He parks and gets out. He circles the bank and heads up the road, shoes crunching the snow, eyes scanning the hemlocks and cedars that rise 100 feet or more into the sky. The air is crisp. He appears full of thoughts.
Within minutes, he spots a batch of bullet casings. He gestures at the ground, where a couple dozen casings -- from a 9-millimeter gun -- lay in the snow next to a crumpled cigarette butt.
"That's what they do," Stodden says. "They shoot, then they smoke."
Target shooting and hunting are legal in national forests, and signs of gunfire lay scattered throughout the road. Farther up, Stodden finds .40- and .45-caliber casings and shotgun shells of various gauges strewn among empty beer cans.
Last fall, he had put up a reward poster at the trailhead and returned weeks later to find bullet holes over Mary's and Susanna's faces. Their photo had been used as a bull's-eye. He replaced the poster.
He realizes now that he won't be able to check that poster today. The snow gets deeper farther up the road; it could be several feet deep at the end (a ranger later said Pinnacle was covered by 8 feet of snow).
Mary and Susanna hadn't encountered this. They'd driven six miles up this winding gravel path to an elevation of 2,700 feet, where the trailhead to Pinnacle Lake opened up like a cave amid lush green. A thousand feet past the entrance, the trail forked to the left, then zigzagged through creaking timber before leveling off.
The lake glistens at the end of 1.9 miles, but Stodden doesn't know whether Mary and Susanna made it to the lake and turned back or got no farther than the place where they were found. The spot, at about 1.5 miles, lies on a natural overlook, above a small valley. It was a natural place to stop, to look around, rest or have lunch.
"Another month," says Stodden, already thinking about the next time he returns. "Another month and all this will have melted."
He trudges back down the road and into the van.
Driving back through Granite Falls, Stodden turns onto a side street and parks in front of a small blocky building, the Granite Falls Police Department. Inside, Officer Rich Michelsen works the front counter.
Stodden hands him a poster. "Have you heard anything?" he asks.
The officer shakes his head. "County's not telling us a thing," Michelsen says. "But we got people out there listening. If there's anybody talking, we'll hear about it. OK?"
"Thank you," Stodden says with an expression half-polite smile and half-something else. Anguish? The drive home takes longer than the drive up. The cloudy day has turned rainy. The van swishes through the water, through the city where Mary and Susanna made their way, finally slowing to a stop in front of the house where so many memories still live.
