trip back up to our cabins was quiet. I imagined they all wanted to talk about the night’s events; they just didn’t want to talk in front of me. Once in the cabin, things didn’t get any more talkative between Dad and me. We minimized our verbal contact as we got ready for bed and sleep that would never come. I could hear my dad tossing and turning on the bed. I knew he could hear my tossing and turning on the sofa when in the single-digit hours of the night he said, “Stephen’s father was killed in a car wreck.”
“I know,” I replied.
“It was a one-car accident, and there were only two people in the car,” Dad continued, “Raymond Warrensburg and Stephen Warrensburg.”
“I know,” I repeated.
“Yes, but what you don’t know is that the wreck happened on this mountain,” said Dad.
I didn’t know that.
“It was January a year and a half ago. Late night or early morning depending on how you look at it. Maybe two or three AM. Ray and Stephen had been up here at the observatory. They were on their way back home. Back down the mountain. Back down that winding narrow road we took to get up here.”
I didn’t know that either, and it made me wonder about the selection of Huntsville for this year’s Space Cadet get-together. “Did that have anything to do with Dr. Warrensburg choosing this mountain for your meeting?” I asked.
“Actually,” said my dad, “Angie wanted to go to Chicago. She has a colleague at the University of Chicago she wanted us to meet. And frankly, the rest of us were looking forward to Chicago, too.”
So why are you here? I started to ask. I didn’t ask. I knew the answer.
“I guess,” Dad said, “now we know why Stephen begged her to bring the Space Cadets to Huntsville.”
The moon had been full two or three nights before. It still had enough strength to find its way through the humid Alabama night and sneak into the cabin through a breach in the curtains. I watched its subtle light fill a crack in the wood floor.
“Dad,” I asked, “why did you and the others agree to come here?”
“Obviously,” he replied, “we didn’t know we were going to be murder suspects.”
Then he laughed.
And so did I.
The laugh felt good. It took the tension out of the room, out of the night.
“Murder suspects.” When he said it out loud it sounded like the joke that it was.
“I don’t know,” I said, “Huntsville might not be so bad. The barbeque was good, and I’d love to see the Saturn V and the Ares rockets.”
“I think you’ll get a kick out of the observatory, too. Last time I was here it was kind of cold. There was even a little snow on the ground up here on the mountain.”
Last time?
“You’ve been here before?”
“Sure,” said my dad, “several times. We all have.”
I didn’t know that.
8
First I heard the cricket. Annoying. I cracked my eyelids and was shocked to discover the subtle glow of a waning moon had been bleached out by a stark sun. I must have been out for a while. This was no dawn’s early light. This was mid-summer’s morning, grab-your-sunglasses light. I could grope around for my sunglasses, or I could shut my eyes. I shut my eyes.
The cricket chirped again, and then I heard my dad talking to it. “This is Robert,” he introduced himself to the cricket. He sounded as groggy as I felt.
“Oh, hey, sweetheart,” he said.
Sweetheart? How well did he know this cricket?
“He’s still asleep. We were up kind of late . . . No, just Jason and me. Everyone else went to their own cabin by nine o’clock. He and I stayed up for awhile.”
I began to realize he was talking on his cell phone.
“They’re all fine. She’s fine. Yeah, he’s even more strange than he was last year, but he was a little eccentric even before the accident. He’s got a new high-tech wheelchair and a van . . . Yeah, almost seventeen; he’s driving now . . . Okay. Me, too, sweetheart . . .
“Jason? Jason, it’s your mom. She wants to talk with you.”
I had to promise myself an afternoon nap as a way of forcing myself into opening my eyes and sitting up. I’ve made that promise before and never kept it.
The conversation with Mom was short and to the point: she did not want me riding in the van with Stephen Warrensburg.
I resisted the impulse to ask why. This was too good an opportunity to pass up. I had an official mother’s warning against riding with Stephen A. Warrensburg which I took as a warning to stay away from him altogether. Maybe this year I would get to hang out with the Space Cadets and listen in as they solved the mysteries of the universe. And maybe I would take that nap.
I hung up the phone, and as I handed it back to my dad he gave his head a slight tilt to the right and raised his left eyebrow.
“She wants me to avoid Stephen,” I said.
Dad brought his head upright and furrowed his brow.
“No idea,” I said. “She didn’t say why.”
Dad shrugged his shoulders.
“Me either,” I said.
We took our time getting ready to meet whatever was left of the day. Dad let me use the shower while he made breakfast. The warm shower washed away my grogginess and even some of the confusion that still covered me from the night before. After breakfast I was beginning to feel like I could come to enjoy a few days in the little mountaintop cabin.
“If I remember right,” Dad said, “there are trails running across the top of the mountain throughout the State Park. You can probably get a trail map at the park office. Take a bottle or two of water. It’s supposed to be in the high eighties today.”
“What about observing tonight?” I asked.
“I’ll get with Angie and the others,” he said. “We’ll probably head over there around six or six-thirty so we can get oriented while there’s still some daylight. Come on back by five, and we’ll get a bite to eat.”
“I may be back earlier. I owe myself a nap.”
Dad told me not to worry about cleaning up, then he stepped into the closet that held the shower and closed the door. I stuck a bottle of water in my back pocket, grabbed a granola bar, and stepped out the front door.
Big mistake.
There it was: midnight blue with gray trim and dark tinted windows. It dominated the landscape in front of our little stone cabin. How long it had been there I can’t say.
“Caldwell!” came the inevitable call.
Right then would have been a good time to take that nap.
9
“Caldwell, come here!”
He’s persistent, I thought. Persistent in his demands. Persistent in his obnoxiousness. I figured I might as well get it over with and tell him that my mommy said I couldn’t play with him anymore. I walked to the van.
He