Deadman Anchor Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

  Darby Creek

  A division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  241 First Avenue North

  Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA

  For reading levels and more information, look up this title at www.lernerbooks.com.

  The images in this book are used with the permission of: © iStockphoto.com/epicurean (ski lift); © iStockphoto.com/sleepingvillage (snowboarder); © iStockphoto.com/mustafahacalaki (skull); © iStockphoto.com/Igor Zhuravlov (storm); © iStockphoto.com/desifoto (graph paper); © iStockphoto.com/Trifonenko (blue flame); © iStockphoto.com/Anita Stizzoli (dark clouds).

  Main body text set in Janson Text LT Std 12/17.5. Typeface provided by Adobe Systems.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Coleman, K. R., author.

  Title: Deadman anchor / by K.R. Coleman.

  Description: Minneapolis : Darby Creek, [2017] | Series: The Atlas of Cursed Places

  Summary: “Spring break turns into a mountain climbing trip for a girl trying to connect to her distant father. One problem: her dad has picked a cursed mountain, and they might not make it to the summit”— Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015043487| ISBN 9781512413267 (lb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781512413496 (pb : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Blessing and cursing—Fiction. | Cascade Range—Fiction. | Mountaineering—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.C644 De 2017 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2015043487

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1-39785-21323-3/18/2016

  I dedicate this book to Alex and Auggie, whose sense of adventure, courage, and grit inspire me to create characters who never give up.

  Chapter 1

  A storm ravaged the Pacific Northwest. It rained for two days. A steady rain, a hard rain, a rain that sounded like the chattering of teeth. The creeks and rivers rose quickly. Mud swept down hillsides, and at the top of Mount Hood, rain turned to sleet and then a heavy, blinding snow. Three climbers went missing that day. Kendal and her father were two of them.

  Chapter 2

  The day they left for their trip, Kendal’s father wove in and out of traffic. They were late for their flight, and it was Kendal’s fault.

  “Do you have everything?” her father had said as he loaded their backpacks into the trunk of his car.

  “Yes,” she’d said, but ten miles deep into Washington, DC, traffic, she realized she had forgotten her hiking boots—boots she’d spent three months breaking in so she wouldn’t get blisters. She’d meant to wear them on the plane, but out of habit, she slipped on her white Converse tennis shoes instead.

  Her father was mad. Kendal wanted to remind him that this trip wasn’t her idea, but she didn’t say anything. This trip, after all, was supposed to bring them together—not drive them even further apart.

  Her father was an officer in the Navy, and during his last deployment, he was gone for eighteen months. When he left, Kendal was thirteen. When he returned, she was nearly fifteen. So much had changed while he was away, and, since his return, she felt like everything she did disappointed him—her grades, her friends, and most of all, her quitting the soccer team.

  For a while, her mother acted as translator and mediator between the two. She soon grew tired of this and decided that Kendal and her father needed to do something together. That’s why her mother arranged a trip for the two of them to climb Mount Hood. An old friend of Kendal’s father was a professional mountain climber and worked at a lodge out there.

  “It will be fun,” her mother had said. Kendal thought only a mother who was a former marine would think climbing a mountain would be a fun father-daughter activity.

  Kendal often wondered if she had been switched at birth. If she hadn’t inherited her mother’s thick, curly hair and her father’s height and hazel eyes, Kendal would have asked her parents for a DNA test. Both her parents were fearless, competitive, and adventurous. They met while training to jump out of a plane. Kendal, on the other hand, was a worrier, a non-competitor, and happiest when she could curl up somewhere warm and escape into a book. Climbing a mountain was not on her top-ten list of things to do.

  “We’re going to be late,” her father said as they limped in traffic toward the airport.

  Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, Kendal thought. After all, if they missed the flight, maybe they could skip the trip completely.

  Chapter 3

  At the airport, Kendal and her father checked their bags and waited in a security line that snaked around and around. Her father looked down at his watch every twenty seconds. He hated waiting as much as he hated being late.

  “Take off your shoes,” Kendal’s father directed as they finally moved to the front of the line.

  “I know,” Kendal said. “I’ve flown before.”

  “Next,” the stone-faced security guard said.

  Her father flashed his military ID and went through the metal detector with his shoes still on his feet, but Kendal had to put her shoes in a gray plastic bin.

  “I’ll meet you on the other side,” her father said to Kendal, but when she stepped through the metal detector, she set off an alarm because she had forgotten to take her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans.

  Her father looked impatient and annoyed when she finally made it through.

  “Final call for August and Kendal Gibson,” they heard over the loudspeaker.

  “Run,” her father said, and the two of them ran as fast as they could through the airport. Kendal was still in her stocking feet, sliding across the shiny floor, her father leading the way with her hiking boots in his hand.

  “Wait!” her father yelled. The crew was about to close the gate door. “The Gibsons are here!”

  Her father grabbed Kendal’s hand as if she were five years old and pulled her down the ramp and onto the plane. They were the last two people to board.

  A few minutes later, the captain got on the loudspeaker and welcomed everyone aboard. Then he said, “Just a heads-up that there’s going to be some turbulence.”

  Chapter 4

  The captain wasn’t lying. The plane bounced around like the air had potholes in it. Kendal’s teeth chattered with every jolt. Her book practically leapt out of her hands. She felt dizzy and sick and spent most of the time with her eyes closed, telling herself not to puke.

  Her stomach was still in knots when they got to the car rental place.

  “Something with four-wheel drive,” her father said to the smiling woman behind the counter.

  “Where are you heading?” the woman said as she typed something into the computer.

  “Mount Hood,” her father explained.

  The woman’s fingers froze. Her smile disappeared.

  “Do you have something with four-wheel drive?” her father repeated. He looked confused by the woman’s silence and sudden stillness.

  “I wouldn’t go near that mountain if I were you,” she said in a whisper of a voice. “That mountain is cursed.”

  The woman reached for a silver cross that hung around her neck and moved it back and forth along the thin, silver chain.

  “Six months ago,” the woman said, looking at Kendal’s father and then at Kendal, “one of our rentals went missing. And you know where it was found?” The woman
didn’t give them a chance to answer. “In a parking lot at the base of that mountain. The driver had decided to go for a short hike, and he never came back. He was the third person to go missing this year. I’m telling you, I wouldn’t send my ex-husband near that place.”

  The woman waited for them to change their mind, and Kendal hoped that maybe her father would ask for a convertible instead. She imagined them driving south to California and spending the week on a beach. But her father just repeated his original request.

  “Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you,” the woman said, typing again and then squinting at the screen. “Just trying to keep my customers safe and the cars returned.”

  Kendal looked at her father, but her father just shook his head as if the woman were crazy, as if they didn’t have anything to worry about, as if Kendal hadn’t spent the last month having nightmares in which she fell off the side of the mountain. Over and over, there she was—in a free fall, tumbling through icy, cold air. Nothing to grab hold of. She always woke up just before she hit the ground.

  “Come on, kid,” her father said, holding a set of keys in his hand. “You look like you need some fresh air.”

  Outside, there was a black jeep waiting for them. Kendal’s father threw their backpacks into the back, and there was the sound of rattling chains.

  “What is that?” Kendal said.

  Her father moved the bags.

  “Looks like someone left us their tire chains, which is lucky because now we don’t have to stop and buy them. There’s a hefty fine if you don’t have them up on the mountain when it snows.”

  “You don’t think this is the car that the missing guy drove?” Kendal said, afraid to get in.

  “I’m sure it’s not,” her father said, scrunching up his eyebrows and shaking his head. But Kendal noticed in the left corner of the windshield there was a parking sticker for Mount Hood National Park. It looked like someone had tried to scrape it off but had given up.

  Chapter 5

  As they drove away from the airport and up Highway 21, they could see Mount Hood rising in the distance. The sharp, black rocks and snow-white peak seemed to want to cut through the silver sky.

  Her father pulled off at a scenic overlook.

  “Look at that,” her father said excitedly. “It’s magnificent. Imagine what it will look like when we are at the top looking down.”

  Kendal didn’t want to imagine this. She had no idea how they were even going to make it to the top. The mountain was bigger than she had imagined.

  “Hey,” her father said. “Let’s take a picture.”

  They tried to take a selfie, but Kendal’s father kept making a confused face when he saw himself in the screen, and Kendal couldn’t stop laughing at him.

  “Do you want me to take that for you?” a guy about her age said as he walked past them. He wore a camera around his neck and a blue knit hat on his head.

  “Oh, please,” Kendal said as she handed him her phone.

  “I’m gonna take a few,” the guy said. Kendal’s father put his arm around her and smiled stiffly at the camera.

  “Wow, the mountain looks crazy right now,” the young man said as he handed back her phone.

  Kendal turned around and saw that clouds were moving in from the west and swirling around the mountain peak like a plume of smoke.

  Her father moved to the edge of the overlook and watched the clouds move in.

  “Have you ever been up there?” Kendal asked the guy.

  “My dad and I go snowboarding up there every year, but not this year. We’re heading to the Three Sisters instead. Every boarder I know who’s tried to conquer the Hood has come back injured or . . .”

  Kendal would have asked, “Or what?” if the wind hadn’t suddenly picked up and forced the two of them to turn away. The cold breeze blew across the small parking lot as Kendal turned back to the guy.

  “Hey,” the guy said. “Would it be weird to take your picture? It’s just that your hair and the light behind you is really amazing right now. I’m taking this photography class and I have, like, a dozen portraits to take.”

  “Sure,” Kendal said, reaching up to try to tame her hair.

  “No, leave it,” the guy said. “It’s perfect.” He took his camera off his neck and snapped a few pictures. “Where you heading?”

  “To the top.” Kendal nodded toward Mount Hood. “My dad and I are going to climb it this week.”

  “Just be careful, okay?”

  Kendal nodded again.

  She watched the young man walk toward a baby-blue van where his father waited.

  “Kendal,” she said before he opened the passenger door. “That’s the name of the girl in the picture you just took.”

  “Bjorn,” he said. “That’s the name of the photographer who took it.”

  Right before he closed the door, Kendal shouted. “What were you going to say earlier?”

  He tilted his head, confused.

  “You said snowboarders have come back injured or . . . but you never finished your thought.”

  The wind picked up again just as he answered her question. But Kendal was pretty sure he said, “Or didn’t come back at all.”

  Chapter 6

  He was kidding, Kendal told herself. She wasn’t sure why boys insisted on trying to scare girls, why they thought it was so funny. If people were actually going missing on Mount Hood, it would have been national news. Right?

  Then again, it wasn’t just Bjorn who had mentioned people never coming back. The lady at the car rental place had said the same thing.

  Maybe they were talking about the same person?

  As she and her father walked back to the jeep, Kendal scrolled through the pictures that Bjorn had taken with her phone. The first picture of Kendal and her father was really good. They were both smiling and the lighting was good, but each picture after that seemed to grow darker. In the last photo she swore she saw a face smirking from the summit of the mountain, so she zoomed in. What she saw frightened her—dark, deep holes that looked like angry eyes and a jagged, rocky snarl.

  Kendal dropped her phone. It shattered on the black pavement. When she bent down to pick it up, she cut her finger on a piece of glass. Blood streamed down her hand and across her wrist.

  “Put pressure on it,” her father said, running to the car to grab the first aid kit from his backpack.

  It took her father a few minutes to pluck out the piece of glass and clean the wound. The cut was deep, so he used some Super Glue to close it shut. Kendal’s mother insisted that duct tape and Super Glue be placed in all their first aid kits. She’d been a medic in the Marines and used these things to secure wounds.

  “Do you think it will still work?” Kendal said, nodding to the phone that her father had wrapped up in white gauze so that it wouldn’t cut her again.

  “It doesn’t look good.”

  Kendal held the phone like a small, hurt animal and put it in a side pocket of her backpack. She had saved for over six months to buy that phone, even babysitting the three-year-old triplets down the street—twice. Now it was wrecked.

  “You need to be more careful,” her father said. He was always telling her this. She constantly dropped or tripped over things. It was like her legs were too long, her feet too big. Or maybe her brain was to blame. Her mind was always distracted by something else.

  “I know,” she said.

  She wanted to tell him about the face she saw in the picture on her phone, but she knew it would sound crazy, so she sat silently as they drove toward the mountain, her finger throbbing where it was cut, a sick feeling taking over her stomach again.

  They turned off the highway and onto a steep and winding road.

  “So,” Kendal said, “How many times has Jeremy been up Mount Hood?”

  Jeremy was the person who was going to guide them up the mountain. He was an old buddy of her father’s. They had met at the Naval Academy and served together on the SS Carter. Kendal never remembered meetin
g him, but apparently he was around a lot when she was really little.

  “He’s led dozens and dozens of first-time climbers up that mountain,” her father said. “He’s been saving up and hoping to buy the lodge where we’ll be staying.”

  If it weren’t for Jeremy, Kendal thought, maybe she and her father would have taken up bowling instead.

  “So he knows what he’s doing then?”

  “He’s a trained Navy SEAL. Believe me, he knows what he’s doing. We’re in safe hands.”

  They turned off the highway and onto a mountain road.

  “But I thought Navy SEALs trained with the Navy—in the water, not on mountains.”

  “SEALs are trained for everything,” her father said.

  As they drove higher up the mountain, they crossed over the snow line.

  “Strange how it all just changes,” Kendal said as they went from brown grass and green trees to everything covered with snow.

  Kendal thought how beautiful and peaceful everything looked covered in the deep waves of white. For some reason, in that moment, the mountain didn’t seem that scary anymore. It was as if her worries were also hidden in a blanket of snow. She wanted to get out of the car and lie down in the white softness. She wished she could take a picture, but then remembered her phone was broken. She closed her eyes so that she would remember how beautiful it was, how happy she was to be driving up this mountain with her father by her side.

  But something told her this calmness wouldn’t last.

  Any second now, her worries would emerge once again from their snowy covering.

  Chapter 7

  “Welcome to Summit Lodge and Ski!” a bright green sign read as they reached a turnoff.

  At the top of the hill were ski slopes to the left and the lodge to the right. The lodge looked as if it were made out of stacked logs. A large, wooden porch wrapped around the front.