Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [86]
Ashley sat bolt upright, her pupils fully dilated. “You heard that, right? That’s what they call ‘cryptic foreshadowing.’ Get out of my way. I’m in charge now.” Then she promptly wrested control of my body, forcing me to call up my editor and announce my intention to back out of the assignment. “You can no longer use your detached rational logic on me,” she threatened as she dialed. “I am doing a rewrite on the plot of this movie, especially the second act where we drown.”
Naturally my editor was sympathetic but felt that I should at least go down to the trip headquarters and get their take on the weather.
So … back into the rental car, and by six A.M. we were cruising through a very pretty part of rural Utah. The desert was gone, and in its place were dirt roads lined with lush foliage and split-rail fences. The homes and pastureland looked like postcards from someone else’s idyllic childhood.
A half hour later, I arrived at trip headquarters: a small storefront at the end of a dirt road, where I learned that apparently I was the only person who watched sunrise television before coming over. There were no other terrorstricken people, desperate to get their money back, like I expected. No one was the least bit interested in my “Think before you act” theories.
Ashley stared slack-jawed at the happy campers as they packed and chatted among themselves. They were about twenty sporty-looking women in shorts and T-shirts, sweatshirts and sandals, raring to go. Most were in their thirties, with a few in their twenties and a few in their forties and fifties. The senior member of the group was in her seventies: an extremely fit-looking woman in shorts and a hoodie.
Ashley was duly annoyed. “Don’t trust what you’re seeing,” she warned me. “It’s the kind of false lead they always add to the front half of the movie so everyone will continue skipping merrily toward their doom.”
As someone in charge handed each of us two waterproof duffel bags in which to put all of the things we were bringing, Ashley refused to buy into the prevailing mood. Especially after our group leader, Susan Ann, a woman with a touch of the sixties folksinger about her, reminded me to lock my wallet and my cellphone in the car. “There’s no point in bringing them,” she said calmly. “Cellphones won’t work where we’re headed.”
“Of course not,” Ashley whispered breathlessly, humming the theme from Psycho. “More cryptic foreshadowing. We should back out.”
Feeling naked and nervous as I locked my wallet and cellphone in the trunk of my car, I comforted myself by packing extra makeup instead. In the event of a disaster, at least I could count on looking kind of cute in my autopsy photos.
Before we boarded the vans meant to transport us to the river, we were asked to form a circle, introduce ourselves, and say why we were making the trip. Ashley looked at me through half-closed eyes, well aware of how I hated stuff like this.
The other women seemed nice enough. Thirtysomething Cheryl, a married high school math teacher who wore her curly brown hair pinned up in a barrette, explained that she was here to grab one last hit of summer before school started again on Tuesday. She also bought the trip as a birthday present for her oldest friend, Tammy, who was sitting beside her.
Next to Tammy was Jody, a pretty fortyish woman who worked in advertising sales at the Houston Chronicle. After she’d shown some rafting brochures to her husband and he’d said he wasn’t interested, she’d simply told him, “Okay, well, I’m going anyway.” There was laughter and applause from the group when Jody imitated his parting words to her: “Well, now what am I going to do?”
Seven of us were traveling solo, though Suzie had actually been traveling alone since her divorce last spring. In preparation for this trip, she had made a special point of