High Country Read online

  Anna doubted Bobby, Billy and Ben, the pseudonymous stooges, would have been able to behave with the professional coldness Nicky described, particularly not after consuming the amount of booze they’d downed two hours before the break-in. Mark, the leader, struck her as a man with sufficient control, but who was working with him? He wasn’t the one sitting on Nicky’s back. He was slight of build and, when Anna met him, he’d just showered. Unless he’d showered again he had been in the tent cabin long enough that his clothes, hair and skin would have recovered their ashtray stink.

  However unlikely, these thoughts triggered sudden fear for Mary, Anna’s unwitting accomplice. Careful to make no noise, Anna crept out of the room and down the hall to peek into the girl’s room. Mary and her roommate slept the sleep of the innocent.

  Relieved, Anna returned to her room. For her, the sleep of the innocent had ended many years before. Lying in bed, grateful to the marauders for not harming her roommate and for being the inspiration for cleaning the place, Anna planned her morning. As soon as it was decent for a citizen to go calling, she would return to Camp 4.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Long before sunup Anna was awake. Longitudinally Yosemite National Park wasn’t much farther north than Mississippi, but the deep narrow valley that bore the brunt of visitation—referred to by the park employees as The Ditch—didn’t receive day’s blessing for an hour or more after the sun gilded the tops of the Sierra. Rising early was a perk of middle age and a boon to law enforcement. Anna had never seen any statistics on it, but she was willing to bet fourA .M. to eightA .M. were the safest hours of the day. In many ways criminals were a lazy bunch.

  Taking advantage of this diurnal edge, she left her roommate sleeping soundly, bundled up for a December morning in the mountains and slipped out of the dorm.

  As often happened, the valley lay under a small tailor-made inversion layer imposed by the surrounding peaks. Air was trapped in The Ditch and, though campers were few this time of year, the cold damp air was redolent with the smell of campfire smoke.

  Anna had reached an age where sleeping on the ground with the bugs and the sticks no longer held the appeal it once had. Still, the smell of woodsmoke on a winter morning called forth a strange nostalgia, an ache that vacillated between a yearning for home and hearth and a need to carve an adventure out of untrammeled land.

  Enjoying the sweet sting of this dichotomy, she buried her hands in the pockets of her parka and lengthened her stride.

  The path away from the Ahwahnee led through a field of boulders a story and a half high. Beneath an overcast and as yet lightless sky, rocks and trees loomed black and close. Anna remembered one of Yosemite’s unsolved mysteries. On a sunny afternoon in the mid-eighties, a young woman had walked into this rocky defile. A hundred yards behind her was a family of four. Ahead about the same distance were two newlyweds honeymooning in the park. The woman had walked from sight into this granite alley. Two screams were heard. By the time the family ran to see what the problem was, the woman was dead, stabbed thirty-nine times. Her killer was never found.

  Remembering this gruesome history some might have walked faster. Anna stopped, let the darkness cease swirling in her wake and opened herself to any sinister vibrations that might remain in the ether. There were none; all was peace. The natural world lived and died by tooth and claw, without malice and without regret. Ghosts, it seemed, could only be bound to the earth by man-made walls.

  As befit her rank and status, Lorraine Knight had one of the better homes in the park. Built of wood with a deck overlooking a creek, quiet now with winter but a frothing orchestra of liquid sound in spring, it was tucked up on a gentle rise beneath the southern cliffs. In the nineties the Merced River flooded, wiping out much of the park’s housing. Some had yet to be rebuilt, making what was left even more precious.

  Despite the early hour, a light burned in the kitchen and Anna was relieved. Where there was light there might be coffee.

  Lorraine was still in her pajamas, but she was conscious and had the coffee on so Anna adored her. The thick braid in which her glorious hair was incarcerated for duty was unbound. A cascade of red-gold floated around the ranger to well below her waist. With a face sculpted by laughter and weather for half a century, Lorraine looked to Anna like a wise woman of fiction. Or a white witch.

  Over coffee—Folgers with two percent milk in place of cream, but being in the beggar’s category, Anna was not choosy—she told Lorraine of the situation that had awaited her when she’d returned home from the clinic the previous night.

  The chief ranger listened without interrupting, an occurrence rare and welcome enough that Anna noted it in Knight’s credit column.

  When she was done they sat a moment in silence. Then Lorraine asked: “What do you make of it?”

  A good part of the night Anna had lain awake trying to answer just that question. She shared the pitifully few thoughts she’d come up with. The intruders were accustomed to and proficient at their chosen career. They smacked of city-dwellers in the park for nonrecreational reasons. It was not random. They’d chosen Anna, Cricket and Nicky’s room for a reason. They’d known where it was and that the three women would be out that night. That spoke of a connection inside the dormitory.

  “Do you think these men might have had something to do with the girl—this Cricket’s—collapse? Poisoned her to guarantee you’d all be out?”

  Anna thought of that. It might work for Nicky and Cricket—Nicky’s poisoning not taking—but it didn’t account for her.

  “I think it’s linked to the disappearance,” Anna said. “These guys were searching for something specific—something they didn’t find. Something one of them at least thought worth snapping a young woman’s neck for. Maybe Cricket or Nicky possesses this desirable object. We’ll have to talk to Cricket when we get a chance. Nicky seemed genuinely baffled.”

  “Maybe it’s about you,” Lorraine said. “If so, we’d better pull you out of this job.” The chief ranger looked genuinely concerned for Anna’s safety and Anna was flattered. “These guys are not your average dog-off-leash, campfire-out-of-bounds park criminals. If you’re right and it is connected with the four missing persons it could get ugly. Uglier.” Lorraine licked a drip of coffee off the side of her mug with an amazingly pointed tongue.

  A dog, an unimpressive heap of breeds with warm and soulful eyes, pushed its head into Anna’s hand and she scratched its ears as much for her comfort as for the dog’s. “Wendy,” the chief ranger said fondly. “She’s a keen judge of character, a kind of doggie sixth sense that helps her nose out people who are likely to drop food. She especially loves children.”

  For the briefest of moments, Wendy’s soft ears put her in mind of her dog, Taco, the cozy kitchen reminding her of home and, so, of Paul, with whom she would soon share a life. Anna considered pretending she believed the night searchers were about her, about her undercover identity. Just for a second she indulged in a fantasy of going home.

  “It’s not about me,” she said before fantasy could mature into temptation. “At first I thought maybe that was, it coming so soon on the heels of a visit I made to those bozos in Dixon’s tent cabin. I’ll check it out but I’m sure it wasn’t them. At least I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.” Anna explained her logic of following Nicky’s nose in the matter.

  “They didn’t smell right,” she concluded.

  Lorraine smiled at the literal application of the old law enforcement saw but otherwise seemed to accept Anna’s reasoning.

  She went on: “If it wasn’t me and—I know we’ve got to check this out—it wasn’t Nicky or Cricket who inspired our visitors, then it had to be Trish. Something she’d cached. According to Nicky, the man searching said he’d found, ‘nothing’ and the man holding Nicky down said, ‘He should have figured that.’

  “I know there’s a slew of reasons for that remark, but the obvious one is Trish Spencer. She’s gone missing. I’ve taken her place in not only the
Ahwahnee dining room but in the dorm. It makes sense that the ‘he’ who directed this search should have realized Trish’s stuff would have been packed up and moved.”

  “Ah,” Lorraine said, and: “Let me get dressed.”

  Alone with Wendy, Anna wondered what “Ah” meant. “Ah yes, you clever thing,” or “Ah, so, you’re in therapy for this?”

  Lorraine emerged looking official: Rapunzel hair in a tasteful knot at the nape of her neck, Scooby-Doo pajamas replaced with the green and gray. “I’d give you a lift but I expect folks are stirring by now. When it looks like a good time, drop by the medical clinic. I’ll leave the key to the old fire cache. For lack of a better place, Ms. Spencer’s stuff was stored there. We couldn’t track down her parents. None of the people at the Ahwahnee seemed to even know if they were living or dead. Nobody else appeared asking after Trish or her things. I’ll see if we can turn anything up on two city men entering or staying in the park last night.”

  Anna left first, feeling pleased and reassured. Despite the silly pajamas, Lorraine was a woman of business. A good boss was a blessing indeed. With a boss as clear-thinking and action-oriented as Lorraine Knight, Anna felt half inclined to obey orders.

  Having returned to the dorm, breakfasted, checked on Nicky and seen the tragic erosion of the so briefly clean room, Anna decided it was late enough to wander down to Camp 4 and nose around. Given her age and civilian status, unless she could come up with a believable reason for metaphorically ringing their doorbell, a direct assault on the denizens of Dixon’s cabin would be out of character and most likely unproductive. Anna didn’t know precisely what they were up to in Yosemite but, judging from the soiree the previous afternoon, it had Secret Squirrel written all over it. What she needed to figure out was whether theirs was a secret she need worry about or if she could leave them to their nefarious activities without compromising her own quest for the missing people.

  The sun, watery and white with winter, had crawled above the cliff tops and poured light if not heat into the valley. Camp 4 was astir. Men were hanging clothes on the trees trying to dry them from yesterday’s sleeting rains. Men huddled around fires and crouched over camp stoves. Men stared at each other over morning coffee. In the entire village of eleven tents Anna didn’t see a single female. Climbing was mostly a boy’s sport, though women were uniquely suited to excel at it.

  Not finding an amiable woman with whom she might strike up a conversation based on gender or age, she approached three men in their late thirties or early forties who had pitched their tents fairly close to Dixon’s cabin.

  “Excuse me,” she said pleasantly, “but is that North Face’s newest tent? I’ve been thinking about getting one. Are they any good?”

  Outdoorsmen dearly love to talk about gear. Before the wonders of the high-tech tent were halfway extolled, Anna was seated at their picnic table sipping their coffee. When she’d listened to the virtues and shortcomings of various pieces of equipment long enough to establish her credit, she shifted the conversation.

  Gesturing at Dix’s cabin with her tin mug she said: “Now that’s the way to go: standing room, plank floor, woodstove.”

  To her surprise, the second her meager line hit the water, fish began virtually leaping into the boat. Her coffee klatch had a great deal to say about Dix’s tent cabin.

  A party had raged within its walls long after these sober fellows had wanted to go to sleep. Along with apparently every climber in Camp 4 and a generous sprinkling of concession employees from nearby Yosemite Lodge, they’d got wind of the gathering by the usual osmosis. They’d attended the first three hours readily enough, but when they’d called it a night the others were just warming up. The racket had gone on till threeA .M.

  “The rangers should’ve done something,” one man groused.

  “Did you report it?” Anna asked. He hadn’t. Given that the park was fairly deserted this time of the year, probably no one had been patrolling within earshot of the festivities.

  By careful questioning—controlling the direction of flow rather than trying to keep it going—Anna found out what she wanted to know. From around eight-thirty till the men she talked with pooped out at midnight, all four of the tent cabin’s occupants were in attendance. At midnight the “slobby guy”—Anna guessed him to be the heavyset man she’d first dubbed “Beer” and who was later introduced as Billy Kurt—took the others, booted, bundled and backpacked, off in a red Ford Excursion.

  “Big into winter camping,” the man opposite Anna at the picnic table said.

  “At night?” Anna asked.

  “They like to hike in by moonlight,” the fellow at her right elbow said. “They see more game that way.” After this contribution he and his buddy exchanged an odd glance. Anna guessed this rationale had made a lot more sense the night before after a couple of six-packs.

  “Thinking the party’s over, the three of us turned in,” said the first speaker. “Then Slob and the boy-faced prick come back, park that big damn gas-guzzling piece of shit in front of the tent like we were in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and the party starts up again.”

  “You can’t park your vehicle in a campground. The rangers should’ve done something.”

  This time Anna didn’t bother to ask if they’d reported it. These three had joined that majority who believe an all-seeing, all-powerful government owed them safety, comfort and a living whether they lifted a finger to help themselves or not.

  A couple more nudges and she discovered they didn’t know where the men had gone on their moonlight hiking and camping adventure. She stayed long enough to finish her coffee, then left with what she’d come for: none of the squatters could have been in on the search of the room and the assault on Nicky. She’d also gotten a bonus: the truck tracks she’d wanted to trace belonged to a red Ford Excursion. Instead of doubling back, Anna continued on past the tiny cluster of tent cabins at the east end of the campground.

  Billy, or the boy-faced prick, was home, that or a black bear was napping on somebody’s cot. Wet growling snores came through the tent’s sides with such gale force Anna was surprised the canvas walls didn’t puff out and in the way they did in cartoons.

  Fairly confident that the owners of the Excursion were either gone or comatose, she headed back through the grounds of Camp 4 toward the parking lot that girded its western side. Campers had begun emerging from their brightly colored cocoons. There was an edge of excitement that she wouldn’t have expected on a cold and hungover morning at the bedraggled tail end of the climbing season. Nights got below freezing and, with the previous night’s drizzle, Anna would have thought the rock faces too icy to climb before ten o’clock.

  The bustle and low-grade buzz kept company with her through the camp. Groups of guys were dragging out packs and boots. Climbers were mostly obsessed by the climb. Many never set foot more than a mile into the park, at least not horizontally.

  Anna guessed the unusual combination of ice on the granite walls and dry conditions in the high country had inspired them to try their hand at winter camping. But for the single snowfall that had effectively sabotaged the search effort, there’d been no precipitation to speak of. Even at eighty-five hundred feet there was only a foot or so of frozen crusty snow. If the pattern didn’t break, Yosemite was going to have one hell of a fire season come summer.

  The coffee she’d cadged from various generous parties was completing its morning rounds, and she stopped at the camp’s restroom.

  Above her chosen commode near the outer wall was a small high ventilation window. Through this came the desultory morning conversation of a group camped just outside.

  “What a bash.”

  “That fat guy was off his head.”

  Anna’s ears pricked at that with such interest, had she been a terrier, the tips would have been quivering. She climbed on the commode seat to get her ears nearer the window, and began to eavesdrop.

  “You think it’s like he said?”

  “Shit, even if you fi
gure sixty percent was just hot air, it’s worth going after.”

  “He swore he’d been there.”

  “Lot of people there last night. It’s going to be a fucking gold rush.”

  “The guy’d been somewhere. Did you see the dude’s feet? Hamburger.”

  “Yeah but I’m not dragging my butt all over hell and gone in the snow trying to figure out where.”

  “He said a low lake. How many can there be?”

  “A shitload.”

  “That’s what I want. A load of shit.”

  This scatological sally was met with much laughter. The voices trailed off as the climbers walked away from their site. Anna sat back down for some serious thinking.

  Deep thought having availed her nothing, she zipped her trousers and rejoined the world of men. Slob or Billy “Beer” Kurt or whatever his name was wasn’t the type to stray too far from an easy form of transportation. Taking an educated guess, she thought she’d find the SUV in the closest parking lot.

  As luck would have it, one group of backpackers had their vehicle parked next to the only red Ford Excursion in the lot. She didn’t dare get too snoopy—she’d look fishy as hell. Wandering past slowly she was amazed—as she always was—at how damnbig SUVs were. Unless she was pulling a six-horse trailer fully loaded she’d have been embarrassed to be seen in the thing. Oversized SUVs were conspicuous consumerism taken to such lengths she marveled that people willingly participated in cruel caricatures of themselves by driving them.

  Mentally she noted the Excursion was brand new—or nearly so—and hard-used by the look of the frozen mud caked on its underside. The plates were from Mendocino County outside of San Francisco. Anna memorized the tag number and moved on. Vehicle information and perhaps a closer look would be done by Yose’s law enforcement rangers.