High Country Page 5

  Diane took over. Anna let her. While she asked Nicky the standard EMT questions and the pale, clearly shaken girl answered, “I’m fine, I’m good,” in an unvarying monotone, Anna looked around the room. Nothing was amiss. Clothes were hung neatly in closets or folded away in drawers. Shoes were in regimental lines, books and magazines squared up in tidy stacks, cosmetics tucked in plastic carry-all baskets. Having left the place not two hours earlier looking like a pigsty populated by a herd of teenage clothes horses, Anna found the pristine order unsettling.

  “The place looks nice,” she said guardedly.

  Nicky shot her a frightened look and clamped her lips shut so tightly their childish plumpness was reduced to a thin line of white. Until Diane, with her badge, gun and uniform, was gone, Nicky wasn’t talking. Maybe not even then.

  Blissfully unaware of the currents of unease, the ranger satisfied herself that Nicky was in good health and left. Moving for the first time since Anna had returned, Nicky sprang from the bed with an energy startling after so prolonged a stillness. She closed the door behind the ranger. She didn’t slam it as if angry, but closed it softly and firmly as if attempting to muffle the click of the latch lest some evil being hear and come to investigate.

  Anna sat on her bed and kicked off her shoes. “What gives?” she asked.

  To Anna’s annoyance Nicky flopped down on the bed next to her and began to cry. Uncomfortable with weeping women, even when it was she herself doing the weeping, Anna sat rigid with her shoe in her hand. The nonsense nursery rhyme “diddle diddle dumpling, my son John . . . one shoe off and one shoe on,” rattled through her head.

  She removed her other shoe to quell the rhyme. Since Nicky was still sobbing and gulping on the mattress next to her, Anna patted her head as if she were a dog and muttered, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” wondering what “it” was and sincerely doubting it was okay.

  Minutes passed. Rather than subsiding, the crying grew more breathy, more shrill. Nicky was working herself into a fit.

  “Stop it,” Anna commanded. “My nerves are getting frayed.” Nicky cried harder. “Stop it now,” Anna ordered and gave the girl a whack on the shoulder, not enough to hurt her, just enough to get her attention.

  Nicky flinched and cried out as if Anna had struck her with a tire iron.

  “Shit,” Anna hissed. With great gentleness, she moved the prostrate girl’s long hair, exposing Nicky’s neck. A bruise, so new it had yet to lose its angry red color, was forming there. The shape and placement indicated the heel of a hand and a thumb. On the front of the shoulder Anna knew she would find the corresponding finger marks.

  In the brief time she’d been gone, an hour and fifteen minutes at most, someone had come into the room and forcibly held Nicky facedown.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Anna muttered. “That does it. Sit up. There you go.” She helped Nicky up and saw that her feet were planted firmly on the floor, lest she flop over in defeat again. “Look at me now. Here. Let me.” Using the tail of the girl’s shirt, Anna dried her face, then pushed her hair back over her shoulders. “Three deep breaths. No more weeping and wailing tonight. The son-of-a-bitch doesn’t deserve it. What’s needed here is a lust for revenge.”

  Nicky smiled at that.

  “Good girl.” For no reason except that it felt right, Anna got a brush from the dresser and started brushing Nicky’s straight brown hair, gently working out the tangles. The sobs subsided to an occasional outbreak.

  Having set aside the brush, Anna again tucked Nicky’s hair behind her ears so she could see her face, and said: “Do you want a drink of water, blow your nose?”

  Nicky nodded. Anna fetched a box of Kleenex and a plastic bottle of the newly fashionable Yosemite Water that stood half empty on a night stand.

  “Can I go wash my face?” Nicky asked in the voice of a three-year-old.

  “In a minute.” Anna didn’t want her washing anything till she’d satisfied herself there would be no evidence going down the drain with the soap and water. She turned on the bedside lamps and switched off the overhead light, making the room feel homier, less bleak and transient. Sitting in the desk chair, she rocked back, propping her feet on the bed next to Nicky, consciously staying close but not too close, and choosing a pose that was both relaxed and unofficial.

  “Now why don’t you tell me what happened. Start at the beginning when you left the Ahwahnee and tell it till you get to the part where Diane and I came in.”

  Nicky heaved a big sigh, then winced as the attendant shoulder-shrugging inflamed her bruised muscles. Pushing her hair back with both hands she tied it out of the way with a soft band that she’d had around her wrist. Eyes red and puffy but focused, she looked at Anna, confusion clear on her face.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  For half a beat Anna thought the girl had slipped a cog. When she realized the question was actually astute and perceptive, she felt a stab of alarm, wondering where she’d failed in her cover persona.

  “Just a lady who’s been around the block often enough to smell a rat, especially when the rat leaves a paw print the size of the one you’ve got on your shoulder,” Anna replied. With intonation and expression, she suggested she’d been on the receiving end of physical abuse a time or two herself.

  Nicky looked at her suspiciously, then chose to accept things at face value. The moment of insight passed. Her eyes lost the sharp look. “Okay,” she said.

  “Tell me,” Anna said, taking pains to sound kind rather than curious.

  A number of emotions could be read on the girl’s open countenance: fear, hesitation, need. Need won out after an exceedingly brief struggle. Anna doubted Nicky had ever kept a secret for more than ten seconds in all of her short life.

  “You’ve got to promise not to tell anybody,” Nicky said earnestly. “Especially not like rangers or cops or anything, okay? They said they’d kill me if I told anybody.”

  “I promise,” Anna said. Lying was getting easier and easier. After the big lie of who she was and why she was waiting tables, the little ones rolled off her tongue effortlessly. Of course she would tell law enforcement. Villains thrived on fear and secrecy. The ones who would really kill a victim for telling were those who never would have left a victim alive to tattle in the first place. “Your secret is safe with me,” she added for good measure.

  “When I came back I was going to—to clean up some stuff—before I went to the clinic.” She looked at Anna to see how the story was going.

  Anna nodded reassuringly. “You came back to get rid of the dope you and Cricket were smoking before we went on shift,” she said matter-of-factly and without a hint of judgment or condemnation.

  “Yeah!” Nicky showed the pleased surprise of a teacher getting an unexpectedly correct answer from a dull student.

  Anna stopped herself from smiling. The last thing she wanted was for Nicky to regain that spark of insight that suggested Anna was not who she pretended to be.

  “Did you get rid of all of it?” she asked neutrally.

  “All of it, I even flushed the baggie.”

  Again Anna nodded. This time to hide her disappointment. When analyzed, a sample of the marijuana might have given them a clue as to where it had come from and what might have been added that had nearly proved fatal for Cricket.

  She wanted to ask who Nicky had bought the stuff from but didn’t dare. The instant she sounded like a cop—or disapproving parent—she sensed Nicky would clam up, retreat into that place youth suffer with such painful pride: that imaginary world where they are so unique, their experiences so rarified, that adults cannot possibly understand them. Instead she asked: “What then? After you’d gotten rid of it?”

  Nicky’s face screwed up but she didn’t give in to the urge to dissolve into tears again. Anna thought better of her for this small act of courage.

  “Afterward I came to the room—”

  Anna made a mental note: the girls’ cache was not hidden within these four walls. The
y were cleverer than she’d given them credit for.

  Battling another attack of emotion, Nicky stalled out. Patiently, Anna waited till she recovered in her own time. Telling was, in a very real sense, reliving.

  “I came to the room and the door was shut. I didn’t think anything. I mean, me and Cricket might even have shut it for all I know. We were pretty high when we left.”

  She looked up at Anna through strings of hair fallen again in front of her face. There was that about her that put Anna in mind of a caged and cowering puppy. A desire to inflict great bodily harm on whoever had abused her hit hard. The emotional tidal wave evidently changed the open, interested expression she’d adopted. Nicky’s chin dropped and her hair closed over her face in a curtain.

  Anna wasn’t ready for the show to be over. “Sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t listening. I got to thinking about killing whoever put that bruise on your shoulder.”

  As Anna hoped it would, the hard edge of truth in her brutal confession reassured the battered girl that she was not the one in trouble. Nicky found the courage to continue.

  “So I came on in, not thinking anything, you know. Just walked in like always. The light was off and there were these guys with flashlights, two of them I think, and they’d torn the room apart.”

  Anna’s first thought washow could you tell, but she kept it to herself.

  “One of them said, ‘fuck,’ then a big one—not fat, big but tall big—grabbed me and pushed me down on Cricket’s bed. He mashed my face into the pillow and I couldn’t breathe.” Here she stopped and looked at Anna, expecting something.

  “Bastard,” Anna murmured sympathetically.

  “He sat on me and the other guy kept on. I could hear him throwing things around.”

  Nicky stopped. Anna waited. When it became clear the girl wasn’t going to continue on her own, Anna asked: “What then?”

  “The one on top of me got funny.”

  In her years in law enforcement Anna’d heard her share of rape stories. It was one form of violence she’d never become inured to. There was something about the using of a person’s body as if it were a thing, an object to be exploited, played with, degraded then left as one would leave a dirty diaper or soiled Kleenex that shriveled her soul.

  “Did he rape you?” she asked bluntly.

  “No . . . It wasn’t anything like that or anything. You know how you can feel guys when they start heating up toward something crude? Well these guys had no heat. Like it was business. I was part of a job. Like a glitch, you know. This one that held me down, keeping my face in the pillow so I couldn’t see or anything, he’s sitting on me, his knees on my arms and he starts pulling my head back. I thought my neck was going to snap but this other one says: ‘We don’t need that kinda shit.’ ”

  Anna was surprised to find herself relieved. It hadn’t been attempted rape, God forbid, but merely attempted murder. Why that seemed cleaner, more decent, she wasn’t sure. Certainly a woman had a much better shot at recovering from rape than from death. Anna realized her gut reaction was based not on her feelings for the victim, but her feelings toward the crime, the criminal. Murder wasn’t usually about dehumanizing, making an “it” of a living, thinking person. Murder was most often about removal, revenge or perceived gain. The victim lost his life but not his personhood.

  “Then they left.”

  Nicky wanted to be done.

  Anna sympathized but had a few more questions. “They left right away?”

  “Not right away. Maybe five minutes after.”

  “Did they say anything else?”

  “No. Yes. Wait.” Nicky thought a moment. “One said ‘Nothing.’ Then the guy on me said: ‘He should’ve figured that.’ And the other guy said: ‘No. It was left.’ Then they told me they’d kill me if I ever told anybody and they went.”

  For a while the two of them sat in shared silence, each alone with her thoughts. Without the chatter of speech, the small sounds of the dormitory crept in to fill the void: the bathroom door opening, footsteps of someone returning late, the faint broken hum of conversation from another room.

  “Did they take anything?” Anna asked at last.

  “Not even our tip money.”

  For anybody looking for quick cash in small unmarked bills, robbing the room of three waitresses would be a dream come true. Though they were encouraged to deposit their money regularly, because of the inherent lack of security that comes with communal living, between the three of them there was usually a lot of cash lying around. Whoever these men were, they hadn’t bothered to pick up such small change, not even to try to make the break-in appear to be a simple theft.

  “Anything else?”

  “I didn’t notice anything.”

  “They didn’t say anything more? Do anything? Did you see them to recognize them again?”

  “God no!” Nicky said believing that to recognize the bad guy meant he would kill you.

  “This sucks, but do it anyway,” Anna said. “Close your eyes.” Nicky obeyed unquestioningly. Guilt at using innocent young women to her own ends had been spent earlier in the evening when she’d dragged Mary to Camp 4. Anna felt nary a qualm about the discomfort she was about to cause Nicky.

  “Let your mind go. We’re going to do a memory exercise. It’ll help find these guys. Anyway, it won’t hurt,” Anna added a dash of honesty from old habit. “You’ve flushed the dope. You’re standing outside in the hall about to come in the room. Be there now. Feel the floor under your feet, your hand on the knob. Now push open the door. Okay. Is it open?” Nicky nodded an affirmative. “Now we stop time. What do you see?”

  Nicky proved a good subject for this sort of game and recovered information she’d not known she had. The knee pressing down on her right elbow was clad in what looked and felt like slacks from a man’s suit. She’d seen one of her assailant’s feet. The shoe was a black dress shoe, out of place on a sleeting winter day in a wilderness park. The man who’d contemplated snapping her neck had smooth cool hands that smelled faintly of lotion. Both men “sounded” white. They’d spoken no extraneous words. There’d been no unnecessary touching or violence. That, coupled with the cash left behind, was too professional for the simple tossing of a girls’ dorm room. Somebody in Yosemite was into something way over their head.

  The memory exercise had been so productive—and apparently cathartic—when they finished Nicky said, “Let’s do it again. I bet I’ll remember a bunch more.”

  Anna declined. A second run-through and creative memory had a habit of filling in pesky blanks. “One more question,” she said. “You told me the man who held you down smelled of lotion.”

  “Yeah. You know, like Jergens or something. Hand lotion.”

  “Any other smells?”

  Nicky closed her eyes, back in the game Anna had not wished to reprise.

  “Maybe cologne, but faint.”

  “Any bad smells?”

  Nicky squeezed her eyes more tightly shut to aid recall. Finally she said: “He didn’t fart or anything if that’s what you mean.”

  Anna laughed and the girl opened her eyes looking offended. To make up for her lapse, Anna became extra serious. “I was thinking more along the lines of gasoline, smoke, skunk, things like that.”

  Nicky sniffed the air as if she wanted to be able to smell something for Anna. “Nope,” she said disappointedly. “He smelled okay.” Then: “You’re not really a waitress are you,” she asked shrewdly. Anna had forgotten her role; like a bad actor she’d dropped out of character. Mentally she cursed herself for carelessness and stupidity. Mistakes the magnitude of the one she’d just made could get a person killed under the wrong circumstances. Maybe she was the one in over her head.

  “Not exactly,” Anna admitted. “I was a school psychologist in my former life.”

  “Why did you quit?”

  “Personal reasons. I needed to get away from the town I lived in for a while.”

  “Messy divorce?”

 
“Something like that.”

  “He beat you?”

  Anna said nothing. Lies were getting so easy she could tell them without saying a word. The wicked web’s weft and warp was getting complex. Lies take on a life of their own.

  “He stalking you?” Nicky asked with an odd mixture of sympathy and hope. She was a child of TV movies and in love with domestic drama.

  “I just need to stay away awhile,” Anna said in such a way it was clear further questions would be rebuffed. To crowbar the subject back onto the track she wanted to follow, she stood, turned in place, hands on her hips and said: “Then you cleaned up?”

  Nicky nodded. “I didn’t want anybody to know. They said they’d kill me.”

  Nicky cleaning was as suspicious as it got, but Anna said nothing. The girl hadn’t been thinking clearly. Who could blame her?

  Anna got her a cup of hot tea with plenty of sugar. The Brits had it right: good strong tea made everything more bearable. The next half-hour was spent convincing Nicky to report the break-in and the assault. In the end a compromise was struck. Anna would report it, but only if the rangers would first promise not to make a “big deal” out of it. Anna reassured her the chief ranger would probably be circumspect, sending a ranger over in street clothes so the villains would be none the wiser.

  Knowing the girl would feel safer that way, Anna sat up with the light on, pretending to read till her roommate’s breathing evened out in sleep.

  When Nicky first began telling her story, Anna had jumped toward the conclusion that it had been the men she and Mary had spoken with in Dixon’s tent cabin. As the tale unfolded and Nicky told of the man who’d restrained her—smooth-handed and sweet smelling, the slacks, the dress shoes—she’d become less sure. Anybody who’d spent time in the tent cabin inherited by the erstwhile climbers would have reeked of tobacco and probably whiskey.

  Still, there was such a thing as showers.

  Maybe they suspected Anna wasn’t who she pretended to be and came to find out if their suspicions were well founded. If so, they’d discovered nothing. She’d been careful not to drag along a single scrap of her past: not a badge, not a gun, nothing.