Blind Descent

by Nevada Barr

  As Anna walked in the door, Jewel, George Laymon’s secretary, said, “Just the person I was looking for.” Never a good sign. “George wants to talk to you. He’s in with Brent, but they should be pretty close to done.”

  The implication that Anna would, of course, sit and wait docilely till summoned was strong. At an early age a serious streak of contrariness had been discovered in Anna. The only two stickers she’d ever considered slathering on her Rambler’s bumper read “God Bless John Wayne” and “Question Authority.” Today she chose not to rise to the occasion. Claiming a folding chair near Jewel’s desk, she sat and composed her face along cooperative lines.

  Jewel was a stocky woman in her early thirties with an abundance of black hair curling down her back to brafastener level. Not a glint of a shine escaped the careful tangle of curls, not a thread of gray or red or brown. The hair was black as construction paper, flat and rough. Bangs and sides were cut short and teased high on the crown. Hair was molded into flying wings above each ear with industrial-strength hair spray. From the front the coif looked big, a lion’s mane. From the side the effect was lost. The volume was two-dimensional; the popular style always made Anna think of the false fronts on buildings along movie Main Streets of the Old West.

  “What’s up?” she asked in hopes of opening channels of communication.

  The secretary was more interested in her computer screen than in gossiping with Anna. “Debriefing,” she said without bothering to turn around.

  “Critical incident stress debriefing?”

  “Something like that.”

  After incidents in which rangers were exposed to unusually stressful situations—the death of children or fellow employees, long rescues in which the victim died, or messy accidents with burned or mutilated bodies—the National Park Service had instituted debriefing sessions, times when the rangers involved could theoretically come to terms with their own personal trauma. Undoubtedly the idea was a sound one, but Anna’d never been to a session that proved helpful. It’s just me, she thought, not for the first time.

  She eyed Laymon’s office door suspiciously. Jewel had just said Brent, not a whole host of cavers. One-on-one was unusual unless it was with a bona fide psychologist. Laypeople trained to run the sessions always had all the participants in at the same time. Part of the therapy: sharing fears, inadequacies, strengths. Coming to know you weren’t alone, that the bizarre things that passed through your mind weren’t an indication of a character flaw. She turned her attention back to the secretary.

  Jewel typed like a fury, stiffened tresses quivering with the impact of lacquered nails on the keyboard.

  The office was cold and boring. Anna squirmed around, but comfort on a metal folding chair was elusive. “I thought it would be a group thing,” she said, hoping Jewel would relent and amuse her.

  “Nope.” Jewel typed on.

  There were no magazines to be seen. Anna’s shoulder began to ache. She laid her injured limb along the edge of the secretary’s desk.

  “Do you happen to know where Sondra McCarty is? Peter McCarty’s wife?” Anna asked.

  “All nonessential personnel have been demobbed.”

  For all the expression Jewel put into the practiced words, she could have been one of those dolls with a ring in its back one pulled to make it talk.

  “She’s a civilian. Peter asked me to check on her,” Anna lied.

  “Packed and gone.”

  A punch, a poke, and paper was sucked into the printer next to Jewel’s elbow. Still she typed; she didn’t miss a beat. Anna didn’t think anyone outside the confines of the big city could type that fast. It was a talent best kept under wraps in the Park Service, or ham-handed rangers would endlessly be pestering one to type up their reports. Probably not an issue; Jewel looked pesterproof.

  “Are you sure Sondra’s gone?” Anna asked, testing the theory.

  Flying fingers stopped midword and began a slow drum. Not pesterproof. Jewel screwed her chair around till she was facing her desk—not all the way around to face Anna, that would have constituted too great a commitment.

  “Absolutely positive.” She whipped a pile from her “out” basket and, dabbing the pad of her index finger into a little pot of waxy stuff, flipped through it quickly, keeping her fingers stiff so the acrylic of her nails would not be compromised.

  “Packed and gone,” she repeated with satisfaction, and shoved a list in Anna’s direction. “She was given a ride down to the airport yesterday with some other guys. Guess she couldn’t wait for her husband to come out.”

  A note of humanity crept into Jewel’s voice, suggesting she would have waited for a husband until hell froze over.

  “Good job, Brent, I mean that. Hang tough.” The words wafted from Laymon’s office as he pushed the door open to usher the geologist out.

  Brent mumbled something. He looked bad. Pale and unshaven, the haggard eyes of a man who’d been sleeping badly. Anna guessed she didn’t look so hot herself.

  “Is Holden here yet?” Laymon asked Jewel. Anna could tell he’d seen her. Draped as she was over the end of his secretary’s desk, it would have been impossible not to. He chose to pretend he didn’t. A man who liked to deal with one thing at a time.

  “He can’t come in,” Jewel told her boss. She didn’t look at him, but turned back to the computer screen. Her fingers rested on the keys, but she was neither reading nor typing. The screen had gone blank. She either had lost her text or had touched a magic computer hide-it button.

  Laymon wasn’t in the mood to take no for an answer. “Did he call? I told you to interrupt me if he called.”

  “His wife, she tol’ me he gotta go to the doctor’s about his foot.”

  Jewel’s articulation, her posture, her vocabulary, all were disintegrating under Laymon’s disapproval. Anna wondered if it was personal or if the secretary habitually cowered in the glare of the opposite sex.

  “I got Anna Pigeon,” she said with the air of a shop-keeper offering inferior but available merchandise.

  “Keep trying the Tillmans’,” Laymon said. “Talk to the man himself, not his wife.”

  Only after this exchange had been completed and a nod of acquiescence wrung from Jewel’s bowed neck did George Laymon officially “see” Anna.

  “Good of you to come by,” he said, managing to gather power unto himself by conferring obedience upon her.

  “I just sort of wandered in,” Anna said. “I wasn’t aware there was a critical—”

  “I appreciate your coming down so early,” he said, and waved her into his office. Closing the door he winked conspiratorially and shook his head. “For a woman who types that fast, Jewel doesn’t seem to get a whole lot done. How’re you doing?”

  Laymon’s attention, a focused beacon, lighted and warmed. Despite a natural aversion to being wooed by politicians, Anna had to admit the effect was flattering. Laymon ushered her gallantly—but ever so correctly, without a hint of condescension or sexism—to the single chair in his office. Padded, the seat and back covered with nubbly brown fabric, the visitor’s chair, though significantly less grand, matched his desk chair. The desk matched a computer credenza behind it, against the windowed wall. The carpet was new, the potted plant in the corner alive. George Laymon obviously rated. Anna had been in superintendents’ offices that weren’t so well appointed.

  Laymon didn’t retreat behind the pseudomahogany of his desk but perched on the side, one haunch on the wood, one booted foot swinging free. He actually must have paid attention in those management classes the NPS was always shipping the higher-ups off to. Putting me at my ease, Anna thought. She decided if he crouched down to her level the way one was taught to interact with children, she was going to leave.

  Laymon was a spectacularly average individual. Height, weight, color of hair and eyes: everything fell in the neutral zone. Because true average is a mathematical concept and not a class, he didn’t vanish into the woodwork. Graying hair, good build, and regular feature
s made him a handsome man. Anna guessed he was fifty-five or sixty, and had little doubt he could still have been quite the ladies’ man but for one thing: he wasn’t interested.

  She wasn’t vain enough to think because a man wasn’t flashing lights and sounding sirens the minute she walked into a room he was gay or asexual. Laymon’s lack of interest was beyond the personal and had nothing to do with the expected photo of the lovely wife and two appropriately scrubbed kids framed on the desktop. Anna guessed it was something harder to come by than sex or affection that fueled his inner fires. Imposing order. Maybe knowledge. Attributes that could make him good at his job. Controlled zealots were just the people needed for the daunting task of saving what was left of the environment.

  “Brent sure looks like shit,” Anna said, making conversation.

  “Brent’s taking this hard,” Laymon told Anna. “He’s a sensitive man. One of the things that makes him the best in his business. Attention to detail and a straight answer no matter who it costs. But he takes a lot on himself. He feels somehow responsible for Miss Dierkz’s death.”

  Anna understood. After all, she was the one who had killed Frieda. “We all do,” she said.

  “It’s to be expected. How are you doing?”

  Anna gave him the short answer to that and several more questions designed to show her he was a caring administrator. Then he got down to the meat of his inquiry. Laymon had no interest in critical stress debriefing—there were procedures for that and they did not fall within his job description. What he wanted from Anna was a detailed account of his resource, Lechuguilla Cavern.

  “I’m from the ‘Show Me’ state,” Laymon said. Exactly what had she seen? How far had she explored the Paddock? What had others told her of holes blowing, going leads? Who carried the survey and the sketches? How clear was Lake Rapunzel? How deep the slide? How unstable the Pigtail?

  Anna told him she was not the best person to ask. As a neophyte, a claustrophobe, and a close friend of the deceased, her powers of observation had been at a low ebb. Claiming to understand her limitations, he was still keen to hear her views, so she answered the questions as best she could. He pressed her for detail on Tinker’s, Rapunzel, and the Pigtail—parts of the cave to which he had never been. Anna struggled to remember as much as she could and, in a childish desire to please, came close to making up answers—a human trait that made eyewitnesses so unreliable. Time after time she drew blanks and he pushed harder.

  Laymon was digging in a vein that had been mined out in the first few minutes of their interview. She could tell he wanted more, but there wasn’t any more she could give. It made her feel stupid. Stupid was turning to annoyed before he finally gave up.

  Anna had said nothing about Frieda’s death being not an accident but murder. In the light of day, she was unsure, hyperaware there was no hard evidence. In honor of Frieda, she had to try.

  Clearly, Laymon felt the interview to be at an end. He stood. Anna kept her seat. “Frieda thought the rock was pushed on her. Not fell. Pushed.”

  The words out, she waited. Laymon looked blank, then, as the import struck, shock twisted his even features. Lines cut between his eyes and around his mouth. He sat down, this time in his official chair and in his official capacity.

  Anna told her story. Laymon took notes and didn’t interrupt. When she finished he stared for a time out his window.

  “You realize how serious this is?”

  She did.

  “You’ve given us nothing to go on—not your fault,” he added quickly. “Just the nature of the beast. Frieda was sure?”

  Anna admitted she was not.

  “And this print in the dirt, you’re a hundred percent sure of that?”

  Anna stuck to her guns. The butt-print was real.

  The chief of resource management blew out a lungful of air and turned to face her squarely across the desk. “Holden is coming in later. I’ll meet with him, the superintendent, and Oscar when he gets out of Lechuguilla. We’ll take it from there.”

  “Thanks,” Anna said, relieved to have passed the buck.

  Now the interview was indeed over. Laymon rose and walked around his desk, nudging her toward the door with repeated thanks.

  She managed one question of her own before it was closed between them.

  “What next?” The question was purposefully vague. She wanted to take the temperature of resource management, to find out if Holden, Oscar, Zeddie, or anyone else was going to be targeted as scapegoat. Her cynicism was uncalled for. Laymon was thinking only of the cave. A rescue, even one as carefully orchestrated as Frieda’s, could go sour. Despite Holden’s care, damage had been done. Possibly irreparable damage. Even without the rock slide, that many people, that much equipment couldn’t be dragged through the fragile and pristine underground without leaving a mark. Since there was no way of guaranteeing that cavers would not injure themselves, and since the American public would never condone the idea of a “no rescue” wilderness where visitors went in at their own risk to come out or die as the gods and their own skills decreed, the only way to protect the cave, at least this newest and most virginal part, was to close it off. Until a truly compelling reason to allow people in arose, the cave could rest. Unlike the surface of the earth it would not be able to regenerate, to cure the wounds they’d left behind—or not on a timeline short-lived humanity could appreciate—but further impact would be stopped.

  That was fine by Anna. Holden would be miffed, and she could sympathize. Had Lassen Volcanic, Big Bend, Isle Royale—any of a dozen parks she could name without thinking—been closed to her she would be bereft, resentful. Caves she could comfortably leave in the dark.

  Cavers were another matter. Before she could get a clearer picture of the survey team that had been with Frieda, she needed to know more about the personalities involved. She had little idea how to go about gleaning background information. They were such a disparate bunch. Curt was a New York university professor, Brent a geologist for somebody, Peter a midwestern gynecologist. Who would she call, the AMA, the PTA? Sondra, at least, had a face, address, and phone number.

  Anna was in the middle of wheedling the McCartys’ home address out of Jewel when a series of interrupting phone calls brought Laymon back out of his office.

  “Ah, good, you’re still here,” he said, and Anna knew she was about to be volunteered for something. “Could you do us a favor and pick Mrs. Dierkz up at the airport? She wanted to be here when the body was brought out.”

  The body.

  Laymon was businesslike, nothing disrespectful in word or manner. Yet Anna bristled. As far as she knew, Laymon wasn’t acquainted with either Frieda or her mother. It would have been bizarre had he beat his breast or rent his garments. Still, she would have preferred it to this cold dispatch.

  What she said was, “Sure,” and, “Vehicle?”

  Laymon nodded at his secretary. “Jewel?” Without waiting for her to respond, he shut himself back into his office.

  Not only was Anna’s sick day to be co-opted but her solitude as well. Jewel informed her that what visitors’ quarters existed were filled with cavers, specialists, and media. Frieda’s mother would bunk with her at Zeddie’s house until she left with the corpse of her daughter or more suitable arrangements could be made.

  Jewel saw to it Anna was provided with a not-too-bad sedan. The battered 4 × 4s and pickup trucks struck them both as frivolous for the task at hand.

  Clouds were as thick over the town of Carlsbad as they were over the caverns, but, as the town was considerably lower in elevation, small planes were able to sneak in below the overcast. It was in one of these puddle-jumpers that Dottie Dierkz arrived. Anna had no trouble finding her in the tiny waiting room. It wasn’t that she was one of only three people. She looked like a woman who had recently sustained a killing blow and had not yet had the luxury of falling down.

  Frieda’s mother was tall, five-foot-ten or so, and impeccably groomed. Money and taste were evident in the p
erfectly brown, perfectly styled hair, the cashmere mock turtleneck in fuchsia, and the tailored navy jacket. Unlike her daughter, Mrs. Dierkz was thin and angular with high cheekbones and a clean fine jawline, bone structure that would keep her beautiful as long as she lived. From the look of her, Anna wondered how long that might be. Her settled beauty was brittle with the effort of holding grief in. She smiled brightly, showing perfect teeth behind exquisitely painted lips. The eyes remained as lifeless as mannequin’s glass.

  “Flying! Ooh!” Mrs. Dierkz mock shuddered as Anna carried her one bag out to the waiting sedan. “I can’t count how many hours I’ve spent in the air. Dad—Gordon—and I have been to Europe I don’t know how many times. I never got used to it. Goodness! It’s good to be on the ground.”

  This and similar flight-related comments got them across the parking lot and out toward the highway. Anna had done little besides introduce herself. She and Mrs. Dierkz had never met, but they had become acquainted as those who share a loved one tend to. Once or twice, Anna had answered the phone at the office when it was Mrs. Dierkz calling for her daughter. Stories had been told on both sides. More to Anna. Daughters so love to gossip about their moms. Frieda had adored hers and, less common, had enjoyed her company and looked forward to visits home.

  As Anna turned the car onto the National Parks Highway, out of town toward the park, the wind turned vicious. Buffeting the sedan, it skinned away the fragile warmth. Mrs. Dierkz sat in the passenger seat, her shoulders hunched and her hands pressed between her knees. Anna turned up the heat, though she doubted mere Btus had a prayer of warming the cold that held Mrs. Dierkz. The smile was still switched on. Not to impress—Anna’d been forgotten—but because she had simply neglected to turn it off. Emotions were no longer attached to facial expression. Had they been, the world might have seen a mask of tragedy best reserved for Greek plays.