Murder on High (2 page)

The first part of the Knife Edge wasn’t so bad, and she crossed it easily. It was the jagged up-and-down terrain of the stretch between South Peak and Chimney Peak that always gave her the most trouble. She had once heard this section described as resembling the spine of a stegosaurus, with its row of pointed, upright plates. Adding to the difficulty was the fact that this was the narrowest section of the ridge, the result of glaciers on either side having honed it to a slender blade. After pausing for a few minutes on South Peak to gather her courage, she continued on. From South Peak, the trail turned to the northeast, and then descended steeply to a low point. She could never decide which was worse, down or up. Usually she thought it was down, but today down wasn’t that bad because there was no down to see. She was breathing deeply when she reached the notch between the first and second of the plates, and paused to remove her canteen from her pack. The bank of fog that clung to the headwall stretched out below her like a great white plain studded with snowy hills and mountains. Ahead, the rounded summit of Chimney Peak loomed out of the fog, and beyond it, the peak of Pamola. If the Knife Edge was a dinosaur’s spine, Chimney Peak would be its hunched-up shoulders, and Pamola Peak the back of its head. After taking a drink, she returned her canteen to her pack—she liked the open packs because you could just reach around to take something out, though they weren’t as practical in bad weather—and began her ascent of the next of the steep, narrow plates on the dinosaur’s back.

This trip, up was definitely worse than down. The trouble with up was that there wasn’t anything in the distance to fix your gaze on, to orient you in space. Today, there wasn’t even a distant cloud; only the cold, damp vapors of fog. The solution, of course, was not to look out. To look only at the dark rocks at your feet, with their green and gray patterns of ring and map lichens. To plot the placement of each hand and foot with the precision of a brain surgeon deciding where to make the next cut. Only a few more steps now. One last lift over an outcrop. There, she had made it! Standing precariously on the tip of the dinosaur plate, she savored the cold, damp sting of the fog against her cheek. She took out her pocket spyglass, and lifted it to her eye. In the distance, the conical summit of Russell Mountain peeked out of the fog like a volcanic island, perfectly centered in her field of view. She put the spyglass back. Now for the next descent.

She was just turning when she felt a rush of air, then a sharp pain on the side of her neck. What was this! Stung by the force of the impact, she rocked back and forth on the pinnacle like an amusement park Kewpie doll that’s been hit with a softball.

Then she fell into the soft bed of fleecy white clouds.

2

The assistant ranger at the Chimney Pond Campground, whose name was Chris Sargent, awoke at 5
A
.
M.
with a sense of disquietude. In the mental confusion of first awakening, he thought at first it was the bed. He wasn’t used to sleeping in the double bed on the screened-in back porch of the ranger’s cabin, but rather in a hard, narrow bunk in the crew cabin on the other side of the campground. He was only here because his boss, the campground ranger, was on vacation. But when he opened his eyes and caught his first glimpse of the fog-shrouded headwall on the other side of the screen, he remembered what had caused him such an uneasy night. It was the hiker, Iris Richards: a seventy-two-year-old woman from Old Town, a hundred miles to the south. She had signed in at the hiker’s register yesterday at eight, as all hikers to the summit were asked to do. But she hadn’t signed out. Nor had she returned to Chimney Pond to meet her companion, a woman in her fifties named Jeanne Ouellette, who, being the less experienced hiker of the two, had chosen an easier route to one of the mountain’s other peaks. Though they had set out together, Mrs. Richards had gone on ahead once they reached the rim of the basin, leaving Miss Ouellette to go off in another direction.

After arriving back at the campground at six, Miss Ouellette had waited at the ranger’s office for two hours. When Mrs. Richards hadn’t returned by eight, Sargent had notified the South District supervisor, whose name was Haverty, that Mrs. Richards was missing. Haverty had asked the Old Town police to check Mrs. Richards’ home on the off-chance that she had returned there by some other means. Miss Ouellette had reported that a friend of Mrs. Richards’ from Old Town, a man named Mack Scott, had announced his intention of climbing the mountain that day from the opposite side, via the Abol Trail. Mrs. Richards had discussed meeting him in the vicinity of the summit, and Miss Ouellette had speculated that perhaps Mrs. Richards had done just that, and had descended the mountain and returned to Old Town with him. For Mrs. Richards to leave her hiking companion waiting at the Chimney Pond Campground was highly inconsiderate, but certainly not out of character for a woman who tended to put her own needs ahead of those of others, and in particular ahead of those of the woman who had been her devoted companion for more than thirty years. It was also possible, confessed Miss Ouellette, whose annoyance had transmuted itself into worry as the hour grew later, that she had misunderstood, and that Mrs. Richards had been planning to go home with Scott from the start. But why, then, would she have given her descent route in the hiker’s register as the Dudley Trail, a trail whose terminus was the Chimney Pond Campground? In any case, Iris Richards had not arrived home by eight when the police checked her house, though it was possible that she and Scott had stopped for dinner on the way back. Miss Ouellette had finally decided to spend the night in Millinocket on the chance that Mrs. Richards would still turn up. Without her companion’s car, Mrs. Richards would have no way of getting home. But when Sargent had checked in with Haverty at eleven, Mrs. Richards still wasn’t back.

As Sargent rolled over, he felt the stiffness of his muscles. The day before had been exhausting. A full day of clearing a blow-down from a trail had been followed by the search for Mrs. Richards. When she hadn’t returned by eight, he had been directed by Haverty to give her route a thorough going-over—quote, unquote. Usually he would have begun by scanning the headwall with binoculars, but the fog that had moved in earlier that day had ruled out that option. Instead, he had walked around the pond to the base of the headwall, and tried to make voice contact from there. Voices carried well in the Great Basin, and extended conversations had been carried on in the past with stranded hikers from the base of the headwall. But this time his efforts had been to no avail. Finally he had surveyed her route, taking the opposite direction on the theory that a hiker who got into trouble would most likely have done so on the way down. But he hadn’t found anything. Wasn’t likely to in that fog.

All the time, he had been considering what might have happened to her. Though he never would have admitted it, a part of him was hoping it was something serious. He wasn’t wishing for a fatality, mind you; but a broken leg wouldn’t be bad. An accident victim on the headwall would give him a chance to show off his training in mountain rescue techniques. As a member of the University of Maine’s Dirigo Search and Rescue Team he had participated in several exciting rescues in New Hampshire’s Presidential Range, and he was eager to do the same here. A chance to show off his rappelling skills might even result in a promotion. The campground ranger wasn’t taking time off to visit relatives, as she had told Haverty, but was interviewing for a job at Denali National Park. If she got it, and she seemed fairly confident that she would, the Chimney Pond campground ranger post would be vacant. And he was the man to fill it. As the rock-climbing center of Baxter State Park, the Chimney Pond site needed an experienced rock climber in charge. Most of the assistant rangers had trained, as he had, at the national park ranger school, but none of the others were technically qualified, as he was. At least, that was the line he was planning to use with Haverty.

Unfortunately for him, his two previous summers at Chimney Pond had failed to provide him with the opportunity to show off his technical expertise. Despite the thousands of hikers who climbed Katahdin each season, the only mishap had occurred last year when a Boy Scout who’d become separated from his troop took the wrong trail down. Realizing his error, he had turned around and gone back the way he had come, meeting the search party almost before it set out. Which wasn’t to say that Sargent hadn’t proven himself in other ways: for instance, in coping diligently and effectively with the day-to-day problems that arose at the campsite. Thinking of problems, he was reminded of the sticky little problem that was plaguing him now—a prankster in the camp; someone who was appearing to campers in the middle of the night dressed up as Pamola, the malignant Indian spirit who was supposed to dwell in a cave at the summit. At least, it was Pamola whom he thought the prankster was supposed to be, with his moose antlers and eagle mask. Three nights in a row, now. It was stupid, really. Like a Halloween trick. Sargent was pretty sure the culprit was the nut case in Lean-to Number Two who had bored him for two afternoons running with his theory about how the patterns in the fissures on the headwall spelled out messages in Penobscot from the Great Spirit. Sargent hadn’t found anything when he’d checked the camper’s lean-to for the Pamola costume, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have stashed it in his car, which was parked down at Roaring Brook Campground. Sargent didn’t know quite what to do about this problem. But he was damned if he was going to ask Haverty. He’d been planning to stay up last night to catch the guy in the act, but those plans had been ixnayed by the Mrs. Richards business. It would have been a waste of time anyway, since the prankster hadn’t shown up. He’d probably been kept away by the same fog that had foiled Sargent’s search efforts.

Yes, the Mrs. Richards business. He thought it unlikely that she had come to any calamitous end. For Iris Richards, as for many Mainers, climbing Katahdin was an annual ritual. Though there had been many accidental deaths on the mountain, they were almost without exception due to two factors: ignorance or weather, and usually a combination of the two. Most of the deaths had taken place on the Knife Edge, the narrow glacial arête that had been created by two glaciers biting into the opposing walls of the ridge like the blades of a knife sharpener. Despite prominent signs warning hikers not to leave the Knife Edge Trail, inexperienced hikers were sometimes seduced into thinking that the ravines that cascaded down the face of the headwall were easy shortcuts back to Chimney Pond. From the ridge, the tops of these ravines resembled trailheads, but hikers who chose to descend by these routes quickly found that they led to vertical drop-offs that were impossible to negotiate without technical equipment and expertise. In fact, as his boss was fond of saying, there were only three ways off the Knife Edge: forward, backward, and to your death. Which was a bit of an overstatement. Many stranded hikers had been plucked off the headwall, but there were others who had indeed either plunged to their deaths or died of exposure overnight. For Katahdin, with an elevation just under a mile, was subject to sudden changes in weather; in fact, the Penobscot Indians, to whom the mountain was sacred, said that Pamola cooked up its furious storms in the Great Basin to keep interlopers off his turf.

But Mrs. Richards hadn’t been an inexperienced hiker. She had climbed the mountain a dozen times or more. She would have known there were no shortcuts off the Knife Edge. Nor had she been caught by the weather. The day before had been clear and warm, and though a fog had moved in around noon,’ it had not rained and the temperature had stayed fairly mild. If she
had
been forced to spend the night on the headwall, she wouldn’t have died of exposure. There was a chance that she had fallen off. Her companion had described her as being extremely fit, but there were accidents of health that could befall a woman of her age: a mini-stroke, a dizzy spell brought on by undetected heart disease, or an episode of forgetfulness that resulted in her wandering off the trail. Thus he had made the circuit: up the Dudley Trail and across the Knife Edge. Though the chance was slim that he would see the neon-green windbreaker that Miss Ouellette said the missing woman had probably been wearing—the headwall was buried in a sea of fog—he had hoped he might see a signal from the flashlight she had been carrying. But he had found nothing except some trash left by hikers on Baxter Peak. At Baxter Peak, he had turned south to Thoreau Spring, which Mrs. Richards had given as her first destination. It was ten by the time he got to the Baxter Peak Cutoff, where Mrs. Richards and Miss Ouellette had separated, and past eleven by the time he got back, completely exhausted, to Chimney Pond. After trying once again to make voice contact, he had radioed in his report to Haverty, and, after being instructed to get a good night’s rest in preparation for a more thorough search in the morning, had collapsed into the unaccustomed luxury of the campground ranger’s double bed.

Now he found himself scanning the headwall again. Picking up the field glasses with which, at intervals during the night, he had searched for a signal from Mrs. Richards’ flashlight, he sat up and studied the wall of fog through the naked branches of the trees. Though it was June ninth, the trees here were just beginning to bud, in contrast to those at the Roaring Brook Campground three miles below, which were nearly fully leafed out by now. Even when the trees here were in full leaf, however, there was still a magnificent view of the headwall. How he loved this sleeping porch! Ever since he had arrived here three years ago, he’d been coveting the accommodations at the ranger’s cabin. By most people’s standards, they would be considered primitive—a small log cabin without even the convenience of central heating—but to him, they were the height of luxury. In addition to the sleeping porch, there was a private outhouse, a little kitchen, and, best of all, space. As assistant ranger, he was relegated to the dark, cramped crew cabin, uncomfortable enough in itself and made even worse by the fact that he had to share it. It could accommodate eleven, and often did: visiting rangers, Student Conservation Association workers, park employees who wanted to climb the mountain on their day off—a sneezing, farting, coughing, snoring mass of humanity.