High Country

by Nevada Barr

  Being undercover, even such a benign undercover as a waitress in a fine restaurant with nary a mob boss or biker ring in evidence, was a pain in the ass. Divested of power, clout, radios, backup, cell phones, All Points Bulletins and computers that could talk to the DMV, NCIC, the FBI and, if one knew the e-mail address, probably God, she felt as if she was working half blind and mostly deaf.

  Though remaining successfully undercover in a small isolated community was considerably more difficult than in larger operations, Anna felt slightly silly picking up the key Lorraine had promised her at the clinic. She gave no explanation as to why the chief ranger had left it for her—indeed Lorraine would probably have sent it with someone with a much lower profile than herself—and the nurse receptionist asked for none.

  The key was not to the main fire cache that held the newer equipment—that was to the back of the Search and Rescue building resting its rustic beporched self between the barn and the old graveyard. Fortunately for Anna—otherwise she’d have had to tell too many lies to people too clever to believe her—Trish Spencer’s belongings were stored in the old fire cache, a junk room more or less, in one of the snowplow garages up the hill. The garage doors were aligned with the SAR building and sat cheek-by-jowl with the great stone building that housed fire trucks, jail and law enforcement offices.

  Looking as boring and unremarkable as possible, Anna fought briefly with the padlock, raised the door in an alarming clamor, then pulled it shut behind her. The odds of her fellow concessionaires smelling her for the rat she was were small. The odds of a ranger getting curious and chatting about it to the ruination of the investigation were much higher. Hiding from her peers was an unpleasant sensation. She shook it off with a twitch of her shoulders.

  Locking herself in a grimy old garage piled with boxes undoubtedly providing winter homes for black widow spiders didn’t add to her comfort or self-esteem. Batting at an eyeball-high string, she caught it and pulled. A hundred dusty watts from a bulb suspended from the eight-foot ceiling clarified matters.

  Spencer’s boxes were easily located. Last in, they were freest of dust and closest to the door. When Anna had packed them, she’d marked them with Trish’s name, last known address and the date packed. There were four. Squatting on her heels, she cut the first one open with her pocketknife, which she had remembered to stuff in her checked luggage at the last minute. Confiscating Swiss army knives was an affront to that sovereign nation’s neutrality, but she doubted that argument would have impressed airport security on her flight out of Jackson, Mississippi.

  Using the unopened boxes as tables, she began to methodically sift through Trish Spencer’s things. Over the years she’d had cause to rifle through people’s belongings a number of times: the domestic detritus of the living, the dead or, like Ms. Spencer, those whose status was as yet undetermined. It wasn’t a task she particularly liked or disliked but—and this she would confess to no one but her sister, Molly—it never failed to fascinate her. Other people’s stuff. Being civilized to a certain extent, she wouldn’t dream of going through her host’s medicine cabinets or peeking in drawers. Being as curious as the doomed cat and of a sleuthy disposition, when the task was forced upon her she couldn’t deny a certain thrill. When poking through another person’s papers, underwear or computer files, there lurked that prurient and delicious possibility that one might come across a secret, the dirtier and more horrifying the better.

  Secrets—if one could glorify them with such a titillating appellation—whispered or hinted at by most people’s belongings tended to be little and boring: Grecian Formula, Viagra, pornographic magazines, bad poetry. But reality wasn’t where the voyeur’s excitement lay. It was thepossible.

  Ignoring this ignoble part of her psyche, Anna combed through the boxes with clinical dispassion. Trish’s collected estate was run-of-the-mill. Perhaps better suited to a girl of nineteen or twenty than a woman of twenty-seven, but the seminomadic lifestyle of a concessions worker could account for it. Two of the boxes were crammed with clothes; a sparse wardrobe when spread out. Anna was reminded that Trish had a taste for gaudy finery and real short skirts, and the money for a couple of designer pieces: a Ralph Lauren leather vest and red Gucci stiletto heels. Underneath the clothing was a black leather satchel, a sort of soft-sided briefcase. Either Trish had found it or she’d had it for most of her life. The leather was scarred and stiff from at least one drenching. The handle was torn off and the stitching along one side ripped open. Anna looked inside. Nothing. The bag was out of place, but having no idea where it would be in place, she moved on.

  The third box was full—completely and totally full—of cosmetics and hair-care items.

  Working so long in the parks, makeup hadn’t been much of a factor in Anna’s life. Since moving to Mississippi she’d begun to notice it. Southern women wore a lot of makeup, expertly applied. On any given day on the Natchez Trace Parkway, Anna would stop speeders wearing more makeup than her husband, Zach, had applied when, at the age of twenty-six, he’d been cast as King Lear in an off-off-Broadway production where Shakespeare’s characters were portrayed as lizardlike creatures in a post–nuclear holocaust setting.

  Mississippi had not sold her on makeup, but she didn’t sneer as she might have done a year or two earlier. Since moving to Dixie she’d developed a bit of a taste for true red lipstick and once, when feeling wild and crazy, had painted her toenails to match.

  A nine-cubic-foot box filled with paints and powders, hairpins and curling irons wasn’t standard for wilderness use, but then Yosemite Valley was not wilderness. In an unavoidable and unsettling way it and its adjacent areas were urban. Not in the good sense of art, culture and cinema, but in the vaguely creepy sense of . . . well, of lizards in a postapocalyptic world.

  Anna went through the items one at a time. Trish liked earth tones and metallics and put a lot of goop in her hair. With the care she always took of the belongings of those whose privacy she invaded in her professional capacity, Anna neatly replaced the cosmetics in their box.

  The last box was the most promising, though it was less than a quarter full. It held books and papers. Trish had only two books, romances—a Nora Roberts and a LaVyrle Spencer. Both were dog-eared and rumpled, as if much read.

  Anna leafed through a checkbook. Entries ratified the suspected vanity; most were to department stores, the notations reading clothes, makeup and miscellaneous. Trish used a bank in Merced, the largest town within a two-hour radius, and did most of her shopping there. Regular deposits had been made for her tips, deposits considerably larger than those Anna reluctantly set aside each week to be plowed back into the park’s budget. Either Trish was an excellent waitress or she had some other source of income.

  The rest of the papers consisted of a pile of “dear occupant” correspondence and one unfinished letter. The salacious glee of the village snoop flicked the edges of Anna’s brain as she picked up the most personal of human flotsam; writing, the only place other than conversation where a human being’s actual thoughts could be discovered, a direct peek into the brain of another creature.

  “Dear Dickie,” she read. “Your gym is closer than you might think. I’ve become a miner. There’s gold in them thar hills . . .”

  That was it. The letter had never been finished. Since there weren’t any missives from “Dickie,” Anna guessed the correspondence—and possibly any relationship—was one-sided.

  She replaced the books and papers, closed the boxes and sat on the cold concrete, her breath visible in the still air.

  Miner, mining.

  Having so recently stolen, via eavesdropping from the ladies’ john, the thoughts of another group who spoke of a gold rush, the words reverberated. Maybe this Lost Dutchman’s Mine theme connected the events of Dix’s squatters, Camp 4 and the disappearance of Trish Spencer. Gold, actual honest-to-God gold, in the foothills of the Sierra had populated California in the rush of ’49, but Anna had never heard of it being found in this glacier-car
ved granite country.

  Whether metal ore or another form, the letter fragment suggested Trish had found a way to get money, quite a bit of it. “Your gym is closer than you think.” Either she’d found a convenient way for Dickie to buff up or Dickie had the dream of owning a gym or gym franchise. Anna’d worked with enough down-and-out young people to recognize a standard fantasy: girls wanted to own their own clothing boutiques, boys wanted to own their own gym. Taxi drivers and waitresses wanted to be stars of stage and screen.

  Profiling—so severely frowned upon that Anna, a middle-aged white lady from Mississippi, had been searched three times on a two-plane flight on the off chance it was she and not a male of Middle-Eastern descent between eighteen and forty who was intent on the overthrow of America—was not only a useful tool in law enforcement, but absolutely unavoidable. Profiling was merely using a lifetime’s experience to make an educated guess.

  Anna guessed Trish had stumbled on a real or virtual gold mine and intended to use the proceeds to buy Dickie his heart’s desire and, if she were lucky, his heart as well.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Prophylactically squinting against the expected glare, Anna raised the garage door a few feet to slip out. The weak December sun had given up all but the ghost. Heavy fog had settled back into the valley. Anna scrunched out and lowered the door. Gray and damp and close, the granite walls of The Ditch were getting to her. The dry weather had nothing to do with crisp sunny days and clear starlit nights. Fronts, cold and slow moving, marched in from the Pacific, offering all the delights of a nasty winter without the life-giving snows. “Fog” wasn’t even the proper term. The mountains seldom suffered the fogs for which the valleys were famous. Fog suggested graveyards and London, Jack the Ripper and little cat’s feet: frightening, fascinating, creeping, elusive, hidden things. This California mountain fog was freakish, lacking in romance or menace. A pewter lid, it effectively sealed off the view above three or four hundred feet and made the cold cut deeper than it might otherwise.

  For a moment she stood beside the storage space’s door. Being undercover had yet another drawback: there was simply no place one could be comfortable. Her room was dark and, since Nicky had probably been awake for five or ten minutes, a disaster area. Even if had it been warm and light and tidy it still would have lacked privacy. Virginia Woolf had it right: a woman needed a room of her own. That was especially true for a woman leading a double life.

  Having taken time to acknowledge her disgruntlement and give crabbiness its due, Anna walked to the Ahwahnee employee dorm. Nicky didn’t go on duty till ten, and Anna not till three-thirty. There was plenty of time to enjoy the squalor and visit with her roommate.

  Nicky was up. Hugging a mug of coffee to her chest with one hand, she sat in bed clad in T-shirt and sweatpants, reading a comic book. Anna had grown up on the comics: Spiderman, Superman, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Archie. Her habit had followed her into high school where Classic Comics served to assist her with book reports, then to whet her appetite to read the unillustrated and unabridged versions ofLorna Doone, A Tale of Two Cities, The Count of Monte Cristo and too many others to hold in a single flash of memory.

  The comic book Nicky pored over resembled none of Anna’s remembered favorites.

  “How’re you doing?” she asked as she began the time-consuming process of peeling off layers.

  Nicky put down the comic. “I’m okay.” The girl looked at Anna differently this morning. Cricket and Nicky’s combined ages didn’t add up to as many years as Anna had birthdays. Because of this, they may have observed her, but they’d never bothered tosee her. Occasionally, when she cracked a good joke or displayed some other bit of cleverness, she had gotten the sense that for a moment—just a second or two—she had flickered out of the pale world of parental-aged wraiths and been seen by them to be real, as real as themselves. These glimmers were few.

  This morning Nicky was looking right at her. The previous night’s events had destroyed artificial barriers of age. Two humans in a room together. Anna hadn’t realized how much she’d missed existing in the eyes of her fellows till that moment. It felt good to be visible again. In a very real way, when working undercover, one ceased to exist. The old persona was buried with great care. The new one was a fraud. The only moments of genuine reality were when reporting to the contact in the old life regarding the goings-on in the new.

  Anna had thought she would be much better at living a lie.

  Before she had time to enjoy it, she regretted the passing of her invisibility. Though lonely, it had been handy. Nothing she said, did or asked made much of an impression. Neither Nicky nor Cricket evinced curiosity about where she went, what she did, who she was.

  That wouldn’t be true now. As if to ratify Anna’s conclusion, Nicky said: “Where were you off to so early? I got up to pee around six and you’d left.”

  Faint but discernable to a Catholic school–trained ear, Anna could hear the accusation under the words. What with one thing and another she’d gone from invisible nobody lady to surrogate mom. Since there was no changing this and no guaranteeing that it wouldn’t shortly slide into teenage resentment, Anna decided to capitalize on it.

  Nicky was listening and needing to talk: the search of their quarters the night before provided Anna with an ideal excuse to openly pump her about Trish Spencer.

  No pumping was required. Since Anna, by virtue of “saving Cricket’s life” and being “cool” about them being high, had become one of the gang, Nicky was willing, anxious even, to talk. Trish’s disappearance hadn’t hit her as hard as one might expect. The realm of seasonal park workers was peopled with itinerants, the turnover considerable, often unheralded and usually sudden. Concessions employees commonly “disappeared” for reasons of their own or those of their employers.

  The fact that three others had gone missing at the same time, coupled with the attendant hullabaloo of the search, had affected Nicky in a way Anna had often witnessed in young people living through tragedies peripheral to their lives, a public trying-on of grief fed mostly by the attention of adults or the media. Anna didn’t hold this self-centered worldview against them. The life experience of most people under twenty was too limited to embrace great tragedy. It was one of their charms, making them appear innocent and simple to more jaded eyes.

  Nicky’s first tidbit of shared information was no surprise. After seeing Trish Spencer’s checkbook and the large deposits written off to “tips,” Anna had suspected it. It explained why the dorm residents had been tight-lipped when the rangers questioned them in hopes of gaining a direction for the search. Trish was the local drug connection. According to Nicky, she dealt only in marijuana and only in small amounts, but she admitted neither she nor Cricket ever asked for anything else.

  Thinking “Dickie” might be the source of Trish’s goods, Nicky and Cricket had been careful not to enlighten law enforcement about his existence. As Dickie was to be the recipient of largesse as outlined by Trish’s unfinished letter, Anna doubted he was the supplier. If he was the boyfriend apparent, Nicky and Cricket’s keeping him secret might have had dire consequences for Trish. If he knew where she was headed, Yosemite’s SAR team might have been able to question him and perhaps locate Trish in time to save her life.

  Briefly, Anna was tempted to tell Nicky this in hopes she would learn a lesson about the cost of not cooperating with rangers. In the end she decided against it. There was already too much ambient guilt in the world.

  And this particular guilt might be groundless. Trish might not have died.

  With these thoughts, Anna wondered if Trish had somehow engineered the fate of the others, then disappeared to throw suspicion in other directions. How she could take out three hardy people all by her little self and why she would do that to her best friend and two pals, Anna couldn’t venture a guess. The obvious motive was that they knew she was dealing, but probably half the park knew she was dealing. Salesmen had to ma
rket their wares. It was one of the risks of the profession.

  Anna decided not to chase this particular wild goose, at least for a while.

  With a bit of creative questioning, she was able to get Nicky to recall Dickie’s last name: Cauliff. She was pretty sure he lived in Mariposa, a little town fifty minutes southwest of the park. Though Nicky couldn’t remember her ever having said so, she got the idea that Trish stayed with Dickie Cauliff when she was there.

  Nicky left for her bussing duties. Anna bundled up again for the walk to Yosemite Lodge with its discreetly tucked-away pay phones.

  Usually Anna wasn’t a proponent of cell phones. Having been born to the heft of a rotary dial, when she used a cell she felt as if she were holding a bar of soap to her ear and talking to empty air. Still, she would have used one and been grateful for it in her current position. Unfortunately, satellite phones were too costly and the other services had yet to penetrate large chunks of the Sierras, including Yosemite Valley.

  One nifty call to information and Anna had the phone number for a D. Cauliff in Mariposa. The initial threw her off briefly. Usually it was only women who listed themselves by an initial instead of a name, mistakenly assuming it disguised gender.

  A man answered.

  Whatever it was—if anything—Dickie Cauliff did for a living, he didn’t do it at ten-thirtyA .M. on weekdays. For that Anna was grateful. She didn’t relish spending her free time at pay phones.

  “Yeah?” The voice sounded wary and Anna had yet to introduce herself.

  On the walk over from the dorm she’d given considerable thought to this introduction. If Trish spent a lot of time with this guy, Anna doubted she’d be on safe ground pretending to be a friend. If she admitted she was a ranger she would need to use an assumed name; she had no way of knowing whether Cauliff was on speaking terms with anyone at the park. Should she use an assumed name with ranger credentials, too many people at administration would have to be let in on the secret in case he called park offices asking for her fictitious self.