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features melted in his memory. And this face in the photo was so ethereal, like a face in a dream. What if he was wrong? What if this woman was the same one he’d found in the forest?
    “You don’t know,” Augustine decided.
    “Who the hell would steal a body?” Lewis said.
    Hugh started to describe the wild man, but Augustine interrupted. “Joshua,” he said. “He’s one of the cavemen.”
    The rangers had used the same term that afternoon, “cavemen,” as if the hermit were part of a rare, dying species, an American yeti.
    “Joshua?” Lewis said. Hugh looked at him. “Didn’t he used to work in housekeeping? This was thirty years ago, a kid. A crag rat. He got hit by lightning. I thought he died.”
    “It was before my time. But he lived,” Augustine said. “He kept coming back. They finally gave up and let him stay, a charity case. Ever since, he’s been living in caves and animal dens, eating tourist leftovers and downed game, foraging for nuts and berries. He rants and raves. We thought he was harmless.”
    “Somebody must know where to find him,” Lewis said.
    “Do you know how many places there are to hide?”
    “What about dogs?” asked Lewis. “Can’t they bring in dogs?”
    “It’s not her,” Hugh said. “I’m telling you.”
    Augustine didn’t believe him, though.
    “Have you spotted the others?” Hugh asked. He wanted Augustine to hold on to his dignity, or at least not come apart in front of them. “There were three of them. They couldn’t all have disappeared.”
    They could all have fallen, of course. Their anchor could have pulled and sent the other two to their deaths. But the rangers knew that and Hugh had watched them looking everywhere, including the treetops.
    “We’ve been calling. There’s no sign of anybody up there.”
    “They’ll find them,” Lewis said.
    “I know,” Augustine said. It was spoken without emotion, a promise to himself, to fetch the dead and wounded. To keep on hoping.

FIVE
    Hugh looked at their reflections in the dark window.
    Over the next days, El Cap was sure to peel them open and see what grit each contained. Hugh and Lewis would run their stone gauntlet. Augustine would probably kiss a cold forehead, or a hand, something still recognizable, and learn grief, the hardest lesson of all. No matter what happened on the wall or in its forest, their shapes would shift. Each of them would come away changed. El Cap was like that.
    Even as Hugh gazed at the dark glass, a woman’s face surfaced in the mirror. Lewis and Augustine didn’t notice as the ghost gradually joined them from the other side of the window. Her eyes stayed fixed on Hugh.
    At first, rising from the darkness, she could have been any woman, old or young, practically an idea. Closer to the glass, her features grew more distinct. The pallor took on color. Her lips were a lush red. She seemed to be boring in on Hugh, seductive and dangerous at the same time. Was he imagining the dead girl? At the last instant, she reached her chin forward and pursed her lips and pressed them against the glass, a kiss for Hugh.
    “Rachel,” he murmured.
    She rapped at the window, and the other two men started. With a silent laugh, she vanished back into darkness. A minute later, she came through the door. The men rose to their feet, Lewis last of all. “My wife,” he explained to Augustine.
    Hugh had never seen her this way, in designer jeans and a black sweater that sparkled and played with her curves, and with exact makeup, and a stride that suggested daily tennis or aerobics. Her beauty confused him. It was so different from the beauty he remembered. Over three decades had passed.
    Gone was the granola girl with her hair in a ponytail tied with a bandana. She and Annie had been the closest of pals, bonded by Yosemite and camp life, and by the dangers their boyfriends courted on the walls. The four of them, the two couples, had traveled up and down the West Coast, from Baja to Vancouver,