Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 13 - Hard Truth

by Hard Truth(lit)

  Mindful their early release was only on sufferance, Beth and Alexis dutifully walked down the long hall with Anna and Lorraine, through the chapel, and out toward where the Crown Vie was parked.

  A ring of boys, ranging in age from seven to sixteen, had formed in the dirt yard. In another setting they would have been laughing and yelling as they pursued whatever game they were at. Here in New Canaan they muttered and snickered. Though this was probably due to the discipline of their pieced-together culture, it lent them an air of conspiracy and underhandedness.

  So intent were they on their game, they didn't hear the women and girls approaching. Two of the boys knelt. Anna glanced over their heads to see what all the suppressed excitement was about. Within the circle of knees and booted feet was a kitten, nine to twelve weeks by the look of it, but it might have been older. When an animal is half-starved, size is an unreliable indicator of age. The kitten was black, with white paws and a white ascot.

  The poor thing was terrified. Each time it tried to escape, to break through the line of boys, it was thrust back with sticks, kicks, thrown atones.

  Anna's blood pressure shot up thirty points. Her vision turned red at the edges. In the instant before she might have done something that would jet her sentenced to life in a box, Beth, the limpet, shot by, long skirts fly-ing, hair tumbling down. Shrieking like a demented banshee, the girl tore into the first boy she collided with, scratching and biting and kicking.

  Anna waded into the melee. Under the guise of controlling Beth, she managed to send three boys sprawling and bloody the nose of the leader, a boy bigger than she was but a coward all the same.

  The fracas was over almost before it started. Boys were sitting in the dirt stunned. Boys were crying. Three boys were bleeding, one from Anna's elbow in his face, two from the fierce onslaught of the diminutive Beth. Anna was not dissatisfied with the carnage. Little remained in the world that could trigger a Viking's berserker rage in her soul, but these boys had managed to stumble upon it.

  She picked up the kitten. It was sitting in the wreck of boys, head low, panting like a dog. By the time an opportunity to escape had been pre-sented, it was too exhausted or sick or weak to take advantage of it. The cat didn't fight but pushed its head down into the crook of Anna's arm to hide there.

  Cat taken care of, Anna turned to Beth. Whatever had moved the girl to rush to the defense of the kitten had not receded once the battle was won. Beth was no longer violent, she was hysterical. Tears poured down her face in staggering quantities, dripping from her jaw. Snot poured from her nose. Saliva frothed at the corners of her mouth. She clawed at her face and hair as if it were she and not the boys in need of punishment. By rights she should have been wailing, screaming, but the noises she made were shut behind clenched lips and sounded like the keening of whales. Alexis and Mrs. Sheppard held her between them. Mrs. Sheppard was alternately crooning and making sharp commands to snap out of it. Alexis had her arms around her friend but that was where the show of comfort ended. The taller girl's face was as pale as her hair and utterly blank. Even in sleep the human face has emotion, an inner working that lends anima-tion though the muscles are relaxed. The only faces Anna could remem-ber seeing that were as empty as that of Alexis were the death masks on the marble tombs of medieval fighting men. Taking Beth's hand, Anna set it gently on the kitten's back so she could feel its warm living fur. The strangled internal whoops slowed, then ceased. Beth opened her eyes.

  "See," Anna said. "You saved the kitty cat. See how he's all poked down in my arm? You saved him. He's okay. I bet he's even purring. Put your ear on him and see."

  Beth mopped some of the mess off of her face with the backs of her hands and carefully laid her ear on the cat's side.

  "Is he purring?" Anna asked.

  "He is," Beth said with surprise.

  "He's happy you saved him," Anna said. Cats not only purred when they were happy but often when they were hungry or scared, but Beth didn't need to know that.

  'Are you going to be okay?" Anna asked.

  Beth stopped petting the kitten and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. "Okay," she managed. The tears began again.

  "What are you going to name your kitty?" Mrs. Sheppard asked kindly, relieved that a key to the child's sanity had been recovered.

  "No," Beth cried. "I don't want it." She tore free of Alexis' embrace and ran for the house. Mrs. Sheppard ran after her.

  Alexis never moved. Her face remained a death mask. Anna reached toward her then hesitated, overtaken by the unsettling fancy that if she touched her the girl would shatter. Or her flesh would be as cold as the morgue.

  fourteen

  Lying on her back on a slab of sun-warmed granite, Anna watched the afternoon thunderheads build to the southeast. Customarily her thoughts would drift to fog and reknit black and powerful as the storms, but today there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell of that happening. Civ-ilization, so-called, had screwed around with her head so much an eight-mile hike and a few hours of Mother Nature's glamour weren't going to straighten it. Anna quit trying and let herself think about what she was going to think about even if every Zen master in the world gave her his secret mantra.

  The girls. The room where they were sent to pray. The pitter-patter of little demon hooves with little children's voices around Heath's trailer. Demons poking at Heath with sticks. Demonic boys poking at a kitten with sticks. Beth saving the cat. The cat's failure to save Beth. Beth running for the house. Alexis turned to a pillar of salt as sure as if she'd looked back at Sodom and Gomorrah.

  Beth. Alexis. Alexis and Beth. They'd left the camp, if the missing Proffit were to be believed, alone and under their own power. They'd reappeared near Heath's camp alone and under their own power. They both claimed complete amnesia. Both lied-maybe-about Candace. Both their voices were recognized by Heath as mocking and threatening.

  As counterintuitive as it was for Anna, who had seen the cuts and bruises and battered feet, the tears and the fear and the blood, she made herself consider that these girls were in a dark drama of their own making.

  Amnesia, total amnesia, amnesia not following severe trauma to the head and lasting for days, was exceedingly rare. For two people, both with skulls intact, to come down with it simultaneously was beyond the realm of the believable. Sheppard and his flock, as well as the psychotherapist who worked for the hospital, muttered about shock, denial, blocking, regression, repression but Anna didn't buy it. She'd called the only men-tal health professional she knew to be sane and not in deep denial about the limitations in her field's provable knowledge, her sister, Molly, an overpriced, extremely bright and ethical psychiatrist who practiced on Manhattan's Upper West Side. In over thirty years of practice, Molly had never seen a single case of long-term amnesia without severe head trauma. She mentioned that in the late eighteenth century it had been all the rage for young men of fashion to go into fugue states, vanish from London to turn up a week later in Paris or Bath having no recollection of the days in between. It was undoubtedly a handy epidemic but short-lived. Nobody much suffered from fugue states anymore.

  Molly had confirmed what Anna had suspected: the girls were lying. They remembered and, for their own reasons, had decided not to tell anyone. Lying was as valid a response to handling trauma as amnesia or hysterics but it wasn't nearly as socially acceptable. People believed if one was doing something consciously then one could stop doing it on command. Not always true. What Anna needed to know was why they were lying.

  Guilt and fear of consequences were common and powerful motiva-tors. Beth and Alexis were clearly feeling desperately guilty about some-thing. Leaving Candace? Guilty they lied about her staying with Proffit? Guilty about getting Proffit in trouble so they lied about lying?

  Proffit had run, that was three days ago, and no one had heard from him since. He'd said he'd gone to find Candace. Unless the girls had lied about that, too. Law enforcement in Colorado was keeping an eye out for him as a courtesy but, so far as an
yone could prove, he'd broken no laws.

  Had the three girls and Proffit planned the disappearance between them and something went terribly awry? Or was the guilt Beth and Alexis suffered not because they'd left Candace behind but because they had killed her themselves in a girlish rendition of Lord of the Flies? That would certainly account for the persistent bout of amnesia.

  And why had Beth been willing to take on every boy in town to rescue a kitten, then fled in horror when it was suggested she keep it herself?

  The only silver lining so far was that Anna had gotten a heck of a nice cat out of the deal. She'd named him Hector, then changed it to Hecuba when the vet informed her she'd sexed it incorrectly. When Piedmont came to Estes Park she would have some explaining to do. It was bad enough that she'd brought home Taco. But Taco, after all, was only a dog. Another cat could be viewed as serious competition.

  Anna looked at her watch. Ray was late. Much as she enjoyed lounging about in glorious solitude, the thunderheads were getting ever more seri-ous. This time of year outings in the Rockies were timed around the inevitable lightning. Today Raymond was to take Anna up to Gabletop Mountain, one of the less used climbing areas. The eastern face of it rose in a steep fractured cliff-face above Tourmaline, a jewel of a lake. The hike in was longer and rougher than that to Longs Peak and the climbing routes less varied and spectacular, so fewer people scaled it.

  Gabletop was at the head of steep-sided Tourmaline Gorge, which ter-minated at Odessa Lake. On her earlier trip to Fern, Anna had hiked down the gorge. Today she'd crossed at midpoint and hiked up along an unim-proved trail to a rendezvous point where a fallen slab of granite jutted out providing a glorious view of Gabletop in one direction and Odessa in the other. The day before, while they'd hiked to Frozen Lake, Rita had told her about the place. It was a favorite lunching spot-uncreatively dubbed "Picnic Rock"-of the backcountry rangers.

  Though grateful to have a job where one's first duties were to hike through beautiful country with well-informed park rangers, Anna had suggested for today's outing Ray meet her here. It made a shorter hike for him and she got to do at least the first half of this professional adven-ture alone.

  In the interest of looking more manager-like when Ray arrived, Anna pulled herself to a sitting position and dangled her feet over the edge of the slab. The flat chunk of granite was cantilevered over the canyon's rim a dozen feet. Below was a sheer drop of twenty feet or so to a scree and scrub slope. When heights were precipitous but not dangerous Anna loved them, loved the bird's-eye view, the rush of the nearness of empty space and the knowledge that a moment's insanity could hurl one into the winds. Perhaps it was the choice not taken that made these places so rich in life force.

  As the crunching of boots on the rocky trail let her know her date had arrived, an eagle appeared in the valley below her boot soles, closer than she'd ever seen one except in the heartbreaking confines of zoo aviaries.

  "My god," she whispered. It was a golden eagle, its white tail band spread and glittering in the hard noon light. The creature's wingspan was an easy six feet. Anna felt like Thumbelina; she could leave the earth and ride on its back to warm and wonderful lands.

  "Ray," she whispered, not daring to look away. "See my golden eagle?"

  Softly for a heavily booted man, he crept up beside her, then: "Oh my..." on a breath of air. He, too, was captivated by the singular beauty and the blessing of being witness to it. Though Anna expected it from fel-low rangers, all the same it pleased her. More people were joining the NFS because it was a good government job rather than because they loved the parks, an unexpected downside to recent pay increases.

  The eagle caught a thermal and corkscrewed out of the canyon in effortless circles. Rapt, Anna's eyes followed it till the man standing over her intruded into her view.

  It wasn't Raymond Bleeker.

  "Robert Proffit," she said, pretending the sight of him hadn't jolted her down to the marrow of her bones. He was standing too close. The pre-cipitous height she'd been so enjoying became suddenly precarious.

  "Step back, if you would," she said pleasantly. "It makes me nervous, vou standing so close to the edge. A good gust of wind and you'd be another search-and-rescue report I'd have to write up."

  Proffit backed up obediently. Not as far as Anna would have liked. Not enough she felt comfortable standing up. Once again she was hiking in civilian clothes, the better to observe her rangers interacting with the public. Once again she wasn't carrying her service weapon. She'd planned on hiking with Bleeker. Two semiautomatics seemed like overkill for an afternoon's jaunt in the woods. Now she wasn't all that sure.

  The sun was directly behind Proffit's head. Anna couldn't see his face against the glare.

  "We've been looking for you," she said conversationally.

  "I've been around." He turned from her, looking toward Gabletop Mountain. Light caught the sharp line of jaw and cheekbone. There was no meat on him and it looked as if there once had been. His was the worn thinness of obsession or stress, not the lean wiry sort of skinny Anna often saw on people in the backcountry.

  His eyes narrowed against the light. He stared up-canyon with an intensity that let Anna know he wanted to run away from her.

  Given she'd stacked the deck against herself in every way possible- perched over a sheer drop, blinded by the sun, seated and unarmed-she was comforted by the idea that he was afraid of her. Scared people could be extremely dangerous but usually not unless one strayed between them and their means of escape. "Got a minute to talk?" she asked before he could act on the impulse to run.

  With an obvious effort, he tore his eyes away from the mountain. "Yeah. I guess."

  "Where are you headed? Gabletop?"

  "Yeah. No, nowhere really."

  The other times she'd had an opportunity to observe Robert Proffit, he had been anguished, ardent, passionate, theatrical, charming and con-fident in his righteousness. This Robert Proffit was none of those things. He shuffled. He sniffed. He avoided eye contact.

  He acted guilty as hell.

  "The girls recanted," Anna said, to see if that was what was giving him the fidgets. "They told us they'd lied about Candace Watson staying behind with you."

  "Yeah. They told me they would. They're good kids. Just scared."

  "What are they scared of, Robert?"

  He looked down where she sat, extraneous movement and mental vagueness gone. "I don't know," he said earnestly. Real earnestly. Anna couldn't tell if he'd stopped acting guilty because she was on the wrong track and he felt safe with this line of conversation or because he was a born actor and the moment he trod the boards his stage fright vanished.

  Or maybe he was simply an earnest young man addressing a subject he cared deeply about.

  "Sit down," Anna said. "Take your pack off and rest a bit. I'm getting a crick in my neck looking up at you."

  He shed his pack. By the thunk as it landed, Anna guessed he carried a hefty load. Having freed his water bottle from one of the side pockets, he sat down next to her, feet dangling over open space. All things now being equal, Anna felt considerably more relaxed.

  Alone in the wilderness on the edge of a precipice wasn't the ideal place to interrogate a man suspected of abduction and murder, but a girl had to take what she could get. The appearance of the golden eagle and her assumption that the man behind her was Raymond Bleeker had given Proffit the perfect opportunity. Had he murder on his mind, he could have shoved her over in a trice and no one would ever have been the wiser. The fact that she still lived was a point in his favor, as far as she was concerned.

  "I thought you were going to arrest me," Proffit confessed.

  "Should I?"

  "No. But that doesn't mean much. Many are taken in His name."

  "You think this is a religious persecution?"

  "Not exactly. But when Beth and Alexis said they'd left Candace with me I knew I'd be in trouble."

  "So you ran?"

  "No. I didn't run. I'm goi
ng to find Candace."

  "Do you know where she is?"

  "No. I just... I just have to keep looking, that's all."

  "Is that what you're doing up here, looking for Candace?"

  "Mostly. I..."

  Anna waited for him to finish but he thought better of it and busied himself with his water bottle.

  "The night you left New Canaan you talked with the girls at that room they were sent to."

  "Yes."

  "Did they climb out the window, go anywhere with you?"

  "No. Why?"

  The question seemed genuine enough, but then everybody in this bizarre case seemed genuine and guilty by turns, with neither rhyme nor reason separating the two states.

  "Did you know Heath Jarrod was camped out on the main road?"

  "The lady in the wheelchair? Yeah. Beth wanted her close. She wouldn't eat till Mr. Sheppard okayed it."