High Country

by Nevada Barr

  According to Scott, Trish and Caitlin had been joined at the hip. Trish often hiked up to Little Yosemite Valley on her days off and stayed in the tent cabin Caitlin used. Though the tourist season was four months long, NPS folks lived ruggedly: no showers, cold water from a single spigot, toilets several hundred yards through the woods in the visitors’ campground. Because the jobs were seasonal and the living conditions harsh, LYV rangers tended to be young, strong, dedicated and independent. Caitlin met and exceeded these qualifications. At nineteen, she was the youngest ranger there. She loved all things outdoorsy and played fast and loose with NPS rules that she believed to be “bogus.” “Caitlin was irresistible,” Scott said wistfully. “If I had a daughter . . . no. Scratch that. I wouldnot want a daughter like Caitlin. She’d worry you into an early grave. No. If I were nineteen again, she’d be the love of my life. She’d break my heart, naturally, but I’d secretly harbor a torch for her through all subsequent marriages.”

  For a second or two, Anna toyed with the idea that, in his mid-thirties, with a felony record, Scott had fallen in love with Caitlin, gotten his heart broken, then helped her to vanish. She had to give it up. Scott spoke so clearly she couldn’t but believe he had a realistic view of life that was truly invested with the gratitude he’d professed earlier. Not the sort to pine and kill for love.

  “Trish wasn’t good for Caitlin, I don’t think,” Scott cut into Anna’s thoughts. “Being—what? Nine, ten years older, she ran the friendship and Caitlin didn’t even know it. Once I kind of tried to feel her out on the subject. I was reminded of myself at nineteen. I knew everything. I even knew what I didn’t know so there was no sense telling me I didn’t know something because I already knew that.” He laughed, head tipped back, the sound big and flowing. Anna joined him because it was infectious and because, on an undoubtedly deep and psychologically fraught level, it made her feel like a little girl again, safe and free.

  The instant she recognized those seductive sensations, she scotched them. Given that people were tossing her room and secreting sharp objects in her clothing, feeling safe was dangerous.

  “Why don’t you think Trish was good for Caitlin?”

  “Nothing real specific. Trish was a small-time dealer—nickel and dime stuff, you know, just the party supply line.”

  Anna nodded. “Nicky told me.”

  “My guess is the only people who haven’t been told are the park rangers—the ones in law enforcement, I mean. Cops. Jesus.” Scott shook his head contemptuously.

  Anna was unoffended. Often the curtain of silence between the illegal world and that of law enforcement, though thin, was stunningly opaque. Once it was torn down the cops looked like idiots but, till it was, law enforcement had no way of knowing it even existed.

  “Marijuana?” Anna asked.

  “Yeah. Maybe coke, but if she did, not much. There’s hard drugs here, like everywhere, but mostly brought in from the outside. Drugs were never my thing. In prison you just develop a sense for who’s using. Even without the petty dealing, Trish felt bent. Rotten inside. Hard to explain. Maybe I just didn’t like her.”

  “Maybe she was rotten inside.”

  Scott might have amended his statement to sayillegal drugs were not his thing. He raised his glass, his third, in a salute. He was pleased Anna hadn’t blown off his gut feeling about Trish. It wasn’t mere flattery. Anna respected intuition.

  “I pretty much steered clear of Trish,” Scott said. “Bad news. Once girls—women—who felt bent lit me up. Now they just scare me. Getting old, I guess.”

  “One of the perks,” Anna said. Over the years she too had lost her taste for dangerous lovers and counted the loss among her blessings. She hoped this particular state of grace was not on the wane. To pay Scott in kind for the information and because she wanted to, she told the story of her visit to Dixon Crofter’s tent cabin with Mary and the four unsavory men they’d found squatting there. Scott got satisfyingly hostile when she related the crude welcome they’d received before Mark returned from the shower. Having grown up underfoot, Mary Bates was a favorite around the hotel. Young, delicately pretty and surprisingly unspoiled, the staff was protective of her. Scott was no exception. Over the next few minutes Anna rode the roller coaster of his esteem. That she was Mary’s friend took her up in his estimation. That she’d taken Mary to a place of vile males dropped her way down. That she’d brought Mary home safe leveled things out again.

  “Now, Mary is exactly the sort of girl I’d want for a daughter,” Scott finished. “But, then, I’d probably end up back in Soledad for wringing the neck of the first boy who looked at her the wrong way.”

  “You keep mentioning imaginary daughters,” Anna noted. “Do you have any real kids?”

  “Shoot,” Scott said and smiled ruefully. “Three bourbons is too much on a first date. Lowers inhibitions.”

  “Nah,” Anna said. “Just makes you forget about consequences. Kids, then. Any to speak of?”

  “I might have a daughter.” Scott was grinning and Anna couldn’t tell whether it blocked laughter or tears. Or simply indicated his bourbon level.

  “You don’t know?”

  “She looks like me. The timing is right but her mom swears otherwise.”

  “You could maybe get a DNA test.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was right before I got arrested. The mom married. Shea—the little girl—has a nice family. Why screw that up?”

  Anna had nothing to say to that. She concurred. These after-the-fact custody battles because one parent belatedly grows a conscience—or what they believe to be one—seemed to turn out badly for the kid whom everybody professed to love so much.

  When enough nachos had been consumed to let the emotional dust from this disclosure settle, Anna moved on.

  “This Dix guy. Mary seemed enamored of him. Did you ever get to know him at all?”

  Scott brightened perceptibly. Anna was sorry she’d never known Dixon Crofter. He’d captured the imagination of so many.

  “Spiderman. Everybody knew Dix.” Scott stopped there and thought for a while. “Or nobody did, come to think of it. Dix was a wildman. If it was vertical, he’d climb it. On one level he was always easygoing, a lot of laughs. The only time he’d get serious was when he talked about getting funding to climb something that sane people would be nervous flying over in a seven-forty-seven. Now that I think about it, I’d have to say no, I didn’t know him. We went to the same parties, hoisted a few too many together but all we talked about was climbing. I don’t know where he was from, brothers, sisters—nothing personal.”

  “You say ‘was.’ Do you think he’s dead?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I guess,” Anna said.

  “Probably all of them. It’s been too long. Jiminy,” Scott said. “What did you slip in my drink. In don’t think I’ve gossiped this much since I was inside. Nothing better to do there. We’ve pretty much chewed over everybody at the lodge but old Tiny Bigalo.”

  “Don’t want her to feel left out,” Anna said.

  “Okay. So what do you want to know about Tiny?” The question was rhetorical and Anna waited as he gathered his thoughts. He’d knocked back a hefty dose of bourbon and was feeling it. Most people wouldn’t notice, but the way he handled his whiskey was another thing he had in common with her dad. Anna’s father had two small scotches every night. On the rare occasions he had three or four he never seemed drunk or high, but his smile would widen, his laugh deepen and he’d do silly tricks like wiggle his ears if she or Molly asked him to. Scott’s smile was wider and his laugh deeper. Anna chose not to push her luck by asking him to wiggle his ears. She was already pushing her luck. And for reasons she chose not to examine, she didn’t want to lose his good opinion.

  “Tiny’s a hard one,” Scott began. Mentally Anna prepared to take notes. “I’ve been here, what? Three years? And I’ve never really gotten to know her. Jim knows her better than anyone and
their relationship’s kind of bizarre. Like family. They don’t seem to get along all that well, and he bad-mouths her a lot, but they stick together. They’ve got some kind of tie. Maybe just years. All I know is she’s like this hardheaded businesswoman who waits tables for some unknown reason. She’s got no family—kids, I mean. She’s got a brother and two nephews she’s always sending money to. Kind of a surrogate mother thing. Far as I know she’s never married. So that’s all I got on Tiny. Anybody else we should dish the dirt about?”

  He smiled and Anna smiled back, but she was wracking her brain to make sure there wasn’t another hotel employee she needed the lowdown on. “Maybe later,” she said.

  They sipped in silence for a while. The last hangers-on in the bar muttered softly over their drinks. Windows, blind-black with an overcast night, put Anna in mind of cave walls and a sudden panic of claustrophobia shuddered through her. She rode it out.

  “Tell me about working with Jim,” she said to keep the conversation going.

  Telling stories of his mentor, Scott grew animated, joyful. Listening to him extol his eccentric patron’s virtues, Anna was put in mind of David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, Dickens characters who knew and showed gratitude untouched by resentment or shame. The picture Scott painted of Chef Wither was very different from the man Anna saw each day, and she wondered if something had happened to change the sensitive, funny, driven man Scott described into the obsessive curmudgeon she knew.

  “Why was he so pissed off at me tonight?” she asked. “He’s never exactly jumped over the counter to give me a welcome hug but he usually ignores me pleasantly enough. Tonight he was furious.”

  Scott fell quiet. Enthusiasm for talking about Jim Wither drained from his face. He picked up the much-folded napkin, spread it flat and began tearing it along the scored creases. “Who knows,” he said. “Jim’s a moody guy. The price of genius, I guess. He is a genius when it comes to food. He’s internationally known. Or was. He’s kind of semiretired here.”

  Scott looked up from mutilating the napkin. Gossipy camaraderie was gone. There was no trace of boyishness or bourbon. His years in Soledad stood in his eyes like rusty nails. Voice gone hard, he said, “The reason I’m not hauling plastic pipe for some pool company in San Diego or pushing buttons at a wastewater plant for six-fifty an hour is because of Jim. I won’t let anybody fuck with him.”

  He was warning Anna off. He might as well have waved a red flag in front of a bull.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Veiled threats had a way of damping conversation. Anna’s “date” limped quickly to a close. She doubted there’d be another tête-à-tête with Scott Wooldrich to challenge her undercover skills or tweak her affianced conscience.

  They drove to the Ahwahnee in silence. This time Scott didn’t open any doors for her. After he’d driven off—to park his car, presumably—Anna changed direction, walking not to the dorm but toward the hotel. Feeling conspicuous in her uniform, though black trousers and a down jacket weren’t exactly dead giveaways as to profession, she used a pay phone in the lobby. Chief Ranger Knight being out of town, she called Deputy Superintendent Johnson at his home.

  “I have something I need to show you,” she said when he came on the phone. “I’d rather it be tonight,” she told him when he tried to put her off and added, “I’d rather not tell you over the phone,” when he wanted to know what it was.

  Hanging up the receiver, half a dozen movies where the protagonist uttered the fateful words: “I’d rather not tell you over the phone,” flashed piecemeal through her mind. Roughly translated into cinemaese those words meant: a bad thing will prevent me from telling you until the plot thickens considerably.

  Pretending she didn’t feel the cold hand of superstition clutching the back of her neck, she went to her dorm room to change clothes. Another minute or two wasn’t going to make any difference and she was tired of feeling like the tablecloth after the feast.

  The door to the room she shared with Nicky and Cricket was open, soft light falling in a bar across the mud-tracked linoleum of the hall. The sight reassured her criminals were not ransacking within and Nicky had recovered sufficiently to return to her happy social self.

  Nicky was not alone. Sitting on the edge of her bed, a glossy magazine open on her knees, she looked as if she was waiting in a dentist’s office for a root canal. Slouched in Anna’s desk chair was a lumpish young man in the ubiquitous winter costume of Levi’s, fleece pullover and dirty running shoes. Both of them looked immensely relieved to see her. Two young persons of opposite genders alone in the dark of night thrilled to see a middle-aged lady; the news couldn’t be good.

  “Hey,” Anna said. “What’s up?”

  “This is Richard Cauliff,” Nicky said.

  Before she could continue, the man in the chair said. “I came to get my sister’s stuff.”

  Richard. Dick. Dickie. “Right,” Anna said. She flipped the switch by the door turning on the overhead light to get a better look at him. He was in his early twenties, thick from between the ears to the hips. Not much neck to speak of and not nearly enough hair. He hadn’t shaved his head—maybe not living close enough to fashion’s cutting edge for that—but he’d had it clipped as close as a new boot camp recruit’s.

  The effect was not flattering. His ears were too big and his skull an unattractive shape, the forehead sloping back to a pointy crown, the bone over the spine ridged and protruding.

  “Anna Pigeon,” Anna introduced herself and thrust out her hand in a manly fashion, a habit picked up from a feminist mother and years spent in what had been, when she’d begun, a man’s profession.

  Without rising, Dickie leaned forward and shook it tepidly. “I came for Trish’s stuff,” he repeated. “I’m her brother.”

  It occurred to Anna that he didn’t recognize her voice from the phone call earlier in the day. A good thing. It wouldn’t do for a mid-level payroll clerk to be showing up in the employee dorm smelling of pepper steak and blackened catfish.

  Her first impulse was to ask for identification, but it was too heavy-handed for a disinterested waitress and one who’d never even met his sister. Besides, Dickie’s ID was in his DNA. If not a brother, he was a close relative. Anna recognized the dark brown eyes and buckteeth from the photograph of Trish the chief ranger had shown her. Dickie’s teeth were even more prominent than his sister’s. A rude comment of her dad’s surfaced in the back of Anna’s mind: “Looked like he could eat corn on the cob through a picket fence.”

  Despite the slipshod way he’d been slapped together, Dickie might have been appealing in a goofy sort of way had not acne ruined his skin. The scars were deep, pitted, the flesh ruddy and new outbreaks thrust through the damaged flesh. Treatments now existed for cases as severe as his. Anna pitied him that his parents had been too broke, indifferent or ignorant to save him the disfigurement.

  “I’m the lady who took over Trish’s job—just till she gets back,” she said.

  An emotion other than dull, carplike sullenness flickered in Dickie’s eyes. Anna couldn’t tell if it was in response to her stepping into his sister’s shoes or to the halfhearted sop she’d tagged on the end about Trish’s imaginary return. Either way, it wasn’t a happy gleam. Suddenly Anna got tired. Fatigue dropped on her chest so heavily it was hard not to stagger under it. The day had been excessively long and filled with people who wanted, feared, or hated things Anna couldn’t quite get a grip on. Sour peevish humanity had soaked her in spiritual brine till, had a vampire been around to sink fangs into her, he would swear he’d bitten into a pickle.

  “The rangers took her packed-up belongings just after I got here,” she said. “You’ll have to ask them what happened to them. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to go to bed.”

  Nicky shot her a look of admiration, and Anna was reminded of her salad days when she thought she was tough but in reality was so very young and unsure she couldn’t even get rid of Jehovah’s Witnesses who came uninvited t
o her door or hang up on phone solicitors, let alone evict a person who’d managed to get inside.

  The force of age and authority brought Dickie up from the chair but didn’t move him out the door. He wanted to go; Anna could see that in the shuffle of his feet and the cant of his shoulders. It was as if his body were pulling for the door and only a stubborn mind held it back. And maybe not the mind of Richard Cauliff; he didn’t look like a man determined to stand his ground to get what’s rightfully his. Everything about him, the body language, his eyes shifting away from hers each time they met, the sullenness, screamed of a servant afraid to return to his master without whatever it was he’d been sent to fetch.

  “I got that stuff, but stuff was missing from her stuff.”

  Anna wanted to give him something just to avoid having to hear the word “stuff” one more time.

  “You want to search the room?” she asked. “Be our guest. Just hurry up. I’m dead on my feet.”

  “You got her clothes on. She said.” He pointed at Nicky with a forefinger, the nail bitten till the quick was bloody in places.

  Anna laughed. “Jesus. You want heruniform ? Hell, I’ll buy it from you. Twenty bucks suit you? Depreciation on polyester pants is a bitch. Not much resale value.”

  “They’re mine. I got a right.”

  Though he’d yet to show any sign he suffered grief over the loss of his sister, it crossed Anna’s mind that he might want the clothes because they had belonged to her, because she had worn them. She backed off.

  “Sure. They’re all yours. Step outside and I’ll change.”

  He didn’t move.

  “I’m not changing in front of you.”

  He left, closing the door behind him. Nicky jumped up and turned the deadbolt. “He was probably afraid we wouldn’t let him back in,” she whispered.

  “We won’t,” Anna replied. She skinned out of the shirt and trousers, pulled on a pair of Levi’s and a work shirt. Zipped, tucked and buttoned, she unlocked and opened the door. “One waitress uniform.”