Epilogue

Six months after the North Mountain fire, Tom received a call from Gil Brown.

“We’ve found something at the Dead Man’s Curve worksite,” Brown said. “You might want to come down, and be sure to bring your camera.”

By the time Tom arrived, a crowd had gathered. Word had spread quickly that the road construction crew had found a vehicle in the San Miguel River and a crowd had gathered to watch. Deputy Billy Pedersen was supervising. Tom was standing with Dave Best and Mayor Harry Denny when the winch started up and, to gasps but no real surprise, Ray Walker’s bright red truck slowly emerged from the muddy water.

For a brief moment, to the onlookers for whom the mystery had never been solved, a resolution appeared at hand. Like so many others before him, Walker had apparently gone off the road at Dead Man’s Curve. He had not been found during the extensive search for him because his truck had come to rest in the deepest spot in the river.

The crowd fully expected that Ray’s body would be found trapped in the cab of the truck.

But the truck was empty and the mystery was not so easily resolved. It could have been that there had indeed been an accident and Ray’s body had later floated out of the truck cab and had been carried downriver, probably during the spring runoff when the current was strongest. That possibility was quickly ruled out, though, by the simple fact that the truck windows were rolled up tight. Even more perplexing, the truck showed no signs of having been damaged in a wreck, which it would have been if it had flown off the road with enough velocity to reach the spot where it was found. Moreover, if there was anyone who knew not to speed on Dead Man’s Curve, it was Ray Walker. The stretch of highway was famous for claiming victims, but they were almost always the unwary.

Somebody had carefully placed the vehicle in the river, choosing the one spot in the San Miguel that was deep enough to keep it hidden for years. It was easy to see how it was done. The truck would have been positioned above the river, put into neutral, and given a shove. It could have been Ray himself who did it, or someone else.

“Walker Disappearance Deepens,” was the headline Tom wrote for the Forum. In the story he wrote he quoted Billy Pederson saying, “I reckon we’ll never know exactly what happened to Ray.” 

We will truly never know, Tom mused, as he prepared the story for publication. Not with any certainty. More to the point, the deeper mystery in the end was not what happened to Ray Walker. The deeper mystery was how everyone else – those who drifted to the West End and those who were born there – managed somehow, unlike Ray, to best the odds and survive.  

Tom had often wondered how people endured the pitilessness of life on the West End, how they inhabited this beautiful but forbidding place where human nature is rubbed as raw as a rock spire eroded over the millennia by the forces of wind, rain and frost. Now he was one of them, living out his brief moment of existence on the same implacable landscape.