by Nevada Barr
ONE
So, how do you feel?”
Anna stared at the doctor. He wasn’t a real doctor; he was a psychologist with a Ph.D. out of Boulder, Colorado, who liked very much to be called Doctor James. Vincent James was not-so-affectionately called Vinny-the-shrink by the rangers at Rocky Mountain National Park. Whenever the brass decided rangers needed to be counseled they were sent down the hill to his shiny little office on the mall. Vinny had decorated his lair in Early Intimidation. The walls were slate gray, the furniture black leather and chrome. An arrangement of dried and very dead grasses in russet and umber was his nod to the real world, the non-Vinny world.
“I feel good,” Anna said, attempting to look comfortable in a sling of shiny patent leather. She drummed her fingertips on the silvery armrests, hoping they’d leave prints. She didn’t doubt that he leapt up to polish them clean before the door closed on departing clients’ butts. Or maybe he carefully lifted the prints with tape and kept them on file.
Vinny smiled slightly and waited. Anna smiled back and waited. Anna liked to wait. If one waited long enough and quietly enough, all manner of woodland creatures might creep out of the underbrush. In Dr. James’s case, perhaps they crept out from under rocks.
The psychologist sighed audibly and smiled a bigger smile this time, the one mothers reserve for tiresome children who insist on playing games with their betters.
“How do you feel about the incident at Isle Royale?” he asked.
Feeling like the tiresome child, Anna purposely misunderstood him. “Not bad. The ankle twinges when I step on it wrong and is stiff in the mornings. My shoulder is as good as new, though. Got to find the silver lining.”
He sighed again, less ostentatiously this time but still audibly. A shrink should know better than to exhibit obvious manipulation.
“That’s a bad habit,” Anna said. “That sighing thing.”
Anger was pressing up under her sternum, a boil of heat she’d carried since returning from Windigo Harbor on Isle Royale in Lake Michigan that February. The balance had gone out of her life, the yin and yang of good and evil, light and dark, peace and pain. What she needed was clean air and warmth and Paul, quiet so deep birdsong could only enhance it, miles free of the millings and mewlings of humanity. She didn’t need a shrink with a sighing problem and ergonomically hostile furniture.
“You seem to be carrying a lot of anger,” Vinny said in a rare moment of insight.
“Bingo,” she said.
Again he waited.
She didn’t elaborate.
Vinny might have been an idiot, but he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t play the waiting game long this time. “You killed a man,” he said. “Up close and personal; killed him with your bare hands.”
“No,” Anna said. “I wore gloves.”
The psychologist’s chest swelled with another sigh but he caught himself and let it out soundlessly through his nose. Leaning back in his chair, a comfortable chair, Anna noted, he took off his wire-rimmed glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He must have seen the gesture in old movies back when psychiatry was new and the public believed in hypnotism and Freud and the dangers of early potty training.
The boil of heat beneath her breastbone was growing. If it burst—if she let it burst—she would spill her guts to this man and she didn’t want to go down that road with anyone but Paul. Since Isle Royale she found herself unable to trust anyone but Paul, and that included herself. Most of all herself. Anna wasn’t sure if she was a good person. Worse, she wasn’t sure if she cared.
“I’ll talk about it with my priest,” she said.
Dr. James rocked forward in his lovely padded office chair and shifted the papers on his desk. He used the tip of his forefinger, as if merely touching the written dirt of others’ lives could soil his soul. “Your husband,” he said. “Paul Davidson, the sheriff of Jefferson County, Mississippi.” The way he said Mississippi annoyed her. He said it like it didn’t count, like being a sheriff there was tantamount to being a racist or a campus kiddy cop. “He’s also an Episcopal priest?”
“The gun and The Word,” Anna said.
The psychologist didn’t smile.
“I see you didn’t change your name when you got married. You kept Pigeon. Why is that?”
Anna took a deep breath, trying to ease the pressure in her chest. She felt like Mount St. Helens the day before. Steam pouring from her vents, molten lava pressing against a dome of rock, fires so deep and burning so hot nothing could contain them. She had a sudden mental image of her small middle-aged self on a city street, women and children fleeing in every direction, men yelling, “Look out, she’s going to blow!” The picture startled her and she laughed.
“You find the question funny?” Vincent James asked.
“I find the question irrelevant and intrusive,” she said. It was happening. The crown of rock that was her sternum was bowing under the push of the fire and she couldn’t stop it. “I find the question none of your damn business. Yes, I killed a man. With my gloves on because it was so cold your fingers would freeze off without them but, yes, up close and personal. You want to know what that was like? What kind of person could kill like that? Me. That’s what kind. The son of a bitch deserved to die. The world is better off without guys like that. There are a whole hell of a lot of people in this world who should be ushered into the next, if there is a next, which I sincerely doubt. If I had it to do over again I would have killed him in his sleep the first night on the island.”
Blowing off steam wasn’t helping. If she didn’t shut up she was going to cry. The inherent knowledge that Vinny would take her tears as a personal victory was the only thing that kept them at bay. They dried in the heat of her anger but there were plenty more where those had come from and Anna had to clamp her mind shut to keep them from pouring out, to keep her face from melting in a flood of saltwater and snot.
Vinny put his elbows on the papers he’d fingered and steepled his hands. He’d never bothered to replace his glasses and Anna wondered if they were merely a prop, the lenses plain glass, or if he decided she was too hard to look at when her edges were clear.
“Would you?” he asked.
She had no idea what he was talking about. The repression of the volcano was making it hard to concentrate on anything else.
“Would you have killed him in his sleep? Killed him in cold blood?”
Anna didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to think about anything but she couldn’t stop her mind from pawing through the images of her weeks on Isle Royale. Nights she’d wake up so cold she couldn’t clamp her teeth against their chattering, her heart pounding. Days she walked in a fog, blind to the beauty of the Rockies and the needs of the visitors and fellow rangers. April didn’t bring an end to winter at that elevation. Snow capped the mountains and the glaciers. Wind blew ragged and vicious down the canyons. She could not get warm and she couldn’t think clearly and the man she’d killed stalked her.
“I’m not sorry it happened, if that’s what you’re getting at,” she snapped. The use of it and happened shuddered with weakness. Anna was tired of the hard words so she made herself say them: “I’m not sorry I killed him. I’m sorry I had to kill him.”
“Earlier you said”—Vincent poked at his papers again as if every word she’d spoken had been magically and instantaneously written into the report on his desk—“that there were a lot of people who needed to be ‘ushered into the next world.’ Do you feel you have to kill the bad guys, that you have a calling to do this so-called ushering?”
Anna could tell Vinny-the-shrink thought he was on to something big, that he’d found the key to what ailed her. Anna didn’t feel she had a calling to kill or to do anything else. Once she’d thought she had a calling to protect the wild places, but she wasn’t even feeling that anymore. What she felt mostly was an inner darkness lit by strange fires from below and haunted by scraps of thoughts and fragments of conversations. The only time she felt good or safe or halfway no
rmal was when she curled under the blankets and buried her face in a purring cat. The purring and the silky warmth of the fur tethered her to the land of the living.
She didn’t know what ailed her, and she doubted Vinny knew. “No,” she said firmly. “No calling to kill.” To have said anything else would have brought the men in the white coats bearing straitjackets. If they still used straitjackets on crazy people. “Sufficient stopping force if the assailant is a danger to law enforcement or others.” She paraphrased one of the rules from the levels of force continuum drummed into the heads of the students at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia, where she and countless others had received their education.
“Stopping force, is that how you think of what you did? That you ‘stopped’ him?”
Vincent’s voice didn’t sound combative. If anything, it might have gentled somewhat since she’d first arrived. Anna wished she could read his face but to do that she’d have to see it, and her vision was growing odd. Unshed tears made it hard to focus her eyes; unshed thoughts made it hard to focus her mind.
“Yes.” She found the word somewhere in her vocabulary and offered it up on her tongue. It tasted alien and sounded far away. “Killing will do that to some people. For guys like him, killing is all that would do it. I stopped him: stopped him from preying on women, stopped him from killing me, stopped him from taking up space and breathing good air.” The anger eating her from the inside out seared the words and she knew she sounded even more heartless than she was.
“This wasn’t the first person you’ve . . . stopped . . . in your career as a law enforcement ranger, is it?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.” In that moment Anna couldn’t remember if she had ever killed anyone else or not. She remembered parks and jobs and broken bones and wounds slashed into her body with fish gaffs and pine branches. She remembered animals slain and people bloody and covered in flies. She remembered hurting and hurting others. But, as she stared into the face of Vinny-the-shrink, she couldn’t remember whether or not she had taken the life of another human being.
Shaking her head, she struggled up from the hammock of leather, pushing against the cold chrome of the chair’s arms. “You’d think a girl would remember something like that, wouldn’t you?” she said, and laughed. “It’s not like I have to count the notches on my gun to know how many. You can’t notch a Sig-Sauer—they’re all metal.” She turned as if to leave, and fixated on the desiccated grasses in their square silver vase. “I suppose you could mark the kills with scratches,” she said absently. The grasses were supposed to be beautiful, the pale rust-colored stalks and the tawny feathered tops. “Dead,” Anna said. “The grass is dead. Can’t anything live in this room? The chairs made of the hides of dead cows, the walls of dead trees.” She turned back to the psychologist. He was standing now, as well, his glasses back on his nose. “What’s the desk made of? Plastic? Dead dinosaurs? I can’t remember if I killed anyone else.”
Her eyes gushed with tears, her nostrils poured mucus; Anna could feel the sides of her mouth pulling down in the wild howl of a child. She was imploding, exploding, her body and mind were turning their blackened insides out and she felt dams breaking and bones melting, steel bands tightening, bowing her spine, puppet strings of piano wire forcing her hands to flap feebly.
“I want to go home,” she screamed at the shrink.
Dr. James was around the desk, a hand outstretched toward her. On his face was a look of deep and genuine concern. In his eyes she could read pain for her suffering. She had misjudged him, been unfair, unfeeling and cruel. The knowledge should have made her kinder, but rage would not let it. More than anything she wanted a fight, a hard fight with knuckle bones and edged weapons, an excuse to strike out, to let the pressure smash into a deserving target. James was closing in on her, both hands out now as if he was going to fold her into an embrace.
Time chose this moment to do its petty pace thing and all but stopped. In the grip of this psychic stasis the tears in her eyes acted as lenses that didn’t distort but magnified. She could see the wear under Dr. James’s eyes, the fine lines growing into folds from too much worry and too little sleep. Patches of stubble smudged beneath his right ear and along the jawline because he had shaved in a hurry or been distracted by thoughts of other than his own vanity. The fingernails on the outstretched hands were clean but short and the hands themselves calloused from hard labor.
Dr. Vincent James was a human being. Barricaded behind her brittle carapace of anger, Anna had neglected to note that.
The need to strike out, the fury of the volcano, the wild lash of rage stopped flowing outward and, with a suddenness that brought her to her knees, turned on her. The burning place beneath her sternum was extinguished by the blast and, where the fire had been, only a great empty hole remained.
Anna felt herself tumbling into it.
TWO
Darden White caught himself doing it again. His hands were folded loosely in front of his crotch. Years in the Secret Service had ingrained the classic pose into his bones. Left to its own devices his skeleton settled into watchful cop stance. The Secret Service was misnamed, he thought. They wanted to be seen and identified to let those with sinister intent know the subject was being protected by the best. A visual presence didn’t deter serious criminals, but it helped keep amateurs with big dreams at bay.
Darden no longer needed to be that obvious. Not to mention the addition of his gut didn’t lend itself to the pose with any grace or dignity. Since he’d retired he’d put on a pound a year, give or take. Wanting a hobby—and trying to get his mom to eat something other than Pepperidge Farm white chocolate chunk cookies and peanuts—he’d taken up cooking and gotten too good at it.
Darden sniffed. At sixty-three, a man should be able to have a gut if he wanted. Along with graying hair worn just long enough to make it look like he needed to see a barber, the extra pounds lent him an avuncular look that he found useful.
As a bonus, his doctor told him the added weight, carried out front under his heart, could take years off his life. Darden’s mother had changed the way he looked at death and longevity. At eighty-five, as fit and strong as ever, she only had enough mind left to know she hated being locked up.
Poor old bird, he thought, as he did whenever his mother came to mind.
Darden had lived most of his life ready to take a bullet for somebody else—often somebody he didn’t much like—and death didn’t frighten him overmuch. Alzheimer’s did. Idly he considered taking up smoking again to help the gut along, but decided that would be overkill.
Letting his hands fall to his sides, he continued watching the waiters setting up the Chisos Mountain Lodge’s dining room for the event. The view couldn’t be beat. The lodge was nestled in a ring of ragged peaks. On the southwest side of the tiny valley where the lodge’s rooms and cabins were built a mountain was missing, like a tooth pulled from a line of molars. Through the gap one could see the desert below roll out into a misty distance stopped by the mountains of northern Mexico.
When it came to security, the lodge wasn’t what Darden would have chosen. Judith had her own reasons, and they were politically savvy, but she left herself open too often. Politicians he’d guarded fell into two categories. Either they were so paranoid there was an assassin slavering after their worthless little lives that he had to check every space big enough to hide a cat before they’d enter a building, or they were like Judith, believing themselves immortal and beloved. Most were like Judith. The good ones anyway.
An elderly couple came and stood at the entrance looking confused as the dining room they’d been using was being rearranged. A young whip of a man, working summers in the parks while going to college, Darden knew—he’d interviewed all the employees working the cocktail party—stopped them from entering. Darden watched the kid’s face move plastically through the permutations of a young man who had grown good at telling people they can’t have what they want without endangering his tip.
The couple, in their seventies or maybe early eighties, was holding hands. They leaned in toward each other as if they’d grown together until their limbs became indistinguishable, one from the other, like two ancient trees. Darden smiled at them and nodded at the waiter. Judith could afford to feed a few strangers. Fundraising came naturally to her. Looking relieved, the young man led the couple to a table by the window.
Darden had never married. His job didn’t lend itself to family life. Sometimes he wished he was gay. Another man would be a better fit for the home life of an agent: sex and companionship, somebody to grow old with and no worries about who’d call the plumber or shovel the walks or scare away the burglars when you were away on assignment.
In the service gay would not have been a plus. A lot of the guys he worked with were flat-out homophobic. It was a moot point. Darden was not gay. Whoever said it was a choice had never considered making it. Men were born wired for a socket or a plug. At least that was how it was for Darden.
Judith Pierson walked in. She was small, five-foot-five, with a boyish figure. In baggy khakis and Converse high-tops she should have looked about as imposing as any mall rat, but the straightness of her spine and the military bearing of her shoulders made her seem bigger, a person to be reckoned with.
Another woman would have been sequestered in her room worrying about her makeup or her dress. Maybe Judith worried and maybe she didn’t, but she wasn’t one to trust the details to other people. It was why she was going to make it. She was going to be Texas’s next Ann Richards, but without the liberal trappings.
“Hey, Darden. Everything okay for the meet-and-greet?”
“I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble. Big Bend is too far from anywhere for the uglies to bother making the trip. I’m just making sure the tees are dotted and the eyes are crossed.” He winked at her.
The hard facial lines of the polished politician softened and he glimpsed his little girl. Judith was forty-three. Darden had known her forty of those years. When she was little her mom used to drop her off at his mother’s house to be looked after while she was working, and she was always working. It was from her mom Judith inherited her ambition. Darden was living at home then, going to night school, and he babysat her as much as his mom did. Half the time he’d wake up around ten and there’d be Judith, lying on her stomach, her bare feet in the air, legs crossed at the ankles, pointed chin in her hands, watching him as if his snoring and drooling was more entertaining than anything she could have seen on the television.