed him from nothing and set him down in the Garden of Eden, of course. Never mind the irrefutable arguments for evolution. The fall of Sodom and Gomorrah? God did it. Scholars claim to have found the Garden and the remains of both cities. If they had actually existed, then what had truly happened there? And if the mythology of the Bible were based in fact, then what had his sister and her friends found in these very mountains?

  Gabriel was forced to slow the black Intrepid as the snow, which until now had only come down in fits and starts, began to fall in earnest. The impregnable walls of ponderosa pines, assorted spruces, and bare aspens sparkled with the recent accumulation, while the scrub oak packed between the trunks remained sheltered beneath the canopy. Each bend in the road granted a brief glimpse of the sharp white peaks in the distance over the treetops. The flakes tumbled sideways across the asphalt on the shifting wind, but had fortunately yet to begin to stick.

  He cranked up the radio to drown out his thoughts.

  The highway descended into a deep valley, at the bottom of which was a wide river so blue it positively radiated a glacial coldness. Its banks were already buried beneath several inches of snow. Gabriel veered from the pavement onto the widened gravel shoulder just before the bridge that crossed the river, and turned right onto an uneven dirt road designated only by the 432 mile-marker post. The forest closed in from both sides to form a claustrophobic trench. Tire tracks marred the dusting of snow ahead. His car rattled over a long washboard stretch before the road evened out again.

  County Road 432 wended around the topography of the mountains for twenty-some miles before it appeared to simply peter out on the map. The cabins were just over fourteen miles from the highway. If he pushed the car past twenty-five miles per hour, he would be there in half an hour. Unconsciously, he eased off the gas.

  The river flirted with the road, but remained just out of reach through the trees.

  Gabriel switched on the headlights and turned up the windshield wipers, which made the thumping sound of a mechanical heartbeat that accelerated with his own. Between the heat gusting from the dashboard and the oppressive forest, the car was beginning to feel like a coffin. Cracking the window, he welcomed in the crisp wind, which screamed through the valley. He chased away the thought that it was the residual echo of the sound his sister had made with her dying breath.

  * * *

  Gabriel recognized the final stretch leading to the cabins as though only days had passed since he was last there. In his mind, he still wandered the forest in circles radiating outward from the small cluster of buildings, his throat on fire from crying Stephanie’s name well past the point where his voice failed him. The sharp pain in his gut intensified as he rounded the final bend and turned down the short drive, which ended in a rough gravel turnaround. There was a ring of pines in the center, between which were several weathered picnic tables. Three cars were already parked in front of the cabins beyond. He pulled around and parked behind Cavenaugh’s red Explorer. More than an inch of snow had already accumulated on its hood and roof, while the two cars parked diagonally in front of it were only beginning to grow a layer of ice.

  He sat in the car a moment longer and watched the snowflakes turn to droplets of water on the windshield. His hand shook when he finally reached for the handle and opened the door. After collecting his suitcase and backpack from the rear seat, he headed past the other cars toward the front cabin. The gold Lexus sedan presumably belonged to Kelsey Northcutt, Levi’s father the gastroenterologist, but he didn’t know to whom the forest green Chevy pickup in front of it belonged.

  At the foot of the dirt path, Gabriel paused to survey the cabins. They seemed somehow smaller, yet otherwise little had changed. Maybe the dark wood of the exterior had faded slightly, but the fixed green shutters beside the windows still appeared to be a stiff breeze from falling off and there were more shingles missing from the roofs than remained. The painted green doors were chipped and battered, and again he refused to imagine how they might have gotten that way. Thinner branches led from the main path around the sides of the front cabin to the other two, which were set just far enough behind and to the sides of the first to form a small courtyard between them. The yellowed wild grasses showed through the snow in matted clumps. There were no stumps or other evidence of cleared trees, as though the lush forest that encircled the buildings had simply refused to grow there.

  He heard the grumble of tires on gravel from the distance behind him and suddenly noticed that it was the only sound he heard over the soft patter of his tread on the snow. Even the wind, it seemed, couldn’t reach them on that isolated patch of earth.

  The front door opened and Cavenaugh stepped out onto the wood-plank porch. Firelight flickered behind him through the slots of the wood-burning stove.

  “Glad you were able to make it,” Cavenaugh said. He smiled, but it was obviously forced.

  Gabriel nodded and continued up the path. He ascended the warped stairs and passed Cavenaugh without making eye contact. The warmth pulled him into the small room, where he set his bags to the right of the door beside the others. There was barely enough room for a threadbare couch and a small end table with a kerosene lantern around the potbellied stove. He could see the lumpy, stripped mattress through the bedroom door directly to the left of the fire, and an avocado Formica countertop beside a rust-stained sink without faucets through the door to the right. Until now he had forgotten he would again have to become accustomed to using the outhouse and the hand pump for the well water.

  Cavenaugh rested a hand on his shoulder and he nearly jumped.

  “We’re just waiting for Maura Aragon now,” Cavenaugh said. “The former Maura Evans
.”

  “Chase’s sister,” Gabriel said.

  “The only one who won’t be represented here is Nathan Dillinger. His family feels that finding his femur was more than enough to answer their lingering questions. They just asked that they be notified if we come across any more of his remains.”

  Gabriel nodded once. He couldn’t blame them for not wanting to learn the details of how their loving son could have been separated from his right leg. The mere knowledge that he had must have been painful enough.

  “We’re setting ourselves up in the same rooms where our siblings—or son, in Kelsey’s case—stayed,” Cavenaugh said. “That means the two of us are bunking in the northern cabin with Jess MacAuley. She’s dropping off her bags over there now. We figured she could sleep on the couch and you and I could share the bed. Just no spooning.”

  Cavenaugh laughed. Gabriel tried to at least smile, but he didn’t have it in him. He had known how difficult it would be to return here, yet he had been completely unprepared. It felt as though all of the air were being sucked from the room. A dull ache radiated outward from his head into every bone in his body.

  “Might as well run your stuff over there before the storm gets much worse,” Cavenaugh said. “We’re all meeting back here as soon as we’re through.”

  Gabriel grabbed his bags, walked through the kitchen, and exited the back door. He veered left and passed the outhouse, which was now nearly overgrown by scrub oak. Smoke billowed from the aluminum cap on the roof of the cabin. He was nearly to the back door when movement from the edge of the forest to the right caught his eye, but when he turned, he saw only a cluster of ponderosa pines and the maze of trunks beyond leading into the shadows.

  He set his bags by the back door beneath the overhanging roof, and walked toward the tree line. Nothing moved, not even ground squirrels darting across the detritus from one mouth of their burrow to the next.