High Country

by Nevada Barr

  “I had some things I wanted to ask Jim about,” she said.

  “She figured out I’ve got AIDS,” Jim said. “She came to see if I’d put my poisoned blood into a needle to infect her.” The way he said “poisoned” carried such a world of hurt and bitterness it made Anna ashamed to have come quizzing him. To dispel it she said:

  “Do you know anything about that, Scott?”

  Before answering he looked at his roommate. Jim looked back. It was as if each challenged rather than accused the other. “I was there when you found it,” Scott said noncommittally.

  “You recognized the syringe.”

  “All of them look alike.”

  “The blood.”

  “It crossed my mind it could’ve been Jim’s, but he’s got no reason to want to hurt you,” Scott said.

  “Except you’re a lousy waitress,” the chef put in.

  “I am not,” Anna snapped before she thought. Jim smiled. A point for him.

  “I know Jim,” Scott said. “He would never give anyone the virus knowingly. He’s phobic about it. Won’t let me use the same coffeepot as him. I’m surprised he lets me keep my tuna cans next to his in the cupboard.”

  “Screw you,” Jim said.

  “Don’t you wish you could.”

  “Everybody else has.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” Scott finished and smiled.

  There was no rancor between the men and Anna got the idea it was a private joke, that the lines had been said many times. Lines: it was from a play. “Love Letters,” Anna said.

  “A lover of theater,” Jim mocked her. “I knew you couldn’t be a real waitress, too many complaints.”

  This time Anna did not rise to the bait. Needing to regain control, she changed the subject. “He was telling me about Lonnie, the guy in Soledad prison who gave him AIDS.”

  Jim suddenly took fire. Rising out of his chair he pointed a bony finger at Anna. “Lonnie did not give me AIDS. Goddamn you. Damn you. Get out,” he yelled. “Get out of here before I . . . Get her out of here, Scott.” He was shaking so bad he fell back, remaining standing only because he supported himself on the back of the chair. Spittle flecked his lips and his eyes had gone wild.

  Anna stood and gathered her coat from where she’d dropped it beside the chair. “Sorry.” She’d hit a nerve squarely and hard. Now was the time to press the issue. Wishing she knew what the issue was, which nerve she’d triggered, she watched Jim. He was as a flame around a dying wick, all shimmer and heat, no substance.

  “Jim,” she said. “If—”

  “I’ll walk you out.” Scott took her arm in a firm grip.

  “I can find my own way,” she said, but didn’t try and pull away.

  Ignoring the rebuff, Scott went with her to the door, catching up his own coat as he did.

  “Want me to walk you back?” he asked as Anna stepped onto the little porch.

  “No thanks.” Scott lived with Jim. He knew the man had AIDS. Very possibly he helped his old friend and mentor with medications. Scott would have been in a prime position to withdraw blood after giving a shot and keep the syringe for later use. For the first time since she’d met the man, Anna had no desire to be alone with him in the dark.

  “Let me walk you. It’s late,” he insisted.

  “No,” Anna said, too tired to bother with amenities or kind excuses.

  “Be careful.”

  She left not knowing whether Scott’s parting words were a warning, a banality or good wishes.

  CHAPTER

  19

  Again Anna eschewed the darkness of the forest path and walked the less prosaic road edging the meadow. Late on a winter night so close to Christmas the park was stunningly quiet. The stillness was so deep Anna sank into it, sank into herself. Blind with a thousand thoughts, she walked, head down, trusting her feet to find their own way.

  Jim’s fury at the suggestion Lonnie had given him the virus, Scott’s insistence that the chef was careful—overcareful, to the point of obsession—not to spread his disease had rung true. Jim had not been the one to booby-trap her coat sleeve, but there was little doubt that his blood had been used. Both he and Scott had seemed to accept that. That left only Scott, the man who lived with him, helped him with his medications, gave him shots.

  Anna took her time with that thought, making sure she wasn’t fooling herself because she was attracted to him. Crushes, lust, pheromones—whatever the mechanics that kicked in to insure the continuation of the species—clouded judgment. Since she had known Scott, she had spent too much time with him in her mind. It was hard to know how many gray cells had been rearranged.

  Regardless of how stern she was with herself, the sense of his innocence, at least of trying to kill her, remained strong. Scott as perpetrator of this awful attempt on her life didn’t feel right. Scott was a bookkeeper. He looked the part of an enforcer from the neck down, but everything else—personality, smile, attitude—denied he’d lived a life of violence.

  The muted roar of coming wind tickled through the layers of external silence and internal noise. Idly, Anna wondered if a storm was brewing. The roar deepened, came closer until it pulled her out of her brown study. Not a storm; the meadow grasses lay as still as a painting, their frost-rimmed tips bent in sleep or seasonal death.

  A car engine then. Or a truck. Anna turned and looked back down the road. At first she saw nothing, then movement, metal caught by faint silvery light. A pickup truck with its headlights off was headed toward the hotel. Because the truck was without lights, Anna watched it.

  Whoever was driving pressed down the accelerator. The engine whined and wheels sang on the asphalt.

  “Holy shit,” Anna breathed. Without taking time for further thought, she threw herself into the meadow grass, regained her feet and began to run. Behind her she could hear the truck leaving the roadway, engine loud, frozen earth and grasses crunching beneath the tires.

  The winter-dead growth, waist high in summer, pushed down by cold and snow in winter, tangled, caught her ankles, bound round her knees. Anna fell. The bone cracked in the high country cracked again, the sprain twisted. Pain so intense it threatened consciousness screamed up her leg.

  Not trusting it to carry her further, she began to roll. Like a log. Like she and Molly had done down grassy slopes as children. Roll till they could scarcely stand, then stagger about laughing.

  The truck smashed by, the tires so close Anna could smell the hot rubber, and the sky was lost in racket and bulk. Then it was gone. A red flare of taillights. It began backing toward her at a reckless speed. On hands and feet, Anna loped, a Navajo skin walker changing to a wolf, a crippled animal being hunted. The images flashed. The truck came on.

  Suddenly grass went flat, frozen stalks no longer cutting across her face. Warmth struck her, and an earthy, milky smell. Flesh pounded into her shoulder, scrabbling and bleating. She went down. A sharp hoof grazed her cheek.

  The deer she’d frightened leaped over her and ran. There came a sickeningthunk as it collided with the oncoming truck and the sound of glass breaking, then the high horrible cry of an animal in pain.

  Fighting the need to go to the deer, Anna crawled across the fragrant bed it had made for itself to burrow into the grass on the far side, working herself as deeply under the cover as she could. For a brief time the only thing she heard was the scuffling crackle of her own passage. When the last of the sky was crosshatched with an impromptu thatch roof, she stopped. In daylight she’d be easily found. At night, by a lazy son-of-a-bitch in a truck, she might get run over accidentally, but she doubted he’d even know it till her body wentthump thump under his wheels.

  The rustle and snap of frozen stalks ceased. The laboring of her heart and lungs continued to deafen her as she strained past this internal cacophony, listening for the scream of an engine. Stephen King’sChristine came to mind. A psychotic car with a grinning grill and staring headlights. Anna laughed. It crashed in her ears with
the force of a sonic boom. Every whisper was a shout, every mote a beam. There was so much adrenaline coursing through her veins, nerves were frayed, each breath a hurricane. The upside was she felt no pain. She half believed she could lift the truck off of her with one mighty shove, should it come to that.

  Thudding and wheezing subsided. Pain returned. The super-reality of nature’s altered state ebbed. She could see, touch and hear in real time. No hum of an idling engine bent on homicide sullied the night. Anna didn’t move. She’d run toward the middle of the meadow. Once she showed herself, there was no cover for a hundred yards in any direction. Her adrenal glands were pumped dry; the chemically induced strength of ten men wouldn’t recur to save her.

  Time passed. Anna let it, Stephen King’s nightmare only one careless move away.

  The soft pop of grasses beginning to recover resounded comfortingly in the new quiet. Cold seeped through the seat of her pants and the knit of her gloves.

  A thin mewling cry cut into this speckled stillness. Anna stiffened. It went on, long and low and incredibly lonely, a sound to break the heart—or of a heart breaking. She put her fingers in her ears. The cry came through her bones, the roots of her hair.

  Finally she could stand it no longer. Gingerly, she poked her head above the protective covering of grass. The truck was gone. From her vantage point, the meadow appeared as perfect and unmarked beneath the silvering light as it had when she’d first walked to Jim Wither’s house. It was as if the truck had never been. For an unsettling moment she wondered if the whole thing had been a hallucination, the fevered workings of a mind unstable from trauma and lack of sleep.

  The crying was real. All that was good and clean leaking out of the world on a single note.

  She stood. Dark cuts where the truck had smashed through the meadow, black gouges where it powered back up onto the road reassured her she was not paranoid; someone really was out to get her.

  Following the sound of the pitiful cry, she limped to where the deer had fallen. It was a young doe. Both forelegs were smashed, bent in nauseating angles nature never intended. The animal lay unmoving, trying to limit the pain.

  When Anna neared, the doe lifted her head. Faint light glittered like tears in her dark eyes.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Anna whispered. There was no saving her. Anna could drag herself back to the dorm and call the rangers to come put her down, but in her present shape the trip would not be short.

  Perhaps because she was tired, perhaps because the deer had accidentally saved her life, dying in her stead, Anna couldn’t bring herself to leave. Ignoring the pain from her reinjured ankle, she lowered herself to the frozen turf and took the doe’s head onto her lap. The deer almost seemed to welcome her touch.

  Whispering “Shh, shh” and “It’s all right” as one would to a suffering child, Anna put her gloved hands over the doe’s nose and mouth and held tightly. As her oxygen supply was cut off the deer flinched once but didn’t fight. Anna went on holding for several more minutes not wishing to add to the trauma by botching the death.

  The dark eye never left Anna’s. She watched as that ineffable spark dimmed and went out. Where once there had been a graceful woodland creature, there was only carrion. Anna loosened her grip and sat for a while, her hands on the still-warm corpse of her inadvertent savior. She was crying. She’d been crying a lot of late. Whether the tears were for the deer, herself or the condition of mankind, she wasn’t sure.

  It was too cold to mourn for long. Anna had no desire to have her frozen carcass added to the carnage the rangers would have to clean up the following morning. Because this was a national park, not only would the deer’s body have to be moved, but the scars left by the truck would be rehabilitated, the meadow made new—or at least to look like new.

  Her days of leaping up and trotting off being behind and—gods willing—ahead of her, Anna moved like an old and crippled woman. The ankle brace permitted forward motion, but the bone exacted a high price. Had crawling been less painful, she might have thrown dignity to the winds and gone back to the dorm on all fours. Since it wasn’t, she walked. After a fashion. Three or four steps then she’d stop, rest, let the level of pain drop. She’d been injured before but didn’t remember pain being so exhausting. Fighting it left her breathless and sweating. Maybe it was age. As she got older she found she had less patience with her own stupidity. It was why she rarely drank, if at all, and scarcely ever got sunburned. The hangover and tender skin hurt no worse than when she was twenty, but the self-recriminations were hell.

  Scott had warned her not to walk home alone.

  Or threatened her.

  Either way she should have paid attention. Instead she’d let herself wander along the road deaf, dumb and blind to the world around her. She’d been had as neatly as a rube on a street full of city pickpockets. And she’d be dead if the deer hadn’t startled the driver, busted the taillights, loosened the bumper or whatever. Having worked the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi for coming on two years, Anna knew the damage a deer-car collision could do to the car.

  She’d covered half the distance from where she’d gone into the meadow to the hotel when a set of headlights flashed, a car coming toward the Ahwahnee from Yosemite Village.

  Several yards ahead of her a line of trees began. Clenching teeth against the pain, she hurried her steps till she reached the first protective pine. The trunk was two feet or more in diameter and the bark fragrant, smelling slightly of vanilla. Tucking herself behind this bulwark, she watched the vehicle approach. She doubted it would be Christine in her truck persona. For one thing it was a smallish sedan. For another, it had its headlights on. If the driver of the truck had any sense, he’d be out of the park by now, before a phone call to the rangers could trap him in The Ditch.

  The car slowed. Anna tensed. It stopped. She could not run and resisted the urge to hide. The national parks were jam-packed with good Samaritans. Cell phones had cut down on most actual hands-on assistance from kindly strangers. Dialing 911 from the comfort of one’s car and reporting a citizen in need apparently soothed consciences enough their owners no longer felt the need to lend a hand personally. Still, it happened often enough not to be a rarity. Especially to middle-aged limping white ladies with torn and muddied clothes.

  Anna braced herself for an assault of either deadly force or gooey sympathy demanding too many explanations.

  She got neither.

  The car, a late-model Mercury sedan, pulled over to the side of the road. A faint whirring and change of light on the glass indicated the passenger window’s descent. Out of the darkness inside came the sharps and flats of Tiny Bigalo’s imperious tones.

  “You’re not fit to work,” was the greeting. “You’re lame as a duck. First I thought you were drunk, hitching along the way you been. Get in. I’ll give you a ride to the dorm. Tomorrow you resign. I don’t give a damn that Dane Trapper’s got a hard-on for you.”

  As knights in shining armor went, Tiny Bigalo was a bit of a disappointment. It occurred to Anna to sniff disdainfully and walk on, but it was too late, she was too cold and her ankle hurt too much.

  “You’re all heart, Tiny,” she said and levered herself awkwardly into the car. Anna hadn’t suddenly decided to trust her Napoleonic boss. Tiny was tied into the web that spun out through Yosemite Valley, maybe from the Ahwahnee itself. But Tiny was tiny and older than Anna by a good ten years. The dome light had shown her clad in turtleneck and slacks, her coat thrown in back. Beneath the snug clothes there was no sign of a weapon. Even crippled and brain-dead, Anna figured she could handle the headwaitress. Besides, she wanted to ask her a few questions. A car was the next best thing to a confessional for privacy.

  “What’re you doing gimping around in the middle of the night?” Tiny demanded as Anna buckled her seat belt. She sounded so much like Mrs. Kay, Anna’s dorm-mother in high school, Anna nearly confessed all out of knee-jerk reaction.

  “I went calling,” she said mildly. “Your old bu
ddy, Jim Wither.”

  Tiny grunted, the sound of a satisfied piglet. “He must’ve been thrilled. Jim is such a social butterfly.” The car was running, doors closed, engine idling, but Tiny made no move to pull out.

  “He was moderately chatty,” Anna said. “At least till Scott came home and rescued him.”

  “Scott.” The hatred in Tiny’s voice startled Anna. She’d seen Tiny appear charmed by the big blond felon more than once.

  “You have something against Scott?” The car still was not moving, but Anna didn’t much mind. She was warm, the weight was off her ankle and Tiny was in a mood to talk. This confluence of serendipitous events might not happen again for a hundred years.

  “He’s a pain in the patootie,” Tiny said. “A handsome pain but still a pain. Beefcake’s never been my favorite dish.”

  Anna didn’t know whether Tiny was stating a preference for women or just being spiteful. Since her gender preference had no bearing on the case, Anna didn’t pursue it.

  “How so?”

  “With Scott around, Jim thinks he can do as he damn well pleases.”

  The car pulled ahead slowly, and despite the fact that Anna had thought she was happy the way things were, she felt a small rush of relief. Tiny wasn’t acting true to form. For one thing she’d done a good deed in stopping for a pedestrian in need. And she was talking, being personable almost. Over the years Anna had learned not to trust people when they were acting out of character. It usually meant they were sick or they wanted something.

  Tiny didn’t look sick.

  “Up till he and Scott got all buddy-buddy, Jim and I were real close. He’d told me he’d got AIDS and I helped him with his meds and all. When Lonnie—his lover boy—got it from him he cried on my shoulder for weeks. Jim’s got a thing for guilt.”

  “Jim gave Lonnie the disease?”

  “Anal injection,” Tiny said maliciously.