Ill Wind

by Nevada Barr

  “Maybe.”

  The doubt in his voice irritated her. She ignored it. At present the topic held little interest for her, but it was the only thing she could think of besides her eyes and she didn’t care to think about that. “Greeley must’ve made Stacy breathe the fumes,” she went on. Fleeting sadness darkened her mind. “The prints on his arms and shoes were etched with whatever it is I’ve been rolling in.”

  “Think Greeley dumped him in the kiva just to be mysterious?” Stanton asked.

  “We’ll never know, but probably. Jamie’d been babbling on to everybody about the solstice and angry spirits. He might have been taking advantage of Jamie’s ghostly brouhaha.”

  “So he carries him into the kiva, folds him up in the fire pit, rakes it all smooth, puts on Meyers’ shoes, backs out, and tosses the shoes back where he got ’em.”

  “Mysteries are like magic,” Anna said. “Once you know how the trick is done, it’s obvious to the point of stupidity. I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts Silva was blackmailing Greeley,” Anna said, suddenly remembering the short-lived spate of expensive gifts he’d poured into Patsy’s lap. “He reported seeing a truck at night once. He was out at all hours harassing Patsy. Maybe he saw something else. Put two and two together.” Anna pressed her face near the shower head, hoping the water pressure would force it beneath her lids.

  “Tom must have gotten greedy,” Stanton said. “Ted probably started threatening the wife and kids to shut him up.”

  So Tom had been guardian angel and not stalker after all, looking after his girls the only way he knew how. “Killed Pats” wasn’t a confession of firsthand homicide but guilt at putting her in danger. “Threats against his family would shut him up all right,” Anna said. “Tom was obsessed with his ex.”

  “But you can’t trust a drunk.”

  “Nope. And nothing easier than getting a drunk to take a drink. Point the truck in the right direction and wedge a golf ball in the linkage. Greeley was a golfer. Tom mentioned it one day.”

  Silence. “Are you still there?” she demanded. Panic rose in her chest and a sour taste poured into the back of her throat.

  Something heavy slammed into the tile near her head. Covering her face and neck, Anna collapsed to the floor of the shower. “I can’t see, goddamn it! I can’t see!” she was screaming.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry. It was me, Frederick the idiot.” Stanton’s voice was in her ear, his hands on her shoulders. “A spider. A black widow. No kidding. As big as a Ping-Pong ball. Huge. It looked ready to pounce. I hit it with your shoe. Sorry.”

  “Fuck you. Fuck you.” Anna began to cry. Stanton crouched down in the shower and held her. The slick fabric of his windbreaker stuck to her cheek and his arms were warm around her. Water dripped from his hair to her face. He held her as she would hold a frightened kitten, tightly, carefully so it wouldn’t hurt and couldn’t fall.

  When she could finally stop, he helped her to her feet.

  “Four more minutes,” he said.

  “Thanks,” was all she could manage.

  When Anna had only a minute left to go, Frieda took over. She and Frederick discussed Anna’s disposal in hushed tones till she couldn’t stand it anymore and shouted at them.

  Frieda shut the shower off and wrapped a shivering Anna in clean towels. “Can you see?” she asked.

  Anna forced her eyes open a slit. “I guess. No. Sort of.” The pain was there but not so intense and she could make out shapes, light and dark.

  “Keep your eyes shut,” Frederick said, and Anna felt him winding soft gauze around her head. “I’m going to bandage them both closed. You know the routine. Don’t want you looking hither and yon scratching things about.” The bandaging done, he kissed her on top of the head and left to return to the crime scene.

  As Frieda wrapped Anna’s hair in dry terry cloth, she said: “I’m going to drive you to Cortez. Hills is out at the scene. Paul and Drew took Jennifer down soon as they got there. She’d come around. She got a hell of a wallop on the head, but it looks like a concussion and a good story’s all she’s going to come away with. Short’s lucky.”

  “If I weren’t so glad she weren’t dead, I’d kill her.”

  “C’mon, you were young once,” Frieda chided.

  “No, I wasn’t.” With her aching muscles and acid-etched body, Anna felt as if it were true.

  DR. Dooley kept Anna overnight for observation but released her the next morning with eye salve and a cheap pair of sunglasses. The world was still a little fuzzy around the edges but it looked good to Anna.

  She pulled on a pair of mechanic’s overalls and rubber shower thongs Frieda’d dug out of her trunk and left for her. Her own clothes were ruined. Hopefully the duty nurse hadn’t thrown them away. They were evidence.

  On the way out, she stopped by Jennifer Short’s room. Jennifer’s head was swathed in bandages and both her eyes were swollen shut. She was so contrite Anna’s anger, never heartfelt, evaporated entirely. It had taken a good deal of courage to go up against Greeley all alone in the dead of night. Tombstone courage that needed leavening with common sense, but courage all the same, and Anna respected that.

  To her surprise, Short was determined to keep on being a ranger. “I’m going to get on permanent,” the woman lisped through swollen lips. “Get me some trainin’ and get damn good.”

  “I’ll hire you,” Anna said, and was pretty sure she meant it.

  Hills was waiting near the emergency room desk when Anna walked out. “Where’s Frederick?” she asked.

  “Glad to see you too,” he returned. “Get your stuff. We’re gonna have paperwork up the wazoo over this thing.”

  “I’m wearing my stuff. And I’m on sick leave for a week. Doctor’s orders.”

  “Doggone it. You gotta be more careful.”

  “You’re glad I’m alive, admit it.”

  Hills grunted. Anna took it for an affirmative. The depths of his feeling were revealed on the drive back up to the mesa top. He’d found Patsy and the girls lodging. The tower house was hers.

  “When?” The question was so abrupt, Anna laughed at herself.

  “If you was a tomcat I do believe you’d be up there peein’ in every corner,” Hills retorted. “It’s yours today, I guess, if you want. Patsy had the movers there this morning. I’d think you’d want to let the sheets cool off before you went hopping in.”

  “Nope.”

  “Need help?”

  “Nope. Thanks though,” Anna added belatedly. What she had was in storage in Cortez. Her estate consisted of little more than a futon and frame, a rocking chair, and a few good Indian rugs.

  The movers were late, and as it turned out Anna had to spend one more night in the dormitory. A little after eight the next morning she had her belongings stuffed into boxes and paper sacks and piled into the Rambler.

  Zach’s ashes were last to be loaded. As she carried the tin out through the living room she took a last look around.

  “Find anything to miss?” Jamie asked.

  “Not much. The company,” Anna lied.

  “Hah!” Jamie was unoffended. “You forgot your wine cellar.”

  Anna paused for a second in the kitchen and looked at the five bottles lined up on the counter beneath the shelves she’d claimed as her own. “Share it with Jennifer,” Anna said. “Sort of a good-bye toast.”

  “My, my.” Jamie clucked her tongue. “And they told me it was Jennifer who got hit on the head.”

  On her way down to Chapin, Anna stopped by Frieda’s and gathered Piedmont into the canvas satchel that served as his travel carrier.

  By two o’clock she’d brought all of her worldly goods up from storage. Her boom box had pride of place on the mantel and Louis Armstrong poured out “It’s a Wonderful World” like honey-laced bourbon. Anna amused herself dragging rugs and pictures from place to place, then standing back to discuss the effect with a disinterested cat.

  The only furniture she’d arranged so
far was a rocking chair and, beside it, a small marble-topped table where the phone sat in solitary splendor. Soon she’d call her sister. Anna’d been promising herself that for three hours but had yet to drum up the nerve. There were things needing to be said, confessions to be made.

  Rapping at the front door interrupted both her nesting and her dithering. With less than good humor, she went to the door.

  Stanton waved at her through the screen. Despite a flash of awkwardness engendered by their unscheduled intimacy in the shower, Anna was glad to see him. Because it seemed less stilted than leaving him on the doorstep, she invited him into the kitchen and sat down in the booth. The little vinyl benches and polished tongue of Formica were too small to accommodate his lanky frame.

  “Kitchens are made for girls,” he complained, turning sideways to stretch his long legs. “Just to reach the sink without bending double I’ve got to stand with my feet so far apart I’m almost doing the splits.”

  “Sounds like an excuse to get out of doing the dishes to me.”

  “How’re you doing?” he asked when he’d gotten himself arranged.

  “Fine. Can’t offer you anything. The cupboard is bare.”

  “I’ve been tying up loose ends,” he said. “Rose is willing to turn state’s evidence in return for clemency.”

  “For the false alibi?”

  Stanton nodded. Anna shoved three carpet tacks the movers had managed to leave on the kitchen table into a pinwheel shape. “The woman’s husband gives his life to stop the dumping, Greeley kills him, and Rose is still willing to alibi him. Go figure.”

  Stanton looked uncomfortable—miserable, in fact. He looked like Anna’s dad when he had bad news about Fluffy or Bootsie or Pinky-winky—whichever of their multitude of pets had succumbed to the inevitable.

  Anna waited. Everyone she knew was safe. Still, there was a hollow place in her belly.

  “Stacy was on the take,” Frederick said apologetically. “Greeley paid him to unlock the Four-Way and make sure the coast was clear. That’s why Greeley did it Monday nights; Stacy was on the late shift. Greeley’d lock up when he was done.

  “That funky twisty way with the chain,” Anna said, remembering how the same lock configuration at the maintenance yard had tipped her off.

  Stanton went on: “After he was killed Rose gave Greeley Stacy’s radio so he could keep tabs on the rangers. Without Stacy’s keys, Rose says she doesn’t know how he unlocked the Four-Way. Presumably at some point Stacy made him a copy.”

  Anna looked at the table, her mind playing with something as her fingers played with the tacks. Patsy’d said the night Tom broke in and left the derringer, she’d been awakened twice. The next day she mentioned she’d “lost” her keys. “Greeley stole Patsy Silva’s keys, copied them, then put them back,” Anna said. “I can’t prove it, but that’s what happened.”

  Stanton nodded. “Rose said Stacy’d decided to turn Greeley and himself in after a little girl you carried out of Cliff Palace died.”

  “Stephanie McFarland.”

  “He and Rose argued about it over the phone the night she was in Farmington, the night Stacy was killed. Up till then he was in collaboration with Greeley to dump the toxic waste.” The FBI agent seemed to be repeating the news in case Anna hadn’t quite been able to grasp it first time around.

  Anna had understood just fine. The devil buys on the installment plan. People are always shocked when he shows up to collect his merchandise.

  “Everybody’s got their price,” Frederick said.

  “Stacy’s wasn’t money.”

  “But money could buy it.”

  “And money bought Rose’s alibi.”

  Stanton shook his head. “Matrimony. She hated Ted but he said he’d marry her and put Bella on his health insurance plan. Strictly business. He told her you and Stacy were having an affair to lower any sentimental inhibitions she might have had.”

  Anna pushed the carpet tacks around till they formed a jagged line, like a bolt of lightning, and she remembered the storm Bella had made with Hattie because her mad was so big. Rose had made her lie, say Greeley was in Farmington. At six telling a lie is still a great burden.

  “What was Greeley dumping?” Anna changed the subject.

  “There’s electroplating plants in the area. One in Cortez, one near Shiprock, and a couple around Farmington. They use an acid for the wash and cynaide in the brass plating process. Greeley was contracted to dump it. I haven’t got the particulars yet but evidently Greeley Construction was in financial trouble. Greeley couldn’t finish the pipeline, he’d already spent the money. By dumping illegally he hoped to fix his cash flow problems long enough to avoid the penalties.”

  “Worth killing for?”

  “One hundred thousand dollars a day for every day over schedule. Greeley didn’t do his homework—or didn’t care. He dumped the acid and cyanide in the same place. Mixed, it creates cyanide gas. Sometimes it mixed, sometimes it missed. But the gas was what was drifting up the canyon. Nausea, palpitations, confusion, tachycardia, hyperventilation, hypoxia.”

  “A smorgasbord of ills.”

  “Unless it was suspected for some reason, no doctor would even think to test for it.”

  For several minutes they sat without speaking. Piedmont, alerted by the silence, came and jumped onto the table between them. “Remember the monkeywrenching I told you about? Brown boots, insurance, key to the yard: my bet it was Greeley. A little self-sabotage to claim the insurance money, keep himself afloat awhile longer.”

  Stanton nodded.

  “Case closed?” Anna asked.

  “Fun part’s over. The lawyer part will drag on till neither one of us can remember who did it.” Stanton tweaked up Piedmont’s long yellow tail and absently tickled his cheek with the tip of it. Murder might make for strange bedfellows but that wasn’t always such a bad thing.

  “We’re not co-workers anymore, Anna. Want to go out to dinner? Maybe a movie?”

  “A date?” Anna sounded appalled and Stanton laughed.

  “A date. I come pick you up at the door at seven sharp. You wear lipstick, can’t touch the check, and have to call the women’s toilet the ‘powder room.’ How about it?”

  “I have to make a phone call,” Anna hedged.

  Stanton glanced at his watch. “Okay, you’ve got just under five hours. Then the date.”

  “I guess. Sure.”

  Anna would have felt awkward but he didn’t give her time. With startling grace he sprang from the cramped booth. “Got to figure out what to wear,” he said, and: “Seven.”

  He was gone, the screen door banging behind him.

  Anna stood up. Then sat down. All at once she didn’t know what to do with herself. Scooping up Piedmont for support, she went into the living room and to the phone.

  It was Wednesday. Maybe her sister wouldn’t be at the office.

  Molly picked up on the fourth ring. “Dr. Pigeon,” she snapped.

  “Hi,” Anna said. “My name’s Anna and I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Hi, Anna,” Molly droned in parody of the group response, but her voice was warmer than Anna’d heard it in a while.