Rock Bottom (Em Hansen Mysteries) Read online

  I moved back to the side of our raft that was nearest Jerry’s and adjusted the cam straps on the Paco Pad that Fritz had placed across the main seat as a cushion. A Paco Pad is the gold standard of waterproof foam mats used for camping on river trips, and the air so carefully trapped inside this one was starting to heat up in the sun, making the whole thing swell to the point where I was concerned that a seam might rupture. I opened the valves and let out some air, then dipped some water out of the river and spilled it across the expanse of rubber to cool it off. As I bent to do this, I noticed that Wink had now wandered over to where Brendan was working to carefully pack loaves of bread into waterproof storage boxes.

  “Who are you?” Wink asked him.

  “I’m Brendan, Fritz’s son.” He offered a hand to shake.

  “Oh, so you’re with Fritz?” Wink ignored Brendan’s hand and instead planted his feet and stared down at the kid, watching him work. His jovial expression skewed halfway into a sneer.

  My emotional radar went nuts. An unpleasant tone had crept into the man’s voice, something that made me feel crawly. I wanted to tell Wink to get to work and leave Brendan alone, but that would make for a bad beginning to our three-week enforced acquaintance. I told myself that the fact was that his boat didn’t need to be rigged, a point in favor of a wooden dory as compared to a rubber raft. Rafts were big and buoyant and carried a lot of gear, but they arrived flat as a pancake and thus had to be inflated, and rigging them with all the rocket boxes and coolers and dry bags and what-have-you was a lengthy process that, in part, was going to have to be repeated daily, while the dory had floated off that trailer as pretty as you please and all Wink had to do was load in his dry bag and Paco Pad and accept that delivery of vegetables.

  It occurred to me to make sure that those veggies were properly stowed. I waited until Wink wandered up the ramp to use the bathroom and then hurried over to the dory, lifted the after hatch, and took a peek. “Holy Moses, this thing is awash!” I told Jerry. “Is this thing going to make it down the river?”

  “I noticed that he was running a pump earlier,” she said. “The wood looks pretty dry. Maybe it will swell up and seal after it’s been in the water a while.”

  “But won’t things get wet?”

  “Well … maybe we won’t have to wash those carrots so much.”

  “His granola bars are afloat.”

  “They aren’t his granola bars.”

  I closed the lid and turned to look at her. “Then whose…?”

  “He sweet-talked Don into giving him one, saying he couldn’t afford to go up to lunch at the café with the rest of us. I noticed when Don turned his back he took a few more. Like maybe half the box.”

  I smiled. Nothing got past Jerry Rasmussen, not a single blessed thing. I moved to the forward hatch and gave it a tug. It was latched, and I couldn’t figure out how to get it open. Was it locked? This guy was beginning to be more than a little bit of a puzzle to me.

  I strolled over to the bulletin board and looked at the item Wink had tapped. It was a listing of the river parties set to launch that month. I supposed that he had looked it over to see if any of his old friends or colleagues might be on the river the same time he was, but I wondered if sharing the river with old chums would be a good thing for him, or bad.

  I found our trip on the list (private, twenty-one days from this launch ramp to the take-out at Diamond Creek). There were several others, mostly commercial trips, and it appeared that the park was running a botanical survey. I also noticed a still-moist smudge of orange pulp next to one of the commercial trips, which indicated where Wink had tapped the page. He had identified a group called God’s Voice; why?

  Molly Chang strolled past me on her way back from an errand to her car. She leaned close and read the page. “God’s Voice. Isn’t that one of those fundamentalist Christian groups? You know, the one with the big television program.”

  “I can’t say as I watch that kind of programming.”

  Molly shook her head. “Don’t you remember them? Their preacher worked himself up into a real fervor one Sunday and dropped dead right in front of about a million or so of his TV faithful.”

  “I missed that one.”

  “You gotta read the tabloids, Em. You’re falling behind on your gossip.” She gave me a pat on the shoulder and continued back to the raft she was helping to rig.

  I headed back toward the rafts myself, trying to sort out this new bit of data about Wink Oberley. Certainly the canyon inspired plenty of awe but it didn’t make sense that someone as profane as Wink would take an interest in a church group, unless he had tapped the page out of contempt; but no, he had been smiling, apparently happy to see whatever it was that had caught his eye.

  Something about Wink Oberley was very wrong, and I wanted to know what it was. Forewarned was forearmed. I had just an hour or so before we launched to find out what I could about him. Even here at Lees Ferry I could raise no cell phone signal, and once we were afloat, my only communications with the outside world would depend on very expensive calls over the satellite telephone we had rented in case of emergencies. Part of the idea of a raft trip was to leave behind the modern world of high-speed Internet and flush toilets and box stores and TV and its violence and prescription drug ads and most other things that we let define us, but right that instant, I wanted access to information.

  The pay phones next to the bathrooms at the top of the ramp weren’t working. I straightened up from my work and stretched my back, trying to remember how far up the road I’d have to go to find another one. The best person to call would be Faye Carter, my closest friend and Fritz’s business partner. I had first met her while working with the FBI agent who became her husband. My life always did have a way of getting snarled in such ways, but Faye was a smart cookie and knew me well enough that she wouldn’t take my concern for unfounded paranoia.

  I told Fritz that I was going to move our vehicle to the long-term parking lot and headed up the road. It turned out to be a five-mile drive to the nearest working telephone, but I was lucky and caught Faye at the office.

  “What’s up?” she inquired. “Forget your water wings?”

  “Ha ha, I need a favor,” I told her. “Could you flip onto the Internet and see if there’s anything in the Princeton University Geology Department about a George Oberley? He’s supposedly a Ph.D. candidate there. Sometimes graduate departments have stuff about who’s working with whom.”

  I listened to Faye tap keys. “Nope. I’m not finding anything in their search window … Let me try this … No, I went back to Google and typed George Oberley and Princeton and got nothing. Got something else you want me to check?”

  “Put the name into 411.com for New Jersey.”

  “So how are Fritz and Brendan … Okay, on that 411, I’ve got an address in Rocky Hill. That’s right next to Princeton. I had family back there. In fact, they’re still there, and I think one of them is in administration at the university; you want me to do some digging?”

  “That would take a while. We launch in an hour.”

  “Business is slow. It would give me something to do. Fritz said he was going to call me on the fifth or sixth with a resupply list, so I could shovel my dirt then.”

  “Maybe this is going further than I should.”

  “Is this Em Hansen I’m talking to?”

  “You know I promised Fritz that I’d stay away from contentious stuff; you know, investigations where people might get mad and someone—like me—might get hurt.”

  “Oh, so that means you’re not supposed to look after him when he gets a ringer on his prize river trip? Come on, this is enlightened self-interest, and it will be like old times: you, me, maybe a miscreant…”

  A good friend is someone who supports you in doing what instinct is screaming for you to do. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll talk to you on the fifth.”

  *

  When at last every last piece of gear was secured and we’d handed our car keys off t
o the crew that was going to shuttle the cars to locations at the South Rim (for those who couldn’t make the full three-week run, and would therefore hike out at the halfway point at Phantom Ranch) and at Diamond Creek (for the rest of us, and for those who would hike in and row only the lower half), Fritz called us all together for a final powwow and safety briefing, after which he said, “Okay then, we launch!”

  A chorus of cheers went up. Pop tops popped. Fourteen souls pushed the rafts and kayaks into the water and pulled away from the beach with great gusto. Our fifteenth waded his beat-up plywood marvel off the beach, climbed in, and pointed its high nose downriver, but he seemed distracted by the route that led down from the rim. I wondered what was he looking for.

  Fritz led the procession until the kayakers sped past him in search of riffles to play in. Aboard our raft, Brendan settled himself in the bow and I climbed up on top of the load behind Fritz, lifted my eyes to the rim rock—the gorgeous sweep of vermilion Wingate Sandstone—and silently chanted the mantras I had worked out with the psychotherapist I had covertly consulted about my phobia (“I float like a cork, I float like a cork.… The water is chocolate Jell-O, the water is chocolate Jell-O”).

  It really was a lovely day: The sky was cobalt blue, we had a light breeze and seventy-five degrees, my life vest (PFD, or personal flotation device, Fritz was teaching me to say) was pleasantly snug, and the rhythm of the oars was darned close to soporific. Fritz began to sing a little ditty about his happiness. Swallows flitted through the air.

  Over eons, the river had cut down through thousands of feet of layered sedimentary rock but at Lees Ferry, the river level stood at 3,107 feet above sea level. I leaned back and studied the strata that lined the river: naked red and brown rocks that had been carved into fantastic shapes stair-stepping back, the hard sandstones and limestones forming cliffs, and the soft shales forming slopes. I could see great red cliffs of Wingate Sandstone, stepping away toward the sky. In the solidity of stone I was at peace.

  Four miles downriver, we slid under the high span of the bridge that carries Highway 89A from the east side of the river to the west. A huge bird circled overhead, one of the canyon’s resident California condors out looking for something dead to eat. (“I float like a cork and I don’t taste like chocolate Jell-O or anything else you might like to eat,” I told it in my head, regarding its nine-foot wingspan with respect.) The chocolate brown Moenkopi Formation opened downward, and beneath it emerged the white cliff-former of the Coconino Sandstone.

  I studied the river guide, a waterproof flip-book that illustrated the canyon and the river and all of its tributary canyons and important features such as sandy beaches big enough for overnight camping, symbolized by triangles. The river was represented by a sinuous blue band between cliffs, which were picked out with contour lines showing elevation above the banks. Each mile downriver was indicated by a number framed in a hexagon. Riffles were marked by single lines crossing from bank to bank, and rapids were a series of lines that looked like ladders reaching downriver. Each rapid was named, and that name was followed by numbers in parentheses that gauged the magnitudes of the rapids, some of which grew or lessened in difficulty with increase or decrease in river flow. Dashed lines showed where side canyons presented dry tributaries that might wake up and deliver flash floods. I concentrated on the little triangles that meant I got to walk on land.

  The river ran south for the first sixty miles through a section of the Grand Canyon known as Marble Canyon, cutting down through the Hermit Shale, the four rock formations of the Supai Group, the Surprise Canyon Formation, and, by river mile 23, the massive Redwall Limestone. Fritz had shown me photos from his prior trip. The Redwall was hundreds of feet thick and rose nearly vertical from the water’s edge. The towering red cliffs, the deep blue sky, and their reflections on the swirling water formed a tableau so mesmerizing that photographers could not keep their cameras at bay. Fritz promised that the subject of his snapshots would bring me tranquillity and serenity, punctuated by moments of raw thrill as we shot over rapids. “You’ll love all that stone,” he’d said. “How can you not?”

  Indeed. I leaned back, closed my eyes, felt the sun on my face, and descended into the landscape of the river.

  U.S. National Park Service, Grand Canyon National Park

  Transcript of communication received by satellite phone by dispatcher Cleome James

  April 18, 0820 hrs.

  “I need to speak to a ranger, and quick!”

  “State your name, please.”

  “Sherry Rhoades. I’m with a river party and we’ve found a body.”

  “A body, ma’am? Is that a human body, or an animal?”

  “A human body, goddammit! Do you think I’d get this excited about a dead jackrabbit?”

  “Hold the line, please, ma’am.”

  “Get me someone who can—”

  “You’ve found human remains?”

  “Yes, we’ve got a goddamn dead body in our goddamn campsite!”

  “Where are you located?”

  “Whitmore Wash. River mile 188 right. I—”

  “Is this person known to you?”

  “No. Never saw him before.”

  “A male? Describe him, please.”

  “Yeah, I’d say it’s male, all right, but—”

  “Height? Weight? Age? Skin color?”

  “Height? What do you mean, height? He sure as hell ain’t standing up! I’m trying to tell you that the man is dead!”

  “Is this an average-height, muscular, white male?”

  “Ah … okay, I see what you’re saying. Yeah, you could say so. That would describe him. Sure.”

  “Brown hair? Brown eyes?”

  “His hair is brown, but the eyes … Um, listen: He doesn’t look so good. And we didn’t check for ID. I didn’t touch him. Kathryn! Hey, anybody! Anything in his pockets?”

  “We’ve had a man go missing from farther upriver, so that’s probably him. Please cover the body with a tarp or something and—shit, lost the connection. I hate these damned sat phones! Howie, hand me that radio. Has Seth Farnsworth checked in yet this morning? Damn it. Is this recording device still running?”

  End of recording.

  APRIL 1: SHAKEDOWN CRUISE

  Our first night on the river we camped at the mouth of Badger Canyon, just below Badger Creek Rapid, the first stretch of whitewater large enough to kick up what Fritz called “a soporific veil of white noise.” Badger was rated a 5 out of 10 at high water and an 8 at low because large rocks stuck out then. Lucky for me the river was running high that day. “We caught some luck; someone up at the dam turned the river on,” Fritz told me. He thought it was a good thing that we not take on heavy challenges on our first day going down our first rapid, and I heartily agreed. The river guide indicated that we made a fifteen-foot drop over the course of the rapid, but you could have fooled me; I had my eyes closed. I hardly got splashed. I hoped that maybe this wasn’t going to be all that tough after all.

  We had come eight miles from Lees Ferry rowing on otherwise flat water, though there were plenty of places where the water sort of spread out into flat boils, indicating who knew what was going on below. At Badger Canyon, we pulled over to river right, brought the rafts up to the bank, and tied them to the stoutest trees we could find, paying out twenty feet or more of line. As he paid out our bow line and tied his best Eagle Scout knots, Fritz explained that tethering rafts was a tricky business: Because the river waters rose and fell with the requirements of the Glen Canyon Dam’s need to generate electricity for all the traffic lights, air conditioners, light-emitting diodes, and automated pool sweeps in this region of the Southwest, we had to be careful not to tie our boats too close to the high-water line, lest we find ourselves having to drag them across a naked sandbank in the morning. Similarly, if we paid out too much and the water rose, we might find the boats a rope’s length downriver banging against whatever rocks or tree stumps lurked in that direction.

  O
ur first night in camp went fairly smoothly, considering that it was a shakedown exercise for unloading the rafts and setting up camp. A key element in laying out our camp was to choose a sanguine spot for our portable toilet. National Park Service rules required that we carry out all solid wastes, especially those that came out of the aft ends of humans. It was okay to pee in the river, but not on land, and our feces had to leave with us. A system had therefore been devised for the efficient packaging of poop using vessels large enough to double as a commode yet small enough to be easily transported back to the designated raft each morning when we broke camp. Our system depended on repurposed army surplus rocket boxes. The rocket boxes were the height of a standard porcelain toilet, and they handily came with two big, friendly handles for ease of lugging them about. Their lids were tightly sealed, but once in position in a suitably private alcove among the brush that lined the riverbanks, the lid was popped and a toilet seat was clipped to the top. Stick a roll of toilet paper on a nearby twig and voilà, eco-friendly frontier toilet. “The groover,” as Fritz called it, was positioned downwind from the campsite yet not so far that it be difficult to find or reach should midnight peregrinations be required. Daytime pee stops were another matter. Fritz explained that at lunch stops, “The ladies shall head upstream and the gentlemen shall head downstream.