Ill Wind

by Nevada Barr

  “I threw it in his face. He made a lot of noise about the money having nothing to do with anything, but I noticed he took it with him when he left.”

  Anna washed the sandwich down with Diet Pepsi. “I saw Tom this morning. He didn’t seem like his old self.”

  “He’s not.” Patsy picked up a potato chip and began breaking it into small pieces. “Or else he’s so much more like his old self it’s scary. He gave me a gun.”

  “Did he say what the gun was for?”

  Patsy shook her head. “I didn’t see him. He left it sometime last night. A couple of times I woke up thinking I heard something—the girls are in Gunnison with their grandma. When I’m alone I don’t sleep well. I hear things—you know: branches scraping and the wind. I scare myself silly thinking it’s an escaped murderer or a crazy person.”

  “With a hook instead of a hand?”

  Patsy laughed. “You know him?”

  “I first heard of him at a pajama party at Mercy High School. When I moved to Manhattan I swear he had a sublet under my bed.”

  “Campfire Girls,” Patsy explained her arcane knowledge.

  “Anyway . . .” Anna brought the subject back to Tom and his gun.

  “Anyway last night I woke up a couple of times but I never came downstairs. I scare myself more if I start peeking in closets and under beds. For once it wasn’t all my imagination. This morning there was a gun in the middle of the kitchen table.”

  Patsy got up and opened a cupboard door. Bundled onto a high shelf was a blue apron with white eyelet ruffling. She took it down and unwrapped the apron from around the gun.

  “It’s a derringer,” Anna told her. “A twenty-two.” The flashy little gun seemed in keeping with Tom Silva. “Do you know for sure it was Tom who left it?”

  “I recognize it. He won it in a stock-car race. And there was a note.” Patsy had tucked the note in the pocket of the apron. She unfolded it and handed it to Anna.

  “‘Pats, see how easy it is to get into this place? Get yourself new locks,’ ” Anna read aloud. “Definitely edgy.”

  “I thought so.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Anna promised. “Meanwhile I’d do what he suggests: get new locks. Give Maintenance a call, okay?”

  Patsy said she would. As Anna was leaving, she stopped her. “Do you want to take the gun?”

  Anna thought about it for a moment, thought of Tom, of the girls. “Do you know how to use it?” she asked. Patsy nodded. “Then why don’t you keep it for a while.”

  ANNA went off duty at three-thirty. Ninety minutes before tradition allowed cocktails. She peeled off her uniform and, sitting on her bed, opened the top drawer of the dresser. Expensive lace underwear, a legacy of more intimate times, mingled with cordovan-colored uniform socks, hollow-point bullets, and half a dozen ragged handkerchiefs.

  In the back, lying on its side, was a metal container. With its fitted lid and wire handle, it was much like a paint can sans label.

  Jamie Burke professed singular discomfort living in a house tainted by the presence of a firearm. Anna wondered what the interpreter would think if she knew that the remains of Anna’s husband rested amid her underwear.

  “You were always happiest when you were in my pants, Zach.” Anna smiled as she closed the drawer.

  The clock on the dresser read 3:47.

  The hell with tradition. Anna went into the kitchen to pour herself a drink. Glass in hand, she wandered out onto the rear deck. Four miles away, on Chapin, it was warm enough for shorts. At Far View, a thousand feet higher, Anna was slightly chilled in long pants and a sweatshirt.

  The serviceberry bushes were in full bloom and the valley between Far View and Wetherill Mesa looked as if it had been decorated for a wedding. Glittering emerald-green hummingbirds with ruby-colored throats were busy at the blossoms. Mating, showing off, or just celebrating the day, they flew up thirty or forty feet then dove down in a buzz of wings.

  Leaning against the wall of the dormitory, Anna let her legs rest on the sun-warmed planking and closed her eyes.

  Tom Silva wasn’t the only one who wasn’t acting like his old self. Till she’d left Michigan for the southwest, Anna hadn’t realized how big a part of her life Christina and Alison had become. The gentle, clear-thinking woman and her spirited daughter had kept her on an even keel. Kept her looking ahead instead of back.

  Banging of the kitchen door announced the end of solitude. Jennifer was off shift. Anna took a long drink and held it in her mouth, savoring the rich bite of the alcohol and trying to shut out the muffled thumps from within as the seasonal law enforcement ranger noisily divested herself of briefcase and gunbelt.

  Moments later the sanctity of the rear deck was invaded. Wearing a T-shirt and faded jeans, Jennifer came out to share the last of the afternoon’s warmth. She folded down, crossing her legs tailor-fashion, then popped the top of a Bud Light.

  “You devil, you!” She shook an admonitory finger at Anna. “You snatched old Stacy right out from under my nose.”

  For a brief instant Anna wondered if Stacy had stated some preference for patrolling with her. She couldn’t decide whether she was more flattered or alarmed.

  Jennifer laughed. “Still waters and all that. When I went to pick him up, his wife said he’d already left.”

  “Not with me he didn’t,” Anna defended herself.

  As if in counterpoint to their conversation, Anna’s radio, clearly audible through the open bedroom window, crackled to life.

  Three times, seven hundred called Meyers’ number. Finally came Frieda’s voice saying: “No contact. Seven hundred clear. Sixteen-forty-five.”

  This was followed by three attempts to reach “Any Chapin Mesa patrol ranger” and “No contact.”

  “I thought Stacy was on till six,” Jennifer said.

  “He is.” Anna waited for an uneasy feeling to pass but it didn’t. “I guess I’d better make a few calls.” She looked longingly at the wine in her glass, righteously considering pouring it over the deck railing. Instead, she took it all in one gulp. Something told her she might need it.

  SEVEN

  STACY DIDN’ T TURN UP THAT NIGHT OR THE NEXT or the night after that. Though Hills Dutton, in his capacity as district ranger and resident scrooge, had grumbled about paying her overtime for working on her lieu days, Anna had been on duty. She was needed to cover Meyers’ shifts. And to search.

  Investigation indicated that at the end of Stacy’s late shift on Monday night, all the ruins’ gates had been locked, and the patrol car he’d been driving was parked in the maintenance yard. Apparently, somewhere on the hundred yards of paved path between Maintenance and the housing loop, he had simply disappeared.

  TUESDAY Hills spoke with Mrs. Meyers. Coming home late from Albuquerque, she and her daughter had chosen to spend Monday night in Farmington where they could take in a movie and do some shopping rather than continue the two hours on to the park. Around seven—the time Stacy customarily took his meal break when he was on late shift—Rose phoned him from the motel. He had answered and they spoke for several minutes. Rose said Stacy had seemed calm and cheerful.

  AT&T long distance corroborated the call.

  Just after eight Monday night, while she was taking her evening walk, Al Stinson said she saw Stacy locking the Cedar Tree Tower Ruin gate. After that Stacy had been neither seen nor spoken to by anyone. At least not anyone willing to come forward.

  On arriving back in the park Tuesday morning, Mrs. Meyers found the bed made and the sink free of dishes. As her husband was a man of tidy domestic habits, she couldn’t say if this indicated whether or not he had slept at home.

  WEDNESDAY Anna saw Bella on her bike riding back from Maintenance. Nine-thirty A.M.: Anna guessed she’d been escorting Drew to work after his physical training.

  Pulling the car to the side of the narrow lane, Anna called the girl’s name. For a moment the green eyes looked at her without recognition. When a spark did dawn it was feeble and su
ddenly gone as if very little held the child’s interest anymore.

  Bella rode up to the Ford and Anna climbed from behind the wheel. Wordlessly the girl looked up. Anna could read the question as clearly as if it had been written in felt marker across the unlined brow. “No,” she said gently. “We haven’t found Stacy yet.”

  Bella didn’t change expression but it was as if her soft cheeks froze. Anna ached to see so adult a reaction on a six-year-old’s face.

  “We’re looking real hard everywhere,” Anna told her.

  Sadly, Bella shook her head. The curls, as carefully tended as always, glimmered in the sunlight. “Not everywhere. Not where he’s at.”

  “No,” Anna conceded. “Not there.”

  “I wish Aunt Hattie would come,” Bella said, and propped her chin in her hands, her elbows resting on the handlebar. “She knows things.”

  “How to find things?” Anna asked.

  “No. Just things.”

  “Like what?” Anna leaned against the fender of the patrol car, enjoying the warmth of the metal through her trousers.

  Bella screwed up her face with the effort of thought and Anna was glad to see, for a moment at least, she was distracted from her worry over Stacy.

  “Not knowing knowing exactly. But Hattie plays with you. Not like she’s a grown-up who’s playing with a little kid. Like she’s there. Sometimes we’ll be witches. We turned Timmy Johnson into a toad.”

  Bella looked pleased. Anna was careful not to look anything.

  “Why a toad? So you could kiss him back to handsome princehood?”

  “Yuck-oh!” Bella stuck out her tongue as if she were gagging on something foul. “He said mean things about me.”

  Anna could guess what.

  “We didn’t exactly turn him into a real toad,” Bella said after a moment’s thought. “I mean to other people he still looked like a piggy little boy. But Hattie said he’d turn his own self into a toad if he kept doing toady things so we just helped a little. I could see the toad parts though, after that. He’d say stuff and I’d squint and laugh at the greeny warts just ready to pop out on his pig face. But that was a long time ago when I was little.”

  Anna laughed. “Do you think the transformation’s done by now? Is he all toad?”

  “Maybe not,” Bella said kindly. “He stopped being so toady after a while. He may have saved himself. Aunt Hattie thinks so.”

  Bella laid her chin on the handlebars of her bike and pushed back and forth, rocking herself absently. “Aunt Hattie’s like those big colored balloons, the ones with the little baskets for the people to ride in. She just lifts you up, zoop, zoop, zoop.”

  Bella accompanied the words with floating gestures, small white hands like leaves blowing upward.

  “We could all use some of that,” Anna said.

  “Maybe she’ll come. Sometimes she does,” Bella said hopefully. “I have to go.” She stood up on the pedals of the bike and wobbled past Anna.

  “ ’Bye.” Anna felt slightly abandoned. “I have to go too,” she added childishly.

  Bella pedaled faster and never looked back. Worry was back in the hunch of the little shoulders.

  THAT evening Anna spent an hour with Rose going over Stacy’s routines and the times of the phone call and her return to the park. Rose mixed vicious snipes at Hills, Ted Greeley, Drew Kinder, the superintendent, and the National Park Service with seemingly heartfelt pleas that no stone be left unturned in the search for her husband.

  Bella crept about like a tortured spirit. White-faced and silent, she hid herself behind coloring books that she didn’t color in, dolls that she didn’t enliven with imagination. Twice the child curled up at her mother’s feet the way a dog might, her knees pulled up, her chin on hands fisted like paws. The only time Anna saw her play was when Bella dressed up in Stacy’s class “A” uniform jacket and winter hat. On the child’s stunted frame the jacket brushed the floor.

  Anna had to look away, aware for the first time how terribly costly Stacy’s abdication would be. His wife had an edge; she would cut her way through life regardless. Bella truly loved.

  IN the end it was the interpreter Claude Beavens who found Stacy. Or, more accurately, a family of canyon wrens that had made their home high in the ancient ramparts of Cliff Palace.

  Early the Thursday morning after Stacy’s disappearance, Beavens was down in the ruins. He climbed into the back reaches of the dwelling in hopes of finding a vantage point from which he might see the wrens’ nest. Clambering around the fragile site was forbidden to all but officially permitted archaeologists and NPS brass. But, finding himself with a quarter of an hour till visitors would be allowed down, Beavens had decided to take a few liberties.

  Given the nature of his discovery, admitting his transgression seemed the lesser of two evils.

  ANNA was at Navajo Overlook on the Ruins Road Loop with binoculars pressed to her eyes. Jennifer Short, back to the canyon, stood at her elbow.

  “It’s not like every damn inch of those trails you keep lookin’ at haven’t been looked at before,” Jennifer was saying. She leaned against the chest-high cyclone fence. Endless civil suits designed to dig money out of Uncle Sam’s “deep pocket” had forced the government to mar every precipitous view with safety devices. Jennifer’s flat-brimmed hat was pushed back to protect her hairdo. It gave her a Rebecca-of-Sunnybrook-Farm look that Anna found annoying.

  “If y’all ask me, he just took a powder,” the seasonal drawled, rehashing a theory that had been voiced by a number of people in the park as the search wore on. “Found himself a woman who hasn’t let herself go, kept her figure. Can’t blame him. If they ever strayed from the missionary position he’d be squashed flatter’n a bug. Uh-uhg-lee!”

  “Reubens wouldn’t agree with you,” Anna said mildly. “I doubt Stacy would either.” Again she traced the fragment of trail visible in the canyon below. Worn bare of vegetation over the centuries by feet and paws and hooves, it showed white, a ribbon in the canyon bottom. Brush and scrub grew to either side, becoming taller toward the cliffs. Finally, at the base, where walls sheered up toward the mesa and the strata of sandstone met a strata of slate, natural seep springs nourished the grander ponderosa pines.

  Anna didn’t expect to see the straggling—or fallen—form of Stacy Meyers. It had not escaped her notice, nor Hills’, that Meyers had vanished in full defensive gear with his radio. If he wanted to be found or still had strength and voice, he would have called for help. Looking was just something to do. And Anna needed something to do.

  Had anyone dared to suggest she was falling in love with Rose Meyers’ husband, Anna would have denied it. When she chose to consider her loss, she could not but see the wraithlike face of Bella and know that the vague emptiness she felt was of no importance. Still, the days of seeking without finding, of work and worry and waiting, had worn her down in a way that was more than professional frustration or budding friendship.

  “And that poor little thing!” Jennifer sighed gustily. “What man’d want to deal with that when it wasn’t even his?”

  “Bella,” Anna corrected, finding “it” offensive. In saying the child’s name something she had sensed from the onset became crystal clear: “Stacy wouldn’t leave Bella. No way. No how.”

  “I don’t know—” Jennifer began again.

  “I do,” Anna said flatly. Maybe Rose, maybe. But never Bella, never his pine nut. With that realization came another: Stacy Meyers was dead or close enough it wouldn’t matter unless they found him soon.

  Anna lowered her binoculars. “You drive,” she said. “My back is killing me.”

  That was when Claude Beavens made his call.

  THE transmission was garbled. In the patrol car, Anna fiddled with the radio’s volume as Frieda said: “Unit calling seven hundred, you are broken.” Scratches and crackles came over the air a second time.

  “Head toward Cliff Palace Loop,” Anna told Jennifer. From within the Cliff Palace and Balcony House ruin
s radio transmissions were frequently too broken to understand.

  Frieda repeated Anna’s thought over the air: “Unit calling seven hundred, you are still unreadable. Try again from higher ground.”

  Silence followed. “Pick up the pace,” Anna said. The patrol car smoothly picked up speed, Jennifer conning the boxy vehicle neatly around the meandering RVs and rental cars.

  “ ’Nother carry-out?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” Anna said.

  “Good. I keep missin’ out. Everything seems to happen on Tuesdays, when I’m off.”

  They were heading up the straightaway toward the intersection with Cliff Palace Road when the radio crackled to life again.

  “Seven hundred, can you hear me now?” was bleated out in breathy tones.

  “Loud and clear.”

  “This is Beavens at Cliff Palace. You better send somebody down here right away.”

  There was a short silence. The entire park waited for particulars. “What’s the nature of the incident?” Seven hundred asked evenly.

  “I—uh—found Stacy Meyers. He’s up in one of the back kivas.” Another silence followed, longer than the first. Then in a sudden blurt of sound Beavens said: “I think he’s dead. There were flies.”

  “Holy shit!” Jennifer whispered. She flipped on the lights and siren.

  Anna thought to switch them off again. No sense going code three to a body recovery. Speed meant nothing to the dead, and the commotion could startle the living into having accidents. In the end she let Jennifer call the shots. Somehow the outward shrieking was in keeping with the small cries trapped in her skull.

  And, she told herself, there was a slim chance Beavens was mistaken and Meyers was alive. Slim.

  Hills’ 4X4 was already there when Anna and Jennifer screamed into the Cliff Palace lot. The district ranger was fumbling with the lock on the toolbox in the bed of the truck.