“You think a prospector killed him?” She leans back. “God, that would be…” She shakes her head and makes a noise that is half laugh, half sob. “The cruelest of ironies. We come to see the landscape Matt raved about… and someone trying to find his claim kills my husband.”
She meets my gaze. “Blake wasn’t ‘poking around.’ He had no interest in prospecting. He never even jokingly mentioned finding Matt’s claim.”
“When he fell,” I press, “he was trying to get a better look around.”
“Because we were lost!” Her voice rises in exasperation. “He wasn’t looking for…”
She trails off, and I try not to react. I try not to glance at Dalton, quietly sitting behind her.
“He saw something,” she murmurs. “Or he thought he did.”
“What?” I ask.
“A person. Out in the forest. That’s actually why he fell. He was looking for landmarks, something to tell us which way to go, when he spotted movement. He figured it was a bear, but then the figure looked up, as if seeing him. Blake realized it was a person, and that startled him enough that he stumbled. Later, after we met you, he grumble-joked that you owed him those bandages, since you or your husband were probably responsible for him falling. Inadvertently, of course.”
“Do you remember where he was when he fell?”
She nods. Dalton hands me a map of the region, and we figure out where they’d been.
“Do you know where he spotted the figure?” I ask.
“Roughly, yes.” She looks at the map and points. “Southwest.He was facing this way. He said the person looked to be a few hundred feet from the bottom. So maybe…” Her chin jerks up. “Oh. Is this…?” She looks at me. “Remember I told you I heard voices in a clearing? Where you found my footprints? That’s about where Blake would have seen someone. Right around there.”
She leans forward. “Blake saw someone in the same area where I later heard voices. Unless that was you guys, there’s definitely someone else out there.”
I look at the map, and then look at Dalton, who gives a grim nod. She’s right—where Blake saw a figure is the same general area as the clearing where we found a dead man. A convict miner who could have been buried the day Blake saw someone in the forest.
Blake saw whoever buried that miner.
And they saw him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
We manage to convince Gretchen to delay her pick up, using our sat phone. That’s a start, but we aren’t out of the woods yet. She isn’t ready to cancel altogether and let us take her home… with Émilie making sure she doesn’t expose Haven’s Rock.
We’ve headed back to town, quietly talking on the way.
Was Blake killed for what he saw? From that distance, he wouldn’t have been able to identify anyone. They could have just not wanted to take chances. Eliminate all witnesses. After all, Blake and Gretchenhadlingered in the area afterward.
But circle back towhothey were burying. A convict laboring in a mining camp. A guy who didn’t die of natural causes, who hadn’t perished in an accident. He’d been poisoned.
I hate to think a prison camp would murder one of their charges, but they did execute one of their guards in front of us. They may also—as we speculated at the time—have killed the man who kidnapped Max. It’s not a huge leap to killing a miner, maybe one who was causing trouble.
But would they kill Blake—and try to kill Gretchen—for potentially witnessing the burial?
Although it’s notimpossible, I think there’s more to it. We know they’re security paranoid. Now we know why. What if they spotted Blake on that rock, surveying the land around their secret and highly illegal mining camp?
They track him and notice he’s with a woman, and they appear to be outsiders, not residents of our settlement. The next morning, still watching Blake and Gretchen, they follow Blake to the creek. Maybe he sees them. Maybe they confront him. Something is said that makes them decide he’s come for them, for their prison camp or their mining operation.
Wrong place, wrong time.
Is that the answer here? As Gretchen said, just the cruelest bad luck? I’m starting to think it is.
Blake and Gretchen weren’t here by accident, but theywerewhat they claimed to be. Hikers… who happened to be in the area because they knew the prospector who started all of this.
I know there are other answers, but everything fits, and Gretchen’s reactions had seemed genuine. They weren’t even here because they thought Mark/Matt’s death seemed suspicious. They literally only came because he said it was a beautiful area.
If all that is true, then it seems someone from the mining camp must have killed Blake. There’s no third party running around murdering hikers. We never really thought that was the answer. We just needed our link, and we thought we had it in Blake and Gretchen’s connection to Mark, but the reality is that Blake probably died because he stepped onto the side of a mountain. He was spotted, and that sealed his fate.
