by Nevada Barr
Hattie answered the door in her nightgown, a knee-length poet’s shirt in burgundy with the sheen of satin and the wrinkle-free texture of good polyester. Graying hair was wild around her face. She looked the embodiment of an elemental force. Whether of earth or sky, for good or evil, Anna couldn’t hazard a guess. Greek mythology had never been big in Catholic school.
“You’re just in time for a cup of tea,” Hattie said. Much of her usual spark was banked beneath fatigue or worry, though still she sounded genuinely welcoming. “C’mon in, Anna. Agent Stanton.”
“Fred,” Stanton said, and Anna shot him a startled look. In the years she’d been acquainted with him “Frederick” was the only accepted form of address. She looked back at Hattie. The elemental force: the quintessential aunt with all the rights and privileges conferred therein. One’s aunt would scarcely call one “Frederick” unless some formal trouble were in the air.
“Fred,” Hattie said warmly. “I’ve never known a weak or dishonest Fred.”
“Or a pretty one, I bet,” Stanton said.
Hattie laughed as she opened the screen and waved them in. “Maybe to a Fredericka.”
“The only one who finds a papa moose handsome is a momma moose.”
The banter carried them indoors, where they pooled in front of the archway leading to a small built-in eating nook that separated the living area from the kitchen. Rose and her daughter sat in their nightgowns over breakfast. Rose had two plastic curlers clipped on the crown of her head, just enough to give her coif that rounded pouf short hairdos seem to require. A definite chill radiated from the woman as she looked at Anna.
Bella, in a sleeveless white nightie covered with little blue sailboats, huddled on the bench opposite her mother. Knees tucked up and arms pulled inside the armholes, she hid her face in the open neck of the gown; a personal fall-out shelter.
Anna guessed discussion over this morning’s bananas and Grape-Nuts had been somewhat strained.
“Yes?” Rose said in lieu of a greeting. She opened her hands to encompass the food-littered table. “As you can see, it is a bit early for receiving callers.”
It was after ten o’clock. Anna resisted the urge to glance at her watch. In true coward’s fashion, she stepped aside and drew Stanton into the line of fire.
“Agent Stanton and I are just tying up a few loose ends,” she said. “Did Hills happen to collect Stacy’s duty belt?”
Rose looked blank but she knew exactly what was referred to, Anna would have laid money on it.
“C’mon, punkin,” Hattie said. “Let’s get dressed and go for a walk.”
Eyes full of alarm, Bella glanced at Stanton.
“We’ll change in your mom’s room,” Hattie assured her.
Modesty met, Bella climbed from the bench.
“Hiya, Bella,” Anna said.
“Hello.” Bella was merely being polite, she didn’t meet Anna’s eyes.
While Bella slid to the floor, Rose managed to pluck the rollers from her hair and secret them away somewhere. “Would you care for a cup of coffee?” She was talking to Stanton.
“No thanks,” Anna replied just as he said: “That’d really hit the spot.”
Accordingly, Rose went to the kitchen and returned with a mug of coffee for the FBI agent. Anna wondered if she would have gotten one even if she’d said yes.
“Any progress finding Stacy’s murderer?” Rose asked as she regained her seat.
Stanton sat down across from her. “Not as much as we’d like. But Ranger Pigeon and I are still chipping away at it.”
Rose didn’t look up at Anna leaning coffeeless in the archway.
Amid the breakfast debris on the table were papers that had an official fill-in-the-boxes look to them. “Looks like we’ve caught you at a bad time,” Stanton said apologetically.
“Yes, rather.” This time Rose did look at Anna.
Disrespect, verbal and sometimes physical abuse was often directed at the uniform, the badge. Anna’d become practiced at not letting it get under her skin. But this was personal and it felt personal. She found herself becoming irked and began to count to ten in Spanish.
“Death and taxes?” Stanton asked solicitously.
“Medical forms for Bella,” Rose said.
Anna’d just gotten to cinco, seis. She quit counting. The conversation was getting interesting. “Is Bella sick?” she asked.
Rose ignored her. “Bella’s getting an operation,” she told Stanton. Excitement was clear in her voice. “It’s been something I’ve been wanting for a long time. She can’t have it yet, but in a few years. They think they can fix her legs, make her normal.”
“That’s wonderful,” Stanton said.
Anna was undecided. “We’re the variety that adds spice,” she remembered Drew saying.
“Stacy’s insurance left us with enough money to cover medical expenses.” Rose volunteered the information and Anna wondered why.
“Stacy had a life insurance policy?” she asked.
Rose took a second to respond. In that second the silence shouted. “Not that it’s any of your business but—yes, he did, Miss Pigeon. Stacy was a good husband.”
Good was emphasized, and logically or not, Anna found herself wanting to defend Zach for dying broke and unprepared. She chose not to rise to the bait—real or imagined.
“You’re welcome to see the policy, if you want, Miss Pigeon.”
“Sure, why not.”
Rose rolled her eyes for Stanton’s benefit and left the table to get the form.
There was a murmured exchange in the bedroom, then Hattie and Bella emerged and slipped out the back door with exaggerated sneakiness. Anna suspected some Hattie-led game was afoot.
Rose returned. Her hair was combed and Anna’s female eye detected a discreet layer of blush brushed on the high cheekbones.
“Miss Pigeon?” Rose held out the insurance policy then, dismissing Anna with a look, sat again. “All that’s of no interest to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I imagine,” she said sweetly to Stanton. “Is there anything I can help you with this morning, Agent Stanton?”
“Coffee’s all I need,” he said. “Anna?”
She laid the two-hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy on the table. “Just Stacy’s duty belt—gun, radio, leather gear.”
“I have no idea where I put it,” Rose said disinterestedly. “I’ll drop it by the CRO later this afternoon if it turns up.”
In a house the size of a postage stamp, inhabited by a six-year-old child, it was unlikely she’d mislaid her recently deceased spouse’s gunbelt. Whether she lied to hide something or just for spite, Anna hadn’t a clue. Admitting defeat she said: “Thanks, Mrs. Meyers. That’d be a big help. We won’t take up any more of your time.”
“Thanks for the coffee,” Stanton chimed in.
“Anytime, Fred. It was so sweet of you to come by.” Rose blessed him with a Pepsodent-perfect smile.
“Watch out,” Anna said ungraciously as they climbed back into the patrol car. “You’ve got Husband Number Three written all over you.
“First there’s insurance, then there isn’t, then there is. There’s chindi, then they’re gone, then they’re back. Gates are locked, unlocked, locked. Silva’s a thug, a guardian angel, then presto chango, a thug,” she ranted.
Stanton rolled up the windows of the car and cranked up the air conditioner.
“Everybody’s got a radio, then there’s not a radio to be found. Interps have trucks, then they have subcompacts. The truth is getting to be such a variable. New realities to be announced as needed.” Anna turned the air conditioner off and rolled down her window. “What now? You’re choreographing this show.”
“Gee, thanks.” The radio cut off anything further. Jamie Burke at Cliff Palace was reporting a medical. Unceremoniously, Anna shushed Stanton and turned up the radio. A boy, fourteen, was complaining of faintness and shortness of breath. He insisted he could walk out, his parents demanded he have medical
attention.
“Do you need to go?” Stanton asked.
Anna shook her head. “Hills and Jennifer are both on today. They can do it.” For a second she stared at the radio thinking. “Damn,” she said finally. “Let’s go anyway. I’ve got some questions to ask.”
Cliff Palace parking lot was full and a line of cars extending a hundred yards back up the one-way road followed those creeping slowly through the lot looking for nonexistent parking places. Anna turned on her blue lights and, driving on the shoulder, nudged past the sluggish stream. She parked with two wheels in the dirt and two in the “motorcycles only” zone.
The sun burned through the thin atmosphere, touching the skin ungently. Anna loved its rough kiss and had the wrinkles and age spots to prove it. Red-faced tourists queued up at the drinking fountains.
Down in the Palace the heat and the crowding would be exacerbated. To keep from adding to the congestion, Anna and Stanton stayed on the mesa top monitoring events over the radio.
In the fifteen minutes it had taken them to get to Cliff, the boy’s condition had deteriorated sufficiently. Burke’s voice had gone from self-important to mildly panicky. Hills had called in on scene. From the two patrol vehicles parked in the lot, Anna guessed in all the excitement Jennifer had forgotten again.
Stanton found a bench in the shade at the trail head. Two German women, both in their seventies or early eighties, wearing print dresses and straw hats, moved over to make room for him.
Anna leaned on the split-rail fence behind the bench and tilted her head back to catch the sun on her face. The heat drew wind up the canyons and she reveled in its touch.
“Some questions to ask, you said. Let me in on your secret?” Stanton asked.
“I wish I had a secret. It’d make me feel superior. This doesn’t even qualify as a hunch.” Since she didn’t choose to add to that, Stanton made small talk with his bench companions in German and Anna was duly impressed. She would have been more so had the ladies not laughed so much as they tried to puzzle out what he was saying.
The ambulance arrived, Drew driving, Jimmy riding shotgun. They came to wait with Anna.
“They’re walking him out,” Drew said. “A kid again. Asthma, up at seven thousand feet. His parents ought to be shot.”
Hills’ voice, phlegmatic as ever, came into the conversation via the airwaves. “Seven hundred, three-eleven. We’re going to need some help. Fella’s collapsed on us. If the Stokes isn’t already up top, don’t wait on it. We’re to the metal stairs. Send me some big boys ’n’ we’ll hand-carry the kid out.”
“Lifting heavy objects, that’s you, Drew,” Anna said. The helitack foreman and Agent Stanton followed her toward the overlook at a trot.
LOOKING disgustingly heroic, Hills was halfway up the metal stairs, in his arms a pale young man in khaki shorts and a blue T-shirt. Oversized unlaced sneakers—the fashion that summer—made the boy’s legs look even skinnier than they were.
Walking beside and behind, Jennifer carried an oxygen bottle, the mask affixed to the patient’s face, plastic tubing connecting him to the cylinder. Following so closely they trod on Short’s heels were the boy’s parents.
A panting woman with permed reddish hair and an overheated complexion held on to one of her son’s feet to comfort him or herself. The father was lost in testosterone hysterics. Fear masquerading as anger, he berated the stolid Dutton even as Hills carried his boy. Behind them walked an older couple, grandparents, Anna guessed.
Drew came alongside Hills. They propped the young man, still conscious but barely so, against Anna and interlaced their arms. The boy’s breathing was labored, the wheezing audible without a stethoscope. His lips pursed with effort and he sipped at the air, sucking it into his lungs a bit at a time, working to push it through shrunken bronchial tubes. Anna eased him into the chair the men had made of their arms. “You’re almost there,” she said encouragingly. He nodded and made a valiant attempt to smile.
Her part in the process completed, Anna stepped back, letting Hills and Drew carry their patient to the waiting ambulance. She fell into step with the elderly couple. They seemed the sanest of the group. Both wore wide-brimmed hats, baggy shorts, and the comfortable walking shoes of experienced tourists.
“Grandson?” Anna asked.
“Our first,” the woman said.
“And probably last,” the man snarled. Obviously this was an old bone of contention in the family.
“Not now, Harold. He has had asthma ever since he was a baby,” the grandmother told Anna.
“It’s usually not bad,” Harold argued. “I told Eli not to bring him up this high.”
“Okay, Harold. I don’t think it’s the altitude,” she whispered conspiratorially, though her husband could easily hear. “Dane has been up to seven thousand feet half a dozen times and been just fine. It’s radon. Like in caves. Last time Dane was taken this bad it was something like that.”
“Irma! Leave the lady alone. It wasn’t radon. He was sniffing that glue like the kids all got crazy about.”
“Nonsense.”
The party reached the parking lot and the grandparents were lost in an organizational shuffle.
As the ambulance drove away, Stanton came to stand by Anna.
“All your questions answered?” he asked.
“Oh, yeah. The pattern’s crystal clear. I have no idea what it’s of, but it’s clear.” She twisted the watchband around on her wrist and showed the face to Frederick. “Tuesday, eleven twenty-eight A.M. Another collapse, another carry-out, right on schedule.”
“Whose?” Stanton asked.
“You tell me.”
SEVENTEEN
A PRETTY LITTLE MOUSE WITH EARS DISNEYESQUE IN their cuteness and whiskers Gus-Gus would have been proud of poked her nose out of the kitchen and contemplated crossing the risky expanse of carpet in the living area.
“You’re getting fat,” Anna warned. “One day you won’t be able to squeeze under the door.”
The mouse looked up at the sound of her voice but was otherwise unmoved. When Anna had first arrived at Far View there’d been no mice. With the largesse left on countertops and on dirty dishes by her roommates, the little creatures had come to stay. This one was so plump Anna was put in mind of an ink drawing in her childhood copy of Charlotte’s Web; a very round Templeton the rat lying on his back at the country fair saying: “What a gorge!”
Early on Jennifer and Jamie had set out d-CON. Dying mice had staggered out with such regularity the living room began to resemble the stage after the final act of Hamlet. Disgusted, Anna’d thrown the poison out. “Not cricket,” she told her housemates. “You can feed them or kill them. Not both.”
Since then they’d all come to terms with one another and the dorm no longer had pests but, as Jennifer had dubbed them, politically correct pets.
Anna’s wristwatch beeped. The mouse squeaked on the same frequency and ran behind the refrigerator. Three A.M. on the nose: Anna tried a combination of invisible-to-the-naked-eye buttons on the watch to turn off the hourly alarm. The beeping stopped but she had no idea whether it was of natural causes or if she’d won. “Man against Nature: Woman against Technology,” she mumbled.
Half a glass of burgundy sat before her on the table. Her third, but since the first two were downed six hours earlier, she figured they didn’t count. Hopefully, this one would help her to sleep and without the usual cost: waking with the jitters just before dawn.
Jack of diamonds: she put it on a black queen in the solitaire game she’d been playing since one-thirty. A space was freed up and two more moves revealed a second ace. She enjoyed a vague sense of triumph. Her mind wasn’t on the game, merely in free-fall, unloosed by solitaire’s mantra of boredom. This game had many of the earmarks of the one she and Stanton had spent the day pursuing. One by one they’d peeled away lies in hopes of uncovering a truth they could play, one that would start the game moving again.
Another of Frederick the Fed’s infer
nal lists cluttered up her notebook. While Jennifer and Hills attended to the medical at Cliff Palace, the two of them had divided up all the stories in need of checking. “The lie detector part,” Stanton had called it. A line cut down the middle of the yellow notepaper. On Anna’s side was “Policy, Truck, Rose/ Radio” and “Beavens/Veil.” In her own handwriting was added “Stephanie/Dane.” On Stanton’s side was “Silva/ Gun/Threats.”
Stanton’s day had been a complete washout. Before he could question him, Silva had been let out on bail, paid not by Patsy but by Ted Greeley. Neither Greeley nor Silva could be found.
Anna’s half of the investigation had gone well. One phone call proved Rose Meyers a member of the liars’ club. The two-hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy she’d shown Anna had been canceled six months previously for lack of payment.
Knowing the truth without knowing the rationale behind it was fairly useless. Maybe Rose was not yet aware the policy had been canceled—or knew but wasn’t ready to admit it to herself or anyone else. Maybe she’d been trying to impress Stanton. An underpaid public servant might find a lady a wee bit more enticing if she had two hundred grand. Money was a proven aphrodisiac.
Whatever the reason, Mutual Casualty and Life told Anna there was no policy, no payoff. Rose had said Stacy’d left them with nothing, then changed her tune when the truth was nothing.
Red seven on black eight; nothing revealed. She turned over another three cards.
It seemed unlikely Rose would be lying to Bella and Hattie about the operation. That would be cruel, and despite her dislike of the woman, Anna believed that in her own way Rose loved her daughter. Therefore logic would suggest Rose did have money. Fact indicated it did not come from where she’d claimed.
Anna was too old to believe that people always lied for a reason. Mostly they lied because it was easy, felt good, or was habit. However, this particular lie was complex, suggesting a more focused motive. If Rose wanted to hide the source of the money, it was probably illegal or embarrassing.
Greeley as a potential new stepdaddy might have that kind of capital. Would Rose want to admit she and Ted were that intimate? Sharing a bed meant nothing but sharing a checkbook was a real commitment. And money was a stronger motive for murder than love.