by Barr, Nevada
Again she went through the files, this time with greater interest. The bottom right-hand drawer held confidential personnel folders—the record of each employee, including letters of commendation and censures, their personal information, and the numbers that Americans carry from cradle to grave.
Anna pulled Slattery Hammond’s folder from the neat arrangement of hanging files. There wasn’t much to it; he’d worked for the parks only sporadically, and as he was strictly seasonal, the service didn’t much care how he made ends meet in the off months.
She looked through the sheets quickly. All of it was standard—memos, evaluations. When she reached the page containing his personal data, she stopped. Hammond’s life insurance was handled by a company in Washington State. Dead he was worth $125,000. Dead by accident on the job: $250,000. Double indemnity. Given what Slattery did for a living, that codicil wasn’t surprising. Pilots tended to believe the fool killer would call them home long before they had a chance to die peacefully in bed; a romantic notion and most often wrong. The insurance companies bet on that. This time they lost. Anna scanned the rest of the document to see who had won. The beneficiary was Linda Hammond, a resident of Hope, Canada, wife of the deceased. Should she predecease him the moneys would be put in trust for his son, Dylan.
Hammond was married. Had Lynette known? Certainly no one else seemed aware of it. Would a self-professed Christian commit murder to revenge a broken heart and a damaged ego? Absolutely. Human beings weren’t linear creatures, cut from one piece of cloth. They routinely harbored moral dichotomies that would short-circuit the most sophisticated robot. And most did it effortlessly. Maybe Lynette was not only Christian but Catholic. Fornication, murder, a quick confession, and she’d be back on the Lord’s good side.
Nothing in Mitch Hanson’s history called attention to itself and Anna went on to Lynette’s. Her only claim to fame was having started out in the Park Service as a GS-1. Anna hadn’t known that low a designation existed. The stamp on her pay envelopes must have been worth nearly as much as the check itself.
There was no folder on Schlessinger. He was attached to the NPS but not of it. Turtle-research funding was obtained from other sources. Whoever was head of Resource Management kept the files on the marine biologist.
Renee, Norman’s secretary, had held more jobs than looked good on a résumé and hadn’t the sense to disguise that fact. She’d been with Cumberland Island National Seashore for fifteen months. A personal best.
Dot and Mona were not represented. As VIPs, the chief ranger would not be in charge of them.
Todd Belfore’s folder provided a couple of tidbits of information. He had health insurance through the NPS but no life. After the baby was born they might have bought some. Now it was too late. Of greater interest was the fact that he’d been a district ranger in North Cascades. He had transferred to Cumberland on a lateral—no promotion, no raise in pay. Though Cumberland had undeniable charms, one could argue it was a step down in status. North Cascades was considerably bigger and had that certain cachet unique to the western wilderness parks.
Todd and Slattery had been in Washington, working for the NPS, at the same time. Within several months of one another, they’d moved clear across the continent, where they died together in a planned plane wreck. It was possible they’d had dealings in the past, that someone wanted both of them dead and found a way to kill two birds with a single actuator rod.
Meticulously, Anna replaced the files and double-checked to see all was as it should be. Having closed and locked the desk, she pulled the sleeve of her fire shirt down over her hand and polished her fingerprints from the drawers and the key. Not for a moment did she think Norman would have the desk dusted for prints. She was just killing time.
Ten o’clock rolled around and she tried her phone calls again. Molly didn’t answer. Frederick’s machine in Chicago picked up and Anna left a message. No face lost—she wouldn’t call again tonight.
From habit she rattled the doors and windows before she let herself out of the ranger station. At Mesa Verde it was what the late ranger did each night.
The moon was high, the air warm and sweet with the scent of mimosa and the tang of the sea. Tonight Anna wasn’t drawn into the southern dream; tonight it felt cloying, unclean, as if the air clung to her skin, clogged her throat and mind. The sandblasting of lies and counterlies, drug addiction, clinical depression, heat, broken hearts, and ticks was beginning to get to her, and she longed for the cool, arid mesa she’d come to think of as home.
And, she admitted reluctantly, she was lonely. Before Frederick, lonely was a state of mind she’d grown accustomed to, risen above, and finally, come to find peace in. Now there was a hollow place behind her breastbone when he didn’t answer the phone.
Absurd, considering that two nights before, this very intimacy gave her the heebie-jeebies. When next she talked to Molly she’d ask her for a magic incantation, a rite where the word “codependent” figured prominently. Smiling at the idea of modern witch-doctoring, she felt better.
TABBY WAS STILL up when Anna got back to Plum Orchard, and the good feeling evaporated. Grief was wrapped around her, blurring her features. Color was gone from her skin and even her hair looked closer to gray than blond. She’d lost weight, the flesh melted from her face and bones showing through in a death mask. Thin and brittle-looking, her arms and legs poked out around her belly. She more closely resembled a refugee on the six o’clock news than a pregnant American.
Anna made a pot of hot tea—a concept she’d picked up from reading dead English authors—and arranged it prettily on a tray with two ornate teacups and a plate of eternally fresh Ho Hos.
Tabby was in the tiny living room sitting on one end of the sofa where Anna slept. Maternity fashions don’t lend themselves well to mourning. The bright red and black horizontal stripes on Tabby’s smock made her look even more ethereal in contrast. The lights were off but for a lamp on an end table. Its forty watts didn’t make a dent in the darkness shrouding Tabby Belfore.
Near the entrance to the hall, scattered across the hardwood floor between two cheap new area rugs, were brown pebbles the size of marbles: deer scat.
“Where are Dot and Mona?” Anna asked as she set the tray on the coffee table and began pouring. The VIPs had the evening shift, as they termed it, and had promised to sit with Tabby. This enforced lack of privacy would have driven Anna insane; the constant pressure of eyes on her skin, voices in her ears. With Tabby it had been deemed necessary, at least for a while.
Tabby sat immobile, her hands folded on what was left of her lap. If she heard Anna, she lacked the energy to respond. Anna repeated the question and forced a cup of Grandma’s Tummy Mint into the woman’s lax fingers.
“Gone home,” Tabby replied in a monotone.
“When?”
Tabby shook her head. The question was too complex.
“Drink your tea,” Anna ordered, and watched as the girl sipped mechanically. The bandages were torn from her forearm and the puncture wounds scratched open. Spots of blood had smeared but Anna could read the letters they formed: TOD and what was probably part of another D. Todd. Anna remembered girls in high school making crude tattoos of their boyfriends’ initials with sewing needles and ink from fountain pens. Tabby seemed so painfully young. Compassion fought with irritation in Anna’s breast.
Tabby Belfore was beyond the palliative effects of either, so Anna opted for shock therapy. “You and Todd knew Slattery. You met him when you worked in North Cascades,” she stated flatly. “What was between Todd and Slattery?”
Tabby blinked several times, then focused on Anna’s face. Her mouth opened, closed, and opened again but no words came. Tears filled her eyes and spilled down her drawn cheeks. Tabby put the teacup and saucer down on the table and pushed the tears into her hair with the heels of her hands. A string of pronouns dribbled brokenly from her lips: “I . . . He . . . We . . .” Her hands fell to her belly, clutching it protectively. More tears, unch
ecked this time, then she said in a whisper Anna had to strain to hear, “No. No. No. I can’t.”
Anna was casting about for words of reassurance or a mild form of blackmail she might use to pry out the woman’s secrets, when Tabby stood abruptly. With her altered center of gravity, the movement threatened to overbalance her, and Anna sprang to her feet to steady her.
“Leave me alone!” Tabby choked on the words.
Anna let go and watched till she closed the bedroom door between them.
Sitting back down, she eyed the untouched Ho Hos suspiciously. Real chocolate was never that shiny, that compliant. Sipping tea, she tried to let the frustrations of the day drift away and failed. Unable to reach anyone by phone or in person, her sense of isolation had grown more acute.
“Fuck you all,” she grumbled after a while, and crawled into her sleeping bag. Lost Horizons was where she’d left it on the end table. She couldn’t remember how many times she’d read it, three or four. Old stories were the best stories.
CHAPTER Nineteen
TIRED AS SHE was, sleep wasn’t going to happen. As with all insomniacs, Anna’s body refused to fit into the contours of her couch. On firelines she’d slept the sleep of the innocent on crude beds hacked from earth and stone. It was the mind-prodding that kept her awake. Constantly rearranging limbs and pillows was merely a distraction.
Perhaps she was getting too old to be a field ranger. On her next birthday she’d be forty-two. Maybe it was time to move into management. In the climate of equal opportunity that pervaded the NPS it shouldn’t be too difficult. She was qualified and she was female—worth a lot of points on somebody’s register.
Theoretically, hiring was color- and gender-blind but managers were evaluated on how many “minority” people they brought on board. Once Anna had confronted a personnel officer on this seeming dichotomy. The message was clear: There Were Ways. Last names. Voices on the phone. Accents. And if worse came to worst, word would filter down from higher up disclosing a coveted “quality” of a certain applicant.
Anna had no compunction whatsoever about cashing in on this fortuitous turn of events, she just didn’t care for management. She didn’t like to lead and she wasn’t much of a follower. Fieldwork suited her. Till her body betrayed her, she’d go on doing it. It was the transience that was beginning to weigh heavily.
Frederick Stanton came to mind—not cloaked in a fantasy of home and hearth but surrounded by an ambiguity that brought with it a sense of malaise. Lately he’d pressed her to move to Chicago; make a geographical if not an emotional commitment. Anna was cynical enough to wonder if love and hope spawned his desire or if he too felt a little lost, in need of an anchor. They’d known each other long enough that heartthrobbing romance was no longer a factor. That was the problem; without the narcotic of being “in love” the pain of change was too great.
Anna opened her eyes and let thoughts of Frederick go. The top pane of the window behind the sofa framed a moon, dime-sized and distorted. In Georgia even the moonlight was warm.
Striving for physical if not spiritual ease, she wriggled out of her pajamas and dumped them on the floor. When a guest, she tried to sleep clothed lest she offend her host’s delicate sensibilities, but it was absurd, like suits for swimming, panty hose under trousers, and underwear with dresses.
Rearranging her sleeping bag against the draft from the air conditioner, she contemplated life on the island. Though motorboats daily ferried visitors to and from St. Marys and cars traveled the inland lanes and residents came and went by plane, the island fostered a sense of separateness—a people as different as the animals were different—altered by the unique demands of the environment. Like mountaintops and desert strongholds, human beings sought out islands for a lot of reasons. Some washed ashore, cast up by the storms of their lives. Some were running, some hiding, some chasing a dream.
And, on Cumberland, some were committing murder.
Rather generous of them, Anna thought. It gave her something to do at night besides count sheep. An image of Tabby, widowed and scared in the other room, flashed through her mind trailing a comet’s tail of guilt. She refused to grab on. “I didn’t kill the guy, for Chrissake,” she whispered to the shadows lace and moonlight painted across her chest, and began ruminating on possible murderers.
Todd Belfore and Slattery Hammond were dead, one or both targeted for murder. Todd and Slattery had known each other at North Cascades and Tabby wouldn’t—couldn’t?—say why.
Anna heard Tabby say Todd would leave her. Slattery flew drug interdiction, was suing Alice Utterback and wooing Lynette. Lynette thought Hammond loved her and wanted to marry her. Hammond had a wife. An Austrian had a ruined leg from a shotgun shell. Schlessinger had a habit and an attitude and lied about hearing the shot. Mitch Hanson was a goldbrick and a double-dipper, roundly disliked by Schlessinger. According to Dijon, he had been inordinately cheerful, pottering around the crash site cracking jokes before the corpses were cold. A blond and a brunette were featured on Slattery’s wall and three used tampons inhabited his freezer.
Separating the clues from the flotsam of human idiosyncrasy was a bitch. How, if at all, Hanson, Schlessinger, and the shotgun wound fit into the Beechcraft sabotage, Anna couldn’t fathom.
She resurrected her dead pillow and settled into a new position. Fragments of ideas continued to jump docilely over her mental fence: baby alligators hooked on bologna sandwiches, plastic bags in the outboards, volunteers with orphaned fawns, separated actuator rods, chipmunk piglets. Still sleep eluded her. Giving it up as a lost cause, she threw back the sleeping bag and padded out through the kitchen, snatching up a dish towel to protect her bare behind from the splintered steps that led down from the apartment.
In her current role as incubator, Tabby kept the air conditioner on high and Anna welcomed the moist warmth of the night. With the heat came a twinge behind her left ear. She fingered the diminishing lump. She’d forgotten to include that incident in her inventory of significant happenings. She wrote it off to brain damage and revised her mental list. An unknown assailant, hiding like a bogey-man in Hammond’s bedroom closet, had bashed her over the head with the butt of a twelve-gauge shotgun.
List complete, Anna’s mind became empty. The exquisite balm of the South wrapped around her. Though she loved the high deserts, felt renewed by the harsh vistas of the West, there was no denying the sultry pleasures of Georgia. Breathing deep and evenly, she closed her eyes to better let the night soothe her.
Through the music of frogs came the shattering crunch of shod feet on gravel. Peace was canceled. With the noise, a sudden realization came to Anna: she was naked, or in local vernacular, buck nekkid. Night crawlers seldom separated art from pornography. All at once she felt vulnerable; a wrinkling white-skinned woman on a peeling white-painted step.
For the past quarter of an hour she’d sat without moving. If she continued as still, the odds were good she would remain undetected. Slowing her breaths, aware now of the myriad sounds of a body sustaining life, she froze.
Reacting to a seldom-used instinct, her bare skin was prickling. Sensations were clear and sustained in their detail. Rough wood pressed into her buttocks with a mild ache, warning her not to sit too long, not to compromise mobility. The soles of her feet stuck damply to the step below, her own sweat providing traction should it be needed. A breath of air touched her left cheek, teasing the fine guard hairs.
Undoubtedly there was a time in man’s evolution when these things combined to warn and prepare, to help survive. Years indoors, feet on concrete, had forced the intellect to try and compensate for the sensate and Anna found the alarms of her body to be a distraction. Fervently she wished she’d dressed. Even a T-shirt and panties would have helped.
The crunching stopped. In the thick silence she became aware that the song of the frogs had stopped as well. A minute ticked by, cataloguing the discomforts of a body in stasis. Reveling in her captive state, a mosquito whined bloodthirsty threats
in her ear.
A frog peeped, then another. They’d gotten over their panic. Anna had not. Without the crunch, she couldn’t locate the interloper. Perched naked as a jaybird on the top step, it was possible that she’d been seen and the prowler had fled in unseemly—and unflattering—haste.
The theory died as it was born: no racket of retreating steps. Left behind was the disquieting knowledge that in the inky shadows on the drive someone stood watching or waiting or both.
A shriek of metal ripped the darkness. Anna’s senses were stretched, a web of nerves. They caught the knife-edged noise in their silken strands and Anna twitched as if she’d been struck. The urge to leap up and bolt indoors quivered through her. She breathed shallowly, like a woman having contractions, till the terror passed. All this transpired in a Jack Robinson minute and she found herself thinking of Einstein, wondering if there was an untapped internal correlation to his theory of relativity.
With the passage of knee-jerk panic, the source of the noise became clear. It was the familiar rasp of the passenger door on the pumper truck being forced open over a rusted wrinkle acquired in a past encounter with another vehicle. A soft thump followed; the seat back being pulled forward, hitting the steering wheel.
Anna stared until her eyes watered. She’d parked the truck beneath a venerable magnolia. Light-reflecting waxy leaves kept the midnight beneath safe from the moon and her prying eyes.
Faint rustlings and bumpings painted a picture on the black screen of her vision. Someone was rummaging through the truck, stirring the rusted mess of tools behind the seat, rearranging water bottles and insect repellent cans.
