Yosemite Fall (National Park Mystery Series) Read online

  Dale crossed the circle for a closer look. “Are those machine-rolled?”

  “You think my fingers don’t have it anymore?”

  Dale reached for the case. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done any toking.”

  “Your crowd isn’t into pot?”

  “You mean, my gay crowd?”

  Dale had been closeted during his summers at Yosemite, but he had let it be known in his emails to the group that he was out and proud these days.

  “Actually, I was thinking of your wine-sipping crowd. If they’re anything like—”

  Caleb stopped in mid-sentence when the deep-throated chuff-chuff-chuff of an approaching helicopter sounded from down the valley. As the sound grew louder, Chuck hurried with the others out of the campground to the edge of the trees next to the road. Janelle joined Chuck from the campground. A rescue helicopter, blue against the green trees and gray granite cliffs of the far valley wall, flew toward Sentinel Ridge.

  Opposite the campground, an ambulance pulled off the road and parked next to a bladed landing zone. The vehicle’s uniformed attendants hopped out and craned their heads as the chopper proceeded up the valley high above them.

  The rescue helicopter slowed to a hover above the ridge. Dangling on a line from the chopper’s open side door, an empty wire-cage stretcher descended toward the ground. The stretcher disappeared from view, hidden by ponderosas growing on the mountainside. After less than a minute, the helicopter rose from the ridge, its engine growling as it climbed. The stretcher reappeared out of the trees below the chopper, a black body bag now strapped inside the wire cage.

  The ambulance attendants pulled a gurney from the back of their vehicle as the rescue helicopter turned toward them. The chopper descended across the valley and came to a hovering standstill fifty feet above the waiting ambulance, the roar of its engine deafening.

  The wash of the chopper’s rotor blades flattened the meadow grass around the landing zone as the ambulance attendants grasped the dangling stretcher, suspended from its guy line a few feet off the ground, and guided it to the wheeled gurney. They settled the stretcher on the gurney, unhooked the line, and directed a pair of raised thumbs at the chopper overhead. The helicopter rose and departed back down the valley, the line retracting as it flew, while the attendants loaded the gurney into the back of the ambulance and climbed in front.

  The ambulance stopped traffic with its flashing lights, turned onto the road, and headed west, trailing the helicopter out of the valley.

  “They sure are efficient,” Caleb remarked, his eyes on the receding helicopter, a dark speck in the western sky.

  “They ought to be,” Janelle said. “I read that YOSAR conducts more than two hundred missions a year in the park, forty involving helicopter assistance.”

  “That’s almost one helicopter operation a week,” Chuck said. “Hard to believe they—”

  He stopped at a tap on his shoulder. Turning, he came face to face with Owen Hutchins, Jr.

  “I’ve got more questions for you,” Owen said.

  “I was as clear with you this morning as I could be,” Chuck told him.

  The ranger pointed at Janelle. “And for her.”

  “She had nothing to do with Jimmy’s accident.”

  “It’s not about that. It’s about the wingsuit death,” the ranger said. “Thorpe Alstad.”

  7

  Chuck stiffened. “What about Thorpe’s death?”

  “I understand from the ranger team on the ridge that you located the body. The team is securing the scene and collecting evidence in advance of the SAIT being selected and assigned,” Owen said.

  “You mean a Serious Accident Investigation Team, like you talked about for Jimmy’s fall from the climbing tower.”

  “Correct. The incident involving Jimmy was a maybe. But they’re already assembling a team for the Alstad incident. The team will generate an FIR, a Fatality Investigation Report. But all that takes time. For now, I’ve been assigned to conduct initial interviews. I’m using the campground office building. I need to take statements from the two of you. It’s standard operating procedure in advance of the SAIT’s formation.”

  “Now?” Chuck asked. He waved in the direction of their campsite. “We’ve got to—”

  “Yes,” Owen interrupted. “Now. We prefer to take statements ASAP.” He swiveled and indicated the front of the campground with an open hand.

  “What about me?” Ponch asked.

  “You are . . . ?”

  “Ponch Stilwell. My given name is Henry. That’s probably what you’ve got on your list.”

  Owen consulted his clipboard. “Right. Stilwell, Henry. You were with the vic this morning, too, weren’t you?”

  “The ‘vic’?”

  “Alstad.”

  Ponch nodded.

  “I was going to find you next.” Extending an elbow at Chuck and Janelle, Owen said to Ponch, “Why don’t you come to the office after I’m finished with these two?” Without waiting for a response, he marched toward the front of the campground, his clipboard clamped beneath his arm.

  A worried frown scored Janelle’s face when she turned to Chuck.

  “We didn’t do anything wrong,” Chuck assured her.

  “That’s not what he makes it sound like, with all of his ‘SAIT’ this and ‘ASAP’ that.” She looked into the campground, where Clarence sat with the girls at their campsite picnic table. “Okay,” she said with a sigh. She mimicked Owen’s officious tone: “I guess it’s just ‘standard operating procedure.’”

  Ponch tagged along as they made their way through the campground toward the small A-frame office.

  “This should be pretty straightforward,” Chuck said to Janelle and Ponch, “provided the two of you don’t say anything about your conspiracy theory.”

  “It’s not a theory,” Janelle said. “There’s very clear evidence pointing to potential wrongdoing.”

  Chuck groaned. “The rangers securing the scene on the ridge will see what you saw. They’ll pass it on to the accident investigation team. The team members will follow up on their own to the extent they want, regardless what we say or don’t say.” He looked to Ponch for support.

  “I don’t know,” Ponch equivocated.

  “You, too?”

  “This is Thorpe we’re talking about. I was with him this morning. He was alive, stoked, excited for the reunion.”

  “As near as you could tell.”

  “Right. As near as I could tell. And he was the safest flier ever. For years, no mistakes, no accidents. But now he’s dead. I don’t care how much grief you give me about my cards, there’s nothing wrong with giving them their due. If I want to be suspicious on Thorpe’s behalf, I’ll be suspicious. And if I want to tell Owen, Jr., about my suspicions, I’ll do that, too.”

  Chuck raised his hands in surrender. “Tell him whatever you want.”

  “That’s better.”

  Ponch peeled away, heading for the reunion campsite. Chuck continued with Janelle toward the A-frame.

  After a few steps, she said, “I have to say, though, the more I think about it, the more Ponch’s suicide theory makes sense. One of my final lectures was by a psychologist who talked about how easy it is for people to make bad choices in their lives. It was aimed at paramedics—how important it is to recognize when job stress is getting to be too much.”

  “But you think it might apply to Thorpe? You think his happiness with Ponch this morning was fake?”

  “I just wish we had some way of knowing.”

  “Sit,” Owen said, waving Chuck and Janelle to a narrow bench along the front wall of the tiny, one-room building that served as the Camp 4 office.

  The ranger sat in a worn chair behind a compact oak desk in the middle of the small room. The chair squeaked as he rolled it across the plywood floor until his stomach met the desktop.

  Behind him, loose papers and bound manuals covered a folding table set against the triangular rear wall of the bu
ilding. A handheld radio in a recharger tray occupied one end of the table, while an ancient, drip coffeemaker took up the other. Dust motes hung in the air, lit by a shaft of sunlight streaming through the building’s sole window, a smudged pane of glass set in the front wall. The room smelled of stale coffee.

  Owen removed the sheath of papers bound in his clipboard. After arranging the papers into three tidy piles on the scarred desktop in front of him, he took a pen from his shirt pocket, clicked it several times beside his ear, and lowered it to the sheet atop the center stack of papers.

  He requested and jotted Janelle’s personal information on the sheet as she recited it. When he finished writing, he looked up at her, his pen poised above the piece of paper. “I understand from speaking with the YOSAR team that you were the first to encounter the vic.” He cleared his throat. “The victim.”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t feel it was the officials’ job to conduct a search? That’s what YOSAR is for, after all.”

  Chuck broke in. “Who knows how long the park service would have waited? We knew where he’d headed. We were worried he might be injured.”

  Owen kept his eyes on Janelle. “The YOSAR team leader said you told her you touched the body. You moved it.”

  Janelle squared her shoulders. “I’m a paramedic. I completed my coursework in Colorado a few weeks ago; I’m waiting for my certification to come through. All I did was follow my training. I assessed the patient.”

  “Wasn’t it obvious to you that your patient, as you’re calling him, was deceased?”

  “I was taught never to make such an assumption. I wanted to be absolutely sure, which resulted in my handling the patient.”

  Owen peered down his long nose at Janelle. “What, exactly, did you do?”

  Remaining composed, Janelle told Owen how she’d turned Thorpe’s head and checked his jugular for a pulse, determining within seconds that he’d likely died upon impact with the cliff somewhere above, and that he was certainly dead where he lay.

  “You told the YOSAR team leader you were the first to spot the severed leg, too,” Owen said.

  Janelle inclined her head. “It was what led us to the body.” She described the leg’s location in the tree and the condition of the appendage itself. If she was at all squeamish, it wasn’t apparent to Chuck. She mentioned the laceration on the ankle of Thorpe’s severed leg, describing it as deep and straight. She told the ranger about the separated wingsuit foil and exposed plastic stay, and her concerns about its potential correlation with the cut in Thorpe’s ankle.

  “I’ll make a note of it,” Owen said, though his tone was dismissive and he wrote nothing down. “Is there anything else you’d like to add?”

  Janelle pressed her lips together. “No.”

  The ranger shifted his attention to Chuck, his gaze penetrating. “What about you?”

  Chuck tipped his head toward Janelle. “I followed her lead up there. She covered things pretty well with you just now, I’d say. Exceptionally well, in fact.”

  Janelle straightened beside him on the bench.

  Owen requested Chuck’s personal information and ran him through the same questions as Janelle. Chuck kept his responses short, mirroring Janelle’s answers.

  With his questions completed, Owen dismissed them without thanks, his head down as he studied his notes on the desk.

  “Finding Thorpe’s body didn’t really bother you, did it?” Chuck said to Janelle as they walked back through the campground together.

  “If you’d seen what I saw growing up . . .” She let her comment dangle.

  “You don’t really talk about it.”

  “Mamá and Papá could only do so much to shield Clarence and me.”

  Not long after their arrival in the United States from Mexico, Janelle’s parents had purchased a cheap, barren lot south of downtown Albuquerque. On it they’d built a modest, single-story home, stacking concrete blocks by hand and troweling the blocks with stucco. They created a sanctuary within their walled lot that included a small rectangle of grass, a handful of pecan trees, and a productive vegetable garden. But they couldn’t do much about the war zone outside their front door.

  “The sound of gunshots started up as soon as it got dark,” Janelle said. “Squealing tires. Screaming, yelling. I saw my share of dead bodies.”

  “But you escaped.”

  She put her arm around Chuck’s waist. “It took me a while, but I found my knight in shining armor.”

  He pulled her to his side. “It took me a long time to find my princess, too.”

  “I just wish I could convince them to get out of the South Valley and move to Durango with us.”

  “It’s only a matter of time. They miss the girls enough, that’s for sure.”

  They neared the side-by-side campsites at the west end of the campground. Ahead, the reunion attendees sat in their circle of camp chairs, bottles of beer in hand.

  “Speaking of the girls,” Chuck continued, “I’d like to get them away from all the talk about Thorpe. And I wouldn’t mind getting away myself.”

  “It’s almost dinner time.”

  “We’ll grab some snack food. We still have two hours of daylight. Plenty of time to check things out.”

  “The contract?”

  Chuck nodded. “Clarence and I have a lot to get done this week. The sooner we get started, the better. It’d be great to have your and the girls’ help on the front end.”

  “We’re not exactly professional archaeologists.”

  “The first thing on the to-do list is a recon mission to get a sense of what we’re up against. For that, the more sets of eyes the better, trained or untrained.”

  “Does the IRS know you use child laborers to fulfill your projects?”

  “I won’t say anything if you don’t.”

  “What’s the guy’s name again, the one you’re supposed to study?”

  “Stephen Grover. He came to Yosemite Valley in 1852 with a group of gold prospectors. Researchers working for the Indigenous Tribespeople Foundation were going through the Yosemite Museum archives. They ran across Grover’s account of the killings of two members of his group, supposedly by hostile tribespeople.”

  “Supposedly?”

  “That’s the reason the foundation decided to put the contract out to bid—Grover’s account raises quite a few questions about that conclusion.”

  8

  From “A Reminiscence” (Part One) by prospector Stephen F. Grover:

  On the 27th of April, 1852, a party of miners, consisting of [myself and] Messrs. Babcock, Peabody, Tudor, Sherburn, Rose, Aich, and an Englishman whose name I cannot now recall, left Coarse Gold Gulch in Mariposa County on an expedition prospecting for gold in the wilds of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

  We followed up Coarse Gold Gulch into the Sierras, traveling five days, and took the Indian trail through the Mariposa [Sequoia] Tree Grove, and were the first white men to enter there. Then we followed the South Fork of the Merced River, traveling on Indian trails the entire time.

  On reaching the hills above Yosemite Valley, our party camped for the night and questioned the expediency of descending into the Valley at all. Our party were all opposed to the project except Sherburn, Tudor, and Rose. They over-persuaded the rest and fairly forced us against our will, and we finally followed the old Mariposa Indian trail on the morning of the 2nd of May. Entering the Valley on the East side of the Merced River, [we] camped on a little opening, near a bend in the River free from any brush whatever, and staked out our pack mules by the river.

  I, being the youngest of the party, a mere boy of twenty-two years, and not feeling usually well that morning, remained in camp with Aich and the Englishman to prepare dinner, while the others went up the Valley, some prospecting, and others hunting for game. We had no fear of the Indians, as they had been peaceable, and no outbreaks having occurred, the whites traveled fearlessly wherever they wished to go. Thus, we had no apprehension of trouble.
/>   To my astonishment and horror, I heard our men attacked, and amid firing, screams, and confusion, here came Peabody. [He] reached camp first, wounded by an arrow in his arm and another in the back of his neck, and one through his clothes, just grazing the skin of his stomach, wetting his rifle and ammunition in crossing the river as he ran to reach camp. Babcock soon followed, and as both men had plunged through the stream that flows from the Bridal Veil Falls in making their escape, they were drenched to the skin.

  On reaching us, Aich immediately began picking the wet powder from Babcock’s rifle, while I with my rifle stood guard and kept the savages at bay the best I could. The other men, with the exception of Sherburn, Tudor, and Rose, came rushing into camp in wild excitement.

  Rose, a Frenchman, was the first to fall, and from the opposite side of the stream where he fell, apparently with his death wound, he screamed to us, “’Tis no use to try to save ourselves. We have all got to die.” He was the only one of our company that could speak Indian and we depended on him for an interpreter.

  Sherburn and Tudor were killed in this first encounter, Tudor being killed with an ax in the hands of a savage, which was taken along with the party for cutting wood.

  The Indians gathered around as near as they dared to come, whooping and yelling, and constantly firing arrows at us. We feared they would pick up the rifles dropped by our companions in their flight, and turn them against us, but they did not know how to use them.

  As we were very hard pressed, and as the number of Indians steadily increased, we tried to escape by the old Mariposa Trail, the one by which we entered the Valley, one of our number catching up a sack of a few pounds of flour and another a tin cup and some of our outer clothing, and fled as best we could with the savages in hot pursuit.

  We had proceeded but a short distance when we were attacked in front by the savages who had cut off our retreat. Death staring at us on almost every hand, and seeing no means of escape, we fled to the bluff, I losing my pistol as I ran. We were in a shower of arrows all the while, and the Indians were closing in upon us very fast; the valley seemed alive with them—on rocks, and behind trees, bristling like Demons, shrieking their war whoops, and exulting in our apparently easy capture.