High Country- Pigeon 12 (12 page)

Wither came back to life in the sense that the peculiar mix of rigidity and trembling broke into a more ambulatory pattern.

"Get back to work," he snapped. "Clean this water up. Now. Now. Now!"

The kitchen muttered and hummed. Wither shot Anna one more hard look. This time it seemed more searching than menacing. "Rolls'll be hot," he said and turned his back on her.

Suffering a touch of palsy herself, Anna returned to her task at the oven. Scott was still near-pleasantly so-a shield for her back, a screen for her momentary weakness.

"Are you all right?" he whispered. His mouth close to her ear, she could smell mint on his breath, or maybe parsley. Whatever it was, she liked it.

"I'm okay." She was glad to have the business of loading fresh bread into baskets. "How about you? The back of your arm doesn't look too good."

"I'll live. Look, I don't know what got into Jim tonight but I . . . You want to get a drink after work? Unwind. Bad-mouth Wither?"

Anna laughed and turned, baskets in hand. "My treat," she said. "You saved my life. Let me buy you a beer."

Delivering her hard-won rolls, Anna suffered a small maelstrom of thoughts and feelings. Had mayhem been attempted? What had caused Jim Wither to take against her so suddenly and vehemently? Why did Scott wish to have a drink with her? Friendship? Boredom? A taste for older women? Professionally, it was good to get this chance to sound him out. As an affianced woman, she doubted she should be looking forward to it quite as much as she was.

Briefly, she wondered how many officers of the law were married when they went into undercover work. And how many were still married when they came out of it. When one donned a new world, the rules, moves and traditions of the old dropped away. Without conscious decision the unthinkable was thought, the unacceptable became the norm. Lines one learned never to cross shifted or vanished altogether.

Slipping off to the staff bathroom, Anna took a moment to pull herself together. She was merely having a drink with a potential source of information, not committing adultery with the entire Knicks team. Her nerves, usually dependable, had grown frayed. The high drama of the spilled or hurled cauldron oddly enough wasn't the most wearing factor. It was the cheek-by-jowl parade of the small and annoying: a room searched while she was out, a surly "brother," unsettling undercurrents first in Camp 4 then the Ahwahnee's kitchen. Of all the things Anna hated, high on the list were secrets she was not privy to.

Since coming to Yosemite Valley she'd had a sense of a dark river flowing below the surface, a cold current which had swept away four young people. She credited this ambient evil with bringing professional thugs into her dorm room; hikers smelling of petrol, with new boots, into Dixon Crofter's tent cabin; dope smoke that paralyzed lungs and made an obsessive culinary expert so angry he'd accidentally or in the throes of black passion nearly scalded her half to death.

These anomalous secrets to which she was not privy might not be connected. The metaphorical river whose undertow tugged at her mind was not necessarily of a piece. Secrets were like rabbits. If you got two in January, by year's end you had two hundred.

Secrets corrupted. Camp 4 was tainted. The Ahwahnee, James Wither, were part of something bigger; maybe he was just a half-crazy cook with a grievance and the corruption centered around the Yosemite Lodge, where Mark despoiled maids. Maybe it was fostered by the NPS staff. Anna couldn't begin to guess. She was severed from the society of rangers more completely than if she had, in truth, been a waitress. As a real concessions employee she would have been allowed to make friends.

Lest she grow too philosophical-or maudlin-she focused on being a good waitress for the next four hours. Wither didn't relent to the point of apologizing or commit any radical act like speaking to her, but the hostile stares were gone and her orders were served up as they should have been. Still, she felt a weight lift when at nine o'clock Wither went off duty.

At ten-thirty her last table, a party of four, two nice couples from Canada come south for a holiday, left. Anna went into the bowels of the building, to the employee locker room. Regardless of history, fresh paint or company goodwill, backstage rooms were uniformly dreary whether one worked as an elf in Macy's on Thirty-fourth Street or served pasta primavera in God's country.

She flopped on a scarred bench in a horseshoe of lockers that looked as if they'd been salvaged from an inner-city high school. Having kicked off her shoes, she rubbed her feet. The absurd but accurate clich‚ she presented made her laugh. Why eight hours waiting tables in a gorgeously appointed temperature-controlled restaurant should leave her more tired and footsore than the same amount of time crossing harsh terrain in heavy boots was a mystery.

"You survived."

Scott was leaning in the doorframe, his muscled arms crossed on his chest. The scald on his forearm had blistered. Anna suffered annoyance instead of gratitude. Being rescued was a burden she seldom carried gracefully.

Burned, aproned and spattered with food, Scott Wooldrich was still a good-looking man. Another stab, this time of guilt, stirred Anna's innards. A soon-to-be-married woman, a woman hurtling toward the half-century mark with blinding speed, should surely be past the dangerously addictive nonsense attendant on cute boys.

"I survived," she said for lack of anything witty or erudite.

"Put on your coat and let's go get that drink. How about our sister lodge, just for a change of scenery? A little slumming is good for the soul." Anna slipped her shoes back on, then stood to open her locker as he asked: "Shall we walk or drive?"

Even after an eight-hour shift on concrete floors, Anna would have chosen to walk. The air, the night, the unfettered movement were more refreshing than sleep. Tonight for some reason a vision of the woman stabbed thirty-seven times while in the stony embrace of the great boulders flashed to the front of her mind.

"Ride," she said. "My feet have had it for one day."

She pulled her jacket from the locker and swung it around to put it on. The sleeve slapped the metal of the door and thunked.

Thunked .

It was a down jacket with knit cuffs. There was no thunk about it. Anna caught up the sleeve and looked inside. A hair below cuff-line she could see a white plastic disk the size of a dime.

"What the . . ."

"A problem?" Scott came close, looking over her shoulder.

"There's something. . ." Anna held open the sleeve and peered in, remembering the silly childhood joke of holding one's fist hidden in a sleeve and saying: "Want to see stars? Look up my telescope."

"Jesus."

"What?" Scott demanded.

"Got a handkerchief?"

Scott gave her a blue cowboy bandanna. Using the handkerchief to protect any fingerprints, she reached carefully into the sleeve and pinched the barrel of a hypodermic syringe. The plunger-the end of it being the dime-sized disk she'd seen-was duct-taped firmly to the inside of the cuff. The barrel of the syringe was loosely affixed with the same kind of tape. Had she jammed her arm in the sleeve with the customary abandon of folks getting off work and heading into the cold, the force would have shoved the needle into her hand or wrist and depressed the plunger, injecting the syringe's contents into her arm.

She pulled the barrel, plunger and needle out and held it up to the light. "Blood," she said. "The syringe looks like it's full of blood."

For a second she thought she saw recognition spark behind Scott's eyes.

CHAPTER 7

Holy Toledo," Scott said. Shock blew out the spark, if it had ever been there.

Anna looked away from him to the hypodermic pinched in his handkerchief. Standard stuff. The kind doctors give out by the handful to patients with a variety of maladies. The liquid inside had the viscous clinging qualities of blood still moderately fresh-that or thinned with an anticoagulant. There was nothing remarkable about it except for the fact that someone had wanted to inject it into Anna's arm.

"Here. Let me take that." Scott reached for the needle.

"I got it." Anna held it away from where he hovered, hand outstretched, with that peculiar intensity men get when wanting to snatch a power tool or computer mouse from their female compatriots. In Anna's pack was an unopened plastic bottle of water. Retiring to the sanctity of the ladies' bathroom with coat, backpack and bloody syringe, she poured the water down the drain, dropped the hypodermic in the bottle, and screwed the cap back on. That done, she turned her jacket inside out, searching carefully for any other booby traps. She found none, nor had she expected to. Whoever had rigged the syringe was an amateur. No practiced, competent doer of harm would rely on a delivery system that depended so much on luck.

Secreting the bottle in the bottom of her pack, she rejoined her "date."

Scott had doffed his apron and changed his white uniform shirt for a black T-shirt that wasn't warm enough for a mountain winter and too tight. On him it was flattering, stylish rather than d‚class‚.

"Nice build," Anna said because it was true and displayed for the public's enjoyment.

"I used to spend a lot of time working out on weights," Scott said as they left the hotel.

"No more?" she asked to make conversation.

"Some. Enough not to get fat. But that's about it these days."

"What changed? Decided you were already handsome enough?"

Scott laughed. His teeth were small and straight, giving him a boyish look when he smiled. "I learned to cook. Love at first bite."

Scott drove a classic '68 Mustang, the body spotted with rust-colored patches where dents had been filled in, sanded and primed. A gentleman by upbringing or education, he held the passenger door for her. As Anna started to buckle her seat belt, good manners were overcome by fashion sense: "You gonna wear that?" he asked, sounding genuinely alarmed.

Anna looked down. In the excitement of finding a hypodermic of blood duct-taped in her sleeve she'd forgotten to take her apron off. She untied it and chucked it in the backseat along with her pack. After eight hours of seeing, smelling and serving food, she was not anxious to wear it during her free time.

On the short drive from the Ahwahnee to the Yosemite Lodge they talked about the Mustang, the ins-and-outs of what would one day be a restoration to rival the first phoenix rising from the ashes. Anna was content with this harmless chat. She'd not yet decided what she wanted from the assistant chef, though the black T-shirt and melting smile were loading that question with unprofessional possibilities. Unprofessional and unethical. For the first time in a long while she had to consciously remind herself of Paul Davidson. He, along with the rest of real life, grew ever more dim. Scott, on the other hand, showed almost superreal, the heat and energy of him nearly enough to bask in like a cat in the sun.

Anna pulled her thoughts from basking. It's the damp, she told herself. The unrelenting gray. I can't get warm. She told herself lies but it served. Her mind obediently returned to the task at hand.

Questions.

Mostly she would just be casting around hoping her line would snag information to help tie together the bits of suspicious jetsam that had washed up over the past days. As he waxed poetic about polymers, paint and Internet parts stores, she let her mind drift back over the evening shift: Jim Wither, scalding water, finding the needle, who was where and why.

The Ahwahnee's back door wasn't kept locked, nor was her locker. She never kept anything of value in it, a seven-year-old down jacket being as worthless in Yosemite as last year's computer in Silicon Valley. Anyone could have access at any time. Had they wanted privacy, they could have had that too, as long as they didn't hit the locker room at a shift change. When on duty, the staff seldom went there. Anna couldn't even factor out people unfamiliar with which locker belonged to whom. Employees' names were written in magic marker on strips of masking tape on the doors. Whoever planted the syringe had meant to harm her specifically.