Endangered Species

by Barr, Nevada

  “It’s very formal, like the call. ‘Dr. Pigeon: There is apparently no end to the damage you do. Stupidity? Greed? Or just old-fashioned evil? You need to be dead and I need to do it. Please reflect on this. I wish you to be as uncomfortable as is humanly possible, should you be, after all, human.’ ”

  Holding the mouthpiece of the phone away from her face so as not to be munching the Baby Ruth in her sister’s ear, Anna let the words soak in. The note was strangely dispassionate, hatred grown cold, held close in the mind till a warped but compelling logic grew up around it.

  “I suppose you’ve gone through your patient list to see if anybody might carry a grudge?”

  “More than once. Contrary to Hollywood’s febrile depictions, a psychiatrist’s life is not fraught with serial killers. Killers of any kind are rare. Killers who seek help are virtually nonexistent. Except for my prison work—and that’s mostly drug rehab and depression—my patients are wealthy neurotics. I handle maybe fifteen psychotics at any given time on hospital and prison rounds. Of the few that are not incarcerated, four are men and the other is a homeless person, a bag lady. She has trouble stringing sentences together and eats out of garbage cans. Hardly the type for fancy stationery.”

  “The ones in lockup, they could call you or mail a letter, couldn’t they?” Anna asked.

  “I suppose. It doesn’t feel right but I’ll give it some thought. It’s possible. These people are crazy, not stupid.”

  Muted voices distracted Anna. “Just a sec,” she said, and held the phone to her chest the better to listen. The office building, like the crew quarters, was closed up tight to seal in the air-conditioning. Though grateful for a respite from the Georgia heat, Anna hated being cut off from the summer, the sounds of the night, frogs and crickets. Snuggling up in winter was different. Winter didn’t sing to her the way summer did.

  Molly temporarily forgotten, she set the receiver on the desk and forced open the window. The voices became clearer: human, distraught, tearful. “Doggone it,” she whispered to herself.

  “Molly?”

  “I’m here.”

  “There’s some kind of altercation outside. I’d shine it on—not my park and all that—but it sounds like a woman’s crying. Probably nothing but you never know.”

  “Go check.” Relief permeated Molly’s voice. She was relieved to have the spotlight off of her. The threats upset her. That, more than the fear of personal violence, was what was bothering her.

  God forbid the great psychiatrist should not be controlling some small aspect of life, Anna thought and smiled. “I’m calling you back,” she said.

  “Not tonight.”

  “Tomorrow then.”

  “Same time, same station.” A click and the line went dead. “Goodbye” wasn’t in Molly’s vocabulary. Anna was unoffended, she’d grown used to it a lifetime ago. Molly had walked her to her first day of school in Mrs. White’s first-grade class. Outside the door she handed Anna the paper sack with the lunch their mother had made, then sat her down on a low bench under a row of coat hooks. Anna was six, Molly fourteen.

  “Pay attention,” Molly had said. “I’m going to want details.” She turned and walked away without a backward look. Anna hadn’t felt abandoned; not then, not ever. She knew whatever happened, Molly would be back to hear the details.

  CHAPTER Four

  SUCKING THE LAST of the Baby Ruth from her fillings, Anna stepped onto the concrete stoop at the office’s back door. Weeping ebbed and flowed like the waves of an incoming tide, each sob breaking higher than the last.

  A fan of the night, Anna had made her phone call without switching on the lights. After the indoor dark, her night vision was keen, and moonlight washed gently over the landscape. Across the field, where the deer had stopped grazing to listen with more curiosity than alarm, a pickup truck idled, its headlights plowing yellow-white furrows in the dust of the lane.

  Two figures stood beside the truck, one so close to the front bumper that her dress was caught by the headlight and showed bright red, the only scrap of true color in the nightscape. The other, a man Anna guessed from the timbre of his mutterings, was trying to grab the woman’s shoulders and being batted away on each attempt.

  Fifty yards separated Anna from the couple. She walked quietly, keeping to the grass-covered berm between the wheel ruts. It didn’t cross her mind to return to the office to call for backup or alert Cumberland’s law enforcement ranger. Family squabbles in national parks were as ordinary as parking tickets, though considerably more volatile. As she closed the distance it occurred to her that she’d grown dangerously complacent and it would behoove her to cultivate a healthy sense of fear in the not-too-distant future.

  “You would leave me,” the woman cried clearly, and lurched back into the glare of the headlight. It was then Anna saw the swollen belly and knew her for Tabby Belfore, the district ranger’s wife.

  The man stepped forward, reaching for Tabby.

  “Hey, Todd!” Anna yelled, hoping if violence was in the offing to avert it. “You guys need any help?”

  She was close enough now to see their faces. Annoyance mixed with sheepishness. Tabby blotted at her eyes with her fingertips; a woman concerned about makeup damage. There were no signs of high drama, just the usual ear-marks of a spat.

  Because of training and a natural distrust of people, Anna checked Tabby for any signs of abuse. “Having engine trouble?” she asked easily.

  Todd Belfore was a small man, five foot three or four and not more than 140 pounds, but muscular and self-assured. “Nope. We were having a fight,” he said with disarming candor. “Tabby’s smarter than me. I had to stop driving and concentrate if I had any hope of winning.”

  Tabby laughed. It didn’t sound forced, so Anna joined her. After that there was nothing else to say and the Belfores stood looking foolish, both sets of eyes flitting everywhere to avoid making contact with Anna’s.

  “We’d better be getting on home,” Tabby said finally.

  Todd got back into the truck so fast he cracked his head against the frame. “No harm done. Hard as a rock.” He laughed again, alone this time.

  “Guess we better be going.” Tabby backed away from Anna, heading toward the passenger side. She didn’t seem afraid or anxious. Reassured, Anna watched them drive away to be swallowed up by the oak woods.

  The district ranger and his wife lived in an upstairs apartment in the Plum Orchard mansion. At one time the mansion had been open for the public to tour but funds had failed and it was now closed to visitors. Tabby probably felt isolated. From their brief acquaintance she didn’t strike Anna as a woman of great inner resources.

  As she walked back to the ATV an old Doris Day movie she hadn’t watched in years floated into her mind: Midnight Lace. Day played an heiress, married and rich. She shopped, she looked terrific, she mixed martinis and had them waiting when Rex Harrison returned from a hard day at the office. And she was compellingly, endearingly helpless in an era when the helplessness of grown women was accepted, admired—at least in fiction.

  Mrs. Belfore had some of Day’s blond vulnerability. People found themselves wanting to look after her. In Midnight Lace there was an attraction even for Anna. It would be delicious to sink back into frailty and let the battles be fought around you.

  As she fired up the ATV, she allowed herself a brief fantasy of giving in, giving up, giving over; absolute trust and, so, absolute dependence. Appealing, but only momentarily. To the victor go the spoils. It wasn’t healthy to align oneself with the spoils.

  BACK IN THE air-conditioned sanctity of her upstairs bedroom, Anna stretched naked on her yellow fire-issue sleeping bag. A room and a bed of her own; a rare luxury on a fire assignment. “God bless sexism,” she said to the spirits above the raked ceiling. As crew boss, Guy had claimed one bedroom. He’d assigned her another as the only female. The remaining three crew members shared the third. As in every crew since the first group of Cro-Magnons banded together to stomp out the f
irst grass fire, there was a magnificent nose, a man who snored with the resonance of a dull chain saw cutting through hardwood. On this crew Rick did the honors.

  Through two closed doors it was dulled to a comfortable rumble. A little imagination could mutate it into a purr and Anna liked to pretend Piedmont, her orange tiger cat, was curled up beside her. Cats were such excellent soporifics.

  Folding her hands behind her head, she stretched till her ankles cracked. She had a lot to think about. Besides, she was too lazy to go to sleep. It would mean getting up and crossing seven feet of hardwood floor to switch off the light.

  How serious was the threat against her sister? she wondered. For Molly to mention it at all indicated some concern. On a couple of occasions there had been those who wished Anna ill. Oddly, before the fear and outrage set in, her feelings were hurt; a childish sense of, How could anyone dislike me? Anna had felt that from Molly. For a healer it must be worse.

  In law enforcement, emergency response, firefighting—the things rangers were involved with—a great deal of one’s time was spent sitting around waiting for something bad to happen. When boredom set in, it was inevitable that one sort of hoped something bad would happen. No malice intended, just something interesting to do. A psychiatrist dedicated her life to ameliorating the impact of those bad happenings. It would hurt to be the object of deadly hatred even if you knew the polysyllabic name for the syndrome.

  Molly would get over the insult—probably by morning. Despite her vocation, Anna’s sister was remarkably sane. The threats were the tangible aspect of the greater evil of hatred and possibly madness. How real the actual danger was, Anna couldn’t fathom. The note and the message were so pedestrian. There was a hollow bureaucratic ring to them. Impersonal to the point of cruelty. Anna remembered her fifth-grade teacher, Mr. White, telling her that hatred wasn’t the worst of emotions. If one hated, one still cared. Indifference was the most inhuman.

  Anna could picture the author of the threats calmly penciling “Kill Dr. Pigeon” on her calendar between “Meet with client rep” and “Get facial.”

  Tomorrow night she would test Al Magnus’s patience. She’d call both Molly and Frederick. Surely sleeping with an FBI agent earned a girl some perks.

  AS HAD EVERY day since Anna arrived on the island, Thursday dawned hot and humid, the overnight low scarcely dipping below eighty. Inland the heat was intensified by the clack of cicadas and the intermittent drone of the drug interdiction plane making its sweep of the woodlands. By nine a.m. it was ninety-three degrees.

  On the shore a sea breeze made it livable. Anna and Rick patrolled the beach. Al and Dijon were condemned to the suffocating interior till they switched in midafternoon.

  Shore duty pleased Anna because of the air and the ever-changing patterns of water and shell and sand. Sky mosaics, painted by clouds, had yet to begin for the day. Cumberland sat beneath an inverted bowl of burnished and burning blue.

  At intervals were solitary fishermen, their folding chairs plunked down where the last lick of surf could wash over their toes, cooler and fishing rod in serene attendance. Creels were set several yards from the main encampments, an island phenomenon that had been in place for many years. Legend had it the alligator they called Maggie-Mary would crawl down from the inland dunes, moving as quietly as a ghost for all her great and scaly length, and rob them of their catch. The creels were set apart lest she inadvertently rob them of a leg or a hand in the process.

  Rick was happy with beach patrol because of the nude sunbathers. It never ceased to amaze Anna that in America naked was such a big deal. In parks all across the country naked sunbathers, skinny-dippers, and topless hikers were warned and cited and occasionally arrested under any statute that was handy, from Disturbing the Peace to Disorderly Conduct.

  The only ticket Anna thought fit this trumped-up crime was Interfering with Agency Functions. It certainly interfered with Rick’s and Dijon’s. Dijon, Anna forgave—maybe because she liked him, but mostly because he was twenty-two. Dogs bark, cats sharpen their claws, boys ogle and pant. Rick—in his mid-thirties, married, Baptist, and a born-again redneck transplanted from Massachusetts to southern Mississippi—Anna was less tolerant of. He condemned while he leered and it was hard to tell which activity gave him the greater thrill.

  This morning Anna was driving, Rick riding shotgun. For the past twenty minutes he’d been working himself into a lather over abortion rights. Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy were his much-quoted experts on the subject. Anna was attempting a Zen-like state and failing miserably. The heat, the boredom, and Rick were a combination that would have gotten Gandhi’s loincloth in a bundle.

  She kept her equilibrium by a base but satisfying amusement. Each time Rick raised his binoculars to inventory an unsuspecting sunbather’s assets, Anna steered the truck toward the nearest hillock or water-cut in the beach. So far she’d scored two “Fucks” and one “Dammit, Anna.”

  If people did harbor the inner child psychologists had brought into vogue, hers needed a good spanking, Anna thought, as she turned the wheel to take better advantage of a trench the retreating tide had left behind.

  “Shit,” Rick growled as the binoculars banged against the soft tissue around his eyes. “You drive like a girl.” He too was bored and hot, but if he’d hoped to get a rise out of Anna he was disappointed.

  “Don’t I though,” she said as she adjusted her mental scoreboard: Anna 4, Rick 0.

  “I’ll drive,” he said.

  That suited her. Flocks of pelicans were skimming the ocean, flying between the chocolate-colored waves like bombers down narrow canyons. What seabirds lacked in color, they more than made up for in grace and complexity. Anna never tired of watching the many ways they interacted with the sea. Besides, torturing Rick was beginning to pall. He’d never caught on to the game: fish in a barrel, no challenge.

  She let the truck roll to a stop and switched off the ignition.

  Rick was a big man, thick through the chest, shoulders, and head. His face was a perfect oval. Clustered in the center were a dark mustache, two close-set eyes, and a nondescript nose. The eyes had the puffy look of a perennial hangover, though as near as Anna could tell, he suffered more from allergies than alcoholism. His hair was almost black and clipped so short that the crown of his head, where he was balding, had a peculiar look of having been sanded.

  Like every man Anna had ever known, Rick had to spend a minute or two performing some inscrutable ritual before he could get out of a parked vehicle. She slid from the seat and crouched in a scrap of shade afforded by the truck to watch the silt-laden waves break into buttery foam. She’d never spent much time by the sea. Even the waters of Lake Superior had scared her. The Atlantic both scared and fascinated. In its own way the shore was as harsh an environment as the high deserts of Colorado and Texas. The constancy of the August heat, the sand and salt and wind—by day’s end human strength was abraded away.

  The crunch of boots let her know Rick had uprooted. Over the protest of creaking joints she pushed herself up. It was still early and the sun was at her back as she walked around the truck’s tailgate. To the west the green foliage showed dark behind shimmering white dunes. Clouds were just beginning to build, as they did every day, making a promise of rain they never kept. One of the clouds drooped, an uncharacteristic gray. Anna cupped her hands around the brim of her ball cap to cut the glare.

  “Hey, Rick.” He walked up beside her and she pointed.

  “Smoke?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Hallelujah! Hazard pay!” With a cowboy’s “Yee-hah!” he leaped two yards and threw himself behind the wheel.

  Anna was galvanized as well. Lethargy, heat, the myriad aches and pains of hours spent patrolling over rough ground in a truck with wasted shocks were banished.

  Rick laughed as he cinched down his seat belt. Firefighters, like fire horses, stamped and snorted at the first sniff of smoke. Anna felt the excitement, but hers was tempered with the
tragic memories of the Jackknife fire the summer before. Like the sea, fire was elemental. It would be many years before she would again underestimate its power. Or its indifference to human life.

  CHAPTER Five

  RICK DROVE LIKE a madman, dropping from gear to gear, revving the tired engine as if more gas could give it a new lease on life. Bouncing like a bean in a tin cup, Anna fought to buckle her seat belt. Between them, ricocheting from thigh to thigh across the vinyl, the portable radio crackled for attention. Finally secured, Anna caught it as it skittered toward the floor, and thumbed down the mike. “This is Pigeon. Yes. We see it. We’re about three quarters of the way to the north end of the island due east of the smoke. Maybe two miles.”

  The truck nosed over a lip of water-sculpted sand and Anna’s chin smacked into the King radio. Anna 4, Rick 1, she thought as she grabbed at the armrest for stability. Over the airwaves Dijon added to the racket. He and Al were on the southernmost tip of the island near Dungeness, about ten miles from the smoke. They wouldn’t reach the fire for at least twenty minutes. The frustration in Dijon’s voice made Anna smile. “Don’t put it out till we get there” were his parting words.

  Anna looked at the fanatic grin on Rick’s face and laughed. They would try their damnedest to kill it before the others arrived. It was part of the game, the competition, the testosterone follies. She loved it.

  “Yee-hah!” she mimicked Rick, shouting over the engine. “Are we having fun yet?”

  Guarding the woodlands from the Atlantic was a rampart of dunes running the length of Cumberland. Near the tips of the island, where they were always being rearranged by the tides, the dunes were only four or five feet high. In the center they climbed to forty and fifty feet, great slow-moving waves of fine white earth.

  In several places along the oceanfront, weathered wooden boardwalks snaked out from the jungle and across the barrier of dunes providing access to the beach. For Anna, these, more than the crumbling mansions, symbolized the island’s heyday, a time when it glittered with wealthy holidaymakers escaping the confines of the cities.