Hard Truth Page 12

  Alexis never moved. Her face remained a death mask. Anna reached toward her then hesitated, overtaken by the unsettling fancy that if she touched her the girl would shatter. Or her flesh would be as cold as the morgue.

  fourteen

  Lying on her back on a slab of sun-warmed granite, Anna watched the afternoon thunderheads build to the southeast. Customarily her thoughts would drift to fog and reknit black and powerful as the storms, but today there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening. Civilization, so-called, had screwed around with her head so much an eight-mile hike and a few hours of Mother Nature’s glamour weren’t going to straighten it. Anna quit trying and let herself think about what she was going to think about even if every Zen master in the world gave her his secret mantra.

  The girls. The room where they were sent to pray. The pitter-patter of little demon hooves with little children’s voices around Heath’s trailer. Demons poking at Heath with sticks. Demonic boys poking at a kitten with sticks. Beth saving the cat. The cat’s failure to save Beth. Beth running for the house. Alexis turned to a pillar of salt as sure as if she looked back at Sodom and Gomorrah.

  Beth. Alexis. Alexis and Beth. They’d left the camp, if the missing Proffit were to be believed, alone and under their own power. They’d reappeared near Heath’s camp alone and under their own power. They both claimed complete amnesia. Both lied—maybe—about Candace. Both their voices were recognized by Heath as mocking and threatening.

  As counterintuitive as it was for Anna, who had seen the cuts and bruises and battered feet, the tears and the fear and the blood, she made herself consider that these girls were in a dark drama of their own making.

  Amnesia, total amnesia, amnesia not following severe trauma to the head and lasting for days, was exceedingly rare. For two people, both with skulls intact, to come down with it simultaneously was beyond the realm of the believable. Sheppard and his flock, as well as the psychotherapist who worked for the hospital, muttered about shock, denial, blocking, regression, repression, but Anna didn’t buy it. She’d called the only mental health professional she knew to be sane and not in deep denial about the limitations in her field’s provable knowledge, her sister, Molly, an overpriced, extremely bright and ethical psychiatrist who practiced on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In over thirty years of practice, Molly had never seen a single case of long-term amnesia without severe head trauma. She mentioned that in the late eighteenth century it had been all the rage for young men of fashion to go into fugue states, vanish from London to turn up a week later in Paris or Bath having no recollection of the days in between. It was undoubtedly a handy epidemic but short-lived. Nobody much suffered from fugue states anymore.

  Molly had confirmed what Anna had suspected: the girls were lying. They remembered and, for their own reasons, had decided not to tell anyone. Lying was as valid a response to handling trauma as amnesia or hysterics but it wasn’t nearly as socially acceptable. People believed if one was doing something consciously then one could stop doing it on command. Not always true. What Anna needed to know was why they were lying.

  Guilt and fear of consequences were common and powerful motivators. Beth and Alexis were clearly feeling desperately guilty about something. Leaving Candace? Guilty they lied about her staying with Proffit? Guilty about getting Proffit in trouble so they lied about lying?

  Proffit had run, that was three days ago, and no one had heard from him since. He’d said he’d gone to find Candace. Unless the girls had lied about that, too. Law enforcement in Colorado was keeping an eye out for him as a courtesy but, so far as anyone could prove, he’d broken no laws.

  Had the three girls and Proffit planned the disappearance between them and something went terribly awry? Or was the guilt Beth and Alexis suffered not because they’d left Candace behind but because they had killed her themselves in a girlish rendition of Lord of the Flies? That would certainly account for the persistent bout of amnesia.

  And why had Beth been willing to take on every boy in town to rescue a kitten, then fled in horror when it was suggested she keep it herself?

  The only silver lining so far was that Anna had gotten a heck of a nice cat out of the deal. She’d named him Hector, then changed it to Hecuba when the vet informed her she’d sexed it incorrectly. When Piedmont came to Estes Park she would have some explaining to do. It was bad enough that she’d brought home Taco. But Taco, after all, was only a dog. Another cat could be viewed as serious competition.

  Anna looked at her watch. Ray was late. Much as she enjoyed lounging about in glorious solitude, the thunderheads were getting ever more serious. This time of year outings in the Rockies were timed around the inevitable lightning. Today Raymond was to take Anna up to Gabletop Mountain, one of the less used climbing areas. The eastern face of it rose in a steep fractured cliff-face above Tourmaline, a jewel of a lake. The hike in was longer and rougher than that to Longs Peak and the climbing routes less varied and spectacular, so fewer people scaled it.

  Gabletop was at the head of steep-sided Tourmaline Gorge, which terminated at Odessa Lake. On her earlier trip to Fern, Anna had hiked down the gorge. Today she’d crossed at midpoint and hiked up along an unimproved trail to a rendezvous point where a fallen slab of granite jutted out, providing a glorious view of Gabletop in one direction and Odessa in the other. The day before, while they’d hiked to Frozen Lake, Rita had told her about the place. It was a favorite lunching spot—uncreatively dubbed “Picnic Rock”—of the backcountry rangers.

  Though grateful to have a job where one’s first duties were to hike through beautiful country with well-informed park rangers, Anna had suggested for today’s outing Ray meet her here. It made a shorter hike for him and she got to do at least the first half of this professional adventure alone.

  In the interest of looking more manager-like when Ray arrived, Anna pulled herself to a sitting position and dangled her feet over the edge of the slab. The flat chunk of granite was cantilevered over the canyon’s rim a dozen feet. Below was a sheer drop of twenty feet or so to a scree and scrub slope. When heights were precipitous but not dangerous Anna loved them, loved the bird’s-eye view, the rush of the nearness of empty space and the knowledge that a moment’s insanity could hurl one into the winds. Perhaps it was the choice not taken that made these places so rich in life force.

  As the crunching of boots on the rocky trail let her know her date had arrived, an eagle appeared in the valley below her boot soles, closer than she’d ever seen one except in the heartbreaking confines of zoo aviaries.

  “My god,” she whispered. It was a golden eagle, its white tail band spread and glittering in the hard noon light. The creature’s wingspan was an easy six feet. Anna felt like Thumbelina; she could leave the earth and ride on its back to warm and wonderful lands.

  “Ray,” she whispered, not daring to look away. “See my golden eagle?”

  Softly for a heavily booted man, he crept up beside her, then: “Oh my . . .” on a breath of air. He, too, was captivated by the singular beauty and the blessing of being witness to it. Though Anna expected it from fellow rangers, all the same it pleased her. More people were joining the NPS because it was a good government job rather than because they loved the parks, an unexpected downside to recent pay increases.

  The eagle caught a thermal and corkscrewed out of the canyon in effortless circles. Rapt, Anna’s eyes followed it till the man standing over her intruded into her view.

  It wasn’t Raymond Bleeker.

  “Robert Proffit,” she said, pretending the sight of him hadn’t jolted her down to the marrow of her bones. He was standing too close. The precipitous height she’d been so enjoying became suddenly precarious.

  “Step back, if you would,” she said pleasantly. “It makes me nervous, you standing so close to the edge. A good gust of wind and you’d be another search-and-rescue report I’d have to write up.”

  Proffit backed up obediently. Not as far as Anna would have liked. Not enou
gh that she felt comfortable standing up. Once again she was hiking in civilian clothes, the better to observe her rangers interacting with the public. Once again she wasn’t carrying her service weapon. She’d planned on hiking with Bleeker. Two semiautomatics seemed like overkill for an afternoon’s jaunt in the woods. Now she wasn’t all that sure.

  The sun was directly behind Proffit’s head. Anna couldn’t see his face against the glare.

  “We’ve been looking for you,” she said conversationally.

  “I’ve been around.” He turned from her, looking toward Gabletop Mountain. Light caught the sharp line of jaw and cheekbone. There was no meat on him and it looked as if there once had been. His was the worn thinness of obsession or stress, not the lean, wiry sort of skinny Anna often saw on people in the backcountry.

  His eyes narrowed against the light. He stared up-canyon with an intensity that let Anna know he wanted to run away from her.

  Given she’d stacked the deck against herself in every way possible—perched over a sheer drop, blinded by the sun, seated and unarmed—she was comforted by the idea that he was afraid of her. Scared people could be extremely dangerous but usually not unless one strayed between them and their means of escape. “Got a minute to talk?” she asked before he could act on the impulse to run.

  With an obvious effort, he tore his eyes away from the mountain. “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Where are you headed? Gabletop?”

  “Yeah. No, nowhere really.”

  The other times she’d had an opportunity to observe Robert Proffit, he had been anguished, ardent, passionate, theatrical, charming and confident in his righteousness. This Robert Proffit was none of those things. He shuffled. He sniffed. He avoided eye contact.

  He acted guilty as hell.

  “The girls recanted,” Anna said, to see if that was what was giving him the fidgets. “They told us they’d lied about Candace Watson staying behind with you.”

  “Yeah. They told me they would. They’re good kids. Just scared.”

  “What are they scared of, Robert?”

  He looked down where she sat, extraneous movement and mental vagueness gone. “I don’t know,” he said earnestly. Real earnestly. Anna couldn’t tell if he’d stopped acting guilty because she was on the wrong track and he felt safe with this line of conversation or because he was a born actor and the moment he trod the boards his stage fright vanished.

  Or maybe he was simply an earnest young man addressing a subject he cared deeply about.

  “Sit down,” Anna said. “Take your pack off and rest a bit. I’m getting a crick in my neck looking up at you.”

  He shed his pack. By the thunk as it landed, Anna guessed he carried a hefty load. Having freed his water bottle from one of the side pockets, he sat down next to her, feet dangling over open space. All things now being equal, Anna felt considerably more relaxed.

  Alone in the wilderness on the edge of a precipice wasn’t the ideal place to interrogate a man suspected of abduction and murder, but a girl had to take what she could get. The appearance of the golden eagle and her assumption that the man behind her was Raymond Bleeker had given Proffit the perfect opportunity. Had he murder on his mind, he could have shoved her over in a trice and no one would ever have been the wiser. The fact that she still lived was a point in his favor, as far as she was concerned.

  “I thought you were going to arrest me,” Proffit confessed.

  “Should I?”

  “No. But that doesn’t mean much. Many are taken in His name.”

  “You think this is a religious persecution?”

  “Not exactly. But when Beth and Alexis said they’d left Candace with me I knew I’d be in trouble.”

  “So you ran?”

  “No. I didn’t run. I’m going to find Candace.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “No. I just . . . I just have to keep looking, that’s all.”

  “Is that what you’re doing up here, looking for Candace?”

  “Mostly. I . . .”

  Anna waited for him to finish but he thought better of it and busied himself with his water bottle.

  “The night you left New Canaan you talked with the girls at the room they were sent to.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they climb out the window, go anywhere with you?”

  “No. Why?”

  The question seemed genuine enough, but then everybody in this bizarre case seemed genuine and guilty by turns, with neither rhyme nor reason separating the two states.

  “Did you know Heath Jarrod was camped out on the main road?”

  “The lady in the wheelchair? Yeah. Beth wanted her close. She wouldn’t eat till Mr. Sheppard okayed it.”

  “Did you go to Miss Jarrod’s camp that night?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t take the girls out there?”

  “No. What are you getting at?”

  “Just asking,” Anna said mildly.

  For a minute, maybe two, they sat in a surprisingly companionable silence. Surprising to Anna because she’d never known Proffit to be so still. Not simply unmoving, but internally still. When Anna was a girl there’d been a woman named Loretha, a handsome black woman who came twice a week with fresh eggs. Loretha had carried such deep stillness within her that the dogs, who barked at every falling leaf and passing fancy, never barked at her. She did not disturb the ether with inner fussiness.

  Robert Proffit had in no way reached the level of spiritual quiet of the egg lady but Anna sensed a lot of his internal histrionics were gone. Gone, too, was the exaggerated portrayal of them, the clutching of hair and gnashing of teeth.

  “You’ve come to a decision,” she declared, having not the foggiest notion what that decision might be about.

  “I guess I have in a way.” He tossed a pebble into the canyon below.

  “Want to let me in on it?”

  “I don’t see why I should.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I’m not going back to New Canaan.” Though there was a good deal about him Anna didn’t trust—didn’t like much—she didn’t doubt that he did what he did for what he considered to be godly reasons. This softened her suspicion not one whit. Reasons touted as godly were responsible for more deaths than a whole host of deadly diseases combined.

  “Why not?” Now that it had been established that neither of them thought he should confide in her, he seemed almost eager to do so.

  “I got my degree at Brigham Young. A master’s in liturgical music. After that, I worked in a couple of temples. One in Salt Lake City and one in Provo. The hypocrisy sickened me. The people smoking, drinking, committing adultery and fornication like it was going out of style and all the time keeping up this front that they’re better—more godly—than the rest of the smokers, drinkers and adulterers. I wanted to go back to a time when we were close to God. When we lived as the Bible and the Book of Mormon told us to live. That’s when I hooked up with Mr. Sheppard and his flock. They were living outside of St. George in a trailer park then.

  “At first it was like stepping back in time. I thought my prayers had been answered.”

  Anna said nothing. Her views on the subject were probably too acerbic for even a disillusioned Christian. Besides that, she didn’t much care about his spiritual journey except as it related to the three girls.

  “I guess things never were the way they’d been. Anyway it was pretty much the same in the Sheppard group—except for the smoking and drinking. At first there were more of us but most of the younger guys split. They wanted families and all.”

  From this Anna surmised that Mr. Sheppard and a handful of the older men had first dibs on all the females, each of them taking multiple wives and the young men left to their own devices—or vices, as the case may be.

  “Then Mr. Johanson—one of the elders—inherited the ranch and the group moved here.”

  “And you came with them,” Anna said. “Why?”

  “Partly becau
se I had no money and no place else to go, but mostly because I’d begun working with the kids, the young teens and preteens, girls for the most part, and I’d fallen in love for the first time in my life. Not like you think. You don’t know any better,” he added with unself-conscious condescension. “For the first time I knew what God wanted me to do, how I was to serve Him.”

  “And just how was that?” Anna thought she’d kept every molecule of cynicism out of her voice but the look he shot her let her know she’d not been entirely successful.

  “I was to help them to see God’s grace, to feel His love for them.”

  Anna said nothing. Men helping girls—or boys for that matter—to feel God’s love could easily morph into precisely the kind of behavior that had gotten the Catholic Church in such hot water. Proffit might swear his love was spiritual while he was busily expressing it in corporeal terms.

  “And I wanted to get them . . .” He stopped, maybe remembering with whom he spoke.

  “Get them away?” Anna finished for him. He didn’t respond.

  “What happened to get you to abandon them now?” Anna asked.

  “I haven’t abandoned them,” Proffit said.

  “You told me you weren’t returning to New Canaan.”

  “No, I didn’t. I said I wasn’t going back.”

  “You lost me there,” Anna admitted.

  “I have to get on,” Proffit said abruptly, as if realizing that he’d either tarried too long or shared too much.

  “What are you doing in Rocky? Camping?” Anna asked.

  “No.”

  “Why the backpack?”

  “I don’t have to answer you,” Proffit said and scrambled to his feet. Openness was gone. Whatever had him on edge before had been remembered. He wanted to get away from her. Stooping, he dragged his pack toward him, readying himself to take its weight.

  The pack was leaking blood from its lower back corner. Against the gray-gold of the granite, the blood was a breathtakingly red, cartoon blood, but it never crossed Anna’s mind for a second that it was anything else. Blood has a life energy that is hard to mimic with paints or dyes.