Endangered Species

by Barr, Nevada

  Anna had said she was going for a swim. Frederick thought of her firm body slipping through the sea and felt a pleasant stirring.

  “Guess it’s time to earn my keep,” he said to the little green bird hopping along the edge of the table.

  A pair of heavy plastic half-glasses, the cheap kind from the grocery store, lay near the phone. Frederick pushed them halfway up his long nose with a practiced movement and studied the numbers he’d written on the back of July’s electric bill.

  In the year he’d been with Anna, her sister, Molly, had taken on superhuman proportions. He’d never met or spoken with her but he didn’t doubt she knew everything about him, from how he voted in the last election to the size of his penis. Once a man started sleeping with a woman, he was a fool to think he had any secrets left.

  Cradling the telephone to his ear, he dialed. He hadn’t much of an idea what he could say or do. Death threats were vague, unpredictable things and could mean anything from a desire for power over someone to an actual warning. The motive was always to harass but the degree of real danger was on a sliding scale. Too often the procedures TV had taught the public to believe in as standard magic—DNA, fingerprints, paper type, handwriting—couldn’t be applied. Career criminals, those citizens who tended to have their fingerprints on record, weren’t much given to letter writing. Computers had done away with the idiosyncrasies of the old typewriters, and most grades of paper were sold by the tens of millions of sheets.

  He would listen, make suggestions, earn some Brownie points, and maybe something clever would come to him. Adolescent as it was, Frederick admitted to a fantasy of rescuing Anna’s sister from fiends most foul. It would look great on his résumé.

  “Hello,” snapped over the line, and he was alarmed to find Molly home. A message on a machine would have been the easy way out.

  “This is Frederick Stanton of the FBI,” he said stiffly, then rolled his eyes at himself.

  “This is Dr. Pigeon,” returned a cool voice.

  Title to title, they waited.

  “I just called to see if my introduction was truly pompous or if I should work on it,” Frederick said. Molly laughed and he was relieved. The laugh itself was an infectious cackle suitable for the kidnapper of Toto and other strong women in history.

  It died away and a black void of phone silence crawled into Frederick’s ear. Having initiated the contact, he was obliged to go first. “Anna asked me to call. She’s worried about the threats you’ve been getting.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath that he took for outrage till he remembered Molly was a smoker. As a young man he’d smoked. Caffeine and telephones still brought on the occasional urge. “Why don’t you give me your read on it? I’m not sure what, if anything, I can do to help. Maybe just allay Anna’s fears.” He couldn’t remember ever having used the word “allay” in a sentence. He realized he wanted to impress Molly Pigeon.

  Another indrawn breath, then Molly said: “Much as I hate to admit it, this one’s got me twitchy.” Like Anna’s, the psychiatrist’s voice was deep, but there was a distinct difference. Molly sounded as if she weighed each word, passing judgment on its deservedness before allowing it utterance. Frederick suspected Molly would be even harder to know than Anna. Rather than being put off, he found it challenging.

  “I’ve had death threats before—I imagine you have, too.”

  Frederick nodded, then remembered to accompany it with the appropriate listening sound.

  “This one—or maybe I should say these, I’ve heard from her three times now—have a different feel to them. They’re very cold. Very concise. More as if she has been assigned to . . . to do this job, rather than a frothing-at-the-mouth hatred.”

  Frederick waited till he was sure she’d finished, then he asked: “Why do you think it’s a woman?”

  “I know it’s a woman,” Molly said. “The choice of words, the handwriting, the stationery, the voice on my message machine, all were female.”

  “Could you be fooled?”

  A moment’s silence, then: “Yes.”

  Frederick admired an answer devoid of excuses. Anybody could be fooled anytime. Professionals had a harder time admitting that than most. His opinion of Molly went up a notch. Till that instant he’d not realized how prepared he was to dislike her. Defensive, he told himself. Anna had talked so much about her sister, he’d felt intimidated.

  He asked Molly all the questions Anna had asked and then drummed his fingers on the coffee table, hoping for a constructive thought. Molly waited without nervous chatter and he almost forgot she was there.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “What we’ve got is basically nothing, so I’m not going to tell you to call the police. At this point it would be a waste of time.”

  “Good,” Molly said, but Frederick wasn’t listening, he was following his train of thought.

  “What I can do in my exalted position as an FBI guy—” He almost added, “and your sister’s boyfriend,” but the absurdity of the word derailed the thought. “What I can do,” Frederick pushed on, “is set the computers to computing. Find out if there’s any history of this particular pattern. If you’ve got the names and dates of birth of anybody you think might be involved, I can run them for criminal histories. If there are fingerprints on the note, I can run them and see if we get a hit. All this will probably lead nowhere but it’s standard operating procedure. It’ll at least clear the decks a little. If you like, I’ve got some things you can do.”

  “Let me get a pen,” Molly said, and: “Shoot.”

  “These threats usually come on the tail end of some event, something fairly recent. The Count of Monte Cristo notwithstanding, most folks don’t carry a grudge that long.”

  “Attention deficit disorder,” Molly said, and Frederick laughed.

  “Write down any event surrounding you—maybe you were only peripherally involved—that might generate an impulse for revenge. Go back, say, six months, no more. Vary your routines: when you go out, how you get to work, where you eat lunch. Don’t be predictable. Pay attention to anyone you see more than once when there’s no reason to—maybe on the subway and later at a restaurant. That sort of thing.”

  “Damn,” Molly said: “Now I’m getting scared.”

  “Scared is good,” Frederick told her.

  “Trust your paranoia?”

  “What scares Anna?” he asked apropos of nothing, and was startled at the suddenly voiced thought.

  “Everything that shouldn’t and nothing that should.”

  Loyalty to Anna seeming at odds with the need to know her better, Frederick was debating whether to ask Molly to elaborate. After a moment’s pause she took the decision from him. He could hear caution in her voice and knew he was being trusted. Afraid to break the gossamer thread of her approval, he listened with the mouthpiece held away from his face lest a stray noise distract her.

  “After Anna’s husband, Zach, was killed she went into a black depression and stayed there for close to a year. During that time she was not sane. We didn’t lock her up, but I came close a time or two. She tried to kill herself. Not cries for help so much as to take her mind off worse things, if you can imagine. Anyway . . .”

  Molly drew out the word and Frederick could hear the conversation was about to come to a close. He let the breath he’d not realized he was holding escape.

  “Anyway, she came out of it, but somewhere along the line she lost something.”

  “Survival instinct?” Frederick hazarded a guess.

  “I don’t know. I’m working on it. I’ve got to run. Have you anything else?”

  Frederick had barely voiced his “No” before the line went dead.

  Clearing the bird droppings off his calendar, he took it from beneath the phone. Business put him in Baltimore on Friday. If Molly was amenable, he’d stop over in New York on the way home.

  Meeting the mythical sister, he mocked himself, but the thought excited him.

  CHAPTER Ten


  AT FIVE A.M. Anna slunk downstairs to reap the rewards of coffee beans sown the night before. Their quarters were blessed with a state-of-the-art automatic coffeemaker and each evening she made it her business to load it and set the timer. In order to maintain the charade that they were indispensable, all fire crews on this presuppression assignment worked six a.m. to six p.m.; a lot of hot, slow hours to fill with ever-vigilant boredom. Coffee gave her a reason to get out of bed.

  Eschewing the idea of community cooking, each member of this crew had decided to fend for himself and, burrowing through the refrigerator in search of heavy cream for her coffee, Anna could catalogue her fellows by what they ate: Vegetables and peanut butter for Al. Kraft macaroni and cheese, made in vats and eaten for days—Dijon. The beer and red meat were Rick’s. A jar of Miracle Whip, three loaves of Wonder bread, and an assortment of cold cuts served Guy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He’d had a wife cooking for him so long that when he was away from the home fires he counted on the kindness of strangers’ wives or ate sandwiches.

  Despite careful concealment, the cream carton felt suspiciously light. Them that mocked luxury were the first to pilfer, Anna thought ungenerously.

  “Nice pajamas.”

  She turned to see Guy. Nearly always the second pilgrim to worship at the coffee shrine, he was dressed in Nomex and two pairs of socks. If not for the self-imposed sand regulation, Anna didn’t doubt he would have been laced into his heavy lug-soled fire boots.

  “Do you sleep in fire clothes?” she asked.

  “These ain’t clothes,” Guy told her as he poured himself a cup of coffee and another for her. “I just had myself tattooed green and yellow a couple of years back. Saves time.”

  “I believe it. You’re baggy and wrinkled enough.”

  Insults exchanged, they sat down together at an oversized Formica-topped table surrounded by metal folding chairs. Both stared contentedly at nothing, waiting for the caffeine to burn away the night’s vapors. In her blue-and-white-striped PJs Anna felt mildly self-conscious but didn’t intend to be cowed by it. Nobody on a fire wore pajamas. It simply wasn’t done. Not manly, she suspected. One slept in one’s clothes, underpants, or nothing. When men were being men in a man’s world they didn’t allow for lounging attire. It spoiled the ambiance. Usually Anna bowed to fashion from necessity. On a real fire there was little space for nonessentials. But this was presuppression. They lived in a house, slept in beds, and kept regular hours.

  Without realizing she did it, she shot the cuffs of her pajamas and sat up a tad straighter.

  Halfway down his first cup, Guy became coherent. “Had a long talk with Norman Hull last night while you were dancing with the fishes. They got an aviation investigator they borrowed from the Forest Service flying down from Washington today.”

  “Why?”

  “They always do if there’s a fatality. Aviation safety stuff. You never work an airplane crash before?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “Me neither. I found one in the back country once but it was a kazillion years old before I got there. Just bones. Hull wants to borrow a couple of you guys to help out, seeing as Todd’s dead and they got nobody else. I’m giving him you and Rick.”

  “What if we get a fire?”

  “We should be so lucky.”

  Inaction was wearing on everyone’s nerves, along with the ticks, the heat, and Rick’s snoring.

  TH E NEW ASSIGNMENT came like a reprieve, a day out of school, and Anna was careful not to gloat. Rick had no such qualms and by the time they got the call to meet Hull and the aviation safety inspector at the dock, the rest of the crew were glad to see the last of them.

  Eight in the morning and already it was hot. Heat stayed through the nights but air-conditioning gave a false sense of weather. It jarred Anna to sweat in the early-morning light. In the mountains the sun dictated the temperature. On Cumberland heat radiated from the soil, the trees, the air itself.

  Rick leaned on the fender of the pumper truck and Anna sat on the hood. Firefighters were seldom found standing unaided. Too many years leaning on shovels.

  A small green-and-white inboard puttered across the glassy water of the channel between Cumberland and the coast. Near land the water was brown, a rich-looking soup. Grasses waved in salt-water marshes along the shallows housing an abundance of life that never failed to amaze Anna. Life was everywhere, even in the high desert, if one had the patience to look and to wait. In this warm sea, life crawled and hopped and flapped over every available space. Patience was not required.

  The NPS boat docked and its human cargo crawled, hopped, and flapped out onto the wooden dock. Hull trotted down from the office to welcome them. His scarecrow figure, all angles and planes, topped by the flat-brimmed Smokey Bear hat, dominated the three lesser beings dressed in the pale green uniform of the United States Forest Service.

  “Shall we make ourselves useful?” Anna asked.

  “Why not.” Rick levered himself away from the fender.

  A long white barn, open at both ends, reminiscent of a New England covered bridge, spanned the area from solid ground to the floating docks where the boat was moored. Hull and the three visiting dignitaries seemed capable of handling the luggage, so Anna and Rick stopped in the shade and waited.

  Two squat men, their faces deep in the shadow of their green ball caps, came first carrying the bulk of the luggage. Norman Hull walked behind them, crabbing his steps to match those of his companion.

  Anna narrowed her eyes against the ubiquitous glare. The Forest Service officer with Hull was a woman. White hair, cut short and curling in such casual perfection it had to be natural, caught the sun like the down on a dandelion. Anna guessed she was five foot three or four, but that could have been an illusion; she stood ramrod-straight, shoulders back, like a retired military man. The bearing created a sense of height and authority.

  The woman’s eyes were hidden behind dark aviator glasses. The lower half of her face was wrinkled and sagged at the jawline. Anna put her age somewhere between fifty-five and sixty-five.

  “Yikes!” Rick said. “Get a load of Grandma.”

  Anna oinked a couple of times, granting his status as a sexist pig, and he laughed.

  “Maybe she’ll bake us cookies,” he said.

  Somehow Anna doubted that.

  The two carriers of heavy objects stepped under the covered quay and grunted with surprise as Anna and Rick materialized from the shadows. Hull and the white-haired woman were close behind. The chief ranger stopped to make the introductions. Shorty Powell, a blunt mustachioed man in his forties, was the fixed-wing specialist. Wayne Pitt, the second man, was of an age with Powell and close to the same build but carried his weight around his middle. He was the maintenance specialist. A dark, incredibly curly beard obscured much of his face.

  The woman, Alice Utterback, was the chief investigator. “Mrs. Utterback,” Hull introduced them, “this is Anna Pigeon and Rick . . .”

  “Spencer,” Rick filled in for him.

  “Alice,” the woman said.

  When Anna shook her hand it was warm and dry, the grip firm. The fingers were wrinkled, the knuckle of her pinky knobbed by arthritis or an old break. Though her eyes were hidden behind the dark lenses and Anna couldn’t see them, she felt them. Rick, herself, the truck, were all quickly assessed and filed. What the verdict was, Anna couldn’t guess. Alice Utterback’s face gave nothing away. She didn’t smile much, Anna noted. A distinctly unfeminine trait. Women—girls—were taught to smile under any and all circumstances. Probably the human equivalent of the little dog showing the big dog its throat as a sign of submission. Alice Utterback was evidently a big dog.

  “Your quarters aren’t much,” Norman Hull apologized as the procession started up again, moving toward the waiting trucks. “We’ve opened up an old VIP dorm but it’s in pretty bad shape.”

  Anna quashed an urge to offer her room to the older woman. Giving in to generous impulses usually left her gro
uchy by day’s end. And Alice Utterback looked like she was accustomed to fending for herself.

  “It’ll be fine,” Utterback said.

  “Do you want to settle in? Freshen up?” Hull asked, old-world manners taking precedence over new-order political correctness.

  “I’m pretty darn fresh,” Alice told him, and smiled for the first time. Her teeth were yellow and crooked but not displeasing. They suited the weathered face. “Shorty and Wayne will let me know if I go beyond fresh and start getting ripe.”

  “We try and stay downwind,” Shorty said, and Alice laughed.

  “Let’s get to it then,” Hull suggested.

  WRECKAGE WAS STREWN over two hundred yards; bits of the shattered Beechcraft marked the way like trail signs. Rick was set to flagging the points of impact and the final resting place of the airplane much as he would have in a routine traffic accident investigation. Measurements would be made, fixed points—landmarks the accident investigators hoped were permanent—established so that the crash could be plotted on paper for the report and, if need be, reconstructed later should questions arise.

  The fixed-wing expert, the man Alice called Shorty, took Chief Ranger Hull and a 35mm camera and began a detailed recording of all that Rick flagged and measured.

  Wayne, Alice’s maintenance specialist, wandered around with a magnetic compass, and pencils stored absurdly in the thatch of his beard. At least three had been poked into the tangled curls, as a woman might stick them in her bun. It put Anna in mind of a half-remembered fairy tale about a man with birds nesting in his whiskers.

  Alice gave Anna the chore of secretary. Clipboard in hand, she followed the older woman around jotting down notes. There’d been a time when Anna was younger and easily offended that she would have taken umbrage at being cast in the traditional female role. In the intervening years she’d lived through enough bureaucracy to know secretaries not only were the glue in the mix, holding the cumbersome aspects of government together, but frequently were the only ones in possession of all the facts. In one form or another—letter, fax, phone call, or gossip—all information passed over their desks.