Borderline

by Nevada Barr

  The ability to do something to save oneself—or at least try to—was the only panacea for fear she’d found reliable. Standing unarmed with a baby she was responsible for and a large male person of unknown motivation sitting down the hall from her, Anna realized what a terrible disservice America was doing its women—all of its citizens—in teaching them never to do for themselves but to wait for the authorities to come and save them from whatever dilemma had arisen. No wonder people grew fat and lived in fear of going out at night or allowing their children to play in the front yard.

  Taking a deep breath, she shoved the fear down with the intake of oxygen and slid Helena into the crook of her left arm. With her right hand free, she gathered up the knife and carried both back down the hall.

  Darden didn’t rise when she’d left and he didn’t rise when she returned with the baby. By the twitching, Anna knew he wanted to, that he had been brought up to remain standing until women were seated and rise when they entered or left a room. That he didn’t was a point in his favor as far as she was concerned. It indicated that he was sufficiently sensitive to know she would be more comfortable with him in a chair, that his size and strangeness and maleness needed to be cut down to size by sitting.

  “So that’s the girl, is it?” he asked as Anna leaned against the far counter, setting the knife on the tile ready to hand. He might have sought to reduce the ambient anxiety by remaining seated, but he was amping it up again with his narrow study of Helena. Leaning forward, his coffee forgotten, both hands flat on the tabletop, he stared fixedly at the baby. Instinctively, Anna held her closer, tucking Helena’s face against her shoulder.

  “May I see her?” Darden asked. Apparently unaware of Anna’s discomfort with his single-minded interest, he held out his hands as if she would, in some alternate universe, actually put the child into them.

  “Not a good idea,” Anna said. “She bites. Vicious little thing, really. Birth trauma brings it out in girls.”

  “Babies don’t have teeth at that age, do they?” Darden asked seriously. Anna was pleased there was at least one individual in the world who knew less about infants than she.

  “Pointy fangs,” Anna said. “Real teeth grow in later.”

  Belatedly Darden realized that she was, if not precisely kidding, then relating false information. He dropped his arms and sat back. The beefy old security guy was doing the trick he was so good at; he was making himself look harmless and kindly, fat and slow.

  “I wouldn’t hurt a baby,” he said. “Whatever you may think of me.”

  “I don’t much think about you,” Anna said honestly, wondering why he thought she would and would think badly of him.

  “Fair enough,” he said, and lifted his coffee cup to his mouth. Anna smiled. He wasn’t drinking, he was pretending to drink, part of his kindly persona; don’t insult the hostess’s cooking.

  “You don’t have to drink that,” Anna said, taking pity on him.

  “Thank God.” He pushed the cup away and smiled at her. The exhaustion in it did more to alleviate her fears than any of the tricks he’d learned over the years. “You can sit down. I’m not here to hurt you or the baby.”

  Anna didn’t move. “Why are you here?”

  “I wanted to ask you some questions about the woman you found in the river.”

  “You were there when Paul and I gave our report to the chief ranger.”

  “That was a report of the facts. I was hoping, if I asked you nicely, you’d tell me the rest: your impressions, those of your husband or any the college students might have shared with you. I’d like to know everything you know.”

  “Why? What is the woman in the river to you?”

  Darden didn’t answer right away and Anna was willing to bet he was thumbing through a well-used card file of lies for all occasions. He must have come up with a blank. “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know. Habit maybe. It happened while I was in the park. While I was on duty. Anything out of the ordinary that happens around Mayor Pierson, especially when she is in the process of lighting a fire under a lot of people, is of interest to me. That good enough for you?”

  “I can’t tell you much,” Anna said. “We didn’t spend what you would call quality time together.”

  “What did she look like?”

  Anna leaned her hip against the counter, cradling Helena, not sleeping but quiescent, and thought back to the river gorge. “She was not young—at least not helplessly young, if you know what I mean. I’d say in her late twenties, maybe even early thirties. Tall. I don’t have a good sense of it, she was never standing, but I believe she was five-foot-seven or -eight. Long black hair. If it had been straight and untangled it would have come down to the middle of her back. There was either a lot of natural wave in it or a very good perm. For a pregnant woman, she didn’t weigh much. I doubt she’d gained more than fifteen pounds for a six-pound baby; her arms and legs were slender. She was wearing a cheap rayon dress and no jewelry that I noticed. White underpants, the kind with the stretch panel to accommodate a growing stomach.

  “I think her skin was good, but it’s hard to say after being in the water as long as she had been and undergoing a lot of physical trauma. She had a pedicure and a bikini wax. That’s about it,” Anna finished.

  “What color were her eyes?” Darden asked.

  “Brown, I think. Maybe light brown or even a touch of hazel. Mostly they were closed and I had other things on my mind.”

  Darden stared into the black depths of the coffee cup he’d pulled back toward himself during Anna’s recitation. Tired of standing holding a baby that weighed more with each passing moment, Anna dragged a chair over to the counter and settled on it while the security man contemplated his coffee grounds.

  After a while she was about to prod him; she’d promised to meet Chrissie, Cyril and Steve at a place called the Terlingua Porch around five. It was getting near that and she was looking forward to getting out of the house she’d not yet straightened and away from people she did not know but who refused to remain strangers. According to Lisa, the porch was within easy walking distance and could not be missed. According to the sheriff’s deputy and her own observations, that was a good thing. The Honda was totaled. The engine would start but the metal had been smashed back into the wheel wells until, if the tires could turn, they would be shredded.

  “The Park Service is doing body recovery today, that right?” Darden asked without looking up.

  “That’s right,” Anna said. “They’ll be able to bring back the body of the outfitter who was shot but I’d be surprised if they find Helena’s mother. She was down where the river-scour is powerful. The body would have been washed away. If they do find it, it will be downstream a ways.”

  “That’s okay, then,” he murmured, and Anna didn’t think he was talking to her. When she’d met him, Darden didn’t strike her as the sort to talk to himself, at least not out loud, and most certainly not in the hearing of others.

  “What’s okay?” she asked sharply.

  “Did I say something was okay?” Darden’s gaze turned inward, then he started. “Getting old,” he said, and seemed to mean it. “Okay that they’ll find it downstream, I guess. My mind was on something else.”

  Anna didn’t believe him. “You come all the way down here to get my take on things and your mind is someplace else?”

  “Sorry,” he said. Then, probably to deflect any more interest in what he had said and why, he said: “Tell me about the shootings.”

  Anna did. Why she was being so generous with information, she wasn’t sure. Partly because it didn’t really matter, most of what she told him was a matter of public record by now. Partly because she wanted to tell the story. Her sister, Molly, after a lifetime as a psychiatrist to the rich and twisted of New York City, had formed a theory that people had a need to water down the emotion in the stressful events in their lives by relating them a minimum of three times. Anna had told hers to the chief ranger, she’d related pie
ces of it to Gerry Schneider, and this was the magical number three. As she went through the tale again she had to admit her sister was a smart woman. With each telling she could feel a bit of the drama leak out.

  “So,” she finished. “Helena’s mom died, Carmen died, Lori died and the rest of us lived happily ever after.”

  Again Darden was silent. It was wearing on her nerves. “What are you after?” she asked. “I’ve got a dinner date in about ten minutes. Maybe if you told me what it is you really want to know, we could get this over with.”

  The sharpness in her tone brought his gaze up from where it had retreated again into the cup of cold, vile-tasting coffee. “Dinner? Where is there to go to dinner around here other than the lodge?”

  “The kids found a place called the Starlight Theatre. On a porch or something. I’m meeting them there and I should get going.”

  “Mind if I tag along?” He wasn’t looking at Anna; he was staring at Helena.

  “It’s a private party.”

  “I understand,” he said. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

  Anna stood behind the screen door and watched until his black SUV had backed out and driven away. Then she spent another thirty minutes feeding and changing Helena. She never did get around to cleaning up the house. Babies were incredibly time-consuming.

  When enough time had elapsed that she was sure Darden White had left the neighborhood, she started out for the Terlingua Porch and the Starlight Theatre. Being out of doors brought a sudden freedom. Dry air smelling of dust and secret life filled Anna’s lungs. Helena weighed less; the claustrophobic terrors of the house were gently blown away. Sere earth under her feet was solid, connecting her to the center of the planet. A sky of unfathomable size purified the world of men. Breathing deeply, she felt bands of steel she’d not known were bound round her rib cage falling away, and she was glad the wreck of the Honda had made her travel the half mile on foot.

  She reached the T intersection where the narrow dirt lane leading to the Martinezes’ house joined the main route through Terlingua Ghost Town. A few yards to her left the road forked and, beyond a sign showing the skeleton of a boy in a baseball cap riding a skateboard, she saw what had to be the Terlingua Porch. A long low building, raised four feet from the gravel of a wide parking lot, was fronted with a deep frontier-style porch. Benches lined up beneath the windows of a mercantile store, a museum and a façade sporting the sign “Starlight Theatre.” Men who wouldn’t have looked out of place in a sepia-toned photograph of the gold rush days in California sat smoking and drinking beer.

  Anna turned to walk the last hundred yards toward this idiosyncratic outgrowth of civilization and saw Darden White’s SUV parked just off the road where he could see anyone coming or going down the road to the Martinezes’. He sat behind the steering wheel watching her as she hurried across the road, feeling her sense of freedom ripping away.

  When she was close enough to the public eye to feel safe, Anna hazarded a glance back over her shoulder. The SUV was creeping slowly down the road. As she half-ran toward the sanctuary of the porch with its beer drinkers she heard the SUV rev up and crunch back toward the main highway.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Images from books with titles long forgotten and movies she recalled only vaguely popped and fizzed in Anna’s mind as, clutching an infant to her chest, she hurried across the gravel parking lot toward the Terlingua Porch: Liza on the ice, Tess on the heath, Little Nell on the streets of London, women helpless and fleeing. The visions and her present reality were alien to who she perceived herself to be and she felt an impostor; an overweening sense of having awoken in an alternate reality where this Anna was similar but not the same as the one she was accustomed to.

  Helena was a newborn, maybe even premature, though her parts all seemed to be in good working order. She needed to be seen by a doctor. She needed to be in a safe environment. And Anna was carting her through the desert like a bundle of dirty laundry. She was probably killing her. Lisa shouldn’t have left her alone with the child. She shouldn’t have left the Martinezes’ house. But the Martinezes’ house no longer felt safe, nowhere felt safe.

  This cascade of terror and misery washed away her aversion to turning Helena over to the authorities. By the time she reached the imagined sanctuary of the raised porch, Anna was ready to turn Helena over to the first kindly female and arrest herself for child endangerment.

  Where the hell was Paul?

  “Anna!”

  She looked up to see Gerry Schneider staring at her from one of the benches, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Secondhand smoke; another thing that killed babies.

  “What are you doing?” Gerry chided. She put out the cigarette and came down the wooden steps to meet Anna. Wordlessly Anna handed her Helena, took the beer from her hand and downed a long swig.

  Gerry cradled Helena and led the way back to a bench a ways away from the smokers. “This baby is only a day old, Anna. She shouldn’t be out breathing the germs of anybody who passes by. What were you thinking?”

  Anna sat down, still holding Gerry’s beer. The chiding served to deepen her helplessness. “A couple of thugs tried to kidnap her today,” Anna said. “Then Darden White decided to drop by and act creepy. Gerry, we’ve got to get Helena somewhere safe, away from this place.” Hysteria edged Anna’s voice but there was nothing she could do about it. “Where are the people that do these things?”

  Gerry was staring at her. Anna shut up.

  “The chief ranger has been in touch with Health and Human Services,” Gerry said. “They are sending someone down tomorrow to take custody. She’ll be taken to El Paso, to the hospital there. What they do after that, I don’t know. Bernard was trying to reach you today to let you know but no one was answering your cell phone.”

  Anna had forgotten who Bernard was. The chief ranger, it came back to her. She had forgotten she even had a cell phone, the thing had been so worthless in the Chisos Basin. It was packed away in the suitcases they’d brought down from the lodge and the suitcases were in the trunk of the totaled Honda.

  “Oh,” Anna said. Earlier she would have been upset at the news “they” were coming to take Helena and drop her in the machinery that devoured unwanted children. This evening the news was cause for celebration. She took another swig of Gerry’s beer.

  “I can buy you one of your own,” the reporter said mildly.

  “Sorry,” Anna said, and put the beer down on the bench closer to Gerry than to herself. “Should we take Helena back to the Martinezes’?” Anna used the word we intentionally. She wanted nothing more at this moment than to abdicate all responsibility for the newborn. The fear that her incompetence would factor into death or long-term impairment of the baby was strong in her.

  “Is there anybody there, besides thugs and creepy security guys?” Gerry asked.

  “No.”

  “Why don’t we wait, then.”

  Anna nodded and stared out at the range of mountains small with the immense distances of Texas. Low in the sky the sun painted the desert with soft hues of coming evening; the spiny, biting nature of her inhabitants was muted with pastels and a faint haze of dust.

  They sat companionably without speaking. The weight of the baby was no more than six pounds, seven at the most, but the weight of responsibility was crushing and Anna reveled in having her arms empty, her lap unpopulated. To have a child was a form of incarceration, the acquisition of a tiny jailer who dictated the terms of imprisonment. Not having children was a decision Anna had made when she was a young woman. Those around her had told her, just wait, the biological clock will begin to tick at twenty-five, at thirty, at thirty-eight, and you’ll change your mind. The mile-stones had passed and no ticking. She’d never regretted the decision, never looked back and wished, never envied other women their families. As attached as she’d become to Helena, Anna had not changed.

  Gerry broke the silence. “Darden came by, you said?”

  “Yes. Just no
w. He didn’t do anything untoward. He wanted details about Helena’s mother and he was fixated on Helena herself but he wanted something more—at least he sure seemed to. He was strung-out and tired. It looked like he’d been rode hard and put away wet since we had breakfast at the lodge this morning.” Time had gotten skewed. Breakfast faded into a past so distant Anna could see it only through a fog of years instead of hours. Had she been younger then? At the moment she doubted she’d ever been young.

  “I’ve known Darden a few years,” Gerry said. “Never well, but the way people do when they move in the same circles. I liked him.”

  “Liked, past tense?” Anna asked.

  “You know I smell something rotten about the mayor,” Gerry said. “I was doing a bit of checking on the histories of people she’s surrounded herself with, hoping to get a feel for what it might be. Darden has known Mayor Pierson since she was three years old. I don’t know if there was anything perverted about it; he’s twenty years older than she is and devoted to her. You always think of sexual abuse but, if that was the connection, it was never reported or hinted at and the mayor probably wouldn’t have him on her personal security detail if that was the case.”

  “Stranger relationships between abused and abuser have happened,” Anna said.

  “True, but this doesn’t feel like one—not that way. Before Darden was with the Houston mayor’s office, he was Secret Service for thirty-five years. I couldn’t tap into those years. I suppose a Wood-ward or a Bernstein might be able to dig that deep but not me, at least not in Timbuktu with an Internet connection that comes and goes as it sees fit. The last seven he’s been with Judith during her first and second terms as mayor. That, I could dig into.”

  “Houston’s Deep Throat?”

  Gerry laughed and shifted Helena to her other shoulder so she could pick up her beer. “I do know a few people in town,” she admitted.

  “Did you find your tabloid bonanza?” Anna asked, remembering Gerry’s self-deprecating humor at chasing scandal.