Tourist Trap (Rebecca Schwartz #3) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

were caught in it. No time to straighten it out then; I pulled my sweater down as far as it would go and nipped out in the open. Rob was already running up the hill. I caught up with him and we kept running. There was more noise up ahead, some sort of scrapings, so we figured we were headed in the right direction. We could see about two inches in front of us.
    We ran for about a week and a half—why, I’m not sure. The “oof,” I guess. Perhaps someone was being attacked under the giant cross at the top of the mountain. On the other hand, running, even uphill, just before dawn in an eerie fog, with the smell of eucalyptus pungent in our nostrils, wasn’t the worst way to spend Easter morning. But I was getting tired. Rob was one curve ahead of me. “My God!” he said as he rounded it.
    At first I couldn’t see what had startled him. I could see the cross, and it was very impressive indeed. I hadn’t realized it had a carved Jesus on it. The fog swirled then and I caught a glimpse of color—green spattered with red. “Jesus!” I said. But I was lying again. It wasn’t Jesus, or an artist’s depiction of Jesus, or even a prank. There was a man nailed to the cross—a man with white hair, wearing jeans and a green cowboy shirt, satin, I thought, with blood all over it.

2
     
    The ladder was lying at the base of the cross, along with a rope. Somewhere quite near, a large animal scuffled in the brush and began to run, off to our left. Rob’s head swiveled toward the noise, then back to the cross. “He might not be dead,” I said, meaning the man on the cross. But his chin was on his chest and his eyes were staring open. And the running animal was, by now, clearly a two-footed one—no dog or deer ever crashed through brush quite so clumsily. Rob followed the noise, leaving me staring at a corpse.
    But how could I be sure it really was a corpse? To my regret, I had some experience in these matters, but no expertise. If he wasn’t dead, I couldn’t just let him hang there. That was my first thought, I guess, but it was more or less subconscious. Consciously, all I could think of was how mad I was at Rob for leaving me alone.
    The fog had lifted suddenly and I felt very naked. Maybe the person Rob was chasing wasn’t the killer. Maybe it was just some derelict, or even a solid citizen who’d come early for the sunrise service, like us. Maybe the real murderer was lurking about, and now I was all alone. I was terrified.
    It was all I could do not to turn around and go running right back down the hill, but I still wasn’t sure the man was dead. I had to do something; or so my pathetic excuse for reasoning went. With quite a lot of effort, I lifted the ladder and leaned it against the cross. Then I started climbing up, about as distasteful an activity as I’ve ever undertaken. Not only was I frightened of any long-legged beast that might be in the neighborhood, I wasn’t too keen on ladders at the best of times. I took it slow and easy, breathing deeply on each rung, not courting hysteria by looking down. “Hold it right there!” said a female voice. I slipped off the ladder, knocking it over as I fell.
    “Oof!” I said as I landed and rolled to the right, so as not to end up under the ladder. I realized as I did it that what I’d surely heard a few minutes ago was someone making precisely the same sort of wrong move.
    I raised my hands over my head, outlaw fashion, and turned, sitting up, to see who’d captured me. I was expecting a police officer, maybe; I hadn’t really thought about it. But my nemesis was a scrawny woman in her thirties with straggly brown hair and no makeup. If she’d paid $2.50 for her outfit at the local Goodwill, she’d been robbed. One hand was in the pocket of a tattered ski jacket, and there was a bulge in the pocket large enough to be a gun. Or a beer bottle. I was betting on the latter. She took a step closer. “Are you hurt?”
    I shook my head, too stunned to speak.
    “Stand up.”
    I did, and took a step toward her, still holding my hands up. She moved back, but not before I caught the reek of alcohol. “That’s not really a gun, is it?”
    “Stand back!”
    I moved forward again. “If that’s a gun, let me see it.” I can’t really explain why I wasn’t terrified, except that the woman seemed so frail. Even if she had a gun, she didn’t look as if she’d have enough strength in her trigger finger to use it. Or maybe I could smell fear, like an