The Girl on the Cliff

The Call

Damn, it was cold. Ethan Walker rubbed the inside of his new F150 windshield, clearing a small patch on the frosted glass. He drove fast. He knew the road, and time was important -- maybe life or death important. The winters at Lake Tahoe are brutal, and someone out there might be dead or dying. He pressed the gas pedal harder. It was cold as an ISIS heart, but a dry cold, devoid of humidity. The road wasn’t icy. It didn’t get warm enough at this altitude for snow to melt and re-freeze this time of the year. Plows pushed the snow high on the sides and wind from the glaciers on the mountain tops kept the surface clean.

There was only one road from South Tahoe up the west side of the lake, Emerald Bay Road, and he’d driven it a thousand times. The engine wasn’t warm yet and frost blocked most of his vision. Familiar tree formations and granite outcroppings provided enough visual cues to help steer. He’d rushed out of the store immediately when the call came. He just shouted at Megan to take over as he ran out after grabbing his coat. She knew why he was going. His rescue gear was always ready in the truck’s tool box.

Ethan owned the South Tahoe Outfitter’s Trading Post and volunteered with the Sierra Mountain Rescue Team. As an expert climber, he’d come to the high mountain region sixteen years ago as a survival instructor, and he never left. After finishing college at Sacramento State U., he couldn’t find work in the Bay Area or the Sacramento Delta, so he turned his hobby into a profession. He’d only gone to college to please his parents. In fact, he didn’t really look hard for a job with his new BSBA degree. Instead, he’d packed everything in a gym bag and took off in his old Jeep for the mountains, eighty miles away. He never looked back.

It was rough going at first. He’d climbed most of the challenging mountain peaks in the Sierras, but hadn’t yet attempted the monster faces at Yosemite. He was just a weekend climber back then. When he got to Tahoe, he talked his way into a job at a sporting goods store as a part-time climbing instructor, paying his own way through an instructor school. He’d slept in his car for a couple weeks before sharing a small trailer with another summer resident, a kid working at one of the casinos. He was lucky to be making enough money to handle it on his own when his roommate went back to school in the fall. He’d been hired full time as a sales associate for the winter, making minimum wage.

Over time, he’d put his business degree to work and started his own store, based primarily on mountaineering and skiing. They both were his passions and they were popular with weekenders coming to the lake. Now, when a skier or climber was in trouble, Ethan was usually the first person called for rescue.

All he knew today, traveling north up the lake, was that someone was hurt part way down a cliff. Emerald Bay was fifteen minutes away. As he neared the site, emergency lights flashed through the tall pines on the other side of the bay. He was less than a mile away if the road was straight, but it curved inland around the bay, adding another mile.

He stopped behind a line of trucks and cars blocking the road with EMTs, the sheriff, and fire personnel all waving for him to hurry. He climbed over the edge of his truck bed, pulling gear from the tool box behind the cab, then jogged up the road to where everyone was standing, looking over the edge.

What’s going on, Bill? Sheriff Deputy Bill Nickerson was walking quickly to meet him. It was Nickerson, Ethan’s best friend, who’d called him.

Don’t know, Ethan. Some folks stopped to take pictures here at the turnout and saw someone down the cliff in some rocks and brush. Come on, I’ll show you.

Several responders were looking over the guard rail, down the steep embankment. It wasn’t a sheer cliff, but it was too dangerous to hike down through ice and show without special equipment. It was mostly basalt rock, crumbling in places with pine outgrowths in crevices. Some of the trees were more than a hundred feet tall, towering above the lookout. There was brush between the trees that partially blocked the view of the bay below. Wind gusts blew snow and ice through the trees, stinging exposed skin. The wind-chill was near zero.

Here, over here, you can see better. An EMT stood about twenty feet away, calling. Ethan ran there. Seconds counted in the extreme weather. From this spot, he couldn’t see much, nobody could. About fifty feet down, a pair of pink sneakers protruded from some brush with ankles exposed. That was all that showed. It seemed familiar to him. He couldn’t place it, but it felt familiar.

He set his bag on the hood of the Sheriff’s car and pulled on his climbing harness, handing his hundred-foot rope to a fireman. He yelled over the howling wind. "Get some men to help hold this; it’ll need to handle two of us if I can’t get her into a litter. He lept over the rail, carrying a second climbing harness in case a litter wouldn’t work. He rappelled fast. His thick gloves protected against rope burn and cold. He couldn’t feel the rope sliding through his grip in the cold. He reached her in seconds. Her calves were milky white, which didn’t make sense in this weather. They should have been blue or purple, unless she was dead long before falling. He feared the worst. She wasn’t moving despite all the sirens and people yelling above the storm. In most rescues where the victims were alive, they tried to move when rescuers came – showing some sign of life. This girl was frozen solid.

Throw down a line.

Someone above yelled. We’re sending the basket. Can you get her in it or do we need to send another climber down?

Just send a line, no basket.

Rescuers above were talking. Ethan, you can’t haul her up with just a rope. Even if she’s dead, the rope isn’t right.

He looked up and grinned. It’s a mannequin. Someone’s playing a joke.

A few minutes later, Ethan was back at the top and others were pulling the female store display up. It was dressed in denim jeans and a flannel shirt with sneakers and light socks, nothing appropriate for the Alpine winter. He recognized it.

Across the bay, hidden in trees, a man watched through binoculars. He chuckled at all the vehicles clogging the road. It took more than twenty people to save one dummy. The climber was probably Walker. It had to be. It was too far to see faces, but the red 4x4 pickup was his. Who’s minding the store, Walker? Walker would be pissed … good, that’s good. The man saw the responders starting to leave as quickly as the sheriff released them. It was freezing cold and near blizzard conditions. His plan had worked beautifully. He’d read about it in the Tahoe Tribune tomorrow. A television van had arrived. It would be breaking news in a few hours. He was happy, despite the weather, watching everyone acting like fools.

An hour later, Walker carried loosely-coiled ropes, harnesses, and helmets through the back door of the store, dumping it all in a heap in the office. Megan sensed that he wasn’t in a mood for jokes. Hey, I listened on the scanner. Guess it was a false alarm, huh? Megan Coolidge was his only full-time employee and a close friend.

Ethan started laying out a rope along the floor toward the front entrance for coiling. You could say that. He wasn’t talkative.

It was a dummy?

Yeah, it was ours. He’d only realized it when he saw the whole figure on the cliff. Look up in the window. See anything missing?

She usually came into the store around noon, always rushed for time. She hadn’t noticed the missing mannequin from the front window. Oh, we got robbed!

Yeah, someone took her and went to a lot of trouble placing her on a cliff above the bay. Let’s look around to see if anything else is gone.

Megan called the Sheriff’s office to report the break-in and theft while Ethan looked around.

She was frustrated. The sheriff’s office says that if the damage is less than two thousand and nobody got hurt, we can fill out a report online. They don’t come out.

He shrugged, Yeah, it figures. It doesn’t look like anything else is gone. I can’t figure how they got in. The security system was on at seven when I came in and none of the doors or windows look like they were damaged. Somebody knew our codes and had a key. You sure you didn’t do it?

She smiled at this. Sure, I snuck in here in my sleep and threw our girl off a cliff. So, can I have my raise now or you gonna force me to hurt you?

Megan was always playful, even when he was pissed. She and Ethan had a partnership that had spanned almost ten years. He was the owner, but she’d been with him from the beginning when the store opened. She was his only employee, except for weekends and nights during peak season, when local kids came in to help with ski rentals and equipment fitting. One, Sheryl, was an older single mother who also worked as a dealer at a casino during weekday evenings. None of these part-time staff knew the access codes or had keys to the front or back doors.

Megan had first come to Tahoe from Oakland, California, on an excursion after finishing high school, as a gift from her parents. She met Ethan as a climbing instructor about the time he was planning to open his own store. They liked each other and learned trust through several elementary climbs. She discovered that she didn’t like climbing all that much, but impulsively, she decided to stay at Tahoe and work with him, at first living partially with money from her parents and minimal pay when he could afford it. She had only intended to stay a season or two, thinking she’d go on to college or get married. After ten years though, those thoughts had softened: they weren’t gone completely, but she wasn’t actively pursuing either dream. She was almost eleven years younger than Ethan and attracted to him. In his mind, he didn’t want to spoil a good working relationship through romance. He preferred outdoor girls, and Megan had given up climbing after the first lessons, preferring indoor activities in the winter. The beaches were nice at the lake in summer. She stayed in Tahoe because she liked Ethan. She had no more ambitions, just accepting life as it happened day-to-day. That was her outward rationalization. Secretly, she’d had a crush on him from the first time they’d met. He hadn’t given her any sign that he was interested in her romantically, so she just accepted it, hoping it would change someday.

Ethan in turn had developed a special relationship with Megan. It wasn’t amorous. It was the kind of love a brother had for a younger sister. He would protect her and do anything for her, but it never progressed further than that. It had lasted ten years and he trusted Megan completely. The store now made decent money and she could afford a modest apartment and a ten-year-old Jeep Wrangler 4 x 4. Living at Tahoe year round required this kind of vehicle.

She wasn’t thrown off, Megan. Somebody took her down the cliff and staged the whole scene. Someone was a climber; the conditions were awful. He must have gone over the edge sometime late last night. You know what the weather was like. It was probably minus-twenty and the wind was bad, so the chill was arctic. Somebody really wanted this bad.

Why do you think, Ethan? Why go to all that trouble just to play a joke? He could have dressed her in a bikini bottom and got lots of laughs. Why risk his life and cause all the rescue people to go up there?

I don’t know. Something was familiar about it, but it wasn’t clear to him.

Erin

She was running late. Dillan had missed the bus again and she needed to get him to the high school before eight or she’d be late herself. Her boss was a tyrant … an older woman who had personality issues.

Dillan, hurry up.

He ran out or his bedroom a moment later, Okay, mom, why so crabby this morning?

I’m not crabby; I just need to get to work. If you hadn’t flunked your driving test again, you could be late on your own time. If he could drive, she could leave her car for him and take a bus to work.

It wasn’t my fault. That inspector was a nervous jerk. He said I was speeding in a twenty-five zone. Hell, everyone speeds. It’s impossible to drive a car below thirty. He didn’t like me anyway. I can go again in three months, and this time I’ll get someone else.

Dillan, would it kill you just to pay attention and do what’s expected? Is it that hard to obey the law? You can’t expect an inspector to pass you when you speed. Now, you have to pay the fee again and start over.

In California, he could take the exam three times. It was important that he passed the next time. She couldn’t drive Dillan and his younger sister, Kimberly, everywhere anymore. She had a job. She hadn’t worked since graduation from UC Santa Cruz eighteen years earlier. Then, with a fresh English degree, she’d lived with her parents in Auburn briefly while considering her future. She didn’t search hard in the area since her fiancé, Chris Chatsworth, had graduated two years earlier and had a sales job in Los Angeles. After months of driving back and forth to Southern California, she’d gotten pregnant with Dillan. Within weeks of discovering her condition, they were married in a civil ceremony in Inglewood.

Erin’s parents had never liked Chris. Now, she knew they were right. He’d never been a serious husband. He liked having a beautiful young wife to show off, but that was it. He kept a separate social life and a high degree of freedom. At first, she thought she also liked it. But with the baby arriving soon after they were married, she was at home alone most of the time; Chris’s job required that he travel frequently. Because of his schedule, she had to manage everything at home and wasn’t able to pursue her career. He made good money and wanted her taking care of everything at the home: cooking, child care, bill paying, maintenance … everything. Now, after their divorce, she lived alone with two children in San Fernando, in the heat and smog, with nobody to help and too little support from her ex. She had to move.

Chris had never been a good father. He went along with purchasing their small tract house in The Valley, but it was just superficial. He was never home. There were excuses involving work and travel, but it was only partially true. She knew it from the time Dillan was still in diapers. She was too afraid to confront him about it. She’d never had a chance to pursue a career and she depended on his income. The house wasn’t anything special, but Chris made the money. Now, with him gone, she had no income, a mortgage, bills, and an older Volvo wagon to maintain. Their divorce settlement included a subsistence allowance until she could find work along with child support, but it wasn’t much, and wasn’t always paid.

Dillan was sixteen and Kimberly was nine. Chris had always referred to his daughter as their little mistake and blamed Erin for stopping the pill. She’d started experiencing side effects, and her doctor had ordered her to stop. Chris never lost his voracious sex appetite when he was around her, but after Kimberly arrived, he was gone so much that it didn’t matter. She wasn’t getting pregnant again.

The final straw ending their marriage happened when Chris had been in a car accident on I-405 with a twenty-something co-worker. The girl was suing Chris for secretly giving her a sedative, mixed with alcohol, claiming she would never have left the party with him otherwise. After all, he was married. Whether her story was legitimate or not, it didn’t matter to Erin, he had claimed to be on a sales trip up the coast in San Francisco, only gone a few nights. In fact, he had a cheap apartment across town in Huntington Beach and seldom traveled anywhere. It was his playhouse.

Erin had suspected his infidelities, but had tried to hide it from the kids. Now, she couldn’t hide the lawsuit when it ended Chris’s career and threatened her financial support. The house and her car had been titled jointly and could have been lost. But before the lawsuit went to court, Erin threatened him with dooming his chances, so he agreed to retitle all their important physical assets in her name (they had no savings or investments aside from his 401K) and give her an uncontested divorce. He remained co-signer on the mortgage since she had no earnings history. Everything was finalized in three months. He’d moved to his apartment, and she refused to communicate until everything was finalized. She’d never heard any outcome from the lawsuit against him and didn’t care. Dillan knew some of it, but Kimberly was still confused and missed her daddy. He’d never really been around much, so Erin continued filling both parental roles.

She had needed a job quickly. She got almost no support from Chris and needed money to pay the bills. She had a degree, but no resume, so she’d taken a job as a legal assistant in an office with seven attorneys and five Administrative Assistants. She worked enthusiastically and impressed all the legal staff. She was intelligent and could do simple research, despite having no prior legal experience. She’d started at the lowest level and hoped to advance quickly. The other office women made it difficult. They gossiped and made things difficult for her. Even without support from her coworkers, she did more than others and didn’t make mistakes.

The senior law partner knew what was going with the admin staff but ignored it. After all, Erin wasn’t about to quit with two children to feed, and the others had been there for years, some as long as twenty years. She was recognized as superior, but she was new, and the lawyers weren’t going to disrupt operations just because she was picked on. Nobody in authority cared. She needed the job, and there were no others available for a thirty-eight-year-old housewife with no work experience.

On one level, she didn’t care. She was making just enough and gaining experience. With Chris gone, she started spending more time on herself. She’d never lost her appearance, but she’d gotten a little soft and a bit heavier since college. Now, she had a workout routine that showed results. She could jog most mornings before the kids were up. She could do three or five miles in under an hour, depending on the time and her mood. At night, she practiced Pilates and Zumba to DVDs that she’d purchased years before. Now, after several months on her own, she was back at her college weight and had more stamina than ever before. She felt terrific physically and avoided thinking about other aspects of her life. For now, it felt good being independent from Chris. She realized how she’d overlooked his philandering for their entire marriage, never thinking about herself. Now, with him gone, she needed a new plan for the future.

Upset

Get the fuck out of the way! The driver leaned out of the door of the box truck looking at the rear and threatening to drive into a Mexican worker near the loading dock at the casino. He’d just gotten his commercial class B license. Now, he was living in the Sierras, east of Tahoe, in the log house where he grew up. He had it to himself, his parents were both dead. They died together, a murder & suicide when he was sent to prison. It was filthy when he returned and the well was tainted. The place looked derelict. It had a condemned sticker on the door, put there by the county when the taxes went unpaid for years. He ignored it. He tore off the sticker and moved back in.

The cabin’s electricity was shut off, so the well only operated by hand pump. The outhouse was the most uncomfortable aspect in winter. The cabin was okay. It was better than sleeping in his folk’s old Buick, and he no longer worried about inmates attacking him at night. The local predators were now mostly bears and mountain lions. They didn’t scare him; he’d grown up with them.

When a bakery had needed a driver, and there were no others available during winter months, he’d taken the job. Everyone else with the right license had jobs before the first snow, or they moved into the lower valleys: east to Reno, or west to Sacramento and the Bay Area. He didn’t have anywhere else to live and needed work at Tahoe. The bakery served hotels, hospitals, and casino restaurants along the south shore, crossing both state lines, California and Nevada. He lived in the mountains near the Nevada side. He had the old sedan, but drove the bakery truck home some nights when the weather was bad. So far, he hadn’t missed a day of work because of weather. If it got too bad to drive home at night, he could sleep in the cab outside the bakery. It was cold in the truck, but he could live through it. He needed the job. The side benefits included the baked goods he ate.

Most nights, alone in the log home, which was basically an unheated one-room cabin with a loft for sleeping, he lay in bed covered with every blanket in the place, drinking from a bottle of cheap whiskey under candle light. He’d grown up in this place. For some illogical reason, he felt it was a mark of distinction. He had some girlie magazines, but nothing more to stimulate him.

He would lie on the bed, recalling dreams of the imaginary girls he’d ravaged and the phantom friends he’d invented since he was a small boy. Most dreams were distorted over the years. He’d go crazy if his fictional friends didn’t keep him company. Sometimes the ghosts came also. He was afraid to let the candle burn out, fearing that they would come in the dark for vengeance. Noises from the woods and mountains added to the eeriness. During his therapy sessions at Folsom, the doc had said he was schizophrenic and needed medication to function in society.

He was no danger to his friends, his illusionary friends. The only people that should be scared of him were strangers. He didn’t like strangers, so he avoided them. Some of the bakery customers had complained to the owners about the strange man delivering, but so far he was still employed. If he did get fired, he would know who to blame. He could always take them to the middle of the lake to be with the others he’d heard about. They were all his friends now, visiting him on cold nights alone, isolated, in the woods. The lake was over nine hundred feet deep, fed by glacial runoff. Stories persisted about the preserved bodies still on the bottom from the gold rush and bootlegging eras. Icey water preserved them and prevented bacteria growth, so they didn’t float. It was too deep to explore, so most stories were regarded as myths. His friends were real; they weren’t myths!

But some of the women in the lake weren’t friends. He knew women couldn’t be trusted. He had learned that the hard way and feared they would come for him at night. He needed the candle light to protect him. Some of them, preserved deep in the lake, could be useful to him in some ways, but, mostly these women terrified him.

Most of his women had done things to him in his dreams, things that men couldn’t. He remembered the feelings. It aroused him. Those women made him feel things more intensely even than men’s magazines. The men at the bottom of the lake just needed to be quiet and rest. It was a girl who’d sent him to prison; it was because of her that he lived like this.