by Nevada Barr
There were reasons: she wasn’t in her own jurisdiction—cops, even tree cops, didn’t like anybody else stirring in their pot—and she was in bad odor with the central office. Cooties were not merely a malady of elementary school children. Adults were as vulnerable as any third-grader. Nobody wanted to get somebody else’s cooties on them. But Darden guessed it was much simpler than that. Anna Pigeon was a woman and women were easier to deal with when they were cast as mommies and wives and victims, roles most of them had never played from a time before many were born.
Underestimating women was the last gasp of male dominance, Darden figured. He used to do it himself. A first lady of the U.S.A. had cured him of that before he was thirty. She was little like this Pigeon woman and ladylike and perfectly groomed and soft-spoken and he’d mistaken that for being weak. It nearly cost him his career. He’d not made the same mistake again with any woman.
Anna Pigeon might look like a waif out of a Dickens novel but she was taking in everything that was said, scanning the table the way he scanned a room, looking for anything amiss. Women noticed different things than men did. Darden hadn’t exactly made a study of it, but he’d paid attention. Female agents were better at noticing personal details and interpreting them: unironed shirts, beard growth, body language, vocal tones, sidelong glances, lapses in personal hygiene, cosmetic surgery, hair dye, what clothing cost and where it came from. In the political jungle this paid off more often than watching for the glint of gun barrels in windows or bulges under sport coats.
The man standing behind her chair—Darden assumed he was her husband by the way he was standing guard over her—interested Darden as much as the Pigeon woman. He didn’t look any better than she did, white hair, a little too long for corporate work, was matted on one side and sticking out in wires on the other. His face was drawn with fatigue and years, his clothes were filthy and torn. Scratches marked his arms and his legs between the drooping cargo shorts and the battered Tevas. Yet he was utterly dignified. No, dignified wasn’t the right word. There wasn’t any sense of class consciousness or pride. More that he seemed completely comfortable in his own skin, completely devoid of insecurities. He was still as an oak tree is still on a windless day; the life is there, and the strength, but what one notices is the welcoming shade.
Darden figured he’d like Mr. Pigeon if he ever got the chance to know him. He doubted Judith would have much interest in him. He didn’t look like a man who could be used. That’s what Darden had been sent here for; things and facts and people Judith could use. Mr. and Mrs. Pigeon didn’t look like good bets. He was turning his attention to the three college kids when the door to the conference room opened and a tall woman with tightly permed gray hair slipped noiselessly in. A secretary, nobody but secretaries had so soft a footfall and so firm a determination. They had to be trained in it in secretarial school but Darden could never get one of them to admit it. They’d just laugh and say, “Oh you!” She leaned down to whisper in Bernard’s ear.
“Good. Thank you, Darlene.” Darlene whispered out and they all sat quietly, watching the open door till she returned with another woman whom they had apparently been expecting.
“Thanks, Lisa, you’re a lifesaver,” Bernard said as a Hispanic woman in her late thirties stepped into the conference room. She looked ordinary: nice eyes, a little thick around the middle, black hair with a stylish salon cut, Levi’s over a broad, alluring bottom and a very generous bosom. Very generous. Anna Pigeon seemed to find her extraordinary. She looked startled when the name Lisa was proffered. Then the set of her mouth changed subtly and she looked pleased or respectful. Darden wasn’t sure which. Maybe both.
“Hi, baby,” Martinez said, and stood to give his wife his chair.
She didn’t sit but walked around to the “Them” end of the table. “Is this the famous river baby?” she asked Anna.
“That’s it,” Bernard said. “Thanks again, Lisa. You can take it into my office if you’d be more comfortable there.”
Lisa ignored him, waiting for Anna to answer her question. “Yes,” the ranger said. She didn’t offer up the child and there was a fierceness in her manner that Darden didn’t understand unless the baby was her grandchild and her daughter was one of the victims of the “shots fired” reports circulating up at Chisos Lodge.
“Do you have a name for her?” Lisa asked, as if she and Anna and the baby were alone in the room.
“Helena,” Anna Pigeon said, and she finally held out her arms so Lisa could take the baby.
“Helena and I are going to dinner,” Lisa said, smiling down at the woman with the empty arms. “Then I’ll bring her back to you.”
“Lisa, we haven’t decided—” the chief ranger began.
Lisa Martinez shook her head fractionally and he stopped mid-sentence. She smiled again at Anna and took the infant from the room. Before they had all settled back into their chairs there was a gabble of noise from the hallway and the door was opened again by Darlene, who did not look pleased.
“Mayor Pierson,” she said flatly.
Smiling, Judith managed to slip by the secretary and still appear to have been ushered in.
Darlene wasn’t the only one displeased. This was a bad idea and one Judith had not shared with Darden.
He half rose, hoping that she had come down the mountain in the shank of the evening merely to give her good old Darden a ride back to his cabin. No such luck. She settled into a chair on the Us end of the table with the aplomb of one for whom the meeting has been called and nodded graciously at Bernard Davies, granting him permission to resume his job.
Darden suppressed a groan. Had he not been feeling so sorry for himself, he would have felt sorry for the chief ranger. Bernard cleared his throat, probably trying to think of a way to throw her out, get his conference room back, and he might have done it, too, had Judith not preempted the decision.
Leaning in a bit, not flirty but conveying sincerity, she looked Davies in the eyes and said: “I sure appreciate what you’re doing.” Without saying so she made it sound like he’d invited her, that this was her party.
Darden eyed her narrowly. Her linen trousers were still unwrinkled and her silk blouse had not wilted. The short blond bob was neatly in place and her makeup perfect, but she had a feverishness in her eyes. Drugs would have been the first thing that popped into Darden’s mind, but Judith didn’t do drugs. As far as he knew, she didn’t. After the wink from Kevin, he was beginning to think he didn’t know as much about Judith as he’d believed.
Sex was his second thought, but if it was a roll in the hay with Kevin or anybody else, it had not left her languorous or satisfied. Judith was avid, greedy, not so the general public would notice, but Darden could see it. He thought she was afraid, as well, and anything that frightened Judith was bound to terrify him.
TWENTY-ONE
I know you’ve gone through this all before for Jessie and I know you’re tired so I’ll try not to make this any longer than I have to.” The chief ranger was talking, Bernard Davies. Anna knew him vaguely from a forty-hour refresher they’d attended in Apostle Islands some years before. He’d been a district ranger at Great Sand Dunes, if she remembered correctly. She tried to concentrate on what he was saying but she found herself watching the door through which Lisa had gone with Helena. Anna had been dead wrong about Freddy Martinez’s wife. She wasn’t number two or three; she was his first love and mother of two children, a nineteen-year-old son and Edgar. Edgar had been, as Martinez had put it on the ride out from the canyon, “a pleasant surprise.”
Lisa had volunteered to serve as temporary wet nurse for Helena. For this Anna loved her, but she suspected she would have liked her even if she hadn’t proved useful. The baby was a curious thing, Anna thought. She left an empty place in Anna’s lap when she was taken to dinner with the generous Lisa Martinez, rather like when a cat jumped off her lap. The fleeting moment of acceptance and comfort was gone, replaced by a sense of freedom to move. Realizing she was holding
her arms in an awkward bowl ready to accept baby or kitten, Anna relaxed them and let them lay in her lap. They were heavy, so much so she wondered if she would be able to lift them again when the time came.
“Mrs. Davidson?”
Lost in her thoughts, Anna hadn’t been following the conversation around the conference table. A prolonged silence brought her back from her woolgathering expedition. All eyes were upon her.
“Mrs. Davidson?” Bernard Davies said again.
That was her. Anna was Mrs. Davidson. “Yeah. Right,” she said, shaking her head to clear it. “Sorry. Tireder than I thought, I guess.” Did Bernard recognize her from the Apostle Islands class? For reasons she could not put her finger on, she believed he did. The “Mrs. Davidson,” once a title of respect, had become one of dismissal in certain circles. Ranger Pigeon, or Ms. Pigeon, or simply Anna, would have put them on a more equal footing. The chief ranger was putting distance between himself and her, she could feel it as clearly as if he’d straight-armed her, but she hadn’t a clue why he would act that way.
He didn’t keep her in the dark.
“I understand you’re on administrative leave from Rocky,” he said. “Down here on vacation?”
Bernard had called her chief ranger. Anna had hoped her lapse into tears in Vincent James’s office had been confidential, but she knew the hope was in vain. Nothing was confidential but that which was kept in one’s own skull. Records were subpoenaed, people talked or, if they didn’t talk, they told by their silences. Every move Bernard made, the inflections in his voice, the way his eyes slid away from her when she tried to meet his gaze, told her he believed her to be a broken vessel. The use of her married name let her know that he preferred it that way. When he’d first laid eyes on her—given that he’d erased Apostle Islands from his mind—she’d been holding a baby. That, too, would count against her. Women with babes in arms were seen as victims. Not that there was malice in it, but they were to be protected, given parking places nearer the supermarket doors, and first, in theory at least, to be handed into the lifeboats when the ship was going down.
Anna didn’t know whether to fight it, give in to it or laugh. In the end she did nothing; she answered the chief’s question. “Yes. Vacation.”
Relief flickered momentarily in Bernard’s eyes and she knew he was well aware of what he was doing, that he was intentionally putting her on a shelf—or out to pasture. She flattered herself that it was because he knew she would not let go of this, administrative leave or not, till she had found out who killed the three women and where Helena would go from here. Flattered herself because even as she enjoyed the thought, she was aware it was not true. Bernard just wanted her in a pigeonhole where he would not have to deal with her.
Anna smiled at him. This was one pigeon it was going to be hard to label and forget. The smile bothered him and he looked quickly to Paul. Anna was surprised until she caught sight of herself in the black mirrors night had made of the windows. The smile on her face had a wolfish quality, a tinge of the cold of a Michigan winter hardening the edges.
“Mr. Davidson—”
“Paul.” In the mirror of glass Anna saw her husband’s smile as he put things on a less formal basis. There was nothing cold in it. Nothing warm either. She suspected he was as aware of Bernard’s dismissal of her as she was and it was making him wary.
“Paul,” the chief said, more comfortable now. “Why don’t you sit down?”
Anna had known but not given any thought to the fact that Paul, as exhausted as he must be, had chosen to stand behind her and Helena rather than relax. Something, maybe just instinct or habit, was keeping him on guard.
He took the chair next to hers, reached over and lifted one of her hands from her lap and folded it into his, both resting on his thigh. The heat and the touch buoyed Anna up and the title Mrs. no longer nettled her. Not for a moment did she doubt it had been meant to belittle but, given her Mr., it never would. She closed her fingers around Paul’s and waited to see what Bernard had next on his “to do” list now that he believed she had been summarily disposed of.
“You’ve been through this with Jessie.” He nodded at the head of Law Enforcement, Jessie Wiggins. He’d been with the paramedic and the two rangers who had fetched them off the rim of the canyon. Jessie nodded. As far as Anna knew, Jessie didn’t have an agenda and hadn’t seemed to react to the news that she was on administrative leave for PTSD or whatever the park had chosen to call it. “I’m going to have to ask you to go through it once more for me. Mayor Pierson of Houston and her head of security, Darden White, are in the park for the border impact convention and asked if they could sit in.”
Because Bernard was being a twit, Anna was tempted to allow herself a small curl of the lip to let him know they were all aware that the mayor had railroaded him, but she was too tired to be petty. The mayor was an interesting woman. She was petite and, though she had a gym-toned body, she worked at hiding the fact with soft silk that flowed from her shoulders, lending fullness to small breasts and roundness to what Anna guessed would be sinewy arms. Her hair was incarcerated in what Anna thought of as a Texas bob, very expensively blond and done in stone. Rather like a toned-down, Bumble & Bumble version of Ann Richards’s coif.
The eyes were her most captivating aspect. She had schooled herself in dress and makeup, hair, nails, even body type and managed to create a package that was both attractive and businesslike, physically unremarkable, neither sexy nor unsexed, the fine line women in politics had to walk every day on the way to their closets. To a careful observer, though, her eyes gave her away, Anna thought. They did tonight, at any rate. Surely she hadn’t been entrusted with running a city with eyes like that. The Christian right wouldn’t allow it. Not in Texas.
Judith Pierson’s eyes burned. If Anna squinted, she believed she could almost see the conflagration behind the brownish green irises. The mayor had the eyes of a hungry vampire or a sainted lunatic in mid-vision.
“Mayor Pierson.”
The man Bernard had introduced as Darden White spoke from his corner. Anna had forgotten he was there and his voice startled her. Darden had drifted out of her consciousness as a fat old guy in the mayor’s entourage. When he spoke he was so very much there, she was surprised she could have overlooked him.
“Can I get you a coffee or a soda?” White asked his boss deferentially.
The mayor paused, took a breath, then said: “A soda if they’ve got it. Thank you, Darden.” When she turned back to the table the fire in her eyes might not have been extinguished but it was no longer in sight.
As he left the conference room it occurred to Anna that he might have intentionally disappeared into the woodwork, the way she often disappeared in plain sight along trails, situated where the natural line of sight would miss her, quiet and unmoving as a rock. People would hike within feet of her, chattering and laughing, never noticing that they were being watched.
“Paul, could you tell us what happened?” Bernard asked, and sat back as if he didn’t wish to have the messiness of their adventure splash on him during the telling.
Paul looked to Anna to see if she needed to say anything before he began. She didn’t. Paul started with the rescue of Easter, and then told of losing the raft. The chief ranger rolled his eyes at the mention of the cow but otherwise made no comments.
Anna watched Cyril and Steve and Chrissie. The twins were uncharacteristically quiet and Chrissie slumped in her chair with no more life than a deflated balloon. They were exhausted and, now that the adrenaline had been reabsorbed and they were no longer living from moment to moment trying to stay alive, the full impact of the deaths of Carmen, Lori and Helena’s mother would be hitting them.
The deaths were waiting to hit Anna. She could feel them like black shadows drifting between her and the overhead fluorescents, swimming past the corners of her eyes always just out of sight but for a gray wisp or a stealthy movement. Ghosts were not the spirits of the uneasy dead, but the projections of
the living, drifts of guilt, fear, failure and mortality too great to be contained in the mind.
Anna didn’t know why they had chosen to join the specters that had followed her home from Isle Royale or whether or not they would remain with her. Logically she should have been able to banish them easily. She had neither caused nor contributed to the cause of any of the deaths. She had saved whom she could, doing the best she had with what was at hand. That used to be good enough to get her to sleep at night.
No more.
“Chrissie found the woman caught in the strainer,” Paul said, and he leaned over to pat Chrissie’s shoulder. He smiled at her with the full force of priest and father figure behind it. Chrissie visibly grew stronger; she sat up straighter and tossed her head. Her hair was so filthy and matted it more or less clunked but the gesture had a smidgeon of the old arrogance and Anna was pleased.
“Do you want to tell this part?” Paul asked. Years as a priest would have taught him the necessity of letting people share their horrors, Anna realized. There was much about her husband she did not know, they’d not been together long enough. Instead of making her uneasy she enjoyed a tickle of excitement at the wonders she had yet to discover in this man she had married.
“Yeah. Okay,” Chrissie said as she pulled herself together to be a productive member of the adult world.
“Paul, if you don’t mind . . .” Bernard left the sentence unfinished but his meaning was clear. He wanted to hear a real account, not one by a girl in her teens or a middle-aged woman who’d recently fallen apart.
Chrissie began to deflate again. “I wasn’t in on a lot of this part,” Paul said easily. “Chrissie’s the only one who was there start to finish.”
