time. It was easy for me to keep tabs on his new videos—featuring his latest, um, young ladies. He plugged his sponsors every chance he got.”
Janelle glanced up, taking in the ridge above, as she continued along the trail. “You’re making me less and less upset about what happened to him up there.”
“There’s never a lot of public grief for wingsuit fliers when they get killed. Most of them are estranged from their families. That was true of Thorpe, from what I gathered. I heard he’d gotten himself a girlfriend of late, but he never married. I can’t imagine the women he featured in his videos will spend too much time mourning his passing, either.”
“Bad timing for this to happen, though,” Chuck said. “At the start of the reunion.”
“Or suspiciously good timing,” said Ponch.
“What do you mean by that?”
“If you’d watched Thorpe’s most recent videos, you’d know what I’m talking about. There was a certain melancholy to his latest postings. Fewer babes and more scenic shots while he talked about how great his years of flying had been—in the past tense.”
“You’re suggesting he might have killed himself?”
“His last video really made me wonder what was going on with him. He was alone in his van, at night, talking to the camera. He started out defending the fact that he’d turned away from Sentinel Gap three times in a row, and he claimed wingsuit flying had become a cult of death. But then, in his very next breath, he swore he would shoot the gap the next time he jumped off Glacier Point. He said everybody should keep an eye out for his next video because it would be incredible.”
The trail snaked through the trees, descending toward the valley floor. Chuck tripped on a rock protruding from the path and jogged a few steps forward, catching his balance.
“And then I dealt the cards,” Ponch continued. “The message was so clear when I laid them out. By the end of the hand, there was no question. I planned to tell him when I met up with him this morning. After the tone of his last video, I figured I could for sure get him to stop. But he wasn’t at all like what I was expecting. He joked around, seemed perfectly happy. He was so jazzed to make his big entrance to the reunion and to see everyone again. I kept thinking, who was I to say anything? He’d been flying all these years. He knew what he was doing. I couldn’t bring myself to mention the hand I’d dealt.” Ponch’s breathing was in check now that he was walking down the path rather than trudging up it. “If I’d had any sense whatsoever he wanted me to talk him out of his flight, I would have. But he was stoked. He talked about how excited he was to shoot the gap and post the footage online right away, to kick off the weekend.”
Chuck frowned. “So you don’t think he was suicidal, or you do?”
Ponch glanced back at Chuck. “Based on the video he posted when he was alone in his van, I’d say yes. But based on how he acted this morning, I’d say no way.”
“There’s that thing about people being really happy, almost euphoric, right before they kill themselves.”
“Which is why, to be perfectly honest, I just don’t know.”
Janelle said to Ponch, “I overheard you telling Chuck about your tarot cards when you first got to the campground this morning. You said they told you more than just that something bad was going to happen to Thorpe. You said the bad thing was going to happen to him at the hands of someone else.”
“That’s right,” Ponch replied, subdued. “Me. I’m the ‘someone else.’ I didn’t tell Thorpe about my reading, and now he’s dead.”
“I’m not convinced the cards were referring to you.”
From the back of the line, Chuck waved his hands in exasperation. “One crazy card person is enough,” he said to Janelle. “There’s no need for two of you.”
She stopped and turned to Ponch and Chuck. They halted on the trail. She circled her thumbs around the shoulder straps of her pack. “This isn’t necessarily about the cards. It’s about the loose thread and the separation in the wingsuit.”
Chuck frowned. “That was from when he hit the cliff. It had to be.”
“I might agree with you—if it weren’t for the cut in his ankle.”
Chuck’s frown deepened.
“You saw it,” Janelle said. “On his leg, in the tree.”
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