High Country

by Nevada Barr

  The secretary, a wonderfully efficient young woman whose only shortcoming in the eyes of her superiors was a irreverent tendency to come to work with hair dyed in neon blues and reds, told her the superintendent was still at a conference in Washington, D.C. Anna had known that but had hoped for an early return. Accepting the inevitable, she asked to be patched through to Deputy Superintendent Leo Johnson.

  After what seemed an excessively long time the secretary came back on the line. “Leo’s in a meeting right now. Can he call you back?”

  “It’s urgent,” Anna said. “Did you tell him it was Anna Pigeon calling?”

  “I did,” the secretary replied without a hint of defensiveness. “Hang on. I’ll tell him it’s urgent.”

  Another few minutes slid down the black hole Anna held pressed to her ear.

  “He’ll have to call you back,” the secretary said at last. “Is there a number where you can be reached?” Her tone had the balance of a top-notch secretary; enough disappointment the caller knew she was on her side and enough firmness she knew continuing to push it would get her nowhere.

  Anna gave the number on the phone next to her bed and the number stenciled on the door to her room, then hung up.

  Food made her sleepy. Sun soothed her. Not yet recovered from forty-eight hours of assorted trauma, she dozed off. When she woke again the sun was gone, the short winter day over. It was twenty after five and Leo hadn’t returned her call. She dialed the park number again. A machine answered and a recorded voice told her the administrative offices were closed for the day and would reopen at eightA .M. the following morning. She was instructed to dial 911 in case of emergency . Within the boundaries of the park, 911 would put her through to the law enforcement dispatcher. In Merced it would get her the local police.

  “Damn,” Anna whispered.

  Phil was dead and Mark was very probably dead. Whoever had been in the drug plane when it crashed had been dead quite a while. Dead people didn’t really constitute an emergency. One could dawdle and lollygag for hours—days—and they’d still be dead when rescue finally arrived.

  The drugs themselves didn’t constitute an emergency either. Twelve miles in over rough trail in winter: odds were good nobody would bother them tonight. When Mark and Phil failed to reappear packing product, whoever they worked with—or for—would send others up to find out what happened. That shouldn’t happen for a day or two.

  Excuses in place for abandoning the fruitless telephoning, Anna threw off the thin covers and stood up gingerly. When her brain had gyrated around in her skull and adapted itself to this new position, she put a bit of weight on her bad ankle. It hurt, but the pressure bandage and the rest had done wonders. With a crutch or even a cane, she would be able to move fairly well.

  Anticipating a fuss and not wanting to go into it with her bare bottom exposed, she moved to the narrow closet, supporting her weight on the furnishings when she could and hopping when she couldn’t. Her clothes were hung neatly inside. Shirt and pullover were distinctly disreputable-looking and smelled vaguely like a locker room, but they were dry. Anna put them on. That was as far as she got. Her trousers had been cut from waist to hem when they’d removed them to tend to her damaged ankle. The laces on her hiking boot had been cut as well. Socks and underpants had gone missing, probably down a trash chute. Anna thought harsh things about whichever EMT had gotten scissor happy.

  There’s nothing like having no pants, no transportation and no money for making a woman feel helpless. Anna got back in bed and called the Ahwahnee dorm.

  Two hours later, with crutches and an ankle brace from hospital stores, she was headed back up into the mountains in Mary Bates’s rusting old Chevrolet. To pay for the ride, Anna told Mary her story, all of it.

  “I knew it, I justknew it,” Mary crowed when Anna finished. “My whole life I’ve been in the Ahwahnee. I’ve known waitresses who dropped out of lawyering, who could’ve been beauty queens, even some hiding from outstanding warrants or abusive husbands. I knew you didn’t fit in. Ha!”

  Anna was offended. She’d worked hard to fit in. It hurt her pride to think a seventeen-year-old girl had seen through her cover. “You didn’t know,” she said.

  “Yes I did.”

  Anna sniffed. Mary, being a well-brought-up girl and one with keen intuitions, must have sensed Anna’s hurt feelings. She went on to say: “Oh, I didn’t know your were aranger undercover or anything. And you were a good waitress. Honest. Really and truly.”

  Two protestations of verisimilitude. She was lying. Anna was a lousy waitress. Depression began to settle over her sternum, stirred by a soupçon of peevishness. Even knowing it wasn’t from her failure in the restaurant business but a conglomerate of the other shocks and horrors, Anna had trouble shaking it off.

  “I thought maybe you were working for the hotel,” Mary said. “Sometimes my dad would do that. When he felt something wasn’t right and couldn’t figure out what it was, he’d hire somebody to work in the hotel who would report to him. A bunch of us thought maybe you were doing that.”

  “A bunch?” Anna repeated. The depression thickened. No wonder she hadn’t been able to get any information. The staff thought she was a stool pigeon for the bosses.

  “Well, not abunch, ” Mary admitted and Anna felt a bit better. “Just me and Scott, I think.”

  They rode in silence for a ways. Anna thought about Scott and the unanswered questions that had been pushed from her mind the last three days. Scott Wooldrich. Picturing him in his youth and strength sent a tingle through her tired bones. So much so, she pushed the image aside. Going through adolescence once had been more than enough.

  The questions were more comfortable, if only because they were familiar. She returned to the litany. Who had put the needle in her jacket and why? Who had tossed the dorm room and why? If Trish had known about the downed plane and had been mining the frozen dope to buy a gym franchise for her brother, then had Dickie known? Was that why he’d shown no interest in the search? Had he been aware his sister was murdered and either not wanted to get involved with Mark and the gang or chosen not to alert the NPS so he could take up where Trish left off? How had Mark and his boys known of the plane’s whereabouts? How had they known Trish, Caitlin, Patrick and Dix were jumping their claim?

  And were the answers to these questions related?

  Anna focused on the needle. A syringe full of blood; had it been a mere scare tactic meant to frighten off a person suspected of spying for the boss, it could have been left in her locker where she would see it but not be injured. The fact that it had been carefully and ingeniously rigged to inject into her arm suggested that whoever put it there wanted a surer and more permanent solution to her nosing about. The only thing that could be genuinely threatening—other than the inherent scariness of blood found outside the skin it belonged under—was if the blood were in some way poisonous.

  The obvious blood-borne poison was HIV or AIDS. Scott had looked as if he recognized the syringe. He had wanted to take the syringe from her. Scott had been in prison. Scott seemed to love his job as assistant chef. Could he be infected and afraid Anna, in her mistaken role of stoolie, had been sent to ferret out the truth and so get him fired? It was illegal to fire someone because they had AIDS, but considering he was in the food services business, fear of a miserable and lingering death sentence might outweigh fear of the law.

  Anna sat with that idea as they drove through the tiny town of Mariposa. The solution fit a lot of the kinks and bends in the chain of events, but it didn’t feel right. If AIDS were the secret a person was trying to hide, delivering a needle full of infected blood that could be tested for DNA and matched to the suspect made no sense. There was always the possibility of vicious revenge, a sort ofyou hurt me because I’m sick, I’ll make you sick so you’ll know how it feels. Anna wasn’t a great judge of character, but she couldn’t see that kind of petty virulence in Scott Wooldrich.

  If the blood wasn’t his, whose then? And if t
hey’d wanted to keep their disease a secret, the same illogic applied. Scott knew more about the syringe than he should have. Anna remembered the sudden jarring of his facial muscles when she’d pulled it out of her jacket sleeve. Maybe it wasn’t Scott’s blood and he’d had no hand in the booby trap but he knew who did.

  That worked.

  Mariposa put Anna in mind of Trish and brother Dickie. That they were into this thing up to the eyeballs, she didn’t doubt. Precisely what role each had played she wasn’t sure. Trish was a dope dealer, the local connection in Yosemite Valley. From the aborted letter, Anna guessed she’d stumbled onto the news of the downed plane. Because she’d gone missing and because Anna walked into a backpack with no owner up near Lower Merced Pass Lake, Anna figured she’d been murdered for her trouble. The other three were probably brought into the scheme of quick money and high adventure by Trish and ended up dying with her.

  Dickie Cauliff didn’t fit into this tidy scenario except as the proposed beneficiary of his sister’s benevolence. Anna thought back to her phone call to him, then meeting him in the flesh. He was young and strong—certainly capable of acting the mule and packing the stuff out. But he struck Anna as lazy, indifferent, sullen. The kind of man who waits for others to give him things, then gets angry and resentful if it’s not enough. He might have been convinced to shoulder such a profitable burden if his sister told him to, but Anna didn’t think she had. The unfinished letter she’d found in Trish’s belongings was written shortly before she disappeared. It suggested the plan had been kept secret from him, merely hinted at.

  When Anna had contacted Dickie he’d been singularly uninterested in anything but his sister’s belongings. Given the impression of selfishness and sullenness she’d gotten of him, it didn’t surprise her that he hadn’t been suffering paroxysms of grief over Trish’s disappearance. Sentiment over family keepsakes was out. Self-interest was more likely. Since in all likelihood he didn’t know about the marijuana, he must believe there was something of value in the things Trish left behind in the park.

  Recalling the items in Trish’s storage boxes—clothes, cosmetics, paperback novels—the one that didn’t fit was the battered, water-soaked leather satchel. It had come from the downed plane, Anna was suddenly sure of it. When the airplane hit the ice and shattered, the pilot’s briefcase must have spewed out of the cockpit along with everything else that busted loose. Customarily a captain’s briefcase would contain maps, charts and whatever personal paraphernalia were deemed necessary for comfort. A satchel in the cockpit of a drug plane might well carry cash, enough of it to make things interesting. That would account for Dickie’s pressing need to recover his sister’s effects.

  “Damn,” Anna whispered and ignored a questioning look from Mary. Her thread of reasoning had snapped. If the aborted letter was any indication, Dickie had been ignorant of the downed plane and, so, of all proceeds derived therefrom. This wads-of-cash theory also left unexplained Dickie’s urgency to recover each and every little scrap belonging to his sister right down to her apron, ticket book and uniform.

  Anna let Dickie slide from her mind but retained the satchel and its presumed contents. Given Trish found the bag and packed it out, who might know what it contained? The three people with her, whomever they might have told, and the folks responsible for the drug run in the first place. Any of these could have been behind the search of Anna’s dorm room, but given Nicky’s albeit sketchy description of the two men as strangers and city boys, Anna’s money was on the drug importers.

  It was a fine solution, but brought with it more questions: How had the importer known where in the great Sierra wilderness his cargo came to earth? How had he known a satchel of cash had been thrown from the cockpit? How had he known Trish Spencer found it?

  The rational answer was that Trish, Dix, Caitlin or Patrick told the importer or told someone who’d passed the information on. Dix, Caitlin and Pat might have done so either intentionally or inadvertently. From what Anna had learned of them, they were adventurers, casual dope smokers and opportunists, but none of them had the record or reputation to indicate they were more deeply involved in the trade.

  Trish was the dealer. She would likely have only one contact, the person who supplied her, the next bird up in the pecking order. That was the person who Trish would have approached to unload the dope she couldn’t sell to her park cronies, the person who would have passed the information up to the next level.

  They passed through El Portal. Full darkness had come but without the crushing overcast which had oppressed eastern California for two weeks. Night was no longer the blinding dark of Lower Merced Pass Lake. Stars, looking impossibly close, were caught in the tops of the pines and flowed in a silver-white river over the highway. A thumbnail moon as perfect as any in a children’s picture book—or cut in the door of an outhouse—rose above the mountains. The jagged black of the forest pressed close and, as they passed the boulders standing sentinel at the park’s entrance, rock walls began to rise. Even in this faint and frosty light, the stone glowed, polished granite catching the light and reflecting it back. Though they were again in The Ditch there was no sense of claustrophobia. Narrow as this crevice in the bastion of the Sierra was, all of the great universe looked down on it.

  Anna breathed a sigh so deep it was a marvel stars weren’t sucked into her lungs. “I’m glad the weather’s cleared,” she said.

  “I know. Me too,” Mary replied. “The world gets way too little up here when there’s no sky.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  Since Anna had awakened in the hospital—indeed, before that, about the third time she’d tumbled off a stone step in her flight from Mark and Phil—she had assumed her undercover operation was at an end. A gimp waitress wasn’t much good to anyone, and in her mind at least, she’d blown her cover. In reality, she hadn’t. Except for Mary Bates, she’d told no one. According to Mary, the “bunch” that suspected her of spying for the Ahwahnee higher-ups was, in truth, only herself and Scott Wooldrich.

  Because she’d been attacked, threatened, hunted and shot, Anna had assumed she was back in her role as a federal law enforcement officer. She had forgotten that most violent crimes are perpetrated upon ordinary citizens. Mark hadn’t struck at the arm of the law stretched out to snatch him from his felonious pursuits and slap him in the penitentiary, nor had he defended himself against the force of the legal system as personified by Anna Pigeon, National Park Ranger.

  Mark had set out to butcher a waitress out hiking on her day off just because she might cost him money. With this thought a rush of anger warmed and strengthened Anna. She pulled out of the slump she’d allowed herself to collapse into. “What shits!” she exclaimed. Mary laughed, then apologized, lest it was an inappropriate response.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Those bastards thought they were killing a nice middle-aged lady who maybe had kids, a husband, a dog for Chrissake.”

  “Not you,” Mary said carefully.

  “No,” Anna fumed. “Somebody innocent. Bastards!”

  Mary made a noise as if suppressing a laugh. As Anna saw nothing funny, she ignored it.

  Anna had intended to make Leo Johnson’s house her first port of call, but it was after tenP .M. when they drove into Yosemite Village. If his bingeing ran true to form, Leo would be drunk on booze and self-pity by this hour. An interview would be pointless. Come morning he might not even remember it. Lorraine would have put one of her rangers on as acting chief, but Anna didn’t know who it was. In retrospect it struck her as odd that Lorraine had left her with no interim contact. A chief like Lorraine Knight would have left behind instructions, messages, a phone number in Montana. At least that was the impression Anna had gotten of the woman. And she hadn’t changed her mind.

  The only thing that made sense was that the messenger hadn’t bothered to deliver them. For this crime of omission Leo Johnson was Anna’s prime suspect. Tomorrow, when she was stronger, braver and more p
atient, she would tackle him.

  Mary turned toward the Ahwahnee. “Mary,” Anna said. “Don’t tell anyone what I told you, okay? I’d like to stay on in my waitress persona awhile, just till I can get a few more answers.”

  Mary was thrilled to be in on such a terrific secret. Lest the girl endanger herself by knowing only a fragment of the truth, Anna had left out none of the pain or the terror. She hadn’t wanted Mary thinking of this as a game and getting in the way of evil. She’d told her everything up to the point when she’d ignited Mark. That wasn’t a story she was ready to share with anyone, much less a seventeen-year-old girl who looked like a Christmas angel.

  “I can help,” Mary said too eagerly.

  “You already have, just by letting me talk.”

  “No. Really. Trish tried a bunch of times to get me to smoke marijuana. If I noise it about that I’m ready, could be somebody else’ll pop up to offer to sell me a baggie. Nobody’ll offer it to you. You’re ol—not the right age.”

  Anna thought about it awhile. Mary was right. If she should start asking for a supplier it would look fishy. Mary Bates wouldn’t look fishy with an armload of mackerel. Because Trish was dead didn’t mean the drug business wouldn’t go on as usual. Either Trish’s contact would step in to fill the void or another user would be recruited to keep the party circuit supplied, particularly if there was an overabundance of weed. Whoever was moving the stuff in the park would want to get rid of it. What better way than getting patsies to pay for the privilege of burning the evidence?

  “Okay,” Anna said. It was against her better judgment and, if Lorraine Knight found out she had enlisted the help of a civilian and a minor, Anna would be severely reprimanded, probably sent back to Mississippi in disgrace. Not only did it run counter to policy, but it created an ideal situation in which the park service could be sued for punitive damages to the tune of half the gross national product. Anna invited Mary to assist because she was ninety-nine percent sure Mary was determined to do it anyway. By the pale green light washing back from the dashboard, Anna could see the glitter in her eyes and the set of her jaw. To deny her would be to send her underground. Mary was safer if Anna kept tabs on her.