Ill Wind

by Nevada Barr

  After the information was disseminated, Anna opted to move her brown study to a less accessible locale. More because it was secluded than for its ghoulish ambience, she chose the closed section of Cliff Palace. In her exalted capacity as the FBI guy’s chauffeur, the ruin was still open to her.

  Weather had driven the tourists from the lesser-known sites but Cliff was doing a booming, if soggy, business. It was one of the most famous cliff dwellings in the world. Visitors, some on the mesa for only a day, had traveled from as far away as Japan, Germany, Australia. Come hell or high water, they would see Cliff Palace.

  Tucked up in the ruin, out of sight lest she stir envy in lesser beings, Anna felt her privilege. Deep within the alcove she was completely dry and out of the wind, yet privy to the wondrous perfume the rain struck from a desert land. One hundred feet below the mesa top, Cliff Palace was still several hundred feet above the bottom of Cliff Canyon. Anna had a lovely view out past ruined walls and turrets. Along the canyon rims rainwater had begun to pour over the sandstone, cascading down in thin ribbons of silver.

  Near Jug House, a closed ruin on Wetherill Mesa, there was a stone reservoir built at the bottom of such a pour-over. The archaeologists surmised it could have been a tank to save the water. Anna was surprised there wasn’t one at every ruin, but then the Anasazi were such accomplished potters, perhaps they had caught and stored rainwater in earthenware vessels.

  Impromptu waterfalls delighted the tourists as much as they did Anna. From her hiding place she could hear the occasional squeal of pleasure. Leaning back on her hands, Anna let the sounds wash over her. She couldn’t identify with Jamie’s need to invent supernatural phenomena. As far as Anna was concerned these were the spirit veils. Common miracles that never lost their power to stir the human soul.

  Just for the hell of it, she said a vague, nondenominational prayer for the spirit of Stacy Meyers.

  Feet dangling into the abandoned kiva, the white noise of running water and muted voices to still her mind, she let the world settle around her. Details came sharply into focus: a small handprint in black on the alcove overhead, the stark slash of a vulture’s feather fallen in the center of an ancient building block, concentric circles marking the butt of a centuries-dead juniper hacked down by stone axes.

  Half and hour melted away. No earth-shaking realizations came to her, no revelations as to why Greeley might have told Rose she and Stacy were having an affair. No guesses as to why Rose lied about having communicated with Greeley after the night of the murder; whether Beavens lied to Jamie when he said he saw the veil or lied to Anna when he said he didn’t.

  Hunger and cold overcame pastoral beauty and her thoughts began to turn materialistic. She stood and slapped some life into her rear end, then surreptitiously made her way back to the populated areas of the ruin.

  A tall gray-haired interpreter, a retired philosophy professor from San Francisco State, was talking to a group of people near the tower. His long arms, encased in NPS green, semaphored information and enthusiasm.

  Claude Beavens held down the post at the mouth of the alcove. Not only was he not speaking to the visitors but he also didn’t seem interested in them even as statistics. Anna could see the silver counter dangling from an elastic band around his wrist. Binoculars obscured the upper half of his face. Because of the rain, birds were roosting, deer tucked up somewhere dry, and Anna wondered what he stared at so intently. She followed the direction of his gaze down Cliff Canyon toward Ute reservation lands. Without the assistance of field glasses, she couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  “What’ve you got?” she asked. Beavens jumped as if she’d goosed him with a cattle prod.

  “Nothing!” he snapped, pulling the binoculars from around his neck as if they could testify against him.

  “No law against looking,” Anna reassured him.

  A visitor stopped beside them and asked what the Anasazi used for bathrooms. Beavens escaped into an earnest discussion of waste disposal in thirteen hundred A.D.

  Anna stepped up to the rock where he’d been holding his vigil and looked down the canyon. All seemed to be as it always was. Then it came to her. “Somewhere out there Jamie’s spirit veil does its elusive thing, doesn’t it?” she asked as the visitor moved on.

  “Who knows?” he said with his signature shrug. Whatever it was, it had ceased to interest him and, so, to be of much interest to Anna.

  She was not sorry to reach her patrol car. Not only was it warm, dry, and upholstered, but a moving vehicle was one of the few places in the modern world a person had some semblance of privacy. Cellular phones were an abomination. Along with bullet-proof vests and panty hose, it was a piece of equipment she’d never submit to. The radio was intrusion enough.

  Driving back to the chief ranger’s office, she went as slowly as the traffic would allow. There was something about rain that opened the doors to dreaming. The steady beat, a softening of the edges of things, promoted a meditative state that unraveled the threads of linear thought. The drift was restful and Anna found herself glad to be freed from Stanton’s sharp mind for the day.

  Through the CRO’s windows she saw enough gray and green to color a medium-sized swamp. The office was clogged with rangers holing up till the rain stopped. Not quite ready to rejoin the real world, she ducked around the building to the balcony in back. Set as it was into the side of Spruce Canyon, the front of the chief ’s office was only one story high, its door opening directly onto the walk to the museum. The rear of the building was comprised of two stories. A heavy wooden balcony framed in the blocky saw-cut gingerbread of the southwest provided a picture-perfect view down into the canyon. On the far rim three silvery ribbons fell from pour-overs smoothed into troughs edging the cliff top. Through a screen of huge pine trees, black now with turkey vultures sitting out the storm, was Spruce Tree House; one hundred and fourteen rooms and eight kivas tucked neatly into a natural alcove.

  The timbers framing the balcony were dark with water. A sand-filled standing ashtray and a bench built in the same massive style as the framing were the only furnishings.

  To Anna’s relief there was only one visitor seeking sanctuary there. A woman in an ankle-length cranberry slicker and a canary yellow nor’easter hat stood near the far corner looking at the sky where the storm was darkest. Clouds hung down in bruised mammalia. Lightning was generated not only between heaven and earth but from cloud to cloud, as if the gods fought among themselves.

  The woman turned slightly and bent her head. Anna amended her earlier census: there were two seekers of sanctuary. A child sat on the wide railing, enfolded securely in an ample cranberry embrace.

  It was Hattie and Bella. Somehow they didn’t qualify as destroyers of solitude and Anna was surprised to find she was glad to see them. Lest she be the one to shatter the peace, she slipped quietly onto the bench and watched the lightning play against curtains of rain.

  Thunder’s grumbling was foreshadowed and echoed by faint feral sounds closer to home. Soon Anna lost interest in the meteorological show and watched Bella and her aunt with rapt attention.

  They were growling.

  Because of the innocence that blessed both faces, the sight was not frightening but it was disturbing. Bella Meyers’ perfect little mouth was pulled back into a square, exposing small white teeth. Her cheeks pushed up till they made slits of her eyes, and her hands—at least the one Anna could see clutching the sleeve of Hattie’s raincoat—were curled into a caricature of a claw.

  The growls, nearly soft as purrs, were not amusing. There was too much anger for that. Bella snarled and clawed at something very real—at least to her. What kept the scene from being alarming or, worse, pathetic, was the power. A definite force, even in so small a girl, commanded respect. It was not the desperate anger of helplessness. It had focus. And, too, the child was safe in the loving arms of her aunt.

  Growling at the universe isn’t half scary when you know you’re loved, Anna thought.

&n
bsp; Hattie was snapping and snarling too, but her fury was diluted. Maturity and understanding had undermined the purity of her attack. Hers was more of a supportive growl, giving Bella’s anger confirmation.

  The minutes passed. The storm moved to the south. Bella’s growls and snarls grew less ferocious. Hattie rested her chin on top of the child’s head and hugged her tightly. Finally the last little “grrr” was squeezed out and they stood still as statues. The rain stopped.

  “Well. I guest that’s that,” Hattie said.

  “Sure is,” Bella returned with satisfaction. Using her bottom as a fulcrum and her aunt’s arms as a brace, the little girl levered her legs over the rail and slid to the balcony floor.

  “Hi, Anna,” she said, apparently unsurprised. “Aunt Hattie and me were making it storm. But mostly me because I’m the maddest.”

  “You sure cooked up a doozy,” Anna said. “I practically got drowned.”

  “Everybody did,” Bella said, unrepentant. “Even the vultures.”

  “How did you make it storm?”

  Bella pulled herself up on the bench beside Anna and patted the seat, inviting her aunt to join them. “Aunt Hattie taught me. First you have to be really, really, really mad. Then you screw it all up into a ball and put it right here.” She reached up and tapped the middle of Anna’s brow where the Hindus often drew the mystical third eye. “Then you just point it at some clouds and order them to do it.”

  “Ah,” Anna said.

  “It helps if they’re the black piley-up ones.”

  The three of them were quiet for a minute, just sitting in a row listening to the pine needles drip. “Do you say something like ‘Rain, rain, don’t go away, come and stay today’?” Anna asked after a while.

  “No.” Bella sounded as if that was an exceedingly stupid question and Anna felt as if she’d asked Willard Scott what he meant by partly cloudy. “You talk cloud language,” Bella explained, and growled for Anna—but not too loudly lest it unleash another deluge.

  “You must have been really, really, really mad,” Anna said. “That was one of the best storms I’ve ever seen.”

  “I was pretty mad,” Bella conceded.

  “What were you mad at?”

  Bella looked at her aunt.

  “You can be mad at anybody you want to, honey. It’s okay. Sometimes I even get mad at your uncle Edwin.”

  “Really, really mad?”

  “Yup. Sometimes I get really mad at God.”

  Bella looked impressed.

  “She doesn’t mind one bit,” Hattie said. “She probably gets made at the angels sometimes.”

  “When would anybody get mad at an angel?” Bella asked skeptically.

  “Maybe when they’re molting,” Anna offered. “Dropping feathers all over heaven.”

  That seemed to make sense. “Okay.” Bella dropped her voice to a whisper. “I’m really, really mad at Momma.” She waited. No stray lightning bolt struck. With greater confidence, she added: “Rose is a thorny, thorny, morny, dorny, thorny old Rose.”

  Anna laughed and Bella was offended. “What’re you mad at your mom about? ” Anna asked to win the child back but it was too late.

  “Can’t tell you,” Bella said, and jumped down from the bench.

  “Why not?” Now Anna was offended.

  “Because Momma said blood’s sicker than water.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  “Nope.”

  THE sun was beginning to peak through. Hattie and Bella left. Anna waited a few more minutes to allow the newly clement weather time to lure the crowd out of the office, then walked around to the front door. Jennifer Short sat on the table behind the counter swinging her legs and eating candy out of a jar Frieda kept stocked. Her hair was squashed flat against her head from crown to ears, then stuck out at right angles.

  “Idn’t it awful,” she was complaining to Frieda. “Ah feel like something out of a horror flick. The one that goes crazy and hacks everybody up at the slumber party.”

  “Terminal Hat Head,” Frieda contributed. “Occupational hazard.” The dispatcher sat behind her desk, her computer for once dark, the radio mike near her right hand.

  “Hey,” Jennifer greeted Anna.

  “Howdy.” Anna leaned her elbows on the counter. Beneath the sheet of glass that topped it were maps of the park and surrounding areas. “Talked to Patsy lately?” she asked Frieda when it became obvious she’d killed the conversation in progress.

  “Matter of fact.” Frieda laughed her delicious laugh. “She’s doing okay but Tom’s got her and the girls all atwitter.”

  “She’d better be careful,” Anna said. “Stalking is stalking, not flattery. This guardian-angel-in-a-Chevy-truck routine strikes me as a bubble or two off plumb. I think Tom is one weird guy.”

  “I think Tom Silva’s cute,” Jennifer said. “Kee-ee-yoot.”

  “Better watch out,” Anna kidded her. “Remember what happened to the last guy you thought was cute.”

  “Serves Stacy right for bein’ married,” Jennifer retorted. “All the good ones are married.”

  “All the good ones are dead,” Anna said before she thought.

  She was rewarded with an awkward silence and averted eyes.

  “Guess I better look like I’m doing something constructive.” Jennifer smashed her hat down over the ruined hairdo and swaggered toward the door. It wasn’t braggadocio, Anna knew from experience. For a short woman there was no place left for the arms once the gunbelt was strapped in place.

  “I should too,” Anna said. Grabbing a handful of Frieda’s butterscotch candies, she made her way back to the eight-by-six-foot cubbyhole that served as an office for Hills, the fire management officer, Anna, half a dozen seasonals, and the Xerox machine.

  Her desk was nearly as bad a rat’s nest as Hills’, and most of the rubble wasn’t of her making. Space shared—shared with Homo sapiens who’d not yet attained their thirtieth birthdays—was reduced to chaos. Anna preferred order and knew herself to have entered upon that stage of the game Molly dubbed the Pre-Curmudgeon Warm-ups.

  Everything that wasn’t hers she scraped into an accordion envelope, marked it “The Poltergeist File,” and stowed it in the kneehole under Hills’ desk. Before anyone dared to dig that deep the stuff would be transmogrified into historical artifacts by the sheer passage of time.

  To impose some semblance of organization, she unearthed all the 10-343 Case Incident and 10-344 Criminal Incident reports that had been turned in since the beginning of the tourist season in April. Thanks to Frieda, they had all been neatly filed in chronological order. Hills hadn’t yet found the time to stir them into his ongoing stew of papers.

  Anna separated out all the incidents that had occurred in or around Cliff Palace and ordered them again according to date. The last was the report she had written on the discovery and evacuation of Stacy Meyers’ body.

  Reading through it, the day was re-created in her mind but no new details or connections were generated.

  Slouching down in the chair, she put her feet up. More blood to the brain. Again she read the report. Words on a page: no leaps of logic, no sparks of genius.

  Putting the 344 aside, she picked up the sheaf of 343s and thumbed through them. Most were medicals: broken wrist, respiratory failure, anxiety attack, tachycardia w/ confusion, asthma, fractured C-spine from a kiva diver—the local parlance for tourists who tumbled into the underground rooms.

  Anna selected out all the evacuations. But for the wrist and the C-spine, each carry-out was in some way, shape, or form a heart, brain, or breathing difficulty. Not unusual at seven thousand feet with a high percentage of elderly visitors. She set the two fractures aside and looked through the remaining reports.

  Pretty standard stuff; the only thing peculiar was the number of them. Anna carried the file into an ex-coat closet now pressed into service as a computer room and called up all the 343s for six summers past. Even accounting for the steady increase in touris
m, medical evacuations had quadrupled at Cliff Palace this season. She checked reports for Balcony House and Spruce Tree House. They had remained more or less constant.

  “Frieda, are you busy?” she hollered.

  “Always.”

  “Too busy?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Computer-nerd stuff.”

  “Come here then, I can’t leave the front desk.”

  With Anna breathing down her neck, Frieda used D-Base to cross-reference all the evacuations by the patients’ point of origin, age, sex, race, and primary complaint. “Looks like a normal group,” Frieda said. “Old people and sick people. You were expecting somebody else?”

  “I don’t know what I was expecting.” Anna sat down on Frieda’s desk and looked through the reports again: ten-thirty, eleven o’clock, eleven-eighteen, April twelfth, twenty-sixth, May third, twenty-fourth, and thirty-first, June seventh, June fourteenth. “Try by time.”

  Frieda complied. “All but two were in the morning.”

  That was something. The usual time for rescue excitement was midafternoon, when the day’s heat was setting in. “Try by date.”

  “Hey ho.” Frieda clicked the keys. “Well, lookie there!”

  “What?” Anna demanded.

  “All but two—the afternoon ones—fell on Tuesday. And I thought Mondays were tough... Coincidence?”

  “Got to be,” Anna said. “Thanks, Frieda.”

  Back at her own desk Anna fanned out the reports now reduced by two, the two neither in the morning nor on a Tuesday. “What do I know now?” she whispered to herself.

  “What?” Frieda called.

  “Nothing,” Anna answered both her own question and the dispatcher’s. She pored over the paltry bits of information she had gathered. Rose lied about when and where she’d seen Greeley both the night of the murder and since.

  Greeley was still grousing about the sugar in his D-14 Cat’s fuel tank. The murder had so overshadowed it there’d been no further investigation to speak of.

  “Hey, Frieda,” Anna interrupted herself. “Do private vendors like Greeley have to show proof of insurance before they’re hired?”