Hard Truth

by Nevada Barr

“I don’t know why he left,” Rita said simply. “I only know he had a good—and honorable—reason. You can’t understand a man like him.”

  Anna wasn’t sure whether she understood or not, she was only sure that she wanted to. Keeping Rita talking, keeping her stirred up and on the defensive, was a way she might achieve that. This was the one plan that might actually be helped by isolation, discomfort and darkness. That in itself made it worth trying.

  “Oh, I understand perfectly,” Anna said. “Proffit puts himself in a position where he is in the company of, and has control over, young girls. Circumstances call away the chaperone. He sees his chance and takes it. Two of the girls run away, traumatized by his advances. The third isn’t so lucky. He kills her to shut her up, then works his tail off trying to find the two witnesses before they’re found by anyone else. He fails. The girls turn up too freaked out to talk. He starts trying to get next to them to kill them, keep them quiet, whatever.”

  Anna spun the theory to provoke Rita, but having put it together found she rather liked it.

  “It wasn’t like that,” Rita snapped.

  “Sure it was. You just don’t want to admit he grabbed onto you using God as his handle so he could keep an eye and ear on how the search was progressing. Not to mention a connection to get him in good with the Park Service so he could base himself out of the cabin at Fern Lake. You can’t stand the thought that you’ve been used.”

  “That’s not true,” Rita spat. “Robert loves me.”

  The trite phrase and the vehemence with which Rita uttered it took Anna aback. Admittedly she’d been fishing in dark waters with improvised bait; still her catch surprised her. Usually with a man and a woman and a secret, sex or love would have been the first thing that came to mind. Part of this oversight was because of the disparity in their ages. Robert was twenty-two, Rita eight or nine years older. The one time she’d seen them together there’d been hugging and praying but the heat had seemed more for their adventure and their God than one another. Other vibes coming off them had struck her as platonic. The reddest of herrings, however, had been Rita’s night of passionate disporting with Raymond Bleeker.

  Annoyed at herself for being fooled by a woman who used piety to cover both promiscuity and dishonesty, Anna said with more of a sneer than was necessary to keep the pot boiling, “What does good old Ray think of all this?”

  Dead silence met her query. Anna was attuned to the language of silence. Lack of noise had many notes: hostile, uneasy, comfortable, dead. Till now, she’d believed the sense of a silence was transmitted by the eye. Not so. The darkness, though not perfect, was sufficient to hide the nuances of facial expressions and still she knew. Apparently silences had a tone, a timbre that didn’t require sight. This one played the dull, blank symphony of confusion.

  So rapidly was her brain working, she scarcely heard Rita when she put voice to her silent music: “Why would Ray think anything about it?”

  Pictures were held up in Anna’s brain like flashcards in the hands of a manic tutor: Ray in funny reading glasses, Ray with an odd pink-flowered handkerchief. Ray with punk-dark hair. Ray disappearing to fetch something to show her, something he seemed pleased not to have found.

  “You and Ray didn’t have sex half the night when you and I stayed at Fern?” Anna interrupted her own thoughts.

  “No. Ish. No. I came to bed right after you. I told you that.”

  “I woke up in the middle of the night. Thumping. Grunting. Voices from the storage room. I shined my light. You weren’t in the bunk. Where were you?” Anna didn’t succeed in keeping the pleading out of her voice. She wanted Rita to be lying.

  “I was on the top bunk. The bottom one on that side is too sprung. Ask anybody.”

  More flash cards. Beth in her old replacement glasses. The underweight girl on the rock at Odessa, a girl with punk-dark hair inexpertly cut, a girl who verified Bleeker’s alibi in such a timely fashion.

  Anna pressed the tiny button on her watch and the face lit up. Over an hour had passed since she’d radioed Fern Lake.

  “Give me your hands,” she demanded of Rita. Working by feel she unlocked the cuffs.

  “What—” Rita began.

  Anna cut her off. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

  twenty-five

  The door to the kitchen banged open with such force that when it struck the wall, the hallway reverberated. Lights had been turned on in the kitchen, throwing Mr. Sheppard into stark silhouette. He looked huge, black and menacing. Heath remembered him as a stocky man but of no more than middling height, five-nine tops.

  Stomping on legs like pistons, his short, thick arms pumping, he came down the hall like a juggernaut. He struck each door he passed with a fist, calling, “Out! Out! Out! Where are they? Anyone hiding or helping them will answer to me.” Knobs rattled in desperate, futile attempts to obey but the doors were all locked from the outside.

  Recovering from her initial shock at the wrath of the clan’s patriarch, Heath realized he had not seen her. Parked sedately below eye level, in a dark chair, dark clothing and an unlit hall, she was invisible. Literally this time, rather than figuratively.

  Reaching to the walls on either side of her, Heath felt for the switches. Most halls had them at both ends. This one was no exception. Putting her palm over the three toggles, she waited. When he was five or six feet away from plowing into her, she switched on the overhead lights. The effect was gratifying. Sheppard stopped so suddenly the soles of his shoes screeched on the floor and he blinked at her as if she had appeared in a puff of magician’s smoke. From the tangle of his beard, his mouth formed a neat “O.” Heath was put in mind of other orifices.

  “Hello,” she said with what, given the circumstances, was a miraculous impression of calm. “I was hoping you’d get back. I need the keys to the chapel. I’ve come to pick up Patty Dennis.”

  Her feigned innocence or sheer effrontery held Sheppard motionless for a moment. With a peculiar sense of detachment, she studied him as she’d once studied the ice, looking for flaws, rotten places, handholds, traverses. Sheppard was overweight and over sixty. He would have lost speed, endurance and agility but looked to be at the height of his strength. His mouth, partially hidden by facial hair, showed more of rigid fanaticism than outright cruelty. The lips were pulled thin by determination, no sensuality to soften the corners or warm the eyes. It proved nothing, but Heath had a strong sense that he’d never admit to being a hedonist or a run-of-the mill pervert who impregnated thirteen-year-olds and kept women locked in their rooms and their narrow lives. He’d believe he did it because it was his duty as a more exalted being. Because he was personally told to by God.

  Hearing voices.

  Was one any less crazy when they were purported to come from God rather than the fillings in one’s teeth or the family dog?

  The other facet of Sheppard’s face was hatred. Whether a strength or weakness or both, Heath guessed it ruled his life and the lives of those around him. Hatred was an outgrowth of fear. Suddenly Heath knew that too well. With a clarity that dropped her jaw she knew she didn’t hate this new way of living, moving, relating. She was scared to death of it. She didn’t hate the words “disabled,” “other abled,” “physically challenged.” She was terrified of what they meant. It wasn’t even never being able to climb again that she hated. Though she would miss it terribly, mostly she was frightened she wouldn’t find something else that made her feel so alive, as powerful.

  Looking up at Sheppard she knew the man lived in fear of nearly everything: the government, the church, women, foreigners, the past, the future, his god.

  Fear paralyzed in its early stages. Turned to hate, it became dangerous. And right now it was focused on her. The moment of insight and contemplation shattered.

  “Move,” Sheppard ordered in a cold, flat voice. Fists were balled at his sides, knuckles knobbed and sprouting black hairs. Heath was certain only the fact she sat in a wheelchair stopped him from strikin
g her, and it wouldn’t stop him long.

  “I can’t,” she said reasonably, hoping he would overlook the fact that she was facing in a direction that attested to where she’d come from. “There’s not room to get by you. Hand me the keys and I’ll just unlock the door and back in.” She nodded to the oversized ring of keys he sported at his belt in the time-honored tradition of jailers.

  Sheppard didn’t respond. Behind his eyes things began to move. His beard rippled as he clenched and unclenched his jaws. Either he was thinking hard or about to suffer a psychotic break.

  Into this strange standoff came the sound of an engine revving, gravel being thrown by tires too quickly started in motion. Sharon and Patty had gotten to the RV. They were getting away. That unacceptable truth dawned in Sheppard’s eyes.

  “Filthy bitch,” he snarled. Heath didn’t know if he referred to her or Sharon. She was given no time to figure it out. Holding to the wheel of her chair for balance, Sheppard drove his heel past her shoulder, kicking open the door behind her.

  “Goddamn filthy bitch,” he reiterated and backhanded Heath to one side as he pushed by her.

  The blow caught her on her ear. Pain was sudden and paralyzing. Her head snapped toward the wall. Her thoughts exploded into red fragments. Sheppard pushed. She could smell his sweat and feel the repulsive softness of his belly against her hand and arm. Maybe if he hadn’t hit her she wouldn’t have found the courage to do what she did. Face burning from the blow, too furious to be sensibly scared, she lifted the hook that held the keys on his belt.

  Stench and softness were gone. Sheppard was in the chapel. Heath heard the heavy fall of his feet as he charged toward the outer door, then a bestial roar when he found it locked. She tried to move but the chair seemed rooted to the ground.

  The brakes; she’d set the brakes.

  A crash resounded behind her: Sheppard kicking at another door. The chapel doors opened inward and wouldn’t give. Frustration brought another guttural burst of sound from the man’s considerable lungs.

  Heath released the brake and spun her wheels. Pounding thundered behind her. Too much adrenaline coursed through Heath’s veins to coordinate fine motor control. Careening down the hall, weaving like a drunkard, the chair veered left, the wheel scraping the wall.

  Sheppard was upon her. Meaty hands grabbed at her chair. During the past week a metamorphosis she’d been told of had occurred. The wheelchair ceased to be The Other, a vile contraption in which she was imprisoned, and had become an extension of her body. The pressure of his blunt fingers on the chair’s handles felt like a violation of her person.

  “Keys,” he yelled. His breath, smelling sweetly of cinnamon and mint, was hot on her cheek. The odor jarred her. It should have reeked of the grave, the corruption of flesh.

  Snatching the keys from where she’d dropped them in her lap, she turned as far as she could and hurled them back down the hall toward the chapel.

  “Filthy bitch.” Sheppard growled. It was apparently his only description of females who were not under his control. Heath covered her ears with her hands and tensed for another blow, but he had more pressing abuses to mete out. He raced after the keys.

  Doors banged opened, slammed shut. Muffled shouts came faintly from outside. Adrenaline’s strength and courage deserted Heath, leaving behind only a quaking fatigue. It was all she could do to breathe, to not cry. Noises from out of doors abated. Noise behind the closed doors began murmuring out through keyholes. The kitchen light was switched off, as was the hallway light, by a hand Heath never saw. Somewhere along the line she stopped gasping like a landed fish. Time proved its relativity: she couldn’t have testified as to whether she sat in the hall for three minutes or thirty.

  Apparently Mr. Sheppard wasn’t returning to wring her neck but neither was the local sheriff’s department coming to rescue her. Not that she’d expected the latter. Sharon’s terror of the United States government in all its many guises was too deeply ingrained to allow her to dial 911.

  Heath roused herself from this post-traumatic torpor and began to move slowly toward the kitchen. As she rolled past each door on silent rubber wheels, she could feel the lives behind, waiting, scared, excited, frustrated, bored. This sensitivity was so pronounced she wondered if loss of the use of her legs, coupled with her recent adventures, had rendered her psychic or just made her crazy.

  Besieged by the real or imagined emotions of others, she traversed the length of the hallway and entered the darkened kitchen. At the threshold, she experienced a twinge—not of anxiety precisely, but of expectation—a waiting for a corporeal life form to manifest so that she might know she herself was real and this bizarre night wasn’t a dream brought on by too much wine, too many cigarettes.

  Cigarettes.

  At the thought came an overpowering craving. Alone in the deserted kitchen, she fumbled in her saddlebags, retrieved a pack and lighter. The first drag was heaven, comfort in a toxic cloud, and Heath savored it. Again flicking the lighter to life, she held it above her head. Nothing, no one lurked in the shadows.

  Oddly at peace—or at a loss, at the moment they felt one and the same—she sat quietly in the darkness and enjoyed her smoke. When she finished, in an act of supreme disrespect, she dropped the butt on the kitchen floor and ground it out with two careful passes of a wheel.

  Revived by nicotine and minor vandalism, she bumped over the doorsill and onto the gravel outside. After the confines of the hall with its locked doors and muffled lives, the Colorado night, black of mountains walling off the west, the impossible distances of the prairie beckoning to the east, blasted into Heath’s consciousness, cleansing the muck of humanity’s sty from mind and soul. Stilling her thoughts and her wheels, she absorbed the immensity and beauty of the real, the eternal, cosmic reality.

  Unfortunately, the wee human intellect cannot encompass the divine for more than an instant or two. Following a rush of gratitude so intense she felt as if she might levitate, the sense of wonder vanished, leaving her in the middle of nowhere with people who did not wish her well.

  The instinct for self-preservation reasserted itself. Heath took stock of her surroundings. No lights shone from any of the buildings. Lockdown must encompass more than the securing of entrances and exits. A flashlight beam poked under the hood of an old Chevy van, the only vehicle in evidence. By its sporadic movements, Heath counted three men, Dwayne Sheppard and two others, likewise bearded, staring intently at the engine. The sedan Mrs. Dwayne, then Sharon, had driven to the RV park was not in evidence.

  Mr. Sheppard would have taken it to pursue Sharon and Patty if it had been available, of that Heath was certain. The fact he was still here indicated the car had been gone when he erupted out of the chapel. Possibly before that. Sitting unnoticed in the dark, no attractive course of action open to her, Heath thought about what that might mean.

  It had been clear Mrs. Dwayne did not know where her daughter was. She had fully expected to find Beth and Alexis incarcerated in the chapel with Patty. From Mr. Sheppard’s reactions, Heath didn’t believe he had taken the two older girls. She doubted he knew where they had gone.

  Either someone else had taken them or they had run—or been lured away. Had they been taken, the kidnapper would have spirited them away in his own car. Neither girl was old enough to drive legally but Heath knew what it was like to grow up on a ranch in rural Colorado. As soon as kids’ legs were long enough to reach the pedals they were carrying feed to cattle, fetching fence posts from one side of the property to another. At least one of the girls, and probably both, would know how to drive a car.

  Heath badly wanted to think they’d stolen the car and run away, but she couldn’t. Where would they run? They’d have run to her and she hadn’t seen them.

  They had been lured. The voices that called to them from the brush had called them again. This time they’d followed.

  “Shit,” Heath whispered. Regardless of Sharon’s sensibilities she was calling the sheriff’s department.
Having dug her cell phone out of her saddlebag, she flipped it open. No signal.

  “Shit.”

  She couldn’t—and wouldn’t—stay where she was. Heath grasped her wheels and began moving over the gravel, her passage making an unseemly noise in the stillness of the night. The men stopped staring into the van’s engine compartment and turned as one to stare at her. In what seemed an unreal eternity of outer silence and inner cacophony, Heath rolled through the dirt yard and onto what passed for a road. From there she turned south, propelling herself past the disabled van and the hostile wall of bearded men. No one spoke; not to her, not to one another. Finally they were behind her. Feeling their eyes on her back, an odd visceral pressure to either side of her spine, she pushed on. It was ten minutes before that pressure eased and she dared stop and look back.

  A low rise in the road and the darkness erased New Canaan. Already her arms were tired and she was sweating. Scrub brush lined either side of the road. To the west the Rockies blotted out the sky. To the east the low, jagged ridge of rock cut into the eastern horizon. Though the moon was far from full, the sandy soil picked up the light and the roadway shone clear, stretching away for miles.

  And miles.

  For the first time Heath wished she’d gotten a motorized chair. When she’d been choosing a conveyance, the motorized version was strongly recommended for those who could afford it. Heath had opted for the hand-propelled model, the cheapest one they had. At the time, she’d not wanted to think, to spend, to commit. She’d believed she chose the inexpensive one for reasons of frugality and to retain at least some of her independence. Sitting in the middle of the dirt track, flexing fingers cramped from grasping and pushing, she realized she’d picked the cheapest chair because she didn’t believe she’d be using it long. It wasn’t that she thought she’d be up and walking soon, climbing rock and ice just like old times. She’d believed she would die. Suicide was never a conscious thought. There’d been too many times she’d literally clung to life by her fingernails for her mind to work that way. But sitting in that room surrounded by the shiny unkind-looking paraphernalia of the disabled, a part of her had decided to let go, to fall again. This time she would not survive.