The SUV is pulled off the dirt road onto the edge of the playa. The front passenger’s door stands open. I glance up towards Ubehebe Peak, see no movement among the stands of mesquite. Approaching the vehicle, I move round the back and peer through the windscreen. There are two large suitcases behind the rear seat. I continue on round the Toyota till I come back to the open door. I reach inside and grab the carry-all on the rear seat. Inside is a money belt with close to four hundred dollars in cash, plus a book of travellers’ cheques. There’s also a Nike fanny pack in there with three passports, a driver’s licence and car-hire documentation. I look at the photographs, just for a moment, then put everything back in the holdall. On the floor by the front passenger’s seat, there’s a video camera. It’s a Sony Hi-8 and the tape is about three-quarters of the way through. I sit on the running board, my feet resting on the ground, trying to decide what to do. The last thing I want to do right now is play the tape but I know that if I don’t I’ll never find the answers I need. Flipping open the viewfinder, I touch the play button and get nothing but blue. I press and hold the rewind, listening to the machine whirr as the world runs back to where it has already been. I watch shadows grow westwards from the Cottonwood Range and a strip of broken cloud which pulls itself together as it scrolls back across the sky. After a minute I release the button and the tape rolls forward.
Sophie Delauney and her daughter walk out of their apartment at Stovepipe Wells, holding hands. They stop halfway across the parking lot and Sophie turns, smiles and waves toward the camera before continuing on to the Rav4. The scene changes to a view of Ubehebe Grater from the north rim, stretching a half-mile across and five hundred feet deep. The girl skips into the shot from the right, Delauney from the left. Something blurs the picture for a second or two, but I can’t tell what it is — a hand or part of a face in extreme close-up. Delauney talks about how the crater was formed, sounding vaguely authoritative. The kid complains about the heat. Next I see Sophie and the girl standing in front of the sign at Teakettle Junction. Delauney enters the frame from the left. The girl has a stick and she starts tapping out a rhythm on the kettles and pots hanging from the arms of the wooden cross. Sophie and Delauney start dancing round her, whooping like a couple of movie Indians. They look foolish but the girl laughs. No one seems to notice the single shadow that slips down the mountain behind them.
The scene changes abruptly, showing the three of them sitting in their vehicle, smiling and waving. After a second or two, I realize that there’s no soundtrack. They get out of the Toyota and start walking directly towards the camera, their faces growing in the frame. The jump cut I’m expecting doesn’t happen. Instead, as Delauney draws close, the scene shifts slightly to the left and catches his face in profile as he walks past the spot where the camera had been. It catches the other two as they walk by, then turns and tracks them to the side of the road. Their smiles have disappeared and they avoid looking at the camera until something prompts Sophie to glance up and say a single word which might have been “please”. Moments later, she takes the girl by the hand and walks out onto the playa. After a second or two, Delauney wipes his face and follows them. The camera pans left and zooms in on the Grandstand to the north, holding the outcrop in the frame for what seems like an eternity. Nothing moves onscreen, even when I hold down the fast-forward button. When I release it, the camera moves upwards to capture a clear and cloudless sky. The tape has played almost to the end. The final shot is of Sophie, Delauney and the kid, three hundred yards out on the playa, growing smaller as they walk on without looking back. And then the screen turns blue.
My head has started aching and the heat is almost intolerable. I put the camera on the seat, understanding what I have to do. At my vehicle I grab the radio, press the call button and speak my name. Instead of voices all that comes out is feedback and white noise. I try once more but whatever I hear, it isn’t human. I lack the will to do this, but there’s no one else. I load half a dozen bottles of water into a backpack, grab my binoculars and head out onto the playa.
There are no tracks in the honeycombed surface. I walk five hundred yards due east, a little further than I had seen them go before the tape had stopped. I figure they must have been looking for the rocks, or at least for one of their trails. I look north to where the slanting sunlight blurs the edges of the Grandstand. Shielding my eyes, I turn my gaze southwards and pick out a few rocks of varying sizes scattered across the dry mud. There’s little else to see out here, no signs of life. I head south and try not to think about the tape and the expressions on their faces as they had trudged past the camera. Almost twenty minutes pass before I am walking among the silent, unmoving rocks. Though I don’t want to admit it, their watchful stillness bothers me. I don’t want to think about what they’ve seen. Instinctively, I lay a hand on the Sig Sauer at my hip, drawing some comfort from the touch of the gun. There’s a picture forming in my head. It’s the haunted look in Sophie’s eyes as she stared at the camera for the last time, just before she took the child’s hand in her own and started walking. I’d like to think that she looked back one last time but I really can’t be sure.
I search among the lifeless rocks for an hour. The ground is flat and the rocks are neither plentiful nor large enough to provide cover for anything much bigger than a gecko. Finally, as the sun falls towards Ubehebe Peak, I sit down on a rock, feeling dizzy and nauseous. I drink about half a litre of tepid water and pour the rest over my head. I raise the binoculars and see the vehicles where I left them, two dusty sentinels watching over the playa. As I shift my gaze northwards I’m startled by a flash of light from the mountains above Racetrack Road. I turn back to the cars, then search the slopes above them, looking for something up there in the creosote. I lower the binoculars and feel a tightness across my chest. I breathe slowly, head hanging between my knees, and that’s when I see it for the first time, the faint trail cut like a groove in the dried mud. It ends at the rock between my feet. It wasn’t there when I sat down, I think, but I’m not certain. I’m spooked a little by it, even more when I notice more trails terminating at the other rocks lying nearby. I try to picture a rain-softened surface and a hundred-mile-an-hour wind pushing them along but it’s all in vain.
The flesh crawls on my back and for some reason the air feels cooler. The silence is weird and when I hear the two shots ring out, I need no further prompting to leave the rocks behind. I pick up the backpack, unholster my pistol and set off at a slow trot north towards the sound of the gunfire. I don’t think about what has happened, about the mess Delauney has got them into. Instead I concentrate on getting there, on locating their position even though there are no further sounds to guide me towards them.
I pass the vehicles on the road, a half-mile or so to my left, without having seen anything I don’t recognize. But I keep on, another mile, until I realize I’m heading right towards the Grandstand. I don’t turn back. There’s no point, even though I won’t find anything there. Nothing alive. Yet I have to see.
There’s nobody at the Grandstand. I drink another bottle of water to quiet my despair. Shadows stretch out across the playa towards the outcrop, painting the surface the colour of blood. For a while I stare at the rocks, losing track of time. There are a dozen or so, scattered in a wide circle round the outcrop. Had these shapes seen Sophie? I grind the dust and dirt from my faithless eyes and when I open them again I see that the rocks have drawn closer. The last rays of sunlight pick out their newly laid trails. My heart is racing and the band across my chest tightens even more. At first I think I’m having a heart attack, that I’m really dying, but after two minutes I realize that isn’t possible. I focus on the nearest rock. It’s eighteen inches high, a little more than that from back to front, weighing, I guess, about 300 pounds. The ground is bone dry, not even a whisper of wind. Even though I haven’t seen it, I accept that the rock has moved. It’s too late to matter a damn. I don’t feel anything as I set off towards the road