Ill Wind

by Nevada Barr

  Anna banged through the screen door and leaned on the glass-topped counter. In true bureaucratic fashion, the inside of the graceful little building had been cobbled into cramped “work areas” and further vandalized by the addition of indoor-outdoor carpeting and cheap metal desks.

  Frieda Dierkz looked up from her computer. In her thirties, with short reddish-brown hair cut in an ear-length wedge, more hips than shoulders and more brains than just about anybody else in the Visitor Protection and Fire Management Division, Frieda was the heart of the office. Or, more correctly, as the computer-generated sign on the bulletin board above her desk announced, Queen of the Office. Anna guessed there’d been a time, maybe not yet quite past, when Frieda had hoped to be Queen of a more intimate realm. But a plain face and, more damaging to matrimonial prospects, an air of absolute competence, had made her a career woman.

  Though Frieda might have seen that as a bad thing, Anna didn’t. It was always the breadwinner, she’d noticed, who had the adventures. Support staff—whether at work or in the kitchen—seemed ever relegated to keeping the tedious home fires burning.

  “So . . .” Anna said for openers.

  “Patsy called. Tom’s in the park.” As ever, Frieda was economical with words.

  Patsy Silva was the superintendent’s secretary; Tom the estranged husband. Ex-husband. “What this time? Bad guitar music at three A.M.?”

  “Suicide notes and chocolates. The chocolates were put through her mail slot. The dog opened them. Half melted on May’s bank statement. The dog threw up the other half on a four-hundred-dollar Indian rug.” Frieda laughed. In his capacity as two parts joke, one part pathos, Tom Silva had been a thorn in law enforcement’s side since Patsy had been hired the previous winter. Had they lived outside the park they would have been the problem of the Colorado police. Inside park boundaries the task fell to the rangers.

  Anna hated domestic disputes. The good guys and the bad guys kept switching roles; an outsider didn’t stand a chance. “Where’s Stacy?” Anna hoped to drag another ranger along for moral support.

  “Occupado. Another medical at Cliff Palace. Elderly lady.”

  “Damn. What does Patsy want us to do about it?”

  “Just go talk to her, I guess. She wasn’t too specific. ‘Do something but don’t say I said.’ ”

  Anna nodded. “On my way.” Halfway out the door she stopped and turned back. “Frieda, can I come visit Piedmont tonight?”

  “Anytime,” the dispatcher returned, already back at her computer. “If I’m not there, let yourself in. Door’s never locked.”

  THE tower house was the most picturesque, if not the most convenient, of the historical homes. Named for the round tower that housed the master bedroom, the staircase, and a small round living room, it sat on a gentle hill just west of the museum behind the more conventional homes. For one person it would have been perfect. For a woman with two teenage daughters it had proved a nightmare of bathroom scheduling and closet-space allotment.

  Rumor had it, because of the girls, Patsy would be moved as soon as a two-bedroom became available, leaving the tower house up for grabs. Due to the housing shortage, when Anna entered on duty eight weeks before, the district ranger had parked her in the seasonal women’s dormitory till more suitable quarters could be found, so it was with a more than slightly proprietary eye that she allowed herself to be ushered in.

  Patsy Silva was compact, with the voluptuous curves of a woman who has borne children. Her hair was close-cropped and honey-blond, her eyes made impossibly blue by tinted contact lenses. Teeth as straight as an orthodontist’s slide rule were shown off by hot-pink lipstick drawn on slightly fuller than her natural lip line.

  Patsy smiled and waved distractedly toward the living room with its mess of clothes and magazines littering every flat surface. “Missy and Mindy are over at Frieda’s watching the VCR,” she said, as if the temptation of video explained a hasty and untidy departure. “She’s got quite a movie collection and lets the girls watch almost anytime. It helps.”

  Anna nodded. Bucolic park living was fine for adults and children but could weigh heavily on adolescents with a long summer on their hands.

  “Sit down. Sit.” Patsy shooed Anna toward the kitchen. “Coffee or anything?” With the offer, as with most of Patsy’s communications, came a tight bright smile. More a habit of placating, Anna suspected, than a genuine show of happiness.

  “Coffee’d be fine.”

  The kitchen, the only square room in the house, was small but efficiently made, with wood cabinets and a restaurant-style booth under one of the two windows. Anna slid into the booth. Patsy busied herself at the counter. Anna wasn’t particularly fond of reheated coffee, but people seemed more comfortable after their hospitality had been accepted. Maybe some ancient instinct about breaking bread together. Or maybe it was just the comfort of having something to keep their hands and eyes occupied.

  Patsy put the cups on the table along with a sugar bowl and creamer in the shape of ceramic ducks wearing blue calico bonnets.

  “Thanks.” Anna pulled the cup to her and poured pale bluish milk out of the duck’s bill. Patsy’s smile clicked on then faded slowly, the effort for once proving too great.

  “It’s Tom,” she said, as if admitting a tiresome fact.

  “Chocolates.”

  “And a note. It’s awful. How can you protect yourself from that? The police act like I’m lucky to have such an attentive husband.”

  “Ex-husband.”

  “Yes. Thank you. He makes me forget. Ex-husband. Ex, ex, ex as in exit, finito, gone. Except that he’s not.” She put her fingers to her temples, looking as if she would have run them distractedly through her hair had not each wave been expertly coaxed into place.

  “What makes him more than a nuisance?” Anna asked. At a guess, she might have added “other than guilt?” How could a woman not feel guilty for walking out on flowers, candy, and serenades?

  “I was afraid you were going to ask her that,” Patsy replied with an explosive sigh. She slumped back in the booth. “I don’t know. I mean, he doesn’t really do anything. It’s just kind of an increasing sense of weird. Know what I mean? As if my not folding like I always did with the flowery courtship business is pushing him near some edge. This last note seemed, well... edgy.” Patsy apologized with a particularly bright smile.

  Anna would have laid odds that Patsy Silva had apologized a lot in her thirty-seven years; sorries and smiles poured like oil on life’s troubled waters. “Can I see the note?”

  “Yes. I kept it. At least I’ve learned that since the divorce. Anything edgy, I keep. You can’t imagine how silly this all sounds, even to me, when I try to tell it to some big burly policeman who thinks his wife would die and go straight to pig heaven if he ever paid her this kind of attention. Here it is.”

  While she talked, Patsy rummaged through a doll-sized bureau complete with miniature vanity mirror. Decals of ducks matching the creamer were centered on each tiny drawer. From the bottom drawer she pinched up a scrap of paper. Holding it by the edge as if she didn’t want to smudge incriminating prints, she laid it on the table.

  In a childish but legible scrawl, more printing than script, was written: “What do you want, Pats? I’ve give you everything. A car, nice close, everything. What do you want? Maybe you want me to do like that guy you told me sent somebody his ear. I’ll go him one better. I’m not living without you, Pats. I’m not.”

  “And you think it’s a suicide note,” Anna said. To her it read more like a threat but she was not privy to the inner workings of Tom Silva’s mind. Being the new kid on the block, Anna’d not yet caught up on the gossip.

  “I wish it was a suicide note!” Patsy snapped.

  Anna liked the anger better than the shiny smiles. At least it rang true.

  Patsy, who’d been rereading the note over Anna’s shoulder, slid onto the bench beside her. Such proximity made Anna uncomfortable. Before her husband, Zachary, had been k
illed, when she’d lived in the confines of New York City, Anna’d fought for personal space on elevators and in subway cars. Since joining the Park Service and moving to less constricting climes, the need had increased, rather than the opposite. An acre per person and bullhorns for communication struck her as about right for socializing.

  She turned as if to give Patsy her full attention and put some space between them.

  “I told Frieda it was a suicide note because it seemed easiest—you know, made sense for me to be calling.” Patsy picked up her coffee but just stared into it without drinking. “It was that ear thing he said—like van Gogh. Besides the chocolates there was an envelope. One of those little square ones that come with florists’ arrangements.”

  Anna waited, sipping coffee made gray and tepid by skim milk. Patsy didn’t go on with her story. “And the envelope?” Anna prompted.

  “I burned it.”

  Since silences didn’t draw Patsy out the way they did most people—too many years of being a good girl and not speaking till spoken to, Anna guessed—she asked her what was in the envelope.

  “A little piece of brown material, soft, like expensive crepe. Tom isn’t circumcised. I think it was foreskin.”

  Anna winced. It seemed a little “edgy” to her as well.

  For maybe a minute neither spoke. Whether Patsy sensed Anna’s discomfort with her proximity or, once her information was told, no longer needed the closeness, she moved to the sink to dump her untouched coffee. When she returned she resumed her place on the bench opposite.

  “What do you want me to do?” Anna asked.

  Patsy burst into tears.

  While Patsy Silva cried, Anna thought.

  “I don’t suppose Tom has any outstanding wants or warrants against him?” she asked hopefully.

  Patsy shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

  Anna didn’t know if she was apologizing because she still cried or because her ex-husband wasn’t a known felon. “I’ll run him anyway. You never know.” After a moment she said: “Maybe a court restraining order; keep the guy away from you. I’ll look into it; see if you have to prove harassment, what it will take to keep him out of Mesa Verde.”

  “It’s too late. He’s here,” Patsy wailed, sounding like the little girl who saw poltergeists. “He’s got a job with the contractor putting in the new pipeline.”

  The waterline. It was getting so Anna was tempted to blast the thing herself. Perhaps Mesa Verde’s staff had been on the outs for decades—living in isolation where dead people were the main natural resource had to have an impact—but since she’d entered on duty the pipeline had been the lightning rod.

  “Are you dating anybody?” Anna asked abruptly.

  Patsy looked pained. “Not exactly,” she said, not meeting Anna’s eye.

  She was dating somebody. A tidy old-fashioned triangle in the making. “Does Tom know?”

  “No! I don’t even know for sure.” Patsy smiled a shy smile. Inwardly Anna groaned.

  “Talk to him,” Patsy pleaded.

  “Sure,” Anna promised.

  “Talk to his boss. Mr. Ted something. He seems reasonable.”

  “Ted Greeley. I can do that.”

  “But don’t get him fired. With Missy and Mindy both in high school next year we’re counting on the child support.”

  Anna repressed a sigh. Domestic stuff. “Gotta go,” she said, glancing at the clock over the sink. “Quittin’ time.”

  Patsy laughed for the first time in a while. “Hills blew his overtime money on an all-terrain vehicle. I’m kind of glad he did—he’s so cute at budget meetings when he begs.”

  “Take care,” Anna said, setting her Smokey Bear hat squarely on her head and taking a last look around quarters she hoped soon would be hers.

  “I’ll keep anything else... personal... Tom sends and give it to you,” Patsy promised as she held open the door.

  “I can’t wait.”

  Summer was off and running.

  TWO

  NO REST FOR THE WEARY—OR WAS IT THE WICKED? Anna couldn’t remember. There was definitely no rest for those fated to share dormitory quarters.

  Her briefcase, used for carrying citation notices, maps, and brochures, banged against the screen door, jarring her elbow. Simultaneously her ears and nose were assaulted. The first by the Grateful Dead and the second by a kitchen that would daunt even the most hardened health inspector.

  Early on in this allegedly temporary housing arrangement Anna realized she had two choices: bite the bullet or play Mom. As she had neither the taste nor the inclination for the latter, she had spent the four and a half weeks since the seasonals entered on duty knee-deep in unwashed dishes and empty beer cans. The mess wasn’t as hard to take as the noise. After some sparks had flown she’d been given a room of her own but the walls of the flimsy, prefab structure were so thin, at times she swore they served better to conduct than deflect sound waves.

  Clad in a homemade ankle-length sarong of double knit, Jamie Burke was draped across one sofa. Jennifer Short, the other woman with whom she shared the two-bedroom house, was sprawled in a pajama-party attitude. They were intelligent, funny, interesting women. Left ignorant of their domestic habits, Anna would undoubtedly have found them delightful.

  As she tried to slip unnoticed into her bedroom the imperious call of “Stop there!” arrested her progress.

  The order came from Jamie, one of the army of seasonal interpreters hired on each summer to lead tours of the cliff dwellings and, for a short time—or so Hills repeatedly promised—Anna’s housemate at Far View.

  Dutifully, Anna waited, briefcase in hand.

  In her late twenties, Jamie had the look of someone who has been athletic all her life. Muscular hips and legs gave her a stocky silhouette that was accentuated by the flat-brimmed hat and cloddy shoes of the NPS uniform she wore on duty.

  In contrast to her juggernaut physique, her face was a perfect oval, the skin flawless, setting off pale blue eyes and a sensuous mouth. Jamie’s hair, fine and smooth and blue-black, fell to her knees in a single braid thickened by red yarn woven through and bound around, Apache style, at the tail.

  Jamie boasted that she inherited the black tresses from a half-blood Cherokee mother but Anna strongly suspected that she dyed it. In a women’s dorm there were few secrets. All of Jamie’s body hair was not of the same raven hue.

  “What’s up?” Anna asked, trying to keep the weariness from her voice.

  “Stacy had to walk an old lady out of Cliff this morning. Where were you?”

  Anna ignored the accusatory tone. “What was the problem?”

  “Some kind of pulmonary thing. Wasn’t breathing right. There was that old guy last week.”

  “Yup.” Again Anna waited.

  “They’re pissed. I’m not surprised, either.”

  Now Anna was lost. The previous week’s carry-out had gone well. The man’s wife had even sent a glowing thank-you letter. “The man’s family is pissed?”

  “No-o.” Jamie drew out the syllable slightly, as if Anna was too obtuse for words. “The Old Ones. The Anasazi. They should close this park to everybody but native peoples. It’s not Frontierland, it’s a sacred place. We shouldn’t be here.”

  Jamie Burke leaped from one drama to the next. In the few short weeks Anna had known her she’d been through exposure to AIDS, been engaged to a nameless state senator in Florida, and been involved in an affair with a married man so discreet it had to be imaginary. The pipeline was a bandwagon made for jumping on.

  “Ah. Chindi.” Anna used the Navajo word for spirit or—she was never quite sure—evil spirit. “Could be. Listen, I’ve got to slip into something less deadly.” She grimaced at her gun and escaped down the hall.

  Once divested of the dead weight of her gun and the airtight shoes required by NPS class “A” uniform standards, Anna felt less hostile. By the time she’d poured herself a generous dollop of Mirassou Pinot Blanc, she was civilized enough to join the part
y in the front room.

  The television was on with the volume turned down and Jamie was verbally abusing Vanna White as she turned the letters on “Wheel of Fortune.” It was a nightly ritual that seldom failed to amuse.

  “Arms like toothpicks! Look at that,” Jamie was exclaiming. “I don’t think she’s pretty. Do you think she’s pretty? Who in God’s name thinks she’s pretty? Little Miss Toothpick Arms. Little Miss White Bread.”

  Anna curled her feet under her on the nubby fabric of an armchair. The boxy room was furnished in Early Dentist’s Office but it was serviceable. Anna, barefoot, in pink sweat-pants and an oversized man’s shirt, surrounded by girls with Budweisers—or women that looked like girls from a vantage point of forty—had a sense of being an uncomfortable traveler in time. Even the cheap southwestern print of Jamie’s sarong put her in mind of the India-print bedspreads she’d found so many uses for in her college days. In a gush of self-pity she felt her world as dead as that of the Anasazi. She missed Christina and Alison, the woman and her daughter with whom she’d shared a house in Houghton, Michigan, when she worked on Isle Royale.

  Chris was a rock: gentle and soft and stronger than Anna ever hoped to be. Alison, at six, was like a kitten with brains—irresistible and a little scary.

  Anna’d left on the pretense Mesa Verde was a promotion as well as a return to her beloved southwest. In reality she’d cleared out because she knew Chris was in love but wouldn’t move in with her sweetheart if it meant abandoning Anna. So Anna’d abandoned her.

  I’m a fucking saint, she thought sourly, watching Vanna turn E’s on “Wheel of Fortune.”

  The job wasn’t too bad. Though at times Anna felt more like a nurse than a ranger.

  Mesa Verde was an old and staid national park. As early as 1906 it was clear that the ancient cliff dwellings, though already largely looted of artifacts, were a part of America’s heritage that must be preserved.

  Visitors to Mesa Verde went out of their way to get there and had the money to do so. Consequently, the clientele tended to be older, with gold cards and expensive RVs. Retired folks with bad hearts and tired lungs from San Diego, Florida, and the south coast of Texas found themselves up at altitude for the first time in thirty years. If drug dogs were called in Anna suspected they’d sniff out more nitroglycerin tablets than anything else.