Blind Descent Read online

  “Frieda—” Anna began, needing to say something.

  Mrs. Dierkz plucked one hand from between her knees and fluttered it; a woman batting away gnats. The hand was in keeping with the rest of her: nails shaped and painted, a heavy gold wedding band embracing a few carats’ worth of engagement ring. Tasteful, affluent, but not off-putting. Anna knew a little of Frieda’s childhood, enough to know her mother was not a stranger to hard work. She and her husband had started a used-car dealership in 1951. Four daughters and nearly half a century later, they were rich. More power to them.

  “Call me Dottie,” Frieda’s mother offered unexpectedly.

  “Dottie,” Anna repeated. Without Frieda as a subject, she was at a loss for words.

  Mrs. Dierkz—Dottie—tried to keep up a semblance of conversation. As much, Anna suspected, to keep thoughts of her daughter at bay as to fulfill any sort of social obligation. The vagaries of air travel exhausted, she hit upon landscape as a safe topic. The desert was less than helpful. Anna couldn’t but feel that it had put on its bleakest aspect. Thin rain fell in fitful spates, providing no moisture, only adding to the gloom. Without sunlight or any lingering touch of summer, the sage showed black and spiny against soil gray as ash.

  It wasn’t long before Mrs. Dierkz gave up. Her last sentence, an admirable attempt to liken the black scrub to the graceful lines of Chinese brush paintings, skidded to a halt midsentence. A heartbeat’s silence followed, then she admitted, “I’ve always liked a little more green. So restful on the eyes.”

  Anna nodded. She kept her attention on the road. Grief is such a naked emotion, and she wanted to respect Dottie Dierkz’s natural modesty.

  “Frieda?” Mrs. Dierkz said then, inviting Anna to take up where she’d been fluttered to silence some minutes before.

  Anna was more than happy to do things on Dottie’s terms. Never having had children, she could not fathom the sort of pain the woman must be suffering. She knew only the loss of a husband, a father, and several very good cats. If it was worse than that, she was impressed that Dottie remained upright and coherent.

  “Frieda,” she began again, as asked. Monitoring Dottie from the corner of her eye as she talked, trying to gauge what to tell, what to omit, whether to go on or turn the subject to other matters, Anna told her of the accident, the rescue, the second and fatal fall. She left out the part where her knee crushed the life from Frieda. Maybe she did it to protect Dottie, maybe to protect herself. There was nothing in it but gratuitous angst for all concerned. Mostly she focused on Frida’s love for the underground, her courage, her humor, and how deeply admired she was by her fellows. Or all but one of her fellows, an addendum Anna kept to herself.

  By the time they started the twisting ascent to the park quarters, Anna had pretty much talked herself out. Whether or not Dottie had taken all she could of Frieda’s last days, Anna certainly had. Lumps formed like salt licks in her throat, and tears burned beneath her eyelids. The last thing Dottie needed was to see Anna break down.

  Yet abandoning the topic altogether seemed not only callous but impossible. Now, and for a while, it was the only topic in the world. So Anna skewed the tales around till she was gossiping about the other members of the survey team. Curt Schatz’s claim to mouse bones, Tillman’s mainlining caffeine—anything to distract herself or Dottie for a moment. She described Brent Roxbury’s caving ensemble and elicited a small smile, brief but genuine, a break from the bigger brighter ones. Mrs. Dierkz didn’t recognize Roxbury’s name and that surprised Anna somewhat. Brent had been so upset by Frieda’s injury and then her death, Anna assumed they’d been close. Perhaps they had. Mothers weren’t necessarily privy to all information. Time and distance made them strangers even in the best of relationships. And, too, Brent’s distress could have been just the stress of the situation or the sensitivity of one caver for another.

  Zeddie Dillard was an old family friend. Her older sister and Frieda had gone to college together. When her own sister died, Zeddie had attached herself to Frieda and her sister.

  Dottie knew Curt, but “just to say hello to.” They had met in Minnesota. Dr. McCarty she had known for years. He’d inherited her when her gynecologist retired. Dottie had recommended him to her daughter.

  Dottie and her husband, Gordon, had been invited to his wedding. They’d been in Italy at the time and hadn’t gone, but she’d heard it had been beautiful. “Quite lavish,” she said, and managed to convey disapproval without so much as a lifted eyebrow or a lowered tone. “I don’t know his wife well.” She sounded like she didn’t care to rectify that situation in the foreseeable future.

  Piqued, Anna pushed a little. “I only just met her,” she said. “But I got a feeling there was trouble in paradise.”

  For a minute it seemed Mrs. Dierkz was too dull with grief or too refined to go for the bait. A need to keep her mind off worse things won out. “I think it might have been one of those hurry-up deals,” Dottie said without much interest. “Gilda, Frieda’s . . . my youngest girl knew her from graduate school. Just to say hi to, you know. They didn’t travel with the same crowd. I guess there was some trouble with one of the professors and this girl. Then we hear Dr. McCarty’s marrying her.”

  “You think she was pregnant?” Anna asked bluntly.

  Too bluntly for Dottie Dierkz. “Who can know?” she said. “We’ve all got to live our own lives, I guess. Me as much as anybody.”

  Anna left it alone. It would be easy enough to find out if there’d been a baby. What that might tell her, she was uncertain. Having babies out of wedlock was an epidemic among the poor and a fashion trend among the rich. Not the weapon for serious blackmail it had once been.

  “I thought they might get together at one point,” Dottie said wistfully.

  “Sondra and Peter?” Anna asked.

  “Peter and Frieda.” Staring out the rain-streaked window at the broken hillsides they climbed through, her face was turned away, perhaps mourning not only her daughter but grandchildren she would never know.

  “Dr. McCarty and Frieda,” Anna repeated, more sharply than she’d intended.

  “They went together for a year or two. Frieda seemed like she might be getting serious at one point. Both Dad and I would have liked that. Frieda was always an independent girl. A little too independent to be a doctor’s wife, I think.”

  McCarty and Frieda.

  McCarty and Sondra.

  McCarty and Zeddie Dillard.

  Anna was beginning to wonder if she was the only woman in the western hemisphere who’d not enjoyed the doctor’s bedside manner.

  A GOOD DEED actually paid off, and Anna was enjoying a mildly righteous glow of virtue’s own reward. This good deed had begun as the lesser of two evils; to hang around Zeddie’s and soak in the palpable pain of Frieda’s mother or to make a cowardly retreat to town with the excuse of checking on Holden Tillman.

  Her first choice, pursuing background information on the members of Frieda’s survey team, had ended against several blank walls. Sondra wasn’t answering her phone in St. Paul, and, since she was freelance, there was no place of business whose business it was to keep tabs on her whereabouts. Just for the hell of it Anna had called the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The fourth person she’d been forwarded to had actually heard of Sondra McCarty—the doctor’s wife wasn’t as regular a contributor as she liked people to believe—but had no inkling as to where she could be found. Anna left messages and Zeddie’s phone number. As for the rest, she hadn’t the foggiest idea where to begin. She doubted McCarty’s medical colleagues would know much about his caving contacts. The same went for Curt’s academic associates. That left Zeddie and Brent. Zeddie was a little too close to home. Staying in her house, on the heels of the disaster, with her still underground toiling to bring Frieda’s body out to her mother, Anna wasn’t comfortable questioning her friends. The park was too small, the mood too highly charged. As Anna’s grandmother would have phrased it, she was liable to get a thick finger stirring in t
hat pot. A little time needed to pass before she could cast her aspersions before peers.

  Brent, Anna could and did get to. The man wanted to talk. She could hear the craving over the phone. Till then she’d not realized how strong the need was in her to talk it all over with someone who had been there. In a way, had the cave not been growing ever tighter and more malevolent, staying with the body recovery team would have been a comfort.

  Unfortunately, when Anna reached him, Roxbury was on a cellular phone in a Jeep on BLM land adjacent to the park. His cure for the crazies had been to throw himself into his work. Their phone connection started out bad and rapidly went to worse. The last intelligible words were mutually desperate promises to get in touch.

  Dead ends.

  That was when, faced with an afternoon basking in Dottie Dierkz’s grief, Anna had decided to hang on to the borrowed sedan a few more hours and call on the Tillmans. She didn’t phone ahead for the obvious reason that she didn’t want to be told not to come and thus have an honorable avenue of escape denied her.

  Holden and his wife lived in a modest house on the outskirts of the town of Carlsbad. Outbuildings, a requisite in the West, cluttered the lot beside and behind the house: an old garage with a door that wouldn’t close, two trucks, a horse trailer with one flat tire, a barn with a horse without sense enough to get in out of the rain standing miserably nearby, and a dog house, sans dog, with a peeling tar-paper roof. Other items scattered around completed a look that Anna, through long familiarity, had come to find homey. Rubber tires, a staple of western decor, were tumbled near the woodpile; an aluminum canoe, partly filled with brackish water, was grounded under a leafless tree.

  She parked the sedan in front of a picket fence denuded of paint by wind-blown sand and let herself through the gate. The tiny porch was overflowing with cowboy detritus: deer antlers, rusting metal pieces of machinery that, like bleached skulls and pine cones, created their own artistic statement. To one side of the door a square picture window framed a book-covered table lit by a single lamp. On such a gray day, the golden glow was welcoming. Anna was glad she’d come.

  The door was opened before her knuckles could fall a second time. A woman a good ten or fifteen years Holden’s junior smiled at her with the hushed apologetic look that unmistakably says “nap time.” Anna had forgotten the Tillmans’ four-year-old. Waking the boy was a sin on two counts, once against the child and once against his mom. Anna found herself whispering.

  Holden was napping as well. He and Andrew were curled up together on the boy’s little bed. Anna was warmed by a glimpse of them as Rhonda Tillman closed the door off the kitchen.

  Tillman’s wife was classically beautiful, with thick lustrous hair that fell past her shoulders and wide-set green eyes under winged brows that had probably never known a pair of tweezers. She was model-thin, with long slender arms and tapered fingers. When she talked her hands sketched graceful pictures in the air to accompany her words. Holden’s wife was young enough and pretty enough to dislike on sight, but she gave Anna two homemade oatmeal cookies and a glass of white Zinfandel so Anna decided to overlook her faults.

  Rhonda pushed aside a paper plate full of multicolored Play-Doh and put her elbows on the painted wood of the kitchen table. “Holden’s driving me nuts,” she said, and she and Anna fell into the easy camaraderie women often do when left to themselves. “I thought I was going to have to wrap him in a towel and shove the painkillers down his throat the way I do with the cats.”

  Anna broke off a chunk of cookie and washed it down with the wine. Beer last night, wine now. Two years of abstinence poured away. She just didn’t give a damn. The terrors of the bottle had faded, the attendant weirdness an unreal memory. Not to mention, the stuff didn’t seem to work anymore. Three beers had left her with a full bladder and no buzz. Still, she drank Rhonda’s Zinfandel, was eager to drink it. A memory of comfort? Of forgetfulness? Maybe it was the only way she knew of handling death. Nobody important had kicked the bucket in a long time. No wonder sobriety had been a piece of cake.

  “How’s Holden doing?” Anna asked, tired of asking the same thing of herself.

  “Not good,” Rhonda replied in her hushed nap-time voice. The softness made Anna lean across the table, her and Rhonda’s heads together like conspirators. It was a nice feeling. Rhonda picked up a cookie with both hands, holding it between fingertips and thumbs as if it were a sandwich. Nibbling around the edge with little squirrel bites, she thought about her husband. “Very bad, in fact,” she said at last. “He’s convinced himself he killed Frieda Dierkz. Now he’s working on convincing himself he can’t trust his own decisions. This morning he had Andrew in fits dithering about whether to let the little guy ride in the front seat. Poor old Holden. I can read him like a book. No, like a newspaper. His emotions are headlines. He was scared he’d crash the car, hurt Andrew.” She took a delicate sip of wine and resumed torturing her cookie to death.

  “Tain’t so,” Anna said. “That’s not how it happened.” She decided now was not the time for secrecy. “Did he tell you what I found?”

  Rhonda nodded, her hair shining in the overhead light. “Holden no longer believes in your butt-print,” she said. “It’s like he won’t let himself believe. Some sort of punishment. He said he would have known if somebody had gone up there.”

  “No, he wouldn’t have,” Anna argued. “Sixty feet above him, in the blackety-black of that frigging cave, Godzilla and Puff the Magic Dragon could have been perched up there the whole time and none of us would have seen them.”

  “Not seen,” Rhonda said. “Known. He’s getting metaphysical in his delusions.”

  “Damn it.” Anna was annoyed. “It was my butt-print. I saw it. I should know. It was there. I could see pocket seams. It was an ideal, perfect, unassailable butt-print.”

  “Talk to him?” Rhonda asked.

  “Sure.”

  “It won’t do any good.”

  “Probably not.” They sat in companionable silence for a while. A fat white cat with Siamese markings from one ancestor cut into tiger rings from another jumped up on the table and stretched out full length, his paws pushing gently against the base of Anna’s glass.

  “You know you’re not allowed on the table when we have company,” Rhonda said. The cat twitched its tail in disdain.

  “Are you a caver?” Anna asked.

  “I used to be. Not so much anymore. When you’re married to the Holden Tillman it gets old.” There was a tinge of bitterness there, but Anna knew the feeling. Some battles weren’t worth fighting. “I still do some,” Rhonda said in self-defense. “I just backed out of the whole political side of it.”

  Anna had not considered caving as having a political side. Naïve of her; everything touched by humans was touched by politics. “How so?” she asked to keep the visit from ending.

  “I used to go to all the grotto meetings. Get involved in all that. My last year I was president of the local grotto. No more.”

  Grottos. Local groups of cavers. That was the key. Anna had overlooked the inevitable: people couldn’t resist joining up and forming clubs. Cavers were no different. She could let the AMA and the PTA alone. “Grotto meetings!” she said as one might say “Eureka!” “Is Brent Roxbury a member? Is Zeddie?”

  “Are you going to help Holden?”

  Anna laughed. “Unless he really did kill Frieda.”

  “Not a problem. Holden hasn’t killed anybody in years. He puts spiders outside. Even big hairy ones.” Rhonda got more cookies from a jar on the counter and refilled their wineglasses. “Fire away.”

  Anna outlined her theories. It didn’t take long. If someone had attempted to kill, then finally had succeeded in killing Frieda, the list of suspects was mercifully short: the members of the core group with the exception of Oscar, Holden, and herself. If the fall in the Pigtail was unrelated to the rock that had broken Frieda’s leg, then they were all suspects. Anna felt duty-bound to mention that but didn’t give it much credenc
e. The law of averages was meant to be broken, but it served as a fairly trustworthy guide.

  “I don’t know what I’m fishing for,” she admitted in the end. “I need more information. More to go on. Other than Dr. McCarty’s tendency to drop trou at the slightest provocation, I know almost nothing about anybody. With zip in the way of physical evidence, motive is the only thing I’ve got.”

  Despite Rhonda’s desire to be of help, the pickings were pretty slim. Frieda had a reputation in some circles for “scooping booty,” the highly unpopular practice of dashing headlong down new passages to be the first without addressing the needs of the cave, i.e., surveying each new portion as it was explored. Rhonda assured Anna that emotions ran high when it came to scooping booty, but neither of them could see it as a motive for murder. Tinker’s Hell was a dead end or, as Holden would have said, an end in itself. All the leads surveyed petered out. No booty to scoop.

  Sondra McCarty was a neophyte, a whiner, not well liked. No news there.

  Brent was well thought of by cavers. He was active with children’s groups, taking even very little kids into the caves to teach them about bats and crickets, instill in them awe instead of fear of things subterranean. Brent was a good father—high praise from the mother of a four-year-old. Rhonda said Andrew sometimes played with his daughters. They had a house in town a couple of miles from the Tillmans’.

  Rumor had it Brent had exaggerated reports on occasion to protect the underground resource. The caving community loved him for it. The petroleum interests would have had a significantly different take on the issue, but Rhonda said it was just gossip. She doubted it had penetrated much outside the grotto.

  Zeddie was new to caving. Enthusiastic, young, idealistic, she had all the makings of a life-long devotee. No rumors attached themselves to her, but Rhonda seemed reluctant to write her off as squeaky clean. They weren’t too far apart in age. Zeddie a caver, Rhonda a mommy—Anna guessed it was just a natural jealousy.