Vision narrowed and concentration wavered. Soon she was just putting one foot in front of the other, seeing only the prints Joseph Hayhurst left in the snow. When he came to a stop, she almost tread on his heels before she realized it.
"Listen," he said.
Anna could hear her own breathing and his, the faint crunch of boots in the snow from where Page walked behind them.
"There," Joseph said.
A thump, something pounding into the snow, the dirt, a body—something soft enough to absorb most of the sound of the blow. Then a shout, a whoop, joyous, victorious.
"Wherever we're going, I think we just got there," the Apache said softly.
Ahead was a clutter of downed trees blanketed with snow. Beyond, as best as Anna could tell with the fog and the vague light, was a ditch or ravine backed by a steep hill. In places trees had blown down, pulling root systems out of the hillside. Great gouts of brown, living dirt spilled down over the apron of white.
The track they followed circled the piled timber and vanished down into the ravine. The scene was picture-perfect for a trap. All that was missing was a nice little bit of cheese set in the trail.
Anna looked behind her. Page had stopped twenty yards back. Waiting to see which way to run, she guessed.
"Let's do it," she said.
Chapter Fifteen
A SECOND SHOUT galvanized Anna. She moved past Joseph and down the trail. Mobility restored courage and she was surprised that she'd let the heebie-jeebies soak so deeply into her soul. Still, when yet another cry came she flinched and her step faltered. Lest Joseph notice, she walked faster.
A minute brought her to the end of the pile screening the ravine. She looked over her shoulder. Hayhurst was right behind her. She nodded and he raised his hand, slowing and falling back slightly. There were those with whom communication was effortless, even without words. Maybe especially without words. And then there were the Pages, the Pepperdines, the Bogginses who seemed impervious to all the words in the world. Like lovers, Anna thought. Some understood the merest touch, others even Dr. Ruth couldn't get through to.
Careful to step only in existing tracks so the noise of her footsteps wouldn't broadcast their approach, Anna moved into the crook where the trail hooked around the timber: the place the cheese would be were this indeed a better mousetrap.
From that vantage point she could see into the wash, a shallow creek, five or six feet wide and half that deep, carved by spring runoff. Black snags had fallen across, creating fragile bridges dusted with snow. Beneath were the tracks they'd been following.
Crabbing down the steep bank Anna lost her footing and slid the last few feet. So much for the element of surprise.
"Are you okay?" Joseph whispered from the top of the bank.
Anna made the "okay" symbol with thumb and forefinger.
"Can you see anything?"
Crouching, she looked under the burnt timber spanning the creek bed. For several yards the snow was crushed and trampled. Drops of red, startling in a landscape devoid of color, were spattered in a wedge-shaped pattern.
"Blood."
"No kidding?" Joseph slid down the bank, squatted in the snow beside her and shouted: "Hey, Lawrence! Are you in there?" Maybe it was a tactical error but Anna was glad to have the tension broken.
Footfalls crunched toward them, slow and labored as somebody frog-walked under the downed pines.
"Lawrence?" Anna echoed because she needed to do something.
Another whoop and Lawrence Gonzales crawled from beneath the tree trunks on hands and knees. Blood stained the cuff of his NoMex shirt and he pushed a shovel ahead of him. The blade left a red trail on the snow where it passed.
Lawrence grinned up at them, his teeth white and perfect, then reached back and Anna tensed.
"Breakfast," he said, presenting them with a badger dead of severe head trauma.
Joseph started to giggle, high and sweet like a young girl. Anna became infected and laughter bubbled out.
Gonzales looked from one to the other, a tentative smile on his face as if he was willing to join in if only someone would share the joke with him. "What? What's so funny?" This innocuous phrase tickled Anna and Joseph all out of proportion.
Anna could hear the hysteria, feel it hard in her rib cage. It was out of control but it felt good.
GONZALES WAS HAILED the conquering hero by everyone but Hugh Pepperdine. He made a sullen remark about the Great White Hunter that brought the blood into Lawrence's cheeks but Anna thought she saw it for what it was, good old-fashioned envy.
Lawrence and John cleaned and skinned the badger with Black Elk's Buck knife. The San Juans, it seemed, went for the most part unarmed.
Just for something to do, Anna watched for a while, but the steaming entrails and the casual gore of men used to dressing game got to her and she retreated back to the relative civility of camp.
Howard and Joseph were talking quietly. Paula appeared to be asleep. Jennifer hadn't moved from where she sat back from the fire pit. Anna settled close to her, closer than she normally would, hoping to share some of her warmth with the other woman.
Jennifer's bare hands rested on her knees. Anna pulled off her glove and touched the back of Short's fingers. They were ice cold.
"Jen," she said softly. A second or two elapsed before Short responded to the sound of her voice. Jennifer's eyes were unfocused, her cheek muscles sagging like those of a much older woman.
"After we eat, we've got to talk," Anna said.
"I thought you were a vegetarian." Short spoke in a monotone.
"Under duress I've been known to eat my little friends. Jen, you've got to snap out of it," Anna said.
Jennifer's eyes were glazing over. Clearly, she just didn't give a damn.
Anna changed tack. Softness left her voice. "A man's been murdered. The only person I really know is you. I can't afford to trust anybody else. You've got to help me."
A flicker, the merest gleam of interest, enlivened Jennifer's blue eyes. From the distant past, Anna remembered her sister telling her one of the few things other than drugs and exercise that could help pull someone out of a clinical depression was helping others, virtue its own reward, medically speaking.
"After we eat," Anna said just as if Jennifer had agreed, and scrambled to her feet before Short had time to reject the idea.
Anna wasn't sure she wanted to know who'd knifed Leonard Nims. Even less did she wish the perpetrator to know she knew. But perhaps the puzzle would pull Jennifer out of herself, give her something healthier—if that was the right word given the circumstances—to focus on. If they turned anything up, they could hand it over to Frederick Stanton when they got off the ridge.
Stanton. The idea of rescue, of a savior, of warm caring arms, made Anna weak and weepy. With an unconscious twitch she shrugged the thought off.
BADGER WAS AS aggressive and feisty inside Anna's belly as the animal was purported to be when defending its position in the food chain. Having given up her carnivorous ways for nearly a decade, her stomach found the gamey meat a challenge to digest.
Seeing the look on her face as she carefully chewed each bite Stephen said: "It's fat-free and organically grown."
Anna shot him a dirty look and doggedly chewed on. Stephen's chunk seemed to be putting up a fight of its own. Cursing, he yanked his left glove off with his teeth and tackled the meat bare-handed.
"I'll eat yours, Anna," Pepperdine offered.
Anna scowled and swallowed. Nauseating, politically incorrect, stringy—it didn't matter. Strength was legal tender when the niceties of society were stripped away, and she had no intention of going bankrupt before she had to.
Failing with Anna, Hugh began eyeing Jennifer's meat. Short held the badger without interest.
"Eat that," Anna ordered.
Mechanically, Jennifer bit off a chunk, chewed and swallowed.
"Eat all your badger or there'll be no rat pudding for dessert," Lindstrom said firmly, and was rewarded by a ghost of a smile.
Everyone's spirits were up. Not only because of the food— they'd not been without long enough to suffer more than discomfort—but because they had taken back the reins. Lawrence was a San Juan. He'd brought home the bacon. No longer were they helpless children cowering and waiting for someone to rescue them. They were, as in Brando's famous line, "contenders." Men facing the wilderness. Even the women. Macho was a state of mind.
Though Anna didn't so much as fish—she hadn't the heart to stop that silvery flash of life—and the meat curdled in her belly, she felt it. All for one and one for all: the Musketeer credo permeated the group around the fire. Except for Hugh Pepperdine. He'd not forgiven Lawrence for being the day's hero and tried to build himself up and tear Gonzales down with a series of inane remarks.
They were so close in age some competition was inevitable, and Pepperdine's attributes, assuming he had any, Anna thought uncharitably, didn't translate well outside the city limits. Pepperdine lost on all counts: looks, courage and endurance. Probably the most damaging thing was that Hugh tried desperately to be liked and failed. Lawrence never had to try.
When Anna had forced down all the badger she could and Jennifer had eaten all she was going to, Anna announced: "I'm going to the bathroom," and fixed Short with a pointed stare.
As they walked away, Lindstrom called after them: "Firefighters don't go to the bathroom in groups." Laughter followed them out of sight around the boulder.
Seated on rocks a hundred yards up the creek, an icy fog isolating them from sight as well as sound, Anna told Jennifer everything she'd seen, thought or been told. She recounted the criminal histories Stanton had gathered, how the body was found, the knife, the blood on the glove where Nims had evidently tried to pull it out, the depression in the sand from the weight of the second body. She told Jennifer that the corpse had been searched by someone and of Neil Page's furtive hiding motions. Though Jennifer had been there when LeFleur came in with a split lip, Anna went over that.
Jennifer sat like a lump and Anna couldn't tell if she was listening or not. When she finished the recital, she waited. After a full minute, the younger woman stirred. Pushing her matted hair back off her face, she stared down the creek bed.
"Josh and I were close," she said, the words made visible as her breath steamed in the air. "He was just a year older than me and it was like we were the same age. He got mono when we were kids and got held back a year so in high school we were even in the same grade."
She was talking. Anna didn't much care about what. Cold seeped through the seat of her britches from the rock, stealing what little warmth Lawrence's badger had brought her, but she sat stock-still for fear of interrupting.
"We went to college together in computer science. Josh was smarter than me but I worked harder so we made the same grades. We'd go to parties together and wait for Mr. Right." Jennifer laughed.
There was nothing Anna could say. She thought of her sister and tried to think of the words that would comfort her if Molly died. There weren't any.
"What was he doing in this part of the country?" she asked to keep Jennifer talking.
Tears tracked the grime on Short's face and her nose was running. "Josh got a job programming a new security system for Harrah's in Reno—Reno's where he met Stephen. They were both into computers and hit it off right away. Anyway, the money was good and Josh said he needed to get out of Memphis for a while so he went.
"He fell in love with the mountains. I'm a river girl. I got to be by a big muddy river at least a few months out of the year or I just don't feel right. But Josh said he'd found his spiritual home. He got all excited about trying to save it—you know, stopping logging or saving those speckled owls—whatever. It wasn't just a social thing with Josh. He really cared. That's part of what got me interested in being a park ranger, though I thought I'd mostly just like playing at it for a while. New places, new people, something different to do. Josh was doing some kind of environmental thing down where the burn started. I guess that place where he was camped was going to be logged off or something."
Instead Joshua Short lost control of his campfire, lost his life and destroyed the forest he was hoping to save. Anna kept her cynicism to herself. Now wasn't the time. There would never be a time.
"I'm sure gonna miss him," Jennifer said simply.
"Yeah."
They sat without talking. Anna tried to massage some heat into her hands. Jennifer fished a bandanna, more black than red, from the pocket of her brush jacket and smeared the mess on her face. Where she managed to wipe it clean she left streaks of white.
"What do you want me to do about Len's murder?" Short asked.
