It was too tempting and my nosiness got the better of me.
“You know Colson?” Dallas squealed with excitement, her red lip stain popping against her white teeth as she stared back at me.
“Yeah, but it was a long time ago—back in college.” I reached for a Hershey’s kiss from the candy jar on her desk and then cringed, realizing how much I’ve conditioned myself to eat chocolate whenever Colson comes to mind. “He said he was living in Alaska and Canada?”
“He’s so random,” Dallas rolled her eyes, “I’ve been telling him for so long that he should come back, and that was when I could even find him. He spent a lot of time in places that are completely cut off from civilization. Then, last August, he calls me out of the blue and tells me he’s coming back to Ohio, like, next week. No plans, no nothing, just asked if he could stay with Alex and I until he found a job and a place to live.”
I arched my brow with intrigue. She took this as a sign to continue, her fingers flying across the keyboard, entering in my name, serial numbers, key codes, and whatever else she knew based on muscle memory.
“He got a job in no time, so he just had to find a place to live. And you know how dumb housing is.”
“For real,” I sat back in my chair, unwrapping the Hershey’s kiss, “So, what did he do?” I ask, noting that Colson was here for four months before getting hired at Wolfsson.
Dallas chuckled over the thick black rims of her glasses, “His resume makes him look like a mercenary. Honestly, when I looked at it, I half expected to see Blackwater—sorry—” she screwed up her face and raised the pitch of her voice sarcastically, “Academi listed somewhere in there.”
I pressed my lips together, stifling laughter. Dallas was so dramatic, and I was there for it.
“Colson probably told you he was a park ranger and then did Search and Rescue for a while. Then he was a polar bear bodyguard or something out in the tundra. Don’t ask me because I don’t even know. Then, when he got here, he did the whole bouncer thing for a few months. Like, can you imagine Colson breaking up frat boy fights and arguing with little girls about fake IDs? After that,” Dallas bounced her head from side to side, “he worked at a gun range and moonlighted for some security company. Can you see a pattern here?” she says with pursed lips. “Then Alex found out there was an opening here and the next day—” she snapped her fingers, “voila! Granted, Alex is the one who got me this job right after I graduated, too.”
I keep forgetting that Dallas hasn’t been here that long, either.
“That’s pretty gutsy, though, picking up and moving cross-country without a plan?”
“Well,” Dallas gave a half shrug, “I know why, and I don’t blame him.” She paused and a solemn look came over her face. She swiveled around and set her elbows on her desk, lowering her voice, “He loved living in Alaska, until the accident.”
I cocked my head with intrigue.
Dallas glanced over my shoulder at the door to make sure it was closed before continuing, “To make a long story short, Colson and one of his friends went camping in the mountains and only he came back.”
I felt the familiar chill start creeping up my lower back all the way to my shoulders.
“There was a tree fall in the middle of the night while they were sleeping. Just, out of nowhere, a huge pine comes down on top of them. Paige didn’t make it. And there’s no service out there, so he left everything and carried her halfway back down the mountain. But then this freak storm hits, the temperature drops, and it dumps three feet of snow.” Dallas shook her head forlornly. Her bubbly demeanor disappeared, replaced by a pained look, “The entire thing was a series of freak accidents and Colson barely made it out alive.”
“Wow,” I gaped, hardly knowing how to respond, “how’s he doing now?”
“He still has enormous guilt about it,” Dallas scowled. “People are so awful. As if the whole thing wasn’t bad enough, here come these idiots out of the woodwork questioning whether it was really an accident or not. Like, why was Paige injured but he wasn’t? Someone spouts off about how they had an argument right before they left. Someone else wonders why they were out there before a storm. Colson can survive out in the wilderness for months and be fine, but he’s still human. Everyone makes mistakes. And why would he even do something like that?” she leaned further over the desk, “He carried her body, on his shoulders, through the snow until it got too deep and he had to leave her or else he would’ve died, too. Can you even imagine?”
Dallas took a deep breath. She was speaking to me, but I could tell she was only half there, the rest of her thoughts consumed by the tragedy her brother endured.
“Communities are small up there, and people talk. They basically ran him out of town over this. So, I don’t blame him for running off to Canada. I’m just glad he finally decided to come back home. When he told me about all of it, I was just like, God, not again.”
I blinked, “Again?”
Dallas paused, as if she realized what she just said, “Yeah, back when I was in high school, we lost someone close to us and—” she hesitated, choosing her words carefully, “something similar happened. A lot of small-town drama and Colson ending up in the middle of it…”
Dallas’s voice trailed off as she caught herself. Suddenly, her lighthearted demeanor returned and she sat back in her chair, swiveling around to make sure she’d completed her original task.
“Anyway, I shouldn’t be talking about him while he’s not here. I still can’t believe you know him. I’m so excited he has a friend here!”
I clenched my jaw, tensing the muscles in my neck.
A friend…
“Believe me, I was just as shocked as you are. And, look,” I leaned forward, tapping her desk, “I really appreciate you telling me all of this. I wouldn’t want to accidentally say something that would make him uncomfortable.”
It was mostly true. I didn’t want to say anything to create an awkward situation—as if it could get any more awkward. But I was also trying to get as much information as possible about what Colson had been doing the last few years. And the more I spoke to Dallas, I wondered if I really wanted to know, after all.
As soon as I got back to my office, I couldn’t pull up the Google search bar fast enough. I scrolled through the list of news results on my phone until I found a short article from Anchorage dated less than two years ago. It contained a photo of a woman with long black hair and dark almond eyes crouched on a boulder against a majestic mountain lake for a backdrop. She was dressed in leggings, hiking boots, and a tank top with a flannel shirt tied around her waist. The caption beneath the photo included her name, Paige Sweringen.
According to the article, she was on a weeklong hiking trip with her boyfriend—boyfriend—when she was struck by a fallen tree. Paige died instantly from blunt-force trauma to the head. She grew up in Anchorage and was a biologist at the University of Alaska. The article was otherwise vague. Colson’s name wasn’t even mentioned, much less any of the details Dallas told me.
I cleared the search field and started over. Tapping the side of my phone, I tried to recall the long-ago incident both Colson and Dallas mentioned.
Why would Colson say his sister was murdered while Dallas used the term, someone close to us? She didn’t say anything about murder. And what drama was Colson involved in afterward?
Whoever it was, neither of them mentioned her name, so I searched “Lutz”, “murder”, “death”, and “Dire Ridge, OH.” The search results were even more disappointing than the one article about Paige’s death. There was absolutely nothing. All of these could turn out just to be freak accidents where bad things happen to good people. Still, it was made worse by Colson and Dallas’s vague explanations.
I was veering off into a strange train of thought and it wasn’t doing me any good. As I was staring at the unremarkable Google search results, an email notification popped up in my toolbar. It was from Colson.
From: Lutz, Colson (US)
To: Sorensen, Brett (US)
Subject: Your book will be better than the movie
A girl I know from college works for a publisher in NYC now. I told her you finished your book and she wants you to send it to her.
I was going to absolutely die if the name he gave me was Dacia Ferguson’s. Or a couple of
