“Carrying a loaded pack takes some getting used to,” Chris sympathized, then continued filling her in. “He announces himself with a rattle. He stands in front of the lean-to and shakes the rattle very quietly. It’s an eerie sound,” he added.
So far, Charlotte had taken a pretty whimsical attitude toward the whole affair, but she was beginning to get apprehensive. “Is Lieutenant Tracey at his lean-to now?” she asked. She suspected she’d feel more comfortable once she’d gone over the game plan with him.
“I would guess so. You’re supposed to be acting like real campers. There’s no problem with your talking to him, but you should make it look as if you just struck up an acquaintance. On the way to the latrines, or something.”
“Speaking of the latrines …” she said.
“I’ll show you where they are. Also, where to hang up your food so the bears can’t get at it. We’ve been fortunate in not having much of a bear problem at this campground, but it’s because we’ve been very careful.”
“Everything I have’s in foil bags,” she said.
“Which reminds me, the garbage gets packed out. We have a carry-in, carry-out policy. The water in the pond is only for drinking; there’s no washing up. You can throw your gray water out behind your lean-to. Any questions?”
Charlotte shook her head.
“Well, if you think of any, I’ll be here.”
The lean-to that Sargent showed her to stood near a brook on the west side of the campsite, just off the Saddle Trail. Of the nine lean-tos, it was the farthest from the ranger’s cabin. In front was a yard consisting of a patch of earth worn bare by the feet of previous campers and studded with boulders that served the function of stools. A twisting, rocky path led down to the pond. After unpacking, Charlotte went down to the pond to fill a pot with water for her dinner. Squatting at the water’s edge, she looked out at the view. The sun was going down behind the Saddle, and its rays tinted Pamola Peak an apricot yellow and bathed the headwall in a golden glow. By some quirk of the local wind patterns, the surface of the pond was unruffled despite a stiff breeze, and the changing patterns of the clouds and the colored shadows on the cliffs were reflected in it as clearly as if it were a mirror. On the opposite shore, the trunks of a grove of white birches gleamed like polished silver in the twilight. The water itself was a peculiar pearly-green, like an exquisite celadon glaze. Charlotte had noticed this same color at lakes in the Alps. Maybe it was caused by the lack of vegetation; her trail guide had said nothing grew in the pond because of the deep penetration of ice in winter. In any case, it was a perfect paradise: still and clear and quiet, except for the occasional warble of a songbird—and the eerie roar of the wind. The wind had come up quite suddenly shortly after Charlotte’s arrival, and blew unceasingly, sounding at one minute like a high-pitched hum and the next like the dull roar of distant surf.
Returning to her lean-to, she proceeded to set up her camp stove. Despite the somewhat complicated directions, this presented no difficulties, but getting it lighted did. She hadn’t counted on the wind when she’d packed only one box of matches. Every time she lit a match, the wind would blow it out. She tried to find a more sheltered spot, to no avail. She was just about through her box when Tracey came to her rescue with a cigarette lighter. Within minutes, the blue flame under her little kettle was burning merrily away.
After he had gotten the stove going, Tracey joined her on the raised sill of her lean-to to watch the colors on the headwall change from gold to pink to rose to purple as the sun withdrew over the western ridge of the mountain.
“Can I interest you in some chicken curry?” she asked once the water was boiling. She held up her foil packet. “It says it feeds two.”
“I wouldn’t count on it. I just had beef stroganoff, which also said it fed two, but I managed to polish it off quite nicely all by myself. I will take a cup of coffee, though. Once you’ve mixed up your dinner, that is.”
“Sure,” said Charlotte. “How about European-style cappuccino,” she said, holding up another packet. “I got a little carried away in the camping supply store,” she confessed. “I even have chocolate mousse for dessert.”
“Chocolate mousse?”
“Add water and stir. It’s my style of cooking. Want some?”
Tracey looked tentative. “I’ll give it a try.”
“What have you been doing?” asked Charlotte as she stirred the freeze-dried chicken curry into the boiling water.
Tracey tossed a peanut in the direction of a bold little chipmunk perched on a nearby rock. “Getting organized. Without being too obvious about it. There are four trails leading out of here, and we’ll have people on all of them. Though he may not use a trail.”
“If he’s smart, he won’t.”
“It’s pretty tough going if you don’t. There’s so much blow-down around that it’s next to impossible to get through. I also went over the hikers’ register for June ninth.”
“Find anything?”
Tracey shook his head. “Nothing that jumped out at me. We’ll go over it in more detail later; match the names up with the names on the entrance permits. At least there weren’t that many: only twenty-three.”
“That’s good,” Charlotte said. She poured some hot water into Tracey’s cup and then added the contents of the cappuccino packet. The enticing smell of mocha filled the cool air.
“The search and rescue team was out looking for the bolt on the headwall this morning,” Tracey continued. “They didn’t find anything.”
“Which means that Clough must have been right about the retrievable bolt.”
“I reckon,” said Tracey. He whistled and then tossed out another peanut. The chipmunk scampered over, took the peanut in its mouth, then raced back to the safety of his rock.
“Brazen little beggar,” said Tracey as he took the cup of cappuccino.
“They’re probably used to campers.” Sitting back down, Charlotte took the first bite of her dinner. The sauce wasn’t bad, but what was supposed to be chicken tasted like wedges of damp cardboard.
Tracey peered at her over his cup, his blue eyes dancing. “Leaves something to be desired, does it?” he said in response to her grimace.
“This may be the way I like to cook, but it’s not the way I like to eat.” She looked at him accusingly. “What’s this about making me the decoy?” she teased. “Haven’t you got any girl rangers?”
“Yes,” he said. “But they’re just that—girls. Pamola has a taste for older women.” He grinned. “For that, I can’t say I really blame him. I was pretty sure you’d go for it. Nervous?” he asked.
“A little. Like before a big scene. Actually, the thought of someone dressed up as Pamola doesn’t scare me,” she said. “But the thought of the pistol crossbow does. Where’s your lean-to?” she asked.
“Over there,” he said, nodding at the roof of a lean-to about fifty yards in front of her own. It could just be seen through the trees. “But I’m not going to be there. Pyle will be, but not me.”
“Where the hell are you going to be?” she protested. “You’d better be somewhere close by. You’re supposed to be protecting me.”
His gaze fell on a boulder the size of a small car that was nestled in the underbrush just in front of her lean-to. “In the puckerbrush right behind that rock,” he said. “Armed and ready. Just in case Pamola decides to get notional.”
“If Pamola decides to get notional, as you put it, you’d better damned well be armed and ready,” she said. “And a crack shot, besides.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “He’ll be dead and done for.”
After Tracey had returned to his lean-to, Charlotte did her washing up, which wasn’t all that easy without a sink, and then unrolled her sleeping bag. The wind had picked up, and she set up her bed at the rear of the lean-to to be as far out of it as possible, and to be as far away as possible from her expected visitor. The noises of the campsite—the banging of the latrine door, the occasional peal of laugh
ter, the clinking of pots and pans—were dying down as the sun descended behind the mountain. The campsite was retiring for the evening. Charlotte thought of Tracey, and wondered if he had already taken up residence in the underbrush behind the rock. After one last visit to the latrine—she didn’t want to have to get up in the middle of the night—she set the alarm on her watch for one A.M. Despite what Sargent had said about going to sleep as usual, she didn’t want to be caught off guard. Then she took off her boots and climbed into her sleeping bag, fully clothed. It wasn’t the most comfortable bed she had ever slept in, but it wasn’t as bad as she had expected, either. Her inflatable pillow was actually quite comfortable, as long as she avoided the revolver underneath. Most of all, it was warm. Once the sun went down, it had become quite cold, and she was happy to be snuggled into her down-filled bag. For reading material she had brought along The Maine Woods. Switching on her lantern, she started reading about Thoreau’s trip up the West Branch to Katahdin, but found her eyelids getting heavy at about the same time that Thoreau found himself in the cauldron of clouds enveloping the summit.
Setting down the book, she turned out her lantern. No sooner had she done so than she heard a rustling in the underbrush behind the lean-to. Was it Tracey, taking his place? But he was supposed to be sleeping behind the rock in front of her lean-to, not to the rear of it. Maybe it was the prankster, paying an early visit. As the rustling came closer, she groped for the revolver, and then lay there, her ears straining. Even closer now. Finally, she decided to get up. Crawling on her knees to the edge of the platform, with the revolver in one hand, she peered around the side wall of the lean-to.
Standing in the underbrush, chomping away as placidly as a cow, was a mother moose, and at her side was a big-eared, long-legged calf, still wearing the woolly coat of the newborn.
It wasn’t the first time she had seen a moose. She had seen several from the Interstate, and one up close: an enormous bull moose standing full square in the middle of a dirt road. Rather then getting out of the way, he had proceeded to trot slowly in front of her car for the best part of half a mile, as if he had wanted to see her safely home. But she had never failed to be astonished at how big they were, and amused by the ungainly appearance created by their oversized heads and long, spindly legs.
Sensing her, the moose turned her head and cocked her ears. Charlotte stayed stock-still, having heard that one should beware of a female with a calf. But the moose must have been as used to campers as the chipmunk had been, because she calmly turned back to her dinner, nipping the branch of a sapling with her protruding upper lip and then yanking her head backward and stripping off the leaves. She finished by biting off the tasty bud at the end, and then moved on, leaving a bare branch in place on the tree. When her calf got too far away, she would grunt, and the calf would come running back.
Charlotte was turning around when she noticed a familiar round face watching the moose from behind the boulder in the underbrush. She climbed back into her sleeping bag, reassured that she was in good hands.
The soft beeping of her watch awakened her at one. The wind had picked up, and it now sounded less like a whine or a hum than the plaintive wailing of a chorus of spirits. She was reminded again of Pamola, the evil spirit of the night wind. The walls of the lean-to offered scant protection. The wind rushed through the chinking as if it wasn’t there. The open side of the structure formed a frame for the night scene, in which the ghostly shapes of the birches swayed in the wind like emissaries from the underworld. Somewhere a saw-whet owl let out its peculiar, beeping cry, like the warning beep of a construction vehicle that is backing up. With a shiver, she snuggled back down into her sleeping bag to await Pamola’s arrival. The plank floor now felt as hard as a rock to her stiffening muscles, and she tossed and turned for several minutes before realizing that her foam mat had migrated across the floor of the lean-to. Moving it back into place, however, would require getting out of her sleeping bag, which she wasn’t eager to do. She could tell from the feel of the air on her cheek that it was cold—she would guess the temperature had dropped to somewhere around freezing—and the wind made it feel even colder. No, she definitely did not want to get out of her sleeping bag. But there was also the matter of her bladder, which was pressing uncomfortably against her lower abdomen. What to do? If she got up, would she alarm Tracey unnecessarily? Or, more importantly, would she risk scaring off Pamola? Deciding that there was no point in jeopardizing the whole operation on account of a foam rubber pad and a full bladder, she pulled up the hood of her sleeping bag and waited.
Lulled by the roar of the wind, she found herself transported to that state between waking and sleeping where thoughts seem to float up like bubbles from the unconscious and then pop on the conscious surface of the mind. That’s why she didn’t recognize the sound at first. It was a soft, monotonous, susurrant sound: shh-shh, shh-shh, shh-shh, like the pounding of the blood in her ears. It was only when the rhythm grew faster and the volume louder that she realized it was the shaking of a rattle. Reaching for the walkie-talkie next to her sleeping bag, she pushed the button five times in rapid succession. Then she groped for the gun under her pillow. She had just laid her hand on it when he appeared in front of her lean-to.
She had been expecting something on the order of a gorilla costume, something silly and frivolous. The Pamola prankster, they had called him, as if he were playing an innocent game. But he was more like a demon from your worst nightmare. He stood in the center of the open side of her lean-to wearing a gigantic birdlike mask with freakish, staring eyes whose whites gleamed in the moonlight, and a rack of moose antlers that must have been five feet across. His chest was bare and hairless, and painted with a chevron design of black and yellow stripes. Around his neck he wore a collar embroidered with a geometric design that matched the cuffs on his wrists, and a small triangular medicine bag made of beaded leather. His loins were covered with a leather breechcloth, and his shoulders with a long cape made of some rough black fur, maybe bear.
He was all the world’s most frightening gods—Pluto, Osiris, Shiva—rolled into one. He was all the bad things you had ever done, all the bad people you had ever known, all the bad memories tucked away at the back of your mind. Mesmerized by the repetitive shaking of the rattle, she sat up and watched, one hand still on the gun. Then she heard a chilling, high-pitched whine. At first she thought it was the saw-whet again. But then she realized that it had emerged from the throat of the beast: a tremolo of utter despair. His cry was followed by a quick, shrill, shriek of fear, which, she realized only after uttering it, had come from her own throat. And then he was gone.
“Halt!” Tracey shouted. Then he fired two warning shots, and took off into the underbrush after Pamola.
“I blew it,” she said for the tenth time. “I’m really sorry. I just plain blew it.” She was standing outside the ranger’s cabin an hour later with Tracey, Haverty, and Sargent. The others had all gone back to bed.
“No, you didn’t,” Tracey said. “You did exactly what you were supposed to do. You were supposed to be a camper who was frightened by Pamola, and that’s exactly what you were. You played your role perfectly.”
“We’re the ones who blew it,” Haverty said. He shook his head. “We had the people; we had the moonlight. I just don’t understand how he got past us. It was as if he just vaporized. The guy must be one hell of a hunter: he didn’t make a sound going through the woods.”
“He was probably wearing moccasins,” said Charlotte.
“Even so,” Haverty said. “We’ll look for his trail in the morning. At least we know for sure now that he headed off in the direction of the Saddle Trail. We’ve got a ranger here who’s an expert tracker. Maybe he’ll be able to figure out where he went from here.”
“Maybe he really is Pamola,” said Tracey, “and he just flew away to his cave up on the mountain.” He looked up at the Knife Edge, where the moon rested on the edge of the black silhouette of the headwall like a juggler�
�s ball on an outstretched arm.
“The old ranger who used to live here told me that Pamola lived in a hole just below Pamola Peak,” said Haverty. “He said he would come out on moonlit nights to roll the moon across the Knife Edge. See how it seems to be hung up there?” He nodded at the headwall.
They looked up at the moon, which did indeed seem to be stuck on one of the peaks on the Knife Edge.
“He used to say that the moon needed help getting over South Peak,” Haverty continued, “and that’s where Pamola would come in.” He shook his head at the memory. “He had a lot of stories about Pamola. And if you spend enough time here, you start believing some of ’em.”
Haverty talked for a few minutes more about the old ranger’s Pamola stories, and then excused himself to go to bed.
After yet another apology, Charlotte too said good night, and headed off in the direction of her lean-to. Though she carried a flashlight, she didn’t need it. The glowing disc that Pamola was pushing over the hump of South Peak shed light enough for her to see.
Back at lean-to number nine, she slid her foam mat back into place, climbed into her sleeping bag, and fell immediately to sleep.
10
The birds woke her at five A.M. They sang with the abandon of birds in early spring, joyous and exultant. Charlotte recognized some of them from their songs—the Swainson’s thrush, the white-throated sparrow, the chickadee, the winter wren—but there were others whose songs were unfamiliar. The bass note in this symphony was sounded by the thumping of the latrine door. The campsite was coming awake. She opened her eyes to the sight of the tips of the spruces and the new leaves on the birches bathed in the golden glow of first light. It was absolutely lovely, utterly still and clear. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been up this early. She breathed in the fresh air, and took note of the cloud of condensation as she exhaled. It was cold, but she felt as snug as a baby in a bunting in her warm sleeping bag. And despite the interruptions of the night before, she felt rested and relaxed.
Murder on High Page 14