High Country

by Nevada Barr

  Hunched against the cold, back to the wind, Anna shut out the bass chatter of the men and drank in the vast and impossible distances. Light and space, a horizon so far away the eye had to reach; everything she loved about the mountains poured into her. The sightless nights on the Illilouette Trail were just a vague memory of one of Dante’s seven levels, read about in high school then forgotten.

  The thump of helicopter blades reached them long before the aircraft came into view. When it did, Anna was suitably impressed. They’d sent the heavy artillery.

  Yosemite’s fire cache provided the rangers and Anna with fire-retardant flight suits, helmets and ear protection. She was accustomed to aircraft of various kinds and always looked forward to flying. From the air she got a true sense of how the land lay, the rivers flowed. From ten thousand feet the world spread out with all the detail and intricacy of a living map.

  Mostly she’d flown in small planes—Cessna 182s, Aztec twin engines, Comanches, Piper Cubs—the planes flown by local airport operators who contracted out to the parks to help with drug interdiction, fire fighting or search and rescue. The helicopters she’d had occasion to fly in had also been small and brightly colored, with bulging Plexiglas windows that made her think of dragonflies.

  The Navy’s Sea Ranger, painted in bright red and white, looked to be the mother of all dragonflies. The pilot never shut down but waved to Kastner, and he, Anna and several other rangers climbed aboard. There was the sudden feeling of weightlessness, then the machine was airborne and hatcheting its way to Lower Merced Pass Lake.

  It was offensive how quickly and easily the Sea Ranger covered the miles that had cost her so dearly three nights before. Under perfect skies, illuminated by a glittering sun of ice and fire, mirror-bright granite and snow-clad evergreens unfolded beneath them like a Christmas card. Anna allowed herself to be transported by the beauty. Instead of engendering the deep calm she’d come to expect when immersing herself in the majesty of wild country, the purity below, untouched by the grisly events she’d been part of, made her feel sordid by contrast. Little and mean and dirty, as if she’d committed unspeakable acts in the sanctuary of a church. The feelings she’d worried about not having—horror, guilt, fear—began to rise within her.

  Not now,she thought, and the last paragraph ofGone With the Wind, a piece she’d memorized for a freshman drama class, rose complete in her mind . . . “tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then.”

  “Holy smoke, will you look at that!” Kastner’s voice in the earphones snatched her back to the present. Craning to see out the side window, she looked down. They’d come over a small shoulder of the mountain, and the lake lay suddenly beneath.

  “Holy smoke,” she echoed on a breath. Where she had expected an unpeopled expanse of ice, a busy excavation was taking place. Ten, maybe fifteen people, in bright-colored winter parkas, were out on the ice worrying at as many holes. Equipment lay scattered about: backpacks, shovels, axes, even a chainsaw.

  As one the miners looked up, faces blank and white turned toward the sun. Arms began to wave, then they scattered like cockroaches when the light is turned on. Leaving their finds, their packs and their tools, they ran for the woods.

  The Sea Ranger hovered. The last man vanished into the trees. The pilot set down gently and switched off the rotors. Doors opened. Rangers poured out. Not wanting her bad ankle to slow the others, Anna went last. Rangers were shouting. Rotors chuffed to a stop. Then nothing. It was if time had been arrested, there was no forward movement, no tick of the clock, no beat of a heart.

  Silence came down like a blessing.

  Into this a ranger said: “Should we go after them?”

  “No,” Kastner replied. “I don’t think they are our guys. They’re probably just opportunists. Guys looking to make a quick buck off an unexpected windfall. Radio Diane at the trailhead that she might expect company in a few hours. Tell her to get some backup.”

  They spread out then, Anna going with George Kastner. There was little to be done but photograph the depredations of the miners and the debris left by the crash in hopes of finding something with which to identify it.

  That and look for bodies.

  Phil was where Anna had left him, slumped over in the ruin she’d made of their camp. His throat was cut and she wondered if it was wrong to feel glad at the sight of the wound. Not glad he was dead—she didn’t care one way or another about the man’s continuing existence—she was glad it wasn’t she who had killed him. At least not directly.

  More photos were taken. Phil was put in a body bag, a chore that was never pleasant but was made even more macabre because he’d frozen in position. As they forced the corpse into alignment for packaging, there were the nauseating cracks of bones breaking, joints coming unglued. Phil dispatched, two rangers stayed behind to sift through what remained of the camp site. Anna and the others went in search of the backpack she had stumbled over on her night walk down the creek flowing out of Upper Merced Lake.

  With the water as a guide they found it easily. As she’d expected from her original Braille investigation, the pack was filled with fuel-soaked weed. Identification wasn’t a problem. “T. Cauliff Spencer” was written on the nylon closure flap with black Magic Marker.

  More photographs. Clean-up would be a big job—much bigger than a handful of rangers could hope to accomplish in an afternoon. With the exception of corpses, everything was to be left as they found it. Until the detritus could be cleared away, a guard would be posted at the lake to keep away scavengers of the two-legged variety.

  Working in pairs lest some of the human cockroaches remained in the area, they began the search for Trish’s body, Dixon’s, Caitlin’s, Patrick’s. The ground in the high country had been frozen for a month or more. Anna doubted her buddies from Camp 4 would have exerted themselves to bury the corpses.

  They found Caitlin first. Kastner’s radio coughed up the news: “We’ve got an 1144.”

  “Why don’t they just say ‘dead body,’ ” Anna complained mostly to have an irritation to enjoy rather than the empty feeling searches ending in a body recovery always engendered. “I thought we didn’t use ten codes these days.” Even knowing the missing persons were dead, until the bodies were found, Anna, like most search and rescue veterans, was unable to extinguish that tiny hope for a miracle.

  “I don’t know. Maybe movies,” Kastner said tersely. “I wish Hollywood would go back to westerns for a few decades. I got rangers wanting to hold their service weapons sideways like TV hoods. Ever try to aim a weapon like that?” He, too, wanted distraction. Anna felt less like a wimp for having company.

  The rangers who’d found the body had touched nothing, whether from fear of contaminating the crime scene or because they didn’t want to be alone when they did it, Anna wasn’t sure. In as remote an area as Lower Merced Pass Lake there would be no special crime scene investigators to call in. The crime scene was short, brutal and contaminated by scavengers.

  From beneath the overhang of a boulder the size of a small house trailer, a tangle of curly blond hair trailed through a mess of frozen leaves and duff.

  “Caitlin,” Anna said though no part of the face showed. “The hair. Hers was bleached and permed.”

  “Okay,” Kastner said. In their brief acquaintance Anna had come to learn that “okay” was the acting chief’s launch word, the word he used as an attention-getter before he made his point. This time there was no point and the word stood alone.

  The photographs were taken and the rangers began clearing away the forest litter raked over what the rock failed to conceal.

  Despite exposure to the black humor of wisecracking TV cops, no one made any grim jokes. Anna might have welcomed one; a little bad taste to distract her from the bad taste in her mouth. Rangers were too politically correct or too sensitive. And they may have known Caitlin. A death close to home has a way of stripping the mind’s natural defenses against grief, fear and helplessness.

  Though there were three o
ther bodies to be found, three more young people the deaths of whom would shatter families, leave mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers with a wound in their lives that would never completely heal, when the other rangers came, George Kastner gave no immediate orders to continue the search. They stood huddled in a lonely little group, a de facto tribe deriving comfort from their numbers, as the two who’d found the body carefully scraped leaves away, then eased the little corpse from its crevice.

  Anna’s assumption had been that the girl was killed, then shoved beneath the nearest rock to hide the body. As the hands were dragged free she saw it hadn’t been as she’d imagined it. Finger ends were bloodied, nails torn. The back of Caitlin’s sky-blue coat was black with blood where two bullets had ripped into her, one probably severing her spine. Judging by the amount of blood spilled, she’d lived a while after she’d been shot.

  This patchy information painted a new picture in Anna’s head. Caitlin had not been killed and then hidden. Caitlin had run. Her pack would turn up somewhere in the woods, dropped so she could move more quickly. Panicked, she’d tried to hide, crawling beneath the overhang of rock. At some point, possibly when she heard her murderers coming, maybe after she’d been shot, she’d mutilated her hands trying to claw her way to safety through solid granite.

  Leaves and duff had been kicked over her and she’d been left to die.

  “Damn,” Anna said. The violent horrors she had visited upon Mark and Phil suddenly seemed almost benign. A small part of her wished she’d stayed to make certain Mark burned to death.

  When Caitlin’s remains had been hammered from their curled and clawing shape into one the body bag could accommodate and the plastic zipped closed, George said: “Back to your search patterns. There’ll likely be three more. Everybody okay?”

  The rangers, including Anna, said yes, but in no case was it true. Anna had worked homicides in her career with the NPS, but she’d never had to work a mass slaughter of young people. As she and Kastner walked away, leaving the original locators to carry Caitlin to the helicopter, her mind choked on a single image. When the body bag had been closed a wisp of Caitlin’s permed blond frizz got caught in the zipper. This pathetic and childish fluff of hair was ground between the metal teeth, pulled and tearing. It would tug and pull till it was yanked free of the scalp.

  “Wait,” she said to Kastner and limped back to where the body was being lifted. At her request they lowered it to the ground. Anna freed the tress and rezipped the bag. Nobody asked what she was doing. No one mocked her.

  Finished, she turned back to the acting chief ranger.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “No problem. You want to wait in the helicopter?”

  Anna did. She was cold in body and spirit and her ankle was aching. Like most good law enforcement rangers, she said, “No.” It would be a weakness and a betrayal of sorts not to share in this grim duty.

  By three o’clock they had located all of the packs and one more body, that of Dixon Crofter. Long limbed and strong, he’d made it almost to the top of the broken granite slabs at the lake’s end before a bullet took him in the knee. A blood trail showed where he’d crawled on despite the wound. They found him wedged between two stone blocks, his skull crushed by a rock.

  Dixon Crofter was lean, but he was six-foot-four and all muscle. It took four rangers to get him down the slope. Because of the difficulty of the carry-out, they chose not to bag him till they reached the lake, his arms and legs providing a better grip than the slick plastic of his waiting shroud. The pallbearers slipped and stumbled. Once they dropped him, and the corpse rolled down a sloping chunk of granite, the arms they’d broken at the joints to straighten them flopping in sickening angles, making sad cracking sounds as dead flesh flailed at granite.

  It was funny. It looked funny. Grotesque. Macabre. AWeekend at Bernie’s acted out on the gray and black stage of frozen stone. Someone laughed and was immediately hushed by their own sense of shame. Anna was relieved it wasn’t her.

  Time came for the helicopter and the pilot to go back to base. The corpses took the place of two of Kastner’s rangers, who remained behind with food and gear. Till the dope could be cleaned up and hauled out, rangers would stand watch by the lake. From the look of it, the downed plane had vomited between two and five thousand pounds of weed onto the ice before it sank. They would probably never know how much had been packed out.

  The park ambulance met them at the helipad to take the bodies and the returning rangers to the valley. As the rear door closed, the sound of subdued yet excited chatter began. The tragedy was being turned into a story. Before much time passed the story would be worked and reworked by subsequent tellings until it became legend. Storytelling was the way humans assimilated tragedy, made of it a thing that, instead of defeating, became strengthening: a cautionary tale, a teaching story, a rallying cry for the troops, a builder of pride and a sense of brotherhood.

  Anna knew these things, understood them, yet when she and Kastner were alone in his patrol vehicle headed down the twisting two-lane road into The Ditch, she found herself unable to speak of it. Almost unable to speak at all.

  Kastner, too, was quiet. After a quarter of an hour, time Anna spent not thinking but letting the strobe of dark timber and white snow hypnotize her, he said: “This finishes it. It’s finished.”

  Anna let the words trickle gently through her idling mind. She could go home, fly out of Merced tomorrow, be in Jackson by evening. Paul would pick her up at the airport. Taco would probably be with him to cover all exposed parts of her anatomy with saliva in a doggie welcome. Piedmont would be waiting full of complaints about his abandonment. She could sleep in her own bed with her lover and her cat, her faithful dog sprawled on the floor by her side to keep boogeymen from molesting her dreams.

  Unaware she did so, she sighed so deeply Kastner asked: “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “It’s not finished,” she said. “Not by a long shot.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  Nicky was putting on her makeup, getting ready to work the dinner shift, when Anna arrived back at the dorm. Her ankle was killing her, and all the other bones of her body ached from being manipulated into unfamiliar duties to take the pressure off their cracked sister. Not in the mood for her roommate’s high-intensity chatter, Anna slunk unseen from the open door and went down the hall toward the room Mary Bates shared with two other maids.

  Not only did Anna need a shot of beauty and innocence to counteract the corpses dancing in her head, she wanted to make sure the girl had come to no harm during her absence.

  Mary was in, lounging on her bed in pink sweats, playing Tetris on a handheld Game Boy. When Anna appeared in her doorway she squeaked, dropped the game and leapt up to give her a hug.

  Unaccustomed to such affectionate welcomes, Anna was at a loss and patted the girl’s back awkwardly. Though embarrassed, she was surprised at the comfort she derived from the girlish hug. For the first time in her life it crossed her mind that her decision not to have children might have been a costly one.

  “Oh Anna, I’ve been so worried,” Mary said, leading her back to sit on the bed. Still holding her hand, Mary went on: “When I couldn’t find you this morning I got scared.”

  Given Mary knew who she was and that the gossip of the day’s flight and the sad provocative cargo they had brought home would be all over the park within hours, Anna told her that Dixon Crofter had been found.

  Mary was quiet for a moment and Anna watched a chunk of the girl’s childhood break away and disintegrate. “I figured he was dead, but knowing is different.”

  “It is.”

  “I went to his cabin—I thought that might be where you were—you know, trying to find things out,” Mary said and Anna got a clutch in her stomach.

  “You must not do it anymore.” Anna made her voice harsh.

  Hurt showed in Mary’s sweet blue eyes. Anna wanted to soften her words, but didn’t. Should anything happen to th
is lovely child, the nightmares collected over a lifetime would pale in comparison to those she’d carry to the grave.

  “I was careful,” Mary said defensively. “And I didn’t learn anything. I tried to get Scott to talk, and Jim and even Tiny, but all they’d do is tease. When you look like I do everybody wants to pat you on the head or watch you chase bits of string. It’s a pain in the ass.”

  Anna laughed because it was true. Lest her merriment be considered condescending, she said: “I know what you mean. If I didn’t already have a cat and a dog I’d be tempted to take you home and make a pet of you.”

  Perhaps hearing the genuine affection, Mary didn’t take offense.

  “I was serious about doing nothing,” Anna pressed her point. “This is nearly over—maybe it is over—but if it’s not, this is when people get desperate; when they feel cornered. It’s the dangerous time. George Kastner’s going to see if prints can be lifted from Dix’s cabin and whatever was left at the camp those guys had at Lower Merced. Chances are at least one of them has a criminal record. We’ll find out who they are.”

  “That means you’re done here,” Mary said. Anna was flattered at the disappointment in her tone.

  “Pretty much.” There were pesky loose ends—more than loose ends. Mark and Phil were not the big fish. Big fish didn’t schlep dope on their backs down mountainsides. They didn’t put bullets in the backs of people’s heads. They ordered it done. These things Anna didn’t share with Mary. The last thing she wanted, though it was she who had entangled Mary in the first place, was to have her back in the game.

  “I’ll hang around a few more days,” Anna said. “Just to tidy up. At least I will if I’ve still got a job. Tiny must have been fit to be tied when I didn’t show up for my last shift.”