Borderline

by Nevada Barr

  Paul leaned back, closed his mouth firmly and smiled encouragingly at the bedraggled teenager.

  Chrissie regained the oxygen she’d lost and puffed up a bit. For a moment she scanned the table the way a practiced speaker might assess their audience. Anna’s eyes followed hers, interested to see how the mayor would respond to the change of narrators. Mayor Pierson had lit up again. The soda White had brought back—a diet 7UP—was at her elbow, the tab not yet pulled. She was leaning in, her lips slightly parted as if she wanted to lap this part of the story up like rich cream.

  “I was down farther than everybody else,” Chrissie began. “And I was kind of freaked out, the water was so . . . you know . . . so pushy. I’d gotten turned around and I was walking away from everybody else instead of toward them when I saw this bunch of branches and things caught between two rocks, like a beaver dam or something, just a bunch of sticks and logs and brush.”

  “The woman was caught there? Washed down by the river?” Judith jumped in, and Anna was glad to see Chrissie had recovered enough spirit to be annoyed by the interruption.

  “I’m getting to that,” she said with exaggerated patience. “Anyway , there was this bunch of branches and things caught between two rocks.”

  The backtracking was sawing at Judith Pierson’s nerves. Her lips were pursed as if her tongue was busy checking the sharpness of each tooth.

  Satisfied the woman had been put in her place, Chrissie moved the story along. “I thought pieces of our stuff had got caught up and I went to see if maybe I could get it. When I got close I saw it was this Mexican woman. The water had tangled all her hair into the sticks and her arm was woven through it so she looked like one of those sculptures of people becoming trees, you know like the Greeks liked to do, people turning into different things?”

  It wasn’t actually a question; Chrissie was in the habit of ending her sentences on an up note.

  “She was dead,” Judith said. “My God, how awful for you.” She reached a hand across the table but Chrissie was having none of it.

  “She was not dead,” she said repressively. “She was all alive and pregnant.”

  The mayor reacted as if Chrissie had slapped her, unaccustomed to being rebuffed, probably. “She wasn’t dead?” she asked Paul.

  “No,” Paul said. “She died later but she was alive when Chrissie first found her.”

  “Did she say anything? Did she talk to you?” the mayor asked Paul.

  “She did not say anything,” Chrissie took back the floor. “She was alive but she wasn’t exactly conversational. Jeez Louise, she’d probably drank about half of Colorado or wherever. She didn’t say anything.”

  “Sorry,” Judith said, evidently recalling her manners. “Please go on.”

  “Thank you,” Chrissie said, unappeased. “We made a line of us holding to each other and Anna cut her out of the sticks. Then we floated her back to shore and carried her up out of the water to the cliff where there was shade.”

  “And the poor thing died there,” Judith said, shaking her head. “Such a waste.”

  “Not yet,” Chrissie said. “She didn’t die right off. She said ‘my baby’ then she died, okay?”

  “God, that is so sad,” the mayor said. “I suppose she was trying to cross the river so she could have the baby on American soil. As long as they think they can, they’ll try it. It’s not fair to anybody.”

  Martinez put down his foam cup and unfolded his legs.

  “We don’t need to go into the political ramifications now, Mrs. Pierson,” the chief said as he shot his river ranger a hostile glance.

  Mrs., not Mayor. Bernard definitely used the title as a way to strip a woman of her professional power, should she be so brazen as to have any.

  “Did she have any ID on her?” Pierson asked Jessie Wiggins. “Do we know who in Mexico to inform?”

  Wiggins shook his head, the bald spot flashing dully under the overhead lights. “Unless somebody comes asking after her, we may never know. If she was crossing to get to relatives here—that’s often the case—if they’re here illegally, they won’t come forward. Even if they did, identifying the body might be out of the question. The river will have taken it. Next time we find it, if we do, the turtles and fish won’t have left us much to go on.”

  “I don’t think she was a poor Mexican woman crossing the river to have her baby in the U.S.,” Anna said.

  Jessie and Bernard and Judith stared at her as if toads had just hopped out of her mouth.

  “Mrs. Davidson,” Bernard began.

  “Anna,” Anna said.

  Bernard’s face settled fractionally and was made older and kinder. “Anna,” he said. “This kind of thing happens on the border every day. Not this tragic or dramatic, but people die trying to smuggle themselves in. Truckloads sometimes.”

  “I read the papers,” Anna said. The breach in the chief’s charade when he was forced to say her name had been shored up. He was pushing to get her back into her assigned role. “I first thought she was washed away trying to cross so she could give her baby American citizenship. But she wasn’t a poor village woman with no resources. At least I don’t think she was.”

  “And why is that, Mrs.—Anna?” The chief caught himself and, not being rude by nature, used the name she’d given him, but Anna could tell she was Mrs. Davidson, tourist/victim again.

  “She had a Brazilian bikini wax and a pedicure,” Anna said.

  Judith smiled, a testament to the art of cosmetic dentistry. “You’re not from Texas, are you, Mrs. Davidson?” she asked with a hint of conspiratorial humor in her tone that kept the question from sounding confrontational.

  Anna didn’t reply. Regardless of twinkles of merriment, the mayor was being confrontational. Anna waited to see why, which direction the attack was going to come from.

  “What was the woman wearing?” Judith Pierson asked.

  Anna drew a blank.

  “She had on a rayon dress with a floral print from Wal-Mart,” Chrissie piped up. Anna raised an eyebrow and the girl looked slightly abashed—not because she’d interrupted, Anna guessed, but because she’d admitted to being a Wal-Mart shopper and in the fat section, no less.

  “You are a very observant young woman,” the mayor commended her, and Chrissie shot Anna a glance of triumph. At some point during the long, long day Anna had evidently become The Enemy. Perhaps the fact that she was wearing Chrissie’s friend Lori’s blood all over her had something to do with it.

  “Mexican girls might not have good medical care or education, but they’ve all got television sets in their houses. These girls watch their idols and emulate them, giving each other pedicures and manicures and waxes,” Judith said. “They are no different from American girls when it comes to fashion.”

  The comment was a mild reproof aimed at Anna’s perceived prejudice. Anna resisted the temptation to ask the mayor if she had a bikini wax.

  Dismissing the question of the woman’s motives for being caught dead in Santa Elena Canyon, Judith turned her attention to Jessie Wiggins. The chief ranger had lost control of the meeting and, by his look of tired annoyance, Anna figured he didn’t know how to get it back.

  “Up in Chisos we heard that there had been shots fired,” the mayor said. “Is there anything to that or was it just a rumor? I know how these things can take on a life of their own through the grapevine.”

  Jessie took off his glasses and brushed one hand over his brow, an homage to the hair that had once fallen in his face. “There were shots,” he said. “Two people were killed. We can’t give out any names until we’ve notified the families.”

  Pain carved lines down from his nose to the corners of his mouth. The chief ranger was suffering as well. Good men at heart, Anna thought, they grieved the death of innocents and the blow those deaths would deal their park and parks in general. Parks were not places people expected to die.

  To her credit, the mayor was stricken as well. Judith Pierson had made all the right sounds, s
hown the appropriate facial expressions while listening to the story of the Mexican woman caught in the strainer, but the news of the deaths by shooting penetrated the perfect façade to affect the muscles beneath the makeup. Her eyes widened then narrowed, and knots rippled on her cheeks as her jaws clenched.

  “Two people were shot and killed?” she asked, heat and horror taking her voice up half an octave.

  Stirring behind her caught Anna’s ear and she looked to where the mayor’s head of security sat. Confusion and concern clouded his wide soft face. From the way his eyes were fixed on his boss, Anna believed it was more for the mayor’s reaction than the murder of two women.

  White women.

  The death of the Mexican woman hadn’t brought on such a tsunami of barely suppressed emotion. Uncharitable, Anna thought of herself. There was a difference between a tragic accident and homicide. She hoped that was what had unbalanced the scales of their compassion. And maybe the death of Helena’s mother was a tragic accident, precisely what they said it was, a woman who cared enough for her child to want it to be born in a country where it might have a better chance at a good life. Whatever the reasons, the woman had ended up in the river, Helena had been born on American soil. Anna had no intention of letting that fact slip away in the general circus that was forming around this incident.

  In the canyon, it had crossed her mind that the shooter might have thought she had murdered the woman and, bent on revenge, shot the party up then panicked and ran. Of course that would mean the avenger had been atop the canyon watching the woman dying down below and done nothing to help her. Or he could have come too late to help, only in time to see the woman die and the baby being brought out.

  Anna wasn’t so much thinking as falling asleep in her chair.

  She bestirred herself to hear the chief ranger speaking her dreams: “Lots of times these girls come across and are met by a relative or boyfriend. Could be the boyfriend was waiting, saw her go under and was following along the rim trying to see where she washed up. When he saw the rafters, he panicked and began shooting.”

  “That makes a horrible kind of sense,” the mayor said. Her firm mouth, the drop in her voice, indicated the end of the discussion, but the fire Anna had seen burning behind her eyes was not extinguished by this line of logic, merely banked. Anna hadn’t taken to Mayor Pierson the way she had to Lisa Martinez but, when it came down to it, Anna was a lousy judge of character. It was a weakness she’d had to shore up with observation and patience. For her the days of rushing headlong into relationships of any kind had been sufficiently perilous she learned to wait and watch. It was possible this smoldering politician was a fighter for justice and the rights of the downtrodden, that the fire was burning for a good cause.

  Too tired to maintain this optimistic view, Anna let it slide.

  “It’s after midnight and these folks have had a hard day,” Jessie Wiggins said. “This thing isn’t going to be figured out in an hour or two. What do you say we finish up in the morning?” He looked at Bernard and the chief ranger nodded.

  “Where are you staying?” he asked the table in general.

  “Campground,” Steve said. “Our stuff is in our car. The gear we used on the river was provided by the outfitter.” It was the first time he’d spoken since he’d been introduced to the chief ranger when they first arrived. The richness of his voice had thinned and he sounded forty years older than he had on the river. His eyes had a hollow look and though Anna knew—or hoped—he would again be the nineteen-year-old boy whose wit and courage had helped them get through, she doubted that the shadows of the deaths he had witnessed would ever truly disappear. Cyril had aged, as well, and Anna got a glimpse of what the twins would look like in their forties: still reedy, still as close to identical as opposite genders could get, but no longer straight-backed and supple, no longer light on their feet.

  “Is there someplace we could get a shower before you take us to the campground?” Cyril asked. “We don’t want to attract skunks.”

  The glimmer of humor cheered Anna. Cyril was stronger than she had thought, more resilient. Watching the young woman straighten her shoulders and steady her gaze, Anna made a mental note to find the cow, save it again if it was still alive. The thought was absurd. How would she know one scrawny Mexican cow from another? What difference would it make even if Easter was still alive, which wasn’t bloody likely?

  Absurd or not, Anna would do it.

  At the moment she wanted a shower and she wanted Helena back and she wanted to curl up with her head on Paul’s shoulder and sleep until Rip Van Winkle called her to breakfast.

  “How about you two?” Bernard asked Paul.

  “We have reservations at the lodge,” Paul said.

  “For tonight? I thought you were supposed to be on the river for the next couple of nights.”

  “Right,” Paul said, and sighed. “No reservations. Surely they’ll have one empty room.”

  “Not with the convention and the mayor here,” Bernard said.

  Anna stood. She’d been sitting too long. People had been talking too long. The room had too little air. Currents from the rangers and the mayor and the three traumatized kids buffeted her brain and the fluorescent lights burned like acid on the backs of her eyes. “We’ll work it out,” she said, and began edging around the table toward the door. She wanted a shower and food and all the niceties but more than that she wanted out of there. The desire had blown up from a spark to a conflagration and she felt her skin would begin to curl and peel and fall away if she didn’t get into real air, air with space around it to breathe free of the pressure of the suffering souls incarcerated in this room.

  Paul stood, as well, the intention to stay by her side clear on his face. The need to settle them safe for the night kept him from following. “We’d appreciate the showers and anything else you can do for us,” he said.

  Anna grabbed for the doorknob. The misery clogging the air, the walls of dun and the acid light were coming together, the crush of humanity pushing down her throat. Unease was turning to panic, and the fact of the panic scared her even more. She jerked on the door and it opened so quickly the edge caught her in the shoulder, knocking her back and into the still-seated mayor.

  In front of her, as startled as she, Lisa stood, Helena in her arms.

  Anna reached for her, an unformed vision of taking the child and running into the night ricocheting around in her skull. Lisa let her take the baby but didn’t step out of her way. Instead she tucked her arm through Anna’s like an old friend on a shopping trip.

  “Helena ate like a little pig,” she told Anna. “Then she burped all over Bernard’s in-box and fell fast asleep. When we get home we’ll give her a bath. I got more baby stuff than one little boy could ever use.”

  The warmth of the baby safe in her grasp, the warmth of Lisa’s arm in hers, the warmth of the woman’s eyes, poured into Anna and the freakish need to flee was quieted.

  “Thanks,” Anna said simply.

  “Good, you two will stay with us,” Freddy said. “That’s settled.” He wasn’t entirely successful at keeping the dismay from his voice but Anna didn’t care.

  Mayor Pierson stood, making a cramped threesome between the door and the conference table. A confused half smile was on her neatly lipsticked mouth and her head was cocked slightly to one side, as if listening for an explanation that was being given too quietly to be heard by human ears.

  “What a lovely baby,” the politician said smoothly. “How old is she?”

  “Twelve hours, give or take,” Anna said. She held Helena closer. If the mayor went in for kissing babies, she was going to have to wipe the lipstick off before she laid a lip on this one.

  The half smile didn’t slip. Judith turned back to the men, an audience she was surer of. “Am I missing something?”

  “Mrs. Davidson—Anna—was able to save the woman’s baby,” Bernard said. “It’s the one bright spot in this mess.”

  “But the woman died,
” Judith said, sounding annoyed at the chief ranger’s stupidity.

  “Anna performed a C-section soon after and the baby was close enough to term it survived,” Bernard explained. He stood, as well, probably hoping the women would begin to clear out of his conference room, preferably as a precursor to clearing out of his park and his life.

  Judith didn’t move. “This woman is not a doctor, I take it? I find it hard to believe she had any surgical equipment with her.”

  “She used Paul’s pocketknife,” Chrissie volunteered.

  “She just cut the dead woman open with a jackknife and took the baby? Isn’t that illegal?” the mayor demanded. Despite the makeup, her face was losing color under the fluorescent lights and the age the plastic surgeon had excised glowed up from her bones.

  Helplessly Bernard shifted his eyes to Jessie. The head of law enforcement shrugged, then said: “Exigent circumstances, ma’am.”

  “I know it sounds horrible,” Paul said gently. “Even ghoulish. But it was the only way Anna could save the baby’s life. Without oxygen from its mother’s beating heart the baby would have died in the womb.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Judith snapped. “I know that.”

  The vehemence startled everyone into silence. A slight cough pulled their attention off the unraveling mayor. The head of security, Darden White, the man Anna had forgotten again despite the fact that she suspected it was what he wanted them to do at the moment, was heaving himself up from his chair.

  “We sure appreciate you letting us sit in on this, Bernard. The mayor already had a high regard of how Big Bend conducts business, and watching you all at work tonight has done nothing but raise that regard even more.” White’s interruption gave Judith Pierson time to collect herself, which she did with a speed that impressed Anna. It spoke of a powerful self-discipline that Anna had found herself lacking in recent months.

  “Mayor Pierson, would you be so good as to give me a lift back to the lodge?” Darden said.

  “Of course. Of course I will.” Freed by the request, Judith dutifully thanked her reluctant hosts and left the conference room.