Murder on High (33 page)

It seemed to Charlotte as if they’d been climbing over outcrops and boulders forever, but they were barely past the turn-off for Pamola’s Caves, a group of slab caves that were only about a quarter of the way up. The hike up to Chimney Pond from Roaring Brook, which had seemed so overwhelming three weeks ago, now seemed like child’s play next to this. The palms of her hands were raw, and her shoulders ached from lifting herself up onto boulders and then lowering herself back down again. She now knew what the park authorities meant when they advised hikers not to underestimate the mountain. Its unique personal quality—the fact that it wasn’t part of a chain, but an individual mountain standing alone—made it seem approachable, but to think that it was easy to make Katahdin’s acquaintance was a serious miscalculation. The trail was steep, and the rocks were sharp and slippery. Katahdin, like the man who had written most eloquently about it, was a mountain that spurned society.

As she climbed, Charlotte was reminded of her friend Larry Olivier, who had died a year ago to the day. In his obituary, he was quoted on his secret for good acting. It was “Remember your feet.” The writer had treated this as a flip remark, but Olivier had been very serious. Keeping your feet on the ground was the secret to good acting, and it applied to mountain climbing as well. As in acting, the trick was not to think about how far you had to go, or, for that matter, how far you had come. To consider either was to divert your attention from the present, which required every ounce of your physical and mental energy. The trick was to stay with the moment, to concentrate on the simple matter of where to put your hands and feet next. The second trick Charlotte had discovered was to maintain the pace: not to shrink back at the tough spots, but to keep going—around, if possible; or over, if necessary. Likewise, not to tarry in the easy spots. It struck her what valuable lessons these were for life, as well. As Thoreau had said—it was a great art to saunter.

As she climbed, Charlotte found herself thinking about Mack again. She had spent a great deal of time thinking about him over the last two weeks. Mack’s problem had been that he’d gotten hung up on an obstacle way back at the beginning of the trail. It had been a sizable enough boulder, but instead of finding a way around it, he’d let it block his way. All his hatred had become fixated on that boulder. There had been ways of getting around it, but his obsession had blinded him to them. He was another of Black Elk’s Blue Men, blinded, if not by greed, then by hatred and rage. If only he could get rid of that boulder, everything would be fine. Finally, he had blasted it away, and was left only with a swath of rubble so wide and so deep that it would be years, if ever, before he would be able to work his way through it and get back on the trail again.

Once they emerged from the scrub onto the ridge, the going was a bit easier, and they made faster progress. It was like walking up an inclined plane: a straight, steep, open path leading directly to the summit. At Index Rock, just two tenths of a mile short of the summit, they decided to take another break. By now, they had been on the trail for three hours, and had stopped a number of times. Index Rock was a giant boulder—as big as a full-sized car—that had been deposited on the ridge by the retreating glacier, what the trail guide called a glacial erratic. They sat with their backs against it, drinking tea that Charlotte had packed in a Thermos, and looking down on Chimney Pond fifteen hundred feet below.

So far, the weather had been with them, but it was beginning to look dicey, Charlotte thought as she gazed out at the horizon. For the past hour, a fog had been creeping across the landscape, leaving only the distant mountain peaks protruding above it, like volcanic islands in a South Pacific sea. The ranking at the ranger’s station was for a Class II Hiking Day, which meant that the trails above the tree line would be open but were not recommended because of the possibility of thunderstorms. They had decided to chance it. Perhaps it had been a mistake.

After finishing his tea, Tracey stood up and went around to the other side of the rock to assess the weather conditions. He was back in an instant. “Looks like we’re in for some weather,” he said, nodding up at the rim.

Charlotte stood up and went around the rock to take a look: above loomed the jagged gray peak of Pamola. Beyond that, a huge black thundercloud was advancing rapidly toward the Knife Edge from the back side of the mountain.

“Uh-oh,” she said as she came back around.

“Time to get out the rain gear,” said Tracey. Squatting, he removed his rain gear from his backpack.

Charlotte could already feel the first drops of rain. Not little sprinkles, but big, heavy drops. They were in for a real storm.

“There’s a place on the other side of the rock where we can take shelter,” she said. “It’s a good thing we got here before the storm broke.”

“You can sit under that rock if you want to,” said Tracey. “But I’m not going to get fried by a lightning bolt.”

Charlotte gave him an inquiring look as she donned her rain gear.

“It’s the biggest thing around,” he explained. “It will be the first place that lightning strikes.”

“So what do we do?”

“Sit right out in the open,” he said. “Below the ridge. We don’t want to be up on the ridge, either.” His rain gear on, he led the way to a spot about ten feet down the slope.

At Tracey’s direction, Charlotte sat on top of her backpack with her legs crossed to avoid being electrocuted by ground currents. “It’s a good thing I’m with you,” she said. “I would have done all the wrong things.”

No sooner had she spoken than the storm broke with a crack of thunder. For fifteen minutes, they sat in the pouring rain and watched as the storm raged around them. Each thunderclap was followed by rumbles and rolls so loud that the ground seemed to shake beneath them. As the thunderclaps came closer and closer, the rumbles and rolls and crackles and booms bounced back and forth across the basin, as if the basin itself were a gigantic kettle drum. The wind roared, bending the tops of the fir trees lining the basin, and the air seemed to almost hum with electricity. Rivulets of water cascaded down the mountain. From their vantage point, they had a fine view of the lightning striking the rim, which was spread out before them. At one point, Charlotte counted five bolts striking the Knife Edge at once, like the fingers of a fiery hand reaching down from the heavens. Below, the clouds whirled around in the basin, as if they were being whipped up by a giant egg beater.

“Pamola’s artillery,” said Tracey, after a particularly loud boomer.

“I’m glad we’re not up there,” said Charlotte, nodding at the Knife Edge. Had they been faster, they would have been on the summit when the storm struck, she thought, concluding that there were some benefits to old age.

“A number of people have been struck by lightning on the Knife Edge,” Tracey said. “Some of them fatally.”

Charlotte shuddered. It was a frightening display of the power of Pamola, the storm bird. But that’s why they had climbed the mountain: to experience nature in the raw. She would have felt cheated if they’d seen only sunshine.

And then, just as suddenly as it had come on, the storm was over.

Forty-five minutes later, they were sitting on a knob of grim, frost-riven granite nearly a mile high under a cloudless blue sky, eating their lunches. It had taken them three hours and forty-five minutes to reach the summit, almost two hours longer than usual. But they had made it, and had added their rocks, symbolic of having made it to the top, to the monument at the summit. It was an amazing feeling, being at this spot where the earth and the heavens came together; to be in contact with the earth, yet in the midst of unimpeded space. Spread out below was a vast vista of green, dotted with countless lakes. Charlotte remembered Thoreau writing that it was as if a mirror had been broken into a thousand pieces and scattered over the landscape, each piece reflecting the blaze of the sun. Ahead of them, the Knife Edge Trail followed the narrow rim of the basin over to Baxter Peak. Charlotte was very glad that they hadn’t decided to attempt it: it started out with a near vertical descent of one hundred yards into a notch between Pamola and Chimney Peaks, the latter being named for the Chimney leading down the headwall to the basin floor, which was strictly for technical climbers. Just past the Chimney was the gully where Iris’ body had been found. The notch, or col, between Pamola and Chimney Peaks was the most difficult section of the Knife Edge, Tracey said. Once you were past that, the rest was easy. Charlotte had no desire to try it, however easy it might have been past the first scary section. “The most difficult nontechnical route east of the Rockies,” which was how the Knife Edge was referred to in her trail guide, might be a little on the ambitious side for an over-the-hill movie star with a weakness for Manhattans and marzipan.

On the other side of Chimney Peak, she could see a pair of hikers, a young man and a young woman, traversing the Knife Edge at about the spot where Iris had been killed. Below, the headwall fell away: a sheer drop of two thousand feet. Charlotte and Tracey watched the couple’s careful progress over the most narrow and dangerous section. They were at the head of a group of half a dozen other young adults, who were strung out behind them like birds on a wire.

“Looks like we’re about to have some company,” said Tracey.

For a moment, the leader disappeared behind Chimney Peak. When he reappeared a few minutes later on its summit, Charlotte recognized him with a start as Keith Samusit, and was reminded of the translation of his name, which meant line walker. He was certainly walking a line now.

Keith and his companion, who turned out to be Didias, reached them a short while later, after their descent down to the floor of the col, and their climb back up the other side.

“Fancy meetin’ you here,” said Tracey. “I thought the Penobscots had a superstition about going above the tree line.”

“Some Penobscots do,” said Keith.

“The ones who are smarter than we are,” said Didias.

“Did you get caught on the rim in the storm?” Charlotte asked.

Keith nodded. “We had just come up the Saddle Slide. When we saw the storm coming, we turned around and went back down. But we were caught on the rim during the storm for a few minutes. It was pretty hairy,” he said.

“Who are the others?” asked Tracey.

Keith turned around to look at the other hikers, the first of whom was just starting the descent into the col.

“Vision questers,” he said. He removed his pack, and set it down. Then he sat down next to them. “We’ve added the ascent of the mountain to our curriculum. It’s the first thing we do now. It’s a way of getting them to leave their everyday routines behind.”

“I’ll say,” said Tracey.

Opening his pack, Keith pulled out a package of chocolate bars and offered it around.

“Speaking of vision questers,” said Charlotte as they sat on the mountaintop, eating their chocolate, “have you decided yet what you’re going to do with the money Iris left the Katahdin Foundation?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been talking about it with the board. We’d like to expand the center into a national center for the study of Native American rituals. Slowly,” he added. “We don’t want to move too fast.”

“We want to help carry out Black Elk’s vision,” said Didias. “To bring Native American ways into the mainstream of American life.”

“The first thing we’d like to do is build a dormitory,” Keith went on. “As it stands now, we’re only available to people who are willing to rough it, which is fine, except that it excludes a lot of people.”

“Like families,” Didias added.

“Yes,” said Keith. “We’d like to have day care available too so parents could come and be confident that their children were well taken care of. But we’re not going to be as rich as we thought we were going to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“I talked with your friend Ron Polito the other day. He says the novels that Iris wrote since she came to Maine aren’t any good. He’ll still be able to sell them based on the popularity of her other books, but he doesn’t think they’re going to be best sellers.”

It was like the script she had done for Harold Ames, Charlotte thought.

“There will still be the income from her other books, though. By the way,” he added. “He’s very sick.”

“I know,” said Charlotte.

“I mean, I think he’s dying,” he said. “When I called him back yesterday to clarify some questions I had, his secretary told me that he was in intensive care. Apparently, his cancer has spread.”

Charlotte felt a wave of heaviness wash over her. Another one of her old friends, checking out. Was this the way it was going to be for her in years to come? Each taking with them a part of her life, a part of her history.

For a moment, they watched the progress of the first of the vision questers as he began his steep descent into the col.

Then Keith asked, “What brings you up here?”

“Don’t ask me,” Tracey replied. “Miss Graham here got me into this.” He nodded at Charlotte. “Wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

The pair’s attention shifted to Charlotte. She addressed Keith. “Do you remember Louis Neptune?”

“Do you mean the Penobscot who was supposed to be Thoreau’s guide on his trip to Katahdin, but who didn’t show up?”

Charlotte nodded. “Do you remember him telling Thoreau in
The Maine Woods
about planting a bottle of rum on the summit to pacify Pamola?”

“Sure,” he said. “That’s why Iris always took a bottle of rum along on her annual climb. That and her own personal reasons,” he added, alluding to her history of alcoholism.

Charlotte reached over to her backpack. Unzipping it, she rummaged around for a minute and then produced a bottle of Mount Gay. “I figured that I had some unfinished business to take care of on Iris’ behalf.”

“You lugged that all the way up the mountain!” said Tracey.

“You’d better be glad I did,” Charlotte said. “We want to keep Pamola happy. Do you want him to put us through another thunderstorm like that one?”

Keith smiled. “I like that,” he said. “Finishing Iris’ business. You asked what we’re going to do with Iris’ money. One of the things we want to teach is the importance of creating ritual in everyday life.”