The End of the Trail

The maple syrup was still warm when Roz set it on the table, and the kitchen smelled the way a Maine morning was supposed to smell: woodsmoke, strong coffee, and something honest baking in the oven. She had been up since five, which was not unusual. Sleep had become a negotiation in her sixties, and she had long since stopped trying to win it.

Daniel Forsythe had come down the stairs at seven sharp, his pack already cinched and leaning against the mudroom door. He was a quiet man in his mid-forties, lean in the way that six months on the trail made a person lean, with a beard that had outgrown its original intentions and eyes that held the particular, faraway quality of someone who had been walking toward something for a very long time.

"Blueberry pancakes," Roz said, sliding the plate in front of him. "Last meal before the summit. You deserve something that didn't come out of a foil pouch."

Daniel smiled at that, and it softened his whole face. "You didn't have to go to all this trouble, Mrs. Merryweather."

"Roz," she corrected, the way she always did. "And it's no trouble. It's the point." She refilled his coffee without being asked. "So. Katahdin today. How does it feel, being two thousand miles from where you started?"

He was quiet for a moment, turning his mug in both hands. "Like I'm still looking for something," he said finally. "Even up there. Especially up there." He caught himself and looked up at her with a careful expression, the kind a man wore when he decided a sentence had gone one word too far. "The summit view," he added, a beat too late. "Nothing like it, I'm told."

Roz had spent thirty years coaxing truth out of people who didn't want to give it. She recognized the stitch. She let it go, for now, and watched him eat.

He was out the door by seven-forty. She stood on the porch and watched his truck disappear down the gravel drive toward the park entrance, the taillights blinking once at the bend like a punctuation mark. The morning was cold and still, the kind of November quiet that pressed against the ears.

By six in the evening, the truck was still in the trailhead lot, and Daniel was not in it.

Roz drove to the Baxter State Park ranger station as the last of the light bled out of the sky, leaving a bruised purple dark behind it. The station was a squat, utilitarian building that smelled of coffee grounds and old reports. Behind the counter stood a tall, slouching man with a ranger's hat pulled low and eyebrows that could have sheltered small birds. His name tag read B. Tiller.

"I'm looking for information about a hiker who checked in this morning," Roz said, keeping her voice even and pleasant. "Daniel Forsythe. Solo, finishing his thru-hike. He hasn't returned to my B&B, and his vehicle is still at the lot."

Barney Tiller looked at her the way a man looks at a weather forecast he doesn't agree with. "Hikers hitch rides," he said. "Happens all the time. Man finishes the trail, he's emotional, somebody offers a ride to town, he takes it. Doesn't think to call anybody."

"He left his car," Roz said.

"Cars get left." Barney was already turning back toward a clipboard on the wall behind him. "We'll log it. You can call the non-emergency line in the morning if he doesn't turn up."

"He had a reservation at my B&B for another two nights," Roz said. "He paid in advance. His bag is still in his room." She paused. "Now, Barney, I have lived in this town long enough to know that a man who pays for a room he intends to sleep in doesn't simply evaporate because someone offered him a lift." She smiled pleasantly. "That story has more holes in it than a pair of moth-eaten wool socks."

Something shifted behind Barney's gray eyes, brief and unreadable as a cloud shadow crossing a ridge. "I'll log it," he repeated. "That's what I can do tonight."

She recognized a wall when she ran into one. She thanked him with the kind of politeness that left a chill and turned toward the door.

The parking lot was lit by a single sodium lamp that threw everything in a sickly amber. Near the trailhead kiosk, a young man in neon-green gear was speaking earnestly into a camera mounted on a small tripod, gesturing toward the dark tree line with the confidence of someone who had never actually spent a night in those trees.

"Excuse me," Roz said, walking toward him. "I don't mean to interrupt your filming."

The young man straightened up, his smile reflexively bright. "No worries at all! Skip Sterling, trail documenter. You staying local?"

"I run the Merryweather B&B," she said. "Were you out here this morning? Near the trailhead?"

"All morning," Skip said, nodding eagerly. "Getting that golden hour content. Actually, I saw the guy you're probably asking about. Solo hiker, older pack, kind of kept to himself." He paused. "There was a car, though. A dark SUV, not park-issue. It was parked up near the secondary access road. The hiker talked to whoever was inside for maybe five minutes. I thought it was weird enough to film, but I was too far to hear anything." He shrugged. "I figured it was a friend."

Roz held his gaze for a moment. "What time was that?"

"Eight-fifteen, maybe eight-twenty."

She drove back to the B&B with that detail sitting in her chest like a cold stone. In Daniel's room, she stood at the threshold for a long moment before she crossed to the bed and slid her hand under the mattress, where a liar or a careful man might hide something he couldn't risk carrying to the summit.

Her fingers found the journal.

The last entry was brief and written in a tight, controlled hand. False Summit. They don't want anyone to know what's up there. B. Holloway has the contract. If I don't come back, someone needs to find the cairn off the northwest ridgeline.

Roz sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the name written on that page. The room was very quiet, and the mountain outside was dark, and Daniel Forsythe was somewhere on it, or he wasn't anywhere at all.

She set the journal carefully on the nightstand, smoothed her wool vest, and went downstairs to put the kettle on. She had a great deal of thinking to do, and thinking, in her experience, went better with tea.