Chapter 24: Mescal Point

In November we drove back to Sedona, and I asked him to take me to Mescal Point at dawn.

He didn't ask why.

He only parked in the same gravel lot, under the post with the camera on it.

Then he turned the engine off.

The sky was pink over the red rock, and the air was sixty degrees and smelled of juniper.

Biscuit jumped down from the back seat and looked at me.

"He'll go slow," Wyatt said. "He knows you."

I put on my boots.

I had bought them in Providence, with my own money, the week after I got home.

I had a hat, and a long-sleeved shirt, and a pack with three liters of water in it.

"You can say no," Wyatt said. "We can sit in the truck."

"I want to walk it."

"All right."

"I want to see the whole thing, with my own feet, with somebody I chose."

He took the pack from my hands, and then he gave it back, because it was mine.

The trail climbed through the juniper and over a shelf of red rock.

I knew the first bend.

I had been walked around it once, with my sun jacket gone and my phone left in a car.

Now it was a bend in a trail.

A small gray lizard sat on the cairn beside it and watched us pass.

"The deputy emailed yesterday," Wyatt said, a few minutes in.

"Jared?"

"He took a plea. Probation and community service."

"He's paying the sponsor back out of his paycheck for years."

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