Hard Truth

by Nevada Barr

  Heath grabbed the wheels and pushed on. As soon as she was near a credit card she was getting the high-end machinery. Not for every day—she didn’t want to lose the strength of her arms and upper body—but for special occasions.

  Like touring the western plains of Colorado at night.

  twenty-six

  Heath’s palms were blistered and her arms felt as if she’d free-climbed Everest. At a guess, she’d traveled two miles, maybe three. It felt like thirty. With a grunt and an effort that tore more skin from the palms of her hands, she rolled over a small rise; a small rise for a recreational vehicle, a veritable mountain for a tired woman in a wheelchair.

  Before her, hideous black and bloated on the iridescent sand, was a huge spider. A tarantula. Bigger, much bigger than a tarantula. A tarantula whose parents had immigrated to Colorado from Three Mile Island.

  “Jumpin’ Jehosephat!” Heath panted, wondering even as she said it from whence the ridiculous oath had sprung. She came to a halt and lifted her ravaged hands from the tires. Unbraked, the chair began rolling toward the oversized arachnid, oversized in a Chihuahua-eating sort of a way.

  “Fuck,” she screamed, finding a more satisfying way of expressing her alarm. She stopped the chair then wiped her eyes. Sweat ran in rivulets from her scalp, dripping off her nose and jawline, soaking through her shirt between her breasts.

  Eyes clear and mind under control, she saw the monstrosity for what it was: a distributor cap. The mystery of the broken-down van at New Canaan cleared up. Sharon had sabotaged their vehicle. Heath was proud of her. Because she’d always been strong, liberated and fiercely independent, it had been hard at first to feel sisterhood with women who lived under the thumb of a man. Like most people, she took her upbringing for granted, but lots of girls didn’t have nice daddies, mothers who worked for a living, aunts who became doctors.

  Looking at the leggy bit of rubber with images from the Sheppard household still reeking in her mind, Heath glimpsed the determination and courage Sharon must have had to open His van and rip the guts from His engine that she might steal her sister—and herself—from Him.

  “Good girl,” Heath whispered.

  Free of the worry that the van would be made operational and come roaring up the road in pursuit at any moment, Heath allowed herself to rest for a while, just sit and breathe and let the cool of the night soothe her palms and take the burn out of her lungs.

  Despite the fact she was exhausted, alone, aching and had hands resembling cheap hamburger, Heath realized she was experiencing a sensation of well-being. She’d not felt just plain old good in such a long time, at first she couldn’t grasp what was happening and wondered if she verged on hysteria, denial or some other mentally unbalanced event.

  It was a runner’s high. Roller’s high, she amended, and shook her head in awe of her discovery of the patently obvious. Because she could not do what she wanted, Heath had chosen to do nothing—nothing but smoke and drink and feel sorry for herself. As her heart rate returned to normal, she promised herself as soon as she got the okay from the medical world she would join a gym or whatever paraplegics joined to stay fit.

  Energized, she grabbed her wheels. The jolt of pain from her ruined palms took the edge off her good cheer but didn’t manage to eradicate it. That took two more miles of rough road.

  Finally Heath stopped. Not stopped to rest but quit, ceased, gave up, threw in the towel.

  You didn’t give up, she corrected herself. And she hadn’t, she’d just given out. There were not more reserves to draw on. She wanted a cigarette but was unsure if she had enough strength in her arms to lift it to her mouth; enough grip left to flick the lighter.

  A large part of her still-functioning brain urged her to make comparisons of the woman in the chair who’d covered five miles in four and a half hours and the woman who’d run eight miles every day before breakfast. Heath ignored it. Only once, on a hellacious climb in Canada, had she pushed herself so hard she hit the wall. Tonight she’d done it again. Regardless of the goal, there is a pride in giving one’s all.

  Heath only had enough strength remaining to let her head fall back that she might better scream the way a child does when it is too tired to sleep, like Charlie Brown does in the cartoons, “Aaargh.”

  Heath laughed. She’d always wondered how that sounded aloud. Now she knew.

  Something else knew, too. The brush at the edge of the road twenty or so yards ahead of her clattered, its bone-dry sticks hitting against one another as a body of considerable size shifted within. The rattling came again, moving away maybe. Then the pound of feet or hooves on hard, dry ground.

  Heath expected to be afraid. Hadn’t it been only recently she’d had to screw her courage to the sticking place just to sit outside the RV alone of an evening? Here she was in the night, in, if not the middle, then certainly the back forty of nowhere, too spent to swat away small mosquitoes, and yet footsteps in the bush didn’t move her.

  Another good thing about holding nothing back: self-pity, grief, loss, even fear had been ground up, used for fuel to push her chair a couple more feet, another quarter of a mile.

  “Hello,” she shouted. If it was a mountain lion with the sense it was born with, it would run from the sound of a human voice. If it was a person, maybe they’d kill her. Or, more likely, offer her a ride back to civilization.

  No answer. Then an animal moving low and fast, with the sleek outlines of a wolf or coyote, sneaked from the underbrush running straight for her. Unable to do much else, Heath watched it come. In an instant it was upon her, paws on her chest, tongue up her nose.

  “Wiley,” she cried. Literally cried. Tears she’d thought long paid out in the form of sweat now poured down her face at the earth-shaking joy she felt seeing her friend. Wiley was never, ever to leap on her without an express invitation to do so. This was written in stone somewhere in the companion-dog manifesto. Heath let it pass. In her heart, in the depths of her soul where only angels and dogs can look, the invitation had been writ large and Wiley, being the best dog in the known and unknown universes, had seen this.

  Lights cut across the dirt at a right angle to the road, and over the smacky attentions of her dog, Heath heard an engine fire up. Shortly thereafter the boxy silhouette of her aunt’s recreational vehicle crept from behind an arm of the rocky crest to the east. The first fleeing footsteps would have been little Patty, hiding and keeping watch with Wiley, running back to tell her sister Heath had come.

  They didn’t return to Rollin’ Roost RV park. Though the New Canaanites had been effectively stranded, it wouldn’t last. Mr. Sheppard had contacts in the neighborhood of Loveland. A new distributor cap would be brought out. Or a sympathizer or convert sent to find Patty and Sharon and bring them home.

  Sharon drove till the mountains opened a crack to let them in, then followed Highway 34 along the winding Thompson River. When a pullout with enough depth and trees to screen a vehicle of immoderate size presented itself, she pulled in and parked out of sight from the road.

  Rescue was nearly the undoing of Heath. What with the unconditional love lathered on her by Wiley, the warmth of the RV and the knowledge these wheels had a powerful diesel engine to turn them, fatigue caught up to her. Muscles turned to jelly. Brain fogged. Concentration flagged. Her heart’s desire was to sit and do as she was told. Like in the hospital in Denver, just abdicate and give the world over to those who cared. The problem was now Heath was one of those who cared, and looking at her impromptu nurse, she realized Sharon was on the ragged edge. She had energy but it was that of raw nerve. Heath doubted she was capable of much in the way of rational decisions.

  Though the shades were closed and snapped down, Sharon tended to Heath’s hands by the light of a single votive candle. She’d not had the cathartic cleansing of physical exertion. Sitting, hiding, waiting, unsure whether to go or stay, to search for Alexis and Beth or go back to New Canaan for Heath, to leave Patty hidden in the brush or take her with her, had worn
away at her till Heath believed half her nervous system lay exposed on the surface of her slender body. A slightly raised voice, an accidental brush of fingers against her arm, and she would jerk as if an electrical current had been sent through her.

  Patty, all eyes and elbows, was anxious to help: run errands, make sandwiches. The child even lit Heath’s cigarette when her own hands were too stiff and sore to work the lighter’s magic. But Patty was only a little girl.

  Heath shook herself, much as Wiley was wont to do after his hated baths, and forced her mind to focus. When a cup of hot, strong coffee and a cigarette pulled her back together sufficiently, she could ask: “You guys waited for me the whole time?” Not a particularly brilliant opening to a campaign to rescue lost girls, but it was a start.

  “We didn’t know what else to do. We didn’t know where the girls had gone. We didn’t know if you were all right.” Sharon’s voice rose in pitch, the words coming hard upon one another. She was fast reaching a breaking point.

  “That’s good. Of course you didn’t. And I’m grateful,” Heath cut in with a flood of her own to divert the rising tide of panic. “Now. Let’s sit a bit. Patty, pour your sister a glass of wine. There, inside the refrigerator door.”

  “We don’t use alcohol—” Sharon began. She was doing that smoothing-pulling thing with her skirt again, flattening it over her knees as if her life depended on it being wrinkle-free.

  “It’s not alcohol. It’s medicine.”

  Patty handed Heath the glass. In the way of children, she’d filled it to the brim. “Do I need medicine, Miss Jarrod?”

  “No,” Heath said. “Children are stronger than grown-ups.” She passed it to Sharon and watched while she dutifully swallowed a good slug of the stuff. Aunt Gwen—and Heath when she was drinking for pleasure and not for pain—had a connoisseur’s taste in the wine up to their self-imposed twenty-dollar-a-bottle limit. It hurt to see Sharon choking down an excellent Pinot Grigio as if it truly were vile-tasting medicine.

  Heath accepted a glass Patty poured for her unasked. She wanted another cigarette but having a kid both serve up the booze and light the fags struck her as too decadent. In California it was probably a felony. Even in Boulder, citizens had become so politically correct it was as much as one’s life was worth to light up within three feet of a building. Heath made a mental note to try it from the vantage point of a wheelchair, a sociological experiment to see if, to the PC police, deference to the disabled won out over death to all smokers.

  Sharon calmed down fractionally. At least holding the wineglass kept her hands from their infernal pressing.

  “There’s not a lot of ways I can think of to try and find the limpet and Alexis, short of bringing in the police,” Heath said neutrally. She’d reverted to her pet name for Beth. It passed unremarked. If there was a favorite with Heath, so there was with Sharon: her sister.

  “No. No police!” Sharon said. Fear, honed sharp by nerves and fatigue, warped the words. “The Internet. Remember? Robert was sending them e-mails, trying to get them to come away somewhere. They took the car. He must have e-mailed them or they wouldn’t know where to go except to you.”

  Heath chose to let the issue of the police rest a moment. Sharon had worried herself till she wasn’t rational; she needed time to accept the inevitable.

  The Internet. Pushing the lovely Pinot Grigio to the farther side of the counter lest any more of it accidentally fall down her throat and further dull her intellect, she said, “Did you check their messages?”

  “No connection. I was afraid to leave you. I couldn’t find your cell—”

  The hysteria was beginning to shriek through again.

  “Right. Right. Right. Of course. Of course,” Heath repeated till the danger passed. “Let’s do it now, shall we?”

  Granite walls blocked the signal. Sharon again driving, they returned to the flatter lands toward Loveland. In a turnout, Patty keeping a lookout for suspicious vehicles—a category they’d made too broad considering she set off her alarm at every passing car—Heath got on the Internet then turned the laptop over to Sharon. Within a minute Sharon was downloading her sister’s e-mail. Over fifty messages, all purportedly from Robert Proffit. They ran the gamut from threat, to promise, to seduction and back again. The last seven had hooks baited with Candace Watson.

  “ ‘You didn’t kill Candace. But only you can save her. Come back. Your loving friend, Robert,’ ” Sharon read aloud. “What does he mean ‘You didn’t kill Candace’? Of course they didn’t.”

  Like most Americans, Heath knew altogether too much about crime. After all, it was the entertainment media’s—and so the public’s—obsession.

  “Beth and Alexis said they didn’t remember anything. Aunt Gwen told me that kind of amnesia is rare to the point of being virtually fictional.” It had actually been Ranger Pigeon who had told Heath, but an auntie would be more acceptable at the moment than a cop, even a tree cop. “She thought the girls remembered but chose not to tell. Either because they were frightened into silence by threats—Robert knew where they lived, who they cared about—or because they felt guilty. Maybe they were forced to participate in the torture or killing of Candace.”

  “Oh God. Oh Lord.” Sharon shrunk, internalizing the pain both of the death of a child and the belief one was responsible for that death. “Candace is dead?”

  “Not necessarily,” Heath said overloud. The kid probably was dead but she could tell Sharon needed to deny that a while longer. “E-mails,” she urged.

  Sharon forced her eyes back to the computer screen.

  “ ‘Candace . . . only you . . . alive . . . come . . . come save her . . . we’re here still . . . come back . . . he’s dead . . . I need you . . . he’s gone . . . we need you . . . come back . . .’ ” Sharon skimmed the remaining messages, her voice cracking wet with tears. When she’d done, the three of them stared at the gray wasteland, the face of cyberspace.

  For a minute no one said anything. Not even the faint comforting sound of Wiley licking hypnotically at some part of his anatomy could kill the echo of the unvoiced siren’s song Proffit had been singing via e-mail.

  “ ‘He’s gone’ . . . ?” Sharon looked over at Heath.

  “Get the light, would you, Patty?” Heath had had enough of this ghost gray computer glow. Then, remembering they were hiding, said, “Never mind. Thanks anyway.” The little girl waited by the switch, wanting to be on hand to help should Heath change her mind again.

  “He, from the context of the messages”—Heath put the thoughts together as she spoke—“must be the kidnapper. A man the girls have reason to be afraid of. ‘He’s gone. He’s dead.’ That looks to be said by way of reassurance.”

  “Robert telling the girls that he’s killed or gotten rid of their kidnapper? That doesn’t seem right.”

  “My guess is it’s the other way around, the kidnapper’s pretending to be Robert to lure the girls back. He’s hooking them with their faith in Robert Proffit. The bait is Candace. Saving Candace. He’s playing on their goodness. Or their guilt.

  “ ‘Only you . . . we need you . . . save her. Come back, we’re here,’ ” Sharon repeated the highlights of the litany.

  “Where the hell is here?”

  “The park.”

  Heath said nothing. The girls had been found—or rather, had found her—in the park after who knew how many days walking, wandering, running, maybe much of that time lost. Even half-naked and unshod they could have covered a lot of country.

  Heath had covered a lot of country herself. There were few places in Rocky she’d not been. A place where a man could keep three girls. A place with access to computer and Internet. Within walking distance to the handicamp. The west side of the park was out—too far. Two girls without gear, food or water couldn’t make it that far. And it meant a climb up and over the great divide. The frontcountry was a possibility. It was densely populated but often there’s more anonymity in crowds than in solitary climes. They’d been missin
g too long for them to have been kept in a camp, tent or RV. At the height of the season permits weren’t that long and compliance was rigorously enforced.

  This place: “back,” “here,” was still extant six or seven weeks after the initial disappearance. An employee, then. Dorm and shared housing were out. Most of the permanent employees lived in Estes Park.

  “Fern Lake Cabin,” Heath said with certainty. She’d not thought of it before because no one really knew if the girls had been kidnapped or run away, whether any accomplices or perpetrators remained in the area or had long since departed. Besides, Fern Lake Cabin was occupied during the summer months by a law enforcement ranger. A ranger who was by now dead, or if he wasn’t, would be if Heath got her hands on him.

  twenty-seven

  Either Rita heard the urgency in Anna’s command or she was too glad to be free to push her luck. Without a word of protest or a single question she shrugged into her daypack.

  Anna was already on her feet. “Quietly,” she whispered. In the darkness beside her, Rita rose effortlessly. Strong and young, knees didn’t crack, hands didn’t grab at the tree for support or balance. Jealousy was the furthest thing from Anna’s mind. At the moment she needed all the strong and young she could get.

  “He’s had time. More than enough. Rita, you’ll need your sidearm.” She dropped to one knee and reached for her daypack. Nothing. Eyes were useless. Filtered moonlight was sufficient for the big stuff, not for this. On all fours, she dragged her hands lightly over the duff, feeling for it.

  “My pack’s gone.”

  “It’s not gone,” Rita said reasonably. “You must have shoved it farther back than you thought.”

  “It’s gone. Shut up. Listen.”