CHAPTER 1
The man who had hired us took the lead.
His name was Robert Shelburne and he was as sure of himself as he was of this route.
Indeed, he had a name for this way up the mountain: the rogue route.
That it was.
No trailhead marked the beginning. The path did not exist on any map. It had been blazed long ago, surviving today as little more than a hint. It shot straight up the slope and was so thickly haired with trees and brush that we were nearly hiking blind.
I heard my partner Walter Shaws, a couple dozen feet behind me, muttering words he would not normally speak aloud. Walter and I had certainly hiked plenty of unofficial trails and exploited the terrain where no trails ran at all, in rougher country than this—we're geologists who read earth evidence from crimes and crises, which often takes us deep into the field. Still, we weren’t in the habit of bushwhacking up a mountain without good reason.
Shelburne had given a reason, good enough that we'd signed on to this case, but that did not stop Walter from grousing about the topography.
Didn't stop me from keeping a nervous eye on the landscape.
As we climbed, my senses shifted to the olfactory. A breeze kicked up and brought an odd vegetative odor, which I could not identify. Clearly it didn’t come from the rangy manzanita or deer brush that infested the path. It came from deeper into these oak-and-pine wooded slopes, or perhaps up higher.
Up ahead, Shelburne disappeared into the timber as if he’d been consumed.
For a moment I was disconcerted. What if he took a turn that we, in turn, missed? What if the path branched left and we went right? Bad form for two geologists to lose the client in the field. I shouted, “Slow down!”
From the woods above came the reply, “I’ve stopped.”
Lost his way? I picked up my pace and called to Walter to pick up his and a half-minute later I crashed through the brush and found Robert Shelburne kneeling on the path.
I could not see around him so I asked, “Find something of interest?”
He got to his feet and brushed dirt off the knees of his stylish hiking pants and adjusted the hip belt of his backpack and then, almost in afterthought, he stood aside to reveal the ground where he’d knelt. On the trail was a bandana, moon-silver and dirt-smeared. If this had been a proper trail I would have assumed that a random hiker had wiped grime from his face and gotten careless stashing the bandana in his backpack.
The chance of that, here and now, was not worth discussing.
Walter drew up, winded, and crowded in beside Shelburne. Walter in his battered gear and weathered face looked like he’d been out in the field for weeks. Shelburne in his upscale gear and cultivated tan looked ready for a photo shoot for Outside Magazine. As for me, I was comfortable in aged boots and worn backpack, female and unweathered enough to take notice of Shelburne’s stylish look, acutely aware of the messages we sent with the gear we chose.
Like bandanas.
Walter was now studying the bandana in the dirt. “That’s his?”
“I'd lay money on it,” Shelburne said.
“Meaning what?” I asked. “He flagged the trail?”
“I’d say so.”
“And the color?”
Shelburne cocked his head.
“Silver,” I said, “unless you’d call it light gray.”
“Silver,” Shelburne agreed. “That’s his color.”
“So do you read anything into that?”
“Beyond the color identifying it as his bandana?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Beyond that.”
“I could read things into the color silver until death do us part.”
“I was thinking in particular about his state of mind.”
“The state of his mind,” Shelburne said, “is chaotic.”
Walter cleared his throat. “And yet functional enough. Else we wouldn’t be here tracking him.”
We fell silent, gazing down at the bandana. There was no way to tell if it had been dropped a day ago, an hour ago, minutes ago. The ground was thin-soiled, thick with fallen pine needles. No footprints to be examined, identified.
Shelburne turned to go.
Walter said, “Are you going to leave it there?”
“Message sent,” Shelburne said. “Message received.”
I said, “The message being we’re on the right track? No need to lay money.”
Shelburne smiled but there was caution in his eyes.
Walter picked up the bandana and stowed it in his pack, muttering about good wilderness manners.
We continued our ascent, stringing out along the narrow path, Shelburne picking up his impatient pace, Walter soon lagging, me claiming the middle, keeping track of my companions. I tracked Walter by the sound of his heavy breathing. For the briefest moment the thought floated he’s getting slower in the field. And then the thought went away. I tracked Shelburne by the red of his backpack, which stood out from the green of the brush. I wondered if he was brooding on the color silver.
That odd smell came again—something loamy and rotting, it seemed, beneath the trees beyond the brush.
I thought, not for the first time today, this is not my turf.
Ten minutes later the trail jacked hard left and then like a gift the trail and I escaped the besieging woods.
We’d achieved the upper slope and it was paved by a field of bedrock. Rubbed raw by ancient fingers of ice, this field was not going to give us an easy traverse. The rock was too steep for us to take a high line, and I saw no ducked trail marking, no little pyramid of stones to point the way.
Shelburne quickly found his traverse, charging ahead.
I followed.
Bare-bone bedrock would normally lift my heart but not here, not now, not pinned to the rock face with a thirty-pound pack on my back and that bandana on my mind.
I looked behind me and saw Walter, just beginning the traverse. Slower in the field, yes, but sure-footed. Not young, but surely not old.
I returned my focus to the path ahead and judged the bedrock—by its silky golden sheen and crinkly foliation—to be phyllite, a rock one metamorphic step beyond slate, not the rock we were hunting but perhaps a close neighbor.
Ahead, Shelburne had reached a hackly break in the bedrock where a ladder of switchbacks ascended the wall.
Shadows moved across the rock. I looked up. I didn’t much like the bruised clouds darkening the sky. The weather report had forecasted a chance of showers, and we were prepared for the possibility of a full-blown storm. In the Sierra Nevada mountains bad weather was not out of the question, especially in September’s dying days.
By the time I reached the switchbacks, the breeze had begun to bite.
Two switchbacks up, as I was mulling over the idea of digging a poncho out of my backpack to have at the ready should the skies open up, there came a clattering sound like rain—no, like hail hitting a sidewalk—and Shelburne up above shouted “look out” and I flinched. Rock fragments fell, shotgunning the bedrock trail. A slaty sharp-edged piece impaled itself in the tongue of my right boot. It was nearly the size of my fist. It stung my foot. I was glad it missed my head.
Walter, still below on the traverse, called, “Cassie, what happened?”
“Dislodged talus,” I called back. “It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t. Shelburne in his haste was courting recklessness. I hollered up to him, “Be more careful.”
Shelburne called down, “It wasn’t me.”
“What?”
“It came from up there.”
I tipped my head way back. Several switchbacks above Shelburne there was a ledge, slightly overhanging the trail. You don’t get talus unless it’s been wasted out of a rock face and that meant this bedrock sheet we were climbing continued above the ledge. The ledge was a false ridge, with a debris field hanging on its lip just waiting to be dislodged.
Shelburne shouted, “Henry!”
No sound from the ledge above.
Down on the bedrock trail, the three of us waited.
No answer.
My foot throbbed. I bent to extract the rock fragment. It had torn the leather skin of my boot tongue and bruised the top of my foot.
Conceivably, nobody was up on the ledge flinging rocks at us. There was the obvious alternative. A scampering ground squirrel could have done it, although those were a good number of big rock frags for one small squirrel. Could have been a bear. I once encountered a shifty California black bear patrolling a ridge, waiting for hikers to arrive and shuck their packs and open the trail mix. I knew bears. I'd foregone the trail mix, and the bear and I each pursued our own paths.
“Come on,” Robert Shelburne yelled down at us.
I straightened up.
If we hadn't been following Shelburne's rogue route, hunting an erratic man, I might have written off the falling stones. Unfortunately, mistrust came with the job. If I had been, say, a carrot farmer taking the day off to enjoy a hike in the woods, I wouldn't have given the incident another thought. But I'd spent enough years with Walter encountering the darker side of Homo sapiens and I had trouble reaching for the innocent explanation.
Hell if it was a squirrel or a bear.
Odds said that it was the man who’d left the bandana to flag the trail. And now he’d found himself a vantage point to watch for us. And I dearly hoped he’d dislodged the talus by accident.
If not…what the hell, Henry Shelburne?
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