Blind Descent

by Nevada Barr

  Anna appreciated the “we.”

  Dust overwhelmed them then, and Holden needed all of his concentration just to stay on the road.

  NIGHT HAD COME to further obscure the mysteries of the desert by the time they returned to Holden’s office. There were three messages on his desk: a courtesy call from the sheriff’s office telling him the only print lifted from the shell casing was Oscar’s. Iverson had picked it up by the ends, planting his thumb on the base of the shell. A call from Laymon’s secretary informed Holden the Roxbury funeral would be in Carlsbad the following day, with a short graveside ceremony at the Santa Catarina Cemetery. The last message was from Rhonda. By the way Holden smiled and folded the scrap of pink paper into his shirt pocket, Anna deduced he treasured up every communiqué from his wife.

  Holden limped to his truck and Anna to her Neon aphid. Letting the engine warm up, she fiddled with the radio tuner trying to decide between half a dozen country-western stations playing more or less the same song. The day had been long, tiring, and confusing, but not a waste of time. Though she was no closer to knowing the identity of Frieda’s killer, or Brent’s, she was compiling a stock of information. Most of it would prove useless, but she was accustomed to that. Somewhere in this miasma of gossip, observation, and speculation, there would be answers.

  Roxbury’s ledger was filling fast: a dishonorable discharge from the army, bad information to a drilling company, a reputation for falsifying data, a presence at the first attempt, the opportunity to talk with Oscar Iverson during the rescue, on site at Frieda’s death, and the victim of the second murder.

  Oscar had the opportunity to conspire with Brent after the attempt and before Frieda’s death. He was in the neighborhood, could have known Brent was meeting Anna at Big Manhole, and he’d screwed up the evidence either intentionally or accidentally.

  Zeddie was present for the attempt and at Frieda’s death. She knew where Brent was to meet Anna and how to get there. The love of her young life, Peter McCarty, had been blackmailed from her side by another woman. If Sondra had been the victim instead of Frieda, Zeddie would have been at the top of Anna’s list.

  The picture was skewed. Either the pieces of more than one puzzle had been mixed, or a piece was missing.

  Anna backed the Neon into the deserted parking lot and fumbled with an unfamiliar dashboard in hopes of locating the headlights. Each time she laid out her thoughts, going over old information or incorporating new, she always ended back at the same blank wall: Sondra McCarty. A fugitive on the lam? A runaway wife? A frightened witness? Another victim?

  After Brent’s funeral Anna would dedicate her time to tracking down the doctor’s wife.

  16

  FUNERALS GAVE ANNA a displaced feeling, a sense of purposeless rattling through life. Since the death of a boy her junior year in high school, during the aftermath of which most of the class sat in the back of the funeral parlor undecided between giggles and tears, she’d managed to avoid them. Despite her connection with the corpse, she would have weaseled out of this one had she not wanted to study the other attendees.

  For a rotten afternoon, cold and cloudy with a flaying north wind, a goodly number of people turned out. They looked as miserable as she felt. To focus on the casket with its decaying reminder of mortality was morbid. To think of anything else was irreverent. Mourners turned up their collars against the wind, settled their faces into neutral solemnity, and stared at the ground. Not where it erupted in new earth to receive Roxbury’s remains but the little safe patches of brown grass in front of their toes.

  The caving community was represented by a motley assortment of poorly dressed individuals. Those who had come to Carlsbad to work or study underground had not arrived with a wardrobe suitable for weddings or funerals. Anna had ridden down with Zeddie, Peter, and Curt. On behalf of the park, George Laymon and Oscar Iverson were there. Holden had come and with him Rhonda. A dozen others were in attendance. People Anna didn’t recognize, friends and business associates of the deceased.

  Roxbury didn’t leave this earth awash in tears. Every eye in the place was as dry as the north wind. Brent’s wife looked on with the drawn face of shock but without any indication of great sorrow. A wide-bodied man in a good suit seemed bent on protecting her not only from the wind but from the storms of life. Imposing in a calf-length black wool coat, he stood at her side, his shoulder touching hers. Mrs. Roxbury’s head was inclined toward him as if it was there she sought comfort. The saddest note in this bleak formality was Brent’s little girls. At three, they were too young to understand what was happening. Identically clad in tiny navy blue coats, double-breasted and buttoned up, they hung one on each of their mother’s hands. Well-behaved little creatures, they didn’t whine or pull away, but time and strangeness weighed upon them. They wiggled, peevish and playful by turns.

  Arsonists liked to hang around to watch the firetrucks arrive. Serial killers often enjoyed reading about their exploits in the newspaper. Had Brent’s killer come to his funeral? The possibility was there. Not so much to return in some way to the scene of the crime or to gloat over the finality of the act, but because most murderers know their victim. Often they are close friends or family. In that situation, not to appear at the funeral could be cause for comment.

  Anna studied the faces. Uniformly grim, pinched with cold, and red-nosed from the wind, the mourners listened to the preacher’s words. With the exception of Brent’s wife, the mourners were uninteresting. She clung too close to her male companion to win any awards in the grieving widows category.

  “What’s with the fat man in the expensive coat?” Anna whispered to Zeddie as Mrs. Roxbury stepped forward to drop a handful of dirt on the dearly departed.

  “That’s the boyfriend,” Zeddie told her. “He’s a local dentist.”

  “Did Brent know?”

  “Yeah. The marriage was over. They were just dickering over the details.”

  “What details?”

  “Kids, dogs, house. Shh.”

  Anna hushed and, jamming her hands deep in pockets devoid of warmth, watched her suspect pool flood over its banks.

  An estranged wife, a new boyfriend, a custody battle; as potentially illuminating as these bits of information were, Anna did not welcome them. Like an obsessed scientist, she wanted only data that proved her theory. This new twist could indicate Brent Roxbury’s death had no connection whatsoever to Frieda’s. Anna had used the Roxbury incident to prove that Dierkz was murdered. If it was freak coincidence, she was back to Frieda’s testimony—recanted—and the butt-print—buried. Holden, her one ally in this quest, would desert her for the seductive realm of the guilt-ridden.

  A sickening possibility stirred her thoughts with an icy finger. Could it be she was dead wrong and making a world-class ass of herself? A shudder vibrated her bones. Curt’s strong arm threaded between her elbow and her ribs. He snugged her up against his side and kept her there till the last clods were thrown and the mourners were allowed to escape the grave.

  “What’s the matter, don’t you like dead people?” he asked as they followed Peter and Zeddie back to Zeddie’s rusting Volvo. “They seem inordinately fond of you, judging by the numbers dropping at your feet.”

  “I like them fine,” Anna replied distractedly. “It just occurred to me that I might be totally mistaken about nearly everything.”

  “I wouldn’t have any idea what that was like,” Curt said with apparent sincerity.

  “Bloody awful.”

  “I love it when you talk dirty in foreign languages.”

  In the car, Anna pressed Zeddie for details regarding the Roxburys’ marriage.

  “I thought I shot Brent,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to bump me in favor of his wife? I’ve already opened negotiations with Meryl Streep to play me in the movie.”

  Anna squirmed uncomfortably in the backseat. Curt, who’d retained her arm, gave it a squeeze. “C’mon, Zeddie,” he said. “One teensy-weensy little murder a
ccusation and you get all bent out of shape. Where’s your sense of humor?”

  To Anna’s relief, both Zeddie and Dr. McCarty laughed. The cold shoulder was still there but, Anna dared hope, a shade less glacial. Caught up in the mood of generosity, Anna admitted she could have been wrong.

  “Gee, yuh think?” Zeddie returned. A second laugh at Anna’s expense warmed the car’s interior. “Brent’s marriage has been on the rocks for a while. The divorce papers are in the works. I don’t think his heart was too badly broken over the whole deal. He just wanted his kids,” Zeddie said.

  “Would he have gotten them?”

  “Ah ha! You have replaced me. What do you think, little Mrs. Roxbury toddled over the desert in her high heels with the dentist’s deer rifle?”

  “Maybe the dentist did it for her,” Peter suggested.

  “Right. ‘Local Dentist Goes Berserk in Love Triangle.’ He’s got three kids of his own. I doubt he’d risk everything to bring the total up to five. She was the one who ended the marriage,” Zeddie admitted. “My bet is the dentist has been fixing more than her teeth. She might have lost a custody battle.”

  Not wanting to waste a perfectly good trip to town, Zeddie pulled in at the supermarket before they started back up for the park. As soon as she and Peter wandered off down aisle six, Anna asked Curt if he’d made the calls, located Sondra.

  “You never give up, do you?” he said with a hint of exasperation.

  “I may have to,” Anna said. “But not quite yet. Did you?”

  Curt sighed, took the basket from her arm, and began sniffing apples. “I called a bunch of people. Pete’s mom, Sondra’s dad. The Pioneer Press and the YMCA. Pete and I work out there. Well, Pete does. I sit in the sauna. Sondra’s an aerobics fanatic. It’s great. They wear those thong things and you’re not even considered a pervert if you watch. Just admiring glute definition.” Two apples passed muster and made it to the basket. “Nobody’s seen or heard from her.”

  THE BAD NEWS was waiting for Anna when they got back to the park. George Laymon had taken the liberty of making an appointment for her with a psychologist in Carlsbad. Whatever plans she’d made for the afternoon had to be postponed. To keep her credit good and her lies all in a row, she was duty-bound to go.

  Anna swallowed a little lunch, climbed into the Neon, and started back down the long and twisting road out of the park. Desert views, usually captivating, failed to interest her. Lost in thought, she drove like an automaton. A list formed in her mind: things to do in town. As it grew, her resentment toward Laymon for wasting half her day began to wane. She would stop at the airport and see if she could unearth any record of when Sondra had flown out and what her destination was. On one pretext or another she would worm her way into the Roxburys’ house and have a chat with the widow. Coincidences were part of life. They happened with a regularity that flew in the face of statistics and common sense. Bad things quite often did come in threes. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that Brent’s shooting was in no way connected with Frieda’s death. Should that be the case, Anna swore she would bow out, leave the investigation to the sheriff’s department or the BLM—whoever had jurisdiction over that particular part of the desert.

  And Sondra’s disappearance?

  Anna pondered that while the pseudo-frontier village of White’s City, a tourist town clinging to the shirttails of the park, flashed by the Neon’s windows. Was that yet another coincidence? The third in a string of evils? A hoax designed to bring a straying husband to heel?

  The clock set into the Neon’s dash read 1:27. Anna’s appointment with Dr. Coontz was at 1:45. She had no idea what she would say to the guy. Yes, her knee had crushed the esophagus of her friend. No, she didn’t feel guilty about it. Yes, she thought the fall had been orchestrated. No, she had no proof. No, she didn’t know who did it. No, nobody else agreed with her. Yes, she had been under a psychiatrist’s care before. Yes, she was an alcoholic. Yes, she was drinking again.

  The litany clicked through her mind with the familiar resonance of rosary beads, and Anna laughed out loud. An hour wouldn’t even scratch the surface of her psyche. Visions of weekly visits for the next thirty years would dance sugarplumlike through the psychologist’s head. Coontz would think he’d stumbled onto a veritable gold mine.

  No sense getting his hopes up.

  Deciding to be late, Anna turned off the highway into the Carlsbad municipal air terminal. The airstrip wasn’t much different from a dozen other small-town airstrips she had flown into for one reason or another. Meager landscape vegetation, planted with the best intentions then abandoned, clung to life around the front of the terminal. Small aircraft, belonging to those with the money or the passion to support a private plane, were tied down beside the taxiway.

  Anna parked in the same spot she’d used when she came to fetch Frieda’s mother and went inside. A young woman stood behind the counter, her chin propped in her hands, talking to a boy dressed in the uniform of the West: cowboy boots, Levi’s, western shirt, and tractor cap.

  As Anna blew in on a gust of cold wind, the conversation stopped. Wide intelligent eyes lit up a face already half smiling and ready to be of assistance; someone who enjoyed her work and was good at it. Given that Anna wanted rules broken, this was not an auspicious sign.

  With patience and unfailing good manners Becky—or so the name tag on her chest proclaimed—repeated the regulations about divulging the contents of passenger lists on commercial flights. Anna pushed until the woman began running out of new ways to say the same thing, then accepted that this cat would have to be skinned another way.

  Having no appreciable weight to throw around in New Mexico, she couldn’t lean on Becky. But she could lean on Jewel. Before Laymon’s secretary had managed to blank her computer screen, Anna had gotten a glimpse and an inkling as to why she was such a mumbling idiot around her boss. When she got back up the hill, she would approach this issue from another angle.

  DR. COONTZ WAS a woman. The hour went quickly, and Anna enjoyed herself. She walked a thin line trying to maintain her integrity, to show just enough neurosis to be of interest but not so much she’d have to live it down later. Another visit wouldn’t be a bad thing if it bought her more time in Carlsbad. They parted with mutual assurances of goodwill.

  Roxbury wasn’t a common name, and Carlsbad was a small town. So small, in fact, the public phones actually had phone books attached to them. Only one Roxbury was listed. Having neither pen nor pencil, Anna started to rip the page from the directory, an act prompted by seeing it done repeatedly in the movies. Before the tear was half an inch long, she had to stop. Lying, stealing, mayhem, adultery— all those were crimes she had committed or might commit if the wind was blowing from the right quarter and she was so inclined. But petty vandalism was right up there with littering. An unpardonable breach of personal etiquette and public decorum. Making up a nonsense rhyme to cement 10672 Luna Vista in her mind, Anna left the phone book only slightly worse for having known her.

  It didn’t take long to put herself and the Neon outside the cyclone fence around the widow’s house on the north-western edge of town. Low to the ground and built of brick, the Roxburys’ home was indistinguishable from the others in the same tract built in the sixties. A bricksided carport, the bricks mortared in an open lattice to the windward side, housed a dusty burgundy 1985 Honda Accord, the kind Anna would have chosen was she organizing a vehicular tail. Make, model, and color were so common as to render it invisible.

  This aggressive tedium didn’t cause her to question the accuracy of the address she’d memorized. Two tricycles with identical pink ribbons feathering down from the handlebars were parked to one side of the front door. Two kiddie swings with offensive but safety-minded plastic bucket chairs hung from a branch of a leafless tree in the front yard. Two child-restraint seats peeked through the rear window of the Honda.

  Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “I Feel Lucky” was on the Neon’s radio. Anna waited till the end o
f the song, procrastinating because she didn’t. Visiting widows was a chore she’d been given more than once. Logic being since she was a woman and a widow, she could help. No one could help, nothing. Even women who’d lost husbands they didn’t love or didn’t like—drunkards, philanderers, bums, and bores—staggered under the blow of their death. Most from that category recovered to flourish—or found another man to hate—in fairly short order. For the first few days though, widows of all stripes shared similar fear of the future and brutal severance from the past.

  Mrs. Roxbury would be no different. Because of the boyfriend she’d have a giant chip on her shoulder that was bound to be dislodged by Anna’s first question. Bracing herself for an unpleasant interview, Anna tripped the child-proof latch on the gate and walked to the front door. A benevolent cover would be best, she decided. Questions pertaining to marital problems and infidelity would usually be answered more truthfully by the gossips than by those directly involved.

  Mrs. Roxbury answered the bell almost the instant Anna rang. She was attended by two identical yapping shih tzus, a house of twins. Brent’s wife was a small woman, well proportioned and carefully made-up. Her hair was cut short and layered, an easy cut to maintain for the mother of toddlers. Her features were ordinary but pleasant, like the house and the car.

  “I’m Anna Pigeon,” she introduced herself as the woman quieted the dogs. “I was caving with Brent.”

  “I recognize you from the funeral,” Mrs. Roxbury said politely, her voice a soft Southern drawl. “Won’t you come in?” The children, lying on their identical bellies in front of a television set alive with the abrasive colors of a cartoon show, didn’t even turn to see who was calling. Anna was led across neutral tan carpeting into a tidy kitchen that smelled of coffee and roasting meat.