Della picked me up at eight in a lodge utility vehicle that still had a Christmas pine smell air freshener clipped to the vent, and she talked the whole way out County Road 18 like she was giving a tour she'd given a hundred times, which, I realized, she probably had.
"This is roughly where the car would've entered the skid," she said, slowing near the bend where the guardrail still shows a newer section patched in sometime in the last decade. "Nobody knows the exact point, obviously, but it's close enough for the story to land."
I didn't answer that. I was looking past her shoulder at the shoulder itself, at how little room there was between the white line and the drop toward the treeline, and thinking about how different a road looks in daylight with dry pavement than it does at night with snow coming sideways into your headlights.
A half mile further she turned off onto an unmarked cut that ran behind a stand of birches, blocked at the entrance by a chain strung between two posts. A faded sign read SERVICE ACCESS, NO PUBLIC USE, and the chain itself had a newer padlock on it, the kind you buy at a hardware store, not the kind a county puts up.
"We've got permission," Della said, before I asked. "Informal, but permission. The forestry office doesn't mind foot traffic out here in winter, long as nobody's cutting wood."
She unlocked it and we drove the vehicle slowly down the track, which narrowed as it went, snow-packed in the middle with two bare ruts where other vehicles had been through recently, and ended, after maybe three quarters of a mile, at a timber crossing over a streambed that had clearly seen better winters.
The near end of the crossing had buckled, one whole plank sheared and tilted down into the gap, and the rest of the structure had a soft gray look to the wood that told me rot, not just age. I got out and walked to where I could see the drop beneath it, maybe eight feet to ice-covered rock.
"How long has this been like this?" I asked.
"I don't know exactly. Since the thaw last spring, maybe. It's not load-bearing for a vehicle, I know that much, which is why the bus was always going to stop back at the chain."
I crouched at the edge and put a hand on the nearest plank, and it gave slightly under pressure that shouldn't have moved it at all. "Della, I'm not driving anyone back here, and I'm not certifying this ground for a group excursion. Not the track, not anywhere near that crossing."
"The bus isn't crossing it," she said, like that settled something. "Nobody said the bus was crossing it."
"Then what were you planning to do with eleven paying guests once the bus stopped at the chain?"
She hesitated, just long enough that I understood the hesitation was the answer. "They walk from the chain to the crossing, then a little past, to the overlook. We call it the last stretch of his route. The car was back by the bend, obviously, but this is where the search theory leads. People don't pay for candlelight alone, Lenora. They want somewhere to stand."
"On foot. In February. Across broken timber over an eight-foot drop."
"Most of them go around the edge. There's a path."
I looked at the path she meant, a narrow shelf of snow-covered ground skirting the gap, no wider than a boot, with nothing between it and the streambed but luck. "Della, I inspected a bus this morning because that's the job I signed up to help with. I did not sign up to walk a candlelight group across that."
"Nobody's asking you to walk it. Just drive it."
"I'm telling you the part of this I can see with my own eyes is already unsafe, and I haven't even gotten to the part I can't see, which is what you're telling eleven strangers my family supposedly knows about where that road goes."
She didn't have an answer for that yet, and I didn't wait around for one, just walked back to the vehicle and got in, because I'd seen enough of the service track to know exactly what I needed to tell Grant that night, whether he wanted to hear it or not.