High Country- Pigeon 12 (27 page)

Ten minutes passed before a nurse came. Anna didn't mind the wait. Little things were giving her immoderate joy: drinking the flat-tasting water from the metal pitcher on the bed stand, seeing and feeling the sun on her legs, watching airplanes as they made their pattern prior to landing at Merced's small airport.

This idyll was eroded around the edges by niggling memories of what she had done: the axing, gouging, burning. Whether because of residual drugs in her system or because these things had happened in the dead of night like the grisliest of dreams, they were mercifully unreal.

With the nurse and the food came information. As she had surmised, she'd been in the hospital half a day. Her ankle bone was cracked, but not broken, and she'd suffered a bad sprain. The doctor hadn't put a cast on it because six weeks of atrophy would do the leg more harm than the crack in the bone. The bone would heal more quickly and with less discomfort than the sprain. The bandages on her fingers were for frostbite, but it wasn't severe. She'd lose no digits, just a little skin. Mostly she'd been suffering from exhaustion and dehydration.

The nurse took the intravenous tube from her arm and Anna immediately felt better. Lying in a hospital bed, tubes and needles invading the body, felt like the precursor to a long and humiliating death.

Proving hunger really is the best sauce, she devoured the hospital food the nurse brought. Reassured and fed, she decided to face her responsibilities.

"I need to make some calls," she said. "How do I get an outside line?"

The nurse explained the hospital's phone system and the billing system for calls. Following the lead of America's finest hotels, hefty surcharges were levied for simply lifting the receiver from its cradle.

Mostly Anna wanted to call Molly, but her sketchy memory of her less than triumphant return to the valley following her mountain sojourn didn't include her having reported to anyone. Because she was known only to a handful of people as anything other than a waitress at the Ahwahnee, the clinic wouldn't automatically inform the ranger division of her injury. Anna called information for the park number and waded through choices and button pushing before she got a live human being who could transfer her call to the superintendent's office. Experience had taught her that, when a death was involved, if the superintendent wasn't one of the first to hear, sparks would most definitely fly.

The secretary, a wonderfully efficient young woman whose only shortcoming in the eyes of her superiors was a irreverent tendency to come to work with hair dyed in neon blues and reds, told her the superintendent was still at a conference in Washington, D.C. Anna had known that but had hoped for an early return. Accepting the inevitable, she asked to be patched through to Deputy Superintendent Leo Johnson.

After what seemed an excessively long time the secretary came back on the line. "Leo's in a meeting right now. Can he call you back?"

"It's urgent," Anna said. "Did you tell him it was Anna Pigeon calling?"

"I did," the secretary replied without a hint of defensiveness. "Hang on. I'll tell him it's urgent."

Another few minutes slid down the black hole Anna held pressed to her ear.

"He'll have to call you back," the secretary said at last. "Is there a number where you can be reached?" Her tone had the balance of a top-notch secretary; enough disappointment the caller knew she was on her side and enough firmness she knew continuing to push it would get her nowhere.

Anna gave the number on the phone next to her bed and the number stenciled on the door to her room, then hung up.

Food made her sleepy. Sun soothed her. Not yet recovered from forty-eight hours of assorted trauma, she dozed off. When she woke again the sun was gone, the short winter day over. It was twenty after five and Leo hadn't returned her call. She dialed the park number again. A machine answered and a recorded voice told her the administrative offices were closed for the day and would reopen at eight A.M. the following morning. She was instructed to dial 911 in case of emergency . Within the boundaries of the park, 911 would put her through to the law enforcement dispatcher. In Merced it would get her the local police.

"Damn," Anna whispered.

Phil was dead and Mark was very probably dead. Whoever had been in the drug plane when it crashed had been dead quite a while. Dead people didn't really constitute an emergency. One could dawdle and lollygag for hours-days-and they'd still be dead when rescue finally arrived.

The drugs themselves didn't constitute an emergency either. Twelve miles in over rough trail in winter: odds were good nobody would bother them tonight. When Mark and Phil failed to reappear packing product, whoever they worked with-or for-would send others up to find out what happened. That shouldn't happen for a day or two.

Excuses in place for abandoning the fruitless telephoning, Anna threw off the thin covers and stood up gingerly. When her brain had gyrated around in her skull and adapted itself to this new position, she put a bit of weight on her bad ankle. It hurt, but the pressure bandage and the rest had done wonders. With a crutch or even a cane, she would be able to move fairly well.

Anticipating a fuss and not wanting to go into it with her bare bottom exposed, she moved to the narrow closet, supporting her weight on the furnishings when she could and hopping when she couldn't. Her clothes were hung neatly inside. Shirt and pullover were distinctly disreputable-looking and smelled vaguely like a locker room, but they were dry. Anna put them on. That was as far as she got. Her trousers had been cut from waist to hem when they'd removed them to tend to her damaged ankle. The laces on her hiking boot had been cut as well. Socks and underpants had gone missing, probably down a trash chute. Anna thought harsh things about whichever EMT had gotten scissor happy.

There's nothing like having no pants, no transportation and no money for making a woman feel helpless. Anna got back in bed and called the Ahwahnee dorm.

Two hours later, with crutches and an ankle brace from hospital stores, she was headed back up into the mountains in Mary Bates's rusting old Chevrolet. To pay for the ride, Anna told Mary her story, all of it.

"I knew it, I just knew it," Mary crowed when Anna finished. "My whole life I've been in the Ahwahnee. I've known waitresses who dropped out of lawyering, who could've been beauty queens, even some hiding from outstanding warrants or abusive husbands. I knew you didn't fit in. Ha!"

Anna was offended. She'd worked hard to fit in. It hurt her pride to think a seventeen-year-old girl had seen through her cover. "You didn't know," she said.

"Yes I did."

Anna sniffed. Mary, being a well-brought-up girl and one with keen intuitions, must have sensed Anna's hurt feelings. She went on to say: "Oh, I didn't know your were a ranger undercover or anything. And you were a good waitress. Honest. Really and truly."

Two protestations of verisimilitude. She was lying. Anna was a lousy waitress. Depression began to settle over her sternum, stirred by a soupcon of peevishness. Even knowing it wasn't from her failure in the restaurant business but a conglomerate of the other shocks and horrors, Anna had trouble shaking it off.

"I thought maybe you were working for the hotel," Mary said. "Sometimes my dad would do that. When he felt something wasn't right and couldn't figure out what it was, he'd hire somebody to work in the hotel who would report to him. A bunch of us thought maybe you were doing that."

"A bunch?" Anna repeated. The depression thickened. No wonder she hadn't been able to get any information. The staff thought she was a stool pigeon for the bosses.

"Well, not a bunch," Mary admitted and Anna felt a bit better. "Just me and Scott, I think."

They rode in silence for a ways. Anna thought about Scott and the unanswered questions that had been pushed from her mind the last three days. Scott Wooldrich. Picturing him in his youth and strength sent a tingle through her tired bones. So much so, she pushed the image aside. Going through adolescence once had been more than enough.

The questions were more comfortable, if only because they were familiar. She returned to the litany. Who had put the needle in her jacket and why? Who had tossed the dorm room and why? If Trish had known about the downed plane and had been mining the frozen dope to buy a gym franchise for her brother, then had Dickie known? Was that why he'd shown no interest in the search? Had he been aware his sister was murdered and either not wanted to get involved with Mark and the gang or chosen not to alert the NPS so he could take up where Trish left off? How had Mark and his boys known of the plane's whereabouts? How had they known Trish, Caitlin, Patrick and Dix were jumping their claim?

And were the answers to these questions related?

Anna focused on the needle. A syringe full of blood; had it been a mere scare tactic meant to frighten off a person suspected of spying for the boss, it could have been left in her locker where she would see it but not be injured. The fact that it had been carefully and ingeniously rigged to inject into her arm suggested that whoever put it there wanted a surer and more permanent solution to her nosing about. The only thing that could be genuinely threatening-other than the inherent scariness of blood found outside the skin it belonged under-was if the blood were in some way poisonous.

The obvious blood-borne poison was HIV or AIDS. Scott had looked as if he recognized the syringe. He had wanted to take the syringe from her. Scott had been in prison. Scott seemed to love his job as assistant chef. Could he be infected and afraid Anna, in her mistaken role of stoolie, had been sent to ferret out the truth and so get him fired? It was illegal to fire someone because they had AIDS, but considering he was in the food services business, fear of a miserable and lingering death sentence might outweigh fear of the law.

Anna sat with that idea as they drove through the tiny town of Mariposa. The solution fit a lot of the kinks and bends in the chain of events, but it didn't feel right. If AIDS were the secret a person was trying to hide, delivering a needle full of infected blood that could be tested for DNA and matched to the suspect made no sense. There was always the possibility of vicious revenge, a sort of you hurt me because I'm sick, I'll make you sick so you'll know how it feels. Anna wasn't a great judge of character, but she couldn't see that kind of petty virulence in Scott Wooldrich.

If the blood wasn't his, whose then? And if they'd wanted to keep their disease a secret, the same illogic applied. Scott knew more about the syringe than he should have. Anna remembered the sudden jarring of his facial muscles when she'd pulled it out of her jacket sleeve. Maybe it wasn't Scott's blood and he'd had no hand in the booby trap but he knew who did.

That worked.

Mariposa put Anna in mind of Trish and brother Dickie. That they were into this thing up to the eyeballs, she didn't doubt. Precisely what role each had played she wasn't sure. Trish was a dope dealer, the local connection in Yosemite Valley. From the aborted letter, Anna guessed she'd stumbled onto the news of the downed plane. Because she'd gone missing and because Anna walked into a backpack with no owner up near LowerMercedPassLake, Anna figured she'd been murdered for her trouble. The other three were probably brought into the scheme of quick money and high adventure by Trish and ended up dying with her.

Dickie Cauliff didn't fit into this tidy scenario except as the proposed beneficiary of his sister's benevolence. Anna thought back to her phone call to him, then meeting him in the flesh. He was young and strong-certainly capable of acting the mule and packing the stuff out. But he struck Anna as lazy, indifferent, sullen. The kind of man who waits for others to give him things, then gets angry and resentful if it's not enough. He might have been convinced to shoulder such a profitable burden if his sister told him to, but Anna didn't think she had. The unfinished letter she'd found in Trish's belongings was written shortly before she disappeared. It suggested the plan had been kept secret from him, merely hinted at.

When Anna had contacted Dickie he'd been singularly uninterested in anything but his sister's belongings. Given the impression of selfishness and sullenness she'd gotten of him, it didn't surprise her that he hadn't been suffering paroxysms of grief over Trish's disappearance. Sentiment over family keepsakes was out. Self-interest was more likely. Since in all likelihood he didn't know about the marijuana, he must believe there was something of value in the things Trish left behind in the park.