Hard Truth

by Nevada Barr

  “How about just down to Fern Lake?” Anna compromised. There was no sense in blustering or playing at heavy-handed authority. Being rational was the lesser of evils. “At least we’d be warm and dry and fed.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll just call for backup and first thing in the morning you’ll be hauled ignominiously out, a spectacle for all your friends. Wouldn’t it be better to walk out quietly? Who knows, maybe you’ll get off easy. A slap on the wrist. Hailed as a hero. Restoring the natural order and whatnot.”

  “What about the finger?”

  “That’s going to be a problem,” Anna admitted. They sat in silence for a while. Soon Anna would have to radio dispatch and report the situation. Not yet, though. She still had hopes of getting Rita back on her feet and moving. Silences were usually easy for Anna, a boon in an overly noisy world. This one was not. It was full of the racket of questions she wanted to ask about the finger, the pups, the girls, Proffit. As soon as the cuffs went on and Rita was officially under arrest as in no longer free to come and go as she pleased, Anna didn’t choose to ask a single one. Rita had yet to request a lawyer but judges tended to look on interrogation post arrest with a jaundiced eye. Law enforcement had become a good deal more complicated since Matt Dillon first rode into Dodge.

  “What do you hope to gain by sitting here all night? Other than a cold butt and a lousy end-of-season review?” That question seemed safe enough.

  Rita said nothing for a while. Then: “I haven’t thought it through. I just know I’m not going out like this. I don’t know where that finger came from. If it’s even a finger.”

  The last rang hollow. They both knew it was a finger.

  “ROMO, two-oh-one,” Anna radioed dispatch. There wasn’t light to drag Rita out but someone could hike in with a flashlight to bring food, sleeping bags and the comfort of backup. “ROMO, two-oh-one.”

  “Can’t get out from here,” Rita said with weary satisfaction. “You’ll have to hike back up the way we came. On the ridge you can get a signal.”

  Anna had been afraid of that. In a world of soaring granite peaks and deep stone canyons, radio accessibility was spotty at best.

  “Don’t suppose you’d come with me?”

  “Nope.”

  More time passed. Dusk became dark. Anna got colder, achier. Her thoughts grew more sinister. She had found blood in Rita’s patrol vehicle, followed her, caught her flagrantly breaking park regulations, discovered a human finger amid the scraps of meat Rita fed to her pups, arrested the woman and yet, through all that, she’d not seen Rita as a threat. Not really.

  Why would Rita plop down on a trail, putting herself and Anna through a long, cold night for nothing? The confusion of innocence? The stubbornness of righteousness?

  Or because she expected a friend to come along and help her even the odds?

  Again Anna considered her options. It was a good twenty-minute hike to the ridge where she could establish radio communications. Forty minutes there and back. During that time the annoying Miss Perry would have to be tethered to a tree.

  In Rocky’s backcountry there were a few remaining predators—not counting the four Rita had imported from Wyoming—black bears, cougars. There was little chance that one would come upon one particular ranger tied to one particular tree. If this did transpire, chances were the beast would run away rather than attack.

  The chances of whomever or whatever Rita waited for coming by and freeing her, then waiting in ambush for Anna to return in the dark, were incalculable.

  “You’re a royal pain in the patootie, you know that?” Anna said irritably.

  “Uncuff me and we’ll walk out.”

  Anna levered herself up from the cold, damp earth and unlocked the cuff from Rita’s left wrist.

  “Thank—”

  Before the woman could finish, Anna clamped her thumb and elbow in a pain compliance hold, forced her to the nearest tree and recuffed her with the trunk in her embrace.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Anna said. “Don’t feed the wildlife.”

  twenty-three

  Heath hadn’t degenerated into a total idiot. Before she dashed into the coming night for a rendezvous with destiny in the guise of the New Canaanites, she put in one call to her Aunt Gwen and left a message, and another to Anna Pigeon. Again she left a message. It would have given her greater courage to have talked to a real live person but she could think of no one else to call. Certainly not the Loveland police. They were probably fine fellows all in all, but she wasn’t a hundred percent sure what she was doing was legal and she was damn sure the cops, like most authority figures, had been trained to believe citizen action was a bad idea; that it smacked of anarchy and vigilantism at best and made them look bad at worst. Citizen action by a middle-aged, female paraplegic? She’d be head-patted and kid-gloved and pooh-poohed right out of her mind.

  Part of her knew it would be a relief to be put on the shelf. Part of her knew it would be another little death. She pushed fear aside and drove. The RV rattled and shuddered down the dirt road, the headlights catching the dust, and Heath felt as if she moved through a fog idiosyncratic to her mind rather than to the outside world. This blurring of mental and ocular vision deepened a sense of unreality that had been growing since she’d returned Sharon’s e-mail. Surely she was out of her head.

  Commuting through the world in a wheelchair brought with it a host of concerns she was not yet accustomed to addressing. Would the girls be waiting outside? If she were expected to go in, help them pack or unchain them from their prayer benches, would the compound be wheelchair-friendly? Did her enemies have handicapped-accessible dwellings?

  Panic began to rise, a welling up of liquid terror so cold it tightened her scalp and blurred her already impaired vision. Then Heath suddenly laughed. Grumbling down a one-lane road to nowhere in a vehicle half the size of Rhode Island to rescue three sisters from an old goat of a patriarch bent on bedding them all: a sense of unreality was the sanest reaction she could have. Discovering herself to be sane did nothing to alleviate the fear.

  The hand-scrawled New Canaan sign loomed up like a signpost on a dream road to hell. Just past it a ghostly apparition, the American equivalent of Wilkie Collins’ woman in white, drifted into the road.

  Heath was almost relieved to see her too-real sense of unreality made manifest by the appearance of occult phenomena.

  Not a ghost of course. Perhaps on England’s moors ectoplasmic beings could wander with impunity for centuries. On the front range of the Rockies, the poor specters would be burnt or frozen or blown away before they could get a good haunt going.

  Heath tapped the brake. She’d been going too fast. The RV was too heavy, the road surface bad. The great lumbering vehicle slid on the gravel for a stomach-churning second before lurching to a stop. Her ghost vanished in a cloud of dust then reappeared, coughing, tapping on the driver’s side window.

  Heath pushed the magic button and the glass hummed discreetly into the door. “Where are the others?” she asked.

  “Wait.” Sharon quickly ran to the bushes and returned with a gray-blue hard-sided suitcase, the kind all the girls wanted when Heath was fifteen, the kind that came with a square overnight case with a mirror in the lid.

  “Where are the others?” Heath repeated and felt a stab of guilt as she realized she was thinking only of Beth, her limpet, and not of Sharon’s sisters.

  “We’ve got to go back. Patty told Mr. Sheppard we were going. About two hours ago, I guess. He’s locked her in the chapel. I couldn’t find Alexis or Beth. They’re probably locked there too,” she said as she climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Buckle your seatbelt,” Heath said automatically. The anxiety she’d felt earlier couldn’t be said to have returned because it had never left. It did change, and not for the better. Her hands went numb on the wheel and her adrenaline-drugged mind whispered of creeping paralysis from a new complication in her spine. Though she could see, it was as if she lo
oked through a tunnel, and Sharon’s words reached her ears a fraction later than normal. Her voice sounded tinny and far away as if a tiny person whined from deep inside her skull.

  “What are we supposed to do?” she asked.

  “I can’t run off and leave them. I can’t,” Sharon said unhelpfully.

  “I have to go there to turn around anyway,” Heath said numbly. “This thing’s like driving a semi.”

  She shoved the gearshift into drive and the RV crept ahead. The speedometer read seven miles an hour. All of a sudden she wasn’t in a hurry. During her aborted time in physical therapy the medical staff had attempted to teach her, among other things, relaxation techniques. She wished she’d paid more attention. The out-of-body experience—numbness, altered vision, audio distortions—were growing worse. Heath looked at Sharon, wondering if she could tell her that her driver, her hero, was melting, dissolving, right down to her functionless feet of base clay.

  Sharon, white-faced, eyes as glassy and gray as the window beyond her, was caught in the faint green glow from the dashboard lights. Written in the younger woman’s profile was the alphabet of Heath’s fear: jaw muscle rigid, lips pressed too tightly together, corners of the mouth pulled down. In her lap, the delicate-boned, rough-skinned fingers flexed and stretched as if she readied herself to play a difficult concerto. Or strangle a man.

  Heath might lose her dignity. Fall on the ground. Flop around a bit perhaps. Boys could laugh at her. Mr. Sheppard or one of his disciples could come after her with a shotgun or, worst case scenario, she might soil herself.

  Sharon, carrying only one old-fashioned suitcase, was leaving behind the only life she’d known since she was a little girl. Wretched though it might be, a warm bed, three meals a day and a roof to keep off the rain were not to be taken lightly. And she had two sisters at risk, sisters she might lose forever tonight though all three went on living.

  The stakes were hardly comparable. Heath felt the panic recede—not much but enough she could unclench her jaw, enough she could loose the death grip she had on the steering wheel, reach over and take Sharon’s hand.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said, and felt better for saying it. “Mr. Sheppard can’t lock us all up. My aunt and that ranger, Anna Pigeon, know what we’re doing. They’ll come if we don’t call.”

  “Patty and Alexis, we have to get them out,” Sharon said. “I don’t care about me. I’m over.”

  Heath gave Sharon a startled glance, not because the sentiment was unique, but because it was one she shared. To hear it from a woman twenty years younger than she, a woman with two good legs for walking through the long life that presumably lay ahead, jolted her into the realization that giving up was the saddest disability of them all.

  “You’re not over till it’s over,” she said harshly. The condemnation in her tone was for herself, not Sharon, but she didn’t apologize.

  In front of the building housing the Sheppard clan, Heath stopped the RV. Only a single light showed. No dogs barked. No one came out to greet or banish them. She put the vehicle in park, the engine idling. They might be leaving in a hurry.

  “The cars are gone,” Sharon said. “We have two—all of us, two cars. He’s taken the girls somewhere.”

  “Maybe not,” Heath said and was ashamed at the part of her that hoped it was true, hoped to avoid a confrontation.

  “You said he locked them in the chapel?”

  “Patty. Yes.”

  “We’d better check it out,” Heath said before she could chicken out and change her mind.

  “You’ll come with me?”

  Sharon’s voice had gone thin and wispy. Being back in New Canaan robbed her of what was left of her courage. Heath knew if she didn’t go, Sharon wouldn’t leave the van.

  “I’ll come as far as I can,” she promised.

  The process of swiveling the driver’s seat, transferring herself to her chair and engaging the hydraulic lift went without a hitch. Knowing she might be driving the getaway car, Heath had rehearsed it a dozen times during the hours she’d awaited word from New Canaan.

  “Stay, Wiley. Guard the fort.” The dog wasn’t pleased but, being a professional, dutifully trotted to the driver’s seat, leaped up and settled in to keep watch. Or nap.

  Pressed as close to the side of the RV as she could get without actually melding with the metal and fiberglass, Sharon waited as the lift descended.

  “The kitchen door has no steps. Do you need me to push you?”

  Heath started to snarl no, as had become her habit when being offered help, but she didn’t. Sharon needed something to do, something to think about besides her own fear. If Heath’s infirmity could give her a fleeting sense of strength and control, a little humility was a small price to pay.

  “I’d appreciate it,” she said with a graciousness she’d not known she still possessed.

  So quiet was the compound, Heath’s wheels on the rocky soil seemed excessively loud. In her mind, if not in actuality, the noise echoed like the approach of a tank battalion. She wished she felt as formidable.

  Sharon came around the chair and opened the door on the side of the building. Heath wheeled herself through, the wide tread of her rubber tires moving easily over the doorsill. The kitchen, of industrial size as it would have to be for a family with at least three wives and heaven know how many children, was dark and deserted. Dinner hour had come and gone, yet a kitchen, the heart of a house, should still be bustling.

  “Where is everyone?” Heath whispered.

  “Lockdown,” Sharon whispered back. “Mr. Sheppard must have ordered it after I got away.”

  Not left; got away.

  “When things are some way he doesn’t like, everybody is confined to quarters until he says they can come out again. I was ordered to my room after he locked Patty in the chapel. I don’t think he believed I would leave without my sisters. I went out the window and waited for you. He must have figured I’d gone.”

  “And gone out looking for you,” Heath said, thinking of the missing cars. “I didn’t pass anybody on the road.”

  “There’s lots of dirt roads. Old ranch roads. He might have thought I’d gone out one and hid.”

  During this whispered exchange, Sharon had again taken the driver’s position and pushed Heath through the oversized kitchen and into a long hallway that ran from the kitchen at one end to the chapel at the other. Closed doors lined either side like a dormitory after lights out.

  “We have to hurry.” Sharon leaned down so close Heath felt the warm breath stir her hair. “Mr. Sheppard won’t have gone far.” Urgency could not counteract the fear that had entered her bones; she continued to push Heath at a lame snail’s pace.

  Fear had settled in Heath’s bones as well, though of precisely what, she wasn’t sure. Not death. Fear of something worse than life—worse than life in a wheelchair. Though she couldn’t think what that might be at this moment, over the last week she’d come to know it existed. Grabbing the wheels, she rolled herself forward. The handles of her chair slipped from Sharon’s grasp, the tires squealed on the linoleum. Moving fast, Heath could hear Sharon’s Keds snuffling on the hard floor in her wake. Ahead was the door to the chapel. Heath wished she carried a lance or a battering ram. She wanted to hit something. Hard. And she was afraid if she stopped she’d never find the courage to start again.

  One of the side doors opened abruptly. Heath was going too fast to swerve. Her left wheel clipped it, then she struck the opposite wall. The hall, the darkness, the miasma of twisting emotions oozing under closed doors conspired with this sudden violence and Heath exploded in a battery of language so foul it was a wonder the walls didn’t melt and the flooring curl.

  Not a door opened. No voice called out to ask what was happening. Lockdown was a serious matter in New Canaan.

  Mrs. Dwayne stepped into the hall between them and the chapel door. Light from her room—or the room she’d come out of—lit half of her face and cast long shadows over the other. The us
ually innocuous dumpling visage was ugly, frightening.

  “Filth,” she hissed. “You’re nothing but filth. The both of you. Get out before I call Mr. Sheppard.” Her hands were fisted on lumpy hips. Jowls quivered at her jawline. Spittle flew, obvious as moths in the unilateral light. Mrs. Dwayne was a caricature of the harridan but Heath had no desire to laugh. A face like that could countenance murder and never suffer a moment’s remorse.

  The fear that had been shuddering through Heath’s frame since Sharon had called for help was suddenly gone. She didn’t feel brave, just unafraid. All the ugly and crippled in the world was embodied in the woman standing before her. None was left over for Heath. She felt free.

  “Mr. Sheppard’s not here,” she said, marveling at how reasonable she sounded—and felt.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Dwayne said. Then: “I don’t believe you.”

  But she did, Heath could tell. She didn’t want to admit that her beloved kept her as much in the dark as he did his other wives. For a long moment neither moved, caught in the tension of the dark hallway, tethered by the rope of yellow light coming from Mrs. Dwayne’s doorway.

  “You’ve come for that little slut, Patty,” Mrs. Dwayne said finally.

  Heath felt her chair shiver as a spider might feel a helpless thing twitching in its web. Sharon had come up behind her and taken hold of the handles.

  “That’s right.” Quiet authority reverberated in her words. The voice of command; the voice that had talked terrified climbers off ledges and calmed panicked neophytes on icy crags; a voice Heath had never thought to hear again.

  Mrs. Dwayne came to a decision. The venom that had been frothing behind her eyes, spewing from her lips, solidified till she looked old and mean and hard. “You can have her,” she snapped. “And good riddance. The little whore is no better than her sisters. Casting sideways eyes at my husband, tempting my husband to sin, coveting my husband’s attention.”

  “My husband” was stressed each time it was uttered, as if Mrs. Dwayne were a priestess calling on the name of her god.