High Country- Pigeon 12 (18 page)

"I'm not scared," Cricket said and attempted a smile that was gruesome in its parody.

"Who is threatening you?"

Cricket's face went a shade paler and she swayed as if losing this last bit of blood from her head made her dizzy. "Nobody. Don't you say that. You can't prove it. I'll sue you for . . ."

Had she ever known the words "defamation," "slander," "harassment" or whatever she sought, they'd fled her mind.

"I can prove you lied," Anna said.

Cricket clutched the baby-blue blanket in both fists and pulled it up to her chin. Feeling old and hard and evil, but not minding it all that much, Anna pressed on.

"You lied about not having visitors."

Cricket squeezed her eyes shut.

"Dickie Cauliff came to see you." Anna sat back and waited for this grand slam to bring some if not all of the players home.

Cricket's eyes opened. Her little fists unclenched. She opened her mouth and said: "Uh-unh, no sir."

Except that she knew for a fact the girl was lying, Anna would have sworn she was telling the truth.

CHAPTER 10

Depression settled like dust over Anna's mind as she followed the road up into the mountains. There'd been no sun in the San JoaquinValley, but she'd been able to breathe in the space between the earth and the bottom of the sky. As she drove into the park, slate-colored rock and clouds closed around her in a tight box.

Frustration and a sense of failure further darkened her mood. The hectic activity of the past days had turned up everything and nothing. When she'd arrived in Yosemite there'd been one pressing question: What happened to Dixon, Patrick, Caitlin and Trish? Now there were half a dozen: Who put a needle in her sleeve and why? Who'd tossed the dorm room? What were they looking for? Were the men in Dix's tent cabin up to something illegal or just slimeballs polluting a new environment for the holidays? What was Cricket so afraid of? And why in hell had the chef at the Ahwahnee taken against her all of a sudden?

Distracted by these fruitless inquiries, Anna's foot grew heavy. A ranger stopped her for speeding and wrote her a ticket. Another reason never to go undercover: no professional courtesy.

Nicky had succeeded in turning the dorm room back into a disaster area, no mean feat without Cricket's able assistance. Anna lay on her bed and tried to read. The walls kept closing in. She fled outdoors, caught the bus to stop sixteen, disembarked and walked up the path leading to the bottom of the Mist Trail where Caitlin Bates had last been headed. In sunlight the scenery would have taken her breath away: two stunning waterfalls linked by rocks and deep pools. Beneath the settling cloud, no wind, no rain, scarcely a sound but the clatter of her feet on the paved path, it was suffocating.

Anna had to get the hell out of The Ditch. Short of going AWOL, she had but one choice: the high country.

Decision made, there came a modicum of relief. The leaden sky would be even closer above the valley floor, but the trails wouldn't be paved and there'd be no people with bourbon breath and lousy housekeeping habits.

Winter camping had never been on her list of fun things to do, but any weather was good hiking weather. Contemplating the pull of her muscles on an uphill stretch, the depth of her breath after a scramble, lightened her heart. Moving so little and always in walled spaces had left her feeling her own skin, her very sinews, were closing in.

The short day was dimming to an end. She tempered her impatience to go by pulling out a topographical map of the park. Plotting a journey was part of the fun, and Anna pored over maps with the pleasure sane women took in shopping: deciding what to pick, what to leave behind, fantasizing over treks for later, savoring the selection of the one for tomorrow. A cup of hot tea at her elbow, she ran her fingers up dotted lines marking trails and let the music of places cleanse the thoughts of her heart: MayLake, Tenaya Lake, EchoValley, SunriseLake, Long Meadow, Clouds Rest. Mount Starr King, LowerMercedPassLake.

Lower MercedPassLake . The name sounded a sour note in the song of Sierra. Jarred out of her pleasant mind trip, she sat back and took up the cup of rapidly cooling tea. LowerMercedPassLake; it lacked euphonic charm, certainly, but it was more than that. It was almost as if she'd heard it before, though she was ninety-nine percent sure she hadn't. Maybe in the old days, thirty years back, when she'd visited Yosemite? That didn't click anything loose. Having nothing better to do, she cleared her mind, sipped her tea and waited. If she prevented herself from chasing a memory or blocking its entry with faulty guesses, it would usually surface.

This one was a long time in coming, so long, in fact, she'd completely forgotten not to think about it and had drifted off into the gray-on-gray beyond the window, fascinated by the incremental creeping of night, as if the sun never set but was slowly turned off by a cosmic dimmer switch.

NotLowerMercedPassLake-that was too idiosyncratic to forget. What she'd heard was: a low lake. That's what the man had said when she'd inadvertently begun eavesdropping from the ladies' bathroom in Camp 4 the morning she'd learned of the squatter's party. The climbers had been restive, a low-level fever stirring the camp. Through the window she'd overheard three men talking as they had packed. "The guy'd been somewhere . . . if you figure sixty percent was just hot air . . . a fucking gold rush . . . a low lake . . . How many can there be? A shitload . . ."

Since she and Mary had had their run-in with the men in Dixon's tent cabin and Anna's follow-up visit the next morning, so much had unraveled in her tiny world that that particular conversation had been put out of her mind. Tea forgotten, Anna replayed everything she'd learned. The night of the party the city men left, new boots on their feet and packs reeking of diesel on their backs, ostensibly for a moonlit hike into a frozen wilderness. The heavy guy with the worst manners and the bloodiest feet had returned to the party. Judging by the general tenor of the camp and the conversation she'd overheard, he'd gotten drunk and spewed out heavy-handed hints concerning a plan or project that if even forty percent of it was true would "start a fucking gold rush" to "a low lake."

After garnering that unilluminating fragment of gossip, she'd repaired to the storage garage and found the letter Trish Spencer had written to Dickie referring to having become "a miner" and acquiring the cash to buy him a gym.

The only possibility these thoughts brought to mind was an impossibility. Still, it gave her direction, and she grabbed at it. With renewed energy she returned to the map. Despite the prognostication of the climber dude, there was not a plethora of low lakes in YosemiteNational Park. As near as she could tell there were exactly none. The only lake she could find with anything "low" about it was LowerMercedPassLake which at nearly nine thousand feet in elevation was low only in comparison to UpperMercedPassLake.

There was a trail through the pass with a lake to either side. If Anna drove up to Mono Meadows Trailhead and hiked in from there it was twelve miles to Lower Merced with a total elevation gain of two thousand feet. Over rough terrain, elevation gain on a map meant little; one could easily climb three times as much as was recorded, as elevation was gained and lost and gained again over the wrinkles in the world.

Usually, in December, trails in the high country were impassable but for snowshoers. Winter snows easily reached five to eight feet. Because of the ongoing drought in the Sierra, less than a foot of snow remained in most places. On exposed rock, even that had melted away. Hiking to Lower Merced should be doable. The worst danger would be on ice over the granite shoulders pushing through Yosemite's thin mantle of soil. Slipping and shattering an elbow or knee was a real possibility.

Sunrise wasn't till after six, sunset around five-or so Anna was guessing. Since coming to California she'd seen the sun only twice and then but for an instant. To the people of Mississippi, California was all sunshine and sandy beaches. Her rangers were expecting her to return with at least a tan and possibly one or more body piercings.

Six to six if she started in the dark and returned in the dark. Twenty-four miles round trip, twelve hours, two miles an hour, half uphill. She could do it. The next day she'd probably be sore-she'd been living at sea level in a state where the highest peak was slightly above her porch roof-but she didn't report in to the Ahwahnee till three-thirty on the next day. Time enough to ease out of bed gently.

Twenty-four miles in the cold across rugged country. Beats the hell out of sitting here, Anna thought. Twenty-four miles. Twelve hours. She pushed back from the map and tried to think past her arrogance and enthusiasm. It would be a killer hike. Cold sapped energy as surely as altitude and distance. She needn't go all the way, just far enough to be sure there was activity in the area. That done, she could simply report, let the rangers do the heavy lifting. Report to whom? Leo? A picture of his sodden face and bleary eyes flashed before her.

Never mind, she told herself. Burn that bridge when you come to it. Having crammed a dozen granola bars, water, dry socks and, because one never knew, a down sleeping bag into her day pack, she set her battered hiking boots beside the bed, set her alarm for five A.M. and went to sleep with what passed these days for great good cheer.

By the time the sky began to gray with a sun that rose everywhere but where Anna was, she had hiked a ways up the Illilouette Trail. Her rental car was parked at Mono Meadows trailhead. Hiking in the dark wasn't nearly as hard as one might imagine when on an improved and well-marked trail. Winding white between the trees, the gentle trough worn by feet and paws and hooves, held the snow longer than the surrounding earth. Her flashlight lit the trail up and it unrolled as inviting as the bride's white satin down a church aisle.

It wasn't until she'd hiked in a mile and half that the tracks appeared.

Winter campers, that hardy breed, were alive and well in the Sierra, but Anna doubted they could account for the traffic this trail had seen. All at once the pristine snow became scuffed and muddied. Before she added her boot prints to the mix she stopped and played her light over the churned-up snow. The flashlight's beam poked between the surrounding trees to reveal several trails across patches of snow and duff. All convened where Anna stood. A meeting place? A gathering before the trek?

"Nope," she said. In the utter silence of fog, darkness and forest, this breach of etiquette annoyed her, and she kept the rest of her thoughts inside her head. These hikers hadn't wanted the patrol rangers to notice the trail to LowerMercedPassLake was getting such heavy use. They'd hiked in cross-country to meet the Illilouette.

Dry crisp snow and half-frozen mud were splendid tracking mediums. A few minutes' study and she was fairly sure she was seeing not the tracks of nine or ten men, but three men who had come repeatedly at different times. She had little doubt that, should she follow their tracks downhill, they would lead to the road somewhere in the vicinity of Mono Meadows trailhead. Knowing she was on the right track, the pure pleasure of pursuit made her boots light and her heart strong. Had the need for stealth not made her circumspect she would have been singing.

Outside, moving, tracking, she forgot about time and distance, about the halfhearted promise she'd made herself to go only partway. She walked too far and too fast. Sweat soaked the collar of her shirt and lay damp between her breasts. Forcing herself to take a break, she dried off as best she could and sat down to rest, eat and cool down.

According to the map, her body and her watch, she'd covered close to eleven miles. LowerMercedPassLake was nearby, not more than a mile or two. This was where things got dicey and a person could get herself lost. The lake might or might not be visible from the trail. On a clear day she wouldn't have given a thought to wandering haphazardly into the woods. Due west was MercedPeak, at 11,728 feet. East-southeast was Buena Vista at 9,700. Orienting one's self with landmarks of soaring granite was a piece of cake. With clouds clamped down, and the sky oozing between mountains and leaking through trees, there was no place but here, a moveable feast of rock and pine. It wouldn't do to forget where "here" was at any given moment. In weather this thick even map and compass were no guarantee. The human mind and the wilderness were foxy things. They had the power to bend reality, cause blindness, make madness seem a viable path.

Food warmed her from within as her sweat-soaked shirt of microfiber dried faster than anything in the natural world had a right to. It was quarter past twelve. She'd been hiking seven hours. Four hours of daylight remained. She knew she should turn back, but she was so close. Shouldering her pack, she returned to the trail, heading uphill.