Hard Truth Read online

  The buckle gave way and the contents of the pouch fell out, striking wrists and dirt. Fingers scrabbled. The barrel of the flashlight came under her hand and she grabbed it. Wiley’s rumble escalated to a high-pitched whine that penetrated the enamel of Heath’s teeth and made her skull reverberate. Dragging her weight on her elbows, legs trailing behind, she crawled toward the dog.

  “Quiet, Wiley. Come here.”

  The hand without the flashlight struck something furry. Hoping it was part of Wiley and not the bear, she closed her fingers around a bony ankle. Wiley let out a bark that ripped the darkness.

  Still holding onto the dog, she thumbed the flashlight on. She held it backward and the light blasted her retinas. Startled, she dropped it. Found it. Pointed it in the right direction. “Holy shit,” she whispered.

  Then the screaming began.

  two

  Anna looked at her left hand for the umpteenth time. The band of gold on her ring finger was so new it was mirror-bright from the jeweler’s polish and there was hardly a scratch on it. The band was plain: no twining leaves, no gems, no patterned etching. No words were engraved inside. When Paul had brought her the rings to ask if they might be used, he’d told her their story. In 1945, after being mustered out of the army, his father bought them from a jewelry store in New York City, then brought them back to Natchez in hopes he would one day wed. Four years later he’d met the woman who would be Paul’s mother and they’d set the date. When the day came, Paul’s father went to the chest in his bedroom where they’d been kept. A hole was gnawed through the corner of the chest, and the back of the cardboard box that had contained the rings was eaten away. Inside the box, where the rings had waited so long, were two dried-up acorns.

  On the way to the church, the groom picked up two tin rings at the five-and-dime. A year later, on their first anniversary, he’d replaced them with gold.

  In 1952, with the first child due, Mrs. Davidson was sewing a tiny layette while Mr. Davidson knocked out the back wall of the bedroom to build a nursery onto the house. Amid the debris and dirt from the wall of the ninety-three-year-old house was the detritus of a long-dead packrat’s nest. Pride of place among the screws and bolts and hairpins were the wedding rings.

  It had been decided that they would be set aside for the baby to bring to his or her mate for their wedding. Paul’s first wife wanted diamonds. Knowing that, he had never shown her the rings or told her the story.

  “Our union was prophesied by a rat,” Anna had said, but she loved the rat, the ring, the man and the tale. She even loved the former Mrs. Paul Davidson for being too greedy to want the gold and too ambitious to keep the man.

  From the wooden balcony of their honeymoon cabin, Anna watched the rat’s gold catch the candlelight. The cabin was of logs, new and neatly fit together, red-brown with a polyurethane finish. The balcony was on the second floor with French doors that led into a pleasant bedroom. From where she sat, she could see the mountains of Colorado, sparked tonight by lightning, and smell the sweetness of pine.

  The place was ideal. The ring ideal. If Anna had only had a husband to share it with, the honeymoon would have been close to perfect.

  She stared at the cell phone Paul had given her, a phone with free long distance and more minutes than it had taken the Hebrew god to create the world. Cell phones were annoying. They were too small, made odd noises, cut in and out. Mostly Anna hated them because they were, by nature, intrusive. They broadcast civilization’s blather and fuss into places it was never meant to be; their shrill insistence and one-sided shout sullied the myriad blessings of the out-of-doors. Despite this antithetical relationship, she considered using it, calling Paul just to tell him how sweet the air, how bright the stars. It was an hour later in Port Gibson, Mississippi, than it was in Estes Park, Colorado, nearly eleven o’clock. Paul would probably have been in bed for an hour. He wouldn’t mind her waking him, not on their honeymoon. What self-respecting bridegroom would?

  As she reached for the phone, the radio in the bedroom demanded her attention.

  “Two-oh-one, ROMO. Two-oh-one, ROMO.” ROMO: ROcky MOuntain, the park’s designating letters. Anna had never worked anyplace where dispatch went by a name. She thought it rather endearing. And she welcomed the interruption. Ruining some visitor’s evening was preferable to staring at the phone.

  “This is two-oh-one.” There was a momentary pause. Anna was not only the first woman ever to be a district ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park but had only been the Thompson River District Ranger for two days. ROMO was not yet accustomed to hearing her voice.

  She grabbed notebook and pen. “Go ahead, ROMO.”

  The night dispatcher was a seasonal employee but she’d been with the park for seven seasons and knew her business. She laid out what facts were known in a voice better suited to soothing crying infants than spelling out law enforcement horrors. Anna loved it. There was no situation that couldn’t be improved with a little maternal calm.

  “We’ve had a garbled report from a gas station owner just outside the park. An RV pulled in several minutes ago requesting an ambulance at Sprague Lake Handicamp. The RV’s driver was agitated. Apparently he’d tried to call from Sprague, but couldn’t get a signal.”

  “Any indication of who was injured?”

  “Two women, evidently. I got all this from the gas station attendant. The RV man drove off before giving any other information. An ambulance has been dispatched.”

  “Where’s two-oh-two?” Anna gave the number of the law enforcement ranger who was on duty in the frontcountry from four till midnight, when the park’s problem calls were turned over to the local sheriff’s department.

  “Tied up with an elk/ Toyota collision by Bear Lake.”

  “I should be at Sprague in ten to fifteen minutes,” Anna said and broke contact.

  The cabin she rented from the NPS was on the outskirts of the park across from the Visitors’ Center. She was so new to the place, she had yet to unpack, and cardboard boxes took the place of furnishings. Most of her things had not been moved, only as much as could be loaded into a small U-Haul in a hurry. This proof of the unsettled nature of her life was sufficiently depressing, she was grateful when she could leave it.

  Out alone at night, the dark mountains around her, Moraine Meadow rolling out gray and silver to the west, the scent of rain and pine and dust gentle on the air blowing in through the car’s window, Anna was reassured she’d made the right decision in leaving Mississippi . . . leaving Paul. District ranger in Rocky Mountain was a pay grade higher on the government service scale, and the park itself considerably up the food chain as far as glamour, adventure and political clout went, than her old duty station, the Natchez Trace Parkway. It was an opportunity that wouldn’t knock often. The plum had only fallen to Anna by way of a series of fortuitous events.

  Lorraine Knight, the chief ranger at Yosemite, with whom Anna had worked in the past, had taken the deputy superintendent’s position at Rocky. When one of her district rangers, a thirty-five-year veteran of the NPS, had retired, Lorraine contacted Anna and helped shepherd her application through the inevitable jungles of red tape at the regional personnel office.

  Two days before they were to be married, Anna and her husband-to-be, Paul Davidson, sat down to discuss the job offer. Paul had recently been reelected sheriff of Claiborne County. Anna had been offered the position of a lifetime, thirteen hundred miles west.

  They loved their jobs.

  They loved one another.

  But they’d been at their jobs many more years than they’d been sweethearts.

  One year, they’d decided. For one calendar year, they would carry on a long-distance marriage. At the end of that year, one would give up a job and make a home in the other’s shadow.

  Or they wouldn’t.

  The “wouldn’t” was unspoken but Anna, if not Paul, heard it loud and clear.

  Three days after the wedding, she moved to Rocky. Customarily the NPS wasn’t s
o heartless, but Rocky had been too much in the news that summer. The park needed normalcy. The rangers, particularly in Thompson River District, needed reassurance, routine. Even more so than most corporate cultures, that of a national park was vulnerable to epidemics of mass insanity. Perhaps because of the isolation and the high adrenaline aspects, park personnel bonded quickly and tightly. When something disrupted those bonds, the reverberations could shudder on for years. Anna had seen litigious employees divide a park. In the case of Rocky it had been the search for missing children. For four weeks ROMO had searched. The children were never found. After the search was discontinued, the Thompson River District Ranger retired. The rangers involved intimately with the search had been left with the weight of three lifetimes of unfinished business to carry on their shoulders.

  At the edge of Moraine Meadow, just before the ragged black line of trees swallowed the road, two coyotes trotted across in front of Anna’s car. Though western Colorado suffered a drought, the glacier-carved meadow was rich with grass. Mice, picas, squirrels and other small denizens raised big broods on the wealth of forage. As a consequence these Rocky Mountain coyotes were fat, their fur thick and glossy in the moonlight. The two of them could have understudied for Rin and Mrs. Tin Tin.

  Where Anna had grown up, on the edge of Smoke Creek Desert, the coyotes looked like starving mangy hounds. It was good to see at least some of the park’s critters looking so prosperous. Balance was impossible to maintain when the depredations of man smashed so many links from the food chain. The bigger carnivores—grizzlies, wolves and, ever increasingly, mountain lions—had been killed off. Coyotes weren’t fearsome enough to thin the herds of elk. Once in a while they’d get a newborn or the old and sickly, but not often enough. The elk were rapidly eating themselves into a food shortage that would bring on starvation and its attendant diseases. Assuredly this would thin the herds, but it wasn’t the sort of spectacle John Q. Public liked to bring the kiddies camping to see.

  In Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, wolves had been successfully reintroduced. So successfully, occasionally a wolf was seen outside the park. Not a month before, a rancher up near Jackson had shot a nursing female. Resource managers from Yellowstone searched but she’d hidden her den too well, and her pups weren’t found. Colorado used this and other wolf-as-evil-predator stories to justify the state resolution that these four-legged, livestock-eating varmints would never be brought back to Rocky.

  Wyoming’s wolves were only one day’s long walk north. There were those hoping a few would take it into their heads to cross state lines. If the wolves came on their own, they’d fall under the protection of the endangered species act.

  The black shadows of the trees took the coyotes, then Anna’s patrol car. She caught up with the park’s ambulance at the Big Thompson River Bridge and trailed it to Sprague Lake Handicamp. The ambulance ran dark. At this hour, with little or no traffic to hinder it, the rangers had rightly chosen not to break the peace of the park and run with lights and siren.

  Sprague Camp’s toilets were on a center island in the middle of a large parking lot with spaces radiating out like spokes. The rim of this ovate wheel was where the sites were located, all of them with easy access by graveled path to the asphalt. The ambulance and Anna circled the lot slowly. There was none of the light and babble of a hair-raising event to clue them in to which campers had placed the call.

  When they’d completed half the circle, the ambulance’s headlights cut an angular woman from the surrounding night. She had wild red hair, was clad in a blue sweatshirt and khaki shorts and was waving them to the curb.

  She introduced herself as Dr. Gwen Littleton, OB-GYN, retired. Anna’s favorite sort of emergency hostess, she was calm, sensible and informative.

  The only aspect of her demeanor that suggested all was not well was the blood smeared down the front of her shorts.

  three

  No, no,” Heath was crying, but the screaming wouldn’t stop. Her mind jumped to its feet and ran to them. The need and the response to it were so great, it startled her to find she still lay on the ground, less ambulatory than a beached whale.

  With sudden inspiration she turned the light back on herself. “See,” she said. “A lady. Just a crippled lady. See my chair? I crashed. I can’t hurt you. Look.” She shone the light down at her legs. “I can’t walk. You’re okay. Hush now. Hush.”

  They couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. Both were thin to the point that bones stuck out at pelvis and collarbone. Heath could see this because they wore nothing but filthy underwear. One had on panties that once had been pink and a matching camisole, ripped at one shoulder exposing a breast so scratched and muddied, at first Heath hadn’t differentiated fabric from skin. The other girl wore white cotton panties and a bra, intact but filthy. Mud, feces, blood: Heath couldn’t tell. From the smell it was probably all three. They had nothing else: no shoes, no socks, no water, nothing. Scratches, cuts and bruises discolored their legs and feet.

  “It’s over now. I’m here. You’re okay.” I’m here. Jesus. Helplessness washed over Heath till she was nauseated with it. There wasn’t a damn thing she could do, not even yell for Gwen. The girls had quieted to whimpers, the low pitiful kind that puppies make when they have nightmares, but they looked ready to bolt back into the woods if she made any loud noises. That couldn’t happen. Heath couldn’t carry that around with her. Not in a fucking wheelchair.

  “Could you please help me?” she said finally, her voice as soft and kind as if she lured bunnies from their burrow. “See, I’m paralyzed and my chair fell over and I can’t get myself up.” In all the months since the accident, Heath had never once asked for help. Now that she did, she felt as if she were lying. The fact that it was true and that she asked it of two little girls who could not even help themselves struck her as horrifically funny and she laughed.

  The sound struck the girls like a blow and they skittered, ready to run.

  “Oh my god. Please,” Heath cried, terrified they’d run back into whatever hell they’d just found their way out of. “I’m hurt. Please help me, I’m hurting.” This last was a lie. Not only was there no feeling in half of Heath’s body but there was enough adrenaline in her veins she doubted she’d have felt pain even if she’d crashed in a nest of yellow jackets.

  The girls stopped. One of them—the one with the bared breast—took a step closer.

  “I’m all tangled up. See?” Again Heath shone the flashlight on her legs and the overturned wheelchair.

  “We thought you were a bear,” the girl said in a voice years too young for the body it emanated from, the voice of a three-year-old.

  “I thought you guys were bears,” Heath told her. “I got scared and tried to get back to camp but my wheelchair fell over.”

  “Heath! Heath!” A sharp-edged cry came through the darkness. Before the girls could run, Heath hurried on. “That’s my aunt. She’s an old lady.” Mentally she apologized to Gwen for the categorization. “She can’t lift me by herself but she’s real nice. She made s’mores for dessert. They’re real good. There’s some left.” Heath realized she was talking as if she spoke to preschoolers, toddlers, not young girls, but these battered children had slipped back in time and mind and treating them like babies felt right.

  “Heath! Damn it! Answer me!” Thunder sounded in the distance underlining Gwen’s shout.

  “Will you stay and help my aunt put me back together again?” Heath pleaded.

  “Humpty Dumpty,” said the one who’d not yet spoken, and she giggled, a high, uneven sound with the broken notes of hysteria beneath.

  “Just like Humpty Dumpty,” Heath said and smiled. “Okay. I’m going to holler for my aunt. Don’t be scared, she’s a nice person and a doctor. A lady doctor. Ready?

  “Up here,” Heath yelled. “Up the trail on the eastern side of the tent. Bring a light.”

  “Heath,” Gwen cried again and there was the sound of feet pounding up the trail, a “Yowch!
,” a “Damn it,” and Gwen stumbled up to the overturned chair. “Are you all right? My god, I heard screaming—”

  “Gwen.” Heath stopped her with a concrete tone. “I want you to meet some friends of mine.”

  Heath shined her light on her aunt’s face to show the girls Gwen was truly, if not as she’d represented her, at least a kindly soul who did not apparently devour lost children. “My aunt.” Introduction made, she turned her light on the girls still in the woods, still poised as if for flight. Or a blow. Gwen’s light followed in natural succession and the children cowered.

  “Oh my heavens, my heavens, my darlings, poor babies. Y’all come here. Whatever happened? No. Never you mind that. Whatever it is, it’s over. Come on, sweethearts. Oh, look at your little feet!” Gwen started toward them, propelled by a maternal instinct that had inspired her to deliver thousands of babies and take care of their sniffles, mumps and other disasters large and small till they reached young adulthood.

  The girls were mesmerized by the soft southern flow of motherly love but didn’t leave their woodland darkness till Heath remembered Wiley. Or rather Wiley intruded into her world again by pushing his nose under her arm. Good sense or good training had stopped his aggression the moment Heath had identified the girls as nonthreatening.

  Something—probably the arrival of Gwen, a witness to his dereliction—made him decide it was time to come back on duty.

  “Bring them to me,” Heath said to the dog and pointed at the shivering half-naked creatures.

  Obligingly, Wiley trotted into the circle of illumination made by the two flashlights.

  The dog Gwen had bought in hopes of increasing Heath’s so-called independence might not have won a single show or even placed. He wasn’t the best or smartest helper. What Wiley had was wit and charm. His walk was the jaunty distillation of cartoon cocksuredness, and his scruffy demeanor an example of nature mirroring art. Crooked whiskers, half-salute ears, baleful grin, raggedy fur, his maker had fashioned a Disney star. Only fate had decided he had a higher calling.