Shining Rock

Sue was crying. “That’s why you sold the Lexus. Why you moved us to Eden Prairie. How’d you keep this from me, Roger? How did you—”
“Live with myself? I don’t know. I still don’t know.”
“Are you sure it’s him? That Donald’s the father of the girl you hit?”
“This thing happened in early October. Almost six years ago. In St. Paul.”
“But what if it’s just a horrible coinci—”
“I still dream about the orange shoes and blue shorts, Sue.”
“Oh God, baby.” She turned over and pulled her husband down onto her chest, ran her fingernails across the back of his neck. “What do you think he’s gonna try to do to us?”
“I don’t know, but he didn’t come all this way, follow us up into the middle of nowhere just to talk.”
“So we just leave? Right now?”
“Yes.”
“Can you get us back to the trailhead in the dark?”
“I think so. If not, we’ll just hide somewhere until morning. What’s important is getting out of this tent and away from our camp as soon as possible.”
“But he must know where we live, Roger.” Sue sat up, faced her husband. “He was able to find out we were coming to North Carolina. What keeps him from doing this when we get back to Minnesota? Or from turning you in?”
“I don’t think this is about bringing me to justice in any legal sense of the word.”
“We can’t just run away, Roger.”
“Sure we can. And we will.”
“He might know where our girls live. Might decide to go after them. We have no idea what he’s capable of.”
“So what are we supposed—”
“You wanna be free of this?”
“Of course.”
“Have it never come back to haunt you as long as you live? Guarantee the safety of me and the girls? Your own freedom?”
For a moment, there was no sound but the weeds brushing against the exterior of the tent.
“Jesus, Sue. I don’t have that in me.”
“Well, you had it in you to leave a teenage girl dying in the street. Now if that man came into this wilderness to murder us, he probably went out of his way to make sure no one knew he was coming here, which works out perfectly for us.”
He heard his wife moving in the darkness, the separating teeth of a zipper.
The leather case dropped in his lap.
“You have to take the bullets out,” she whispered. “Wipe them down so they don’t have our prints. You probably won’t be able to find the shell casings in the dark.”
“Sue, I can’t.”
“You’re gonna make me handle this? Look, it breaks my heart that that man lost his daughter, and it makes me sick that it’s your fault, but I will not live the rest of my life in fear, looking over my shoulder, calling Jennifer and Michelle five times a day to make sure they’re okay. That morning, when you drove away, you decided you weren’t gonna let a mistake you made destroy our lives. Well, it’s too late to change course now.”
“I am telling you I can’t—”
“You don’t have a choice. This night’s been coming ever since that October morning. You started this six years ago. Now go finish it.”
* * * *
He left Sue lying in the tall grass several hundred feet down the mountainside and headed back up toward the meadows of Beech Spring Gap carrying a flashlight he didn’t need under the blazing wattage of the moon.
He reached the gap, moved past their tent and along the trail that led to Shining Rock Mountain, the base of which stood cloaked in thickets of rhododendron that bloomed pink in the month of June.
On a walk that morning, a thousand years ago, he’d noticed a piece of red tucked back among the glossy green leaves, and wondered now if that had been Donald’s tent.
He walked off the trail and crouched down in the grass. Five yards ahead lay the edge of the rhododendron thicket. Roger thought he recalled that piece of red being a hundred feet or so up the gentle slope, though he couldn’t be sure.
For a while, he lay on the ground, just listening.
The grass swayed, blades banging dryly against one another.
Rhododendron leaves scraped together.
Something scampered through the thicket.
This was his thirteenth summer coming to Shining Rock, and he found that most of their time here had vanished completely from memory—more impression than detail. But a few of their trips remained clear, intact.
The first time they’d come and accidentally discovered this place, the twins were only six years old, and Michelle had lost her front teeth to this gap while she and Jennifer wrestled and rolled in a meadow one sunny afternoon, and cried her heart out, afraid the tooth fairy wouldn’t pay for lost teeth.
There had been the trip seven years ago, when he and Sue had to fake happy faces for the girls, crying at night in their tent, while fifteen hundred miles away, in a laboratory in Minneapolis, a tumor cut from the underside of Sue’s left breast was screened for a cancer that wasn’t there.
Three years back, he’d been anxiously awaiting news on an advertising campaign he’d pitched, which, if chosen, might have netted him half a million dollars. He remembered trying not to dwell on the phone call he’d make once they left these mountains, knowing if he got a yes, what that would mean for his family. He’d pulled over once they reentered cell-phone coverage at an overlook outside of Asheville. Walked back toward the car a moment later, eyes locked with Sue’s, shaking his head.
But looking at the time they’d spent here as a whole, forest instead of tree, it felt a lot like his life—so many good times, some pain, and it had all raced by faster than he could’ve imagined.
Roger crawled to the thicket’s edge and started up the hill, the flashlight and the Glock shoved down the back of his fleece pants.
After five minutes, he stopped to catch his breath.
He thought he’d been making a horrible racket, dead leaves crunching under his elbows as he wriggled himself under the low branches of the rhododendron shrubs. But he assured himself it wasn’t as much noise as he thought. To anyone else, to Donald, it probably sounded like nothing more than the after-hour scavenging of a raccoon.
Roger was breathing normally again and had rolled over on his stomach to continue crawling when he spotted the outline of a tent twenty yards uphill. The moon shone upon the rain fly, and in the lunar light he could only tell that it was dark in color.
He pulled the gun out of his waistband.
His chest felt tight, and he had to take several deep breaths to make the lightheadedness dissolve.
Then he was crawling again, though much slower now, taking care to avoid patches of dead leaves and low-clearance branches that might drag across his jacket.
The tent stood just ahead, a one-man A-frame. He was still hidden in shadow, but another few feet and he’d emerge from the cover of darkness into the moonlit glade.
* * * *
Roger lay beside the tent and held his breath, listening for deep breathing indicative of Donald sleeping, if in fact this was even the man’s tent. He didn’t know how long he lay there. Two minutes. A quarter of an hour. Whichever it was, it felt like ages elapsed, and he still hadn’t heard a sound from inside.
Maybe Donald wasn’t in there. Maybe he’d already found a spot to hide and watch their tent. Maybe he was a silent sleeper. Maybe he’d heard Roger crawling toward him through the rhododendron and was sitting up right—
“That you out there, Roger?”
Roger jumped up and scrambled back toward the thicket.
He stopped at the edge of the glade, his gun trained on the tent, trembling in his hand.
“Would you tell me something?” Donald asked. “Was she alive right after you hit her? She was dead when the paramedics arrived.”
Roger had to wet the roof of his mouth with his tongue so he could speak.
“She was gone instantly,” he lied.
“You didn’t tell your wife, did you?”
“No.”
“She seemed surprised. Does she know you came over here? Did you discuss it with her after I left? Tell her what you’d done?”