Burn: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

by Nevada Barr

  The boys had to wear "stupid pants that were short and stupid coats with buttons or diapers and nothing fun." Candy said she was glad she wasn't a boy.

  The "guests" were "men who smelled good and weren't supposed to mark anybody." To Anna that suggested that some violence was allowed, just not the kind that would damage the goods.

  "How did you 'entertain' the guests?" Clare asked.

  Then Candy told them. As one horrible act after another was described, Anna felt sicker and sicker. Clare, her children undoubtedly on her mind, grew so pale Anna was worried she wouldn't be able to continue. Candy finished with "It wasn't so bad because I'd get ice cream after. Till I got fat. They liked me some fat but not real fat."

  Pleasingly plump, Anna thought, and a tide of nausea threatened to send her running to the bathroom.

  Blessedly, Clare changed the subject.

  "Did you have any friends there?" she asked.

  "Dolly was my friend," Candy said; then sadness aged her face. "She was real little and she got broke and they took her somewhere. A broke jewel got given away."

  "Who were the broken jewels given to?"

  "People. Sometimes to Dougie. He was bad. He sounded good, but he was mean."

  At the name Dougie, Clare looked at Anna. That was the name the Cajun had called the pervert.

  "I had a baby for a while. A real baby, and they let me carry her around and feed her, but she got broke so bad she was dead afterward."

  Star groaned, and Anna thought of the infant Helena she'd cared for and was blinded by a white-hot need to kill somebody.

  "Did you have any other friends?" Clare pressed on.

  "No. Maybe Blackie. When I got broke he was supposed to give me to Dougie, but he said since I was a retard I could just go away and he wouldn't tell anybody."

  Blackie, the Cajun; it was he who turned her loose on the streets to survive the only way she knew how. Charity of a kind, Anna supposed.

  Interesting as this all was, it brought them no closer to the location of the house, if, indeed, it was still operating out of the same space it had been when Candy was there. Since it had been less than a year since she'd been turned out, it was likely, but not certain by any means.

  Despite the hypnosis, Candy was growing restive under the questioning.

  "Ask her if she could smell anything or hear anything from the outside world," Anna whispered.

  Clare nodded and turned back to the girl on the bed. "We're nearly done, Candy. There's just one more thing I'd like to ask you. Let's go into the courtyard in the morning after all the guests have gone and sit by ourselves on a bench. Are we there?"

  "I guess."

  Anna didn't know if hypnosis wore off after a time or if people could get bored or annoyed or scared and bring themselves out of it, but it sounded like one or the other was happening. Candy's voice was a bit more distinct and her eyes active beneath the closed lids.

  "Listen," Clare said. "What do you hear?"

  Anna found herself listening so hard that, even with the low hum of the city, her ears were ringing. For a long time Candy said nothing. Clare's shoulders slumped. Then Candy opened her mouth and sang. "Da, da, da, da, da, da dah." Scales, sung in a clear sweet voice. She sang it again in a higher register. Then again.

  "Anything else?" Clare asked.

  "A piano." This time Candy sang low, using the word "dunk" to imitate scales being played on a keyboard.

  Music lessons, singing lessons. For the first time since the hypnosis began, Anna had hope they might learn something after all.

  "That's good. That's good," Clare crooned. "Let's listen some more."

  Candy quieted but for a tiny voice in which she sang the scales again. Just when Anna thought that well had gone dry, the girl erupted with a great hiss.

  Crawfish dumped into boiling water? A steam cleaner? An industrial-grade iron for pressing sheets? There were too many things it might be.

  "Thunk, thunk, thunk like big darts hitting, or a gun with a silencer," Candy said.

  A child who probably didn't know the world was round--or care--lived in a city where guns with silencers were common enough for her to know what one sounded like when fired. Anna longed for her parks, her mountains, and her quiet home with her kind husband, her soft cats and silly dog. Cities were too grating.

  Clare looked at Anna, and Anna shook her head. The sounds, the thunk and the hissing put together, brought nothing to mind.

  Clare rubbed her eyes wearily. "One last question," she said. "Do you smell anything?"

  "Perfume," Candy said. "Nice kinds."

  "Flowers?" Clare asked.

  "Uh-huh."

  "Anything else?"

  "Other flowers."

  "You've done so well, Candy. I'm going to count backward from ten, and you're going to come up slowly like you were floating, and when I get to one you are going to open your eyes. You'll feel real good and rested and happy."

  Candy got her beer and her hundred bucks.

  Anna and Clare got three vague clues and a memory of misery that would last a lifetime.

  TWENTY-NINE

  They walked the streets of the Quarter. They sniffed and listened for thunks, hisses, and scales being played on a piano. Clare put one foot in front of the other and fought images that slammed into her mind with the force of sledgehammers, making it a struggle just to remain upright. The swift dark Mississippi River called to her, and she wanted to throw herself into its deadly embrace and never think or feel again, but, until she knew her daughters were dead, that was a release she had to deny herself.

  Anna Pigeon walked with her. She talked of the clues they had, of the names Dougie and Blackie, proof of the connection between the fancy house and Seattle, of the possibility that David had been killed because he learned what was happening to the children and turned to the FBI.

  Clare heard her and knew the woman was trying to prop her up with hope. Clare wanted the hope but couldn't get hold of it. Each time she tried to grab on, it slipped from her fingers and was replaced by pictures of men's hands on her girls. The depth of the depravity shamed her, made her not want to be a human being anymore, if humans could do these things; made her hate men for what they did and thought and wanted; made her want to be a man that she might atone by killing herself.

  They made copies of the sketch the Jackson Square portraitist had drawn from the description of Dougie. Anna kept one. Clare gave the rest to Danny and his gang of punks. Handling the page, seeing the lines coalescing into the cramped face of the man with the yellow coat, the words "broke jewels" cut into her brain like a razor blade held too tightly in the hand: children as commodity, as things, things that could be broken and given to scum like Dougie to use or kill or both, precious Dana with her olive and alabaster skin, dark eyes brimming with love; little Vee always moving, too full of fun to stay still; jewels, broken toys, used up and thrown on a trash heap to be picked over by rats like Dougie.

  "Hey!"

  Clare dragged herself from the chamber of horrors. Anna Pigeon was standing in front of her, her hazel eyes so penetrating they burned some of the fog from Clare's brain.

  "What happened?" Anna demanded.

  Had the fool woman been listening? Had she not heard what Clare had? Did she not see the fancy house?

  "Are you a fucking idiot or what?" Jordan snarled.

  Oddly, the pigeon didn't look offended, only concerned.

  Clare was outside of herself, above and to the right, looking down from the space she inhabited when she was being her own director. What she saw was not Clare Sullivan the actor playing a role; she saw a man who had no conscience, no regrets, no ethics, no friends, no hopes or fears, a man who was as free as he was reprehensible. She envied him.

  "Clare?" An iron grip closed on Jordan's arm, and Clare slammed back into the body and the costume. Metaphorically speaking, Clare had lost herself in roles before, becoming enamored of the accent or the time period or the internal workings of a character she
played--but only metaphorically. Never had she confused herself with a fictional person. Never thought their thoughts but with full knowledge that she was merely walking a mile in another's shoes, not morphing into flesh of their flesh. The line between art and insanity was always clearly drawn. Actors were the world's great realists. One couldn't focus intently on what made humans do as they did and have many illusions left.

  Jordan was different. More and more Jordan was the only person Clare could bear to be. He'd become more than pretense; he'd become her fate, what she was becoming, cell by cell, thought by thought.

  When Anna asked what happened, she wasn't harking back to Candy's revelations. She was asking why Clare had stopped and was standing in the middle of the sidewalk staring at a construction Dumpster.

  "Sorry," Clare said. Unable to say more, she began walking.

  Mackie greeted them at the gate. For once the joyous little face, the tongue that would not stay in his mouth, the ears flopping and bouncing as he ran, his obvious delight in her existence, did not lift her spirits. In a way, she had seen what she had let happen to Mackie's kids, the little girls he'd slept with most nights of his life and every night of theirs, the girls who doted on him and to whom, in return, he gave complete love and loyalty, even unto allowing them to dress him in doll dresses and bonnets and wheel him up and down the street where other dogs might see. His unquestioning love only served to remind her that she had betrayed him; he trusted her to keep his world with its two suns, Dana and Vee, intact. Having failed, it physically hurt to be greeted like a returning hero. Jordan pushed at Clare, and she had to fight not to kick the little dog away, yell at him to get down.

  This cruelty, on top of the others she had borne this day, knocked her to the ground. Her knees slammed into the brick, and the pain was welcome. She opened her arms and gathered up her children's dog, burying her face in the fur of his neck as he wriggled and licked and made small happy noises.

  When she could let him go, she realized she'd blocked the way, effectively trapping the so-called federal law enforcement officer behind her on the narrow walk. The pigeon had waited patiently, not trying to comfort or rush her.

  Grateful, but without the strength to express it, Clare pushed herself to hands and knees, then to a standing position. No more than a month before, she'd been able to rise fluidly from sitting cross-legged to standing without the aid of arms or hands. Now it was all she could do to pull herself upright by holding on to a swirl of iron decoration nailed to Geneva's fence.

  "Go take a shower," the pigeon ranger said. She put her hand on Clare's shoulders.

  Neither Clare nor Jordan had the energy to jerk free of her touch.

  Clare allowed herself to be steered to her apartment door. The key fell from nerveless fingers as she took it from her pocket. She watched Anna bend down to retrieve it. The ranger's hair was red and white, salt and cinnamon. It was braided into a single plait down her back and so long that, as she took up the keys, the red tail of it coiled momentarily on the ground.

  When Clare played her she would remember that; she would remember what it felt like to have hair that fell heavily and had a life of its own, that did things the head never realized it was doing.

  "A long shower," the pigeon said as she unlocked the door. "With lots of hot water. Wash your hair. I'm going out for a little while--not long." She peered at Clare with those sharp greenish gold eyes, the skin around them wrinkled from too many days in the sun and too little vanity to do anything about it.

  "Shower," Clare said.

  "Atta girl!" Anna slapped her on the shoulder as if they were old friends from the football field and left, pocketing Clare's keys as she did so. The water was hot and Clare was wet before she realized the ranger had effectively taken her prisoner. The gate could only be opened with a key.

  She'd showered and washed her hair and was standing naked in the middle of the bedroom when the apartment door opened and Anna Pigeon walked in without knocking. She had two plastic bags, both of which she dumped on the table by the computer.

  "I'm figuring you'll want to ask the concierge of Les Bonnes Filles to recommend a good restaurant, and then tip him lavishly to sort of break the ice," the ranger said as she took out a baguette, cheese, a bottle of wine, a carton of orange juice, and a jar of dill pickles.

  "But I doubt there's any point in wasting time and money at a fancy restaurant. This should give you enough energy to go on." Anna took a Swiss Army knife from the pocket of her shorts, opened the corkscrew blade, and uncorked the wine. "Strictly medicinal," the ranger said with a smile. She looked around. Clare had no dishes. None. Surely she'd eaten in the last couple of weeks, she just didn't remember when.

  "Well," the ranger said. "It'll be like camping." She took a genteel swig from the neck of the bottle, wiped the mouth on her shirttail, and offered it to Clare. "It is a proven fact no one ever got sick from drinking out of a bottle that has been wiped clean with a shirttail or a sleeve. Socks are another matter entirely. I knew a guy who had survived three weeks in Olympic National Park in one of the worst blizzards to hit the Northwest in half a century. Died a week and a half later because his brother wiped off the mouth of a beer bottle with his sock."

  Clare accepted the bottle and took a drink. Anna carried the cheese, bread, pickles, and knife into the bedroom and sat on the floor. There she spread the picnic out on the boards. Clare watched without moving. Her brain wouldn't engage, and though she felt vaguely impolite, she didn't know what to do about it.

  The ranger looked up at her expectantly. When Clare didn't respond, she said, "Food," as if telling a being from a distant galaxy what lay before it. As proof, or to remind Clare how it was done, or because she was hungry, she cut off a bit of the cheese and put it into her mouth.

  "Right. Food," Clare said. She padded over to where the ranger sat with the pickle jar and joined her on the floor. "The Naked Lunch," she said.

  "William S. Burroughs," Anna said and handed her a chunk of bread and cheese.

  "Yes." Clare held the rude sandwich. The smell made her sick.

  "Eat," the pigeon ordered.

  "I'll eat it later," Clare said. Anna Pigeon looked at her narrowly but didn't press the matter.

  When the ranger had polished off a good bit of the food, she put the leftovers on the counter.

  "Sleep," she told Clare.

  Clare crawled to the sleeping bag and lay down.

  "I'll wake you up in a few hours. It will probably be a longish night. At least I hope it will."

  Clare closed her eyes, but cold panic shot through her and she opened them again. The ranger was still standing in the bedroom door.

  "Don't worry," she said as if she were talking to a child. "I'm not going anywhere. I'll be right here in the next room."

  Clare slept.

  Anna didn't have to wake her. Two hours later she shot into a sitting position, driven there by a nightmare that was too like the reality Candy had painted to be let go of easily. From the other room she could hear the faint tak tak tak of fingernails hitting a keyboard. Anna had been as good as her word; she'd stayed and kept watch over her while she slept.

  Having gotten up and brushed her teeth, Clare got the Ace bandage down from the shelf in the closet and bound her breasts flat. That done, she pulled on the fine silk boxers, a pair of pale blue silk-linen blend pleat-front trousers, an off-white collarless linen shirt, a snakeskin belt in light brown, and Gucci loafers without socks. In the shower she'd tried to scrub off her crown of thorns, but the ink left a ghost that was worse than the tattoo, so she refurbished it. Using spirit gum and a bit of hair, she replaced the patch beneath her lower lip. There was no need to darken and roughen her complexion with makeup. Stress and weight loss had aged and coarsened her skin.

  The mirror reflected back Jordan Sinclair, and Jordan recognized himself.

  Hair slicked back, he took a wad of twenties, fifties, and hundreds from his old wallet and folded them into a buttery soft leathe
r billfold that he tucked in the inner pocket of the jacket hanging in the closet. Jordan liked the upgrade, the way the expensive clothes felt. He could do a pedophile with money to burn. Clare wasn't the only one who could pull off a scam. He dug out her last purchase from where she'd stuck it in the side pocket of the suitcase: a heavy gold signet ring set with a diamond the size of a hen's eye. The weight felt right on his hand.

  "Wow," Anna said, and he looked up to see the pigeon leaning in the doorway, legs crossed at the ankles, arms crossed on her chest. "Nice ring. It'll be good in a fight."

  "Yeah," Jordan said. The pigeon blinked. Maybe she saw him, maybe she didn't.

  "Did that set you back another five thousand dollars?"

  "What do rangers get paid?" he asked.

  "Not much."

  "We get the fuckers who took the kids, you can have this." The ring was the cheapest thing on Clare's wardrobe list. She'd bought it for seven dollars in the French Market.

  "Are you about ready?" Anna asked.

  "Let's do it." Jordan slid into the sport coat--also silk and light enough for spring in Louisiana--and grabbed the handle of the rolling suitcase.

  "You may need this. It's prepaid. My cell number is programmed in."

  Jordan took the cheap phone from the ranger's hand. He might need it, but he sure as hell was going to keep it out of sight. It screamed LOW RENT.

  "Take these, too," the pigeon said. In her hand were two of the pictures from the wall where Clare kept the photographs of children from porn sites.

  Clare flopped in Jordan's breast. Had Anna held out a rattlesnake, she couldn't have had a more visceral reaction of fear and nausea. Jordan swallowed her down.

  "Right," he said, unzipped the bag, and put them under the boxer shorts. If the concierge did any snooping, Jordan might as well let him know exactly what he was in the market for.