by Nevada Barr
A shudder took her, violent and sudden the way muscles sometimes spasm just before sleep.
"Don't tell me you're shivering. I've got news for you; it ain't cold."
Anna turned back and smiled at Mack even more warmly than she had intended. It didn't go unnoticed. His blue eyes took on a glitter that makes a woman want to flirt or flee depending on the glitterer.
"To what do I owe this honor?" he asked and moved so he stood a little too close for comfort.
Quashing an urge to reclaim her invaded space, she cloaked herself in business. "With Bob out of commission and Linda and Cliff back in Key West I'm going to need help finishing up the investigation on the wrecks. I was hoping you'd dive and Daniel would tend. Do you guys have any free time?"
Mack wiped the sawdust from the length of wood he'd turned on the lathe, a table leg by the look of it. While his eyes were thus busy, Anna took the opportunity to step back a pace.
The maintenance man looked up, his gaze wandering into the sky above the far rampart. He narrowed his eyes and scratched at his grizzled beard, dislodging a minute blizzard of sawdust. "Lemme think."
It wasn't that hard a question. Anna wondered if he had a problem with the dive per se or if he was playing hard to get.
"Daniel and me got to work on generator five. Been sounding funny. How 'bout maybe four o'clock?"
Sunset wasn't till nine.
"Suits me," Anna said and, belatedly, "Thanks."
Impatience urged her to dive the wrecks without them, but good sense prevailed. Ignoring reports to be written and schedules still to be done, she decided to return to Lanny Wilcox's house and see if anything new presented itself. The decision to revisit the scene of last night's adventure was made more from homage to rationality than because she expected to find anything. After six hours of good sleep the events of the previous night--the ghost, the light in Lanny's window, the wet prints on the moat wall, even Mrs. Meyers--had taken on the ephemeral quality of a dream imperfectly remembered.
Wilcox's quarters weren't improved by daylight. Theresa's art still took Anna's breath away, as did the crowded living room, though for less exalted reasons. Ignoring the niggle and nudge of claustrophobia, she made room for herself on the sofa by pushing aside a stack of magazines and two ratty pillows and settled into the cluttered confines of Lanny's life. Minutes passed as she absorbed the room, waiting for anything added to make itself known, anything taken away to reveal its absence by a sign.
The ailing Supervisory Ranger's housekeeping habits were a petty thief's dream. Amid the choking plethora of goods, she doubted Lanny himself would be able to detect a minor disarrangement. After a time one small anomaly came to her. There were no photographs of Lanny's inamorata. No pictures of Theresa hung from the walls; no framed photos of her joined the clutter on shelves and tabletops. Lanny was there, grinning from mountaintops, monstrous-looking in snorkel and mask. Other women, never alone or particularly featured but with Lanny and friends, lived the half-life of memory in colored snapshots. Unless Theresa was phobic where cameras were concerned, her absence was peculiar.
Glad to have even this teensy weensy thread to follow--anything to stay occupied and out of her tomb of an office--Anna began searching through Wilcox's piles in search of Theresa's likeness. With sunlight and an achievable goal, Anna had better success than she'd had the night before. Two plastic bins, six by fourteen inches, the lids long gone, were stuffed full of snapshots, most of them still in the envelopes from the developers. Both bins had been shoved into the bottom niche of one of those units fashionable in the seventies, the kind made by stacking any number of wooden cubes. The number Lanny had chosen to live with was fifteen, piled into a pyramid shape with five of the units forming the base. The cubes housed everything from tattered record albums to beer bottles, each from a different country. In his fifties, Lanny retained the decorating instincts of a college boy.
Finding the photos was moderately satisfying. What Anna found intensely satisfying was discovering she probably wasn't the first person to seek them out since Lanny's unpremeditated departure--unless Lanny himself had pawed through them, surgically removing the images of the woman who had betrayed him; an explanation too common, too human, to dismiss out of hand. Anna refused to let the thought rob her of the mild buzz of discovery.
One of the flimsy envelopes had torn, and half a dozen pictures had fallen out. She'd not noticed them in the general mess because, shoved between couch and cubes, was an end table probably from the early fifties, when blond pseudo-cowboy style was popular. The loose pictures fanned out beneath the table, two pinned under a leg. The end table had been moved, the photo bins gone through, then the table put back.
Before leaping to the conclusion she preferred--that she had seen a light, someone had been in Wilcox's quarters, had poked about, the intruder's search culminating with the digital camera upstairs and, ergo, Anna was not nuts--she carefully inspected the pinned photographs, then the top of the table. The table was sufficiently dusty, had she been so inclined, she could have written her initials therein. In a way somebody had. Two prints, clearly, the heels of ungloved hands, marked the dust where the table had been picked up and moved. On the scattered pictures there was no dust at all. The table had been moved recently, the mess of pictures was newly spilled.
Anna pulled latex gloves from a pouch on her duty belt. She was a world away from snazzy modern lab equipment. The NPS hadn't the money to spare on expensive tests when, as far as she knew, no crime had been committed. Not even breaking and entering. She'd found Wilcox's door closed but latched. Who was to say Lanny'd not left it that way when he'd gone? Or Teddy had, on her mission of mercy cleaning the spoilables from the refrigerator. Still and all Anna didn't want to add her prints to the mix and, just for the hell of it, would return later with a kit to lift the palm prints.
The pictures were a disappointment. They were what one would expect to find in a ranger's quarters between the Gulf of Mexico and the Strait of Florida: boats, more boats, blue water, pale sands, people in swimsuits and, occasionally, people without swimsuits. Three of the envelopes were dedicated to the fort and were all but indistinguishable from those Anna had taken her first week to send home to Paul: arches disappearing within arches, the camera aimed down either the casemate's larger section where the cannon were once housed or the same perspective down the long line of man-sized arches that fronted them, the parade ground, the lighthouse: the usual.
Social pictures captured the Shaws, Daniel, Mack, Duncan and his wife and son. There was even a photograph of Mrs. Meyers.
Again what was interesting was what wasn't there. No photographs of Theresa. Four that Anna had separated out were of what she thought might be Theresa's backside. And a fine backside it was. Anna could well understand why a man, especially a man entering his fifties on an island with no single women in residence, might well choose to follow that backside with all the ardor with which the three wise men were reported to have followed the star.
Anna pocketed her find, fetched her kit from the office, and lifted the prints from the table. Besides the heels of the intruder's hands, she was lucky to get a good-sized partial from the person's right fore- and middle fingers--given he or she had lifted the table in a normal way. The prints would probably languish in a file proving nothing, but it was something to do.
When she finished, she still had a couple hours to kill before Mack and Danny would be free to lend a hand with the wreck dive. Rather than return to an office that, without Teddy Shaw on site, Anna had looked forward to as a place of glorious solitude but which turned out to be merely lonely in a creepy sort of way, she fired up the Reef Ranger and motored over to Loggerhead Key.
The endless expanse of blue water had the same calming effect as the mountains on a clear day. Being able to let her eyes stretch for a horizon without stumbling into walls, to see in every direction for miles, to shout without being heard, gave her a sense of reckless freedom. The cloying claustrophobia o
f Fort Jefferson's substantial ramparts and Lanny Wilcox's packrat's den was blown away on the hot wind. She steered the boat in lazy S patterns and belted out several of the cruder verses of "What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor."
Midday, mid season, Fort Jefferson's docks, harbor and beaches were teeming with campers, fishermen and tourists. The two ferries from the mainland, both enormous catamarans capable of dumping over two hundred visitors between them, filled the fort with bodies.
Loggerhead was refreshingly deserted. There was but one small dock for NPS use only, no camping, no toilets, no drinking water for the public. Neither of the ferries stopped there. People lucky enough to own their own boats occasionally brought a dinghy into shore or swam in, but there were none today.
At the landward end of the dock where a sand path started through the scrub to the lighthouse keepers' quarters and the old lighthouse, a strange garden had grown up. In the low dunes swelling to either side of the trail, passersby had planted bits of flotsam or dead marine animals they'd come across; things too wonderful not to pick up at the beach and too useless to take home.
Fishing nets, broken lobster traps, buoys in all sizes and colors, pieces of dead coral, skeletons of horseshoe crabs, sand dollars, bottles scrubbed clean of their labels, seashells, fishing lures and other oddments had been arranged in an ongoing work in progress. Nothing in this ten-by-twenty-foot sculpture garden appeared to have been tossed. Each piece had been placed with somebody's idiosyncratic idea of beauty.
The result fascinated Anna. Each time she visited Loggerhead Key she looked for new things. The garden made her feel good about her species, as if fed, watered and left to peaceful pursuits, mankind would tend toward making the world a better place. Today she stopped for a minute and rearranged a horseshoe crab and four sand dollars to make an ersatz turtle. Satisfied with her contribution to the ephemeral world of art, she walked to the house shared by the women charged with maintaining the lighthouse.
Lighthouse keepers were volunteers who came to Loggerhead for a month at a time. The post was so isolated and the duties so specialized and yet mostly undemanding that more than thirty days drove most people crazy. All there was to do on the tiny key was to keep the generator in good running order and the visitors from damaging anything. Besides the light and the light keepers' cottage, there was a house used by visiting research teams. At the moment it stood empty.
The cottage delighted Anna. As it came into view over a sand dune she stopped to admire the scene. The building was of stone, two stories, one small room stacked atop the other; a haven in which to weather storms. The house and the concept appealed to Anna. This afternoon the reassuring picture was completed by Donna and Patrice. Patrice was seated at a picnic table as gray and warped as driftwood, staring intently at the guts of a piece of machinery. Donna stood at her shoulder, pointing and talking, one hand on Patrice's shoulder.
What kept this scene of domestic bliss from being a cliche were the women themselves. When Neil Simon wrote The Odd Couple, he had no inkling of how very odd couples were to become in the near future. Donna was tall, thick of shoulder and narrow of hip with arms that she'd probably earned at her "other job" as a boiler-room engineer. Breasts and shoulder-length hair framing a distinctly craggy face denied the manly frame.
Patrice, who had retired from walking a beat for the Boston police department some years before, switching careers to teach kindergarten, was slightly less masculine-looking, being squat rather than tall, but she too had what looked to be signs of a vestigial X chromosome. Gossip rampant in the close and often closed circles of the National Park Service had thoroughly chewed over the lighthouse keepers. Anna leaned toward the theory that one or both women had undergone sex-change operations before which they were heterosexual and after which they discovered they were lesbians.
Since this was the seventh year Donna and Patrice had come to Loggerhead during the month of July, fort personnel and park regulars had grown accustomed to them. Because they did their job well and proved excellent company, they'd come to be accepted, their odd looks and mysterious origins merely one more wonder of this tiny world.
Anna enjoyed them immensely, particularly Donna, whose wit was so dry and subtle often Anna would only get the joke after she'd put to sea headed home and would find herself laughing all alone on her boat.
"Ranger Pigeon," Donna called in a voice tuned to overcome the noise of a boiler room. "What brings you to our island paradise?"
Anna joined them at the picnic table, was given a glass of sweet tea in return for which she was expected to tell them the news of the previous two days' happenings.
She began with the last dive she and Cliff had taken and ended with the tale of Bob Shaw's heroics. She hesitated to tell her ghost story. People periodically claimed to see ghosts at Fort Jefferson. Daniel, a four-square chunk of Americana with the tattoos to prove it, insisted he'd felt a spectral hand on his shoulder in the generator room. It wasn't that Anna believed her story would make the two women look at her askance; it was that Donna and Patrice were clever.
Clever and smart with senses of humor honed sharp as razors, probably from years of fending off prying questions and rude remarks. Of the staff at Fort Jefferson, these two struck Anna as the most capable of pulling off a complex hoax. Why on earth they would want her to believe either in ghosts or her own incipient insanity was beyond her.
Instead she asked: "Did either of you guys know Theresa Alvarez?" When dealing with minorities in the oh-so-politically-correct climate of government service, whether they were minorities because of race, infirmity or gender bending, Anna was hyperconscious of her words. She hoped "guys" would not cause offense.
Donna and Patrice were blessedly ignorant of this social gaffe.
"Oh, yes," Patrice said with an enthusiasm that clearly annoyed her partner.
"We didn't know her all that well," Donna said repressively. "She'd come over here now and again. Sometimes to visit, mostly to comb the beaches for things she used to make her picture boxes."
"She is a terrific artist," Patrice said.
Donna raised her eyebrows. "Especially in that tiny little thong bathing suit." Her voice was a seductive growl.
Patrice laughed and punched Donna in the arm, a slug that would have sent Anna ass over teakettle but didn't move Donna at all. "You!" Patrice said playfully. Then: "You've got to admit she showed off that thong to good advantage."
Donna put a beefy arm around Patrice's shoulders and told Anna: "Neither of us knew her in the biblical sense, but we were allowed to admire her from a safe distance."
"Safe from Theresa?" Patrice asked. "Theresa was gentle as a kitten."
"Safe from me, sweetheart."
They both laughed and Anna was glad to see accord restored.
"Tell me about her," Anna suggested. "From the thong upward."
Donna and Patrice were silent for a bit and Anna began to suspect the thong and regions there adjacent pretty much constituted their notice of Ms. Alvarez.
"She didn't talk much," Patrice said finally. "Kept to herself."
"Unless she got on her soapbox," Donna amended. "Then she'd run on till your eyes rolled back in your head."
Patrice nodded. "A liberal."
"Fire-breathing, heart-on-your-sleeve liberal. Major snooze."
"Except for the thong," Patrice said dreamily, hoping to get a rise out of Donna. Donna obliged with a boiler-room snort.
"Anything else?" Anna asked.
Patrice shook her head.
"We didn't see that much of her--" She shot Patrice a look that stopped the obvious rejoinder. "Theresa left not long after we got here."
"That did kind of surprise me," Patrice said. "Teddy'd told us she'd figured Theresa for using Lanny, but I got the feeling she loved the man."
"Using Lanny how?" Anna asked. Lanny Wilcox wasn't going to attract gold diggers on a GS-II's salary, and though there was no accounting for taste, Anna couldn't see a balding man in his fifties
with the housekeeping instincts of a frat boy as anybody's idea of a sex toy. "Was she broke enough forty thousand a year would seem like money?"
"Not money, I don't think." Patrice looked to Donna for corroboration.
"No. Teddy didn't make it sound like a money thing. Besides, Theresa had the looks to use a man for a whole lot more than forty thousand a year less taxes. Teddy kind of thought Theresa might be running from something, using Lanny and Fort Jefferson as a place to hide out."
"A lot of people who wash up on islands are running from something," Anna said.
Donna and Patrice exchanged a look that made Anna think she'd hit a nerve.
"Or running to something," Patrice said softly.
"Or running to something," Anna agreed.
"Ask Teddy," Donna suggested. "Teddy is from whence all information worth having around here flows."
Anna would do that as soon as the Shaws returned from the mainland.
"Why the sudden interest in Lanny's love life?" Donna asked.
"I've been seeing ghosts," Anna said and watched them carefully. Donna's face was impassive to the point of frozen, but Anna couldn't tell if she'd solidified her facial muscles to hide a guilty secret or to hide the fact that she thought Anna was an idiot.
Patrice seemed delighted. "Oh, man, I would kill to see a ghost. Even part of one: a spectral hand, a rattling chain. I wouldn't even mind being slimed. Tell us everything," she demanded, and propped her chin in her hands expectantly.
The juxtaposition of the girlish pose and the hairy forearms shook Anna's insides, but she didn't laugh; she liked these women too well.
She obliged them with the story of Great-Great-Aunt Raffia's fleeting visit to the casemate near the chapel. She'd meant to keep it bare bones and focus on their reactions, but Patrice was such a good audience and Anna so in need of women confidants with whom there was no one-to two-second delay from mouth to ear, she found herself relating every detail: the turn of the head, the upswept hair, the delicate long fingers pushing in otherworldly hairpins.
