Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (2 page)

“Lost in thought,” Leah said. It was less a question, it seemed to Heath, than a statement of personal choice.

“I was contemplating your genius,” Heath said truthfully.

“Oh.” Evidently, people often did that, and it had ceased to be of interest. Leah went back to studying the wheelchair. The wheels were larger and softer than those on street chairs, and it weighed next to nothing. Leah had designed it to be folded so it could fit easily into a canoe or strapped onto a backpack. Firelight flickering on the lenses of her glasses gave Heath the illusion of witnessing mental gears turning as Leah mulled over her design, seeking out flaws.

Elizabeth, Heath’s daughter, had named her wheelchair Robo-butt. This new miracle of modern engineering was dubbed Robo-butt ATV.

Taking a drag from her cigarette, Heath watched her daughter. Heat rising from the campfire twisted the air, and she saw E as if through antique glass. The first time she’d laid eyes on this amazing creature who was to be her child had been in the woods at night. Elizabeth and two other little girls had stumbled half naked, bleeding and mute, out of the forest near where she and her aunt were camping in Rocky Mountain National Park. Heath had thought they were a bear come to dine on the helpless crippled lady. Instead, one of them became her salvation.

After the accident that broke her back, Heath had given up on herself. Along came Elizabeth, and Heath discovered she couldn’t give up on herself without giving up on Elizabeth. That was unthinkable.

From a bitter drunken cripple, Heath had grown into a semicivilized paraplegic. From a scrawny frightened limpet, Elizabeth had grown into a confident beauty. Still, her eyes were the eyes of someone much older—a thousand years older. Ghosts could be seen in those depths. Shadows moved there even on cloudless days. Heath liked to think her adopted daughter was an old soul who had visited the realms of the living in many incarnations.

Before she’d asked E on this trip, they’d talked long and hard about whether a sojourn in the woods would bring back the nightmares. E was in favor of facing one’s fears. Where her daughter was concerned, Heath sang the praises of running away.

“You’re doing it, Heath.”

Elizabeth had caught her in the act. Mothers should not be obviously smitten. E told her once in mock seriousness that it undermined discipline.

“I am not,” she lied as she wiped the doting look off her face.

Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

“Doing what?” Katie asked. Leah’s daughter, Katie, was thirteen. Heath had hoped they would be company for each other on the trip, but Katie looked and acted far younger than her years.

“Looking all warm and runny inside,” Elizabeth said. “You know, Mother Gooey?”

Katie’s white-blond eyebrows, nearly invisible on her pale, heart-shaped face, drew together in confusion. When it cleared Heath saw bitterness. “Right,” she said. “Maybe if I had titanium parts.”

Katie stabbed a marshmallow through the heart with a twig. “These have got to be covered in germs and squirrel poop,” she said with a grimace.

“Organic,” Elizabeth kidded her. “Costs a fortune at Whole Foods.”

“Daddy gets fits if Tanya lets me eat anything that isn’t organic. ‘Organic’ is Latin for boring.” Katie thrust the skewered marshmallow into the fire and watched keenly as it caught and burned, the skin turning black and crusted.

“Who is Tanya?” Heath asked.

“Warden,” Katie said.

“Au pair,” Leah said without looking at her daughter.

Katie tilted her head until her baby-fine blond hair fell forward and curtained her face. Heath suspected she was mortified. Who has a babysitter in the eighth grade? What kind of a mother mentions it in front of another girl, and a high school girl at that?

“A pair of what?” Heath asked.

Katie raised her eyes from the charred corpse of the marshmallow. Katie didn’t grace Heath with even a hint of a smile. Heath had known Leah’s daughter for twenty-four hours and had yet to see her smile. Katie might be accustomed to manipulating adults by withholding approval. God knew most mothers would wag themselves to death for a pat on the head from their kid.

“You shouldn’t smoke,” Katie said to wreak a kind of revenge. “Secondhand smoke kills people.”

“It’s okay. Mom doesn’t exhale,” Elizabeth said.

Leah said nothing. Heath had been raised by her aunt Gwen, a pediatrician. Rudeness, particularly to adults, was not tolerated. Heath had never tolerated it in Elizabeth. Leah just glanced at her daughter as if she were the ill-mannered child of a stranger.

Wily sighed in his sleep. Heath ran her fingers up his pointed coyote-style ears. Maybe Anna was right, maybe animals were better people than people. Then again, Anna didn’t exactly work and play well with others. She should be roasting marshmallows and celebrating the night on the river instead of floating somewhere in her damn sacred solitude. A true friend would be drinking wine and keeping Heath from getting too involved in other people’s business.

“E, would you go see if you can see Anna’s canoe?” Heath asked. “Tell her we’re making s’mores. That should bring her in out of the cold.” Elizabeth rose with a fluid grace Heath could barely remember. Movement was language for E. Often she’d forgo use of her own legs to experiment with new ways Heath could get around. They installed monkey bars in the living room and performed monkeylike antics on them. Elizabeth was an ace with Heath’s wheelchair. So as not to seem a drag, Heath learned to pop wheelies, entered races, and was rear guard for the basketball team Rolling Thunder.

The leaves, rich reds, yellows, and oranges during the day, were black with coming night. The last light of the day limned the edges with silver. Leaning back, Heath looked for the first star of evening amid sparks rising lazily into the air, then winking out like fireflies. Campfires and Wily were two of the reasons Heath preferred to camp on Forest Service rather than Park Service land. Much as she loved Anna’s parks, the NPS was not dog- or fire-friendly. There were times Heath didn’t want to conserve for the use of the next generation; she wanted to pretend there was enough of everything wild, that it would go on forever, and humans were too insignificant to do any real damage. Camping with a good fire and a good dog helped that illusion.

“Are these things any better roasted?” Katie asked. She was holding up one of the mushrooms Leah had picked earlier in the day. Raised north of Duluth, Minnesota, the only child of two mothers, both of whom were concerned with natural foods and sustained harvests, Leah had grown up hunting mushrooms and gathering wild rice.

Before Leah could respond, Katie had jabbed the orange fungus with a stick and poked it into the flame more as if she were torturing than cooking it.

“Don’t do that,” Leah said softly. Katie kept doing it. Leah looked away.

“Leave a few, at least,” Heath said. Lobster mushrooms had added a nice zest to the prepared foods they’d brought.

“Never eat a mushroom I haven’t okayed,” Leah said. “Some are deadly.”

“Oh right, like I’m going to mistake an Amanita for a lobster,” Katie sneered.

“They look like deer mushrooms, not lobster,” Leah said mildly.

“Do you see Anna?” Heath asked Elizabeth, a sharp silhouette on the bluff overlooking the water.

“Nope. Nada.”

Feeling abandoned, Heath swallowed a slug of bourbon. It definitely tasted better from a tin cup than from a crystal glass. She wondered if that would be true inside four walls. Definitely a double-blind test in the offing when they returned to Boulder.

A crashing in the woods interrupted Heath’s meditation. Katie dropped the mushroom she was burning with such determination.

“Wolf?” Elizabeth asked hopefully. “It would be so cool to see a wolf.”

“More likely a bear or a moose,” Heath said. “Get Wily’s leash, would you, E?”

Elizabeth ducked into the tent with the enviable ease of the young and limber, scooped up the leash, then knelt, legs folding smoothly like the self-lubricating hinges on Leah’s high-tech inventions, and clipped the lead to Wily’s collar.

“Probably a deer,” Leah said absently.

Too many years without predators had allowed the deer herds to outgrow their habitat. In winter, they starved and died of disease. Wherever humans were known to give handouts, they begged. Without food, even Bambi could become aggressive. Wolves had reinhabited northern Minnesota, but not in sufficient numbers to do the thinning work.

Wily’s neck hair stiffened under Heath’s hand. His body went rigid. A growl, so low she more felt than heard it, began building in his chest.

“It’s people,” she said quietly.

THREE

All forms of sorrow and delight, All solemn Voices of the Night.
The words seemed to form from the soughing of the wind in the dying leaves. The mystical ululation of a loon, a sound that seemed to Anna to linger on the water long after the bird had ceased to call, punctuated the thought.

Wadsworth? Frost?

The air was a delicate balance. The last of summer rested on the skin as the prickle of coming winter brushed the mind. Anna could taste the fertile loamy scent of leaves, fallen and readying to return to the earth, and the lingering smell of warm grass, dust, and pine. Mated with the spicy scent of campfire smoke, it triggered a longing for sometime, someplace, someone that never existed, but was nonetheless exquisite, and to be deliciously mourned.

Enjoying nostalgia, a luxury she seldom allowed herself, she lay back in the stern of the canoe as it drifted down the Fox River as light and quiet as a leaf on a pond. A new moon, a dime-sized wraith barely edged with light, was almost lost in a dense sea of glittering stars. This far north, this far from neon, fluorescent, incandescent, and halogen, this far from television screens, stars and sky appeared simultaneously close and impossibly distant. If Anna let her fingers loose from where they relaxed around the gunwales, she might fall up and forever.

There was nowhere she needed to be, no one she needed to serve. The owner of the convenience store at the put-in said the camp they’d planned on using had been burned over by a forest fire, so they stopped a few miles upstream. Anna reveled in the extra time to do absolutely nothing productive. She knew she should be missing Paul. A better husband than Paul Davidson would only serve to make a woman feel chronically inadequate.

It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy his company; they’d been married several years and she was still crazy in love with the man. Catching his smile in a crowd never failed to make her heart skip a beat. The thing was, when she was alone in wild country—or as wild as country got in these United States—Anna didn’t miss anyone, not her friends, not her dog or cat, not her sister, Molly, not her husband.

Early imprinting, she supposed. In her thirties she’d been pretty well deconstructed by life. In solitude and wilderness she’d been put back together. Perhaps it wasn’t so odd that she felt at home here, complete.

Paul was different. He moved through the world of people with the ease of a water snake across a calm lake. Human constellations, in the form of neighborhoods, clubs, or congregations, came to his orbit, drawn by his warmth and honor.

Anna admired it greatly but couldn’t live that way every day. Now and then, she needed to breathe air that wasn’t someone else’s exhalation. Even this trip was somewhat overcrowded for her taste, though Leah seemed nice enough for an extremely wealthy person. Money was like sugar; too much of it sickened people.

Leah didn’t talk much, which was a plus, and her voice was so soft. It had been the first to fade as Anna drifted farther and farther from camp. Heath’s went next, and E’s. High and sharp, Katie’s was the last to be nullified by the gentle susurration of the river.

In blessed solitude and silence, Anna drifted. Heaven. To dream of anything else was sacrilege—if one believed in sacrilege.

Gods were tricky business. Anna seldom gave them a thought, nor, if they existed, did she expect they pondered much upon her comings and goings. This amiable standoff ended when Paul retired as sheriff of Adams County and moved to Colorado, where she was a district ranger at Rocky Mountain.

Before he was a sheriff, Paul had been an Episcopal priest. He was an Episcopal priest again, working interim at St. Aidan’s in Boulder. Tired of pursuing the bad guys, he said he needed to pursue the good guys for a while, for the sake of his soul. Father Davidson was not the sort to press his wife to attend church or to embrace Jesus. That would have sent Anna screaming for the hills.

Paul Davidson enjoyed the simple gift of faith.

When Anna asked him in what way and why, he said people needed to believe in something. Not necessarily the patriarchal smiting god, or the white-washed westernized vision of the carpenter’s son, not even in miracles. In the twenty-first century miracles were commonplace. People couldn’t get excited over a man walking on water when they’d seen a man walking on the moon. Paul’s contention was that to fend off despair and embrace life, humanity needed to move beyond miracles. They needed to believe the impossible: that there was an end to suffering, that their emptiness would be filled. That they were loved.

Since the beginning, churches had used all that was deemed holy to get their victims to collude in their own destruction. Regardless, churches were where people sought the divine. So Paul served his grand scheme of love from the altar.

Trailing her hand in water grown cold with early rains in Canada, Anna wondered idly what she served.

A low thrumming clatter of grouse wings applauded.

A sign, she thought. She smiled.

The applause continued, the sweet cacophony punctuated by the grouse clicking low in his throat. Then something alien, a wrong note in the symphony of the woods, metal swallowing metal. Anna sat up straight, suddenly alert. Nothing in nature made a sound like that.

Faintly, far away, and unmistakably, a pistol had been manually cocked, a wheel gun probably, a big one, .45 or .357. Maybe a .38. Because she was on vacation—and flying commercially—Anna hadn’t brought a weapon. Heath had no interest in firearms.