In the not-too-distant past Anna had had bad experiences in the woods at night. "Little Red Riding Hood syndrome," she muttered as she literally and figuratively tried to shake off the willies. She smiled at the image. This time there were real live wolves in the woods, four of them. 'And you're not to pet them," she reminded herself.
Using the Mag-Lite more than she wanted to, she arrived at the ring of boulders holding the nascent wolf pack. Here the slope she'd been follow-ing leveled out down toward the shores of Loomis Lake. Within a hun-dred yards and one hundred eighty degrees was her prisoner. With neither light nor trail, Anna couldn't be sure of the exact route the two of them had been following when Rita staged her sit-in. Leaning against a chunk of granite, Anna waited and listened. The alarm that had been jangling her nerves all the way down the mountainside warned her not to walk blindly back into the woods in search of that one particular tree to which she'd manacled Ms. Perry.
"That you, Anna?"
Apparently Anna wasn't the only one keeping an ear out for nonnative species. Anna didn't reply.
"If it's you, I've got to pee."
Listen as she might, Anna could hear no subterfuge in Rita's announcement.
"It's me," she called back. "I got turned around in the dark. Keep talk-ing so I can find you." Anna had placed Rita when first she'd spoken. She wanted Rita's chatter to cover the sounds of her passage as she circled to come upon the prison tree from what she hoped would be an unsus-pected direction. The sense of impending danger had entered into her body on a cellular level. Her nerves were stretched till each rustle of needles or breath of air brought forth an answering reverberation within
her. It wasn't Rita Anna was afraid of exactly, but she was most definitely afraid.
While Rita sang "Frere Jacques" in a rich alto voice, Anna slipped around to the lake side of the tree, then closed in on her singing captive. Eyes adjusted to the dark as much as they could, lacking the cones and rods of a cat's eyes, she could just make out Rita's shape melding into that of the pine's trunk. Moving as little as possible and not using her light at all, Anna assured herself there was no accomplice lurking nearby. Nothing. Nothing she could see, hear or smell at any rate. The feeling of something sick and mean lurking nearby didn't abate one jot.
Rita's singing broke off.
"Where the heck are you?" she shouted. "A woman's bladder can only take so much."
"Here," Anna said and Rita squawked satisfyingly. It was good not to be the only one scared.
"You're a creepy, sneaky little thing," Rita said.
"Thank you."
Anna uncuffed Rita from the tree, then drew her service weapon and held it and the Mag-Lite on the young woman while she relieved her-self. Keeping Rita Perry at gunpoint till she'd buttoned her trousers and recuffed herself didn't make Anna feel any safer. It made her feel foolish Rita's vocal disdain for these precautions didn't help matters.
Calls of nature answered, Anna reholstered the 9 mm and they sat again beneath the pine to which Rita had been so recently cuffed. The rain had stopped or, as was more likely with the storm cells that built even afternoon in the mountains, moved on. The sweat Anna had worked up during her dash up the ridge cooled, leaving her damp and chilled.
"What now?" Rita asked. "The cavalry coming to help you bring in your dangerous fugitive?"
"Something like that."
Rita was also in a foul mood and for a long time neither spoke. Anna dug through her pack and shared her granola bar with Rita. The pack she tossed a couple yards away, out of lunging or footsie distance should Rita take it into her head to try and retrieve her service weapon. Inspired by generosity, or just still hungry, Rita volunteered to split her remaining bologna and cheese sandwich if Anna would retrieve it from her daypack
Having broken bread together as well as taken the edge off their hunger, they began to feel more kindly toward one another.
"Tell me about your wolf project," Anna said, both because she was interested and to pass the time. There would be no sleep tonight, at least not for her.
Rita liked talking about the pups and told Anna how, once the little family had fallen into her hands, she had researched reintroduction tech-niques that had been used successfully in other parks, put together a pen and a plan, then smuggled the pups in. It would be a couple months before they would be ready to release but Rita hoped by then they'd be old enough and strong enough to make it through the winter.
Anna did, too, but she didn't say as much. These pups would be put in a zoo, destroyed or introduced into another wolf program by the time the first snows fell in Rocky. The thought saddened her. Reports filtered in occasionally of grizzlies, sharks and, increasingly, mountain lions attack-ing humans as their territory and food sources were reduced by encroach-ing development. To keep herself out of hot water, Anna pretended to be on the side of the people attacked. She did feel sympathy of a sort for the fear and pain they endured. When they were killed, she managed genuine compassion for the friends and relatives who mourned them.
Inside though, down deep, she was really pleased the critters got lunch. She always hoped-usually in vain-that the beasts would get away with it, not be hunted down and killed like... like animals.
Personally, she relished hiking and camping where there were predators greater than herself. It kept her on her toes, alive and alert. In Glacier/ Waterton National Peace Park, where the great grizzly bears were a real threat, Anna had found the blessings of being alive-breathing, seeing in color, the taste of glacier milk and the smell of burnt earth and new grass-to be more piquant than anywhere else she'd been.
"How did Robert Proffit figure in?" Anna asked.
For a long time Rita didn't respond. The storm cells had spent them-selves. A quarter moon rose above the mountain to the east, rendering the darkness beneath the trees incomplete. The faint silvery light caught rain drops on the needles, creating a pale nimbus that allowed Anna to distinguish the pines from sky and Rita from the pines. Weak as this illumination was, it raised Anna's spirits. Time lost in Lechuguilla Cavern and a bloody black night in the high country of Yosemite had engendered in her a fear of the dark, the real dark, the kind that settled into the pores and clogged the lungs.
At length Rita raised her head. Light caught on her strong chin and the flat high planes of cheekbones, hard beneath the skin. "You've got Robert all wrong," she said. "He's a good man. He loves the Lord. And he loves those kids. When they went missing, he was crazy with worry and eaten up by guilt. He thought if he'd not gone looking for them, not got-ten lost, gone straight to Ray to report it, they might have been found. I thought Robert might do something awful. Might kill himself even. He almost did, in a way. He worked himself harder than anybody on the search: hiking sixteen, eighteen hours a day, going without sleep, forget-ting to eat. He looked like a scarecrow-a zombie. Even after the park had given up, he kept on. The people at New Canaan tried to stop him. They'd more or less decided the loss of the girls was God's will. Robert never bought it. I think he came to think it was a judgement against him. A test of some kind."
"That sounds egocentric to me. Thinking it was all about him," Anna commented.
"It wasn't like that," Rita said. "He wasn't thinking of himself. Not the way you mean it. Robert didn't think God's will was focused on Robert Proffit and everybody else was just pawns in a cosmic game. It was more the God within him, his own faith. When the girls went missing he felt himself losing it. Every day we'd all come back tired and depressed and nothing to show for it. I could tell he felt that God turned away from him. Or that he was turning away from God. After a while he no longer believed that God would look after his lost lambs. He quit the prayer vigils the New Canaanites held and spent all of his time searching, thinking God was gone and there was only him left in a godless world to find Beth and Alexis and Candace. He found my wolves. He was the only one who did. There wasn't anyplace up here he didn't cover more than once. We got to know each other then. He started helping me out when I couldn't
get up to take care of the little guys. He'd've been up here searching any-way. I think when Beth and Alexis came back he got his soul back. Most of it anyway."
"Never gave up? Candace doesn't count? According to you, he knocked me over a cliff, fed the puppies, left you a note and split."
"I don't know why he left," Rita said simply. "I only know he had a good-and honorable reason. You can't understand a man like him."
Anna wasn't sure whether she understood or not, she was only sure that she wanted to. Keeping Rita talking, keeping her stirred up and on the defensive, was a way she might achieve that. This was the one plan that might actually be helped by isolation, discomfort and darkness. That in itself made it worth trying.
"Oh, I understand perfectly," Anna said. "Proffit puts himself in a position where he is in the company of, and has control over, young girls. Circumstances call away the chaperone. He sees his chance and takes it. Two of the girls run away, traumatized by his advances. The third isn't so lucky. He kills her to shut her up, then works his tail off trying to find the two witnesses before they're found by anyone else. He fails. The girls turn up too freaked out to talk. He starts trying to get next to them to kill them, keep them quiet, whatever."
Anna spun the theory to provoke Rita, but having put it together, found she rather liked it.
"It wasn't like that," Rita snapped.
"Sure it was. You just don't want to admit he grabbed onto you using God as his handle so he could keep an eye and ear on how the search was progressing. Not to mention a connection to get him in good with the Park Service so he could base himself out of the cabin at Fern Lake. You can't stand the thought that you've been used."
"That's not true," Rita spat. "Robert loves me."
The trite phrase and the vehemence with which Rita uttered it took Anna aback. Admittedly she'd been fishing in dark waters with improvised bait, still her catch surprised her. Usually with a man and a woman and a secret, sex or love would have been the first thing that came to mind. Part of this oversight was because of the disparity in their ages. Robert was twenty-two, Rita eight or nine years older. The one time she'd seen them together there'd been hugging and praying but the heat had seemed more for their adventure and their God than one another. Other vibes coming off them had struck her as platonic. The reddest of herrings, however, had been Rita's night of passionate disporting with Raymond Bleeker.
Annoyed at herself for being fooled by a woman who used piety to cover both promiscuity and dishonesty, Anna said with more of a sneer than was necessary to keep the pot boiling, "What does good old Rav think of all this?"
Dead silence met her query. Anna was attuned to the language of silence. Lack of noise had many notes: hostile, uneasy, comfortable, dead. Till now, she'd believed the sense of a silence was transmitted by the eye. Not so. The darkness, though not perfect, was sufficient to hide the nuances of facial expressions and still she knew. Apparently silences had a tone, a timbre that didn't require sight. This one played the dull blank symphony of confusion.
So rapidly was her brain working, she scarcely heard Rita when she put voice to her silent music: "Why would Ray think anything about it?"
Pictures were held up in Anna's brain like flashcards in the hands of a manic tutor: Ray in funny reading glasses, Ray with an odd pink-flowered handkerchief. Ray with punk-dark hair. Ray disappearing to fetch some-thing to show her, something he seemed pleased not to have found.
"You and Ray didn't have sex half the night when you and I stayed at Fern?" Anna interrupted her own thoughts.
"No. Ish. No. I came to bed right after you. I told you that."
"I woke up in the middle of the night. Thumping. Grunting. Voices from the storage room. I shined my light. You weren't in the bunk. Where were you?" Anna didn't succeed in keeping the pleading out of her voice. She wanted Rita to be lying.
"I was on the top bunk. The bottom one on that side is too sprung. Ask anybody."
More flash cards. Beth in her old replacement glasses. The under-weight girl on the rock at Odessa, a girl with punk-dark hair inexpertly cut, a girl who verified Bleeker's alibi in such a timely fashion.
Anna pressed the tiny button on her watch and the face lit up. Over an hour had passed since she'd radioed Fern Lake.
"Give me your hands," she demanded of Rita. Working by feel she unlocked the cuffs.
"What-" Rita began.
Anna cut her off. "We've got to get the hell out of here."
Twenty-five
The door to the kitchen banged open with such force that when it struck the wall, the hallway reverberated. Lights had been turned on in the kitchen, throwing Mr. Sheppard into stark silhouette. He looked huge, black and menacing. Heath remembered him as a stocky man but of no more than middling height, five-nine tops.
