Ill Wind

by Nevada Barr

  “I hardly recognized you with your clothes on,” Anna said.

  “Ah. Out of uniform.”

  “You clean up nice.”

  “Thanks.”

  Small talk died. Anna sipped her beer and resisted the urge to glance at her watch. “I thought the medical went well this morning,” she said to get the conversation into neutral territory.

  “God.” Stacy shook his head. Pain was clear in his eyes.

  Anna forgot her discomfort. Leaning across the table, she took hold of his arm.

  A familiar laugh brought her head up. Ted Greeley had taken a table across the veranda. As he caught her eye, he raised his highball in a salute. Anna smiled automatically then returned to Stacy. “What is getting to you?”

  “Stephanie McFarland died. I called the ER before I came.”

  Anna felt as if he’d slapped her. “That’s not right,” she said. “Stephanie was just a kid with asthma. They got the name wrong.”

  Stacy shook his head. “The name wasn’t wrong. She died.”

  “Fuck.” Anna took a long pull on the beer. It didn’t help. “Third grade. What the hell happened? She didn’t have to die.”

  “Yes she did.”

  Stacy sounded sure of himself, like a man quoting scripture or baseball scores.

  “Why?” Anna demanded.

  “Figure it out,” Stacy snapped. “You saw me. I couldn’t do a thing, not one damn thing.”

  Anna looked at him for a long moment. Self-pity in the face of the child’s death struck her as blind arrogance. “Give it a rest. We did what we did. You were useless, not deadly. Don’t make yourself so important.”

  Stacy stared at his hands. Clearly this was a cross he was determined to bear. Maybe he was Catholic.

  “I’m sorry,” Anna said.

  “Yeah. Me too. Sorrier than you know.”

  Stacy made circles on the glass tabletop with the beer bottle.

  Anna finished her beer and ordered another.

  “Bella can get bone grafts in her legs,” he said, as if this were part of an ongoing conversation instead of a non sequitur . “She could dance, fall in love, marry, save the world—whatever she wanted.”

  “Does Bella want the operations?” Anna asked, remembering Drew’s sour appraisal of the treatment.

  “She’s scared. But Rose wants them for her. Rose was so beautiful. She once—”

  Anna nodded.

  “I’ve probably told you. But she was, and it meant a lot to her and she wants that for Bella.”

  “What do you want for Bella?”

  “I want her to have a chance at the brass ring, whatever that means.” Stacy took a long drink of his beer and let his eyes wander over the panorama that was northern New Mexico. “It’s not cheap.”

  Anna’s eyes followed his over the soft blue distance. The beers were taking effect. Words were no longer as necessary.

  “Rose’s used to better,” Stacy said after a while.

  “So you’ve said. Old Number One was rich?”

  “A lawyer. Megabucks.”

  “The vultures always eat better than anyone else on the food chain,” Anna said. Meyers barely smiled.

  “Rose left him. She says she had a problem with commitment.” Stacy made it sound like a compliment.

  Remembering Bella’s remark about her dad leaving because of her deformity, Anna said nothing.

  Stacy folded his hands around his Moosehead in a prayerful attitude and looked across the table at her. She smiled and he smiled back. Something sparked, ignited the rushes of emotion the medical had left strewn about their psyches.

  Nature’s narcotic: more addicting than crack, harder to find than unadulterated Colombian, and, in the long run, more expensive than cocaine. But, God! did it get you there. Anna’s breath gusted out at sudden, unbidden memories of love.

  “I’ve got to go.” She stood so abruptly her chair overturned.

  “Yes.” Both of them pulled out wallets and tossed bills on the table. The waiter would get one hell of a tip, Anna thought as she walked out of the lounge.

  “Can I give you a ride?” Stacy called after her. Anna just waved.

  Unwilling to return to the cacophony that was home, she walked down the Wetherill Mesa Road till she was out of sight of the lodge, then sat under the protective drapery of a serviceberry bush. She felt like crying but was too long out of practice.

  SIX

  ANNA GROPED HER WAY TO THE KITCHEN TO START her morning coffee. Clad in striped men’s pajamas, Jennifer sat at the dining room table eating cereal. Already in uniform, Jamie played with an unlit cigarette.

  She held it up as Anna passed. “Trying to decide whether or not to have breakfast,” she volunteered.

  “Better light up,” Jennifer said. “It’s going to be a long day.”

  “The longest.” Jamie pulled herself out of the straight-backed chair and took her morning drugs out onto the rear deck.

  “Long day,” Jennifer repeated.

  Since it was obviously expected of her and because early in the morning Anna actually found Jennifer’s refined version of the Southern drawl soothing, she asked, “Why long?”

  “Longest day of the year. June twenty-first.”

  “Right: solstice. If something doesn’t happen, I’m going to be miffed.” Anna spooned coffee into the drip filter.

  “Oh, nothin’ will. You know Jamie. There’s always got to be something. A bunch of the interps got a backcountry permit to go down into Balcony House to watch the moon rise. That’s about it.”

  “I’d think they’d want to watch the sun rise.” Coffee was dripping through the filter but too slowly. Balancing the cone to one side, Anna managed to pour what was in the pot into her cup without making too much of a mess. “That’s when all the magic is supposed to happen: spears of light through scientifically placed chinks—that sort of thing.”

  Leaning in the doorway, she sipped and watched Jennifer eating cereal.

  She and Jennifer had such disparate schedules they seldom had the opportunity to work together. But bit by bit Anna was getting glimpses that this hair-sprayed and lipsticked magnolia blossom had a penchant for heavy drinking, late nights, and speaking up for herself. Anna found herself warming up to the woman.

  “Jamie mentioned something about Old Ones and solstice again last week when we were carrying Stephanie McFarland out of Cliff Palace.” Anna threw out the line, not sure what she was fishing for.

  “Who knows what Jamie’s up to,” Jennifer said impatiently. “She says she hears Indian flute music coming out of the ruins at night; she’s always seeing some big thing—ghosts and mountain lions and big-horned sheep and cute boys. I never see anything except illegally parked cars.”

  Jennifer sounded so disgusted that Anna laughed. “What about Paul Summers? He’s as cute as they come.”

  “He’s got a girlfriend back home.”

  “Back home is back home. Going to let it get in your way?”

  “No, but it’s sure getting in his. I just hate fidelity.”

  “Jimmy Russell?”

  “He’s ten years younger than I am.” Jennifer pronounced “ten” as “tin.” She shrugged philosophically. “If things don’t start looking up soon, I’m going to have to start poachin’.”

  Anna’s coffee was done. She walked back into the kitchen.

  “Stacy’s kinda cute,” Jennifer mused.

  Anna didn’t want to get into that.

  RUNNING late, she called into service from the shower. At quarter after seven, hair confined in a braid and her teeth brushed, she pulled out of the Far View lot.

  Hills was in Durango attending a wildland fire seminar, so Anna had the small four-wheel-drive truck. It was newer than the patrol car and had been built by Mitsubishi. Anna attributed the commercial success of Japanese cars to the fact that they were designed and built by a small people, hence they tended to fit American women far better than the wide-open spaces Buick and Dodge incorporated into t
heir vehicles. At any rate, the seat didn’t hurt her back.

  Late June marked the peak of the tourist season and there were cars waiting at the locked gates to Far View Ruin and Cedar Tree Tower. The four-way intersection was backed up four cars deep. Anna liked to play hero with the simple act of letting folks go where they wanted to. This morning the kindly ranger routine was turned into a comic interlude while she wrestled with one of Stacy’s signature twisted chain locks. Eventually she succeeded and was embarrassed by a round of applause.

  Leaving the Four-Way, she drove slowly around the Museum Loop, stopping to check the picnic grounds for illegal campers. It was blessedly empty and she was spared the un-savory task of rousting out people in their nightgowns.

  As Anna was passing the Administration Building, Patsy Silva flagged her down. The clerical staff wasn’t required to wear uniforms and Patsy was in a flame-orange blouse and close-fitting gray trousers. Her lipstick echoed the color of her top.

  Though immaculately dressed and every hair characteristically in place, Patsy looked somehow disheveled, as if she’d had a bad night or bad news.

  “What’s up?” Anna asked as she rolled down the pickup’s window.

  “Can you believe it, I lost my keys!” Patsy smiled apologetically. “Would you radio one of the Maintenance guys to let me in?”

  Anna made the call.

  Patsy didn’t look relieved. “Are you all right?” Anna asked.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  A slight gray-haired man with a dowager’s hump came from the direction of the museum. When he saw them, he jangled a ring of keys.

  “The superintendent’s having a breakfast meeting. I’ve got to set it up. Can you come over to the house around twelve?” Patsy pleaded.

  “Will do.”

  Patsy clicked on her smile and started thanking the janitor before she’d closed the distance between them.

  Anna managed to kill twenty minutes cruising the ruins road. Cliff Palace was about halfway around a six-mile loop. Just before the parking lot the two-lane road became one way. Beyond the ruin a mile or so, at Soda Point, it crossed onto the Ute Indian Reservation. When the road had first been designed it had been incorrectly surveyed and a quarter-mile stretch crossed the park’s boundary onto the reservation. A dirt track, never used anymore, ran for several miles into the piñon/juniper forest owned by the Utes. Brush had been piled across it to deter wandering visitors. A plan to barricade it had been in the works for years but nothing had ever been done.

  Where the dirt road started into the woods, on a wide graveled turnout, was a curio shop and a trailer selling Navajo tacos and Sno-Kones. Short of rerouting the existing road, Mesa Verde’s superintendent had little recourse but to accept this unauthorized invasion of commercialism. Authorized park concessionaires had jacked food prices so high the little stand did a booming business, especially among the rangers.

  Past Soda Point, back on park lands, the one-way road widened into a parking lot at the Balcony House ruin. A mile or so farther on, the loop completed, traffic rejoined the two-lane road.

  On Isle Royale Anna had patrolled in a boat, in Guadalupe Mountains on horseback. Both were preferable to the automobile. Anna wondered what it was that was so alienating about cars. Somehow, more than any other machine, they seemed to create a world of their own, a mobile pack-rat midden full of personal artifacts that utterly separated man from the natural environment he hurtled through. Maybe, she thought as she crept along in the line of cars trolling for parking spaces at Balcony House, that was why Americans were so enamored of them: power without connection, movement without real direction.

  At nine, she returned to Far View, picked up Jennifer, and took her to Maintenance, where the patrol car was parked. As the seasonal dragged her briefcase from behind the seat, she volunteered to pick up Stacy when he came on duty. Anna remembered the poaching threat but forbore comment. If the Catholics were right and the thought was as bad as the deed, she was in no position to cast any stones.

  With two rangers on duty and nothing happening, Anna felt lazy. She parked the truck and wandered over to the fire cache to find someone to amuse her. Helitack was gone. Physical training, she recalled. Every morning for PT Drew ran his firefighters two miles down the Spruce Canyon trail, then back up the steep pathway to the mesa top.

  As she turned to leave, a clattering arrested her attention. Moments later a child’s bicycle with pink training wheels came into view around the corner of the cache. It wasn’t one of the modern plastic monstrosities, but a classic, old-fashioned, metal bicycle. Extensions had been welded onto the pedals so Bella Meyers could ride.

  She rolled to a stop in the shade beside Anna. “Drew’s not here, Mrs. Pigeon. He’s supposed to be back by nine but he’s always late. He says it takes him longer to shower because there’s so much of him. I’m always early.”

  “That’s good to know. Does your dad know you’re here?” Anna was thinking of Stacy’s concern about traffic the only other time she’d seen Bella in Maintenance.

  “Stacy’d already gone to work. Me and Momma only got back from Albaturkey this morning.”

  Stacy didn’t come on duty till later and it crossed Anna’s mind that the child was lying. But Bella didn’t seem the type. Life, for her, had to be full of personal triumphs and grown-up dramas. She had no need to fabricate.

  “I thought Stacy was on project shift,” Anna probed gently. Project days were scheduled from nine-thirty till six.

  “Sometimes he goes early. He likes to go off by himself and look at birds and things. Sometimes he takes me. I like being by myself with Stacy.”

  Anna leaned back against a workbench set up outside the cache.

  “That’s where they clean their chain saws,” Bella warned. “You’ll get grease on your behind.”

  “Too late now.”

  “Glad I’m not your mom.”

  “Doesn’t your mom approve of greasy behinds?”

  “Hates ’em,” Bella returned. “You know why Stacy always looks so good?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “Momma dresses him. Stacy’d just put on whatever was laying closest on the floor. Never iron it or anything. When we got him he was a mess.”

  Anna smiled. “Like a stray dog brought home from the pound?”

  “Not that bad,” Bella answered seriously. “He didn’t have fleas or anything. But he was pretty scruffy.”

  Anna glanced at her watch more out of habit than anything. There was no place she had to be, nothing she had to do. In parks with backcountry her days had been spent walking, looking for people in—or causing—trouble. In the automobile-oriented front country of Mesa Verde the days were spent waiting for Dispatch to send her on an emergency or visitor assist.

  “You’re too old to have anyone dress you,” Bella said, giving Anna a frank appraisal. “You do pretty good.”

  “Not as good as your mom?”

  “No,” the child answered honestly. “Mom’s going to buy her and me all new stuff when she gets thin again and I get my legs fixed.”

  Bella seemed disinterested and Anna suspected the new clothes promised a greater delight to Mrs. Meyers than to her daughter.

  “I got to go,” Bella announced. “Drew comes walking over now.” Having carefully looked both ways, she rode across the maintenance yard toward the asphalt path that wound down to the housing loop several hundred yards away and invisible behind a fragrant curtain of evergreens.

  No one left to play with, Anna decided to head for the chief ranger’s office to fill out a few forms and pester Frieda. As she crossed the tarmac to where she’d parked, Greeley’s six-pac rolled in. The contractor wasn’t in evidence and a man she recognized but had never met was driving. Tom Silva rode shotgun. The pickup pulled in close to her truck. Since there wasn’t room for both vehicle doors to open at once, Anna waited while they got out.

  Silva was completely dressed; everything buttoned, belted, and tucked in. “ ’Mo
rning,” he said as he slammed the door. He didn’t meet her eye and, for once, there was nothing bantering in the way he spoke.

  “Good morning, Tom. Have you gotten any closer to Bachelor of the Year?”

  His head jerked up as if she poked him with a cattle prod. There was something different about his face as well as his demeanor. He struck Anna as older, less alive.

  “I was just messing around,” he said sullenly. “I didn’t mean anything by that. ’Scuse me.” He pushed by her and disappeared into the shop where the soda-pop machine was housed.

  Anna speculated as to whether this new subdued Tom had anything to do with Patsy’s lunch invitation. The day was definitely getting more interesting.

  ANNA reached the tower house before Patsy and sat in the sun on a stone wall by the front door fantasizing about how she’d arrange the furniture if she inherited the house. She’d just gotten around to hanging curtains when Patsy hurried up the walk.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she panted. “You could have let yourself in!”

  “I’ve only been here a minute,” Anna assured her. “I was early.”

  “You didn’t have to sit out here all that time.”

  Anna gave up and let herself be apologized to.

  Patsy bustled around the kitchen making bologna sandwiches and small talk. Anna kept up her end of the conversation. Perhaps they were to follow formal rules of dining: no business discussed until brandy and cigars were served.

  After every condiment and chip had been taken out of cupboards and put on the table, Patsy sat down. Anna noticed she no longer wore the expensive wristwatch. A Timex with Pluto’s face on the dial had taken its place.

  Anna bit into her sandwich. Patsy pushed her untouched plate away as if she’d already eaten. “It’s about Tom,” she said.

  Anna nodded encouragement.

  “He’s been so full of himself lately. He was bragging and giving the girls school money. You saw the watch he gave me. I guess he thought he’d bought his way back in. When I said no, he got sore.”

  Anna waited but Patsy showed no inclination to finish the story unprompted. “What happened to the watch?” she asked to get the wheels turning again.