by Barr, Nevada
Anna turned and fled, the unsubtle pounding of Dijon’s boots half a step behind her.
“Holy shit, what was that?” Dijon asked when they’d completed their ignominious retreat and sat again in the sanctuary of the pumper truck. “He’s crazy as a loon. Ted Bundy. Like I’d want to read his frigging mail. It was laying there. Christ, a blind man would have been able to read it. What is his problem?” Dijon was babbling, creepy laughter mixed with his words.
“He was higher than a kite,” Anna said.
“On Nestea? That’s all it was. I’ve got a nose like a bloodhound.”
“Not alcohol. Cocaine, maybe. Crack. Could be meth or just old-fashioned speed. Something. His pupils were almost invisible and he was wired so tight he hummed.”
“Damn,” Dijon said. “I didn’t think marine biologists did drugs.”
“Scientists invented drugs,” Anna countered.
“Sorcerers and shit.” Dijon shuddered.
Anna crossed herself. “Just in case you’re right,” she said when he looked surprised. She fired up the truck and backed out the fifty yards of driveway. There was room to turn around but she wasn’t comfortable with her back to Marty Schlessinger.
Only once before had she had such a sense of malignancy. It was when she worked in Texas at Guadalupe Mountains National Park. She’d pulled over a blue sedan for speeding. The sun was high, the road public, and Anna well armed. The sedan had two occupants. The driver was a woman in her late thirties, weighing close to three hundred pounds, with small, very dark eyes. The passenger was a wisp of a woman somewhere between seventy-five and a thousand years old. Her eyes were the same beetle-back black.
As Anna approached the driver’s-side door, she’d gotten a real bad feeling, as if some odor of pure evil poured out the open window. She didn’t even ask the woman for her driver’s license. All she said was: “Slow it down, please,” and, “Have a nice day.” God knew what was in their trunk and Anna didn’t want to.
Whether it was ESP or PMS, she never found out, but she’d never been sorry she turned tail and ran. Today she’d gotten a whiff of that same scent in Schlessinger’s shack.
CHAPTER Seventeen
IGNORING THE BLARING headline, “POLICE CAPTURE SUSPECT IN BABY KILLING” shouting up from the paper on the table in front of him and nearly every other rag in the room, Frederick sat in the pub on Ninth Avenue waiting for Molly. In the three days he’d been in New York it had become “their” place. At least in his mind. Along with titillating excitement was a rising tide of self-contempt.
He’d found a reason to lunch with Dr. Pigeon Saturday, meet her for dinner Saturday night and brunch Sunday. Today he’d called the Chicago office pleading the flu and, to the tune of $220 a pop, reserved another couple of nights at the Parker Meridien. He’d worked harder than a roomful of hot new recruits tracking down the leads he had on the threatening letters.
In seventy-two hours he’d lost control. It started over drinks the first night. Sometime between salad and coffee at Saturday’s lunch he’d slid over the edge. Love at first sight? He scoffed, making a small noise he passed off as a cough, not wanting to call attention to himself. As if talking to oneself were cause for comment in Manhattan. There was an apt definition of love at first sight floating around the e-mail circuit: when two horny but not particularly choosy people meet for the first time.
Chemistry? Biology? Maybe simple neurosis. Anna was getting too close—and at his ardent behest. Promises had been, if not made, certainly implied: letters written, laughter shared, a future together strongly hinted at. Was this just panic, this sudden infatuation that gripped him as if he were a boy of fifteen? And not merely over a Jean or a Janet or a Judy, but with Anna’s sole and beloved sister.
Not aware he did it, Frederick buried his face in his hands, a parody of the tortured soul. Though he was aware logic—not to mention everyone he knew—would see this dramatic shift of affections as a psychological blip on his aging radar, in his heart there was a romantic arrogance demanding it be True Love.
He was ashamed. On some level he was aware of that. The telltale sign was secrecy. Like a lovesick coed, he wanted to talk about Molly but kept her name a mystery, even when he talked with his daughter, Candice.
Frederick lifted his head and took a long pull on his Scotch, then checked his reflection in the mirror over the fireplace to see if his histrionics had made his hair clownish. He downed the rest of his drink and signaled the waiter to bring him another.
Soon, he knew, the process of his exoneration would begin. Bit by bit he would change what needed changing. Each time he told himself the story he would come out looking a little cleaner. Frederick’s judgments were cruel, damning. Years before, he’d learned how to keep them from turning and cutting him. After the process was complete and he was once again whole, there would be only a scar.
Anna would hate him.
She was proud. She’d never let on. Like Mary Tyrone in A Long Day’s Journey into Night, she would forgive but she would never forget. Respect would die. Touched by betrayal, memories would be transmuted from gold to lead.
With something akin to desperation, he pawed beneath the paper he’d been pretending to read to find the folder. When self-analysis came close to an unpleasant truth, Frederick turned his mind to his work. It was what he was good at.
None of the leads Molly provided him with went anywhere. James Lubbock, the man angling for disability, had sued and won, this time claiming a back injury. His hostile wife, Portia, had been happy to tell Frederick more than he’d ever wanted to know about the Lubbock union. The money, not surprisingly, was still not enough, but the Lubbocks were on to other scams and had forgotten Molly Pigeon’s unprofitable sense of ethics.
Sheila Thomas, the not-so-gay divorcée, was head over heels in love with the lawyer who had gotten her such a lousy settlement, and quoted Dr. Pigeon the way the newly converted quote Jesus.
Thomas bored him. The page tired his eyes. His concentration splintered. Though his head didn’t ache, Frederick rubbed his temples. His train of thought was derailing, Molly Pigeon, or his sudden attraction to her, filling his mind.
When emotional lightning strikes once, it’s easily passed off as the real thing. By the third or fourth hit, the possibility it’s a neurotic pattern and not love had to be considered.
There’d been a woman in California, a married woman, he’d made a fool of himself over. Much, he suspected later, to her great if adamantly denied delight. A lawyer in Oregon he’d thrown himself at, only to run like a scalded cat when she began to talk commitment. Then Anna: Anna had been slow and sure. Time had passed, they knew one another. It had been, he’d told himself, Real.
And it had been blown away over lunch by this new wind that Molly breathed through his soul. Frederick laughed aloud, no longer concerned that others might stare. Maybe the Scotch was kicking in. “Soul” might be a little less specific a part of the anatomy than that which was acting as a lightning rod. Intellectually, he knew Molly might be another symptom of whatever: a choice between the tedium of having and the endless potential in wanting. What saddened him was that he didn’t give a damn.
Anna was fading. Just like that, dissipating into a vague fog the way a dream will on waking. A memory that ached only occasionally, like a bad tooth when he bit down on it.
The light Frederick saw himself in was rapidly becoming less than flattering. Forcing himself to sit up straight, he fixed his mind on the work before him.
Nancy Bradshaw, the smasher of lamps, had proven a bit more of a challenge, but the end result was no more promising. She’d moved to Vermont. Assuming correctly that someone as volatile as Molly had said Bradshaw was would have little patience with posted speed limits, Frederick had traced her through outstanding traffic tickets.
Miss Bradshaw’s new employer told him she had been vacationing in Ireland for three weeks and wasn’t due back till Thursday. That effectively let her out of the picture unless the plot
was ridiculously convoluted, which was seldom the case.
Nancy Bradshaw’s defection left Frederick fresh out of ideas. In his mind’s eye he’d seen himself hauling the perpetrator off in chains after a suitably Schwarzeneggeresque rescue of the imperiled heroine. Failing that, he’d hoped to have a fait accompli to lay at Molly’s feet.
The pub door opened and Dr. Pigeon walked in. Frederick saw her through a haze of Scotch and rose-colored glasses. Her suit was perfect, cool white linen with a salmon blouse of what was undoubtedly silk, soft to the touch. Despite the heat and the time of day, she looked fresh. In the moment that she paused, scanning the tables for his face, he noticed how pale she was, the slight crumpling of her features. Molly Pigeon looked afraid.
Frederick’s first rush of feeling wasn’t compassion, it was satisfaction: she needed him.
CHAPTER Eighteen
ANNA WAS FEELING bereft. The guys, including the usually rational Al, had gone jogging. Anna had escaped, though not unscathed. Gender and age had been touched upon with good-natured ridicule. Rick had been closest to the mark; Anna wasn’t so much lazy as genetically skinny and congenitally opposed to profitless exertion. Dijon had offered to chase her with a girl-hating reptile of some sort to give the exercise a point. Anna had declined his generous offer and slipped away to the ranger station for an uninterrupted evening with AT&T.
Neither Molly nor Frederick was home.
She’d called both three times over the past hour and three times had hung up without leaving a message. A message was a commitment. If she called again afterward it would prove she was desperate, or worse, pathetic. The etiquette of phone tag had grown more complex with the advent of the answering machine.
Anna broke off another chunk of a Nestlé Crunch and chewed it slowly. Lights off, she sat in the chief ranger’s office, her feet on his agonizingly tidy desk. It wasn’t merely cleared of debris; everything was lined up in precise rows, like men on a chessboard: tape dispenser, stapler, electric pencil sharpener, each a careful two inches apart and square with the blotter. Lined up on the opposite side of the desk, the opponents faced off in the same two-inch formation: stamp dispenser, pencil holder, paper clip magnet.
Alone in the center of a rectangle of unmarked green, Anna’s candy wrapper looked craven, a malicious act of vandalism. Finishing the last of the chocolate, she folded the leftover paper neatly and set it two inches from the pencil sharpener.
Squat and colorless in a faint spill of moonlight, the phone sat like a malevolent toad at the edge of the desk. Years of isolation, of distance from family, friends, and lovers, had created in Anna a love/hate relationship with telephones. They were often her only contact with the people she cared about, and at the same time not only pointed up how fragile that connection was but, she was sure, in some arcane way managed to warp the very relationships it made possible.
Perhaps the plastic contained some dormant virus that came to life when pressed long enough against the warmth of human flesh. Once revived it would be in a unique position to penetrate the brain orally or aurally, causing a chemical imbalance that brought on obsessive calls to empty houses, fights with sweethearts, and long silences costing more than ten cents a minute.
The clock over the door insisted it was just nine p.m. She would wait another half hour. If nobody was home by then, she’d give it up as a lost cause.
Tilting back in Norman’s chair, she cast about for something with which to amuse herself. Tidy men were not particularly entertaining, no flotsam or jetsam to fiddle about in. Normal men, men who didn’t clean out their wallets but transferred the whole mess every few years when a new wallet appeared under the Christmas tree, carried their history in their back pockets.
Desks served the same purpose, if on a more business-like plane. Hills Dutton, Anna’s district ranger in Mesa Verde, had a magnificent desk. His professional past could be read in geological strata as one worked down through the accumulated canyons of paper.
Hull was either indescribably tedious or had something to hide. Anna clicked on the desk lamp. Just passing the time, she jiggled the drawers. They’d been locked. A sense of challenge crept into her idle snooping. Rangers were the most trusting creatures on the planet. They habitually left wads of money, candy, hollow-point bullets, house keys, car keys, and confiscated alcohol littered around the office. Amazingly enough, with the exception of the candy, none of it ever disappeared.
The only people Anna had known to lock their desks—all two of them—both turned out to be chronic litigators, always embroiled in one lawsuit or another against the NPS. Their secret-squirrel tendencies sprang from paranoia that the information they’d gathered was actually worth something. With a renewed sense of purpose, she searched all the standard key hiding places but came up empty-handed.
A quick search of Renee’s drawers proved more satisfying. A key tagged “Norman’s Desk” lay prominently in the pencil tray. Like any task, once undertaken the search took on a life of its own, becoming important by the simple fact it had proven difficult. Anna carried the key back to the chief ranger’s office with a pleasant feeling of accomplishment.
After all her suspicious surmisings and stealthy machinations, the prize wasn’t worth the game. The desk’s interior was as sterile as the surface. Files were carefully marked and each folder contained what it advertised. Stationery and envelopes filled wooden racks. In the center drawer, the one usually doomed to catch life’s precious litter, there was precious little.
Anna flipped through Hull’s desk calendar. On the day of the airplane crash he’d written, “Slattery, Stafford meadow—10 a.m.,” as if he’d intended to keep the appointment. The other entries were what might be found in any day planner, notes of meetings and times. “Cheryl” was dotted here and there and “Ellen” made a number of appearances along with personal hieroglyphics—PU and PO, asterisks and underlinings. Cheryl and Ellen, Anna knew from the general scuttlebutt, were Hull’s wife and daughter.
The only thing of interest was an envelope with a handwritten address and a Pennsylvania postmark. In for a penny, in for a pound, Anna thought, and shook out a single sheet of paper covered with the same loopy writing as on the envelope, and a snapshot.
“Dear Norm, I don’t think the change has done Ellen—”
Anna refolded the paper and stuffed it back into the envelope unread. The letter was clearly personal and there were limits to the rules she would break without probable cause. Somehow looking at a picture was different. Pictures, by their nature, seemed in the public domain. The photograph was of a young girl. Anna would have guessed she was eighteen or nineteen but loopy letters in pencil read, “Ellen on her 13th birthday.” Norman’s only daughter. There was a family resemblance in the watery blue eyes and narrow, squared-off chin. Heavy makeup and what looked to be very expensive, if tasteless, teen-tart clothes hugged the chunky frame of a body not yet out of childhood.
Engrossed as she was in meddling, when the phone rang Anna reacted so violently she cracked her kneecap on the underside of the desk. The pain was intense but would be short-lived. Breathing deeply and counting backward from twenty, she glowered at the phone as if it had attacked once and might try it again. By the fourth ring she’d recovered and decided to answer it. There wasn’t a chance in hell it was for her but at this time of night it was possibly urgent.
“Cumberland Island National Seashore,” she said.
“Yeah. Hey. This is Charley Riggs. Who am I talking to?”
Anna was momentarily starstruck. Riggs was the Southeast’s regional director. Silently she closed and locked the desk drawer lest he sense her transgressions. “Anna Pigeon, presuppression, fire crew,” she answered formally.
“Drought’s pretty bad there, Anna?”
She recognized the use of her name for what it was—a politician’s trick—but she didn’t resent it. Government agencies were highly political. It was, if not good, at least expedient to have a politician in charge.
Duti
fully she prattled on about what they’d been doing on Cumberland, until Riggs signaled her to stop with an indrawn breath. “Well, hey, Anna, that’s terrific—”
Anna rolled her eyes and wished she had another chocolate bar.
“Is Norm around? He said he might be working late tonight.”
No, Anna told him, and could she take a message? Well, hey, Anna, she could.
“I just got out of a backcountry management retreat in Big Cypress and need to talk to him about the airplane wreck. Tell him to give me a call as soon as he gets in tomorrow, would you, Anna?”
“Yes, sir.” She wrote the message down on a notepad placed precisely two inches from the phone. A stray thought jarred her as she watched the regional director’s words draining from her pen. “Hey, Charley, how long was that retreat?” Maybe in her next life she’d go into politics.
“Five days. No fax, no phone, no running water. We got a lot accomplished but I’m getting too old to sleep on the ground.”
Anna laughed politely and hung up.
The thirty minutes she’d designated had passed. She had permission to try Molly and Frederick again, but she didn’t reach for the telephone.
For some reason Norman Hull had lied. He’d not been on the phone with the regional director when the ill-fated Beechcraft left the ground. Anna had little doubt that if she nosed around she’d find that Renee was under the impression Hull had received the lifesaving call on the mainland and the woman in St. Marys believed just the opposite. Two lies, each tailored to support the other. Deceit of that caliber usually sprang from a more than casual motivation.
She unlocked the chief ranger’s desk. Having been handed probable cause on the proverbial silver platter, she took out the handwritten letter and read it through. It was family news. From the context, she gathered it was from a sister of Norman’s. Ellen had been sent to Pennsylvania for a visit with the cousins, had proven to be a major pain in the butt, and was being put on the next bus back to Georgia. Anna refolded the letter carefully and placed it precisely where she’d found it. A man as anal-retentive as Norman Hull would notice any disruption.
