Hard Truth

by Nevada Barr

  “Stay,” she commanded. Pushing by Heath’s left wheel, she trotted down the hallway in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Where’s she going?” The voice of command was gone. Heath was back to whispering, intimidated by a silence only sharpened on the squeaky thumps of Mrs. Dwayne’s determined march.

  Sharon looked over her shoulder. Mrs. Dwayne had taken keys from her pocket and was unlocking the last door to the right before the kitchen. “Mr. Sheppard’s room,” Sharon said. “She’s the only one besides him that’s got a key and doesn’t she let the rest of us know it. She acts as if that room is her private sanctuary, like she’s the priestess of a temple. It’s not like she sleeps there much,” Sharon finished bitterly. “Nobody but Mr. Sheppard actually sleeps there. Me and Alexis are just called in, then dismissed.”

  Before Heath had to respond to this unwelcome peek into the lives of the Dennis girls, Mrs. Dwayne reemerged, carefully relocked the door, then steamed back down the hall.

  “Come on,” she puffed as she passed. Sharon pushing and Heath letting her, they followed toward the door to the chapel. Selecting a key from the jingling bunch she’d fetched, Mrs. Dwayne unlocked the chapel door and shoved it open. “Get your dirty baggage and get out,” she said viciously.

  Sharon wheeled Heath past her. Mrs. Dwayne didn’t give an inch. Though Heath pulled in her elbow, her wheel and shoulder pressed the soft belly. It was not a pleasant sensation.

  The chapel was dark, no windows to let in what feeble light the night sky might offer. Heaven forfend any of the natural world He was purported to have created with miraculous love be allowed into the man-made box where Mr. Sheppard held forth.

  “Turn on the lights,” Heath said to Mrs. Dwayne.

  “There are no lights in the chapel.”

  “There are lights,” Sharon said and switched on the overheads. There were three naked bulbs hanging from the low ceiling by electric cords.

  A little girl, blond like her sisters, long-legged and reed-thin like her sisters, was kneeling between two of the benches facing the altar. She was dressed in an odd mixture of turn-of-the century fashions and twenty-first-century workout clothes. A ruffled dress came down past her knees and up to her chin. Beneath the hem were running shoes. Over the bodice was a pink hooded sweatshirt.

  “Sharon,” she breathed when she saw who’d come for her. Bursting into a storm of tears, she jumped to her feet and ran to her sister.

  “He told me you’d gone. Taken Alexis and left me behind.” Sharon met the little girl halfway and folded her in her arms.

  “Where is Beth?” Mrs. Dwayne asked. “What have you done with my daughter?” she screamed just as Sharon was crying, “Alexis!”

  The shouts canceled each other out. Much as they hated one another, there was no doubt that both were genuinely ignorant of the older girls’ whereabouts. Not knowing where the limpet was opened a pit inside Heath. She felt the falling sensation she suffered each night in her nightmares.

  “Mr. Sheppard, he’s taken them,” Sharon accused.

  “So what if he has,” Mrs. Dwayne shot back. “They are his to do with as he will.”

  It looked as if Sharon would launch herself at her co-wife. Heath would have genuinely enjoyed seeing the harridan taken down, but time was at a premium. Besides, Sharon would come out the loser. Probably she’d never been strong and the time with Mr. Sheppard and his flock had worn away what resilience youth might once have lent her.

  “Sharon, she doesn’t know he took them,” Heath said firmly as she wheeled herself between the two Mrs. Sheppards. “Hell, she didn’t even know her husband was gone. She’s as much in the dark as we are. Let’s get Patty someplace safe. Then we’ll worry about—”

  The sound of an automobile approaching stopped Heath mid-sentence. Heads cocked, eyes wary, the three women and the girl listened as rabbits might listen to the coyotes howling.

  “Out the back,” Mrs. Dwayne said quickly. Heath didn’t for an instant believe she had decided to help them from empathy or altruism, but she trusted her all the same. They shared a common goal: to get the Dennis girls out of Mr. Sheppard’s bed.

  Leading Patty by the hand, Sharon ran to a door left of the lectern that opened to the rear of the building. “Hurry,” she urged as Mrs. Dwayne fumbled with the keys. Mr. Sheppard had outfitted the compound like a prison. Outer doors needed keys to open from both the inside and out. Heath was willing to bet that the doors of the women’s and girls’ quarters could only be locked from the outside.

  Men’s voices broke through the enforced stillness of New Canaan. The kitchen door slammed shut.

  “Hurry,” Heath repeated Sharon’s plea.

  “Out,” hissed Mrs. Dwayne as she got the key turned and jerked the door open. Sharon and Patty didn’t hesitate but bolted down the steps.

  Steps.

  From the bottom, the sisters looked back. Light from the overhead bulbs in the chapel touched only the planes of their faces and their eyes, giving them the soulful, disembodied stare of the cheap velvet paintings Heath remembered from the mid-seventies.

  “We could help you down,” Sharon offered faintly.

  They couldn’t. It would have been a struggle for the two of them to lift a pudgy dachshund, let alone a woman. A woman and a chair.

  Mr. Sheppard would figure out where they were in a moment, if he hadn’t already.

  “Go,” Heath said. “Get in the RV, lock the doors. If anybody bothers you, drive off. Don’t go to the park. Someplace else. I’ll be okay. Sheppard won’t dare touch me. I’ve got my cell phone,” she finished as if a cell phone were a magic talisman. In a way it was. According to the tales, magic was a whimsical thing, working least when needed most. Cell phones were much like that.

  Maybe the Dennis girls trusted her. Maybe they didn’t give a damn about her. Either way, they ran into the darkness without another word. Mrs. Dwayne did, too, but turned left toward the long end of the building rather than right, around the corner of the chapel. Probably she hoped to return her husband’s keys and secret herself back in her room so she wouldn’t be blamed for letting his chattel escape.

  Heath closed the exit door, hearing the lock snick into place, then moved soundlessly across the chapel, her rubber wheels silent on the hard floor. Having switched off the lights, she rolled into the hallway and shut the chapel door behind her.

  “I hope the son-of-a-bitch draws the line at hitting cripples,” she muttered, and set the brakes on her chair.

  twenty-four

  The Maglite was tiny, more for peeping at locks and finding keyholes than any true illumination, and its batteries were small. Anna didn’t want to waste her only source of light and so she ran, chasing the last gray mirage of light to the top of the ridge.

  At least she ran as much as her middle-aged body and flat-lander’s lungs would allow. It was a good half hour and full dark by the time she reached the elevation from which it was purported her radio would work. Drenched in sweat and panting, she threw herself down on the nearest rock to recover before calling dispatch.

  Purported to work: it was Rita, her felonious seasonal ranger, now handcuffed to a pine tree, who had told her where the best place to call out was.

  Sitting in the duff, Anna wondered why she had believed her so readily. The bottom line was she trusted Rita even while arresting her for importing endangered species into a protected area, the massacre of mice, the slaughter of a squirrel and the murder of a teenage girl. Sitting there, Anna realized she believed Rita innocent of all but the care and feeding of illicit puppies.

  Regardless of woman’s intuition or its more manly cousin, gut feelings, Anna called dispatch as soon as she recovered her breath. Experience had taught her that she was not the best judge of character. More than once she’d been dead wrong—or nearly dead wrong—about her fellow humans. She would not bet her life that this time she was right.

  The chief ranger was out of pocket, the dispatcher informed Anna. She’d gone t
o the Denver Resource Center and wouldn’t be back in the park till the following afternoon. Lorraine would have grasped the gist of things without a lengthy explanation. Anyone else would require chapter and verse. Anna’s situation was complicated—baby wolves, a ranger flaunting park regulations and state laws, suspected of murder—she didn’t want to broadcast details to the entire park as well as anyone else who might choose to listen in. In the end she merely asked that the Fall River District Ranger be contacted and asked to send a couple rangers up in the morning to assist in walking out a prisoner in a routine arrest.

  Her next call was to Fern Lake and Raymond Bleeker. He’d been monitoring the radio. “Hang tight,” he said. “I’ll get together food, water and sleeping bags and head your way. I should be there in an hour or so.”

  Having done all she could, Anna started back down the hill. The descent was slower than the climb. No longer was she headed into the light, however feeble it had been, but into the greater darkness of the forest.

  As she picked her way down the ragged slope, she reviewed the plans she had set in motion. There was nothing she could do that hadn’t been done. Within an hour or two she’d have backup and enough in the way of worldly goods to pass the night in relative comfort. Tomorrow she’d have hot and cold running rangers to ease the hike and/or carry out, depending on Rita’s mood. Yet she didn’t feel relieved. If anything, she suffered a deepening disquiet, a sense that somewhere she’d left a fire burning and that fire was going to blaze out of control.

  In the not-too-distant past Anna had had bad experiences in the woods at night. “Little Red Riding Hood syndrome,” she muttered as she literally and figuratively tried to shake off the willies. She smiled at the image. This time there were real live wolves in the woods, four of them. “And you’re not to pet them,” she reminded herself.

  Using the Maglite more than she wanted to, she arrived at the ring of boulders holding the nascent wolf pack. Here the slope she’d been following leveled out down toward the shores of Loomis Lake. Within a hundred yards and one hundred eighty degrees was her prisoner. With neither light nor trail, Anna couldn’t be sure of the exact route the two of them had been following when Rita staged her sit-in. Leaning against a chunk of granite, Anna waited and listened. The alarm that had been jangling her nerves all the way down the mountainside warned her not to walk blindly back into the woods in search of that one particular tree to which she’d manacled Ms. Perry.

  “That you, Anna?”

  Apparently Anna wasn’t the only one keeping an ear out for nonnative species. Anna didn’t reply.

  “If it’s you, I’ve got to pee.”

  Listen as she might, Anna could hear no subterfuge in Rita’s announcement.

  “It’s me,” she called back. “I got turned around in the dark. Keep talking so I can find you.” Anna had placed Rita when first she’d spoken. She wanted Rita’s chatter to cover the sounds of her passage as she circled to come upon the prison tree from what she hoped would be an unsuspected direction. The sense of impending danger had entered into her body on a cellular level. Her nerves were stretched till each rustle of needles or breath of air brought forth an answering reverberation within her. It wasn’t Rita Anna was afraid of exactly, but she was most definitely afraid.

  While Rita sang “Frère Jacques” in a rich alto voice, Anna slipped around to the lake side of the tree, then closed in on her singing captive. Eyes adjusted to the dark as much as they could, lacking the cones and rods of a cat’s eyes, she could just make out Rita’s shape melding into that of the pine’s trunk. Moving as little as possible and not using her light at all, Anna assured herself there was no accomplice lurking nearby. Nothing. Nothing she could see, hear or smell, at any rate. The feeling of something sick and mean lurking nearby didn’t abate one jot.

  Rita’s singing broke off.

  “Where the heck are you?” she shouted. “A woman’s bladder can only take so much.”

  “Here,” Anna said and Rita squawked satisfyingly. It was good not to be the only one scared.

  “You’re a creepy, sneaky little thing,” Rita said.

  “Thank you.”

  Anna uncuffed Rita from the tree, then drew her service weapon and held it and the Maglite on the young woman while she relieved herself. Keeping Rita Perry at gunpoint till she’d buttoned her trousers and recuffed herself didn’t make Anna feel any safer. It made her feel foolish. Rita’s vocal disdain for these precautions didn’t help matters.

  Calls of nature answered, Anna reholstered the 9 mm and they sat again beneath the pine to which Rita had been so recently cuffed. The rain had stopped or, as was more likely with the storm cells that built every afternoon in the mountains, moved on. The sweat Anna had worked up during her dash up the ridge cooled, leaving her damp and chilled.

  “What now?” Rita asked. “The cavalry coming to help you bring in your dangerous fugitive?”

  “Something like that.”

  Rita was also in a foul mood and for a long time neither spoke. Anna dug through her pack and shared her granola bar with Rita. The pack she tossed a couple yards away, out of lunging or footsie distance should Rita take it into her head to try and retrieve her service weapon. Inspired by generosity, or just still hungry, Rita volunteered to split her remaining bologna and cheese sandwich if Anna would retrieve it from her daypack.

  Having broken bread together as well as taken the edge off their hunger, they began to feel more kindly toward one another.

  “Tell me about your wolf project,” Anna said, both because she was interested and to pass the time. There would be no sleep tonight, at least not for her.

  Rita liked talking about the pups and told Anna how, once the little family had fallen into her hands, she had researched reintroduction techniques that had been used successfully in other parks, put together a pen and a plan, then smuggled the pups in. It would be a couple months before they would be ready to release but Rita hoped by then they’d be old enough and strong enough to make it through the winter.

  Anna did, too, but she didn’t say as much. These pups would be put in a zoo, destroyed or introduced into another wolf program by the time the first snows fell in Rocky. The thought saddened her. Reports filtered in occasionally of grizzlies, sharks and, increasingly, mountain lions attacking humans as their territory and food sources were reduced by encroaching development. To keep herself out of hot water, Anna pretended to be on the side of the people attacked. She did feel sympathy of a sort for the fear and pain they endured. When they were killed, she managed genuine compassion for the friends and relatives who mourned them.

  Inside though, down deep, she was really pleased the critters got lunch. She always hoped—usually in vain—that the beasts would get away with it, not be hunted down and killed like . . . like animals.

  Personally, she relished hiking and camping where there were predators greater than herself. It kept her on her toes, alive and alert. In Glacier/Waterton National Peace Park, where the great grizzly bears were a real threat, Anna had found the blessings of being alive—breathing, seeing in color, the taste of glacier milk and the smell of burnt earth and new grass—to be more piquant than anywhere else she’d been.

  “How did Robert Proffit figure in?” Anna asked.

  For a long time Rita didn’t respond. The storm cells had spent themselves. A quarter moon rose above the mountain to the east, rendering the darkness beneath the trees incomplete. The faint silvery light caught raindrops on the needles, creating a pale nimbus that allowed Anna to distinguish the pines from sky and Rita from the pines. Weak as this illumination was, it raised Anna’s spirits. Time lost in Lechuguilla Cavern and a bloody black night in the high country of Yosemite had engendered in her a fear of the dark, the real dark, the kind that settled into the pores and clogged the lungs.

  At length Rita raised her head. Light caught on her strong chin and the flat, high planes of cheekbones, hard beneath the skin. “You’ve got Robert all wrong,” she said.
“He’s a good man. He loves the Lord. And he loves those kids. When they went missing, he was crazy with worry and eaten up by guilt. He thought if he’d not gone looking for them, not gotten lost, gone straight to Ray to report it, they might have been found. I thought Robert might do something awful. Might kill himself even. He almost did, in a way. He worked himself harder than anybody on the search: hiking sixteen, eighteen hours a day, going without sleep, forgetting to eat. He looked like a scarecrow—a zombie. Even after the park had given up, he kept on. The people at New Canaan tried to stop him. They’d more or less decided the loss of the girls was God’s will. Robert never bought it. I think he came to think it was a judgment against him. A test of some kind.”

  “That sounds egocentric to me. Thinking it was all about him,” Anna commented.

  “It wasn’t like that,” Rita said. “He wasn’t thinking of himself. Not the way you mean it. Robert didn’t think God’s will was focused on Robert Proffit and everybody else was just pawns in a cosmic game. It was more the God within him, his own faith. When the girls went missing he felt himself losing it. Every day we’d all come back tired and depressed and nothing to show for it. I could tell he felt that God turned away from him. Or that he was turning away from God. After a while he no longer believed that God would look after his lost lambs. He quit the prayer vigils the New Canaanites held and spent all of his time searching, thinking God was gone and there was only him left in a godless world to find Beth and Alexis and Candace. He found my wolves. He was the only one who did. There wasn’t anyplace up here he didn’t cover more than once. We got to know each other then. He started helping me out when I couldn’t get up to take care of the little guys. He’d’ve been up here searching anyway. I think when Beth and Alexis came back he got his soul back. Most of it anyway.”

  “Never gave up? Candace doesn’t count? According to you, he knocked me over a cliff, fed the puppies, left you a note and split.”