Borderline

by Nevada Barr

  “Ladies,” Darden said by way of excusing himself, and walked away.

  “I’m disappointed you didn’t bring the baby,” Judith said to Anna. “I only got a glimpse of her last night but I would love to see her again. Is she staying with you at the Martinezes’ place? Where is that, Terlingua?”

  There was no need for the mayor of Houston to ingratiate herself with an out-of-favor ranger from a park not even in her state, so Anna figured the interest was genuine and answered.

  “For now,” she said. “At some point the child-care people will take over.”

  “And you don’t want that,” the mayor said. The woman had more insight than Anna had been prepared to grant her. That or Anna was more transparent than she liked to think she was.

  Anna didn’t say anything. She stirred her coffee so she’d seem to be doing something and stared out the window. Judith could help Helena; Anna wasn’t fool enough to think she couldn’t. Had Judith Pierson not been the mayor of a huge and rich city she would have been able to help Helena. Judith was a woman who knew her way around the system, Anna guessed. The woman sounded sympathetic and Anna’s first impression of her as a person who might kill and eat the children was undoubtedly off base. Still, she didn’t want Judith’s help with placing Helena and she didn’t know why. Gerry’s help she’d solicited, bartered for, and Gerry, well connected as she might be, probably didn’t have the clout Judith had to cut through red tape.

  “That’s an area I’m familiar with,” Judith said gently. “Just let me know if you need anything.”

  “Thanks,” Anna said. “I will—and I will need something.” She pushed as much gratitude into her tone as she could. Because she had taken against the mayor was not reason enough to turn away anybody who might be in a position to make Helena’s life better.

  “I do believe it’s time,” Judith said, and Anna was glad of a change of subject. “Are either of you going to come see what Ranger Martinez will make of this unfortunate circumstance?”

  Anna thought three murders rated more than “unfortunate circumstance,” but being a woman who could enjoy understatement in better circumstances she mustered a smile. “I think I’ll pass,” she said. “I expect I’ve heard most of it before.”

  Judith left Anna and Gerry sitting at the table nursing their third cups of coffee. Anna had the day to kill before she met Cyril, Steve and Chrissie for dinner at a place in Terlingua they had raved about. The Starlight Theatre on the Terlingua Porch; at least it should be colorful.

  After a moment she poked the disreputable leather satchel at Gerry’s feet with her toe. “What else have you got in there?”

  “The rest of my life,” Gerry answered. “What do you need?”

  “Do you have a laptop and satellite hookup?”

  “Does the Pope like long dresses? Of course I do.”

  She lifted the shapeless sack and plopped it on the table between the salt and pepper shakers and the crumby toast plates. Having cleared a place in front of her, she set up her laptop and phone. “What are we looking for?”

  “Bernard, or maybe it was Jessie, said this had happened before. That a woman trying to cross the Rio Grande to get medical treatment had been carried downriver and drowned. Can you find something on that, if it happened?”

  “Nothing easier,” Gerry said. From one of the satchel’s many zipped pockets she took a pair of reading glasses, the frames a tiger print with sparkles at the temples, and put them on the end of her nose. “Okay.”

  While Gerry searched new databases for stories that related to what they were after, Anna watched three vultures drying their wings on the top of a mountain, a small mountain from where she sat but big enough if it were to be measured from the ground up. Black and wide-winged, the center bird on a high finger of rock, the two flanking on slightly lower crags, they put Anna in mind of the thieves on either side of Jesus at Golgotha. That put her in mind of Helena’s mother crucified on deadwood and garbage. Had she been sacrificed on the altar of Freddy Martinez’s belief that the greater good would be opening the border between Big Bend and Mexico, that the new and better life breathed into Boquillas and San Vicente and Santa Helena—villages where the economy had been all but shut down with a single stroke of a pen—would balance out the evil of two murders?

  Anna couldn’t imagine Freddy in that story. A man with a wife and children, a man with a family he appeared to love, might kill other men or even women, but a pregnant woman? Anna doubted it. Unless she was more to him than a symbol, unless she posed a threat to the life he had or wanted, then this hypothetical dad could do it. Kill for personal reasons and pose the body for political reasons. Was this woman blackmailing Freddy, threatening to tear his family apart, take from him all he had? Was she carrying his child?

  That wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility but, even with the proposed obliteration of his world, Anna couldn’t see Freddy killing the fetus. Racism was a wretched thing, the putting on of individual traits to an entire race of human beings, but in Anna’s experience, Mexican men loved kids, venerated mothers-to-be. Not that one didn’t get knocked off now and then for the usual reasons, but she felt it would be a harder murder for them than for people raised in certain other cultures.

  Had another person killed the woman and Freddy helped dispose of the body in such a way it would look like an accidental death? That didn’t work, not unless Freddy and the supposed murderer were such dimwits they hadn’t known the woman was alive when they put her in the water. Particularly since it would seem one of the major motivations for putting her into the river while she was still alive was so the corpse, when it was found, would attest to death by drowning.

  Regardless of Anna’s continuing belief in Freddy’s intrinsic humanity, she wasn’t as comfortable leaving Helena in the care of his wife as she had been when she left that morning. That was another point in Freddy’s favor: if he’d wanted the baby dead, why had he asked his wife to feed it? To get his hands on it before child services whisked it away? To kill Helena before a DNA test could prove she was his daughter?

  That was a little draconian, Anna thought. With the mother dead, who would be demanding the DNA test? And, in this day and age, outside of his own family, it wouldn’t have much in the way of repercussions if it was Freddy’s child. Lisa might forgive Freddy an affair, but she would never forgive him for murdering a baby to hide it from her. At least Anna didn’t think she would.

  Two anti-Freddy facts were inescapable: Freddy knew something about the drowned woman and Freddy was sitting pat in the shooter’s seat when Anna and Paul had climbed out of the canyon.

  “Well, that didn’t take long,” Gerry said.

  “What’ve you got?” Anna hitched her chair around to the end of the table so she and the reporter could both see the computer screen.

  “An article written eight months after nine-eleven, about the time when the border was closed between the park and the villages.”

  They read together and silently. The article was short. Two days after the border was closed a young mother, the wife of one of Big Bend’s Mexican firefighters, the Diablos, had been stopped by Border Patrol while trying to cross the river with her mother and mother-in-law. In the confusion of the border patrolman trying to turn the women back and the anxious women, one of whom was in labor, trying to explain their predicament, the pregnant woman had fallen. The river wasn’t at flood level, but it was high enough she couldn’t regain her footing and drowned.

  The surviving women, mother and mother-in-law, had never been told the border had been closed.

  After three days of searching, a young river ranger named Freddy Martinez found her body in a strainer. The body was recovered and taken out by way of Rio Grande Village. The ranger who had found the dead woman attacked a border guard and had to be pulled off by his fellow rangers. The Park Service attributed the uncharacteristic behavior to fatigue and stress. Martinez had refused to be taken off the search. Another ranger told the reporter that Ma
rtinez had been without sleep for close to seventy-two hours.

  The border guard did not press charges.

  “Poor Ranger Martinez,” Gerry said. “The worst kind of déjà vu all over again.”

  “That or revenge,” Anna said. “Re-create the crime but this time the victim is ‘one of theirs’?”

  “I thought the woman you found was Mexican?”

  “Hispanic,” Anna said, and: “Maybe. Her baby has hazel eyes.”

  Gerry suffered a moment’s confusion, her sharp eyes clouding till Biology 101 came to her rescue. “Right,” she said. “Dominant gene.”

  “Nobody in America is all of one thing or all of another anymore,” Anna said. “But it’s interesting.”

  “It is interesting,” Gerry said. Her eyes were again going out of focus.

  Not confusion, Anna guessed. “What are you thinking?” she demanded.

  “Nothing.”

  “No woman is ever thinking nothing,” Anna said.

  “It has nothing to do with Freddy.”

  Anna tried to stare her down but it was clear this was the sort of secret Gerry had decades of practice keeping from more persistent and alarming inquisitors than Anna.

  Giving up with good grace, Anna leaned back in her chair. The coffee cup tempted her for a moment but one could only drink so much of the stuff before it warped the taste buds. “The article says Freddy stayed up seventy-two hours, then attacked a border guard,” Anna said. “You don’t hear a lot of reports of ranger brutality. We are a peaceful people for the most part, trained to use our radios rather than our guns, teach bad people to be good conservators of the wilderness and campers to work and play well together. Yet this river ranger with a nice wife and a kid at home drives himself to the edge of his endurance on a body recovery, then punches out the first border patrol agent he sees.”

  Gerry raised her eyes from the computer screen where she’d already clicked onto another train of thought.

  “Freddy knew the woman killed in 2002,” Anna said. “Don’t you figure? Why else all the dramatics?”

  Gerry glanced back at the laptop. Anna didn’t know if it was merely a habit that gave her time to think or if she’d continued the research while Anna deliberated the old-fashioned way.

  “The article didn’t say he did,” Gerry replied.

  “Freddy hasn’t said he did either. He hasn’t mentioned the case at all. The two mirroring each other so closely, wouldn’t you think he’d have brought it up, told the story of when he stayed up for three days running? Most people would have.”

  Anna stopped talking and let her gaze wander back out the window. The mountains were compelling, ever-changing as the angle of light changed. For a while now she’d not felt like herself, or like the self she remembered. The pit was new, the fear of spiraling down until she was everybody’s albatross and nobody’s friend. Or wife.

  But the pit wasn’t the whole of the difference in her internal landscape. Mindscape. Fog was a part of it. She’d always been good at multitasking. For the past week even mono-tasking had been an effort. Part of it was this was not her park, not her crime to solve, not her evil to root out. Most of her consciousness wanted to pull away, go to the movies—if there were any movies within a day’s drive of Big Bend—sit in the desert sun and watch lizards. She would have, too, she told herself, if there was anybody trustworthy to look after Helena, if Cyril’s cow was found safe and growing fat on beaver tail cactus, if Freddy would shut up and keep his job.

  “Would you?” Gerry’s voice brought her back into the dining room.

  “Maybe,” Anna said. “I’m getting tired of fighting the good fight. If it is a good fight. No. I wouldn’t,” she said with sudden determination. “Good or bad, this isn’t my fight.”

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth she realized Gerry had not been listening in on her thoughts and then questioning her about them. She was referring to whether Anna would speak of the old case when it was reenacted years later.

  “Yes,” Anna said. “Sorry. My mind has been wandering of late.”

  “Ahh,” Gerry said knowingly. “The Change.” She said the phrase the way Rod Serling used to say “The Twilight Zone.”

  “Jeez,” Anna said. That was all she needed at the moment. “I’m not even fifty.”

  Gerry looked at her over the top of her leopard-print half-glasses, one eyebrow lifted high. “But I expect you have always been precocious, haven’t you?”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The itching under Darden’s armor was getting worse. If he could have peeled off the skin of humanity and left it lying in the dirt, he would have. Over breakfast, the way Judith was, the women discussing the corpse in the strainer, the baby, all of it grated against the speculations he’d been avoiding. Judith was different. She’d changed, and recently. Since they’d come to this godforsaken waste-land of gray rubble the state was so proud of. Even as a girl she’d been a creature of extremes, and she had grown into a woman who seemed capable of molding those extremes into visions, of holding opposites within her whose opposing natures would have destroyed a lesser woman: fragile and unbreakable, wise as a crone and innocent as an eight-year-old child, mean as a snake and capable of great kindness.

  Stomping down the uneven natural stone steps that led from the lodge to the parking lot below, Darden startled a herd of deer no bigger than Great Danes and they scattered onto the pavement, their tiny hooves making a faint clipping sound.

  Darden never saw them. He was looking for the city SUV his security men were driving. Where in the hell were Kevin and Gordon? Automatically he reached for his cell then stopped, snorting his displeasure like an old and angry bull. Why did anybody live in these primitive places? Cell phones were useless. Nothing to look at but snakes and spiny plants that would kill a man as soon as feed him.

  And Judith hissing that Charles would never have kids, that he would never marry his girlfriend. Not saying it the way any woman would but spitting it like a curse or a promise. A line had been crossed and he hadn’t been paying attention at the time. Probably lost in one of his furry old-man dreams. Damn it!

  His little mayor had that look that said she’d crossed a personal Rubicon and there was no going back for her. Darden had seen the change before a couple of times. Once when an agent he was working with had made the decision to kill his wife and himself because she was running around. They’d been on assignment together, Darden remembered. Out of the country for two weeks while the president made the rounds of the Middle East, for all the good it did. Terry, the guy’s name had been Terry, Terrance Clark or Parks, a short name full of barking. They’d been standing around doing what they were paid to do, looking for trouble, and Terry had been out of it, not paying attention, caught up in whatever he was playing in his head. Then his face firmed, a sucking in like skin being shrink-wrapped to bone but subtle, a thousand tiny muscles and sinews tightening up a fraction. Terry had changed himself with the decision, Darden was sure of it. From that minute on he’d been a little different. He said things that didn’t make sense until after he committed the murder-suicide, cryptic comments about his wife doing or not doing a thing again, about what he would or wouldn’t need in a couple weeks. Little things that nobody commented on. They were just weird. Off.

  Judith was weird and off. The fixation on the baby. She’d been upset when he’d told her on the way to breakfast that Anna didn’t have the kid with her.

  Her and Charles and kids and divorce, that had to be it. The worm turns and Judith falls apart. Darden had never asked her but he knew she never thought Charles would leave her. Never. She was aware on whatever level she allowed herself to be that he had had a couple of affairs. She didn’t like it but they hadn’t seemed to worry her, not in the sense that she felt she was losing her husband to another woman. For a man like Darden it was hard to see how a woman, especially a woman like Judith, who could have pretty much any man she wanted, could love a man at the same time she believed him to be suc
h an utter coward that he’d never get up the gumption to walk out of a marriage he hated.

  Well, now he had. Was that enough to bring the whole house of cards she’d so painstakingly erected down around her ears?

  He caught himself fumbling for his cell again. He wanted to make a Goddamn phone call. Was that too much to ask?

  Wanting to give Judith time to get herself together, they’d walked down from the cabins to the dining hall, not more than a few hundred yards, but Darden wished they’d driven. Too ornery and set in his ways to listen to the voice of reason, he’d brought his usual shoes, black leather lace-ups with leather soles. He hadn’t been standing long enough for his feet to hurt, but the leather clapped against the asphalt with each step. The racket jarred him. A fat squirrel, dun-colored with a white stomach that hadn’t gotten so round gathering nuts, sat on a flat-topped rock at the side of the lane. It sat up and pressed a paw to its white chest and chittered at him as he neared it.

  “What are you looking at?” he snarled. The creature dropped to all fours, twitched its tail, and vanished off the far side of the stone. No phone, no television and glamour rats mocking the paying guests, Darden thought.

  The itching was killing him. Where the hell was Gordon?

  A car was coming up behind him too fast. Needing to have a place to put his anger, Darden swung around to glare at the driver.

  “About damn time,” Darden muttered, and pointedly looked at his watch. They weren’t late; in fact they’d turned the job around in record time. Darden wasn’t appeased. He would have liked to have an excuse to ream somebody out.

  Gordon let down the window.

  “Hey, boss.”

  “Meet me at my cabin,” Darden snapped, leaving his subordinate wondering what he’d done to deserve it.

  It crossed his mind to ask for a ride the rest of the way, or pull Gordon out through the side window, Eastwood style, and drive the last forty yards himself, but he did neither. The first was embarrassing, the second was no longer possible, maybe never had been possible, only a trick for stuntmen and actors.