Down River by Karen Harper

don’t see—Oh. A cable goes from side to side. But we can’t just hang on that.”
    “Come on. I’ll show you,” he said, setting out ahead of her again, climbing uphill on a rocky path as they had for the last half hour. “Up ahead, where that cable is tethered, is called a gauging station, a spot where scientists—hydrologists, specifically—used to drop a weighted plumb bob to measure the water’s depth. I heard it was built by a geological survey team but was abandoned for lack of funds. Hunters use it now.”
    He kept talking. She could tell he was nervous, too. “It’s like a little ski lift, I guess, with a cable car. At least that’s what I heard from a friend of my uncle’s. I’m just glad I recalled what he said.”
    “But that cable—”
    “It’s made of braided steel.”
    “I don’t care. It sags. It’s old.”
    He didn’t answer as they neared the spot where the cable was connected to the gorge, bolted into solid rock on this side and attached to what looked to beabout a ten-foot tower so it would be fairly level. But the so-called cable car was actually a big, aluminum bucket, a bit smaller, but shaped like the gondola baskets that hung under hot-air balloons. It measured maybe two feet by four feet, and its height might come to Lisa’s chest.
    “No way!” she told Mitch, and sat down right where she was.
    “It’s the only way across for miles. We’ll be over the river in minutes, onto the access road and home quickly.”
    “My home is thousands of miles away. I’ll stay here while you go and send help. But I don’t think you should trust it either. I haven’t looked down, but, honestly, I just can’t do it, and it looks like we’d have to cross one at a time. Alone. The weight of one person in there would be scary enough, but two?”
    “I’ll test it first with a trial crossing. We can’t send it over empty because it looks like the pulley system will have to be worked by hand to haul it up the last little distance on both sides.”
    “Even more than the worry about its condition, I just cannot go in or over this river. It almost killed me—that and whoever pushed me,” she protested.
    He came back, dropped the pack and sat down beside her with his knees bent up almost to his chin and his arms linked around his long legs. She thought he would berate her, but his voice was calm and steady, almost seductive.
    “So how are you going to handle that when youget back? Call the sheriff in from Talkeetna and ask him to arrest whom? Pretend to go back to normal, trying to get the senior partner position as if you just fell in? Or do you plan to carefully investigate—try to discover or set up whoever shoved you?”
    “You believe me now?”
    “I’m just strategizing like I would with a client preparing a defense. Whichever of those paths you take, unless you’re just going to run—and back to where, to the law firm where someone might have tried to kill you? Those are your choices. You and I made a good legal team a couple of times—the Dailey case, then the big casino money-laundering investigation. You cross that river, after I’ve checked out the steel cable and aluminum tram first,” he went on, pointing down at it, “and I’m your sidekick private detective and co-counsel on this attempted homicide investigation. Even if someone ends up claiming they didn’t mean for you to fall in that foaming, freezing river, we’ll know who did it and can find out why. Or maybe we’ll figure out the why first and that will lead us to the perp. It’s possible that the why involves me, too.”
    “I’m remembering why you have such a great reputation as a persuasive attorney. But what do you mean it could involve you?”
    “Two reasons. One, maybe someone didn’t want us back together to talk things out.”
    “About our breaking up? Who cares about that but us?”
    “We’re just in the realm of ‘what ifs’ right now.”
    “Do you mean someone could be afraid we