Borderline

by Nevada Barr

  “Mind if I join you for breakfast? I could do with a bite myself.”

  “Give me about an hour.”

  Darden turned smartly and walked smoothly back to the SUV, his spine straight, his shoulders square.

  He’s showing off, Anna thought.

  White stopped before he opened the door to his vehicle and threw her a mocking smile to let her know he was showing off and they both knew it.

  Anna laughed and waved. Breakfast would be good. Anna wanted to know what in the hell he and his little blond mayor were up to.

  TWENTY-SIX

  An hour. That would give him time to check on Judith. When she’d sent him down the mountain to invite Anna Pigeon to lunch, her RPMs were getting close to the point her engine was about to start screaming. Or freeze up. He’d never seen her so strung out. He’d been with her through a lot of political battles; the underhanded backstabbing world of politics didn’t tax her nerves, it exhilarated her. Domestic traumas were the ones that got to her little girl’s heart and she often reacted like a kid, Darden mused. Wild and emotional and not always completely rational.

  This was a rotten time for Judith to go to pieces, Darden thought. There were too many plates in the air. Darden felt like the guy on Ed Sullivan who had to run from pole to pole to pole keeping the darn things spinning so the whole mess wouldn’t crash to the floor and shatter.

  Judith had been upset by the news of the woman found in the strainer. That didn’t surprise Darden; he hadn’t much liked it either. She was concerned about the baby the Pigeon woman had saved. Darden thought about that for a while.

  He didn’t know much about babies—didn’t know anything about babies, if the truth be told. They were an uninteresting mystery to him but he’d seen enough sane women and a few sane men lose their minds over the little things to know they were powerful magic.

  Charles had wanted kids. To carry on the Pierson name, no doubt, Darden thought sourly. To give the guy some credit, he did like kids. His sister had three and he doted on them. Judith had nixed that idea shortly after the wedding. Kids and political ambition didn’t mix and she’d known what she wanted. Now that she was in her forties, had her biological clock kicked in? She hadn’t said as much to Darden but then that wasn’t the sort of thing they talked about. Thank God.

  Did she have an idea of using that baby to further her career? That might make sense, in a warped kind of way. He could see her, looking every inch the concerned maternal woman, holding the golden-skinned child up as an example of the evils of a porous border.

  He shook his head and smiled as he eased the big SUV around the parking lot and headed up the narrow back road to the cabins. Judith was the one to sell it. The kid snatched from the Rio Grande by the mayor of Houston would make a fine emotional appeal and soften the hard edges that could turn off women voters and bleeding-heart liberals.

  Darden didn’t want any part of that scenario but it was better than some he could imagine. At least the little bugger would get a good home. That is, if it was a little Mexican baby and if its mother was trying to cross to the promised land and instead went to the Promised Land.

  That speculation was one Darden had been studiously avoiding. He was trained in obedience and loyalty. It suited him to follow; he’d known it since he was a youngster. Men like him were born to be soldiers in somebody’s army, to give their lives for somebody’s flag. Whose flag was an accident of birth. Born in the U.S.A., Darden had followed the stars and stripes and was loyal to the commander in chief, whoever he was and whatever he believed in. When he retired he’d shifted that allegiance to the mayor of Houston.

  Worry about right and wrong wasn’t a concept he embraced. Right and wrong were ephemerals; they changed from every angle, from hour to hour, depending on which side of any of a thousand borders a soldier was born.

  The armor of blind loyalty that he’d worn so comfortably for so long was beginning to show cracks. The corpse in the river, the baby sliced out with a priest’s pocketknife. How biblical was that? Anna should have put the kid in a basket made of those great big reeds that were taking over and floated it to the nearest pharaoh.

  That whole mess crawled under Darden’s protective skin. The coincidence of it happening now and here and in that way was hard to swallow but if he didn’t swallow it he was obliged to check on it. Swallowing the truth that might uncover would be worse; it would be swallowing hemlock as far as he was concerned.

  A man loomed into the periphery of his daydream and he cursed himself for a fool. He’d never used to have problems concentrating, observing his surroundings clearly. Maybe a little hemlock was just what the doctor ordered.

  The loomer was Gordon. Heavy with the thoughts he’d been entertaining, Darden stopped the SUV and lowered the tinted window. “Hey, Gordon,” he said. “I’ve got a job for you. And take your buddy Kevin with you. He’s been getting on the mayor’s nerves.”

  Dispatching his agents made him feel both better and worse but it also allowed him to shelve the speculation for a while. At least until he had hard information.

  A SPACE HAD Opened up nearest the stone stairs to the cabins; he parked the SUV and stepped out. For a moment the peace of the Chisos Basin swept away the turmoil in his mind. Rain had washed the air so clean it nearly sparkled. Each twig and branch of the pines glistened and the intoxicating smell of pine and sage and sunlight eased the wrinkles from his gray matter. It was so close to narcotic he stood and breathed for a minute, the need to hurry and fix, abort, dissuade, dissemble washed from him for that brief time.

  Maybe when he retired and his mom died, he would buy a cabin in the mountains, grow his beard out and become a hippie. He’d missed the whole free-love, tune-in, turn-on, drop-out business when he was in college. Revisiting it in his so-called golden years might be entertaining.

  Probably not, he thought as he shook off the joy of the day; he’d been born in a city and he would die in a city. The pulse of the life of the human hive was as necessary to him as the pulse of his own heartbeat.

  Comfortably shouldering the weight of his world once again, he started up the walk. He heard the hissing when he was still fifteen feet from the shared porch. It evolved into words as he stepped under the overhang.

  “Keep your voice down!” A stage whisper carried through the open screened window of Judith and Charles’s cabin. “I will not have a scene. I will not.”

  “My voice is down,” Charles said in a conversational tone. He didn’t sound angry, just tired. “Don’t fight this, Judith. If you do, I promise you I will make a scene that will bring your whole house of cards down around your ears.”

  “Please wait. You don’t have to make a decision now, do you? Please wait awhile.” Judith no longer hissed like an angry snake. The change was painful to Darden’s ears. She was begging, a lost little girl begging for her life. God but he hated to hear that. When her mother had finally walked away for good, abandoning her seven-year-old daughter to the care of the babysitter, Judy had pleaded in that way, so tiny and afraid. Hearing it from the grown woman brought back the pain and helplessness Darden had felt as a young man trying to soothe a brokenhearted little girl.

  Damn Charles.

  Usually, when Judith and Charles fought, Darden made himself scarce. What went on in the marital arena was none of his business and he liked it that way. It was when it was out of the arena that he stepped in. Given there was so much at stake and he was the man who was going to have to put Humpty Dumpty back together again after the fall, he sat down quietly in one of the plastic armchairs outside his cabin, no more than five feet from their door, and listened.

  “I’ve waited long enough, Judith. You’ve got what you wanted. You’re a big wheel, the mayor of Houston. I’m sorry if that’s not enough for you, but I’m through putting my life on hold while you conquer the world. It’s a done deal. I saw to it before we left Houston.”

  “I’ll fight you.” The anger was back, the cold anger of a grown woman.


  “No you won’t, Judith. How would that look? Desperate.”

  “Do you love her?” The little girl was back and tugging at Darden’s heart if not at Charles’s.

  When Charles spoke again his tired voice held a peculiar mixture of steel and sympathy. “I’m going to marry her, Judith. As soon as the divorce is final.”

  There was an intake of breath, then, razor-sharp edges cutting out of her throat, Judith said, “Don’t tell me you’ve knocked up your bitch this time. What a cliché you are. She going to walk down the aisle with a big slut’s belly?”

  “Don’t do this,” Charles said.

  “Why? You can do it but I can’t talk about it? You’re such a hypocrite!”

  “Please, Judith, don’t do this. It’s over. Let me go quietly. Neither of us needs this at the moment.”

  Again Judith regressed to that seven-year-old watching her mother drive away for the last time. “Stay, Charles, please, I love you. Just stay for a while. It will be different, you’ll see. Wait until the election is over, give me that at least. Give me time. Please.”

  Darden could hear Charles’s sigh from where he sat, an exhalation of the years of bowing down to Judith’s wishes, of his family’s need to keep the Pierson name free of scandal, of his own inability to shake off the chains shackling him to live his own life. For a moment Darden thought he was going to knuckle under again, give Judith what she wanted, and was about to heave his own sigh, one of relief, but Charles surprised him.

  “Sorry, Judith, I can’t.”

  “You won’t marry your bitch,” Judith nearly snarled. “Never.”

  Charles opened the screen door.

  “Never. You might as well get that through your head, Charles. You aren’t going to leave me and marry some little whore. Never.”

  Charles stepped out onto the porch and gently closed the screen door behind him, holding it until it latched the way a person would who was afraid any small noise would disturb those within.

  “Charles, please, I love you,” trickled on tears from inside.

  Darden half expected Charles to say, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” but he only turned away.

  “You heard?” he asked when he saw Darden sitting on the porch.

  “I heard,” Darden said.

  “I filed for divorce before we left Houston.”

  “So I gathered.”

  “Stay out of it, Darden.”

  “Why don’t you go do whatever it is you need to do,” Darden said as he pushed himself up out of the plastic chair. “I need to see to Judith.”

  “Stay out of this, Darden,” Charles said again, this time with a hint of threat in his voice.

  Darden said nothing, just reached for the door to Judith’s room. Charles turned and walked quickly down the shallow stone steps. He was pushing buttons on his satellite phone as he went.

  Steeling himself for Judith’s pain and anger, Darden knocked gently on the wooden frame of the screen door then opened it, not waiting for an invitation to come in. Judith would be beyond words at this point. All he could do for her was provide a shoulder to cry on. In the past, when Charles strayed there’d been something he could do about it, pay people off, scare people off, force Charles back into the mold for another month or year or ten years. This time he didn’t think that would work. Charles had finally grown a spine and was willing to take the punches that would be thrown at him to get what he wanted.

  He wouldn’t get what he wanted and Darden found himself feeling a little sorry for the guy, little being the operative word. Stepping into the room he was rocked back onto his heels as Judith flew at him, eyes streaming, and glued herself to his chest. Burying her face in his shoulder, she let the sobs come. She was a little thing; bones like a bird, Darden thought as he gathered her up and carried her over to the bed. A chair would have been more comfortable for him—after she’d turned eight or nine, he felt she was grown up enough that no man should see her undressed or be in her bedroom—but the straight-backed wooden chairs were too small for the both of them. He settled against the headboard, one foot on the floor and one knee bent under to make a bit of a lap for her and let her cry it out.

  “You’re okay, you’re strong,” he murmured as he gazed over the top of her blond head at the rustic wooden dresser against the wall. Judith was strong. Whether he was strong enough for the storm forming around her, he wasn’t sure. The situation might have gone too far this time.

  “Charles is leaving me,” she cried, the words gurgling with tears and misery.

  “I know, Judy. It’s been coming. You’ll be all right. You’ll get through this, wait and see.”

  “I won’t!” she wailed, and he patted her back and stroked her hair.

  “Shh, shh, you’re okay.”

  “My head is so full of monsters,” she cried.

  When she was little and had bad dreams or horrible thoughts after her mother left, she’d called them monsters that lived in her head. He’d not heard her use the term in thirty years. Tears came to his eyes and he did what he had done then, when he was a young man and she was a child. He pressed his lips to her forehead and made a loud sucking sound then spit with a noisy p’tui.

  “Got one out,” he said. “A nasty bugger. Black and leathery and spiny.”

  Again he pressed his lips to her forehead and slurped then pretended to spit.

  “Ouch! That bugger had claws!”

  Judith looked up at him and smiled, a weak watery smile but he was glad to see it.

  “What would I do without you, Darden?” she asked, and had the same look in her eyes that had captured him so many years before.

  “Just what you always do, Judy. You’d dry your eyes, suck it up and run back into the fray.”

  She laughed and got up from his lap. It was a relief. Light as she was, his right leg was going to sleep.

  Judith crossed to the small mirror and, taking a hairbrush from the top of the dresser, began putting herself together. Darden escaped the bed and took one of the straight-backed kitchen chairs.

  “Charles thinks he’s going to marry the bitch,” she said without looking at him.

  Darden didn’t say anything. He knew better than to talk when Judith started speaking in a voice sharp as lemon juice. He didn’t like to hear her like that and he didn’t like what the sourness did to her face. From where he sat he could see it in the mirror, how her lips became twisted and her eyes narrowed.

  When she did it she reminded him of the witch in Snow White, the animated version Disney made, a beautiful face in the glass turning dark and sick and ugly. He looked out the window so he wouldn’t have to see it anymore.

  “He said he loves her and she wants to have a litter of his brats.”

  A little black-and-brown bird with shining bugle bead eyes hopped up from the fieldstone steps to the concrete slab of the porch. Cocking its head, it fixed one eye on Darden and waited expectantly. Deciding he wasn’t going to proffer any crumbs, it hopped away on its spidery feet till it hopped out of sight beneath one of the armchairs. Darden kept his eyes fixed on where it had disappeared, trying not to imagine Judith’s face. The sound of the hairbrush was loud, scraping her scalp with each pull. If she kept at it her thick bleached hair was going to stand on end.

  “Charles wants to rush the divorce so he and his brood mare can start playing house right away. Not in Houston—he said that like he was doing me a big favor—he’s going to move to Virginia to be near the bitch’s parents, who are all slavering like dogs over the aspect of having little grandkiddies shrieking underfoot.”

  “Stop it, Judy,” Darden said. The bitterness was beginning to erode the core of him where his love for her was housed.

  “He’s in for a big surprise,” she said with a black brand of satisfaction. “No wife. And if I’ve got anything to say about it, no brats.”

  “Judith, that’s enough,” Darden said sharply. She stopped brushing her hair. He’d been right; it was standing out in a ragged halo
around her head.

  “Leave it alone for now,” he said a bit more gently. He started for the door.

  “Where are you going?” she demanded. The hairbrush was held stiffly in her hand, the arm half raised as if it was a weapon and not a tool for personal grooming.

  “I’m meeting Anna Pigeon, the woman who saved the baby, for breakfast.”

  “Don’t leave me,” she said pitifully.

  “I’m not leaving you, honey. I’m just going to get something to eat. I doubt I’ll be gone even an hour. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  “Can I come?”

  Darden looked at wild hair, the tear-streaked face and eyes that were clouded with pain and fury and God knew what else.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, honey. Why don’t you take a hot shower and relax. I’ll bring Mrs. Pigeon up after we’re done.”

  “Please let me go with you,” she begged. “I’ll be good.”

  Darden had never been able to say no to her. He considered doing it now for her own good but the hope and hurt on her face wouldn’t let him.

  “Do you promise?” he said.

  She traced a cross on her chest and said, “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a million needles in my eye.” There was a mocking edge to the smile she gave him and he laughed.

  “Fix your face and flatten your hair and come on,” he said.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Houston security guy hadn’t shown up yet and Anna was outside the dining room on the patio, sitting backward on a picnic table bench, her elbows on the tabletop, her feet stretched in front of her, the sun on her face. She didn’t mind waiting when she could do it in such a magnificent spot. Lazily she watched as a bright summer tanager worked its way through the crooked branches of a pine. One of Texas’s little-known delights—little known to everybody but birders—was that it was home or host to a tremendous variety of winged creatures, some quite rare. Anna loved the colorful birds, indigo buntings and hummingbirds and bluebirds and tanagers, but her favorites were common house sparrows. They were so delicate and curious and brave. Often too brave. Piedmont, her big ginger tiger cat, had nailed one on her balcony in Colorado not a month before and Piedmont was getting on in years and not as quick as he once was.