The Conan Flagg Mysteries: Bundle #3

by M. K. Wren

  A. C., Lucas, and Al gathered by the fire pit and divested themselves of their backpacks. Conan joined them, sighing as he eased the weight off his shoulders, then he twisted the top on his water bottle for a long draught. A. C. pulled a stainless-steel thermos out of his pack. “Find your cups, and we’ll have a coffee break,” he said.

  It took awhile for them to unpack their collapsible cups. A. C. filled them, stopping abruptly when he reached Conan’s. It was a Sierra Club cup, which he had brought along precisely for the reaction it got from A. C.: a snort of disgust and a mocking threat to throw Conan and his cup off the top of King’s Mountain when they reached it. But A. C. filled the offending cup now, and everyone chose a log to sit down on.

  While Conan savored the first taste of coffee, Lucas leaned over to peer at the gear Al had dumped out of his pack, then asked with a conspiratorial grin, “Al, is that what I think it is?”

  Al looked down at the two six-packs of Heineken and conceded, “Well, I figured it might—”

  “You carried all that beer up here?” A. C. cut in. “Goddamn it, Al, don’t you get enough beer at home—or out of my icebox?”

  Al had been close to smiling, but at that his jaw went tight, and despite the shaded glasses, Conan could almost see the shutters slamming shut behind his eyes.

  Lucas said, “Hey, Dad, lighten up. A couple of beers’ll taste like heaven by the time we get down from the mountain. Cold beer. Al, let’s put this in the creek. Best refrigerator around.”

  But Al was already on his feet. “I’ll take care of ’em,” he muttered as he grabbed both six-packs and set off for the creek.

  Lucas grimaced as he took a swallow of coffee. He said nothing, but A. C. was on the defensive. “Hell, Lucas, you haven’t seen Al for—what? Two years? He’s turning into a lush, and I thought just for this one day of the year, he could stay sober.”

  Lucas looked at Conan, perhaps calling his father’s attention to the friendly outsider in their midst. “Okay, Dad, but if we do our share on the Heineken, I don’t figure Al can get too drunk on what’s left.”

  Nothing more was said about the beer. Al came up from the creek, and they finished their coffee in silence, then A. C. rose. “Well, let’s get the lunch into one backpack, and I’ll carry it.” He looked up at the sky, hazy with cirrus clouds, then took off his parka. “Don’t figure I’ll need that. Getting downright warm.”

  Conan pulled off his parka, too; the wool sweater was more than sufficient now, and the sun at this altitude called for the cloth hat and sunglasses he’d carried in his pocket. They left the camping gear stacked around the fire pit, then resumed their journey. A. C. again took the lead as they headed south toward King’s Mountain.

  The second leg of the trek was harder than the first, with the trail constantly winding around ridges, down into ravines and up again, and taking a tortuous course up the rugged flanks of King’s Mountain, and in the next couple of hours, Conan began to think that perhaps this was more of a mountain than a hill after all. Still, the exertion in this setting was a physical and sensory pleasure.

  He had checked his watch when they left the campsite. It had been ten-twenty. It was twelve-forty when they finally reached the top of King’s Mountain, where the rocky surface and savage winter winds discouraged all but the toughest growth: a few twisted white pines and the dried seed heads of stunted plants finding a precarious existence in clefts of rock painted with orange and green lichen.

  The view was magnificent. A. C. stood looking north as if surveying his domain. In fact, his domain occupied only a small part of this view. Conan gazed at Mount Hood, the sleeping volcano. At its feet, he could discern the fine line of the highway, but it asked too much of his eyes to find the lodge. He turned to the south and saw the next pearl in the strand, Mount Jefferson, hazed in distance. In the southwest, a bank of clouds stretched pale tendrils toward the zenith.

  They sat down on a boulder and ate lunch—thick roast beef sandwiches on sourdough bread, potato chips, and crisp Jonagold apples—and every mouthful was made ambrosial by exertion and altitude. Afterward Lucas wandered to the edge of the caprock, found a flat spot, and stretched out to absorb the sun, arms folded behind his head. Al wandered off in a different direction apparently to study the view of Mount Jefferson.

  A. C. began filling his pipe, while Conan lit a cigarette. The silence in this place was primordial, broken only by bird calls and the hum of insects. There had been little conversation during lunch, which had satisfied Conan because he cherished this quiet, but he knew the Kings hadn’t been restrained by a respect for wilderness silence.

  At length, his pipe lit, A. C. puffed out a cloud of smoke whose scent reminded Conan vaguely of juniper. A. C. said, “Well, I guess a man has to face up to it sooner or later. The good old days are dead.”

  Conan studied his granitic face, finding there a weary regret. “A. C., the good old days are always dead by the time you get around to recognizing them as such.”

  A. C. gave that a rumbling laugh. “Like they say, all you can count on is that things change.” He puffed at his pipe, lips opening and closing around the stem. “Guess I should be happy with what I’ve got.”

  “Like having Lucas back?”

  “Yeah. You know, I really think he meant it when he apologized.”

  Still, there was doubt underlying that affirmation.

  Conan ventured, “Well, maybe it’s worth taking a chance on believing him.”

  “Maybe. But it bothers me, having to take a chance on believing my own son. Hell, I did everything I knew how to bring my boys up right, but look at ’em. Sometimes I think…” He hesitated, and Conan wondered if he would go on. He did, finally. “Sometimes I think they’re all just waiting for me to die. The money—that’s all they want from me. Look at Al. Can’t hold his business together, drinking too damn much and getting mean about it. And Mark. Staying on with the company, staying on with me, even if he hates my guts. Just waiting. Lucas? I want more than anything in the world to trust him, but I’m still not sure about him. Damn it, I didn’t raise my boys to end up this way.”

  Conan felt uneasy with those confidences, but he understood that this was part of being a friendly outsider. He was a safe receptacle for such revelations. He inhaled on his cigarette, watched the smoke dissipate. “A. C., they’re not boys anymore.”

  A. C. looked at him sharply, then laughed. “Well, you never had kids. They’re always your boys—or your girl—no matter how old they get. But you’ve got a point. Maybe it’s too late to worry about what I did wrong, but I’m not dead yet, not by a long shot, so I have to keep on trying to do what’s right by my kids, and I don’t know what it is.”

  Conan thought a moment, then, “No, I didn’t have kids, A. C., but I remember something my dad told me when I was a kid. About breaking broncs, actually. He said you can make a horse your partner or your slave, and a horse that’s a slave isn’t worth the powder to blow it up. But if you want your horse to be a partner, you’ve got to let it know when it does things right, not just when it does wrong. Any good horse will figure out what to do when it knows what’s right.” In fact, Henry Flagg might have espoused that Skinnerian philosophy, but he had never verbalized it. Still, Conan thought the moral might sit better with A. C. if it was put in the mouth of his childhood friend.

  Perhaps it did. A. C. didn’t comment on it, but obviously he gave it some thought.

  At length, he looked at his watch. “It’s nearly two. High time to head back to camp.” He called to Lucas and Al, then stowed the detritus of the lunch in his backpack. Before they set off down the mountain, Conan looked again to the southwest. The bank of clouds was closer and darker, the blue faded in the rest of the sky, the sun circled with a glowing ring bright with the rainbow fragments of sun dogs.

  The descent from King’s Mountain was a great deal easier than the ascent, but it was after four when they reached the Loblolly Creek campsite. Conan wondered if tensions might be exacerb
ated by the chores necessary to setting up camp. It was the kind of work that required cooperation in close proximity. But undoubtedly these chores had also over the years become rituals, and they were accomplished with easy precision, Lucas and Al working amicably together to set up the two bright blue dome tents, A. C. splitting kindling with a hand ax and starting a fire, while Conan helped out where he could, spreading out bedrolls in the tiny tents, bringing water up from the creek. Before the chores were finished, there was a degree of camaraderie among the Kings, and when Al retrieved the beer from the creek, A. C. welcomed a cold can. Conan usually didn’t enjoy beer, but here in this setting after a long day’s hike, it seemed exactly what he was thirsty for.

  A. C. set up a folding grate over the fire, started coffee brewing in a battered aluminum pot, and again assumed the role of chef du jour. The menu consisted of freeze-dried beef stew, served with slabs of skillet-toasted, sourdough bread, and for dessert, Doris Rasmussen’s dense, rich brownies. By the time the meal was consumed, darkness had fallen, and a cold wind blew out of the southwest. They were all wearing their parkas before they finished cleaning up after the meal.

  “Don’t worry about it,” A. C. assured Conan when he asked about the noticeable drop in temperature. “Hell, Conan, the nights are always cold in the mountains this time of year.”

  With the cooking gear stowed away, the fire replenished so that its whispering, hectic light closed out everything else, they sat on the logs, finishing the beer and exchanging memories. It was A. C. who steered the conversation in that direction, reminiscing about Al when he made the varsity football team at Oregon State University, and Lucas when he set a record in the hundred-meter dash, about Al when he got his captain’s bars, and Lucas’s first commission after he went out on his own and established LJK Design, about the birth of Al’s first child. His son. A. C.’s grandson.

  It was, Conan realized, entirely purposeful on A. C.’s part. He was remembering times when he was proudest of his sons, even if he never actually managed the words: I’m proud of you.

  But perhaps one day he would. At least now the reminiscences and the fire drew them together with quiet laughter and affection. Even Al seemed to let go of his frustration and resentment.

  Male bonding, no doubt, Conan thought. Lise would be happy to know that it still worked on the trail to King’s Mountain.

  Chapter 8

  When Lucas and Al suggested that Conan sleep in A. C.’s tent, they had an ulterior motive, but Conan didn’t discover it until an hour after he had crawled into the tiny, nylon igloo with A. C.

  A. C. King snored.

  Not only did he snore, he whiffled, brayed, trumpeted like a bull elk, at a decibel level that billowed the dome of the tent. This wasn’t ordinary snoring that could be dismissed as white noise. This was a veritable symphony in an alien musical scale, repeatedly rising from whispering wheezes to a crescendo of rattling snorts, percussioned by honks and grunts and sounds much like muttered words.

  That Conan didn’t expect this aural phenomenon was due to the fact that on previous treks up King’s Mountain, he had never slept in the same tent with A. C. That he didn’t become aware of it tonight for an hour was due to weariness earned by physical exertion at a high altitude. It had been seven o’clock when he crawled into his sleeping bag, and against all his expectations, he fell asleep almost before he got it zipped up. But now his brain had apparently reopened for business and accepted input from his senses. What his senses put in was the raucous serenade from the sleeping bag only two feet away.

  Conan lay in his own Quallofil cocoon, muscles tightening by increments with the annoyed resentment that snorers inspire in the wakeful, and with the unease of incipient claustrophobia.

  And something else: cold.

  His nose felt like a chunk of ice attached to his face, and even in the confines of this high tech, insulated body bag, his feet and hands were turning numb. He realized then that it wasn’t A. C.’s spectacular snoring that billowed the dome of the tent. It was the wind.

  Finally, driven by anxious curiosity, a yen for a cigarette, and a desire to put some space between himself and A. C.’s symphony, Conan unzipped his sleeping bag and felt for his boots. By the time he got them laced, he could feel gooseflesh pebbling his skin under his Levi’s and wool sweater. He pulled on his parka and wool gloves, made sure his flashlight and cigarettes were in his pockets, then wormed his way through the tent’s opening into the night.

  To his dark-accustomed eyes, the sky seemed eerily light, the diffuse light of a waxing moon behind an opaque layer of clouds. The wind had not only quickened, it had turned frigid. He pulled up the hood of his parka as a gust tossed a rain of fir needles into his face.

  He managed to get a cigarette lit and took a long drag while he looked up at the black silhouettes of cedars and hemlocks swaying in an ominous dance. He could still hear snoring from A. C.’s tent. Lucas and Al slept more quietly, but at least one of them had inherited their father’s undoubtedly deviated septum.

  There was a smell about this wind, something pungent and electric that generated a prickle of fear at the back of Conan’s mind. He didn’t know this country well, didn’t know how to read the signs, but if he were on the Ten-Mile, he would regard this rising wind and sudden drop in temperature as warnings.

  But he was in a bowl here, encompassed by trees and the talus slope looming over the camp, and he couldn’t see enough sky. If memory served him, it was no more than a quarter mile to the clear-cut that had this morning provided such a fine view. Perhaps from that vantage point he could find some stars to tell him how extensive the cloud cover was. He almost laughed, reminded of his father’s acerbic dismissal of the forests of western Oregon: “Hell, a man can’t see a damn thing for all the trees.”

  Conan flipped the cigarette into the fire pit, then started down the trail. The diffuse light was just sufficient for him to stay on the trail without resorting to the flashlight. He wanted to hold on to his night vision, even though it meant stumbling occasionally over exposed roots. The distance seemed longer than he remembered, but finally he emerged from the trees onto the bare knoll.

  The wind here caught his breath, and now the sky was perceptibly darker, featureless, not a star anywhere. To the northeast, against the velvet black of forest, he saw a yellow light. The lodge. As he watched, a smaller light appeared beyond the lodge, moving west. A car on the highway. The light seemed to slow then wink out.

  He turned, looked up toward the camp. He could barely discern the black contour of the talus slope above the trees. Something colder than wind touched his cheek, a sprinkle of moisture. It felt like the fine droplets of a coastal mist.

  But not here, not at this elevation, not at this temperature.

  He jerked the flashlight from his pocket, turned it on. He had come looking for stars, and in a sense he had found them. The snowflakes caught in the beam looked uncannily like a shower of falling stars.

  The panic he felt was born of memories of blizzards he had survived in his youth, one in particular that had cost the lives of his mother and brother.

  But the panic ebbed as he took a deep, cold breath. At least he could be grateful for A. C.’s deviated septum. He pushed up his left sleeve, squinting at the glowing numbers on his watch. Eight o’clock. They had warning now and time to hike back to the lodge before—

  It came from the direction of the camp, a sundering blast that hammered at his eardrums, incited his heart to frenzied pounding. Then a cracking rumbling that seemed to go on forever yet ended with singular abruptness, a gust of wind that staggered him.

  Conan stood stunned, seeing nothing but darkness, hearing nothing but the ringing in his ears. On some level, he understood exactly what had happened, but his mind balked at acceptance.

  Then he broke into a run across the clear-cut and back into the forest, the beam of the flashlight glancing in quick arcs on the ghostly shafts of tree trunks. Panting with dread more than exertion, he sprinted
toward what he knew was a catastrophe.

  Dust. The starflakes in the beam were obliterated in a pall of dust. But he didn’t stop. Not until he stumbled—literally—into a barrier of broken rock. He sprawled on the sharp-edged rubble, coughing, eyes stinging with the dust, fine grains gritting between his teeth.

  “A. C.! Al! Lucas!”

  And why was he shouting their names into the wind?

  The camp was buried under tons of rock, and A. C. King and two of his sons were beyond hearing anything.

  Conan couldn’t have untangled the emotions that forced from his throat a long, desolate cry. Grief? Yes, even though he hadn’t known the victims intimately. Frustration, certainly. Terror when it came to him that he should have been in one of the tents smashed under this rock slide. And finally rage.

  This was not an accident.

  Yes, that talus slope had been on the verge of a slide for years, but the explosion that triggered this avalanche could not in any way be regarded as a natural phenomenon.

  He got to his feet, found the flashlight, and backtracked a short distance, then climbed to the crest of the ridge, detouring around trees and clumps of underbrush uprooted and wedged aside. When he reached the top of the slide, he cast the beam downward.

  It was as if the slope had been scooped out with a huge spoon. A rubble of boulders was mounded halfway up the raw concavity and had spilled down the ravine toward Loblolly Creek. It had probably dammed the creek. Methodically, he crisscrossed the area near the edge of the slide, teeth chattering with cold as he bent over the seeking beam of the flashlight, but it revealed no traces of dynamite wrappings or fuse, and the ground was too rocky for footprints. He found a crumpled, empty Marlboro pack and put it in his pocket, knowing full well that it might have been here for months.

  So intent was his mental focus that it was some time before it came through to him that he was finding nothing else because the ground was covered with snow, that the icy flakes were no longer showering stars, but dense waves riding the moaning wind.