Theoretically, hiring was color- and gender-blind but managers were evaluated on how many "minority" people they brought on board. Once Anna had confronted a personnel officer on this seeming dichotomy. The message was clear: There Were Ways. Last names. Voices on the phone. Accents. And if worse came to worst, word would filter down from higher up disclosing a coveted "quality" of a certain applicant.
Anna had no compunction whatsoever about cashing in on this fortuitous turn of events, she just didn't care for management. She didn't like to lead and she wasn't much of a follower. Fieldwork suited her. Till her body betrayed her, she'd go on doing it. It was the transience that was beginning to weigh heavily.
Frederick Stanton came to mind-not cloaked in a fantasy of home and hearth but surrounded by an ambiguity that brought with it a sense of malaise. Lately he'd pressed her to move to Chicago; make a geographical if not an emotional commitment. Anna was cynical enough to wonder if love and hope spawned his desire or if he too felt a little lost, in need of an anchor. They'd known each other long enough that heartthrobbing romance was no longer a factor. That was the problem; without the narcotic of being "in love" the pain of change was too great.
Anna opened her eyes and let thoughts of Frederick go. the top pane of the window behind the sofa framed a moon, dime-sized and distorted. In Georgia even the moonlight was warm.
Striving for physical if not spiritual ease, she wriggled out of her pajamas and dumped them on the floor. When a guest, she tried to sleep clothed lest she offend her host's delicate sensibilities, but it was absurd, like suits for swimming, panty hose under trousers, and underwear with dresses.
Rearranging her sleeping bag against the draft from the air conditioner, she contemplated life on the island. Though motorboats daily ferried visitors to and from St. Marys and cars traveled the inland lanes and residents came and went by plane, the island fostered a sense of separateness-a people different as the animals were different- altered by the unique demands of the environment.
Like mountaintops and desert strongholds, human beings sought out islands for a lot of reasons. Some washed ashore, cast up by the storms of their lives. Some were running, some hiding, some chasing a dream.
And, on Cumberland, some were committing murder.
Rather generous of them, Anna thought. It gave her something to do at night besides count sheep. An image of Tabby, widowed and scared in the other room, flashed through her mind trailing a comet's tail of guilt. She refused to grab on." I didn't kill the guy, for Chrissake," she whispered to the shadows lace and moonlight painted across her chest, and began ruminating on possible murderers.
Todd Belfore and Slattery Hammond were dead, one or both targeted for murder. Todd and Slattery had known each other at North Cascades and Tabby wouldn't-couldn't?say why.
Anna heard Tabby say Todd would leave her. Slattery flew drug interdiction, was suing Alice Utterback and wooing Lynette. Lynette thought Hammond loved her and wanted to marry her. Hammond had a wife. An Austrian had a ruined leg from a shotgun shell.
Schlessinger had a habit and an attitude and lied about hearing the shot. Mitch Hanson was a goldbrick and a double-dipper, roundly disliked by Schlessinger. According to Dijon, he had been inordinately cheerful, pottering around the crash site cracking jokes before the corpses were cold. A blond and a brunette were featured on Slattery's wall and three used tampons inhabited his freezer.
Separating the clues from the flotsam of human idiosyncrasy was a bitch. How, if at all, Hanson, Schlessinger, and the shotgun wound fit into the Beechcraft sabotage, Anna couldn't fathom.
She resurrected her dead pillow and settled into a new position.
Fragments of ideas continued to jump docilely over her mental fence: baby alligators hooked on bologna sandwiches, plastic bags in the outboards, volunteers with orphaned fawns, separated actuator rods, chipmunk pigiets. Still sleep eluded her. Giving it up as a lost cause, she threw back the sleeping bag and padded out through the kitchen, snatching up a dish towel to protect her bare behind from the splintered steps that led down from the apartment.
In her current role as incubator, Tabby kept the air conditioner on high and Anna welcomed the moist warmth of the night. With the heat came a twinge behind her left ear. She fill ered the diminishing lump. She'd forgotten to include that incident in her inventory of significant happenings. She wrote it off to brain damage and revised her mental list. An unknown assailant, hiding like a bogeyman in Hammond's bedroom closet, had bashed her over the head with the butt of a twelve-gauge shotgun.
List complete, Anna's mind became empty. The exquisite balm of the South wrapped around her. Though she loved the high deserts, felt renewed by the harsh vistas of the West, there was no denying the sultry pleasures of Georgia. Breathing deep and evenly, she closed her eyes to better let the night soothe her.
Through the music of frogs came the shattering crunch of shod feet on gravel. Peace was canceled. With the noise a sudden realization came to Anna: she was naked, or in local vernacular, buck nekkid. Night crawlers seldom separated art from pornography. All at once she felt vulnerable; a wrinkling white-skinned woman on a peeling white- painted step.
For the past quarter of an hour she'd sat without moving. If she continued as still, the odds were good she would remain undetected. Slowing her breaths, aware now of the myriad sounds of a body sustaining life, she froze.
Reacting to a seldom-used instinct, her bare skin was prickling.
Sensations were clear and sustained in their detail. Rough wood pressed into her buttocks with a mild ache, warning her not to sit too long, not to compromise mobility. The soles of her feet stuck damply to the step below, her own sweat providing traction should it be needed. A breath of air touched her left cheek, teasing the fine guard hairs.
Undoubtedly there was a time in man's evolution when these things combined to warn and prepare, to help survive. Years indoors, feet on concrete, had forced the intellect to try and compensate for the sensate and Anna found the alarms of her body to be a distraction. Fervently she wished she'd dressed. Even a T-shirt and panties would have helped.
The crunching stopped. In the thick silence she became aware that the song of the frogs had stopped as well. A minute ticked by, cataloguing the discomforts of a body in stasis. Reveling in her captive state, a mosquito whined bloodthirsty threats in her ear.
A frog peeped, then another. They'd gotten over their panic.
Anna had not. Without the crunch she couldn't locate the interloper. Perched naked as a jaybird on the top step, it was possible that she'd been seen and the prowler had fled in unseemly-and unflattering-haste.
The theory died as it was born: no racket of retreating steps.
Left behind was the disquieting knowledge that in the inky shadows on the drive someone stood watching or waiting or both.
A shriek of metal ripped the darkness. Anna's senses were stretched, a web of nerves. They caught the knife-edged noise in their silken strands and Anna twitched as if she'd been struck. The urge to leap up and bolt indoors quivered through her. She breathed shallowly, like a woman having contractions, till the terror passed.
All this transpired in a Jack Robinson minute and she found herself thinking of Einstein, wondering if there was an untapped internal correlation to his theory of relativity.
With the passage of knee-jerk panic, the source of the noise became clear. It was the familiar rasp of the passenger door on the pumper truck being forced open over a rusted wrinkle acquired in a past encounter with another vehicle. A soft thump followed; t he seat back being pulled forward, hitting the steering wheel.
Anna stared until her eyes watered. She'd parked the truck beneath a venerable magnolia. Light-reflecting waxy leaves kept the midnight beneath safe from the moon and her prying eyes.
Faint rustlings and bumpings painted a picture on the black screen of her vision. Someone was rummaging through the truck, stirring the rusted mess of tools behind the seat, rearranging water bottles a
nd insect repellent cans.
Dressed, Anna would have confronted the intruder and gotten at least an ID. Sans clothes she felt too vulnerable. She was annoyed to note the protective magic with which modern women imbued a layer of cotton. Surely, unencumbered by flapping fabric, one could fight harder, run faster, escape with more agility. Not to mention the possibility of distraction to one's opponent. Still, she didn't move.
Heavy and low, the sound of ripping rose through the darkness.
Seats being slashed. Nothing else in the aging vehicle was made of fabric.
Metal squawked again, announcing the end of the assault on the truck's interior. Anna watched the sharp edges of the shadows to see if the night visitor would expose himself. A moment of silence reigned, the crunch of gravel began, then faded in the direction opposite the mansion. After a moment it stopped and was replaced by the delicate crushing of leaves. Whoever it was had left the drive, keeping to the shadows. Within moments the faint sound of leaves underfoot was gone as well.
l'o be on the safe side, Anna waited another long minute before easing to her feet and stinking back indoors.
Armored in NoMex and armed with a flashlight, she emerged five minutes later and clattered down the wooden stairs. Attempts at stealth would have been fruitless given her footwear, but Anna wasn't interested in sneaking. Knife-wielding night creepers were best scared far away before any investigation was undertaken.
Following the selective eye of the flashlight, she traced the marauder's progress through the cab of the truck. The seat was again upright, the glove compartment gutted, its eclectic innards strewn across the floor. A motley collection of tools and litter had been raked from beneath the bench seat. Chaos being its usual state, the clutter behind the seat looked much as it always did.
On the back of the seat on the driver's side, approximately where a small woman's shoulder blades would rest, were two deep slashes, short and vertical, the way old medical texts illustrated the proper cut for sucking poison from a pit viper's bite. The neat slits struck Anna as a violent form of shorthand.
The content of the message was unclear but the blind malice made her scalp crawl. A twinge was frightened from the tender spot behind her ear. This was personal, though for the life of her Anna couldn't guess why.
Anna climbed the stairs once more, dawn was Bdrowning the stars over the Atlantic. She showered, dressed again, and made coffee to create the illusion she'd enjoyed a night's sleep. A report would have to be filed on the vandalism done to the truck's upholstery, but no one would care. It wasn't as if the slashes lowered the relic's trade-in value. By the light of day she would do a more comprehensive inventory, but she was sure nothing had been stolen. There wasn't anything of value in the truck to steal: no car phone, no radar detector, not even an AM radio.
There was an outside chance the vandalism was random. Even paradisiacal islands had their share of malcontents. Or the attack could have been politically motivated, aimed at fire policy, the National Park Service, or even the United States government in general. The aftershocks of Waco, Texas, the Oklahoma bombing, and assorted lesser calamities were being continually resuscitated by the hot breath of publicity-hungry groups. Mostly down-at-the-heel men "i with too many guns and too few brains who'd taken it upon themselves to tarnish the memory of the American militia by embracing the name and not the ideal.
Random vandalism appealed most strongly to Anna. Mindless, without purpose, it struck and was gone. Like lightning, it often did strike the same place twice, but one entertained the reassuring delusion that it would not. Organized political vandalism had its merits as well. The caricatured macho of feral militias was a villain Anna loved to hate. She'd been surprised a spate of movies and television shows hadn't sprung up around the concept. Hollywood had been in search of a serviceable evil since the end of the Cold War.
Restoring order to the toolbox and the disemboweled glove compartment, she turned these temptations over in her mind. In the end she had to abandon both. Plum Orchard was too isolated for violence of the random variety, particularly the sort that customarily fell to disgruntled teens. Political groups tended to leave a calling card-those that were literate, Anna in all prejudice felt obliged to add. That left her where she'd begun, with the uncomfortable knowledge that it was universal malice, malice toward fire crew in general or her in particular.
Near the gravel drive a portable water tank of rubber held up by metal piping was kept full. The tap ran slowly but steadily, and over time, would fill the man-made reservoir. As part of her morning's chores, Anna unrolled and spliced together two hundred feet of cloth hose and ran the line from the tank by the spigot to one of the two tanks situated on the open green area where helicopters could get access. Evaporation sucked up nearly a fifth of a tank every twelve hours. Topping them daily was one of the duties of the fire crews.
That done, she tested her patience and the muscles in her right shoulder pull-starting a Mark IV portable pump. When it was up and running, smashing the tranquillity of the morning and hardening the hose with moving water, she took shelter under an oak and mapped out a plan for the day.
Dijon would be with her again. He was up for pretty nearly anything that broke the monotony and was not yet old enough to worry about getting caught. As long as they covered the island at least once, Guy wouldn't much care how they spent their time. On an island eighteen miles long and three wide it wasn't as if they were going to wander off. Their job was mainly to be around just in case.
Both tanks were topped. Absently, she followed the hose back toward the pump. Sweat beaded on her upper lip and her shirt stuck to her back between her shoulder blades. It was 6:35 in the morning.
Parked behind the pumper truck was a battered orange Volkswagen bug, the chassis turned to burnt metal lace around fenders and door from the incursion of rust. The din of the Mark IV had covered the sound of its arrival and, lost in her thoughts, Anna had not seen it. Inattention made her nervous. Dreamers were easy marks. Muggers, rapists, pickpockets, could cut them out of a crowd. Purse snatchers made a living off of them. The frank delirium of a southern August carried away sharpness on zephyrs of scented air, softened reality with a brush of Spanish moss. The South was famous for vivid eccentricity. Anna could see why. Anger flared in the heat; reality became tenuous.
The Volkswagen belonged to Lynette. A cross dangled from the rearview mirror and the Virgin Mary rode in regal splendor on the narrow dash. Brochures of Cumberland Island and field guides to the Southeast were scattered over the back seat and the floor. A box of files filled the passenger side.
It was "Tuesday. Probably Lynette's lieu days were midweek.
Anna hoped so. It would be a relief to know there was someone to sit with Tabby. She regained the stairs and climbed to the apartment. The door was open but the screen closed and latched. From within came the murmur of prayers. A faint clicking accompanied them and at first Anna thought someone was telling the rosary through her fingers, but the sound was coming from a flat green insect the size of her thumbnail clinging to the screen.
"God can forgive anything." Lynette's low voice trickled out through the wire mesh. She spoke in a monotone, the intensity of her personality rather than changes in pitch adding color to her words.
"Not this he can't. Not me," Tabby returned. Her voice was choked with tears. Her voice was always choked with tears. Though Anna understood and even empathized, it was beginning to get on her nerves. Sliding down, fanny on the steps, back against the railing, she settled in for some unabashed eavesdropping. If she was caught she could pretend she simply didn't want to disturb their devotions.
What a prince, Anna thought of herself dryly. Tilting her head back against an upright, she closed her eyes the better to listen.
"That's kind of arrogant in a way," Lynette said gently." It's like saying, 'My sin is so magnificent not even God can forgive it."' "You don't understand," wailed the eternally drowned voice of the widow.
" Try me."
> Anna's ears pricked up, or felt as if they did, but the hoped-for revelation was not forthcoming. Tabby cried out ," can't!" and dissolved again.
Anna liked Tabby well enough but the woman had a bit of the invertebrate about her. It was hard to picture her under an airplane, her pregnant belly thrust up like a fecund shark fill, unscrewing the panel to the actuator arm. Nor could she picture her offing her husband.
What about offing Slattery?
Twisted soap opera plots gamboled through Anna's brain. The baby was Hammond's, Hammond was going to tell Todd. Tabby had been jilted by Hammond. Or jilted by Todd. Todd and Hammond were secret lovers. Everybody was related and separated at birth.
She laughed and pulled herself up from the warm wood. Prayer service was over. She wanted to make herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and get on with the day. Banging on the screen she yelled, "Somebody let me in."
Lynette unlocked the screen. Round without in any way being fat, her face was a soft oval, eyes wise and blue. In the 1930s she would have been considered a beauty. Lynette was in her late twenties and, if one saw with the eyes only, she looked it. Fine lines were forming around her mouth, and her forehead was creased from years of raising her eyebrows in concerned interest. To the other senses, Iynette registered as considerably younger. Innocence, trust, a wit that was sharp but never cutting, gave her a childlike quality that somehow missed being treacly.
Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 05 - Endangered Species Page 17
