“I met him instead.” Now I understood some of Nick’s cryptic remarks. He had thought I was Lucy, in the hotel to interview him for the casino story. And so, obviously, did some other people who had showed an inordinate amount of interest in a woman who was there to write about the corpse flower. I told her Nick was dead but she already knew.
“Betty called Claude and told him. That’s why the guys haven’t wanted to drive back. Some local cop has a real hard-on for them and probably thinks they did it. The boys stashed their car in the woods and we walked the rest of the way here.”
“And where is here?”
She was somewhere on the reservation in a log cabin off a dirt road. “It’s kind of nice, like one of those places pictured in the Sunday Times real estate section with a view that you can never afford. High on the mountain, lake, there’s even a small waterfall in the distance.”
Waterfront property notwithstanding, she was brought to a secret place, car stashed, and incommunicado for three days. Any minute she’d start speaking Swedish. I forced myself to stay calm and not scream at her.
“Okay, why are you still there?” There was a silence and after being Lucy’s friend for many years and through many relationships I knew exactly what it meant.
“Jeez, Lucy, both of them?”
“No, just Claude. You have to see him, he’s gorgeous. He’s got this amazing hair and skin. Our kids would be phenomenal.”
Oh, brother. The only reservation in Lucy’s future was at Balthazar, downtown, table by the window, but she was playing out some fantasy. One of us had to be the grown-up.
“It’s not as if I just met him,” she rationalized. “We’ve been e-mailing for weeks—I felt as if I knew him.” I tried not to be judgmental with friends, but my silence smacked of disapproval.
“Lucy, I just heard the cops say they had evidence that implicated the Crawfords in Nick’s death. What do you know about that?”
“I know they’ve been persecuted by some psycho local cop with an ax to grind . . .”
“And hotel security at Titans has instructions not to admit the Crawfords,” I said. “There’s a restraining order against them entering the hotel, so Billy’s got to be lying about meeting someone there. Luce, physical evidence. Ted Bundy was cute, too. Not my type, but someone thought he was cute.”
I checked my watch; it would be dark in about thirty minutes, and it was getting chilly. As it was, I didn’t know if I could make it back down the mountain in the dark with all of those switchbacks—and the very real possibility of going over the side like poor Mrs. Mishkin made it an unattractive prospect. I had to find her, and soon.
The light was fading but I had a picture of the spot on my phone and Lucy had given me a description of what she could see from the cabin; I tried to match it up with what I saw from my perch on the side of the dirt road. She told me the lake was on her right.
“That’s west,” I said.
“Is it? Oh yeah, setting sun.” Clearly she hadn’t been a Girl Scout. Neither had I for that matter—west was the Henry Hudson Parkway and east was the FDR, what else did you need to know in Manhattan?
“I’ve got it!” she said. When Lucy rented the car, YoDrive had provided her with a TomTom, a portable global positioning system. Since no New Yorker leaves anything of any value in her car, she had automatically taken it with her. She rummaged through her bag to get the Tom.
“Great! What does it say?”
She waited for a satellite signal. Finally the screen lit up. “It says I’m screwed. I’m at the corner of nowhere and battery low,” she said, frustrated. “I’m a speck. What’s the point of this thing? You have to know where you are to know where you are.”
I told her to minimize the screen to see as much of the surrounding area as possible. She was somewhere west of 95, which was not much help since so was most of the United States.
“Plug in Titans as a destination,” I said. If she’d used it on the drive up it would have been her last address on the TomTom. She groaned.
“I didn’t use it. The clerk at YoDrive said all I had to do was take 95, so that’s what I did.”
“It’s near Academy Road. Start with that.”
Titans’s exact address was on my Jeep’s system and I ran to get it before the power drained on Lucy’s Tom. We waited until her handheld unit processed the information. She was eleven miles from Titans, but the TomTom was having a rough time choosing a route selection since there weren’t any established roads through the reservation.
“Keep at it,” I said, “and call me back if something comes up. Wait a minute, give me your longitude and latitude. Maybe I can figure out how to use that to find you.”
“How do I do that?”
I told her to hit browse map but it was too late. The TomTom ran out of power.
“Lucy, is there electricity in that cabin?”
“No.”
“Well, light some candles and make a fire. And save your cell power. Turn it back on in one hour. I’ll call you to let you know where I am.” Assuming I knew.
Before I risked losing my cell signal, I made one more call.
“Paradise Diner.”
Babe and company were gearing up for the dinner crowd, not as busy as breakfast or lunch, but busy enough so that Babe didn’t answer the phone herself.
“She’s with some customers. Want me to get her?” Alba, the budding rock singer/waitress, took a message. I could hear her making change at the register, and she read the message back to me with no reaction at all to its contents: Lucy missing, searching Quepochas reservation, just in case you never see me again. Paula.
“Okay, so, like, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
Thirty-one
A former colleague once dragged me to a foreign film called The Wages of Fear, starring Yves Montand, a French hottie from the fifties. The movie was about a couple of guys who were so broke they agreed to drive a truck filled with nitroglycerin across the proverbial hundred miles of bad road. Most of the film showed a nervous, white-knuckled driver and a wild-eyed passenger stopping and starting the car while they navigated the treacherous road.
All I needed was the passenger.
Farther on from the spot where I’d spoken to Lucy, the road had fewer switchbacks, but other than that, it was really only good for mountain goats or Dall sheep. The kind you see in National Geographic magazines and wonder how the hell it is they don’t fall off the side of a craggy bluff. Luckily the Jeep is the automotive equivalent of a mountain goat. All of those car commercials that are so obviously Photoshopped to show cars at the tops of arches and hoodoos in Colorado or Utah actually have some basis in reality.
As long as I kept to a snail’s pace, I made progress. The road had to have been at a forty-five-degree angle in some spots and even more in others with only intermittent stretches where I could kick butt and drive a whopping eight or ten miles an hour.
Even with my brights on I could only see about twenty feet ahead of the car. Without another vehicle in front of me as a frame of reference, the road seemed to get narrower, at times seeming just inches wider than the Jeep. Branches scraped both sides of the car. I pulled left to avoid them on the right and a stubby shrub reached in and left a long scratch on my cheek, scaring the hell out of me. Then I overcompensated and hugged the mountain so closely on the next turn that I smacked in the passenger-side window. The sound startled me and I stopped to survey the damage. To the car and to my face.
I slid out of the car, clinging first to the door, then the hood. In the headlights I saw hundreds or maybe thousands of gnats or midges, so dense they looked like mist rising from the ground. I brushed them from my arms and flicked them away from my face and hair. I inched around to the passenger side and saw the mirror hanging by a shred of plastic. I tried to snap it off, but one thick plastic-coated wire wouldn’t give up the ghost. I held the mirror and looked at my distorted reflection. There was a long pink line on my face that was puffin
g up but no blood. I convinced myself the image was magnified and the scratch wasn’t really as long as it appeared.
The bugs were getting to me so I hustled back to the driver’s side of the car, stumbling on a few loose rocks. I remembered reading somewhere that small rocks gouged out of a road or hiking trail were frequently evidence of bears looking for food. Oh, good. Another thing to worry about. I climbed back into the driver’s seat, and continued creeping uphill for almost another hour.
The mountain flattened out a bit after the next two sets of switchbacks and I had my fingers crossed that I could get past them before the sun went down completely. I unconsciously leaned in with every turn as if that would make a serious aerodynamic difference inside a two-ton vehicle. I was so intent on reaching the mesa I forgot my promise to call Lucy and didn’t do it until reaching the relative safety of a clearing just short of the top.
Until I stopped driving and got out of the car I hadn’t realized how tightly I was gripping the steering wheel; when I released it the tension drained from my neck and shoulders.
Just to be on the safe side, I reached back into the car to put on the emergency brake; that’s when I noticed the odometer read 24,507—I’d only gone six miles. I speed-dialed Lucy’s number but there was no answer—she must have still had the phone turned off; I’d check back in fifteen or twenty minutes.
I hadn’t eaten anything all day and was starting to feel it. I never kept food in the car, other than the occasional Zone bar, and I checked the storage box between the driver’s and passenger’s seats to see if I’d get lucky.
Bingo. Chocolate mint. Okay, it was a little hard, but it was better than nothing. I walked to the back of the car and opened the hatch. The case of bottled water I usually had stashed in the car was covered by the tarp and garden tools that had shifted in the course of my climb up the mountain. I moved the tarp, the pitchfork, and some hand tools and cracked open a bottle of water. I sat in the back dangling my legs and looking at the stars.
High on the mountain, I thought I saw a light. Hopefully it was Lucy in the Crawfords’ cabin. Then I looked down at the long slow climb that I’d just made, and saw something else—two specks of light. Moving slowly, but definitely moving. Judging by how long it had taken me, it would take whoever it was at least an hour to get to me, so that gave me an hour to get to Lucy.
But I had a bigger problem. First there was the overpowering smell. It was a steaming pile of fresh scat. Which is a nice way of saying bear shit. Then there was the long low growl.
Thirty-two
When you’re hiking in black bear country and confront a bear, half the guidebooks tell you to drop into a fetal position and cover your head. The other half tell you to wave your arms like a lunatic and make noise—some parks even sell bear bells that you’re supposed to jingle to make the bears go away. This struck me as contradictory advice and I had about three seconds to decide which to follow—but I’m not a fetal position kind of gal.
What the guidebooks never tell you to do is throw a Zone bar and a cell phone at the bear, but that’s what I did. It wasn’t intentional, it was a reflex—they just flew out of my hands. I remembered the bit about making noise and reached into the Jeep, grabbing two hand weeders and furiously clanking the tines together. Then I thought, Just get in the freaking car!
The same reflex as before made me fling the weeders in the bear’s general direction and jump in the car, closing the hatch from inside. I scrambled to the driver’s seat and raised the windows as fast as I could. The black bear is generally harmless and would really prefer eating berries or garbage to human flesh, but when you’re on foot and so is he—despite the fact that it’s a different animal and you’re on a different continent—visions of King Kong pop into your head and that, inevitably, makes you the screaming, writhing Fay Wray.
I had the presence of mind to lock the doors and was catching my breath when the bear lumbered over, stood on his hind legs, and put his front paws on the driver’s side of the car. In the bear’s mouth was the Zone bar, the wrapper sticking to his teeth. He didn’t mind that it was stale. He seemed to like it, even the paper. In his paw was my cell phone, which must have looked like just another hunk of chocolate to him because that was what he ate next.
The bear took his sweet time walking in front of the car, swatting at the gnats, turning over rocks looking for fat juicy bugs, and finally lumbering off into the night. When I lost him in the headlights it was the first time in hours I was glad I couldn’t see that far ahead of me.
Now I had no food and no phone. Lucy didn’t know where I was and I didn’t know if her hosts, the Crawfords, had returned. The two specks of light I’d seen below had disappeared, probably struggling to negotiate one of the switchbacks, but whoever it was he was getting closer and closer the longer I sat there, so I put the car into drive and took off again.
There was a surprisingly flat stretch of road ahead of me; still I was careful not to get too cocky just in case there was a sheer drop or a second bear on the other side.
The flickering lights above me grew bigger. That was either good news or not; by this time, every tree stump was a bear, every screeching owl was an assailant, and I still didn’t know what I’d find at the cabin.
I put the radio on for background noise and that’s just what it was, all static. I neurotically went around the dial twice as if that was going to improve the reception. Then I remembered AM. I switched frequencies and got a little buzz, then an oldies station. It was better than nothing and helped keep my mind off lions, tigers, bears, and whoever was in the car behind me. Half an hour later I was listening to Freda Payne singing about her unfortunate wedding night. I was mouthing the words when the road simply ended. No more turns, no more switchbacks, no more nothing. Just the hint of a footpath between the trees.
I stopped the car, opened the moon roof, and stood up on the driver’s seat, trying to get my bearings and find the flickering lights I’d seen before. There they were. And this time I could see the faint outline of a cabin.
I climbed into the backseat to look for anything that might be useful. The battery in the lantern was dead. I had a tarp, a few bungee cords, and a pitchfork. I had no idea what I was going to do with them, but I wanted to feel prepared, so I took them just in case.
The folded tarp fit under my arm, I wrapped the bungee cords around my waist, and I carried the pitchfork in my right hand, using it to hold back branches as I made my way through the brush to the cabin. There was a small clearing in front of it, but the cabin was carved into the side of the mountain, Anasazi style; without any lights on it would have been nearly impossible to see. I crept closer to the door, desperate to hear any sounds inside. Nothing. I rapped on the door with the pitchfork.
“Don’t . . . don’t come any closer,” yelled a shaky voice from inside. “I have a gun.”
“Lucy, it’s me, Paula.” I took a deep breath and straightened up from my fighting stance.
“Thank god,” she said, opening the door, white as a ghost.
She had an iron fire poker in her hand and if it hadn’t been me, she would have been prepared to use it. I had the pitchfork. We looked like a couple of settlers about to go at it.
“That’s not a gun.”
“What was I supposed to say, ‘I have a poker’? And what is that,” she asked, looking at the pitchfork, “a house gift?” Her color came back and so did her smart mouth. Neither of us wanted to admit we’d been scared.
“Mother told me never to go visiting empty-handed,” I said, hugging her.
She squeezed back, then pulled away, smacking me on the shoulder. “You didn’t call me.”
“A bear ate my phone,” I said, tossing the pitchfork and tarp on the table. I don’t think she believed me.
The cabin was two rooms with a packed-dirt floor, rough-hewn cabinets, a wooden table and chairs in one room, and two monastic beds in the other. One window was carved out of the mud that was the front of the structure.
“Shut up. You caught me at a weak moment, I was very vulnerable. You’re right, it was crazy. Now, can you please get us out of here?”
Good question. We could make it to the car, but I didn’t love that drive in the daylight going forward, I’d probably hate it at night going backward until there was a spot wide enough for me to turn around in.
“Is there a flashlight here?” I asked.
“No. There weren’t exactly a lot of cabinets to check. I bet when these guys misplace something they don’t have to look for it for very long.”
I went into the other room to search under the beds for any boxes where tools or supplies might be stashed, but no luck. Lucy ran in a few minutes later.
“Paula . . .” she whispered. “I hear something. What’s that?” Lucy grabbed hold of my hand and squeezed so tightly my fingers went numb. I closed my eyes to shut out everything else. Apart from the pounding of my own heart, I heard something, too.
Whoever it was would be able to get in; all we had going for us was the element of surprise. We shoved the heavy table closer to the door and rearranged the chairs; I planned to use one of them as a weapon, if necessary. If it was someone familiar with the cabin, tripping over the furniture would slow them down and give us some time. I unwrapped the bungee cords from around my waist, criss-crossed them at ankle height three feet inside the door, and stretched them from the cabinet legs to one of the beds and from the chairs to the other bed so that in the dark, anyone entering would think he was okay and then be tripped up a few steps inside. It would buy us a few minutes at best. I told Lucy to line up our arsenal—the pitchfork, the poker, a chair, and the tarp.
“That’s it?” I asked. “No big frying pan à la Wile E. Coyote?”
“I guess the boys don’t cook much, they certainly didn’t offer me anything. I haven’t eaten for hours and you know how cranky I get. I was kinda hoping for those big Navajo pancakes like you get outside of Vegas.”
The Big Dirt Nap Page 14