High Country

by Nevada Barr

  The conversation back on her turf, Mary brightened. “You’ve still got a job. At least I think you do. If there’s a patron saint of waitresses you owe her big-time. A box of candles at least. You got bailed out again. Tiny had some family emergency and was out of the park for a couple days. She only got back today. Far as I know she doesn’t even know you went AWOL. Somebody’ll let the cat out of the bag eventually, but by then you’ll have been back and it’ll seem like yesterday’s news.”

  Anna was relieved. After her adventures with Mark and Phil, facing the wrath of one small woman should have been a little thing, but when that woman was Tiny Bigalo, Anna, like every other waitperson on staff and even the formidable Jim Wither, quaked in her sensible shoes.

  The clock on the bed stand read quarter till four. “I’d better suit up then.” Anna rose reluctantly, hoping a long very hot shower would entice her aching parts into working together long enough to get her through a four-hour stint carrying dishes and taking orders. She’d reached the door before the exact wording of the reprieve struck her. “Bailed outagain, ” she repeated. “What was the first time?”

  “That night Cricket got sick and you and Nicky flew the coop. I got called in to help. The wedding party, remember?”

  “Yeah. They were late?”

  “They never showed. We cleared the plates and came home, so the fact you’d taken off was no biggy.”

  “Ah.”

  Shampooed, showered and wearing a borrowed uniform, Anna reported for duty at 5:45P .M. Mentally, she’d geared up to ignore Jim Wither’s unaccountable animosity and make her excuses to Tiny.

  Expected battles have a way of disappointing. The chef, who had been unable to speak a civil word or even look at her when last they’d met, greeted her with something close to kindness. For Wither the nod and “hey” she received was comparable to a ticker-tape parade from anyone else.

  The cold hatred was not gone, however. Tiny Bigalo had it. “You’re damn lucky I’m not running the show or you’d be out on your ass,” she said as Anna walked in. The threat wasn’t casually given. The woman’s eyes narrowed and the words hissed from a mouth drawn so tight saliva collected in the corners where her lips met.

  “You’ll be at reception. Don’t expect a cut of the tips. Everybody else here works for a living.”

  Anna received. She handed out menus. She escorted parties to their tables and tried not to limp. She endured vicious looks from Tiny, apologetic looks from Scott. Apparently he’d forgiven her for her prying ways and was back to his desirable self. Anna was grateful. The dining room had grown cold. The spark of affection in his eyes was the only place she could warm herself. Nobody else spoke to her unless they had to. Tiny’s hatred was the emotional equivalent of Agent Orange. The ground it was sprayed over was incapable of supporting the growth of collateral friendships.

  Thus isolated in the midst of the many, Anna had time to think. Her social interactions had run the gamut from tedious to disastrous of late, but she found being an outcast restful and refreshing.

  The men, the deaths, the incidents on the mountain, had fallen into a pattern she was glad to hand over to the greater machinery of Yosemite Park’s law enforcement operation. They, in turn, would hand over parts of it to the Federal Aviation Agency and, because the plane had crossed state and probably national borders carrying thousands of pounds of illegal substances, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and possibly the ATF or the FBI. Eventually they would find out who the men in Dixon’s cabin were. From there they’d move up the line to the bigger fish. At least that’s the way it was supposed to work.

  The National Park Service didn’t have the manpower or equipment to pursue crime into the cities, up to the cartels or rings or godfathers. A ranger’s jurisdiction, except under special circumstances, ended at park boundaries.

  Rangers were sworn to protect the natural and historic resources entrusted to their care and see to the safety of those in the park. It was that safety that concerned Anna. The wreckage of the airplane would be cleaned out of the lake come spring. The bodies of the other two missing kids—Trish and Patrick—would be found and carried out, or eaten, or returned to the soil. The park would heal itself.

  The people mightn’t have such powers of regeneration. The evil she’d sensed—owned for a time—on the Illilouette Trail was connected in some way to the life of the park. Regardless of how many arrests were made of urban and pastoral drug dealers, if that connection wasn’t severed, sickness within the park would fester and grow.

  As Anna’s aching body went through the prescribed paces of an Ahwahnee hostess, her mind, purposely put in neutral and helped to remain there by the mindless repetition of her tasks, floated free. Ideas came to the surface.

  Trish: a dealer who worked at the hotel. She—probably tipped off by Patrick, who’d stumbled across it while working trail crew—knew about the downed drug plane before the thugs squatting in Dixon’s cabin had.

  A last-minute reservation had been made for a wedding party. Anna and both roommates were called in to work. Cricket and Nicky, busgirls at the bottom of the dining hall’s pecking order, were elevated to servers.

  Cricket collapsed.

  Nicky was assaulted. Their room was searched.

  The wedding party canceled.

  Anna began asking questions. Jim Wither was inexplicably angry with her. A syringe of infected blood was rigged in her jacket sleeve. Scott Wooldrich seemed to remember, recognize or connect to it in a way he wouldn’t talk about. Scott had spent a number of years in prison. He’d met Jim Wither there. Tiny Bigalo had gotten Jim the teaching gig. Jim’s friend died of pneumonia but he didn’t quit teaching cons to cook.

  Anna spent two nights in the high country: Phil killed, Anna injured, Mark burned and his eye gouged out.

  Tiny Bigalo had a family emergency. Anna returned. Tiny Bigalo hated her and Jim Wither was, in his aloof way, positively heartwarming.

  For four hours information, memory and images came and went in. By the end of her shift, Anna’s ankle was aching in fierce protest and she was more tired than she would ordinarily have been, but the pieces had begun to connect and interconnect. She had the rudiments of a story. Till she tested it out she wouldn’t be able to sleep. And, too, late night was a time for lowered defenses and confidences that one might rue the next day. If she was right, there would be little risk to her already battered and assaulted person.

  If she was wrong . . .

  But she wasn’t wrong. That snug solid feeling that comes when the bats are out of the belfry, the marbles are found and answers become sane was upon her. After two nights of literally and figuratively wandering around in the dark, it felt good.

  Because lightning quite frequently strikes twice in the same place, Anna inspected her jacket before slipping it on, then clocked out and left the hotel.

  The night was as rich and glittering as the previous nights had been blind. The river of sky visible over the valley was thick with stars, and the edge of a three-quarter moon showed above the cliffs to the west. Granite, glazed with ice where the sun had melted snow in the high places and the water had made it nearly to the Merced River before night stopped its run, reflected each small spark from the sky till the cliff faces glowed as if lights of their own burned within.

  Deeper cold came with the clearing skies. Anna didn’t mind. Breathing in the icy air she cleansed hours of rebreathed air and cooking odors from her lungs.

  The pines beyond the parking lot showed black. Boulders amid and beneath them were drowned in shadow. Though the trail ran that way, Anna had had enough of darkness; she walked along the edge of the meadow between the Ahwahnee and the main road.

  Grass was gilded silver with moonlight. Crushed places showed where deer made their beds. Two does, out late doing whatever does do on Wednesday nights, trotted across the road fifty yards in front of her.

  On the opposite side of the meadow from the hotel was a row of old houses. Each fronted on the meadow, the
ir “street” was a footpath. Built on the flat as they were, it was a wonder they’d not been destroyed by the flood in the late nineties. The homes were small—beyond small, tiny almost, like the shops on Main Street in Disneyland, built to three-quarter scale the better to charm the hearts of children. Once these wee dwellings had been less varied, simple housing built for workers. Over the years the residents, a proud lot, Anna guessed from the loving care the miniature porches and narrow brick walks received, had individualized them: a stained glass window, an ornate garden gate, gingerbread under the eaves. Walking in the quiet with the crystal of the night stilling the valley in a silver embrace, she could almost believe she’d stumbled onto a fairy village, one that would disappear with the morning mists burning off the meadow.

  She wished her errand were more benevolent, her heart more pure and her motives less sullied. Turning in at the gate of the seventh house, gray with darker gray trim and careful plantings—bedded now for the winter—to either side of a brick path, she shook off the milk of nature’s kindness and made ready for human interaction.

  These delightful little homes housed the concessions’ elite: managers, chiefs of maintenance. Four-star chefs. The front yard of Wither’s house was no bigger than a badminton court. Anna stopped beneath the one tree. Lights were on. The window to the side of the chimney glowed behind a gauzy curtain. Scott wouldn’t be back for another half hour. Probably Jim waited up.

  For longer than she intended, she stood in the storybook yard, beneath a storybook sky. It wasn’t that she was afraid of knocking on the door; at least not afraid she’d be met by a shotgun blast or anything so sinister. Jim Wither was dying. The walking dead posed social problems for the living. Anna, soaked in the luminescent life of a winter night, wanted to put off knocking on Death’s door a few minutes longer.

  Before too much time passed, cold soaked through her clothes and the ache in her ankle cut through her mind’s repose. She stepped onto the miniature porch with its tidy wreath announcing the Yuletide season and knocked.

  Wither opened the door. He had changed from his chef’s whites to striped flannel pajamas and a fine floor-length fleece bathrobe in bright red. Stripped of his badges of office he looked small and old and sick.

  “Hey, Jim. Sorry to bother you so late but I need to talk with you.”

  “Could it wait till morning?”

  The question was weary, pleading, unlike the Jim Wither who terrified waitpersons at the Ahwahnee. Anna wasn’t the only one who wanted to postpone the inevitable for one more minute, one more day. The talk could wait till morning but she wanted to get it over with. Having no better argument than selfishness, she said nothing.

  “Come in, then.” He turned to walk back into the house, trusting Anna to close the door and follow.

  He preceded her into a living room as small and well appointed as the outside of his house intimated. A fire burned low in the grate. Two leather chairs arranged before the hearth were warmed by a reading lamp of old brass and alabaster. A book of psalms lay facedown on the ottoman.

  Nothing like disturbing a condemned man at his prayers to get a conversation off on the right foot.

  Wither resumed his seat. Uninvited, Anna sat in the other chair. A coal-black cat, fat from four-star leftovers, laboriously leaped into Wither’s lap. “Stinker,” he said by the way of introduction.

  Before she could actually begin to like the man, Anna launched into the reason for her late-night visit.

  “You’re gay,” she said without preamble.

  “Yes,” he said, and: “You’re a prying female.”

  “Yes. Did Scott tell you about the syringe of blood taped in my jacket?”

  Wither said nothing. He stroked Stinker. Anna could hear the cat’s rumbling purr from where she sat and wished he’d come to her lap instead of Jim’s.

  “The blood tested positive for AIDS,” she said.

  Still Jim said nothing. The skin of his face, already drawn tight across the bones, twitched, a spasm around the mouth.

  “What do you know about the needle?”

  “I didn’t put it in your coat.”

  “But you know who did.”

  Wither was not indifferent to Anna’s words. Though silent, his attention apparently on the cat filling his bony lap, there was nothing relaxed or insolent about him. He almost seemed to be collapsing in on himself, the thick red robe swallowing his gaunt frame.

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” Anna said when it was clear he wasn’t going to chime in anytime soon. “I think you had a lover who was arrested for some reason and sent to Soledad. You finagled your way into the prison system as a teacher of the culinary arts because you wanted to be with him during the last months of his life. He had the AIDS virus and eventually succumbed to pneumonia.”

  Anna was alarmed to see a fat tear leak from the corner of his eye to begin a perilous journey down the cliffs and planes of his face. “He was twenty-seven when he died.”

  The tears irritated Anna. She’d come prepared for raging, verbal abuse, even self-pity. Wither’s obvious grief was unnerving. To counteract these unsettling feelings of compassion, she was unnecessarily harsh. “So the guy kicks the bucket and you take up with Scott Wooldrich and stay on at Soledad.”

  “You’re a stupid bitch,” Wither said with a hint of his customary fierceness. “Scott’s not gay. Gay men, believe it or not, are capable of having friends they don’t fuck.”

  That was better. Anna felt less sorry for him.

  “The night the needle was put in the sleeve of my jacket you were mad at me. Why?”

  The fierceness left him as quickly as it had manifest. Without it he looked even smaller, frailer than before. Seeing this crumpled, ailing man, his cat in his lap, his fluffy bathrobe dwarfing him, cowering under her tongue-lashing sickened Anna. She didn’t like who she was or what she was doing. The greater good of truth and law seemed far away, irrelevant in the face of breaking a human spirit even further.

  Jim kindly rallied and attacked, relieving her of some of her guilt.

  “How dare you come flouncing in here and grill me? You’re nothing but a damn waitress.”

  Anna was offended. She never flounced. Still, she was glad to see his customary arrogance. After she had tiptoed around in fear of his wrath for two weeks, it had been disconcerting to see him shrunken, old and pathetic.

  “You come in at the top of the food chain even though you’re a lousy waitress and start poking around in things that are none of your business. You’ll get a thick finger stirring in this pot, I can tell you that.”

  Anna was stung. “I’m not a lousy waitress,” she said before she could remind herself not to engage in peripheral matters.

  Jim sniffed. “If the pasta primavera isn’t served hot you might as well leave it out for the coyotes.”

  One little visitor complaint and a girl’s reputation was ruined. Anna took a moment to mourn the tarnishing of her new career, then began again.

  “There’s more going on at the Ahwahnee than food,” she said in exasperation. “Talk to me. You’re making me crazy here. There are four dead kids and one—maybe two—dead thugs on the mountain. Something is going on in this valley. I think you know about it.”

  The blast of words scorched over and around him. Anna watched decisions made and unmade and made again on his face. For a moment she believed he would tell her what he knew, then that he would say nothing. Then:

  “I was mad because I thought you knew I was sick and were going to noise it about. Cooking is what I do.”

  “Why did you think I’d do that?”

  Silence.

  “Somebody told you, didn’t they?”

  Silence.

  “They were setting you up, so when the syringe was found you’d be the number-one fall guy.”

  Nothing.

  “Don’t you care, for Chrissake?”

  Nothing.

  “Who told you I was trying to get you fired?”

  Exas
perated, Anna decided to try another tack. “Tiny got you the job in the prison. Tell me about that.”

  For a moment she didn’t think he was going to respond to this either, but he pulled himself up from the depths of his bathrobe and began.

  “Tiny’s brother has some pull in the criminal justice system. Tiny and I had been friends for a long time. She knew about Lonnie. When I started researching ways I might be with him, she got her brother to call in some favors. At least that’s what she said. Maybe my proposal would have been accepted anyway. I don’t know. At the time I thought she was helping me and I was . . . grateful.”

  “Tiny knows you have AIDS?”

  “She knows.”

  “Are you afraid she’ll tell?”

  “It doesn’t matter now. I told the general manager—Dane Trapper—tonight.”

  “Why now?” Anna asked.

  In lieu of answering he pulled back the lank dark hair that fell forward over his face. On his temple near the hair line two lesions marred the skin. In the gentle firelight they appeared black and deadly, the harbingers of death.

  “Ah,” was all she could think to say.

  The sound of the front door opening caught their attention. “Hey Jim, you still up?” Scott’s voice.

  “In here,” Jim replied like a drowning man calling for help.

  Scott came in, dwarfing the small room. With him came the smell of cold, of pine, cologne and the faint odor of food. When he saw Anna he stopped and the smile of greeting left his face. No other expression replaced it. He looked at her with a countenance so carefully blank she couldn’t but wonder what he was hiding.

  “A little late for social calls, don’t you think?” he said neutrally. Without taking his eyes off of her, he let his jacket slide to the floor and sat on the low hearth, his knees up around his broad shoulders. “To what do we owe this honor?” The boyish smile was back but Anna didn’t trust it. She was distracted by the biceps pushing out of the thin sleeves of his black T-shirt, of the broad blunt hands that could snap a small woman’s neck in a heartbeat.