Fatal Descent

by Beth Groundwater

  “I could fish for supper,” Paul offered.

  Elsa pshawed that suggestion. “Yeah, right, like you could catch enough to feed sixteen people. And Tina and I have classes to get back to. We can’t extend our vacation time.”

  Mandy stared at the woman. How could Elsa go on about climbing and her vacation time when her lover was dead? What a cold-hearted bitch!

  Alice put down her half-eaten sandwich. “Look, the family’s talked about this already. We don’t think Alex would have wanted us to quit. He was so anxious for all of us to experience the Canyonlands.”

  Hal nodded and put an arm over his wife’s shoulders.

  Amy glanced toward the river, where Alex’s body lay out of sight, below the edge of the river bank. “I feel like his spirit is still with us,” she whispered. “Maybe appreciating the wild beauty of this place is the best way to say good—” She choked up and couldn’t continue.

  “Oh, honey, maybe you’re right.” Diana reached for her daughter’s hand.

  “And, it’s not fair to the rest of you if his death ruins your vacations,” Alice said. “We should stick with the original plan until we can find a way to get word out.”

  “I agree,” Les said forcefully.

  Everyone looked at the older Andersons, who glanced at each other. Finally, Hal breathed out a sigh. “Okay,” he said, and the rest of the family nodded in agreement.

  “Does everyone else agree with that?” Mandy asked and looked around.

  Relief seemed to be etched on most of the faces of those who were not in the Anderson clan.

  “Okay.” Rob pushed off from the picnic table and stood. “Even though we’ll keep moving, we’ll also keep trying to find a way to get word out. We guides will search for hikers and other boats along the way. Once the radio dries out, I may be able to get it to work. There’s a repeater at the confluence, so I’ll try calling there. Our goal will be to arrange for Alex’s body to be taken to a morgue as soon as

  possible.”

  Diana took Hal’s hand and squeezed it. “And Hal and I will go with him.”

  “Me, too,” Amy said.

  “No, we want you kids to finish the trip no matter what,” Diana said. “As Alice said, it’s what Alex would have wanted.”

  A tear rolled down Amy’s cheek. “I don’t want you two to have to deal with everything by yourselves when you get back. I want to help.”

  Les put a hand on her shoulder. “You heard your mom. And besides, it may not happen. We might all be stuck on the river until the end of the trip.”

  And apparently whatever Les said was golden, because Amy shut right up.

  seven

  What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t

  have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going,

  and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.

  —hal boyle

  After lunch, Mandy worked with the rest of the guides to reallocate gear between the rafts, so there was room for two clients to sit in the front again of Mandy’s oar raft. With Alex’s body bag strapped in the front of Rob’s raft, there was no room for others to sit there. That meant he might be oaring solo for the rest of the trip. He and Mandy had made that decision, with the Andersons’ okay, because none of the clients—not even the Andersons—wanted to share a raft with Alex’s corpse.

  During the shuffle, Mandy’s emotions wavered between guilt over Alex’s death, anxiety about the loss of the radio, their link with the outside world, and doubt about whether she or Rob could have done anything different to prevent either. She was also worried about what might happen to them on the rest of the journey. Since she hadn’t been able to speak alone with Rob at the lunch stop to talk about Betsy’s findings, she had made do with saying, “We need to talk later.”

  The Anderson family all opted to stay in Kendra’s raft. Tina Norton asked her father to join her in Gonzo’s raft along with the three female friends. That left Elsa looking decidedly unhappy. She stomped over to Mandy’s raft, plopped down in the front, and crossed her arms.

  Cool pushed Mandy’s raft off the river bank while she pulled on the oars, then he hopped in next to Elsa. “You look like you could use some cheering up,” he said to her with a grin, “so I’m here to delight you with my sparkling company.”

  Elsa just harrumphed.

  Mandy hoped that cheering up Elsa was Cool’s only motive—not that he had struck out with the three girlfriends and was going to try his luck with her. He was another one Mandy hadn’t had a chance to take aside for a private talk—about his excessive flirting. While she pulled out into the main river current, she wondered if she should divulge Elsa’s prior relationship with Alex to Cool when she did talk to him, to get him to leave the woman alone.

  No, that relationship was private, and she didn’t know Cool well enough to trust him to keep it secret. Besides, he might view Elsa’s connection with Alex as a positive sign that she could be lured into a relationship with another younger man.

  A morose silence fell over the group during the first couple of hours on the water. The hot sun beat down on them, adding to the feeling of melancholy. Whenever anyone put an oar or paddle in the water, it made a soupy plop in the languid silence. Sweat slid down Mandy’s face, and she batted at a persistent buzzing fly. When they passed the coffeepot formation above them, Rob pointed it out, and the granary ruin underneath it, but it didn’t elicit much interest from the group. Mandy saw some heads nodding as people snoozed.

  Cool made a few attempts to start a conversation with Elsa, but each time it died after a curt comment from her. He shot a pleading look back at Mandy, as if asking her for help in getting or keeping a topic going, but she just shrugged. She doubted Elsa would ever have anything to do with him, and frankly, she thought they all needed some quiet time.

  When they reached the point where Indian Creek fed into the main canyon, Cool perked up and started scanning the shoreline. Mandy figured he was bored and looking forward to a change. A hiking stop at Indian Creek Canyon to see some more ancestral Puebloan ruins and a waterfall that was probably dry at that time of year had been an option on their itinerary—if they were making good time.

  Mandy checked her watch. After the long debate at lunch, they weren’t making good time.

  Before she could say anything to the others, though, Gonzo had directed his paddlers over to scan the canyon entrance. The water was clogged with sand bars and bushy stands of green willows and dying tamarisks. Gonzo’s raft promptly got stuck on a hidden sand bar. He and Paul hopped out to push the raft off and sloshed back inside.

  “I don’t see a good way in,” Gonzo hollered to Rob and Mandy.

  “We don’t have time to stop anyway,” Mandy shouted back. Besides, she didn’t think their clients could work up any interest in it.

  When they floated past the canyon entrance, Cool looked wistfully over his shoulder at it. Then he sat up and yelled at Gonzo. “Hey, since two of you are wet already, how about a water fight? It would cool us all off.”

  “I’m game,” Gonzo yelled back. He ruddered his paddle so his raft floated closer to Mandy’s. “Hey, Kendra, come hither!”

  Before Kendra could respond, Elsa said, “Well, I’m not game. I don’t feel like getting wet.”

  Cool raised his arms to the clear sky. “Isn’t that sun blazing away up there making you hot? Not just hot for me, but hot all over?” He waggled his eyebrows at her and playfully dipped a hand in the river to splash a few drops on her.

  “No.” Elsa firmly crossed her arms. “I’m not interested in a water fight—or in you either, you little creep. Leave me alone.”

  A black look passed over Cool’s face, and his hands clenched. He glanced at the other rafts. When he realized from their wide-eyed reactions that many others had heard Elsa’s comment, his face grew even darker.

  “Someone’s
not in a party mood,” Gonzo said lightly, trying to dispel the tension.

  “We can’t have a water fight unless everyone agrees and all the cameras are protected,” Mandy added quickly, trying to draw attention away from Cool and Elsa. “Though it sounds like a great idea to me.”

  She flipped some water in the air with her oar. Sweat was dripping down the back of her neck and she knew she smelled a little ripe. She longed to cool off. She hoped she could persuade Elsa to change her mind—about the water fight, at least.

  “I’m in!” Rob chimed in and flipped an even larger arc of water in the air with one of his oars.

  Mandy glanced at Cool. With the attention off him, his embarrassment seemed to be receding. His fists had unclenched.

  “Well, I’m not that interested in getting wet either,” Alice said from Kendra’s raft.

  Kendra stopped angling her raft in toward the other side of Mandy’s.

  “Aw, c’mon gals.” Cool moaned. “Yes, we’ve had a tragedy, and I understand that, but can’t we lighten the mood a little?”

  Mandy shushed him, but it was too late.

  Diana sat up straighter. “No, it’s all right. Alex would have wanted us to try to savor this experience even though he’s no longer with us.” She choked up and covered her mouth with a hand.

  That clinched it. No one was interested in a water fight after that.

  _____

  About four that afternoon, the group pulled in at a large stretch of sandy beach on the left side of the river. Gonzo and Cool hid the portable toilet in an alcove among a jumble of hackberry trees, willows, and dying tamarisks upstream. Kendra set up the handwashing station on the beach and put out some granola bars for snacks.

  Mandy and Rob lowered Alex’s watertight body bag into the river to keep it cool overnight. Mandy held the bag while Rob secured it to his raft on the upstream side. Rigor mortis had set in, and the corpse was rigid. She could feel Alex’s stiff arms and legs through the thick black PVC, but she tamped down the revulsion that turned her stomach. She glanced at Rob, whose lips were clamped shut. They worked quietly by unspoken agreement, trying to show some reverence.

  Most of the group deliberately avoided looking in their direction, but Amy and Diana stood nearby watching. Their arms were wrapped around each other’s waists and tears slid silently down their cheeks.

  After the task was completed and Mandy passed by them, Diana said a soft thank you.

  Mandy gave her a gentle nod, then got the group’s attention. “We’re about a mile upstream from the hiking trail that goes over the saddle of the Loop and down the other side. We’ll hike it tomorrow morning and scan the river on both sides from the top to see if we can spot any other rafters or hikers. We had planned to offer the option of climbing and rappelling the cliff on the other side to those who want to, and we’ll still do that.”

  She glanced at Hal and Diana, who stood entwined in a comforting embrace, then continued, “Anyone who doesn’t want to do the hike can ride in the rafts on the river around the four-mile loop. So, think about your choice. Right now, the guides are going to take a rest.”

  That elicited a raised eyebrow from Rob.

  “We’ll unpack the horseshoe set and some cards,” Mandy continued, “if you’re looking for something to do. But we don’t plan to start cooking dinner for another hour. We’ll ask for your help in unloading the rafts then.”

  “I’m going to do some fishing,” Paul announced.

  Gonzo helped him dig his rod out of the gear pile, then hunted up the horseshoes. Kendra put some camp chairs around one of their roll-up card tables, then she and the three female friends sat down for a game of hearts. Diana and Hal found a shady spot to sit in. Amy dropped next to her mother and leaned in for a hug, and Alice lowered herself next to her father. Looking dazed, the four of them sat and stared at the river.

  Cool seemed to be talking the rest of the group into a game of horseshoes when Mandy pulled on Rob’s arm. “Let’s go gather some driftwood for a fire.”

  He followed her along the beach a ways. When they were out of earshot from the others, he turned to her. “What’s up?”

  She filled him in on her conversation with Betsy Saunders. By the time she finished, they had walked a fair distance from camp and Rob’s brow was wrinkled with worry.

  “First of all,” he said, “can we take everything she said as fact? How much of a bear expert is she?”

  “Even if she isn’t an expert, her questions make sense to me. Alex should have been fighting the bear and yelling, but nobody heard him or a bear. And it didn’t make sense for the bear to kill him and leave the remains, no matter whether it was a black bear or a grizzly.”

  “But jumping from those questions to the conclusion that someone staged the attack seems like quite a leap to me.”

  Mandy spread her hands wide. “How else can we explain that all the prints came from one paw?”

  “If that’s really the case,” Rob said, scratching his head. “We’re relying on Betsy’s judgment there.”

  “There’s a big difference between back and front bear paw prints—and left and right.”

  “So you think someone brought a preserved bear paw on the trip so they could kill Alex and make it look like an accident?”

  Mandy nodded. “And disabled our radio and made it look like the bear did that, too. That means we’ve got a killer among us—who might be planning to kill again.” She rubbed her arms, where the hair was bristling. “Otherwise, why disable the radio?”

  Rob let out a long, slow whistle and looked up at the narrow, steep canyon walls. “And we’ve got no way out of here other than down the river. If that’s true, how do we protect ourselves and the others? And who is it?”

  “Well, Elsa was the last person who saw Alex alive. That’s always who the cops start with.”

  “But why?” Rob’s eyebrows raised. “He was boinking her!”

  “It could have been some sort of twisted last goodbye before she killed him. She could have had any number of reasons. Maybe he was going to tell everyone about their relationship, and she wanted to keep it secret. Maybe he was blackmailing her. Or maybe he refused when she wanted to stop seeing him. Who knows?”

  “And who else would she want to kill?”

  “Someone who found out about them, possibly.” Mandy bit her lip. “What gives me the shivers is that Alex could have been dying when Elsa walked past me to camp. Maybe I could have saved him.”

  “No. Don’t go there, Mandy.” Rob took her in his arms. “You can’t do that to yourself. You have no idea if it’s true. Even if it was, how could you have known?” He stepped back. “Come to think of it, how could Elsa have killed him without making any noise? You were right there on the other side of the rocks.”

  “I didn’t hear them finish making love, either, or get dressed. The rocks blocked those sounds.”

  Rob blew out a breath. “You know what I think? I think being exposed to those other murders this summer may have made you hypersensitive. I really find it hard to believe that Elsa Norton—or any of the others, for that matter—could be a killer.”

  “We don’t know anything about these people!” Mandy had doubts, too. Lots of them. But her intuition was on high alert.

  “And the evidence you’re basing all of this on is mighty slim.”

  “I know,” Mandy couldn’t keep the irritation out of her voice. “And I don’t think we should go back there now and accuse Elsa of murder or anything. But we should be on guard, looking for anything else suspicious.”

  With a nod, Rob said, “Sure, we can do that.” He picked up her wrist and checked her watch. “We should head back.”

  Mandy turned and fell into step beside Rob as they walked back to camp. She jumped when he stopped all of sudden. “What?”

  “We don’t have any firewood,” he said. “
That was our supposed reason for this walk.”

  “Duh!” she said with a smile.

  She reached down and picked up a couple of dead tamarisk branches on the sand. They both continued to gather wood on the way back, so when they reappeared, they were each carrying a small armload.

  Cool spotted them and put his hands on his hips. “Not much driftwood there, given how long you were gone,” he shouted. “I bet that wasn’t the real reason for your disappearance, hmmm?” He waggled his eyebrows.

  The sexual insinuation was obvious, and Mandy didn’t like it one bit. She bit back a retort. Not in front of the clients.

  “I need to talk to Cool about his excessive flirting,” she said quietly to Rob. “Why don’t you get the rafts unloaded while I pull him aside?”

  “You sure you want to handle that on your own?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She said it flat and final, so Rob wouldn’t argue. He probably saw it as his job to put Cool in his place, but he didn’t know the whole story.

  To Cool, she shouted, “There’s another pile of driftwood back there. Could you help me get it while Rob organizes unloading the rafts?” She dumped her load of wood on the beach and waved for him to come with her.

  “Okay, I guess.” Cool turned to the other horseshoe players. “We’ll start up again where we left off after we all do our chores.”

  He trotted after Mandy, and she kept up a quick pace until they were out of earshot of camp. Then she turned to him. “There isn’t another pile, but we can find some sticks to pick up so it looks like there was one. I needed to talk to you away from the clients.”

  Cool nervously licked his lips. “What’s up?”

  Mandy folded her arms. “I know flirting with clients is par for the course, but you’re taking it too far.”

  His jaw dropped. “What?”

  “A couple of the women have complained, and I’ve seen some negative reactions myself.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” A red flush crept up Cool’s neck. “What negative reactions?”