High Country Read online

  The first contact caused Anna’s conscience the fewest qualms: Scott Wooldrich, the assistant chef. At thirty-seven he was old enough and at six-foot-four and two hundred twenty pounds he was big enough to take care of himself. Whether or not he would prove a font of information as she wormed her way into his affections, Anna couldn’t say. Even without that professional perk, he was a worthwhile ally. Bluff, good-natured, fun-loving—all those Iowa farmboy clichés—Scott ran interference between offending waitpersons and the wrath of Jim Wither. The febrile and brilliant chef could hear Scott’s baritone when his ears were closed to other voices of reason. Such were Wooldrich’s charms, Anna’d even seen him tease a smile out of Tiny a time or two.

  What roused Anna’s radar regarding the ease with which she’d become friends with Scott had little to do with the assistant chef and much to do with human nature—hers. Whenever she became bosom buddies with a blond, blue-eyed hunk that made her little heart go pitty-pat, she questioned her motives.

  The second connection was more likely to prove useful, but despite her attempts to justify it as necessary, it caused Anna the occasional stab of guilt.

  Mary Bates, an exquisite, naturally blond, seventeen-year-old hotel maid, was a concessions brat. Her parents had worked at the Ahwahnee and she’d grown up in the valley. This year Mom and Dad had moved on to better jobs at the lodge in Yellowstone. Out of love for Yosemite, Mary opted to stay behind and work for a year before going to college. It was the first time she’d been separated from family. She was a sitting duck for Anna’s “hip mother” or, God forbid, “hip grandmother” routine.

  Anna had intentionally adopted her to use as bait. Being a woman of a certain age there were natural barriers when it came to cuddling up to the men on trail crew who’d worked with Patrick or the eclectic and unpredictable community of climbers inhabiting Camp 4. A nubile blond opened more doors than a gold badge.

  Revulsion at this subtle form of pimping might have outweighed expedience had Mary been made of lesser stuff. Having grown up in the park, despite her youth and fairy-princess good looks, she was accustomed to the dangers of bears, hypothermia, falling rocks and climber dudes.

  “Hey, Anna, over here,” was hissed as Anna passed the hostess’s station with an armful of heavily-laden plates.

  The very child she contemplated using for her own ends stuck her towhead from behind the fronds of a plant tired with winter and dropping leaves onto the stained and polished cement floor. Employees were discouraged from hanging about where they did not belong; one of the many niceties that marked the Ahwahnee as a grand hotel.

  “Yeah?” Anna whispered back, stealth being contagious.

  “When does your shift end?”

  “Three-thirty.”

  “Want to go for a walk? I’ve been making beds all day and feel like an old wadded-up piece of tinfoil.”

  “A walk would be good.”

  The blond slipped into the underbrush.

  At three thirty-five Anna clocked out and left the hotel by way of a utility entrance that let out through the Dumpsters at the back. There was something Disneylike about the Ahwahnee, about Yosemite Valley. Natural features were too big, too perfect: domes of granite sliced neatly into aesthetically appealing halves, rocks and trees juxtaposed to delight the eye. The Merced River, clear and emerald by turns, chuckled through in glittering communion with wind in the pines.

  And, like Disneyland, Yosemite required machinery to run smoothly, law to regulate too many people, too many cars and buses, walls to hide the ugliness of Dumpsters, boneyards, toilets. Like H. G. Wells’s future, parklands must have the Morlocks to keep Eden beautiful for the Eloi. Periodically, when this stage-set unreality struck, Anna was nearly overpowered with a need to flee into the high country, the ninety-five percent of the park that was wilderness. She’d yet to make it more than a mile from the main road. As with all true evil, whatever had set off Lorraine Knight’s alarms centered round the human element.

  Besides,Anna consoled herself as she scuttled through the garbage and mud-spattered vehicles,it’s cold. Camping, hiking and communing with the gods seemed less appealing when temperatures dropped below fifty degrees.

  In deference to her age and status as a year-round waitress, Anna had been offered one of the hotel’s employee houses—a single-room tent-frame to which walls and a bathroom had been added. The dorms were reserved for seasonal workers and those significantly lower on the food chain than the main dining room waitstaff. Tempted as she was to snatch at this scrap of solitude, she had requested dormitory housing in the room where Trish Spencer had lived.

  In communal housing it was more likely she would hear the kinds of rumors that never make it to the ears of law enforcement and, by being placed in a living situation “below her station in life” she had a built-in reason to be one of the valley’s disaffected, should she choose. All the better to be part of the whining and plotting of others on the fringes.

  The room she shared with the two busgirls, both securely under thirty, was dark and dank due to the weather without and the décor within. Her roommates had yet to reach the age where visual order was necessary to the psyche. The place resembled the inside of a laundry hamper. Dirty clothes and female accoutrements were heaped on unmade beds and vomited out of open dresser drawers. Anna’s first task on arriving in her new persona had been to pack up Trish’s things while Nicky and Cricket—the roommates she’d inherited along with the missing woman’s apron, shirt and pants—looked on with the thrilled misery of those half playing at tragedy.

  During the search the NPS had gone through Spencer’s belongings, hoping for a clue that could tell them where she’d gone. In the normal course of events it would have been Yosemite rangers who packed up the missing woman’s goods for shipping or storage. Lorraine Knight left the task to Anna, hoping it would serve as a bridge to the missing woman and a way of breaking the ice with the roommates. It had been successful on both counts.

  Anna waded through to her wee tidy space to peel off her uniform. White shirt, black polyester pants and black many-pocketed apron: these Anna had borrowed from the late—very late—Trish Spencer, and everything was a couple of sizes too big. Not only was Anna an imposter, but a poorly-dressed imposter at that. Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes was a tad creepy when done literally.

  Mary was dressed and waiting. She wore Levis, running shoes and a red hooded pullover that made her look like every wolf’s dream of Little Red Riding Hood.

  Perfect,Anna thought and suffered a pang of remorse for being bloodlessly pragmatic. “Ready?”

  “Want to go to the village?” Mary asked as she fell into step beside Anna. “I’ve got to get some things.”

  “Sure.” En route Anna would come up with a plausible excuse to get her living lure to Camp 4; see if they could coax anything interesting from the climbers. Though active and seemingly anxious to help with the rigors of the search, they’d been characteristically close-mouthed with law enforcement.

  While Mary made her purchases in the grocery department, Anna poked around the souvenirs section. Depending on one’s point of view, Yosemite Village with its deli, pizzeria and full-service grocery store was either a tremendous convenience or proof the park was going to hell.

  Making conversation, Lorraine Knight had told her how the local public school, some forty-five miles away, had held a children’s symposium on the nation’s parks, asking the children what they would do with Yosemite Valley. The park’s rangers sat back complacently waiting for their enlightened offspring to lead the way. The consensus of the kids from Yosemite was that a Costco and an orthodontist should be added to the village’s repertoire. The three-hour round-trip drive to these necessities was a very real burden to them.

  During her college days Anna and others had contemplated monkeywrenching the village infrastructure in hopes of driving out the urban blight. Thirty years later and now, at least temporarily, a resident, she was sympathetic with the children; sh
e was was glad she didn’t have to drive eighty miles every time she ran out of shampoo.

  Civilization wascomfortable.

  Anna dearly hoped she’d never reach the point where the love of comfort outweighed her love of the natural world, but she wasn’t about to make any rash promises even in the privacy of her own skull.

  As they left the store, passing the statuesque twin pines which graced the entrance, Anna decided to nudge.

  “Let’s go down toward Yosemite Lodge. I’ll buy you a drink.” Mary would have hot chocolate, but the alcoholic phrasing flattered the girl’s youth and fit with Anna’s assumed role. Since Anna had picked Mary up she’d kept herself open, warm, fun and funny, winning the girl’s trust. This was the first time she would use it.

  Set the hook before you reel her in,Anna thought sourly as Mary bobbed charmingly along at her elbow.Too good a catch to throw back, she told herself philosophically and began:

  “That Dixon guy, the one that got himself lost with those others, didn’t he live in a camp somewhere down here?”

  “Yup. Camp 4. It’s really famous. Climbers come from all over. They’re a wild bunch. Sort of a force unto themselves. Wanna go see it? It’s just past the lodge.”

  Candy from a baby.“Sure. Did you know him? Dixon? That would be pretty creepy.”

  “Notknow know him,” Mary admitted reluctantly. Like most people, she wanted to be in the center of the excitement even if only by association. She was a longtime park-dweller, and Anna ostensibly in Yosemite for the first time. It would be tempting to anyone to embroider the truth to such a willing believer. Anna admired her for resisting.

  “I’ve seen him around to talk to,” she went on quickly lest Anna be disappointed. “You pretty much see everybody around if you live here.

  “Dixon was cool. The other guys call him Spiderman. Once he climbed Half Dome in the morning—an unassisted climb, you know, just fingers and toes and a belay—then he ran down and over to El Cap and climbed it in the afternoon. Nobody’d ever done that before. He always looked kind of wild with all that hair and that smile. Kind of like Lawrence of Arabia but not so pale and faggoty. More like that other guy, the black-robed guy.”

  “Omar Sharif?”

  “I guess. But taller. Oh, I’m screwing it up but Dix was a rock: real and hard and unfathomable.”

  Dixon Crofter had been a resident on and off for three years. He would have come on the scene when Mary was fourteen. A good time for a man to steal a girl’s heart without even being aware of it. At fourteen it was still acceptable to love pure and chaste from afar. Anna suspected Mary had yet to let go of this girlish habit where the lean and romantic climber dude was concerned.

  “Dix was always scruffy but backpacker scruffy. You know—fine.”

  Anna knew. Even at her age there remained an attraction to scruffy young men, though in recent years, she’d been content to merely admire them from a distance, the way she did mountain lions and grizzly bear cubs.

  “This is it,” Mary announced.

  They had passed the lodge and arrived at the notorious Camp 4. It was set in a field of boulders that dwarfed the tents and trees. Despite the inclement weather, men were out climbing. A new breed of climber had sprung up since Anna first visited Yosemite Valley back in college: sport climbers, people who eschewed the long dangerous climbs, preferring short speedy pitches up boulder faces which they pocked with anchors in what seemed to be an attempt to re-create indoor climbing walls on living rock. Sport climbers dotted the rain-streaked granite with brightly colored ropes and more brightly colored spandex and fleece.

  “They’re not real,” Mary said with unself-conscious snobbery. “They’re more like climbing groupies. They like to talk the talk and swagger around the campfires with the big boys.”

  “Dixon was one of the big boys?”

  “Oh yeah. He owns a tent cabin. They’re hard to come by. These guys guard their cabin rights like you wouldn’t believe. Somebody’s practically got to die before they change hands.” Her words caught in her throat. Mary’d lived too long in a wilderness park not to know that was probably what had happened to Dixon. Her climber was most likely dead.

  Maybe not,Anna reminded herself. People lost in the mountains, fallen down gullies to break femurs, off cliffs to shatter hips, had been known to live weeks under conditions and weather as severe as any the Sierra had dished up so far. Humans were tenacious and unbelievably tough for animals without claws, who were unable to run fast or jump high, blind in the dark, without any real sense of smell to speak of and no pelt to ward off the cold. That was why SAR units hated to quit looking. When time came, they stopped spending NPS resources and talking about it but over a few scotches the stories came out. An unsolved disappearance from ten, twelve or thirty years before would still be on their minds.

  Mary shook her pale yellow hair to banish the vision of the fine and scruffy Mr. Crofter dead in a ditch. “Dix—Dixon Crofter—bought the cabin a few years back off a French climber who lost his feet to frostbite.”

  “Had to quit climbing?”

  “Oh no. He got wooden prosthetic feet. He had ’em made smaller than his old feet so he could wedge them better, and of real hard wood because it worked better for him than plastic. I guess he’s still climbing, but we haven’t seem him around here for a couple years.”

  Anna made a mental note to ask the chief ranger how one went about “buying” a tent cabin on NPS land and whether the owning of one was worth killing for.

  Camp 4 was well populated for so late in the year. The unusually cold but dry weather had lengthened the climbing season significantly. Red, orange, green and blue tents sprouted between the boulders like poisonous mushrooms. Climbers—the real and the unreal—hunkered around picnic tables dark with moisture saying little and nursing their beverages of choice from battered melmac cups and thermos caps.

  The paved path Anna and Mary followed wended through the campsites. For all the notice Anna got she might have been invisible, but in Mary’s wake there stirred a hormonal breeze that brought heads up and enlivened faces.

  On a small rise at the east end of the campground, forming a skeletal village, perched the tent cabins of climber royalty. Dirty gray-brown canvas houses, a door at one end and a stovepipe sticking out the other, were splattered down at odd angles as if they’d fallen from a low-flying plane. Unprepossessing in and of themselves, they looked a picture of cozy comfort next to their nylon neighbors on this gloomy, cold November afternoon.

  Taking in the scene of Dixon Crofter’s last known address, Anna enjoyed the scent of pine mixed with wood smoke, a perfume that captured the essence of mountains and adventure. It tickled a place in her brain that was untouched but by train whistles and engendered a need to sing sad songs and wander the globe. Maybe the smell had a like effect on Crofter, Spencer, Bates and Waters. Maybe one day they’d simply turned left toward the Rest of the World instead of right toward the containment of civilization.

  “Which one belonged to Dixon?” she asked.

  “The one with the porch.” Mary pointed to a short narrow deck crowded with a hibachi and bicycle. Two forlorn beach towels, their gay colors muted from wear and precipitation, hung across the railing, relics from better weather. Smoke poured out of the stovepipe. Given the information Mary had shared regarding real-estate transactions in Camp 4, Anna had expected Crofter’s cabin to stand empty. If it took death or something very like it for these tents to change hands, the next tenants had not stood on ceremony.

  “Looks like squatters moved in. Probably sport climbers not wanting to get their spiffy new gear wet.” Mary’s voice, usually softened by the blurring of natural shyness, had an edge to it. Her face was set in hard lines—no easy feat with flesh firm and unmarred by time and trauma. “That just plain sucks,” she said. “Dix might be coming back. We don’t know anything for sure.”

  For a heartbeat or more Anna watched Mary from the corner of her eye. The girl was park born and bred. He
r sense of pride and the proprietary pleasure park people take in gifted eccentrics attracted to “their” park had been outraged.

  “Dixowns that cabin. They can’t just move in. Makes me want to go in there and chew somebody’s head off.”

  Anna wanted to get a look in the cabin as well, but for less exalted reasons. “Why don’t you?” she tempted the girl. “The bastards have it coming.”

  “I just should.” Now that opportunity had knocked in the form of adult approbation, Mary’s courage wavered. So did Anna’s. Without gun, pepper spray, baton or color of law to hide behind, she questioned the wisdom of goading the girl into a confrontation with whomever had taken Crofter’s space. Still and all there were plenty of tents nearby and, out of uniform, Anna had no compunction about screaming for help at the top of her lungs should things go awry.

  “They are probably even using his gear,” Anna said, picking the most heinous crime she could think of.

  “Will you go with me?” Pleading and fierce, righteousness ignited Mary’s usually pacific blue eyes.

  “You bet.” Though she felt unpleasantly powerless without the weight that went with a badge—regardless of the size of the individual it was pinned to—Anna’s blood ran faster and warmer at the thought of real work. Standing straighter to take full advantage of all sixty-four inches of her imposing frame, she pushed the graying hair back from where her hood had fringed it around her face and reminded herself she was yet possessed of a formidable weapon. Odds were good these squatters were in their twenties. With luck, those who did not respect their mothers feared them. If they had any buttons, Anna intended to push them the way only a woman of a certain age can.

  It wasn’t her style, but Anna let Mary go first. They weren’t serving a warrant on known felons; they were visiting a tent in the peaceful splendor of a national park. Besides, Mary’s face was more likely to get them invited in than Anna’s was. The poor girl, blissfully unaware of it and never to be enlightened by Anna, was adorable when she was mad.