High Country- Pigeon 12 Read Free Page A

unreality struck, Anna was nearly overpowered with a need to flee into the high country, the ninety-five percent of the park that was wilderness. She'd yet to make it more than a mile from the main road. As with all true evil, whatever had set off Lorraine Knight's alarms centered round the human element.
     
    Besides, Anna consoled herself as she scuttled through the garbage and mud-spattered vehicles, it's cold. Camping, hiking and communing with the gods seemed less appealing when temperatures dropped below fifty degrees.
     
    In deference to her age and status as a year-round waitress, Anna had been offered one of the hotel's employee houses-a single-room tent-frame to which walls and a bathroom had been added. The dorms were reserved for seasonal workers and those significantly lower on the food chain than the main dining room waitstaff. Tempted as she was to snatch at this scrap of solitude, she had requested dormitory housing in the room where Trish Spencer had lived.
     
    In communal housing it was more likely she would hear the kinds of rumors that never make it to the ears of law enforcement and, by being placed in a living situation "below her station in life" she had a built-in reason to be one of the valley's disaffected, should she choose. All the better to be part of the whining and plotting of others on the fringes.
     
    The room she shared with the two busgirls, both securely under thirty, was dark and dank due to the weather without and the d‚cor within. Her roommates had yet to reach the age where visual order was necessary to the psyche. The place resembled the inside of a laundry hamper. Dirty clothes and female accoutrements were heaped on unmade beds and vomited out of open dresser drawers. Anna's first task on arriving in her new persona had been to pack up Trish's things while Nicky and Cricket-the roommates she'd inherited along with the missing woman's apron, shirt and pants-looked on with the thrilled misery of those half playing at tragedy.
     
    During the search the NPS had gone through Spencer's belongings, hoping for a clue that could tell them where she'd gone. In the normal course of events it would have been Yosemite rangers who packed up the missing woman's goods for shipping or storage. Lorraine Knight left the task to Anna, hoping it would serve as a bridge to the missing woman and a way of breaking the ice with the roommates. It had been successful on both counts.
     
    Anna waded through to her wee tidy space to peel off her uniform. White shirt, black polyester pants and black many-pocketed apron: these Anna had borrowed from the late-very late-Trish Spencer, and everything was a couple of sizes too big. Not only was Anna an imposter, but a poorly-dressed imposter at that. Walking a mile in someone else's shoes was a tad creepy when done literally.
     
    Mary was dressed and waiting. She wore Levis, running shoes and a red hooded pullover that made her look like every wolf's dream of Little Red Riding Hood.
     
    Perfect, Anna thought and suffered a pang of remorse for being bloodlessly pragmatic. "Ready?"
     
    "Want to go to the village?" Mary asked as she fell into step beside Anna. "I've got to get some things."
     
    "Sure." En route Anna would come up with a plausible excuse to get her living lure to Camp 4; see if they could coax anything interesting from the climbers. Though active and seemingly anxious to help with the rigors of the search, they'd been characteristically close-mouthed with law enforcement.
     
    While Mary made her purchases in the grocery department, Anna poked around the souvenirs section. Depending on one's point of view, YosemiteVillage with its deli, pizzeria and full-service grocery store was either a tremendous convenience or proof the park was going to hell.
     
    Making conversation, Lorraine Knight had told her how the local public school, some forty-five miles away, had held a children's symposium on the nation's parks, asking the children what they would