Blind Descent

by Nevada Barr

  “Brent did so much work with the Park Service we wanted to write an obituary for him for Ranger Magazine,” Anna lied easily. “People who knew him would like a chance to say good-bye.” To her own ears she sounded treacly, but Mrs. Roxbury seemed not to mind. She refilled her own coffee cup, poured one for Anna, and shoved two bowls of white powder in her direction. Guessing which one was the cream substitute, Anna spooned a gob into her cup.

  “That’s very nice,” Mrs. Roxbury said, and sat down, leaning slightly forward, eyes wide, the personification of being “all ears.”

  “How long had your husband been interested in caving?” Anna asked to prime the pump.

  “Oh, forever,” the Mrs. said. She looked expectantly at Anna, then asked, “Don’t you want to take notes? I always forget things if I don’t take notes.”

  “I forgot pen and paper,” Anna admitted sheepishly. Roxbury’s wife smiled suddenly, and Anna knew why the dentist loved her. She had perfect teeth, square and white and even, not in the least feral. Totally beguiling.

  “I’ll get some.” She hopped happily to her feet and bustled out of the kitchen.

  Ineptness, a wonderful tool. Guaranteed to take people off their guard. And in this instance Anna didn’t even have to feign it. Settled again with a Woody Woodpecker pencil and a Leonardo Da Doodle pad between them, Anna resumed the “interview.”

  Brent was a graduate in geology from a college “somewhere in Virginia.” He was an only child, his mother was dead and his father “long gone.” Anna took that to mean he’d left the family in some fashion other than feet first. Brent and Amy—as the woman invited Anna to call her—had been married for four years. They’d met in Springfield, Missouri, where Amy worked as a dental hygienist. Both had wanted children. From the way Amy looked first in the direction of her daughters then down at her coffee, Anna suspected this had been a strong motivator on her part. Maybe on Brent’s as well. Amy would have been somewhere between thirty-three and thirty-six, the ticking of the biological clock growing ever louder.

  “Previous marriages?” Anna asked, trying to sound professional.

  “No,” Amy answered readily. “A first for the both of us.”

  Anna kept quiet, in the hope silence would goad her into telling more than she intended.

  “Brent was a late bloomer. His mother suffered a long illness. He stayed with her. I never knew Mother Roxbury. She died before we met.”

  “Do you still work?” Anna asked, her pencil poised as if the answer was relevant to the obituary.

  “I’m a hygienist for a dentist here in town,” she said, and she blushed. “But I’m hoping to quit soon so I can spend more time at home with the girls. Brent and I just never had the money.”

  Anna didn’t need to ask where the money was to come from. Roxbury might have had life insurance, but that would be icing on the cake. The blush pretty much told it all. Though death, violence, and infidelity intruded, Anna couldn’t but envy Amy. She loved her fat dentist with transparent girlish adoration.

  “I don’t like it here,” Amy said with sudden candor. Coffee, chat, and an interested ear fooled her into thinking she’d found a friend. Stifling a stab of conscience, Anna mimicked the “all ears” posture and made listening noises, the indistinct murmurs of reassurance her sister had taught her.

  “It’s too . . . too everything. Except green. Everything just dries up and blows away. Even the people are dry. Tough and strong. Stringy.” She laughed. “I guess you can tell I’m a southern girl. I don’t want to climb and ride horses and fight rattlesnakes. And nobody goes to church. Not that I’m a real churchy person, but it’s good for children to be raised in the church, a community, something to give them a sense of morals, of their place in God’s world. Potluck is a dirty word here, and only Indians play bingo. Jeff . . . my boss . . . well, I’ve got a chance to move to Memphis. Now that—” Realizing too late she’d chattered beyond the limits set by a formal interview, Amy buried her nose in her coffee cup. When Amy came up for air, Anna could tell she was embarrassed. She rose partway out of her chair, suddenly desperate to get rid of her company.

  Anna glanced over her shoulder at the clock on the kitchen wall, pretending to notice how time had flown. “Oh dear, I’ve taken up way too much of your time,” she said to calm Amy’s nerves. “One more quick question, then I guess I’d really better go.” The end in sight, her faux pas apparently unnoticed, Amy lowered her round behind to the chair seat again.

  “Did Brent have a military record? Lots of our readers are vets,” Anna explained. “They set a lot of store by that sort of thing.”

  “I think he had a high draft number or maybe one of those college deferments,” Amy told her, and Anna could detect nothing to suggest she lied. “Anyway, he never had to go. They were drafting people back then.”

  Amy wasn’t aware of her husband’s dishonorable discharge.

  Anna thanked her and promised to send her a copy of the bogus obituary. Remembering to take the worthless notes, she left the widow to her coffee, her dogs, and her children.

  Several things of interest had been disclosed. Amy wanted out of Carlsbad, and Jeff, her boss, the boyfriend, was a ticket back to the lush Christian greenery of the South. Moving out of state would have upped the stakes in the custody battle. A separation of a thousand miles rendered joint custody impossible on any practical level. Somebody was going to lose their children, the children they had come together for the purpose of creating.

  As the adulteress, Amy might have lost that battle. Might have. A weak motive for murder. The scene just wouldn’t play out in Anna’s head. Amy would possibly kill to protect her children, but Anna couldn’t see her doing it with a high-powered rifle. A self-professed southern girl with a hatred of the desert wouldn’t be likely to have the knowledge or the canniness to traverse several miles of damp soil without leaving a single track for Anna to find. Though Anna hadn’t peeked into the woman’s closet, she doubted she’d find a pair of fire boots among the Reeboks and Liz Claibornes. McCarty had suggested the dentist boyfriend for the role of the shooter, but the man at the funeral had been too fat. The figure in camo retreating from Big Manhole had not been fat.

  On the surface, the things Anna had learned were not illuminating, but she cranked over the Neon’s engine with a light heart and rising optimism. Nothing Amy said went against her original theory. Brent’s death was not a freak coincidence. A jealous boyfriend hadn’t shot him. A crazed wife hadn’t hired it done. Brent had been killed because Frieda was killed.

  Yearning for Guy Clark and settling for Clint Black, Anna switched on the country-western station. Compared to the past few days, she was feeling positively gay.

  17

  DARKNESS HAD FOLDED quietly around the buildings by the time Anna arrived back in the park. A thread of gold leaked from the blind on the window to the right of the doorway. Within, there was wine and food, a cat, and the companionship of three murder suspects. It felt like home to Anna. Parking the Neon beside Zeddie’s Volvo, she sat for a minute enjoying the night. Much of her adult life had been lived alone. For society, she had her work and the telephone. Half-read books remained undisturbed till she returned for them. Food in the refrigerator waited till she, or mold, ate it. No one snatched her covers, hogged her bed, used her toothbrush, or maladjusted the driver’s seat in her car.

  Loneliness became a way of life after Zachary was killed. At some point the stings and barbs had worn away until all that remained was a soothing aloneness. Periodically Anna invited men possessing charm or wit or lovely physiques to share her space. Visitors only, passersby; she’d never allowed anyone to grow too comfortable in her quarters.

  Sitting in the night’s stillness, she prodded into dusty corners of her mind to see if this was healthy. Nostalgia for the past was there, mental pictures of Zachary blurred by the river of years that had poured over them since they were new-made. Nostalgia not only for the husband she had loved but for the youth they had lived.
She’d been a young woman when she was widowed, not yet thirty-four. From the vantage point of her forties, that seemed young. At the time she’d felt too old to go on living.

  Beyond this mist of memory there existed fragile hopes of finding a man with whom she could combine the littles of her life. Pictures of the animals going joyously two-by-two were created as much by the media as by personal need. Songs, billboards, movies, sit-coms, liquor ads repeated the mantra. Rock and roll summed it up concisely: even a bad love is better than no love at all.

  A sharp rap on the window jerked Anna from her brown study, and she cracked her knee against the steering wheel.

  “I thought I heard you pull up,” Curt said as he opened the car door. “Can’t you get out? If you push that little red button it’ll undo your seatbelt.” He took in the cramped interior of the Neon and added, “Sort of like unbuckling your roller skates.”

  Anna was glad to see him, so much so it alarmed her. Declaring it an official night off, she put aside the dirty particulars of double homicide and went with him into the house.

  Supper was spaghetti and red wine. A Fish Called Wanda was the evening’s entertainment. At ten thirty Peter and Zeddie vanished down the hall. Wrapped in pajamas, sweat-shirts, and candlelight, Curt and Anna retired to their sofa. Her head rested on the arm near the door, his at the opposite end. The cat cemented their thighs together where they crossed midway. Until past two in the morning they talked of nothing: nieces and nephews, cats and dogs, clothes, cars, college, alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. Curt told elephant jokes. Anna remembered knock-knock jokes. They invented How-many-university-professors-would-it-take? jokes. Anna fell asleep first and dreamed no dreams. When she got up just after dawn to go to the bathroom, she noticed Curt had blown out the candles. So soundly had she slept, she’d not felt him get off the couch.

  In the morning she was left alone in the house. Zeddie was giving an off-trail tour in Carlsbad Caverns; a trek of three or four hours crawling through rock-gutted worm-holes to an immense cavern boasting an enormous ghostly formation and called the Hall of the White Giant. Curt and Peter responded as was appropriate to such an unexpected treat. Anna declined in her most polite and inoffensive manner, yet the three cavers looked upon her with the condescending pity a beer drinker might expect at a wine-tasting convention.

  If the snub bruised her delicate sensibilities, they were soon salved. Nobody bothered to shower. In a few short minutes they would be burrowing through the dirt like so many grubs. All the hot water was Anna’s, and she used every drop. The drum of water for backup, she belted out half a dozen verses of “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine” and laughed because, despite the clichéd behavior, she had not gotten laid the night before. They had talked. And they had slept. A combination any woman worth her salt had to admit was better than sex three times out of five and a good deal harder to come by.

  In the sanctity of the shower stall, she entertained pleasantly impure thoughts. Curt was, for lack of a better word, such a dear, his smile so deliciously canine. Opportunities had been presented on silver platters, but he’d never made a pass. For an instant Anna wondered if she was losing her touch. She dismissed it. Her mother always told her and Molly that a woman needed only two physical attributes to be pretty: good face, nice legs. Great breasts, fine hair. Terrific hands, lush hips. Anna could still lay claim to two out of three.

  Contradicting her macha nature-girl image, Zeddie’s bath was stocked with enticing shampoos, scented soaps, creams, unguents, conditioners, and perfumes. Without suffering so much as a qualm of guilt, Anna partook of the sensual goodies. Lingering over her toilette, she dabbed on enough blush, brow pencil, and mascara that she could pass for unadorned while banishing ghastly.

  Painted and perfumed, she let herself into the administration building at half past nine. Not one to be caught out twice, Jewel blacked out her computer screen before Anna was halfway across the room.

  “You still here?” she said by way of greeting.

  “Still here,” Anna replied cheerfully, and plopped herself down in the chair at the end of the secretary’s desk.

  Jewel fidgeted, glanced pointedly at her computer, then drummed lacquered nails on the blotter. “I got things I gotta do,” she said when Anna refused to take a hint.

  “I was hoping you could help me,” Anna said.

  Jewel’s face twisted from the mouth out as if smart-ass retorts were trying to escape the carmine lips. “Whaddya want?”

  “I haven’t had any luck getting in touch with Sondra McCarty,” Anna told her.

  “I don’t have her phone number or nothing.”

  “I’ve got all that. She’s not answering. You said she flew out of here the day after she came out of Lechuguilla.”

  “Yeah?” Jewel was getting antsy. She sensed the net closing around her but hadn’t a clue as to what kind or why.

  “Did you see her?”

  “Whaddya think, I run a taxi service to the airport?”

  “You didn’t see her after the accident, didn’t talk to her on the phone, didn’t hand her a ticket, anything?”

  Anna took Jewel’s mute stare for a negative.

  “Why are you so sure she left?”

  Another glance at the blind screen, another at her nemesis, and Jewel apparently decided the only way to get rid of Anna was to answer. “Her name was on a list.” The satisfaction in her voice suggested that what was written was fact, a result of living in a world of secondhand information.

  “But you didn’t see her?”

  “Would ya quit?” Jewel snapped in exasperation.

  “Who put her name on the list?”

  “I did.”

  “All by yourself?” The words were out before Anna realized how patronizing they would sound. She was punished by a baleful glare from eyes so black the pupils were indistinguishable from the irises.

  “I typed it,” Jewel said tersely.

  “Who wrote it?”

  “Oscar gave it to me. Why don’t you go badger him?”

  Anna would probably get around to that, but for the moment she was perfectly happy badgering Jewel. “Did you—the park—make the plane reservations?”

  “We don’t make ’em for cavers.”

  Anna digested that. Becky—or whoever filled Becky’s loafers at Carlsbad’s airport this morning—would be no more likely to hand over passenger manifests to Jewel than to Anna. “So you only know who was scheduled to go down to the airport, not who went?”

  “Like I been telling you. Can I get back to work now?”

  “Can I see the list?”

  Petty triumph glowed in Jewel’s midnight stare. “Sorry. That’s personnel stuff. Nobody gets to mess with it.”

  Anna doubted that. Maybe this was one of those situations her grandmother had warned her about where more flies were caught with honey. Too late; the vinegar had already been served.

  “How is class going?” Anna asked.

  Jewel’s demeanor transformed. Sullenness was replaced with excitement. Tension went out of the taloned fingers on the desktop. “Good. I’ve got—” Suspicion clouded the briefly sunny disposition. “What class?”

  “Yesterday I noticed you were working on—what? Your master’s thesis? Too many footnotes for anything else. Looks like you’ve put in a lot of hours on it.”

  Jewel’s right hand skittered furtively toward the keyboard. A spider in crimson shoes, it seemed to move without her permission. “There’s nothing says I can’t educate myself.” Jewel was on the defensive. That was where Anna wanted her. Saying nothing, she let the silence weigh down. Jewel was using government time to do personal work. Maybe not a firing offense, but most certainly one that would get her a stern lecture and, worse, put her under Laymon’s careful eye. Her activities would be curtailed.

  “Maybe I still got that list somewhere,” Jewel said coldly.

  Anna was careful not to smile or show any sort of gloating. Her edge was tenuous. Jewel wasn’t the sort of woman to
be jerked around too often. A sheet of paper was smacked down at Anna’s elbow. “This is a terrific help,” she said as if Jewel had handed it over in the spirit of cooperation. “Can I copy it?”

  Jewel pointed toward the copier.

  Anna ran off a copy, folded it, and tucked it in her hip pocket. The original she brought back to Jewel’s desk. “Thanks a million.”

  “You’re welcome.” Jewel snatched the paper and crammed it in the out part of her in-out basket.

  “There’s one other little thing.”

  “Oh, Jeez . . .”

  “Brent Roxbury’s SF-171.”

  “We don’t use ’em no more.”

  “Brent would have. He’s worked here off and on for four years. He’d have had to fill one out to get his first position.” The SF-171 was an agonizingly detailed application form the Park Service had required for most of Anna’s career. Pages of constipated little boxes for the answering of complex questions.

  “You can’t look at that,” Jewel said. “It really is a personnel thing.”

  “What are you getting your master’s in?” Anna asked interestedly.

  “Oh, give it a rest,” Jewel growled. Then, because she couldn’t hide her pride, she said, “Abnormal psychology.”

  “Cool,” Anna said, and meant it.

  “I’ve got two kids. I got no time at home,” Jewel said. Then, “George doesn’t know.”

  “I won’t tell him,” Anna promised. “I wouldn’t have anyway. I just need a break on this Frieda thing. It’s making me crazy.”

  “So I noticed. We studied people like you second semester.”

  Anna laughed. “Will you look up Roxbury for me?”

  Jewel thought about it. Anna had called her own bluff and waited without much hope. “What the heck,” Jewel said after Anna had suffered a sufficient length of time. “It’s not like the guy’s not dead.”

  ARMED WITH BRENT’S SF-171, the list of cavers with whom Sondra had presumably flown out, and her AT&T credit card number, Anna settled down at Zeddie’s dining table for an afternoon of telephonic sleuthing. Midmorning on a weekday it took her thirty minutes before a real live human being answered in place of a machine. Stan Daggert, the long-bearded caver from Kentucky, worked the graveyard shift at a plant producing electrical cable. Anna dragged him out of a sound sleep and had to talk a minute till the fog cleared. Once he was oriented to time, place, and task, he was very clear. Sondra had not been with the group on Jewel’s list. She’d not ridden down the hill with them; she’d not flown with them. He remembered her, “a leggy looker.” He had not seen her when leaving Lechuguilla or at any point thereafter.