Page 96 of Dead Mountain

With trepidation, Corrie walked over to the silk curtain, grasped the material, and began to draw it back. But even as she touched the rotten material it dissolved in her hands, parting along the warp and generating a cloud of particles and bits of drifting thread, dazzling in the light beam.

It took a moment for Corrie to pull herself together and examine the scene. A man lay on the bed, hands folded across his breast, looking more like a corpse laid out for viewing than a person who, it seemed, died in an agony of hunger or thirst. His face was desiccated: the eyes sunken, lips dried and drawn away from even, white teeth. The mummification did little to hide numerous signs of starvation: the skin drawn tight across the bones of the face, the body shrunken, the clothes sagging and loose on the limbs. The fingers of his hands were entwined on his breast, shriveled to dried vanilla beans. His neck looked impossibly skinny. He could not have been older than twenty or thirty, and the body issued no smell beyond a faint and not unpleasant scent of dust.

On the bed, next to the man’s right hip, lay a journal and pencil. And on the other side was a camera.

52

FOR A LONG time, Corrie simply stared. She seemed unable to pull her gaze from those withered fingers, interlinked with each other. It was as if the man—and it had to be Rodney O’Connell—had meticulously laid himself out for death . . . which, of course, was exactly what he had done.

So her long-gestating speculation had proved right. Victim nine of the Dead Mountain tragedy had made it to the bunker, gotten locked in, and then died. How long would it have taken? Without water, she knew that death by dehydration would take less than a week. Death by starvation took much longer—forty days, perhaps.

“Poor guy,” said Nora, echoing Corrie’s thoughts. “What a way to go.”

Corrie tried to sort through her emotions: anguish at the pathetic figure in the bed, mingled with vindication, repulsion, sorrow.

“You were right,” Nora said.

Corrie nodded. She reached out for the journal.

“Are you sure you should touch anything?” Nora asked. “Shouldn’t we leave it as is?”

Corrie hesitated. “Normally, I’d say yes. But if I don’t read what’s in that journal, and do it right now, I may never see it again. They’ll cover all this up—you know they will. You see that pencil?” Corrie pointed at the bed. “He was writing in that journal, probably right up to his death.” She lowered her voice. “I want to know what really happened. I need to know. Even if it’s just for myself.”

She reached out and—carefully, carefully—picked up the journal, then held it under her headlight. It was a small volume, with a tooled leather cover and a leather thong to hold it shut. The thong was broken, the leather of the cover rubbed and worn.

She slipped a finger under the cover and opened it. In carefully drawn letters, the title page read:

Manzano Expedition Journal

Being an account of ten fearless mountaineers Who ventured into the wilderness October 27 to _____ 2008

Corrie stared. Was this a mistake? Ten mountaineers—not nine? She kept reading.

To which we have each solemnly affixed our respective John Hancocks:

Alex DeGregorio

Henry Gardiner

Luke Hightower

Andrew Marchenko

Lynn Martinez

Michael Mastrelano

Rodney O’Connell

Paul Tolland Jr.

Amanda Van Gelder

Gordon Wright

Corrie stared at the first name on the list. DeGregorio? What the hell? DeGregorio, the wealthy roommate of the knife owner . . . he’d been on the expedition?

If that was true, it meant he’d been the only survivor. Yet he had told no one he was there—including her. For some reason, he’d hidden the fact of his participation, covered it up . . . but what was he covering up? And why?

---