High Country- Pigeon 12 (3 page)

"I've seen him around to talk to," she went on quickly lest Anna be disappointed. "You pretty much see everybody around if you live here.

"Dixon was cool. The other guys call him Spiderman. Once he climbed Half Dome in the morning-an unassisted climb, you know, just fingers and toes and a belay-then he ran down and over to El Cap and climbed it in the afternoon. Nobody'd ever done that before. He always looked kind of wild with all that hair and that smile. Kind of like Lawrence of Arabia but not so pale and faggoty. More like that other guy, the black-robed guy."

"Omar Sharif?"

"I guess. But taller. Oh, I'm screwing it up but Dix was a rock: real and hard and unfathomable."

Dixon Crofter had been a resident on and off for three years. He would have come on the scene when Mary was fourteen. A good time for a man to steal a girl's heart without even being aware of it. At fourteen it was still acceptable to love pure and chaste from afar. Anna suspected Mary had yet to let go of this girlish habit where the lean and romantic climber dude was concerned.

"Dix was always scruffy but backpacker scruffy. You know-fine."

Anna knew. Even at her age there remained an attraction to scruffy young men, though in recent years, she'd been content to merely admire them from a distance, the way she did mountain lions and grizzly bear cubs.

"This is it," Mary announced.

They had passed the lodge and arrived at the notorious Camp 4. It was set in a field of boulders that dwarfed the tents and trees. Despite the inclement weather, men were out climbing. A new breed of climber had sprung up since Anna first visited Yosemite Valley back in college: sport climbers, people who eschewed the long dangerous climbs, preferring short speedy pitches up boulder faces which they pocked with anchors in what seemed to be an attempt to re-create indoor climbing walls on living rock. Sport climbers dotted the rain-streaked granite with brightly colored ropes and more brightly colored spandex and fleece.

"They're not real," Mary said with unself-conscious snobbery. "They're more like climbing groupies. They like to talk the talk and swagger around the campfires with the big boys."

"Dixon was one of the big boys?"

"Oh yeah. He owns a tent cabin. They're hard to come by. These guys guard their cabin rights like you wouldn't believe. Somebody's practically got to die before they change hands." Her words caught in her throat. Mary'd lived too long in a wilderness park not to know that was probably what had happened to Dixon. Her climber was most likely dead.

Maybe not, Anna reminded herself. People lost in the mountains, fallen down gullies to break femurs, off cliffs to shatter hips, had been known to live weeks under conditions and weather as severe as any the Sierra had dished up so far. Humans were tenacious and unbelievably tough for animals without claws, who were unable to run fast or jump high, blind in the dark, without any real sense of smell to speak of and no pelt to ward off the cold. That was why SAR units hated to quit looking. When time came, they stopped spending NPS resources and talking about it but over a few scotches the stories came out. An unsolved disappearance from ten, twelve or thirty years before would still be on their minds.

Mary shook her pale yellow hair to banish the vision of the fine and scruffy Mr. Crofter dead in a ditch. "Dix-Dixon Crofter-bought the cabin a few years back off a French climber who lost his feet to frostbite."

"Had to quit climbing?"

"Oh no. He got wooden prosthetic feet. He had 'em made smaller than his old feet so he could wedge them better, and of real hard wood because it worked better for him than plastic. I guess he's still climbing, but we haven't seem him around here for a couple years."

Anna made a mental note to ask the chief ranger how one went about "buying" a tent cabin on NPS land and whether the owning of one was worth killing for.

Camp 4 was well populated for so late in the year. The unusually cold but dry weather had lengthened the climbing season significantly. Red, orange, green and blue tents sprouted between the boulders like poisonous mushrooms. Climbers-the real and the unreal-hunkered around picnic tables dark with moisture saying little and nursing their beverages of choice from battered melmac cups and thermos caps.

The paved path Anna and Mary followed wended through the campsites. For all the notice Anna got she might have been invisible, but in Mary's wake there stirred a hormonal breeze that brought heads up and enlivened faces.

On a small rise at the east end of the campground, forming a skeletal village, perched the tent cabins of climber royalty. Dirty gray-brown canvas houses, a door at one end and a stovepipe sticking out the other, were splattered down at odd angles as if they'd fallen from a low-flying plane. Unprepossessing in and of themselves, they looked a picture of cozy comfort next to their nylon neighbors on this gloomy, cold November afternoon.

Taking in the scene of Dixon Crofter's last known address, Anna enjoyed the scent of pine mixed with wood smoke, a perfume that captured the essence of mountains and adventure. It tickled a place in her brain that was untouched but by train whistles and engendered a need to sing sad songs and wander the globe. Maybe the smell had a like effect on Crofter, Spencer, Bates and Waters. Maybe one day they'd simply turned left toward the Rest of the World instead of right toward the containment of civilization.

"Which one belonged to Dixon?" she asked.

"The one with the porch." Mary pointed to a short narrow deck crowded with a hibachi and bicycle. Two forlorn beach towels, their gay colors muted from wear and precipitation, hung across the railing, relics from better weather. Smoke poured out of the stovepipe. Given the information Mary had shared regarding real-estate transactions in Camp 4, Anna had expected Crofter's cabin to stand empty. If it took death or something very like it for these tents to change hands, the next tenants had not stood on ceremony.

"Looks like squatters moved in. Probably sport climbers not wanting to get their spiffy new gear wet." Mary's voice, usually softened by the blurring of natural shyness, had an edge to it. Her face was set in hard lines-no easy feat with flesh firm and unmarred by time and trauma. "That just plain sucks," she said. "Dix might be coming back. We don't know anything for sure."

For a heartbeat or more Anna watched Mary from the corner of her eye. The girl was park born and bred. Her sense of pride and the proprietary pleasure park people take in gifted eccentrics attracted to "their" park had been outraged.

"Dix owns that cabin. They can't just move in. Makes me want to go in there and chew somebody's head off."

Anna wanted to get a look in the cabin as well, but for less exalted reasons. "Why don't you?" she tempted the girl. "The bastards have it coming."

"I just should." Now that opportunity had knocked in the form of adult approbation, Mary's courage wavered. So did Anna's. Without gun, pepper spray, baton or color of law to hide behind, she questioned the wisdom of goading the girl into a confrontation with whomever had taken Crofter's space. Still and all there were plenty of tents nearby and, out of uniform, Anna had no compunction about screaming for help at the top of her lungs should things go awry.

"They are probably even using his gear," Anna said, picking the most heinous crime she could think of.

"Will you go with me?" Pleading and fierce, righteousness ignited Mary's usually pacific blue eyes.

"You bet." Though she felt unpleasantly powerless without the weight that went with a badge-regardless of the size of the individual it was pinned to-Anna's blood ran faster and warmer at the thought of real work. Standing straighter to take full advantage of all sixty-four inches of her imposing frame, she pushed the graying hair back from where her hood had fringed it around her face and reminded herself she was yet possessed of a formidable weapon. Odds were good these squatters were in their twenties. With luck, those who did not respect their mothers feared them. If they had any buttons, Anna intended to push them the way only a woman of a certain age can.

It wasn't her style, but Anna let Mary go first. They weren't serving a warrant on known felons; they were visiting a tent in the peaceful splendor of a national park. Besides, Mary's face was more likely to get them invited in than Anna's was. The poor girl, blissfully unaware of it and never to be enlightened by Anna, was adorable when she was mad.

Anna trailed Mary up the short, well-worn path from pavement to cabin. Vehicles were not allowed in camp, but there were tire tracks frozen in the soil. Big tires, and new. The tread was crisp, cutting deep. Probably a truck or an SUV. Anna could see gouges where the vehicle had been backed up to the railing as if to load or unload something. Given the length of time and the weather since Dixon Crofter quit his quarters, the tracks had been made after he'd disappeared.

Unless Dixon kept a secret treasure in his little cloth house, there shouldn't have been much worth stealing. Climbing gear was expensive but didn't have much resale value, and it looked as if the new guys not only had their own stuff but enough to be cavalier with it. Four brand-new but filthy backpacks leaned against the railing on the narrow porch. No attempt had been made to protect them from the elements.

Mary rapped smartly on the screen door. Anna hurried up the steps to be near when whatever was going to happen happened. As she squeezed past the hibachi and the packs she was hit with a familiar smell. It was so out of place it took her a moment to place it. Diesel fuel; something nearby was soaked with either diesel or gasoline and oil.

The door opened and they were greeted by a gust of cigarette smoke and a boyish voice saying: "Well, did you get your . . ." It broke off when its owner saw them instead of whomever he was expecting. "Yeah. Hey. Um, can I do something for you?"

Anna looked over Mary's shoulder. The door's screen added its veil to the smoke nearly obscuring their intended host. Dark-haired, short in stature, confused and mildly alarmed were the only impressions she could glean.

"May we come in?" she asked before Mary could begin her tirade. From a sudden slump of the girl's shoulders, Anna suspected she'd chickened out anyway. All the better. Mary was there to get them inside. A scene on the doorstep that got them banned would be of little use.

For a second Anna's request was met with silence, then: "Hey, man . . . I don't know . . ." and the shadowy face turned as he looked inside for guidance. Anna poked Mary gently in the ribs.

"Please, sir," she said like a child accustomed to being nudged into good manners by her elders.

The plea put Anna in mind of little Oliver Twist with his empty porridge bowl, and she smiled.

"Yeah. Sure. I guess," the doorkeep managed, and the screen was opened. Anna pushed Mary into the stifling darkness. Inside it was eighty degrees or better, the woodstove crackling and smoking with too much wet wood.

"Uh, sit down if you can find a spot," their host said uncertainly.

The place looked as if frat boys had been having a three-day orgy in an REI warehouse. Equipment, new by the look of it, and backcountry apparel were scattered and heaped so thickly not even a footpath remained across the plank floor. Dixon's storage boxes and cook area had been looted. Opened cans of food, dirty dishes and socks were mixed haphazardly. Whoever these people were, they clearly knew nothing about housekeeping in bear country. No grizzlies were left in Yosemite, but the black bear population was thriving and had long ago learned the delights of people food. With this largesse, Anna was surprised bears hadn't already torn out the side of the tent.

As her eyes adjusted she realized part of the piled debris was in human form. Amid the flotsam on the cot to the left of the stove were two men. One leaned against the wooden frame of the cabin, legs splayed, one foot on the floor, one on the cot. Between a beer and a cigarette both hands were spoken for. Hunkered at the cot's foot was another man with a bottle of bourbon held by the neck. No glass. He, too, had a cigarette, but his lay forgotten on a saucer at his feet, a long white ash highlighting a burn mark on the plate.

Masked by beard stubble, smoke and the paucity of light, Anna couldn't guess their ages. They felt older than most climbers. Thirties. Maybe forties. The habitual ease with which they embraced their various dissipations spoke of long practice. Neither of them looked like athletes. "Beer" was significantly overweight and "Whiskey's" bare and dirty feet had been inexpertly bandaged in the wake of serious blistering. Despite the haze of their chosen painkillers, both looked miserable.