Deadman Anchor Page 2

As they pulled into the parking lot, Kendal saw a police car parked near the slope. A crowd of people gathered around the chairlift.

  “I wonder what happened,” Kendal said to her father. She looked at the slope and realized it was blank. No one was skiing or snowboarding down it.

  “It looks like there was an accident with the lift,” her father said, pointing to a place halfway up the hill where steel cables lay on the ground. Off to the side was a tipped-over metal chair.

  Kendal felt a cold breeze blow down from the mountain, and she shivered as she gathered up her things.

  Inside the lodge, there were a few people huddled around a huge fireplace, hands wrapped around white coffee cups or glasses of dark beer.

  Everyone was so quiet.

  Her father rang the bell at the front desk, but no one came.

  Kendal read the sign framed on a nearby wall: Welcome to the only ski area in North America open all 12 months of the year. Our highest point is 8,540 feet above sea level. Enjoy the ride down.

  Suddenly, a white-haired woman came down the large staircase and rustled through some papers behind the desk. She looked distraught. Her hair escaped from the braid she wore down her back. Her eyes had dark circles beneath them.

  “Good afternoon,” she finally said. “Though it hasn’t been a good one, not at all.”

  “What happened out there?” Kendal asked, nodding to the scene outside the large window.

  “An accident with the lift,” the woman replied. “Thank God everyone is all right, but just to let you know, the slopes are shut down until further notice.”

  Kendal walked over to the window while her father checked them in. Near the top of the run, to Kendal’s surprise, she noticed a lone snowboarder. The sun was dropping fast, but she could still make out his blue jacket as he moved back and forth across the snow-covered slope. It was hypnotic, watching him descend. Like watching a surfer ride a white wave. Her eyelids actually grew heavy. Then, just as suddenly, he was gone. One second she was blinking, the next—all she could see was the blank slope.

  Chapter 8

  Had the snowboarder disappeared behind that line of tall pine trees? Or had she imagined the whole thing? She felt as though she was coming out of a dream-like state.

  In the reflection of the window she saw a broad-shouldered man wearing a bright red jacket. This time she definitely wasn’t dreaming. The man came through the front door and headed straight toward Kendal’s father and wrapped his arms around him.

  “Jeremy Jacobs!” Kendal’s father said, laughing and stepping back to get a look at his old friend. “I didn’t recognize you with that beard. You look like an old man.”

  “Augie Doggie,” Jeremy said. “You look like an old dog.”

  “Augie?” Kendal said. She’d only ever heard her mother call her father by that name. Everyone else she knew called him August. Or Captain Gibson. Her father didn’t look like an Augie.

  “How have you been?”

  “Good,” her father said, then nodded toward Kendal. “I don’t think you’ve seen this kid since she was about two feet tall.”

  “Ahh,” Jeremy said, reaching out to shake Kendal’s hand, “your dad goes on and on about you. The apple of his eye.”

  “Really?” Kendal said. “I thought I was more like a kiwi or banana.”

  Jeremy laughed. Her father didn’t. He’d always been puzzled by her when she said silly things.

  The woman behind the counter stepped around the desk.

  “This is Marion,” Jeremy said. “She and her husband have been running this lodge for nearly forty years.”

  “Forty-two,” Marion corrected. “Ready to retire after this year, though.”

  “What rooms are open?” Jeremy asked.

  “Nearly all of them,” Marion replied. “The place emptied out after we shut the chairs down. I’m going to give your friends the Twin Pine Suite. Best view in the place, but it isn’t quite ready yet.”

  “Thanks,” Kendal said.

  “You’ll sleep well there,” the woman said with a smile. “And it sounds like you’re going to need your rest.”

  The three of them sat down at a wooden table, and Jeremy went into the kitchen and brought back a plate of nachos, two beers, and a Coke.

  “What’s been going on?” Kendal’s father asked when Jeremy sat down.

  “One freak accident after another,” Jeremy said, popping the cap off his beer. “Today, the cable on the lift just snapped.”

  “We’ve heard the mountain is cursed,” Kendal said, stirring her Coke with a straw.

  “We’ve had some bad luck,” Jeremy said. “Mostly, I just don’t think people come here prepared. The mountain makes the rules, and the rules can change at any time.”

  Kendal bit into a piece of ice. The whole idea of climbing the mountain suddenly seemed insane.

  Jeremy peeled the label off his beer. “I’ll get the two of you prepared. Before we begin our summit, you’ll understand whatever rules the mountain throws at us. How’s that sound?”

  “To preparedness,” her father said, lifting his beer up in the air.

  “Training begins at 0500,” Jeremy said.

  Kendal’s father clinked bottles with his friend. But Kendal wasn’t in the glass-clinking kind of mood.

  Marion came over with a set of keys and told them she’d show them up to their room.

  “Go ahead,” Kendal’s father said. “You better get some sleep. I’ll be up in a bit.”

  “Rest is one of the best ways to prepare for any climb. If you’re tired, you are more likely to make a mistake,” Jeremy said.

  “Then I think we should meet at 8:00 a.m.,” Kendal said.

  “How about 7:00?” Jeremy said.

  “7:30?” Kendal countered.

  “7:30 it is,” Jeremy said. “See you tomorrow, kid.”

  “Goodnight,” Kendal said.

  She was exhausted after all the traveling. She followed Marion’s swinging, silver braid and with each swing, she seemed to get sleepier. An image of the snowboarder slalomed around her brain.

  They climbed the staircase. Kendal noticed that when Marion stepped, the stair did not creak, but when Kendal stepped, there was a loud creak.

  “You need to know where to step,” Marion said, turning around and giving Kendal a crooked smile. “You need to know the structure of anything you climb.”

  “Sounds like it was a bad day around here,” Kendal said as they made their way to the top of the stairs.

  “It’s been one bad day after another,” the woman said. “The mountain has been bitter this year.”

  “Why do you think that is?” Kendal asked.

  “I don’t know, not for sure, but bad things started happening when a sixteen-year-old boy went missing a year ago. He was off back-country snowboarding and never made it back down.”

  “They still haven’t found him?” Kendal asked.

  “Sometimes volcanic gas will melt through ice and snow and create a sudden hole where the gas has escaped. After a day or two, ice will freeze over the top.”

  “Volcanic gas?”

  “You are standing on a volcanic mountain,” Marion said. “Didn’t you know that? Just like St. Helens.”

  “No,” Kendal said. “My father told me we were going mountain climbing, not volcano climbing.”

  Kendal followed Marion down to a room at the end of the hall.

  “There are two bedrooms,” Marion said as she pointed to the doors on each side of the sitting area. “I think you should take the one on the left. It’s a bit warmer than the other one and the bathroom has a tub.”

  Kendal followed her into the bedroom and noticed how quickly Marion shut the plaid curtains.

  “Why is a volcano covered in snow?” Kendal asked.

  Marion began to answer—something about geology and climate—but then said, “The library downstairs can probably do a better job answering any questions you have. There’s a whole shelf dedicated to Mount Hood.”
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  Kendal wanted to run straight down the stairs, but she thanked Marion and waited for her to leave. She wanted to go down to the library alone. She didn’t like it when people talked to her when she was looking through books.

  After Marion left, Kendal peeked out the door. The hallway was empty, so she headed down the stairs. In the lobby, she could hear her father and Jeremy laugh. She thought about how much she missed the sound of her father’s laugh when he was away. She wished he laughed more, but every time he returned home, he seemed to grow more and more serious.

  The library was behind the staircase and down a short hallway. Books stacked on shelves up to the ceiling, comfy leather chairs, a gas fireplace, and green reading lamps.

  Each shelf was labeled: Mysteries, Classics, History, Nature, Romance . . .

  Kendal grabbed a few paperbacks from the mystery shelf. She was looking for a book about Mount Hood on the history shelf when a large, red book caught her eye. The color reminded her of a hot coal.

  The Atlas of Cursed Places was written in bold, black letters down the spine and across the front. She thought it was strange that there was no author listed. No copyright date, either.

  There was a faint smell of cigar smoke as if someone long ago had sat smoking as they read. Kendal looked through the table of contents, and one chapter caught her eye: “The Curse of Mount Hood and Nellie Bly.”

  Chapter 9

  Gathering up an armful of books, Kendal hurried back to her room and wrapped herself up in a thick down comforter. She’d suddenly caught a chill.

  She opened The Atlas of Cursed Places and flipped through the pages until she came to the chapter on Mount Hood. Beneath the title, there was an old sepia photograph. In it stood a short, stout man, a beautiful, dark-eyed woman, and four small children. Rising up behind them was Mount Hood. There was something about these people. It was almost as though she recognized them. When she looked at the mountain behind them, she could see a sharp, snarling face near the peak. She definitely recognized this face. It was the same one she saw on her phone. She wrapped the blanket more tightly around her shoulders and began to read.

  Gold was discovered in Oregon before it was found in California, and the yellow metal created a fever like no other sickness had created before. Many of the pioneers who arrived in Oregon in the early 1850s were bent on speculation, including Nellie Bly’s husband, Samuel Bly.

  The details of their story were faithfully recorded in Nellie’s diary.

  In the fall of 1853, he and his family set up camp along Quicksand River, a river known to swallow horses and men whole. The river had once run clear and clean, but Mount Hood’s eruption decades before had filled the river with rock and ash.

  Samuel Bly was convinced there was gold buried beneath the ash. Months went by—but no gold. That’s when he heard rumors that a man had struck it rich panning in an unknown creek that flowed down Mount Hood. It was fall by then and getting cold quickly. But Samuel wasn’t about to give up. He loaded up his family, and they made their way to the base of the mountain.

  Soon their supplies began to run out, and Nellie tried to convince her husband that they should leave and head toward a new settlement that had formed near the coast. But the rage of prospecting possessed Samuel Bly. Even when the snow began to fall, even when they ran out of food, he refused to leave Mount Hood.

  Her family near starvation, Nellie Bly took off hunting one day, tracking a mule deer, when a wet, heavy snow forced her to take shelter in a cave. After starting a small fire, she discovered a cache of gold. Nuggets the size of a man’s fist, hidden beneath burlap bags that had been eaten away by mice.

  It wasn’t she who had discovered the gold, but someone else, someone who had hidden it there but hadn’t returned.

  She put just a few pieces of the gold into her pocket, hoping that it would be enough to lure her husband off the mountain and to buy her children shelter and food.

  “Here,” she cried, throwing the gold at her husband’s feet when she returned to camp. “Please, now let’s leave.”

  Her husband picked up the gold and kissed it.

  “Where did you find this?”

  “Does it matter?” Nellie asked. “Do we matter anymore to you? Please, let’s just leave. We can come back in the spring. But the children need food and shelter. We need to leave before the next storm.”

  Samuel refused to leave until she showed him where she had found the gold.

  “It belongs to someone else,” she reminded him as he filled his pockets.

  “It is ours now. All of it is ours.”

  As he spoke those words, the mountain rumbled, stirring up an avalanche. Nellie ran out of the cave and down to their camp, discovering that one of her children was buried alive and that the other children were desperately trying to dig her out.

  Nellie began to dig too. When she finally reached her youngest child, the child was near death, her lungs struggling for air. Nellie breathed life back into her child, making a promise with God, with the mountain, that she’d leave the gold behind if only her child would live.

  When her husband returned to the camp, she begged him to return the gold, she begged him to leave, but he refused. In the middle of the night, as she listened to her youngest child cough, Nellie Bly filled a pack with the gold and snuck away from her husband and climbed the mountain to return it in hopes of saving her child.

  She had only started up the mountain when she saw the light of a lantern behind her and knew her husband was tracking her through the snow.

  She climbed higher and higher up the mountainside, her heart thudding against her chest and the weight of twenty pounds of gold pounding against her back.

  Snow began to fall, but she didn’t stop climbing. She knew that getting rid of the gold was the only way to save her family.

  Finally, she found a deep crevice and began to feed the gold into what looked like a mouth. One piece of gold after another, like feeding a hungry child.

  Her husband discovered her throwing away the gold and, in a rage, lunged for her. But she moved out of his grasp, and he slipped on the icy ledge along the crevice. He fell into the deep hole . . .

  There was more, but Kendal was too spooked and too tired to continue. Her eyelids felt heavy again, like they had when she first saw the snowboarder. It was as though someone, or something, some force, was willing her to sleep. Before she knew what had happened, she began to dream. She dreamed that the mountain was trying to swallow her whole. She could see its sharp rocky teeth and felt its black serpent tongue wrap around her waist. It tried to suck her into a dark, cold, empty place.

  Chapter 10

  “Kendal,” her father called to her. “Kendal, are you awake?”

  During the night, Kendal had fallen out of her bed and onto the cold wooden floor. For a moment, she had no idea where she was.

  Her father opened the door.

  She crawled back into the bed.

  “You need to get up and get going. We need to meet Jeremy in a half hour.”

  Her father pulled open the curtains in her room. The mountain was a dark shadow against a periwinkle sky. The sun was just beginning to rise.

  Unable to shake the dream, Kendal stumbled into the bathroom. She splashed cold water on her face and tied her hair into two messy braids.

  “I brought you up some coffee,” her father said from the other room. “You seem like you could use some.”

  She took the cup from his hand and took a sip of the black bitterness. After a few minutes, she remembered the story she had been reading before she fell asleep. She ran back to her room. She wanted to know what happened to Nellie Bly and her children. Had they made it down the mountain? Had Nellie’s youngest child lived? Was that the reason for the curse?

  But when she got to her room, she couldn’t find the book.

  She searched and searched, pulling off all the blankets on her bed, going through the stack of books sitting on the small table next to her bed. But the glowing
red book was nowhere to be found.

  Chapter 11

  Kendal went into the sitting room where her father sipped his coffee and read a newspaper. She hadn’t noticed the night before how much plaid there was in that room—a plaid couch, plaid curtains, plaid pillows. It almost hurt her eyes.

  Her father looked at his watch. “We better get going.”

  “Did you see a bright red book next to my bed? Did you take it?”

  Her father took a sip of his coffee and shook his head. “What was it called?”

  Kendal felt weird telling him the name of the book, because it seemed so strange. Besides, like the snowboarder on the mountain, she wondered if she had dreamed up the book.

  “We better get going,” her father said. He stood up and put on his jacket. “Make sure you’re dressed in layers. We’ll be outside training most of the day.”

  Chapter 12

  Outside, the sky was clear and blue. Not one cloud drifted above them.

  “It looks like there will be good weather today and tomorrow, and then there’s a chance of a storm blowing in off the coast,” Jeremy said as they followed him to a steep snowy slope. “I think the best thing we can do is start our climb early tomorrow, so that we’re on the peak by mid-morning. Climbing after a heavy snow is never safe. The risk of an avalanche is too great.”

  “Sounds good to me,” her father said. “Tomorrow we climb.”

  “We’ll have to leave here at 0300,” Jeremy said.

  “Three a.m. isn’t morning,” Kendal said. “That’s the middle of the night. Isn’t it dangerous to climb at night?”

  “The first half of the climb, we’ll be following a trail along the ski slopes. We’ll have headlamps to light our way. There is no negotiating the time we leave; we don’t want to be up near the peak later than noon.”

  “Why?” Kendal asked.

  “The sun can make ice melt and rocks shift, and it is always in the afternoon when a crevice will suddenly open up.”

  “Yikes,” Kendal said.

  “We’ll be fine as long as we stick to a schedule and to the route I know like the back of my hand.”