Dark Divide: A Cormac and Amelia Story Read online

  Cormac chuckled. Yeah, the guy seemed like one of those. “Right,” he agreed.

  “So—you need anything else?” Annie said.

  “A place to stay in town. A quiet place.”

  Truckee had two sides to it. “Old” Truckee was the tourist side of the town, where you couldn’t get a hamburger for under $15 or a hotel room for under $200. Exactly the kind of mountain tourist town that made Cormac’s skin crawl. Colorado was lousy with them, and he’d spent too much time in places like it as a kid, working instead of playing. Cormac had started going along on trips to help his father when he was a teenager. The façade of it all—the high-end stores in fake-log-cabin buildings, the so-called rustic vacation lodges that had granite counter tops and hot tubs—was symbolic of the prepackaged experiences people came here for. They didn’t really want to rough it in the wild, just pretend like they could. And they needed people like Cormac’s father, like Annie Domingo, to keep them from getting hurt.

  Domingo directed him to the other half of town, that had an actual supermarket and looked like any modern main street of any small town. Normal, in other words. The old highway ran through here, from before the interstate went in, and this was where he found the old-style motor lodges and almost-forgotten vacation spots from decades before. Domingo guessed, correctly, that Cormac would be happier on this side of town.

  He found a low-key place that had cabins tucked back by a rushing creek. He’d have plenty of space and privacy, and they rented by the week. The sign with “Donner Trail Inn” spelled out in rustic log-shaped letters might have dated from the fifties.

  Everything around here seemed to be named “Donner” something. He couldn’t tell if it was good branding or a kind of wretched product placement.

  He went into the small lobby of the Donner Trail Inn, glanced over the rack of tourist brochures and the faded moss-green carpet, a refugee from another decade. He searched for a bell on the wood-laminate counter, found it, but didn’t need to ring it, because a young woman dashed out of the back office at his approach. She had honey-brown hair in a ponytail, a round face, and adjusted her glasses as she looked Cormac over. She was maybe twenty. In college, working for the summer?

  “How can I help you?”

  “Need a room. One of the cabins if you have one. Farthest from the road.”

  She smiled happily. “I certainly do. And how long will you be staying with us?”

  “Not sure. That a problem?”

  Her smile grew sly. “It certainly isn’t. My name’s Trina, just let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

  She tapped the keys of a very ancient computer and made some kind of affirmative noise. Cormac couldn’t see the screen to tell what she was nodding at. She kept glancing at him out of the corner of her eye, her lips locked in a smile.

  “I just need to get your name and information,” she said, sliding a card across the table for him to fill out. Dutifully, he did so. She studied it when he handed it back over.

  “So, Mr. Bennett, what brings you to town?”

  “Just having a look around.”

  “Nice. It’s a great town. You’ll love it here.”

  “You from around here?”

  “My whole life! My grandparents build this place!”

  He tried to turn his wince into a smile. “Nice.”

  “I mean, why would I leave? And you know what? People come to visit here and like it so much they never leave. Half the people in town have a story like that! Car broke down, liked it so much they decided to stay. Came for vacation, liked it so much they just stayed. Neat, huh?”

  Along with the sign out front, the keys on a plastic key ring—no magnetic key cards here—might have dated from the fifties. Trina put the key on the desk and kept her hand on it. He couldn’t just reach out and grab it from her.

  She beamed. “So, you know, just watch yourself. You might never leave, too!”

  Through Amelia, he felt the sudden urge to make a warding sign against evil.

  “We’ll see about that,” Cormac said, since he wasn’t able to manage a polite chuckle.

  Trina slid the key across the counter, along with a strip of paper with a wifi code on it, because God forbid anyone have a mountain vacation without internet access.

  “Anything else I can help you with? Need a place to eat? Maybe rent a mountain bike or something? Anything?”

  Cormac gathered the Donner Trail Inn didn’t get a lot of business this time of year. Trina was leaning on the counter now, making it hard to look away from the low-cut scoop of her purple T-shirt. She wore a woven leather necklace and had a tattoo of roses on her left bicep.

  Amelia seemed rather nonplussed, expressing roiling discomfort in the back of his mind. What. . .is she. . .what would you call it?

  She’s flirting, he thought back. He pressed his lips into a thin smile, amused and a little annoyed. Trina was cute because she was young and bright eyed, but she wasn’t his type.

  Do you have a type?

  He had to think about that a minute. And realized he wasn’t sure he did. He liked what he liked.

  “I’ll let you know,” he said, leaving without a backward glance.

  The photocopied map she’d given him highlighted which unit was his. She’d also written her name down and circled the phone number for the front desk. Just in case.

  “What do you think so far?” Cormac asked, back in the fresh air and sunlight, crossing the parking lot to the row of little cabins nestled among sparse pines. A raven sailed overhead, and chickadees called from the trees. “Is Donner Pass haunted?”

  You mean other than Art Weber’s cabin? No sign at all. This place is so bright, it’s the opposite of haunted. After another moment of thought she added, You never hear so many birds around a place that’s haunted.

  First thing they did—or rather Amelia did—was cast protective magic over the room. Just a basic spell to keep the bad stuff out, make sleeping at night a little easier. In her first life, when Amelia was traveling all over the world, she made a habit of protecting her room wherever she stayed. She’d taken up the habit again, with Cormac. He was skeptical that the magic did much good. It might keep out an angry ghost, but wouldn’t stop anyone who decided to drive a truck through the wall. The odds of either thing happening were pretty slim. But the spell didn’t hurt anything, so why not? The one time I don’t do this will be the one time something terrible happens.

  They had an argument about whether lighting a sage smudge would violate the motel’s no-smoking policy—$250 fine for smoking in the cabin, a plastic sign on the nightstand declared. Cormac thought it probably would, Amelia didn’t much care, and when did Cormac worry about following the rules anyway? Answer: since he got off parole after his felony conviction. Given the unknown nature of what they were investigating, Amelia was adamant: they needed the spell, and the spell needed incense. They could add any fines to their list of expenses when they handed Domingo the bill.

  You could probably persuade that very helpful young woman at the front desk to dispense with any fines, should the issue arise.

  Cormac didn’t want to go near that conversation.

  So they cast the spell, filled the room with haze from a smoldering bundle of sage, and hoped they wouldn’t need it. When Amelia murmured the last syllable of her chant, using his voice, Cormac felt something like a wall going up, a thin sheet of bluish light, invisible to anyone who didn’t know what to look for. He did breathe a little better when it was done.

  Next, he wanted to have a look around town. He found a sporting goods store where he bought a detailed map of the area, and put a mark at the rough location of Art Weber’s cabin. The road it was on barely showed up as a faint dotted line. The woods around here probably had dozens of cabins tucked away on back roads, in addition to the ones prominently overlooking the lake. Still, the area had some remote stretches—part of the Pacific Coast Trail went through here. The Tahoe National Forest reached in all directions.<
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  Amelia circled maybe a dozen or so areas equally spaced around the location of Weber’s cabin. She wanted to raise her pendulum and take readings at each spot—a magical survey. An almost scientific approach, taking measurements that would help them discover if whatever supernatural influence they’d located only affected that one spot—if this was an isolated event—or if that magical sink they’d sensed had appeared anywhere else.

  They started in the woods around the state park visitor center and worked in a circle, west toward the glacial lake between the town and the mountain pass, east toward the town. It took longer than Cormac expected. Not every spot Amelia wanted to check was on a road or hiking trail. In a couple of spots he had to park at a trailhead then hike a mile or so to some grove of tangled underbrush or granite outcrop.

  One of the spots was just a few feet off of a scenic overlook. A couple of other cars were parked there. None of the tourists made his nerves twitch, and they didn’t even stare when he left the pavement and went through the underbrush. When Amelia found the place she wanted, it turned out to have a view, looking out over a stretch of forested hills to the east, across the lake, to the town beyond. This was the view the Donner Party might have seen if they’d made it this far and bothered to turn around to look.

  Weber’s cabin was visible from here only because Cormac knew where to look. Its brown shingled roof made an angular line at odds with the vertical trees around it. From here, it looked harmless. Normal. He didn’t sense anything like what he’d felt passing through the doorway.

  Ready?

  “Yeah.”

  Amelia slipped into his limbs, taking charge of his nerves. She grounded them both, taking stock of the space around them as he uncoiled the nail pendulum. He expected it to swivel, then point decisively to the cabin. But just like at every other spot they’d tried so far, the nail shivered, then pointed straight down before going slack as if tired. Unlike at the cabin, the nails didn’t stay pointed. They jerked in the one direction, then returned to neutral. The farther from the cabin, the less the nail moved. The effect disappeared about five miles away in all directions—at least the directions they could check. He didn’t feel the need to climb the ridge that rose up south of the cabin. This much should give them something to work with.

  I don’t like this, Cormac. It’s like some kind of bomb went off and flattened the atmosphere around it.

  Back at their room, Amelia worked on the map, adding markings, interpreting what they found. She consulted one of her standard research books, one of the first things she’d asked him to track down when he’d gotten out of prison: a study of ley lines, maps marked with color-coded lines and dots that supposedly represented veins and roads of magic existing deep in the earth all over the world. According to these maps, a couple of lines passed through the area, and she copied their routes over her increasingly crowded markings.

  When they sat back to regard the whole picture, they found a swirling mass of magical influences, flows of power saturating the area. Nothing indicated why Weber’s cabin should be the focus of whatever it was they’d discovered.

  “Could what happened to Weber be connected with the Donner Party in any way?”

  No, she said, which surprised him. She rarely made such decisive declarations. Usually it was probably not, or I don’t believe so. Look at the map. I’ve marked the presumed locations of the campsites where the party made shelter, the spots where the deaths occurred, even the ones along the pass and beyond. None of them correspond in any way to Weber’s cabin or the ley lines, or influence reaching beyond it.

  She indicated a trio of squares near the visitor center— the Donner Party’s campsites. Another set of squares marked a few miles east—the party had separated before getting trapped for the winter. The Donner family itself was at that eastern location.

  Mostly, Cormac was amazed that this much information survived about the Donner Party, to be able to mark the deaths on a map.

  They’re still making archeological investigations to learn more about what happened. It’s an obsession with some people.

  “Peterson?”

  Indeed.

  “What now?”

  I need more information, she said, with an intensity that might have been, if he could say it, obsessive.

  Time to hit the books.

  The local library was rustic, but honestly so, a small brown building tucked into yet another collection of pine trees—and right next to the sheriff’s department, Cormac noted. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, no reason he ought to draw suspicion. A bunch of kids’ drawings decorated the library windows.

  The nice cardigan-wearing woman at the counter smiled briefly at him as he entered and turned back to whatever she was doing. The place was soft and insulated. Safe, which should have been comforting.

  First, he found the local newspapers going back to Weber’s death, and read everything he could. He didn’t learn much more than Domingo had told him and what he’d read online. The man didn’t have much family, wasn’t married, and didn’t have kids, which was a small comfort, he supposed. Weber had been a popular guide and ranger. He was an authority on the white-headed woodpecker, a local rarity. People liked him. They’d miss him. And he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d kill himself. There was no reason someone like him should have died so mysteriously—and no reason that he shouldn’t, if he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Like a lot of libraries in tourist towns, this one had a section of local books about the area. Places like this always had a couple of local authors who collected folklore and stories of regional interest, publishing them in pamphlets just a couple of steps up from homemade. And yes, he found a few by Elton Peterson, the angry historian. He’d written biographies of several of the main figures from the tragedy; an entire book discussing the children who were part of the expedition—as depressing a subject as Cormac could imagine, so he didn’t even crack the cover on that one—and another covering the equipment and survival techniques the members of the party would have used to set up their not-particularly successful camp. As far as Cormac could tell from skimming the work, Peterson hadn’t done much original research—the archeological information in that last book was all done decades ago, and he compiled it from other sources and recycled it into the newer book. He’d talked about a new book in his rant at Domingo. Cormac wondered what could possibly be left to cover.

  Amelia took notes. Just in case, she insisted. It was probably most noteworthy that they didn’t find anything new and interesting. The Donner story was tragic, but it wasn’t supernatural.

  Next stop was the local historical society, which could be another font of quirky and often useful information in a town like this. What stories were important to the town itself, maybe overshadowed by the notoriety of the Donners? Then again, it might just be a room with lots of black and white pictures of Fourth of July parades of yesteryear. Amelia didn’t want to miss anything, so they looked.

  The society had a small cabin at one end of a standard city park, with ball fields and a playground, a few kids playing and people throwing sticks for dogs. It all would have looked innocuous except for a couple of vans and a big SUV parked near the cabin, blocking out half the lot, and a series of traffic cones marking out an area of the grassy lawn nearby. The reason for the presumptuous claim of public space became clear quickly: the nearby cluster of people included a man with a big video camera, another with a mike boom, and a few of the others were wearing historical costumes, cheap nineteenth century pioneer outfits, shirts and trousers, skirts and shawls, floppy hats and sunbonnets.

  Somebody was filming something. Cormac wondered if the costumes looked as fake to Amelia as they did to him.

  How am I supposed to know if they look real? Those costumes represent an era well before my time, she answered with a huff. You do realize the nineteenth century was a hundred years long, don’t you? She added, But yes, they look fake.

  An energetic young man emerg
ed from the back of one of the vans. He had slicked-back dark hair and wore expensive-looking shirt and trousers. Clapping his hands, he started calling out orders. The cameraman and mike operator took positions at one end of the grassy stretch, and the people in costume—actors—straightened skirts and hats and moved toward the other end of the grass, against a backdrop of trees, the one and only place they could be filmed without the modern buildings, roads, wires, and so on, intruding. One of them dropped a half-burned cigarette and stomped it out.

  The energetic man must have been the director. Cormac scanned the vans for some kind of production company logo, but they looked like plain white rentals. A few more people were on hand with clipboards, bottles of water, and other odds and ends. Some of the dog walkers wandered over, and one of the women with a clipboard marched over to them. “Move along, folks. We’ve got people working here, we need you to stay out of the way.”

  That didn’t really help. This was too interesting to just walk away from.

  “Okay, people! This is part one of the Fort Bridger scene, everybody know where we’re at?”

  Amelia observed, Fort Bridger is a thousand miles away, in Wyoming. What are these people doing?

  Cormac believed they were filming a dramatic reenactment for some kind of documentary.

  “All right!” the director checked in with his crew while the actors took up places they’d obviously discussed or rehearsed. “Ready? Action!”

  Two of the men in costumes began arguing. “We should continue on the old route! It’s the safest way!”

  “No!” said the other. “This new shortcut will be faster! It will shorten our journey by three hundred miles!”

  “But we know nothing about the route and we have no guide!” They made expansive gestures and over-enunciated in a way that made Cormac wince.

  “How hard can it be?” the second man declared. Cormac couldn’t tell if this was intended to sound as ironic as it did.

  Oh dear Lord, are they reenacting the Donner Party? Amelia seemed horrified by the idea.