Ill Wind
Page 14
Shoving aside several days’ worth of coupons in the midst of the clipping and sorting process, Anna settled on the couch. “I’ve always liked these little houses,” she said, looking around the room with its wooden floor and wood-burning stove. She’d seen the homes redone for permanent employees. They had wall-to-wall carpeting and more recent paint jobs—more comfortable but less picturesque.
“It’s cramped,” Rose said.
“After dorm living, a doghouse would look like a mansion to me if I had it all to myself.”
Rose gave up her post at the door and went so far as to perch on the edge of a chair but she didn’t get comfortable. That this was not to be a long visit was made abundantly clear.
“I can’t stay long,” Anna said to put her at her ease. “Only an hour or two,” she added, just for the fun of watching Rose flinch.
Mrs. Meyers looked as if she were ill and Anna, remembering widowhood, softened. “How are you doing?” she asked. “That’s really all I came by for. This is a hard time.”
“Yes.” The rigid cast of Rose’s features trembled and for a moment it looked as if her control might crack but she recovered herself. “Hard.”
“Was Stacy depressed over anything?” Anna ventured. “Poor health, family problems, finances—anything like that?”
Rose’s head jerked up, her face so full of anger Anna was half surprised her hair didn’t catch on fire. “Stacy was in perfect health,” Rose said coldly. “And, not that it’s any of your business, but, no, there were no ‘family problems,’ as you put it. If you’re implying my husband killed himself, you can put a stop to that line of thinking right now. This minute. Stacy wouldn’t do that to me.”
Anna waited a minute, letting Rose cool off. She searched her mind for a way of connecting with the woman, breaking through the wall of fury. “My husband was killed,” Anna told her. “I had a real bad time for a while.” Still have, she thought, but didn’t say it.
“How was he killed?” Rose asked without interest.
Anna hated this part. More than once she wished Zach had had the good taste to die rescuing a child from a burning building, or skiing in avalanche country. “Crossing Ninth Avenue against the light, he was hit by a cab.”
Another silence began. Anna watched Rose’s drawn face and downcast eyes. Her need for information seemed petty in the face of this grief and she made up her mind to quit badgering. “Are you going to be all right?” she asked impulsively.
“All right?” Rose laughed. “Now that’s relative, isn’t it? I have no job, no income, a child with special needs. All right?” Rose’s voice was becoming shrill. The dam was breaking and Anna wasn’t altogether sure she wanted to be there when it gave way. “No, I’m not going to be all right. Maybe if the Park Service would stop piddling around and find out who did this, I could be all right. You can bet your cozy little government job I’m going to sue for everything I have coming to me. No health insurance, no retirement, no death benefits. Like Stacy was a migrant worker, no better than a strawberry picker. Temporary appointment!” She spat out the words. “We can’t even stay here much longer. Not that that’s a big loss but it is a roof over our heads.
“Oh, yes,” she continued, as if Anna had argued. “I’m going to sue all right. Tell that to Mr. Hills Dutton. And tell him to stop writing parking tickets and talk to Ted Greeley.”
“Ted Greeley?” Anna probed.
“Money can buy anything, anybody,” Rose said, then snapped her mouth shut so hard her jowls quivered. Anna doubted she would get another word out of Rose with anything short of a crowbar.
“Well . . .” She levered herself up out of the nest of papers. “I’ll sure tell him. We can use any help you can give us. Let me know if you need anything.” With that and other platitudes, Anna paved her way to the front door and escaped down the walk.
She’d gotten what she wanted, a flood of unedited words. Out of which “Ted Greeley” and “Money can buy anything, anybody” merited consideration. Rose seemed to be suggesting Greeley had bought off Hills, paid him to steer the investigation away from him or his. If he had, Greeley was a fool. Hills wasn’t the head of this incident, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was. Their man was due in in the morning.
That left the possibility that Rose believed the contractor had something to do with her husband’s murder. Coupling Rose’s finger-pointing with Bella’s admission that the fight on the phone between her mom and Stacy was over some man made for interesting hypotheses. Was “some man” Greeley? Was Greeley jealous of Stacy, in love with his wife?
Anna made a mental note to mention this interview when she met with the federal investigator.
She dropped the Rambler in gear and pulled around Rose’s Oldsmobile. Her mind flashed back to the day she and Stacy had confronted Tom Silva about the foreskin note. Greeley had said something that chilled or angered Stacy. Anna remembered: “How’s my little Bella?”
Could Greeley be Rose’s rich first husband? No, Anna remembered, Number One was a lawyer. Greeley as Rose’s lover? Worth pondering. Uncharitable as it was, Anna thought it unlikely any man would kill for the pleasure of Mrs. Meyers’ company but she knew that was pure prejudice on her part. On like occasions her father used to say: “Perhaps she has talents we are not privy to.” The human heart, though often predictable, remained unfathomable. People loved who they loved and killed who they killed. Rhyme and reason, when they entered in, were often so skewed as to be meaningless to an outside observer.
Anna shoved these new ingredients to the back burner of her mind to stew awhile.
Killing time, she drove down to the Museum Loop and through the picnic grounds. Snuggled down in the evergreens, the picnic area seemed common, if charming, but a few steps carried one to the lip of Spruce Canyon. There the mesa fell away in staggered steps of fawn-colored sandstone, before a sheer drop to the wooded ground below. Like many canyons cut into the mesa, Spruce was small. For Anna there was always a sense of Shangri-la about these hidden places. Each had its own dwellings, long since abandoned by their owners and bleached back to the color of the earth.
Since Mesa Verde’s cliffs had first been inhabited the Anasazi, the Utes, the Navajo, cowboys, hunters, and tourists had all tramped the trails. Yet there remained a tremendous sense of discovery. In that lay much of the park’s allure.
Anna parked the Rambler and walked out toward the canyon rim. The sun was just setting, casting golden light that made the trees greener and the sandstone seem to glow from within. Blue-and-black-winged butterflies settled on the milkweed as if trapped in the amber light.
Since there was no camping on the mesa top, the picnic grounds were gloriously deserted in the evenings. Anna breathed in the solitude.
Not wanting to break the peace, she made her way through the band of junipers between the picnic area and the canyon with great care, placing each moccasined foot on bare ground to avoid snapping needles and twigs.
Such stealth had paid off several times since she’d moved to Colorado. Once she had seen a mother lion with two speckled cubs behind Coyote Village and once a bull elk looking fat and fine and full of himself at Park Point.
This evening she crept up on a much stranger game.
Out on the canyon’s lip the sandstone had been worn into a shallow trough sixty feet wide. Over the centuries summer rains had scoured it smooth. In the middle of the pour-over a stone block the size of a sofa and relatively the same shape had come to rest. Lying on the rock, dyed red by the setting sun, was the body of Bella Meyers. Her hands were crossed on her breast in the classic pose of the deceased. Aunt Hattie, her hair a frizz of sun-drenched brown, bent over the child. The woman’s small, perfect hands were doubled under her chin. She was murmuring or singing.
Anna stopped at the edge of the trees. The little scene played on; the child motionless, Hattie moving occasionally as if exclaiming or weaving spells. After a time, Anna ventured out into the dying light, her footfalls soundless on the stone.<
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When she was eight or ten feet away she heard Hattie asking in her high, pleasant voice: “Shall I kiss you awake now?” and was relieved to see a small shake of Bella’s head. The child had not been slaughtered in some bizarre ritual.
“Oh my, but she was such a beautiful girl, beloved of all in the kingdom,” Hattie sighed over the little body.
Hattie glanced up then and saw Anna. “Someone else has come to pay their last respects to the lovely Bella,” she said in her storybook voice. To Anna she whispered: “We’re playing Dead Princess.”
Anna cocked an eyebrow.
“It’s a game Bella made up when she was little,” Hattie explained in a whisper, careful not to break the spell. “The princess lies in state and is admired by all and sundry until she is awakened by the magic kiss.”
“Sounds like my kind of game,” Anna returned.
“The princess has been dead a very long time today,” Hattie said sadly. “She doesn’t seem to want to be kissed back to life.”
“Aunt Hattie!” came a remonstrance from the side of Bella’s mouth. Her eyes were still squeezed shut.
“Yes, Royal One?”
“Okay. Now.”
Hattie leaned down and placed a gentle kiss in the middle of the child’s forehead. Slowly Bella opened one eye, then the other, and looked around as if she were in a strange place.
“Welcome back, little one,” Hattie said. “The crowds are cheering your return to the world of the living. You have been sorely missed.”
Bella smiled a little. “Okay. I’m done.” She sat up abruptly and swung her short legs over the side of the boulder.
Hattie sat beside her and both of them looked at Anna. “We’re done,” the aunt said.
Anna squatted on her heels. The sun threw their shadows a dozen feet, shading her eyes. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your game,” she apologized.
“That’s all right,” Bella assured her. “I was about to come to life anyway. My behind was getting tired of the rock. Being dead isn’t as easy as it looks.”
“I guess not.”
“Do you want to play?” Bella offered. “My behind’s waking up some.”
“I don’t know how,” Anna told her, and Bella looked disappointed. “Maybe your aunt Hattie could teach me,” Anna relented, and won one of Bella’s smiles.
“It’s a good game,” Bella promised as she lay back down and folded her hands over her chest.
Anna stood and looked down at the little girl with her angel’s face and stunted legs, so peaceful in her pretended and admired state of suspended animation. Anna was glad Hattie had come. Everybody needed someone to kiss her back to life.
“Does the kiss always work?” Anna teased the other woman.
“It does if you do it right.”
TWELVE
FIRST THING THE FOLLOWING MORNING, ANNA RECEIVED a secondhand message by way of Jennifer Short that she was to meet Hills at the CRO. Unable to sleep, she came down early and sat on the bench opposite the office door, enjoying the freshness of the day. Soon buses and cars would begin puffing the park full of carbon monoxide and noise. The first hours after sunrise were new made, hinting of wilderness, of what the world was once and, in dreams, might be again.
Across the walkway, amid the knife-point leaves of the agave, a yellow-and-black bull snake uncoiled himself into the warmth of the sun. The snake lived in a hole in the stonework of the superintendent’s porch. At least that’s where Anna’d seen him flee other mornings when the first foot traffic of the day began.
She stretched her shirt against her shoulder blades and took primal pleasure in the sun’s rays. “I think I’m an exotherm,” she said. The snake didn’t even blink.
An unnatural sound, high heels clacking on paved ground, got a better response. Anna looked in the direction of the racket and when she turned back her narrow fellow had gone.
“You scared away my snake,” she complained as Patsy Silva came down the walk.
“Good. Nasty things.” Patsy was dressed in a colorful Mexican skirt with a turquoise blouse and sandals. She looked chipper. But she always looked chipper so Anna deduced nothing from that.
“You look chipper,” she said to see if it were so.
“Found my keys.” Patsy dangled a ring with a neon-pink rabbit’s foot on it. “Good omen.”
“ ’Bout time. What with chindis and”—she almost said “dead guys” but realized to those not in law enforcement it might seem unnecessarily cavalier—“what not,” she finished safely. “Find them in the last place you looked?”
Patsy laughed. “Usually. Not this time. They were in my purse all along. They’d fallen down among the used Kleenex and dead lipsticks—the bottom-feeders.”
“Speaking of: how goes it with Tom? Since I haven’t heard, I’ve assumed no news is good news.”
“I suppose so.” Patsy sat down beside Anna, deciding to take time for a proper chat. “He’s not around. I mean he’s here and I see him and the girls see him, but it’s like he’s sneaking. Lurking, sort of.”
“Spying?”
“Not spying, I don’t think. I’d’ve reported that for sure. No, it’s sort of like a storm cloud always on the horizon. Not really threatening you, but you know it’s raining on somebody somewhere.”
Anna shook her head. “I’m still not getting the picture. Does he come over and moon at you or leave notes or what?”
“No. I’d’ve called you for that too, I think. He’s just around, in our peripheral vision, sort of. Like the girls’ll be waiting for the bus and he’ll drive by at a time he should be working. Or I’ll come home after dark from somewhere and he’ll just be walking by my house. Mindy and Missy and I came out of the movies in Cortez and he was across the street having coffee at that little lunch place.”
“Following you?”
“Maybe—but from a big distance.”
“Does it scare you or the girls?”
Patsy laughed again. “I suppose it should but it doesn’t. It’s sort of comforting, like that old song ‘Someone to Watch Over Me.’ ”
Tom’s behavior struck Anna more in the stalker than the guardian-angel mode. “He doesn’t talk to you or the girls, he just sort of skulks?”
“Doesn’t talk. In fact he seems to be avoiding us. A couple of times we’ve responded, you know—like friends—and Tom acted like he wanted to get away.”
“Well, holler if he starts scaring you,” Anna said, because she could think of nothing else to say. She looked at her watch: seven fifty-seven.
Adept at taking hints of dismissal, Patsy stood and arranged her purse on her shoulder. “Waiting for Hills,” Anna explained. “I’ve been summoned for God knows what.”
“Oh.” Patsy brightened. “I bet it’s to go to Durango. The FBI man is arriving on the ten-eleven from Albuquerque. The superintendent had me book it.”
“That’s it then. Pigeon’s taxi service.”
Patsy picked up on her annoyance. “Hills thought you’d want to go. It turns out the investigator is an old friend of yours, a Frederick Stanton.”
“You’re kidding! Frederick the Fed? I’ll be damned.”
“He’s not an old friend?” Patsy had such a practiced look of concern Anna would’ve pegged her as a mom even if she hadn’t known of the girls.
“We worked together once,” Anna said. “We’re more like old acquaintances.”
Hills strode up looking lean and marvelously rangerlike with his blond bulk and tight pants. Her assignment was, indeed, to fetch Frederick Stanton from the Durango airport ninety miles to the east.
The drive between the park and Durango wound down off the mesa and through the Mancos Valley nestled between the snow-topped La Plata mountains to the north and the red mesas to the south. Fields were carpeted with dandelions, and blue irises lined the streams. Several hundred sheep, herded by men and boys on horseback, stopped traffic for twenty minutes, making Anna late to the airport. Fortunately, the flight was even later.
Isle Royale had been a while ago but she still remembered the gory details. The FBI agent was a tall gangling man with well-cut features a size too large for his face. Anna estimated his age at thirty-five. Dark hair, cut in the inimitable style of a third-grader, class of fifty-eight, flopped over his forehead; skin showed white around the ears where the clippers had cut too close.
Stanton had a vague and bumbling manner but was usually a step or two ahead at the end of every heat. Too much Columbo, too much Lord Peter Wimsey, Anna thought. Or, perhaps, Revenge of the Nerds and “Saturday Night Live.” Stanton didn’t fit the mold. It made him hard to type and impossible to predict. Which was, Anna guessed, exactly why he did it.
He used people. He’d used Anna and he’d done it effortlessly; that was the part that rankled.
A twin-engine prop plane, the commuter out of Albuquerque, roared in from the taxiway and came to a stop on the ramp beyond the chain-link fence.
Anna eased herself up.
The fourth passenger off was Stanton. Anna laughed at how like himself he looked. Same haircut, even the same clothes. He wore a short-sleeved madras shirt he must have unearthed from a vintage clothing store, rumpled khaki shorts, white socks, and brown lace-up shoes. As he came down the metal steps that folded out from the fuselage, he kept looking behind him, swatting at his posterior.
Absorbed in this activity, he ambled across the ramp. When he reached the fence he looked up. If he was surprised to see Anna, he didn’t show it. “I think I sat in something ooky,” he said, wrinkling his long nose. “Anything there?” He turned to give her an unobscured view of his backside.
There was perhaps a speck of something on his right hip pocket but Anna wasn’t in the mood to enter into a discussion of it. “Looks fine to me.”
Stanton craned his neck and looked down over his shoulder. “Okay then,” he said. “I’ll have to trust you on this one. Sure felt sticky for a minute.”