by Jeff Soloway
“They weren’t. Our resource management people worked on those gadgets too. I’ve known Tommy Handler for fourteen years. He’s a blowhard but honest.”
“Everybody’s honest until they’re offered a bribe,” I said. “The other suspects are Grant and Freddie. You say Grant never left the hotel.”
“And you say Freddie’s dead.”
I looked out the window at the Yippie-Ei-O! Steakhouse. I remembered Meat’s first look of anxious contemplation, back in his trailer, before he knew Freddie was dead. He was wondering if Freddie had done something awful.
“Let’s say you’re right,” I said. “The meters were honest. Freddie was wrong. He and Jewel hadn’t found the evidence they wanted on all those hikes. Jewel was about to give up on him. So he convinced her to hike down that trail with him, maybe on the pretext of finding Silver Bell Spring. And then he killed her.”
“What for?”
“To keep her from exposing him. And so he could blame the Grand Chalet for her death—which he did, last night. To make her a martyr.”
“Okay. And why was Freddie killed?”
“According to Grayson, Greenbaum’s men had been hunting for him for weeks. Last night he finally came out of hiding. They followed him home. It had nothing to do with Jewel.”
Doby finally got her turn in the rotary. She veered onto the Camper Village road and sped up just until I was bouncing in the seat.
“I like your first idea better,” she said. “Grant sneaks out of the hotel that morning, under the radar. Rents a glider, dresses up like a lady, whatever. He follows Jewel to the trail. Finds out she’s waiting for Freddie Bridgewater. Gets her down the trail and kills her for fooling around with another guy.”
Three suspects, three motives. The Greenbaums, for money; Freddie, for the cause; Grant, for love.
—
We fell silent as we entered Camper Village. Doby drove to the end of the dirt lane. There was a cruiser by the orange fencing. Its side bore a detailed graphic with a sunset scene of the Grand Canyon and the words TUSAYAN MARSHAL. Even the cops here were billboards.
We parked Doby’s battleship and got out. A marshal held up his hand. Doby held out her badge. Neither moved. They seemed to be fighting by force field.
“Crime scene,” the marshal said. Behind the cruiser, the orange fence was now not just bowed but crushed and embedded in the dirt. Something big had driven over it.
“Haven’t I seen you at the Grand Chalet?” said Doby.
“I don’t know where you seen me,” said the marshal.
“We heard some kids found a body.”
“Guy shot himself in the head.”
“Funny. We heard the body was found in a dumpster. Who shoots himself in a dumpster?”
“Nah, the body was on the ground. A firearm in his fingers.”
“I saw the body in a dumpster,” I said.
“Did you?” He stared into my face, making a mental mug shot. “I guess he must have got up and moved.”
“What’s his name?” asked Doby.
“License in his wallet says Freddie Bridgewater,” he said. “Poor bastard.”
We got back in Doby’s SUV.
“I know the medical examiner,” Doby said. “He’ll let me see the body. Eventually.”
She dropped me at the hotel.
—
I now had no doubt that Greenbaum had ordered Freddie’s death—the Tusayan cops wouldn’t have covered up so quickly for anyone else. But I still didn’t know who had killed Jewel.
I had held on to the map. In the shop attached to the Grand Chalet’s Adventure Command Center, I bought two sandwiches, the cheapest daypack available, several bottles of water, a flashlight, and the official Grand Canyon Association guide to the Hermit Trail (it also offered a few pages on the Dripping Springs and Boucher trails, which were too obscure for their own guides). I couldn’t speak to the dead, but I could follow a map. I could find Silver Bell Spring. If the water meter there had indeed been tampered with, Jewel’s exposé would have threatened the Greenbaums and Grant as well. If the water meter was honest, her discovery of it would have threatened Freddie.
It was still early afternoon. I had several hours of daylight left. I was going to Hermits Rest, to hike the trail that Jewel died on.
Chapter 20
In the park, I bypassed the East Rim Drive and instead took the main road past the Grand Canyon Visitor Center and the mini grocery store (where milk, I trusted, also cost eight dollars), and finally through Grand Canyon Village itself, the park’s administrative and touristic heart. Parking-spot hunters ambled infuriatingly; large families rumbled across the roads obliviously; time was racing; the sun was falling; my car hardly moved.
I glanced up the rimside hill at El Tovar, the century-old restaurant whose massive plate-glass windows provided, according to the brochures, the greatest view in the history of world dining. Might be true if you dined before six, but on my only previous trip, I had eaten after sunset and enjoyed a view like a blank movie screen. All the writers on the press trip were supposed to be lunching there tomorrow. I could turn around now, go back to the hotel, enjoy the world’s greatest lunch visuals tomorrow with everyone else. But I knew that the memory of giving up on Jewel now would haunt me forever. By finishing her work, I was trying to free myself of her, just as Victoria was trying to free herself from Grant.
At Hermit Road, a candy-cane-striped tollgate blocked the road. To the right and just ahead was the Hermit Route bus shelter, with its heavy wood-shingled roof upheld by polished logs, in the National Park Service’s official Lincoln Log style. Behind the shelter a series of iron rails formed a corral for waiting riders. I leaned out the window and punched the secret code into a keypad screwed onto a metal stand. The gate lifted; bus queuers stared and pointed. “That’s a real hiker,” I heard a parent explain to an envious six-year-old with a SpongeBob backpack. Would Jewel have refused to resort to the Grand Chalet code and instead jumped out in solidarity with the bus riders? She wasn’t that virtuous. But she might have helped someone out.
I opened the passenger-side window. “Want a ride to Hermits Rest?” I called to the mom. The Rest was the last stop on the bus route.
The girl bounced on her toes, making the dangling SpongeBob legs kick out behind her. “Is it safe, Mommy?”
“No,” Mommy said.
The girl beamed. She’d probably been warned all her life about strangers offering rides. To find one in the flesh was as exciting as spotting a grizzly bear. Just then I noticed, taped to the log beside her, something familiar—a copy of Doby’s flyer, the one with Jewel’s face on it. I studied it for a moment, then remembered myself and turned back to the mother, wanting to offer some apology or excuse. She had wrapped the child in both arms, unnerved by the intensity of my stare.
I drove on but pulled over again just past the bus stop. I wouldn’t have any cell reception after this. I wrote Victoria an email, telling her where I was going and why. Someone should know.
—
As I recalled from my pretrip research—which had not been limited to accounts of sudden death in the Grand Canyon and which was now buttressed by my new $5.95 trail guide—the building known as Hermits Rest was named for the legendary hermit Louis Boucher, a struggling copper prospector who spent most of his days near Dripping Springs or by the Colorado River. He cut the trails that are now called the Dripping Springs Trail and the Boucher Trail. Most of the time, his only companion was his mule, Calamity Jane, but when money was tight, which was often, Boucher worked as a camp hand for other prospectors or led guided tours of the area. For a hermit, he made a powerful impression; almost everything in this region of the Canyon is named after him: Hermits Rest, Hermit Creek, Eremita Mesa, the Hermit and Boucher trails, Boucher Canyon, Boucher Creek. One wonders what he would have thought of his extensive legacy. No one knows when and where he died.
Hermits Rest was commissioned by the Santa Fe railroad company and initially serv
ed as a rest stop for horse-carriage travelers taking the Hermit Road from Grand Canyon Village. The architect Mary Colter carefully designed it to evoke a romantic spirit of a hermit’s hut, just as the lobby of the Grand Chalet was designed to evoke the romance of a hunting lodge. The Rest too is much grander than the real thing. The highlight of its interior is a gigantic stone-arched fireplace alcove, as crudely impressive as a chapel in a Romanesque church.
Many visitors assume that Hermits Rest, being the last stop and namesake destination of Hermit Road, has the road’s finest view, but park experts know the truth: The Rest lies above a relatively cramped side canyon. Nonetheless, it also provides access to the network of trails that many aficionados regard as the most spectacular in the Canyon. The two most popular hiking destinations have historically been the picturesque and lush oases around Santa Maria Spring and Dripping Springs. But what was left of those springs now?
I slowed the car at the Hermits Rest bus stop, where a few families were waiting. A middle-aged man, his posture eroded by the day’s exertion, turned away from the spectacular—albeit restricted—view of the Grand Canyon, dropped his daypack, and squished it with his butt. Two kids nearby were kneeling by the road and slashing lines in the dirt; I thought they were playing tic-tac-toe. It’s hard to maintain your awe for a whole day.
Pavement soon gave way to a gravel road through a small forest of pinyon pines—shorter and bushier than the ponderosas I’d seen in places at Grandview Point and the northeastern pines I was used to—and junipers, with their crooked, twisted trunks and peeling bark. I slowed to look closely at them. The needles on the pinyon pines ranged in color from bright green to old-tobacco brown. A few trees were entirely naked of needles, just brittle old coatracks. Dead. This was the desert, and drought was the prevailing condition, but had so many trees been dying the last time I came to the Grand Canyon?
I parked where the road bulbed into a parking lot. Half-hidden to the left was a little house with a No Entry sign on its front door—built for that modern-day hermit, the park employee.
The sun had now burned away all the morning’s chill. I stuffed my sweatshirt into my daypack, along with my sandwiches, water, flashlight, and map. The path to the trailhead was sandy, flat, and edged on each side with a rocky curb that protected it from the surrounding scrub. My trail guide helped me identify many of the plants: creosote bushes, prickly pear cacti; and yucca plants, their long, spiky leaves reminding me of sea urchins I’d seen on a snorkeling trip. I passed another of the ubiquitous signs: GETTING TO THE BOTTOM OPTIONAL; GETTING TO THE TOP MANDATORY. The trail guide said that in the summer rangers were stationed at the trailhead to give out these warnings in person; they could even refuse passage to the obviously clueless. Grand Canyon hikes begin invitingly, on the descent, suckering all too many novices in too far too quickly; they find themselves stranded far below the rim in the scorching midday heat, exhausted, confused, their water gone, a long hard uphill hike between them and salvation.
I checked my phone: 3:00. Going up was said to take twice as long as going down. My destination was somewhere down the Boucher Trail, which turned off the Dripping Springs Trail before Dripping Springs itself. I might have to climb out by flashlight. I would have to risk it. I had food and water.
At the official trailhead, a still larger sign provided a map, trail profile, and additional warnings, in case you’d missed them everywhere else. And there was another taped-up copy of Jewel’s flyer: “The National Park Service is investigating the death of Jewel Rider….” The words Hermit Trail on the flyer were highlighted. Here she was. Here you are. I checked the GPS coordinates on my phone; they matched, more or less, the numbers on the email.
By this time of day, all the serious backpackers had set off already, but the semiserious—the day hikers—would be returning from their excursions, and screwer-arounds can always be found on the first hundred yards of any trail near a bus stop. Up ahead was a couple burdened with daypacks and two children, probably just returned from a brief dip below the rim. The older boy had a handful of pebbles and was flinging them, one by one, toward the girl’s feet as she walked; instead of fleeing or retaliating, she was whining. The parents lacked the energy to yell. Even a brief dip was exhausting.
Past the sign, the trail began to slide downward and the trees became still more stunted and spread out. The Canyon was as yet only barely in view, a burnt-orange strip above the fringe of trees in the distance. The limestone rocks on the trailside were white and chalky, weak-looking, like a crumbled-up scone.
An elderly couple had halted up ahead. The man was pointing at a trailside boulder. His companion was touching it reverently.
The woman looked up at me. She held a trekking pole in one hand and sunglasses in the other. Her eyes were pale blue; the skin on her cheeks was almost translucent.
“Look at these fellows.” She had a British accent. “Fossils.”
“Brachiopods, dear,” the man specified. “Sea creatures,” he added for my benefit. I smiled at his typically British passion for exposition, and also at his hair. It was white and thick and had probably been well combed before the canyon winds got hold of it; now swaths flopped in every direction, like a pile of bath towels in the laundry room.
The boulder he pointed at was covered with ugly dark lumps.
“The crust forms over the fossils,” he said, “and where it breaks, you can make out the fossils inside.”
I looked closer at one of the dark stone turds. It held a distinct scallop-shell impression. I looked all over the boulder. The fossils were everywhere.
“One forgets that this was an ocean,” the man said, “many millions of years ago.”
“One never forgets with you around, dear.”
“Are you married?” I asked.
“Fifty-three years,” she said. “For God’s sake, don’t congratulate us.”
“You might congratulate me.” He leaned closer to peer into another turd.
Fifty-three years was almost inconceivable to me, and yet just a drop in the ocean of time, and what these two had left of their lives was just a speck of a drop. All my actions, all my thoughts, seemed to swell in importance. I had more time than them, but not that much more. I’d better not spend it screwing up. Jewel’s drop had dried up so suddenly.
“We’re quite close to the road, aren’t we?” asked the woman. “We’ve come a ways.”
“Just a few minutes more,” I said.
“I’ll suppose we’ll survive,” the man said.
I must have looked concerned, because the woman reassured me: “We know our limits. Unlike some. We passed a man below who looked like he wanted to die.”
“We had to give him some water,” said the man. “One should never hike alone.”
He was too British to nod meaningfully at me in my solitude, but I got the message.
“I’m not going far.”
The couple said goodbye and moved on up the path, arms and legs and hiking sticks all jangling forward in graceless but rapid coordination, like a spider clambering up a wall.
Chapter 21
I continued the descent. The trail at one point in history had been the Grand Canyon’s finest, but it had gone untended for many years. In some places it was paved with slabs of rock and protected by curbs made of more piled-up slabs, each the size of a dinner plate. In the steepest stretches, broad stones carved into blocks were laid across the trail to form stairs. But in many other stretches, there was no apparent man-made structure at all, just dirt underfoot, or untouched rock, and nothing at all on the trail sides. If you tripped and fell the wrong way, you would tumble a hundred feet into the canyon and die. This, however, was as unlikely as falling off a city sidewalk into traffic.
The trail surfaces that were solid rock were the scariest. At times you had to walk ten or twenty feet over the boot-smoothed top of a boulder. In one place the boulder’s surface was banked the wrong way, into the canyon. It might have been engineered to dump hikers
into the abyss. Imagine a smooth sidewalk tilted toward the traffic. When I saw it, I stopped and scratched my sweaty scalp. I stepped across the diabolical surface carefully, knowing that any stumble could cause the slide that caused my death. But I made it, just like the thousands of hikers who had crossed the same unnerving passage. Afterward I felt the thrill of survival.
After a series of switchbacked descents, I found myself on a long, relatively flat straightaway, probably a traverse to the next set of switchbacks. Here the trail passed just above an extra-long sheer drop. My knees ached, but the walking, for now, was pleasant. The dirt trail was gentle on my feet, the grade easy, the breeze refreshing, the view now open to all of Hermit Canyon and a dazzling swath of the greater Canyon beyond. I had at least three hours of daylight left and four liters of water.
But the next switchbacks were rocky and treacherous. They were stone stairs weathered beyond regularity and often shattered into several pieces; sometimes one of the pieces wiggled underfoot like a loose tooth. The third or fourth switchback had a half-dead juniper tree at its crook, an old wizened sentry guarding the steep slope beyond, where other junipers and pinyons clung to the dirt beside shorter, more miserable-looking shrubs and cacti.
I rounded another switchback and almost tripped over the outstretched legs of a hiker, a man of about forty. He was sitting on a rock at the crook of the trail. His nose was white with sunblock, like a lifeguard’s. His forehead was striped with shining sweat. His damp T-shirt was wrapped tight around his protruding stomach.
He was staring at the plastic bottle poking up from my pack’s outside pocket.
“Would you like some water?” I asked.
“Thank God.”
I passed it on. He took a controlled guzzle, lowered the bottle, looked at me with uncertain eyes.
“Keep it,” I said. “You’re almost home.” It had only been half-full anyway. Now less than a quarter.