by Nevada Barr
“Peter got rid of her,” Zeddie said, pride of ownership in her voice. “ ’Bout damn time.”
She was too open, cheery. Anna was getting confused and a little nervous. What she had here was either a misunderstanding or an undiagnosed psychopath. She sought clarification with a gentle probe. “I hate to pry—”
“Hah!”
“Okay. I like to pry. How about this: Why in God’s name did Peter think it was such a terrific idea to go on an expedition with his wife and his girlfriend and his ex-girlfriend?”
“The ex is no big deal,” Zeddie said. “That was years ago. Frieda and Peter were friends. Shoot, Frieda and I were friends. With the notable exception of the Boil, I’ve always liked Pete’s taste in women.”
A clutter of tourists, jangling cameras and Anna’s nerves, clattered down the trail. Duty calling, Zeddie left the bench and answered questions for a few minutes. Anna’s favorite came from a scrawny youth in trousers so large the crotch hobbled him at the knees. “What does the cave weigh?”
The group was swallowed by the shadows, and Zeddie returned to the bench. “What do you want to bet that boy’ll piss in the Urinal?”
Bowing to Zeddie’s greater experience in things scatological, Anna declined the wager.
“Where were we?” Zeddie said, then, “Oh, right, you were interrogating me about the most intimate personal aspects of my life that are none of your business.”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” Anna conceded. “You, Peter, and the Mrs. along on the same trip. That’s where we left off.”
“It does sound kinky when you put it like that. I was going through a bad time. Peter wanted to be with me. The sentiment was mutual. This survey came up. I wangled two places on it through Frieda. At the last minute Sondra dug in her heels. It was bring her or call the whole thing off. He brought her. Peter and I have known each other a long time, been through a lot together. We don’t have to sleep in the same bed—though I’ve got to admit it’s nice. Just being together, having a chance to talk, was enough.”
“I take it Sondra didn’t know about you two?”
“We were broken up when they got married.”
“Why did he marry her, blackmail?”
“Rebound. I broke up with him. He’s older than I am, established. I’m not ready to become Mrs. Doctor anybody. There are things I want to do. To make it stick, I made it brutal. Just fooling myself. I’m as addicted to Peter as he is to me. But I’m damned if I’ll marry him. He was beginning to feel like an aging Warren Beatty with no Annette Bening in sight. Sondra showed up and waltzed him down the aisle. Therapy waiting to happen.”
“Does he want a divorce?”
“Yeah. It embarrasses the hell out of him. They haven’t been married all that long. He did make a fool of himself. We all do now and again. But he wants out. She was just too much of a bitch.”
Anna let the information soak in. Zeddie genuinely seemed not to care that Peter was wed, not to want to marry him herself. It fit with the other things Anna had observed: the free spiritedness, the fierce independence, the hint of tie-dye and incense. According to her—and the story had the mundane ring of truth—Sondra had not blackmailed Peter into matrimony. She’d caught him on the bounce and parlayed it into a white veil and a wedding band. Blackmail must have come later, been used not to acquire the husband but to control him.
Zeddie was kidding herself if she believed Sondra was not aware of her relationship with the doctor. In the beginning Sondra may not have known, but after the forced intimacy of several days underground she would have figured it out. Secret lovers seldom fool anyone but themselves. The discipline of an Olivier is required to lie with body language over a protracted period. There’s too much to control: looks, gestures, position, voice. Women are especially adept at reading the signs. When a husband and a younger woman are involved, the senses become preternaturally acute. Sondra knew. A few questions to Frieda or Curt would have told her Zeddie, like herself and Frieda, had once been a patient of Dr. McCarty’s. Two would be added to two, and Sondra would have enough leverage to keep Peter married to her or walk away with a hefty divorce settlement.
Anna had heard her threaten Peter with those choices. During that part of the rescue the team had been strung out along the route, each with a job to perform in the problematic evacuation. Peter would not have had a chance to talk with Zeddie, not before Katie’s Pigtail. Zeddie wouldn’t have known Sondra was going to play hardball.
“. . . was too much of a bitch . . . was a boil . . .” Zeddie had used the past tense when speaking of the doctor’s wife.
“Was a boil. You said ‘was.’ ”
“Too crude for you?” Zeddie asked offhandedly. “Too bad. It’s about the nicest thing I can think of to say about her.”
“Was. Not is. Why the past tense?”
“Okay. Is.”
Not a flicker of self-consciousness. Anna got no inkling that Zeddie had been caught in a trap, given herself away.
“As long as she’s not a boil on my personal butt, I couldn’t care less. What’re you, her press agent?”
“I only asked because Sondra never came out of Lechuguilla.”
Zeddie snorted her truncated laugh. “Yes she did.”
“Nope. Never came out, never rode down to town, never flew out of the Carlsbad Airport.”
“You’re kidding.” Zeddie sounded hopeful.
“Not kidding.”
“Jesus.” Zeddie took off her flat hat so she could lean back against the stone. Stretching her heavy legs, she drummed her heels softly against the asphalt; an obstruction just waiting for a tourist to trip over it. Anna sat without speaking, watching gray ghostly visitors glide along pathways below.
“Sondra never came out?”
“Never did.”
“Jesus,” Zeddie repeated. “Is this the part where you accuse me of murder?”
“No,” Anna said. “Not quite yet.” She was thinking of that something else that had been troubling her. “You said Peter came down because you were going through a bad time.”
Zeddie didn’t reply, and for the first time since they’d sat down together Anna sensed wariness. “What was that about?” she pressed.
“Just some personal demons. I intend to keep them that way.”
Warning was clear in her voice. Anna chose to ignore it. “You had an older sister?”
“Darla,” Zeddie said dully.
“She was killed in a climbing accident, wasn’t she?”
Zeddie didn’t say anything. Had they not been so close, Anna wouldn’t have seen her nod. Her chin dipped toward her chest in acquiescence or defeat.
“Ten years or thereabouts?” Anna asked.
“Ten years this month.”
The tenth anniversary of her sister’s death; Anna could understand how that would cause a bad patch, emotionally speaking. “Was Frieda there when it happened?”
Again the nod. Before Anna could go on, Zeddie looked up like a woman coming out of anesthesia. Anna didn’t need light to see the anger burning in her face. “What are you saying?” Zeddie demanded. The hard edge to her voice should have tipped Anna off, but it didn’t.
“That maybe what happened to your sister happened to Frieda.”
Anna never saw the blow coming. Suddenly she was facedown on the path with a buzzing in her right ear and a feeling the world had fallen in on her. Imposing as a limestone formation, Zeddie towered above her. In the velvet semidark Anna could not see her face. She could see strong hands bunched into fists next to muscular thighs and the broad expanse of shoulder looming between her and the vastness of the cavern’s ceiling. The shadowed bulk moved back. Anna curled into a tight ball, readying for a kick in the ribs.
“Oh my gosh! What happened?” A voice piped through the gloom. Half a dozen tourists, smelling of catsup and cologne, pattered down. The herd closed around Anna.
Zeddie reached down. Anna clasped her wrist and was hauled to her feet. “I tripped,” she s
aid to the concerned crowd.
“Watch your footing,” Zeddie said to the visitors. “These paths can be treacherous. Are you all right?” she asked Anna because the audience expected it of her in her role as the ranger.
“Right as rain,” Anna said. The clout behind her ear had been delivered by the meaty part of Zeddie’s forearm. No harm was done, but she was stunned and disconcerted.
When the group passed out of earshot, Zeddie turned. Not willing to take another hit, Anna stepped back. Evidently Zeddie thought better of fisticuffs, but her rage was undiminished.
“Get out,” she said. “Out of my cave, out of my house, out of my park. Stay the fuck away from me.”
There was no give in her face, no chinks in her armor. Anna didn’t precisely turn tail and run, but a hasty departure was the only option she’d left herself. Having backed out of range, lest Zeddie change her mind about using physical violence, she walked through the Urinal, cut across a corner of the Big Room, and caught an elevator back up the seven hundred fifty feet to the real world.
No question about it, Anna had hit a nerve. For that matter, so had Zeddie. A pervasive ache was spreading from behind Anna’s ear up to her temple and down her neck into her shoulder.
AS PREDICTED, PETER and Curt were crumpled in front of the television, Calcite stretched along the back of the sofa, one paw kneading the bristle of hair on Curt’s cheek. Greetings were grunted. Surreptitiously, Anna gathered up her things. It took all of three minutes. Standing at the door, she said, “I’ve got to say good-bye.”
Like drunks emerging from stupor, the men tore their eyes from the TV and refocused on Anna. “Going?” Curt said stupidly.
“It’s time. I can catch a flight out to somewhere—Las Vegas or Phoenix or Dallas—and be in Durango late tonight or tomorrow.”
“This is sudden,” Curt said. A roar erupted from the crowd on the television, and his eyes strayed back to the set.
“Not really. Walk me to the car, Curt,” Anna said firmly.
It wasn’t until the door closed between them and the game that the spell was broken, and Anna noted signs of intelligence returning to Curt’s brown eyes.
BOOKED INTO A charming but cold cabin in White’s City, Anna telephoned Dottie Dierkz. She remembered when Darla had been killed. Yes, Frieda had been there. The death of Darla Dillard was only half the tragedy. Anna thanked her and replaced the receiver in its cradle.
Zeddie and Peter at breakfast, Peter sneaking sips of her milkshake: the meaningless particles that had been floating in Anna’s mind like dust motes settled into a pattern.
“Holy smoke,” she said. She had been way the hell off base.
19
I HOPE YOU realize you’re putting me in an awkward position.”
By the light of the flashlight Anna held, Curt was tying an anchor line around the stunted oak at Lechuguilla’s mouth. “I realize,” she said. “Arrest, fines. You’re a pal.”
“Not that. Going to jail would lend me a certain cachet with my students. And you are going to pay any and all fines incurred, including the speeding tickets we get while running from the law à la Thelma and Louise. No, this goes deeper than that. It’s dangerously close to midnight. We are about to descend into utter isolation. Isolation, I might add, from which your screams will not be heard. I am the only one whom you trust completely. Are you with me so far?”
“Hurry up.” December was breathing ice down Anna’s collar. Mixed with a bad case of nerves, it was all she could do to keep teeth from chattering and knees from knocking.
“I’m duty-bound to try to kill you,” Curt said. He stopped twisting the nut on the locking carabiner and looked up. His eyes were masked in shadow, but the glow from the flashlight illuminated small white teeth bared in a wolfish smile. A chill deeper than that of the north wind worked its way toward Anna’s bone marrow.
“What?” she said stupidly.
“That’s the way it is,” Curt said. He went back to his anchor. “Hold the light still.”
Anna’s hand was shaking. She grabbed her wrist to steady it.
“In the next to the last chapter the only guy the hero—or heroine, in this case—trusts undergoes a sudden and total personality transplant. Sort of the literary equivalent of growing fangs and hair on his palms. And it turns out he was the killer all along. Voilà!” This was in mild celebration of the completed anchor. “You first or me?”
Anna was unable to speak. Like a child by the campfire, she had been scared by the ghost story. When she was twelve, her parents had left her home alone. A city council meeting, the results of which could affect their business, required their joint attendance. Anna had the flu but, wanting to be grown-up, she hadn’t told them. To pass the evening, she’d curled up in her dad’s big chair by the fire and read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Somewhere around ten P.M., fever and Stoker’s genius combined to raise the undead. Vampires whined on the wind under the eaves, skritched at the windows with bony twig fingers, hid in shadows behind the piano and at the end of the hall. To put even a foot from her father’s chair was to court disaster. There was but one way to exorcize her febrile demons. Knowing she committed the unthinkable, Anna had thrown the hardbound book into the fire and watched until even the cardboard curled in, completing the black rose-petal ruin of pages.
That same feverish terror gripped her on the limestone ledge above the gateway to Lechuguilla. This time there was no book, no symbolic crucifix to frighten away the bogeyman.
“Anna! You or me?” Curt’s voice cut through the sludge of remembered horrors.
“That wasn’t funny,” Anna said.
Curt registered mild confusion, then laughed. “Sorry.” He didn’t sound it. “My sisters used to take me out for walks at night when we were little, then stop and say, ‘Did you hear that? What was that!’ then run shrieking away, me shrieking right behind them. I fell for it every time. Till now I didn’t know I’d inherited the knack.”
“Not funny. I’ll go first.” Anna handed him the light. They traded places, and she straddled the rope where it snaked over boulders hinting at white in the truculent light from the stars. Having clipped her safety to the line, she began threading rope through the ladderlike rack for the descent.
“You’re sure this is a good idea?” This was not the first time Curt had asked that question since Anna had stolen the key to Lechuguilla from the pegboard behind Oscar Iverson’s desk.
“Nope.” She gave the usual answer. “But Holden knows all the details. He’ll know where to come looking.”
“Tell me you didn’t leave him a letter marked ‘To Be Opened in the Event of My Death.’ ”
“Something like that. On-rope.” The circle of gold from her headlamp dancing giddily across her boots, Anna walked backward down the face of a boulder the size of a small Airstream and providing only slightly more traction than polished aluminum. Among Holden, Rhonda, endless phone calls, and a short stint as a burglar, the day had been tiring. Closeted in her cold cabin in White’s City she had tried for a few hours’ sleep. Though her body ached for rest, her mind refused to cooperate.
Much as she liked Curt and—morbid fantasies aside—trusted the man, she wished Holden Tillman were with them. The broken foot rendered it out of the question. Superstitiously she couldn’t but believe the cave wouldn’t hurt Holden. Her it might devour. Like a dog or a horse, it would smell her fear and turn on her.
“Cut that out,” she said aloud.
“I didn’t say a word,” Curt complained.
Anna didn’t have sufficient concentration to explain that it wasn’t he but her own subconscious she ordered to silence.
The night below sucked her inexorably from the night above, darkness swallowing darkness till even the hope of day was lost. Fleetingly, she wished she were a religious woman. Perhaps it would be a comfort to have a blessed congregation lobbying a beneficent deity on her behalf.
Descending into a forbidden pit at midnight was ridiculously melodramati
c. The sheer theatricality of it helped keep reality at bay. For half the afternoon Anna and Holden had gone around and around trying to find another way. She’d laid out her thoughts, and they’d spent an hour going over reports from the Blacktail well, Brent’s recommendations for concrete and pipe, and the desert road, pulverized to a choking dust. Holden agreed that the key to Frieda’s death would most likely be found in Lechuguilla. Between them they pieced together a picture of what must have occurred, though not one so clear they could identify all the players. Adding the Blacktail to the mix implicated half the brass in Carlsbad Caverns National Park. There was no one they could safely tell until they had proof.
And there was still the question of Sondra McCarty. How she fit in was unclear. The woman had literally vanished off the face of the earth, never to be seen again. If she, like Brent, had been involved and then disposed of, the field was somewhat narrowed. If not, then the number of people who would want Anna kept out of the cave and permanently silenced increased by at least one.
As Anna dropped down the last forty feet, the now-familiar musk of the underground filled her nostrils. A dank cellar smell, it put her on alert like a jittery cat. For Holden, Zeddie—true cavers—it was perfume, the scent of adventure, of untapped potential in the earth and within their own souls. To Anna it smelled of trouble, the olfactory hallucination that warned of a coming seizure. Once inside the cave it would be gone. Lechuguilla didn’t have bat colonies to provide guano, no ready exchange with the surface to promote mold or insect life.
The floor of Old Misery Pit was below. Spinning like a spider on its web, Anna suffered a moment of vertigo. Her helmet light moved across one wall, was lost in a hole that fell sharply to one side, then flickered to life again on the ridge between the drop-off and the subtler exit that led into Lechuguilla. Giving in to momentary dizziness, she landed not lightly on her feet but firmly and solidly on her butt. She’d been right to descend first. This was not an entrance she would care to have witnessed by a pretty young man. Feeling all thumbs, she freed herself from the rope. In her limited but intense caving experience, she’d noticed a phenomenon she could always count on. Regardless of how often she changed batteries or switched lamps, the light from her helmet always appeared dirty brown, possessing only half the wattage of that of the other cavers.