The assembly point was exactly where the brochure said it would be, a gravel pull-off a half mile up County Road 18 where the service track forked off into the trees, and I got there at six-forty, ten minutes before the posted time, because I wanted to be standing in plain sight when people arrived, not hiding in a car waiting to ambush anyone.
Six headlamps bobbed down from vehicles parked along the shoulder. Della said the seventh guest had decided over breakfast not to come. Her lodge van stood in the pull-off; our bus was back at the school. Grant was already there, pack on, trekking poles in hand, running through something with her that looked like a route briefing he'd rehearsed. He saw me and his jaw set.
"You're not stopping this by standing there," he said.
"I'm not trying to stop it by standing here. I'm here because I told you I'd be here whether you wanted me or not, and because I want you to see something before you take six people one step onto that track."
Fresh snow had fallen overnight, four or five inches, soft and undisturbed, smoothing every rut and hollow along the service track's mouth into a single clean white surface, the kind of snow that makes a bad crossing look exactly like a good one until weight finds the difference.
"I inspected this five days ago," I said, loud enough for Della and the group to hear, not just Grant. "The timber crossing is about three-quarters of a mile in. One plank was broken down into the gap, and another moved under my hand. Fresh snow hasn't repaired either one. It has only made them harder to see."
"We're not walking the full track," Grant said. "Route's been adjusted, we stop well short of the crossing, same overlook, same view of where the car was found."
"Then let's walk it together, right now, before anyone else takes a step, and you tell me exactly where you intend to stop, and I'll tell you whether the ground agrees with you."
He hesitated, and in that hesitation I saw six people watching him decide, which mattered more to him, I think, than anything I'd said. He finally nodded, and told the group to wait at the pull-off, and the two of us walked in alone, headlamps cutting twin cones through the snowfall.
We kept to the packed center of the track until, about three-quarters of a mile in, our lamps picked out the crossing. I stopped on the firm approach and pointed Grant to the near edge without stepping onto it. Under the fresh cover, the surface sagged into a shallow bowl where the broken decking had been, snow smoothing the edges of a hole I knew was there.
Grant stopped at the edge of it without my having to say anything, planted one pole, and pressed down slowly. The pole sank through eight inches of snow and then another two through nothing at all, no resistance, into open space where decking should have been.
He stood there a long moment looking at the small black hole his pole had made, breath coming out in a long cloud, and I let the silence do what I couldn't, because some things land better unnarrated.
"This isn't about him," I finally said. "I'm not telling you the crossing's bad because of some theory about where Tobin Voss went. You just put your pole through it. That's something we both saw. Somebody following your headlamp could put a boot there before they understood what the snow was covering."
"I wasn't going to let anyone cross it," he said, quieter than I'd heard him in weeks. "I was going to stop at the overlook, same as I said."
"The overlook's thirty feet beyond the far end, Grant. To reach it without crossing the timber, you'd have to take that shelf around the edge." I kept my light on the narrow white strip beside the drop. "That's your adjusted route. Six strangers along there, in the dark, with fresh snow hiding where the bank ends. Stopping at the overlook doesn't keep them out of danger."
He didn't answer right away. He crouched down instead and brushed snow away from the edge of the sag until the broken decking showed black and splintered underneath, as plain a fact as either of us had found in two weeks of guesses, and for the first time since the brochure first landed on the counter, he looked like a man measuring the actual size of what he'd been about to do.