Mountain Rampage (7 page)

Hemphill pivoted and held the photograph out to where Kirina and the students stood in a knot beside the excavated cabin site. “Can any of you tell me how this knife might've ended up behind your dorm building last night? Or how it could have gotten blood on it?”

Chuck opened his mouth, ready to break in before the students said anything incriminating. But what if one of them offered information that would free Clarence from suspicion? Chuck settled back on his heels.

Hemphill allowed several seconds to pass. When none of the students responded, he said, “Thank you for your attention.”

He turned and spoke only to Clarence. “We'll be in touch.”

E
IGHT

Not until the police officer was well away from the mine site did Chuck turn to the students.

“Lunch break,” he said.

Kirina clapped her hands. “You heard the man.”

The students removed their sack lunches and water bottles from their packs and spread out around the site in twos and threes, sitting on boulders or the stacked cabin logs or cross-legged on the ground. They leaned close to one another, whispering and directing furtive glances at Clarence, who stood in place, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

Chuck picked up his pack and motioned for Clarence to do the same. “Let's get out of here,” he said, leading Clarence across the mine site to where Samuel sat looking at his sandwich.

Chuck gave the young man a reassuring tap on the shoulder. “You did great in there.”

Samuel offered a pallid smile. “So did you.”

“Let's you and me never do that again, okay?”

Samuel aimed his chin at the mine tunnel. “I'm never going back in there.”

“You won't have to. No one will.”

With Clarence following, Chuck crossed to the far side of the mine site and angled up Mount Landen's northeast ridge. Though he was breathing hard by the time he reached the ridge crest, he hadn't escaped the questions presented by Officer Hemphill's appearance at the mine.

Clarence reached the top of the ridge a minute later. He bent forward, his hands on his knees, his stomach heaving. When his breathing calmed, he straightened and joined Chuck in looking north off the ridge into Fall River Valley far below. The valley was bisected by Fall River Road, a tan ribbon snaking through
the trees. The park's original route to the high country predated the construction of Trail Ridge Road by several decades. These days, the road was a little-used gravel byway.

High above the valley to the north and west, the three tallest peaks of the Mummy Range, Ypsilon, Chiquita, and Bighorn, jig-sawed the skyline. The midday breeze coursing over the ridge was warm, the sky clear and blue.

By this hour on any normal summer day in the Mummies, massive thunderheads should have been building above the mountain peaks, leading to afternoon storms that would lash the high country with rain, sleet, hail, even snow. But this was no ordinary summer. In contrast to the heavy summer rains and raging floods that had washed out roads and devastated downtown Estes Park a few years ago, this summer the park was gripped by drought attributable, scientists said, to the extremes of global climate change, just as the floods had been.

Though the months-long drought was hard on the park's flora and fauna, the string of cloudless days had made the students' work at the mine easy these past weeks. Collapsible nylon shelters, toted by the students to the site at the beginning of the summer to protect their excavation work from downpours, remained stowed in stuff sacks at the edge of the site. Not once over the last seven weeks had the students been forced to don their raincoats.

Chuck and Clarence sat facing west on a pair of rocks, the summit of Mount Landen high above them, Fall River Valley more than a thousand feet below.

“Time to figure this thing out,” Chuck said.

“What's to figure?” Clarence asked. “My knife, human blood, white-man cop ready to lock me away.”

“We're not in the South Valley, Clarence.”

“I'd be better off if we were. At least a few Albuquerque cops
have the same skin color as me.” He flicked an angry hand. “You saw how he treated me. He's got my arrest warrant all ready to go.”

“He's just getting started on his investigation.”

“Easy for you to say. It's not your knife they found.”

“No one knows if a crime's even been committed yet.”

“Doesn't matter. Whatever happened, he figures I did it.” Clarence gave his Latino accent free rein. “
El Chicano
.
El spic.
” His voice grew bitter. “I never should've come here this summer.”

“What are you talking about?”

Clarence gave Chuck a level look. “Jan knows. Even the girls have felt it.”

Chuck studied the north slope of Mount Landen. Narrow, stone-walled couloirs cut into the bare, alpine slope every couple hundred yards. Where the pitch of the slope lessened, the couloirs came together to form a funnel-like drainage that twisted and turned before disappearing into the forest on its way to the river below.

He pressed his fingers into his thighs. For a year now, Janelle and the girls had shared their lives with him—a middle-aged white guy making his way through the world with his brown-toned stepdaughters and mocha-hued wife. He'd seen the heads turn; he'd read the appraising looks in people's eyes.

“They don't mean anything by it,” he told Clarence.

“So what. We're still plenty different from the upstanding, white-bread folks of Estes Park, and different is all that matters.”

“You're overreacting. We'll head back to town, find a lawyer, get this thing sorted out.”

“
No
. No lawyers. I'm not guilty of anything. Somebody took my knife. I had nothing to do with it. I don't need a lawyer.”

“We've got to make sure—”

“I said
no
,” Clarence repeated. “What we have to do is figure
out what happened. And we have to do it on our own, before the cops stick it to me.”

“They've got nothing to charge you with.”

“They'll come up with something. Just you watch.”

“I
was
watching. I saw a cop doing his job.”

“We need to think beyond him—to the students, the workers next door. Somebody saw something. They had to. You can get Kirina to talk to the students. I'll talk to the Falcon House people. They won't say anything to the cops, but they'll talk to me.”

Chuck lifted an eyebrow. At the beginning of the summer, he'd made it clear that the field school's female students were off limits to Clarence, full stop, no exceptions. Chuck had seen the looks every one of the Fort Lewis girls, even Kirina, had aimed at Clarence when he was at his most alive and magnetically electric. To his credit, however, Clarence had taken Chuck at his word and had focused his charms on the flock of female, college-age resort workers from Eastern Europe boarding for the summer in Falcon House.

“You really think,” Chuck asked, “that whoever sliced somebody with your knife is going to turn around and confess what they did to you?”

“Somebody's sure to know something. And there's plenty who will let me know what they know.”

Chuck eyed Clarence. “How many are we talking about?”

Clarence avoided Chuck's look. “It's been a whole summer.”

“It's been a month and a half.”

“I don't put notches in my belt.”

“
How many?
”

Clarence addressed the line of peaks marching away into the distance. “Three or four. Five, maybe.”

Chuck shook his head. “Unbelievable. And how many guys over in Falcon House do you suppose you've managed to piss off in the process?”

Clarence twisted to face Chuck. “All the guys living in Falcon House are a bunch of
campesinos
from
México
—cooks, janitors, dishwashers—sending their money home and counting the days till they can get back to their families.”

“And the young women?”

“They're on their big summer adventure from Romania, Bulgaria, places like that. Ready to par-
tay
. They're way out of those
Méxicanos'
league.”

“But not yours.”

“Nobody's out of my league.”

“I bet you made one of the Mexicans jealous.”

“So he did what, took my knife and stabbed somebody with it? What sense would there be in that?”

“I'm still thinking it through,” Chuck admitted.

“While you're doing your thinking, let me tell you what I already know. Nobody's going to come forward and tell the cops, ‘Hey, guess what. I stole Clarence's knife and slashed somebody with it and they stood there and bled for a while and then they ran off into the woods and now they're gone.' Which means the focus is going to stay right on
me
.”

“All the more reason to get a lawyer.”

“Wrong. The cop said they're going to call me in for more questioning, right? Later today, probably, or maybe tomorrow. When they do, I want them to see I got nothin' to hide. If I come in all lawyered up, they'll figure it's me for sure. They'll focus everything they've got on nailing me to the wall.” Clarence took a deep breath. “I have to show them I'm a victim of circumstance, that whatever crime was committed—
if
a crime was committed—was somebody else's doing.”

“Who do you suppose
did
get their hands on your knife?”

“Could've been anybody. It's not like I was hiding it.”

“Somebody must've grabbed it to do some whittling, like you,” Chuck reasoned. “They cut themselves by accident. They
can't bring themselves to say anything. Not yet, anyway.”

“You saw how much blood there was. They'd've had to cut themselves pretty deep.”

“Maybe they were drunk.”

Clarence rolled his eyes.

“Really drunk,” Chuck insisted.

Clarence grunted. “Wasted,” he said flatly.

“Blotto,” Chuck offered.

Clarence's mouth lifted in the start of a smile. “Blasted.”

Chuck nodded. “Blitzed.”

Clarence grinned. “Pulverized, dude. Totally, absolutely obliterated.”

Chuck chuckled and bent over his pack, digging out his lunch. The faint rattle of tumbling rocks reached him from where Mount Landen's rugged northwest ridge etched the skyline half a mile away.

He looked up in time to see a Rocky Mountain sheep clamber into sight over the top the ridge. The sheep, a ewe, was followed by another ewe, then another. Gradually, three dozen more sheep ambled over the ridge, their hooves sending small stones clattering into a steep couloir below them. The animals fanned out, nipping at the dry, brown bunch grass on the slope as they made their way across the north side of the mountain toward Chuck and Clarence.

Chuck scanned the grazing sheep, looking for trophy rams. His eyes fell on animal after animal. Each was a ewe, a first-year lamb, or a juvenile male with nascent, half-curl horns—yet a herd this big should not be without two or more adult rams with broad chests and fully curled horns.

Chuck slid his sandwich from its baggie and bit into it, waiting to spot the heavy-horned rams sure to trot over the ridge to unite with the herd at any moment.

The sheep continued to graze their way across the north
slope of the mountain. By the time Chuck finished his sandwich, the sheep were well clear of the ridge—and not a single adult ram had topped the rocky crest to join them.

N
INE

Chuck's phone pinged several times to announce incoming texts when the van reentered service range on the way back to the resort. Throughout the van, phones dinged and chimed, prompting the students to stop talking to one another and set their thumbs to work.

Chuck pulled the van to a stop at Raven House fifteen minutes later. The students grouped at the rear door to retrieve their packs, then stood with their packs in hand, waiting for Chuck to address them.

Chuck slipped between the students to the rear of the van, grabbed his pack, and backed away a few steps. What was there to say?

His eyes roamed from old, rundown Raven House with its warped, clapboard exterior to new, stucco Falcon House capped by its shiny, green metal roof. Between the two buildings, amid tufts of buffalo grass, he spotted the shallow divot dug by the police the night before to gather the blood that had soaked into the ground.

Someone knew something about Clarence's knife and the human blood, and that someone was either one of the students standing before him, or one of the Falcon House employees.

Who might it be? He hadn't a clue.

He glanced across the fields toward the cabin. Janelle's glare as he'd left this morning had made clear the risk he'd taken in heading to the mine with the students so soon after Rosie's seizure. He assumed Rosie hadn't suffered a relapse today because he'd gotten no voicemails or texts from Janelle—though the absence of any of her usual, chatty messages was a bad enough sign by itself.