Endangered Species

by Barr, Nevada

Dressed, Anna would have confronted the intruder and gotten at least an ID. Sans clothes she felt too vulnerable. She was annoyed to note the protective magic with which modern women imbued a layer of cotton. Surely, unencumbered by flapping fabric, one could fight harder, run faster, escape with more agility. Not to mention the possibility of distraction to one’s opponent. Still, she didn’t move.

  Heavy and low, the sound of ripping rose through the darkness. Seats being slashed. Nothing else in the aging vehicle was made of fabric.

  Metal squawked again, announcing the end of the assault on the truck’s interior. Anna watched the sharp edges of the shadows to see if the night visitor would expose himself. A moment of silence reigned, the crunch of gravel began, then faded in the direction opposite the mansion. After a moment it stopped and was replaced by the delicate crushing of leaves. Whoever it was had left the drive, keeping to the shadows. Within moments the faint sound of leaves underfoot was gone as well.

  To be on the safe side, Anna waited another long minute before easing to her feet and slinking back indoors.

  Armored in Nomex and armed with a flashlight, she emerged five minutes later and clattered down the wooden stairs. Attempts at stealth would have been fruitless given her footwear, but Anna wasn’t interested in sneaking. Knife-wielding night creepers were best scared far away before any investigation was undertaken.

  Following the selective eye of the flashlight, she traced the marauder’s progress through the cab of the truck. The seat was again upright, the glove compartment gutted, its eclectic innards strewn across the floor. A motley collection of tools and litter had been raked from beneath the bench seat. Chaos being its usual state, the clutter behind the seat looked much as it always did.

  On the back of the seat on the driver’s side, approximately where a small woman’s shoulder blades would rest, were two deep slashes, short and vertical, the way old medical texts illustrated the proper cut for sucking poison from a pit viper’s bite. The neat slits struck Anna as a violent form of shorthand.

  The content of the message was unclear but the blind malice made her scalp crawl. A twinge was frightened from the tender spot behind her ear. This was personal, though for the life of her Anna couldn’t guess why.

  CHAPTER Twenty

  BY THE TIME Anna climbed the stairs once more, dawn was drowning the stars over the Atlantic. She showered, dressed again, and made coffee to create the illusion she’d enjoyed a night’s sleep. A report would have to be filed on the vandalism done to the truck’s upholstery, but no one would care. It wasn’t as if the slashes lowered the relic’s trade-in value. By the light of day she would do a more comprehensive inventory, but she was sure nothing had been stolen. There wasn’t anything of value in the truck to steal: no car phone, no radar detector, not even an AM radio.

  There was an outside chance the vandalism was random. Even paradisiacal islands had their share of malcontents. Or the attack could have been politically motivated, aimed at fire policy, the National Park Service, or even the United States government in general. The aftershocks of Waco, Texas; the Oklahoma bombing; and assorted lesser calamities were being continually resuscitated by the hot breath of publicity-hungry groups. Mostly down-at-the-heel men with too many guns and too few brains who’d taken it upon themselves to tarnish the memory of the American militia by embracing the name and not the ideal.

  Random vandalism appealed most strongly to Anna. Mindless, without purpose, it struck and was gone. Like lightning, it often did strike the same place twice, but one entertained the reassuring delusion that it would not. Organized political vandalism had its merits as well. The caricatured macho of feral militias was a villain Anna loved to hate. She’d been surprised a spate of movies and television shows hadn’t sprung up around the concept. Hollywood had been in search of a serviceable evil since the end of the Cold War.

  Restoring order to the toolbox and the disemboweled glove compartment, she turned these temptations over in her mind. In the end she had to abandon both. Plum Orchard was too isolated for violence of the random variety, particularly the sort that customarily fell to disgruntled teens. Political groups tended to leave a calling card—those that were literate, Anna in all prejudice felt obliged to add. That left her where she’d begun, with the uncomfortable knowledge that it was universal malice, malice toward the fire crew in general or her in particular.

  Near the gravel drive a portable water tank of rubber held up by metal piping was kept full. The tap ran slowly but steadily, and over time, would fill the man-made reservoir. As part of her morning’s chores, Anna unrolled and spliced together two hundred feet of cloth hose and ran the line from the tank by the spigot to one of the two tanks situated on the open green area where helicopters could get access. Evaporation sucked up nearly a fifth of a tank every twelve hours. Topping them daily was one of the duties of the fire crews.

  That done, she tested her patience and the muscles in her right shoulder pull-starting a Mark IV portable pump. When it was up and running, smashing the tranquillity of the morning and hardening the hose with moving water, she took shelter under an oak and mapped out a plan for the day.

  Dijon would be with her again. He was up for pretty nearly anything that broke the monotony and was not yet old enough to worry about getting caught. As long as they covered the island at least once, Guy wouldn’t much care how they spent their time. On an island eighteen miles long and three wide it wasn’t as if they were going to wander off. Their job was mainly to be around just in case.

  Both tanks were topped. Absently, she followed the hose back toward the pump. Sweat beaded on her upper lip and her shirt stuck to her back between her shoulder blades. It was 6:35 in the morning.

  Parked behind the pumper truck was a battered orange Volkswagen bug, the chassis turned to burnt metal lace around fenders and door from the incursion of rust. The din of the Mark IV had covered the sound of its arrival and, lost in her thoughts, Anna had not seen it. Inattention made her nervous. Dreamers were easy marks. Muggers, rapists, pickpockets, could cut them out of a crowd. Purse snatchers made a living off of them. The frank delirium of a southern August carried away sharpness on zephyrs of scented air, softened reality with a brush of Spanish moss. The South was famous for vivid eccentricity. Anna could see why. Anger flared in the heat; reality became tenuous.

  The Volkswagen belonged to Lynette. A cross dangled from the rearview mirror and the Virgin Mary rode in regal splendor on the narrow dash. Brochures of Cumberland Island and field guides to the Southeast were scattered over the back seat and the floor. A box of files filled the passenger side.

  It was Tuesday. Probably Lynette’s lieu days were midweek. Anna hoped so. It would be a relief to know there was someone to sit with Tabby. She regained the stairs and climbed to the apartment. The door was open but the screen closed and latched. From within came the murmur of prayers. A faint clicking accompanied them and at first Anna thought someone was telling the rosary through her fingers, but the sound was coming from a flat green insect the size of her thumbnail clinging to the screen.

  “God can forgive anything.” Lynette’s low voice trickled out through the wire mesh. She spoke in a monotone, the intensity of her personality rather than changes in pitch adding color to her words.

  “Not this he can’t. Not me,” Tabby returned. Her voice was choked with tears. Her voice was always choked with tears. Though Anna understood and even empathized, it was beginning to get on her nerves. Sliding down, fanny on the steps, back against the railing, she settled in for some unabashed eavesdropping. If she was caught she could pretend she simply didn’t want to disturb their devotions.

  What a prince, Anna thought of herself dryly. Tilting her head back against an upright, she closed her eyes the better to listen.

  “That’s kind of arrogant in a way,” Lynette said gently. “It’s like saying, ‘My sin is so magnificent not even God can forgive it.’ ”

  “You don’t understand,” wailed the eternally dro
wned voice of the widow.

  “Try me.”

  Anna’s ears pricked up, or felt as if they did, but the hoped-for revelation was not forthcoming. Tabby cried out, “I can’t!” and dissolved again.

  Anna liked Tabby well enough but the woman had a bit of the invertebrate about her. It was hard to picture her under an airplane, her pregnant belly thrust up like a fecund shark fin, unscrewing the panel to the actuator arm. Nor could she picture her offing her husband.

  What about offing Slattery?

  Twisted soap opera plots gamboled through Anna’s brain. The baby was Hammond’s, Hammond was going to tell Todd. Tabby had been jilted by Hammond. Or jilted by Todd. Todd and Hammond were secret lovers. Everybody was related and separated at birth.

  She laughed and pulled herself up from the warm wood. Prayer service was over. She wanted to make herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and get on with the day. Banging on the screen she yelled, “Somebody let me in.”

  Lynette unlocked the screen. Round without in any way being fat, her face was a soft oval, eyes wise and blue. In the 1930s she would have been considered a beauty. Lynette was in her late twenties and, if one saw with the eyes only, she looked it. Fine lines were forming around her mouth, and her forehead was creased from years of raising her eyebrows in concerned interest. To the other senses, Lynette registered as considerably younger. Innocence, trust, a wit that was sharp but never cutting, gave her a childlike quality that somehow missed being treacly.

  “Off today?” Anna asked, to have something to say.

  Lynette shook her head, her permed curls quivering charmingly. “I don’t go on till ten-thirty.”

  Anna nodded. Boatloads of tourists from St. Marys would be arriving. Lynette gave them a tour of the splendid ruin of Dungeness mansion, the impressive bones of what had been one of the premier homes in the 1880s. Fire and time had reduced it to memories evoked by steps, stone patios, partial walls, and cold fireplaces. For Anna’s money it was as inspiring in its own way as the ruins of the Anasazi in Mesa Verde National Park. Dungeness had yet to acquire the patina of centuries but already it spoke of a unique human history, a nostalgia for better days.

  “Tabby is making herself sick over something,” Lynette said as Anna spread a meticulously even layer of peanut butter on a slice of raisin bread.

  “Other than death and impending birth, what do you figure?”

  Lynette flicked up a bit of peanut butter from the side of the jar and put it in her mouth. Her fingers were tapered, almost pointy, her teeth small and even. “A fight?” she hazarded. “That would be a drag, wouldn’t it? To tell your sweetie he’s a real son of a bitch and then have him die thinking you meant it? Even if you did?”

  “A drag,” Anna agreed. “Was Todd a son of a bitch?”

  “Whoever knows, but I don’t think so. He seemed sweet and sweet on his wife. No eyeballing-the-naked-ladies sort of thing.”

  “Does Tabby have anyplace to go? The NPS isn’t going to toss her out on her ear anytime soon, but she can’t stay here forever. Whoever replaces Todd is going to need a place to live.”

  “Tabby’s from money,” Lynette told her. “Old lumber money out of Seattle. Her folks will take care of her and the baby.”

  “Now would be a good time to start,” Anna said sourly, and wriggled her PB&J into a sandwich bag stolen from the Belfores’ cupboard.

  “They’re somewhere in the Far East on a Stanford University tour to see primitive peoples.” Lynette spoke as if she were reading the words from a snooty brochure. “Incommunicado for another week or so. Then they’ll come.”

  Relief hit Anna harder than she would have expected. Being even peripherally responsible for the weeping, gestating girl was tiring. “At least she’ll be financially secure.” The meager lunch complete, she turned her back to the counter so she could watch Lynette. “Both widows are,” she said. Nothing but polite confusion crossed Lynette’s smooth face. “Slattery’s wife will be taken care of by his life insurance.”

  “Slattery wasn’t married,” Lynette said. It didn’t sound as if she believed it, at least not a hundred percent.

  “A wife and a little boy in Washington State.” Anna knew she was being cruel. She needed the truth and didn’t know any other way to get at it. Fleetingly, she wondered if biologists testing pain response in animals forgave their actions with the same rationale.

  “A little boy?” Lynette echoed, her voice small and stunned.

  She might have suspected Slattery was married but Anna was willing to bet the farm on the fact that he had a child was new information. Lynette turned and left the kitchen without a word.

  Anna had delivered the blow, made the world a slightly more miserable place, and gotten virtually nothing for it but the sense that maybe, just maybe, Lynette was lying about not knowing Hammond had a wife. Not much to pin a murder indictment on.

  HEAT AND THE dusty jolt of the truck brought on a wave of fatigue. Had there been a time she could stay awake all night, eat cold pizza for breakfast, and bound out to take on a new day? She remembered there had. Of course she did; one of the wonderful things about youth was attaining a respectable distance from it. In retrospect, all things became possible: endurance greater, grades improved, romance polished to a fine shine.

  Slowing the truck to a crawl, she began a mental list of things to do. It was not yet eight a.m. The office would be empty. There’d be a phone she could use and the necessary privacy to make the most of it. Frieda would have had time to cull, charm, and weasel information from all available sources. Between the computer, the phone, and her wide-ranging, if eclectic, contacts, there was little she couldn’t ferret out of a federal agency. With luck she would have gotten the dirt on Hammond’s suit against Utterback and his connection with the Belfores.

  This murder was not unlike the Deep South itself, intricate, slow-moving, relationships unclear, each aspect draped or veiled by something else. Facts married to their first cousins producing information that was slightly out of whack.

  A silver pickup appeared in the lane ahead and politely pulled to the side so Anna would have room to pass. Peeking from behind palmetto fronds, the little truck looked almost coy and Anna smiled as she slowed to squeeze by. Dot was driving, wild gray curls half-captured beneath a red ball cap, hands in the ten and two position. Anna glimpsed Mona nearly hidden behind a stack of antiquated turtle files. The fawn was on her lap, his head out the open window like a dog’s.

  As the pumper truck edged by, both women waved and both grimaced identical grimaces as they pointed to the pile of paperwork between them. On Mesa Verde there were two trees that had joined together late in life. Pushed over by a storm, they became one rather than die. Anna wondered how many years it took human beings to grow together like that.

  When she reached the fire dorm she found Dijon balancing on a four-by-four that had been laid on the ground to delineate parking lot from “lawn.” A subtle distinction the sand did not recognize.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he asked as the truck rolled to a stop. Before she could answer, had she indeed intended to, he tossed his yellow pack into the truck bed and was jerking open the damaged door. “You’re late,” he accused, and looked at his watch. “Taxpayers’ dollars at work and all that. At my salary you’ve just upped the gross national debt by a buck and a quarter.”

  The other truck was gone, as was the ATV. Dijon had been left all alone. Entertaining himself was not his strong suit. To make amends, Anna told him of the vandalism of the truck. She omitted her nudity, preferring to seem a coward than a prude.

  Dijon indulged in a favorite law enforcement pastime: Monday morning quarterbacking. A minute or so after he’d finished telling Anna what he would have done—and with the guaranteed success rate of hindsight—he settled into a brief silence, fidgeted, then moved on. “So, what have we got on the agenda for today, Mata?”

  Anna raised an eyebrow.

  “Like in Hari. Mrs. Sherlock.”


  Anna nodded to keep him from further analogy. “Mata” was better for the self-image than “Marple,” and he was headed in that direction. “Ranger station,” she said. “I’m going to call Frieda. See if she’s turned up anything more. Maybe you could call what’s her name, that girl—”

  “Woman.”

  “Woman—of tender years—who works the Visitors’ Center on St. Marys.”

  “The pudgy blonde or the lanky one with the nice set of ...”

  Anna counted to three waiting for the inevitable punch line.

  “. . . teeth?”

  “Whoever.” Though she’d probably seen and talked to each of them at least once in passing, Anna had noticed neither of the young women. “Which one was on duty on Thursday morning?”

  “Blond pudgy,” Dijon answered without hesitation. Hormones had temporarily given him an almost superhuman memory for gender details.

  “Okay. Her. Call and find out what the deal is with Hull. She’s got the idea he was on the phone with the regional office. Not true. Maybe she’ll tell us something we can use.”

  “Right. And why am I supposed to be calling Ms. Georgia Peach?”

  “I don’t know. Boy meets girl. Boy calls girl. Be creative.”

  A silence stumbled between them that was so unlike Dijon that Anna looked over at him. “What?” she demanded.

  “She’s white. Don’t look so offended. White’s not innately disgusting. But this is Georgia. PC ain’t happening. What if Daddy’s a good ol’ boy with a shotgun and a sheet?”

  Anna hadn’t thought of that. “Pretend you’re Rick,” she said after a moment.

  Dijon laughed. “You’re frigging weird, you know that?”

  He’d do it. “Good,” Anna said, and having rolled one fender into the single scrap of shade the lot afforded, she turned off the ignition.

  FRIEDA HAD BEEN busy. In her mind’s eye, Anna saw a map of the United States lit up by telephone calls as was sometimes depicted in old movies. The lawsuit against Alice Utterback was more than just a nuisance suit. Slattery had a strong case. According to Frieda, in Alice’s zealousness to bring women pilots on board, she’d pulled strings in personnel. When the job descriptions were published, they were explicit almost down to bra size, making it virtually impossible for any but the four targeted women to obtain the positions.