Total pages in book: 126
Estimated words: 119746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 599(@200wpm)___ 479(@250wpm)___ 399(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 119746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 599(@200wpm)___ 479(@250wpm)___ 399(@300wpm)
“I’m guessing you didn’t hear anything about them,” I say.
“About your sister? No. Would have said so if I did. I just want to know her mindset, would be helpful to know where she could have ended up.”
“Honestly, I don’t know.” I pause. “How familiar are you with the Donners?” Though his back is to me, he tenses again. “Sorry,” I quickly say. “I mean I suppose that’s a dumb question considering where you live.”
“Mmmm,” he grunts, having some of his beer. “I know my history.”
“Good. Well, because of Lainey, so do I. I’ve been doing some research and the only things I can think of is that she went to the original campsite where George Donner and his family were situated, which is a park near some estates, or she went to Donner Lake campground where everyone else was stranded for the winter.”
“Right,” he says, finally turning to face me. “Problem with that is we won’t find anything. At least I won’t. The campground is heavily trafficked, as is the other picnic spot. Hundreds if not thousands of campers every year. There will be no tracks or no trail, nothing that the cops wouldn’t have found back then. Even though they did a half-assed job, I’m sure that area was searched. Beyond that, you got capitalism. Real estate. Other than the park, nearly the whole lakefront is bought up with vacation homes. There’s no getting on private property.”
I swallow more of my beer, surprised at how quickly it’s going down. I really need to stop at one. The way it’s loosening me up, especially around Jensen, feels like a mistake in the making.
“So then we don’t have much of a route, do we,” I say, unable to keep the disappointment out of my voice.
“I do,” he says, and I look at him in surprise. “You told me that she said the mountains were calling her.” He pauses. “There’s more to the Donner Party than what meets the eye. More than what the written accounts say.”
“How do you know?”
“I said I knew my history,” he says, an intensity blazing in his eyes. “History that’s passed down through generations. My relatives were here in the 1850s, not long after the party went missing. My great-great-great-grandaddy Jake McGraw was a tracker himself and those parties weren’t the only people to go missing in the area at the time. You gotta remember that their story, their strife, it attracted nationwide attention. People flocked here to see where it all happened, where all the gruesome events took place. There are things that maybe even your sister didn’t know.”
Now he has my full attention. “Such as?”
“Them mountains,” he says, pointing his beer at the darkened window and beyond. “They held people back but that didn’t mean people didn’t try to cross them, time and time again. They made routes. Some of them ended in tragedy. Some of them ended in dead ends. And, occasionally, some of them lead to civilization on the other side of the Sierras. People like James Reed made it to the Sacramento Valley. The party of the Forlorn Hope. But it was rare that the mountains didn’t take something in return.”
Okay, I didn’t take this gruff cowboy to be so philosophical but he says it without any irony. In fact, he’s serious enough that it puts a chill down my spine.
I cross my arms, as if to ward off the cold. “So what are you saying?”
“You know what I’m saying,” he says. “There was never any doubt that we weren’t going to look for Lainey down here. We were going to look for her up there. You know that she wouldn’t have been satisfied sticking around these touristy parts. They would have gone up into the mountains, into the wild, far away from people. Explains why no one saw them.”
I mean, he’s right. I did figure she’d head into the mountains, since they were calling her and all. I guess I didn’t really pause to think about what that meant. I figured this whole area was considered the mountains. But Lainey wasn’t seeking out Donner Lake or the most infamous locations of the tragedy. She would have been looking for the obscure places, the places only someone as studious and obsessed as her would know about.
Places that Jensen McGraw might know about.
“What’s our route then?” I ask.
“I reckon we start low, still near the lake, just in case. It’s an area that’s left wild and isn’t built-up. Old Highway Road. We can camp by Donner Creek before we make a go for the summit. Once we’re at the summit, we can ride to the family cabin at Mount Judah before going onto Benson Hut. That should cover a lot of the old trails that people took at various times. Let’s just pray that—”