Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 11 - Flashback
Page 14
Lanny Wilcox's bedroom and her own were the only viable choices remaining. She chose Lanny's. If one wasn't going to sleep, surely it was more interesting not to sleep in a man's bedroom than one's own.
With this thought, the image of Paul Davidson sprang clear and strong behind her eyes: the square shoulders, the slow smile that never came cold and always reached his eyes, the southern drawl, the way he called her "darlin'."
A wave of emotion so strong it wrung a flood of tears from eyes dry an instant before overcame her. Not since the months after her first husband, Zach, died had she so longed for a man. Had Paul appeared before her on the moon-swept brick she would have married him on the spot, abandoned the park service, given her life over to him, and gladly crawled into the circle of his arms, there to hide safe and warm for all the years left to her.
Davidson did not appear. After a time the disconcerting flow of tears dried up and she was left with nothing but Lanny Wilcox's bedroom. She fetched another pair of shoes from her quarters, running shoes this time, quiet and tightly laced, and donned a pair of underpants. Creeping about in the middle of the night seeking unsavory persons was not an activity she wanted to undertake without panties. Thus sartorially fortified, she descended the stairs to return to the administrative offices for the key to the ex-Supervisory Ranger's house.
Her flip-flops were where she'd stepped out of them at the steps. She took them in and tossed them on her desk, then retrieved the key, along with a heavy six-cell flashlight. Anna was the acting Supervisory Ranger, there was no rule stating she could not enter quarters to investigate a suspicious occurrence yet, for reasons she didn't understand, she knew she would not turn on any lights in Wilcox's quarters.
Lanny's front door was closed but not latched. She didn't need the key.
Aware that normal people were abed at this hour and that the Shaws' house shared a wall with Wilcox's, she moved even more softly than was her habit, leaving doors ajar lest the click alarm Teddy, presumably sleeping next door. There'd been no room on the medevac helicopter and she was to take the sea plane to Key West in the morning.
Unsure of precisely what she sought, Anna first opened the refrigerator. The core of people's lives often lay in their refrigerators and medicine cabinets. Nothing remained in Lanny's that could go bad. Someone-probably Teddy-had had the foresight to remove food that would spoil. A six-pack of Yoo-Hoo with one bottle missing, an unopened plastic jug of drinking water and a door full of condiments were all that had been left. The water jug had sprung a leak and about a quarter of its contents glistened atop the vegetable trays.
The freezer contained nothing but ice cubes and frozen entrees. Apparently Lanny ate with the creativity and nutritional concern of the average bachelor. Anna moved on.
Built over a century before, the house was small to modern eyes, the rooms cramped, the windows few and high off the floor. Between the tiny kitchen and a living room not much bigger was a sort of stile: three steps up to a landing from which narrow stairs ascended to the rooms above and three steps down the other side to the living area. Having gained the landing, Anna stood still in the chill air-the air-conditioner left running so Wilcox wouldn't return to mildewed goods and verdant walls. Her flashlight soundlessly searched that which was in plain sight. Wilcox was a packrat. The little rooms were crammed with the usual and the unusual garnered from half a lifetime in the parks. The walls were covered with framed pictures. Two posters, one of the Devil's Post Pile, one of Chaco Canyon, bumped frames over a derelict sofa. Photos of rough-clad men and women in hiking boots and packs were scattered around. Mixed in were carved masks, mostly foreign-looking: South American, maybe some from Mexico, one clearly left over from a past Mardi Gras. The floor was equally well covered with books, boots, skateboard, compact disks, unopened junk mail, magazines and dead plants in gaily-painted ceramic pots. Forlorn and useless, a pair of snow skis stood in one corner.
Anna turned her light back the way she'd come. The kitchen side was marginally better: counters were clean and the sink was free of dirty dishes. A small wooden table flanked by two very nice wooden folding chairs, probably from the nineteen forties, took up most of the floor space.
The kitchen walls were more interesting than those in the other room. Wooden boxes of varying sizes, from one no more than three inches square to the largest, probably eighteen by twelve inches, had been mounted on the plaster. The boxes were painted in such vibrant colors that Anna's flashlight seemed to ignite rather than illuminate them. Several had been hung so their lids fell open. Inside were scenes complementing or contrasting those on the outside. The artwork was original and fine.
Anna judged art by several criteria. The first was if she could do it, it wasn't art. That disqualified a whole slew of modern painters who slathered, sprayed, glued, welded or stapled shapes together. These box worlds she could not have created. A woman had done them, she'd have sworn to that. The themes were fierce but intensely female with an undercurrent of medieval Catholicism running through. An angel with a scarred face and broken wings stood between a group of armed men and a donkey laden with palm branches. Inside the box were flies and white feathers, the angel and ass either dead and buried or ascended to heaven.
Theresa, the fianc‚e who had run off with Lanny's heart and sanity, was probably the artist. For a moment more Anna was lost to the present as her flashlight fired up one box after another. Each was a miniature theater, the lights just coming up on the actors in the midst of a dynamic scene. When Anna reached the last, she felt a sense of both satisfaction and loss, the way one feels when finishing a good book.
Her brain switched from the divine to the prosaic. She could understand why a beautiful young artist of such intensely personal yet universal images might abandon any number of men, but why would she abandon her work? Had it been Anna, these walls would have been stripped bare, the boxes carefully packed, before she gave a thought to the clothes she would wear or her toothbrush beside the sink.
The bathroom at the top of the stairs was no bigger than a closet. Too small for a bathtub. Toilet, shower and sink were close enough one could wash one's feet and brush one's teeth while sitting on the commode. It was the only room in the house free of clutter. Even a dropped tissue would have been sufficient to inhibit passage in the confined space.
The medicine cabinet, small and old and standing out from the wall, was very like the one Anna remembered from growing up. It even had the same halo of rusty incursions into the reflective surface where metal edging met the glass.
Anna trained her light inside. Here would be evidence of the weaknesses of the body: diabetes, dentures, headaches. Most Americans consumed quantities of over-the-counter drugs, and one in three was on some sort of prescription medicine all the time. Lanny was no exception. On the middle shelf were three prescription bottles: one for high cholesterol, one for high blood pressure and one Anna had a lifetime experience of, Levaquin, the three magic tablets to banish the misery of a bladder infection; one of the more splintery crosses women have had to bear. The prescription had been written six weeks before for Theresa Alvarez. Anna removed the cap and shook out two tablets. Theresa had left behind not only her artwork but the last of her medicine.
Curiouser and curiouser. Anna put the pills back and resolved to check the closet, see if Ms. Alvarez had bothered to take her clothes in what was coming to seem a headlong flight rather than mere abandonment.
The bedroom was jammed with more stuff. No floor space was visible. The walls were lined halfway up with boxes, books, scuba tanks, two backpacks and a lot of other paraphernalia related to outdoor adventure and indoor entertainment.
The closet, the old-fashioned size, built when people had one outfit for the workweek and one for going to church on Sundays, was devoid of women's clothing. Three pairs of high-heeled shoes, obviously purchased before Theresa had taken up living on a desert island, were all that attested to her recent presence.
Gingerly, Anna sat on the bed. Desp
ite what one presumed to be nightly occupancy, it was also covered in piles. After losing Theresa, Lanny had snuggled down each night with laundry-presumably clean since there were no unpleasant odors-magazines and two CD players, one with the lid broken off.
Anna wondered where Theresa had painted. She couldn't imagine works of such detail and clarity being created in the three-dimensional cacophony that was Lanny Wilcox's home.
On reflection, two things surprised Anna regarding Lanny's Theresa: that she'd not left him sooner than she did and, again, that she'd left her artwork behind.
Anna was not an artist. Her creations tended to be big and functional: benches, tables, outhouses. And they were usually painted with a wide brush and any color that was cheap and handy. Even so, when she had put time and effort into making something, she didn't like leaving it with people or in places where it would be abused. If she was disturbed when wicked campers sprayed graffiti on privy walls she'd nailed together, how much more painful it must have been for Theresa to abandon her works to a home where they would eventually be vying for wall space with snowshoes and frying pans?
No answer came. What came was nothing, followed by a short sharp jab of fear. For a moment Anna had absolutely no idea in hell why she'd come to Wilcox's, why she was upstairs in his bedroom with a flashlight.
Flashlight.
Memory rushed back and she laughed out loud with relief. She'd seen a light in the upstairs window. Or thought she had. "Stop that," she said. She'd seen a light. There was no reason anyone whose purposes were legitimate would enter in the night without turning the lights on. The fact that she had done just that wiggled momentarily, but she dismissed it and shone her light around the room. With the plethora of goods crammed into it, she doubted anyone would have been able to find anything and, at a glance, it seemed there would be little to tempt a thief.
The beam raked across the headboard and onto the nightstand. Its surface was the only clear spot in the house. Everything had been wiped from the top of the low table, including reading lamp and alarm clock. In their place a digital camera had been left lying on its side.
Unless Lanny, in a fit of pique, had done it himself at the cost of his lamp, it must have happened after he'd gone, by someone in a hurry, someone who had little respect and no patience for Lanny's stockpile of junk. Maybe somebody who'd been in the house that night, the camera one of the intruder's objectives. Since he or she hadn't taken it with them, they must have been after the pictures stored inside.
Having propped the flashlight on one of the pillows, Anna picked the camera up and turned it on. She hit the eject button. The disk had been left in place. She turned the knob to "retrieve" and began going through the images. They looked as if a child had taken them-or a man testing a new camera under various light and movement conditions. Lanny had no children that she knew of, and the camera was several years old and had the look of a piece of equipment much used, so neither explanation fit. Photo after photo of the corners and walls of the rooms Lanny lived in, flash photos, taken by night, of uninteresting twists and turns within the casemates. Close-ups of what could be anything: cannon barrels, dock pilings, the flagpole.
Anna clicked through, wondering what it was her phantom intruder had sought, which picture incriminated, embarrassed, compromised or exonerated.
After several dozen views of Lanny's kitchen closet, she realized what she was looking at. Not pictures of walls, floors and shelves of canned goods. These were pictures of what Lanny saw, visions he'd tried to validate digitally. Pictures of things that weren't there.
She set the camera back where she'd found it. She needed to get out of that claustrophobic house, away from unseen things that drove men mad.
Such was her need to breathe untainted air that she fled, not home to her bed, but out into the middle of the parade ground where she could stand beneath open sky. There she stared at the stars, sucked in lungfuls of warm, damp air and yearned for the sweet purifying oxygen of her western mountains. Something was terribly wrong: with Fort Jefferson, with Lanny Wilcox, with her. Tears of self-pity stung her eyes, and she wondered if she should take Molly's advice and go to the mainland, to a hospital, get a CAT scan, see a head shrinker. At the moment being in a clean modern room in the solicitous care of professionals didn't seem such a wretched alternative.
Temptation was shouted down by duty. Bob was out of the running; Lanny was gone. Without her the fort would have no law enforcement. Anna pulled herself together, stopped gulping air and breathed slowly, deeply. When her heart ceased to race and her mind to gabble, she turned to go back to her quarters.
A light from the southern casemates stopped her. This was not the ephemeral will-o'-the-wisp she'd spent the shank of the night chasing but the solid reassuring yellow glow of electric lights shining from the archway into the maintenance shop and the long row of generators that provided the fort with the stuff of the good life: light, heat, air conditioning, radio to the mainland and water pressure.
Instead of being alarmed by yet another nocturnal manifestation, Anna looked forward to a confrontation with a live, flesh-and-blood human being, evil or not.
The bringer of light was Daniel Barrons. Anna watched him for several minutes before he knew she was there. Clad in khaki shorts, bedroom slippers and an uncharacteristic tank top that unveiled his tattoos; not only the classic tattoo of the naked girl under the palm tree but a number of others which, screened from view by a prodigious nest of chest and back hair, she couldn't make any artistic sense of. Daniel moved down the line of roaring generators, opening panels and fiddling about inside. It wasn't until he'd visited all but the one beside which Anna stood that he noticed her. When he did he squeaked loudly and threw up both palms shoulder high, reminding her of an illustration in a turn-of-the-century acting book her husband had found at The Strand in New York. The photograph was a graphic lesson on how the Thespian should indicate surprise. She and Zach had laughed at it then. Those were the days when The Method was the rage. Seeing "surprise" produced so spontaneously, Anna wished Zach had lived to share the joke.
Anna hadn't thought of her dead husband in days. Since giving up carrying the torch a few years back, occasionally as much as a week would pass during which she wouldn't say his name to herself. Remembering him after the night she'd just had was oddly comforting. Perhaps being insane in the company of actors wasn't as stigmatizing as it would be in law-enforcement circles.
"Jesus H. Christ," Daniel bellowed over the din of the six generators. "You scared the shit out of me."
"You screamed like a girl," Anna said, uncertain whether she wished to provoke or was merely being accurate.
"Swear to God I thought you were a ghost. We got 'em, you know. And I did not. If anything I squealed like a stuck pig."
Again Anna was unsure if the statement that Daniel would rather be likened to a pig than a girl was meant to provoke or was merely accurate. Either way it amused her. Still she couldn't relax enough to smile. His mention of ghosts put her back on her guard. Had the mention been intentional? Pushing the power of suggestion? Mocking? Or was it just coincidence?
"What are you doing up?" she shouted over the noise. Half a dozen generators, each eight feet high at a guess and half again that long, created noise that poured into ears and corners and arches and nostrils like wet concrete filling spaces, then hardening till it was an effort to move or think.
Daniel made a gentlemanly gesture indicating they step out of his office and away from the racket. For half a breath he paused to let her go first. When she didn't, he moved ahead. On the whole Anna approved of good manners and believed "ladies first" was a pleasant perk. It wasn't misplaced feminism that kept her feet rooted to the floor; it was a desire not to have anyone behind her till she figured out what was throwing her world out of balance.
Daniel walked to the underground cistern built where once the foundation of a chapel had been laid. He sat on the edge of the raised flat "roof" used to collect rainwater.
"What did you ask me?" Daniel dug in the pocket of his shorts and fished out a pack of Marlboros so crumpled it looked as if he slept with the things.
Anna's suspicious mind started to question every detail of his language and body language. With an effort she shut the internal inquisition down. Over-vigilance was as blinding as being oblivious and wasted a whole lot more time. She repeated her original question. "What are you doing up?"
Daniel lit his disreputable-looking smoke with an old-style lighter made of silver with a top to click open and shut. The wings of the Harley Davidson insignia were on one side in raised brass. "Thought I heard something. I figured I'd better check the generators."