Hard Truth Page 5

  “May I take her?” Anna asked, wanting to ease Heath’s stress. Fight came up in Jarrod’s eyes. “She must be cramping up,” Anna said. “If I move her to the sofa I can stretch her out.” The appeal to Beth’s comfort did what no other argument could have. Heath unlocked the clasped hands that had been keeping the girl from sliding off her splayed knees.

  Gently Anna lifted the child. Half-sitting in a moving vehicle, the deadweight pulled viciously at her lower back but she remained steady until she had Beth resting on the sofa. For a moment Anna listened to her breathing, assuring herself she was truly and deeply asleep. Then she set her mind to Heath’s question. Jarrod could be said to have a right to know.

  During the time that had elapsed since she and the EMTs arrived on the scene, much of the story of the three missing girls—read in daily snippets from the morning Ranger Report, a rambling collection of incidents from parks all over the country—had resurfaced and coalesced in Anna’s mind. The tale of the search had been published in broken pieces as it unfolded, pieces that were mixed in with the stories of wildfires burning out of control in Southern California; the badly decomposed corpse of a man wanted in the killings of two students at a boys’ school in Pennsylvania, turning up on the Trace, apparent death by drinking battery acid, notes to the dead boys in his pockets; a series of rapes at Lake Mead; car lootings perpetrated by bears at Yosemite and an organized ring of humans at Yellowstone, dozens of other ongoing sagas. Summers were busy in the parks. It took Anna a moment to sort out the relevant fragments pertaining to the girls and put them back together.

  “A while back, six weeks I think, a church group was up at Odessa Lake on a weekend campout. A youth group. Girls. Six or seven all told. They were slated to stay two nights, Friday and Saturday. The girls were teens and preteens. If I remember right, the youngest was eleven and the oldest maybe fifteen. It was some kind of religious outing; Bible study on the rocks, or whatever.”

  Heath’s eyes narrowed fractionally and Anna realized her cynicism was showing through the narrative. Since becoming engaged—married, she reminded herself, unconsciously turning the gold band on her ring finger—to an Episcopal priest- cum-county sheriff, she had worked hard to keep her ungodly thoughts from poking into others’ belief systems. At times like this, when a truly heinous act sent its unholy stink to high heaven, that resolution failed her.

  “Jee-zuss.” Heath mimicked the traveling salvation show pronunciation with a bitterness that those raised without religion could never know. Anna wondered if the fall that took away the use of her legs had started Heath on a vendetta against her personal god.

  The woman’s color had improved and her breathing was less shallow. Regardless of whether it was anger at a deity or the removal of an oversized limpet from her diaphragm, Anna was glad to see it.

  “Two adults accompanied the girls,” she went on. “One kid’s mom—I don’t remember which—came as chaperone. The other was a man named Robert Proffit. He was the church’s youth group leader and organized the outing.”

  “ ‘She stayed with Robert.’ ” Heath repeated Alexis’ answer when asked where the third missing girl, Candace, was. “Jesus,” she said again. This time she didn’t mock; she cursed.

  “The backcountry ranger up at Fern Lake—it’s just a half-mile or less from Odessa—”

  “I know where Fern Lake is,” Heath interrupted, as if Anna had insulted her.

  “Okay,” Anna said agreeably. “The ranger at Fern got a call from dispatch. The chaperone mom had an emergency back home. So mom hikes out with the girls who have had enough wilderness—or preaching. Candace, Alexis and Beth stayed behind to finish up their weekend with the youth group leader, Proffit.”

  “How old’s this guy?”

  “I don’t know. Young, I think. Early twenties.”

  “They left three girls alone with him overnight?” Heath sounded accusing. Anna didn’t rise to the bait. She looked at Beth curled into the fetal position, thumb in mouth. Anna, too, wanted to lay the blame on somebody with a heavy lash or, failing that, to pound hell out of a serviceable scapegoat.

  “Evidently.”

  “Why?” The outrage in Heath’s voice penetrated Beth’s dreams and she whimpered.

  “I don’t know,” Anna replied. “I didn’t work here when the girls went missing.”

  “We’re there,” Dr. Littleton said from the driver’s seat as she maneuvered the RV off the highway and into the Estes Park hospital parking lot.

  Workers in scrubs took over the children. Despite her nap Beth wasn’t ready to let go of Jarrod, and Heath was wheeled into the bowels of the hospital alongside the gurney. Alexis made no protest; she’d returned to that inner landscape where outsiders did not exist.

  Anna and Gwen Littleton were left in the waiting room with Chief Ranger Lorraine Knight, the detective from the Estes Park police department, a child psychologist on call by the hospital, and a lawyer, also on call, who looked tired and mulish. His stubble-covered jaw was set in Anna’s least favorite manifestation of stubbornness. Self-righteous stubbornness pushed the chin out. This man’s was tucked in: the set of a man defending what he’s paid to, not what he believes in. Anna was surprised when none of the three experts followed the disappearing gurneys.

  “Quite a welcome to Rocky, hey, Anna?” Lorraine said.

  “Quite a night,” Anna agreed. Talking with Chief Ranger Knight, Anna felt a couple hundred pounds of little lost girls lifting from her shoulders. Lorraine was near Anna’s age, fifty maybe, or fifty-one. Her face was aged and ageless from a lifetime of working outdoors in all weathers. Though she was tall and lean and stronger than some men her size, she’d retained a womanly roundness of body and a childlike roundness of face. When her hair wasn’t sequestered in a braid coiled at the nape of her neck, it fell to her waist in gray and auburn waves, creating a strange, sweet mix of mother, Magdalene and wicked child.

  “There’s good and bad news,” the chief ranger said. “The good news is it’s over. The bad news is it’s over.”

  Anna must have looked as baffled as she felt because Lorraine explained.

  “Right after I got off the phone with Beth Dwayne’s mother, she called the other parents, then the lawyers.” She nodded at the mulish man.

  “The girls are not to be rape-tested, not to speak with a psychologist, not to be questioned by law enforcement without a parent or guardian present and only to be given life-saving medical care.”

  “Are they crazy or what?” This from Dr. Gwen Littleton, who stood forgotten at Anna’s elbow.

  “Let’s hope they are crazy,” Chief Knight said. “ ‘Or what’ is too grisly to contemplate.”

  six

  The chair might not have been a cone of silence, but it did strong duty as a cloak of invisibility. It was as if, once terminally seated, Heath had dropped below the spectrum of human sight: like the high notes on a whistle, only dogs were aware of her. Since she’d been given a life sentence to sit in it, Heath had inwardly—and sometimes outwardly—raged against the phenomenon.

  This was the first time it had worked to her advantage. While the others were shut out, she’d been whisked into the room along with the limpet, parked in a corner, and promptly forgotten like a piece of portable equipment.

  Heath had become accustomed to hospitals: the smell, the sounds—muted and annoying, as if bad things were happening just out of earshot—the impersonal intrusions of total strangers coldly intimate. Hospitals no longer frightened her. Though the emotion shamed her on a level too deep to question, she felt at home in them. They were the only place her disability served as a membership card; she was supposed to be there. In hospitals everyone was broken. Too fucking pathetic, she castigated herself and renewed a vow she made, broke and remade a thousand times a day, to be a good little cripple: strong and brave and cheerful.

  Doctors and nurses came and went, muttered and poked. The limpet was attached to an intravenous tube. She cried silently but made no prote
st when the borrowed sweat suit was peeled off of her and her soiled underthings removed.

  One nurse—or maybe she was a doctor, with gender no longer a factor and everyone wearing what amounted to medical pajamas—startled Heath by actually seeing her.

  “You the mother?” she asked in a business-only tone of voice.

  Heath shook her head, for once annoyed that she’d been noticed. The woman turned away and Heath again disappeared. The question launched an unpleasant train of thought. She was not the mother. She was not a mother. And now she never would be. Even at forty-one she’d always thought there’d be time. Now there was time, endless time, and nothing with which to fill it.

  To derail this wretched locomotive, she concentrated on the limpet. Not praying. Praying was bullshit; she was done with that. Should she still believe in a personal, benevolent god who saw each sparrow fall, she would have cursed the son-of-a-bitch for not catching them before they broke their little birdie backs on the rocks, never to fly again.

  She did still believe in the power of emotional support, one lonely marooned human heart to another. Anyone who had climbed for a while did. On a cliff-face there was only the rope, the rock and the person with whom you climbed. Rope and rock were unforgiving. She’d learned the value of the person. Inching her chair closer, she took Beth’s hand so the child would know she wasn’t alone.

  Busyness ended. The parade of people in scrubs dwindled to nothing. Time hitched by one palsied minute at a time on the classroom-sized clock on the wall. Heath began to wonder where the others were—the cops, the rangers, the shrinks—wonder if both she and the limpet had been forgotten.

  Still holding Beth’s hand, she laid her head down on the bed and drifted. A dream came, the same dream she always had in one of its myriad forms: ice falling away under her hand, anchors ripping out as she hurtled past. In dreams the fall was endless and, with a knowledge of the future, all the fear she’d not had the leisure to feel at the time, she now enjoyed at length and in heart-stopping detail each time she closed her eyes.

  This time Sean, her climbing buddy, caught her hand and, for a moment, she believed herself saved. As always, fingers slipped and she fell. This night she was caught a second time. A fist closed tight in her short thick hair. Even while the dream had her trapped in its repetitive reality, some part of her brain registered change from the usual pattern. There on the cliff-face of nightmare she found herself muttering, “This is a new twist,” as she waited for the monsters of her id to tire of mocking her with false saves, the fingers to loose, the inevitable crash, then the happy ending where she awoke in a wheelchair.

  The grip in her hair tightened, pulled at her scalp. For the first time since the dreams began she was being pulled up, not down.

  Tugging continued until Heath was pulled out of the dream completely. Beth had a fistful of her hair and was tweaking it.

  “Are you asleep?” the girl whispered, as if afraid the sound of her voice would bring down the Mongol hordes in their dull green scrubs.

  “No,” Heath whispered back for the same reason. “I was, but you saved me from a bad dream.”

  “I had a real bad dream,” Beth said. Heath didn’t know if she referred to a sleeping dream or obliquely to whatever she’d been through over the last weeks.

  For the first time since they’d stumbled upon one another in the woods, Beth spoke, not in broken fragments, but in a whole and responsive sentence. Her eyes were different as well, haunted still and mostly empty, but a little person had returned behind them. She no longer looked like a child from Village of the Damned.

  Heath was staggered by the force of the joy she felt and terrified by the sense of responsibility. This wisp of a girl, nearly lost in all that darkness, could be frightened away all too easily, maybe never to dare come forth again.

  “I dreamed I was falling like I did when I broke my back. That’s why I can’t walk,” Heath whispered. “What did you dream?”

  “I dreamed Candy was with us and we were all going to Denver to shop for winter coats.” This, too, was whispered. Without vocal cues Heath had a hard time reading much into it. Beth had rolled onto her side and curled down till her face was only six inches from Heath’s, who still rested her cheek on her folded arms. Each of the limpet’s expressions was as clear as a fish in shallow water. And as hard to pin down. Within the one short statement, it seemed Beth lived a lifetime of angst. Behind the innocuous words Heath saw conspiracy, confession, horror, shame—or thought she did. Maybe, having imagined these things, she projected them onto the smooth skin of this child.

  “How come the dream was real bad?” she asked.

  “Because Candy wasn’t really with us. And we weren’t going shopping.” Her whisper trailed off to the merest distortion of air. Had Heath not been so close she wouldn’t have heard it: “We were going somewhere else.”

  Heath’s brain flooded with questions. Where was Candace? Where was somewhere else? Who was taking them “shopping”? What the hell had happened? The most pressing was where was Candace, but that had been asked and answered, though the answer had satisfied no one.

  Heath decided to leave interrogation to rangers or cops or whomever. She was Beth’s climbing partner. Others could worry about the rest.

  “Somewhere else sounds like it sucks big-time,” she whispered back.

  Because Beth was twelve and Heath a grown-up, the word “sucks” won Heath a ghost of a smile from her young friend.

  “Sucks big-time,” Beth said.

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  Heath feared she’d pushed too hard too soon. Silence flowed between them, pooling and spreading till the air in the room grew thick with it, making sounds outside unnaturally loud. The clock’s second-hand’s lurching progress around the dial snicked, lopping off tiny increments of life.

  The clock; looking at it Heath was surprised to see her nap had lasted over an hour. It was close to midnight.

  “Little animals . . . ” Beth said, her toddler’s voice back.

  Heath waited. This time the silence wasn’t true silence. Underneath were words, stories, revelations.

  A low murmur of voices crept in around the doorframe. The shuffle of feet as a hushed wave of people came down the hall.

  Heath closed her eyes the better to focus, if not in prayer, then in a fervent incantation for supernatural intervention. No, no, no. Bugger off. Not now.

  It was now. The wave broke and the door to the room swung quietly open.

  Heath looked first to Beth. The connection was broken. Big-eyed and slack-jawed, the child stared at the door. Heath couldn’t tell if it was terror she saw, anticipation or bone-breaking weariness.

  seven

  Let’s sit,” Lorraine said. The lawyer and the psychologist had melted away, probably to homes and beds. Dr. Littleton had excused herself to check on Wiley. Anna and the chief ranger sat, each on her own low square sofa, the kind that ensures that those who wait also serve. The backs weren’t high enough, the seats too deep, armrests lacking.

  Perched at right angles, leaning forward, they talked.

  “What gives?” Anna asked for starters.

  “It’s complicated.”

  Anna waited while Lorraine untangled the complication into a coherent narrative. The chief ranger had aged in the months since Anna had last seen her. They’d worked together on a case that bore certain similarities to the one Lorraine had walked smack into when she’d transferred to Rocky Mountain: young people lost, a search. Prolonged searches, particularly where children were involved, were emotionally scarring. Two of them back-to-back had cost Lorraine.

  “A couple of the girls turned up in one piece,” Anna said. It wasn’t her custom to barge into other people’s brown studies without knocking. Maybe she hoped counting blessings would ease the harsh lines digging between the chief ranger’s brows.

  Maybe she was just being impatient.

  “One still missing,” Lorraine said.

  T
he shepherd and the lost sheep; the parable fit Lorraine Knight to a T. Anna admired Knight for genuinely caring about each and every visitor that came to her parks. Admired but didn’t emulate. Counseling herself to patience, she leaned back, giving her boss space to think.

  “Okay,” the chief ranger said finally. “These folks are religious. Real religious. Kids home-schooled. Social life, personal life—near as I can tell, everything—is centered around their church. They call themselves Reformed Saints.

  “At one point they were Mormons but the sect broke away. The chief of police in Loveland said it was because Salt Lake City decided African Americans could hold church offices, but I have no idea if that part’s true. From interacting with them during the search, I do know they think of Salt Lake City as a modern Sodom. They’re a real conservative bunch. The sheriff—they don’t live in Loveland proper but about twenty miles out of town in an enclave of sorts—has never had a problem with them. They’re quiet. Keep to themselves.”

  “Sounds like every description of a serial killer,” Anna said.

  Lorraine laughed. “It kind of does, doesn’t it? I didn’t mean to paint such a sinister picture. For what it’s worth, I don’t think they had anything to do with the girls’ disappearance. Everyone I was in contact with—one of the dads and two moms—seemed devastated by their loss. What was hard for those of us who aren’t of a religious bent was that they refused to help with the search. They never walked trails, took calls, pursued family leads, put faces on milk cartons, never called the park or came up here to see how the search was going.”

  “They didn’t do anything?” Anna was as appalled as she was amazed. Parents could usually be relied upon to, if nothing else, drive the search-and-rescue officer insane.

  “I didn’t say they did nothing,” Lorraine said. She paused a beat, caught Anna’s eye. “They prayed. Round-the-clock vigils. Prayed in shifts. They kept right on doing it. Their whole little community.”