by Nevada Barr
Anna slid down as far as the anti-ergonomics of the chair allowed and opened herself to the experience as Geneva began to sing "Swing low, sweet chariot" a cappella. On "comin' for to carry me," the keyboard crept in. Tendrils of the first guitar notes wrapped around the word "home" till the sound was like that of distant hearts catching up a single thread of emotion.
Geneva reminded Anna of a woman she'd known--seen, rather--when she lived in New York City with her first husband, Zach. She was a street singer, a big woman, tall and heavy, with long hair in so many tiny braids that where she tied it at the middle of her back the ponytail was easily six inches in diameter, who worked the north entrance to Saks on Fifth Avenue. White was her signature color: white headdress, caftan, flowing trousers, sandals in the summer, white boots in the fall, and a long white cane with a red tip on the end as an exclamation point to the black-and-white canvas. The Blind Blues Singer, as traditional as the music she sang.
Once, on the 7 train, Anna had seen her, cane folded away in her bag, drugstore reading glasses perched on her nose, perusing Newsweek. Sighted or not, she put on a good show, and the only revenge Anna took was winking at her when she dropped a bill in her box on Fifth.
Geneva genuinely was a blind blues singer. Behind the black Ray-Bans she always wore, her eyes were slashed and burned from an accident on her dad's farm in Illinois when she was four. Like the New York street singer, she was of regal size and royal bearing, but she wore her hair cropped so close to her skull it dusted the skin like the first snow in the high desert. In the 1980s she had trained at Juilliard, but, because of her seemingly boundless talent, she never sounded "professional." She sounded real, a blind eyewitness to the sorrow and love and joys of the world.
Proud as Anna was to have a talent like Geneva's in the green and gray, the uniform jarred with the music, and she closed her eyes hoping the rich imagery of the old gospel song, colored in the many hues of Geneva's voice, would cancel out images of punks frothing at the mouth and belting out the B-word every other sentence and pimped-out white boys with dead eyes and sharp objects.
Unquestionably, Anna was less crazy than she had been when, in the wake of the incidents on Isle Royale, Rocky Mountain National Park's superintendent had recommended a leave of absence. Coming off winter study on ISRO, Anna had been so crazy she had no idea how crazy she was. The intervening weeks had moved her a long way toward sanity. Now the black hole that had threatened to swallow her was a mere speck on her mental horizon.
Paul worried that the net of evil that caught them up during their belated honeymoon in Big Bend would set her back, but the events in the Chihuahuan desert were not comparable to what she had gone through on Isle Royale. For one thing, it was warm in Big Bend. The sun shone. Mostly, though, it was because she'd found strength and courage, kindness and honor, in her comrades. And they had found it in her.
Maybe this wasn't enough to heal the deep wounds, but it was sufficient; with that and the love of Paul Davidson, she could sustain life. Whether or not she could sustain life as a law enforcement ranger with the National Park Service remained to be seen.
Had she Geneva's musical abilities, she could sing for her supper rather than hunt and kill and drag it home. Unfortunately Anna's singing voice was better suited to clearing large numbers of people out of places in record time. She knew for a fact it didn't soothe savage beasts.
Despite the gift of gospel, her thoughts wandered, the gutter punks reinfiltrating her inner landscape. As a tribe they exhibited the familiar one-size-fits-all hostility of any urban gang. The oldest, the Charlie Manson of the group, carried himself with angry arrogance, the chip on his shoulder clearly one of his most prized possessions. The others, the drab, the dim, the nondescript ashes of his followers, had a piece of his mettle, enough of an edge to hold the ambient kindness of strangers at bay.
The terrier punk had cursed her and tried to attack her; still, he felt a little different against her psychic skin than the rest. Two of these differences came to her clearly as she drifted on Geneva's music and New Orleans's dark waters: The terrier punk was dying, and he still cared desperately about something. Maybe the dog, or maybe the dog was only a manifestation of it.
The man's frailty was obvious; he was as thin and brittle as spring ice, he was malnourished, exhausted, and very possibly the victim of AIDS or tuberculosis or drug addiction, but that wasn't the kind of dying Anna saw when she pictured him. Demons were killing that punk. She could almost see their claw marks at the backs of his eyes, sense them jerking at his limbs when he tried to strangle her. In a moment of revelation she realized the dog was all that kept the satanic hordes from dragging him down into the fires of hell. Anna felt a sudden and powerful kinship with him.
"Jesus H. Christ," she whispered and opened her eyes. After all these great healing weeks with her husband, sun, orange juice, and cats on her lap, her mind still wasn't anyplace she needed to be playing by herself.
Punks were an urban blip; her run-in with the dead-eyed knife man and the dog lover had no more lasting importance than an aborted mugging or a snatched wallet. If blood was not spilled nor bones broken, one counted her lucky stars and didn't dwell on it.
The set was finished. The musicians turned back into plain old rangers; the tourists gathered up their loot and headed back out into the sun for more. Anna stayed in her chair watching Geneva strike the floor mike, then help the pianist dismantle his keyboard and pack it in its carrying case. The guitar player, speaking to no one, had left the stage while the last note of the last song was still reverberating to let himself out through a door on the inside wall.
"Is that you I hear breathing out there, Anna?" Geneva asked as the piano player latched his case.
"I breathe silently," Anna said. "You're just guessing." She rose from the chair and walked toward the front of the room. "I think you were a bit sharp there on that last note. You know, just a hair pointy."
Geneva laughed. "You've been to too many firearms trainings without earplugs. I bet you can tell the difference between a .22 shot fired and a .38, but you've never been able to tell the difference between E-flat and middle C."
"Early childhood trauma," Anna said. "I could never pick out 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' on the piano."
"Shoot, anybody can pick out 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.' You must not have been trying."
"Where's Sammy?" Anna changed the subject. Geneva was right about her musical disability. She'd been the only sophomore Sister Mary Judette told to just mouth the words in choir, the only waitress excused from singing "Happy Birthday" to customers.
"He's around." Geneva whistled "Dixie" softly, and a tall champagne-colored standard poodle unfolded itself from behind the raised stage, stretched long and lean as a cat, and yawned hugely. "Sammy likes World War II songs," Geneva said as she dug Sammy's leash from a patchwork shoulder bag big enough to carry a small child.
Sammy sat still with his back to her while she latched the leash onto his harness.
" 'Boogie-woogie Bugle Boy' and all that. A pretty little blond number comes in with her hair done up and a forties' dress and heels and does Andrews Sisters stuff. Sammy laps it up. But then Sammy laps up cat shit."
"A seeing-eye poodle," Anna said as they fell into step in the bricked alley outside the auditorium. "Who'd've thunk?"
"A poodle!" Geneva exclaimed. "Here all these years I thought that kinky hair just meant he was an African American Lab."
Anna laughed, and Geneva took her arm companionably. She didn't need the guidance; she had Sammy and years of walking the same route to and from work for that. Geneva was just a warm, touchy sort of woman. Anna wasn't, but she didn't want to seem ungracious, so she quelled the urge to squirm free. The afternoon sun had been obscured by dark clouds, and a salt-and-swamp breeze kicked up the litter of yellow blossoms that dusted the walkway.
"When's this man of yours coming down?" Geneva asked as Sammy stopped them to wait for the light to change on North Peters
. "When I'd heard you'd gotten married, and to a Mississippi preacher to boot, I didn't believe it. I mean I did not believe it. I made a major fool of myself arguing with the messenger. This guy must be a man of God to want a prickly old thing like you lying next to him at night."
"He's the sheriff of Adams County up on the Trace," Anna said.
"Ah, at home with criminals and firearms. That makes the union more explicable," Geneva said. "So you're honeymooning in my back apartment?"
Anna'd called Geneva to see if she could stay with her for a week but hadn't told her much more than that. Gossip in the Park Service spread with the speed of the Internet, and she guessed Geneva knew about her administrative leave and the investigation into the deaths on Isle Royale. After her and Paul's adventure in Big Bend, Anna, her dog, Taco, and her two cats had reunited at his home in Port Gibson. The leave was of an unspecified length--five weeks being the best guess--and Anna didn't want to sit around all alone in Rocky Mountain National Park thinking herself into a pit.
"Not so much a honeymoon," Anna said. "A getaway is more like it. He'll be down in a few days."
"Newlyweds. I bet you can't wait."
Anna could wait. She loved her husband and would be missing him before long, but she'd been by herself most of her adult life. She liked it. She was good at it. She needed it. Since they'd left for Big Bend in March, she and Paul had scarcely been more than arm's length from one another. Paul loved it. If he had his way, Anna and her menagerie would have lived in his shirt pocket. Anna needed a bit of breathing room to process the beginnings of sanity, the joys of matrimony, and possibly the end of a career.
Geneva's house was an easy walk from the Jazz Historical Park. Moving at a southern saunter, Anna enjoyed the narrow streets, the two- and three-story buildings, wrought-iron balconies heavy with ferns and flowers. Age, and two hundred years of crooked politicians taking more from the city than they gave back, overlaid everything with a sleepy decadence that was more seductive than alarming.
Katrina might have brought much of New Orleans to its knees, but it had done wonders for the French Quarter. Anna had never seen it so clean and painted and primped. The seediness was still there. The undercurrent of lasciviousness and overindulgence that had been luring Christian leadership conventions to the area for a hundred years remained. But it smelled a lot better.
In the Quarter, Uptown, the Garden District, in many of the neighborhoods in New Orleans, it was easy to forget the underlying menace of a city with a people who had declared war upon themselves.
Dumaine, the street they walked down, was the home of many of New Orleans's voodoo shops, windows filled with charms and books and spells and all things pertaining to the African magic as filtered through an American--and commercial--perspective. Anna's favorite was Vieux Dieux. It always had weird displays set on a table outside the door. Today it was a tiny graveyard complete with miniature crypts.
When they reached Geneva's door, Sammy woofed once politely. Two nine-foot-tall French windows fronted the narrow house, but both were blinded with heavy shutters peeling mauve paint. The entrance Geneva used was through an iron gate beside the house that let into an alley barely wider than Anna's outstretched arms. Beneath their feet a pathway, two bricks wide and grouted with moss, snaked between what had once been raised beds but were now low mounded hillocks of greenery spilling onto the walk.
The peach-colored stucco of the house was to the left. To the right was a wooden fence that rose twelve feet, then was overtaken by vines, which climbed another five or ten feet, their tendrils bridging from the top of the fence to the house next door. Peeking through this dense curtain of greenery were beasts and faces, flowers, and patterns made by bits of ironwork collected over fifty years and nailed onto the fence.
On her aunt's death Geneva had inherited not a single house but a ramshackle complex with three rental apartments and a two-car garage--unheard of in this part of town--with three brick, cavelike rooms behind it that local historians said were where the house slaves had lived. Hearing the bare-bones facts of Geneva's real estate, it would be easy to assume she was rolling in money, and she probably could have sold the buildings for close to a million dollars, but Geneva had no intention of selling.
Probably, Anna thought, because moving would be an impossible task. Geneva's mother had been a pack rat, and the property was a maze of saved wrought iron, old tools, wooden shutters, memorabilia from the music world, and Lord knew what else. So Geneva held the property, and the property held Geneva hostage with a constant need for money to keep the roofs from leaking and the toilets flushing.
The walkway ended in a courtyard no more than twenty feet square. It, too, was paved in brick and overgrown, vines hiding the fences to either side and mounting an assault on what had once been a carriage house but at some juncture had been made into a guest cottage. The cottage was one room wide and three tall, each of the upper rooms fronted by a tiny balcony and the walk-through sash windows common to the Old South. No lines were straight, no angle true to another. All that was rigid had cracked. That which was not rigid had warped as the house threw off the constraints of the rectangle. Vines and age blurring the edges, it looked as if the structure were melting into the garden. To accentuate the illusion a pond, the basin of brick, the fountain stilled, lay at its foot, and the wind, its coquetry hinting at a storm to come, stiffened the bleeding heart and voracious wisteria until they moved and snapped audibly.
The only jarring note in this romantic decrepitude was the gutter punk. Smoking a cigarette, his gaunt frame hunched into a wary question mark, he sat on the low fountain wall with his dog at his feet, as if they waited for Anna.
FIVE
A freakish hail of burning wood and glass fell from the sky. Pieces striking the street burst like comets hitting earth, fire breeding fire. By Seattle's dripping grace, nothing else was ignited.
This horrible glory unfolded in near silence for Clare. The blast that knocked her down had momentarily deafened her.
Silence, and the peculiar stop-frame way the explosion cracked through seconds of the night, ended simultaneously.
Tracy's baby cried. People ran toward the flaming house. A crowd appeared, born of the conflagration as maggots are born of dead meat. Neighbors. More police. Cars. Gawkers drawn by the noise, the light. A news van. The sound of sirens. The petty star pecks of camera flashes fighting the sun of the burning house.
Clare got to her feet. By the effortlessness of her rise she guessed she was unhurt. The information was of no interest to her. Like others, she was pulled toward the fire till a sensation, so different from those that had been racking body and brain it startled her, brought her to a standstill. Relief. She was suddenly desperately grateful her children had been taken.
Otherwise they would have been inside the house.
"Hallelujah," she whispered.
"What the hell . . ."
The officer with the bad knee--Dunn--was standing a few feet away, his fleshy face dyed demonic red by the flames. His eyes, black cuts enlivened by reflected sparks, slewed toward her.
"Jesus Christ!" he muttered as if he'd just had a revelation from the Man himself. Then a voice cut through the murmur of the growing crowd and the fierce chewing sound the flames made as they devoured the house. The radio clipped to Dunn's belt said, "Jim. Behind the house. Call the medics."
No preamble. No formal radio protocol.
Clare's thoughts, centered on her children, widened slightly to encompass others' lives, others' pain. The handsome young officer who'd gone theatrically in the front door; he was dead now. Had to be.
The voice on the radio was male, and Clare guessed Shopert, the woman cop she'd liked, was the one hurt. Dunn's eyes left her. Thumbing the mike clipped to his epaulet, he made calls as he ran, his gate lopsided and slow.
Bad knee.
More sirens. Or the same ones closer. Fire trucks arrived.
Feeling detached and outside of time, Clare drifted across th
e street.
Fire painted the world garish red, much as Clare imagined dawn would on Mars. Each bush, tree, each burnt-black shadow, stood out in high relief. The crippling numbness of shock broke, releasing her. Time was exploding in a rain of fire, and no one was looking for Dana, for Vee. Ignoring the shouts of newly arriving authority figures to stay back, she ran toward the darkness behind the house crying out her children's names.
Shoes slipping on the wet grass, she rounded the corner to the unfenced backyard. Officer Shopert lay on the pebbled walk. Dunn knelt over her. There must have been a good deal of blood--there was a shard of glass the size of Clare's palm protruding from the policewoman's neck and another embedded in her cheek, but in the saturated light color deceived.
Clare didn't slow down. There was no garage, but David had built a carport for one car--his, a Lexus SUV. The bloated station wagon was in its customary place. David had come back. Or had never really left. The SUV's doors were unlocked. No kids. Her 1997 Honda was unlocked. Four or five times she checked the backseats of both vehicles, under the chassis and around back of the carport, certain, if she looked one more time, Dana and Vee would be there.
Had to be there.
The act of searching fed her frenzy until she found herself prying desperately into places where not even a cat could hide. Before her mind snapped and sent her to the ground howling like a deranged wolf, she forced herself to stop, to breathe. Then, with careful steps, she followed the north side of the house toward Laggert Street. There were things she should do. Things to tell the police. More places to look. People she needed to call. Her mind would not complete these thoughts, and they crashed into each other till only a jumble of words remained of what was once sense.
