Hard Truth Read online

  Mrs. Dwayne had begun slurring her words. The glass was empty. Heath smiled. “Can I get you another glass? Talking is thirsty work,” she offered.

  “Just a wee sip,” Mrs. Dwayne demurred.

  By six, the woman was out cold, slumped in an untidy heap on the sofa, snoring loudly.

  Heath took the glass from her hand and set it on the counter. For what seemed like a very long time Beth stared at the grumbling heap that was her mother. “Will she be all right?” she finally asked.

  “She’ll be fine,” Heath said. “How about you? Will you be fine?” She rolled close to the sofa. “You can talk to me, you know.”

  Beth looked at her mother, snoring peacefully two feet away.

  “She’s asleep. Nobody can hear us but Wiley, and he’s good at keeping secrets.”

  “You won’t tell anybody, will you?” She shot a significant look at the snorer lest Heath be unaware who “anybody” was.

  “I won’t,” Heath swore. “Scout’s honor.”

  “Like Daniel Boone?”

  The question made Heath acutely away of how little their home schooling was going to prepare them for the greater world. But that wasn’t its aim. Keeping them in the fold was closer to the mark.

  “Yeah,” Heath said, not wanting to get sidetracked into Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, Brownies and Bluebirds.

  “Robert talked to me and Alexis,” Beth told her.

  “I know. Said goodbye and that he was going to find Candace. That lady ranger called and told me.”

  “No.” Beth leaned forward till her face was scarcely a foot from Heath’s and whispered, “Since then.”

  “He came again?”

  The girl nodded.

  “What did he want?”

  “He told us that Candace was alive and he knew how to find her.” Given the cheery message, the sudden tears that accompanied it were incongruous. They splattered on the lenses of Beth’s old-fashioned glasses, then trickled beneath the plastic frame.

  Despite the tears and big eyes, she didn’t sound terribly frightened. More hopeful than anything. Hopeful for what? That their friend still lived? And what did the tears indicate? Relief? Sorrow?

  Several days had passed since Heath last talked with Anna Pigeon. Last she’d heard, Robert was still missing and still the prime suspect in the abduction. Not wanting to frighten Beth back into the web of secrecy and lies she’d been trapped in, Heath carefully asked, “How is it that he knows where she is?”

  Clearly Beth hadn’t given this much thought. She was of an age when facts, or purported facts, are shoveled at children by the truckload. Not having the experience to weigh them, all information is more or less accepted at face value, the proclamations of the sages given the same weight as those of the girl sitting one row ahead in the homeroom.

  “I guess he found her,” Beth said finally.

  “And then he came back to New Canaan? When?”

  “Last night. That’s why I had to see you today, to tell you Candace is okay.”

  “You actually saw Robert last night?” Heath was trying not to sound too anything: too skeptical, too excited, too interested.

  The limpet looked toward her mother but Mrs. Dwayne was down for the count. “We didn’t see him, exactly, but he talked to us.”

  “How did he talk to you if you didn’t see him? He came to your bedroom window or what?”

  “No. Alexis and I don’t sleep together. I’m still in the girls’ quarters with the little kids. But every night after the evening service it’s our job to take the trash out to the barrels behind the house and burn it. It’s fun, lighting fires.”

  Heath nodded. As a girl she’d had pyromaniacal tendencies as well. She loved fire. Couldn’t leave it alone. When her father found her playing with fire behind the big propane tank, it had scared him so much he changed the rules. Instead of being forbidden to ignite things she was given permission to play with fire all she wanted as long as she did it under his supervision. The apprenticeship had served her well. Regardless of weather, she could get a campfire going when others failed.

  “So you were out burning the garbage,” she said. “What happened then?”

  “Well, it was dark and the cans are pretty far out. There’s brush all around and we heard Robert’s voice. He said Candace was okay.”

  For a while they sat in silence, Mrs. Dwayne snoring softly, Beth looking at Heath as if she expected her to pull a rabbit out of a hat or something similarly miraculous. Heath was fresh out of rabbits, out of magic of any kind. She needed help. She needed to talk to Ranger Pigeon. She needed to shift this burden of love and trust off onto a person who could deal with it. A whole person. In the end she knew she couldn’t. Abled or disabled, she was the one Beth had chosen as her champion.

  “What else?” she asked gently.

  “Robert asked us to go with him.”

  That sent a shaft of ice down Heath’s spine. “He did?”

  “He said to follow him.”

  “Did you want to?”

  Beth didn’t choose to answer but Heath could see the indecision, temptation warring with fear in her face.

  “Momma came out then, hollering for us, and we had to go in.”

  Thank god for Momma, Heath thought. So many questions needed answering it was a physical hardship to keep herself from riding roughshod over the child. The missing weeks, Candace, Heath sensed these were not areas Beth could go into yet.

  “Why might you want to leave home?” she asked instead.

  For a while she didn’t think Beth was going to tell her. The girl looked to her comatose mother, to Wiley, flopped on the rug in front of the sink, out the window at the enormous RV parked next door. “We wouldn’t. Not really, I guess. I mean, where would we go? We’re not even old enough to drive. But Alexis wants to a lot. She says it’s hard not being in the girls’ quarters anymore. Maybe Robert could take care of us.” She looked pleadingly up at Heath. “You know, till we’re old enough to get jobs.”

  That was a lot more answer than Heath had bargained for, and she felt a wave of helplessness so great it put that of merely not walking for a few decades to shame. She wanted to grab the child and hold her safe from the shadowy evils that permeated her young life but she didn’t even had a firm grip on what those evils were, what menaced the limpet from without and what from within. Feeling a failure but not knowing what else to do, she changed the subject.

  “What’s wrong with Alexis? Your mom said she wasn’t feeling well.”

  The disappointment in Beth’s eyes stung. The declaration that followed stunned her. “Morning sickness,” Beth said matter-of-factly.

  “Who is the father?” Heath asked, attempting to sound as calm and accepting as her young friend.

  This question brought on the embarrassment and horror that Heath had felt was missing from the original declaration.

  “Oh no. Oh no.” The limpet curled down into the couch, reminding Heath of the girl she’d been when she’d first come out of the woods.

  “Does it have to do with the time you can’t remember?” Heath asked gently.

  Beth looked like a small animal cornered by wolves. Heath thought to retract her question, then decided to let it lie. Whatever had happened to the children during the weeks they were missing, it would be a boon psychologically if they could talk about it.

  The annoying Mrs. Dwayne chose this moment to puff and snort herself awake. Heath could happily have strangled her but Beth looked relieved.

  “My goodness!” Mrs. Dwayne exclaimed. “I must have been more tired than I thought. We’d best be getting home.” With a minimum of lurching and stumbling, she gathered her purse and her daughter and loaded them into the old Dodge Caravan the New Canaanites shared.

  Heath felt mildly guilty allowing an inebriate behind the wheel, but consoled herself with the thought that there wasn’t much to collide with between Rollin’ Roost and the commune, and the rough dirt road would keep Mrs. Dwayne’s speed down.

>   Watching them go, she realized how desperately she, too, needed to move, to be free of the aluminum box she was calling home at the moment.

  Having lowered herself down on the hydraulic lift, she rolled around to the other side of the RV, where she could see the mountains. Heath was as tired as if she’d scaled the highest peak in the Rockies. For the first time since the fall, she realized there were more challenging and worthwhile mountains to climb than those made of granite and ice.

  seventeen

  Raymond gave up his bunk and slept in the room dedicated to tools. The mattress on the bunk Anna claimed was old and flat, the metal mesh sprung, but after a night spent on granite and manzanita it felt like the Plaza Hotel on Central Park to her. She was asleep long before Rita deemed it time to turn in. Regardless of the relentless ache from nape to knees, she might have gone on sleeping through the night had it not been for Fern Lake Cabin’s legacy of mice. Or what she first took to be mice.

  A noise which, to a sleep-drugged mind, sounded like the squeak of a sizable rodent, forced Anna awake in the strange chill hours between midnight and dawn. Through the wall she bunked against came the sounds of mutterings and thrashings and bumpings. Too big to be mice. For a while Anna lay staring at the slightly darker darkness of the bunk over hers, hoping for a return to silence and, if she was lucky, the anaglesic of sleep.

  Having served her time in tents and other thin-walled communal living situations, she wasn’t terribly surprised when the thumps settled into the rhythmic pulse of the mating dance. Knowing she would disturb no one, Anna clicked on the tiny Maglite she carried as part of her standard pocket detritus. Three forty seven A.M. The bottom bunk opposite was unoccupied, as she’d expected it would be. At least her rest had not been broken entirely in vain. One mystery was solved: why Rita, a backcountry ranger who hiked for a living, would go hiking into Fern Lake on her day off. Anna smiled and switched off the Maglite. If a Christian were hell-bent on a little fornication, Fern Lake was certainly a beautiful place for it.

  Morning came as a misery. Each and every tissue in Anna’s back begged her not to move, screamed at her as she pulled on her shorts and shirt, and tried in every way possible to convince her that she’d aged forty years overnight. She winced out into the living area to find Ray and Rita drinking coffee and looking annoyingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Spurred on by a temporary hatred of all good cheer, she said, “The mice were certainly restive last night.”

  Ray smiled enigmatically. Rita said, “I didn’t hear anything. I turned in half an hour after you did and slept like a log.”

  Anna’s crusty old soul was gratified to find the young woman was not as averse to lying as she would have people believe.

  Coffee, instant oatmeal with cinnamon and raisins, and moving her muscles restored Anna to civility. She thanked Ray for his hospitality and left the two of them to linger over breakfast. Because the hike out was relatively easy and because it was her duty, Anna inspected the campground before heading down the mountain.

  Like most sites in national parks, the Fern Lake camps were a ways from the lake. With increased visitation and increased awareness of the impacts on water systems, the days of campsites at the lake’s edge had gone the way of cutting evergreen boughs to make a bed and digging trenches around tents to keep the rainwater out.

  Campers were, for the most part, good custodians of the park, but in Rocky Mountain, an easy Friday afternoon’s drive from the major urban center of Denver, visitation was relentless. It was a weekend recreation area with all that entailed: beer parties, half-assed adventures, sports people who liked to run, bike or fish in the park. The mix made campground patrol and maintenance as never-ending and important as housework.

  Raymond had not been doing a damn thing. Fern Lake camp was a mess. Fire rings had been built, used and rebuilt. Tree trunks were dragged around to create benches. Each of the sites was provided with a bear-proof canister chained to a tree to provide safe food storage for visitors. One was vandalized. One was gone. Why anyone would bother packing chain-cutting tools in for the pleasure of packing out a cheap, heavy, ugly metal box was beyond Anna’s comprehension. But then so was a lot of what passed for entertainment among her fellow human beings.

  Bleeker had five years as a backcountry ranger. The dereliction couldn’t be written off to inexperience. Laziness. Indifference. “Disrespect for the land,” Anna hissed. The prolonged search gave him some small excuse but not much. Anna guessed that the search had taken up his district ranger’s time and attention and, when the cat was away . . .

  Mice.

  At Rocky everything seemed to come back to mice.

  It crossed her mind to hike back to the cabin and discuss campground responsibilities but she decided against it. Bleeker needed to be called down and addressed in the confines of the ranger station on Anna’s turf and Anna’s schedule.

  Ray Bleeker’s season ended September seventeenth. Two weeks—less, she realized as she reached into her brain to retrieve the day’s date. There wasn’t much point in firing him but neither would he be working at Rocky Mountain next summer, not if Anna had any say in the matter. He would be reprimanded. It was to be hoped that would be sufficient to motivate him to do his work. Destroying and rehabilitating the fire rings would take him at least three days.

  About thirty minutes down the trail she found the bear-proof food storage box. It had been tossed into a pile of broken granite when the thief realized he wasn’t having as much fun with a chunk of metal alloy as he’d thought he was going to. Having retrieved it, she tied it to her daypack. Though the metal was nothing special, the construction simple and the design slightly older than that of the wheel, she was glad to have recovered it. The box might be cheap but it was not inexpensive. Nothing the federal government bought ever went on sale.

  Anna radioed ahead and Emily was waiting at the trailhead to give her a ride. Knowing that once she got home a hot bath would beckon and the odds against her getting anything constructive accomplished would be significantly increased, she asked to be taken straight to the district ranger station off Bear Lake Road.

  Rocky had a glitzy new Visitors’ Center with administrative offices at the east entrance of the park. The offices there were carpeted, well lighted, and the Visitors’ Center had all the bells and whistles, including a beautiful four-hundred-seat theater and a gift shop. The Thompson River District station was more traditional—and more to her liking. Small, old, it had been built with other purposes in mind and converted to a ranger station later in life. The place smelled of stale wood smoke and pine and, of course, mice. It reassured her that she was indeed in a national park and not a cubicle in a city somewhere.

  Her office was a delight. It had been added on to the original structure, probably for use as a sunroom. Many-paned windows enclosed three sides of the small rectangular room, and pine-filtered light gave a sense of being out of doors. In winter it would probably be impossible to keep warm. In late summer it was a pleasure to serve there.

  Her first order of business was to call the chief ranger and report on her misadventure at Picnic Rock. Lorraine would take it from there, informing Colorado law enforcement that the search for Robert Proffit was no longer a matter of mere courtesy but one of law.

  Anna’s next task confirmed the urgency of the appeal. A message had been left on her desk to call Heath Jarrod. Jarrod told her of Robert’s visit to the girls, his attempt to lure them away from New Canaan, and Alexis’ purported pregnancy. As Anna dutifully relayed this new information to Lorraine, she roundly cursed the New Canaanites for refusing to allow rape kits to be taken when the girls first reappeared. Given that the children were all they had of the crime scene—wherever the hell that was—the DNA and trace evidence on their persons might have meant the difference between solving the case and not.

  After spending several hours of what was deemed by the bureaucracy to be necessary paperwork, Anna felt it was legal, moral and ethical to go home though it was on
ly four-thirty.

  Hours in a chair had undone any good gleaned from her hike down the mountain. Muscles and sinews in her back had grown stiff and ached like the dickens. As she pulled the Crown Vic under the carport of her rental house, she realized she needed emotional heat more than physical. Paul’s voice, or words of love transmitted via cyberspace, loomed even larger in her vision of heaven than a long, exceedingly hot bath and a bed without rocks and manzanita as its main structural components.

  Anna had reason to regret her priorities.

  There were several e-mails from Paul. Witty, kind and beginning with the salutation that always made her go weak at the knees and fall in love all over again: “My darling wife.” But before she was done reveling in the knowledge that she missed him, truly deeply missed him, missed him even more than she was enjoying her solitude, she noticed an unfamiliar address: [email protected].

  Anna had never heard of Slipstream but that didn’t concern her. The net evolved exponentially. In moments of weakness she could almost believe the takeover of earth by The Machines was in the not-so-distant future. What gave her a creepy feeling was the “goodnews.” Some repressed memory of early Sunday school trauma suggested, though the news might be good, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be good for her. For the briefest of moments she considered deleting it unread. For a slightly longer period of time she toyed with the idea of putting off reading it till she’d had her bath. Dismissing both thoughts as cowardly, she opened it.

  Dear Mrs. Pigeon: I wanted you to know it was an accident. I hiked out as fast as I could and told Rita to go get you. I hope your few hours in the gorge weren’t too uncomfortable. Yours in Christ, R.

  Robert Proffit. Anna was getting right royally sick of that boy.

  Chances were he was a kidnapper, murderer and pervert. That made him of professional interest. Pushing her over a cliff made him of personal interest. Those wishing to evade the law should never make themselves personally interesting. Proffit was not only responsible for the ache in her back, but now condemned her to postponing the longed-for panacea of a hot bath.