Ill Wind

by Nevada Barr

  Frederick was offered a chair and a glass of tea. Anna was snubbed. She was not even invited to sit. Indeed there was no place left to do so. But for Hattie’s bed and the couch, Stanton had been given the only chair in the room, an office swivel tucked in the kneehole of an old wooden desk.

  Sensing this production of “good cop, bad cop” had already been cast, Anna left the federal agent to question Rose and wandered over to the sunlit bed.

  Obligingly, Bella scooted over and Anna sat down, happy in the cheerful disarray. “What are you guys drawing?” she asked to make conversation.

  “We’re doing landscapes,” Bella told her. “Here.” She tore off a sheet of newsprint and handed it to Anna. “You can do it too. Put a coloring book under it so you can write on it. You can share my pens.”

  Obediently, Anna put the paper on the hard cardboard cover of a Birds of the Southwest coloring book and selected a pink felt-tipped pen from the pile. “Aren’t we supposed to have a landscape to draw from? Or are we just drawing the living room?”

  “We’re doing inner landscapes,” Bella said importantly. “Tell her, Aunt Hattie.” The little girl dropped the black pen she was drawing with, picked up a dark purple one, and promptly forgot them in her concentration.

  Anna looked expectantly at Hattie. The woman stopped sketching and thought for a second. Her hair was pulled up in a knot, curled wisps escaping in all directions from where she’d stored and plucked colored pencils. Seven or eight still resided in her bun, poking out like the spines of a rainbow porcupine.

  “We-ell,” Hattie said, dragging the word out. “You close your eyes.”

  Anna waited.

  Hattie waited.

  Anna realized this was for real and closed her eyes.

  “You go down your esophagus.”

  “That’s your throat,” Bella volunteered helpfully.

  “Turn left at your breastbone.”

  Anna snuck a peek. Hattie’s face was serious.

  “Go into your heart.”

  “Cree-aa-eek.” Bella provided the sound of a heavy door opening on rusted hinges.

  Maybe because I haven’t opened it in a while, Anna thought, caught up in the game.

  “Look around you,” Hattie continued. “What do you see? Don’t tell it, draw it.”

  Anna wasn’t about to tell it. Or draw it. In her mind’s heart she’d seen a lot of furniture covered with drop clothes. Molly would have a field day with that one.

  To keep her credit good, she drew a picture that was supposed to be of Piedmont. A great orange blob with four legs and a tail. The eyes she made emerald green because Bella didn’t have a bronze pen.

  Hattie stopped drawing, a frown creasing her otherwise smooth brow. She was looking down at Bella’s picture.

  The child had made black-and-purple concentric circles filling the page. It looked like the top view of a tornado or a giant whirlpool. In comparison, shrouded furniture seemed perfectly okay for decorating a heart.

  “What is that, Bella?” Hattie asked easily, but the worry was still on her face.

  “Just colors,” Bella replied. “Like in a flower.”

  More like a bruise, Anna thought.

  Stanton and Rose emerged from the kitchen where they’d vanished a while before. Stanton was just finishing a tall iced drink and Anna realized with some annoyance how thirsty she was. After her time on a damp island in Lake Superior, she had forgotten how the arid climate of the southwest could suck the moisture from the human body.

  Stanton looked at her lumpy pumpkin-colored drawing. “Are you done?” he asked politely.

  “All done.”

  “Can I see?” Bella asked.

  Anna showed the child. “You forgot his whiskers,” Bella told her. “If you don’t draw him whiskers, he’ll run into things. That’s how cats know how big the world is. They feel it with their whiskers.”

  Anna picked up a black pen and began to fill in the missing items. “I’m making them extra long,” she said. “In case Piedmont wants to explore the galaxy.”

  “Good idea,” Bella agreed.

  “Honey, come here,” Rose said to her daughter as Anna and Frederick let themselves out. “Momma needs to talk to you.”

  THE sun was still high but the angle had changed. Light streamed between the trees in long fingers filled with golden dust. The cicadas had hushed and the bulk of tourists gone from the mesa top.

  Loath to confine themselves inside the patrol car after the claustrophobia of Rose Meyers’ living room, Anna and Frederick leaned against the Ford, their backs to the bungalow. In front of them a fringe of trees separated the houses and Spruce Canyon. From where they stood the piñonjuniper forest, not a hundred yards wide, seemed to stretch on forever.

  “I had fun,” Anna said.

  “Bully for you. I didn’t. The good news is I did get some iced tea.”

  “Rub it in.”

  “What’s she got against you?” Stanton asked. “The claws were definitely unsheathed whenever your name came up.”

  “Beats me. Today’s hostility is a new development.”

  “The bad news is we’re back to Silva and chindi as far as suspects go—unless Burke or Beavens show some spunk.”

  “How so?”

  “Rose was in Farmington with Ted Greeley.”

  Anna thought about that for a moment. It fit none of her preconceived notions. “I thought Rose hated Greeley.”

  “She does. Not only did she say she’d had no intercourse—her word, not mine—with that ‘little, little man’ since Farmington, but she alibied him through clenched teeth. I got the feeling she’d’ve rather put him in the gas chamber than admit she’d been with him in Farmington. But she swore to it.”

  “All night?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Go figure.” Anna shook her head, remembering Bella saying the argument her mom had had on the phone with Stacy that Monday night had been over some man. “Maybe we’re back to suicide, maybe Stacy couldn’t hack another wife cheating on him.”

  “It’s been known to happen.” Stanton didn’t sound convinced. “No gunshot wound, no knife cuts, no pills, no poison—‘it is a good day to die’? Meyers just lay down and willed his life away?”

  “Not likely.” After Zach died Anna’d tried it enough times to know it didn’t work.

  “Frederick!” Rose was calling from the front steps. “Do you have Stacy’s things? Hills said Anna had taken them.”

  She made it sound like petty theft. It took Anna a minute to realize what she was referring to.

  “His shoes and hat,” she said. “I’d forgotten. They’re in the trunk,” she hollered to Rose as she walked around to the rear of the Ford.

  They were still where she’d tossed them the day of the body recovery. The hat was a little the worse for wear, crushed by the toolbox. Anna pushed the dent out. She had to dig under traffic cones, shotgun, and shovel for the shoes.

  “Got ’em,” she called, and pulled them out. As the clear afternoon light hit them, she sucked in her breath. “Hey, Frederick, come here for a minute.”

  Reacting to something in her voice, the FBI agent was beside her in seconds.

  “Look familiar?” Anna showed him the low-cut cordovan shoes. On the heel of the right and the instep of the left shoe were the same oval burn marks the coroner had described on Stacy’s arms.

  SIPPING the Beaujolais, Anna was careful not to let the wineglass clink against the telephone receiver. She was in no mood for another lecture from her sister on the evils of worshiping Bacchus.

  She’d just finished an acerbic account of the interview with Mrs. Meyers. “The green-eyed monster,” she said. “One of us is acting like a jealous woman.”

  “Gee, yah think?” Molly returned sarcastically. “Obviously you had a proprietary interest in her husband, for whatever reasons. Maybe because he had some of the same characteristics as Zach?”

  “Maybe because he had a brain. Rare in these back-woods.
”

  Molly laughed. “Your jealousy is obviously rooted deep in childhood trauma and will require umpteen thousand dollars’ worth of therapy to root out. What’s more interesting is why she’s jealous of you—if the anger was inspired by jealousy.”

  “I sure don’t know. Maybe Stacy said something.”

  “It started before the murder?”

  Anna thought about that. “No. After. Way after. I mean she was never My Friend Flicka but the outright hatred is new.”

  “Something since? She could have found a torrid entry in his diary or an unmailed love letter.”

  The idea thrilled Anna in a morbid sort of way. She sighed deeply and sucked down some of the red wine.

  “Somebody telling tales out of school?” Molly suggested.

  “Stacy and I were never together except professionally,” Anna said. “It could be all in her head, a way to justify a less than ideal marriage. Looking at it from the outside, it didn’t seem to be based on the principles of wellness. More mutual need than mutual respect and admiration, if you know what I mean.”

  Molly chortled her evil-sounding chortle. “Why do you think I never married? Nothing like an internship in family counseling to put the fear of matrimony in one’s soul.”

  “I hate feeling jealous!” Anna said with sudden vehemence. She pulled in another draught of wine and felt comforted. “It makes me feel like such a girl.”

  “Ah, yes. Such helpless, emotional creatures. Given to anorexia and fainting fits. Run like a girl, throw like a girl, whistle like a girl.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “Stacy’s gone on two counts,” Molly reasoned. “He’s dead and he wasn’t yours. I’d recommend you grieve like a girl. Let it run its course. It’s not cancer or frostbite, it’s just pain.”

  “Like the phantom pain in an amputated limb?”

  “Very like. Not much you can do with a feeling till you give in and feel the damn thing. As long as you mask emotions, anesthetize yourself, the confusion will only get worse.”

  Anna had the irritating sense that Molly wasn’t talking only about jealousy.

  “You know, Anna, you don’t have to do everything alone. Even out there in the back of beyond there are bound to be support groups.” Molly cut the inevitable argument short: “Just think about it. It works. Lord knows why. It’s not profitable to us honest shrinks. If there weren’t plenty of nuts around to keep me in pin money, I’d keep mum about it.”

  After that Molly let Anna change the subject and they talked on for a while but it failed to eradicate the hollow feeling behind Anna’s breastbone.

  When she’d hung up, she sat awhile on her twin bed playing with the fringe of the Mexican blanket that served as a spread.

  To the lamp, she said: “I could sure use a good game of Dead Princess long about now.”

  FOURTEEN

  WINTER WAS NEVER FAR FROM THE HIGH COUNTRY, and Anna woke into a day cold and dreary enough to remind her how fragile the warmth of summer could be.

  Thunderheads pressed low on the mesa but didn’t obscure the view. Beneath the lowering gray, black piles of cumulonimbus rolled like billiard balls from the mountains of Arizona to the Colorado buttes. Through the thin walls of the dormitory, Anna heard the grind of thunder.

  Helitack crew would be delighted; good fire weather. Lightning could bury itself deep in a juniper and smolder for days. When the weather let up and the fuels dried there might be hazard pay all around.

  Throwing back the covers, Anna leaped out of bed. In the lowlands around Lake Superior weather fronts, with their attendant changes in pressure, gave her headaches. Not so the mountain storms. Cracking thunder and flashing lightning filled the air with ozone till it tingled in the lungs, rejuvenating body and spirit much the same as the air at the seaside or near waterfalls.

  Having braided her hair off her face, she jammed herself into uniform and, catlike to avoid getting wet, ran from the dorm to her patrol car. Thunderstorms made for good thinking weather: the tourists were chased safely indoors and the brass wouldn’t venture out and so catch one cogitating.

  Anna drove the short distance to the Far View cafeteria parking lot and pointed the nose of the Ford toward the panorama of northern New Mexico. Many-tined forks of lightning in the grand tradition of Frankenstein movies shattered a slate sky. Virga fell in curtains, now obscuring, now lifting to reveal a distant butte or valley. Colors were muted, the greens almost black, the reds of the earth somber.

  The car radio was tuned to National Public Radio and something vaguely high-toned was being played on a harpsichord. The ordered gentility of the music and the wild vagaries of the weather suited Anna, and she rolled down the window to better enjoy the concert.

  Special Agent Stanton had taken Stacy’s shoes with their odd marks to Durango so they could be sent to the lab in Hobbs, New Mexico, for analysis. Since she’d been assigned to him for the duration, she wasn’t on Hills’ schedule. The day was pretty much hers to do with as she pleased.

  She took the lid off her plastic coffee mug and took a sip. Once she’d had a severe coffee habit but luxury had cured it. After she’d begun fresh-grinding beans and using heavy whipping cream, the brew with nondairy powders found in most offices didn’t tempt her in the least. However, two cups of the good stuff each morning was a ritual she never missed.

  Anna unbuckled her seat belt, rearranged the .357 and cuffs, and settled in for some serious thinking. Humanity, thus examined, struck her as sordid. Rose and Ted Greeley having their affair—or whatever it was they were having—in a motel in Farmington with little Bella... where? Left in the car? Packed off to a movie? Anger and disrespect—at least from Rose’s side—the hallmark of the encounter.

  Drew’s love of Bella seemed a bright spot in this dreary landscape but it too was tinged with anger. For reasons of his own he was tilting at what Anna hoped was a windmill: the abuse of that lovely child. To Anna’s way of thinking the operations might cause less pain in the long run than fighting the good fight against prejudice.

  Tom and Patsy Silva held together even after divorce by greed on Patsy’s side and some as yet inexplicable obsession on Tom’s. A fixation that had gone from an alarming but active harassment phase to an even more alarming but passive stalker phase.

  Jamie and her posthumous affair with Stacy—in the past two days it had gone from “dear friend” to “dearest friend.” A bizarre form of psychological necrophilia, rare but, according to Anna’s sister, not unheard of. Molly lamented the loss of the melodrama that had been such a part of American life before the turn of the century. A time when people took themselves more seriously, were less bored, less sophisticated. A time when widows wore black veils, the occasional duel was fought, and, though there were no documented incidents of it, people were believed to die of shame and of love.

  The human animal needed its dramas, the psychiatrist believed. Denied, it sought them in unhealthy ways. Like imagined romances with dead married men. This last thought struck too close to home. Made physically uncomfortable by the parallel between her and Burke, Anna literally squirmed in her seat.

  An affair with a dead married man. “That’s got to be it,” she exclaimed. Taken back to her nonexistent romance with Stacy, she flashed on their one rendezvous: the curtailed cocktail hour at Far View Lounge. Ted Greeley had been there. Anna remembered him making a mock toast as she grabbed Stacy’s arm, remembered the leer he was passing off as a smile.

  That’s why Rose was so hostile. In the last couple of days Greeley must have told her, or led her to believe, Anna had been having an affair with her husband.

  “Damn!” Anna struck the steering wheel with an open palm. Everything seemed so sordid. Everything.

  Lightning struck through the looping black clouds, the wide fork straddling the valley between Chapin and Park mesas. Automatically Anna began to count “one Mississippi, two—” Thunder drowned out the thought. The strike had been less than a mile away.

  She
took another sip of excellent coffee and leaned back, letting past conversations with and about Rose drift through her mind. Why hadn’t Rose said right off the bat that she was with Greeley in Farmington? It certainly got her off the hook more effectively than one seventeen-minute phone call several hours before the murder. Embarrassment over being caught in a compromising position? Possibly, but had she been up front about it, no one need have known. It was the nineties. No one believed dinner—even a late dinner—with a member of the opposite sex doomed a woman to wear the scarlet “A.”

  Earlier in the investigation Rose had been pointing the finger at Greeley. A lovers’ quarrel now patched up? Love me or go to the gas chamber? Anna shook her head. The facts, if such a hodgepodge of information and instincts could be labeled that, didn’t support the theory. Stanton said Rose was loath to let the contractor off the hook, said she hadn’t seen or spoken to “that little, little man” since Farmington.

  Rain came down more heavily, blowing in sheets against the windshield, and Anna was forced to roll up her window or drown.

  Rose’s hostility had sprung full blown less than an hour after Stanton had questioned Greeley in the maintenance shop. Ergo, whatever had turned Rose against Anna had occurred recently, within the last couple of days. If Anna was right, and Rose’s ire stemmed from jealousy, and that jealousy was ignited by Greeley, then Rose had lied. She had “had intercourse” with that “little, little man” since Farmington.

  Did Greeley invent Stacy’s infidelity so Rose would be less reticent to expose hers, thus giving them both an alibi?

  Surely Greeley was aware it also gave them both a motive.

  Sharp rapping at the window startled Anna out of her reverie. She yelped in a decidedly unrangerlike fashion and slopped coffee on her knee. Adding insult to injury, a kindly-looking elderly woman under an enormous black-and-white umbrella said, “Sorry to wake you up,” as Anna rolled down the window. “Could you tell me how far it is to the cliff dwellings?”