Burn

by Nevada Barr

  The slippered footfalls became muffled. He’d started up the stairs moving fast. Fast was good. His mind was on the floors above, not the carnage on the steps. As he reached Anna and Dougie, he slowed. She tightened her grip on the knife. She didn’t think of death, of what it would feel like to have a shard of metal shatter her skull and take out the life when it slammed through her gray matter. She didn’t picture Molly or Paul or Piedmont or Taco. The only image in her mind was that of the chief of police’s bare heels.

  Her left arm lay along the tread, the hand open where it might easily be trod upon. She felt the brush of leather against her fingers. He was directly above her. Opening her eyes, she grabbed his ankle hard in her left hand and with her right slashed deep across his Achilles tendon.

  Screaming in pain and shock, he tried to raise his other foot from the step below, but the ruined tendon wouldn’t take the weight. Grasping the banister rail, roaring in fury, he reached back for the gun in the waistband of his pants. Anna took hold of the seat and yanked. The butt of the Colt vanished into his trousers, landing in the roomy seat like an unsightly load.

  This would be funny in the telling, she thought absurdly.

  No good moves left to her, she began hacking at anything that moved. A blow to the side of her face stunned her. Rather than fighting it, she went with the force and rolled down the stairs. The crashing woke up the nerves in her injured side. Blood began to flow that she knew was hers alone. The tumble was only a few yards, but it seemed to pass slowly. She saw her right hand fly up and noticed she had lost the knife. She watched her bare feet flash by and wondered at the childishness of being without shoes. She saw snippets of ceiling, fronds, and flocked wallpaper.

  Then she rolled to a stop on the landing, where the ornate newel post curved into the drawing room in gracious invitation. Other than the loss of the knife and the blood, she didn’t think she was any worse for wear.

  Screaming curses and demands for his men, the chief was hanging on to the banister with one hand while trying to fish the gun out of his pants with the other. Again funny; again Anna had no urge to laugh. She turned tail and crawled down the last of the stairs on her belly like a reptile.

  FORTY-THREE

  The rats were deserting what Clare hoped was a rapidly sinking ship. She watched with cold eyes as sick men, with money and evil in equal proportions, streamed from the three-story mansion. Close in the ferns and the leaves of the subtropical garden, Clare held on to her daughter and wondered what had caused this exodus. Had the pigeon survived? Or had her death scared the whoremongers?

  Two gunshots, close together, snapped her from her thoughts, and she ducked, wrapping herself over her daughter. The shots probably marked the end of the ranger. A law enforcement pigeon, but she hadn’t found Vee, and now she’d gone and gotten herself killed before Dana was out of danger, Clare thought sourly. A faint pang of guilt left over from when she was civilized nudged her.

  If she and Dana survived, she’d put flowers on the woman’s grave. If they didn’t, no flowers for Anna Pigeon.

  When Clare again found the nerve to peek out of their tiny woods, little girls and boys in the hateful trappings of their slavery, some fully dressed, others with bits or pieces of the costumes still on, some dragging a ripped skirt or a wig fallen half off, were pouring out through the French doors. Most were not crying or running but moved with a stoicism that should never be seen on such baby faces.

  Clare didn’t move. She searched for the one face she needed to see. If Vee was not here, then she’d been shipped overseas or secreted away in some man’s basement. Or she had died. Clare prayed for the last.

  In a remarkably short time, the garden was free of perverted clientele. The only sound was the soft rustling of the children on the brick patio. This momentary hush was broken by the chief of police. In Edwardian trousers and bedroom slippers, he roared from the house, “Load up the jewels. And find that goddam photographer.”

  The black suits began herding the children to the door where the perverts had swarmed out of the courtyard. The children, the jewels, diamonds beyond price, and they were being prodded ahead like cattle to be taken to another “fancy house” and another set of “clients.”

  The one the chief called Barrett had run by carrying gasoline to burn the place down, with its evidence. There would be traces left, but, without Anna or the children or Clare, the arson investigators might not know what they were finding evidence of. They might think it was done to cover the theft of the presumed city property that was supposedly stored in this imaginary warehouse. The police would push that theory, for sure.

  Moving slowly so she wouldn’t trip and cause Dana to cry out or the chief to decide the goddam photographer—it had to be her—was hiding in the bushes, she began folding herself through the wide fronds toward the door where the children had been taken. If it led to the outside, there was a possibility that in either confusion or darkness she could carry Dana to safety.

  A howl of rage and pain from the direction of the house stopped her. Had it not, she would have stepped out onto the brick and run right into the man rushing back from wherever the black maw of the door in the brick led to.

  Downs, the chief had called this man. Downs was compact and fast, probably in his early forties. His head was shaped like a bullet from working out his neck muscles and covered with close-cropped dark hair. As another roar of pain and rage came from the house, Downs faltered. He stopped several steps from where Clare stood in the shadows and, hands shaking, began fumbling for his pistol.

  Downs was only used to facing down frightened children, Clare thought. The chief’s shriek was from a larger predator. Coolness coalesced around her like the still, cold air of a walk-in freezer. The smell of gardenias was gone. The sorrow of her lost baby girl was muted. The rush of blood in her ears was silenced. Lifting the brick from where it was cradled in the crook of the arm that held Dana, she stepped lightly into the chill and the silence behind Downs and brought it down hard on the back of his skull.

  With an “oomph” that sounded like the noise a bear might make, he fell to hands and knees. In one graceful movement Clare brought the brick down a second time. He didn’t move again.

  Dana, the coat pulled up over her head, pushed her face deeper in the hollow of her mother’s shoulder. Clare was glad her daughter hadn’t witnessed the violence. Like good dry wine, revenge was an acquired taste, and one too bitter for the palate of a child.

  Dana clinging tightly to her neck, Clare leaned down and took the pistol the officer had managed to get out of his holster just as she struck him. It was a sleek semiautomatic. What make, Clare didn’t know, but she recognized the feel from the gun she’d been given by props for the small part of an CIA agent she’d gotten in a movie shooting in Vancouver. That gun had been rendered harmless, but it had been a real weapon at one time in its life. So the character she played could handle it with confidence, Clare had taken lessons at a shooting range in Seattle.

  Downs’s gun felt good in her hand. She thumbed off the safety and dropped her hand to her side, the barrel pointed down the line of her leg to the ground. Torn between walking into the darkness where the children had been taken or going back toward the house, she remained motionless. Minutes before, she’d written the ranger off, but there was no doubt in her mind that Anna had been the cause of the chief’s anguish. The icy calm did not abate. She turned toward the house, following the winding brick walk with sure and silent steps.

  As she crossed from the patio onto the marble of the entryway, she saw blood on the tiles. The tail of the governess’s dress was peeking from beneath a bench between the potted palms in the crook of the curving banister; the bench Clare had shared with the girls and their dollies.

  Above, leaning over the banister, .357 pointed at the plush velvet cushion, the chief stood on one leg. His skin was pasty. Sweat beaded on his forehead and dripped from his jaw. The hand that held the gun was trembling, but at that distance he would
have no trouble shooting through the bench and hitting Anna.

  Clare raised Downs’s gun and fired two shots into the chief’s center mass. Watching him crumple, his hands groping like blind things trying to find the holes where she’d let his life out, she felt nothing but a mild sense of relief at a dirty chore completed satisfactorily.

  Barrett, gas can in hand, appeared behind the fallen chief, shouting, “It’s burning good—” When he saw Clare he snapped his mouth shut. Clare did not move or blink or breathe. Barrett dropped the gasoline can and pulled his gun. Clare shot him twice.

  “The last scene of Hamlet,” she said softly. “Hamlet is dead, Ophelia is dead, the king is dead, the queen is dead, Laertes is dead—”

  “But everybody else lived happily ever after,” came the ranger’s voice. Clare switched her gaze to the pile of gray muslin boiling from beneath the bench.

  “Wendy Darling’s bedtime story. Peter Pan,” Clare said. “Mr. Nye said I learned to fly faster than Mary Martin.”

  “Bully for you,” Anna said. With growls and curses, she got herself right way around and out from under the bench. Using the nearest palm tree, she pulled herself to a standing position. “Jesus!” she said as she took in the carnage. “Holy smoke. Good job.”

  “They’ve set fire to the place,” Clare said.

  “So I heard,” Anna replied. One hand was clamped tightly over her side. What color remained in her face was made by blood worn outside the skin, not inside.

  “You’re hurt,” Clare said.

  “Smart and pretty, too,” Anna mocked her.

  A crash sounded from above. A choking gout of smoke gushed down the stairs, burning their eyes and lungs.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Anna gasped. She stepped from the support of the little tree and would have fallen if Clare hadn’t dropped the gun to steady her.

  “I’m good,” Anna said. She pulled her arm away, took two steps, and fell headlong onto the floor.

  Clare squatted down as Anna pushed herself to her elbows. “Anna, I’m saving your life again, but if you don’t stop making it so hard you can just die.” Taking Anna’s arm, she stood, pulling the ranger with her. Clare tried to walk her toward the courtyard, but Anna stayed rooted in the burning house.

  “Listen,” she said.

  Clare listened. Faintly, through the increasing cracks and hisses of the fire devouring the building from the roof down, Clare heard it: a tiny sweet howl.

  “Mackie,” she whispered.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Anna sat on a bench holding Dana on her lap. Clare had gone back into the burning house to find Mackie. For a pathetic minute, Anna had tried to go with her but had trouble standing upright long enough to make her point. Dana shifted, and the pressure of childish knees against her side hurt. The comfort Anna derived from the feel of a live and wriggling child more than made up for it. As she rocked Dana gently, Anna’s mind drifted like the smoke reaching out from the upstairs windows.

  This time, she hadn’t killed anyone. That had to count in her favor. There was a small matter of crippling the police chief, but since Clare had subsequently shot him to death, Anna’s damage was a mere footnote. The scariest thought was of the sticky bit about why she didn’t report Clare Sullivan to the FBI as soon as she realized the woman was on their wanted list for murder and escaping across state lines.

  Telling them it was necessary to save the lives of children wouldn’t hold water. It was tantamount to telling a judge the perjury was necessary because the legal system was not to be trusted. She could lie. Then again, lying to the FBI was never a good idea. The punishment for the lie was often more severe than the punishment for the crime would have been.

  When she’d first been drawn into Clare’s search for the girls, she’d given it some thought, but not nearly enough. Aiding and abetting a fugitive wanted for a capital offense wasn’t a casual crime. It was a stint-behind-bars kind of crime. Like the proverbial frog, Anna’d boiled herself to death one teensy illegal act at a time.

  Jail terrified her. Falling into the machinery of the legal system terrified her. Being at the mercy of lawyers terrified her. The thought of being incarcerated poured panic into her until her bones felt soft with it.

  Maybe she could tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and damn little of that—as an old cowboy she’d known growing up had been fond of saying. She could tell them that she’d met a man named Jordan who shared a courtyard with her, that she had gone to Bonne Chance with him because she was curious about what went on inside, that he had led her down the stairs to the whorehouse and she’d decided she’d be safer if she dressed as a worker. Then mayhem ensued.

  Sure, seasoned law enforcement officials would buy that without asking any embarrassing questions. Without realizing she did so, she buried her nose in Dana’s soft hair and took some comfort from the sweet smell of a child.

  Try as she might, she couldn’t remember just how or why she thought she would be able to get away with it. There’d been some vague notion of, should she and Clare succeed, just drifting quietly away unnoticed while Clare pretended never to have known her. Three dead policemen, a dead thug, a governess burned to death, a major structural fire, and a herd of costumed children had a way of shining the spotlight of the law on a girl.

  Would Paul come to see her on visiting days?

  Could she keep from killing herself long enough to get to visiting days?

  Hacking coughs and rattling voices brought Anna back into the courtyard, and she watched as Clare, carrying two children, Mackie at her heels, emerged from the gray fog of smoke like the Pied Piper, seven tiny children in pajamas and two teenagers, one with an infant in her arms, clustered around her.

  “Vee,” she said, her smile wide and white in the sooty face. “Vee was in the nursery. Mackie found her.”

  Anna didn’t think she had a smile left in her but noticed she was grinning back.

  “This is Aisha,” Clare said, indicating the second little girl in her arms, a bird-boned child with huge dark eyes.

  “Aisha, alive,” Clare said.

  From inside the house came a roar, and smoke gusted through the French doors filling the courtyard.

  “The place is coming down,” Anna said and struggled to her feet, Dana heavy against her side. “Help me,” she ordered, and one of the older girls took Dana from her. “Hold hands,” she said to the children, and, leaning heavily on the girl carrying Dana, Anna led the way toward the back of the courtyard where the men had herded the “jewels.”

  Through the door in the brick was a sizable parking garage. The doors to the street were open, and whatever they’d intended to use to transport the children was gone. When the fire started, the driver must have panicked and gone, leaving the children to burn to death. In a confused clot the kids in their absurd costumes milled around; some sat on the concrete, some cried, some just stood mute and still.

  Together, Anna and Clare brought them out onto the sidewalk and across the street where the flames would not reach them. Sirens sounded loud in the distance. Fire trucks were coming.

  Anna started to sink down to sit on the curb. “Wait!” Clare cried. A single cab was meandering down Rampart. “Up,” Clare said, grabbing Anna’s arm and hauling her back to her feet. “You can’t be found here.” With the jacket she’d used to shield Dana, she covered Anna’s bloody dress, then hailed the cab and helped her into it.

  Anywhere else, the cabbie would have been full of questions. In New Orleans, crowds, even of children, in costume at daybreak caused little comment.

  Logic, and the searing pain in Anna’s side, would have had her ordering the cabbie to the nearest emergency room, but, by law, doctors had to report gunshot wounds. Anna returned to Geneva’s, let herself into the garden, and made her painful way to the guest cottage. The governess’s dress was stiff with blood and beginning to adhere to her body. She found scissors in a kitchen drawer and used them to cut it off. That done, she we
t a dish towel and washed the blood from her hands, face, and side.

  When the wound was exposed, she was surprised to find it wasn’t the black round hole left by a bullet but a deep gash. Pressing the edges gently, she could feel a foreign body lodged beneath the skin, as if a shard of glass had been broken off inside of her. The wound was still bleeding, but not copiously.

  Sacrificing another of Geneva’s dish towels, she folded the cloth into a square and pressed it over the gash. The trek up the stairs to her bedroom took much of her remaining energy and started the blood flowing again. Leaning against the wall for support, she pulled on a pair of old khaki shorts and a shirt. By the time she got to Geneva’s French doors, the edges of her vision had turned black and the world was beginning to swim sickeningly.

  “It’s too early and you stink,” Geneva said in welcome.

  “I’ve been hurt,” Anna said. “Could you call me a cab?”

  It was after four when she came out of the anesthesia and the strange and troubled sleep that followed it. Her side was bandaged, her mouth tasted of burning plastic and bile, and she had to go to the bathroom. Clare sat in the blue plastic visitor’s chair next to the curtain dividing the room. There wasn’t a patient in the other bed, and three little girls, dressed in real little-girl clothes, played quietly on the white cotton blanket, a game involving the worn stuffed dog she’d seen on Clare’s pillow, a metal water pitcher, and an emesis basin.

  Clare was showered and dressed in a flowing skirt and top she’d probably picked up at the French Market. The light fabric did little to cover the terrible thinness the past weeks had wrought on her form. The crown of thorns had been scrubbed from her forehead, and she wore lipstick.

  “You look like a girl,” Anna croaked.

  Clare rose, poured water into a plastic cup, put a straw into it, and held it to Anna’s lips.

  Anna took the cup, pulled the straw out, and drank.