Borderline (24 page)

H
EADQUARTERS WAS humming. The rescue team had returned with the victims, the ambulance was back, half a dozen cars were parked hurriedly in the front lot and all the lights were on. The boy ranger insisted on escorting Darden in, probably in hopes of being included in whatever was going on inside. He wasn’t. The chief ranger wasn’t particularly thrilled to have Darden show up unannounced, either, but Darden was good at ingratiating himself when the need arose. He poured on humility salted with a need to understand the park’s issues and was allowed to join the group in the conference room. He took a chair in a corner, out of the limelight and the line of fire, and proceeded to vanish as best he could by looking older and fatter and sleepier than he actually was, a person of no import, nobody to be reckoned with. Wallpaper, Darden liked to think of it. In moments he was forgotten.

The room was spacious and, during the day, probably had a spectacular view of the mountains. At this hour the big square windows on the southwest side of the conference table showed as black mirrors. On the internal wall were three good photographs of scenic stuff and one in black and white of the park in the early days, but other than that it looked like any of a hundred conference rooms Darden had wallpapered.

Bernard Davies sat at the head of the table in an office chair made to match the oak of the table. He had it tilted back as far as it would go to accommodate his long legs and sat with his right ankle crossed over his left knee, exposing eight inches of white sock. His left hand rested on the ankle, looking too big and too rawboned for a man with an office job. Beside him was a compact man wearing wire-rimmed glasses. He looked to be in his forties, but had already lost most of his hair. What remained was still dark brown and curled over the tops of his ears and collar like fringe on a threadbare carpet. Darden remembered he was the head of the law enforcement wing for the park but couldn’t recall his name. Bad PR. He was slipping. Once he got Judith into the governor’s mansion he would step down, he promised himself. Judith needed a sharper man than he’d become. A younger man.

The head of law enforcement had his elbows on the table and an open, sympathetic look on his face that Darden bet got him a lot more information in a week than the old hard-line cops got in a lifetime. Across from him was the river district ranger, Freddy Martinez. He was dressed like a cowboy, down to his high-heeled boots, a Mexican cowboy—vaquero, that was what they called themselves. Darden knew a lot about Martinez; he was so outspoken about the evils of closing the border between the park and its companion villages on the other side of the Rio Grande that Judith had figured she might have some trouble with him, or be able to use him as a foil if he wasn’t all that bright. Darden was surprised how good-looking he was. Sitting comfortably in one of the swivel chairs, a foam coffee cup in his hand, he didn’t give off the aura of a fanatic, but one never knew.

The others—there were six of them if the baby was counted—were at the other end of the table. Had he no clue what was going on, Darden would have known where the power was by the obvious separation between Us and Them. Rangers and tourists or, in this case, victim tourists. A double Them.

The three teenagers, two obviously brother and sister if not fraternal twins, and the third, looking like she was going to burst into tears at any moment, he spent little time on. They were as lost as sheep and he was pretty sure the boy ranger had been mistaken. He didn’t peg any one of them as belonging to the older couple. The woman sitting, holding the baby, had to be the Anna Pigeon Boy Ranger had waxed so derisive about. The fallen ranger from Rocky Mountains, wherever the heck that was. Montana probably. One of the square states in the middle of the country, anyway.

She was small, her hair was a bird’s nest, dried blood or catsup or mud speckled her face and arms. The shirt she was sort of wearing was ripped till it would have put a bag lady to shame and she was no spring chicken, forties at a guess. But she didn’t look crazy and she didn’t look like the sort of person who gave up without a fight. Or gave up with a fight, for that matter. She struck Darden as the kind whose corpse would kick you three days after you shot her.

Davies and the law enforcement ranger—whose name Darden still couldn’t recall—didn’t see her that way. They were too professional to want to let their condescension show but not good enough actors to do it up thoroughly. In the tone of their voices and the tiredness of their smiles Darden could see that they didn’t want to deal with her as a fellow ranger, as another law enforcement professional, as a peer of any kind. It was more comfortable for them to put her in the role of poor little crazy middle-aged victim. A waste, Darden thought, one of their own was front and central to the incident they wanted to investigate and they were ignoring her.

There were reasons: she wasn’t in her own jurisdiction—cops, even tree cops, didn’t like anybody else stirring in their pot—and she was in bad odor with the central office. Cooties were not merely a malady of elementary school children. Adults were as vulnerable as any third-grader. Nobody wanted to get somebody else’s cooties on them. But Darden guessed it was much simpler than that. Anna Pigeon was a woman and women were easier to deal with when they were cast as mommies and wives and victims, roles most of them had never played from a time before many were born.

Underestimating women was the last gasp of male dominance, Darden figured. He used to do it himself. A first lady of the U.S.A. had cured him of that before he was thirty. She was little like this Pigeon woman and ladylike and perfectly groomed and soft-spoken and he’d mistaken that for being weak. It nearly cost him his career. He’d not made the same mistake again with any woman.

Anna Pigeon might look like a waif out of a Dickens novel but she was taking in everything that was said, scanning the table the way he scanned a room, looking for anything amiss. Women noticed different things than men did. Darden hadn’t exactly made a study of it, but he’d paid attention. Female agents were better at noticing personal details and interpreting them: unironed shirts, beard growth, body language, vocal tones, sidelong glances, lapses in personal hygiene, cosmetic surgery, hair dye, what clothing cost and where it came from. In the political jungle this paid off more often than watching for the glint of gun barrels in windows or bulges under sport coats.

The man standing behind her chair—Darden assumed he was her husband by the way he was standing guard over her—interested Darden as much as the Pigeon woman. He didn’t look any better than she did, white hair, a little too long for corporate work, was matted on one side and sticking out in wires on the other. His face was drawn with fatigue and years, his clothes were filthy and torn. Scratches marked his arms and his legs between the drooping cargo shorts and the battered Tevas. Yet he was utterly dignified. No, dignified wasn’t the right word. There wasn’t any sense of class consciousness or pride. More that he seemed completely comfortable in his own skin, completely devoid of insecurities. He was still as an oak tree is still on a windless day; the life is there, and the strength, but what one notices is the welcoming shade.

Darden figured he’d like Mr. Pigeon if he ever got the chance to know him. He doubted Judith would have much interest in him. He didn’t look like a man who could be used. That’s what Darden had been sent here for; things and facts and people Judith could use. Mr. and Mrs. Pigeon didn’t look like good bets. He was turning his attention to the three college kids when the door to the conference room opened and a tall woman with tightly permed gray hair slipped noiselessly in. A secretary, nobody but secretaries had so soft a footfall and so firm a determination. They had to be trained in it in secretarial school but Darden could never get one of them to admit it. They’d just laugh and say, “Oh you!” She leaned down to whisper in Bernard’s ear.

“Good. Thank you, Darlene.” Darlene whispered out and they all sat quietly, watching the open door till she returned with another woman whom they had apparently been expecting.

“Thanks, Lisa, you’re a lifesaver,” Bernard said as a Hispanic woman in her late thirties stepped into the conference room. She looked ordinary: nice eyes, a little thick around the middle, black hair with a stylish salon cut, Levi’s over a broad, alluring bottom and a very generous bosom. Very generous. Anna Pigeon seemed to find her extraordinary. She looked startled when the name Lisa was proffered. Then the set of her mouth changed subtly and she looked pleased or respectful. Darden wasn’t sure which. Maybe both.

“Hi, baby,” Martinez said, and stood to give his wife his chair.

She didn’t sit but walked around to the “Them” end of the table. “Is this the famous river baby?” she asked Anna.

“That’s it,” Bernard said. “Thanks again, Lisa. You can take it into my office if you’d be more comfortable there.”

Lisa ignored him, waiting for Anna to answer her question. “Yes,” the ranger said. She didn’t offer up the child and there was a fierceness in her manner that Darden didn’t understand unless the baby was her grandchild and her daughter was one of the victims of the “shots fired” reports circulating up at Chisos Lodge.

“Do you have a name for her?” Lisa asked, as if she and Anna and the baby were alone in the room.

“Helena,” Anna Pigeon said, and she finally held out her arms so Lisa could take the baby.

“Helena and I are going to dinner,” Lisa said, smiling down at the woman with the empty arms. “Then I’ll bring her back to you.”

“Lisa, we haven’t decided—” the chief ranger began.

Lisa Martinez shook her head fractionally and he stopped mid-sentence. She smiled again at Anna and took the infant from the room. Before they had all settled back into their chairs there was a gabble of noise from the hallway and the door was opened again by Darlene, who did not look pleased.

“Mayor Pierson,” she said flatly.

Smiling, Judith managed to slip by the secretary and still appear to have been ushered in.

Darlene wasn’t the only one displeased. This was a bad idea and one Judith had not shared with Darden.

He half rose, hoping that she had come down the mountain in the shank of the evening merely to give her good old Darden a ride back to his cabin. No such luck. She settled into a chair on the Us end of the table with the aplomb of one for whom the meeting has been called and nodded graciously at Bernard Davies, granting him permission to resume his job.

Darden suppressed a groan. Had he not been feeling so sorry for himself, he would have felt sorry for the chief ranger. Bernard cleared his throat, probably trying to think of a way to throw her out, get his conference room back, and he might have done it, too, had Judith not preempted the decision.

Leaning in a bit, not flirty but conveying sincerity, she looked Davies in the eyes and said: “I sure appreciate what you’re doing.” Without saying so she made it sound like he’d invited her, that this was her party.

Darden eyed her narrowly. Her linen trousers were still unwrinkled and her silk blouse had not wilted. The short blond bob was neatly in place and her makeup perfect, but she had a feverishness in her eyes. Drugs would have been the first thing that popped into Darden’s mind, but Judith didn’t do drugs. As far as he knew, she didn’t. After the wink from Kevin, he was beginning to think he didn’t know as much about Judith as he’d believed.

Sex was his second thought, but if it was a roll in the hay with Kevin or anybody else, it had not left her languorous or satisfied. Judith was avid, greedy, not so the general public would notice, but Darden could see it. He thought she was afraid, as well, and anything that frightened Judith was bound to terrify him.

I
know you’ve gone through this all before for Jessie and I know you’re tired so I’ll try not to make this any longer than I have to.” The chief ranger was talking, Bernard Davies. Anna knew him vaguely from a forty-hour refresher they’d attended in Apostle Islands some years before. He’d been a district ranger at Great Sand Dunes, if she remembered correctly. She tried to concentrate on what he was saying but she found herself watching the door through which Lisa had gone with Helena. Anna had been dead wrong about Freddy Martinez’s wife. She wasn’t number two or three; she was his first love and mother of two children, a nineteen-year-old son and Edgar. Edgar had been, as Martinez had put it on the ride out from the canyon, “a pleasant surprise.”

Lisa had volunteered to serve as temporary wet nurse for Helena. For this Anna loved her, but she suspected she would have liked her even if she hadn’t proved useful. The baby was a curious thing, Anna thought. She left an empty place in Anna’s lap when she was taken to dinner with the generous Lisa Martinez, rather like when a cat jumped off her lap. The fleeting moment of acceptance and comfort was gone, replaced by a sense of freedom to move. Realizing she was holding her arms in an awkward bowl ready to accept baby or kitten, Anna relaxed them and let them lay in her lap. They were heavy, so much so she wondered if she would be able to lift them again when the time came.

“Mrs. Davidson?”

Lost in her thoughts, Anna hadn’t been following the conversation around the conference table. A prolonged silence brought her back from her woolgathering expedition. All eyes were upon her.

“Mrs. Davidson?” Bernard Davies said again.

That was her. Anna was Mrs. Davidson. “Yeah. Right,” she said, shaking her head to clear it. “Sorry. Tireder than I thought, I guess.” Did Bernard recognize her from the Apostle Islands class? For reasons she could not put her finger on, she believed he did. The “Mrs. Davidson,” once a title of respect, had become one of dismissal in certain circles. Ranger Pigeon, or Ms. Pigeon, or simply Anna, would have put them on a more equal footing. The chief ranger was putting distance between himself and her, she could feel it as clearly as if he’d straight-armed her, but she hadn’t a clue why he would act that way.