High Country- Pigeon 12 (8 page)

"Not exactly," Anna admitted. "I was a school psychologist in my former life."

"Why did you quit?"

"Personal reasons. I needed to get away from the town I lived in for a while."

"Messy divorce?"

"Something like that."

"He beat you?"

Anna said nothing. Lies were getting so easy she could tell them without saying a word. The wicked web's weft and warp was getting complex. Lies take on a life of their own.

"He stalking you?" Nicky asked with an odd mixture of sympathy and hope. She was a child of TV movies and in love with domestic drama.

"I just need to stay away awhile," Anna said in such a way it was clear further questions would be rebuffed. To crowbar the subject back onto the track she wanted to follow, she stood, turned in place, hands on her hips and said: "Then you cleaned up?"

Nicky nodded. "I didn't want anybody to know. They said they'd kill me."

Nicky cleaning was as suspicious as it got, but Anna said nothing. The girl hadn't been thinking clearly. Who could blame her?

Anna got her a cup of hot tea with plenty of sugar. The Brits had it right: good strong tea made everything more bearable. The next half-hour was spent convincing Nicky to report the break-in and the assault. In the end a compromise was struck. Anna would report it, but only if the rangers would first promise not to make a "big deal" out of it. Anna reassured her the chief ranger would probably be circumspect, sending a ranger over in street clothes so the villains would be none the wiser.

Knowing the girl would feel safer that way, Anna sat up with the light on, pretending to read till her roommate's breathing evened out in sleep.

When Nicky first began telling her story, Anna had jumped toward the conclusion that it had been the men she and Mary had spoken with in Dixon's tent cabin. As the tale unfolded and Nicky told of the man who'd restrained her-smooth-handed and sweet smelling, the slacks, the dress shoes-she'd become less sure. Anybody who'd spent time in the tent cabin inherited by the erstwhile climbers would have reeked of tobacco and probably whiskey.

Still, there was such a thing as showers.

Maybe they suspected Anna wasn't who she pretended to be and came to find out if their suspicions were well founded. If so, they'd discovered nothing. She'd been careful not to drag along a single scrap of her past: not a badge, not a gun, nothing.

Anna doubted Bobby, Billy and Ben, the pseudonymous stooges, would have been able to behave with the professional coldness Nicky described, particularly not after consuming the amount of booze they'd downed two hours before the break-in. Mark, the leader, struck her as a man with sufficient control, but who was working with him? He wasn't the one sitting on Nicky's back. He was slight of build and, when Anna met him, he'd just showered. Unless he'd showered again he had been in the tent cabin long enough that his clothes, hair and skin would have recovered their ashtray stink.

However unlikely, these thoughts triggered sudden fear for Mary, Anna's unwitting accomplice. Careful to make no noise, Anna crept out of the room and down the hall to peek into the girl's room. Mary and her roommate slept the sleep of the innocent.

Relieved, Anna returned to her room. For her, the sleep of the innocent had ended many years before. Lying in bed, grateful to the marauders for not harming her roommate and for being the inspiration for cleaning the place, Anna planned her morning. As soon as it was decent for a citizen to go calling, she would return to Camp 4.

CHAPTER 5

Long before sunup Anna was awake. Longitudinally YosemiteNational Park wasn't much farther north than Mississippi, but the deep narrow valley that bore the brunt of visitation-referred to by the park employees as The Ditch-didn't receive day's blessing for an hour or more after the sun gilded the tops of the Sierra. Rising early was a perk of middle age and a boon to law enforcement. Anna had never seen any statistics on it, but she was willing to bet four A.M. to eight A.M. were the safest hours of the day. In many ways criminals were a lazy bunch.

Taking advantage of this diurnal edge, she left her roommate sleeping soundly, bundled up for a December morning in the mountains and slipped out of the dorm.

As often happened, the valley lay under a small tailor-made inversion layer imposed by the surrounding peaks. Air was trapped in The Ditch and, though campers were few this time of year, the cold damp air was redolent with the smell of campfire smoke.

Anna had reached an age where sleeping on the ground with the bugs and the sticks no longer held the appeal it once had. Still, the smell of woodsmoke on a winter morning called forth a strange nostalgia, an ache that vacillated between a yearning for home and hearth and a need to carve an adventure out of untrammeled land.

Enjoying the sweet sting of this dichotomy, she buried her hands in the pockets of her parka and lengthened her stride.

The path away from the Ahwahnee led through a field of boulders a story and a half high. Beneath an overcast and as yet lightless sky, rocks and trees loomed black and close. Anna remembered one of Yosemite's unsolved mysteries. On a sunny afternoon in the mid-eighties, a young woman had walked into this rocky defile. A hundred yards behind her was a family of four. Ahead about the same distance were two newlyweds honeymooning in the park. The woman had walked from sight into this granite alley. Two screams were heard. By the time the family ran to see what the problem was, the woman was dead, stabbed thirty-nine times. Her killer was never found.

Remembering this gruesome history some might have walked faster. Anna stopped, let the darkness cease swirling in her wake and opened herself to any sinister vibrations that might remain in the ether. There were none; all was peace. The natural world lived and died by tooth and claw, without malice and without regret. Ghosts, it seemed, could only be bound to the earth by man-made walls.

As befit her rank and status, Lorraine Knight had one of the better homes in the park. Built of wood with a deck overlooking a creek, quiet now with winter but a frothing orchestra of liquid sound in spring, it was tucked up on a gentle rise beneath the southern cliffs. In the nineties the Merced River flooded, wiping out much of the park's housing. Some had yet to be rebuilt, making what was left even more precious.

Despite the early hour, a light burned in the kitchen and Anna was relieved. Where there was light there might be coffee.

Lorraine was still in her pajamas, but she was conscious and had the coffee on so Anna adored her. The thick braid in which her glorious hair was incarcerated for duty was unbound. A cascade of red-gold floated around the ranger to well below her waist. With a face sculpted by laughter and weather for half a century, Lorraine looked to Anna like a wise woman of fiction. Or a white witch.

Over coffee-Folgers with two percent milk in place of cream, but being in the beggar's category, Anna was not choosy-she told Lorraine of the situation that had awaited her when she'd returned home from the clinic the previous night.

The chief ranger listened without interrupting, an occurrence rare and welcome enough that Anna noted it in Knight's credit column.

When she was done they sat a moment in silence. Then Lorraine asked: "What do you make of it?"

A good part of the night Anna had lain awake trying to answer just that question. She shared the pitifully few thoughts she'd come up with. The intruders were accustomed to and proficient at their chosen career. They smacked of city-dwellers in the park for nonrecreational reasons. It was not random. They'd chosen Anna, Cricket and Nicky's room for a reason. They'd known where it was and that the three women would be out that night. That spoke of a connection inside the dormitory.

"Do you think these men might have had something to do with the girl-this Cricket's-collapse? Poisoned her to guarantee you'd all be out?"

Anna thought of that. It might work for Nicky and Cricket-Nicky's poisoning not taking-but it didn't account for her.

"I think it's linked to the disappearance," Anna said. "These guys were searching for something specific-something they didn't find. Something one of them at least thought worth snapping a young woman's neck for. Maybe Cricket or Nicky possesses this desirable object. We'll have to talk to Cricket when we get a chance. Nicky seemed genuinely baffled."

"Maybe it's about you," Lorraine said. "If so, we'd better pull you out of this job." The chief ranger looked genuinely concerned for Anna's safety and Anna was flattered. "These guys are not your average dog-off-leash, campfire-out-of-bounds park criminals. If you're right and it is connected with the four missing persons it could get ugly. Uglier." Lorraine licked a drip of coffee off the side of her mug with an amazingly pointed tongue.

A dog, an unimpressive heap of breeds with warm and soulful eyes, pushed its head into Anna's hand and she scratched its ears as much for her comfort as for the dog's. "Wendy," the chief ranger said fondly. "She's a keen judge of character, a kind of doggie sixth sense that helps her nose out people who are likely to drop food. She especially loves children."

For the briefest of moments, Wendy's soft ears put her in mind of her dog, Taco, the cozy kitchen reminding her of home and, so, of Paul, with whom she would soon share a life. Anna considered pretending she believed the night searchers were about her, about her undercover identity. Just for a second she indulged in a fantasy of going home.

"It's not about me," she said before fantasy could mature into temptation. "At first I thought maybe that was, it coming so soon on the heels of a visit I made to those bozos in Dixon's tent cabin. I'll check it out but I'm sure it wasn't them. At least I'm pretty sure it wasn't." Anna explained her logic of following Nicky's nose in the matter.

"They didn't smell right," she concluded.

Lorraine smiled at the literal application of the old law enforcement saw but otherwise seemed to accept Anna's reasoning.

She went on: "If it wasn't me and-I know we've got to check this out-it wasn't Nicky or Cricket who inspired our visitors, then it had to be Trish. Something she'd cached. According to Nicky, the man searching said he'd found, 'nothing' and the man holding Nicky down said, 'He should have figured that.'

"I know there's a slew of reasons for that remark, but the obvious one is Trish Spencer. She's gone missing. I've taken her place in not only the Ahwahnee dining room but in the dorm. It makes sense that the 'he' who directed this search should have realized Trish's stuff would have been packed up and moved."

"Ah," Lorraine said, and: "Let me get dressed."

Alone with Wendy, Anna wondered what "Ah" meant. "Ah yes, you clever thing," or "Ah, so, you're in therapy for this?"

Lorraine emerged looking official: Rapunzel hair in a tasteful knot at the nape of her neck, Scooby-Doo pajamas replaced with the green and gray. "I'd give you a lift but I expect folks are stirring by now. When it looks like a good time, drop by the medical clinic. I'll leave the key to the old fire cache. For lack of a better place, Ms. Spencer's stuff was stored there. We couldn't track down her parents. None of the people at the Ahwahnee seemed to even know if they were living or dead. Nobody else appeared asking after Trish or her things. I'll see if we can turn anything up on two city men entering or staying in the park last night."

Anna left first, feeling pleased and reassured. Despite the silly pajamas, Lorraine was a woman of business. A good boss was a blessing indeed. With a boss as clear-thinking and action-oriented as Lorraine Knight, Anna felt half inclined to obey orders.

Having returned to the dorm, breakfasted, checked on Nicky and seen the tragic erosion of the so briefly clean room, Anna decided it was late enough to wander down to Camp 4 and nose around. Given her age and civilian status, unless she could come up with a believable reason for metaphorically ringing their doorbell, a direct assault on the denizens of Dixon's cabin would be out of character and most likely unproductive. Anna didn't know precisely what they were up to in Yosemite but, judging from the soiree the previous afternoon, it had Secret Squirrel written all over it. What she needed to figure out was whether theirs was a secret she need worry about or if she could leave them to their nefarious activities without compromising her own quest for the missing people.