Borderline

by Nevada Barr

  Cyril and Steve and, to Anna’s surprise, Chrissie had no plans to fly out before they were scheduled to in five days. The moment their folks were told about the shootings, Anna had thought they would demand their children come home. That would have been the case, Cyril assured her, so she and Steve hadn’t told them. Asking whether Lori’s mother would have told them was halfway out of her mouth before she remembered that these were college kids. Their parents didn’t know one another. They probably had only a hazy idea who their friends were and not a clue from which part of the country they hailed. In college it was nothing to wander off for a weekend or a vacation after giving the parents the sketchiest itinerary.

  They were staying because Cyril was determined to find out what happened to Easter. Vaguely, Anna remembered swearing to herself that she would save Easter no matter what it took, but she’d been under a lot of stress at the time. Fed, clean and out of danger, the beast was looking less and less like a symbol of all that was good in mankind and more and more like a skinny old Mexican cow.

  Santa Elena Canyon was closed to raft trips but the NPS wouldn’t be able to maintain that for long. There was too much economic impact on the outfitters to shut down their livelihood for any length of time. Since they couldn’t get another raft or canoe trip down the river, the three kids had other plans. Anna suspected they involved sneaking across the border into Mexico where the land was flatter leading up to the Rio Grande and hiking upriver. Probably mooing and strewing bits of hay or grain as they went, she thought with a smile.

  Crossing into Mexico, except at officially sanctioned border stations, was illegal, but Anna wasn’t worrying about it overmuch. These were three white college kids from New York. Nobody, including the Mexicans, cared whether they crossed the border. It was the other way around that got Border Patrol and Homeland Security’s undies in a bundle.

  A bit of pure Texas came walking up from the parking lot. Big blond hair, makeup heavy and perfect, clothes from Neiman Marcus or Saks or some store neither Anna’s budget nor her inclination had her shopping at anytime soon. This woman did it up right. She pulled it off with such a natural grace that, on her, it looked good.

  Anna smiled and nodded politely when their eyes met then was immediately sorry she’d done so. Miss Texas veered off course and walked over to Anna’s picnic table.

  “Aren’t you the woman who saved that baby from the river?” she asked. There was nothing Texas about her speech patterns. Upper Midwest, Anna thought, but she was only guessing; she had none of Henry Higgins’s talent.

  “There was a bunch of us,” Anna said. “Prenatal salvation is kind of a group sport.”

  The woman laughed and Anna liked it. It sounded well-used and never rehearsed.

  “I’m Gerry Schneider,” she said, and stuck out her hand. Anna shook it.

  “Anna Pigeon.” She didn’t add that she was a park ranger. For one, she was on vacation. For another, she wasn’t sure she still was.

  Without waiting for an invitation, Gerry sat down on the bench opposite Anna. “I’m beginning to think this is my lucky day. I’ve been wanting to talk with somebody other than NPS brass about the incident. They’re on the body recovery today but the head of law enforcement—Jessie Wiggins—had no intention of letting me tag along. I suppose I could have rented a jeep and followed, this being, at least nominally, a free country. Even in Texas. But by the way he was clouding up at the mention of my presence I didn’t think the antagonism I would earn would be worth the story I got. Body recoveries aren’t terribly gripping. Mostly they underline that the event is truly over and the good guys lost.”

  While she rattled on, Gerry Schneider plopped a shapeless leather bag, scratched and nicked from years of hard use, on the rough planks of the table and removed a tiny tape recorder, a yellow legal pad so rumpled she must have been sleeping with it, and three ballpoint pens, the cheap kind that come in packs, and set these items in a neat row between her and Anna.

  “So, tell me what happened?” Gerry said, and turned an open, interested face upon Anna.

  Anna sat up straight and put her elbows on the table, resting her chin in her palms. “And you want me to do this why?” she asked.

  Gerry laughed again. “Cart before the horse,” she said. “I guess I should be glad I can still get carried away with a story. I’m a newspaper woman. I report for the Houston Chronicle.”

  “Of course it was interesting to me and to the park that a couple people were shot and a baby was brought out of the mess but I’d think a big city paper like the Chronicle would have more shootings than they could shake a stick at outside their back door,” Anna said. “Why would they send a reporter all the way out here to be Johnny-on-the-spot in less than twelve hours to cover our measly two dead?”

  “They wouldn’t,” Gerry said flatly. “We were all sent here to cover Mayor Pierson’s big announcement. Not that it was news but that woman has a way of getting coverage that other politicians can only dream about, so El Paso was here, Middleton, three reporters from the Dallas Ft. Worth area and me.”

  “Where’s the rest of the pack?” Anna was getting a creepy feeling she was going to be pestered to death simply because a passel of newspaper people had a room paid for, per diem and nothing else to do.

  “Don’t worry,” Gerry said. “It’s just little old me. The pack left first thing this morning. Some even left last night as soon as the dinner was over.”

  “Why are you still here?”

  “I thought the C-section rescue of the river baby would make a terrific color piece.” Gerry Schneider’s eyes grew skittery and her voice went up a few notes. As a liar she was hopeless.

  Anna raised an eyebrow and waited.

  “Don’t you want to see your name in print?” Gerry tried.

  “Not so much. In high school I did,” Anna said. She was enjoying sparring with Ms. Schneider. “I was on the debate team and when we won they’d print our names. Now when it happens it’s nothing anybody wants to hang up with a refrigerator magnet.

  “What story did you really stay out here to cover? Or should I say, ‘dig up’?”

  Gerry planted both palms flat on the table and fixed a level gaze on Anna. “I have been in this business for thirty-six years—and before you start thinking I’m as old as Methuselah, I am counting my years on the high school yearbook—and I have never mastered the art of lying. It has been a terrible burden, as you might imagine.

  “I haven’t packed and gone because there is something going on with our mayor and I don’t know what it is. I’m skulking about, sniffing in corners, hoping to turn up something juicy. There, now you know the worst. I will stoop to tabloid scandal if it makes a good story.”

  Anna appreciated the candor. “Do you know anybody in Health and Human Services in Houston, anybody you could lean on to make sure a baby is taken proper care of?” she asked on impulse.

  “I might,” Gerry said carefully. “Is this about the baby you rescued?”

  “Yes.”

  “And in return I’d get an up-close-and-personal account of the rescue so my time here won’t be totally wasted?”

  “That’s the deal.”

  Gerry’s gaze was distracted from Anna, flying over her shoulder toward the parking lot. “If you want someone with real connections, here she comes.”

  “Uh-oh,” Darden said with joviality that sounded forced. “Gerry Schneider. Watch out, Anna, she’ll be dragging every skeleton you ever had out of your closet and have them dancing the samba before you know it.”

  “Hello, Darden,” Gerry said sweetly, and Anna guessed the two old warhorses had a shared past or wished to have a shared future.

  “Anna, you’ve met Mayor Pierson,” Darden said.

  “Call me Judith,” the mayor said.

  She was standing with her back to the sun so Anna could not see her face but, in silhouette, it was clear her shoulders were an inch or so higher than normal and her hands, though not formed into fists, had fingers th
at curled into claws. Tension radiated from her the way sound will from taut wires when the wind blows.

  Before they could settle in, Anna rose from the bench. “I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m hungry.”

  “Mind if I join you?” Gerry asked, echoing Darden’s words from his roadside stop.

  “That would be great,” Anna said. “The more the merrier.” She liked Gerry but mostly she was thrilled with the new addition to their impromptu breakfast club because Darden and his mayor almost growled out loud when Gerry crashed the party.

  Inside the lodge dining hall, at a table for four near the immense glass windows overlooking the basin, Anna got a clearer take on Judith Pierson. In contrast to the perfectly pulled-together politician she’d met the previous night, this Judith was pale and pinched, her hair hastily combed and her makeup slapped on rather than applied. Gerry noticed as well. Anna believed if she squinted she would be able to see the reporter’s ears pricking up the way dogs’ will when they hear a whistle.

  Over eggs and bacon Anna told her story. She’d been so caught up in trying to stay alive and put one foot in front of the other, so tired afterward and so busy with Helena, she’d not thought the events through in an orderly manner, but merely snagged bits and pieces as her brain had a free moment. When she was a young woman, she remembered wondering why stay-at-home moms, known to her generation as housewives, didn’t write epic novels, create great paintings or memorize all of Shakespeare. They had nothing to do all day but sit around, play with the baby, tidy up, why not be creative? Having spent part of a day and a night with an infant, Anna knew she owed each and every one she’d internally sneered at an apology. It was mind-boggling how all-absorbing caring for an infant was. Cute little aliens who stole one’s brain and rendered their body a slave.

  With an interested audience and no interruptions, putting the story chronologically, and attempting to put it logically, information and images that had gotten lost resurfaced. Events that she had accepted at the time showed themselves as unacceptable.

  She’d finished describing how the woman had appeared caught in the strainer when Gerry said: “Bernard—the chief ranger—thinks she was probably trying to cross to have her baby on American soil and got swept downstream.”

  Anna hadn’t entirely bought into that idea because of the pedicure and the bikini wax, signs of a woman living an urban and urbane life. Hearing Gerry make the statement in the clear light of day, she realized it was absurd.

  “That’s a tragedy,” Judith was saying. “But—”

  Clanking her fork down against her plate, Anna cut her off as the scene tried to play out in her mind and failed. “She couldn’t have,” she exclaimed. “If she wanted to cross she’d do it where there was a road, easy access to a vehicle, maybe a family member or friend waiting to pick her up and get her to a medical facility. The only place that fits that description is Lajitas.” Her three dining companions stared at her blankly. They did not know the park.

  “Lajitas is almost on the park’s western boundary. There’s a crossing there, a little bit of development, a road—that sort of thing. Lajitas is one of the places people used to cross back and forth before the border was closed after nine-eleven. That’s where a woman wanting to have her baby in America would cross. On that side of the park, anyway.”

  “And she must have fallen and been swept downstream,” Judith said, stating it as known fact rather than conjecture.

  “Lajitas is miles from Santa Elena Canyon, two or three at least. Maybe more. We found this woman a mile into the canyon.”

  “Couldn’t she have washed down there? I mean the cow did and you said rocks and trees were rolling,” Gerry said.

  “Yes,” Anna said. “Easily. But what are the odds she’d still be alive after she did? Three or four miles of wild river bashing a very pregnant woman against everything that floats and everything that doesn’t; she’d have drowned before she’d been in the water three hundred yards.”

  “What are you saying?” Gerry said at the same instant Mayor Pierson said: “If she was a strong swimmer—”

  “Either she crossed near the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon and lost her footing, which makes no sense, there’s nothing there for a woman in her condition to cross for and no easy access to shelter or medical help or even a phone, or this was no accident. She was put in the river by somebody who wanted her dead and wanted it to look like an illegal border crossing that had tragic results.”

  Saying the words, Anna knew she should have thought of this before. Once seen it was obvious. The next step in the equation was equally obvious.

  “They wanted her and her baby dead,” she said. What she didn’t add because it was too frightening to speak aloud was maybe they—whoever they were—still wanted the baby dead.

  Stunned by these conclusions, Anna ate mechanically while the conversation clattered around her. Helena’s mother, nine months pregnant, had a bikini wax. That bit of information should have screamed louder than it had. To have that bit of vanity attended to in the late stages of pregnancy didn’t suggest poor Mexican girls keeping up with the latest trends. It spoke of pampering and spas and a social stratum where services could be bought at exorbitant prices. According to Chrissie, and she had been confident of her observations, the dress was a cheap rayon number from Wal-Mart.

  The woman had been taken, forced to change into cheap clothes, transported to the mouth of the canyon and dumped in the river, possibly after knocking her unconscious for good measure. The water provided a cause of death—drowning—wreaked havoc on trace evidence and, if the perpetrator was lucky, obscured identification of the body. Heavy rains and the river rising had been icing on the cake, stealing the body away before it could be autopsied.

  “Homicide,” Gerry said, and though Anna suspected she was not a ghoul at heart, she heard the glee in the reporter’s voice. This was a story worth hanging around for.

  “Looks like it,” Anna said.

  Gerry started scribbling on her yellow legal pad. Anna paid no attention; she was interested in Darden, sitting across from the reporter. He’d been the one to call this meeting of sorts, and now it was clear he wanted to get away as soon as he could. His physical self was shrinking away from the mayor as if his body was not waiting for his mouth to make the excuses before it removed itself from the premises.

  Judith must have sensed the incipient exodus as well. She laid her fine-boned hand on his beefy arm to pin him down. Darden flinched and Anna wondered what sort of relationship the two had. It was more than professional, that much was clear, but the mayor didn’t touch him like a woman touched a lover.

  “This homicide sounds convenient,” Judith said. “The ranger you are staying with, Frederick Martinez, is speaking to the convention today on the evils of the border closing after nine-eleven and continuing to keep it closed today. Handy that such a tragedy happens at the moment he needs to highlight his argument with an emotional appeal none of us can help but identify with.”

  “Freddy can’t speak at the convention—” Anna began but stopped mid-sentence. That was what Lisa’s cryptic statements about unemployment referred to. Freddy was a government employee. As an employee, and therefore a representative of the government, he was not free to express his political beliefs. The Park Service cut rangers a lot of slack on this issue, but to fly in the face of the rule in one’s own park on topics under debate by local politicians that affected that park would probably get Freddy fired. He could lose his retirement. Anna marveled at the good face his wife had been able to put on what had to be a family disaster.

  “Originally he turned the invitation down,” Judith said. “I had my secretary keeping tabs on who was to be here and what their arguments were likely to be. It was my guess that he had turned the invitation down because his arguments for opening the border were threadbare. His premise about the death of the little border towns and the vacuum it left to be filled by crooks and drug dealers was old news from before the Mexi
can drug wars broke out.”

  Gerry looked up from her pad of paper. “Are you saying this park ranger murdered a pregnant woman and tried to kill her fetus to get the border reopened? Is this guy a fanatic or a lunatic or a psycho or what?”

  “All I am saying,” the mayor stated quietly, “is that it looks as if Ranger Martinez has decided he now has an argument worth making.”

  Darden eased his arm out from under Judith’s and glanced at his watch. “If you ladies will excuse me,” he said as he pushed back his chair. “I’ve got to meet Gordon and Kevin in a few minutes. Don’t worry about the check.” He winked at Gerry then smiled to include Anna in the gesture. “I’ll have it put on the mayor’s tab.”

  “Darden—” The mayor said his name with a desperation that startled Anna. The fragility that had vanished while she listened to the story of the river incident and discussed Freddy’s nifty new argument was back. For the briefest of moments she sounded like a little girl afraid of being left alone in the dark.

  “You’ll be listening to this Martinez?” Darden asked her.

  “I guess.” The childlike quality was fading but not yet gone.

  “I’ll see you there,” Darden said with a depth of reassurance that only served to confuse Anna further. Maybe they were family, niece and uncle or cousins. They looked nothing alike and the vibe between them wasn’t that of father and daughter, not quite.

  In the few seconds the exchange required Judith Pierson’s expression had hardened, matured. “When you see Kevin, tell him I need to see him, will you?”

  Darden didn’t answer right away and Gerry’s eyes took on a predatory gleam. Maybe this was the scandal she’d sensed brewing. “What about the Martinez thing?” Darden avoided the request.

  “Tell Kevin to come and get me out,” the mayor said, and smiled. She may have thought the smile was seductive or suggestive. To Anna it was snaky, no lips and all fangs.