High Country

by Nevada Barr

  Anna trailed Mary up the short, well-worn path from pavement to cabin. Vehicles were not allowed in camp, but there were tire tracks frozen in the soil. Big tires, and new. The tread was crisp, cutting deep. Probably a truck or an SUV. Anna could see gouges where the vehicle had been backed up to the railing as if to load or unload something. Given the length of time and the weather since Dixon Crofter quit his quarters, the tracks had been made after he’d disappeared.

  Unless Dixon kept a secret treasure in his little cloth house, there shouldn’t have been much worth stealing. Climbing gear was expensive but didn’t have much resale value, and it looked as if the new guys not only had their own stuff but enough to be cavalier with it. Four brand-new but filthy backpacks leaned against the railing on the narrow porch. No attempt had been made to protect them from the elements.

  Mary rapped smartly on the screen door. Anna hurried up the steps to be near when whatever was going to happen happened. As she squeezed past the hibachi and the packs she was hit with a familiar smell. It was so out of place it took her a moment to place it. Diesel fuel; something nearby was soaked with either diesel or gasoline and oil.

  The door opened and they were greeted by a gust of cigarette smoke and a boyish voice saying: “Well, did you get your . . .” It broke off when its owner saw them instead of whomever he was expecting. “Yeah. Hey. Um, can I do something for you?”

  Anna looked over Mary’s shoulder. The door’s screen added its veil to the smoke nearly obscuring their intended host. Dark-haired, short in stature, confused and mildly alarmed were the only impressions she could glean.

  “May we come in?” she asked before Mary could begin her tirade. From a sudden slump of the girl’s shoulders, Anna suspected she’d chickened out anyway. All the better. Mary was there to get them inside. A scene on the doorstep that got them banned would be of little use.

  For a second Anna’s request was met with silence, then: “Hey, man . . . I don’t know . . .” and the shadowy face turned as he looked inside for guidance. Anna poked Mary gently in the ribs.

  “Please, sir,” she said like a child accustomed to being nudged into good manners by her elders.

  The plea put Anna in mind of little Oliver Twist with his empty porridge bowl, and she smiled.

  “Yeah. Sure. I guess,” the doorkeep managed, and the screen was opened. Anna pushed Mary into the stifling darkness. Inside it was eighty degrees or better, the woodstove crackling and smoking with too much wet wood.

  “Uh, sit down if you can find a spot,” their host said uncertainly.

  The place looked as if frat boys had been having a three-day orgy in an REI warehouse. Equipment, new by the look of it, and backcountry apparel were scattered and heaped so thickly not even a footpath remained across the plank floor. Dixon’s storage boxes and cook area had been looted. Opened cans of food, dirty dishes and socks were mixed haphazardly. Whoever these people were, they clearly knew nothing about housekeeping in bear country. No grizzlies were left in Yosemite, but the black bear population was thriving and had long ago learned the delights of people food. With this largesse, Anna was surprised bears hadn’t already torn out the side of the tent.

  As her eyes adjusted she realized part of the piled debris was in human form. Amid the flotsam on the cot to the left of the stove were two men. One leaned against the wooden frame of the cabin, legs splayed, one foot on the floor, one on the cot. Between a beer and a cigarette both hands were spoken for. Hunkered at the cot’s foot was another man with a bottle of bourbon held by the neck. No glass. He, too, had a cigarette, but his lay forgotten on a saucer at his feet, a long white ash highlighting a burn mark on the plate.

  Masked by beard stubble, smoke and the paucity of light, Anna couldn’t guess their ages. They felt older than most climbers. Thirties. Maybe forties. The habitual ease with which they embraced their various dissipations spoke of long practice. Neither of them looked like athletes. “Beer” was significantly overweight and “Whiskey’s” bare and dirty feet had been inexpertly bandaged in the wake of serious blistering. Despite the haze of their chosen painkillers, both looked miserable.

  “Is this okay?” Anna heard Mary ask as she gingerly lifted a box of gym socks, still in their wrappers, from the cabin’s only chair.

  “Yeah. Sure,” said the man who’d admitted them, the only one yet to speak.

  Mary sat. Anna studied the doorman. At five-ten or so and maybe one-sixty, he was younger and fitter than his tent-mates. His weight was muscle. In the heat he’d stripped down to slacks and a tank-top—slacks, not jeans or sweats but much-abused pleated-front pants in charcoal gray. From the waist up he was ripped and carved with washboard stomach muscles hinted at through the thin undershirt. A poster boy for Gold’s Gym. Though his legs were encased in gabardine, Anna guessed the glamour stopped at his belt. Men who buffed for show rather than practical application tended to give short shrift to areas not readily apparent in the bathroom mirror.

  His face was surprisingly pleasant, so Anna forgave him the action-figure body. He was younger than his companions, not much more than twenty-one or so. A nice smile lit up a baby face roughened by a blue-black beard shadow. The kid probably had to shave twice a day.

  To cover the awkwardness he took a swig from a beer camouflaged among its fallen comrades on the countertop. Even with a drink in his hand he didn’t look as dissolute as the men on the cot. Several years in their company would fix that. At a loss for what to do, he fell back on early training. Gesturing at the fat man slumped in the corner he began: “This is Kurt Cl—”

  “This isn’t a fucking garden party,” the fat one, the one Anna’d been thinking of as “Beer,” snarled before his last name could be completed. Either these slimeballs were hiding or secrecy had become a way of life. Probably the former. The signs were there and writ large.

  Parks, like tropical islands, were out of the way, distanced from the “mainland.” Like islands, they attracted men and women who wanted to be anonymous, needed to remove themselves from the real world with its demands that one’s metaphorical and literal papers be in order.

  Had they not been encamped in the missing Dixon Crofter’s cabin posing as climbers or hikers or whatever the hell they were trying to be, Anna wouldn’t have thought to connect them with wilderness. They reeked of the city, right down to the fuel smell that permeated the place.

  “You want to diddle this mother and daughter act you take it elsewhere,” Beer—Kurt Cl—finished.

  Anna was deciding whether anger or tears would best suit the situation insofar as finding out what these bozos were doing in Dixon’s place when Mary took the decision away from her.

  “We came here to find out what you guys think you’re doing in Dix’s tent,” she said hotly. “You’ve just about trashed it as far as I can see. You’ve got no business—”

  Cloaked in nothing but youthful innocence and righteous wrath, Mary had leapt in over her head. The doorman was taking the tongue-lashing and managing to look sheepish, but his two brothers in squalor were shifting in a way Anna didn’t like. Faces hardened under the boozy blur, that instant sobriety hard drinkers can affect after enough years at it. Limbs stiffened and moved to positions of greater mobility.

  The door banged open and a man of middling height and delicate bone structure pushed in.

  “If that bitch’s cunt were as hot as the shower I might be tempted to like this shithole.” The words were barely out when he noticed they had company. Already Anna detested him. He’d used her least favorite word in the English language. The next few minutes did nothing to change her mind.

  Vulgar jocularity vanished. He took in first Anna, then Mary, exposed in the gray wash of light from the fading day. His eyes were dark and sharp. They were also long-lashed and almond-shaped, and Anna might have found them pretty had his vocabulary not already established him as a truly ugly individual.

  Mary’s Goldilocks good looks didn’t soften his demeanor. With no immediate use for her
, she was just another object. “Get them out of here,” he said. He didn’t snap out the words or raise his voice, yet it was a command. There was no question that he was the leader of the strange little wolf pack.

  Not wolves,Anna thought as she took hold of Mary’s hand.Hyenas. There was more of the vicious scavenger about them than the clean-kill predator.

  “Let’s go,” Anna said.

  Looking close to tears, Mary rose and followed Anna toward the door.

  As Anna passed the dark-eyed man, he grabbed her arm. Her whole body flinched with the effort of not driving her elbow into his larynx.

  “What’re you two doing here?” he asked in his even boardroom voice.

  The lies that sprang to mind—Dix’s aunt, mother’s friend used to live here—couldn’t be voiced. Mary would know she was lying and, being a bright girl, would begin to wonder why.

  This close to freedom, Mary’s courage returned. “We wanted to see who was squatting in Dix’s house,” she said. The black karma of the place had robbed her voice of righteousness and the words came out sounding like an apology.

  His hand on her arm, Anna could smell the man’s aftershave and the scent of the hapless girl, probably a maid at Yosemite Lodge, whom he used for showering and other bodily needs, and though the short winter dusk was nearly spent, she could see his face clearly. Eyes and skin and an abundance of beautifully barbered hair lifted an unremarkable face to where it might be called handsome. In the instant Anna studied it, it underwent a startling transformation. Ice, crudeness and steel vanished as if they’d never been. In their place his eyes sparkled with warmth and his mouth curved in a smile so nice his lips seemed to grow fuller.

  “You’re friends of Dixon’s? Why didn’t you say so? Did any of you jerks offer the ladies a drink?” Still holding on to Anna but not so tightly now, he turned his attention to the young doorman. “Bro, get out a couple more beers.”

  But for the salon hair, all at once he looked and sounded genuine, welcoming. Anna was not impressed. The “C” word was lodged firmly in her craw. He would have to rescue a gaggle of little girls from burning buildings for her to soften toward him. And then there was the “Bro.” Intuition told her it was not short forbrother but a way of covering the fact that he didn’t want names bandied about.

  “Where do you know old Dix from?” he was asking as he cordially turned Anna to bring the party back indoors. “Fellas, shake a leg!”

  The others looked baffled but shuffled around in oafish domesticity, clearing places to sit, moving piles of gear and clothes from one place to another, getting in one another’s way and generally accomplishing nothing.

  In the span of a few sentences the new man had turned a viper’s nest into something resemblingThe Country Bears meetI Love Lucy.

  Anna felt plucking at her jacket sleeve. “We should go, Anna. It’s getting late.” Being nobody’s fool, Mary wasn’t ready to forget a whole lot of nasty because a teaspoon of honey had just been forced down her throat.

  Anna needed to stay, see if anything rose to the surface from the muddy depths of these guys, but she didn’t want to risk losing Mary’s respect or friendship. She might need it again. Turning to the man still holding her right biceps captive, she sought his help.

  “It reallyis kind of late,” she said in that oddly porous voice women adopt when they want to be talked into an indiscretion yet maintain plausible deniability.

  He laughed. It was a charming laugh, not at all the laugh of a man who had recently used, then verbally abused a hotel maid. “It’s not even six o’clock. One beer.” This he directed at Mary, pretending he believed her to be a woman of drinking age. “Any friend of Dix’s got to be a friend of ours.”

  Mary was immune to the double flattery of being assumed older and friends with a man she admired.

  “You want to stay, Anna?”

  “Okay. One beer,” Anna capitulated gracefully. The doorman and the slimeballs were introduced respectively as Bobby, Billy and Ben. Billy, to clear up old issues, amended it to Billy Kurt to cover the earlier lapse. Like the well-brought-up girl that she was, Mary was careful to remember their names and use them often in conversation.

  Anna didn’t bother. If she mentally squinted she could almost see the a.k.a. followed by “Turk,” “Mojo” and “Junior.” The leader gave his name as Mark. He seemed comfortable with it; if it wasn’t his real name it was one he’d used before.

  An hour passed amiably enough. Mary charmed by her mere existence, Mark by his art. Mark let them know he was a dear old friend of Dix’s. Unwittingly Mary fed Mark his answers by embedding them in her questions.

  Did you meet Dix climbing?

  He’d met Dix climbing.

  Was it on that expedition to Patagonia?

  Yes, it was on that expedition to Patagonia.

  From there, Mark managed without help, building on general human experiences. Dix had offered the use of his cabin should Mark ever come to Yosemite. He’d arrived to find the tent cabin empty and was hanging out, climbing, waiting for Dix to return. Without coming out and saying so, he managed to get across that Billy Kurt, Bobby and Ben were recent acquaintances who’d horned in on his quarters when the weather turned cold.

  Anna listened and watched. By the end of the beer she might have believed Mark’s version of events. He was that good. But she noticed Mark gave out very little information, yet deftly managed to get everything Mary knew about Dixon Crofter, his disappearance and the subsequent search.

  And she remembered the man he’d been when he’d first opened the door, before he knew they were there.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Anna and Mary skipped cocoa at Yosemite Lodge. The atmosphere of Dix’s invaded tent had left its stench, both physical and metaphysical. Anna needed to be alone, Mary needed to call her mom. Both wanted to get to a hot shower and shampoo the reek of cigarette smoke out of their hair.

  These were luxuries Anna was to be denied. When she entered her room her dorm mates were in a flutter. The two of them were young, just out of high school, and had fled California’s central valley agricultural towns seeking adventure and romance in the high Sierra. Except for housekeeping habits that rivaled those of the Billy/Ben/Bobbsey triplets in Crofter’s cabin, they were pleasant enough. Anna considered them dandelion fluff: lovely lighthearted, light-headed girls whose lives and thoughts were dispersed by any wind that blew their way.

  During the first few days, she’d surreptitiously questioned them about Trish Spencer and learned only that she was “cool” and “fun.” Anna suspected Trish, older by nearly ten years, was one of the winds that affected the two, blowing them into parties and introducing them to cute boys.

  “Boy, it’s a good thing you showed up,” the plump one, Nicky, said as she pulled on her black uniform trousers. “Tiny’s doing her Gestapo-waitress bit.” The effort of standing on one leg while threading the other through a polyester tube proved too great and Nicky fell over sideways onto her bed. Further communication was lost to wild gales of laughter from Nicky and her partner in inanity, Cricket. It went on. And on. Anna guessed their natural good cheer had been chemically enhanced.

  Drugs in the National Parks wasn’t new. In Yosemite it was an old story, dating from the classic drug days of the sixties and seventies, complete with hippies, “pigs” and altered states. Since the early seventies, when the drug culture centered in San Francisco had decided to make Yosemite its summer playground, illegal substances had become part of the park’s law enforcement history. The jail, a bleak modern set of cells walled into an historic stone building above the fire station, was kept busy housing the perpetrators of assaults, batteries and disturbers of the peace whose uncivil interactions were fueled by consumable evils imported from cities.

  “What’s Tiny on about?” Anna asked when the giggling finally subsided. The toking of busgirls was not her problem.

  “They got this last-minute reservation for thirty-two. A wedding party or someth
ing. We got to take another shift. You too. We’re to wait tables. Big promotion. She said if you didn’t show she would fire your sorry ass.”

  The gale began again. While it rippled and guffawed at full blow, Anna took off her reeking clothes, stuffed them into the laundry bag, then began to dress for work.

  Cricket—the girl’s given name was Charlotte but she was such a bouncy, chirpy individual she’d been called Cricket since grade school—recovered first.

  “She didnot say ‘fire your sorry ass.’ ”

  This set them off again. Anna finished dressing.

  “What did she say?” she asked mildly when they subsided.

  “ ‘Find other work,’ ” Nicky admitted. This was too banal to elicit laughter even from those primed for it, and the girls began stuffing themselves into the rest of their clothes.

  Anna stopped at the door before she left. They were good girls, if silly.

  “Straighten up,” she warned. “A blind woman can see you’re high. Keep a lid on it oryou’ll be looking for other work.” Leaving them, it occurred to her how forgiving some occupations were. She could overlook coworkers loaded on this job. Worst case, a plate might get broken, a meal delivered cold. A stoned busgirl wasn’t a threat to life.

  Anna smiled. Not being a hard-ass was actually quite restful to the human spirit.

  The dining room was quiet, most of the regular diners gone or finishing up. Tiny was waiting as Anna came in through the employees’ entrance by the kitchens. In a building as old and fine as the Ahwahnee, even the regions behind the metaphorical baize doors had a sense of grandeur: hallways were spacious, ceilings high.

  “The girls said you’d gone AWOL,” Tiny said in a voice that managed to make an accusation out of every statement. “If you hadn’t showed you would have been looking for another job.”

  Anna hated being lectured for doing right simply because another person had gotten their dander up thinking she might do wrong.