Wicked Eddies Read online

  The two teams would leap-frog each other, searching for a live stranded or injured fisherman, or for a body trapped somewhere in one of the larger rapids. While that search proceeded, the Fire Chief would arrange for a rail car to be brought into Brown’s Canyon, to be used to carry out an injured person on a backboard or a body in a body bag, since there were no roads running through the canyon.

  After they all got their assignments, Steve sent a stack of fliers around. “Here’s who we’re looking for. This is a recent photo his wife gave us.”

  Mandy studied her copy. Arnold Crawford was forty-six years old, 5-foot-11, 220 pounds, white-skinned with glasses, a bit of a beer gut, and thinning black hair. She wondered how his wife was holding up and hoped the man was still alive. Somewhere.

  Someone jostled her arm, and she looked up. Everyone was scrambling for their gear and climbing into the shuttle vehicles that would take the teams to the put-in at Fisherman’s Bridge. The bridge was just upstream from the Ruby Mountain put-in, which was too small and hard to access with all their vehicles. Plus, putting in at Fisherman’s Bridge would allow them to search the area upstream of Ruby Mountain, to see if Crawford had waded upstream and got into trouble there.

  Mandy grabbed her gear and hopped into the back passenger seat of an AHRA van. She fastened her seat belt while Frank drove out of the parking lot, the raft trailer swinging behind them. Her stomach felt fluttery, a combination of nerves and excitement about being a part of a large search and rescue—hopefully a rescue—operation.

  Steve talked on his cell phone in the front seat, relaying their plans to the county dispatcher. Then he said, “A couple of commercial trips have already started down the canyon. We told them to be on the lookout for the fisherman or any gear and to call you if they see anything.”

  When he started talking about communication protocols with the dispatcher, Mandy tuned him out and turned to her seat mates, the two firefighters named Janice and George. She introduced herself and asked about their training and experience. It was always a good idea to scope out who had what skills on a rescue team before an operation started. Therefore, Mandy had no qualms about answering their questions regarding her background, in turn.

  As a result, she discovered why Janice looked familiar. They’d been in the same CPR recertification class two years ago. Knowing the rest of her team was well-trained alleviated some of Mandy’s concern about how well they would work together. She just hoped she would measure up.

  Before long, they arrived at the put-in. Mandy pitched in to carry rafts and paddles down to the water. The teams loaded the rafts with ropes, carabiners and pulleys, first-aid kits, provisions, and other equipment, all of which had to be tied down. There was an edge to their jokes and parried insults, as Mandy and the others tried to bleed off some of their nervous apprehension.

  When they were ready, Steve directed the other two-raft team to paddle directly to the first major rapid in Brown’s, the Canyon Doors. Once there, they were to set up a methodical body search operation among the huge sunken boulders. Mandy’s team would follow more slowly, scanning the river and banks between Fisherman’s Bridge and the canyon entrance for any sign of the missing fisherman. Then they launched the rafts.

  Later, while passing Ruby Mountain, a volcanic hill looming

  over the east side of the Arkansas River, Mandy remembered searching through the talus piles at its base with high school friends. They hunted not for the red garnets that gave the mountain its name, but for nodes of obsidian called Apache’s tears that they’d take home and polish. Her Uncle Bill had explained where the name came from. In retaliation for raiding an Arizona settlement, the U.S. Army trailed a band of about seventy-five Apache warriors and launched a surprise attack against them. Nearly fifty died in the first volley of shots, and the rest leapt over a cliff rather than allow themselves to be killed.

  Legend said the stones were the tears that wives and families shed for the dead warriors. Apache’s tears were supposed to bring good luck. It was said that whoever owned one would never have to cry in grief again, for the Apache women had shed their tears in place of the owner’s. Mandy hoped that the fisherman’s wife owned some of the stones.

  The normally boisterous Lance and Frank, who had teamed up with her in their raft, also seemed subdued by the seriousness of their task and content to focus on paddling and searching. Mandy was sure they were hoping, like her, that their search didn’t yield a body in the river. She’d been trained in body retrieval in her river ranger class, but she hadn’t had to put that training to the test yet.

  They had chosen the left side of the river, while Steve and the two firefighters searched the right side in their raft. At every eddy or deep pool, Mandy slowed to peer into the water below. Sometimes she or Frank would probe the depths or beneath an undercut sunken boulder with a paddle if they couldn’t see the bottom clearly. Lance, ruddering in the back, focused on searching the shoreline.

  They passed riffles where Chalk Creek entered on the right and Seven Mile Rapid where Middle Cottonwood Creek entered on the left, but they found nothing. When they passed the railroad bridge that marked the beginning of Brown’s Canyon, Steve had them eddy out above the Canyon Door entrance rapid while he radioed the team searching there.

  “They’re packing up their gear,” he said to his team. “Didn’t find anything. I told them to head down to Zoom Flume, searching along the way, and set up another body search there, while we take Pinball Rapid. Let’s head out.”

  Pinball Rapid was a dicey technical boulder field with an S turn, a class III-IV killer. Mandy remembered the two most recent fatal incidents with some trepidation. A forty-seven-year-old man had died there in 2007 during a swimming exercise while training to be a rafting guide. And a forty-nine-year-old Texan was killed in July, 2009 after being thrown out of a commercial raft that hit one of the large boulders sticking out of the turbulent waters. This being late summer, the water level was lower than the busy early summer rafting season, but that only made Pinball trickier to maneuver through.

  Mandy, Lance, and Frank and those in Steve’s raft helloed the other team while they rocketed past their tied-up rafts below the Canyon Doors, riding the standing waves on river right. Soon after, they arrived at the entrance to Pinball, signaled by the profiles of large boulders hunkering in the water and the roar of water plunging over the drops.

  “Beach the rafts by the railroad tracks,” Steve hollered.

  Once both rafts were pulled out of the water, they all walked downriver to scout the rapid. Numerous dark, shadowy holes and eddies could hide a body trapped in their depths.

  “We’ll set up a two-point system here, tying two lines to Frank and Mandy’s raft.” Steve turned to George, the large fireman. “You anchor the line on this side, with me as your helper. I’ll try to stay high, so I can see the whole operation and supervise.”

  He put a hand on Janice’s shoulder. “You and Lance ferry our raft over to the other side of the river and tie up there. Lance will anchor the line on that side, with you as his helper.”

  He turned to Frank and Mandy. “Frank, you steer the raft, and relay signals to us, and Mandy, you’ll man the pole. Take your time probing all the eddies, holes, and backsides and undercuts of the rocks. We need this to be thorough.”

  Great, Mandy thought, so if the guy’s body is trapped under one of these rocks, I’m the one who retrieves it. She envied Janice’s role on the sidelines.

  After they’d rigged two lines through D-rings on either side of Mandy and Frank’s raft, Lance ferried his raft to the other side of the river, with Janice playing out the rope. They set up, with Janice holding onto the rope with work gloves, her feet firmly planted, followed by Lance acting as an anchor with the rope wrapped around his back. The remaining length lay coiled in an open bag at Lance’s feet, so he could pick it up and carry it with them as they progressed downstream. Steve and George set up a similar configuration on their side of the river.

&
nbsp; Mandy put on a pair of heavy latex gloves, hoping there wouldn’t be a need for them, then a pair of work gloves to protect her hands from the fibers in the long fiberglass probe pole. She climbed into the tied raft with Frank and shouted, “Ready.” She really wasn’t. Her hands had started to perspire inside the gloves and her mouth had gone dry, but she wasn’t going to admit that to the others.

  With the raft pointed upstream and his back pointing downstream, Frank paddled out into the current. He let the raft slip over the tongue of water for the first part of the S, then blew once on his whistle and held his arm up, signaling a stop. Mandy held on while the two belayers on the shore leaned back on their ropes, halting the raft’s progress. Then she leaned out over the front of the raft, resting her chest on the pontoon, and started probing the downriver side of the rapid with the end of her pole.

  Using whistle blows and hand signals to the belayers, Frank signaled them to move the raft to the far right shore, then back across the current to the far river left until Mandy had probed under all the rocks and in all the deep eddies that might hold a body. “Nothing,” she said to Frank, wiping sweat off her brow with her forearm. “Let’s move on to the next drop.”

  “Good,” he said, while he gripped his paddle. “I’m hoping this whole thing is a wild goose chase and the guy is holed up with a mistress somewhere.”

  Mandy cracked her first smile since getting on the river. “Wouldn’t that be nice? Though, not so nice for the wife.”

  Frank snorted. “Yeah, then she might be wishing for him to be dead.” With whistle and hand signals to the belayers, he ferried the raft over to the standing waves on the left side of the river, let it slip backward over the next drop, and signaled for another stop.

  Mandy poked the pole in gravel and under the large boulders on either side of the river until her arms ached. She turned and sat back, shook out each arm, splashed some cool river water on her shoulders, and took a swig of her water bottle. “One more to go.”

  Frank nodded and ferried right. The last drop was the biggest, so Mandy hunkered down and held on tight while they bounced over the edge. Another whistle blast, and they shuddered to a stop. The current had carried them beyond the edge of the drop, so Frank blew two blasts, signaling the belayers to pull in rope, moving them upriver until Mandy could reach under the boulders with her pole.

  She focused on a massive undercut boulder in the left center of the river. It had a deep pool behind it and was the most likely place in Pinball for something to be stuck. When she probed, she dislodged a couple of water-logged branches that popped to the surface. Her tense muscles jumped, too.

  She soon settled down when she recognized what the branches were. While they floated downstream, she thought, Phew, maybe that’ll be all we find.

  Then a ghostly white shadow wavered on the bottom.

  Her heart rate accelerating, Mandy bent over the side of the raft to get a better look. With the bright sunlight glinting off the ripples in the water, it was hard to get a fix on the underwater phantom. Is it another branch, a fish, or something else?

  “What?” Frank asked, his voice rising. “What do you see?”

  “Something whitish,” she replied, then licked her dry lips and gave him a worried glance. “Might be an arm or a leg.”

  “Christ,” he whispered. Then he blew three long blasts on his whistle, the emergency signal, to alert their teammates, who could neither see them behind the boulder nor hear their voices over the roar of the rapid, that they’d found something. Or someone.

  Mandy regripped the fiberglass pole and ran it along the underside of the boulder, then back again deeper, until something softer than rock pushed back. The white shadow moved.

  A shudder coursed through her.

  She followed the contours of the soft mass under the boulder, trying to dislodge it with the tip of the pole, but with no luck. She pulled the pole out of the water and turned it around so the nasty-looking hook on the other end, the one she’d avoided looking at, faced the water.

  “Get ready,” she said to Frank, who was staring at the hook. “If I get this out, whatever it is—” She didn’t want to admit yet to what her brain was telling her and swallowed back the bile that had risen in her throat. “—and it pops up, you need to help me hold it next to the raft so it doesn’t float downstream.”

  He licked his lips and nodded, then pulled a pair of heavy latex gloves out of his fanny pack and slipped them on. He picked up his paddle and positioned it over the water.

  She dipped the hook under the surface, aiming for the same spot. When it pushed against the trapped mass, she closed her eyes to focus on the feel of the pole in her hands. Running the curve of the hook along the form, she twisted the hook back and forth as she went, groping for a hold.

  Suddenly, the end of the hook slid under something. She turned it and tugged gently. It wedged. “I’ve got it.”

  Steve appeared on the river bank nearest them, after scrambling down the shoreline. He had put on his latex gloves, too, and carried the other probe hook. “Take your time, Mandy,” he yelled. “Make sure you’ve got a good grip on it.”

  “I do,” Mandy yelled back, sounding more confident than she really felt. She took a deep breath and said to Frank, “Here goes.”

  She yanked hard, but her hands just slipped up the pole. She repositioned them, planted her feet against an inflated gunwale, and yanked again.

  The mass moved. Another tree branch and some leaves and pine needles floated to the surface and bobbed downstream. And another white shadow, larger this time, emerged underwater.

  Mandy was sure she saw a foot on the end. “Jesus!”

  “What? What?” Frank yelped.

  “Another limb, a leg.” She glanced back at Frank, whose wide eyes probably mirrored her own. “We’ve definitely got a body.”

  Her heart hammering now, she pulled again, felt the hook slipping, stopped for a moment to reset it, then yanked hard.

  With a sudden release that sent Mandy sprawling back, the body came free and floated to the surface. It was completely naked and face-down, the torso slightly bloated, with the hook wrapped around a thigh.

  Before she could discern much else, Frank scooped his paddle against the body’s shoulder and pulled it against the side of the raft. He reached out and grabbed the nearest arm.

  Mandy quickly righted herself and pulled the legs in toward the side of the raft, too, with her hook. She held onto the hook with one hand and grabbed the nearest ankle with her other hand.

  As soon as she made contact, even though her hand was gloved, a violent shudder ran through her. She gritted her teeth until it passed.

  “You got it secured?” Steve hollered.

  “Yes,” Frank yelled back.

  The two of them gaped silently at the body while Steve directed the belayers with whistle commands and arm signals to ferry the raft toward him.

  Mandy gripped her pole and the ankle with clenched hands. Slowly, while she stared at the body, observations registered in her mind.

  The person was too short and too thin to be Arnold Crawford.

  Even from the back and with the torso bloating, the body appeared feminine.

  Long brown hair, not short black hair, swirled around the head.

  When their raft entered the eddy at the bank beside Steve, he splashed into the thigh-deep water and slid his hook gently around the body’s waist. “Okay, we’re going to turn it over.”

  With Mandy and Frank’s help, he used a gloved hand and his hook to gently roll the body face up. Small breasts and a pubic mound appeared above the water surface. The body was that of a young woman.

  Mandy’s gaze traveled to the bruised face as Steve brushed the hair away. The young woman’s expression was serene, the eyes closed as if she was peacefully sleeping. A large mole was visible under her left eye.

  Slack-jawed, Mandy dropped her pole.

  Six

  The fishing was good; it was the catching that was bad
.

  —A. K. BEST

  Faith Ellis is dead, Faith Ellis is dead.

  The morbid mantra repeated itself over and over in Mandy’s mind until she thought it would drive her mad. Her sweaty hands slipped on the steering wheel of her Subaru when she made a turn. Thursday was one of Cynthia’s nights off at the bar, so Mandy was driving to Cynthia’s apartment on the west side of Salida. As soon as she’d seen Faith’s face, Mandy knew she would have to be the one to tell Cynthia.

  Her stomach tightened while she mentally rehearsed and discarded what she might say to her friend about the death of her young cousin. The taste of cheddar cheese and tomato rose in her throat, from the sandwich hurriedly eaten at home while changing out of her wet river clothes and taking care of Lucky before getting in the car. To keep anything more from coming up, Mandy took a deep breath and blew it out slowly while she hit the brakes at a stop sign. She’d just have to trust that the right words would come at the right time.

  While she accelerated, she flashed back to that afternoon. After they’d pulled Faith’s body out of the Arkansas River and quietly zipped her up in the body bag that Steve had stowed aboard his raft, they radioed in the find. The other team continued down the river, searching for Arnold Crawford. Mandy later heard they had found nothing.

  Lucky bastards.

  She had already started thinking about Cynthia while they waited for a rail car to bring a fire department rescue crew to carry the body out. A sheriff’s office detective also rode out on the rail car to see if he could retrieve anything else from the scene. Steve went back out in the raft with Frank to probe for clothing under the boulder, but only a few more branches, leaves, and other natural debris had surfaced.