Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 13 - Hard Truth

by Hard Truth(lit)

  The delay was driving Anna nuts but she didn't want to do or say any-thing that might shut the child down. "Ray won't be gone long unless he's put the... it someplace far away," she hinted gently.

  "Robert's body. I saw it. It's not far. We put it in the lake wrapped in plastic bags and held down with big rocks. The cold keeps it fresh, just like meat in the refrigerator."

  Elfin-faced abused waif or not, the kid was beginning to give Anna a bad feeling.

  "Could you give me the wire?" she said, abandoning psychology.

  "Yes." Candace dropped the weird chalice pose, walked over to the ladder and drove an inch of the wire into Anna's thigh. The pain and shock made her scream.

  "Shh, shh," Candace whispered, her index finger in front of her lips. "Quiet as a mouse." The wire was jerked out and plunged in again.

  This time Anna didn't scream. It wasn't that she didn't want to or had the iron control to resist. There simply wasn't enough air remaining in her world to do more than grunt. Arching her back against the ladder, she jammed her knee into Candace's midsection and pushed. The girl flew back, landing on her butt. The piece of wire was still sticking out of Anna's thigh. A thin trickle of blood oozed from the first puncture wound and was quickly lost in the dirt and abrasions from their march down from Loomis.

  "Why did you do that?" Anna demanded. "Jeez. What a little creep."

  Candace remained on the floor for a second, looking neither pleased nor displeased with her handiwork and completely unmoved by having been sent sprawling.

  Recovering from the anger brought on by the unexpected attack, Anna said in a kinder, if less honest tone, "I'm not here to hurt you, Can-dace. I'm here to help. I've seen how Buddy... how Ray treats you. Look at your legs. You fell down as many times as me. You were cuffed just like me. Us girls have to stick together."

  Up until the last bit, Anna could have sworn Candace was listening, if in a disinterested brain-dead sort of way, the way seventh graders listen through English class. As soon as the "us girls" plea was uttered Can-dace's mouth curled in on itself. In the strong sideways light from the lantern it looked like a flower wilting on fast-forward. The pixie face grew red. Spittle sparked the air in the light of the Coleman. Candace looked like a demon child.

  "They knew where I was. They were here, too. They knew and they didn't care. Not even to tell anybody. They left and went home and told people I was dead and that they didn't know. They told everybody I was the one that got everybody lost. That I stole their food and was a whore and dirt."

  This diatribe from the heretofore mostly silent girl poured over Anna like hot ashes. For the blink of an eye she had no idea what Candace was talking about, then she realized: "us girls"-Beth, Alexis and Candace. To her knowledge, neither Beth nor Alexis had called Candace a thief, a whore, a corpse or dirt, but Anna didn't waste time arguing details. They did know where Candace was and what she was enduring and they didn't tell law enforcement or their parents or even Robert Proffit. They'd sworn repeatedly that they remembered nothing: not where they'd been or whom they'd been with.

  Anna could guess reasons for this alleged amnesia. Fear that Buddy, a ranger, would be believed and they would not. Fear he would find them and kill them if they spoke. Looking back, Anna remembered his prom-ises when they were in the hospital, telling them repeatedly he knew where they lived and would keep an eye on them. At the time she had mistaken it for concern. As she had mistaken his sudden appearance in the frontcountry, tired and rain-soaked, as a zeal for the finding of chil-dren so long lost.

  It was. He was zealously covering his tracks, keeping them under his control. He probably hadn't had a moment's comfort between the time they escaped and tonight when he'd successfully gotten them back.

  Perhaps he had threatened their families.

  Perhaps he had told them Candace was dead.

  Perhaps he had told them, should they speak, he would kill Candace.

  Reasons.

  But they had known the hell Candace was living in and they had left her there. In the face of that, ameliorating circumstances didn't amount to a hill of beans.

  "I don't know why those things happened," Anna said truthfully. "I know they care about you. I know nobody ever quit looking for you. I know you've been hurt, hurt real bad." Like she had seen Heath Jarrod do when Alexis and Beth first came out of the woods, Anna spoke as if to a much younger child. There was that about trauma that either aged vic-tims or stripped away the meager defenses age provided.

  Candace had been starved, beaten, humiliated and raped till she had abandoned even the pretense of being an adult, being in control. Anna saw her as a little kid, scarcely more than a toddler, and with a toddler's inability to grasp another's reality.

  The Charlie Manson school, Anna remembered Buddy describing it. Buddy had torn Candace down, ripped away every defense, every hope, every innocence, every belief she had, then he'd begun rebuilding her in the image of a serial killer. In his own image, whether he chose to admit it or not.

  Anna was the final exam. Probably it was meant to be Beth and Alexis. What better triumph than to see one's monster kill those of her own kind, those she once loved and who still loved her?

  "You don't have to be who Buddy wants you to be," Anna said, care-fully using "Buddy" instead of "Ray" in the small hope it would help Can-dace disengage.

  "This is who I want to be," Candace hissed. "I let them do those things to me. I let them. Ray's made me strong. Now I won't let them hurt me. 1 won't let you hurt me."

  Candace pushed up from the floor, coltish and shaky on too-thin arms and legs. From the counter in the shadowy kitchen side of the room she gathered a paring knife, then disappeared into the short ell that led to the cabin's back door. The sound of rummaging triggered hideous visions in Anna's brain of the torture potential of household implements. When Candace returned, in addition to the knife, she carried a broom and a roll of duct tape.

  She seated herself at the dining table where the light was best and began taping the knife to the broom handle, making herself a spear. The collapsed face of the feral girl was gone. Back was the expressionlessness. Of the two, it was the more frightening. The other was angry, twisted but very much alive. This was the face of the dead, the kind that walk out of the night woods carrying torches to slaughter and eat the people of the village.

  During the brief tool-making exercise, Anna tried to engage Candace with her, with the living. She questioned, pleaded, flattered and cajoled, but Candace had gone deaf again, incapable of hearing or responding to anything but her master's voice.

  In not too many minutes the spear was completed. Candace exam-ined it for workmanship, banged it on the floor several times to make sure the blade would stay fixed to the shaft under pressure. This done, she held it in front of her and came for Anna.

  thirty-one

  Heath was so angry she was having trouble staying in her own skin. At least that's how it felt: as if she could dig her nails into her sternum, pull her flesh apart and release a monster that would do justice to any-thing in the Book of Revelations.

  She had been flouted, tricked, robbed, hijacked and kidnapped, all within the space of thirty minutes and all by two skinny young blondes earnestly repeating, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." The burst of self-worth she'd earned from rolling herself miles through the dark of night had been canceled out by a wave of helplessness that might have left her whimpering had she not known how upsetting that would be to Wiley.

  Aunt Gwen did keep a can of pepper spray in the drawer next to the sink. In such close quarters she'd probably have ended up peppering them all, including herself and the dog. Had she not been so fond of her abductors, she'd have done it anyway.

  This course of action closed to her, she sulked.

  Sharon drove. Heath fumed in the passenger seat. Patty hung over their shoulders and flitted in and out of sight doing whatever it was nine-or ten-year-old girls do with such enthusiasm.

  "There's nothing they can do ti
ll sunrise anyway," Sharon said as she conned the RV through the deep canyon between Loveland and Estes Park.

  She was convincing herself, not Heath. Even sequestered on a ranch with the modern conveniences doled out by a man sporting a Luddite streak-at least where his women were concerned-Sharon had to know that was absurd. The trails were wide, well maintained; rangers could hike to Fern with lanterns, flashlights, floodlights run on portable generators. Heath didn't bother to make the argument. She'd already tried and run smack into an impenetrable wall of paranoia and prejudice, both exacer-bated by the emotional stress Sharon was suffering. Emotional break-down, Heath thought, but was too mad to feel much sympathy. The law terrified Sharon. Outsiders. Them. They. The Other. She was as scared of falling into the hands of the authorities as she was those of the criminals. To her they were one and the same.

  "An hour or so won't make any difference," Sharon said after a mo-ment of following sinuous curving of road and headlights. Her voice was brittle and overbright. "Then you can have your cell phone back. You can call anyone you want. I promise. The FBI, CIA, UFO, the cavalry. I won't make a peep. The girls may not even have got there. Or they might still be at the parking lot. I bet they're still at the parking lot. They'd be way too scared to hike so far in the dark."

  Again Heath said nothing. An hour could make all the difference in the world; freedom and capture, success and failure, life and death. They'd been over that as well.

  "They'll still be at Bear Lake. Candace's dead. They know that. They won't go to the cabin."

  "He may come down to Bear."

  "Nobody can really do anything till sunrise anyway."

  Heath gave up and stared at her reflection in the side window. Patty had, for reasons known only to herself, decided that the small light over the galley sink should be on. It effectively blanked Heath's window. For the sake of her aunt's investment in the RV, she hoped Sharon was not likewise impeded.

  As deeply betrayed as Heath felt, as helpless and as worried about Alexis and the limpet, as willingly as she would have spanked, demoted or fined both Sharon and her relatively innocent younger sister, Heath couldn't find it in herself to genuinely hate them or wish them ill. That Sharon was making a decision out of fear and indoctrination that might cause Alexis' death only added to Heath's burden of angry compassion. Should that happen, the guilt would ride Sharon like a rabid monkey for the rest of her days.

  Heath knew about that, about regrets. There was no way to calculate the number of times she'd relived the decision to sink her anchor in ice that struck her as a shade rotten, the color a hair off, the texture not quite what it should have been. Part of her knew. Part of her didn't. Part of her was cautious. Part of her wanted to set a record time for the climb. In ret-rospect the parts of caution seemed so clear. Never had she been reckless. Never had she been careless. Still and all...

  What if it had not been she who'd paid that price? How could she have lived with it then? Furious as she was with Sharon, mostly she feared for her. She was as trapped in her belief system as Heath once felt in her wheelchair. Even Mr. Sheppard, whom she purported to detest, when she said his name there was... something. Not love or respect. Not merely fear or awe. But something. Mr. Sheppard was the embodiment of all that Sharon had been taught God would be. Mr. Sheppard was God's repre-sentative on earth. Sharon could never be able to be party to bringing him down.

  According to the scriptures, Peter turned his face away three times, yet he was the rock upon which the church was built, became the saint who, legend would have it, stood at the pearly gates deciding who should be let in and who turned away.

  Judas, on the other hand, the man who actively had a hand in bringing Jesus down, Judas despaired, took his own life and, again as legend would have it, suffered on one of the lowest levels a creative mind such as Dante Alighieri could envision.

  Sharon could turn away. Asking more of her would not only be unprof-itable but cruel.

  Given the mood Heath was in, she wouldn't have hesitated being cruel for a nanosecond had she thought it would get her back her cell phone so she could call 911. Since it would serve no purpose but to bring a bit more bitterness into the world, she said nothing.

  As they entered the park the sky was graying in the east. Heath, Sharon, even little Patty, too wired to sleep, had been up nearly twenty-four hours. The dull nausea brought on by seeing sunrise from the wrong side of the day curled low in Heath's middle, adding to weariness deep enough it ached.

  Sharon turned left onto Bear Lake Road. There was a ranger station part way up, Heath knew, with employee housing near by.

  This last chance at good sense spurred her to try one more time.

  "What can we do?" Heath asked. "Seriously? A paraplegic, a scared woman and an exhausted child: what do you propose to do when we get there? There's a ranger station in a few miles. Let's stop and get help. Please."

  In this narrow forested canyon it was still nearly full dark, but in the faint glow of the dashboard lights Heath could see a ripple of pain cross Sharon's face, deepening her premature crow's feet and hardening her mouth.

  "The girls won't have gone in. Not in the dark. They'll still be at Bear Lake. Probably in the parking lot," Sharon insisted..

  The turnoff for the ranger station came and went. Heath waved. They'd be at the Bear Lake parking area shortly. Hours the rangers could have used to reach Fern Lake had been already sacrificed to Sharon's learned paranoia. Heath doubted a few more minutes would make any difference. She promised herself if Alexis and the limpet weren't in the parking lot she would try more drastic measures. Just what form that might take she hadn't a clue.

  So late in the season, kids back in school, the number of visitors dropped off radically. It was a weekday as well and the Bear Lake parking area was nearly deserted. In August there would have been bumper-to-bumper traffic. A few weeks later and the lot boasted eight cars.

  "There," Patty squeaked, leaning between Heath's and Sharon's seats to point. The aged New Canaanite sedan was parked crookedly half a dozen spaces from the trailhead leading to the Bear Lake campground and on to Fern Lake.

  "They aren't here," Heath said.

  Sharon rolled down her window as if that might be what was obstruct-ing her view of the missing girls. "They could be asleep on the seats." She parked the RV in the slot next to the sedan. From her raised vantage point Heath could see down into the car.

  "They're not there. Give me my cell phone."

  "Wait. They're here," Sharon said desperately. "Probably in the bath-room. Let me go check. I'll be quick like a bunny."

  Before Heath could manage anything more coherent than, "Oh for Christ's sake," Sharon had jumped from the vehicle.

  The keys were in the ignition.

  For half a second Heath eyed them, then heaved her weight up on arms still rubbery from her rolling sojourn, to maneuver herself into the other seat.

  Sharon's head appeared in the driver's side window with the alarming suddenness of a Jack-in-the-box.

  "Patty! Keys. Keep 'em till I get back."

  The little girl grabbed the keys from the ignition and retreated back behind the seats.

  "You might be killing your sister," Heath shouted, too angry to care whether she was motivated by a belief that honesty would change things or just wanton cruelty.

  The honesty didn't work. The cruelty did. Sharon looked as if she'd been slapped.

  "I won't be a minute," she whispered and staggered off, trying to run on feet too long unused.

  Heath pivoted her seat so she could see Patty. The little girl, looking like a lost member of Bob Cratchit's brood in her mismatched old-fashioned clothes, sat on the edge of the sofa opposite the tiny kitchen area.

  "Give me the keys," Heath said none too gently.

  "She'll only be a minute. She promised," Patty replied miserably.

  "Wiley is a trained attack dog," Heath said. "Give me the keys or I'll sic him on you."

  "No sir. Wiley's not mean
like you."

  Heath gave up. She just wasn't cut out for terrorizing children. And Sharon would only be a minute.

  She promised.

  thirty-two

  Being terrorized by a child was more unsettling than Anna would have thought. Had it ever entered her mind to envision such a thing. The utter wrongness of it jarred the brain, like being devoured by butterflies. If Candace had taken joy in her cruelty, even of the maniacal sort, it would have been easier. Then there would have been the visible specter of mental illness to stand between Anna's eyes and the ruinous child.

  Candace showed neither anger nor glee but jabbed Anna with the fierce concentration of a novice 4-H'er working on her first apron hem. The jab was experimental, tentative. Anna kicked it aside.

  The next was not so amateurish. With her hands tethered above her head, Anna's soft white underbelly was exposed. No way could she curl down, take cuts with shoulders, back or upper arms. Any lucky hit could pierce an organ. Candace came two steps closer, not close enough Anna could reach her, but close enough she could do some real damage. Feet planted firmly, one a bit behind the other, she thrust her spear hard at Anna's gut. Bracing spine and buttocks against the ladder, Anna swung a sideways kick with her right leg, connecting hard with the spear's shaft.