Thea stepped out of the old pickup truck, taking care to shake hands with the older man who’d offered to give her a ride from the airfield where she’d landed. Staunchly refusing to use her phone for more than phone calls, Thea had foregone the Uber app her brother had downloaded to her phone and just found someone in the parking lot who she hoped was heading in the same direction as she was. 

“There it is,” the man nodded his head toward the all-purpose store across the two-lane highway.

“Thanks,” she called, slipped a few bucks into the cupholder on the door, gave him a wink and slammed the door, before jogging across the road. Thea liked the look of the area, if the town of Haver’s Creek left a little something to be desired. Lush, green trees bore down from everywhere except the two-lane road itself, but Thea could see that though the canopy was thick, the forest floor was fairly clear. There wasn’t a ton of brush or bushes, just a lot of green gloom punctuated with patches of sunlight. That boded well for hiking. She wouldn’t have to hack through a bunch of obstacles.

She did see some wild blackberry bushes with their silvery spines and the flirty red of fruit not yet ready to be picked. She knew that they would pack an awfully painful punch if she were to wander into their thorns and made a note to steer clear.

She could also hear, but not see, the creek for which the town was named. She heard shouts of laughter from that direction and detoured away from the store she’d been aiming for and headed instead to a small overpass that straddled the creek. She saw, with a bit of surprise, that it was more of a river than a creek, and fast. She could clearly see the stony bottom and as she watched, a group of ten or so people, lounging and laughing and shouting to one another, floated out from under the underpass on bright yellow inner-tubes the size of La-Z-Boy arm chairs. The kids wrestled and attempted to flip their comrades off their tubes while the adults lolled, their faces turned toward the alternating patches of sun and shade, beer cans resting on their bellies.

Thea meditated on the momentary burst of embarrassment that had run her through when she’d seen the inner tubes. Her grandfather had come to Haver’s Creek nearly fifty years ago, looking for the same star on the map that she was looking for, and a part of her, a small, childish, wonderfully naive part of her, had expected Haver’s Creek to be the same as it had been for him. Fifty years in the past, quaint and old-fashioned.

She certainly hadn’t expected, she ruminated as she turned a 180 from the creek and peered across the highway, a falling-down bar with a half-lit neon sign out front. The used bookstore slash antique dump looked about right; that had probably been there, in some iteration of itself, when her grandfather had looked upon it with his own eyes, but the all-purpose store would definitely have changed.

It was a beautiful, old, timber frame building, maybe eighty years old, if she had to guess. There were heritage pines on either side of it and a stack of what looked to be handmade canoes to complete the effect. The effect that was completely and instantly ruined by the fact that the old building had been divided in two and half of it was currently housing a McDonald’s. Half the parking lot was taken over by inner tubes of a bright green color, and Thea surmised that there must have been a few competing rental businesses from which to choose.

Though she was hungry, she avoided the fast food half of the store and instead walked in the side that would be more useful to her. She was discouraged by the lack of charm she’d found in a place that her grandfather had long talked of as being quaint and idyllic. Oh well. Time marches on. Things change. Nothing she could do about it but finish the task he’d asked of her.

The bell above the door wasn’t, in fact, a bell, but an electronic box that let out an exaggerated ‘moooooooo’ when she entered the store. Thea raised an eyebrow at it and surveyed her surroundings. The store was bigger than it looked from the outside and, to her relief, looked like it was actually going to have a lot of what she was hoping for. There was a camping supplies aisle that she headed right toward.

“I’m sorry,” said a bored-looking teenager from behind the counter. “You want to… rent… a horse?” He was talking to a woman with a fall of shiny chestnut hair, perfectly expensive-looking jeans, what appeared to be a cashmere sweater, and—well, I’ll be damned, Thea thought—English riding boots.

“Well,” the woman paused. “I suppose I could buy one, but I’d rather not have to go to all the trouble of selling it afterwards. I’ll only need it for a day or so. Plus, I think it would confuse an animal, to switch owners so quickly! I wouldn’t want to do that!”

“Right,” the kid said, looking at the woman like maybe she had her own YouTube channel where she spoofed people and he was currently the featured rube. “Ah, I guess I can give you my neighbor’s phone number. She keeps horses. Though I’m not sure—”
“Oh, that would be so kind of you!” the woman said, her voice bubbling and joyful in a particularly attractive way.

The woman didn’t turn when Thea passed, but Thea figured she must have been pretty, the way the teenager’s face was blushing a healthy pink at the woman’s overflowing happiness.

An obvious city chick renting a horse for a few days. Just when she thought she’d seen it all.

Thea turned into the camping aisle and found it occupied by a mid-twenties blonde wearing the same green employee vest that the teenager behind the counter was wearing, and a man who Thea could only see the back of.

He wore jeans that were white with wear at the seams and a blue T-shirt. He was tall, maybe lanky, but there was some definite muscle to him as well. An old camping backpack sat at his feet. He had one hand on the aisle divider next to the blonde’s left ear and his other hand was playing with a lock of her hair as he whispered something in her ear. The blonde giggled and blushed.

Thea frowned as she realized that the selection of camping cookware was directly behind the girl. She had nothing against canoodling, but she’d rather not be a third wheel to it.

“Excuse me,” she said in a clear tone. She’d prefer if she only had to say it once.

It worked. The man, without even looking up, moved the blonde about three feet to the right and cleared a space for Thea to drop her pack and crouch, choosing between camping pots. With a single-minded concentration that Thea came by naturally, she completely blocked out the canoodlers and went about inspecting the pots, then the canteens, and finally, the canned goods. It was then that she noticed that she had an audience.

The man, sans the blonde employee, was leaning against the same Swiss Army knife case that she was currently inspecting, only he appeared to be inspecting her.

She glanced up at him and then away. The strange, tugging jolt she felt hit her about three seconds after her first glance at his face, when she was already looking back at the knives. She turned, in a kind of delayed double take, and looked him full in the face.

The man had a sort of worn-in look, much like his jeans, or maybe like a much-used baseball glove. He wasn’t old, but he was probably pushing forty, older by a decade or so than Thea’s 29. His face was long and tan and lined with life. There were the ghosts of thousands of smiles in lines like that, beside his eyes and on either side of his mouth. One of his eyebrows was cut in two by a scar, white against his tan skin, and added to the lined effect of his face. She could see the evidence of a golden beard on his face, maybe a day and a half past needing a shave. He had gold hair to match the beard, peeking out from beneath an old baseball cap that Thea supposed had once been blue. It was more of a gray now, and white with the salt of sweat at the brow.

She raised her eyebrows at him, as if asking him what the hell he was looking at. He grinned at her, as if to tell her that she knew exactly what he was looking at.

The smile elicited that same strange, tugging feeling within her and Thea got the feeling that she’d met this man before, somehow. She knew she hadn’t, though, having one of those brains that never forgot a face, and this was a hell of a face. Straight nose, firm mouth and eyes that Thea guessed were green if she were to get close enough to really look.

The door of the shop mooed again and Thea looked to see the woman in the riding boots practically skipping out of the store. The teenager at the far end of the counter gallumped his way down to the knife display case, halfway caught between looking like this was his lucky day to be talking to Thea and like he’d rather sit naked on a block of ice than embarrass himself in front of another pretty stranger. This tall, black-haired, freckled goddess would make three in two days.

“Can I help you with something?” he mumbled, his eyes on the case and on her pretty hands, which looked clean and competent.

“I’d like to see that one.” Thea pointed to a jackknife with a wooden handle, exactly like the one she kept at home, but wouldn’t have been able to fly with. She’d decided to ignore the stranger who was staring at her.

The kid started unlocking the case.

“That one has a can opener on it,” the strange man said, pointing to a classic red Swiss Army knife with enough attached components to make Thea dizzy.

“A jackknife can be a can opener if you know how to use it,” she responded, looking up at the stranger with one eyebrow raised.

“Fair enough,” he chuckled. “But that one sure is cute.”

This time he pointed to a little pink knife no bigger than her pinky finger. “Right,” she replied drily. “My life goal. To be cute.”

The kid handed her the jackknife and she flicked it open, inspected the blade and the hinge, and flicked it closed with an ease and comfort that had both men raising their eyebrows.

“I’ll take it.”

Thea piled the rest of her things on the counter and the kid began to ring her up. While she waited, she turned her attention to the stranger. He wasn’t the only one who could inspect somebody around here.

She opened her mouth to say something but he beat her to the punch.

“Jack Warren.” He told her his name figuring that there were women who liked to give information and there were women who liked to get information. He also figured, correctly, from her direct manner and air of competence, that she liked to get information, not waste time answering some stranger’s questions. “I’m doing some hiking and camping around here over the next few days.” She eyed him and said nothing in return. He didn’t mind. Hell of a view from where he was standing. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen eyes that clear, or that uninterested in him. “There’s no chance you’d like to show me around the area, now, is there?”

He had things to do tomorrow, important things. But that wasn’t until nightfall anyhow, and he figured he wasn’t harming anybody by spending time with a beautiful woman in the meantime. He looked her over again. And maybe for a few days or weeks afterwards. He had the feeling that this one might take some time.

“She is definitely not from around here. Trust me. I’d have noticed,” the gawky cashier said, and then instantly went a startling shade of red halfway to purple. Yup. 3/3. There’d been three gorgeous strangers and he’d made a fool of himself in front of all three of them. Great.

Jack grinned at the kid, because he remembered what it felt like to be fifteen and horny and awkward and wanting nothing more than to just sit close enough to a girl to get a whiff of shampoo.

Thea ignored the kid’s comment and handed over some cash. “Don’t know the area well enough to show it to anybody.”

But she was obviously camping. And the supplies she had were definitely only enough for one or maybe two days. Jack wanted to ask more, but he realized that any more questions about where she was camping and who she was camping with were only going to make him seem threatening, menacing, and over-interested in a single girl alone in the forest.

Yeah. He thought she was damn gorgeous, but he certainly didn’t want to freak her out. He could read signals well enough. And these were some serious ‘later gator’ vibes she was tossing his way. That was fine.

He might have asked for her phone number, or offered to give his, if it weren’t for a familiar feeling at the back of his neck. It was a feeling that he’d never talked to anyone else about before. And it was one that he’d truly come to trust. Jack Warren only had about two years of high school under his belt, no real college education to speak of, and very little time researching just about anything that couldn’t be studied with a glass of whiskey in his hand. But he was an uncommonly smart man, and when he had a burst of intuition, it was usually right. And at that particular moment, his intuition told him that this wasn’t the last time he’d see this woman.

“Alright, then,” Jack said, dropping his chin to her as she took her receipt and packed her supplies into her pack. “Then I guess this is goodbye.”

She looked up at him, surprised that he wasn’t pushing his agenda. She had, after all, just seen him whispering something in the ear of another woman. He was obviously an ambitious flirt. When she looked into his face, what she saw there also surprised her. It wasn’t the face of a ladies’ man, or of a man who’d just been rejected. There was a pensive look on his face. It reminded her of someone. She just couldn’t place who it was.

She shook the thought and nodded her goodbye to this Jack Warren. “There’s a trailhead out back, right?” she asked the kid.

He looked like a deer in the headlights to be directly addressing her again. “Ah, yeah. It might be a little hard to find through the raspberry bushes but it’s back there. Strange!” he called to her back after she’d nodded and started toward the door. Thea paused and looked back over her shoulder, waiting for him to finish. “No one has used that trail in years, far as I know, but you’re the fourth person to ask about it in just a couple days.”

Strange indeed, Jack thought, considering the fact that he’d been about ten minutes away from heading out back and checking out the supposed trailhead himself. Make that five people in the last few days.

This information led Jack to a few different possible conclusions, none of which would have surprised him particularly. He’d been around the block more than once, and he had the scars to prove it. He wasn’t interested in getting in anyone’s way, nor was he interested in allowing anyone to get in his. He hadn’t been a successful treasure hunter for the last twenty odd years by following the old ‘ladies first’ principle.

If she was headed out on the old trailhead, then there was a good chance this wasn’t a coincidence. There was a real good chance that this chickadee had a copy of the map. Wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened to Jack Warren.

“Say,” Jack said, loud enough for her to hear. “You happen to know what the date is?”

“July sixth,” she answered, quick as a snakebite, as if she couldn’t help but answer his question, as if the date was keenly, intensely relevant to her.

“Uh huh,” he muttered, watching her straighten up and stride out of the store, her long legs eating up the ground. He stared at the empty door for a few minutes after it slammed closed. He was a stealthy man. He knew how to not get his trail picked up. He’d give her a few hours to make some headway, and then he’d leave her alone. But there wasn’t an ice cube’s chance in hell that he was gonna let her beat him there.

“You missed a hell of a fireworks show on the fourth,” the cashier said conversationally, much more comfortable now that the hyperventilatingly gorgeous woman had left the vicinity.

“Huh? Oh. Is that right?”

The kid opened his mouth to say more, but Jack cut him off in that lazy way of his.

“You want some advice, kid?”

The cashier nodded.

Jack leaned forward, elbows on the knife case. He reached behind his ear for one of the cigarettes he’d forgotten he’d quit half a decade ago. In the same instant he felt simultaneously ancient and the thrum of youthful competition racing through him. There was something in those woods worth finding. And at least four other people believed it to be so. Jack couldn’t wait to see what it was. “You ever see another woman like that one there.” He pointed to the door that the black-haired beauty had just exited through. “You do one of two things, you hear?”

The cashier nodded.

“You either bow down, just about as close to the ground as your nose will let you go.” He held up one finger, and then with the dramatic flair of a storyteller, slowly held up another. “Or you run just about as fast as you can in the other direction.”

 

***

 

Thea knew, from her modern maps, that there was actually a much faster way to get to the star on the map, if she hitched a ride up 68 about six more miles. But there was something about walking the same path her grandfather had walked that she just couldn’t shake. Now, she could admit that that was sentimental and maybe a little illogical, but she hadn’t been lying to Ray when she’d told him that this trip was partly about saying goodbye to the man who’d raised her.

Chet Redgrave had been a real salt-of-the-earth type. Hell, Thea’d either come by it naturally, or learned it from him. He was hardworking and realistic and logical. He made hard decisions when he had to. Put down sick animals so as not to prolong their pain, fired farmhands who weren’t hard workers, and spanked his grandkids when they needed it. An old, leathery Montana man through and through.

And yet… Thea thought, as she adjusted the straps on her pack; she’d left the store about an hour ago and she had a good three more hours of daylight before she’d have to pull over and find some place to camp for the night. She’d do the rest of the ten miles the next day. The morning of the seventh. And yet, her grandfather had also believed in this map. And what it promised.

He wasn’t a mystical man, yet he’d traveled here, fifty years ago, because there was set to be a total eclipse on the night of July seventh. But the eclipse had been scheduled for three a.m., well into the eighth, and nothing special had happened. Except that Chet Redgrave had seen some beautiful country and had himself a lovely solo camping trip.

Which was exactly what Thea was expecting out of all this. All she wanted was to fulfill her promise to her grandfather, feel a little closer to him, have a little R and R, and then head back to Montana.

She hiked for a while and relished the cool air of the shadowy forest. There was something almost waxy in the shade, like the leaves themselves were evaporating into the summer air. As she walked, the terrain alternated between pine needles and packed dirt and a kind of mossy swamp. She was able to keep her feet dry by hopping from one little two-foot island to the next little two-foot island and by scrambling up fallen logs. It was greener here, and harder to see the path, but it was also intensely lovely.

She hiked until the colors deepened in the forest and she knew it was time to make a small camp before the night fell.

The water, which Thea couldn’t decide if it was part of a creek system, or simply springing up from the ground water, was fresh and delicious. She filled her canteen and then selected one of the large islands to set up her camp. The mosquitoes were bad, which was the only reason she set up her tent. She ate a can of cold beans, a KIND bar, and a cheese stick, hung her pack in case of bears, and crawled into her tent. She unzipped the canvas at the top, revealing a mesh window that would keep out the bugs, but also allowed her to see the velvety strip of sky through the leaves.

When she fell asleep, she was at peace. She dreamed of the man in the store. Jack Warren. Of his golden hair and crinkled smile. When she woke up in the morning, the morning of July seventh, she didn’t remember.