Ill Wind

by Nevada Barr

  He handed Anna the green oxygen kit. “Might as well,” he said, echoing her pessimism. Shouldering the trauma bag, he started down the path at a fast walk. Anna and Jennifer had to run to keep up with his long-legged stride. In an unconscious parody of Scarlet O’Hara, Short was clutching the top of her flat hat to keep it from flying off.

  Tourists drew aside as they passed, curiosity enlivening their stares. Revolver hammering one thigh and the O2 bottle the other, it crossed Anna’s mind that they—or she and Jennifer at any rate—looked like idiots. With his trim bulk and square face, Hills was protected by the inviolate image of John Wayne To The Rescue. Guilt followed: guilt that she could harbor such petty thoughts en route to what was most likely the death of a fellow ranger.

  Armed with cameras, visitors were already fanned out along the low wall that surrounded the overlook platform. Dimly, Anna was aware of the clicking of shutters as photographers tried to capture the ruin below.

  At the foot of the long metal staircase leading from the platform, Jamie Burke had just finished unlocking the barred gate, opening Cliff Palace for the day.

  “Lock it behind us,” Hills said as he brushed past.

  Burke pulled the gate closed so abruptly that Anna had to turn sideways to fit through. As she pressed by, she noticed Jamie’s pale eyes narrow as she muttered: “Claude saw.”

  Still holding on to her hat, Jennifer clattered after and Anna was pushed into the stone stairway that formed the first part of the descent to the ruin.

  Claude Beavens was waiting for them at the top of the ladder where the alcove began. A green NPS windbreaker was zipped up tightly under his Adam’s apple. Bony wrists protruded from sleeves an inch too short. Long knobby fingers danced an uncomfortable jig on his thighs. “It’s about time,” he snapped, and his Adam’s apple vanished momentarily behind the windbreaker’s collar.

  Beavens was a skinny, busy man, not well liked by Anna’s housemates. He tended to officiousness and factual-sounding declarations that had little basis. Jamie had once grumbled that he seemed incapable of uttering the one true answer to many of the questions about the Anasazi: “We don’t know.”

  “Show us what you’ve got.” Hills could have been asking to see baseball cards or a skinned knee. In the face of his unflappable calm, hysteria was almost impossible.

  Beavens settled down perceptibly. His fingers still fidgeted, but now they plucked at the fabric of his trousers instead of simply twitching.

  “Yeah. Okay.” He turned and began leading the way down the asphalt path in front of the ruin. At a small wooden sign bearing the number three, he leaped up onto a retaining wall that served both to reinforce the ancient structures and to keep tourists from climbing on the ruins.

  “Watch where you step,” he said, panic gone and officiousness returned. “These dwellings are fragile.”

  Hills grunted. Behind her, Anna heard Jennifer mutter: “Crimeny, we’re not from Mars.”

  With sureness bred of familiarity, the interpreter guided them up the slope above the public pathway. Claude was quick and light on his feet. For all his size and strength, Hills had trouble keeping up with him. To their left the alcove dug deep into the side of the mesa. To the right was Cliff Canyon, filling now with early sunlight. They passed a terrace, then a crumbling wall pierced by a single high window.

  Beavens turned into an alleyway formed by two buildings, roofless now but still more than a story tall. To keep her mind from their mission and because the magic of these suddenly deserted and long-empty villages never palled for her, Anna took note of this, her first venture into the closed part of Cliff Palace.

  Much of the masonry was intact even after seven hundred desert winters. The stones still bore the signature of their architects in the many fine chips where harder stones had sculpted them to fit. Rubble, fallen between the walls, harbored dozens of pot sherds: pieces of white pottery, some the size of half dollars, marked with black geometric shapes.

  The short alley dead-ended at another masonry wall. With a bit of scrambling, Beavens was on top of it. Catlike he walked along the stonework. Hills followed, then Anna. Last, Jennifer handed up the O2 kit then climbed. Her boots dislodged a stone. When the sound reached Beavens’ ear, he turned as if he’d been stung.

  “Careful!” he hissed.

  The whisper bothered Anna. People whisper in secret, in church, and around the dead.

  The wall Claude led them down widened out into an abbreviated terrace. A sheer, circular wall dropped off to the right forming a kiva, one of the round subterranean rooms favored by the ancient people.

  “Not this one,” Beavens said, and stopped. “There.” He pointed. At the end of the flat area where they stood was a low wall, a moon-shaped shadow suggesting another kiva, then a tower of stone with a high window.

  Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, Anna thought idiotically.

  Ever pragmatic, Hills stepped past Beavens then over the parapet. “Let’s get to it.”

  Anna didn’t move.

  Hills looked down into the kiva gaping at his feet, then turned back. His square face was devoid of expression. “Yup. This is it,” he said.

  EIGHT

  AN INVISIBLE SWITCH WAS THROWN IN ANNA’S HEAD. She ceased being a shocked spectator and again became a ranger. Stepping over the wall, she stood next to Dutton. A miniature hail of gravel dislodged by her boots pattered into the kiva below. The skittery sound thickened the silence, fixed it hard in her ears.

  At their feet stone and mortar walls curved away then became one again, forming a circle twenty-five feet in diameter. Approximately four feet down, halfway to the floor, the wall widened abruptly into a bench called a “banquette” by the archaeologists. Built up from the bench were six stone pilasters. When the kiva was still in use, the pilasters had supported a roof. Like many others, this kiva roof had long since been destroyed by fire. When Cliff Palace had been excavated the debris had been cleared away, leaving an open pit.

  On the south side of the circle, at banquette level, was a recessed stagelike area that graced most of the Mesa Verde kivas. A hundred theories and ten times that many guesses had been put forth as to its use, but none had ever been validated by archaeological data.

  Below the recess a rectangular opening large enough for a small child to crawl through led back into the masonry to connect with a ventilator shaft that kept air flowing into the underground room to feed the fire and the occupants. Directly in front of the shaft was a section of wall several feet long and a couple of feet high. This deflector wall was a yard or so from a shallow depression ringed with blackened stone: the fire pit. Forming a south-to-north line with the fire ring and deflector wall was a pottery-lined opening the size of a coffee cup. Taken from the Navajo language, it was called a “sipapu” and was assumed to be symbolic of the opening through which the ancients had been said to move from the destroyed underworld to this one.

  Within the kiva only two things were out of place. A flat-brimmed NPS hat had been placed carefully in the center of the deflector wall and, curled into the fetal position, face tucked against his knees, Stacy Meyers lay on his side within the tight circle of stones around the fire pit. His right arm was stretched over his head, partially concealing his face. His fingers were spread. It looked as if he was reaching for—or attempting to ward off—something that had come out of the sipapu.

  Protected by the deep alcove, the kiva was perennially in shadow. Even in December the sun did not sink low enough to touch the back wall of Cliff Palace. The temperature remained relatively constant throughout the year. Consequently the deterioration of Stacy’s body had progressed in a stately fashion, leaving out none of the classic steps of decomposition.

  From where Anna stood, ten feet above and fifteen feet away from the remains, she could smell the sickly sweet odor of decay. Flesh had made the inexorable change from living tissue to inert matter. From the cuff of Stacy’s summer uniform shirt to the tips of his patrician fingers, the skin w
as deathly pale and dimpled. Blood, stopped from flowing when the muscle of the heart could no longer function, had settled to its lowest point. A shadow of postmortem lividity showed on the underside of the arm where it stretched toward the sipapu.

  Curled on his side, only Stacy’s left eye was visible. It was open, the brown iris partly obscured by the upper eyelid, as if Meyers’ last glance had been in the direction of the fabled underworld.

  A black fly dug at the tear duct, searching for any trace of moisture. Flies clustered around the nares of the nose. In death Stacy’s mouth had fallen open, or was frozen in a final cry. His beard and mustache camouflaged the flies and maggots around his lips but the tiny all-encompassing movement was more repellent than obvious incursions.

  Two days. Stacy had been missing since Tuesday morning. Two and a half, if he had died on Monday night. By now his every orifice would be infested with flies and, therefore, maggots.

  The bitter sting of bile backed up in Anna’s throat and her vision tunneled. She had been expecting a corpse—expecting Stacy Meyers’ corpse. She had steeled herself for it. But in her desert-trained mind, she had seen a desert corpse. A person dead seventy-two hours under the relentless sun of the Trans Pecos. A body jerked like prime beef, baked red then brown, then black; peeling, seared, dehumanized. Purified by the arid desert winds. The bulk of the human body that was water purloined by the sun. Moisture, blood, the stuff of life, sucked away, a mummy created. A thing so elemental soul and memory had no handhold where grief could cling.

  This was immediate demanding death. Death not yet turned back to the earth. This corpse would be hard to make peace with. There was no indication the soul had found its way free.

  And it was the death of a friend.

  Shaking her head clear of ghosts, Anna schooled her mind. “Want me to call for the Polaroid?” she asked Hills. Her voice had a quaver she didn’t like.

  “Somebody better.” The district ranger turned and stared out across the sun-drenched canyon. A wren called its characteristic dying fall of song. “Yeah. The Polaroid, chalk—ah, Jesus!” he interrupted himself. “If we chalk the outline of the body on the floor of this kiva we’ll have every archaeologist in the southwest jumping down our throats. Hell. Where was I?”

  Glad to rest her eyes on the living, Anna glanced up at him. Something had kept her from following his example and turning her back on Stacy. A perverse puritanical lust to punish herself? A desire to bid Meyers good-bye? She made a mental note to ask her sister. “You were at chalk,” she answered Dutton’s question.

  Hills ran his tongue along his upper teeth as if clearing them of spinach particles. “Yeah. Hell. Get chalk, a body bag. Bring down an accident kit from one of the vehicles—it’s got chalk, tape. You got that, Jennifer?”

  As was his habit, Hills had been talking in a low monotone. Its usual effect was to dissipate panic and reduce trauma. This time he seemed to have outdone himself. Both Jennifer and the interpreter looked as if they had fallen into a trance.

  Hills snapped his fingers. “Jennifer, got that?”

  Short came awake with a comic, “Huh?”

  “Here, let me.” Anna pulled a notebook from her hip pocket and hastily scribbled down a list of the items Hills had asked for. Adding a couple of requests of her own, she spoke aloud to clear them with Dutton. “Get helitack over here for a carry-out. Tell Jamie to keep the ruin closed till we’re out of here, and get the ambulance up top.”

  “Ambulance? Then he’s not—” Jennifer began. She’d kept close to Beavens, the crumbling wall blocking her view down into the kiva.

  “He is,” Hills said shortly.

  “It’s the ambulance or we toss him in the back of the four-by-four,” Anna said.

  “Logistics,” Jennifer said firmly, as if that one word explained away the messy business of transporting the dead. In a way it did.

  Anna stepped over the wall and handed Jennifer the list.

  “What do you want me to do?” Claude Beavens sounded alarmingly eager, and there was an avidity in his face that made Anna uncomfortable.

  “Uh . . .” Hills looked to Anna but she gave him no help. Making the hard decisions was what he was paid the big bucks for. “You go with Jennifer, I guess. You can fill out a witness statement. Frieda’ll explain.”

  Beavens shrugged—a definite pearls-before-swine shrug—then hurried past Jennifer so that he would be the one leading the way out.

  “Watch your big feet,” Anna heard him say as he dropped down the wall into the blind alleyway.

  “Yew watch yer big mouth,” Jennifer snapped back.

  Hills laughed, a high-pitched giggle. Hysteria would have been Anna’s guess had she not known the big block of a man always laughed that way.

  “Guy gives me the heebie-jeebies.” Dutton shuddered. On so large an individual the gesture seemed out of place.

  “Kind of like a Jim Jones wannabe?” Anna asked.

  “I guess.” Hills had turned his attention back to the kiva and its contents. “Shee-it.” His East Texas heritage showed briefly. “Everybody ever died on me was fresh. Did CPR all the way to the hospital and let ’em die for sure there. What the hell do we do now?”

  Anna didn’t know. Three times in her career there’d been bodies to deal with, but the crime scenes had been so unstable, they’d needed to be moved. “Secure the scene, collect evidence, maintain the chain of evidence,” she said, parroting a list from her federal law enforcement training.

  “Right,” Hills said. “We’ll stay out of the kiva and call the feds. Stay here,” he ordered. “I got to make some calls.”

  He scrambled down the wall into the alley and headed for a place open enough he could radio Dispatch. Anna felt abandoned. “Shee-it,” she echoed.

  For a moment she just stared out through the junipers, watching a scrub jay scolding an invisible companion. Scenes from old movies and books came to mind: wives, mothers, grandmothers, dressed in widows’ weeds, sitting in darkened rooms knitting or crying with no company but one another and death personified in the body of the man they’d bathed and dressed and powdered, lying in state on the bier. Unbidden a picture from Dickens’ Great Expectations took over: the moldering wedding feast, mice and maggots the only partakers.

  “Not your bridegroom,” Anna said aloud, narrowed her mind to the task at hand, and turned to face the deceased.

  There were a few tracks and scuffs on the stones around the kiva: hers, Hills’, probably Claude Beavens’ or the stabilization crew’s. The surface was too hard to make any inferences. No buttons, threads, dropped wallets, white powder, semen, or anything readily identifiable as a bona fide clue was in evidence.

  Keeping to the stones topping the kiva wall, she walked around till she stood over the ventilator hole, looking down into the southern recess, then to the deflector wall, then the fire ring with its cold tinder.

  No obvious signs of violence were apparent, at least not on the side of the body that was exposed. The soft layers of dust that had accumulated on the floor of the kiva were freshly raked.

  It was customary for interpreters to rake out human tracks made in closed areas. Both so the footprints wouldn’t entice others to trespass and to retain an illusion of freshness, of the first time, for those who would come next.

  One line of footprints crossed the raked dirt. It led from below the banquette on the west side of the kiva to the fire pit.

  Stacy reached away from her with one long bony arm that was looking more spectral every moment she was left alone with it. With him, she corrected herself. The flesh was pale, life’s blood pooled on the underside of his arm. Near his sleeve, on the upper side, was an old bruise, a reminder that once this flesh could feel.

  “Wait,” Anna whispered. Stacy’s shoes were off, lying untied very near where his feet were tucked up by his hip pockets as if he’d kicked them off to get more comfortable. Something about the stockinged feet was so vulnerable, so human, Anna felt an unaccustomed pricking behi
nd her eyes.

  She forced herself to continue the study. Except for the shoes and the hat on the deflector wall, Stacy was immaculately dressed. If, as Bella said, Rose dressed him, she would find nothing to be ashamed of. His shirt was crisply ironed, his trousers neatly creased, his duty belt firmly buckled on with gun and speedloader visible.

  Anna continued her circuit, viewing the scene from every angle. Nothing more of interest turned up. She was relieved when Hills finally hauled himself out of the alleyway and crossed to join her.

  “Frieda got the federal marshal out of Durango on the line. They’ll send somebody up. This won’t keep.” He waved a hand toward what had once been a man. “We got to get what we can, bag it, and take it down to the morgue. I’ve got Drew’s boys coming.”

  Hills crossed his arms and stared down into the kiva. “What’d he do? Just walk in, curl up in the fireplace, make hisself comfy, and die?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Jesus.” The district ranger blew a sigh out through loose lips. “This is a hell of a note. Solstice. Some of the seasonal interps are gong to make hay with this.”

  Remembering the strange spark in Jamie’s eyes as they passed her by the gate, Anna didn’t doubt it one bit.

  NINE

  THE GLASS HAD STARTED GETTING IN THE WAY SO she’d left it behind and drank straight from the bottle. Never had the Rambler driven so smoothly. Green eyes of a deer or a coyote flickered in Anna’s peripheral vision as the headlights picked them out of the night. A vague and uninteresting idea that she was driving too fast crossed her mind. The proof of it, the squealing of tires as she made the ninety-degree turn into the Resource Management area, made her laugh out loud.

  When she’d recovered control of the car, she felt between her legs. The wine bottle was still upright, its contents unspilled.

  “All present and accounted for, officer,” she said. “No casualties.” The Rambler rolled to a stop in front of the square stone building. “Car in gear, brake set,” Anna said. Then: “Whoops. Key off. Too late!” As she took her foot off the clutch, the car hopped and the engine died.