Ill Wind (5 page)

Jennifer shuffled past in the hall. Her eyes were puffy and her cheeks dragged down. “ ’Morning,” Anna said.

“Unhh.”

As Anna lifted the coffeepot down from her kitchen cupboard she heard the thump of a wished-she-were-dead weight falling back into bed.

 

 

“THREE-one-two in service.” Anna made the call around her second cup of coffee. Once the initial insult of regaining consciousness was over, she enjoyed early shifts. Since neither the cliff dwellings nor the museum opened for visitors until nine, the park was quiet.

In the clear morning air a comforting illusion of isolation crept over Anna. Law enforcement at Mesa Verde taxed her energies in a way the hard physical work in the backcountry never had. People’s needs were immediate and complex, their wants changing with the hour. Anna suspected mankind descended not from the ape but from the mosquito. In swarms they could bleed one dry.

With morning’s peace came the animals: those just coming on diurnal duty, those going off nocturnal shift, and the crepuscular crew with a split shift framing the day. Two does and a fawn still in spots grazed between the white-flowering serviceberry bushes; from a fallen log an Abert squirrel showed off its perfect bushy tail.

At Far View Lodge, a black bear lumbered down from the direction of the cafeteria, where it had undoubtedly been raiding garbage cans. Anna hit her siren and the bear bolted across the two-lane road into the underbrush below the Visitors’ Center.

This year several “problem” bears had been knocking over trash cans. The bureaucratic machinery was beginning to grind at its usual snail’s pace, but Anna doubted a solution would be found, agreed upon, funded, and implemented before these particular bears died of old age. Or were shot in the name of visitor protection.

She gave one more blast on the siren for good measure, then headed down toward Chapin Mesa, opening gates to ruins that Stacy Meyers had closed seven hours before. Coyote Village was first. Just a mile south of Far View, it was one of the highest pueblos on Mesa Verde, and Anna’s favorite. Though it lacked the drama of the cliff dwellings with their aeries and towers, she loved the maze of intimate rooms and the patterns the ruined walls made against the dun of the earth. Perhaps since it was less alien she could better identify with the people who had once dwelt there, and so wonder at what prosaic magic had caused them to vanish.

Archaeologists hated the word “vanished,” with its implication they’d not done their homework. Visitors loved it. In it was carried the mystery they felt walking through the ancient towns, peering in windows dark for seven centuries.

Theories of where the Anasazi had gone proliferated: war, draught, famine, loss of topsoil, overpopulation. No one concept carried the burden of proof. Theories changed with the political weather.

More than once it crossed Anna’s mind that the best thing about the Anasazi was that they were gone. Their ruined homes forged chalices into which a jaded modern people could pour their fantasies. Never in dreams were there noisy neighbors in the dwelling next door, the reek of raw sewage, chilblains, or rotting teeth. In memory, especially one so magnificently vague as the lives of the Old Ones, the sun always shone and children didn’t talk back.

In a tiny room, not more than five feet square, a cottontail nibbled at grasses prying up through the smooth flooring. Not wishing to disturb the new resident, Anna left quietly.

At Cedar Tree Tower Ruin Anna stopped to watch the sun clear the treetops and pour its liquid gold into the centuries-old kivas. These circular underground rooms, roofless now, were centers for worship or clan gatherings or places of work: the interpretation changed over the years as fads came and went and the science of archaeology grew more exact—or thought it had.

For Anna it was the symmetry and sophisticated simplicity of function that spoke to her of the Old Ones. Air shafts to ventilate fire pits, complex masonry, fitted stones handcrafted by a people who had no metal for tools.

In Europe King Arthur was dreaming his round table. Peasants lived in huts, the Black Plague waited just around the century’s turning, and war and starvation were a way of life. Here where Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona would one day meet, a people had farmed, traded, worshiped , and worked in peace and prosperity for six hundred years.

Park interpreters stressed the terrible hardships the Anasazi must have faced, the daily battle to wring a livelihood from an ungiving land. To Anna the kivas, the tunnels, the towers, the plaster and paint and pottery, suggested a people with an eye for beauty and at least enough wealth and leisure to pursue it.

The sum higher and the shadow play over, Anna continued to the last gate on her rounds, the one located at the four-way intersection near the museum. It blocked off the roads leading to the mesa top ruins, Cliff Palace and Balcony House. As she had every Tuesday for the last six weeks, she made a mental note to tell Stacy not to twist the chain into a figure eight before latching the padlock on his late shift. Placing the butt of the lock up as it did made the key easier to insert, but the chain was pulled so tight it took a wrestling match to get the lock arm pulled free of the links.

As she was securing the gate, Meyers called into service. Due to a paucity of vehicles, he would patrol with her.

Stacy and his family lived in a one-bedroom bungalow several houses down from Frieda’s. With his daughter, Bella, it had to be cramped, but he was lucky to get it. A temporary appointment didn’t carry much more in the way of perks than a seasonal.

Anna pulled up in the shade of an apple tree that grew near the wall shoring up an elevated yard. A picnic table sat under the branches. Two plastic milk bottles with the sides cut away lay tipped over near it. Presumably at some point Mrs. Meyers had intended to hang them for bird feeders. The bottles had been in the same place since Anna entered on duty. The lawn was ill kept and, for a home where a child dwelt, surprisingly untrammeled. No one used this yard as a playground.

Anna had seen Bella Meyers only a couple of times. From the waist up she had developed normally. There was no distortion of her facial features or upper body, but her lower limbs were stunted, half the size they should have been. Bella suffered from dwarfism.

Stacy and his wife, Rose, never brought her to any of the endless potlucks Mesa Verde was so fond of. There were two schools of thought in the park about this obvious cloistering. One was that the Meyerses were ashamed of Bella’s deformity. The other was that the child suffered from delicate health.

Though the latter was the more charitable of the two rumors, it struck a deep chord of sympathy in Anna. Stacy wasn’t a permanent employee. He was on what was called a temporary one-to-four-year appointment: no medical, no dental, no retirement. A GS-5’s eighteen thousand-plus a year wouldn’t go far to purchase comforts or specialty needs for a delicate child with a physical disability.

The sound of the screen door banging announced Stacy. A tall, slender man, six-foot-two or -three, he had dark hair and eyes, and a neatly trimmed beard. On his narrow hips the gunbelt looked out of place and the long sensitive fingers clasping his briefcase more suited to a surgeon or pianist than an officer of the law.

Rose Meyers followed him out.

Mrs. Meyers kept to herself. Jamie and Jennifer were convinced she felt government employees were beneath her socially. Anna’d never spoken to the woman. She’d called Stacy at home on business once or twice but always got the phone machine with Rose’s over-sweet message: “Hi! I’m so
glad
you called!”

Mrs. Meyers didn’t look glad this morning. Her face was twisted into a mask of contempt. Short dark hair was molded in sleepy spikes. Rose carried quite a bit of excess weight. The pounds didn’t form voluptuous curves or wide generous expanses as on more fortunate women, but sagged in lumps like sodden cotton batting in a ruined quilt.

“ ’Bye, darling,” Stacy said, and Anna smiled. No one but Cary Grant could call somebody “darling” and not sound stilted. Stacy leaned down to kiss his wife but Rose stiffened as if the kiss had a foul taste. Anna looked away to give Stacy the illusion of privacy.

Moments later he threw his briefcase and hat into the rear seat and slid in beside her.

“ ’Morning,” she said. Stacy didn’t respond. Anna was unoffended. She clicked on the radio for company.

“Where to this morning?” he asked after a while. Wherever his preoccupation had taken him, he was back with her now, the light in his brown eyes lost its inward shadows. His were compelling eyes, as liquid as a doe’s, and framed with long lashes that showed black against clear skin. He put Anna in mind of the young dandies from the turn of the century who’d purposely exposed themselves to tuberculosis to attain the pale burning look lent by a fire within.

“We’re going out to Wetherill Mesa,” she told him. “Patsy’s ex-husband Tom’s been hired on by the pipeline contractor. He’ll be surveying line near mile two. We need to talk with him.”

“Has he been bothering Patsy again?”

“More or less. Sending her candy and notes that sound threatening or suicidal, depending on how you look at it. This time he sent her a bit of something that Patsy thinks was foreskin.”

“Holy moly,” Stacy said, and, “God I hate law enforcement.”

Stacy had chosen law enforcement not as an avocation, but as a way in. With crime pouring out of the cities onto the nation’s highways, more law enforcers than naturalists were hired in the national parks, more citations given than nature walks.

“You’re a born tree hugger,” Anna remarked amiably. “I could do without the domestic stuff. One way or another the ranger always comes out with a sore thumb. Matrimony is a dangerous game to referee.”

“Were you ever married?”

“Widowed.” She could say it now without feeling a hollowness in her chest.

“Lucky.”

Anna laughed. “Troubles at home?”

Realizing what he had said, Stacy apologized. And blushed. Anna had never seen a forty-five-year-old man blush before. It charmed her.

“Not Rose. Rose’s good to me. I just wish I could do more for her. She’s used to better. You should have seen her in high school. God was she beautiful! She didn’t even know I was alive. I was just this pencil-necked geek who played trombone in the marching band. She even modeled for
Glamour
magazine once.”

Anna knew that. Stacy had dropped it into their first conversation. Evidently he dropped it into most conversations about his wife. One evening after she’d sharpened her tongue on Vanna, Jamie had ranted on about it. “
Glamour!
Give me a break! Maybe for the
Glamour
Don’ts! And a quarter of a century and sixty pounds ago.”

Stacy noticed the smile. “She did, you know.”

“She’s a good-looking woman,” Anna agreed politely. “So what did a pencil-necked geek have to do to get a fashion model’s heart and keep it?”

Stacy laughed. “Are you kidding? In high school Rose wouldn’t give me the time of day. No, we met again about three years ago. I was out on the west coast visiting old friends and there she was.”

“Love at first sight?”

“Let’s say interest at first sight. I was going through a divorce. Rose saved my life,” Stacy added simply. “I’ll always owe her for that.”

“Your ex the one that made widowerhood seem so desirable?”

“She wasn’t a bad woman. There were just too many people she had to meet—without her clothes.” Stacy paraphrased Leonard Cohen.

“Ah.” Anna wasn’t going to touch that remark with the proverbial ten-foot pole.

Past the Far View cafeteria, she turned left onto the Wetherill Mesa. Wetherill was just one of the five mesas, spread out like the fingers of an open hand, that made up the park. The road wound down the mesa’s edge for twelve miles. Along the way there were overlooks, most on the west side. The views changed with the hour of the day and with the weather. Sleeping Ute Mountain nearby kept watch over the town of Cortez in the valley. The solitary white mysticism of Lone Cone pierced the horizon to the north-west. The Bears’ Ears peeked coyly from behind a distant mountain range. To the south glimpses of Ship Rock in New Mexico tantalized. The craggy volcano neck bore a startling resemblance to a ship in full sail gliding through a sea of haze created by the power plant near Farmington. Farmington, Cortez, and Shiprock were home to most of the nontourist-related industries in the four-corners area; smelting the silver for the jewelry trade, the machinery for the farmers.

“Rose would never leave me,” Stacy said quietly.

Since the silence between them had been so long, and he seemed to be speaking only to himself, Anna pretended she hadn’t heard. She pulled the patrol car off onto the overlook where Greeley’s company pickup was parked and switched off the ignition. ‘You want to do the talking or shall I?” she asked.

“You do it. Silva’s supposed to be quite the ladies’ man. Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll underestimate you.”

Anna laughed. “I like you, Meyers.”

Following the pink plastic tape marking the section of line already surveyed, they started down into the ravine. Mesa Verde’s oakbrush grew to the size of small trees—some reaching twenty feet or more—but retained the many branches of a lesser shrub. In places the bushes were virtually impenetrable and provided habitat for quail, rabbits, and other creatures who lived longer if they went unnoticed.

The survey crew had cut a swath through the brush with loppers and chain saws. Suckers, severed just above ground level, stuck up sharp as pungi sticks. Intent on where she put her feet, Anna nearly ran into a man working his way up the hill.

“Whoa there, honey!” He spoke with a slight lisp and he put his arms around her as if she were going to fall. “I do love hugging women packing heat.”

Anna extricated herself from his grasp. The man was Ted Greeley. He was not much taller than Anna, maybe five-foot-eight. In his early fifties, he had startlingly blue eyes and snow-white hair that hugged his round head in tight curls. He’d kept himself in good shape. Anna couldn’t help but notice the muscular arms when he’d grabbed her. Beginnings of a potbelly attested to the fact that physical fitness was an ongoing struggle.