“But Thorpe has stayed alive all these years as a wingsuit flier, too,” Janelle said. “That doesn’t seem possible.”
“He approaches each flight, especially each proximity flight, the same way he approached all his climbs with Jimmy. If things aren’t perfect, he turns away.” Ponch took another swallow from his bottle. “This year hasn’t been a good one for him, though. He’s known for his Yosemite flights. But his videos have become repetitive and his viewership is way down. The rangers don’t even bother to bust him when he lands anymore. That’s the worst thing they could do to him.” Ponch screwed the lid back on his bottle and returned it to the pocket of his pack. “He called me a month ago saying his sponsors were threatening to leave him. When I suggested maybe it was time to give up flying, he about shot me through the phone.”
“So you helped him instead,” Chuck said. “You were with him on Glacier Point this morning.”
Ponch blanched. “I shouldn’t have been there. The hand was as clear as any I’ve ever dealt, but I went anyway. He asked me to support him. I agreed. It’s as simple as that. I kept trying to find a way to bring up what the cards said, but I couldn’t.”
“Because you know they’re a bunch of hooey.”
“No,” Ponch said, his voice sharp. “Because I know what people like you think.”
“And people like Thorpe.”
Ponch dipped his chin. “And people like Thorpe,” he acceded. He tilted his head back and studied the ridge above them.
Chuck followed Ponch’s gaze. Somewhere up there was the rock-walled gap toward which Thorpe had been aimed when Ponch last had seen him. The sooner they got up there, the sooner they could put to rest the hogwash about the hand of tarot cards.
“Ready when you are,” Chuck said to Janelle.
She led the way on up the footpath. Where the established trail angled west around the base of the ridge toward Sentinel Falls, Chuck called ahead for her to leave the path and bush-whack straight up the mountainside. She hiked upward through the pines, quickly outdistancing Ponch. Chuck split the difference between the two of them, anxious to reach the gap but unwilling to leave Ponch too far behind. The mountainside steepened as they climbed. The distance between the three of them increased until Janelle reached a spot near the top of the ridge where the forest gave way to bands of granite stacked one atop another like the layers of a wedding cake.
“Follow along the base of the lowest cliff band,” Chuck yelled up to her from a hundred yards below, basing his recommendation on his memory of the map at the trailhead. “The notch should be just ahead of you.”
Janelle disappeared around a bulge in the cliff, turning sideways to slip past the trunk of a ponderosa pine tree growing close to the granite wall. Chuck reached the base of the cliff a minute later. He waited for Ponch, then led the way between the tree and cliff face, following Janelle’s bootprints in the dusty soil.
A cry from Janelle reached him from around the rock outcrop ahead.
“What is it?” Chuck called to her.
“A leg.” There was a long pause before she spoke again, her voice shaking. “A human leg.”
Chuck sprinted around the base of the cliff with Ponch a step behind him. He came to an abrupt halt beside Janelle, who stood where the cliff band gave way to a sun-splashed slope of tufted grass, spindly brush, and scattered ponderosas. Granite walls boxed the slope on both sides, forming the notch in the top of the ridge known as Sentinel Gap.
The leg was wedged ten feet off the ground between the trunk and lowest branch of a ponderosa growing in the middle of the gap, thirty feet ahead. Janelle reached toward the appendage, her hands arrested in midair.
Sunlight broke through the tree’s branches, speckling the human limb. The leg had ripped away from its body below the hip. A white sock and thick-soled landing shoe clad the foot. Otherwise, the leg was bare, its skin battered and bruised. Blood from a deep cut in the ankle soaked the sock and shoe. More blood from the place where the leg had torn free from its body coagulated on the pine-needle-covered ground at the base of the tree.
Chuck pressed his forearm to his mouth.
Beside Chuck, Ponch spoke, his voice trembling. “I should’ve stopped him.”
Chuck lowered his arm. “You suggested he quit.”
“He wouldn’t hear it.”
“He never listened to anyone when we knew him twenty years ago. I’m not surprised he wouldn’t listen to you now.”
“I should have told him what the cards said.”
“He wouldn’t have listened to that, either.” Chuck didn’t add that no one else in their right mind would have listened to Ponch’s tarot-card nonsense as well.
Ponch dug his phone from his pocket while Janelle approached the wedged leg, her steps slow but purposeful, her hands at her sides.
“We have to find him,” she said. “We have to make sure he’s . . . he’s . . .”
Chuck trailed after her, his legs shaky. He said over his shoulder to Ponch, “She’s right. Then we’ll call.”
Janelle stopped beside the thickened pool of blood below the suspended leg. She turned uphill, studying the gap in the ridge. Chuck eyed the gently sloping ramp between the rock faces with her. Somewhere in the notch, Thorpe’s flight had gone horribly awry.
Janelle turned a slow circle. “The same forces that brought his leg here—” she pointed at the battered limb in the tree above them “—should have propelled the rest of his body in roughly the same direction.” She pointed at the far cliff wall. “There. See?”
He looked where she pointed. “I don’t see anything.”
“More blood.”
He squinted. She was right. A streak of dark cherry shone in the sunlight, splashed across the quartz crystals that spotted the granite face.
She aimed a finger down the slope, where Sentinel Gap opened to the forested lower ridge. “And there,” she said, her voice breaking.
“Oh, my God,” Ponch moaned from behind Chuck.
A piece of red fabric was tucked at the bottom of a headhigh boulder resting on the forested slope below the opening of the gap.
Janelle side-hilled to the boulder ahead of Chuck and Ponch. She put a hand to the stone and leaned around it. “He’s here,” she said, her voice controlled. “The rest of him.”
Chuck looked over her shoulder along with Ponch. The piece of fabric visible from above was the corner of Thorpe’s wingsuit airfoil. Thorpe lay facedown on the far side of the boulder, his arms and remaining leg splayed. Blood was gathered in a small depression beyond and below his head.
Janelle dropped her medical pack to the ground. Donning a pair of latex gloves from an outside pocket of the pack, she knelt and turned Thorpe’s head to her. Thorpe’s black helmet encased his skull. Somehow, his camera remained affixed to the helmet’s crown. His goggles were smashed, his eyes, nose, and cheeks pulverized.
Janelle pressed two fingers to the side of Thorpe’s neck below his jawline, then rocked back on her heels. “No pulse, of course. But we’re always supposed to check.” Her gloved hands, cupped around one another, hung between her legs, her forearms resting on her thighs. “He must have died instantly.”
Ponch turned away and vomited down the slope. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he returned to studying Thorpe’s body with Chuck and