High Country

by Nevada Barr

  She pulled the barrel, plunger and needle out and held it up to the light. “Blood,” she said. “The syringe looks like it’s full of blood.”

  For a second she thought she saw recognition spark behind Scott’s eyes.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Holy Toledo,” Scott said. Shock blew out the spark, if it had ever been there.

  Anna looked away from him to the hypodermic pinched in his handkerchief. Standard stuff. The kind doctors give out by the handful to patients with a variety of maladies. The liquid inside had the viscous clinging qualities of blood still moderately fresh—that or thinned with an anticoagulant. There was nothing remarkable about it except for the fact that someone had wanted to inject it into Anna’s arm.

  “Here. Let me take that.” Scott reached for the needle.

  “I got it.” Anna held it away from where he hovered, hand outstretched, with that peculiar intensity men get when wanting to snatch a power tool or computer mouse from their female compatriots. In Anna’s pack was an unopened plastic bottle of water. Retiring to the sanctity of the ladies’ bathroom with coat, backpack and bloody syringe, she poured the water down the drain, dropped the hypodermic in the bottle, and screwed the cap back on. That done, she turned her jacket inside out, searching carefully for any other booby traps. She found none, nor had she expected to. Whoever had rigged the syringe was an amateur. No practiced, competent doer of harm would rely on a delivery system that depended so much on luck.

  Secreting the bottle in the bottom of her pack, she rejoined her “date.”

  Scott had doffed his apron and changed his white uniform shirt for a black T-shirt that wasn’t warm enough for a mountain winter and too tight. On him it was flattering, stylish rather than déclassé.

  “Nice build,” Anna said because it was true and displayed for the public’s enjoyment.

  “I used to spend a lot of time working out on weights,” Scott said as they left the hotel.

  “No more?” she asked to make conversation.

  “Some. Enough not to get fat. But that’s about it these days.”

  “What changed? Decided you were already handsome enough?”

  Scott laughed. His teeth were small and straight, giving him a boyish look when he smiled. “I learned to cook. Love at first bite.”

  Scott drove a classic ’68 Mustang, the body spotted with rust-colored patches where dents had been filled in, sanded and primed. A gentleman by upbringing or education, he held the passenger door for her. As Anna started to buckle her seat belt, good manners were overcome by fashion sense: “You gonna wear that?” he asked, sounding genuinely alarmed.

  Anna looked down. In the excitement of finding a hypodermic of blood duct-taped in her sleeve she’d forgotten to take her apron off. She untied it and chucked it in the backseat along with her pack. After eight hours of seeing, smelling and serving food, she was not anxious to wear it during her free time.

  On the short drive from the Ahwahnee to the Yosemite Lodge they talked about the Mustang, the ins-and-outs of what would one day be a restoration to rival the first phoenix rising from the ashes. Anna was content with this harmless chat. She’d not yet decided what she wanted from the assistant chef, though the black T-shirt and melting smile were loading that question with unprofessional possibilities. Unprofessional and unethical. For the first time in a long while she had to consciously remind herself of Paul Davidson. He, along with the rest of real life, grew ever more dim. Scott, on the other hand, showed almost superreal, the heat and energy of him nearly enough to bask in like a cat in the sun.

  Anna pulled her thoughts from basking.It’s the damp, she told herself.The unrelenting gray. I can’t get warm. She told herself lies but it served. Her mind obediently returned to the task at hand.

  Questions.

  Mostly she would just be casting around hoping her line would snag information to help tie together the bits of suspicious jetsam that had washed up over the past days. As he waxed poetic about polymers, paint and Internet parts stores, she let her mind drift back over the evening shift: Jim Wither, scalding water, finding the needle, who was where and why.

  The Ahwahnee’s back door wasn’t kept locked, nor was her locker. She never kept anything of value in it, a seven-year-old down jacket being as worthless in Yosemite as last year’s computer in Silicon Valley. Anyone could have access at any time. Had they wanted privacy, they could have had that too, as long as they didn’t hit the locker room at a shift change. When on duty, the staff seldom went there. Anna couldn’t even factor out people unfamiliar with which locker belonged to whom. Employees’ names were written in magic marker on strips of masking tape on the doors. Whoever planted the syringe had meant to harm her specifically.

  Personal malice. At least she had that going for her. Anna smiled in the dark.

  Scott turned the Mustang into Yosemite Lodge’s parking lot. Only then did it occur to her how bizarre his conversation about automobile rehab was. In the six or so minutes door to door he’d not referred to her needle-in-a-bottle once. It was as if she’d lost a button or broken a shoelace, an event traumatic enough to gain a drop of sympathy at the time, but of no sustaining interest.

  Because this respite from the clamor of the dining hall had been so welcome, Anna hadn’t questioned it. Now she did. Most people would have been ababble with speculations and questions up to and including what should be done with the macabre gift. Scott hadn’t said a word. Either he was one of life’s coolest customers or there was a reason he didn’t want to talk about it.

  Anna put the syringe on the list of things she would bring up over drinks.

  Mrs. Wooldrich had raised her boy right. Had Anna waited, he would have come around the car and opened the door for her. She sprang out unaided. Marriage to Zachary, a Westchester, New York, boy, born and bred to the silver spoon despite the family not having cash for anything better than stainless flatware, Anna had come to appreciate mannerly men. The car door thing, though, she could never get used to. Brought up in a rough-and-tumble county on the California-Nevada border, she always felt like an idiot queen waiting while the driver circumnavigated the car to release her.

  Scott seemed happy either way. Anna stuck her wallet in the pocket of her coat and left her pack behind, trusting mother nature to refrigerate the blood sample. The lodge, though not so grand as her older sister, was by no means a fleabag. The public rooms were high-ceilinged and gracious with glass and unpainted timber. Where the Ahwahnee had the rich feel of a turn-of-the-century spa, the Yosemite was as crisp and sharp as a modern upscale ski resort.

  Scott ordered bourbon on the rocks. Anna ordered tea. Tea, hot and fresh, had a clean taste that nothing else could touch.

  “So where did you learn to cook?” she asked, because Wooldrich was sufficiently polite he couldn’t be trusted to focus the conversation entirely on himself without a nudge.

  He took a sip of bourbon.Playing for time, Anna thought, though she couldn’t guess why. The question wasn’t loaded.

  “Actually Jim taught me,” he said. “I’m a little old to be a protégé, I guess, but that’s it. He taught me the basics, then brought me up here as an assistant salad chef—pretty low on the totem pole. I did that for a year, then he promoted me. It’s who you know. Guys who’ve been to chefs’ school in France don’t have the kind of job I’ve got. I’m big on gratitude these days.”

  He smiled and rolled the bourbon around in the glass, watching candlelight play through the amber liquid the way she remembered her father doing when she was small. The image startled, then reassured her. Her instantaneous attraction to the burly cook wasn’t preadulterous. It was Freudian. Scott, though he looked nothing like her dad, reminded her strongly of him: the way he tossed his head back when he laughed, as if the merriment reached down to his toes, the blunt power in his shoulders and hands, the way he leaned in doorways with patience and good cheer, the utter maleness of him untarnished by any blight of macho.

  She
laughed out loud.

  “What?” he asked, half smiling.

  “You remind me of my father.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Good.”

  “Good as in you’ll let me put you through college or good in the Electra sense?”

  A corner of Anna’s mouth twitched and Scott laughed. “Snob,” he said.

  The Electra reference had taken Anna off guard. He’d read her mind, something her father’d never been able to do—which accounted for the fact that she’d not been locked in a convent till she was thirty.

  “Hard to say.” Then she did the eye thing. A drink, a look over the rim of the cup. A smile. Anna knew she was wading down a slippery slope into deep waters, but she didn’t repent. She drew energy from the sexual tension between them. She was ten years older than he and not interested—except in the knee-jerk way she felt hungry when she smelled bacon frying, she assured herself—but the power was there and she took it.

  Scott ordered a plate of nachos to share. Anna remembered she was working.

  “Where’d you meet Jim? Did he work in San Francisco before coming here?” Gossip, as all-pervasive as air in the National Parks, had already informed her that Jim had been at the Ahwahnee for fifteen years. She wanted to see why Scott hadn’t answered the question the first time she’d put it to him.

  “Shoot,” he said and shook his head ruefully. “I’m going to tell you something only a handful of people know. Maybe because you remind me of your father’s daughter. You sure don’t remind me of my mother. You’d need higher heels and a ton more mascara for that. Okay: I lifted a lot of weights. I had plenty of time to read the Greek classics.”

  He waited expectantly but Anna couldn’t answer the implied riddle.

  “Aw, come on, you’re a sharp cookie. Guess.”

  Anna hated guessing.

  He stopped the game before it became obnoxious. “I was sent to cooking school through the generosity of the California taxpayers. I spent nine years in the state pen in Soledad. Got out three years ago. I’m off parole the end of March. Jim and Tiny know. The park superintendent and whoever he told and the hotel’s general manager knows. It’s all on the up and up, papers filed, prints taken. I just don’t choose to spread it any further than that. It’s not that I’m ashamed of being an ex-con . . . It’s just that it’s . . .” He smiled. “Well it’s sort of like being an astronaut. As soon as you mention it everybody gets tongue-tied. All the women want you to be the father of their children. All the men want to be you—or prove they’re just as tough as you.”

  He was poking fun at himself but there was a lot of truth in what he said. An ex-con, especially a big, good-looking, articulate ex-con, confused people. Weak men wanted to prove they were as strong, strong men that they were stronger. Contempt, curiosity, fear, prurient interest or envy at wild adventures imagined clogged people’s brains. Easier just to be a cook. Just to be Scott.

  “And they say crime doesn’t pay,” Anna said. “Jim teaching inmates. Hard to picture. He’s a big-deal chef, isn’t he? Educated abroad, et cetera, et cetera?”

  “Jim’s the best. Why? You think he’s too good to bother teaching bottom feeders like me?” Scott was smiling and Anna sensed no edge to his words. Probably because he didn’t believe he was a bottom feeder and never had.

  “He’s sure got no time for lowly waitresses,” she said. “With the exception of Tiny.”

  “Jim’s been under a lot of pressure,” Scott said repressively.

  Anna would get nowhere casting aspersions on Scott’s mentor. Annoying as it was at the moment, she admired him for his loyalty.

  Perhaps realizing he’d been too abrupt, Scott resumed on his own. “Jim and Tiny go way back. I don’t know if they knew each other before he came to the park, but I know she has a brother who’s got some pull. That and Jim’s reputation in cooking circles is what got him the gig at Soledad. He came twice a week for three of the years I was there.”

  “Why would a four-star chef want to teach cooking to cons?” Anna asked. “Not that convicted felons aren’t handy with paring knives and meat cleavers but you’ve got to admit teaching in a prison system is not a big item on most of the haut mondes résumés.”

  “I wondered at first too, but it turned out to be pretty straightforward. Jim’s best friend had been put away for murder. Since he wasn’t coming out, Jim found a way to come in more than just visiting hours.”

  Deftly, Anna looped the string around her teabag and wrung it out against her spoon. “What were you in for?” As soon as she’d spoken she realized, in the world of civilians, the question would probably be considered rude. Between cops and robbers it was talk around the office water cooler.

  Scott gave her the same sharp look she remembered from when Cricket had collapsed. “You’re an odd duck, Anna Pigeon. Where’d you learn to wait tables?”

  “You first.”

  “You’re going to be disappointed. This is another reason I don’t like to tell people.”

  “Now I’m all aquiver.”

  He smiled an unvoiced double-entendre. Again the tension. Again she embraced it. “In my former life I was a bookkeeper by training and inclination, a CPA. I suppose you could say I came by my present job honestly. I was sent to Soledad for cooking the books for a dot-com in San Raphael. We were making money by the bushel. At least on paper.”

  “A bookkeeper.” Anna wasn’t disappointed but she was amused. Scott was about as far from the cliché of a bean counter as a man could get.

  “A good one,” he said.

  “But not quite good enough.”

  The smile left his face. He took a hefty swallow of bourbon and raised a finger to the barmaid for another round. “I guess not,” he said neutrally. “Anyway, after Jim got hooked up with the system and started teaching, being a swell all-around guy and a nonviolent offender I got in on it. I took to cooking and Jim took to me. When his buddy died, he kept coming anyway.

  “Luther, my cellmate, and I kept on with the lessons. Jim brought us a lot: something to do, be interested in. When the food he needed for the classes was brought in he’d always manage to sneak us chocolate or good coffee. When you’re locked up little things you used to take for granted become a big deal. When I got out he got me this job. There. Me in a nutshell,” Scott finished. The smile was back.

  “How did his friend die?”

  “Pneumonia.”

  Anna fiddled with her tea for a moment. Now that her first thirst had been assuaged she was getting picky. The tea had come the way it usually did in American bars and eateries: an aluminum pot of rapidly cooling water and a generic tea bag on the side. In order to get much flavor out of the leaves one had to massage the bag with the spoon.

  Scott took to cooking. Jim took to him. For the first time it occurred to her that Scott’s flirtation might not be completely genuine. He didn’t “look gay,” but then he didn’t look like a bookkeeper either.

  “Are you and Jim lovers?” she asked.

  “That’s for you to figure out.” The words were an invitation but she could tell the question made him mad. Since there were a lot of reasons it might, including the fact that it was none of her business, Anna didn’t attach much importance to it.

  “Now it’s your turn,” he said.

  Anna told him a short version of her psychologist–abused-wife story. He seemed to accept it, even if he didn’t swallow it whole. Perhaps he was a man who knew about secrets best left untold. Perhaps he was just lulling her into a sense of complacency for reasons of his own. Anna hadn’t forgotten the look on his face when she’d pulled the boobytrap from the sleeve of her coat, nor the fact that, after that initial reaction, he’d showed a stunning lack of interest in the incident.

  “How about that needle in my jacket? That was totally bizarre,” she said for openers. She’d hoped to jolt him with the question. She didn’t.

  “Maybe not as bizarre as it should be,” he said. “The restaurant business is
cutthroat. People defend their turf. You came in at the top of the food chain, took a plum shift in the best restaurant in the park. Big tips. There’s bound to be resentment. My guess is somebody is trying to scare you off.”

  “Why a needle? Why blood?”

  “Beats me. Easy to come by? Scary? Creepy? Besides, you don’t know for sure its blood. Could be teriyaki and maraschino cherry juice.”

  “Somebody wanted to marinate me?”

  “Make you inedible more like,” Scott said with a laugh. “Probably just a bad joke.”

  The needle and syringe, without whatever vile substance was inside, would have given a vicious poke. Though crude, the duct tape rigging was cleverly thought out and executed to deliver the injection. Not a joke.

  “Probably,” Anna agreed.

  Scott had been folding his cocktail napkin into smaller and smaller squares, each newly folded edge scored by his thumbnail. When Anna agreed with him he glanced up, startled she’d swallowed his bullshit, no doubt.

  She kept her face empty and receptive. It went against common vanity not to indicate by a wink or a purse of the lips that she was being facetious. Appearing a fool frightened most people more than heights, small enclosed spaces or speaking in front of crowds. Nobody wrote magazine articles about it; probably afraid of looking stupid. It didn’t bother Anna. Her stupidity—real or feigned—made others overconfident and sloppy. While undercover she’d failed singularly in this department. She’d been a clever take-charge waitress but a stupid federal law enforcement officer.

  Evidently it was too late to change character. Scott didn’t believe her.

  “Probably,” he said again and nodded as if they’d made a pact. In a way they had.

  “So how ’bout those four missing kids?” she said brightly.

  Like most people, Scott loved to gossip. Nothing is so fascinating to humans as the fusses and foibles of other humans. Without much effort, Anna got his take on Trish, Caitlin and Dix Crofter. The only one of the four he didn’t know was the trail crewman, Patrick Waters.