by Scott Graham
The broad-shouldered climbing tower attendant walked with the ranger, their feet crunching on the graveled path.
Chuck lifted a hand. “That’s me.”
The two men stopped next to Ponch. The tag pinned to the ranger’s chest above his brass badge was inscribed with the name Owen Hutchins. Chuck stared at the engraved name. He should have known—the hooked nose; the eyes the same slate gray color as the ranger’s shirt.
“Would you come with us, please?” the ranger, Owen, asked Chuck without introducing himself.
“I’m pretty busy right now. What is it you need?”
Owen indicated the tower attendant beside him with a tilt of his head. “Alden here tells me you belayed a youngster on the climbing wall immediately preceding the accident. I tracked down your name on the campground register.”
“I’m not sure I—”
“Did you or did you not,” the ranger broke in, his face set, “adjust the auto-belay mechanism when you tied yourself into the climbing rope?” He tucked the bulky clipboard beneath his arm, his eyes on Chuck.
“I didn’t touch the auto-belay,” Chuck said, meeting the ranger’s gaze. “As light as my daughter is, I was afraid it wouldn’t kick in if she fell. All I did was release the rope and belay her off the top pulley myself.”
The attendant, Alden, said, “You’re supposed to let me detach the rope from the auto-belay for you.”
While Chuck had released the rope from the device and set up his own belay for Carmelita, Alden had chatted with the female climber on the far side of the line of boulders, his gaze fixed on her bikini top.
Chuck looked the attendant up and down. “You were otherwise occupied, if you recall.”
Alden’s eyes darted away.
Owen stepped forward. “I’m performing a preliminary Q&A to determine if a special agent from the Investigative Services Bureau should be assigned to investigate the incident.”
“A special agent?”
“The National Park Service takes all accidents that occur in its parks seriously. The agent, if assigned, will determine whether an SAIT should be formed.”
“An SAIT?” Chuck asked, repeating the letters.
“A Serious Accident Investigation Team.”
“A whole team of investigators? Sounds pretty over the top.”
“The park service will decide what’s over the top and what’s not.” Owen pulled the clipboard from under his arm. “You claim you did not turn off the auto-belay device, is that correct?”
“I just told you, I didn’t touch it. I had no reason to.”
“But you took it upon yourself to—”
“Look,” Chuck cut in. “I belayed my daughter myself, that’s all. People do that all the time on sport walls.” He turned to Alden and waited until the tower attendant met his gaze. “You know I’m right . . . Alden, is it? Everybody knows. That’s why you didn’t have any problem with what I did.” Chuck pivoted back to Owen. “The only thing I touched was the climbing rope.”
“Which was attached to the auto-belay mechanism.”
Chuck’s voice quivered. “I simply released the rope from the device to belay my daughter myself.”
“I want you to show me exactly what you did.”
“I already told you what I did.”
“There’s no need to get defensive, Mr. Bender.”
Chuck felt his face growing hot. “All I did was—”
Owen held up a palm. “Please.” He turned sideways, his black boots grinding in the path’s chunky stones, and indicated the direction back through the campground to the parking lot with an outstretched hand. “If you’ll come this way.”
Chuck said to Ponch, “I’ll be right back. We’ll figure out what to do next.”
Falling into step with the ranger and tower attendant, Chuck bit down on the inside of his cheek to control his anger. There was more going on here than just Owen Hutchins’ undue suspicion regarding the auto-belay device, and Chuck suspected what it was.
“Here we are,” Owen announced, halting at the base of the climbing tower with Chuck and Alden.
Chuck looked past the tower. Sedans and SUVs glittered beneath the sun in the parking lot, the oversized Bender Archaeological pickup truck among them. Presumably, Thorpe had planned to end his dawn flight by landing in one of the open stretches between the rows of parked cars. Instead, Chuck assured himself, Thorpe had touched down safely somewhere else. As for Ponch’s overwrought concerns? Nothing more than tarot-card-inspired paranoia.
“Let’s take a look at the auto-belay mechanism together,” Owen suggested.
Alden squatted next to the device, a metal cylinder six inches around and eighteen inches long bolted to the climbing tower two feet above the ground. A wire cable ran from the top of the cylinder to a pulley affixed to a steel stanchion extending three feet from the top of the tower. “The disable switch is under here,” Alden said, pointing to the base of the cylinder.
“Did you check it after Jimmy fell?” Owen asked him.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“It was turned off, deactivated.”
“Meaning?”
“The rope had no tension. With the device disabled, the rope spools in, but the ratchet doesn’t engage when a climber falls.” He pointed at the top of the wall. “It’s used for retrieving the rope at the end of a climbing session.”
“But if it’s turned off when someone is climbing . . . ?”
Alden aimed a thumb at the ground and whistled through his two front teeth, a single, descending note, imitating the sound of a falling bomb. “That’s why the switch is underneath the cylinder, where it can’t be turned off by mistake.”
Owen turned to Chuck. “You say you didn’t touch it?”
Chuck thrust out his chin. “I keep telling you, I released the rope and tied myself into it. That’s all I did.”
Owen asked Alden, “How closely did you observe his actions?”
“Not very,” Alden admitted.
Chuck pointed past the line of boulders. “He was back there, under the trees.”
“Is that true?” Owen asked the tower attendant.
“I was making sure no one cut in line,” Alden said, his face coloring. “People get pissed off when that happens.”
“You say you found the auto-belay in the off position when you checked it after the accident?”
“Right.”
“So someone had to have turned it off.”
“Or,” Chuck said, “it’s broken and it switched off by itself.”
Owen appraised Chuck with cold eyes. “That’s possible, I suppose.” He faced Alden. “Whatever the case, we can’t allow the Yosemite Slam to take place tomorrow without knowing what happened.”
“I’ve got an extra auto-belay along,” the attendant said, aiming his square jaw at the semitruck attached to the portable tower’s flatbed trailer. The words “Sacramento Rock Gym” emblazoned the front door of the truck in gold letters above the stenciled silhouette of a climber leaning back from the face of a cliff. “I’ll switch out the old one and test everything to make sure we’re good to go.”
“Correction,” Owen said. “I’ll be the one who will test everything, before the start of the Slam tomorrow morning. If there’s any question things aren’t right, I’ll shut the whole competition down. Understood?”
“Sure,” said Alden. “But Jimmy . . .” His voice trailed off.
The ranger snapped, “He’s the whole reason I’m doing this. An hour ago, Jimmy O’Reilly, the man everybody in Yosemite Valley knows as Camp 4’s best friend, nearly died on your climbing wall. My job is to figure out what happened, to recommend whether an ISB special agent should be assigned, whether we need an SAIT. The way I see it, either something made the auto-belay mechanism turn off—” he directed his gray eyes at Chuck “—or someone turned it off.”
Chuck raised his hands with his palms out. “I’m as upset about what happened as you are. Jimmy and I go way back
. I’m here for the reunion.”
“The reunion,” Owen repeated, his brows drawing together. “Of course.”
Chuck lowered his hands. “I assume you’ve heard about it.”
“Jimmy mentioned it to me. I know all about you and your old friends. My father was a ranger here before me.”
As Chuck already had deduced. “So you’re Owen, Jr.”
Time unspooled in Chuck’s mind. Owen Hutchins, Sr., had been one of a handful of rangers known unofficially as the Yosemite mafia. Allegedly, the small group of rangers had formed a secret, unspoken fraternity dedicated to ridding Yosemite National Park of visitors such as hippies and drug users considered less than desirable by mafia rangers, who even had been accused of illegally bribing informants to implicate suspected drug dealers in the valley. Nowhere in the Yosemite mafia’s vision of the valley had there been room for the unshorn, dirtbag climbers who populated Camp 4.
“Dad retired a long time ago,” Owen, Jr., said. “He died a year later. I’ve been a ranger here for five years now.”
Of the members of the Yosemite mafia, Hutchins, Sr., had been known for his particularly intense devotion to the cause. “You probably know your father wasn’t the most popular guy in the park,” Chuck said.
Owen’s eyes grew flinty. “He did his job, just like I do mine.”
“He rode climbers in the valley pretty hard, especially those of us who hung around with Jimmy O’Reilly and Thorpe Alstad. The way I remember it, he wrote us up for pretty much anything he could think of—noise infractions, open container violations, campsite fee payments that were just a few minutes late.” Chuck glanced past the tower where Thorpe had planned to land in the parking lot; Ponch was waiting back at the reunion campsite.
Owen’s lips flattened. “He kept guys like you in line. He had no choice. It’s the same now. Four million people visit Yosemite Valley each summer, with more coming every year, all of them trying to squeeze into a place not much bigger than an oversized bathtub. The only way that works is with a lot of planning, a lot of control.”
“Planning I’m okay with,” Chuck said. “But control? A lot of people thought your dad was a total control freak.”
“He kept a lid on things. That was his job. When something bad happened, like with Jimmy this morning, he jumped on it right away, hard. That’s the right thing to do—get it figured out before the evidence disappears.”
“Evidence? It sounds like you think someone was out to get Jimmy.”
Owen’s face hardened. “I don’t work with what I think, I work with what I know. And what I know is that sport climbing on walls with bolted holds is, or should be, one-hundred-percent safe. The YOSAR team rescues people off the big walls around the valley all summer long. But sport climbing? Nothing should go wrong with that.” The ranger looked at the auto-belay mechanism at the base of the tower, then said to Chuck, “Maybe the switch is faulty. Maybe it turned off by itself somehow. That’s possible, sure. But the odds of it happening? Astronomical. Whereas, the idea that somebody turned off the switch by mistake—or maybe, even, on purpose?—that’s what makes the most sense to me.”
“I understand you need to look into what happened to Jimmy,” Chuck told the ranger. “I get that.” He extended a stiff finger at the auto-belay device. “But there’s no need for me to examine that thing with you. I didn’t do anything to it, and, to be perfectly honest, I resent any insinuation that I did.”
He spun on his heels and strode past the small A-frame office at the entrance to the campground and back into Camp 4. Halfway to the campsite, he came up short.
Owen Hutchins, Jr., was convinced someone—specifically, it seemed, Chuck—had deactivated the auto-belay mechanism on the climbing tower in an attempt to kill Jimmy. But what if someone had switched off the device earlier—not before Jimmy’s climb, but before Carmelita’s climb? That someone could not have predicted Chuck would detach the rope from the mechanism and belay Carmelita on his own.
Chuck gritted his teeth. No one who knew the ins and outs of an auto-belay device could possibly have anything against twelve-year-old Carmelita. Rather, if the mechanism had been turned off before her climb, it was because someone had it in for Chuck—and had come at him by attempting to harm his family.
4
An icy band tightened around Chuck’s midsection. Who, possibly, could be out to get him? With the question came the immediate answer: nobody.
He was here to investigate a pair of killings in the valley that had occurred in 1852. No one could be worried about what he might discover about the killings more than a century and a half later. Nor could he think of any potential enemy he might have made during the summers he’d climbed in the park, particularly someone still carrying a grudge after all these years.
A beam of morning sun broke through the trees, warming his back. The scent of fried bacon drifted through the campground.
He popped his tongue off the roof of his mouth. Other than the climbers preceding Carmelita, he couldn’t recall anyone coming near the tower before her turn on the wall, nor did he remember anyone other than Alden approaching the base of the tower after her ascent.
He resumed his walk through the campground. Just because Owen Hutchins, Jr., appeared to be a conspiracy theorist of the first order didn’t mean Chuck had to succumb to such irrationality himself.
Jimmy’s fall from the climbing tower was an accident, simple as that. There was no evil scheme aimed at Chuck or Jimmy or anyone else. And as for Thorpe—it was time, right now, to learn where he’d flown.
* * *
Janelle and Clarence stood with Chuck in the reunion campsite and listened to Ponch.
“I caught a red-eye into Fresno from LAX and met Thorpe at Glacier Point before dawn,” Ponch explained to the three of them. “After he jumped, I drove into the valley. I kept trying to reach him on his phone. They say the signals bounce all over the place off the cliffs, so places in the valley that have five bars of service one minute have none the next. The couple of times I did get through, there was no answer.” He held up his phone. “I’m still trying, and still nothing.”
“Did you feel any gusts of wind after he jumped?” Chuck asked. He was no expert on wingsuit flying, but he knew that even a slight breeze would have been enough for Thorpe to abandon his planned flight through the granite-walled notch in Sentinel Ridge, and that stronger gusts might have forced him to seek calmer winds over the Sierra foothills outside the valley altogether before pulling his ripcord and parachuting to the ground. Had that been the case, Thorpe would have landed in a meadow somewhere outside the park to the west, perhaps far from a road—in which case, he might still be making his way to the nearest highway.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Ponch said. “But when he caught enough wind to take flight, he didn’t swing out over the valley. He turned and aimed straight for the ridge. He dropped into the shadows at that point and that was the last I saw of him.”
Chuck exhaled, jetting air between his lips. “That’s where we’ve got to go, then.”
Ponch nodded, his gaze downcast.
“Should we report it?” Chuck asked him.
Ponch looked up. “It’ll go viral the instant we do. If he flew out of the valley and hasn’t been able to contact us yet, he’ll kill us for damaging his brand.”
Janelle’s eyes narrowed. “His brand?”
“That’s what he lives for,” Ponch explained. “His brand, his image.”
Chuck said, “From what I hear, that’s all he lives for.”
Clarence raised a hand to break into the conversation. “You’re not going to call anyone?”
“If we don’t find anything up on the ridge,” said Chuck, “and we still haven’t heard from him . . .”
“. . . then,” Ponch finished, “it’ll be time to put out an APB.”
Janelle asked, “You’re going to look for him yourselves?”
“Our very own mission,” Ponch confirmed.
“You
mean, search-and-rescue mission?”
Ponch nodded.
Janelle faced Chuck. “I’m coming with you. With my paramedic kit.”
Chuck thought about Thorpe’s plan to fly through Sentinel Gap, and the fact that Thorpe had turned toward the ridge before Ponch had lost sight of him. “Good idea.”
“Clarence can stay with the girls.” She turned to her brother. “Right?”
“Por seguro,” Clarence said.
“You understand, though,” Chuck said to Janelle, “we probably won’t find anything.”
“I hope to God we don’t,” Ponch said, a tremor entering his voice. “But that’s not what the cards told me.”
They left the campground after changing into lightweight hiking pants and long-sleeved cotton shirts. The already-hot mid-morning sun promised a blazing afternoon to come. Chuck and Ponch carried daypacks weighted by bottles of water. Janelle shouldered the medical-kit backpack she’d out-fitted piece by piece over the last few months as she neared the completion of her coursework.
They crossed the road outside the campground when a break in traffic presented itself, then traversed the pedestrian bridge over the Merced River. The stream, low and calm in late summer, flowed beneath the bridge on its winding journey down the valley.
They hurried across Southside Drive and through a parking lot filled with cars to the start of Four Mile Trail at the base of Sentinel Ridge. A topo map tacked behind plexiglass on a signboard showed the trail climbing up and around the ridge on the south side of the valley to an overlook of Sentinel Falls, and on and farther up from there to the trail’s end at Glacier Point, four steep, switchbacking miles from where they stood at the head of the trail.
“Thorpe wanted to make a statement,” Ponch said as they set out from the trailhead. “He had this whole picture in his head of how great it would be to drop in on the reunion from out of the ether.”