Hard Truth Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Hard Truth

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2005 by Nevada Barr

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 1-101-13387-2

  A BERKLEY BOOK®

  Berkley Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: Feburary, 2006

  TITLES BY NEVADA BARR

  FICTION

  Hard Truth

  High Country

  Flashback

  Hunting Season

  Blood Lure

  Deep South

  Liberty Falling

  Blind Descent

  Endangered Species

  Firestorm

  Ill Wind

  A Superior Death

  Track of the Cat

  Bittersweet

  NONFICTION

  Seeking Enlightenment . . . Hat by Hat

  For Linda. A true Southern gentlewoman,

  she wouldn’t dream of coming to dinner

  without a hostess gift.

  Nor would she flinch from the necessary murder.

  Contents

  acknowledgments

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  thirty-four

  thirty-five

  thirty-six

  acknowledgments

  This book was not only made possible but turned into an absolute joy by the rangers at Rocky Mountain National Park, most especially Superintendent Vaughn Baker, District Ranger Patty Shafer, Exceptional Child Sierra Shafer, Back-country Rangers Lisa Hendy and Ryan Schuster, Frontcountry Ranger Shannon Olmstead, Chief of Interpretation Larry Frederick, Research Administrator Terry Terrell and Assistant Superintendent Tony Schetzle.

  Thanks must also go to Dr. Alexis Hallock, who helped me through the fascinating vagaries of the spinal cord.

  one

  Jiminy Christmas!” Heath resisted the call of stronger language out of respect for her aunt’s southern sensibilities. “Cross them or fold them or something. Don’t just leave them laying there like a couple of dead carp.” Heath looked away from her legs. Though they were tidily covered in denim trousers and, to all intents and purposes, looked like the legs of any seated, trim, forty-one-year-old woman, she couldn’t bear the sight of them.

  “How about I pretzel them?” Gwen said, turning from the campground’s specially designed picnic table where she was setting out a plate on the specially designed end so Heath’s specially designed wheelchair would roll under oh-so-specially. “Why don’t you get Wiley to do it? He’s a highly trained helper.”

  Heath looked to where the dog lay under the table watching a momma mallard and her three late-season ducklings with an evil glint in his eyes. He was originally named Prince Theo III but she and her aunt called him Wiley because of an uncanny resemblance he bore to the cartoon coyote after a run-in with roadrunners and sticks of TNT.

  “Wiley’s off duty.”

  “Wiley’s always off duty.”

  Heath leaned over, her belly pressed against the wheelchair’s safety belt: an indignity the doctors promised she could forgo when she got used to her “altered circumstances” and quit pitching face forward every time she leaned too far. With hands as angry and curved as talons, she grabbed her right ankle and jerked upward. She could feel the leg in her hands but not her hands on her leg. It reminded her of a creepy childhood trick. Her best friend Sylvia would hold her palm to hers, then, feeling the backs of the fingers, one her own, one Heath’s, she’d intone: “This is what dead people feel like,” and the two of them would squeal in horrific delight.

  “This is what dead people feel like,” Heath said.

  Gwen ignored her.

  Wiley watched the baby ducks picking at crumbs with a fluff of ducky butts and murmurs of ducky glee.

  Heath set her ankle on the opposite knee, like stacking firewood, and wondered if she’d cut off her circulation or done any other damage to her insensate lower half. At least the plastic tubes were gone. The modern-day Frankensteins who had reworked her lower half had cheerfully told her that regaining control of her bowels and bladder was a “positive sign.” She tried to be grateful for this small shred of autonomy—and dignity—left to her.

  For a couple months after the fall, she’d played Christopher Reeve, pretending to be as optimistic, as cheerful, but she was a lousy actor and when the doctors told her, with a crushed third lumbar vertebra, she had the chance of the proverbial snowball in hell of climbing again, she’d rung down the curtain. The first of many curtains.

  Little light now came into her spiritual house.

  “Shit,” she said, for no other reason than it seemed to express the gestalt of the moment.

  Gwen turned, leaned on the prosthetically elongated end of the picnic table. Gwendolyn Littleton was Heath’s aunt. She was seventy-one, thin and in superb condition. Her hair was eternally and determinedly red. She swore she would go to the grave clutching a bottle of Lady Clairol in one hand and a bottle of hormone replacement pills in the other. She wore her naturally frizzy hair up in a wild bird’s nest she referred to as a neo–Gibson Girl. Her face wasn’t youthful or even pretty, but Heath loved it. Every wrinkle turned up at the end, forced against gravity and life’s myriad evils by Gwen’s tendency to laugh at that which did not kill. She wasn’t laughing now. The hurt Heath had caused showed around Gwen’s mouth and eyes. A flinching as if from a physical blow.

  “Maybe a camping trip was a rotten idea.”

  “Not camping, handicamping,” Heath retorted, and was sorry when the pinch of pain on her aunt’s face deepened.

  “Got to call it something, sugar,” Gwen said gently, her southern drawl making “sugar” the sweetest of words.

  Heath said nothing. Shame clogged her throat. Shame and self-pity and shame at the self-pity. “Hey, Wiley,” she called the dog. He heaved himself to his paws with a gusty sigh and ambled over in his loose-jointed way. It had been said that every cloud had a silver lining. For Heath this bedraggled, smart, ugly dog was it, the one thin flicker in the g
reat dark firmament, like low summer lightning beneath a midwestern tornado sky.

  “Hey dog,” she said, and scratched his ratty ears.

  On December twenty-third, Heath had fallen from an ice chute up by the Keyhole on Longs Peak. Rotten ice had dropped her sixty-eight feet to a helicopter ride and her new life as a cripple. Sixty-eight feet. Lucky to be alive, everyone said. The hospital had been her world through March. Physical therapy, Prozac. More physical therapy, Effexor. Pool therapy, Xanax; lots of Xanax. Watching people in gaily colored scrubs, prattling in gaily banal conversation, manipulating chunks of flesh and bone she could no longer feel gave Heath the creeps.

  On the ides of March she’d given up, quit. The antidepressants she flushed down the john. She wasn’t depressed because her brain didn’t work. She was depressed because her life no longer worked. The wheelchair came in April. Wiley in June. The dog and Gwen kept Heath from folding like a cheap kite in a windstorm.

  “Lucky to be alive,” Heath said, to see if it sounded true yet.

  It didn’t.

  “Lucky for me,” Gwen replied, and again Heath felt guilty.

  The late summer day had eased seamlessly into night. Stars appeared and disappeared as the last of the monsoons—the northern edge of them—visited Rocky, and thunder cells racketed around the mountains. Lightning flickered over Longs Peak and Flattop. Thunder rolled down the canyons from the high places, bringing the ineffable perfume of rain on pines, an elixir that made even Heath feel alive. The feeling was followed immediately by the memory of A Life.

  “What is it, darlin’?” Gwen asked as she tidied away the ends of their meal, whisking the crumbs from the hot dog buns onto the ground for the ducklings.

  “You’re feeding the wildlife,” Heath accused to avoid the question.

  “The crumbs just fell off.” Gwen sat on the picnic table, feet on the bench. “You look so down. Mountain air is supposed to lift the spirits, make the heart sing.”

  “Yeah,” Heath agreed. Then the wine said: It might work if I wasn’t a fucking cripple. She smiled because Gwen wanted her to, but she could feel the riptide of alcohol and despair dragging her down to the cold dark bottom of the sea where one day she could drown in booze or bitterness. She tried to think of heroes, of Lance Armstrong, of the man who cut his arm off with a pocketknife rather than die in the wilderness, of those people who’d overcome and triumphed. But they could walk. An arm was nothing. A few toes. A foot. Even one leg. From where she sat, those looked like a cakewalk. They, the lucky, the one-armed, the one-legged, the three-toed, were not helpless. It was the helplessness as much as the loss of her old life—her old self—that scared Heath witless. Scared her so bad she’d told no one. Not even Gwen. Bears could eat her, fires burn her, criminals mug her, little boys torment her, and there was nothing she could do about it but rail pathetically.

  Or die.

  “Stop it,” she said.

  “What?” Gwen roused from contemplation of an ember in the barbeque grate, a poor understudy for a campfire but all that was allowed in the park during fire season.

  “Wiley was licking my hand,” Heath lied.

  Gwen looked at the relatively innocent dog lying some yards from the wheelchair but said nothing. “I’m for bed—not to sleep, to read,” she assured her niece, and Heath wondered if the stab of fear she’d felt at being left alone had shown on her face.

  “I’m going for a walk—a roll,” Heath announced, to prove fear wasn’t what Gwen had seen.

  The older woman stopped, one foot in the tent, one out, the rain fly in her hand.

  Heath waited to be told not to go or for Gwen to pretend she wanted to come along. After too long a silence, Gwen said, “Don’t run over anybody,” and ducked out of sight into the orange toadstool she was calling home for three nights. Heath would sleep in the back of the RV. It had been fitted out for her special needs.

  “Fucking special Olympian,” she muttered to herself and unlocked the brakes on her chair so Gwen would hear her rolling away and know she wasn’t bluffing about the walk.

  Though she could afford a mechanized chair, she’d opted for the hand-powered variety. Rolling her own weight around was a small thing, but it mattered. Not much, but she had fallen from the realm of choosers into the realm of beggars, and she clung to it.

  The paths—Heath was enough of a snob she couldn’t bring herself to call them trails—throughout the Sprague Lake Handicamp were wide and graveled. Like the picnic tables and toilets, they were designed to accommodate people with disabilities. The one she chose headed toward the lake, an exquisite shallow jewel of water, dammed in the early part of the twentieth century to form a fishing lake for a lodge, long since dismantled. Having rolled a few yards, Heath stopped. The crunching of wheels on crushed rock should have convinced Gwen she’d really gone. And Gwen would be listening, worrying, waiting. Knowledge of this protective love grated on Heath’s nerves. To be helpless was either to be alone or without privacy. The former was terrifying, the latter intolerable. With a determined push, she sent herself, not on the level boardwalk spanning the lobe of the lake, but up the “steep” path that wound into a forest of lodgepole and ponderosa.

  A grade she once wouldn’t have deigned to call a bunny slope now taxed her back and shoulder muscles. The vertebra she’d smashed was low enough she still had some motor control in her hips and butt. The doctors said that made her stronger. Stronger than what? She sweated and puffed. Effort filled the mind. Fear was not gone, only pushed back, just out of sight. It followed her, chasing her into the thicker darkness beneath the evergreens.

  Heath drove blind but she didn’t slow down. Knuckles brushed fur. Wiley had come unbidden. The dog stayed close but he was not a Seeing Eye dog. Her right wheel crashed into a branch or rock; the chair twisted, throwing Heath to one side. A flash of old wisdom spun through her mind: Steer into the skid. But this was not ice, it was gravity, and she went down. Three seconds in darkness and not-so-free fall took a long time and ended abruptly. Her elbow struck something soft. She had the decency to hope it wasn’t Wiley.

  Above ear level she could hear the spinning of the wheel. Only a few months had passed since she’d taken this seat that was to be hers for life, yet already she knew the wheelchair like liars claimed to know the backs of their hands. Each click and slip and groan spoke to her. By the clean whir of the hub, she knew the wheel had not been damaged.

  For half a minute, she gave in to the rattle and hum of wheel and brain waves sloshing against her reoriented skull. When her thoughts cleared, she took stock. Nothing hurt. But then half of her could be gashed and bleeding and, in the dark, she’d never know it.

  “The hell with you, then,” she muttered to her legs and focused on that which was still sensate.

  The arm of the chair beneath her dug into her side. She could feel where the belt pulled across her abdomen. Because of the crazy-quilt wiring of nerves and sensations she retained, the medical wizards assured her she had the capacity to enjoy a “fairly normal” sex life—whatever that was. As a consolation prize, sex didn’t cut it. Asked to choose between sex and a 5–13 pitch, Heath would have climbed.

  For a while she lay still. The wheel spun. Mosquitoes whined in her ear. Strong in her nostrils, the smell of dirt and loam comforted her. Wiley licked her hands and face. Lying alone in the dark, a wreck of bone and metal, suited her.

  Till she heard the snuffling. Then the fear she’d been running from caught up to her.

  Even fear had changed. When she was a real person, a whole person, herself, fear tingled and burned through her veins like lightning, electrifying the brain and muscle till she felt as if she could think her way through solid stone, outrun jaguars. Now it was a sick cold thing that spread like poison, shutting her down, reeking out through her pores in a chill sweat.

  A whuff. A piggy grunt.

  Bear. There were no grizzly bears in Rocky but, for the most part, grizzlies weren’t interested in eating people. They wa
nted to scare them away. Black bears, usually shy, when they came, came to dine. A year before, a black bear had bitten into the skulls of two young men up at Fern Lake. They’d been sleeping in their tents. Surely, even sleeping, two young men were more formidable than one middle-aged paraplegic strapped to an overturned chair.

  Sprague Lake Handicamp would be just the place for a hungry bear: human snacks arranged on metal and plastic trays. The Park Service should have named the place Cantina de los osos. Heath snorted at the thought and the snuffling came again. Louder, closer this time.

  Wiley began to growl, low in his throat, the kind of growl that raised his hackles and hers. Primal in its intensity, fear ran through Heath like black ice. Even the quiescent flesh of her lower body seemed to thrum with it. Every cell demanded flight, and for one brief second she believed she would rise up from the dirt and run from the woods.

  The adrenaline rush jerked her shoulders but her legs remained deadweight. Wiley left her side, no longer growling but rumbling deep in his chest. The bear would kill him, snap his scrawny neck with one swipe. The loss of the mangy-looking dog was more than Heath could stand. A modicum of courage returned. She could move.

  Fumbling at her waist, she undid the safety belt with more luck than dexterity. The weight of her legs pulled her over onto the dirt. She could feel it under both hands, beneath her chin.

  “Wiley,” she said. “Come here, boy. Now. Come. Now!” Though she’d meant to shout, pushed with lungs and diaphragm, her voice was a tiny thread of air, like screams in a nightmare.

  The chair had saddlebags filled with the necessary things of life: magazines, dog biscuits, cigarettes and, because she was roughing it in the special wilderness, a flashlight.

  Maybe light would frighten away the bear. Maybe it would only let her see who was coming to dinner. However humble, a goal gave her strength. She wriggled and pawed at the leather flap. The ends of her fingers felt numb. For one horrible moment she thought her crash had broken another vertebra, one higher in her back, and the swelling was robbing her of sensation in the half-body that remained to her.