Ill Wind

by Nevada Barr

  “Look,” Beavens began. “This isn’t my idea. I just—”

  “Tell him,” Jamie insisted.

  Looking annoyed but beaten, he shrugged. Beavens had been so anxious to be a part of the murder investigation the day the body had been found, Anna wondered what held him back now.

  “Claude was here the night Stacy died,” Jamie said for him, and Anna understood. Few people wanted to participate quite that intimately in the investigative process.

  “Not here here,” Beavens defended himself.

  “But here,” Jamie said. “Tell him.”

  Frederick folded himself back down onto the lip of the kiva and stared expectantly up at the interpreter.

  “I was out on the loop Monday night—that’s when Jamie says Stacy was... was here. That’s all. No big deal.”

  Stanton seemed less interested in Beavens than in Jamie. She stood with her profile to them, her long black hair trailing down her back. Her arms were crossed and her feet were planted wide apart in what, for good taste’s sake, Anna hoped was an unconscious parody of Hiawatha.

  “Monday night. You hit it right on the nose, Ms. Burke.” Stanton flapped the papers from the autopsy. “The coroner says that’s the date.”

  Not willing to break the pose, Jamie shot him a scornful look from the sides of her eyes. “Summer solstice.”

  Stanton waited. Beavens fidgeted and Anna watched. Claude was clearly uncomfortable about something but there was no way of telling what sort of ants were inhabiting his mental trousers. Guilt, embarrassment at being dragged into Jamie’s little drama, nervousness at being questioned by the FBI—all were possible, as were a dozen things that didn’t come readily to mind.

  Jamie was basking in the limelight, dragging the interview out with cryptic sentences and pregnant pauses.

  Anna was sorely tempted to spoil the show, but Stanton was satisfied to let the scene play out.

  “It’s when things tend to happen,” Jamie said after a moment. “Some people have a feel for these things. A kinship. I felt it. Ask Anna. Something was coming down on the twenty-first.”

  “Or up,” Anna said, pointing at the sipapu.

  “Go ahead. Investigate me, Mr. FBI.” If one could judge by the glint in Jamie’s pale eyes, the prospect wasn’t unwelcome. “You’ll have to look in your paranormal films for this one,” she finished.

  “The X Files,” Stanton said gravely.

  Jamie liked that. She turned on Beavens, now with hands deep in pockets, poking at a dung beetle with the toe of his shoe. “Tell him,” she ordered.

  “Better tell me,” Stanton said. “Just the facts, like Joe Friday says. Nobody’ll interrupt you.” He didn’t glance at Jamie when he said it. Somehow he didn’t need to.

  “Doggone it, Jamie!” Beavens exploded, then took a deep breath. “It really is no big deal. I was out here that night—Monday. I didn’t go to Balcony House with everybody. That New Age stuff—crystals and mantra-ing at the moon—is crud.” His hand went to his throat and he nervously fingered a tiny gold cross Anna hadn’t noticed before. “I just rode my bike out here. Sat on the rocks over the canyon till the moon was up. Later I guess, two or two-thirty, maybe. Then I rode home. No big deal. I didn’t see Stacy or anything.” He stopped, waited a moment, then shrugged. “That’s it. No biggie.”

  “God, I hate invertebrates masquerading as men,” Jamie sighed. Turning her back on Claude, she said to Stanton: “Claude saw.”

  Anna remembered the phrase; the words she had used the morning the body was discovered. She’d hissed it as Anna squeezed through the gate above Cliff Palace.

  “Just spit it out,” Anna growled.

  Stanton deadpanned in her direction. “You’re such a people person, Anna.”

  “Claude saw what?” she pressed.

  “Where they come through, the veil,” Jamie said triumphantly. “He told me Tuesday morning, before anybody’d even thought to look for Stacy. He said he’d seen the shimmer in the light of the solstice moon as if the spirits were passing through.”

  “Not exactly,” Claude complained.

  “Exactly,” Jamie countered.

  “Exactly in your own words.” Stanton stopped the argument.

  “What’s the time?” Beavens asked.

  All three of them glanced at their watches. “One-ten,” Anna said before anyone else could.

  “Gotta go. Balcony House tour in twenty minutes.”

  “The veil?” Anna asked again.

  Beavens pulled his hands out of his pockets. Again the shrug Anna was beginning to think was a nervous habit. “I was just kidding around. Jamie’s always on about this spirit garbage. I was kidding. Ask the other interps. I heard some of them leaving the loop in their truck later than I did.”

  They watched Beavens trot off, surefooted, down the balcony to disappear into the ancient alleyway.

  “He is a lying little weasel,” Jamie stated.

  It was the first thing she’d said all day that had the ring of truth.

  THIRTEEN

  ANNA AND STANTON FOLLOWED JAMIE OUT OF THE closed part of the ruin and left her at the entrance clicking visitor statistics into the metal counter.

  Rather than go against the flow of traffic, they climbed the four ladders at the western end of the alcove and regained the mesa top. The climb always winded Anna but she forced herself to breathe silently through her nose, enjoying the sound of Stanton’s puffing. “Want to rest?” she asked solicitously as they walked back toward the parking lot.

  “Yes, please,” he said humbly, and threw himself down on half a log round smoothed to make a bench. Gratefully, Anna sat beside him and refilled her hungry lungs with the thin air. Her childishness made her laugh.

  “I hope you’re duly impressed,” she said. “It’s damn hard to hold your breath after that climb.”

  “Tell me about it. I do it to impress the young agents. Nearly did myself in last training session. Gets harder every year.”

  They sat for a while just breathing and feeling the sun on their faces. Anna made small talk with the visitors who came panting up from the ruin. The uniform made it mandatory and it was a part of the job she took pleasure in. Sharing beauty with total strangers made the world seem a friendlier place. In a culture dominated, if not by violence, then certainly by overheated reports of it dished out by a ratings-starved news media, it reassured her that the love of peace and natural order was still extant in the human soul.

  “Let’s do lists,” Stanton suggested after a while. “Pretend we’re organized.”

  Anna reached in her hip pocket and fished out the yellow notebook. She’d already written “Life Insurance,” “Enemies,” “Where Else Should We Have Looked,” and “Greed/ Rose.” “Life Insurance” was crossed out since she’d overhead Rose telling Hattie that Stacy had left her and Bella with nothing.

  “I’ll be the secretary.” Stanton lifted the notebook from Anna’s hands and the government-issue ballpoint from her shirt pocket.

  “No life insurance?” he asked.

  “Apparently not.”

  He wrote “Check” beside the crossed-out words. “Greed, always good. Was there an inheritance? That’s a good one for Greed.”

  “No. Stacy wasn’t rich.”

  “ ‘Where Else Should We Have Looked’?”

  “It’s my guess we were meant to find the body and be mystified by it. Too coy, too precious, to be an accident. The only reasons not to hide the corpse are to prove death to get insurance or something or to stop people from looking for it in embarrassing places.”

  “Good point.” Frederick underlined it. Beneath he wrote, speaking the words aloud as he did so: “ ‘C. Beavens on scene. Interpreters in truck. J. Burke knew date. Spirit Veil.’ Anything else?”

  “Put down Greeley. The widow wants us to talk to him. It’s worth finding out why.”

  Dutifully he wrote the name at the bottom of the list, then tapped the pen against his teeth. The top row was white and even
but his bottom teeth were crowded, one pushed forward. As he tapped he hummed a tune Anna didn’t recognize.

  “So,” he said finally. “We’ve got the wife because—who knows? Because there’s always a good reason to kill your husband. Beavens because he was in the neighborhood. Burke because she knew the time of death and hates the white man’s depredation of sacred grounds. Stacy was a white guy?”

  Anna nodded.

  “I remember.” Stanton shook the autopsy envelope. “Said so. And we’ve got Greeley because the wife says he might know something. What else?”

  “There’s always us,” Anna stated the obvious. “A ranger. We’ve all got what it takes.”

  “Oooh.” Stanton looked impressed. Anna chose not to be amused.

  “Keys to the ruin, to the Four-Way, knowledge of the upper kiva. Stacy would trust one of us. We could get him up here. All we’d have to say is we’d found some archaeological crime—graffiti, digging, theft, whatever.”

  “Any ranger got a motive?”

  Other than her own story of unrequited bullshit, Anna couldn’t think of any. She shook her head. “He was a temporary employee so he wasn’t a threat to anybody promotion- or job-wise. He should have been—he was one of the best rangers we had. But without permanent status he couldn’t get promoted. He wasn’t even eligible for pay raises, and I don’t think he had anything worth stealing. Unless you count his wife, and I’d question that one. Sorry,” she apologized for the nasty remark. “Personal taste. Count her. Nobody seemed to hate him, and if he was blackmailing anyone or selling drugs he was good at it. No rumors.”

  “Somebody offed a nice, poor, unthreatening park ranger. Not promising.”

  “Nope.”

  Stanton closed the notebook and pocketed it along with Anna’s pen. “Let’s do Greeley first thing since nothing else makes a whole lot of sense.

  “Want to have lunch first?” he asked as they drove past the Navajo taco stand.

  “Not hungry.”

  Stanton looked pitiful but Anna didn’t notice.

  TED Greeley was sitting at the break table in the maintenance shop along with Tom Silva and several other construction workers. Tom and two of the others were smoking. Ashtrays, already full, and soda pop cans cluttered the scarred Formica.

  Greeley’s feet, crossed at the ankles, were propped up amid the debris. Even in heavy Red Wing boots his feet looked small. His white curls were stuck to his forehead with sweat and he sucked on a Diet 7-Up.

  “Hey, Ted,” Anna announced herself. “Don’t you guys have to work for a living?”

  “Not much longer if Ms. Stinson has her way. We can sit right here in the shade drinking sodie pops and whistle for our paychecks. The old witch—spelled with a ‘b’—is still trying to get the pipeline shut down till they dig up some beads and bones. A shitload of money to keep a handful of eggheads employed, if you ask me.”

  “Ain’t nobody ever asks you, Ted,” one of the men said.

  “Boy, you got that right.”

  Anna would have expected the smart remark to come from Tom Silva but he sat a little apart from the others quietly smoking his Marlboros. He showed no interest in the banter. To Anna he looked thinner than when she’d last seen him, and paler—not as if he’d been out of the sun for a while—it wasn’t so much a lack of color as a lack of energy, vividness. Somehow he’d turned in on himself, faded.

  She remembered Patsy talking of his haunting her and the girls and hoped he wasn’t winding up to a psychotic break of some kind.

  “Howdy, fellas, Tom,” Anna said to check his social reflexes. There were none. The others nodded or grunted, said “hi” or cracked jokes. Absorbed in his own thoughts, Silva gave no sign he’d even heard her.

  “What’s with him?” she asked Greeley.

  “Time of month.”

  The men laughed and Anna knew there was no use pursuing that line of questioning.

  “This is Special Agent Stanton of the FBI. Agent Stanton’s here to investigate the death of Stacy Meyers. I’d appreciate it if you could give him all the help you can.” Her little speech given, Anna was happy to step out of the spotlight. As Stanton shook hands all around, she slipped back to the refrigerator, put a dollar in the coffee can, and took out two Cokes. One she put in front of Stanton, the other she kept. Not only was she thirsty, but the role of waitress rendered her comfortably invisible.

  The construction workers, with the exception of Silva, were taken by the romance of the FBI. They clustered as happily as scouts in a den.

  Opening her Coke, Anna leaned back against the tool bench and watched.

  For a few minutes they chatted about the shutting down of work on the pipeline. Ted held forth on the financial burden of running a construction company. Stanton got an unedited earful about Al Stinson. The nicest thing she was called was a fruitcake. Occasionally, when the language grew rough, one of the men would remember Anna and mumble “Excuse my French, but it’s true” or “I’m no sexist, but . . .” and then, conscience salved, dive back into the conversational fray.

  Stanton listened, made all the right noises, and looked as solemnly interested as a priest taking confession. Once the political landscape had been colorfully painted, he moved the talk around to the investigation.

  To Anna’s surprise, the construction workers didn’t hold her high opinion of Stacy. “Full of himself,” “A little light in his loafers” were some of their comments.

  Greeley summed it up. “Meyers was a nineties kind of guy. Sensitive, caring, proud of his feminine side.”

  “Yeah, what’s that cologne he used?” a man still wearing his hard hat asked.

  “Jasmine Dick,” a short block of muscle replied, and spit tobacco juice in an empty Pepsi can.

  By the practiced laughter, Anna knew it was an old joke and no doubt what they called Stacy behind his back.

  Buoyed along on the Old Boy laughter, Stanton managed to get the whereabouts at the time of the murder of everybody but Greeley and Tom before they caught on.

  “Alibis?” Ted asked finally, and raised his eyebrows. “Hey, we’re suspects!” This amused them nearly as much as Jasmine Dick. Still, the men who’d cleared themselves looked relieved. “How ’bout it, Tom,” Greeley took over for Frederick. “Where were you the night Stacy was tagged?”

  “Nowhere,” Silva snapped.

  “I guess that lets Tom off the hook,” Greeley laughed. “Me too. At least nowhere I can say and keep in the lady’s good graces.”

  “Better to keep in mine,” Stanton said with a half smile that sobered Ted instantly.

  “When I gotta say, I’ll say. Not till then,” Ted returned sharply. “Break’s over.” Greeley fixed Anna with a cold look. “You want to make yourself useful? Catch the s.o.b. who’s been screwing with my equipment.” The men gathered up their cigarettes and left Anna and Frederick in possession of the battered lunch table.

  “Well, that was certainly productive,” Stanton said. “All non-suspects were in jail with seven nuns at the time of the murder; the two suspects were ‘nowhere’ and ‘nowhere with a lady.’ ”

  “Is Silva a suspect? I don’t think he even knew Stacy to say hello to.”

  “It may end up being a choice between Silva and the chindi,” Stanton cautioned.

  “Now that you mention it, Silva looked guilty as hell,” Anna said.

  “If you ever quit rangering, you might try the FBI. I think you’ve got a flair for this sort of work.”

  Anna glanced at her watch. “It’s three-thirty. Do you want to drop by the Widow Meyers before we quit for the day?”

  “Is she all sad-eyed and teary?”

  “Nope.”

  “Looks guilty as hell?”

  “I don’t think she was in the park that night.”

  “Too bad.”

  “She could have made it,” Anna said hopefully. “There’s a phone call placing her in Farmington at seven P.M. That’s only two hours from here. She could have driven up and back
in one night easily.”

  “Well, that is good news,” Stanton mocked her amiably.

  “Beats chindi.”

  “Could we have something to eat first?” he asked plaintively. “I’m faint.”

  “Sorry. I forget.”

  “Probably how you keep your boyish figure.”

  ROSE was at home. When not shopping in Durango or Farmington, Rose was usually at home. Nature apparently held little allure. The front windows of the bungalow were closed and the shades drawn to shut it firmly out of doors. All the interior lights were ablaze. Rose was on the sofa opposite the wood stove. Magazines—Self, Money, House Beautiful—littered the floor. The remains of an iced tea and a plate covered in crumbs held down a pile of like literature on the coffee table.

  A single bed, the kind on wheels that folds in half to be rolled into storage, was made up in one corner beneath the window. It was the brightest spot in the room. A cotton coverlet in rich red, green, and blue paisley covered the mattress. Throw pillows in similar colors—some prints, some solids—were tumbled in organized chaos, giving the bed the look of a gay and welcoming nest.

  The window above was the only one in the room open, the shade up. Hattie sat cross-legged amid the kaleidoscope of color, holding a sketch pad. Bella had a pad of newsprint propped up against her aunt’s thigh. She lay on her belly with her legs bent at the knee, little bare feet in the air. They stopped their work long enough to be introduced to Frederick Stanton.

  Rose fussed with the magazines, moving them from one place to another without creating any real order. She was more on edge than Anna had seen her in the past week or so. Though the death was tragic, Anna would have thought the wait would have been worse on the nerves and the conclusion harder on the heart. Short, controlled movements as she stabbed at the clutter and tight muscles around her mouth spoke of something more than anxiety or irritation. Rose was furious.

  There was bound to be some anger at Stacy for having had the bad judgment to die—if Rose had not profited by the death—but it was more specific than that. It was directed at Anna.