Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  Leaving the alley, she hazarded a backward glance. The punk had managed to pull himself into a sitting position. He was hugging the dog. The dog was licking his face. For a moment Anna watched them. There was something about the dog that was off, niggling at the edges of her mind.

  Breathing in the cooking smells on the street, the whiff of exhaust, the hints of horse manure, it came to her. The little terrier was a mess--it looked as if its hair had been chewed off in a dogfight rather than clipped by a sane groomer--but it was silky soft, shampooed, brushed, and smelled faintly of lilacs.

  THREE

  Clare was not a big fan of the wee hours. The phrase "dead of night" was too apt. Time was hollow between 2:00 and 4:00 A.M. She felt it in the pit of her stomach, in the back of her brain; a toxic emptiness like the ghost of a hangover or the memory of a one-night stand.

  Slipping in from darkness made manifest by drizzle so fine it hadn't the initiative to fall but must be harvested by passers through, she turned, closed the front door, and threw the bolt.

  David's trench coat, snatched up because it was convenient and because when he'd rushed out that evening he'd forgotten and left his wallet and cell phone in the pocket, was half off before she sensed more than just the nauseous touch of disenfranchised sleep. Years of training and practicing the art of Method acting had sensitized her to any emotion, any feeling, that might one day be useful. Or so she insisted when she grew tired of thinking of herself as high-strung, high-maintenance, or just downright neurotic.

  Something was wrong with the house.

  She shrugged back into the coat, the collar rain-wet and cold against the nape of her neck. Unaware she did so, she backed up against the solid oak of the door.

  Darkness was never absolute in the city, even a city as befogged and cloudy as Seattle. The unsettling orange of sodium arc lamps starred the water drops on the panes of the bay window in the living room and cast lurid dripping shadows on the far wall.

  A panic attack.

  Lord knew Clare had sufficient experience to know what those felt like. Her Xanax were in the upstairs bathroom, on the highest shelf of the medicine cabinet where the girls could not reach, not unless the little monkeys climbed into the sink basin, which was not beyond the realm of possibility.

  Though her scalp was tightening, her fingers tingling, and her nose going numb, she made no move to get the medication.

  Trust your paranoia.

  An actress, older, wiser, and two divorces more cynical, had once whispered that in her ear.

  Yes, she was having a panic attack.

  And, yes, something was wrong with the house.

  Eyes wide, trying to see into shadows, through walls, she fumbled for the belt of the coat to pull it more tightly over her nightgown, armor against whatever was coming. The whisk and slither of fabric sliding over itself shrieked in the quiet of the room. She let go of the belt. Shoving her hand in her pocket, she clutched the children's cough syrup she'd just bought at the all-night pharmacy. Pulling the bottle out, she looked at it as if it might return her to a state of normalcy. It didn't.

  Vee's breath scraping in her throat, gathering together into a cough so violent it folded her tiny body nearly in two.

  "Mommy?"

  "Hi, sweetie."

  Sitting on the edge of her younger daughter's bed, laying a hand on her forehead.

  "My chest hurts."

  Dana's sleepy voice from beyond the elephant night table. "My chest hurts, too, Mommy."

  Cough syrup.

  The wrong was in the silence. Vee's coughing, the painful broken sound that had clawed Clare out of her sleep and into sneakers and a raincoat, was gone. No coughing child. No click of Mackie's claws on the hardwood as he left the girls' room to see who'd opened the front door so stealthily. Silence swallowed the life of the house. Even the grandfather clock that guarded the foot of the stairs had ceased ticking.

  "What?" Clare whispered as if seeking answers from the ether. Yell for David? David had gone. Switch on the lights? Wake the kids, the dog, and the au pair? Jalila was with David. Craziness.

  Breathing in. Breathing out. Nothing to fear but fear. This too shall pass. I'm okay. Inhaling and exhaling on a mishmash of mantras picked up from a mishmash of philosophies and psychologists, Clare walked her body to the stairs, had it lift one foot, then the other. Checked to make sure it put its hand on the railing for safety.

  Never once in the thirty-five years before Dana was born had it occurred to Clare that she could love children. When she'd gotten pregnant she'd wanted an abortion. David called her a murderess and threatened lawsuits. Hers was the rare shotgun wedding where the groom was holding the shotgun.

  Three years later, when she was pregnant with Victoria, abortion was no longer an option; the baby might be another Dana. Vee was different from her sister. Where Dana was graceful, Vee was sturdy. Where Dana was quiet, Vee shouted. Where Dana walked, Vee ran.

  Another facet of Clare's heart made manifest.

  Usually these thoughts embarrassed her. Too mawkish. Too cliched. Not now, not in the gaping dark of the stairwell. Focusing on her girls, she felt the out-of-body experience began to wane; her soul dripped back into her body.

  The kids' room was across the landing from the one she shared with David. Four steps, sneakers soundless on the hardwood, and Clare stood in the doorway. Two neat four-poster beds, bought new in 1899 when their great-great-grandmother and her twin sister turned twelve, sat to either side of an incongruity the kids adored, a glass-topped table held up by an elephant.

  The night-light, shining up through the glass, cast elongated ear shadows on the ceiling.

  No dog trotted over to greet her.

  Clare clicked on the overhead light. The covers were rumpled as if little girls had just climbed out of them; the old blanket where Mackie slept was across the foot of Vee's bed, yet Clare felt an emptiness that spoke of a thousand years of genocide, a crumbling of ancient walls. Not a whisper of her children remained.

  "Vee! Dana!" she began screaming and couldn't stop. "Mackie! Victoria! Damn you!"

  As she cried out the names she ran down the hall, the rubber soles of her shoes squeaking against the polished wood. The bathroom was empty. The playroom. When the girls were scared and their father was gone, they'd get in her bed. Clare darted past the head of the stairs, slipped, fell, scrambled up. Catching herself on the door frame of the master bedroom, she slid her palm down the wall just inside the door, turning the light on.

  No little girls. No dog.

  Nightmare closed around her. She could not move, could not see; her screaming produced no sound. With the dislocated tunnel vision of the dreamer, she pushed through the paralysis settling in her legs and flung herself in the direction of the master bath.

  Empty.

  A sound, a vibration maybe, like the slamming of a door downstairs, penetrated Clare's narrowing world. The girls had gone to Jalila's room. The au pair slept on the first floor in the maid's room behind the old pantry.

  Stairs, living room, dining room, kitchen, passed in a blur, in a shout of the children's names honed razor sharp by terror. Jalila's room. Lights on. The bed was unmade, as she'd left it when she'd rushed out with Clare's husband just before midnight. No little girls, no bright dark eyes, no shaggy dog, just a preternatural chill undisturbed by living heartbeats.

  Dropping the cough medicine, her one link with a warping reality, Clare pulled David's cell phone from the trench coat pocket and pushed 911 as she ran. Babbling her emergency, she slammed on lights, yanked open closet doors, peered under and behind furniture till she reached the half-sized Harry Potter closet under the stairs to the attic and wrenched open the door. This being the last place the girls might have secreted themselves, finally she stopped. Breath coming in cries and gasps, it took a moment to hear the tiny voice from the phone held at her thigh.

  The 911 operator was saying something, had been saying something for a while. Clare held the phone indifferent
ly to her ear and heard what was being repeated with such urgency.

  "Get out of the house. Get out of the house."

  "No." Clare would never leave.

  "Maybe something happened and the sitter took the children to a neighbor's."

  Relief flooded Clare's being. Hope acted on her like cocaine had during her flirtation with the wild side in college. Maybe the operator said more; Clare wouldn't have known. Phone at her side, she ran into the front yard and across Laggert Street. The children could have gone to the Donovans'. If they'd woken and found themselves alone, they would have run over to Crimson Rose and Coltie's like she'd taught them to.

  Frenzied pounding brought the reassuring sound of feet on hardwood stairs; then Robert Donovan, looking tousled and concerned, opened the door. Just past thirty, tall and thin as a rail with the most beautiful brown eyes Clare had ever seen except on a dog, Robert was the father of four children. The middle two, Colt and Crimson, were Victoria and Dana's best friends. Sleepovers were a weekly event. In a few years all this would become problematic. For now they enjoyed innocence.

  Dana and Vee were not there.

  Clare heard Robert say the words, and walls of night folded in. As if the racing fury of the past minutes had burned all her reserves in an adrenaline flash-fire, she no longer possessed the strength to remain upright. As she swayed and began to crumple, she was bizarrely aware of the high drama. Like a director watching a ham actor, she noted how her knees folded and one hand stretched ineffectually toward the door frame, how, still vaguely elegant even in T-shirt and sweatpants, Robert stepped forward to catch her. How the essence of romantic melodrama went awry when he hadn't the strength to hold five feet nine, one hundred and twenty-four pounds of out-of-balance female flesh and they both toppled off the steps into the shrubbery. Robert, who neither swore nor smoked and only drank sparingly, yelled, "Whoa!"

  Clare began to laugh. Tears and snot and convulsive yucks. Hysteria. She knew it, but could not stop. Robert extricated them from the bushes. The look of genuine fear for her on his face ought to have had a sobering effect, but it only brought on more laughter.

  Not merriment, the acting coach in Clare's head noted. There was no relief, joy, or amusement, just emotion so violent it would come out willy-nilly on any vehicle it could find. Psychic diarrhea, spiritual projectile vomiting.

  "Robert?"

  Tracy, Robert's wife of twelve years, stood in the doorway, her long frizzy hair backlit by the hallway light, her small body childlike in a long white cotton nightgown. In her arms was the littlest Donovan, just a year old.

  It was the sight of the baby that brought an abrupt end to Clare's hysteria. To wake the baby, to make him cry, would be too much to bear.

  Sirens did the evil in her stead. Not a long wail for blocks and blocks but a sharp stab of sound and a brief flash of blue light as a patrol car announced its arrival at the curb.

  Robert left Clare for his wife as the police came up the walk. Both cops were middle-aged, not the officers central casting would have sent. The driver was a small woman, a little thick around the middle but strong-looking, with graying hair cut short. The officer riding shotgun was probably close to retirement age and had eaten too many doughnuts over the years. Both wore glasses. Both looked like they'd seen it all and didn't believe over half of it. The female officer looked as if she still cared. The man just looked tired.

  Clare addressed the female officer. "I'm her. It's me. I called." For the briefest of moments Clare believed she was going to be a rational adult, but in saying the words the desperate fear that had sent her racing from room to room screaming claimed her again, and the story of her missing children poured out in a semicoherent flood.

  The officer nodded. "I'm Officer Shopert. This is Officer Dunn. We'll check your house out as soon as another unit arrives."

  Clare had thought she'd reached the maximum overdrive of panic, that place where vision becomes unreliable and speech breaks into pieces chasing fractured thoughts, but when the lady cop mentioned delay it worsened. A force rose in her throat, a power that would come out high-pitched and shrieking. A sound that would get her slammed into the loony bin.

  Officer Shopert sensed it--or heard the indrawn breath--because she said quickly, "One minute, three at the most. A hundred and eighty seconds. They're right behind us."

  Clare clamped lips and jaws together and nodded.

  "So you went to check on your children and they were missing?" Shopert said.

  Clare nodded. She could feel the jarring as her brain slid forward and back inside her skull.

  "And you ran through the house looking, then out the front door and here?"

  Again she nodded. Slide. Stop. Slide, stop. Vision shook.

  "Just when was it you stopped to put on lace-up running shoes and a coat?" Officer Dunn interjected. Suddenly he didn't look the least bit tired.

  Clare blinked; once, twice. She could not make sense of why he asked about her clothes, could scarcely remember the meaningless details of life before the empty little beds.

  A second patrol car arrived, pulling up behind the first and saving her from having to string together words that would waste more precious seconds.

  Two more officers, both men this time and both fairly young, sprang energetically from their vehicle and trotted up the walk. From the orange glare of the streetlight and the kinder spill of light from the Donovans' hallway, Clare could see their faces. Strong manly concern was writ large.

  All the world was a stage, and the men and women on it mostly bad actors. These guys were not just cops; they were also playing cops, and tonight was turning into a good show. Her 911 call probably saved them from a tedious graveyard shift with nothing but coffee-induced heartburn for dramatic tension.

  The four officers met midyard and held a hasty conference. Clare hovered, listening so hard her ears rang, but didn't step toward them. A horror had gripped her that time was running away with her children, that each tick of some hideous clock pushed them farther from her. She didn't want to do anything that might delay the police.

  Straying out from the murmurs like loose hairs from a topknot came bits of the conversation. "Around back . . . give me about a ten count . . . you and Jim . . . bad knee . . . no, I'll go. You'll strain . . ."

  They broke up half a moment before Clare's head was going to explode. Officer Dunn got on the radio. The two younger men and the female officer trotted across Laggert toward Clare's house. Mist and wet pavement caught the light from the streetlamps, and they moved as if through an orange fog that shattered and then re-formed as they passed.

  Hysteria morphed to hyperawareness and tightened Clare's brain. She noted each step the officers took, the way their shoes left fleeting tracks in the moisture on the pavement, the way the off-worldly light played along the barrels of their drawn weapons. Two of them, a man and Officer Shopert, split off and ran around toward the back of the house.

  The back door was locked, and Clare thought to call out to them, but surely they, as policemen, would have thought of that, and she didn't want to offend them or appear foolish. As part of her marked this disturbingly ordinary response to an extraordinary situation, they passed from sight behind the lilacs at the side of the house. The lone policeman stood to one side of the front door, his back against the siding, pistol held in stiff arms and pointed toward the ground between his feet.

  Just like on TV.

  "Just like on TV," Clare said aloud, trying to dispel the creeping surreality clotting in her throat.

  "That's right, Miss . . ."

  "Sullivan," Clare answered automatically. It was the older officer, the heavy one. She reached for, but couldn't remember, his name.

  "Dunn," he said as if he'd read her mind, pointing to the name tag above the breast pocket of his uniform shirt. "Sullivan, huh? The 911 operator's got a Daoud Suliman listed at this address."

  The way he pronounced the Arabic name reminded Clare why David had changed it after the attack
s on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

  "Yes. My husband changed it to David Sullivan for business reasons."

  "Yeah," the cop said.

  The sneer in his voice served to help Clare focus. Briefly, she took her eyes from the house across the street.

  "This Daoud Suliman, he a U.S. citizen?"

  Clare knew she must have said she didn't know by the cynical echo she got in return, but her eyes and mind were again across the street, going into the house with the picture-perfect policeman. Blocking executed faultlessly, he crouched, entered the front door quickly, then stepped to the side lest he provide a tempting backlit target. Because her mind's eye was less shortsighted than those in her face, Clare no longer saw Officer Dunn, though she felt him scratching at the edges of her attention. She saw the stairs, the banister, the upstairs hall.

  Then she was on her butt seeing nothing but fire.

  FOUR

  The entire adventure, from punk to nuts, had taken less than a quarter of an hour. Geneva was just going on when Anna arrived back at the National Park Service center. Slipping in quietly, she settled in the last of eight rows of folding chairs more than half filled with tourists, shopping bags and purses cluttering the floor between their feet. At the opposite end of this humble auditorium a small raised stage jutted out from the wall. A pianist hunched over an electronic keyboard, a guitar player perched one buttock on a folding chair identical to those used by the audience, and a vocalist--Geneva Akers--swayed gently behind a floor mike.

  The musicians wore green and gray, cordovan belts and shoes, and tidy brass nameplates over their left breast pockets. They were park rangers; their job was to protect and preserve the musical heritage of the historic city of New Orleans. Anna loved it. In the name of political pork, the Park Service preserved so many worthless bits of history that some said the NPS was where white elephants went to die. Then there were places like this, where the sacred torch of a time long past was carried, still burning, into the present.