by Bart Paul
“Since we saw that first thing in the Times two years ago,” he said, “I’ve been following you like you’d follow some rookie pitcher, some talented kid on an out-of-town team.”
“Things can’t be that boring down in La-La Land.”
“Don’t bet on it,” he said.
I looked over at the other folks. Drew was sitting in the shade with his back against the logs of the snow cabin rearranging a fly box. Scottie and Tess sprawled in the sun a dozen feet away from him, taking naps.
“Gonna stretch my legs. Twenty minutes suit you?”
He said they’d be ready. I walked downstream, limbering up the back of my thigh stiff from an old wound. I got to a grassy spot at the water’s edge and studied the clear current running smooth and deep along the bank and rippling over the gravely shoal on the opposite shore. The creek was wide here, spreading across the clearing just below the confluence. Crossing here might look like a shortcut to the south fork trail, but close-up you could see there was nothing gradual about the jump-off. The flow had carved a vertical drop well over four feet. Even in an average season like this you could see the sandy creek bottom, and see that it would be dicey to jump stock into that. At full runoff, mules strung together under heavy packs would have a bad time of it in the deep water and swift current. If one went down, they could all go down. It was an arrogant stunt to pull. For Twister Creed to think he could cross at such a spot told me he wanted to be the guy who took heedless chances because he thought that was the cowboy thing to do.
The snow cabin sat at the forks of Aspen Creek. It had been built in the 1920s and abandoned in the 1950s. The Forest Service had torn the roof off of it a year or two before so it would collapse into what they called a state of natural decay. But the cabin fooled them. The logs were well joined and the walls solid, so the place would last longer than the honyocker who decided to speed its destruction.
We mounted up and took the north fork of the creek, climbing the narrow trail west up through tamarack pine and juniper. This trip was always longer but prettier than a person remembered. I told Bill to ride in front so we could shoot the breeze but I really didn’t want to talk anymore. I definitely didn’t want one of the others trying to take a turn at me.
I let the folks dismount and rest a few minutes when we had one last climb ahead of us. We had come out of a rocky cirque and stopped amongst a scattering of whitebark pine at the bottom of a steep set of switchbacks. At the top of that climb we would be perched on the upper edge of the cirque on a crushed granite bench just below North Pass. I didn’t tell them about the place, only saying that we were close to Little Meadows, which would be our camp for three days while they hiked and climbed and fished. I didn’t let them dawdle. I wanted them focused.
“Is it much farther?” Tess said.
“It’s always farther.” I tried to make it sound like a challenge.
“Are you sure we can get up this?” Drew said.
“Just be watchful. Pay attention. Keep your weight forward, keep moving, and trust your horse.”
I checked every cinch and every lash rope, and we mounted up. I grabbed the lead of my front mule and started climbing the switchbacks, not looking back. I counted on my horses to keep everyone traveling. The first turn put me above my party heading in the opposite direction, which is why they call them switchbacks. Drew started to say something. When I didn’t look at him he shut up. Bill just rode, looking serious and focused but unconcerned.
Even with switchbacks, the trail was steep, cut through rock and gravel and mahogany that I bet made Tess glad she’d changed her pants. The mahogany got thicker as we climbed. Two more sharp turns and we were halfway to the top. I came to a slick rock followed by a washout where the trail had eroded. I let my gelding pick his way until we were over it, then went slow so the mules could find their footing, just calm and steady. Then, against my better judgment, I looked back. Scottie’s hands were clamped around her saddle horn, and she was starting to lean back—like that would somehow slow her down. She started to say something I couldn’t hear as I was leaning in, goosing the sorrel up around the next turn where he had to climb hard as he reversed his direction. When I looked down again Scottie was directly below me between two of the others. She got to the washout and leaned back, staring down at it.
“Tommy …”
Then she just froze.
“Tommy, I can’t,” she started to babble. “I—”
“Shut up and ride.”
I didn’t tell them I was sorry. I didn’t tell them a lot of things. I did let them catch their breath on the gravely bench where three years before, a plane had crashed and a man had died. Then, how a year after that, I found that wreck and the body, and a part of my life crashed right along with them. I didn’t mention the rider way below us, following the trail we’d just taken like he had the whole mountain to himself, riding out in the open around the far side of the cirque.
When they’d collected themselves, we climbed up a sandy slope through sparse whitebark and hemlock to North Pass, then started down another narrow, rocky, dicey bit of trail between two sloping ridges that spilled out onto the upper end of Little Meadows. Drew started pointing at the mountains and talking about Hawksbeak Peak that he hoped to climb the next day. I wondered about that. Small, flat, gray, and purple clouds had started to crowd the peaks.
“They look like Frisbees,” Tess said.
“No,” Scottie said. She’d pulled herself together since the switchbacks. “I think they look like flying saucers.”
Tess was smiling until she reached down to a tear in her pants and her hand came back with blood on it.
Little Meadows was a pair of long, grassy open parks circled by thick tamarack and aspen and rimmed by ridges of exposed granite, all tucked under some major peaks like Hawksbeak and Tower Peak. The narrow headwaters of the West Frémont River meander across the meadows where stockmen a hundred years ago ran the cattle that kept the grasslands open and the trees trimmed to the meadow’s edge. We found good places to picket the stock and set up a base camp, all within sight of those peaks that Drew meant to climb. The chatty bunch got quiet crossing that open grass, just taking it all in.
Bill helped me string the picket lines and asked questions about knots and weather. Then I tied the stock and rubbed them down. The other three campers followed Bill’s lead and helped unpack and unsaddle, which surprised me. It was midafternoon, and the flat clouds were stacking up. Bill caught me scanning the sky.
“Lenticular,” he said. “The clouds. That’s what they call those funny-looking bastards. From the Latin, lenticularis. Lens-shaped.”
I must’ve given him a strange look.
“Hey,” he said, “I’m a sailor, remember? Done the Transpac three times. I gotta know that stuff.”
“My wife knows the Latin names for every damn tree and animal we passed today. I’m always impressed. But then she went to Cal Poly.” I finished coiling up a lash rope, waiting. “Where’d you go?”
Bill just laughed. “Half a semester at a community college in Costa Mesa. I was just itchin’ to get to work, so I bailed.” He looked sort of cautious. “You?”
“Half a semester less than that.”
We laughed, and he pulled out a bottle of Jim Beam Double Oak and we each had a swig.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” he said.
“It ever bother you? The college thing?” I snuck a look at his wife and Drew. “Lawyers must clean up.”
He looked over to the others unpacking under the trees. “Never,” he said. He laughed. “Drew sails too, but I got a way bigger boat.”
He followed me around and helped with hobbling the nine head on the meadow and squaring away the equipment for almost another hour. I told him how not to get hurt as he worked close to the hooves, and he told me that Sarah and I would have to come south and sail to Catalina with him one day.
“And the business about the clouds?”
; “Yeah?”
“I was just showing off. All the stuff you know about this place puts every one of us to shame.”
He pointed to Hawksbeak. A single dark saucer-shaped cloud was hovering just above the peak.
“Think we’re in for a squall?”
I just shrugged.
I planned on leaving the hobbled stock out to graze on the meadow until dark. I dug out the sheriff’s radio I’d borrowed from Sarah to try to call her, but the Sierra crest was blocking me and all I got was buzz and crackle with some cross-talk—maybe from the Marine base ten miles north. I went to where I’d parked my saddle and pulled the Remington, then walked out into the meadow to scan the ridges. I could feel the folks’ eyes on me so I quit and stowed the rifle. They were paying me for a fun trip, not to get scared to death. I was trying to balance wanting to know what VanOwen was going to pull next with the kind of important, making-a-go-of-the-pack-station thing. Folks were depending on me, and I was vain enough to not want them to think I was screwing everything up. I walked back into the meadow to check the hobbles and looked up at Hawksbeak again, but the peak was hidden. The round cloud had settled down over it like a wet hat.
While I still had good light, I took my dad’s roll-up canvas shoeing-tool kit out to the meadow where my hobbled sorrel grazed. I never carried much in it—just old nippers and a rasp and my driving hammer, but I liked it because it was Dad’s. On multiday climbs, I’d carry a few pre-shaped shoes, too, but I hadn’t for this glorified spot-trip. As he grazed, the gelding let me pick up the hind foot with the loose iron, clean it out, and drop three new nails in to snug it up until I could reshoe him back at the pack station. I watched his ears as I set my clinches, using the edge of my rasp as a clinch block to bend the nail stubs as I pounded and listened. The horse had noticed something.
“Still shoeing, I see.” It was a woman’s voice.
“Still riding the high country, I see.” I lowered the hind leg and straightened up.
Sitting a zebra dun not more than thirty feet away was Erika Hornberg.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Except for dyed black hair, she looked pretty much like I remembered.
“You look at me like I’m ‘dead woman walking,’” she said.
I looked at the dun. “Well, ‘dead woman riding,’ anyway.”
She turned around, looking back from where she’d come.
“Step down. I can’t be rude to these folks. I’ll introduce you.”
“As what?”
“Old friend and neighbor.”
She took a deep breath.
“Or the female desperado who keeps one jump ahead of the sheriff with grit and savvy. They’re both true.”
She swung down off the dun. “Still Mister Straight Arrow, Mister ‘I cannot tell a lie,’ Tommy Smith.”
“I’ve lowered my standards considerable in that department since I saw you last.”
I was never real close with the woman, so I was surprised when she gave me a quick, rough hug. She was thinner than I remembered, and her hair looked like she cut it with a hatchet. She wore big gypsy earrings—just like I remembered.
“I doubt that,” she said. “That’s why I’m counting on you.”
“Counting on me to do what?”
“To save my life,” she said.
We tied the dun and walked over to my party. I introduced Erika. Scottie asked her if she wanted to stay for dinner. Erika thanked her but said she needed to get moving well before sundown to make it back to the Little Meadows trailhead by dark. She asked them if she could borrow me for a bit so we could get reacquainted. We walked off together.
“You’re a hard guy to catch up to,” she said.
“You got it done pretty easy.”
“Do you think I’m a thief?” she said. “Guilty beyond all redemption?”
“I don’t know crap about redemption.”
I told Erika what I’d suspected and what Aaron had said. That she’d stolen enough money from the bank to dig her ranch out of a hole, then VanOwen leaned on her hard to make a really big steal. She confirmed it all.
“At first Sonny acted like he could be talked out of it,” she said, “if I cooperated.” All the life drained out of her then. “I just ended up degrading myself. After I stole the million, he hid me out in his Reno strip club for a while. I thought that would be enough for him, but it wasn’t. I finally realized he had no intention of ever letting me off the hook—of not making me go ahead with transferring the million to him. I kept thinking, if I could just save the ranch. For my big brother if not for me.” She swallowed a sob. “So I started planning a way to maybe save what my family worked so damn, damn hard for since 1919.”
We hunkered in some tamarack as the wind picked up. I watched my party setting up their big wall tent for what looked like a storm coming.
“After you transferred the million, where would that leave you?”
“Sonny said he’d let me keep half, but I was just lying to myself. He’ll kill me as soon as he gets the money. I’ve seen him do it before. I had to figure a way out.”
“How was the money thing supposed to work?”
“Sonny was worried about drawing attention to himself if we did the bank transfer first thing last fall. Afraid it might lead the FBI straight to him,” she said.
She tried leaning on me, and I edged away.
“What was his idea?”
“To wait half a year at least,” she said. “Make it look like I’d been dead that whole time. Then when things cooled down and the FBI thought they’d hit a dead end, Sonny would stage the missing kid search.”
She told me how VanOwen and her brother had cooked up the idea for the crazy body swap—to plant a corpse similar to her in a place like the bog where it could be found months later. A place where the body would decompose a bit but not totally disfigure—a dummy Erika. Enough so folks would think, wow, so that’s what happened to Erika Hornberg.
“She was close to my height and coloration, but different hair and age and body type. The plan was to slap my clothes and earrings on her, then have Buddy identify her as me once she’d … withered like a prune.” She wiped her eyes. “Once that led to the body being found in the bog, the law would think I was dead.”
“And?”
“With the FBI distracted and giving interviews and the whole county obsessed, the money trail would go cold. Everyone would think the story was over. Folks would think it was a mystery that would never be solved. And right then I would transfer the million to Sonny’s account. Once he was convinced we’d pulled it off, I would transfer half back to me.” She looked off into the mountains. “I knew that as soon as the whole amount showed in his account, I’d be dead for real.”
“One more question.”
“What?”
“Where’d the corpse in the bog come from?”
“A young prostitute who’d worked for Sonny since she was about thirteen. She was maybe in her mid-twenties. Then she crossed him, Sonny said. She was trying to get him arrested, and he wanted her gone. My god, Tommy. He shot that sweet kid right in front of me. To make a point.” She locked eyes with me. “He said, ‘This is what happens to little girls who don’t do like I say,’ then bang.”
“With your granddad’s twenty-five.”
“Yeah,” she said. “He’d taken that from my brother.” She got a panicky look. “How did you know?”
“Ballistics. An FBI agent told me.”
“Sonny kept the pistol. He told me if I backed out on him, he’d say I shot the girl and he had witnesses.” She twisted her hands together. “By New Year’s, I went to work doing housekeeping in a low-rent casino in North Reno, but I was always watched by Myrna Jenks.”
She was staring at me. I looked away.
“Sonny hoped the law would think they’d found the solution to the case,” she said. “Folks like Mitch might believe it was me and stop looking. Everybody would think the story was over.”
“Yeah, Mi
tch wouldn’t spend a dime on forensics if he didn’t have to.”
“Sonny was counting on that,” she said. “He thinks we’re all rubes. And by waiting months and months, it would make any search by Reno cops for a missing Jane Doe drop from the radar, too. Not that anybody would spend a second looking for a missing hooker. People would think that girl just ran off or OD-ed or something. There’d be zero connection to a body in a bog a hundred miles south. Then once the body was found, bills scattered in the canyon would make it seem to folks around here that I’d cashed out a secret account then somehow lost the money or got murdered for it.”
“Still could happen.”
She looked like I’d slapped her.
“What if me and Jack never found that body? What would VanOwen do then?”
“The missing little girl would never be found and the body in the bog would just rot where it lay.” She rubbed her eyes where the trail dust and tears had made streaks of mud in the corners. “The ‘dead Erika’ scheme was just another layer of protection after he shot the prostitute. A twofer. He thinks he’s too clever by half, so he figured he’d get his hands on the million dollars either way. He’d eventually risk the transfer, even without the fake me. If things got too hot, he could always just disappear. I guess he’s done that before, too.”
Scottie hollered that dinner was almost ready. I yelled back we’d be right there. Wind was gusting now and the temperature was dropping.
“And the kid? What would happen to Audie?”
“He talked about selling her to a Russian guy he knew out of state.”
“Jesus. It was good you looked after her that night in the canyon.”
“I gave her my old sleeping bag,” she said. “How did you know about that?”
“She told me. She called you the ‘spirit lady.’”