Endangered Species

by Barr, Nevada

  TABBY WAS HOME. She’d been to St. Marys for a checkup. The baby was fine, a boy. Tabby proudly announced she could see his “little tally whacker” on the ultrasound. Todd was to be the baby’s name. No surprise there.

  Lynette was with Tabby, and after the baby news was shared, both women went out of their way to compliment Anna on her hair. Tabby said a woman named Frieda had called. A Bella somebody had spilled something in Anna’s house. Please call back. There was nothing Anna could do about a ruined rug or a stained chair from two thousand miles away, so she decided the call could wait.

  A bottle of Chardonnay sat on the coffee table; both Lynette and the very pregnant Tabby held a glass. “The baby’s pretty much fully baked or I wouldn’t have any,” Tabby explained, though Anna was too tired to notice and too indifferent to take the woman to task for it if she had.

  They offered Anna a glass and she actually considered accepting. A year or more had passed since she’d last imbibed. Tonight she was saved from the temptation of alcohol by the reality of marijuana. She’d just been too high too long. Even a gentle white wine buzz wasn’t appealing. Taking a cup of tea in its stead, she settled onto the uninhabited end of the sofa and answered all of their questions about Mitch and Louise and Anna’s night out.

  Oddly enough she found she enjoyed talking about it. The men had given her such short shrift. Angry they’d not been included, angry they’d not been given the decisions, the power; they were critical of every choice she’d made, every observation, concerned her actions had robbed them of glory in the present or would come back to bite them on the ass in the future. Giving this adventure to a “girl” was roughly the emotional equivalent of telling the dog one was going to give it to the cat.

  Good to be among your own kind, Anna thought of the women, and smiled wearily. She felt her teacup being taken from her fingers and realized that for a while she’d been telling her story with her eyes closed.

  Then she wasn’t telling it at all.

  CHAPTER Twenty-five

  THE VOICES OF the women wrapped around Anna, made her feel safe, and she let herself sleep there in the chair. It was as if she floated on a velvet river. Now and then she’d drift close enough to the shores of consciousness to make out words from the gentle murmur of conversation. For once Tabby wasn’t crying. Anna was immensely comforted by that. Having been assigned the girl’s interim caretaker, she’d felt responsible for her happiness.

  People can’t make people happy, Anna thought drowsily. That’s why animals are so beloved. The right person can make a cat happy. Anybody can make a dog happy. The vision evoked of joyous furbearing mammals made her want to laugh, but the weight of her languor was too great.

  Words evaporated, Morpheus overwhelmed cannabis, and all was deliciously blank. When she was again aware, sleep was ebbing, but she did not yet want to return to the world of the living. In blissful somnolence, she stayed in her chair, eyes closed.

  Talk had turned to outdoor sports as it often did when two or more Park Service people gathered. Fitting, she thought in pleasant confusion, that Wilderness should be present when two or more were gathered in Her name.

  Tabby and Lynette were reliving favorite hikes, canoe trips, camping spots, and glorious climbs. As their voices lovingly recounted days of ice storms and sunsets, rapids and rappels, a niggling sense of disquiet built under Anna’s breastbone and she wondered what triggered it. For several minutes more she lay as one dead, listening.

  Tabby was telling of a splendid hike in the Cascades, a rare day when the sky was cloudless blue and mountain peaks had thrown off their customary shroud of virga, of seeing a bear with cubs in a meadow, two eagles high above fighting or flirting over the living prize of a hapless bunny.

  Despite the pastoral—if somewhat graphic—scene, Anna felt the disquiet deepen. “I do so miss all of that,” Tabby said, and Anna realized what was bothering her. Her eyes popped open. The women gaped at her like heroines in a melodrama when Dracula suddenly awakes in his coffin.

  The Chardonnay was gone, a bottle of Chablis taking the place of its fallen comrade.

  “You’re awake,” Lynette said unnecessarily.

  “You lived in town, in Hope,” Anna said to Tabby. Even to her own ears it sounded like an accusation.

  “Not for the first year or so,” Tabby replied, with the air of someone defending herself but not sure from what.

  “I thought the wilderness scared you.”

  “I love the outdoors,” Tabby said, bewildered. “It’s one of the things that brought Todd and me together. We both loved all of it.” The name of her dead husband having been invoked, tears flooded her throat.

  Anna wished she’d had the good sense to remain asleep. “Why did you move to town?” she pressed.

  “I . . . We . . . It just seemed better,” Tabby finished lamely.

  Anna struggled upright on the soft couch cushions and rubbed her legs from the memory of their having failed her once before. Friction stirred up half-smothered chiggers and they began to itch fiercely. “I’ve got to go out,” she announced.

  SLATTERY HAMMOND’S HOUSE was not difficult to break into. It was merely a matter of prying off a screen that showed signs of having been pried off numerous times before when previous occupants had inadvertently locked themselves out. The latches on the aging sash windows—where they remained attached—were willing to give up their secrets when a little force was applied.

  Once inside, Anna flipped on the overhead lights. Dense foliage effectively screened the house from the road and she had the added security of knowing that anyone who might take her to task for unlawful entry—not to mention once again following up on an unauthorized hunch—was well off the island staking out the Hansons.

  The place was just as she’d left it, down to the dirty dishes on the table and in the sink. The smell had escalated, a considerable rankness enhancing the illusion that all the oxygen had been leached out of the air.

  Sitting at Hammond’s desk near the front door, she studied the five snapshots Scotch-taped to the wall. She took one down and slipped it in her pocket, then jerked open the desk drawers. On her previous visit she’d been looking only for Hammond’s logbooks, had opened only containers and envelopes that might have concealed a long narrow ledger. The packets of color snapshots in their Wal-Mart envelopes had earned only a cursory glance.

  Anna pulled them out and laid them on the desk. Sifting rapidly through, she looked at each photo, then checked the processing date on the envelope.

  When she emerged from Hammond’s quarters, stars prickled a perfect cloudless sky. The light was fragile but tenuous, revealing nothing yet refusing to give way to night. For a moment Anna stood trying to capture the essence of peace that solitude customarily afforded. On Cumberland it was not to be found. Though the island lacked the richness and verdancy of a jungle, the heat-soaked trees hiding behind veils of moss breathed out the same powerful secrecy she’d felt the few times she’d been in the tropics: a knowledge of things unseen, powerful and dark. It was no mystery to her that voodoo developed in a hot island climate, that witches preferred the darkling woods.

  Shaking off thoughts of less than corporeal dangers, she sought the pragmatic sanctity of the truck. Making one brief stop at the fire dorm to collect the key from the nail where Guy kept it, she drove to the ranger station.

  FRIEDA PICKED UP on the sixth ring. Time zones were working in Anna’s favor. In Colorado it was not yet nine o’clock. At the sound of the Mesa Verde dispatcher’s voice Anna experienced a stab of homesickness. In that instant she was back on the high tableland, the delicate scent of pine and dust in the air, a memory of sunlight on the cliffs. “How’s Piedmont?” she asked, one’s cat being the living, breathing embodiment of all that was Home.

  “Hey, that’s what I called you about,” Frieda said. “Well, not exactly but sort of related.” She laughed. “Not related at all really, but funny. Oops. Maybe not. I guess you had to be there.”

&nb
sp; Frieda was a bit tipsy.

  Anna envied her. They’d begun their relationship as drinking buddies. The friendship had endured through Anna’s climb onto the wagon and was as strong as ever. Still, when booze called, it was usually in Frieda’s warm tones. She had a knack for giving everyday things a festive air: filing, typing, drinking.

  The dispatcher would hardly announce the death of Anna’s orange tiger cat in such cheerful tones; still she forgot the reason for her call in her concern for Piedmont. “What happened?” she asked bluntly, cutting across the wine-tinted babble.

  “It’s a long story. Well, not that long.” Anna waited through what she knew was a fortifying sip, probably of a hearty red. Frieda resumed: “Bella came with me to feed Piedmont—she takes care of the socializing end.” Anna smiled to think of the little girl her fat tomcat had taken such a shine to. Bella Meyers suffered from dwarfism. With her fairy face and foreshortened legs, Piedmont looked the size of a mountain lion when he walked next to her.

  “Anyway,” Frieda went on. “They got to playing and one or the other of them—Bella says Piedmont, Piedmont insists it was Bella—knocked over the urn with Zach’s ashes. You left it on the coffee table. I guess the top was loose.”

  Anna remembered. “I was going to sprinkle him,” she said feebly. She’d been going to sprinkle her late husband’s ashes for nearly nine years. Somehow she never quite got around to it.

  “They scattered all over your Navajo rug.”

  “That’s okay. Zach always liked that rug. It won’t hurt if a little bit of him gets vacuumed up every now and then. I’ve been meaning to cast those ashes to the winds. Maybe this is an omen telling me it’s time to get on with it.”

  “It’s an omen, all right.” Frieda laughed, then made an effort to get herself under control, but amusement percolated beneath her words. “I shouldn’t laugh,” she apologized. “You may not think this is all that funny. Bella cleaned them up like the good little girl she is. She thought they were cigarette ashes and she didn’t want them to make your house ‘all stinky.’ She flushed them down the john.”

  Breath gusted from Anna’s lungs. She remembered the paralysis and panic when she’d fallen from the horizontal ladder in second grade and landed on her back. Gulping fishlike, she managed to get enough air to speak. “She flushed Zach down the toilet?”

  Frieda laughed. “Sorry,” she said more soberly. “Yup. Right down the loo.” Again she giggled.

  So many years of toting a sacred icon, never finding a place holy enough to commit it to, then a seven-year-old girl consigns it to the sewers. “Jesus,” Anna said. “That’s that, I guess.”

  “That’s all the news that’s fit to print,” Frieda said. “Jennifer’s here. I ought to go make hostess noises. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Anna restored the phone receiver to its cradle and sat for a bit in Norman Hull’s high-backed chair. Hollowness formed within her and she wasn’t sure, but she thought she felt lighter, as if a burden carried so long its weight had become part of life had been lifted. Frieda was right: an omen. She would have preferred something classier: a burning bush or a host of angels singing on high, but as omens went this one got right to the point. Anna laughed. “Sorry, Zach,” she said in the general direction of the ceiling. “We’ve all got to let go sometime.”

  Frederick’s oft-repeated invitation to move to Chicago and set up housekeeping came to mind. Forty-two; Anna counted up her years on earth. How many more chances would she get? According to the tabloids it was a buyer’s market. Her stock wasn’t slated to go up anytime soon.

  “Get thee behind me, Satan,” she said to ward off the fears of a generation.

  Anna doubted she’d ever move back to a city. Not just to be with Frederick Stanton, at any rate. In her head she heard Molly’s voice pitched in her best shrinky tones. “Listen to the qualifier, Anna: ‘Not just to be with Frederick ...’ ” Anna waved a hand in front of her face as if dispensing a crowd of angry mosquitoes.

  Plunked untidily in the perfect order of the chief ranger’s desk, the phone reminded her of why she’d come. “Precocious senility.” She excused the lapse as she picked up the receiver and punched in Frieda’s number a second time.

  “That’s not what I called about,” she said when Frieda answered. “Remember you told me Slattery Hammond had two other restraining orders filed against him in addition to the latest one his wife filed?” Anna gave Frieda a second to assimilate the change of subject, then pushed on. “You said they were withdrawn. At the time, I just assumed they were filed by Mrs. Hammond. Feints before the actual battle so to speak. Do you remember if she filed all three?”

  Frieda said nothing.

  “Are you there?” Anna demanded.

  “Keep your pants on,” Frieda said mildly. “Give me about fifteen minutes and then call me at the office.”

  “Thanks,” Anna said.

  “Don’t mention it. I was just relaxing after a ten-hour day. Abandoning my guests and rushing back to the office at the drop of a hint is my idea of a good time.”

  Anna laughed because it was true.

  She passed the time by going over the photographs she’d confiscated from Slattery’s desk. Laying them out like a hand of solitaire, she trained Hull’s lamp on them and studied the figures. They were all very much alike; long shots, some obviously taken with a telephoto lens. The breathtaking scenery of the North Cascades served as a backdrop. In each was a figure, usually alone but sometimes in a group of two or three others. About a third of the pictures featured a slight, brown-haired woman dressed for hiking, most often in shorts but in full yellow rain gear in half a dozen of the shots. A baby in a backpack was strapped on her back. Because of the distance from the cameraman to his subject, Anna couldn’t make out the woman’s features, but from the straightness of her spine, the slender body, and the infant, Anna guessed she was young.

  The pickup date on the Wal-Mart envelopes containing the photos of the woman and child was within the last eight months.

  The second group of pictures, four rolls of film’s worth, were older. The most recent was dated seven months previously. The others went back a year and a half. These followed the same pattern as the shots of the brunette: all long shots, all of the same woman, all against the dramatic scenery of the Cascades. The only difference was these were of a slight blond woman with shoulder-length hair. The same woman who’d sparked a sense of recognition in Anna when she’d first looked at the snaps taped to Hammond’s wall.

  The telephone rang and she jumped as if she’d been poked with a cattle prod.

  “Frieda here,” the dispatcher cut in, before Anna could finish the litany of Cumberland Island National Seashore. “Good news/bad news joke. I found it faster than I thought I would and it has less information than I remember. The only restraining order that’s got a name attached is the one that stuck, the one his wife filed against him. Since the other two were rescinded they’ve got a record of the action but not of who initiated it.”

  “What were the dates?” Anna grabbed the phone pad to scribble on. The top sheet held a note from Dot and Mona: “See us ASAP.” Anna stuck it under the corner of the phone where Hull couldn’t miss it and ripped off another sheet for herself.

  “Let’s see . . . The first was August of last year and the second was December, same year. Are you onto something?”

  “I’m afraid so. I’ll keep you posted. It’s okay about the ashes.”

  Frieda laughed. “Sorry,” she said. “Something about it just gets to me.”

  “You didn’t tell Bella?”

  “Heck no, the kid’s got enough to worry about as it is.”

  “Tell her thank you for me,” Anna said. As she hung up she could hear Frieda was laughing again.

  HEADED NORTH, BACK toward Plum Orchard, Anna drove slowly. Night had triumphed. With oak branches meeting overhead there were no stars. All that existed of the world was the narrow stripe of color brought to life by the truck’s high
beams.

  The effects of the marijuana were gone but for lethargy and the occasional flash of disorientation, yet Anna couldn’t seem to fix her mind on the problem at hand. She knew she should be mapping out a plan of action or, if she was to bow to the wishes of the Park Service in the person of Norman Hull, a plan of inaction until all the proper channels had been followed.

  Rolling along at fifteen miles per hour, she was content to let the road hypnotize her. Had Hull or Guy or the implicated anybody been available, she might have called them. The Hanson stakeout had denuded the island of law enforcement for the next eight hours. It occurred to her to go by the fire dorm and get Rick but this wasn’t his kind of bust. A black belt didn’t qualify him for delicate situations and this was one china shop Anna wouldn’t relish seeing a bull loosed in. With a sinking sadness she knew even her lightest touch was going to cause irreparable damage.

  Pinpricks of light disturbed the black of the forest’s ceiling. She had reached the meadow by Stafford House. The moon had yet to rise and the meadow slept. As she turned onto the lane, the truck’s headlights raked the dry grass, sparking green fire from the eyes of a family of deer snuggled down for the night.

  Life, especially life in such a graceful and benign form as a doe and her fawn, raised Anna’s spirits. She lifted her chin and willed the mesmerizing flicker of woods from her mind.

  Dot and Mona’s cottage was almost obscured by the tabby wall that protected it from the road. A window near the roof shone with yellow light, creating a portrait of a fairy tale house in the woods. Images of witches and ovens and murderous children arose to spoil the effect. “Stop that,” Anna told herself.

  In front of the gate a darker spot marred the dirt. A pothole, Anna guessed, though she didn’t remember a crater of that magnitude on her drive south. She had gritted her teeth to take the jar when something about the shadow’s configuration changed. As her headlights hit it, two glowing green eyes peered up from the tightly curled body of a fawn. Too late to brake, Anna jerked the wheel to the right and bounced out across the rough meadow.