Yosemite Fall (National Park Mystery Series)
Page 24
Chuck clambered out of bed, smacking his forehead on the cabinetry lining the walkway. Janelle threw off the sheets and grabbed her fitted jeans and black T-shirt she’d worn yesterday from hooks in the center aisle.
Carmelita pulled back her upper-bunk curtain. She and Rosie looked on, mouths agape, as Chuck and Janelle tugged on their clothes and hurried past the girls’ bunks.
“Wait here,” Chuck told them from the front of the camper. “We’ll be right back.”
He caught his reflection in the small window in the camper door as he bent to tie his boots. His unkempt hair, brown going gray, rose straight up from his grooved forehead. Morning light streaming through the window reflected off his high temples, bared by his receding hairline. Crow’s feet cut away from his blue eyes, seared into his leathery skin by the harsh western sun over the course of two decades of shovel and trowel work on archaeological digs—tough, physical work that kept him lean and fit.
He tied his boots, pulled on his rain jacket, and ducked outside. Janelle followed. She matched him stride for stride as they hurried through the campground. Bus-sized recreational vehicles loomed out of the mist, parked in numbered sites on either side of the paved campground drive. Electric generators hummed at the back of the RVs. Blurry faces peered out from behind the vehicles’ fogged windows. No one besides Chuck and Janelle was outside.
“Everybody must think the sound was part of the seismic operations,” Chuck said, his head lowered against the driving sleet.
“That’s what it sounded like to me,” Janelle replied.
“It wasn’t, though. It was different. Sharper. And close by.”
“It came from the direction of your work site, didn’t it?”
“That’s one of the things I’m worried about.”
Janelle glanced back at the camp trailer. “Will the girls be okay?”
Chuck waved a hand at the watching RV owners. “We couldn’t ask for nosier neighbors. Besides, Carmelita’s in charge. She knows everything at this point.”
Janelle turned her head to Chuck, sending droplets of melted sleet cascading off the hood of her jacket to the pavement. She ticked a finger back and forth at him. “Uh-uh,” she warned. She slipped her hand back in her jacket pocket. “One smart aleck in the family is enough. You can’t fight fire with fire, not in this case. You’ll never win.”
“Sí, señora mía,” Chuck said, though he wasn’t at all sure he had it in him to do as she directed.
No vehicles were parked at the Devil’s Garden Trailhead, where the road through Arches ended next to the campground. Like the RV owners in their massive homes on wheels, would-be park visitors were holed up in their motel rooms in town this morning, waiting out the storm.
Devil’s Garden Trail headed north from the parking area. Chuck’s foot slipped when he stepped from the parking lot onto the dirt pathway. He waved his arms wildly, struggling for balance, his boots sliding like skis in the saturated soil. Janelle giggled behind him as he caught himself, set his shoulders, and continued on the path, his feet squelching in the untracked mud.
The trail passed through a walled corridor thick with sage-brush and opened onto a mile-wide sagebrush flat at the start of a seven-mile hiking loop. The loop path led to five of the sandstone spans that gave Arches National Park its name. The right-hand branch passed Private Arch on the way to Double O Arch. The left branch led northwest to Landscape Arch, just over half a mile from the parking lot, then to Navajo Arch and Partition Arch.
“We should go left,” Chuck said as they neared the junction.
A gust of sleet-laden wind blew across the flat, carrying with it the crisp, piney scent of wet sage.
“But your contract site is to the right.”
“The more I think about it, the more I think the sound came from one of the arches—and of all the arches in Devil’s Garden, Landscape makes the most sense.”
Janelle moaned. “Please, no.”
“Something made that noise. Besides, the timing’s right.”
“But it’s been there for thousands of years.”
“It’s the longest, narrowest span in the park—and it’s never had a seismic truck pounding away at the ground so close to it before.” Chuck hunched his shoulders against the falling sleet. “The freeze-thaw cycle causes most arches to collapse. The most recent arch to fall in the park was Wall Arch, in 2008. It fell in late October, the time of year when temperatures drop below freezing at night and climb back above thirty-two degrees in the daytime.” He raised his hand, allowing the sleet to wet his palm. “This is the first real cold snap to hit the park this fall. The temperature dropped into the twenties last night, before the clouds came in. That was the freeze part of the cycle. Then came sunrise and the thaw part, with temperatures rising to freezing or a little above just as the truck started thumping.”
“You really think . . . ?”
“Lots of people have been worried about it. That’s why they fought the seismic work so close to the park for so long. But the courts finally okayed it. NatResources started pounding the ground outside the park a week ago—just in time for the storm to come along.”
Chuck led Janelle down the left branch of the trail. The path angled across the flat and entered a gap between sandstone cliffs. The cliff walls fell back after two hundred yards, giving way to a second sagebrush flat, this one a quarter mile across. Red sandstone bluffs surrounded the flat. Wind whistled off the bluffs and across the ground, shivering the sage bushes. Ice crystals clung to the bushes’ tiny, gray-green leaves.
Chuck stopped abruptly at the edge of the flat. He stepped aside and pointed, his back muscles drawing up tight. “There.”
On the far side of the opening, a pair of sandstone stumps extended outward from facing rock bluffs a hundred yards apart. The rock stumps marked the two ends of the place where, until this morning, Landscape Arch had soared through space.
Bile built in Chuck’s stomach. He’d hiked from the campground to see the arch with Janelle, Carmelita, and Rosie just two days ago, their first day in the park. Upon spying the span, Carmelita had become a little kid again for a few welcome moments, oohing and aahing with Rosie at the spindly rock bridge arcing across the sky. But now the sky was empty, the arch reduced to a line of jagged rocks lying jumbled on the ground between the two shoulders of stone.
Janelle led the way across the flat, her movements stiff. She stopped at a wooden post-and-beam fence that until today had kept onlookers from venturing closer to the overhead span. Chuck halted beside her. The sandstone stumps protruded from the facing bluffs fifty feet above their heads. On the ground below, shards of the shattered arch lay amid smashed clumps of sagebrush.
Thump.
The rolling vibration from the seismic truck caused a chunk of sandstone the size of a softball to break free from a waist-high hunk of the broken arch. The small chunk of rock came to rest in the mud beside something blue extending upward from beneath the larger piece of the fallen span.
Chuck gripped the top rail of the fence, his fingers cold and white. “See that?” he said to Janelle, his voice shaking.
He vaulted the fence and sprinted toward the waist-high chunk of stone. The pungent smell of crushed sagebrush filled the cold morning air. When he neared the line of shattered rocks, another scent mixed with the smell of smashed sage, something metallic.
The scent of blood.
Table of Contents
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
PART TWO
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER
15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
PART THREE
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT SCOTT GRAHAM