Chapter 5: The Memorial Stone

I banged on the barn door with both fists.

Gunnar was out in his socks before I'd finished yelling.

"Glory's gone. Out the window. She's headed down the road."

He was already pulling his boots on.

"The others?"

"Asleep."

"Somebody has to stay."

"I'm not staying," I said. "And you can't smell her."

He didn't argue with that.

I called Fern.

She answered on the second ring.

Ten minutes later her little hatchback came up the ridge with the wipers going, Fern behind the wheel in flannel pajamas.

"Go," she said. "I've got the baby. If he bites me, I'm biting back."

Gunnar drove the truck slowly down the ridge road with the window open.

I hung half out of it in the rain, breathing in.

Wet pine. Mud. Diesel from our own exhaust.

And under it, faint, the strawberry shampoo all the Pup House girls stole from each other.

"Still on the road," I said.

Two miles down, the road bent toward the valley.

The scent didn't bend with it.

It went left, up the old trail toward the notch in the mountains.

"Stop."

Gunnar stopped.

He looked up the trail, and I saw his face change.

"She's going to the gap," he said.

The rain turned to snow as we climbed.

Fat, wet flakes, the first of the year, sticking to the pines and to my hair.

Gunnar went ahead with the flashlight. He knew the trail in the dark better than I knew the Pup House stairs.

Deer Gap is a narrow notch between two shoulders of rock where the old border trail comes over from Idaho.

On the near side there's a gray granite stone with two names cut into it.

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