Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 11 - Flashback

by Flashback(Lit)

  St. James Church was stuffy and, as churches seem to be between choir practice and Sunday services, preternaturally still; more than simply an absence of sound, a deepening of silence until one could almost believe it had become active through the alchemy of some unseen listening ear. Those who'd been washed in the blood of the Lamb would probably say it was the presence of God.

  To Anna it had more the feel of the yawning silence of a well inviting a dark fall that was as seductive as it was terrifying.

  Leading her by the hand, Paul took her down the side aisle. The sun was close to setting. From its place near the horizon beyond the far bank of the Mississippi River, the rays cut horizontally beneath the protective canopy of antebellum oaks. Light so saturated with color it collected on the polished wooden bench in puddles of ruby, emerald, topaz and cobalt poured through the stained-glass depiction of St. Francis holding a lamb.

  Paul ushered her into this rainbow-drenched pew, then seated himself in the pew in front of her. He twisted around and put his forearms on the seatback, his eyes level with hers. His blond hair, not so much going gray as fading at the temples, was died a rich auburn by a fold of St. Francis's robe, and he looked closer to thirty than fifty. His eyes, customarily a blue that Anna found varied in hue as much as the sky, depending on his internal weather, showed violet in the strange light.

  Maybe because she'd been alone for so many years, maybe because she'd chosen to be blind to the signs, Anna hadn't known he'd brought her to St. James to propose. His divorce, not a particularly pleasant exercise in emotional law, was scarcely two weeks old. Anna thought she had time.

  From his shirt pocket he removed the clich‚d black velvet box. Anna blinked in the manner of an iguana on speed. She was a trained law-enforcement officer. How could she have missed a clue the size of a two-carat diamond ring box in a man's breast pocket?

  It was two carats Anna asked. She couldn't help herself. It was the biggest diamond she'd ever seen outside a jewelry-store window. Light, green from the grass under the saint's feet, caught in the facets till it glowed like kryptonite. Anna felt her strength being drained away.

  Paul held it out to her, but she could not raise her hands from where they rested, palms up on her thighs like fainting white spiders.

  "You with me sweetheart?"

  Sweetheart. She'd grown to love the endearments he was so comfortable with. Darling. Honey. She'd not yet been able to say them back, but she planned to give it a shot real soon. Zach had never called her sweet names. He'd called her "Pigeon," and she had thought she loved it.

  Anna had not wanted Zach there in the light with her and Paul and fear and hope, and she'd shaken her head to rid her mind of her first husband's face.

  "You're not with me?" Paul asked.

  "No. It's just that... I'm with you." She tried to smile and found it was a whole lot easier than she thought it would be. There was happiness nearby. Anna could feel it rising in place of the listening silence.

  Paul looked at her closely, answering her smile with the slow southern warmth that had first warmed her loins and then come to warm her heart. "Good. I brought you to this church, my church, the house of my God, because I know you're not exactly on a first-name basis with the Almighty. Maybe you don't always think he-"

  "She."

  "-she exists." He reached out, stroked her cheek with such gentleness she felt tears prick at her eyes and confuse her mind. "I brought you here to ask you to marry me because I want you to know my belief is enough. God comes or doesn't, is or isn't, manifests or vanishes according to forces I cannot begin to understand. I have chosen this," and though he didn't gesture at the church, Anna felt as if he had. "What you choose is for you. I will never push or pry or expect. Freedom of religion. An American marriage." Again he smiled. Again the kryptonite flashed. Anna felt a new sort of joy bubbling up around her. From somewhere in the dark of her mind she heard Zach whisper. "Pigeon, you're my person..." and she found an inner voice responding to the old litany: "No, you're my..." Again she shook her head to rattle out the vision, and she wondered when Zach had changed from an angel to a ghost.

  "No. No. Don't say no," Paul was murmuring and reaching out to take her face between his hands. Dislodged, the diamond in its box fell into Anna's open palm. A sign.

  "A good catch," she argued aloud.

  "I am," Paul promised. "I will be."

  "I'm sure you would be," Anna said pulling herself out of the jewel-lit church and back into the stony gloom of her office with its firing slit for a window. Born of the flashback-not the first she had of Paul's offer of marriage-a juxtaposition of joy and haunting filled her lungs as it had in St. James Church. She blew it out on a gust of air.

  "I'm about to lock up," Teddy called back. "Are you going to be awhile?"

  "No. I'm done," Anna replied, glad to have the impetus to move. The message about the water-system meeting she left on the desk. The note from Paul she carried with her. When she got back to her quarters she would tuck it in a painted box Molly had brought her from her trip to Russia when Anna was still in college and her sister was already a rising star in the field of psychiatry. The box was too full to close, but though she felt mildly absurd because of it, Anna couldn't bring herself to throw the notes away.

  "Got everything?" Teddy asked, sounding like a kindergarten teacher asking a five-year-old if she went to the bathroom before letting her on the bus for a field trip.

  Anna held up her net bag as proof she was allowed to go, and slipped out into the stark sun and shade of the parade ground. A brick walk, not original to the fort but added by the National Park Service, circumnavigated the inner court next to the casemates.

  Anna's temporary quarters were directly across from the sally port, so one direction was no shorter than the other. The most direct route was across, but the grass was Serengeti brown, the air still and bright and seeming to hold the glare as well as the heat of the day. She turned south, taking the shaded side.

  Lanny Wilcox had left or, if Daniel was correct, been snatched away from Fort Jefferson hurriedly. Nothing of his had gone with him but for a suitcase of clothes. As a consequence-housing in short supply in a place so small and so removed-Anna had arrived having no appropriate place to perch. After much discussion (including that of making her roommates with Duncan, the historian and interpreter, his wife and their seven-year-old son-an arrangement that had everyone concerned up in arms) the powers that be had grudgingly allowed her to live in the superintendent's quarters. "Superintendent's quarters" was something of a misnomer. In reality they served as VIP guest quarters. Mostly they sat empty, ever clean, ever ready, on the off chance some senator or congressman should call and want a place for the weekend. The quarters were given to Anna with the caveat that if somebody important were to want them she'd be bumped out to share space with the seven-year-old in a bed shaped like a racecar.

  Since that had yet to happen, Anna was pleased enough with her living arrangements. In the second tier, the superintendent's quarters took up two of the old casemates. Like the office, inside it was square, modern and white. To either side of a comfortable living-room-cum-kitchen were two large bedrooms, each with two sets of bunk beds and a small bath.

  What elevated it from adequate to grand was the "porch." The prefabricated box that formed the living space took less than half the width of the fort's second deck. The other half was original, with broad, high openings framing views of the Gulf, the lighthouse on Loggerhead Key and every sunset.

  Only two picnic tables sat between Anna's front door and an uninterrupted view to the end of the world.

  "I'm home," she called as she opened the door to her apartment and banged her snorkel and fins past the screen. Theoretically she was supposed to confine herself to the bunkroom on the left, but she'd opened the door to its mirror image on the other side of the kitchen to make the place larger and more interesting. It had yet to get her forgiven for denying access to the outdoors.

  "I'm home. It
's me. Come out," she called hopefully. Just as she was beginning to believe he'd reconsidered her reprieve and decided to extend her punishment, Piedmont came trotting out of the forbidden suite, his yellow-ringed tail held high, the end curved just enough to be stylish.

  An amber-eyed yellow tiger, found treed by a Texas flash flood, Piedmont probably hadn't a drop of Siamese blood in his veins, but he had always been extraordinarily vocal. As he trotted over to Anna's feet he sounded so much like a fussy old man carping about his day that she laughed and picked him up to rub all the right places under his chin.

  She'd wondered whether it was a kindness to drag him to the middle of the ocean but, once the trauma of cat travel was over, she'd congratulated herself every day on the wisdom of her decision. With a cat in it, a home was never empty. Echoes, like mice, were frightened from the corners, and loneliness, though still possible, had blunter teeth.

  Mutual admiration firmly established, Anna carried the cat over to the sofa. The living-room-kitchen area was rectangular, with stove, refrigerator and sink along the wall overlooking the parade ground. The "living room" was a chair, couch and coffee table arranged before a huge picture window onto the shaded brick of the casemate and the ragged-edged brick "window" with a view of Loggerhead. The furniture was a cut above standard issue-this was, after all, the Superintendent's quarters-made of light-colored wood with white canvas cushions. On the low coffee table was Anna's promised loot: letters from home and the much-discussed box from her sister, Molly.

  Unable to enjoy anything till sweat, salt and sand had been rinsed off, Anna showered, slipped on a short rayon dress-a trick she'd learned living through Mississippi summers-and sat on the sofa with Piedmont at one elbow and a glass of iced tea on the end table at the other.

  Unopened boxes. Packages that came through the mail. Parcels wrapped in brown paper. She'd always loved them. For a few seconds she just sat enjoying the anticipation. Piedmont meowed and butted her in the ribs, then walked prickly-pawed across her lap, slinking his fat tail beneath her chin.

  "You think there's catnip treats in there for you?" she asked, and he meowed again. "Okay. We open it." From long-standing love, she and Piedmont pretended to understand one another's language. After so many years together, maybe they did.

  Molly was a belt-and-suspenders sort of woman and had bound the package round with fiber strapping tape as if she shipped hazardous gas over rough terrain. Anna had to cut into the package with a carving knife. When she got it open there was no salt-baked smell of bagels or Styrofoam peanuts heralding fragile toys. In a thick nest of folded newspaper were two bundles of letters tied up with string, and a handful of black and white pictures sealed in a sandwich baggie.

  The letters looked familiar. They were addressed in a flowing and faded hand to Peggy Broderick, Warwick, Massachusetts. Anna and Molly's grandmother had been one of eight children, six of them girls. The eldest, Anna remembered vaguely, was named Molly. She had raised their grandmother, Peggy, one of the younger children, after their mother had died. "Unknown causes" was written in the family Bible. Having borne eight kids, Anna guessed she'd just worn out.

  The letters and the pictures were in a cedar chest in the attic during the years Molly and Anna were growing up. As the eldest, Molly had inherited this scrap of family history along with the old Bible. They'd probably been moldering in a storage unit in the basement of her West End Avenue apartment building ever since. The old chest, originally a hope chest for one of the girls, had been filled with letters from a time when keeping correspondence was deemed important. These letters must be a small part of that collection.

  A crisp, buff-colored piece of notepaper embossed with the initials M.P, MD rested on top. Stationery was a weakness of Molly's. Even missives as unprepossessing as "don't forget to take out the garbage" were often scrawled on paper so rich and fine Anna could almost smell the sweat of Egyptians laboring in the papyrus.

  She took the note out and read it aloud to the cat, who'd taken the split-second opportunity as she unfolded it to leap into the open box.

  Dear Anna, On hearing you were bored and restless, Frederick reminded me how dearly you love corpses, murder and mayhem of all kinds. I'm not sure this will fill the bill but, lacking in blood and edged weapons, it's the best I could do short of coming down there and killing somebody for your amusement. The letters are to our great-great-grandmother, Peggy, from her sister, Raffia, who was married to a captain in the Union Army. For three years he was stationed on that unprepossessing sand spit upon which you've decided to maroon yourself.

  In hopes this will pass the time and keep you out of trouble-

  Love, Molly

  "Hah," Anna said. "Trouble would have to swim too far to get to me. Out you go Piedmont."

  Not willing to submit to being lifted from the box like a common pest, the cat leapt out. Having landed neatly on the coffee table, he licked a paw to indicate his stunning indifference to the box and its contents.

  Anna took out the bundles and, for reasons she wasn't sure of, sniffed them. Maybe there was the faintest scent of cedar or lavender. Because they'd been written when women wore long dresses and carried parasols, Anna's imagination might have created a memory of perfume that had evaporated a hundred years before.

  Each had the return address:

  Mrs. Joseph Coleman Wife of Captain Coleman U.S. Army Fort Jefferson

  Anna wondered if Mrs. Coleman's address could have been that simple or if she trusted Peggy to know where to write her. Anna had never had much interest in family history, in who had married whom and what year the first had sailed for America.

  Letters, handwritten letters, were different. More real because of the immediacy of connection to the hand that held the pen and, so, the mind that directed the hand.

  The string binding the bundle was new and undeserving of the care advanced to relies. Molly, in her precise academic way, had arranged the letters, probably by date, oldest last, unless some more abstruse and recondite pattern had seduced her by its mere complexity.

  Anna untied the string and draped it over Piedmont's head. The cat continued to wash as if she, the box and the string did not exist.

  Having removed the thin pages from the first envelope and unfolded them with care, she began to read.

  Dear Peggy, Fort Jefferson is the crudest of places...

  2

  Fort Jefferson is the crudest of places. Poor Tilly. I really couldn't blame her-perhaps I should say I could not blame her fairly because, Lord knows, the little beast was getting to be as grating to my nerves as the awful crying she complained of.

  "Oh I do wish he'd pass out or something. It'll ruin everything." She said that for the sixth time while bent over my dressing table, dousing herself with face powder that comes dear here in the middle of salty nowhere. Not that I wear it, Peggy, lest you were thinking I had become a fallen woman at the late great age of thirty-seven. No, no such wildness. Not that it would avail me anything on this sand and brick island. Here, thanks to summer storms and high seas keeping the ships from the dock, I shall be glad if I still have my teeth when I turn thirty-eight and don't lose them to scurvy. In spite of heat, dirt and the rest of it she grows more beautiful every day. I couldn't bear it if she lost even a single tooth. Not to mention what Molly would do to me. When she sent Tilly to live with us I'm sure she had a far more glamorous life in mind than that which Fort Jefferson offers. It's no place for a sixteen-year-old girl regardless of how "hoydenish" she was becoming in Warwick.

  Just as I was choosing to be kind to our little sister despite her wastrel ways with my face powder, another awful wail came in with the wind. It was as if it were a live thing, one of the ghosts Molly sees and tries to pray back into hell. The window curtains bellied out, the lamps were set to dancing and the most inhuman sound crawled up our backs like dead men's fingers.

  "Raffia, can't you get Joseph to do something? Knock him on the head or something? Just till the show's over?" (We were to p
erform "'Tis True I Have Flirted," both playing very young girls for comic effect.)

  With that compassionate plea, Tilly threw down the powder puff, scattering dust everywhere. I could hear the precious particles hitting the lamp chimney and burning, a whispery crinkle at the edges of my mind. Luanne, the woman that does for us-you remember me mentioning her, a Negro who belonged to Mrs. Dicks, the lighthouse keeper's wife-will be looking at me with dog's eyes when she has to clean it up. Because she was born a slave, Luanne never learned to read the Bible, but she is as good at making me feel guilty as Sister Mary Francis used to be.

  "You're a baby," I told her. "And all of us have spoiled you rotten. Joseph can't just give an order like that. Who knows what the man did? If he was caught drinking on sentry duty he could be shot." I have been an army wife for twenty years. Four of those we were at war. Yet I've never served at a place where corporal punishment is so swift and brutal as here. Joseph tells me it's a necessary outgrowth of living at a prison camp. Even here I'd never heard crying of the like gusting into our rooms. It had that anguished animal sound of a wild thing dying in a trap.