Yosemite Fall (National Park Mystery Series) Page 10

  “I agree. Long odds. But the odds that the boulder chose right then to fall? Much, much longer.”

  Clarence’s eyes darted around him. “We should get the hell out of here, then.”

  Chuck looked at Clarence, unblinking.

  Clarence exhaled. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “No. I want you to stay close to Janelle and the girls.”

  “If I thought it would do any good, I’d try to talk you out of this.”

  Chuck summoned a thin smile. “I know.”

  Clarence headed down the mountainside.

  Leaving the dirt shelf, Chuck climbed back up the drainage, grabbing bushes and the trunks of small trees for support. He followed the tumbling boulder’s path of destruction—snapped branches, crushed brush, deep cuts in the soil—until he reached the place, two hundred feet up the chute from the ledge, where the car-sized boulder had begun its downhill plunge. Among low outcrops of rock eroding out of the mountainside in the middle of the drainage, a shallow depression marked the boulder’s former resting place. Uphill from the depression, discarded on the ground, lay an eight-foot length of ponderosa branch as big around as Chuck’s forearm. He hefted it. One end of the stout branch was crushed, as if it had been used as a lever to dislodge the rock and send it down the drainage.

  He squatted, studying the ground directly uphill from the depression. Shoe-sized gouges in the dry soil marked the places where feet had dug into the earth as someone had shoved the end of the branch beneath the rock, working to topple it. Shallower gouges revealed where the person had approached the boulder and retreated from it, side-hilling into and out of the steep chute.

  Chuck snapped pictures with his phone of the depression and branch, then followed the gouges in the dirt as they led east from the drainage. In the dry, crumbly soil, the gouges showed no revelatory indentations of shoe or boot sole. Beyond the drainage, the tracks led into a stand of ponderosa. There, the gouges disappeared where the soil firmed up beneath the trees.

  He spotted no signs of movement through the trees ahead—not that he expected to see anything. Whoever had rolled the boulder down the drainage would be well away from here by now.

  He returned from beneath the trees to the edge of the chute and looked east, where the south wall of the valley met the valley floor at the foot of the next drainage over. There, the Cathedral boulders speckled an area half a mile across. Dozens of climbers, tiny specks from Chuck’s distant vantage point, made their way from the parking lot to the scattered boulders and from boulder to boulder along the foot of the slope. Above the boulders, the valley wall was heavily forested.

  Whoever had toppled the rock no doubt had approached from the bouldering area and would easily mix in with the Cathedral climbers upon returning there.

  Chuck eyed the far-off climbers, rage burning inside him. Someone, very possibly one of those distant specks, had just tried to intimidate him and his family—with deadly intent.

  12

  Chuck caught up with his family as they crossed the valley floor, nearing Camp 4. Janelle fell back with Chuck, out of earshot of the girls and Clarence.

  “What really happened up there?” she asked, her voice tight.

  “I didn’t want to admit to anything until I was sure.”

  “And?”

  “I’m sure now. The boulder was no accident.” He described what he’d found—the depression, the tree branch used as a lever. “We need to get out of here,” he concluded. “It’s not safe.”

  “No,” Janelle said. There was no give in her voice. “If somebody had wanted to kill us up there, they’d have killed us. It would have been easy with a gun. But they didn’t do that.”

  “They tried.”

  “Wrong. They tried to scare us. And they did scare us. Enough that you want to leave.”

  “On account of you and the girls. I—”

  “Don’t you see?” she broke in. “The whole point of the boulder was to get you to do exactly what you’re about to do. For some reason, somebody wants you, us, to leave the valley.”

  “But who could possibly want that?”

  She shrugged. “That’s what we’re going to find out. We’ll be safe from any more scare tactics as long as we stay out in public. If we leave, I know you’ll just come back later, by yourself. That’s when you’ll be in real danger.” She stopped and turned to him. “All of us are staying here, together, until we get to the bottom of this.”

  “And just how do you propose we go about doing that?”

  “We keep our eyes and ears open.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?”

  “Do you have something better?”

  Chuck clamped his mouth shut.

  “Listen to me,” Janelle said to his silence. “We’re Ortegas. The girls, me, Clarence—and you, too, now. When my parents came to the U.S., the only choice they had was the South Valley. They could have run back to their families in Mexico from there many, many times. But they didn’t. They never have.” She looked at Chuck, her eyes dark as steel. “We’re Ortegas,” she repeated. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  The campground sat in deepening evening shade upon their return.

  Chuck angled away to check in with the guys in the reunion campsite while Janelle led the girls to their campsite with Clarence. Janelle bent close to her brother, speaking into his ear as they walked. Clarence’s back went straight. He shot a questioning look at Chuck. When Chuck nodded, Clarence went back to listening to Janelle, the tendons at the back of his neck stiff as iron rods. She spoke while making a levering motion with her hands, illustrating the toppling of the boulder from its resting place in the drainage.

  The guys sat slumped in their chairs in the reunion campsite, their feet crossed before them and their latest beers balanced in their laps. A line of empty beer bottles snaked across the top of the picnic table.

  “Chuck,” Caleb intoned, lifting his bottle in greeting. He burped.

  More tents ringed the perimeter of the reunion site. A pot bubbled on a cookstove at the end of the picnic table, filling the air with the tangy scent of onions, tomatoes, and oregano.

  Dale drew in his feet and sat up. “We were just talking about you,” he said to Chuck.

  Mark added, “We decided it’s your call whether to continue this charade.”

  Dale said of Mark, “No secret where he stands.”

  “I’ll hear him out,” said Mark, sitting forward in his seat. “As we all agreed.”

  Caleb and Ponch sat up, too. Chuck stopped at the edge of the circle of chairs.

  “You always were the levelheaded one,” Dale said to him. “Whenever we got one or another of our wild-hair ideas, it was up to you to inject a little logic into things.”

  In acknowledgment of Dale’s assessment, Chuck raised and lowered his chin. His levelheadedness had come at a price. As a child, he’d had no choice but to assume the role of the mature one in his two-person family, shopping for groceries, paying the electric bill, negotiating a rent extension with the landlord while his mother was off on a bender with another of her feckless boyfriends. He knew his early, hard-earned maturity had played a significant role in the success of Bender Archaeological right out of college. His maturity had shown itself during his summers in Camp 4 as a young man, too.

  Caleb belched again. “Remember the time we wanted to carry a yule log up Half Dome and set it on fire and toss it off the north face?”

  Dale snapped his fingers. “I’d forgotten about that. Christmas in July, that was our plan. We were going to do the same thing the rangers used to do on Christmas Eve in the old days—chuck a burning log off the top of the dome to give the folks watching from down in the valley a big show.”

  Caleb chuckled ruefully. “I chopped down a tree and hid it at the trailhead, ready for us to carry up there that night. We probably would have torched the whole valley if we’d have gone through with it in the middle of the summer like that. What were we thinking?”r />
  “We weren’t thinking,” Dale said. “That was the whole point. We were just stupid kids doing stupid stuff.”

  “Almost doing stupid stuff,” Caleb said. He looked up at Chuck from his seat. “Lucky for us we had you around to tear into us and tell us not to do it. You used the term ‘idiots’ about ten times, from what I remember.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?” Chuck said.

  “Which is why we’re turning to you again.”

  “You’re thinking of calling off the reunion?”

  Caleb’s eyes went to his beer bottle.

  Dale spoke for the group. “We’re thinking maybe it’s best just to pull the plug, call it good after tonight and get out of here in the morning.”

  Chuck glanced around the circle. “I can’t really blame you—us—for thinking like that,” he said, his own mind on the safety of his family. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe this whole get-together wasn’t meant to be.”

  He looked from the campground to the meadow stretching across the valley floor, aglow in the evening light. Ortegas didn’t run, Janelle had just said. They weren’t quitters. And he was an Ortega now.

  He turned to Ponch, who sat next to Caleb with his head bowed. “You were with Thorpe this morning. What do you think?”

  Ponch raised his head, revealing a pallid face and hollow eyes. He set his bottle in the netted holder in the arm of his chair. “I’ve listened to you guys talk about Thorpe all afternoon—whether he had a death wish, if what happened today was his plan to go out in a big burst of glory. If you’d have been with him before his flight today, though, you’d know how wrong you are.”

  He put his hands on his knees.

  “People joked about Thorpe—how old he was, how he was a Peter Pan who never grew up. And that’s exactly what he was, as near as I could tell. But the thing is, he knew it. While he was suiting up this morning, he told me he understood his place in the world. This was it, he said—the valley, the cliffs, the sunsets, the dawns. He said he knew people thought he was past his prime, and that his turning away from Sentinel Gap over and over this summer proved he didn’t have it anymore. Whatever it is.”

  Chuck held his breath. Would Ponch mention the hand of tarot cards, and the suspicions the cards had raised in his mind regarding Thorpe’s death? And what of the bloody plastic rod from the airfoil and the cut on Thorpe’s ankle?

  Ponch’s voice gained strength as he continued. “I’m here to tell you Thorpe still had it this morning. He was calm, steady, assured, ready to go.”

  Ponch took in the group with steady eyes.

  “I don’t know what went wrong in the gap this morning, but I do know Thorpe didn’t kill himself. He was happy we were all getting together again after all these years. He couldn’t wait to see everyone. Whatever happened in the gap, it just happened. The last thing Thorpe would want is for us to cancel the reunion and go home because of him. What he would want, instead, is for us to celebrate his life and to celebrate our own lives, too, like this was our last weekend on Earth—because, really, who knows? Maybe it is.”

  He clasped his hands and sat back in his seat.

  Chuck looked around the group. “I think Ponch just gave us our answer,” he said, noting Janelle listening in at the edge of the campsite. “Who’s in charge of dinner?”

  Mark lifted a finger from the neck of his bottle. “That would be me.”

  “Smells good,” Chuck said.

  Ponch pushed himself from his chair. “I’ll get a campfire going.”

  Caleb rose beside him. “I’ll help.”

  Janelle cocked a finger at Chuck. He followed her away from the group.

  “I heard Ponch just now,” she said when they were out of earshot. “What he told your buddies was different than what he said to us. He went hard against the idea that Thorpe might have committed suicide.”

  “No mention of the cards, either,” Chuck said, his voice low. “It sounded like he was fed up with what the others had been saying about Thorpe all afternoon, so he decided to stick up for him.”

  “Either way, mixed messages.”

  “Chances are we’ll never know for sure what happened to Thorpe. When it comes to wingsuit flying, if something goes wrong at the wrong time, whenever that wrong time comes along, you’re dead.”

  “Like a separated airfoil seam.”

  “Maybe that was the thing that went wrong at the wrong time this morning.”

  “Or the thing that someone made go wrong.”

  Chuck turned to her. She released his arm and met his gaze.

  “You did exactly right,” he said. “You told Owen what you saw up there. You mentioned the cut on Thorpe’s ankle. He didn’t ask you any more questions about it. Not one.”

  “He should have followed up, though. In my classes, we learned the two types of lacerations. There are clean lacs—cuts from knives, razors, broken glass—and blunt-force wounds, like a bomb going off, from car wrecks, objects, falls from height.” She set her jaw. “The lac in Thorpe’s leg wasn’t anything like what a blunt-force laceration should look like. Something stiff and cutting caused it—like a wind-whipped plastic rod sticking out of a separated airfoil.”

  “Fine. Okay,” Chuck said. “Let’s say you’re right. In which case, so what? The airfoil came apart and the stay cut him and maybe had something to do with his death or maybe not. Which gets us, basically, nowhere. It’s no different than Jimmy’s accident this morning. Bad things happen in life.”

  “The boulder didn’t just happen.”

  “Which is why that’s where we should keep our focus. As far as Thorpe’s loss of control in the gap is concerned, if the investigative team comes up with some theory based on the separated airfoil, I’ll listen. In the meantime, I’m sticking with the obvious. Thorpe was participating in the most dangerous sport there is. He’d been doing it longer than anyone else still alive. The odds finally caught—”

  A loud cry from Clarence sounded from the edge of the campground. Chuck spun with Janelle to see a tiny human form—Carmelita—clinging to Columbia Boulder’s overhanging south side, twenty feet off the ground.

  Chuck took a running step toward her just as she lost her grip and plummeted toward the rocky earth below.

  13

  Chuck charged toward Carmelita as she fell. Janelle ran beside him. Ahead, Carmelita disappeared into the upraised hands of onlookers gathered at the base of Columbia Boulder.

  Upon breaking her fall with their grouped hands—the appropriate technique for safely catching unroped climbers after falls from bouldering routes—the spectators lowered Carmelita to a standing position on the ground. Cheering, they stepped back and raised their arms, their hands clenched in her honor. Several slapped her back in congratulations as she stood among them, looking down at her climbing shoes. When Chuck neared the boulder, still running, she lifted her head to reveal a look of glowing pride on her heart-shaped face.

  Clarence stood among the onlookers with Rosie. He turned to Chuck and Janelle as they slid to a halt at the edge of the group. “Incredible,” he said, grinning.

  His smile faded when Janelle demanded, “What in God’s name are you doing with her over here?”

  Uncertainty replaced the pride in Carmelita’s eyes. Janelle reached to caress her arm. “Not you, Carm. This has nothing to do with you.”

  Chuck surveyed the spectators, more than a dozen in all. Several were members of the YOSAR team, returned from Sentinel Ridge. The remainder were park workers and their families from the campground—men and children along with several women in long skirts, their dark hair gathered in loose buns at the backs of their necks.

  “Incredible is right,” a male YOSAR team member said to Clarence, ignoring Janelle’s outburst. He rubbed his forehead beneath the brim of his cap, looking up at the spot where Carmelita had fallen from the boulder. He turned to Chuck and Janelle. “She just on-sighted Midnight Lightning, all the way to the final move.”

  “‘On-sighted’?” J
anelle asked.

  “That means,” the team member explained, “she’d never attempted the route or received any beta about it. This is Midnight Lightning we’re talking about. V8 on the Vermin scale. Ron Kauk’s impossible dream from, like, the 1970s. Kauk was the first person to send it, but only after he worked on it every day for two months straight.” The team member patted Carmelita’s shoulder. “This little one here, she shot the spider monkey swing—” he pointed up at the rock “—from the undercling up and over the mini-roof without even hesitating, like she’d been doing it her whole life. She was one move from the top when she came off. One little move.”

  Carmelita went back to studying her feet, her face growing red.

  The YOSAR team member, in his mid-twenties, his hair escaping from beneath his cap in blond waves, gaped at Chuck and Janelle. “Are you her parents?”

  Chuck nodded.

  “I’ve been stationed here the last two summers,” the young man said, pointing at the ring of YOSAR tents west of the campground. “People attempt Midnight all the time, but nobody—and I mean nobody—ever gets more than a few feet off the ground, much less sending the monkey up at the top.” He gawked at Carmelita, his admiration obvious, then said to Chuck and Janelle, “You’ve got a phenomenon on your hands.” He paused. “Wait a minute,” he said, turning again to Carmelita. “Now I get it. You’re here for the Slam, aren’t you? You really are one of those climber-kid phenomenons. Is there somewhere I can read about you? Has Rock and Ice or Climbing done a feature on you yet?”

  Chuck cleared his throat. “I’m afraid you don’t get it. She’s not like that. The first time she ever climbed was this morning, over on the climbing wall.”

  The tower, in sight through the trees at the front of the campground, was now back in use. A line of climbers waited behind the boulders at the edge of the parking lot in the waning light while a woman made her way upward, roped to what presumably was the swapped-out auto-belay device.

  “Seriously?” the team member said to Chuck. He gawked at Carmelita again. “You’re really something, you know that? You climb like a cat.”