by Barr, Nevada
CHAPTER Fourteen
ANNA RODE INTO the conscious world on a tide of nausea that washed up from the vicinity of her bowels, broke in a sour foam, and spewed out her throat.
Gagging, she tried to push herself to her knees and failed. Bile trickled from her lips, unpleasantly warm against her cheek. The sour smell sickened her further, but still she couldn’t find the strength to lift her face off the linoleum. Somewhere between her will and her muscles there had been a breakdown. Messages were not getting through.
For a minute she lay as one dead, giving in to the inertia. In a brief gust of optimism, it occurred to her that possibly she could open her eyes. The eyes, being in her head—closer, as it were, to the center of power—might work. She paused, gathering her strength, then centered it near the bridge of her nose. With a herculean effort, she raised her eyelids a quarter of an inch.
The vista was not inspiring: dirty blue flooring, a bit of plaid fabric, and a black rubber lozenge. Because it was unexplained, she fixated on the black rubber. For a frustrating eternity identification eluded her. Finally, perspective shifted and she saw it for what it was: a thick waffled shoulder pad forming the butt of a twelve-gauge shotgun.
The rubber was probably why she was still alive. Not that being alive struck her as particularly attractive at the moment.
Screwing her courage to the sticking place, she blinked. Each time it grew easier. “Oil can,” she croaked absurdly, thinking, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, that all her joints had rusted.
The scratch of her own feeble words cut into her head and pain swelled until it seemed her head must explode or her brains leak out her ears onto the floor. Squeezing her eyes shut only made it worse, adding a sense of vertigo, and she opened them again. Images dripped through the cracks in her brain: searching Hammond’s house, opening the closet, the contents falling on her.
Short-term memory was coming back. Perhaps she hadn’t sustained any serious brain damage. Between the years of drinking and the occasional blow to the head, she didn’t have any little gray cells to spare.
Starting small, she wiggled fingers, then toes, flexed muscles gently. When a modicum of control was restored, she fished her watch out of her pocket and pulled it up as far as the chain would allow. Another staggering effort of will was required to bring the tiny gold numbers into focus: 2:04. She’d not been unconscious long—a few minutes at most. Another good sign.
Pushing herself up, she rolled into a sitting position, her back resting against the wall. Surely her brain had been bruised. Not only did it hurt but the pain went out along all the nerve paths till there was no part of her that didn’t throb in sympathy. Anna was groaning, she couldn’t help it. She was glad there was no one around to hear.
Like fog lifting, the pain began to recede, traveling back up the synapses till it was at last contained in a burning knot behind her left ear. As the pain localized, Anna was able to think again.
What were the odds that the shotgun had merely tumbled down on her head when she opened the closet? Slim to nonexistent. The gun didn’t weigh more than five or ten pounds. The blow that struck her unconscious carried considerably more wallop. It crossed her mind to feel the size of the lump on her skull but she wasn’t ready to know that much.
Somebody wanted her out of the way. Maybe permanently.
A spurt of adrenaline sent a shiver through the sweat between her breasts. Breathing deeply, she calmed herself with oxygen and logic. If anyone wanted to kill her, they would have. If they’d thought the deed accomplished, they’d be long gone. If they came back to finish her off, she was too weak to defend herself anyway.
Vomit was drying on her face, the air was unbreathable. She was losing track of where the sweltering airless heat left off and the suffocating ache in her head began. She had to get a drink of water; she had to get out of Hammond’s house.
Walking struck her as too ambitious and, her head down like a bone-weary mule’s, she crawled on hands and knees out of the bedroom and across the living room. The front door stood wide open. Anna thanked her erstwhile assailant. The effort of opening it would have set off a new spate of sparks in her battered brainpan.
Afraid to stop lest she never get going again, she crawled over the front stoop, down the dirt path, and across twenty feet of duff to where she’d parked the truck. Moving carefully, as if her head were a porcelain egg only precariously balanced on her neck, she pulled herself up and onto the seat of the pumper truck. Her much-needed reward was a quart of warm drinking water from her fire canteen. Some she spilled, some she couldn’t keep down, but most of it was soaked up by her dehydrated body.
She hadn’t forgotten there was water in Hammond’s house. She just didn’t want any part of it.
Under her right hand was the King radio. The keys were in the ignition where she’d left them. Anna reviewed her options. She could radio for help. In minutes everyone within hailing distance would swarm down on her. The role of victim would be wrapped around her till she was trussed up like a Christmas turkey. Everyone would have a high old time clucking and caring and bustling her off to St. Marys to the hospital. There they would take her clothes, her boots, and her radio and put one of those wretched little plastic bracelets on her wrist.
“Everybody will be so fucking jolly,” Anna whispered through dry lips. Motivated by this grisly scenario, she reached up and fingered her head wound. Goose egg was as good a description as any, but soft to the touch like a water balloon and very tender. From the size of it, the mechanism of injury, and the length of time she was out, Anna suspected she’d sustained at least a slight concussion.
So: bundled and trundled ignominiously to the emergency room, diagnosed with a concussion and demobbed. Not just Anna—it didn’t work that way. The whole crew would be sent home and a new one dispatched to replace them. This assignment was vacation money for Al’s family, seed money for Rick’s garage door business.
All in all, Anna decided she’d just as soon have a headache on Cumberland at time and a half than a headache in Mesa Verde for considerably less money.
Letting the pain in her head settle, she stared at the gaping front door of Slattery Hammond’s rental. Someone had gotten there before her. That they were up to no good was obvious. Why else hide? It was also fairly obvious they’d been looking for something they either knew or suspected Slattery kept in his house. The something was therefore valuable, incriminating, or embarrassing. She was there for the maintenance logs. She’d not found them, but surely the only one they could incriminate was the so-far apocryphal mechanic.
Drugs? Guns? Used tampons? Kiddy scissors? Pornography? Letters? Cash? That staple in old movies: a cigarette butt with lipstick on it and not Slattery’s shade? Anna’s head hurt too much to pursue it and she let the thoughts scatter.
Ten minutes saw her sufficiently recovered to try the ignition key and ease the truck gingerly over the bumps between Hammond’s and the district office. Movement was good, some basic difference between the quick and dead, confirmation that she was not yet among the latter.
In the dirt parking lot behind the ranger station, she parked in the shade and pulled the side mirror around to see if her looks passed muster. Though she had chosen to hide her little adventure quite literally under her hat, she was disappointed. She looked fine. Physical trauma should produce at least enough blood or bandages to get one some sympathy. Even her color was good. The pallor of shock and the flush of fever evidently canceled each other out.
Hull was in his office, the door open. He welcomed Anna and urged her to sit. For once she was grateful for his formality. Standing had not yet become an occupation she excelled at. And the air-conditioning was heaven.
“Anna?”
She heard him say her name as from a distance and realized she’d allowed herself to sink back in the chair and close her eyes.
“Thinking,” she said idiotically. Chief Ranger Hull was too polite to comment.
“Did you find the airc
raft logs for Mr. Hammond’s Beechcraft?”
Anna started to shake her head, thought better of it and said: “No.”
“Mrs. Utterback suggested the logs might be in the mechanic’s shop. I’ll leave that to her.”
“Somebody had been to Hammond’s before I got there,” Anna told him.
Hull’s eyebrows flew up either in inquiry or because of his nervous disorder. His forehead wrinkled far up on his scalp and the eyes behind the thick glasses bulged slightly. It was a face that invited confession but Anna quashed the urge.
“The place had been searched. What, if anything, was taken, I have no way of knowing.”
Hull’s myopic blue eyes slid off Anna’s face and his long thin hands began stirring in the mess of papers on his desk. Poking through the pages as if seeking something vitally important, he asked Anna, “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
That wasn’t the answer he was hoping for.
“Is there anyone who knew him well enough to know what he kept in the house?” Anna asked.
“No. Mr. Hammond was what we used to call a lone wolf. No one came to visit him that I recall—we tend to know each other’s business on the island. Too well, I sometimes think.” The last sentence sounded bitter, unusual in a man as rigidly controlled as Norman Hull.
“Have you heard anything about Tabby Belfore?” Anna changed the subject.
“Yes. That reminds me. She’s doing much better. The baby hasn’t come and evidently that’s causing some—well—emotional problems. They can’t very well give her tranquilizers in her condition. Unfortunately she’s insisting on returning to Cumberland to her apartment. Her doctor is opposed to the idea but he can’t forbid it. Mrs. Belfore’s agreed to let someone stay with her for a few days.”
An alarmed froglike croak escaped Anna’s lips. The chief ranger pretended not to notice.
“It’s been cleared with Guy,” he said without looking up.
Hull wasn’t asking her and Anna was unpleasantly reminded that the National Park Service was designed along paramilitary lines. She could say no, but the repercussions wouldn’t be worth it.
“Do you have any aspirin?” she asked plaintively, as he pushed a key across the desk. “I’ve got a whale of a headache.”
Hull steered her to Renee, his secretary, and closed his door firmly behind her. As usual Renee’s desk was empty. Beyond the Xerox, through an old-fashioned sash window, Anna could see her in the shade of the porch smoking one of her endless cigarettes. The woman was uniquely suited to the pastime. She carried all her weight from the groin up, giving her the shape of a little chimney, and if one squinted and used one’s imagination, her over-bleached hair could pass for smoke.
Renee was helpful. Rummaging boisterously through her desk drawers, she said: “This has been some week, hasn’t it? More excitement than we’ve had around here in a coon’s age. That boy getting his leg shot off, Todd getting killed in that wreck. Mitch was telling me and Louise—Louise is his wife—about how tore up that airplane was. And the bodies all burnted up like. Norm’s daughter, Ellen, was at the houseboat. She and Louise are kind of special friends. Both are into gardening, if you’d believe that. And Louise living on a boat. Maybe it’s just something to say. Ellen doesn’t get on all that well with her mom. Louise kind of fills that bill. Anyway, Mitch is going on about the bodies and all, never thinking. It could’ve just as easy been Norman, Ellen’s daddy. God, then I’d’ve been out of a job. If you ask me, he ought to send the regional director a case of bourbon. If he hadn’t called Norm at the St. Marys office and kept him on the line, he’d’ve made that flight instead of Todd.
“Nope,” Renee said finally. “I could’ve swore I had some Bufferin in here somewhere but I guess they all got ate up. Sorry.” She flopped down in her swivel chair and looked ready to kill a little more time in idle chatter, but Anna didn’t feel up to it. She mumbled her thanks and made her escape.
In the break room she stole a Coke, promising the honor system two quarters when she had them. Pressing the cold can against the lump on her skull, she again braved the heat of the August sun.
Feeling like an exile, she cleaned out her room in the fire dorm and drove to Plum Orchard. If Guy wanted the truck back, he could damn well come and get it. Anna resented being sold down the river even as she welcomed the solitude of the Belfores’ apartment and the chance to lie down before her head fell off.
The trip up the two flights of stairs took the last of her strength. Abandoning her red fire pack on the first landing, she staggered in the door.
The medicine cabinet was a disappointment. Apparently the Belfores treated only maladies of the ego. A clutter of products promising to restore hair, keep skin young, and grow strong fingernails filled the shelves. No analgesics. Anna sat on the toilet and, head in hands, indulged in a few tears of self-pity.
From a phone in the bedroom she called the Cumberland Island National Seashore Visitors’ Center in St. Marys. A cheerful female voice answered. Anna introduced herself and begged this happy soul to send some aspirin over on whichever boat was going to the island next.
It must have been a slow day. The woman kept Anna on the line for five minutes, marveling at the recent tragedy and telling again the story of the regional director’s call saving Norman Hull from the jaws of death. There was something in near misses, twists of fate, that rekindled in the human psyche the desire to believe in a grand master plan.
Anna stayed on the line until the voice promised a bottle of Excedrin on a maintenance boat leaving around three-thirty.
Silence was a balm. To lie down on a bed, exquisite. Had some quiet, unobtrusive servant tiptoed in and turned on the air conditioner, Anna would have believed in a kindly God. As it was, she lay in the stifling heat, feeling the trickles of sweat prick under her clothes.
Sleep pressed heavily on her limbs, forcing her eyelids closed. Was she indeed concussed, she knew she mustn’t give in to it. Vaguely she remembered that people with head injuries needed to be awakened periodically for the first ten hours. For the life of her she couldn’t remember why.
Fending off the sandman’s advances, she propped herself up against the pillows and reached again for the bedside phone.
“Mesa Verde National Park.”
“Hey, Frieda,” she said wearily. “It’s Anna.”
Frieda was the dispatcher at Mesa Verde, the chief ranger’s secretary, and, Anna hoped, a friend.
“What’s up?” Frieda asked.
Directness: it was one of the many things for which Anna admired the woman. She gave Frieda a brief account of the airplane crash. She didn’t mention the blow to the back of her head. Not because Frieda would tell anyone—Mesa Verde’s dispatcher was a safe repository for even the most sensitive information—but because the effort of convincing her she wasn’t hurt was too much to contemplate.
“See what you can dig up on Slattery Hammond,” Anna said. “He used to work for the Forest Service in Region Six. Each pilot has to be approved by the aviation department yearly. The records ought to be in Redmond or Portland. And could you call me back in half an hour whether you find out anything or not?” Anna was afraid that, left to her own devices, she would sleep too long.
Frieda promised she would. If she thought the request peculiar she kept it to herself. It wasn’t in Frieda’s job description to do investigative background work but she was good at it and, when other duties weren’t pressing, enjoyed it. Frieda had been with the NPS for eighteen years, half her life. Anybody who hadn’t slept on her couch, borrowed her car, or mooched a free meal off of her knew someone who had. The dispatcher had connections in odd and useful places.
“Hammond. USFS. Region Six. Got it,” Frieda said.
Anna let a sigh escape. “How’s Piedmont?” she asked, her pain making her homesick for the comforts of her cat.
“Misses his mom—other than that, good. Bella’s taken to coming with me. While I clean the cat box she plays with the cat.
As a team, we’re unbeatable.”
Bella was the seven-year-old daughter of one of the park employees. Anna had fallen in love with the child her first summer at Mesa Verde.
“Good deal,” Anna said. “I’ve got to go.” She hung up before the ache in her head deprived her of the power of coherent speech.
Secure in the knowledge that Frieda wouldn’t let her sleep to death, Anna let her eyes unfocus and her mind drift. In the narrow and fuzzy field of her vision was the bedroom door standing half open, a lacy pink peignoir hanging from a hook on the back. What looked like a tiny little kid’s purse or a giant padlock hung from the door-knob. Because she didn’t know what it was, the object aggravated Anna. Above it was a dead bolt and above that a chain lock. A chain lock on an inside door; that wasn’t the usual. Taken in the context of the two locks, the unidentified hanging object lost its mystery. Anna had seen them before. They were traveler’s intruder alarms, motion detectors. When disturbed they emitted a loud, obnoxious noise.
Three security measures on the bedroom door. Jesus, Anna thought, as she slid into a heavy sleep. At least one of the Belfores was sure as hell afraid of something.
CHAPTER Fifteen
ANNA WAS UP at four-thirty. At six she was to pick up Dijon at the fire dorm and patrol the north end of the island. Guy had made a special trip to Plum Orchard the evening before to tell her her work with fire crew was in no way alleviated by the nightly baby-sitting chore. The first was her job, the second her duty.
Anna was feeling anything but dutiful. Her temples pounded as if something vaguely equine were trapped in her skull hammering with iron-shod hooves to get out. Her neck was stiff from sleeping on the sofa in the Belfores’ living room. Foraging for coffee in the unfamiliar kitchen, she cursed Norman Hull, Guy, Tabby, and whoever had tried to crack her skull.
The logical assumption was that whoever had bashed her over the head was the same individual who sabotaged Slattery’s Beechcraft. Frieda’s inquiries had turned up some interesting connections. Hammond had a reverse discrimination suit filed against Alice Utterback. Prior to going to the Washington, D.C., office, Alice had been head of aviation for Region Six. She’d passed over Hammond’s application three times. All three times she hired a female pilot to fill the position he applied for. When he finally crawled on board in a seasonal capacity, he alleged Alice had discriminated against him in an assortment of petty ways. Anna’s favorite was the accusation that Alice had put up a poster of Charles Lindbergh over his picture of Miss November in a hangar in Redmond, Oregon.
