“Just what he says. He thinks he’s going to tell the real story of the Donner Party, like everyone else.”
“And what’s the real story, that they ate each other or they didn’t?”
“It’s what happens when you put a few dozen people in a pressure cooker. You know something’ll pop, but nobody really agrees on how.”
He looked around at the trees, at the bright blue sky beyond them. Chickadees were calling in the branches. “Yeah, sounds about right,” he said. “And Peterson thinks he has a new ‘how,’ does he?”
“He won’t tell anyone what it is. Doesn’t want anyone stealing his idea.”
Cormac chuckled. Yeah, the guy seemed like one of those. “Right,” he agreed.
“So—you need anything else?” Annie said.
“A place to stay in town. A quiet place.”
Truckee had two sides to it. “Old” Truckee was the tourist side of the town, where you couldn’t get a hamburger for under $15 or a hotel room for under $200. Exactly the kind of mountain tourist town that made Cormac’s skin crawl. Colorado was lousy with them, and he’d spent too much time in places like it as a kid, working instead of playing. Cormac had started going along on trips to help his father when he was a teenager. The façade of it all—the high-end stores in fake-log-cabin buildings, the so-called rustic vacation lodges that had granite counter tops and hot tubs—was symbolic of the prepackaged experiences people came here for. They didn’t really want to rough it in the wild, just pretend like they could. And they needed people like Cormac’s father, like Annie Domingo, to keep them from getting hurt.
Domingo directed him to the other half of town, that had an actual supermarket and looked like any modern main street of any small town. Normal, in other words. The old highway ran through here, from before the interstate went in, and this was where he found the old-style motor lodges and almost-forgotten vacation spots from decades before. Domingo guessed, correctly, that Cormac would be happier on this side of town.
He found a low-key place that had cabins tucked back by a rushing creek. He’d have plenty of space and privacy, and they rented by the week. The sign with “Donner Trail Inn” spelled out in rustic log-shaped letters might have dated from the fifties.
Everything around here seemed to be named “Donner” something. He couldn’t tell if it was good branding or a kind of wretched product placement.
He went into the small lobby of the Donner Trail Inn, glanced over the rack of tourist brochures and the faded moss-green carpet, a refugee from another decade. He searched for a bell on the wood-laminate counter, found it, but didn’t need to ring it, because a young woman dashed out of the back office at his approach. She had honey-brown hair in a ponytail, a round face, and adjusted her glasses as she looked Cormac over. She was maybe twenty. In college, working for the summer?
“How can I help you?”
“Need a room. One of the cabins if you have one. Farthest from the road.”
She smiled happily. “I certainly do. And how long will you be staying with us?”
“Not sure. That a problem?”
Her smile grew sly. “It certainly isn’t. My name’s Trina, just let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”
She tapped the keys of a very ancient computer and made some kind of affirmative noise. Cormac couldn’t see the screen to tell what she was nodding at. She kept glancing at him out of the corner of her eye, her lips locked in a smile.
“I just need to get your name and information,” she said, sliding a card across the table for him to fill out. Dutifully, he did so. She studied it when he handed it back over.
“So, Mr. Bennett, what brings you to town?”
“Just having a look around.”
“Nice. It’s a great town. You’ll love it here.”
“You from around here?”
“My whole life! My grandparents build this place!”
He tried to turn his wince into a smile. “Nice.”
“I mean, why would I leave? And you know what? People come to visit here and like it so much they never leave. Half the people in town have a story like that! Car broke down, liked it so much they decided to stay. Came for vacation, liked it so much they just stayed. Neat, huh?”
Along with the sign out front, the keys on a plastic key ring—no magnetic key cards here—might have dated from the fifties. Trina put the key on the desk and kept her hand on it. He couldn’t just reach out and grab it from her.
She beamed. “So, you know, just watch yourself. You might never leave, too!”
Through Amelia, he felt the sudden urge to make a warding sign against evil.