Blind Descent Page 15

  Numbness in her fingers reminded her she still clutched a beer. Years had passed since she’d given up the stuff. Not a drop had crossed her lips since the first summer she’d worked at Mesa Verde. Visions of blackouts and delirium tremens and inappropriate remarks had kept her sober.

  Deliberately, she took a long drink. It wasn’t as good as she remembered it, but then little was. She caught herself in that thought and was ashamed. Cynicism was okay, bitterness a pain in the neck. The hairline difference between the two was hope and humor. The cynic had both, the embittered, nothing. She took another drink and enjoyed the sensation of alcohol and rebellion. Eventually she would have to confess to Molly. The whole point of being a recovering alcoholic was making sure there was a healthy dose of guilt and the catharsis of confession as a chaser for each drink. But for tonight none of that could touch her. She felt as if she’d squirmed out of the ground into a world where she was only partially committed, as if she were a ghost or the invisible woman. Shock might have explained the sense of detachment, but, as it was not altogether unpleasant, she chose not to question it.

  Despite Anna’s rebirth on this higher plane, the cold was beginning to seep through the seat of her trousers, penetrate beneath the wet patches on her shirt. Soon she’d have to go back. Freezing to death ten yards from the tent would be humiliating to say the least.

  Till I finish the beer, she told herself, and stayed where she was, watching the drama under the lights unfold. Mouthing lines she could not hear, people three inches tall, as measured between thumb and forefinger, marched about in a purposeful manner getting absolutely nowhere. George Laymon, CACA’s resource management specialist, pushed his way into the camera’s frame between Holden and Brent for his moment of fame, then was hustled offstage with the geologist. The superintendent, resplendent as was Laymon in a Class-A dress uniform, joined them momentarily. Brent was released, and the two National Park Service men gravitated back toward the limelight.

  Brent bobbed this way and that, a man who had no place to go yet could not decide which direction would get him there the fastest. Suddenly his head jerked up, and the indecision left him. Anna watched as he walked, then ran, into the darkness beyond the floods. A minute later he reappeared, his fretful face transformed, almost handsome. In the crook of each arm he carried a little girl. The children were two or three years old. They were dressed identically in frilly pink dresses, white tights, tiny red cowboy boots, and little blue parkas with the pointiest hoods Anna’d seen this side of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Twins, she guessed, probably Roxbury’s daughters by the way they clung and chattered and he laughed and nuzzled. A fourth member of the party dragged out of the shadows. Mrs. Roxbury, Anna presumed. She didn’t seem to share the children’s rejoicing in their father’s safe return from the depths. Possibly she hung back only to give them their moment together.

  The beer was gone; hypothermia was just around the corner. Time to go back. It was all Anna could do to rise from the ground, and that wasn’t accomplished in one fluid motion but in a series of grunting stages from fanny to knees, knees to feet. With cold and inaction her muscles had shut down. She was so stiff it surprised her she didn’t creak like a rusty gate at every move.

  A bath. The concept gave her renewed strength. Now that she’d joined the ranks of the topsiders such luxuries were not unheard of. With this in mind she limped more or less cheerfully back toward the milling humanity.

  Each and every wish of Anna’s had come true. Zeddie’s house had been given to her with Zeddie’s permission granted over the newly functioning field phone. There was a bath, solitude, beer in the refrigerator. Even a cat, a sleek white female with a gray saddle and ears so pink they were translucent. Calcite, she’d been told, was the cat’s name.

  Anna had soaked till her skin shriveled, quaffed a second beer, and now sat on the sofa cocooned in Zeddie’s sweat-pants and hooded sweatshirt. The Austin Lounge Lizards poured forth musical nostalgia from an environmental movement that was over before Zeddie had graduated from high school. All was as it should be, yet Anna could not shake a restlessness so close to the bone her wiggling and twitching had alienated the cat. Despite overtired muscles, Anna wandered from room to room, stopping to stare out windows, gaze into the refrigerator, read the spines of books. More than once she braved the dropping temperature and padded onto the back patio in stockinged feet to look over the starlit expanse of the ancient reef and imagine, below it, the struggling forms of Oscar, Curt, and Zeddie, carrying Frieda’s remains through dark and twisting channels.

  Shortly before the ten o’clock news, she devolved from stalking to outright snooping. Access with permission and no supervision to the home of one of the five people who could have had a hand—or a butt—in Frieda’s demise: this was opportunity knocking loud and clear. Anna would have been a fool to ignore it. Or so she told herself as she poked through her generous hostess’s private things.

  The photos weren’t hidden away like a dirty secret but proudly displayed on bedside table and mantel: Zeddie and Peter McCarty grinning out from hot-colored Polartec pull-overs on a ski slope. Zeddie in back of Peter hugging his neck, her chin on his shoulder, behind them autumn leaves vivid and plentiful—St. Paul, most likely.

  Did this flaunting of an adulterous relationship indicate that Zeddie knew it would soon be on the road to legit? Did she hope Mrs. McCarty might drop by to borrow a cup of carabiners, see the pictures, and run screaming for a divorce lawyer? Was it indicative of a sixties-like scorn for traditional values in keeping with Ms. Dillard’s nuevo-hippie armpit hair? Or was it as simple as a girl wanting to show off her boyfriend and trusting that a twelve-hundred-mile separation from his significant other would keep her from getting caught?

  The skiing picture was several years old, judging by the length of Zeddie’s hair, a good six to eight inches shorter than she wore it now. The autumn leaves shot was more recent, not last autumn but this one. Zeddie had been with McCarty before and during his marriage. It wasn’t unlikely she had plans to be around after. Would those plans include pushing several dump trucks’ worth of dirt down on his bride? Earlier suspicions to the contrary, Sondra McCarty was nowhere to be found, and Zeddie had spent the night in her husband’s arms. If Sondra had counted on the rock slide to solve her marital woes, she’d been sorely disappointed. Zeddie, on the other hand, had come out smelling like a rose.

  Experience told Anna the odds against two unrelated murder plots hatched in a small space and over a short period of time were astronomical. Going on the assumption Frieda had been correct, and someone had pushed a rock down on her, then statistics dictated Frieda was the one and only target both times.

  Unless Zeddie thought Sondra was down in the hole when she shoved the rock. Unless Sondra thought it was Zeddie when she pushed the rock. In the perilous midnight of a cave, a case of mistaken identity wasn’t too far-fetched. But the second time someone had actually died: Frieda. Coincidence? Luck of the draw? Frieda and Anna had been easily the most vulnerable. Could the pusher-of-stones have been so cold as to write off extraneous casualties as the cost of doing business?

  The mechanism of the crimes carried with it no gender connotations. Opportunistic, unprofessional sabotage—possibly even spur of the moment—was as likely to be attempted by a woman as a man. Like poison, it wasn’t hands-on violence. If one was agile, no blood need spatter on one’s person.

  Circular thinking; it tired Anna and she shelved the line of thought for the time being.

  Other than the photos, she found little of interest. Zeddie had submerged herself more or less completely into the NPS lifestyle. Wall pictures were of wilderness views and sports, magazines focused on wildlife and land management issues. Anna did find one outdated Allure stuffed down behind the toilet like a shameful bit of pornography. Even the most stalwart feminist was entitled to the occasional slip into girlishness.

  She was back out on the patio, basking in the light from the stars and ignoring th
e increasing cold when the telephone began ringing. Though she’d spent less than forty-eight hours buried in Lechuguilla, the things of the world had become alien to her. The phone bell jarred, a mildly upsetting intrusion that had little to do with her. Any moment now the caller would hang up or the machine would answer. She turned back to the desert, a breathtaking vista separated from her only by a low cinder-block wall. Zeddie’s house was on a rise; her patio looked down over the Carlsbad complex, across miles of silvered desert to the shadowy beak of El Capitan, forty miles away in Texas.

  The ringing continued. Anna cursed Zeddie’s fundamentalism. Even Ed Abbey would have an answering machine, for Christ’s sake. Stomping back into the house, she snatched the receiver from the cradle.

  “Yeah?” Phone etiquette had deserted her.

  “Anna?”

  It had never crossed her mind that the call might be for her. Staying in another woman’s house in another woman’s park, she’d felt as isolated as if she’d borrowed a condo on Pluto.

  “This is she,” she said formally, phone etiquette returning with a vengeance. “May I ask who is calling?”

  “It’s Frederick.”

  Anna said nothing, both the English and the Spanish languages gone from her head.

  “Frederick Stanton?” she blurted out after a painfully long silence.

  “Come on, Anna, it hasn’t been that long.” His voice was rich with intimacy and humor.

  Hers wasn’t. “It has.” Excitement, the sick variety, wallowed in her belly, mixing with anxiety, embarrassment, and cheap beer.

  “I guess it has,” he admitted, and she relaxed a degree or two. She knew she was spoiling for a fight: with him, with Mother Teresa, with anybody. This conversation was a tightrope she must walk, a high wire between the maudlin and the shrewish. Unarmed, in a stranger’s sweats, she felt unequal to the task. She felt unequal to anything but a cup of cocoa and a Perry Mason rerun.

  Groping for a neutral remark, she said, “How did you find me?”

  “I’m the FBI guy, remember?”

  “It’s coming back to me.” Self-preservation kept her from saying anything more.

  “You were on the news,” he said. “Coming out of that cave. They said Frieda didn’t survive.”

  Anna had forgotten that Frederick had met Frieda the summer they worked a case together in Mesa Verde. A couple of emotions did brief battle with her. Guilt because he was a fellow mourner, and anger that he, who scarcely knew Frieda, had the unmitigated gall to presume on his brief acquaintance to reach out and touch Anna in her hiding place.

  Guilt won. It was amazing that a Methodist childhood could be so completely eclipsed by four years at a Catholic high school.

  “The anchor we’d tied into gave out. Frieda and I fell thirty feet. I landed on top of her, my knee on her windpipe. My weight crushed her larynx. Either she suffocated or I snapped her spine.” Anna heard herself, angry and cruel, and knew she lashed out at both of them. Herself for the deed, and Frederick for not loving Frieda sufficiently in the brief time he’d known her.

  “Do you want me to beat you up about it?” he asked calmly.

  That was a shrink question, a Molly question. Guilt vanished to be replaced by tears. Anger was still very much extant.

  Anna took a deep pull on the beer she’d carried in with her. The problem wasn’t that she’d consumed alcohol after abstaining so long, but that she hadn’t consumed enough. Alcoholic thinking, came the words of a mentor she’d lost contact with. Eat my shorts, she told the memory, borrowing an epithet from Holden’s accepted vocabulary list.

  “I’ve had a real bad day,” she said, and laughed. Laughter turned to tears. She hid them with silence. Zach, her husband, lover, soulmate, so many years dead she’d almost managed to lose count, would have known why that was funny. 1988, Broadway, Crimes of the Heart. Mom hanged herself in the cellar, along with the family cat. Why? She’d had a real bad day.

  Feeling doomed to a lifetime of loneliness, Anna sucked down another draught of beer. Mentally, she removed a cold chisel from an imaginary toolbox. With it she chipped the tears from her face and voice.

  “Thanks for calling, Frederick,” she said evenly, and was rewarded by a brief frisson of pride. “I didn’t know I’d made the news. I’d better call Molly and let her know I’m okay.”

  A silence followed, one so awkward that even through the miasma of alcohol and weirdness Anna generated, unspoken messages pounded like invisible radio waves.

  “I’ve already called her,” Frederick said, his voice curiously devoid of expression.

  At the time Anna had sensed there was something bizarre about the end of her and Frederick’s relationship. Anna was snapped back two years, held in the time warp of flashback. At her request Frederick had traveled to New York City to help her sister with a series of threatening letters. That was when things had gotten strange.

  With the impact of an Old Testament revelation, Anna knew: Frederick had had an affair with Molly.

  The knowledge, accurate or not, broke on her consciousness with the force of lightning. A pit beside which Lechuguilla paled opened in Anna’s befuddled mind. The least breath of air would topple her into it. A vision of her sister’s face dropped like a lifeline, and Anna grabbed on to it. Molly could be—indeed had been—trusted with Anna’s life. A cornea, a kidney, a loan, a place to sleep; if Anna needed it, Molly would provide it. Were there a single drop of water in the Sahara, a last bite of ankle bone among the Donner party, Molly would give it to Anna. She knew this the way she knew her heart pumped blood.

  Had Frederick Stanton been the proverbial last man on earth and Molly the recipient of the last fabled Spanish fly, there wouldn’t have been an affair.

  The pit closed. Sanity resurfaced.

  “And?” Anna said.

  “She wasn’t home,” Frederick admitted.

  Of course she was home. It was 11:40 P.M. New York time on a Tuesday night. Molly was drinking Scotch and watching Leno. She was a woman of regular habits. Nothing short of a patient crisis or a seventy-five-percent-off sale at Bergdorf Goodman could lure her out from one of her sacred “at home” nights. She’d refused to pick up. She’d probably refused to pick up for two years.

  “She’ll be home for me,” Anna said unkindly, and, “Thanks for calling.” As a courtesy, she let him say good-bye and hang up first.

  Three times she tried to dial Molly. On the third attempt her fumbling fingers pushed all the right numbers. As expected, the machine answered.

  “It’s me, Anna.”

  A clatter of plastic followed as Anna’s older sister grabbed up the phone.

  “Anna. Thank God.”

  “I’ve been drinking,” Anna said. It was the last piece of information she’d intended to communicate that night.

  “It happens,” Molly said.

  “And thinking about Zach.”

  “Oh, my. Sounds like you’ve had a real bad day.”

  Not alone, Anna thought. Not alone at all.

  11

  HER PART IN the rescue at an end, Anna had no business remaining at Carlsbad Caverns and no intention of returning to Mesa Verde until she had unraveled what had happened to Frieda. At best guess the body recovery would take another twelve to twenty-four hours. Till then she had a place to stay. Pleading injury, exhaustion, and all manner of unprovable but debilitating ills, she’d asked for and received sick leave. Hills Dutton, her district ranger—indeed, all the staff at Mesa Verde—was reeling from Frieda’s death. Winter was the slow season, and Anna was not really needed. She could easily beg a week or more and get it.

  Beer and bruises had given her a fitful night’s sleep. Thrashing around in Zeddie’s down comforter, she stalked and was stalked by killers of all stripes. More than once she woke up in a panic, fighting a ceiling of stone that was no longer there. Around three in the morning she’d dragged her bedding out onto the back patio to feel the reassuring cold of starlight on her skin as she slept. When day f
inally dawned she was relieved, if not rested.

  Between her first cup of coffee and her morning shower she formulated a modest plan. Or the first stumbling steps of a plan. Sondra needed to be tracked down, information on the other members of the team to be ferreted out. Bundled up in a sweater of Zeddie’s and a battered leather jacket she’d inherited when Zachary died, she walked from the housing area to the cluster of neat stone buildings that housed Carlsbad’s administrative offices.

  Clouds hung heavy over the desert, adding a pervasive damp to winter’s chill, dulling the light of the sun to a gray throb in the south. To Anna the day was made beautiful by its mere existence. Cold embraced and invigorated her. A sharp wind from the northwest reminded her how magnificently alive even this barren chunk of earth was. Down a steep slope from the cave resource building where she’d originally been assigned to man the telephones were the offices of George Laymon and the superintendent. Anna hoped for a low-profile schmooze with the secretaries. In a park as small and isolated as Carlsbad Caverns there would be few secrets. Whose car was parked too long in front of whose home, who drank and, perhaps more damningly, who didn’t, would be common knowledge. It seemed as good a place as any to begin.

  That assumption couldn’t have been more wrong. Once in the door she was caught up in the machinery of government.

  In the wake of the failed rescue attempt and the blaring media coverage, administration was buzzing with activity. Each decision would be reviewed, all plans reconsidered in a new light that would change as the political winds changed. Blame might be assigned, selected heads might roll but, most important, a dense layer of paper would be generated. Like a frightened squid obscuring the past with ink, the NPS would muffle the incident in memos, reports, and revised operating procedures.