Tahoe Ice Grave Page 12

  John hesitated. “I don’t understand.”

  “Someone suffocated him with his pillow.”

  John’s knuckles grew pale as his hand squeezed the control stick. The chopper flew less smoothly than before. As a sometime pilot, I knew well the connection between smooth flight and a light hand on the yoke or stick.

  “Why would someone want to kill my granddad?”

  “One possible reason would be that the killer was trying to find out the location of the secret shrine. Maybe he asked your grandfather. Or maybe he pressured or blackmailed your grandfather. Whether he was successful in finding out the information or not, he didn’t want your grandfather to be able to identify him.”

  “So he killed him?” John sounded genuinely surprised. “That’s extreme.”

  “Another possibility is that once your grandfather was dead, Jasper would take his three sacred items up to the shrine. Every time a family member dies, another trip is made to the shrine. At each visit to the shrine, the killer has another opportunity to follow and learn the location.”

  “Well, following unseen would be impossible. Without giving anything away, I can tell you that part of the path to the shrine crosses the face of a broad cliff. Anyone on the cliff would be in full view of anyone else on it. You can imagine what I mean as we fly off the end of the ridge up here.”

  With that statement, the helicopter crested the Na Pali cliffs and soared out over a breathtaking drop-off thousands of feet high. Street’s intake of breath was audible in our headsets. Below us stretched a vertical face of rock, covered with impenetrable jungle and rippling with huge valleys like lush green window drapery. Far below was the intense blue of the Pacific. The ocean lapped at tiny crescents of beach, nestled in against the cliffs. From a mile above, the white lines of surf looked like gentle waves, although in reality they were no doubt the fierce waves of winter on Kauai’s north shore. To the northeast a dense cloud had thrust up against the base of the cliffs. Winds had pushed the cloud up 4000 feet, where it flowed over the top. The mist swirled through the jungle foliage and flowed back down the back side toward Waimea Canyon. While we flew by in blue sky, the valley with the cloud was socked in.

  “What if,” I said, “the person watched from a distance with binoculars while you crossed the cliff?”

  John shook his head. “With great effort, a person could climb to a vantage point to do that, but then they would never know where we went after we crossed the cliff.” He angled the control stick and the helicopter began to drop down to the right, into one of the giant folds in the cliffs.

  I said, “Suppose, however, that after they watched you cross the cliff, they killed another Kahale like your father and then hustled out across the cliff before you showed up with the person’s sacred items. They would be able to follow you from the far side of the cliff to the shrine. After they learned the location of the shrine, they could retreat and wait for another day when you were nowhere near.”

  John was silent after that.

  We dropped further down toward the ocean, the lush green cliffs now rising above us and stretching for miles up and down the coast.

  “I can’t see that,” John said finally. “Anyway, there is nothing about the shrine that would motivate murder.”

  “That’s what Jasper told me.”

  “Well, he’s right. People designate sentimental objects. Nothing anyone else would consider valuable.”

  We were flying out over the edge of the water and had dropped most of the way to the sea. The altimeter showed our altitude as 500 feet. The cliffs towered thousands of feet above us.

  “From what you described there could be valuables there and no one would even know of their existence.”

  “What kind of valuables?” John asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe a woman on your father’s side of the family had a large diamond and asked that it be put in the shrine. Your predecessor may have hidden it well so that future generations wouldn’t notice it.”

  “There is no way that any diamond...” John suddenly stopped talking.

  “What?” I said.

  John was looking out the window, slightly behind us on the left. “We’ve got traffic at nine o’clock. Shouldn’t be there.”

  I turned around and looked. Sure enough, there was a helicopter in the sky behind us, about a mile back. I didn’t see why another chopper couldn’t be in that airspace. “What’s wrong with its position?”

  “All the tourist pilots have an agreement to keep to a certain schedule and order. This guy’s out of place.” At that, John hit the switch that kills the connection between his microphone and our headsets. He kept speaking, presumably to the pilot off our left as well as to surrounding chopper traffic. I watched his lips but couldn’t make out his words.

  After he was through talking and switched our headsets back on, I said, “What does the other pilot say?”

  “Nothing,” John said. “No response.” He again looked over his left shoulder.

  I couldn’t decide if John was lying or telling the truth.

  I watched the other chopper. It hovered in the sky to the side of us, small enough that I couldn’t make out the type or color. Nothing about it or its position seemed threatening, and I wondered if John was using it as a cover for his discomfort over the subject of the secret shrine.

  I tried to imagine John’s thoughts. This was his first helicopter flight since Jasper brought him to the shrine. He would be very curious to see what the area looked like from the air. Yet he had Street and me onboard.

  I watched John’s eyes as we flew at high speed along the coast. I noticed him make the briefest glance up toward another of the giant folds in the cliff. The undulation in the cliff face was narrow and deep.

  “Could we fly into one of these things?” I said.

  “You mean the valleys into the cliff face?”

  “Yeah. That one we just passed. It looked narrow and deep, but I suppose there would actually be plenty of room for a helicopter to maneuver, wouldn’t there?”

  “This one coming up is bigger,” John said. “You would feel more comfortable in a larger valley.” He looked at Street.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Street said. “I’d love to fly into that last one! It would be so exciting. But only do it if you feel up to it.”

  I stifled a grin at Street’s psychological tactics.

  “Sure, no problem,” John said. He pulled on the stick and the chopper arced around in a tight circle and headed into the valley. The helicopter off to our left continued on without us.

  I looked at the airspeed indicator. It read 60 knots. Vertical green walls rose up on both sides of the craft. The canyon curved to the left, then back to the right. It narrowed further, seeming to close in on the chopper.

  John flew near the bottom making the sky a narrow slice of blue overhead. He eased back on the stick and we slowed further as we came to the end. “We’ll about-face here and head back out,” he said. The chopper came to a stop, hovering near the bottom of the canyon. We slowly rotated.

  “Wait,” Street said. “Up there. What is that?” Street had her face against the window. She pointed straight up.

  I put my head next to the canopy and looked up, but could see nothing but green cliffs reaching for the sky. “Can we go up?” I asked.

  John rotated the craft further and we slowly began to rise. He had a strange look in his eyes that I couldn’t make out. Resistance and curiosity combined.

  “What do you see?” I said.

  “I can’t tell,” Street said. “Something tiny up on the cliff. Light colored. It was moving.”

  John and I craned our necks to try and see what she was talking about.

  “There,” I said, pointing. “A climber up on that broad cliff face.” The climber was maybe a thousand feet above us.

  John saw where I meant. “What in God’s name is someone doing up there,” he muttered just loud enough that we could hear it in our headsets. Judging from the
intensity of John’s frown, he knew exactly what the climber was doing, attempting to head to the Kahale shrine.

  “How ‘bout we go a little closer and check it out?” I suggested.

  “Definitely,” John said. “It could be someone in trouble.” John’s jaw muscles bulged.

  John maneuvered the chopper so that it went slightly backward, away from the cliff as it rose. For a long time it seemed as if we didn’t get any closer, but eventually we gained enough altitude to be even with the climber.

  We were about 300 feet out from the cliff. The climber appeared to be a man dressed in white shirt and blue shorts. He was on a cliff face as wide as a football field and five times as high. The cliff face had a trail of sorts that ran across it. It was on this line that the climber half-walked and half-pulled himself along. He used branches of the cliff plants to hang onto, his feet wedged into the narrow trail. A slip would send him falling over a thousand feet to his death.

  “What do you make of a climber out here?” I asked John.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his frown deeper than before. “I’m going in closer. I want to see who this guy is.”

  We eased toward the jungle-covered wall.

  The climber stopped and turned to stare at us. John went closer still, pressing the chopper uncomfortably close to the cliff.

  I was about to suggest that we head away when John exclaimed. “My God, I’ve seen that guy. He has long blond hair and a big beard! He’s wearing the same T-shirt like before. Where was it?”

  I was staring at the climber as we hovered near the cliff.

  “I know! I remember now!” John said. “At the hospital. I was visiting Grandfather the night before he died. This guy walked into the room when I was there. He was startled to see me and left immediately. It’s the same man, I’m positive.”

  I took a long look and felt the shock of recognition. I’d seen the man, too.

  It was the man I thought of as the Viking. The man who’d been arguing with Brock Chambers outside of the Rubicon Lodge on Lake Tahoe the day that Morella Meyers was doing the underwater search.

  John flew even closer. “He’s trying to go to the shrine!”

  At that the Viking picked up a thick, sturdy stick about three feet long. He swung out from the cliff by hanging onto a jungle plant with his left hand. His right hand made a Herculean toss with the stick and it arced up into the air toward us.

  “Oh, shit!” John yelled. He cranked the control stick sideways and the helicopter lurched in the air. But it was too late.

  The stick came down from above. The main rotor hit the wood. There was a horrible crunch of metal that sounded like two cars in a head-on collision. An explosion of wood splinters shot past the chopper in the down draft.

  The chopper began to wobble to the left. Street gasped. She stiffened and grabbed onto my arm.

  John wrestled with the stick. “Goddammit!” he shouted. The chopper started a slow spin. Screeching metallic sounds came from the engine compartment behind us. Our spin increased in speed. We wobbled through the air like an out-of-balance top spinning closer and closer to the cliff as we dropped out of the sky.

  “Mayday! Mayday!” John shouted into his microphone. “Alpha Bravo Three Two Niner Niner going down at Na Pali! Mayday!”

  John’s call for help was cut off as we hit the cliff. A tree branch ripped through our canopy tearing off the windshield. The spinning rotor hit the cliff and broke into pieces. Sparks showered from an overhead panel. An explosion rocked the engine compartment. My ears were deafened and I heard nothing as the craft bounced off the cliff and plummeted toward the bottom of the canyon.

  EIGHTEEN

  The helicopter bounced against the cliff again. Jungle plants caught on the landing gear. As we ripped away, we went into a slow backward rotation, end over end.

  John yelled, “Shit!” several times. Street stayed silent, her hand like a claw on my arm as she braced herself. The chopper turned a backward somersault one and a half times and landed tail first on the bottom of the canyon.

  The chopper’s tail crumpled as the chopper collapsed down onto it. The impact tore the rest of the chopper into pieces. The piece with my seat attached to it crashed through branches and landed upside down with my face mashed into the gnarled trunk of a tree.

  It took me ten or twenty minutes to decide how it was that I hung from the seat. I realized there was a seat belt over my hips. I rotated my face away from the tree and spied the belt buckle up there on my lap. The latch was easy to pull. The belt gave way and my face scraped down the tree bark as I fell to the ground.

  I got onto my knees, grabbed a nearby branch and pulled myself to my feet. The jungle tilted, but I hung on. In a minute I could stand without holding onto the branch. Look, ma, no hands. But something gave way and I fell. My face went into leafy muck.

  “Street,” I called out, my pronunciation garbled by the gooey dirt in my mouth. “Street!”

  “Up here,” came the miraculous response.

  I crawled through jungle toward the voice and looked up. My vision was distorted. I blinked and tried to focus. The portion of the chopper’s floor that held both Street’s seat and John’s seat was hanging from a tree. Street was still strapped in, hanging upside down. She looked okay, but her face was red.

  John was still strapped in as well, but not so lucky. His left arm was missing. A large piece of metal sprouted from the center of his chest, its mangled end red with blood and looking vaguely like a rose. Mercifully, Street was situated such that she was not facing him. I was already thinking about how to get her down in a way that would prevent her from seeing him.

  “Hang in there, sweetie,” I said in my most reassuring voice. “I’ll have you out of there in a minute.”

  I grabbed onto a woody plant, pulled myself to my feet and tried to walk. My feet didn’t coordinate with my brain signals and I tripped and went down. I pushed up onto my hands and knees. I crawled around a big bush and approached the trunk of the tree where she was trapped. All I needed to do was climb the tree and carry her down. I reached up and grabbed a branch. I tried to squeeze my hands like vice grips as I pulled myself up onto my feet. But my hands gave way and I fell again.

  My vision was blurry. I tried to do a pushup and get to my feet that way. But my arms slipped on moist leaves and I collapsed face down in the mud. I thought briefly about centipedes. It was my last thought for a long time.

  NINETEEN

  When I awoke, the jungle was gone.

  I lay still. What didn’t hurt felt numb. Not a lot was numb.

  In time, I had an idea. I moved my fingers. Then my feet. Continuity from head to toe. Life is good.

  I turned my head to look around. That hurt. Maybe I didn’t need to look. Yes, I did. There was Street.

  She was sitting on a vinyl chair reading Newsweek. She still had on her black mini skirt. Her bare legs were crossed, her sandal lightly bouncing from the toes of her raised foot.

  “Good afternoon, my dear,” I said. The time of day was a guess.

  Street jumped up, bent down and hugged me. “Thank God, you’re awake. They said you’d be fine, but I...” Her voice wavered.

  I grit my teeth and boosted myself to a sitting position. Street helped me lean back against several pillows.

  I was in a bed in a small room painted periwinkle. On the window sill sat a potted plant with a single red flower.

  Street gave me a hug. “Oh,” I said. I tried to shift under her grip. “Easy,” I said.

  “Am I hurting you? Honey, you need to speak up.”

  “No. Yes.”

  Street let go. She sat next to me on the bed.

  “Every time we’re in a helicopter crash,” I said, “I get banged up and you come through unscathed. How do you do it?”

  “I don’t know. Natural talent, I guess.” She tried to force a grin, but it didn’t work. It was clear she was very stressed by John’s death. “Or else it was that modern dance class I took in coll
ege. Never know when such techniques come in handy. But I did get a scratch on my arm. See? And I got some dirt on my skirt.” Another attempt at a grin, then tears filled up her eyes.

  After a few minutes, I inched my way out of bed, Street helping. They had me in a hospital gown, a short little thing that matched the room and the flower. Street helped me stand up. The gown barely covered my crotch. She peeked through the opening of my gown. “Jesus, Owen, your back and side are the same colors as your face. You poor thing.”

  To one side of the room was a bathroom.

  A look in the mirror told me I should stay away from children and people with heart problems. The skin that wasn’t covered with bandages looked pulpy. Some of the colors had darkened toward blue, but others still showed hues of lavender that blended nicely with the periwinkle walls. In my little lavender dress I looked ready for the Easter Pageant.

  “How’d we get out of there?” I asked.

  “John’s Mayday call was heard by another tourist helicopter. They spotted us twenty minutes later. They sent a big military-type helicopter and did the stretcher-on-a-cable thing. You and I went first and they went back later to get John’s body.” Her eyes watered again. “They said he probably didn’t feel a thing.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “They pulled us out of there about noon.” She dabbed at her eyes. “It’s now three in the afternoon. The doctor said you have a serious concussion. You are not to bump your head anymore. Ever. They examined you for broken bones, but only found cuts and bruises. So they took advantage of your semi-consciousness to stitch up some of the cuts. You were kind of noisy about it while they were sticking the sewing needles in you. How do you feel? You look like one of those monsters in a fifties horror movie.”