Firestorm Page 23

  Anna’s foot was bumped again and someone grumbled, “What the hey…” John’s voice. Not John then.

  “Got to pee.” Jennifer Short.

  Anna had a strong need to avail herself of the facilities as well and began inching from between Lindstrom and Gonzales, squirming forward one heel at a time till she’d cleared their legs. Lindstrom never stirred and she was saved any commentary on the sociology behind yet another group ladies’ room event.

  This joint venture was half necessity and half concern. Jennifer was not in any shape to be left alone. Exposure, grief and, Anna had to admit, possibly guilt, had robbed her of much rational thought. The knowledge they were going home might have poured the nearly inexhaustible strength of hope into the veins of the others but that wasn’t necessarily true for Jennifer. There was the possibility she had no intention of leaving this spectral forest.

  Slithering like something unpleasant from under a rock, Anna left the shelter and pushed herself to hands and knees, allowing the nether parts of her anatomy to come back to life before she attempted to stand. An icy breeze cut across the back of her neck. Miserable as it was, the fog had kept the temperature constant. Clearing skies and wind chill would drop it into the teens or lower.

  On a night like this, one little woman could very easily shake off the mortal coil if she so chose. A simple nap in the snow would do the trick. An hour or two and Jennifer would wake up dead. The more prosaic explanation of having to pee was probably the truth but Anna didn’t feel lucky enough to gamble on it.

  By the sound of her steps Jennifer was headed downstream. The accepted ladies’ room was upstream of the boulder. Perhaps Jen required virgin territory. A luxury that could be indulged now that rescue was close at hand.

  Having shaken some function back into her lower limbs, Anna limped down the creek bed, following Jennifer’s crunching progress. With a little care, she was able to time her footfalls with the other woman’s and mask the sound of her own passage.

  Though nature and altruism were the vaunted reasons for tailing Jen, Anna didn’t use her light. Short was one of two people left on the prime suspect list and it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that this nocturnal adventure was inspired by ulterior motives.

  Jennifer reached the pile of rocks downstream of the bivouac where the creek divided into the north and south forks. She hesitated and Anna stopped as well, wondering what went through her mind: self-destruction? Urination? Humans were a complex jumble of the divine and the ridiculous.

  Jennifer began to sway, her light to swing. Sweat pricked in Anna’s armpits, trickling down in icy rivulets; the sweat of fear. Jennifer was an inch or so taller than Anna and perhaps ten pounds heavier—but Anna believed, if she had to, she could overpower her. Age had robbed Anna of some physical strength but it had toughened her. Women were taught not to hurt, not to let themselves be hurt. They were taught to give up. Anna wouldn’t quit and that sometimes gave her an edge when size and strength failed. She remembered a self-defense instructor saying that maybe in opera it ain’t over till the fat lady sings, but in defensive tactics it ain’t over till the fat lady’s dead.

  Insanity was what frightened Anna. Were Jennifer crazy then all bets were off. Actions, reactions, couldn’t be anticipated. Jen could give up or bolt or attack. If she attacked she’d fight like a crazy woman. Anna’d seen that once when she was putting in her requisite sixteen hours in the psych ward to get her emergency medical technician’s certification. A smallish woman had taken it into her head that the orderlies were IRA out to kill her. She fought like a cat with its tail on fire. Anna didn’t relish walking into another buzz saw like that.

  Jennifer came to a decision. From the light reflecting back off the snow, Anna could see the silhouette of her head and shoulders as she turned left and started down the south fork, the part of the creek quarantined because of Nims’s body.

  A path had been trampled to Leonard’s temporary resting place but it hadn’t had the foot traffic of the other areas and it was difficult to walk without making noise. Anna stayed where she was till Jennifer had gone ahead twenty or thirty feet, then matched the other woman step for step.

  The corpse could be her only destination and Anna felt curiosity overcoming fear. Nims had lain in his foil shroud for a day and a half. Only once before had the body been disturbed. Was Jennifer the desecrator of his impromptu grave? Did she go now to take something else, something important that Anna had missed? Or did she go to put something back, either returning what had been stolen or planting an item intended to incriminate?

  Or was the visit unrelated to the murder?

  Images of the Donner party and of the soccer players stranded in the Andes floated up in Anna’s mind and she suppressed a shudder. Not that she didn’t believe in munching up one’s fellows given they were dead and you were starving. What are friends for? Anna just didn’t want to watch. And fourteen or fifteen hours without food hardly constituted starving.

  Unless you were crazy.

  As a citizen Anna had nothing against crazy. It made for an interesting world and kept her sister in a thriving practice. As a law enforcement officer, she hated it. Winning was hard when your opponent was playing on a different game board.

  Absorbed in thought, she took a step out of cadence and the racket of the ice crystals crunching beneath her lug sole cracked so loudly she was surprised it didn’t set off colored lights like a Fourth of July sparkler. She froze, waiting for Jennifer to stop and turn the headlamp on her.

  Jennifer didn’t even break stride. Her trudging steps kept falling with the regularity of a metronome. Either Jen knew she was being followed and intended to lead her shadow farther from the bivouac before she dealt with it, or she was so caught up in whatever mental machinations had dragged her out in freezing temperatures that she was deafened to all else.

  Neither explanation soothed Anna’s raw nerves. For a second she considered going back to the shelter and rousting Lawrence or Stephen but decided against it. In the time it took her to get help she could easily lose Jennifer.

  From now on, Anna decided, she was going to the bathroom all by herself.

  The erratic trail Jennifer’s headlamp was blazing came to rest on the foil shelter shrouding Len’s remains. A circle of gold light eight inches in diameter—the battery could produce no more—crawled slowly down the length of the shroud as if looking for a way in. The aluminum fabric had settled close, frozen in wrinkles and folds. Frost cloaked the shelter where earlier depredations had shaken it free of snow.

  For the most part, the corpse had ceased to bother Anna. Not because she’d had the ill luck to see so many she’d become inured to death but because, as an EMT, she had often seen the last of life struggling out of a crushed body that had been its home. Life was precious if it was yours or someone you loved, death awe-inspiring regardless of who died. But the husk that remained behind after these miracles had transpired fit into two categories: revered garbage and evidence. Anna’s interest in both quickly became academic.

  Jennifer had not yet come to terms with human detritus and, by the wavering of the lamp, Anna guessed her hands shook. With a suddenness that startled, Jennifer dropped the headlamp into the snow and collapsed to her knees. Using both hands as a dog would use its paws to dig out a gopher, Jennifer began worrying at the edge of the cloth covering the body.

  Bile rose in Anna’s throat and she wanted to look away but the action had her mesmerized. Yellow lamplight caught the side of Jen’s face. Strings of soot-blackened hair fell over her jawline. Her lips were parted slightly, her tongue ghoulish and pink against the coal-colored skin. Short’s blue eyes were open wide, white showing on three sides of the irises. So macabre was the scene—an image gleaned from late-night horror movies—that Anna found herself more fascinated than frightened. If at some point Short began gnawing hunks of raw meat from the carcass Anna would step in if, indeed, what she was witnessing was a full-blown psychotic episode.

 
Fabric made a ripping sound as it tore free of the frozen earth, exposing Nims’s left side and his face. Even the dirty amber of the dying lamp couldn’t invest the dead flesh with color. Crescents of white showed where Nims’s eyelids had failed to close completely under Anna’s ministrations.

  Tiny heartbreaking noises, the kind puppies make when they dream, percolated out of Jennifer. Anna doubted she was even aware she made them. Juxtaposed with the frantic pawing at the dead man, the noises made Anna’s scalp crawl. Above the ridge the high whine of wind through the snags sawed at the night and she was put in mind of the Windigo, the flesh-eating spirit that haunted the north woods.

  With clutching motions, Short worked her hands up Leonard Nims’s body, up the arm stretched above his head then tried to drag it back toward her. Rigor mortis would have passed off but Anna doubted he’d become any more flexible. Temperatures had stayed in the mid-twenties and were dropping. Nims would be frozen stiff.

  The sleeve of his yellow brush jacket was stuck hard to the ground. Jennifer swung over, straddling the corpse. With both hands closed around its wrist, she pulled. The puppy-like whimpering increased in intensity, the cries closer to human. The fallen headlamp illuminated Short’s belly and chest as she tugged, each effort drawing forth a small cry.

  Nims’s arm came loose with a sickening crack, either ice releasing the sleeve or the ball joint in his shoulder snapping under the strain. Short fell back, her butt landing on the back of the dead man’s knees, the rigid arm thrust up between her thighs. Struggling up to a crouch, one knee on either side of the body, Jennifer wrestled with the arm. Awful sounds of dry retching underscored the ghastly chore. She pulled the arm down behind her body where Anna could no longer see it and the fight continued; the quick and the dead in bizarre combat.

  With a grunt of triumph more awful in its glee than the previous sounds of suffering, Jennifer achieved her goal. Snatching up the headlamp, she tottered to her feet and stumbled away, farther down the creek bed into the darkness.

  Seconds ticked by. Anna fought to control her stomach. Breath, cold and odorless, was sipped in through pinched nostrils as if it carried the stench of the charnel house.

  Jen’s light winked out. Maybe she’d disappeared behind an outcrop. Maybe she just waited in the dark. Anna stepped over to Nims. Shielding her light with her body, she trained it on the corpse. His hand, the color of ash, two fingers broken during the encounter, lay palm up on the snow, a dead white spider. Jennifer had taken Leonard’s glove. Confusion swirled through Anna’s brain in a numbing wind. Why on earth steal the glove?

  Nims’s right hand had lain palm up at rest in front of his face. With his body twisted up it floated there as if warding off a blow. Anna studied it: a plain leather glove with a small “s” in ink stenciled on the wrist. Nothing out of the ordinary. Evidently only the left glove had any value.

  Anna turned off her lamp and rocked back on her heels. She needed light, heat, food. She needed a vacation.

  Vacation.

  Motive.

  LeFleur mentioned Len had returned from vacation shortly before they’d been dispatched on the Jackknife. Nims had been visiting his kids from a prior marriage. Leonard had lived and worked in Susanville, California, for twelve years. Where better to have left a family? Susanville was not more than an hour—two at most—from the south end of Pinson Lake where the fire had started, where Joshua Short had been killed.

  Nims took kickbacks from oil and gas lessees; when in California, from lumber lessees. It wasn’t a great stretch of the imagination to picture him taking money for other less than legal chores. Like scaring off pesky protesters. If Len had killed Joshua—or if Jennifer believed he had—she had one of the best motives in the world for sticking a knife between his ribs.

  “Damn,” Anna whispered.

  Footsteps retreating brought her back to the present. Jennifer was running now, Anna could hear it. Logically, she should go back to the bivouac and get help, but she couldn’t shake the idea that Jennifer was a greater danger to herself than to anyone else. Len’s murder had been a crime of passion. Short meant to cover it up but Anna doubted she’d be willing to kill again to do so.

  “Want to bet your life on it?” Anna muttered aloud. Then she turned on her lamp and started down the creek in the direction Jennifer had taken.

  Sharp pains shooting through ankles stiffened by cold and immobility slowed her to a lumber and she cursed her frailty. Each step made enough noise she could no longer hear Jennifer. Several times Anna started to call her name but thought better of it, afraid it would only increase the woman’s panic. Glimpses of Jennifer’s light were all Anna had to guide her and it appeared and disappeared out of the unnatural night like swamp gas.

  Suddenly that winking golden eye turned and stared back. “Jennifer,” Anna called. “It’s me. Wait up.” The words were so pedestrian they rang in her ears, but her other choices, “Stop, police! Drop that glove!,” struck her as absurd.

  “Stay back,” Jennifer screamed, her voice guttural edges and cutting highs. “I got to pee!” She turned and began scrabbling up the frozen embankment on the northern side of the wash.

  Anna plunged after, reaching the bank just as Jennifer’s boots disappeared over the edge. Clawing her way up in darkness, her headlamp slung by its elastic band over her wrist, Anna wished she’d had sense enough to wear a hard hat. “Talk to me, Jen,” she yelled as she tried to find a grip on the frozen earth. Crusted snow broke off and fell down into her gloves. Her knee banged against something hard. “Talk to me.”

  Anna reached the top and hauled herself over the lip of the ravine.

  As soon as she’d found her feet, she shined the light in a half circle. Jennifer was gone, her tracks leading up the hillside toward the ridge. For an instant Anna listened. Crashing sounds of flight reassured her and she started up the hill following Jen’s trail. Every few feet she stopped, listened, heard the footfalls and pushed on.

  The way was not particularly steep but it was mined with pits where the Jackknife had burned well below ground level in pursuit of living roots. Snow and frost had conspired to camouflage the holes and the ground was treacherous. Anna had the relative security of following in Jen’s footsteps and so made better time. With each stop she could hear the distance between them had shortened.

  The last time she paused to listen the rushing retreat was checked by a crash and a cry.

  “Jen!” Anna hollered. There was no answer, not even the sound of running. Anna slowed her pursuit, trained the faltering light as far ahead as she could, sweeping it in short arcs, looking for any indication Jen’s trail was interrupted or had doubled back. Black post-hole steps led cleanly through the humps of white and spikes of charcoal that gave teeth to the landscape. After fifteen yards or less Anna’s vigilance was rewarded by a splash of color, the lemon yellow of a jacket designed to be easily spotted in a search.

  Collapsed in a heap, Jennifer Short craned her neck and looked up at Anna’s light. A wild and staring look was in her eyes. Straggling hair half hid her face. Muscles along her jaw bunched as she clenched and unclenched her teeth. Any illusion that humans have somehow shed their animal natures was shattered.

  Anna stopped where she was and sat on her heels, letting her lamp split the distance between them. “Are you okay, Jen?” she asked conversationally. Jennifer didn’t respond. “I heard you leave the bivouac and got scared you’d hurt yourself so I came after.”

  In the half-light Anna could see the rigid cast of Jennifer’s features soften slightly. “And, too, I had to pee,” Anna added, and laughed. Short didn’t smile but the softening process didn’t stop either. “To paraphrase the Queen of England, I expect this is not a time you will look back on with undiluted pleasure.” Anna went on talking just to talk, to build a fragile bridge between them. “You’ve had a rough couple of days. That’s why you’re feeling nuts. Bad as it is, it’ll get better. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  Jennifer’s
face grew slack, her eyes hooded. The transformation from stretched muscle and taut skin was so marked it was alarming. The other at least mimicked life in its energy and violence. This was the face of the comfortably comatose.

  “What happened, Jen?” Anna asked gently, and duck-walked a couple steps closer. “Did you step in a stump hole and twist your ankle?”

  Short nodded and pointed like a very young child.

  “You landed on your right foot?” Anna waddled closer. “Does it hurt?”

  A childlike nod.

  “Can I look?” Anna didn’t get a “no” or a shake so she slipped carefully down the side of the hummock that had tripped Jennifer. A depression several feet deep and five or six feet in diameter held them both like mice in a teacup. Short’s left leg was curled under her, her right thrust out. Beneath her left thigh Anna could see the fingers of Len’s glove peeking out. The glove was dark brown and stiff as if it had been dipped in chocolate and allowed to harden. Anna was careful not to notice it.

  With both headlamps on, shining not on them but on the reflective surface of the snow, Jennifer looked like the heroine in a sepia-toned tragedy.

  “When you fell did you hear anything?” Anna asked. “A crack or a snap?”

  At first Anna didn’t think she was going to reply, then she said, “A snap, I think.” Her voice was little, as childish as her movements had been.

  “Not good,” Anna said. “You may have busted it. I’ll go get some of the guys and we’ll carry you back to camp and cut the boot off there. May as well leave it on for now. It’ll keep your foot warmer and act as a kind of a splint.”