The strange man, K. W. Wilson, rode behind them on a pale gray gelding. Although he wasn’t wearing a black hat or shirt, there was something dark about him. Brooding but at times kind of smiling to himself. Like he had a secret or found his thoughts amusing. The ghostly pallor of his horse only added to the image. He was thin and his face was made of sharp planes shoved together, as if he’d once had a normal face but somebody crumpled it in from the sides where it bent like sheet metal. His eyes were mounted close over the sharp bridge of a hatchetlike nose. He needed a shave and the trip had barely even started. He didn’t seem to laugh at the jokes of the Wall Streeters, not at all. Gracie was wary of him, and unlike Rachel Mina, had zero desire to get to know him at all.
Her dad rode behind Wilson, and Danielle was just ahead. Danielle rode well even though she didn’t have a clue as to what she was doing. Gracie wished she filled her saddle as well as Danielle, and wondered if and when her own butt wouldn’t be skinny and bony like a boy’s. Already it hurt. She could use some of Danielle’s padding, she thought.
“How’s that horse ridin’?” Dakota Hill asked in a tone Gracie could hear but low enough the others couldn’t.
“Good,” Gracie said. “I really like her.”
“Strawberry’s a good little horse. You can depend on her. Just don’t get her too close to those horses up front if you can help it, especially that black one, Midnight. Midnight don’t like Strawberry.”
“That’s too bad,” Gracie said, again leaning forward and patting Strawberry’s neck, “’cause she’s such a sweet girl.”
“Yup.”
Gracie thought Dakota Hill looked like a natural cowgirl in a way that Jed didn’t look like a natural cowboy. She was the type of woman, Gracie thought, who would be almost beautiful if she wore makeup. But Dakota seemed determined to fight against type by playing at being gruff and no-nonsense. What kind of woman wanted to be known as a “mule-skinner”? Gracie was puzzled by her but oddly fascinated at the same time.
When she turned back around in the saddle with the smile still on her face, she was jarred by two sets of eyes directly on her. From the front, Jed McCarthy looked on in what seemed like disapproval. And from a few horses away, K. W. Wilson smirked.
They were walking their mounts through the middle of a large green saddle slope rimmed by trees on all four sides. The air smelled slightly of sulfur. Jed had walked his string off the trail and let the others pass by. Gracie could see him talking to each rider in turn as they rode past him.
As she rode up next to him he asked, “You and that horse getting along?”
“Yes.”
“You sit a nice horse,” he said, nudging his horse into a walk until they rode side by side.
“I’ve been telling everyone to make sure to stay on the trail,” he said. “It’s more important here in Yellowstone than anywhere else.” He gestured toward a large white patch of ground to their right about a hundred feet away. “See that there?”
“Yes.”
“See anything unusual about it?”
“There’s no grass on it, I guess.”
“Look closer. Look at it about an inch above the ground.”
She squinted and noticed how the air seemed to undulate slightly, as if it were underwater. In the center of the white patch, a slight wisp of steam or smoke curled out of a hole the size of a quarter.
“What is it?”
“This is the thing about this place,” he said. “That’s a fumarole, or steam vent. The white is a dried mineral crust that’s covering a place where superheated water comes up out of the ground. The hole there releases some of the steam. Otherwise, it might build up too much pressure and erupt.”
“Wow,” she said, shaking her head.
“The crust is brittle,” he said. “If you walked over the top of it or took your horse over there you’d break right through. The water underneath would scald the hell out of you or your horse. Might even kill you if you got bucked off in it.”
“Really?”
“Really. It’s the reason we have to stay together on the trail and not ride off. Those things are everywhere, and some are much worse,” he said. “There’s a little canyon in the park where so much methane gas is produced naturally out of the ground that any living thing that wanders into it will die within minutes. The floor of the canyon is covered in elk and bison bones, and maybe even some old Indian bones.”
He’d softened his voice and she found it oddly rhythmic. She felt a chill ripple through her.
“But when you look at that white patch,” he said, “I want you to imagine something else. Imagine most of Yellowstone Park itself is that white patch. There’s a real thin crust covering hell itself, which is trying to boil over. That wants to boil over. And someday, it will. It’s known as the Yellowstone Caldera. In fact, darlin’, when it blows it’ll take two million people with it. It’s blown a few times through history, and we’re sixty thousand years overdue.”
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
“To heighten your awareness,” he said. “I want every one of my clients to be awake.”
“I’m awake,” she said.
13
Although it once seemed like he lived in one, Cody Hoyt had not been in a public library for years. And as soon as he entered the Bozeman Public Library on East Main Street, he felt like he was being hurled back in time to when he rode his bike to the Helena library after telling his buddies he was going home. He loved the library, although he kept it in absolute confidence. Only the librarians knew, and they gave him his space and not-so-secretly delighted in the fact that a Hoyt of the violent and rough-hewn Hoyts was actually in their sanctuary of civilization. Often, a librarian would give him a sandwich because he was obviously missing dinner and he’d eat it at his own private table in the back.
He read everything; newspapers, magazines, hunting and fishing books, crime novels, biographies of American presidents, anything he could find on World War Two. He read reference books and Ripley’s Believe It or Not and sex manuals that got him all worked up. Not once did he check out a book and take it with him, because he didn’t dare take a chance that his dad would see it and tease him. And as far as his father knew, he wasn’t home because he was at football or wrestling practice. Since his dad never went to any games anyway, he never found out Cody didn’t participate in the sports he claimed he did.
Lying to his friends about going home and lying to his dad about staying at school started a prominent pattern in his life, he realized later. Leading parallel lives and telling serial lies helped prepare him for the trials and rigors of full-blown alcoholism, which, in itself, was like a second full-time-although secret-career. He’d learned early how to multitask.
Cody learned nothing in school and everything he knew in the library. He still read widely and constantly, and was never without a book in his glove compartment (along with a pint of bourbon). For the past year, he’d been alternating among Jim Harrison’s novels, John McPhee’s nonfiction, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, and the crime novels of John Sandford, Ken Bruen, and T. Jefferson Parker. His books were stacked like Greek columns in his living room and basement. Once he finally built those bookshelves, he could showcase an impressive collection. But he never got around to it.