Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 11 - Flashback

by Flashback(Lit)

  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 of 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 clich‚ 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 foursquare 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 tome 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 thing 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.

  "Doesn't sound like Theresa Alvarez," Donna said when she'd done, hearkening back to the non sequitur that she believed had launched this ghost story. "Theresa was dark and, as Patrice has so observantly pointed out, not much given to clothes that covered her from neck to ankles."

  "No. Sorry," Anna said. "I never thought it was Lanny's girlfriend. Talking about Theresa just put me in mind of it because she disappeared. Ghostlike. Poof?"

  The segue was spotty at best but the lighthouse keepers chose to accept it without question. Anna didn't know what gender the two had been born, but there was no doubt in her mind that they were girls now. It was good to be one of them.

  "Do you think she was 'disappeared' against her will?" A funny edge came into Patrice's voice that bothered Anna till she remembered the woman was a retired law-enforcement officer.

  "You think old fire horses are bad," Donna said as if reading her mind. "They've got nothing on retired cops."

  Patrice was not to be deterred. "Do you suspect felonious play? We heard she'd run off, presumably with a man younger, prettier and richer than Lanny."

  Hearing her vague suppositions laid out in words, Anna backed away from the idea. It sounded melodramatic, like a bored ranger making something out of nothing. Or a woman of a certain age having mid-life delusions.

  "Just poking around," she said. "Nothing really. What I came over here for-besides to waste your time and drink up your tea-was to see if either of you recognized this boat. Here's what's left of it." She took a printout of an underwater photo of the bottle-green go-fast boat. It was taken before the second explosion, when the bow was still recognizable as such.

  "Looks like a Scarab, maybe," Donna said. Anna took note of the fact that the woman knew her boats.

  "It is."

  "What's that color? Looks almost black in the picture."

  "Metallic sparkly dark green."

  "Where's the boat out of?" Patrice asked.

  "I don't know yet. We're working on it."

  "We see a lot of boats come through," Donna said.

  "We'll keep an eye out," Patrice said. "What am I talking about? The boat's on the bottom. It's history. I'll see what I got."

  "The Dick Tracy File," Donna explained when Anna looked confused. "Patrice videos anything the least bit odd. In case..." She laughed.

  Patrice didn't.

  "Not just odd," she defended herself. "Though of course odd is particularly interesting. Just a photographic record of comings and goings." For an instant she looked sheepish.

  Donna patted her with a big callused hand, grease from working on the generator ingrained under her round, clipped fingernails. "It's good you keep it, Patrice. It's come in handy. Because of Patrice the Key West cops-"

  "Key Stone Cops," Patrice interjected.

  "Your opinion. The Key West police and the coast guard were able to track down a twenty-nine-year-old felon who'd run off with his boss's fishing yacht."

  "And his boss's fourteen-year-old daughter."

  "She went willingly."

  "It was her idea, but that doesn't change anything," Patrice said.

  "Nope. He should have been keelhauled."

  If the current theory about the lighthouse keepers was correct, neither of them had ever been little girls. Perhaps the undertone of anger Anna heard had nothing to do with chromosomes and everything to do with humanity.

  Because she had time to kill and because she was enjoying herself and because her position as Supervisory Ranger in the Dry Tortugas was temporary, Anna decided to indulge in a little gossip-real gossip, not police work disguised-good old-fashioned dishing the dirt with the rest of the girls.

  "What do you guys know about Mack?" she asked. "He strikes me as a man with a past."

  Donna straddled the bench on the far side of the picnic table and rubbed her jaw. The way she pushed upward on her cheek made Anna wonder if it was a habit left over from years of checking for five o'clock shadow.

  "He's an odd duck, that's for sure. He loves to talk, but only about himself."

  "He's quite manly in that," Patrice said, and the three of them enjoyed an uncensored laugh.

  "I noticed his back and legs are scarred. He ever mention how that came about?"

  "I noticed those too, right off," Patrice said.

  "She asked him about it right off, too," Donna said.

  "I asked nice," Patrice said.

  Donna mimicked her partner, batting her eyes like a femme fatale, which clearly tickled Patrice: "Hello, Mack, isn't it a nice day? By the by, how the hell did you get all cut up like that?"

  "I did not," Patrice laughed.

  "Did he tell you?" Anna asked.

  "He told us a story," Patrice said. "Something about falling off an all-terrain vehicle and being dragged across gravel by a pant leg. A load of hooey."

  "Child abuse, you think?"

  "That's my guess," Patrice said. "If we're right, it's a wonder he didn't grow up to be another Jeffrey Dahmer. It had to've been brutal. I don't blame him for making up a better story."

  Anna didn't either. "What does he talk about, then, if the past is out of the picture?"

  "Oh it's not out," Donna said. "It's the picture that's a wee bit different than you'd expect after seeing the scars."

  "Mack's got a lot of
stories about how his folks were these rich aristocratic types. According to him he had his own horse, nannies and the trimmings," Patrice said.

  "And he's a lowly government employee now because some evil relative squandered it all away," Anna finished. The fantasy was fairly common among dissatisfied men who thought they deserved better.

  "Something like that," Patrice said. "He gets vague about it. Maybe that part of the story's not written yet."