Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 13 - Hard Truth

by Hard Truth(lit)

  "Did you go to Miss Jarrod's camp that night?"

  "No."

  "Didn't take the girls out there?"

  "No. What are you getting at?"

  "Just asking," Anna said mildly.

  For a minute, maybe two, they sat in a surprisingly companionable silence. Surprising to Anna because she'd never known Proffit to be so still. Not simply unmoving, but internally still. When Anna was a girl there'd been a woman named Loretha, a handsome black woman who came twice a week with fresh eggs. Loretha had carried such deep still-ness within her that the dogs, who barked at every falling leaf and pass-ing fancy, never barked at her. She did not disturb the ether with inner fussiness.

  Robert Proffit had in no way reached the level of spiritual quiet of the egg lady but Anna sensed a lot of his internal histrionics were gone. Gone, too, was the exaggerated portrayal of them, the clutching of hair and gnashing of teeth.

  "You've come to a decision," she declared, having not the foggiest notion what that decision might be about.

  "I guess I have in a way." He tossed a pebble into the canyon below.

  "Want to let me in on it?"

  "I don't see why I should."

  "Me neither."

  "I'm not going back to New Canaan." Though there was a good deal about him Anna didn't trust-didn't like much-she didn't doubt that he did what he did for what he considered to be godly reasons. This soft-ened her suspicion not one whit. Reasons touted as godly were respon-sible for more deaths than a whole host of deadly diseases combined.

  "Why not?" Now that it had been established that neither of them thought he should confide in her, he seemed almost eager to do so.

  "I got my degree at Brigham Young. A master's in liturgical music. After that, I worked in a couple of temples. One in Salt Lake City and one in Provo. The hypocrisy sickened me. The people smoking, drinking, com-mitting adultery and fornication like it was going out of style and all the time keeping up this front that they're better-more godly-than the rest of the smokers, drinkers and adulterers. I wanted to go back to a time when we were close to God. When we lived as the Bible and the Book of Mormon told us to live. That's when I hooked up with Mr. Sheppard and his flock. They were living outside of St. George in a trailer park then.

  "At first it was like stepping back in time. I thought my prayers had been answered."

  Anna said nothing. Her views on the subject were probably too acerbic for even a disillusioned Christian. Besides that, she didn't much care about his spiritual journey except as it related to the three girls.

  "I guess things never were the way they'd been. Anyway it was pretty much the same in the Sheppard group-except for the smoking and drinking. At first there were more of us but most of the younger guys split. They wanted families and all."

  From this Anna surmised that Mr. Sheppard and a handful of the older men had first dibs on all the females, each of them taking multiple wives and the young men left to their own devices-or vices, as the case may be.

  "Then Mr. Johanson-one of the elders-inherited the ranch and the group moved here."

  'And you came with them," Anna said. "Why?"

  "Partly because I had no money and no place else to go, but mostly because I'd begun working with the kids, the young teens and preteens, girls for the most part, and I'd fallen in love for the first time in my life. Not like you think. You don't know any better," he added with unself-conscious condescension. "For the first time I knew what God wanted me to do, how I was to serve Him."

  'And just how was that?" Anna thought she'd kept every molecule of cynicism out of her voice but the look he shot her let her know she'd not been entirely successful.

  "I was to help them to see God's grace, to feel His love for them."

  Anna said nothing. Men helping girls-or boys for that matter-to feel God's love could easily morph into precisely the kind of behavior that had gotten the Catholic Church in such hot water. Proffit might swear his love was spiritual while he was busily expressing it in corporeal terms.

  'And I wanted to get them..." He stopped, maybe remembering with whom he spoke.

  "Get them away?" Anna finished for him. He didn't respond.

  "What happened to get you to abandon them now?" Anna asked.

  "I haven't abandoned them," Proffit said.

  "You told me you weren't returning to New Canaan."

  "No, I didn't. I said I wasn't going back."

  "You lost me there," Anna admitted.

  "I have to get on," Proffit said abruptly, as if realizing that he'd either tarried too long or shared too much.

  "What are you doing in Rocky? Camping?" Anna asked.

  "No."

  "Why the backpack?"

  "I don't have to answer you," Proffit said and scrambled to his feet. Openness was gone. Whatever had him on edge before had been remem-bered. He wanted to get away from her. Stooping, he dragged his pack toward him, readying himself to take its weight.

  The pack was leaking blood from its lower back corner. Against the gray-gold of the granite, the blood was a breathtakingly red, cartoon blood, but it never crossed Anna's mind for a second that it was anything else. Blood has a life energy that is hard to mimic with paints or dyes.

  Robert Proffit, the Jesus-loving servant God had called to look after His helpless girl children, saw the blood at the same moment she did. Their eyes rose from the spreading red stain and met. For a second- less-they looked into one another's souls, or so it seemed to Anna. In, on, beyond his dark hazel eyes with their thick feminine lashes, she could have sworn this bloody Proffit pleaded with her. What he saw in hers, she didn't know.

  The instant passed. Anna gathered her feet under her and began to rise as Proffit grabbed hold of the pack's shoulder straps and swung. The full weight of the pack caught her on the left shoulder. Before she could think, she was in midair, falling backward. In her field of vision was Prof-fit, his bloody pack clutched to his chest.

  Not wanting Robert Proffit to be the last thing she saw, Anna looked to the sky. It was that which was filling her vision when she struck the ground.

  fifteen

  The breath slammed out of her and the world dimmed. Into this dark fog, full of holes and noise and flecks of red, came the grind and crush of rocks moving. An avalanche. Anna felt no pain but pressure on her legs. The holes closed, fog grew solid and she saw nothing.

  Light returned before air. She was paralyzed, full of the unique terror only a lack of oxygen can cause and wondering if her lungs would ever work again. In scratchy sips she pulled in enough air to live. It primed the pump and she began breathing again. Air expanding her lungs sent a sheet of agony down her back. With the rapidity of a dream, where life-rimes unfold in the time it takes the second hand to make one insom-niac's trek around the dial, Anna knew Heath Jarrod, mind, body and soul. Every cell in her body knew the fear and frustration of immobility, the loss of one life with no hint or promise of another. Crippled and mean with self-pity, she saw herself driving away Paul, diving into the bottle wearing nothing but her own misery and staying down till finally even Molly and Piedmont would have nothing to do with her. She would have nothing to do with herself.

  That quickly, Anna was praying to a god whose image she'd recently been burning away with cynicism that her back wasn't broken, that she'd either walk out of the gorge or she would die there.

  Twenty feet above, severed from its body by a granite knife-edge, a head appeared. Robert Proffit.

  "Fucking will-o'-the-wisp," Anna whispered.

  "Oh Jesus. Oh God. Oh shit. Are you all right?" he called down.

  Anna blinked several times. She had the air to answer, she just didn't have the answer.

  The head was withdrawn.

  Anna waited for it to return. She listened for the sound of him scrab-bling and sliding down to where she lay. It was so still she could hear needles on the pines rubbing against one another in the sudden uncer-tain breezes. No sound of rescue, or even company, broke the backcountry
quiet. Insects, silenced by her rude arrival on their patch of turf, began to buzz and drone again.

  "Robert?" she called. The call wasn't nearly loud enough. The ache in her back kept her from taking in enough air. Putting pain aside, she filled her lungs and shouted. "Robert!" The name echoed, returning in a mutant form of itself.

  Proffit had gone. Gone for help? Or just gone? Had he intended to knock her off the ledge or had he been hoping to swing his pack onto his back and make a run for it? His blood-soaked pack, Anna remembered. He must have knocked her off intentionally. Better that than jail. Or the chair. In Colorado maybe they hung people who chopped up little girls and packed them into national parks without a permit.

  "Focus," Anna whispered. She forced her unraveling mind to reknit around a semblance of reality. "ABCs," she said. Airway, bleeding, circulation.

  Talking was breathing. Anna got an A. Circulation at least in the ves-sels leading to heart, lungs and brain was functional. She'd give herself a B- in circulation. Bleeding was a tough one. She didn't feel warm wetness anywhere but she'd not yet gotten herself together enough to sit up and take a look. If she could sit. She had to settle for an "Incomplete" in bleeding.

  Steeling herself to the task, she attempted to move. Her legs were par-alyzed. Nightmare became real. Panic shot through, so acute her body jerked. One shin cracked against a solid object and the pain, sharper and new, momentarily eclipsed the aching of her back.

  Not since the Marquis de Sade had anyone so welcomed pain. Pain was sensation, was life. The dead do not feel. Her legs weren't dead.

  Having metaphorically read the obituaries and not found her name in them, Anna took stock of her greater situation. Because of the nature of her fall, her back taking the brunt of the force, it was unwise to move any-more. If her spine had been compromised but the cord not yet damaged she could do herself irreparable harm by thrashing about inopportunely.

  All well and good but there were no EMTs to stabilize her neck and back, neatly package her and deliver her to the hospital for X rays. Hoping for the best, she gathered the remnants of her courage. With one great shove and a tornado of pain that ripped up her back and into her skull, she pushed herself into a sitting position.

  The news was both good and bad. A pad of dense manzanita bushes growing thick and low to the ground had broken her fall and saved her bones. But for the screaming ache of traumatized soft tissues, she was rel-atively unhurt. On the opposite side of her survival ledger was the fact that Robert Proffit didn't appear to be coming back anytime soon and she wasn't going anywhere for a while. Her legs were immobilized, not from a failure of nerve communication, but by rocks. The mini avalanche her fall instigated had brought three boulders, one half the size of a garbage can, down upon her. Luck, or the whim of the gods, had decreed that she not be crushed. The mercy ended there. The two lesser rocks acted as side supports to the greater, creating a slot through which her booted feet were thrust. She was as securely bound as a woman put in the stocks. Beneath her legs was a slab of granite, making digging her way free impossible unless, like the Count of Monte Cristo, she had nine years and a metal spoon at her disposal. Her radio, even should it be able to broadcast out of the narrow canyon, had been flung away when she fell and lay snuggled in the shrubbery a tantalizing five or six feet out of reach. Her water bottle was in her pack up on Picnic Rock.

  For a while she wriggled and struggled, scraped up both shins and worked up a sweat that went some little way toward melting away the vicious ache covering her back like a coat. Her efforts did nothing to dis-lodge the stone or free her feet and she was forced to face the hardest choice. She must school herself to patience and wait. Ray Bleeker was to meet her. He was half an hour late. There was nothing to do but to save her breath and strength so when he deigned to keep their appointment she could shout for help. With two people, one of whom could stand, gain purchase and fetch levers, she had no doubt the rock could be shifted. With care it could be moved in such a way her feet wouldn't be squashed in the process and she could walk out on her own. New to the park, the first female district ranger in Rocky, the thought of being the centerpiece of a carry-out was easily more frightening than lying pinned under a rock for a bit longer.

  And longer.

  And longer.

  An hour passed, then two. Bleeker never showed. Periodically her radio bleated to life with the usual business of the park. The first couple of times the nearness of dispatch and the voices of the rangers drove her to fish for the damn thing with the stunted twiggy branches of the manzanita. Then she tried catching it with the buckle of her belt. Failing that, she secured her shirt to her belt buckle and, using it as a net, attempted to capture and drag it. Tucked down in the foliage as it was, she never managed to move it more than a quarter of an inch and nearly lost her shirt in the process.

  Finally she gave up. Not from despair: the situation had come nowhere near to the place where despair waited. Not yet at any rate. She stopped because she'd begun working up a thirst and had no access to water. Intel-lectually she knew she could live about three days without water, espe-cially in the cool of the high country, but her body, having lived many years in deserts, knew thirst was one of the most uncomfortable ways of suffering deprivation. Thirst put starvation to shame when it came to the miseries of the flesh. One never heard of dissidents going on thirst strikes to call attention to their causes. Maybe it was because three days wasn't long enough to get the media interested. Or maybe it was because it was because it was just too miserable.

  As the sky clouded and the breezes grew sharp and fragrant, she lay still, conserving her energies and hoping to be rescued. She missed fight-ing with the boulder and coaxing the radio. At least it had been some-thing to do. It helped pass the time. Supine, bored, tired of the stress of the situation and ignoring the aching in her back, shoulders and neck, she kept falling into light dozes. The temptation to give into sleep was enor-mous, but the fear of being overlooked by Ray Bleeker when he arrived kept her prodding herself awake.

  By four-thirty the storms she'd watched forming from her perch on Picnic Rock reached Tourmaline Gorge and a cold rain began to fall. Anna had been expecting it and had dithered about the best use she might make of it, given that Bleeker seemed to have stood her up and might not come looking for her till she didn't show up at Fern Lake Cabin where she was to spend the night. She could either remove her shirt and spread it to catch the most rain possible in hopes she could save the water to wring out and drink, or she could shove the shirt under the small of her back to keep it dry so she wouldn't die of hypothermia should she end up spending the night trapped in the gorge.

  In the end she decided hypothermia was the more imminent danger. Her shorts she shoved down beneath the boulder that held her fast. The shirt was wadded up and smashed in on top of them. For the two hours it showered, she shivered, scraped water off of her exposed flesh and into her mouth and enjoyed a brief respite from wishing to be res-cued. Trapped, with her pants around her ankles, was not how she wanted to be found.

  Afternoon wore away into evening. Evening faded into night. Even in dry clothing she was cold. The manzanita that had very probably saved her life was making it a misery, every branch and leaf poking into her from neck to knees. To ward off the cold she moved as much as the rocks would let her, doing isometric exercises and sit-ups. Occasionally she drifted into fitful sleep filled with dreams of butchered girls stuffed into back-packs and orchestrated by the howling of nonexistent wolves.

  Three hours after dawn, when the sun finally reached down into Tour-maline Gorge, Anna was still alive. As it began to warm her she was even glad of this fact. Thirst returned. Bleeker still didn't come. The sun inched up toward noon. Thunderheads began building again. Twenty-four hours had passed. When she finally heard the sounds she had been listening for all this time, she was afraid to call out lest she be imagining them.

  Thirty seconds passed and the crunch of booted feet on a rocky trail continued. Still she d
idn't call out. The wearer of the boots could be Robert Proffit come to see if she was dead. Playing possum seemed the best course of action. Or inaction.

  But what if it wasn't Proffit? Suddenly overcome with terror that she'd waited too long and whoever it was would pass her by, she began shout-ing, "Down here! Help! Help. Down here. In the gorge. Help me!"

  The footsteps stopped.

  Anna's heart stopped.

  Again she yelled; the desperation and panic she had been assiduously not feeling since she had tumbled into this bizarre death trap gave her voice the strength and range of a seasoned opera singer. Her own racket covered any sounds from above as she shrieked.

  'Anna?"

  The sound cut through her homemade siren song. She focused on the face hovering over the rim of Picnic Rock. "Rita?"

  "I've been here awhile. I thought you'd gone nutso."

  "Sorry. Didn't see you. My mouth was open so wide my eyes were shut, I guess. Welcome," Anna added for lack of anything more intelli-gent to say.