Yosemite Fall (National Park Mystery Series)

by Scott Graham

  “I don’t know about this,” Chuck said. “You’re going to set a fire up here?”

  “Two fires,” Dale replied.

  Chuck shook his head, his fingertips to the bridge of his nose.

  “Everything will wash away with the next rainstorm,” Dale assured him.

  “What if the fires scorch the rock?”

  “That’ll wash away, too. It’s no big deal, Chuck.”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t have been that big a deal for us to do something like this—whatever ‘this’ is—back in the day. But we’re adults now. We’re supposed to be, anyway. This is a national park. You know, ‘leave no trace’ and all that.”

  “Leave no trace, leave no trace,” Bernard echoed at Chuck’s side.

  “Chuck makes a good point,” Ponch said, doubt entering his voice. “We got all the way up here to the summit together. Maybe that’s all we—”

  “Jesus!” Alden barked. “I had no idea you guys were such a bunch of weenies.”

  Caleb said to Chuck, “I had the same concerns you’re raising. I talked to Jimmy about it. He was totally reassuring. We’ll make sure we don’t leave any sign of anything behind. It’ll be all right, Chuck. Like we were never here.”

  “Says the guy who wanted to chuck a burning yule log off of here in the middle of the summer twenty years ago and set the whole valley on fire.”

  “Well, yeah, we did want to do that. But you talked us out of it, remember? And we listened to you. But this, tonight, is different. It’s just a little charcoal, not a whole tree. And it’s way up here on the summit, where there’s only rock, no vegetation at all.”

  Chuck shone his headlamp around the circle, taking in the expectant faces of his friends. He exhaled sharply through his nose. “I got you guys to listen to me once. I guess it’s too much to hope you’d ever listen to me again.”

  Dale held out his hand. “Gimme your load, weenie.”

  Chuck shrugged off his pack and dug out the two cans he’d carried to the summit. He held them out to Dale, the light of his headlamp revealing identical, unopened tin cans of sweet corn. “No trace. Promise me.”

  Dale took the cans. “I promise.” He knelt next to his pile of charcoal. “Corn is perfect for this.”

  “Whatever this is,” Chuck muttered.

  “The high moisture content helps,” Dale went on. “The sugariness, too. At least, I think it does.”

  “Sounds as if you’re talking about one of your wines at Zanstar.”

  Dale put one of the cans to his nose and sniffed. “Strong bouquet of tannin. Aromatic depth. A buttery finish with hints of oak.” He held up the can. “I’d say this is an exemplary varietal for our purposes.”

  He formed a bowl-shaped depression in the top of the briquette pile and set the tin can in it.

  “According to Jimmy, the can’s gotta be upright,” he explained.

  When the can of corn didn’t shift in its depression, he arranged more briquettes around it to within an inch of its top. He took the second tin can from Chuck and repeated the process in the other charcoal pyre.

  “Okay, let’s light ’em up,” he said, a trill of excitement in his voice.

  He took from his pack the plastic bottle of lighter fluid he’d hauled to the summit and squirted some of the bottle’s contents on each of the conical briquette piles.

  He walked to the top of the steel cables, gripped the topmost stanchions, and faced down the route. “Mark!” he called. “Be ready down there!”

  Mark’s faint cry came from the bottom of the cables. “All set!”

  Dale took a lighter from his pocket and squatted beside the nearest charcoal volcano. He flicked the lighter and held the flame to the knee-high pyre. Fire erupted from the briquettes with a quiet whoosh, climbing above the can of corn.

  Dale set the second pile aflame, traded the lighter for his phone, and filmed the twin pyres, panning between the two sets of flames licking skyward around the cans of corn.

  After a few seconds, he checked the time. “It’s 2:52,” he announced. He pocketed his phone. “We’ve got between twenty and twenty-five minutes to wait—that’ll be between 3:12 and 3:17.”

  “That specific?” Bernard asked.

  “Jimmy says it’s the same every time.” Dale eyed the fires burning at the two ends of the depression a few feet away. “But we should move back, just in case one of them decides to go early.”

  Dale backed with Chuck and the others to the rounded summit, fifty feet from the burning cones of charcoal. The flames diminished as the lighter fluid wore off and the charcoal briquettes burned on their own. Waves of warmth from the glowing briquettes rolled past Chuck at the top of the Cable Route.

  “I’ll start filming again at the eighteen-minute mark,” Dale said.

  Chuck checked the time on his phone. Was it really almost three o’clock?

  With cell service strong atop the dome, a text message from Janelle awaited him. Where are you? When will you be back?

  On top of Half Dome, he thumbed back. Not sure what I’m doing here.

  When he received no immediate response, he checked the timestamp on her message—2:32, not long ago. Though, he reasoned, the time might merely indicate when the message had reached his phone upon coming into service atop the dome.

  He sent Janelle another text. Back by dawn for the Slam. Promise!

  Stowing his phone, he sat down on the smooth stone surface of the summit and wrapped his arms around his knees. A slight breeze coursed over the peak, chilly but not cold. The others settled in, too, taking seats on the granite around him. Minutes ticked by. Chuck lay back and watched the stars, his head on his pack and his fingers clasped over his chest. After a minute or two, his eyes sagged shut.

  He jerked awake when Dale announced, “Eighteen minutes. Rise and shine, everybody.”

  Chuck climbed stiffly to a standing position. The briquette pyres glowed red hot at opposite ends of the small depression. The briquettes crackled when a gust of wind swept across the summit, the pyres brightening to the orange-red color of a desert sunset. The bitter odor of burnt charcoal permeated the night air.

  At Dale’s urging, Chuck and the others formed a line atop the dome, facing the burning coals.

  “Almost,” Dale breathed. He held out his phone, filming the twin pyres. “I just wish Jimmy could be here to see this with us.”

  Chuck’s pulse quickened. He took out his phone, punched it to video, and filmed the charcoal piles along with Dale.

  “Headlamps off,” Dale directed.

  They switched off their lights. The night was inky black save for the pinpricks of the stars overhead and a faint glow on the western horizon where the moon had disappeared.

  “Mark!” Dale cried down the steep rock face of the Cable Route.

  “Yo!” Mark yelled from below, his voice bouncing up the rock.

  “Are you ready?”

  “All set!” came Mark’s reply.

  Dale counted off the minutes as he filmed the glowing stacks of charcoal. “Twenty-two.” A minute later: “Twenty-three.”

  Chuck thought of the girls as he filmed the burning coals. If what was about to happen was what he expected, Carmelita and Rosie would get a kick out of watching his footage.

  “Almost,” Dale said between minutes twenty-three and twenty-four. “There’s so little wind and they’re burning so—”

  The night exploded with a concussive blast. Blazing white light blinded Chuck. He staggered backward, throwing an arm across his face. Bits of flaming coal bounced off him and a wave of searing heat flattened his shirt to his chest.

  Someone’s elbow dug into his side as they all fought to remain upright atop the rounded summit. The light of the explosion winked out an instant later, replaced by enveloping darkness. The air was rank with the smell of smoke and ash. Chuck sucked a breath, tasting singed sweet corn on his tongue.

  He shoved his phone in his pocket and blinked, his eyesight returning. The others stumbled aro
und the head of the Cable Route, dark forms on all sides of him. Dale clearly had misjudged the force of the blast—not that Chuck could blame him. Who could have imagined so much force could be generated by a single, exploding can of corn?

  Chuck froze. There were two fires. Two cans.

  The second blast, as powerful as the first, came before he could take so much as a single step in retreat. A second concussive wave pummeled him. The air around him lit brilliant white and another blast of heat washed past him. With the heat came a second round of red hot bits of charcoal, pelting him with the force of BB gun pellets. He put his hands to his face, his eyes closed.

  The concussion from the second blast forced him backward. He took a gasping breath, coating his mouth with smoke and pulverized corn. He heard the distant tinkling of one of the cans, now empty, as it tumbled down the face of the dome.

  Teetering on the sloped summit, he squinted between his fingers. The others milled around him as they, too, fought for balance.

  Someone stumbled through the crowd, striking his shoulder a glancing blow. An instant later, a human form shot away from him, past the iron stanchions at the top of the Cable Route, and down, screaming, into the darkness.

  PART THREE

  “Fingers of steel, zero body fat, and lots of testosterone.”

  —Famed female rock climber Lynn Hill, describing the historically male-dominated Yosemite Valley climbing scene

  24

  Chuck stared in horror, helpless, as the falling victim struck the rock face twenty feet below the summit of the dome, released a harsh “oomph,” and again launched into the air.

  The victim remained airborne, arms and legs flapping like those of a rag doll, until he faded into the dark void below. He screamed again, a terrorized sound, but his second scream ended abruptly, replaced by the crunching sound of his body striking the granite face once more, this time far below the summit of the peak.

  Chuck leaned forward, retching. Whoever had just tumbled off Half Dome was, without doubt, dead.

  He collapsed to his knees as cries of fear and confusion reached him from the smoky darkness.

  Dale’s voice: “What the . . . ?”

  Caleb, agonized: “Jesus God!”

  Alden bellowed, “What just happened? Can someone please tell me?”

  Glowing charcoal embers littered the smooth granite. Headlamps clicked on and darted all directions, their beams lighting the dissipating smoke. From his kneeling position, Chuck turned on his own headlamp and swept it across the others, silhouetted in his light.

  “Sound off when I say your name,” he directed.

  He began with those whose voices he’d already identified in the few shocked seconds since the accident. “Dale.”

  A headlamp bobbed a few feet away. “Here.”

  “Caleb.”

  “Yeah,” Caleb answered from farther away, subdued.

  “Alden.”

  “Still here, thank God.”

  “Bernard.”

  Silence.

  “Bernard,” Chuck repeated, louder.

  “Yes,” Bernard said shakily from behind one of the headlamps, followed by the sound of his hands striking his legs in quick, steady rhythm. “I can’t . . . I couldn’t . . .”

  The tone of the screams must have triggered some sort of recognition in Chuck’s mind, because he saved Ponch’s name for last. “Ponch,” he said, even as he knew he would receive no answer.

  He waited. Nothing.

  He wrapped his arms around himself, his eyes squeezed shut. “Ponch,” he repeated. Tears stung his eyelids as guilt rose, boiling, in his chest.

  Dale strode to the top of the Cable Route. “Mark!” he cried down the rock face.

  “What happened?” Mark hollered back. “Is everyone all right?”

  “No,” Dale yelled. “Someone fell. Ponch. West of you. Go look. Go, go, go! I’m coming down.”

  Dale descended the steep granite wall, walking backward down the bare rock with alternating grasps on the parallel strands of steel.

  Caleb went to the top of the route. “Oh, dear God,” he said. He backed down the sloping stone face between the cables.

  The others descended behind Dale and Caleb. Chuck came last, after a scan of the abandoned summit revealed nothing that hinted at what, beyond the force of the second explosion itself, might have led to Ponch’s plunge from the top of the dome.

  Maybe the second blast, close on the heels of the first, had startled Ponch so much he’d lost his footing and fallen off the peak. But that didn’t seem likely, Chuck told himself, not when he considered his own surprise at the strength of the first blast and his shock at the second explosion so soon after. The blasts had startled him, but he hadn’t lost his footing, much less come anywhere near falling from the summit, not even when he’d been jostled in the darkness by one of the others.

  He stopped midway down the route, his hands locked to the cables, thinking back to the second explosion and the shoulder blow he’d received in the blast’s immediate aftermath. The blow hadn’t been enough to send him tumbling off Half Dome. But what if someone—perhaps even the same someone who’d bumped Chuck—had struck Ponch with enough force to send him cartwheeling off the top of the dome?

  Chuck was certain whoever might have accidentally struck Ponch, if anyone, wouldn’t admit to it. What point would there be in offering up such a confession?

  He resumed his descent. An anguished cry echoed through the night air when he was three-quarters of the way down the coiled lengths of steel, the others nearing the bottom of the route below him.

  “Ponch!” Mark screamed, his voice breaking. “Ponch!”

  Chuck shuddered. Little more than twenty-four hours ago, Ponch had hiked up Sentinel Ridge and, together with Chuck and Janelle, located Thorpe’s battered body. Now, Ponch had suffered a similar fate.

  Chuck’s throat constricted when he thought of Janelle and the girls back in Camp 4. Were they and Clarence safe?

  He paused at the bottom of the Cable Route long enough to pull out his phone and check it for a message from Janelle. Nothing. Nor could he check in with her because there was no cell service here, lower on the peak.

  Dale approached Chuck as he neared a tight circle of glowing headlamps a hundred feet west of the bottom of the Cable Route, where the almost-vertical upper face of the dome moderated to a less severe pitch.

  “Is he . . . ?” Chuck asked.

  “Yes.” Dale’s voice shook. “He’s dead.”

  Chuck’s shoulders fell. “Ponch,” he moaned.

  He sagged, his knees nearly buckling. Why had he allowed the prank to go forward?

  Finally, his voice weary, he said, “I’ll climb back up until I can get a call to go through.”

  “Thank God,” Chuck told Janelle four hours later, taking her in his arms upon his return to Camp 4. “You’re okay.”

  “Me?”

  “You. The girls.”

  She freed herself from his embrace. “You’re the one who was up there.” Her chin trembled. “It could have been you.”

  Chuck had called ahead, filling her in on Ponch’s death. “I keep telling myself it must have been an accident.”

  Her chin stilled and her gaze grew sharp, a pair of dark lines furrowing her forehead between her brows. “You and I both know it wasn’t. It couldn’t have been, not after . . .” Her voice died away, but she could have finished the sentence any number of ways—not after Jimmy’s accident, not after the close call with the tumbling boulder, not after Thorpe’s death and the suspicious cut in his ankle.

  Chuck detailed the night’s events. “If you’d seen the explosions,” he concluded. “They were way bigger than I expected.”

  “You never should have been up there in the first place.”

  Tears filled his eyes at the thought of Ponch’s death. “That’s what I keep telling myself. If only I’d put a stop to it.”

  He knuckled the corners of his eyes and looked around sun-drenched
Camp 4, avoiding Janelle’s gaze. Campers and climbers, unknowing, prepared breakfast and arranged gear in their sites. To the west, the YOSAR encampment was quiet, the team members high on the south flank of Half Dome, assisting the park rangers charged with securing the scene and performing the initial investigation into Ponch’s death. In the reunion campsite next door, Jimmy leaned on his crutches, his face pale above his coiled beard, as he spoke with the others just returned from Half Dome with Chuck.

  Janelle gripped Chuck’s arm. “We both agree it wasn’t an accident. It couldn’t have been. Not in light of everything else.”

  “Meaning,” he said, turning to her, “we have to get you and the girls out of here.”

  Clarence approached. “Is somebody going somewhere?”

  Chuck provided more details to Clarence and Janelle about the explosions and Ponch’s fall.

  The YOSAR team and rangers had arrived on the scene two hours after Chuck’s emergency call. The rangers had released Chuck and the others with the admonition they would be questioned later. As he’d crossed the valley floor toward Camp 4 with the others half an hour ago, Chuck had received a text from Owen Hutchins, Jr., with an assigned time of two p.m. for his interview at the campground office.

  Finished describing the night’s events, Chuck stared at the dusty ground of the campsite, barely capable of keeping his eyes open. The combination of the long overnight climb and lack of sleep was crushing, as was the brutal reality of Ponch’s death on the heels of Thorpe’s death, Jimmy’s injury, and the toppled boulder.

  He raised his head with tremendous effort and said to Janelle and Clarence, his words faltering, “I can’t . . . I’m not sure . . .”

  “You don’t have any choice, jefe,” Clarence said.

  Beside him, Janelle nodded.

  A rush of gratitude surged through Chuck. He wasn’t alone. “What do we do?”

  Carmelita poked her head from the tent.

  “¡Mamá!” she cried, leaving the tent in pajamas and flip-flops. “Chuck! Uncle Clarence! This is it. This is the day. Round four. And I’m going to win!”