Ill Wind (16 page)

SHE poured wine into her mouth and a bit on her chin. “Quick,” she said as she closed her eyes and rested her head on the Rambler’s seat. “Red or white?” Could’ve been either. “Some palate.” She pushed open the car door. For a moment it was impossible to make any headway. Then she remembered to undo her seatbelt and tumbled out.

 

 

MOLLY picked up on the seventh ring. “What? What is it?” she demanded.

“It’s just me.” Anna was mildly offended.

“Where are you? What’s going on? Talk to me.” Molly rattled out the words.

“Can’t,” Anna replied. “Can’t get a word in edgewise. Just called to chat.”

There was a long silence devoid, for once, of the poisonous note of tobacco smoke sliding into dying lungs. Then Molly spoke very deliberately. “I don’t know what time zone you’re in, but here in the civilized world it’s three twenty-seven in the morning. If you’re okay, you’d better lie to me. Tell me something dire enough to warrant this rude awakening.”

Three twenty-seven. Anna pushed the tiny silver button on her watch and squinted at the lighted dial. It was hopeless. The numbers were small and furry. “That can’t be right,” she said.

“Trust me on this one.” A sigh: the cigarette. “Begin at the beginning, Anna. Before your first drink.”

Anna started to cry, great whooping sobs that hurt her throat. Tears poured down her face, dripped from her jaw. “Zach’s dead,” she barked when she was able. Her sister said nothing, choosing not to try and override the storm of grief.

When finally she quieted, Molly said, “That’s right, Zach’s dead. Been dead a long time. Kids born the day he died are old enough to rob liquor stores. What’s going on, Anna?”

“Zach?” Anna was confused.

“You said Zach was dead.”

Anna digested that for a moment, taking a little wine and letting it burn under her tongue. “No I didn’t,” she said at last. “Stacy’s dead. Stacy Meyers.”

“Who is Stacy Meyers?”

“Goddamn it, listen to me!” Anna screamed.

“You’re drunk, Anna,” her sister said reasonably. “I love you—Lord knows why—and I want to help you. But you’re beyond me. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

The line went dead. Anna laid her head on the desk and wept.

CONSCIOUSNESS DAWNED LIKE A FOGGY DAY. ANNA opened her eyes. She was facedown on a rough brown surface, her cheek wet from drool, and she was terribly cold. Thin gray light filtered from somewhere. Through the static in her head she could hear the fussy chatter of scrub jays.

Without moving, as though to do so might prove dangerous, she took stock of the situation. She was lying on the front seat of the Rambler, her clothes rumpled and damp. Pins and needles prickled through her right arm and leg where they were pinned under her. Graying hair, clumped and sticky-looking on the vinyl, fell around her face.

Slowly she raised her head. Her first instinct had been right: to move was dangerous. Even her eyeballs ached. Her mouth was so dry her tongue rattled between her teeth like the clapper in a bell.

She pushed herself to a sitting position. The sun was not yet up. The Rambler was still parked in front of the Resource Management Office. The car and her hair reeked of stale wine. Anna checked her wristwatch: five thirty-five.

She shoved her stinking locks back with both hands. “What the fuck happened to me?”

The keys were in the ignition. She slid over behind the wheel and tried the starter. There wasn’t even a whimper of life. When she’d stumbled out the night before, she had left the ignition on as well as the radio and the lights. “Lucky for me and God knows who else.” Her head dropped back against the seat and she grunted with the ache of it.

The last thing she remembered was dialing Molly’s number in New York. She wondered what she had said.

Tires humming on the pavement brought her back into the present. Soon the park would begin to stir, archaeologists on their way to the lab, the tree kids toting chain saws into the woods to remove hazardous fuels, helitack jogging by on physical training, maintenance men, trail crew, tourists.

Panic tore the fog of alcohol clouding her mind. This was no way to greet the public. Balancing her head carefully on her shoulders, she retraced her steps to the Resource Management Office. The door was unlocked and open. Inside, on one of the desks, was a bottle with half an inch of red wine in the bottom. Mercifully it was upright and the resource management specialist’s nest of papers unbesmirched by her night’s debauchery. The bookcase had not fared so well. It was overturned and the books hurled around the room. Memory, like a snapshot, flashed in Anna’s mind: her hands pulling the shelves toward her, books and periodicals cascading down over her feet.

Why she had done it, what she’d been looking for or trying to prove, remained a mystery.

She dropped to her knees, righted the bookcase, then crawled after its contents and restored them in what she hoped was relative order. Having finger-combed her matted hair and braided it off her face, she tied it with a piece of pink plastic surveyor’s tape she’d found in the office.

Putting on the best face—and the best lie on it—she could, she walked the mile through the woods to the helitack dorm. Paul Summers drove her back in the fire truck and jump-started the Rambler.

Driving back to Far View, Anna felt weak-kneed and queasy. A strong sense of God not being in Her heaven and all’s wrong with the world pervaded every cell of her body. Not only the hangover shook her, but the hours in blackout. A chunk of time she’d been active, talking, walking, evidently hurling research manuals, was utterly alien to her. A black hole she’d fallen into and, but for a dead battery, might never have crawled out of.

A hot shower steamed the booze from her pores and rinsed it from her hair but not even hot coffee could burn the fumes from her brain. As she pulled on her uniform, she hoped no great feats of kindness, courage, or intellect would be required of her for a few days. She longed to call Molly, but embarrassment combined with the need to sort things out on her own stayed her hand.

Purposely avoiding the Museum Loop, the chief ranger’s office, and most of the visitors, Anna patrolled the traditionally uneventful four and a half miles from Far View Lodge to Park Point, the highest place in the park at 8,571 feet. The twisting road to the mesa cut through the flanks of mountains in two places, Bravo Cut and Delta Cut. Rocks falling from the unstable hillsides littered the roadway and were a constant headache. After rains the rocks were numerous and sizable enough to present a hazard to motorists. Delta Cut, the higher of the two, presented a slashed hillside to the town of Cortez far below. Held in by a metal railing, the road ran along a ragged drop edged with thickets of oakbrush. Today Anna found nothing but pebbles, none even as big as a woman’s fist. Still she parked the car and meticulously began kicking each little rock off the asphalt.

It felt good to be quiet and alone and in the sunlight.

Bit by bit her mind cleared and she thought of Stacy Meyers. Not of Stacy Meyers the man, with his intellectual charm and heartfelt commitment to the land—that would have led her back to those lost hours in the Resource Management building. Anna thought of the “Meyers Incident,” reducing it to a puzzle, a mystery that, unlike mysteries of the heart, might prove solvable.

On the grounds of woman’s intuition she’d been quick to discount suicide but it was a real possibility and one that would have to be explored. Stephanie McFarland came to mind and Anna remembered Stacy’s anguish at panicking. Could he have decided he no longer deserved to live? To a sane mind, it seemed excessive, but Anna knew from experience depression could breathe an insane logic into the most bizarre courses of action.

Anna knew very little of Stacy’s inner life, or, as Molly would say, his real life. It was clear that he had financial problems. Short of a generous trust fund, any temporary GS-5 with grown-up responsibilities would have money problems. Stacy’s were exacerbated by Bella’s needs and Rose’s wants.

Would he fake his own murder to provide for them? Anna took out the yellow notebook she carried in her hip pocket and wrote “Life Insurance?” on the first clean page. She had worked a couple of suicide investigations in the past and dreaded them. In many ways they were more destructive to those left living than homicide. Always, with unnatural death, came anger. Homicides had a healthy target, a suitable bad guy, a foe worthy of hatred. Suicide carried the same furious baggage but it fed on the bearer. As widowhood was said to be easier than divorce, so murder was easier than suicide. At least no one chose to leave.

The other possibilities were accident, natural causes, murder, and, if Jamie had her way, vengeful intervention of spirits. Hills was overwhelmingly in favor of the first idea but even he, faced with the neatly placed hat and doffed shoes, had to admit that: “If it was an accident it sure was a lulu.”

Anna harbored a secret preference for the Revenge of the Anasazi. Paranormal foul play would be a nice diversion from man’s daily inhumanity to man.

Foul Play: Anna smiled at the phrase and flicked a stone off the roadway with the side of her foot. It sounded so English, so Old School, implying subtle distaste for something not quite cricket, not entirely sporting. Homicide had an American feel, a businesslike violence-as-usual ring to it. Anna preferred Foul Play. She said it once aloud. In the gentle silence of a summer’s day spoken words grated and she didn’t try it again.

The sun was warm on her back, and a breeze, blowing across from the snow-covered peaks of the Abajos a hundred miles away in Utah, smelled gloriously of nothing. Up high there was only air in the air and Anna took a moment to fill her lungs to capacity.

If one must think of murder, this was the kind of day to do it: a pure day, one without guile.

Murder, then; the motives were usually predictable. Somebody got mad, got greedy, or got even. The pathologically neat arrangement of the scene seemed to rule out a crime of passion. Those killed in the sudden heat were customarily found sprawled and bloody in bedrooms, bar-rooms, on kitchen floors, and in parking lots.

Getting even seemed a possibility. By leaving the corpse in such an odd place perhaps the avenger had hoped to pay back not only the dead but, in some way, the living—the widow, a friend, or even the National Park Service. Again Anna pulled out the notebook. “Enemies?” went under “Life Insurance.”

Greed was Anna’s favorite. Greed seemed to motivate a goodly number of human behaviors, murder among them. But, if greed were the motivating factor, the grandstand play of laying the corpse in the fire ring of a kiva struck her as out of place.

Why wouldn’t the body be buried, hidden, disposed of somehow? Only the very naive would think Stacy’s remains would go undiscovered in Cliff Palace. Even if the archaeologists or the stabilization crew didn’t stumble across it, eventually the odor or the vultures would have given the location away.

Stacy was meant to be found. To prove something? To frighten someone? To stop the search before too many noses were poked into too many places? Beneath “Enemies” Anna scribbled “Where Else Should We Have Looked?” and “Greed/Rose” with an arrow drawn back up to “Life Insurance.”

She’d run out of stones. The stretch of road through the cut was clean. Disappointed to have completed so pleasantly mindless a task, she began to walk back along the highway to where she’d left her patrol car.

A gold Honda Accord was stopped fifty yards or so from her vehicle. The hood was up in the international symbol for motorist in distress. Anna perked up, walked a little faster. Citizen assists were good clean ranger work, the equivalent of firemen rescuing kittens from trees.

A generous behind covered in rich plum fabric was swaying rhythmically to the left of the front fender. Anna approached the far side of the vehicle and looked under the hood. An exceedingly round woman with a froth of chestnut curls shot with gray and held off her face by a yellow plastic banana was chanting “drat, drat, drat” and shaking small dimpled fists at an unresponsive engine. Her face was as round as the rest of her and showed no signs of age. Earrings of green-and-yellow parrots dangled to her shoulders, the birds looking at home against the print of a Hawaiian shirt.

“Trouble?” Anna said by way of greeting.

The woman looked up, bright blue eyes sharp-focused behind glasses nearly half and inch thick. “Oh, hello. Do you know anything about these horrid things?”

Her voice was high and had a singsong quality about it that was exquisitely comforting. Anna, who usually disliked voices in the upper registers, placed it instantly. In her mind she heard Billie Burke in
The Wizard of Oz
asking Dorothy, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” The resemblance didn’t end there. This woman was big, two hundred pounds or so, but seemingly as light and translucent as the bubble in which the Good Witch of the North traveled.

She shook her fists again and Anna half expected her to float with the effort.

“I only know about six things to poke,” Anna apologized. “If that doesn’t work, I call a tow truck.”

“Ooooh.” The woman sounded wickedly delighted. “Let’s poke.”

Anna laughed and took a hard look at her companion. The familiarity wasn’t born just of fairy tales. “You’re Aunt Hattie!” she declared. Bella hadn’t described her aunt in physical terms but she had painted such a clear picture of her spirit, Anna was certain. Hattie bore a slight resemblance to her sister, Rose, but her features were more refined and looked to have been sculpted by laughter where Rose’s were etched by discontent. Rose carried less weight, but she seemed cursed by gravity. The pounds dragged her down. Hattie was buoyant, uplifting.

While Bella’s aunt tried the starter, Anna pushed butterfly valves and rattled air filters. Finally, noting a depressing lack of fuel squirting into the carburetor, she gave it up as a lost cause and radioed Dispatch to call a tow truck from Cortez.