The sign at the Conundrum Creek trailhead said DOGS NOT PERMITTED BEYOND SILVER DOLLAR POND in letters big enough to read from the car.
Seth turned off the car, abruptly ending Axl Rose mid-song. Cooper was standing on the passenger seat with his nose on the window, whining at a Subaru with a kayak on the roof.
“Well, shit,” Seth said.
He had worked his whole plan at breakfast. He had been proud of it. Hubris, he thought to himself.
The television over the bar at the Jerome had the map up again with red dots where the roads were closed. Leadville. Twin Lakes. Highway 82 over Independence. A new one since Friday night on Cottonwood Pass Road out of Buena Vista. Every dot was east of the Divide. The anchor said the FBI had more than a hundred people on the ground and was confident the two founders were still in the area.
Seth stared at the dots for a long time while his eggs got cold.
“That’s the wrong side,” he told the bartender, who was cutting limes and agreed with him without asking what he meant.
Samantha was smarter than all of them. He had watched her take apart two diligence teams and one board member he still didn’t like. If a hundred cops were standing on one side of the mountains, she wasn’t on that side.
Seth was sure she had gone the other way. West, into the Elk Mountains, where there were no roads to close. She would want a place where people camped all summer, so three more wouldn’t look odd. She would want a way out the far side that didn’t go past a checkpoint. Conundrum Creek went up out of Aspen for eight and a half miles to a hot spring, and at the top of it there was a pass that dropped into the valley above Crested Butte. Marcus had texted him a photo from those hot springs two summers ago, standing waist deep in the pool at sunset with a beer, captioned jealous? Seth had been.
And the WINTER tub and the CLIMBING tub in Marcus’s garage had both been empty. Cold nights. Steep ground. A pass at twelve thousand feet.
He had traced it on the map with his finger. It had fit perfectly.
Now he sat in the trailhead lot and looked at the sign.
He could go back to the Jerome and leave Cooper in the room, where Cooper would eat the curtains. He could tie him to a tree at the pond, which he wasn’t going to do. Or he could walk as far as the pond, sit there, and ask everyone coming down.
He decided that was actually the better plan. Anybody who had been up at the springs in the last three days would have to walk past him on the way out, and Cooper was an excellent excuse to start a conversation.
He checked his phone. One bar. He called Marcus. It went straight to voicemail but this time he left a message.
“It’s Seth. I’m in Aspen. I’m going for a hike up Conundrum with Cooper. If you’re up there, I have sandwiches.”
The bar went to none a quarter mile up the trail, and he put the phone in his pocket.
The trail went up through aspen that had just started to turn, then through spruce, along the creek. It was a beautiful day. Cooper went ahead and came back and went ahead again, pulling at the leash every time he smelled something he wanted to eat.
The first people coming down were a couple in their twenties with enormous packs and a permit tag zip-tied to one of them. Cooper went straight to the woman, who said, “Oh my God,” and got down on her knees to scratch his ears.
“You coming from the springs?” Seth asked.
“Two nights.”
“Busy up there?”
“Every site was taken,” the man said. “There’s a lottery now. We tried for three months.”
“I’m trying to catch up with some friends who might have gone up. A man and a woman. Thirties. Maybe a third guy, thin, a beard. She’s outdoorsy. He’s not.”
The woman looked up at him from the dog. “Like from the news?”
Seth laughed. “God, no. The TV says those two are in Leadville. These are just friends who don’t answer their phones.”
“Nobody up there answers their phone,” the man said. “There’s no service.”
They didn’t remember anyone special. Seth thanked them, figuring they’d spent all their spare time fooling around in their tent. Cooper tried to follow them down the trail.
He did it eleven more times on the way up. A family with a teenage son who wouldn’t take his earbuds out. Two women from Carbondale who were training for something. A man alone, in his sixties, hiking in Chacos with a Yeti tumbler, who said the springs were full of kids and that he’d been going up there since before they put in the permits, when it was really something.
Each time he added something in and eventually landed on the idea that they were trying to get away from the world for a few days to hide out and relax.
“Everybody up there looks like they’re hiding,” the man in the Chacos said. “That’s the point of the springs.”
Seth laughed at that one for real.
He heard a helicopter at around one o’clock and looked up. It came up the valley from behind him, low and loud. He tracked it, and for about four seconds he was sure it was for them and it would set down in the meadow above him, but then he saw that it was red and white and had a cross on the side. It went over the ridge in the direction of the Divide. Somebody had fallen off something.
He realized he had been hoping it was a search helicopter. That was stupid of him. If the FBI found them first, he would be watching it on the television at the Jerome with everybody else.
Silver Dollar Pond was a small round piece of water below the trail with a flat rock beside it and another sign about dogs. He sat on the rock. Cooper went in the pond up to his chest, paddled around for a while, and then came out. He waited until he was next to Seth to shake himself dry.
“Thanks,” Seth said.
He ate the turkey sandwich from the Jerome and gave Cooper the crusts.
Nine more groups came down in the next three hours. He could ask the question in about forty seconds now without it sounding like a question. One of them was a big guy from Texas with a walking stick, who said he’d been up and over Triangle Pass once, twenty years ago, and nearly died.
“Anybody out of shape isn’t getting over that,” the guy said. “Not with a pack.”
Seth thought about Marcus, who drove to the gym. He had pictured Samantha on the pass and couldn’t picture Marcus on it. He concentrated, but all he saw was Samantha smiling and Marcus sitting on the ground saying he wouldn’t go any further.
Nobody had seen them.
At four a woman in a green Forest Service shirt came down with a radio on her chest and a clipboard in a plastic sleeve. She stopped and looked at Cooper, then at the sign, then at Seth.
“He’s on this side of it,” Seth said.
“He is,” she said. “You waiting on somebody?”
He told her the same story about the friends. She listened to the whole thing and didn’t say anything for a second.
“I check every permit in that zone twice a day,” she said. “Twenty-some sites. I know every name on the list for this week. I also know that half the people up there aren’t the people whose names are on it, because they bought it off somebody on Facebook.”
“Anybody who didn’t fit?”
She looked at him the way he looked at founders who told him their numbers were conservative.
“Sir, is this about the thing on the news?”
“It’s about three friends who owe me a phone call,” he said.
“Then no,” she said. “Nobody who didn’t fit. It’s been couples and college kids all week, and one guy who brought a guitar, and I wanted to kill him.” She clipped the radio mic back to her strap. “If your friends were hiding up there, they’d be the first ones in ten years who managed to do it quietly.”
He watched her go down the trail.
He sat on the rock a while longer. The sun went behind the ridge at about five and the temperature dropped right away. Cooper came and leaned on his leg.
They weren’t here. They had never been here. He had liked his idea too much. That wasn’t the first time that had happened, but at least this time it didn’t mean he’d made a dumb investment in a company that was going to fail.
He was tired, hungry, and more worried about them than he had been at breakfast.
“Okay,” he said to Cooper. “Let’s go home.”
Cooper bolted.
Seth stood up. He called out to Cooper twice, then heard something in the willows off the trail. When he got there Cooper was on his back in the grass, grinding his shoulders into a gut pile. Somebody with a bow had gotten an elk up here in the last day or two, done the work on the spot, and left the rest.
“No,” Seth said. “No, no, no.”
Cooper rolled over, stood up, and looked extremely happy. Seth leashed him and walked him back to the pond. Cooper sat at the edge staring at Seth.
“Cooper — go,” said Seth, pointing at the pond. Cooper just sat there.
“Fuck this.” Seth found a stick on the ground and flung it into the middle of the pond. As Cooper chased it in, Seth dropped the leash.
It was dark when they got back to the car. He drove back to the Jerome without any music. His phone found a bar halfway down Castle Creek Road and buzzed nineteen times. He looked at it while he drove. There was a text from a number he didn’t have saved.
Seth hey its Brett Sasaki, Marcus’s buddy from Stanford. we met at the Aspen thing. have you heard from him?? getting worried. everyone’s saying crazy stuff
He re-read Brett’s message at the stop sign at the bottom of the road. The burner was in the front pocket of his pack on the back seat, under Cooper, turned off. He looked at the pack in the mirror for a second.
He didn’t answer Brett. He didn’t take out the burner either.
The valet at the Jerome was a twenty-year-old kid who opened the passenger door, took one breath, and closed it again.
“Sir,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I don’t think I can take the dog through the lobby.”
Seth got the hose from beside the loading dock and washed Cooper in the parking lot under a light, with the kid holding the flashlight on his phone. It took twenty minutes and most of a bottle of hotel shampoo. Cooper still smelled like dead elk.
“He’s a good dog,” the kid said.
“Some of the time,” Seth said.