Hard Truth

by Nevada Barr

While accepting their necessity in heavy-use areas, Anna loathed the things. She couldn’t hold her breath long enough and usually ended up gasping and gagging. She’d been told many times to breathe through her mouth, and though logic told her it was impossible, imagination insisted, though she might not smell it, she could taste it.

  When nature did not insist she add solid waste to the collection, she always opted for the outdoors and deposited only the paper in the privy pit. Following her flashlight beam down the well-worn path from the cabin’s back door, she passed the horse paddock, now empty, and went behind the outhouse into the trees.

  She was just exposing her delicate white flesh to the mosquitoes when she noticed it. Riding atop the reek emanating from the rear of the privy was the unmistakable odor of rotting flesh.

  ten

  The smell of death overrode nature’s other calls. Denying the mosquitoes their hoped-for banquet, Anna pulled up her trousers and buckled her belt. For a moment she stood in the crisp darkness and sniffed the air: pine, damp needles, the odor from the privy. Slowly she turned full circle. Faint but unmistakable, the sweet smell of decaying flesh was emanating from the direction of the outhouse. With the child, Candace, still missing, Anna’s mind conjured up ghastly images of human waste and human parts commingling. Surely the smell of the first would drown the smell of the second. But then maybe that was the point.

  She clicked on her flashlight and pointed it toward the small wooden structure. “Jesus,” she whispered. Relief and revulsion vied for predominance in her brain. Not one death but nine, eleven, thirteen she counted as she traveled the few yards to the back of the privy.

  Nailed to the cedar board, one nail to each like insects on a display board, was a baker’s dozen of mice. The tiny corpses were in neat rows of four. The last row, with only one little gray body, looked as hungry and expectant as an open grave. The mice had evidently been gathered over a period of time. Those in the top rows were desiccated. The last one looked to be only a week or so old: a chronology of rodent death, a miniature body farm.

  Anna’s eyes adjusted to the macabre and she began to see past the obvious. Beneath the mice, on the cedar, were hairline marks in dark brown. Scratching. The mice had been crucified alive, their tiny claws scrabbling in their own blood till they died.

  Having seen enough, sickened and ineffably saddened, she made her way back toward the cabin. Tears stung at the corners of her eyes and she cursed the sentimentality of middle age. Mice were routinely killed in the ongoing war between humans and rodents. It wasn’t so much their deaths as the cruelty that hurt her.

  Ray Bleeker was at the dining table where she’d left him. Against the chill of the mountain night he’d put on a shapeless gray cardigan. Perched on his nose were reading glasses. He looked like a young Mister Rogers presiding over the suddenly unsavory neighborhood.

  “Put on your shoes,” Anna said. “I’ve something to show you.”

  Hands bulging in the pockets of his sweater, Ray stared at the collection of tiny corpses. “What kind of sick bastard would do this?” he asked after a moment. His voice was flat to the point of monotone and Anna guessed he held strong emotions in check.

  “You tell me.” It wasn’t a rhetorical statement. It was an order. He was the ranger. It was his privy, his mice, nailed up with government nails.

  “My fault,” he said in the same featureless voice. “He wanted a live trap. Said mice were God’s creatures too, that the traps we had broke his heart each time they broke a mouse’s neck. What bullshit.” Ray laughed then, a jolting bark. Without warmth or humor, laughter is an ugly sound.

  “Robert Proffit?” Anna was remembering his entries in the journal, his stated desire to kill the mice that haunted his sleep in the cabin. Divine retribution with crucifixion to add a biblical flavor. “You’re sure?”

  “No. I like Robert. He seems like a sincere guy. He’s a hard worker. You can’t guess the hours he put in on the search. We’d have knocked off for the night and he’d go out in the dark with a flashlight to get in another hour or two. I don’t want it to be Robert. I don’t think more than a handful of other people—maybe Rita, Ryan, I guess—even knew about the live trap. I mean it’s bullshit. Catch ’em, let ’em loose. First thing they’d do is come home.”

  Anna turned the light away from the mice. The sadness was coming again and she had no intention of letting it show. First thing in the morning she would take the mice down and bury them. At the moment all she wanted was to crawl into a sleeping bag and enjoy oblivion for a few hours. As they walked back over the ragged land to the cabin’s back door, she sent an abrupt prayer in the direction of her husband’s god that her sleep would not be filled with dreams of bloody, scrabbling little claws.

  The following morning, after the one-shovel funeral, Anna hiked out. Fern Lake Trail was a loop closed on the east side by Bear Lake Road. She took the shorter, more direct route that would bring her out below Moraine Meadow, the route Ray had taken when he’d hiked out in the rain. The day was a glorious high-octane mix of sunshine and pine-scented breezes, the trail superbly maintained. Trailcrew, none of whom Anna had yet been introduced to, was to be commended. There were late wildflowers, a deer with a fawn long out of spots, gaily colored hikers sweating under packs too big for them, even an inky black Abert squirrel twitching its silly long ears, yet Anna was unable to keep dead mice from nibbling away at her inner peace. She walked fast, scarcely seeing anything but the pictures in her mind.

  This noon she and Chief Ranger Knight were driving out to New Canaan to talk with Robert Proffit. Anna wanted to get on with it. Kidnapping little Christians entrusted to one’s care was a bad enough crime to be suspected of. Harassing, torturing and murdering the wildlife in a national park was nigh on unforgivable.

  As she showered, changed, then gobbled a hurried lunch, she wished with all her heart she’d brought her old orange tiger cat, Piedmont, with her. He alone would truly appreciate the tale of wanton waste. Piedmont was a scrupulous and ethical hunter. Sure, he played with his food, but he always ate what he killed. Ate everything but the head, feet and guts. Those he traditionally left on the back step for Anna’s culinary enjoyment. She’d never told the cat she didn’t eat his offerings. Piedmont’s feelings were easily hurt.

  In a freshly washed and detailed Crown Victoria, gussied up with the NPS shield and a tasteful shotgun rack, Lorraine Knight picked her up at eleven o’clock.

  Anna told her of the mice. “I bagged the live trap, one mouse and the nails and carried them out,” she finished. “The hammer I left. Ray’s been working on the horse paddock with it. He would have destroyed any prints on the handle.”

  “I doubt the rest will do much good either,” Lorraine said.

  Anna knew that. She’d gathered evidence more to be doing something than out of any real hope there’d be signs of the perpetrator. Murdering mice wasn’t illegal. It was technically against park rules—mice were, after all, indigenous wildlife—but park employees did it all the time. Under normal circumstances the incident would have been reported but not followed up on, as with many after-the-fact resource depredations rangers encountered. There simply wasn’t enough money or personnel to chase after small fry that would, in all probability, never be caught.

  Circumstances at Rocky Mountain were not ordinary at the moment.

  “I’ll follow up on it anyway,” Anna said. “What the hell.”

  “Keep me posted,” was all the chief ranger said.

  From Estes Park to Loveland was a drive of a little more than an hour. Beauty robbed Anna of impatience and she was almost sorry when they emerged from a chasm in the granite mountain range to find themselves suddenly facing the Great Plains. The front range had virtually no foothills but reared up out of the flatlands with stunning abruptness. Driving out from the embrace of great walls of stone at sixty miles an hour gave Anna a brief sensation akin to that of falling.

  About halfway between Loveland and the mountains, opposite a
forlorn and treeless RV park with a dilapidated sign reading ROLLIN’ ROOST, ROLL IN AND ROOST!, a bizarre rock formation disrupted the land. To either side of the road, running parallel to the front range, reddish-brown stone thrust through the soil like the spine of some impossibly huge beast buried long ago, only to be unearthed by the fierce winds of eastern Colorado.

  Lorraine turned north on a narrow dirt road running in the shadow of the skeletal rocks. Anna saw no sign, no name. The road was as anonymous as an old fire road.

  “I had a talk with the dispatcher at Loveland PD. She gave me directions to New Canaan,” the chief ranger explained. “Actually what she said was, ‘When you’re pretty sure you’re going exactly nowhere, you’re on the right road.’ ”

  “We’re on the right road, then,” Anna said. “Rocky doesn’t have a jail, where do you usually do this sort of thing?”

  “Interrogate suspects?”

  “Yes.”

  “This Proffit isn’t yet an official suspect—not exactly. He’s been on-again, off-again on our list, ending with a fairly firm off,” Lorraine reminded her. “But usually we’d do it at the Estes Park or Loveland PD. We’ve got a good relationship with local law enforcement,” she said with justifiable pride.

  The NPS had several kinds of jurisdiction, from parks where the law was enforced completely by the federal government through the auspices of law enforcement rangers, to those that fell within the jurisdiction of the county sheriff. Territorial jealousies and disputes were not unknown.

  “I opted to call on Robert at home, go out to New Canaan so we could take a look around. See why in hell these folks are so squirrelly. That sort of thing.”

  Anna, too, wanted to see Proffit’s home turf. Given the mouse massacre, she wanted to see if the neighbor kids were missing an unusual number of pets.

  For a time they rode in silence and Anna was content watching the strange and wonderful landscape unfolding to the east, rising to the west. They’d traveled eleven miles by the odometer, passed no vehicles, homesteads or grazing animals, when New Canaan was heralded by a crude hand-painted sign nailed to a fence post.

  “It’s not a town proper,” Lorraine explained when Anna commented on it. “It’s more of a commune. The New Canaanites own the land, an old ranch inherited by one of the founders of the community from what I gather.”

  “Why am I thinking of David Koresh and Jim Jones?” Anna said.

  Lorraine laughed.

  The “town” was laid out in a neat grid, as were some of the mainstream Mormon towns Anna had seen in Utah—Cedar City, St. George—but that was where the resemblance ended. This grid was laid out with an optimism that had yet to bear fruit. Like a number of the sorry “ranchette” developments carved out of Nevada’s Smoke Creek Desert never to be populated, here the graveled roads were laid down in a tic-tac-toe pattern but only the intersections at the center had been developed, eight homes total. No trees or lawns, flower beds or foundation plantings graced these graceless houses. All were more or less alike, two-story unornamented structures that looked more like miniature low-income apartment buildings than individual homes. Each had a door at either end. There were no awnings, no porches, no swing sets or jungle gyms in the yards.

  There were plenty of children. The girls, like Mrs. Dwayne and Mrs. Sheppard, in long dresses. The boys wore dark trousers and long-sleeved shirts despite the eighty-degree-plus enticements of summer’s end.

  “I can make a pretty good guess as to why the families are no friend to law enforcement,” Anna said. “I’ve been through towns like this on the Utah-Arizona border.”

  “Polygamists,” Lorraine said. The investigative part of the search would have uncovered that possibility.

  “Has that look about it. Too many kids, too few houses, all too big.”

  “Hard to prosecute,” the chief ranger said. “It’s not illegal to live in sin, only to actually marry more than one of your fellow sinners at a time.” She pulled the car over and parked neatly parallel to a curb that didn’t exist. The children stopped their play—a desultory game that seemed based on a circle of dirt undoubtedly inhabited by some unfortunate insects. They didn’t run over to the car or laugh or chatter. They just stared. It gave Anna a creepy feeling.

  Neither Alexis nor Beth was among them.

  The tableau of stupefied children held for a moment. Curtains in the house behind them flittered. A door opened and Mr. Sheppard emerged dressed, like the male children, in dark trousers and a long-sleeved shirt. Sheppard was bearded as the prophets from the Old Testament and his hair curled at the collar of his shirt. His face was pasty for a man who lived in a state with more sunny days than not. He didn’t look welcoming. As he approached the car he tried to force his stern features into a joyous cast. The effect was more alarming than the original scowl.

  The clot of children broke apart to drift along in his wake. A bark, a wave of his hand, and they turned and filed back into the house as orderly as good children at a grade school fire drill.

  “Any word on Candace?” he asked as Anna and Lorraine got out of the car. Whether he was astute enough to have planned it or not, the question subtly shifted the balance of power in his favor. Before they’d had time to establish themselves, he’d put them on the defensive.

  “Afraid not, Mr. Sheppard,” Lorraine said, ignoring the shift if she’d felt it. “We’d like to have another talk with the girls and Robert Proffit. See if anything that might help us find Candace has been overlooked.”

  “They’re being schooled right now. We’re real conscientious about that.”

  Anna adjusted her face into a pleasant expectant mask and leaned against the fender of the patrol car. If the girls were at their lessons they were the only children in New Canaan who were. The curtains in the house behind Sheppard were fairly dancing with peeps and pushes from those within.

  A short wordless battle of wills was fought between Sheppard and the chief ranger. “I’ll get Robert,” he compromised after a moment.

  “That’s okay,” Lorraine said. “Just point out his house.”

  Sheppard ignored her request. “Wait here.” He went back into the house he’d come out of. Curtains stopped moving. Anna was suddenly aware of the silence: no people talking, no televisions murmuring behind closed doors, no phones ringing or lawn mowers buzzing, no traffic. The underlying pulse of life that is a constant where people gather together to live was missing. New Canaan felt comatose, all life locked deep within an inert body of which Mr. Sheppard was apparently the brain. Anna guessed if he wasn’t the de facto bishop, he was one of the elders.

  “Bet you could get a house here cheap,” Lorraine said with a wry smile.

  “My soul as collateral for the mortgage?”

  Lorraine shook her head. “I don’t understand this kind of fanaticism, trading today for an eternity elsewhere. Plain old life is the best fun I’ve ever had.”

  A door opened on the opposite end of the house from where the original activity had occurred. Mrs. Dwayne stepped out onto the packed dirt. “Why don’t you come in for a cup of coffee?” she said brightly, as if they were neighbor ladies paying a call.

  The room they were ushered into was about three times the size of a standard living room in a tract house, and even less appealing. No windows let in the light of day. No pictures graced the walls. The room was bare but for two rows of backless benches and a lectern. Mrs. Dwayne referred to it as the chapel but, to Anna’s mind, it was the last place an omniscient being would choose to spend time. There wasn’t any coffee.

  Mr. Sheppard stood just to the right of the lectern, arms folded across his chest, beard thrust out pugnaciously. Robert Proffit hunched on the front bench, elbows on knees, hands buried in his hair like a proper penitent. The chief ranger took the bench behind him so he’d be forced to turn around. Anna stood to one side, her senses in a state of hyper-awareness. She didn’t like the space, the New Caananites or the feel of crucified rodents in her brain.

 
“Mr. Proffit,” Lorraine said, her voice warm and motherly, “we’ve been told Candace stayed with you when the other two girls went for their walk.”

  That brought his head out of his hands. He twisted around to face her. The shock on his face looked genuine enough but, were he a manipulative psychotic, it might have been shock that one of his victims had the temerity to rat him out.

  “Who told you that?” he said. Not “It’s not true” or “That’s absurd,” but a demand for identification of his accuser.

  “Who would know?” the chief countered.

  In conscious or habitual drama, he reburied his head in his hands, fingers raking the long curling hair into a crazed thatch. “The girls wouldn’t tell you that,” he muttered to the floor between his feet. “They know I love them. They’re like my own children—God’s children—put into my care. I love them in a way those not followers of the Lord can never know.”

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree.” Mr. Sheppard added a dash of the prosaic to Proffit’s rhapsodizing.

  “What would be the right tree?” Lorraine asked.

  Her question went unanswered. Proffit began to pray or converse with his knees, Anna wasn’t sure which. Lorraine met her eye for a second. Time to go to work. Straddling the bench beside Proffit, her knee nudging his, Anna leaned into him and said, “Hey, Robert, what do you think of mice?”

  “Mice!” he squawked and levitated at least six inches off the bench, looking around him wildly. Had he been a cartoon elephant he would have leaped atop the lectern and balanced on his four feeties. “Where?”

  “Mice in general,” Anna said when he’d settled a bit.

  “Don’t do that,” he said with an odd mixture of ferocity and plaintiveness. Then: “I don’t much care for mice. They’re filthy things. Diseased, a lot of them.”

  “So you kill them to clean up the planet?”

  Proffit had recovered from Anna’s mouse assault. Vulnerability went underground. The gaze he turned on her was sharp, focused. For the first time it occurred to her that he might be smart; not just clever but very, very smart. That was one more “very” than she could lay claim to and she warned herself to be careful around him.