Hard Truth- Pigeon 13 (4 page)

And it was a testament to their peculiar attachment to her that they'd leaped up and run to her when she'd wheeled into camp. By the bright yet unilluminating glare of the Coleman lanterns, Heath could still make out the bloody prints their passage left on the crushed gravel.
She cupped the battered heels, one in each of the palms of her hands, and looked into the hopeless darkness of the limpet's eyes. Wind gusted through the trees, making the night sigh around them.
"Hey, sweetie pie, where ya been?" she whispered.
The eyes might have glimmered. Something as tiny as a minnow at the bottom of a deep night-bound pool seemed to flicker. The limpet's lips parted in an exhaled breath.
"What have you got for me?" came an alto voice, firm, authoritative and loud as a sonic boom in the fragile whisper of contact Heath had managed to establish with the child.
A woman, mid-forties or early fifties-under the brim of her flat hat, collar-length hair waved more white than brown-walked into the light. She wore the green and gray of an NFS ranger and carried a gun that was probably standard size but on her slender hips looked huge and black and in-your-face.
Heath was teetering on disliking her for a number of reasons, starting with her untimely arrival and her doing so on two good legs, when the scales tipped suddenly from casual dislike to overt hostility.
Skipper and the limpet began screaming as they'd done when she'd come upon them in the woods. The fragile calm she and Gwen had knit for them shredded. The fragment of light or life Heath had seen in the limpet's eyes dove into her internal darkness.
The ranger raised both hands as if to show she was harmless and backed away, murmuring, "It's okay. Take it easy. Nobody's going to hurt you. You're okay."
The tone and gesture might have struck Heath as commendable in another person at another time, but the girls had ceased their shrieking and began to cry silently, not the snotty gulping children's sobs they'd trenched her neck with, but the slow, unstoppable tears of old women who know nothing but despair.
Heath had great respect for the instinctive character judgement of dogs and children. True, Wiley was wagging his tail, but this time he'd been outvoted.
four
It's okay. You're okay. My name's Anna..." Anna had walked into a lot of situations over the years where people weren't all that happy she'd shown up, but she couldn't remember entire parties bursting into tears at the sight of her. The rangers behind her, EMTs who'd brought the ambu-lance, didn't seem to reassure the children either, though Ryan, a seasonal so cute he actually had an echoing dimple on his left dimple, usually reduced girls of this age to simpering, giggling blobs of hormonal adora-tion without even trying.
The children weren't alone in their antipathy. A disabled woman, fifty-ish and probably fairly good-looking when her face wasn't screwed up preparatory to spitting nails, sat in a wheelchair near the picnic table.
It was impossible to tell how tall she was and, briefly, Anna wondered if the question of height became moot when one was relegated to a chair. Petite probably, she was delicate-boned, her face almost a perfect oval and capped by short, very dark hair in a pixie cut. Cheekbones slashed hard lines below her eyes. Dark brows, straight as a die, ran parallel above them. On a good day her lips might have softened the effect. Tonight they were as uncompromising as brows and bones.
One of the girls had thrown herself into the woman's lap when Anna had come on scene. The kid was too big to be a lap baby and her legs stuck out over the spoked wheels like jersey-clad sticks. Dr. Littleton had run to a tall, skinny child and wrapped an arm protectively about her nar-row shoulders. This girl didn't cling but sat rigid, her hands squeezed tightly between her knees, her chin tucked into her chest. Curtains of filthy; matted blond hair hung over her face like vines over the mouth of a cave.
Doing everything she could think of to make herself small and non-threatening, Anna backed to the edge of the light, squatted on her heels and removed her Stetson. She raised a hand to keep the EMTs back. Nei-ther girl had anything life-threatening that was readily apparent. What was apparent was that they were suffering severe emotional trauma. Anna wasn't in the mood to exacerbate it any more than she already had.
At least the camp dog seemed glad to see her. He was a scruffy excuse for a helpmate, which Anna guessed he was by the vest he wore. A lab-shepherd mix, maybe. One that had been washed with dark colors and tumbled in a too-hot dryer.
"Hey, fella," she said. Wagging his tail amiably, the dog came over.
The woman in the wheelchair shot one of them a filthy look. Anna couldn't tell if it was aimed at her for some unknown reason or at the dog for consorting with her. The pooch sat and presented his ears for scratch-ing. For a minute Anna tended to the animal, waiting for a bit of the ten-sion that had come with her and the two EMTs to drain out of the camp.
The weather gods were not helping. As they did most every afternoon, thunderheads had been building. Often, by nightfall, they'd dissipate. Not tonight. Lightning flickered to the southwest, startling the granite mountain peaks out of their sleep. Thunder rolled around as if audition-ing for the road show of Rip Van Winkle. Anna could smell rain and taste the ozone on the back of her tongue. It was a night when, had she been a cat, she would have raced from room to room leaping at shadows. The atmosphere was charged with a wildness as much metaphysical as meteorological.
When the air felt less electric, without rising or leaving the dog, Anna addressed the older woman.
"Dr. Littleton, can you tell me what happened?"
The doctor rose, stepped into the light and spread her hands as if she were about to give a formal oration. "My niece" - she said - "this is my niece, Heath Jarrod."
"Anna Pigeon, district ranger," Anna introduced herself.
"Heath had gone for a walk - " The word walk clanked against the metallic reality of the wheelchair, and the doctor came to a stop.
"Which path did she take?" Anna asked, to get her over the rough patch.
"Talk to me," the disabled woman demanded. She'd been growing more restive by the moment. Something had just reached critical mass. Anna could hear the ominous quiet of nuclear fusion clicking behind her teeth.
"What path did you take?" Anna repeated neutrally. It was too late. Ms. Jarrod had apparently reached a psychic point of no return. Despite the fact she had, nominally at least, gotten what she wanted, she pushed on.
"People think a chair makes a person stupid or invisible or deaf. I can hear you. This is a wheelchair, not a fucking cone of silence."
Anna laughed before she could stop herself.
A laugh might not have endeared her to the woman, but it served to startle her out of her fit of pique.
"So you went up the path. Which one?" Anna asked.
Question by question she got what she could of the story. It was short and simple. Ms. Jarrod wasn't inclined to be particularly helpful. The telling of the accident on the path and the discovery of the girls in their underwear was shortened to the point of haiku: "My chair, it tipped. Fell. The girls were there in the woods. Aunt Gwen fixed their feet."
The law enforcement officer in Anna was annoyed that any part of the girls that might contain trace evidence had been tampered with. The halfway decent human part of her was glad the children had been pro-vided with some relief.
During this staccato exchange the girls grew, not calmer precisely, but less demonstrative. Anna decided to see if they could be induced to trust themselves to her, the EMTs, the ambulance: the System. She stood, her knees cracking in protest. "Girls, Dr. Littleton, Ms. Jarrod: What do you say we take a look at you, then get you a warm safe place and call your folks?"
The children shared a look, something hard and sharp. The tears con-tinued. Anna turned from the light to one of the EMTs, Emily some-thing, a seasonal who Anna had reason to know was twentv-six because, wondering what an apparent fifteen-year-old was doing hanging around the backcountry office's computers, she'd asked. To Emily, she said, "It's them, isn't it?"
"It's them." Emily looked to Ryan, who nodded.
"It is," he confirmed. "We saw pictures. God, did we see pictures."
"Get me their names. Notify dispatch and Chief Knight. She'll want to call their folks. Tell dispatch we're going to need a child psychologist to meet us at the hospital. Tell them we'll roll as soon as we can get the kids into the ambulance."
Anna started to turn back to the sad little party around the picnic table but was stopped by Ryan's voice:
"There were three of them."
Three. Normally, even working in a park a thousand miles away, she would have known this. But there'd been the wedding. And the decision. And the move-slings and arrows she'd thought so earth-shaking. Now they seemed petty beyond belief.
"Three."
In their earnestness the rangers nodded like bobble-heads.
"I need to know who we've got and who is still missing. Now," she added when neither of them moved.
"The little red-haired girl with the disabled woman is Beth Dwayne. She's twelve. Her folks-all the girls-live near Loveland, an hour or so east of here," Emily said.
Anna knew where Loveland, Colorado, was. She'd driven through it on her move to the park rather than take the more traveled route from Denver through Boulder and into Estes Park.
"The other one is older, thirteen. Her name is Alexis Sheppard. The one not here is Candace Watson. She's thirteen too."
"You're sure?" Anna asked. Calling the girls by the wrong names could only further any sense they had of being forgotten or unsafe.
Again the nods. Anna took them at their word. She knew from experi-ence that the intensity of a prolonged search for missing children burned the victims' particulars into the brains of the would-be rescuers. Emily and Ryan would probably be able to rattle off this information with accu-racy and in detail long after they'd forgotten their own names or the addresses of their nursing homes.
"Ryan, go on back to the ambulance-or out of earshot-and make the calls. Tell dispatch we're going to need search dogs come morning, see if we can backtrack to where the third girl is. Emily, come with me."
Anna left her hat on the ground. It went against the grain. Her dog, Taco, a three-legged but brave-hearted lab, would have made short work of the Stetson-as-chew-toy.
"Don't even think about it," she muttered to the helper dog and walked back into the light. The blonde, Alexis Sheppard, looked the stur-dier of the two-if one hummingbird in a hurricane can look stronger than another. Besides, she was in the sphere of Dr. Littleton and, like the dog, the doctor seemed less likely to bite than the chair-bound Ms. Jarrod.
Anna crossed slowly to the picnic table and eased herself onto the far end of the bench opposite the girl and the doctor. All the while she talked softly, a lesson learned not from victim assistance training but from working with horses in Guadalupe Mountains National Park early in her career. If she made noise or touched them when she walked behind them, they were less likely to startle and kick her.
"Hi, Alexis," she said. The girl flinched as if Anna had flicked her with a quirt rather than used a familiar form of address. "We're so glad you and Beth are back. Everybody looked and looked. Hundreds of people. You can't imagine how much your folks love you." Anna hoped this was true. Having not participated in the search, she was flying blind, but the details didn't matter. What mattered was that children hear right away and repeatedly that they might have been lost but they'd never been forgot-ten, that their parents never quit hoping and looking. Even adults, lost for long periods of time, had trouble with feelings of abandonment. In chil-dren of twelve and thirteen-too young for adult rationale, too old for childish faith-these feelings could be cripplingly acute.
Half turning to include Beth in the conversation, Anna noticed the lit-tler girl had started sucking her thumb. "Ryan-he's one of the rangers who came to help us take you to your families-has gone to call them so they can meet us at the hospital. This here is Emily. She's a ranger too. If you'll let her, she'd like to check real quick and see if you're hurt, then we'll get you out of here. How does that sound?"
Anna thought she'd made the whole thing sound pretty doggone spiffy, but both girls hung their heads. Literally let them hang from the very top vertebrae till their noses pointed at their navels. The tears fell unimpeded onto the fronts of the borrowed running suits. The Jarrod woman held the one girl in her arms like a bundle of laundry. She must be a good deal stronger than she looked, Anna thought. The kid would weigh close to eighty pounds.
Dark thoughts crowded in. These kids didn't seem thrilled to be back, just relieved to be gone from where they'd been. They didn't cry for momma and daddy. The promise of home didn't bring on renewed energy or hope but an increase in anxiety.
Maybe they hadn't been lost. This kettle of worms had been thoroughly looked into long before Anna came to Rocky. The possibilities were runaways, stranger abduction, accidental death or abduction by a family member. The lack of enthusiasm Beth and Alexis showed when the words "parents" and "home" were bandied about suggested either runaways or possible abduction by a family member.
Anna let it go for the moment. The first order of business was to get them to a medical facility. Moving emotionally damaged children was not something she'd done much. Did one drag them shrieking to the ambu-lance and lock them in? Force them into the cage in the patrol car at gun-point? They needed psychiatric care. They needed nurses, mommies, the kind of succor she couldn't even begin to offer.
They needed to be moved the hell out of her park.
"Have they spoken at all?" she asked Dr. Littleton.
"One of them said something to Heath, I think. When she found them. Before I got there."
Anna turned to Heath Jarrod.
"The little limpet-Beth-said 'It's a dog.' She meant Wiley. Not me."
"Anything else?"
The woman's face lost its angry look as she sent her mind back twenty minutes and two thousand heartbeats. Anna was startled at the differ-ence it made. She'd put her age at about that of her own, but Jarrod was probably ten years younger. Very pretty in an Edith Piaf, Gigi, apache dancer sort of way: fine and exotic. And volatile. High maintenance, Anna thought.
"Beth said 'Humpty Dumpty.' Me. Not the dog. Because I'd taken a great fall I suppose. Ski-Alexis-said she thought I was a bear. I don't think they've spoken since." To the child in her lap she said, "You don't have to talk till you want to."