LITMIR.BIZ

       4

      An icy band tightened around Chuck’s midsection. Who, possibly, could be out to get him? With the question came the immediate answer: nobody.

      He was here to investigate a pair of killings in the valley that had occurred in 1852. No one could be worried about what he might discover about the killings more than a century and a half later. Nor could he think of any potential enemy he might have made during the summers he’d climbed in the park, particularly someone still carrying a grudge after all these years.

      A beam of morning sun broke through the trees, warming his back. The scent of fried bacon drifted through the campground.

      He popped his tongue off the roof of his mouth. Other than the climbers preceding Carmelita, he couldn’t recall anyone coming near the tower before her turn on the wall, nor did he remember anyone other than Alden approaching the base of the tower after her ascent.

      He resumed his walk through the campground. Just because Owen Hutchins, Jr., appeared to be a conspiracy theorist of the first order didn’t mean Chuck had to succumb to such irrationality himself.

      Jimmy’s fall from the climbing tower was an accident, simple as that. There was no evil scheme aimed at Chuck or Jimmy or anyone else. And as for Thorpe—it was time, right now, to learn where he’d flown.

      * * *

      Janelle and Clarence stood with Chuck in the reunion campsite and listened to Ponch.

      “I caught a red-eye into Fresno from LAX and met Thorpe at Glacier Point before dawn,” Ponch explained to the three of them. “After he jumped, I drove into the valley. I kept trying to reach him on his phone. They say the signals bounce all over the place off the cliffs, so places in the valley that have five bars of service one minute have none the next. The couple of times I did get through, there was no answer.” He held up his phone. “I’m still trying, and still nothing.”

      “Did you feel any gusts of wind after he jumped?” Chuck asked. He was no expert on wingsuit flying, but he knew that even a slight breeze would have been enough for Thorpe to abandon his planned flight through the granite-walled notch in Sentinel Ridge, and that stronger gusts might have forced him to seek calmer winds over the Sierra foothills outside the valley altogether before pulling his ripcord and parachuting to the ground. Had that been the case, Thorpe would have landed in a meadow somewhere outside the park to the west, perhaps far from a road—in which case, he might still be making his way to the nearest highway.

      “I know what you’re thinking,” Ponch said. “But when he caught enough wind to take flight, he didn’t swing out over the valley. He turned and aimed straight for the ridge. He dropped into the shadows at that point and that was the last I saw of him.”

      Chuck exhaled, jetting air between his lips. “That’s where we’ve got to go, then.”

      Ponch nodded, his gaze downcast.

      “Should we report it?” Chuck asked him.

      Ponch looked up. “It’ll go viral the instant we do. If he flew out of the valley and hasn’t been able to contact us yet, he’ll kill us for damaging his brand.”

      Janelle’s eyes narrowed. “His brand?”

      “That’s what he lives for,” Ponch explained. “His brand, his image.”

      Chuck said, “From what I hear, that’s all he lives for.”

      Clarence raised a hand to break into the conversation. “You’re not going to call anyone?”

      “If we don’t find anything up on the ridge,” said Chuck, “and we still haven’t heard from him . . .”

      “. . . then,” Ponch finished, “it’ll be time to put out an APB.”

      Janelle asked, “You’re going to look for him yourselves?”

      “Our very own mission,” Ponch confirmed.

      “You mean, search-and-rescue mission?”

      Ponch nodded.

      Janelle faced Chuck. “I’m coming with you. With my paramedic kit.”

      Chuck thought about Thorpe’s plan to fly through Sentinel Gap, and the fact that Thorpe had turned toward the ridge before Ponch had lost sight of him. “Good idea.”

      “Clarence can stay with the girls.” She turned to her brother. “Right?”

      “Por seguro,” Clarence said.

      “You understand, though,” Chuck said to Janelle, “we probably won’t find anything.”

      “I hope to God we don’t,” Ponch said, a tremor entering his voice. “But that’s not what the cards told me.”

      They left the campground after changing into lightweight hiking pants and long-sleeved cotton shirts. The already-hot mid-morning sun promised a blazing afternoon to come. Chuck and Ponch carried daypacks weighted by bottles of water. Janelle shouldered the medical-kit backpack she’d out-fitted piece by piece over the last few months as she neared the completion of her coursework.

      They crossed the road outside the campground when a break in traffic presented itself, then traversed the pedestrian bridge over the Merced River. The stream, low and calm in late summer, flowed beneath the bridge on its winding journey down the valley.

      They hurried across Southside Drive and through a parking lot filled with cars to the start of Four Mile Trail at the base of Sentinel Ridge. A topo map tacked behind plexiglass on a signboard showed the trail climbing up and around the ridge on the south side of the valley to an overlook of Sentinel Falls, and on and farther up from there to the trail’s end at Glacier Point, four steep, switchbacking miles from where they stood at the head of the trail.

      “Thorpe wanted to make a statement,” Ponch said as they set out from the trailhead. “He had this whole picture in his head of how great it would be to drop in on the reunion from out of the ether.”

      Janelle took the lead, Chuck hiked in the middle, and Ponch brought up the rear.

      “But no one would have been awake to see him,” Chuck said.

      “He wanted it to be a surprise, unannounced. He was counting on a big viewer bump from posting the video online.”

      “I take it you’ve stayed in contact with him over the years?”

      “I’ve been one of his YouTube followers forever. I’ve always been fascinated by his flying. He didn’t miss a beat after he and Jimmy had their big split. The Pied Piper of Yosemite, they call him.”

      “‘Big split’?”

      “You know all about what a fixture the two of them became in the valley after the rest of us got on with our lives, right? They put up new routes on El Cap and Half Dome all the way into their forties. It wasn’t until age finally caught up with them and they couldn’t keep up with the younger climbers anymore that they went their separate ways. To hear Thorpe tell it—which he did online, regularly and loudly—Jimmy went over to the dark side. Jimmy and Thorpe had prided themselves on being the most rebellious Yosemite climbers ever. They went

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