Endangered Species

by Barr, Nevada

  Among Park Service nomads there were two mind-sets: those who threw themselves wholeheartedly into each new adventure, sleeping with whoever presented, eating what was set before them, and drinking deep from each intoxicating cup they came across; and those with a strong tether to home—a cord more often than not made of telephone wire. Age was a dividing factor—the young were liberal, having as yet acquired nothing worth conserving—but the newly single and dedicated bachelors swelled those ranks.

  The clatter of rusting metal drowned out even Al’s basso profundo and Anna settled into a favorite pastime: watching the world go by. Spotlit into unnaturally bright colors, the jungle flickered past in patterns of green and black. This was a dry jungle with a fragile grip on land. Soil was thin and sandy, the island prey to hurricanes that could flatten it or divide it in two with a sudden waterway. Plants grew with the voracious disregard of the condemned, springing from the rough ground in impenetrable thickets to fight for light and air beneath oaks broad-shouldered enough to have weathered a century of storms.

  Occasionally the glancing blow of the high beams would stun a night creature. Two baby raccoons, postcard-perfect, hung halfway up a palm tree. Al passed in a thunderous cloud of dust without ever seeing them. Anna hoped the quake of their passage wouldn’t dislodge the kits. A sow and three piglets dashed for cover beneath the palmetto fronds. Three deer grazed in a meadow in the center of the island where a Beechcraft on loan for drug interdiction was tied down at the end of a dirt strip.

  There were few meadows maintained on the island. This was one of the largest. Even more than in daylight, Anna felt the relief of coming out into the open after so long a time closed beneath the dusty canopy of vegetation.

  Moonlight turned the deer to shadows, the dry grass to textured marble. Unlike the feral pigs, deer on Cumberland were not hunted. These looked up as the truck ground past but didn’t leave off chewing.

  Beside the meadow, tucked behind a cottage that could have lured Hansel and Gretel to their deaths, was Stafford, one of the derelict mansions. Built by Andrew Carnegie for his daughter, it had been a place of carriages and candlelight and southern hospitality. This fine old house, like a dowager duchess fallen on evil times, now fought just to keep body and soul together.

  Within were wooden staircases, sconces, parquet floors, coffered ceilings—craftmen’s work that, if artisans could still be found, would cost a fortune to replicate. All was threatened by time and mildew. The Park Service scrambled for funds to battle the decay and drafted plans to bring back the grandeur, but for now it sat empty and vulnerable, roofline sagging, foundation crumbling.

  Several of these magnificent hulks dotted the island. Anna had wandered through most of them, a pleasant break in the monotony. Nostalgia, memories of lives never lived but only imagined, dwelt in the silent dust-filled halls, the moldering books left on the shelves, the broken furniture stashed in enormous cellars; in a moth-eaten fur abandoned in an upstairs nursery. There was something fascinating in the flotsam of the past, once-valued things discarded when their owners moved on.

  WHEN THEY REACHED the south end of the island, the road unraveled into poorly marked byways leading to various NPS facilities. Al negotiated unerringly through the knot and turned at last onto the street where they stayed. Several houses and two barracks were scattered beneath oak trees on the east side of the road. A garage and storage barn were on the right. Farther down this minuscule Main Street the maintenance buildings clustered. The structures were all of wood, scoured to vintage softness by the ocean winds. Wherever metal touched—door hinges, nailheads, window locks—streaks of burnt orange attested to the constant rust.

  At eleven at night all was dark and deserted but for the house that quartered the fire crew. The screened-in porch was aglow from lights spilling out the open door. Behind the ubiquitous row of boots, banned from the interior by Guy in an attempt to slow the migration of the dunes from outside to in, Anna could see people lounging in metal folding chairs. The spark of a cigarette butt traced a slow arc to someone’s mouth.

  Lynette Wagner, Cumberland’s GS-4 interpretive ranger, stood in the doorway, yellow light turning the brown frizz of a shoulder-length perm to red. Her laughter bobbed on top of the hum of conversation. Two shadows hovered near her, Dijon and Rick no doubt. Lynette always had boys dancing attendance. She was not yet thirty, single, and good-enough looking, but it was more than just her physical charms. Somehow she’d managed to strike the perfect balance between being one of the boys and being one of the girls. A tomboy with a strong maternal instinct; the combination drew men like flies. Everything they could want: mother, buddy, and lover rolled into one.

  For all Anna could tell, it was genuine—Lynette to the core—and she found it as attractive as the men did, though probably not for the same reasons.

  The chairs were occupied by Cumberland’s district ranger and his alarmingly pregnant wife. The district ranger, Todd Belfore, spent much of each day with the fire crew. He’d only been on the island five months and already he was bored. Mostly he grumbled about being in charge of law enforcement where enforcing law wasn’t allowed. Word had come down that the wealthy denizens of Cumberland were “not accustomed to interference.” Tourists were fair game but they were disappointingly well behaved.

  Anna had met Tabby, his wife, only once before. The woman was so big with child that when Anna first laid eyes on her, she’d made a mental note to review her emergency childbirth procedures. Mrs. Belfore was a small-boned woman, pale and blond and clingy. There weren’t many moments when she wasn’t clutching some part of her husband’s anatomy. In a pinch even a sleeve or shirttail sufficed. Tonight she seemed particularly in need of reassurance. She held his right forearm in a death grip, his hand palm up on her lap like a dead white spider. Under the circumstances Anna didn’t hold Tabby’s neediness against her but she hadn’t found much to say to the woman either.

  Lynette said something indecipherable and Rick laughed too loud and too long.

  “Party. Party,” Al said neutrally. Anna couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or merely observant.

  She dug in her pocket for a coin. “Heads or tails?”

  “The phone’s all your’n, Ms. Pigeon,” he replied. “If Jimmy’s not in bed by now, he should be.”

  Anna traded up, leaving the pumper truck for Guy’s ATV. When he’d claimed the four-wheeler, the crew boss made noises about convenience and flexibility, but he was fooling no one. He took it because it was fun. And he was entitled. No one begrudged him.

  On the all-terrain vehicle the night swirled around Anna, dried the sweat in her hair. Even the noise of its little engine didn’t detract. Over the short trip to the office she passed four armadillos rooting alongside the road. The weird little beasts delighted her. Since coming to the island she’d spent a good chunk of time stalking them. The animals were nearsighted and not terribly bright. Rick, who hailed from the Natchez Trace Parkway in southern Mississippi and claimed to be an armadillo expert, told her if she could sneak up and touch one, catch it by surprise, it would spring straight up in the air a couple of feet. Anna didn’t know if he was pulling her leg or not. She didn’t much care. It was something to do.

  The office housing the telephone was on the inland waterway between the coast of Georgia and Cumberland Island. Just to the south was a one-room museum and a covered bridge that led to the boat-docking area. One light shone like a star on the waters where the houseboat Mitch Hanson shared with his wife was docked. Trees had been cut away to protect the structures from wildfire and windfall. In this man-made meadow a herd of twenty or thirty small island deer grazed.

  Anna pulled into the dirt parking lot, switched off the ATV, and let the silence settle before she went to the door.

  Inside she took a Baby Ruth from the cupboard in the kitchenette and left fifty cents in a coffee cup set aside for that purpose. Blissful in solitude, she sat in the chief ranger’s chair and put her feet on his desk, the better
to savor her candy and her telephone call.

  CHAPTER Three

  MOLLY PICKED UP on the second ring. At the sound of her sister’s gruff “Hello,” Anna felt muscles relax that she hadn’t known were tensed.

  “Am I interrupting anything?” she asked.

  “Nope. Letterman’s a bust tonight.” There was a sound of stretching at the tail end of Molly’s sentence and Anna suspected she was reaching for an ashtray. The nicotine bone’s connected to the phone bone, her sister had once told her, and Anna wondered if her calls were cutting years off Molly’s life.

  “Why do you do that?” she asked irritably.

  “Because it’s politically incorrect, noxious, and potentially lethal,” Molly replied, unperturbed. “Are you still a castaway?”

  “Still. Three weeks is a lot longer when you’re wearing fire boots.”

  Molly cackled. “Time and a half?”

  “The big bucks,” Anna said. “Pays my phone bills.”

  “You know, I would call you if you were ever anywhere real. Two nights in a row. To what do I owe the honor? I thought it was Frederick’s turn.”

  “I’m playing hard-to-get.”

  “Hah.”

  “I wanted to talk,” Anna said seriously. “And not have to be nice.”

  “Or witty or charming,” Molly added. She wasn’t being sarcastic; she understood the burden of maintaining one’s good behavior for any length of time.

  For the past year Anna had been carrying on a long-distance love affair with Frederick Stanton, an FBI agent she’d worked with on a couple of homicides. They’d fallen “in love”—for lack of a better phrase—over their third corpse.

  There had been an intoxicating night, an awkward breakfast, and a breathless goodbye. Then letters, letters and phone calls, eleven months’ worth. Soon, Anna knew, she would have to leave this comfortable limbo and deal with Frederick on a more flesh-and-blood basis: shoes under the bed, dual vacations, mutual friends.

  He was beginning to talk about the future, urging her to come to Chicago.

  Anna wasn’t sure she cared for that. Conversations about the future always seemed to pivot on how much one was willing to sacrifice in the here and now.

  When she’d married Zach—in what now seemed a past as distant and distorted as King Arthur’s court or the Ice Age—life had been simple. She had nothing. Zach had nothing. No home, no pets, no jobs. Merging was easy. They commingled their paperback books, bought a pretty good mattress, borrowed money to make their security deposit, and started a future with all the forethought of a blue jay planting an acorn.

  For seven years it grew and flourished; then Zach had been killed. To look ahead became too lonely, and out of self-preservation Anna had started living each day as it came. Now it was habit.

  She carried his ashes from park to park, promising herself one day she would pour them—and the dreams of her early twenties—to the four winds to scatter. The time had never seemed right. Before leaving Mesa Verde for Cumberland Island, she’d even gone so far as to take the ash tin from her underwear drawer and pry loose the lid. She’d gotten them no further than the coffee table.

  Now there was Frederick, and with him, baggage, his and hers: jobs, geography, his kids, Anna’s cat, his bird, houses. After years of kicking around amid the mouse droppings and leaky faucets of National Park Service housing, Anna had finally landed a plum: a house of native stone with a tiny tower bedroom that overlooked the green mesas of southern Colorado. During the past year she’d noted an odd tingling sensation in the soles of her feet and thought perhaps she was beginning to put down a few tentative roots.

  Not a good time to be calling Atlas and breaking out the bubble wrap.

  “Come to think of it,” Anna said, meaning Frederick, boys, and the conjugal life in general, “I don’t even want to talk about it.” Instead, she told Molly of the turtles and Marty Schlessinger. After ten minutes it dawned on her she was doing all the talking and she shut up, letting the line cool, waiting to see if Molly needed to talk.

  Nothing but the sucking sound of a Camel drawn straight into dying lungs came over the wire. Molly had been a psychiatrist for over twenty years. Listening had become a habit, as had keeping herself to herself. Born, Anna suspected, from knowing how easily one’s words, however carefully couched, could expose weakness. “What have you been up to?” she coaxed.

  Another second or two ticked by and Anna’s antennae went up. Silence could mean nothing; aggravated silence was a clue. Psychiatry wasn’t the only profession taught to listen for weakness.

  “What?” Anna demanded.

  “Another death threat.” Molly laughed. Annoyance, edginess, defensiveness, and maybe a small thread of fear wove through the short patch of sound.

  Momentarily Anna was stunned as both ends of the statement smacked into her. “Another,” she said flatly, and was pleased that her voice lacked any trace of warmth. Molly sensed warmth as cannily as the Cumberland Island ticks. In seconds she could worm herself into it and evade the conversational thrust.

  “It’s only the second,” Molly defended herself. She was trying to shrug it off. Anna could see her as clearly as if she stood on the other side of the chief ranger’s desk. This close to bedtime she would be wearing a sweat suit—the expensive embroidered kind never meant to be sweated in—probably in lavender, crimson, or pink. On her feet, big feet for so small a woman, would be fuzzy white ankle socks with tiger stripes on them. The day’s mascara would have migrated down to form smudges beneath her lower lashes, and her short, thick, gray-streaked hair would be worked into a frenzy of curls from fingers being constantly thrust through it.

  Molly saw herself as piano wire: strong, sharp, unbreakable. When she was encased in Dior suits, high heels, and a wall full of formidable diplomas and awards, this probably wasn’t too far off the mark. In downy pink PJs and tiger paws, she looked tiny and vulnerable. Wet, she wouldn’t weigh more than 110 pounds.

  Anna closed her eyes and wished for a glass of Mondavi red, room temperature; a large glass with a sturdy stem filled too close to the top for polite society. Reluctantly she let the image go. “You’d better tell me the whole story,” she said. “If you leave any parts out it’ll give me bad dreams.”

  “What about Al?” Molly had grown accustomed to Anna’s phone-sharing dilemmas.

  “He lost the coin toss. You may begin.”

  There was a pause, tense and poised, the kind divers make on the high board as the strategies of their controlled fall coalesce into their muscles.

  “Part of it is me being dramatic, no doubt. Believe it or not, death threats are fairly common—macroscopically speaking. We get our share: husbands whose wives decided to divorce them after getting therapy, patients who spent a ton of money and are still crazy as bedbugs. Mostly threats are like obscene phone calls—the kick is in the words and the shock. No follow-up is called for.” A long, slow inhalation followed. Anna pictured the smoke trickling up through her sister’s fingers as, cigarette in hand, she raked back her curls.

  For the first time she envied Molly her addiction. At least she still had her drug. Dirty and deadly as it was, nobody woke up facedown on a car seat with no recollection of the last eight hours because they’d smoked one too many cigarettes.

  “What was different about this threat?” Anna asked.

  “For one, it was a woman. Very rare. Very. Not for women to scream, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ et cetera, but for a serious telephone death threat it’s quite unusual. And two, it didn’t sound as if she’d made any attempt to disguise her voice. She sounded stressed, repressed, and decidedly clear.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Hang on.” A series of clicks serrated the silence, then a sweet, low-pitched voice, almost a vibrato from underlying emotion, said: “You deserve to die. Not just your kind, you personally. It will be my pleasure to do the honors. My plate is rather full right now but rest assured I will pencil you in as soon as there’s an openi
ng.”

  “Could you hear it?” Molly again.

  “You taped the threat?” Anna was impressed. Her sister was a cool customer.

  “No. She left it on my answering machine.”

  Anna laughed in spite of herself. “I’m surprised she didn’t fax it. God. The consummate businesswoman. ‘Pencil you in’?”

  Molly laughed with her and when the laughter wore out they were both scared.

  “Too weird,” Anna said. “A practical joke?”

  Molly shook her head. Anna could tell from the wavering shush of smoky breath blown across the receiver. “I’ve listened to it umpteen times and can’t make heads or tails of it. Do you think I should call the police?”

  Molly never asked for advice. Flattery and alarm vied for space in Anna’s heart. “Yes. By all means. If it turns out to be nothing, terrific.”

  “Do you think they’d take me seriously?”

  “You’re rich, white, pushing fifty, and well connected.”

  “Of course.” Again Molly laughed. Hers was an evil-sounding chuckle that Anna loved. The sort of chortle Dorothy might have heard shortly before all hell broke loose in the land of Oz. “For a moment there, I was ten years old again, freckled and redheaded and afraid of crying wolf. I’m a grownup, by God!” Molly said.

  “Save the tape,” Anna cautioned.

  “Done. Two copies. One in a safe-deposit.”

  “What was the first threat like?”

  “A note came in the mail. It was on expensive stationery and written in calligraphy—the kind that was all the rage for fancy Earth Day party invitations a few years back. Kind of a walk-in-Broccoli-Forest feel to it. You’re on hold again.”

  A moment later the phone clattered back to Molly’s ear. “Still there?”

  “Still here.”

  “Okay—and for the comfort of your little cop mind I want you to know I’m holding this with sterile tweezers while I read it.