by Barr, Nevada
“I don’t really know what happened,” Shawna told them after a moment’s deliberation. “We’d been camping at Lake Whitney for a couple of days.” Whitney was one of the lovely freshwater lakes being threatened by the encroaching dunes. Because of the delicacy of the island’s ecosystem, camping there was highly illegal, but Anna let it pass. She wanted the story told without interruptions.
“We broke camp and were cutting cross-country. I don’t know how long we’d been walking—we were more or less lost but that was the idea. We knew we couldn’t get too lost on a little island. Eventually you’re bound to stumble across something that will set you straight. We were pushing through a thick bushy place. Guenther was ahead of me a little ways. There was this huge explosion, then Guenther was down on the ground grabbing his leg and yelling.”
“Whereabouts were you?” Anna asked.
Shawna shook her head. “I can’t even guess. We’d been wandering, you know, looking at things. Then I was pretty freaked. And carrying Guenther was no picnic. Somewhere between the lake and where you found us. I’m sorry.” Shawna was panting again, as if the telling were as strenuous as the doing.
“That’s okay. Did you see anyone?” Anna asked.
“Nobody.”
“Did you hear anything, like somebody running or talking?”
“Nothing. Just the bang, then nothing.” Shawna leaned forward, elbows on knees, and rubbed her face hard with both hands.
“You must be pretty pooped,” Alice said kindly.
“That’s not the half of it,” Shawna replied.
For several minutes they rode in silence. Anna struggled with the urge to press the girl for more information and the desire to leave her in peace. Information won.
“Describe the wound to me,” she said. A slight sniff emanated from Alice Utterback’s direction and Anna assumed it was disapproval. “In detail,” she added, just to be contrary.
Shawna thought for a few moments and Anna realized she gave the girl’s answers more credence than she might have because they were so well considered. In one so young, this methodical habit of the mind was unexpected.
“It bled a lot so I can’t tell you exactly. It was a mess and we just wanted to wrap it up before he lost too much blood. Both of us have first aid. We teach skiing in the winter and you have to. It looked like a gouge, a furrow, like the bullet came through the back of his leg sideways and just plowed this trough in his calf.”
Guns in national parks were strictly forbidden but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. As they were in much of America, guns were abundant in the parks. Poachers carried them, criminals, researchers dealing with potentially dangerous animals, citizens feeling the need for self-protection, law enforcement officers. Short of strip-searching every visitor and, on Cumberland Island, every resident, there was no way of keeping them outside park boundaries.
“How big was the furrow?” Anna asked.
“Huge. The Grand Canyon. Maybe three inches wide and an inch or two deep. Seriously. A big chunk of his calf was gone, like a big old bite had been taken out of it.”
Alice reached behind Shawna, still bent nearly double over her knees, her face in her hands, and tapped Anna on the shoulder. When she had Anna’s attention she pointed to the girl. Tears were pouring through her fingers, falling in great dollops, making mud in the dust on her thighs. Anna had never seen anyone cry like that: buckets.
“If you keep on you’ll dehydrate yourself,” she said. Alice must have given her a dirty look. Anna felt a slight tingling on the right side of her neck. “It’ll be okay,” she added lamely.
“What if he’s crippled?” Shawna whispered.
Anna had no answer to that. For two beautiful young people living by the strength and grace of their bodies, it was hard to think of a more bitter blow. Anna hoped Alice would jump in with something wise and motherly, but she didn’t.
As they emerged from the woods into the clearing that heralded the offices and dock, an ATV roared out of the darkness, its headlight bouncing with each rut. The lane was too narrow for cars to pass safely and Anna eased the truck over to let the smaller vehicle by.
The ATV pulled up alongside and stopped. Marty Schlessinger, his gaunt face and pathetic excuse for braids frayed by the wind, glared at them through the truck’s open window. Anna was unoffended. Schlessinger glared at everyone, not so much a message of malice, Anna thought, as a habit of looking deeply at phenomena, studying the creatures of the planet.
“What’s all the ruckus?” the biologist demanded. “Hull’s rampaging around like a scarecrow in a windstorm. You find something at the crash?”
Anna shook her head, wishing Marty would turn off the ATV’s engine rather than shouting over the considerable din. “A kid got shot in the leg. We found him up the road. Norman’s taking him and his girlfriend over to St. Marys. The kid’s going to be okay,” she added, more for Shawna’s benefit than the biologist’s.
The darkness had deepened, but because Marty was so close, Anna could read his face. The information registered with a look of mild surprise and confusion. His eyes narrowed and he drew down his brows and the corners of his mouth. Something clicked in his mind, Anna could see it in the sudden opening of his face.
“I heard the shots,” Marty declared. “And I can just about tell you where.”
Anna didn’t believe him. It was too pat, too aggressive. And Shawna said there’d been but a single shot. “When?” Anna asked.
Schlessinger looked blank. “When what?”
He was stalling for time. “When did you hear the shots?”
Shawna pulled her face free of her hands. “We think it was about—”
“Not now,” Anna snapped. “When did you hear the shots, Marty? And how many were there? Best guess.”
Marty gave Anna a long, slow look and this time there was malice in it. “I can’t remember,” he said evenly, gunned the ATV, and was gone, leaving them to roll their windows up hastily to shut out his dust.
THE LINE FOR the phone was longer than usual—Alice taking precedence with a series of business calls. Anna went next. Neither Frederick nor Molly was home. Feeling bereft, she left snippy messages on their machines and joined Alice Utterback on the concrete stoop to wait while Al called his family.
The air was warm and soft and black. Moonrise wouldn’t be for several hours and the low wattage of stars couldn’t burn through the moist air. Alice was sitting on the concrete, legs crossed tailor fashion, apparently at ease alone in the dark. Anna curled down beside her, unconsciously aping the other woman’s pose.
“Soaking in the silence,” Alice said after a moment.
Anna felt no need to respond and they sat in quiet companionship for several minutes. Cumberland’s stillness was impressive; a living silence deepened by the gentle stirrings of night creatures, minute cracklings and scuffling not diluted with so much as a breath of a breeze.
Unfortunately this cloak of peace was not adequate to sedate Anna’s busy mind. “If the wound was as deep as Shawna said, it had to be a forty-five-caliber bullet or maybe a shotgun slug. My money’d be on a slug. A forty-five would tear the flesh, not just blow it away.”
Since Anna was obviously waiting, Alice replied. “Shawna might have exaggerated. She was rattled.”
“Might have,” Anna said, but she didn’t think so. Answers so carefully thought through were more than likely fairly accurate. “We’ll probably never know. Whoever did it is long gone by now. Shoot, we don’t even know exactly where it happened. Statements will be taken, et cetera, but nobody’ll even go look. It’d be a waste of time. Look for what?”
“Poachers?” Alice offered. In her voice Anna could hear that weary acceptance of the necessity for conversation. The considerate thing to do would have been to leave her to her reverie but Anna was in a mood to chat.
“Poachers don’t lean toward handguns,” she said. “And there’s no game on this island big enough to require a shotgun slug. Even the pigs are
just pigs, not wild boars or anything.”
“Mmmm,” Alice murmured noncommittally.
Anna continued to ignore the other woman’s desire to enjoy the lush Georgia night. “People do strange things. Especially hunters. I could see somebody hunting pigs with a shotgun. Not a sportsman—as if outsmarting a pig was a challenging sport—but somebody who liked the killing.”
“Now there’s a cheery thought.”
“When I lived in Texas, hunters there had what they called a sound shot, as in, ‘I didn’t see anything but I got in a sound shot.’ Meaning they’d heard something in the brush and just blasted away at it. Maybe Guenther was shot by a hunter of that ilk—the poacher never even knew he hit anything. Let alone a person.”
“Shawna said Guenther yelled.”
“Okay. A deaf, quiet Texas pig poacher with a shotgun.”
Alice said nothing and Anna turned the unlikely possibilities over in her mind. Unwelcome thoughts of Molly, of the threats, of Frederick and the future hummed like bees in a jar but she chose not to let them out. Working on the leg wound puzzle was an excellent distraction.
“A shotgun’s an up-close and personal kind of a weapon,” she said, and heard a tiny sigh of exasperation escape her companion. “It’s hard to shoot with any accuracy at more than fifteen yards or so.”
Al pushed out through the office door and Alice jumped up with an unflattering alacrity. “It’s way past my bedtime,” she declared, and led the way to the truck.
BEFORE NOON THE following day the mystery of the plastic bags and Guenther’s assailant was pushed from everyone’s mind. The six of them—Alice, Anna, Rick, Wayne, Shorty, and Norman Hull—were at the site of the airplane wreck finishing up the investigation.
Wayne, the maintenance specialist, had spent the morning following all the control linkages from the cockpit to the controls themselves: cables, rods, hinges, attach bolts. It was standard procedure and this time it bore fruit.
Alice Utterback understood the mechanic’s findings immediately. Due to their technical nature, Wayne dragged out pen and paper and mapped out the sequence of events for the chief ranger. Anna hovered over Wayne’s left shoulder soaking up information.
The flaps—moveable portions on the trailing edge of the wings—were used to slow the plane or to increase lift. They were operated by control rods running from the fuselage out the wing and to the flaps themselves. From the sketch Wayne was drawing it looked very mechanical. The pilot pushed a lever, the flap motor turned, an actuator arm twisted, pushing rods out, and the flaps were forced down. Anna was surprised it wasn’t more high-tech, with electronic goodies and computer confusions.
The control rods were bolted to the flap motor arms in the belly of the airplane. When Wayne tracked them in from the wings, he discovered the bolt fastening the right rod was missing and the rod and actuator arm were separated.
Without that bolt in place, when the pilot activated the flaps only the left one would extend. The left wing would elevate suddenly and the plane would roll sharply to the right. Flying low and slow, as they surmised Hammond had been, there would be no room to recover. He’d have cork-screwed right into the ground.
Wayne finished his lecture and they all continued to stand around staring at his rude sketch as if more information would be forthcoming.
“Could it be an accident?” Hull asked finally. His voice was ripe with hope. Accidents, acts of God, required less paperwork than felonies.
“Yup,” Wayne replied. “Some brain-dead mechanic might’ve forgotten to replace the bolt, or replaced it but neglected to put a nut on it. Maybe he did the nut and left off the cotter pin that secures it. It’s not likely the nut vibrated off but I suppose it could happen. We’ll need to get hold of Hammond’s aircraft logbooks, see when it was last in the shop, who the mechanic was. This isn’t something that could just toodle along unnoticed. It’d have to have happened between his last flight and this one.”
“I don’t think his logbooks were in the airplane,” Alice said. “Maybe they were—reduced to ash. Usually maintenance logs are kept separate from the airplane for exactly that reason. The papers in the glove box weren’t bound and there wasn’t any sign of a flight bag.”
“We’ll check his house,” Hull said.
“Could anybody else get at the actuator arm?” Anna asked. Norman Hull gave her a look of irritation. There were enough cans of worms around without her prying open another.
“Anybody,” Wayne said. “There’s a little metal plate in the plane’s belly. Take out six screws and, bingo, you’re there. You would have to know a little about airplanes and it’d help to know the pilot. Some use flaps a lot, some don’t. A flap-using pilot probably would have tripped this little booby trap fairly early on and maybe not have got himself killed. But my money’s on the mechanic. Incompetence is more common than murder.”
“Whatever the case,” Hull said, “this information is confidential. On a need-to-know basis.” He looked directly at Anna and Rick. “There is nobody you know who fits this description. Are there any questions?”
There were none. Pecking order was established. Anna and Rick were merely migrant workers. For some reason Hull wanted them to remember that.
CHAPTER Twelve
ALICE UTTERBACK HAD all the answers the Beechcraft’s remains would afford. The police tape was taken down, the equipment packed, the Cumberland Island maintenance division alerted to start the cleanup. Rick was released back to the fire crew and Anna dispatched to the maintenance shop to pick up a key to Hammond’s place so she could get his logbooks for Alice.
The pilot had been renting park housing on the island for the duration of his assignment. After a modest amount of gossip was proffered in exchange for the key, the maintenance man gave Anna directions. Hammond’s house was about one third of the way north between the dock and Plum Orchard. In that two-mile stretch, there were a number of homes of both park personnel and island inhabitants who still retained the right to live there.
With the dense screen of oak and palmetto, only thin dusty tributaries to the main road hinted at the existence of these dwellings. Some of the drives were marked with the name of the homeowner, some with the name of the road, and some not at all.
Hammond’s house was in the last category and Anna enjoyed a good bit of sight-seeing before she finally found it tucked back in the trees. Slated for demolition as soon as time and funds were allotted, the house had been allowed to deteriorate into earth tones. The unpainted board siding had weathered to a velvety gray, and fallen leaves and pine needles drifted up to the foundation and over the low porch slab. Several of the windows had lost their screens and the flotsam of a series of renters littered the bare yard: an old stovepipe, the skeleton of a kitchen chair, rusted coffee cans. Anna parked the truck beside a shed housing an unidentifiable piece of machinery and sat for a moment letting the heat coalesce around her.
Feral pigs had rooted a crooked trench to an old watering trough set under a live oak. Gray beards of Spanish moss hung to the ground. If any sound existed beyond the green enclosure, it was absorbed by the foliage. On this tiny populated island Anna felt more isolated than she had miles into the back-country of west Texas.
“Logbooks,” she said to motivate herself, and climbed from the truck.
Hammond’s door was unlocked. Perhaps in an urban setting that might have tripped some alarm, but Anna took little note. In the parks, people were lax about security. It was one of the joys of living there.
Inside, the place had the bleak look of the itinerant bachelor. Seedy brown light leaked through old paper shades pulled all the way down. If there was an air conditioner, Hammond hadn’t left it on. The temperature was easily above a hundred degrees and the place smelled like old gym socks. A scarred Formica table held the remains of several meals mixed in among newspapers, magazines, and junk mail. Against a wall between the two blinded windows was a couch faded from use and sunlight. Its once orange and brown plaid had mellowed
to a less offensive hue. More newspapers, underpants, and a single dirty sneaker were scattered over it to casual effect. No curtains softened the windows, no rugs rescued the blue speckled linoleum floors, no pictures graced the walls. An old metal office desk had been shoved against the wall where the front door banged it every time it opened. Littered with papers and used coffee cups, it looked the most promising.
As Anna closed the door behind her, she was caught by a stealthy sound from the nether regions of the small house. For a moment she froze, listening, then wrote it off to the creaking of an old structure.
Slattery Hammond’s bookkeeping habits weren’t any better than his housekeeping. She sat at the desk and methodically shuffled through his piles: unpaid bills, envelopes full of snapshots, canceled checks, a postcard from North Cascades in Washington bearing the predictable “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here,” signed “Bonnie.”
The Beechcraft was his; Anna found several payments to a West Coast bank on the loan. Any heirs were in for a disappointment however; she also found a bill for the airplane’s insurance that was long past due. There were half a dozen snapshots Scotch-taped to the wall. One was of Slattery standing beside his plane.
Having never seen the man at his best, Anna studied it with interest. Hammond was surprisingly good-looking. For some reason—perhaps the name Slattery or maybe his reputation as recounted by Alice Utterback—Anna had pictured him as a greaseball. If he was, his evil ways had yet to leave their stamp on his features. He looked to be in his early thirties, tall and lean, with brown hair that fell over his forehead. His eyes were wide-set and ingenuous, his smile that of a boy.
“Deadly,” Anna said, and put the photo back where she’d found it.
Of the other five pictures, four were of a girl of eighteen or twenty playing on a beach and one was a long shot of a pale-haired hiker who struck Anna as vaguely familiar and she wondered if it was someone she’d known. The coincidence wouldn’t have surprised her. The Park Service was small and mobile. Rangers from all over crossed paths in training, in transit, and many of them traveled to other parks when they had the time off.
