Yosemite Fall (National Park Mystery Series) Read online

  Praise for the National Park Mystery Series

  “What an extraordinary ride! You know when a reader says they couldn’t put the book down? Yellowstone Standoff is one of those rare books . . . a tour de force.”

  —WIN BLEVINS, New York Times bestselling author of Stealing Fire

  “Bears and wolves in Yellowstone’s backcountry don’t hold a candle to the danger posed by the people sent there to study them . . . (Yellowstone Standoff balances) potential danger and shady characters.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “Yellowstone Standoff takes man versus nature—and man tangled up with nature—right to the brink of wild suspense.”

  —MARK STEVENS, Colorado Book Award-winning author of Lake of Fire

  “Filled with murder and mayhem, jealousy and good detective work—an exciting, nonstop read.”

  —ANNE HILLERMAN, New York Times bestselling author of Song of the Lion: A Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito Novel

  “One of the most engaging mysteries I’ve read in a long while . . . delivers it all and then some.”

  —MARGARET COEL, New York Times bestselling author of Winter’s Child: A Wind River Mystery

  “Get ready for leave-you-breathless high country southwestern adventure.”

  —MICHAEL MCGARRITY, New York Times bestselling author of Hard Country and Backlands

  “(Mountain Rampage) is tailor-made for those who prefer their mysteries under blue skies.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “Stunning setting, intriguing plot, and likeable characters make Canyon Sacrifice a bookseller’s dream.”

  —ANDREA AVANTAGGIO, co-owner of Maria’s Bookshop

  This is a work of fiction set in a real place. All characters in this novel are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First Torrey House Press Edition, June 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Scott Graham

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

  Published by Torrey House Press

  Salt Lake City, Utah

  www.torreyhouse.org

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-937226-88-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947291

  Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf

  Interior design by Jeff Fuller

  Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  The cover of Yosemite Fall features a portion of Thomas Hill’s 1884 painting Early Morning, Yosemite Valley. The painting is reproduced in its entirety below, and is used by permission of the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia.

  Thomas Hill

  American (1829–1908)

  Early Morning, Yosemite Valley, 1884

  Oil on canvas, 53½ × 36 in.

  Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

  Gift of Edward J. Brickhouse

  To all those dedicating their lives and careers to

  America’s national parks, with gratitude

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT SCOTT GRAHAM

  PROLOGUE

  Dawn.

  A good time to cheat death.

  He faced north in his wingsuit, his feet planted on the lip of Glacier Point, half a vertical mile above the shadowed Yosemite Valley floor.

  The sun edged above the serrated peaks of the High Sierra to the east. Its slanted rays stirred the first of the morning’s updrafts, precursors of the blustery, hot summer day to come.

  He flexed his toes in his padded landing shoes, his arms pressed to his sides. The fabric airfoils of his flying suit flapped at his elbows and between his legs.

  He was a small man at five foot six and a hundred and fifty pounds, still heavily muscled as he neared fifty, abs six-packed, biceps and forearms honed from decades of scaling El Capitan, Half Dome, and the dozens of other sheer granite faces walling the valley before him.

  He took a steadying breath and focused inward. Even as he sought calm and the supreme confidence required to leap into the abyss below, his heart, hammering against his ribcage, betrayed him.

  How many flights would this make for him this year? The number shouldn’t matter, but it did.

  Eight.

  Far fewer than past summers, though more than any of the young fliers who’d jockeyed around him in the Wawona campground since May, asking what they could do for him, anything, anything at all, he had only to name it.

  And he, ever magnanimous, telling them thanks, but, really, no, there was nothing they could do—unless the offer came from one of the few female fliers, they with their lithe, supple bodies. As long as his girlfriend didn’t find out, there was always something they could do for him in his camper van, after the campfire burned to coals and the tangy scent of pine replaced the fog of woodsmoke in the air.

  He sensed Ponch’s presence behind him, providing silent, necessary peer pressure—not that he ever would admit he needed it. He assured himself Ponch was on hand simply to film the initiation of his flight off the point, nothing more.

  He glanced down between his feet at the floor of the valley below. Through breaks in trees, the concrete huts of Housekeeping Camp shone with silvery fluorescent light, while Majestic Yosemite Hotel radiated its luxuriant, electric-yellow glow on the opposite side of the river.

  He looked left, focusing on the dark gap in Sentinel Ridge. He hadn’t yet determined if he would enter the narrow slot, a flying dart threading the rock-walled breach at 120 miles an hour. He couldn’t decide, in fact, until he dropped into the yawning void and the first of the day’s rising thermals gathered in his wings. Still, having curled away from the notch his previous three flights, the need to rocket through it sometime soon, as the end of summer drew near, was growing impossible to ignore.

  Half Dome skylined the eastern horizon. The morning sun silhouetted the hulking granite dome’s sheer north wall. Movement rippled along the wall’s few narrow shelves—climbers, outside their portaledge tents, their headlamps winking in the early morning shadows as they prepared breakfast and sorted gear in anticipation of the day’s upward push.

  The sun rested just above the hunchbacked dome of granite in the dusty, brown-streaked sky, bathing the topmost reaches of El Capitan, opposite him, in orange and red. His eyes tracked to the shadowed base of El Cap’s three-thousand-foot face, where the gravel Camp 4 parking lot, his triumphal landing spot, formed a smoky gray rectangle on the flat valley floor.

  His stomach fluttered at the notion of his surprise landing in the Camp 4 lot. His appearance there in a minute or two from out of the dawn sky
would be that of a spirit, a specter, an apparition from beyond.

  The flecks of quartz at his feet glimmered in the slanted rays of the low sun, as if he stood not on stone but on stardust, poised to fly up and away into the morning light, unencumbered by the bonds of gravity. The setting was perfect—the shimmering lip of stone, his Superman-red wingsuit aflame in the day’s initial burst of sunlight, his body still and erect, high above the valley floor. He took quick breaths, boosting the oxygen level in his brain as he sought the mental fortitude required to initiate his flight.

  He began his silent countdown from five. On three, the pounding of his heart rose from his chest into his throat. On two, he didn’t so much lean forward as simply begin the process of falling, his weight shifting out and over the edge of the cliff.

  On one, he lifted his arms, raising his wings into place. On zero, he bent his knees and leapt off the point of rock.

  He plummeted straight down, a hundred feet, two hundred, the stone face scant meters away, his arms and legs spread, until the air rushing past him filled his airfoils and he soared away from the wall, a human missile slicing through the sky.

  He lowered one wrist, then the other, angling left, right, the roar of the wind loud as a jet engine in his ears as he shot across the canyon. No gusts of wind buffeted him. The gap? Yes, a go, the need to increase his viewership numbers announcing itself from deep in his cerebral cortex.

  Bending his spine, his arms and legs fanned wide, he described a sweeping arc and lined up with Sentinel Ridge. He focused through his goggles on the dark notch in front of him, aiming for the narrow break in the forested ridge. The slot, sixty feet wide, angled downward and to his left, requiring a dead-center entry and a continued, precise leftward turn its entire length. At a hundred-plus miles per hour, the slightest deviation would send him rocketing into one or the other of the gap’s granite walls.

  Judging himself too low as he sped toward the notch, he lowered his legs, angling his body upward to catch more air and moderate his gliding descent. The added blast of wind from the maneuver ripped at a loose thread dangling from the airfoil between his legs at the bottom of his suit. The thread popped free from needle hole after needle hole beside his right ankle, lengthening up the seam of his lower airfoil.

  He bowed his body to initiate his turn as he neared the slot. The force of the maneuver caused the thread to lengthen further, separating the airfoil at its seam and exposing one of the foil’s stiff plastic stays. The exposed stay flapped next to his foot like the blurred wing of a hummingbird, setting off an undulating vibration along the bottom hem of the airfoil. The buzzing plastic rod slashed through his sock and bit deep into the skin of his ankle. At the same instant, the vibration along the hem of his wingsuit progressed to his right leg, which bucked violently from ankle to hip and back again.

  Fear flared white hot in his brain. He tightened his right quadriceps, attempting to still his rocking leg, but it continued its fierce shimmy. As he entered the gap, the intense bucking of his leg caused him to veer wildly out of control.

  PART ONE

  “Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.”

  —Renowned Yosemite photographer Ansel Adams

  1

  Caught off guard by Carmelita Ortega’s speedy ascent, Chuck Bender didn’t react until his twelve-year-old stepdaughter was fifteen feet off the ground and climbing higher, her yellow T-shirt incandescent in the morning sun.

  Chuck retrieved the growing slack in Carmelita’s climbing rope, sliding the line past his brake hand and through the belay device attached to his waist harness. The rope’s braided sheath warmed his skin as it slipped through his cupped palm.

  Thin as a whiffle bat, her navy tights hanging in loose folds from her tiny thighs and calves, Carmelita balanced the rubber soles of her climbing shoes on the resin holds bolted to the climbing tower and grasped additional holds above her head with chalked fingers, hoisting herself up the wall.

  “Take it easy,” Chuck called to her, pride edging his voice, as he took up the last of the slack in the rope. “Give me a chance to keep up, would you?”

  She hesitated for only a heartbeat, then shinnied skyward, her helmeted head back, her moves smooth and fluid as she moved from hold to hold up the vertical tower.

  Chuck shot a grin at Janelle, who stood beside him in a form-fitting fleece top, black yoga pants, and white sneakers. “You sure she hasn’t snuck off and done this before without our knowing it?”

  His grin widened as he looked back up at Carmelita. A sweet spot, that’s where he found himself, three years into parenthood, on a working vacation with his family in beautiful Yosemite Valley in the heart of California’s Yosemite National Park. Everything was right in his world on this sunny mid-August morning. Perfect.

  A loner turned sudden husband to Janelle and stepdad to Carmelita and Rosie three years ago, Chuck was well settled in his new life by now, taking off for morning runs with Janelle before the girls awoke, working at his computer in his small study in the back of the house during school hours, helping Janelle with household chores and the girls with their homework in the evenings. He mostly bid nowadays for archaeological work close to Durango, in the mountains of southern Colorado, assuring he made it home on weekends while he conducted the fieldwork portion of his contracts.

  His morning runs kept him fit at forty-five, fifteen years Janelle’s senior, even as gray spread from his sideburns through the rest of his scalp, and new wrinkles pleated the edges of his mouth, mimicking the crow’s feet that for years had creased the sun-scorched corners of his eyes.

  Carmelita continued her smooth ascent up the portable, forty-foot climbing tower, which was raised on hydraulic arms from the bed of a flatbed trailer attached to a parked semitruck at the edge of the Camp 4 parking lot. Her bravura climb in front of the couple dozen onlookers at the foot of the tower, so out of character for her, took Chuck aback. Such brash public displays weren’t like her. Rather, they were the province of her openly exuberant ten-year-old sister, Rosie.

  Chuck took in an arm’s length of rope. Another sidelong glance revealed a happy smile splashed across Janelle’s face as she watched her older daughter’s confident moves up the tower.

  Janelle’s smile reinforced what she’d told Chuck in their crew-cab pickup truck late last night, after the girls had fallen asleep in back as they’d driven from Colorado. She’d spoken softly, so as not to awaken the girls, of her pride at having passed the last of her paramedic training courses and the national certification test, her application now pending with the Durango Fire and Rescue Authority. Since moving north from Albuquerque to join Chuck in Durango three years ago, she’d taken fully to the outdoor lifestyle of the Colorado mountain town, hiking and camping with him and the girls, shopping at the local farmers’ market, and participating in the many group trail runs hosted by the Durango Running Club in the forested hills above town.

  “She must have gotten this from you,” Janelle said at Chuck’s side, her olive face turned to the sky. Her dark hair, long and silky, hung free down her back, and a tiny, pink gemstone winked in the side of her small, pointed nose.

  “Not me.” Chuck took up more slack, maintaining slight tension on the climbing rope to assure it would catch Carmelita the instant she fell—if she fell. “I was always a grunter. I climbed by force of will. But look at her. She’s defying gravity, and she’s doing it with pure grace.”

  Carmelita passed the tower’s halfway point, moving higher despite the decreasing size and number of holds on the top portion of the structure. She grasped the undersized resin grips, dyed a rainbow of colors, with the tips of her fingers while keeping most of her weight on her toes. The climbing rope extended from her harness to a pulley at the top of the wall and back down to Chuck in the parking lot below. Her chestnut hair, gathered in a ponytail, gleamed in the sunlight beneath the back of her helmet. She showed no hint of fear as
she passed thirty feet off the ground, nearing the top of the tower.

  “You go, girl!” Janelle’s brother and Chuck’s assistant, Clarence, called to Carmelita from where he stood forty feet back from the base of the tower with the other onlookers, several of whom waited their turn to climb when Carmelita finished.

  Clarence tucked his shoulder-length black hair behind his silver-earring-studded ears and raised his hands in a two-fisted salute, the sleeves of his black T-shirt climbing his pudgy upper arms, his jeans riding low on his hips beneath his sizable gut.

  “Yeah! You go, girl!” Rosie echoed from where she stood at her uncle’s side.

  Rosie’s stocky frame contrasted sharply with that of her slight sister. She could have been her uncle’s twin, however, with his squat physique and potbelly, if not for the difference in their ages.

  “No way am I going up that thing,” Rosie declared. She hooked her thumbs through the belt loops of her shorts. “No frickin’ way.”

  “Rosie!” Janelle admonished. Her reprimand was halfhearted, however, focused as she was on Carmelita three stories overhead. Janelle put her hand to her brow, shielding her eyes from the sun. “Isn’t that high enough?” she asked Chuck.

  “She might send it,” Chuck replied, agog. “She might actually top out.”

  Carmelita continued her ascent, the widely spaced holds at the top of the tower presenting her no discernible difficulty until, as if by levitation alone, she was forty feet off the ground and there was no more climbing to be done. After giving the top of the fiberglass tower a tap, she leaned back in her harness as Chuck had instructed, her feet spread wide on the wall. She shook out her hands at her sides while he held her in place, his brake hand gripping the rope.

  “How’s the view from up there, sweetness?” he called up to her.

  She looked at the granite cliffs lining the valley thousands of feet above the tower. “I’ve got a ways to go.”