Hard Truth

by Nevada Barr

  “Why was Robert hiking up this way?”

  “He could have been looking for Candace.”

  “Why do you suppose his pack was hemorrhaging?”

  “I suppose it could have been something else. A broken wine bottle, catsup, whatever.”

  “Why were you hiking up the gorge today? It’s your day off. I’d think you’d want a change of pace.”

  “I hike up here a lot.”

  Anna had been asking the questions rapid-fire. Now she stopped. The pattern she’d been searching for—in lieu of any useful information apparently—had emerged. Rita wasn’t going to lie to her, at least not yet, not over this adventure. People would often say, “I don’t want to lie to you . . .” Which usually meant not only did they want to lie but, as her neighbors in Mississippi would say, were fixin’ to do just that. Rita, on the other hand, was jumping through semantic hoops to avoid an untruth. Maybe she was afraid lying would get her sent to hell come the final reckoning.

  Not telling the whole truth could get her there a whole lot sooner if Anna had any say in the matter.

  “I think I’m good to go,” Anna said.

  “Out to Bear?” Rita asked as she let Anna set the pace on the scramble out of the gorge.

  “Down to Fern. I’ve a couple questions for Ray.” As soon as Anna had been freed, she’d retrieved her radio. In the twenty-four hours she’d lain on her prickly bed of manzanita, feet firmly clamped in a pair of Mother Nature’s many jaws, there’d not been a single burble from anybody wondering where she was.

  After the incarceration of the night, movement was not merely good for muscle, nerve and bone, it was a salve to Anna’s spirit. Rita gave her water and granola bars, and by the time they came out at Odessa Lake and joined the main trail to Fern, Anna was feeling almost as good as new. An underlying ache in her back and a pit of fatigue beneath her frontal lobe let her know this bliss was to be short-lived and she made a point to enjoy every moment, every step of it.

  She intentionally maintained radio silence. The only people that knew she had been out of commission for the past day were Robert Proffit, Rita Perry and Raymond Bleeker. He’d never kept their appointment. Anna wanted to know why. She wanted to see his face when she walked into the cabin unannounced. Even the most practiced deceivers, if caught off guard, tended to give themselves away. Maybe only for a fraction of a second, but Anna would be watching for it.

  The trail curled down around Fern to a wooden footbridge that crossed over the stream fed by the tiny lake. Fern’s waters, cupped in a bowl of lodgepole pine, showed emerald green even under partly clouded skies. Over the lip of the outlet where the creek ran shallow, it was crystal clear. Cut-throat trout sometimes came to sun themselves under the bridge, their blood-red throats and speckled backs enlivening an always sparkling scene.

  Anna noted it only peripherally. She walked ahead of Rita, concentrating on the bits of humanity scattered around the lake. Two boys haunted the footbridge, undoubtedly annoying the fish. A woman, trousers shoved up to let the sun warm her shins, leaned against the bole of a tree near the water, reading her book. Two old people, white hair glowing from beneath the rumpled brims of cloth hats, fished from the downed logs in the water in front of the cabin. Of Ray Bleeker there was no sign. She was glad of it. It was her hope to be ensconced in his cabin when he got home, all the better for her experiment in shock.

  Rita fell back, talking to somebody. Anna barely registered the defection. Rangers had a hard time getting from point A to point B without getting stopped half a dozen times by visitors with questions or stories. People like to talk to rangers. Even rangers with guns. Rangers were different from policemen—assumed to be good, nonviolent, understanding, lenient and basically on your side. Mostly that was true. Anna hoped it would never change.

  Except that Rita was on her day off, out of uniform. Anna stopped.

  “Hey, Anna.” The words came at her from behind. She jerked around to see Raymond Bleeker smiling at her, Rita behind his shoulder. So much for surprise.

  “What are you doing here?” she snapped.

  Ray, who’d been smiling in apparently genuine pleasure at seeing her, recoiled as if she’d spit at him. “Here? Fern Lake?”

  “No. Here.” Anna stamped her foot to indicate this chunk of trail.

  For an instant he seemed alarmed. Or maybe just annoyed. “I was checking the group sites.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward where large groups were sequestered lest their noise or hordes infringe on the experience of others. Behind these camps was a long wall of boulders in varying sizes that extended three-quarters of a mile in either direction. At one time a lodge had been built on the flat in front of the rocky slope but that had been years before. Nothing remained of it now but a leveled area. He looked away, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket—a startling pink and yellow plaid—and wiped his face, giving her a moment to recover her manners.

  “Oh,” she said, feeling stupid and oddly let down.

  He kindly chose to overlook her previous hostility. “How was the big meeting?” he asked, the smile back, if not quite so genuine as before.

  “What meeting?” She felt as if she’d walked in after the movie had begun and had missed a key scene.

  “With the brass? Yesterday? How many fingers am I holding up?” he teased her with a standard question asked of people who’d suffered a break with reality for one reason or another.

  “I had no meeting yesterday,” she said slowly, trying to piece together this joking, smiling man with the crestfallen, groveling—or evasive—subordinate she’d been expecting after being stood up with such uncomfortable consequences.

  Bleeker stared at her, blinked twice, then a comprehension of some kind animated the muscles of his face. “Shoot,” he said. “Robert Proffit.”

  “We better talk about this back at the cabin.”

  There was no way in hell three rangers, one in uniform, were going to have an interrupted discussion in full view of the visiting public.

  Inside the cabin, the door closed to discourage campers and hikers from dropping by to borrow a cup of sugar or make conversation, Raymond made tea. Bleeker was six feet or six-one and about one hundred seventy pounds, but he had a quiet, self-effacing way that made him seem a smaller man. With his light-toned voice—not high-pitched exactly but the sort of voice that could belong either to a man or a woman—his ratty gray cardigan and absurd handkerchief, there was something endearing about him. One wanted to trust him and Anna found herself nodding agreeably as he told his story.

  At a little before one o’clock, as he was hiking up the trail to the rendezvous with her for their hike to Gabletop Mountain, he met with Robert Proffit. Proffit, he said, was sitting in the shade of a pine tree beside the trail, waiting for him.

  Proffit told him he’d met Ranger Pigeon earlier and she’d asked that he give Ray a message. She’d tried to radio but couldn’t get a signal. She’d been called back down to headquarters for an emergency meeting regarding deployment of rangers to the wildfires in Southern California.

  “Radios are fairly worthless in a lot of the park,” Ray said. Rita seconded the opinion with an unladylike snort. “I figured you’d given up and thought if I didn’t get the message I’d get hold of you later from the base radio here in the cabin and we’d get ourselves straight.”

  Anna sipped her tea. It was excellent, neither too strong nor too weak and a good brand, English or Irish. Bleeker’s story held together and made sense. A few anomalies stood out, but Anna didn’t know if they mattered or were the usual vagaries of human conduct. She looked up at her companions. Ray rested easily, legs crossed, wrists on his knee. Some tension showed around his eyes and mouth, aging him beyond his twenty-eight years. He had, after all, left his new boss staked out on a bed of manzanita for a day and a night. She might have been mistaken for shrimp cocktail on a lettuce leaf had a rogue black bear happened by. That could wreak havoc with a man’s end-of-season evaluation.

&n
bsp; Rita wasn’t faring so well. For reasons Anna was beginning to get an inkling of, if not a handle on, she was absolutely miserable and doing a bad job of disguising the fact. Color had drained from beneath her tan, giving an unbecoming grayish cast to either side of her nose. Restless plucking and tucking had managed to drag hair out of her usually neat ponytail. The strands hung down straight and greasy-looking in front of her ears.

  “Did Proffit have a pack with him when he waylaid you?” Anna asked Ray.

  “Not that I saw. He could’ve had it stashed nearby, I guess. He had his water bottle. I remember that.”

  “Did he hike out with you?”

  “No. He said it was his last day in the park and he was going to enjoy it right there under that tree. His ‘last resting place’ he called it.” Raymond laughed. Anna looked at him quizzically, having missed the joke. “Guess you had to have been there,” Ray said.

  “That fits with the note he left me,” Rita put in. “It sounds like he’s decided to leave the area. I can’t say as I blame him.” This last had a bitter edge to it and Anna shot the young woman a hard look. Ray didn’t know about the blood from the backpack. Anna had decided to keep that bit of grisly information under wraps till she’d had a chance to talk with Lorraine about it. Put with the other half-truths, retracted accusations, means and opportunity, it would be enough to get an arrest warrant. If nothing else, they had him on reckless endangerment and leaving the scene of an accident, if not attempted murder and assaulting a federal law enforcement officer.

  Rita did know. Anna wondered why she didn’t seem to hold it against Proffit. Was she in love with him? He was seven or eight years younger than she was but that meant little. Proffit was handsome in a wild, boyish way and had an undeniable charm. Anna hadn’t been the least surprised that he was such a hit with the teenybopper set. He possessed that ineffable magic that makes whatever one does seem cool. When Anna was in high school a boy name Steve Stricker had had it. She and her friend Paul used to sit around trying to figure out why when Steve did it—whatever it was—it was cool and when they did it it was just stupid.

  Maybe the adolescent panache appealed to Rita. Maybe the intense passion with which Proffit approached life. Maybe it was the shared God and the seductive frenzy of praying together.

  Anna turned her attention back to their host. “Why did you believe him?” she asked Ray. “The mice. The live trap. The girls. I’d think twice before taking Proffit’s word for anything.”

  Raymond thought about her question, giving it due consideration. As he gathered his thoughts, she had a few of her own. Because she’d been immersed in it up to her eyeballs, it felt as if the saga of Robert Proffit’s on-again, off-again status as a suspect was headline news and had been for months. In reality, all that had transpired had happened in the last four or five days. Most of it wasn’t common knowledge. Raymond would not know Beth and Alexis had said Candace stayed with Robert, then recanted. He wouldn’t know about the strange visitation Heath Jarrod had endured. Seen in this light, Ray’s taking the word of a man he’d come to know well, a man who’d worked hand-in-glove with the rangers during a long and heartbreaking search, didn’t strike her as odd as it had a minute before.

  Of course there were still Minnie and Mickey and their little friends tortured and murdered.

  “I’ve thought a lot about the mouse thing,” Ray said eventually. “There wasn’t really anybody else who could have done it except maybe me or Rita. Still, it makes no sense. I kind of have to believe he did it for a reason. If he did it at all. You know, an experiment or a warning or . . . I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. I can’t explain it any better.”

  “Ray’s right,” Rita said. “Robert would be incapable of anything like that. He’s the only person I know who really wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’d put it out.”

  Anna drank her tea, stared out the window and tried to figure out why Rita’s remark, harmless enough but for a bit of hyperbole, made her uneasy.

  It wasn’t until supper had been eaten, the dishes done and the ache in her back fortified against by two Advil, that the answer came. Anna was making her way to the privy, an action which, forever after, would make her think of mice, when she realized what bothered her.

  Rita had known what “the mouse thing” was.

  sixteen

  Colorado was arguably one of the most beautiful states in the Union. Probably among the most scenic areas on earth. At least parts of it were. The Rollin’ Roost RV park was not one of these parts. What was gilt-edge summer ten miles west was sun-baked doldrums outside Heath’s window. Another thing Heath missed about being ambulatory: now it was such a production getting in and out of anywhere, she could no longer just “run out for cigarettes” when guests threatened to bore her to death, a fate that seemed ever more probable as the woman on the couch babbled on. And on.

  Gwen, who had a sixth sense about who was going to be excruciatingly tedious, made her escape early on the scooter. The limpet was, after all, Heath’s pet project. She pulled her gaze back into the well-equipped recreation vehicle, grown claustrophobic from too many hours, and now too many people, inside. Had she the legs of Man O’ War she knew she wouldn’t have left anyway. The hungry, hurt, hopeful, hopeless face of Beth Dwayne, her very own limpet, kept her more firmly rooted to her seat than her damaged spinal cord could. This was the third “supervised visit” that had been allowed since she and her aunt moved into the Rollin’ Roost four days before. The first had been with full retinue: Momma, Poppa and Alexis Sheppard filling in what space remained after the plump Mrs. Dwayne and her daughter squeezed in around Heath’s wheelchair. Later it was just Sharon Sheppard and Mrs. Dwayne in attendance. Now just Mrs. Dwayne. Heath asked after Alexis but had been told only that she “hadn’t been feeling well.” Heath had hoped, finally, she’d have a chance to really talk with Beth, but that was not happening.

  Beth’s mom had grown way too comfortable. For the past hour—Heath glanced at her watch, half-hour, just four o’clock, sixty minutes before alcohol was socially acceptable—Mrs. Dwayne had been droning on about Mr. Sheppard, his great deeds, his love of the Lord, his special connection with heaven and with Mrs. Dwayne.

  Anna Pigeon suspected Mrs. Dwayne of being another Mrs. Sheppard, and Heath agreed. Had the woman not been so god-awful boring, she might even have felt sympathy for her. She was dumpy and plain and older than the lithe, blond Mrs. Sheppard. The green-eyed monster was catholic in nature and respecter of cults, creeds or customs. Again she looked at her watch. Four-oh-two. Heath was rather surprised she’d not given up and gone home to her cozy condo in Boulder. In this first great outdoor adventure, she and Gwen hadn’t traveled more than a couple hours from home. More than once—more than a hundred times were she honest with herself—she’d thought of it. Each time, the limpet’s eyes stopped her. For reasons that Heath didn’t understand, Beth looked to her as the capable one, the strong one, the trusted one. The one who could move mountains. Not Ranger Pigeon with her great big gun or Mr. Sheppard with his great big ego or her mother with her great big mouth. Her. Heath Jarrod. A woman broken on a pile of rock and ice. Heath knew she could not lose that look even as she felt a fraud for accepting it

  Four-oh-five. The limpet looked up from where she sat docilely by her mother. Those eyes. Heath had to find a way to talk with her. Necessity mothered invention: “Would you like a cherry cordial?” she intruded into Mrs. Dwayne’s monologue. “It’s quite good, if a little sweet.”

  The word “sweet” caught the woman’s attention. “A cordial? Don’t they have alcohol in them?”

  “Not enough to matter,” Heath lied easily. The cherry cordial in Gwen’s private stash was a hundred and eighty proof, but Heath kept that to herself.

  “Maybe a taste,” Mrs. Dwayne said.

  Heath poured enough over ice to take out a regiment of Cossacks and gave it to Beth’s mother, then put a couple of tablespoons in a glass of ice water so she could keep her guest company.<
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  The piously abstemious Mrs. Dwayne took to drink with a passion. Within a quarter of an hour she’d sucked down a third of the syrupy stuff. Within half an hour she was waxing rhapsodic about Heath’s great kindness to her family. By twenty minutes of five she was revealing herself as a mean drunk.

  “Sharon—Mrs. Sheppard—is no better than she should be,” she confided owlishly. “When she was brought to us she was a skinny little pinch of a girl, fifteen or sixteen—I can’t remember. Her folks had come down from our sister group in Canada but they didn’t last long. Oh no. The desert just wasn’t good enough for them. Mr. Sheppard wasn’t good enough for them,” she added, as if this proved what ungrateful malcontents they truly were. “According to the divine couple, Elijah Farmer, this Canadian, for heaven’s sake—oh, he was an American but that wears right off after a few years if you ask me—was the prophet and Mr. Sheppard was just a big nothing. That didn’t go over with Mr. Sheppard at all.” She laughed a nasty little laugh. “Didn’t he just send them packing! But little Miss Sharon, all baby-blue eyes and cotton-candy hair. She had her sights set, that’s all I’m going to say. Had ’em set way high, snooting around like a golden virgin child. Well. I had my doubts about that and I told Mr. Sheppard as much. But you know men, even those chosen by God, have penises.” This last word was whispered, hissed actually, as if the male appendage was a form of demonic possession visited upon half the human race. “It made him crazy for her. He would have her. So he did. And Alexis is no better. Little tramp. Serves Sharon right. She’s getting just what she deserves. It wouldn’t surprise me one little bit if Alexis took the girls up into the hills for whatever, then came traipsing back when she tired of the game.”