Ill Wind

by Nevada Barr

  Anna put a red four on a red five, woke up to her game, and took it back. Things just weren’t adding up: murdering one’s spouse was passé. Stacy had no inheritance, no insurance, and though in a divorce he might sue for custody of Bella, he had the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell of winning. Rose could be intimate with whomever’s checkbook she pleased without much in the way of adverse consequences.

  If there was a good reason for Rose to kill her husband, Anna was missing it. A woman scorned crossed her mind but she dismissed it. Her own presumed affair with Stacy might possibly foment a woman miffed, but hardly scorned.

  Twenty-four-carat motive or not, Rose had a lot of money and was lying about where she’d gotten it. That qualified her as a suspect.

  “Truck,” the next item on Stanton’s hit list, referred to the elusive truck Beavens reported hearing and Anna and Stanton had chased. A tour of the housing areas revealed the whereabouts of thirteen trucks. Trucks were in vogue even for suburbanites. In parks they were de rigueur. Without exception they were teensy little Toyotas, Ford Rangers—toy trucks. Only Tom Silva owned a good old-fashioned bubba truck complete with shovel and gun rack. But even Silva’s Chevy couldn’t grind out the kind of racket that had pulled Anna and Stanton from their chindi vigil.

  The thought of Silva jogged something in the back of Anna’s tired mind. She set down the playing cards and stared into her wine as if waiting for a vision. Trucks and Tom and noise and trucks and Tom... It was coming to her. Back in June, before all the fuss, Tom had complained a “big goddamn truck” almost ran him off the road. Anna remembered following up on his complaint just to prove she was fair-minded and finding nothing. She’d even written a case incident report to keep her credit good. Later Silva’d said he was just “jerking her chain.”

  Tom drove a real pickup and wore cowboy shirts with the sleeves ripped out. What would he consider big? Surely not a snubby-nosed little Mitsubishi. To a construction worker, “big truck” would mean a Kenmore, a Peterbilt, a Mac.

  First a truck, then no truck, now a truck. Another lie. Anna swallowed the medium through which the oracle had revealed this truth.

  Next on the list was “Rose/Radio.” That had been a worthless line of inquiry. Rose had returned belt, gun, and radio to the CRO around two o’clock. When Anna’d dared ask if she’d lent or used the radio, Rose had climbed into an uncommunicative huff and departed.

  Feeling spiteful, Anna had taken the radio out of its leather holster and dusted the hard plastic case for fingerprints. There wasn’t a print on it. Either Rose was an anal-retentive housekeeper or it had been wiped clean so the last user could go undetected.

  “Beavens/Veil” had proved a bit easier. At least Beavens was still speaking to Anna, that was a start. She’d found him down in Spruce Tree House just as he was being relieved for a meal break. He’d brought a bag lunch and they sat together in the cool of the alcove at the rear of the ancient pueblo amid the prosaic needs of a modern-day Park Service: oxygen bottle, backboard, first-aid kit, and white helium-filled balloons. The last interpreter out of the ruin in the evening affixed these to the upper ramparts. Al Stinson’s brainchild, the balloons kept the vultures from roosting and whitewashing the national historic treasure with bird droppings.

  Beavens had been his usual self: shrugging, replying to everything with “no big deal.” Halfway through his bag of Doritos—that and a ruin-temperature Dr Pepper constituted lunch—Anna noticed he was nervously fingering a gold chain around his neck. At an earlier meeting she remembered him holding on to a small gold cross suspended from it as Stanton had questioned him about the veil.

  On a hunch, she turned the conversation along more spiritual lines. After a moment’s silence, she said, “One thing I don’t like about living in the park is it’s so far to church.”

  Beavens’ face, pasty despite the best efforts of the high desert sun, lit up for the first time in Anna’s short acquaintance with him. Animation lent him youth and even a certain charm. “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior?” he asked.

  Such was the hope in his voice, Anna might have felt guilty had she not been fairly sure she’d stumbled on the key that would unlock his confidence. “Washed in the blood of the lamb a year ago next month,” she said.

  A boyish smile curved up the corners of his mouth and transformed his face. “You!” he exclaimed. “I never would have guessed.”

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  “Amen. Which church do you go to?” He was leaning forward, defenses down. Anna didn’t want to lose him with a wrong answer.

  “I’ve only been here a couple months. So far I haven’t found anything that really works for me,” she equivocated.

  Beavens nodded sympathetically. “I can’t find anything either. This New Age stuff is like a cancer. It’s eaten away a lot of real belief. Maybe we could get together a Bible study group up on the mesa?”

  Anna had a sinking feeling she was going to pay dearly for this particular deception. “The park is kind of a magnet for the New Agers,” she said. “What with crystals and the American Indian thing that’s caught on.”

  Beavens’ face continued to look receptive, so she pressed on. “All this sitting around in kivas waiting for spirits, I don’t know . . .” She trailed off, hoping he would fill in with his own ideas. She wasn’t disappointed.

  “It’s just an invitation to Satan, that’s all it amounts to,” he said eagerly. “The Bible warns us that there’ll be stumbling blocks on the road to heaven. These people are just providing the Devil with tools—or maybe I should say fools—to do his work. It’s like holding séances or messing with Ouija boards. You can’t go calling up this kind of stuff. You’ve got to turn away from it, turn to the Bible.”

  “Prayer,” Anna said.

  “Yes!” Beavens looked relieved beyond measure; someone understood him.

  Anna ignored a mild pang of remorse. “What with all that’s been happening, I kind of think the demons have been called up already.”

  In the middle of a sip of Dr Pepper, Beavens nodded his agreement and nearly choked himself to death. When he’d recovered somewhat, he managed to squeak out: “Burke, the spirit veil.”

  Now Anna leaned forward. “Summer solstice—the night you saw the interp’s truck—”

  “Heard it.”

  “Heard it, then. Did you really see the veil?” she asked as one conspirator might ask another.

  “I saw something,” Beavens replied in the same tone. “But we can’t give it credence, can’t spread the bad word. I say get thee behind me, Satan!” He laughed, but Anna could see he was serious, nervous and serious. He was fiddling with the cross again.

  An instinct to pounce welled up strongly. Forcing it down, she leaned back and crossed her ankles. “That kind of thing spreads like wildfire,” she agreed. “People want to believe in signs and portents.”

  “Original sin,” Beavens said.

  Anna didn’t know where that fit in or exactly what it was. Sister Mary Judette had explained it in religion class but that was close to thirty years before. To say something, she threw in a cliché from her own formative years and hoped it was general enough to fit any conversational requirement: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What was it like, the something you saw?”

  “Weird,” Beavens confided. “‘Spirit veil’ is a pretty good description. It’s Jamie Burke, she’d better cut it out, too. She’s got no idea who she’s messing with.”

  Anna looked interested.

  “She’s got half the interps in the park watching and thinking and waiting. So it shows up. You call up the Devil, he comes.”

  Anna nodded sagely. “Was it like a kind of curtain?” She brought the conversation back to where she wanted it.

  “Kind of. An iridescent shimmer. Maybe a hundred feet long. It was really neat-looking,” he said, then thinking better of it add
ed, “But then it would be, wouldn’t it?”

  Another interpreter, a frosted blonde art teacher from Oklahoma, came into the shade of the alcove. “They’re all yours, Claude,” she said as she took a Flintstones lunch box out of the first-aid cabinet and sat down cross-legged on the smooth stone floor.

  Anna walked Beavens out into the sunlight. “You didn’t want to admit seeing the veil because it’d just give the Devil his due? Recruiting for him, sort of?”

  “No sense being Lucifer’s patsy.”

  As Anna turned to go, he followed her a couple of steps. “Let’s do that Bible study, okay?”

  “Anytime.” Anna escaped into a knot of visitors.

  So there had been something—a spirit veil or the Devil’s shirttail, but definitely something.

  Anna stared at the cards on the table. Nothing left to play. Miss Mouse was back, poking her little gray nose around the door frame from the direction of the kitchen. “I’ve got a cat,” Anna threatened. The mouse twitched her whiskers but didn’t run away.

  Eyes down at the tabletop with its scattered playing cards, Anna rested her head in her hands. Three choices: finish her wine and try to get some sleep, deal another hand of solitaire, or cheat. Cheating seemed the most profitable course.

  Shuffling the remaining cards into what she hoped would prove a more cooperative order, she eyed the last item on the list, the one she had written: “Stephanie/Dane.”

  Hills would have a few choice words to say about the phone bill she’d run up tracking them down. Stephanie McFarland was the asthmatic girl she and Stacy had carried out of Cliff Palace. The child who had died. Dane was the boy helitack had evacuated earlier in the day. Both were young and, other than asthma, in good condition. Both sets of parents had insisted the children had been up at seven thousand feet before without ill effects.

  Fourteen long-distance calls had gathered the information Anna’d been looking for. Both children had had previous attacks of like severity. Stephanie’s had been triggered by fumes when as a child she’d locked herself in a broom closet and shattered a bottle of cleaning solution in her attempts to dislodge the door. By the time her mother had found her she was suffering statis asthmaticus and she very nearly lost her life.

  After a bit of cajoling, the ER nurse at Southwest Memorial in Cortez told Anna Dane’s parents, Eli and Dina Bjornson, were staying at the Aneth Lodge. Immediate danger to their son past, they’d been fairly communicative. Dane had had one serious attack before, brought on not by radon or sniffing glue but by exposure to chemical Mace some boys at his junior high school had been playing with.

  One explanation of the Cliff Palace incidents was that the ruin was exhaling poisonous vapors, perhaps the dying breath of the fabled underworld blowing through the sipapus. Stacy had been reaching toward the entrance to that world with his last dying gasp. Or so the corpse had appeared. Anna put no credence in the underworld as a mythical entity but there had been cases of poisonous gas, naturally generated, escaping to the detriment of humankind. Could that be the rationale behind the sudden and complete departure of the Old Ones? A phenomenon that for some geological reason was just now reasserting itself?

  Another solution was coincidence. Two asthmatic kids with similar medical histories collapse within a few weeks of one another on a Tuesday morning. Not really much of a coincidence. It wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow with Anna had it not been for Stacy and the rest of the Tuesday Morning Club.

  Anna was stuck with the facts: something or someone was causing people to collapse in Cliff Palace on Tuesday mornings. Not random, not coincidental, not paranormal, but cause and effect. Anna figured the culprit or culprits were individuals with greater material desires than your average ghost.

  She turned her mind back to her solitaire game. Reshuffling hadn’t broken a single space loose. She gathered up the playing cards and reboxed them. Miss Mouse had gone to bed. Anna would follow suit.

  She’d just swallowed the last of the dry red sleeping draught when the phone rang. In the dead of night it was always a sickening sound, though at Mesa Verde nine times out of ten it was a false alarm from the concessions facility. The new motion detectors were so sensitive, the least vibration set them off, sometimes two or three times in a night. Anna often wondered how much money the hapless taxpayers had forked out in overtime so fully armed rangers could shoo mice out of the Hostess Twinkies. With the monies concessions pulled in they could easily afford Pinkertons.

  Again the phone rang. Anna threw herself on it as if it were a hand grenade. Half the night she’d been up, and if there was any overtime to be had she was damned if she’d let anyone else get it.

  “Mesa Verde.”

  A short silence followed, punctuated by a sharp intake of breath. “What?” came a faltering voice.

  “Mesa Verde National Park,” Anna elaborated. “You’ve reached our emergency number.”

  “This is an emergency?” the voice said uncertainly. It was either a very timid woman or a small child.

  “What can I help you with?”

  “A car’s gone off the road down here. I think somebody’s still inside.”

  Anna felt her stomach tighten and her mind clear. “Where are you calling from?”

  “A phone by the road.”

  There were only two, one at Delta Cut and one at Bravo Cut, two places where the road to the mesa top sliced through the side of a hill. “Are you closer to the bottom of the mesa or the top?”

  “The top, I think.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t think so, I mean no, I’m not. We... I was out on the point looking at the lights when we... I saw the headlights go over. They’re way down. Somebody drove off. That’s all I know.” There was a click and the interview was over. Whoever had called had been out frolicking under the stars, Anna guessed, with an inappropriate “we” and, now that the altruism brought on by shock had worn thin, had thought better of involvement.

  Delta Cut was sheer on one side, a dirt-and-stone bank rising vertically from the roadbed. The other side dropped off precipitously in a jungle of serviceberry and oakbrush. Unless traveling at impossible speeds, a passenger car wouldn’t have the clout to break through the iron and concrete. A vehicle over the edge would’ve had to run past the railing on one end or the other.

  Anna changed phones and put in a call to Frieda from the bedroom as she pulled on her uniform trousers. Frieda would wake up someone to bring the ambulance and call out helitack in case a low-angle rescue was needed.

  The call completed, Anna banged on Jennifer Short’s bedroom door. No one grunted. Jennifer slept like the dead. Anna pushed open the door but the room was empty. Either Jennifer was partying late or had gotten lucky and found a more entertaining bed for the night.

  Stars hung close to the mesa, not dulled by moisture or atmosphere. A half-moon spilled enough light to see by. Garbage was strewn over the walk, and as she walked to the car Anna saw a big brown rump vanishing into the underbrush. When she returned she’d clean up the mess and not mention the marauder to the brass. At Mesa Verde the solution to problem bears might be to shoot first and justify later.

  As she backed the patrol car out of the lot and started down the main road the three miles to Delta Cut, she ran through her EMS checklist. Rehearsing emergency medical procedures and inventorying available equipment calmed and centered her.

  With no traffic to slow her, she reached Delta Cut before she’d played out more than a few possible scenarios. Not surprisingly, no car waited at the pull-out. The phone box hung open as if deserted in haste. Anna pulled the Ford into the left lane, switched on her spot light, and cruised slowly along the guardrail.

  Serviceberry grew thickly down the bank, camouflaging drops and ravines. Late blooms glowed white. Beyond, the thickets were impenetrable in their darkness. Anna rolled down the car’s windows and listened but nothing was audible over the hum of the engine.

  A crank call? It hadn’t sounded it. Crank calls
were usually accompanied by a background of party-animal noises. A trap? The thought made the little hairs on the back of her neck crawl. Could someone have lured her out in the dead of night for sinister purposes? Highly unlikely, she soothed herself. For one thing, there was no guarantee she’d be the one to answer the ’69 line, for another, who could’ve guessed she’d come alone other than Jennifer and whom-ever she was with? The only reason for making her a target was the Meyers investigation and she hadn’t exactly been burning up the turf in that department.

  Reassured by her own sense of inadequacy, she left the patrol car to walk the same ground. Free from the distraction of machinery, she found what she was looking for. Eighty or a hundred feet down the bank, almost hidden by the thick foliage, was the yellow glow of automobile headlights. To the left of the lights she could just make out the pale shape of a vehicle’s body and adjusted her thoughts: not a car, a pickup truck, white or yellow in color.

  Having radioed in the exact location of the wreck, she collected the jump kit and a flashlight, backtracked to the end of the barricade, and shone the light into the brush. A barely discernible trail of broken branches and scarred earth showed where the truck had left the pavement. There were no skid marks, no deep cuts in the sod indicating the brakes had been applied.

  Hunching up like a woman in a windstorm, she forced her way through the brush, following the broken trail. Four or five yards down the steep bank the ground fell away. A cliff, maybe thirty feet high, was cut into the hillside where the undergrowth had let go of unstable soil during the previous winter’s snows. Dirt and scree dropped down to a rubble of boulders scattered on a shoulder of land. Past that was a sheer drop to the valley floor, where the lights of Cortez twinkled invitingly.

  The pickup had cut through the brush at the point where she stood, then hurtled over the embankment. Boulders stopped its fall. The nose of the truck was crushed, the windshield and both side windows smashed. Either time was of the essence or all the time in the world would not be enough. Whoever was inside would be lucky to be alive.