Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

He launched into the promised insights about gas prices, though they weren’t anything I hadn’t already read online, and then he started asking me first about my opinions about oil, and politics, and then about my work and my family — about my beautiful daughter Jenny and her husband Dan, abd the twin grandbabies on the way. I didn’t really notice right off how the questions kept coming, and when I did, for a while I enjoyed the interest, since it was something I wasn’t exactly used to. But by the time my oversize wineglass was almost empty, and the waitperson was clearing away the flowered plates, my answers were getting shorter and shorter, and Frank started leaning in too close. I moved back a bit, the legs of my chair catching in the thick pile of the carpet. He reached out, one finger on the back of my hand, his face inches from mine, the slow puffs of his breath breaking the wavering boundary of air around me that I could feel like surface tension on water. My ex, as our marriage went more and more wrong, had done too near to the same thing, looming just a few inches away during a “discussion,” bending over me as I sat in the kitchen, his hands planted on the table on either side of me, slowly smiling as I tried to stand up. I wasn’t going to wait around to see if that same kind of smile showed up on Frank’s face.

I begged off the desserts the waitress suggested. The heavy sweetness of chocolate syrup cake, caramelized bread pudding, and the rest, all sounded impossible to stomach. I told Frank I had some calls to make, leaving who they were to deliberately vague. Just like I left vague any plans for our getting together again. He squeezed my arm and said he hoped I’d sleep well, that he thought I was looking tired.

I did have trouble falling asleep that night. The pale green walls of my tent, that on other trips had seemed all the protection I ever needed, that kept out the wind and the small biting creatures, now seemed insubstantial and weak, serving only to blind me to what might be out there in the dark. I finally went to sleep with my arm resting across my eyes.

I don’t know what time it was when I woke up. The noise of the generators and lanterns had stopped, finally. No wind stroked the nylon panels around me. Maybe it was the background silence that woke me. Maybe it was the small crunch of gravel as something stepped or shifted its weight only a few inches away, but it had to be nothing. Darkness always magnified sounds and worries. Mice grew into marauding raccoons, raccoons into cougars. It was nothing. I was sure. And then I heard it breathing.

Slow. Measured. Sibilant. And unidentifiable as animal, or human. I reached out of the folds of the sleeping bag, found the flashlight and the Mace, wrapped my hands around their familiar shapes. I slowed my own breathing to almost nothing as I waited for whatever was outside to make a move. It never did. I must have fallen asleep waiting. And in the bright light of morning I told myself it was a dream, despite what I was still holding in my hands.

I didn’t let myself go home early. I decided I was being paranoid and skittish and making way too much out of less than nothing. After all, it couldn’t have been him, he didn’t even have a car, and I could just avoid the places we’d been together. Not a problem. I took my overblown reactions to our dinner and the sounds in the night as clear signs that, regardless of the slight awakening responses of my body, in no way was I ready for actually dealing with anything resembling dating. So I turned for comfort to the heat-washed hills, and headed further and further out every day. I found rocks slick with desert polish, found pathways between high, sculptured walls, orange- and rose-colored, carved by waters that rose and flooded whatever was in their paths and then vanished, all in the space of a day. Water that left hard rock shaped like those vanished waves, rising, almost touching overhead, blocking out all but thin, changing bars of sunlight. Rock formations that became deadly mazes if thunderstorms rose to the north, beyond the horizon, beyond sight and hearing, their clouds breaking open and sending floodwaters racing into these perfect, beautiful traps. I went far enough to find places without people. Sometimes there was a car pulled up near mine when I got back to the trailhead, though I never saw the other hikers.