by Barr, Nevada
Alice certainly had the knowledge to wreck an airplane. And was now in an excellent position to screw up the investigation. Not for a moment did Anna believe that particular scenario. Still, it made her uncomfortable.
Being a woman of wisely maintained cynicism, Frieda had run not only Hammond but all the possible targets of the saboteur through NCIC, the National Criminal Information Center. Hammond, Belfore, and Hull all had clean records.
Anna had not thought to run the chief or district rangers. People with felonies on their records were automatically barred from carrying a law enforcement commission. Frieda knew better and told Anna horror stories of a goodly number who’d slipped through the cracks: convicted murderers wearing the green and gray, representing the NPS to a trusting public.
Through the grapevine, Frieda had also discovered that though Hammond had no record, he’d had some run-ins with the local police in Hope, Canada, the small town outside North Cascades National Park in Washington where some of the park employees kept “city homes.” Cops had showed up at his apartment more than once. What about was open for speculation.
CAFFEINE, A SHOWER, and two Excedrin transformed Anna into something more closely resembling a human being, and at five a.m. she slipped quietly from the Belfores’ apartment to greet the day. The sun had not yet deigned to rise but there was promise in the east. Standing on the wooden landing halfway down the fire escape, she absorbed the freedom to be had out of doors.
She had known her head hurt, realized the couch was lumpy. What hadn’t occurred to her till she was free of it was the tension and sorrow that permeated every stick of furniture and scrap of fabric that made up the Belfore home. Even before Tabby returned from the mainland, Anna had sensed it. Fear was there in the many locks, in the unguents and creams for maintaining youth; sadness in the pink chiffon dressing gown unsuited for a widow, in the wide bed, lonely for one; in every picture where, against a glorious backdrop of green mountains, a blond woman smiled at a dead man.
Breathing deeply of the soft air, Anna let some of that tension leave her. Her mind sank into the holding warmth of a southern dawn as the first light shamed the stars from the sky. The horrid littles of being human: life, death, birth, love, and betrayal, were of no moment to her today. All she had to do was drive a truck and look for smoke. Even with a headache and a bad attitude, she should be able to do that.
As she neared the meadow by Stafford mansion, rusted shocks and rough road were well on the way to undoing her resolve. Early light poured into the clearing. Splashed over the sand-blasted windshield it was blinding. A small dark shape—a dog maybe—darted into the glare, obscuring the road in front of the truck, and Anna slammed on the brakes. She skidded to a stop without any sickening bumps. To her left was the meadow, to her right a wall cemented from sand and shell that separated Stafford and its attendant cottage from the dirt road.
The critter she’d narrowly avoided sending to the promised land was disappearing through a gate in the wall. A glimpse of white tail and spotted rump was all Anna was afforded. Then, like a magical moment in a fairy tale, a face peeked back around the gatepost. A fawn not more than a month old looked up at her with Disney eyes. Anna laughed aloud. Feeling blessed, she watched in stillness, expecting this wilderness apparition to vanish with the usual alacrity of wild things.
This little fellow stayed. He poked his head several inches farther around the gate and cocked it to one side. A pink tongue flicked out and wet a black nose.
Like most women her age, Anna had been raised with the animated classics. The good and pure, the Cinderellas and Snow Whites, could sit down and all the gentle creatures of the forest would come and nestle in their skirts. Drawn by this childhood fantasy, one that wouldn’t die regardless of the number of squirrels, raccoons, and armadillos that rejected her advances, Anna climbed slowly from the truck.
Leaving it parked in the lane, driver door open, she worked her way toward the fawn. Her voice slid into the upper registers, and even as she cooed sweet nonsense, she wondered what it was about babies, regardless of their species, that made people talk funny.
Head lowered, looking at her through impossibly long lashes, the fawn watched. When Anna was less than six feet from him, she felt a wave of dizziness and realized she’d been holding her breath. She let it escape in a rush and the tiny animal turned and ran, not as if it was afraid, but as if it wanted to play.
Enchanted, Anna followed.
Inside the walls nestled a cottage. Once it had probably been the gatekeeper’s quarters. A row of potted plants in the window and a bicycle leaning against the plaster wall attested to more modern inhabitants.
The mansion and grounds had been allowed to deteriorate. Weeds recaptured what had been lawns. Bushes, run wild, tangled up close to the kitchens at the rear of the mansion, much as the curse of thorns had wrapped around Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
The mansion itself was not so grand as Plum Orchard, being smaller and boxier, built with the feel of a Mediterranean villa yet retaining an American hardiness to withstand Atlantic storms. There were no vistas dotted with live oaks, but a long rectangular lawn in the process of being reclaimed by nature. Wide steps built to usher visitors up to the front doors were crumbling. Stones loosed by time and weather lay scattered in the weeds.
It was to this doorway the fawn ran, trotting up the stairs to pause beneath the veranda and look back at Anna. Laughing, she ran after, careful to keep her footfalls quiet and her aura benign.
The clatter of hooves gave away the fawn’s direction as he scampered down the long porch and around the corner of the house. Seconds later, Anna rounded the same corner. The fawn was nowhere to be seen. Weed-eaten lawn stretched empty in three directions. The northern wing of the mansion, housing the kitchens and servants’ quarters, walled off this half of the garden from the entrance gate and cottage.
Nothing moved, not even the crawling heat. For reasons Anna had never been curious enough to ask about, the heat on Cumberland didn’t create the shimmering curtains of mirage that heat in the desert did.
At her feet were concrete stairs leading to a cellar door that stood open eight or ten inches. Unless the deer was equipped with turbojets, there was no other place he could have reached and secreted himself in the time he’d been out of her sight. Though she’d never seen a wild animal bolt into a human habitation for safety, she pursued him down the steps. Engrossed in a fairy tale, it didn’t even strike her as particularly odd.
The cellar was as big as the house, wings disappearing into the gloom, one north and the other east. Anna found a switch by the door and, without much hope, clicked it on. To her surprise, half a dozen dim bulbs cast an inadequate light. The ceiling was low—she could reach up and touch it with the palm of her hand—and coffered into countless recesses by beams, pipes, and exposed wiring. The floor was of smooth concrete.
Over the years bits and pieces of jumbled lives had made their way into these catacombs. History, a lot of junk, and some convenient storage were tucked away in the shadows. From behind an old coal furnace, with as many arms as a Jules Verne nightmare, peeked a classic baby buggy with huge wheels and a tattered bonnet. Fragments of derelict furniture were piled against the walls.
A bleat, like that of a lamb, caught Anna’s attention. Beyond the furnace, in one of the alcoves in the eastern wing, she could just make out the form of the fawn. A bleat: she realized that though she’d seen a goodly number of fawns, she’d never heard one speak. Its voice carried the imperious helplessness of all babies and she smiled. “You gonna run, little buddy?” she said coaxingly.
The fawn vanished, swallowed by shadows. She followed deeper into the labyrinth of cellar. Around an abutment of concrete, amid white PVC pipe lying in unstable piles and plastic containers of fertilizer and herbicides, he was waiting.
Anna folded down onto the floor and there in the artificial dusk of a turn-of-the-century cellar, she got her Snow White dream. The fawn pushed his nose against her
, licked her chin, and let her pet the graceful spotted arc of his neck.
So absorbed was she in the magic of the moment that when a perfectly friendly voice said: “Oh there you are,” she nearly jumped out of her skin. The fawn skittered away to take shelter behind the stout legs of the intruder.
An elderly woman, probably in her seventies, with tightly permed iron-gray hair and thick glasses framed in blue plastic, blocked what little light leaked from the bulb in the next alcove. In this twilight her skin was ageless but her voice spoke of wear and tear and her body had settled into the comfortable lumps brought on by too many years’ exposure to fried chicken and gravity.
“I see you’ve met Flicka,” she said pleasantly, and reached behind her so the fawn could butt his head against the soft of her palm. When Anna said nothing, the woman went on. “ ‘Flicka.’ Pretty silly, I guess, but ‘Bambi’ seemed too cute. Mona and I aren’t very imaginative when it comes to names.”
Anna recovered her equilibrium. The abrupt switches from Disney to Stephen King to the real world had taken some adjusting to. Rising from the dust, she said: “Anna Pigeon, fire crew,” and stuck out her hand because she couldn’t think of anything else appropriate to do.
“Dot,” the woman said, and captured the proffered hand, holding on to it as if Anna were a lost child. Short of jerking rudely back, there was little Anna could do but submit. “Mona and I are VIPs—Volunteers in Parks—working on turtle inventory and related subjects. A step up, I must say, from our first assignment.”
“What was that?” Anna asked politely, trying to think of a dignified way to get her hand back.
“Cellar inventory. That’s when Flicka first came. He got into the habit of playing down here.” Dot laughed. “We volunteer for six weeks of sun and fun on the Golden Isles in our golden years and we get stuck with cellar inventory.” Despite the words, Dot’s good cheer seemed undiminished.
“Maintenance saved us. They decided to use the old place for storage.” She waved at the pipes and bottles and Anna’s hand escaped. She hid it in her pocket lest it again be snatched. “That ended our troglodyte period,” Dot said. “Coffee? It’s on.”
Meekly, Anna followed her from the cellar, the fawn trotting along at the older woman’s heels like a well-trained pup.
Mona, the other half of this marriage—and from the dear and comfortable way the women treated one another, Anna guessed it was a relationship of long standing—was slight and strong, with broad hips and the flat butt that comes with age. Her hair was brown with stark white streaks at the temples. “Bride of Frankenstein,” she said, and laughed when Anna complimented her on them. Her face was wrinkled and soft with the agelessness of elves in old drawings. Either her eyesight was keen or she wore contacts; nothing filtered the warmth from eyes as dark and liquid as Flicka’s.
Mona and Dot were retired schoolteachers from West Virginia. Summers they volunteered for the National Park Service. They’d worked in Yellowstone, and Hovenweep, Rocky Mountain, and Fort Pulaski. Their tastes were eclectic and their store of knowledge vast and varied. At a rough estimate, Anna guessed between them they had over a century of experience. They were as much national treasures as the parks themselves, and Anna was content to snuggle down in their cluttered kitchen and drink their coffee.
As was inevitable in an island society, the talk turned inward, to the airplane wreck and the ripples it continued to send through the isolated colony.
“I liked Slattery,” Mona said, taking Anna by surprise. She’d had the impression everyone hated the man. On reflection, she realized the only person she’d spoken to about Hammond was Alice Utterback and he had a lawsuit filed against her. “Slattery was a real charmer,” Mona went on, offering a package of store-bought cinnamon rolls to Anna.
“A man gets extra points for being charming to horrid old women,” Dot said.
“Yes indeed. Smacks of genuine good manners. Nothing to gain.”
“Unless he’s a pervert,” Dot said.
“Unless you’re a pervert,” Mona returned pointedly, and Dot was chastened. Precisely for what, Anna had no idea.
“Slattery was an amateur marine biologist. The life cycle of the loggerheads fascinated him. He spent a lot of his spare time poking through the old files,” Mona said.
“That’s how we got to know him,” Dot told Anna. “Poking became our second assignment, right after Morlock duty.”
“We’re putting all the back files in some sort of order and entering the data on the computer.” Mona took up the story.
“A mad dash into the twentieth century,” Dot added. “A mere handful of years before it ends.”
“Money makes all things possible. Some clever soul got a hundred and twelve grand out of the U.S. government to study the loggerheads. Pays our room and board,” Mona said.
“Not board, just room. Maybe board next year. The second half is due come September. Hull wants all the files squeaky-clean and high-tech by Labor Day.”
“It’d be easier with assistants,” Mona said.
“You just want someone besides me to boss.”
“On the rolls but never showed.”
“Kids today . . .” Dot clucked.
“A mess. A nightmare,” Mona said. “If we didn’t possess the patience of Job—”
“And nearly the same number of years on the job—”
“We’d be more or less completely nuts—”
“Instead of incompletely nuts—”
“By now,” Mona finished.
Yup, Anna thought, old married couple.
“And Todd was a good enough fellow,” Mona said, as if feeling she’d been remiss. “He hadn’t much time for a couple of senior citizens.”
“Bookworms.”
“Computer nerds.”
“Schoolteachers.”
The two women exchanged comments with such rapidity, many of them fraught with private humor, that Anna was dizzied. She helped herself to a pastry to steady her mind.
“But a dear with his wife,” Mona concluded. Both faces grew somber so suddenly and in such concert with one another that only an inhaled crumb and a brief coughing fit rescued Anna from laughter.
“How is Tabby?” Dot asked with what looked to be very real if belated concern.
Anna saw no reason not to tell them. Theoretically everyone was a suspect and appearances could be deceiving, but Dot and Mona struck her as women who had outgrown murder. Mona lit a Virginia Slim and Dot folded her hands attentively as Anna began. Good listeners; Anna bet they’d been excellent teachers.
She told them as much as she knew. Mitch Hanson had dropped Lynette and Tabby off at Plum Orchard around six the evening before, and Anna found herself in the awkward role of playing hostess to the returning owner. Tabby hadn’t cared, hadn’t seemed to notice. Had Norman Hull’s comments, and her own rudimentary knowledge of pharmacology, not come into play, Anna would have thought Tabby was drugged. Her movements were slow, her responses to questions and other stimuli sluggish. Her head moved first, her eyes tracking a second later. Her speech, though not slurred, gave that impression. Tabby would lose interest in what she was saying before the thought was complete and her sentences often dribbled to a stop in the middle.
Crippling depression; it didn’t take Anna long to recognize it. After Zach died she’d swum in those dark waters. That had been years ago but she could still remember. Her body remembered: the weight behind the breastbone, the pressure at the base of the skull, the tedious and exhausting necessity to breathe in and breathe out, the endless theatrical that demons put on just behind the eyes, making it impossible to focus on the words of those still living.
Overlying this miasma of grief in Tabby was a need for self-destruction only held at bay by the life she carried within her. Damage she could do that would not touch the baby, Tabby welcomed. Making tea, Anna caught her pressing her fingers against the red rings of the electric burner. The flesh was white as ash when Anna snatched them off and held them un
der the cold water tap.
Later, when Anna thought Tabby was working on a cross-stitch of three goslings traipsing after a bonneted goose, she found the girl was repeatedly plunging the needle into the flesh of her forearm. She was spelling something out with dots of fresh blood. When Anna tried to read it, she smeared the letters and let herself be washed and anointed with Neosporin.
There followed an earnest lecture as Anna told her that everything she did, right down to destructive thoughts and watching the six o’clock news, affected her unborn child. Maybe Anna was telling the truth. Who could know?
Lynette was no help. She only stayed a quarter of an hour, then, refusing a ride from Anna, walked the mile and a half home. Either she had problems of her own or she’d caught Tabby’s sadness. The usually bright eyes were lackluster and she scarcely spoke. Anna had little doubt some well-meaning person of the male persuasion with only slightly ulterior motives would turn up to succor the young woman, so she let her go without argument, relieved not to have two zombies in the house.
When Anna had finished her story, Dot said: “Lynette was sweet on Slattery,” clearing up at least one of the minor mysteries.
“Was he sweet on her?” Anna unconsciously picked up the other woman’s phrasing.
Mona answered. “With Slattery, who could tell?”
“He was unilaterally charming,” Dot explained. “Pleasant for antiquarian educators but no doubt aggravating for sweet young things.”
