Hard Truth

by Nevada Barr

  Robert Proffit, the Jesus-loving servant God had called to look after His helpless girl children, saw the blood at the same moment she did. Their eyes rose from the spreading red stain and met. For a second—less—they looked into one another’s souls, or so it seemed to Anna. In, on, beyond his dark hazel eyes with their thick feminine lashes, she could have sworn this bloody Proffit pleaded with her. What he saw in hers, she didn’t know.

  The instant passed. Anna gathered her feet under her and began to rise as Proffit grabbed hold of the pack’s shoulder straps and swung. The full weight of the pack caught her on the left shoulder. Before she could think, she was in midair, falling backward. Her field of vision was Proffit, his bloody pack clutched to his chest.

  Not wanting Robert Proffit to be the last thing she saw, Anna looked to the sky. It was that which was filling her vision when she struck the ground.

  fifteen

  The breath slammed out of her and the world dimmed. Into this dark fog, full of holes and noise and flecks of red, came the grind and crush of rocks moving. An avalanche. Anna felt no pain but pressure on her legs. The holes closed, fog grew solid and she saw nothing.

  Light returned before air. She was paralyzed, full of the unique terror only a lack of oxygen can cause and wondering if her lungs would ever work again. In scratchy sips she pulled in enough air to live. It primed the pump and she began breathing again. Air expanding her lungs sent a sheet of agony down her back. With the rapidity of a dream, where lifetimes unfold in the time it takes the second hand to make one insomniac’s trek around the dial, Anna knew Heath Jarrod, mind, body and soul. Every cell in her body knew the fear and frustration of immobility, the loss of one life with no hint or promise of another. Crippled and mean with self-pity, she saw herself driving away Paul, diving into the bottle wearing nothing but her own misery and staying down till finally even Molly and Piedmont would have nothing to do with her. She would have nothing to do with herself.

  That quickly, Anna was praying to a god whose image she’d recently been burning away with cynicism that her back wasn’t broken, that she’d either walk out of the gorge or she would die there.

  Twenty feet above, severed from its body by a granite knife-edge, a head appeared, Robert Proffit.

  “Fucking will-o’-the-wisp,” Anna whispered.

  “Oh Jesus. Oh God. Oh shit. Are you all right?” he called down.

  Anna blinked several times. She had the air to answer, she just didn’t have the answer.

  The head was withdrawn.

  Anna waited for it to return. She listened for the sound of him scrabbling and sliding down to where she lay. It was so still she could hear needles on the pines rubbing against one another in the sudden, uncertain breezes. No sound of rescue, or even company, broke the backcountry quiet. Insects, silenced by her rude arrival on their patch of turf, began to buzz and drone again.

  “Robert?” she called. The call wasn’t nearly loud enough. The ache in her back kept her from taking in enough air. Putting pain aside, she filled her lungs and shouted. “Robert!” The name echoed, returning in a mutant form of itself.

  Proffit had gone. Gone for help? Or just gone? Had he intended to knock her off the ledge or had he been hoping to swing his pack onto his back and make a run for it? His blood-soaked pack, Anna remembered. He must have knocked her off intentionally. Better that than jail. Or the chair. In Colorado maybe they hung people who chopped up little girls and packed them into national parks without a permit.

  “Focus,” Anna whispered. She forced her unraveling mind to reknit around a semblance of reality. “ABCs,” she said. Airway, bleeding, circulation.

  Talking was breathing. Anna got an A. Circulation at least in the vessels leading to heart, lungs and brain was functional. She’d give herself a B–in circulation. Bleeding was a tough one. She didn’t feel warm wetness anywhere but she’d not yet gotten herself together enough to sit up and take a look. If she could sit. She had to settle for an “Incomplete” in bleeding.

  Steeling herself to the task, she attempted to move. Her legs were paralyzed. Nightmare became real. Panic shot through, so acute her body jerked. One shin cracked against a solid object and the pain, sharper and new, momentarily eclipsed the aching of her back.

  Not since the Marquis de Sade had anyone so welcomed pain. Pain was sensation, was life. The dead do not feel. Her legs weren’t dead.

  Having metaphorically read the obituaries and not found her name in them, Anna took stock of her greater situation. Because of the nature of her fall, her back taking the brunt of the force, it was unwise to move anymore. If her spine had been compromised but the cord not yet damaged she could do herself irreparable harm by thrashing about inopportunely.

  All well and good but there were no EMTs to stabilize her neck and back, neatly package her and deliver her to the hospital for X-rays. Hoping for the best, she gathered the remnants of her courage. With one great shove and a tornado of pain that ripped up her back and into her skull, she pushed herself into a sitting position.

  The news was both good and bad. A pad of dense manzanita bushes growing thick and low to the ground had broken her fall and saved her bones. But for the screaming ache of traumatized soft tissues, she was relatively unhurt. On the opposite side of her survival ledger was the fact that Robert Proffit didn’t appear to be coming back anytime soon and she wasn’t going anywhere for a while. Her legs were immobilized, not from a failure of nerve communication, but by rocks. The mini avalanche her fall instigated had brought three boulders, one half the size of a garbage can, down upon her. Luck, or the whim of the gods, had decreed that she not be crushed. The mercy ended there. The two lesser rocks acted as side supports to the greater, creating a slot through which her booted feet were thrust. She was as securely bound as a woman put in the stocks. Beneath her legs was a slab of granite, making digging her way free impossible unless, like the Count of Monte Cristo, she had nine years and a metal spoon at her disposal. Her radio, even should it be able to broadcast out of the narrow canyon, had been flung away when she fell and lay snuggled in the shrubbery a tantalizing five or six feet out of reach. Her water bottle was in her pack up on Picnic Rock.

  For a while she wriggled and struggled, scraped up both shins and worked up a sweat that went some little way toward melting away the vicious ache covering her back like a coat. Her efforts did nothing to dislodge the stone or free her feet and she was forced to face the hardest choice. She must school herself to patience and wait. Ray Bleeker was to meet her. He was half an hour late. There was nothing to do but to save her breath and strength so when he deigned to keep their appointment she could shout for help. With two people, one of whom could stand, gain purchase and fetch levers, she had no doubt the rock could be shifted. With care it could be moved in such a way her feet wouldn’t be squashed in the process and she could walk out on her own. New to the park, the first female district ranger in Rocky, the thought of being the centerpiece of a carry-out was easily more frightening than lying pinned under a rock for a bit longer.

  And longer.

  And longer.

  An hour passed, then two. Bleeker never showed. Periodically her radio bleated to life with the usual business of the park. The first couple of times the nearness of dispatch and the voices of the rangers drove her to fish for the damn thing with the stunted twiggy branches of the manzanita. Then she tried catching it with the buckle of her belt. Failing that, she secured her shirt to her belt buckle and, using it as a net, attempted to capture and drag it. Tucked down in the foliage as it was, she never managed to move it more than a quarter of an inch and nearly lost her shirt in the process.

  Finally she gave up. Not from despair: the situation had come nowhere near to the place where despair waited. Not yet, at any rate. She stopped because she’d begun working up a thirst and had no access to water. Intellectually she knew she could live about three days without water, especially in the cool of the high country, but her body, having lived many
years in deserts, knew thirst was one of the most uncomfortable ways of suffering deprivation. Thirst put starvation to shame when it came to the miseries of the flesh. One never heard of dissidents going on thirst strikes to call attention to their causes. Maybe it was because three days wasn’t long enough to get the media interested. Or maybe it was because it was just too miserable.

  As the sky clouded and the breezes grew sharp and fragrant, she lay still, conserving her energies and hoping to be rescued. She missed fighting with the boulder and coaxing the radio. At least it had been something to do. It helped pass the time. Supine, bored, tired of the stress of the situation and ignoring the aching in her back, shoulders and neck, she kept falling into light dozes. The temptation to give in to sleep was enormous, but the fear of being overlooked by Ray Bleeker when he arrived kept her prodding herself awake.

  By four-thirty the storms she’d watched forming from her perch on Picnic Rock reached Tourmaline Gorge and a cold rain began to fall. Anna had been expecting it and had dithered about the best use she might make of it, given that Bleeker seemed to have stood her up and might not come looking for her till she didn’t show up at Fern Lake Cabin, where she was to spend the night. She could either remove her shirt and spread it to catch the most rain possible in hopes she could save the water to wring out and drink, or she could shove the shirt under the small of her back to keep it dry so she wouldn’t die of hypothermia should she end up spending the night trapped in the gorge.

  In the end she decided hypothermia was the more imminent danger. Her shorts she shoved down beneath the boulder that held her fast. The shirt was wadded up and smashed in on top of them. For the two hours it showered, she shivered, scraped water off of her exposed flesh and into her mouth and enjoyed a brief respite from wishing to be rescued. Trapped, with her pants around her ankles, was not how she wanted to be found.

  Afternoon wore away into evening. Evening faded into night. Even in dry clothing she was cold. The manzanita that had very probably saved her life was making it a misery, every branch and leaf poking into her from neck to knees. To ward off the cold she moved as much as the rocks would let her, doing isometric exercises and sit-ups. Occasionally she drifted into fitful sleep filled with dreams of butchered girls stuffed into backpacks and orchestrated by the howling of nonexistent wolves.

  Three hours after dawn, when the sun finally reached down into Tourmaline Gorge, Anna was still alive. As it began to warm her she was even glad of this fact. Thirst returned. Bleeker still didn’t come. The sun inched up toward noon. Thunderheads began building again. Twenty-four hours had passed. When she finally heard the sounds she had been listening for all this time, she was afraid to call out lest she be imagining them.

  Thirty seconds passed and the crunch of booted feet on a rocky trail continued. Still she didn’t call out. The wearer of the boots could be Robert Proffit come to see if she was dead. Playing possum seemed the best course of action. Or inaction.

  But what if it wasn’t Proffit? Suddenly overcome with terror that she’d waited too long and whoever it was would pass her by, she began shouting, “Down here! Help! Help. Down here. In the gorge. Help me!”

  The footsteps stopped.

  Anna’s heart stopped.

  Again she yelled; the desperation and panic she had been assiduously not feeling since she had tumbled into this bizarre death trap gave her voice the strength and range of a seasoned opera singer. Her own racket covered any sounds from above as she shrieked.

  “Anna?”

  The sound cut through her homemade siren song. She focused on the face hovering over the rim of Picnic Rock. “Rita?”

  “I’ve been here awhile. I thought you’d gone nutso.”

  “Sorry. Didn’t see you. My mouth was open so wide my eyes were shut, I guess. Welcome,” Anna added for lack of anything more intelligent to say.

  “What happened?”

  “Come down.”

  Rita’s face was withdrawn and Anna was overcome with a sense of déjà vu, of watching Robert Proffit vanish, and had to clench her teeth to keep from crying out, “Don’t go!”

  This time she was not to be abandoned. In less than five minutes—an exceedingly long five minutes—she heard the reassuring sounds of Rita making her way into the gorge from down the trail where seasonal runoff had carved a rough-and-tumble stairway of stone.

  Rita was strong and she was creative. Having shored up both sides of Anna’s feet and ankles with rocks of various sizes so, should the boulder roll in the wrong direction, they would not be crushed, she found two sturdy limbs and put one beneath the boulder on either side of Anna’s knees. On a three count, they pried, Rita providing most of the muscle, Anna doing what she could from her awkward position to steer the boulder along the line of least collateral damage.

  The plan was a complete success. Within half an hour of Rita’s arrival, Anna was free. Walking was out of the question till she got the kinks worked out and the blood flowing. Because she had shared those moments of terror with Heath Jarrod—or at least the Heath Jarrod of her imagining—Anna was grateful for the shooting pains, the tingles that verged on manic itches, all the slings and arrows of sensation letting her know she would walk home in the near future.

  As she kneaded and stretched she told Rita the story of how she’d come to be found under a rock in Tourmaline Gorge. Anna had expected the satisfaction of her subordinate’s righteous anger and edgy mystification at the relating of the bleeding backpack. She was disappointed. Rita let that—which Anna had considered the stellar component in the drama—pass over her as if itinerant youth ministers toting gore in the backcountry of Rocky were an everyday occurrence. The bit she reacted to with satisfying outrage was that Robert Proffit had called down to her, then left without offering aid. For a stumbling minute or two—time during which Anna remembered Rita and Proffit in the emergency room praying together like old seminary buddies—Rita tried to find excuses for Robert’s abandonment of a person in need. Evidently it was hard to accept that he was a rotten Samaritan.

  Anna had told her story in repayment for Rita’s rescuing her from what was beginning to look like a cold, thirsty, ignoble death. That done, she asked the question that had been nagging her since she’d been able to think of anything more complex than crawling out from under her rock.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  Rita was probably not much good at lying because Anna could see the temptation to do it clearly on her face in the seconds before she answered.

  “Robert told me,” she said with reluctance.

  “You’ve seen Robert?”

  “He left me a note,” Rita amended. “I found it when I came home for lunch.”

  Anna noted that she’d not answered precisely. She decided to let it pass. For now.

  “A note.”

  “It said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I have to go. Tell Ranger Pigeon it was an accident.’ ”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes. Just that.”

  Anna digested this information for a brief moment, then again she asked, “How did you know I was here?”

  Rita opened her mouth once or twice in the time-honored tradition of goldfish. After these false starts she said, “I didn’t know you were here exactly. I just knew where he was hiking yesterday.”

  Anna waited but Rita seemed to think she’d said enough. She stood, began gathering up her daypack as if a decision had been made to decamp.

  “Sit down,” Anna ordered.

  “It’ll be dark soon,” Rita said. “We should head down.”

  It wasn’t yet three o’clock and they weren’t more than two and a half hours from the Bear Lake parking lot. Anna said nothing. After a bit of shuffling, Rita took off her pack and sat down as she’d been bidden.

  Anna eased herself up gingerly with the help of one of the many boulders so she could practice standing while she grilled Rita.

  “This hasn’t been a particularly good day for me,” she said after
the first wave of pain and dizziness broke and began to recede. “What with one thing and another I’ve pretty much run out of patience. Suffice to say I’m in a real bad mood. You rescued me. I’m grateful. But if you keep jerking me around with these bullshit half-answers, that gratitude could turn to pure meanness. Let’s try this again.”

  Rita sat quietly through this tongue-lashing, but not docilely. Her spine straightened, her broad shoulders squared, her handsome face settled into a stoic mask. Watching this subtle transformation, Anna realized she’d not triggered sullenness, guilt, defensiveness, slyness or any of the many things she’d expected, given Rita’s evasiveness. What she was seeing was the determined courage of the martyr waiting to die for the cause.

  “Jesus.” Anna sighed.

  “Amen.”

  “Fuck,” Anna fumed, inadvertently hitting on an expletive that Rita didn’t feel the need to ratify with the god of her understanding. Using the rock for support, Anna began rotating her left foot. The movement sent shivers of a nauseating mix of sensations through her bones. “You get a note from Proffit saying to tell me ‘it was an accident.’ Rather than figuring he scratched my car or mowed down my lilac bush you immediately figure he’s shoved me off an isolated rock on the less traveled side of Tourmaline Gorge. Tell me exactly how that worked.”

  Rita thought for a moment. The woman was around thirty years old, educated and smart. As a law enforcement ranger and paramedic at Rocky for seven seasons, she would have seen the darker, stupider, bloodier, more spiteful side of her fellow men and women. Despite that, she seemed to have retained an innocence—or naïveté—that rendered dissembling impossible. Her face was as easy to read as a child’s.

  Running under the smooth tanned skin like fishes beneath clear water, answers were trotted out, examined and then discarded. Finally Rita settled on one she liked.

  “I knew Robert was up this way yesterday. I happened to be coming up here today anyway. The note hadn’t made me think you were in trouble but it bothered me so I was kind of keeping my eyes and ears open more than usual. I heard somebody shouting and saw a daypack sitting on Picnic Rock—I knew you’d probably stop here because we’d talked about it. I looked over and there you were.” To Anna’s surprise Rita then smiled at her. It wasn’t mockery or idiocy, it was pride. She was proud of herself for having managed her story so neatly, Anna suspected.