Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 13 - Hard Truth

by Hard Truth(lit)

  The rest-who had wielded the stick, broken the lamp, organized and transported the children, why it was so important Heath leave the chil-dren alone, why Beth-the limpet, who seemed psychologically depen-dent on Heath-should turn on her with threats of violence, whether this incident, bizarre as it was, had anything to do with the girls' weeks' AWOL or with their reappearance in bras and panties, was up in the air.

  "Before I leave, remind me to check around with a flashlight, see if anything jumps out at me," Anna said. "Tomorrow, when the sun's up, I'll come back and look again. If we're lucky, we may get a usable track or two but I doubt it. This dirt's been packed down over the years till it's almost like pavement. I hear Colorado's in a drought."

  "Drought's normal," Heath said. "It was the last twenty freakishly wet years that screwed us. Zillions of people moved here. Now that the weather's back in its real pattern there's not enough water to go around."

  'Ah."

  'Ah."

  Another piece of quiet formed between them.

  "Three voices," Anna said finally, coming to the crux of the matter.

  "Three. Definitely." Heath sipped her wine. By the gentle unshad-owed light from the night sky, Anna watched her chin and cheeks stiffen as she held the wine in her mouth for a time before swallowing it. A trick practiced by connoisseurs for the taste and alcoholics for the anticipa-tion. "Well, as definite as life is these days, anyway," Heath said when she'd swallowed. "The surreal is getting more real all the time. Do you know I thought I kicked off that burning lap robe? Actually felt my legs and feet kicking, felt its weight flying off, the relief of the cold air on my ankles. Then I look down and zip. Nada. Dead doornails. Lying there like wieners under the broiler. Weird."

  Heath took a deep drag on her cigarette. By the sudden glow of orange light Anna saw a startled-almost comically so-look on her face, as if in sharing even that one fragmented feeling about her physical state, she'd taken herself utterly by surprise.

  "Weird," Anna agreed. The glow moved as Heath reached out to tap ash. Anna would never know how Heath felt about this minor breach in the walls she'd constructed around herself. 'Are you thinking the third voice was the third girl, Candace Watson?" Anna asked.

  "Who else?"

  "Me too."

  Heath stubbed out her cigarette, worked the remaining tobacco out of the paper and tucked the filtered butt in the rolled cuff of her trouser leg. If one didn't count hunters-and Anna never did-there weren't a lot of backcountry enthusiasts who smoked, but over the years she noted the few who did tended to be scrupulously tidy about it, perhaps in hopes that when the day of reckoning rolled around, the karmic gods of nature would mark it down in their anticancer column.

  "So Candace is alive and well and back in New Canaan?" Heath asked.

  "Given how little Mr. Dwayne Sheppard wants strangers-particularly strangers with badges-poking their noses into his little hornet's nest, that both makes sense and doesn't. Why pretend she's lost? It only makes us pester him more."

  "The limpet said Candace never went with them, that she stayed with that Robert Proffit guy. I wish he gave me the willies."

  Anna knew what Heath meant: suspicious, Bible-beating, youth-group-leading, hyperpassionate young man swearing eternal fealty to God and nubile girls. A woman felt downright unintuitive not getting some sort of pervert reading off of him, but she didn't get that vibe either.

  "You don't always," she said from experience.

  "Weird."

  "Yup." Anna drank. When she didn't, she felt so much better. When

  she did, she couldn't fathom why she periodically swore off the stuff.

  "Maybe Candace did stay with Proffit and he's got her stashed somewhere unbeknownst to his fellow Christians."

  "That works," Heath said.

  "It would have to be someplace fairly close by. Daily care and feeding-"

  "God, I hope so."

  "-and to get her down here with the other girls tonight," Anna

  finished.

  "You'd think Beth and Alexis wouldn't cover for him," Heath said.

  "Maybe that's exactly why they do, why they have 'amnesia.' Maybe Proffit told them if they talk he'll kill their friend."

  "Poor little buggers," Heath said. Her voice was full of tears and wine and anger.

  "No kidding. If I had a heart it would be breaking," Anna quoted the Tin Man.

  thirteen

  By nine the following morning Anna had a search warrant in hand. The evidence-if it could be given such a lofty title-was a scant mention by two traumatized teens that Candace stayed with Proffit, and Heath Jarrod's unsubstantiated testimony of three childish voices chanting in the dark. Had it been anybody else, Anna doubted the judge would have been so cooperative. But the New Canaanites were strange, isolationist, standoffish. They lived differently, worshipped, if not different gods, then certainly a different face of the Christian god than Loveland's average church-going Presbyterian. People who are different are suspect. The judge was willing to stretch things a little where the welfare of a child might be at stake.

  Anna, Lorraine Knight and three men from the local sheriff's depart-ment were at New Canaan by nine-thirty to serve the warrant. The scope of the paper was lenient: They could look anywhere a smallish thirteen- year-old could hide. The forty or so residents, at least twenty-five of whom were children or young women, watched sullenly as they searched the sprawling homes. The adult men of the town, clearly led by Sheppard, were belligerent but never stepped over the line of legality. Their threats were of civil suits and heavenly retributions rather than physical violence.

  The search and the demographics of the residents ratified Anna's belief that the commune was rooted in the belief that polygamy was a religious imperative. The houses were divided into monastic cell-like rooms that housed two, three or four children each. Slightly more com-fortable rooms with a single bed were evidently for the adult women. Each house had a spacious master bedroom with a queen-sized bed for the "father."

  Though the judge had not been so generous as to allow the search of spaces too small to keep a girl, Anna noted the houses had well-organized offices. Each had a computer with internet access and a fax machine. From a cursory examination of the papers in plain sight, it appeared the busi-ness of New Canaan was capitalizing on Colorado's welfare system. With so many "single" mothers and out-of-wedlock children, the community was doing fairly well for itself.

  Of Candace Watson, there was no sign.

  Alexis and Beth were found locked in a room in Mr. Sheppard's house. They had been put there, Mr. Sheppard explained, to think on their sins.

  Anna, with Lorraine, insisted on speaking with them. The weight of heavily armed lawmen and a warrant behind them, Mr. Sheppard grudg-ingly allowed it. The girls were up and dressed, the room's two beds made with military precision and what looked like army surplus blankets. Anna had slept under one as a kid. They were a little scratchy but warm and serviceable. Both the room and the children were scrupulously clean. At a glance it was clear they weren't hiding anything. There was no place to hide it. Blankets were tucked in, leaving the space beneath the beds vis-ible. There were no closets and no dressers, no pictures, rugs, or curtains on the one window. Two identical sweaters hung on two of the four pegs in the wall. A single bed table with a lamp and two Bibles sat between the beds. In the corner was a stand with drinking water, an old-fashioned basin and ewer for washing and, beneath, a chamber pot with a lid. The room was Spartan and anachronistic but the children's basic needs were met. It wasn't illegal to lock children in a room with Bibles, though there were times Anna thought it should be.

  To her surprise, Mr. Sheppard left them under the protective eye of his wife. Either the press of feminine flesh, nearly half of it beyond his control, was too much for him, or he was confident Mrs. Sheppard and the girls would say nothing he did not wish them to.

  "Alexis," Mrs. Sheppard said, "where are your manners?"

  "Won't you please sit down?" Alex
is asked politely. She and Beth sat demurely on one bunk, long skirts covering their knees, ankles crossed, feet to one side in an unnatural "ladylike" pose Anna hadn't seen since thumbing through her mother's magazines in the early sixties.

  Anna sat on the bunk facing them. She found herself wondering where in the hell they had found an actual honest-to-god chamber pot.

  "I'm going to leave you to it," Lorraine said. "See if I can't find the elu-sive Mr. Proffit." She departed, closing the door behind her. Mrs. Shep-pard remained standing, one hand on Alexis' shoulder. Anna's attention was caught by her long slender fingers. The woman's face was aged, not so much by wrinkles or bags, but by the careworn, almost pained, expression she habitually wore. Her hand was smooth. Young. Very young. Younger than Anna had first thought. Anna looked at her throat. It, too, was young. Mrs. Sheppard couldn't have been much more than fourteen years older than her daughter, if that. She'd been little more than a child herself when she married.

  Anna left off studying her and focused on the girls, letting silence grow among the four of them. Silence worked better with adults than children. Children had not yet acquired the compulsion to fill it, but it was worth a try considering she had no better opening gambit.

  Seconds oozed by, thick as mud in the small closed room. Both chil-dren sat quietly, looking at her with nervous, expectant faces. Mrs. Sheppard was equally unmoved. It occurred to Anna that mother and children had probably been trained not to speak until spoken to. To be seen and not heard. To be used as the master saw fit.

  "So you're under house arrest," Anna said amiably. "What did you guys do to get locked up?"

  "We lied," said Alexis.

  "Lying is a sin," said Beth.

  "Who did you lie to?" Anna asked.

  "You. Everybody," Alexis replied.

  That caught Anna off-guard. She'd been expecting something more domestic: lying about chores unfinished or cookies gone missing.

  "What lie did you tell me?"

  Alexis fielded this question as well. "We told you-told everybody- that Candace hadn't gone with us on the hike, that she'd stayed behind with Robert, but it wasn't true."

  For a moment Anna was too stunned to speak. The one shred of evidence they had was being snatched away. If they had lied, she was back to square one. If they were lying now, she was back to square one.

  "Okay," she said slowly. "Why did you say that if it wasn't true?"

  This time Beth answered. "When we came back, Candace wasn't with us and we thought we'd be in trouble because we'd left her."

  There was a very believable edge of despair in her voice and Anna found herself halfway believing her. "Where did you leave her?"

  A look was exchanged between the girls. Nothing big, nothing flashy; Anna might not have noted it had she not seen that same look spark between them when she'd first come upon them in Heath's camp.

  "We can't remember," Beth said.

  "Why did you decide to tell the truth now? About Candace not stay-ing behind with Robert?" Anna asked.

  "Because we'd got him in trouble. We never meant to," Beth said earnestly. "We didn't think of it like that. We just..."

  "Didn't want to get in trouble?" Anna finished for her.

  "No."

  The limpet's face was open, her needs transparent. Anna could have sworn she was telling the truth. Or what she'd been made to believe was the truth. Alexis was harder to read. She had a way of hiding emotions that was beyond her years.

  "Did Robert tell you you'd gotten him in trouble?" Anna asked.

  "No, Fa-Mr. Sheppard told us," Beth said. "Robert forgave us. He said it was okay and he loved us."

  "When did you see Robert?" Mrs. Sheppard cut in sharply.

  The limpet looked horrified. "Now you've done it," Alexis hissed.

  'Alexis," Mrs. Sheppard said, and Anna could see those supple young fingers digging into her daughter's shoulder.

  "Robert came by last night," Alexis confessed. "He talked to us through the window." She began to cry.

  "Did you go out with Robert last night?" Anna asked.

  "The door was locked," Beth answered for her friend or half-sister or whatever the hell their convoluted family relationship was.

  That wasn't a straight answer. Anna stood and stepped to the room's one window. It was an old-fashioned sash window with a hinged screen secured by a hook and eye. As a girl Anna had slipped in and out of a win-dow very like it more times than she could remember. It would have taken little effort for them to climb out, go with Robert to the RV park for a bit of terrorizing, then slip back in with the parents none the wiser.

  And Candace-or at least some third girlish voice-had been with them. For a shuddering moment Anna was put in mind of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, a study of the Salem witch trials and the pack of young girls who grew wild and drunk on power till the town was strewn with corpses. Children were not inherently good. They were inherently ignorant and usually helpless. Once that helplessness was removed, the ignorance and ego of the young could be more heartless than anything adults dreamed up. It was possible they'd even done it without Robert Proffit's assistance. In the country, it wasn't unusual for twelve- and thirteen-year-olds to drive.

  Earlier, while she'd waited for the warrant, Anna had returned to the RV park. The low angle of the light was superb for tracking, yet she'd found little to corroborate Heath's tale but scuff marks that could have been made anytime since the last good rain made it out of the mountains and down to the flats.

  Anna turned back to the room where her captive audience watched her with an attention that would have flattered the most jaded actor. She looked at the girls' shoes. They were well-used but clean. If they'd been rampaging the previous night, they had literally and figuratively covered their tracks.

  "Heath Jarrod told me you paid her a visit last night," Anna said abruptly. "Tell me about that, Beth."

  The girl looked dumbfounded: eyes wide and uncomprehending, mouth slightly agape. Genuine surprise. Anna was about to consign Heath to the loony bin, then Beth's eyes filled with tears and the unlined face contorted in a spasm of guilt so heartfelt Anna felt guilty for seeing it.

  "Is Heath all right?" she asked, her voice returned to the babyish tremor it had been when she'd first walked out of the woods.

  Alexis took Beth's hand. It wasn't to comfort her; Anna could see the smaller girl wince from the pressure Alexis put into the squeeze. "We were here all night. Both of us," Alexis said. "Praying and reading our Bibles. Ask my... my mother."

  Anna wondered whom she was going to say at first. Robert Proffit? Maybe she'd concluded his nocturnal visit to the bedroom window of two underage girls had damaged his credibility in the eyes of the law.

  Because she'd been invited to, Anna said, "Well, Mrs. Sheppard?"

  Mrs. Sheppard was looking at her daughter in a new way. The feature-less stoicism-or repressed pain-that had kept her face locked since Anna had first seen her was broken. She stared at Alexis as if she'd meta-morphosed into a Kafka-esque cockroach before their very eyes.

  "The window isn't nailed shut," she said flatly.

  Alexis began to cry again, her face hidden in her hands. "Sharon!" Alexis cried in shock. Her mother slapped her.

  Sharon. She called her mother "Sharon" and her father "Mr. Sheppard." Such a warm, fuzzy family.

  The bedroom door opened. "Proffit's gone," Lorraine said without preamble. "He took some clothes and his car."

  "He went to find Candace," Beth volunteered. "He told us last night when he came to say goodbye. He said he wouldn't come back with-out her."

  "Jesus," Anna said.

  'Amen," Sharon Sheppard murmured.

  "May we walk the rangers out?" Alexis asked politely as Anna rose to leave with Lorraine. Mrs. Sheppard looked at her watch.

  "You've seven minutes left."

  "Please?"

  "Don't tell Mr. Sheppard."

  The girls leaped up with alacrity. Anna doubted good manners or a love for hers
elf or her boss fomented this seven-minute revolt against the powers that be in the form of the clan's patriarch. The girls probably just wanted out. To Anna, this was completely understandable. There were studies showing the threat of prison wasn't much of a crime deterrent but it deterred her most effectively. Life in a box, as far as she was concerned, was not better than no life at all.