High Country

by Nevada Barr

  Honesty was not the best policy. She decided on the intrinsically uninteresting yet seductive persona of a mid-level bookkeeper in payroll at the Ahwahnee Lodge.

  “Hi,” she said with moderate chipperness. “This is Angie Dickinson at the Ahwahnee.” The name had leapt from some mental archive. An alias was the one thing she’d forgotten to come up with. Hoping her quarry was too young to be conversant with Hollywood’s Ms. Dickinson, Anna waited.

  “Yeah?”

  A man of few words.

  “What relationship did you bear to Ms. Spencer?”

  “I’m her . . . Hang on.”

  By the muffled whump that followed, Anna guessed he’d covered the mouthpiece. What seemed like an excessively long time later, at least two full minutes, he came back on the line. “She got money coming or what?” he demanded.

  “Yes. But I’m going to have to ask you—”

  “Hang on.” Whump. Ninety seconds by the big hand on the wall behind Yosemite Lodge’s hostess station and he said: “How much?”

  Anna didn’t have to pretend to sound miffed. She had lost control of the interview and probably not to the monosyllabic Dickie, but to whomever he conferred with during the pauses.

  “It’s a good bit, sir, but first I’m going to have to ask you some questions.”

  “Wait a sec.” This conference was blessedly short. Abruptly he was in her ear again. “Forget the money. Trish left some stuff up there. Her stuff. What happened to it?”

  Anna was startled by the request and the unlikely order to “forget the money.” Obviously she’d missed something of real or perceived importance when she went through Trish’s relics.

  “You mean like her clothes and stuff?” she asked stupidly.

  “Yeah. Like that. What happened to it?”

  “I believe it was packed up and put into storage to send to her next of kin if it comes to that.”

  “You got it in storage? I want it.”

  “I don’t personally have it,” Anna countered. She wasn’t yet ready to turn him over to the NPS. “Ms. Spencer’s belongings go to her next of kin. What is your relationship with her.”

  Whump. Wait.

  “Her brother.”

  Anna didn’t believe that for a minute. “You have different last names,” she said sounding vague.

  “Yeah. She married that asshole Jerry Spencer.” Maybe Dickie was her brother; this nugget of history rolled off his tongue with the familiar contempt of a family feud.

  “Then Mr. Spencer needs to be notified—”

  “They’re divorced. You gonna give me that stuff or not? You got no right to keep it.”

  The wall had been hit. Anna would get no more. Not that she’d handled things brilliantly and gotten anything of much consequence prior to the metaphorical wall.

  “I don’t have anything to do with the deceased’s property,” she said primly. “You’ll have to call personnel.”

  Dickie hung up without even bothering to curse her for wasting his time.

  Whether Mr. Cauliff was brother, paramour or drug connection, he was singularly uninterested in Trish Spencer’s fate. He had not asked about the search, nor had he shown grief at her disappearance. When Anna intentionally referred to him as “next of kin” and Trish as “the deceased” he hadn’t protested—at least not audibly. Chief Ranger Knight said they’d found none of Trish’s relatives.

  Now suddenly she had a brother who showed no surprise or sadness at her probable demise and demanded her fancy shoes, electric curlers and cosmetics be returned immediately.

  Perhaps Dickie knew precisely what had happened to Trish Spencer, and had tried before to collect whatever it was he believed to be among her effects, and Trish had not survived the encounter.

  Anna bought yet another cup of coffee and further jangled her nerves as she sat outside on the lodge’s patio trying to figure out what she knew now that she hadn’t known when she’d crawled out of bed six hours earlier.

  Camp 4 had been festive late into the night. None of the men in Dix’s tent had corporeally participated in tossing her dorm room and assaulting her roommate. Billy “Beer” Kurt had dropped his companions at an unknown destination for nighttime winter camping. He’d returned, rekindled the party and told tales that the climbers of Camp 4 thought could foment a gold rush. Trish wore too much makeup and wrote to Dickie of finding a gold mine. Trish was a small-time dope dealer connected to a Dickie Cauliff in Mariposa. Dickie wanted something he believed Trish had left behind.

  Unable to put it together herself, Anna decided to invest a quarter and unload it on Lorraine. The chief ranger would be able to dispatch law enforcement to interview Cauliff, track down the red Ford Excursion and start an investigation into where Spencer was getting the dope.

  Lorraine’s secretary answered. The chief ranger was not in. She had been sent to Missoula, Montana, that morning. Leo Johnson, the deputy superintendent, was slated to teach a five-day wilderness management class there. At breakfast he’d broken a tooth trying to crack the shell of a Brazil nut with his bicuspids. The tooth had snapped above gum line, the woman insisted on sharing. He had to go to a dentist in Merced. Lorraine was to go teach in his place. Deputy Superintendent Johnson, however, would be back tomorrow.

  Anna refused the woman’s kind offer to take a message and hung up. Feeling abandoned and having no more leads to follow up on, she mentally turned back into a waitress without even the aid of a proper phone booth.

  Life as a waitress was pretty decent, relaxing actually, until she went to work. As she passed through the kitchen and said “hi” to the chef, she didn’t receive her usual noncommittal grunt. Jim Wither, occupied with chopping celery—a task beneath his dignity and customarily reserved for the salad chef—gave her a look of such black hatred it literally stopped her in her tracks. Glaring at her balefully, he chopped with greater vehemence till, with a burst of rabbit courage, she escaped his cobra stare, afraid for his fingers if not her throat.

  Her first two orders were slammed on the counter with such force it was a wonder the plates didn’t break. Every interaction was accompanied by a poisonous scowl. Wither had too much professional pride to screw up the food, but anything he could do to make her look a fool and screw up her tips was done: bread was late or cold, side orders were late, wrong, cold or all three. If she needed anything special or rushed he ignored her. Had Scott not been willing to step in, she would have suffered more verbal abuse from the diners than was already being heaped upon her.

  Halfway through the dinner rush, desperate to get hot rolls for a table of people who’d evidently decided man could live on bread alone, Anna decided to fetch them from the kitchen herself rather than fight through the wordless malice flowing from the head chef.

  The Ahwahnee’s kitchen was large and, despite its age, gleaming. Wither kept it surgically clean and organized with military precision. As she entered this sanctum sanctorum, the bustling of the underchefs hiccoughed. One looked at her with the surreptitious sympathy of a fellow sufferer. The other two let their eyes slide away without recognition. Jim Wither’s inexplicable animosity made her dangerous to associate with. Cooties, like mumps, were ten times worse when contracted as an adult. Only Scott behaved normally. He gave her a wink and a shrug before returning to his drizzling and chocolate curling.

  An island of warmth in the cold war Jim Wither was waging, Anna felt a sudden surge of affection for the assistant chef. She winked back and was rewarded by a smile that would reassure children and make nuns go weak at the knees.

  Encouraged, Anna tried to recapture that middle-aged-waitress invisibility she had so lately belied, and slunk through the counters and pots toward the warming ovens beside the oversized gas range. She was opening the oven door when Wither shouted.

  “Out!”

  The violent bark of sound startled her and she banged her elbow on a countertop, momentarily disorienting herself with the explosion of pain from the misnamed funny bone.

 
“Out!” was shouted again and: “Look out.”

  “Christ!”

  Then she was in the air, her toes slapping cabinet doors as she whirled past.

  A crash.

  A scream.

  She was on the ground again a couple of yards from the ovens. Scott stood between her and the gas range. Water steamed and streamed over the floor. Underchefs cowered on the far side of the kitchen’s central island. Dark eyes, sunken and burning like hot coals in his pale, fleshless face, Jim Wither stood to Scott’s other side. The cadaverous chef was trembling as if an emotion too great for his being raged through his wasted frame.

  The abruptly fragmented world coalesced.

  Wither had knocked over—or thrown—a pot of boiling water that landed where Anna had been standing. Had Scott Wooldrich not snatched her up and moved her, she would have been scalded from waist to ankle. Scott’s apron and trousers were wet. Anna hoped they’d saved him from being burned. The back of his right arm was an angry red where the boiling water had splashed him when he’d stepped in to save her skin.

  The sight of burns on him made her angrier than if they had been on her own body. Grateful as she was for the rescue, she now owed Scott, if not a pound of flesh, then at least an ounce or two.

  The slow boil that had simmered on her mental back burner since Jim Wither had begun his vendetta went over the top.

  Stepping around Scott, she faced the chef. “What in God’s name is your problem? Did I run over your dog? Make a pass at your wife? Tell me for Chrissake. I’ll apologize—hell, I’ll grovel. What is it?”

  The quiet after this brief interrogative tirade was absolute. No choppers chopped. No pans clanked. The spilled pot’s fellow ceased to boil.

  Tiny’s sharp voice cut through the palpable silence. “What is going on here?” she demanded.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Anna said. She did not look away from Wither. There was something wrong with the man and she wasn’t sure if it was overblown prima-donna or homicidal tendencies. Another three gallons of scalding water stood at his elbow. If he so much as looked in that direction, Anna would take him down. Better an undignified brawl on a wet floor than getting burned.

  “What are you doing in the kitchen?”

  Tiny’s voice cut at the back of Anna’s neck. She ignored it.

  Unblinking, Wither held her gaze. Tremors she’d noticed before traveled up from his hands till his head shook on his neck in a palsy. The flush of anger drained from his face leaving it paler than usual and covered in a sickly sheen of sweat. He broke eye contact and looked past Anna to Scott or Tiny or one of the underchefs. What, if anything, was communicated, Anna couldn’t say. She’d not yet reached the place where it was safe to divide her attention.

  Wither came back to life in the sense that the peculiar mix of rigidity and trembling broke into a more ambulatory pattern.

  “Get back to work,” he snapped. “Clean this water up. Now. Now. Now!”

  The kitchen muttered and hummed. Wither shot Anna one more hard look. This time it seemed more searching than menacing. “Rolls’ll be hot,” he said and turned his back on her.

  Suffering a touch of palsy herself, Anna returned to her task at the oven. Scott was still near—pleasantly so—a shield for her back, a screen for her momentary weakness.

  “Are you all right?” he whispered. His mouth close to her ear, she could smell mint on his breath, or maybe parsley. Whatever it was, she liked it.

  “I’m okay.” She was glad to have the business of loading fresh bread into baskets. “How about you? The back of your arm doesn’t look too good.”

  “I’ll live. Look, I don’t know what got into Jim tonight but I . . . You want to get a drink after work? Unwind. Bad-mouth Wither?”

  Anna laughed and turned, baskets in hand. “My treat,” she said. “You saved my life. Let me buy you a beer.”

  Delivering her hard-won rolls, Anna suffered a small maelstrom of thoughts and feelings. Had mayhem been attempted? What had caused Jim Wither to take against her so suddenly and vehemently? Why did Scott wish to have a drink with her? Friendship? Boredom? A taste for older women? Professionally, it was good to get this chance to sound him out. As an affianced woman, she doubted she should be looking forward to it quite as much as she was.

  Briefly, she wondered how many officers of the law were married when they went into undercover work. And how many were still married when they came out of it. When one donned a new world, the rules, moves and traditions of the old dropped away. Without conscious decision the unthinkable was thought, the unacceptable became the norm. Lines one learned never to cross shifted or vanished altogether.

  Slipping off to the staff bathroom, Anna took a moment to pull herself together. She was merely having a drink with a potential source of information, not committing adultery with the entire Knicks team. Her nerves, usually dependable, had grown frayed. The high drama of the spilled or hurled cauldron oddly enough wasn’t the most wearing factor. It was the cheek-by-jowl parade of the small and annoying: a room searched while she was out, a surly “brother,” unsettling undercurrents first in Camp 4 then the Ahwahnee’s kitchen. Of all the things Anna hated, high on the list were secrets she was not privy to.

  Since coming to Yosemite Valley she’d had a sense of a dark river flowing below the surface, a cold current which had swept away four young people. She credited this ambient evil with bringing professional thugs into her dorm room; hikers smelling of petrol, with new boots, into Dixon Crofter’s tent cabin; dope smoke that paralyzed lungs and made an obsessive culinary expert so angry he’d accidentally or in the throes of black passion nearly scalded her half to death.

  These anomalous secrets to which she was not privy might not be connected. The metaphorical river whose undertow tugged at her mind was not necessarily of a piece. Secrets were like rabbits. If you got two in January, by year’s end you had two hundred.

  Secrets corrupted. Camp 4 was tainted. The Ahwahnee, James Wither, were part of something bigger; maybe he was just a half-crazy cook with a grievance and the corruption centered around the Yosemite Lodge, where Mark despoiled maids. Maybe it was fostered by the NPS staff. Anna couldn’t begin to guess. She was severed from the society of rangers more completely than if she had, in truth, been a waitress. As a real concessions employee she would have been allowed to make friends.

  Lest she grow too philosophical—or maudlin—she focused on being a good waitress for the next four hours. Wither didn’t relent to the point of apologizing or commit any radical act like speaking to her, but the hostile stares were gone and her orders were served up as they should have been. Still, she felt a weight lift when at nine o’clock Wither went off duty.

  At ten-thirty her last table, a party of four, two nice couples from Canada come south for a holiday, left. Anna went into the bowels of the building, to the employee locker room. Regardless of history, fresh paint or company goodwill, backstage rooms were uniformly dreary whether one worked as an elf in Macy’s on Thirty-fourth Street or served pasta primavera in God’s country.

  She flopped on a scarred bench in a horseshoe of lockers that looked as if they’d been salvaged from an inner-city high school. Having kicked off her shoes, she rubbed her feet. The absurd but accurate cliché she presented made her laugh. Why eight hours waiting tables in a gorgeously appointed temperature-controlled restaurant should leave her more tired and footsore than the same amount of time crossing harsh terrain in heavy boots was a mystery.

  “You survived.”

  Scott was leaning in the doorframe, his muscled arms crossed on his chest. The scald on his forearm had blistered. Anna suffered annoyance instead of gratitude. Being rescued was a burden she seldom carried gracefully.

  Burned, aproned and spattered with food, Scott Wooldrich was still a good-looking man. Another stab, this time of guilt, stirred Anna’s innards. A soon-to-be-married woman, a woman hurtling toward the half-century mark with blinding speed, should surely
be past the dangerously addictive nonsense attendant on cute boys.

  “I survived,” she said for lack of anything witty or erudite.

  “Put on your coat and let’s go get that drink. How about our sister lodge, just for a change of scenery? A little slumming is good for the soul.” Anna slipped her shoes back on, then stood to open her locker as he asked: “Shall we walk or drive?”

  Even after an eight-hour shift on concrete floors, Anna would have chosen to walk. The air, the night, the unfettered movement were more refreshing than sleep. Tonight for some reason a vision of the woman stabbed thirty-seven times while in the stony embrace of the great boulders flashed to the front of her mind.

  “Ride,” she said. “My feet have had it for one day.”

  She pulled her jacket from the locker and swung it around to put it on. The sleeve slapped the metal of the door and thunked.

  Thunked.

  It was a down jacket with knit cuffs. There was no thunk about it. Anna caught up the sleeve and looked inside. A hair below cuff-line she could see a white plastic disk the size of a dime.

  “What the . . .”

  “A problem?” Scott came close, looking over her shoulder.

  “There’s something. . .” Anna held open the sleeve and peered in, remembering the silly childhood joke of holding one’s fist hidden in a sleeve and saying: “Want to see stars? Look up my telescope.”

  “Jesus.”

  “What?” Scott demanded.

  “Got a handkerchief?”

  Scott gave her a blue cowboy bandanna. Using the handkerchief to protect any fingerprints, she reached carefully into the sleeve and pinched the barrel of a hypodermic syringe. The plunger—the end of it being the dime-sized disk she’d seen—was duct-taped firmly to the inside of the cuff. The barrel of the syringe was loosely affixed with the same kind of tape. Had she jammed her arm in the sleeve with the customary abandon of folks getting off work and heading into the cold, the force would have shoved the needle into her hand or wrist and depressed the plunger, injecting the syringe’s contents into her arm.