Hard Truth- Pigeon 13 (10 page)

"We're on the right road, then," Anna said. "Rocky doesn't have a jail, where do you usually do this sort of thing?"
"Interrogate suspects?"
"Yes."
"This Proffit isn't yet an official suspect-not exactly. He's been on-again, off-again on our list, ending with a fairly firm off," Lorraine re-minded her. "But usually we'd do it at the Estes Park or Loveland PD. We've got a good relationship with local law enforcement," she said with justifiable pride.
The NFS had several kinds of jurisdiction, from parks where the law was enforced completely by the federal government through the auspices of law enforcement rangers, to those that fell within the jurisdiction of the county sheriff. Territorial jealousies and disputes were not unknown.
"I opted to call on Robert at home, go out to New Canaan so we could take a look around. See why in hell these folks are so squirrelly. That sort of thing."
Anna, too, wanted to see Proffit's home turf. Given the mouse mas-sacre, she wanted to see if the neighbor kids were missing an unusual number of pets.
For a time they rode in silence and Anna was content watching the strange and wonderful landscape unfolding to the east, rising to the west. They'd traveled eleven miles by the odometer, passed no vehicles, home-steads or grazing animals, when New Canaan was heralded by a crude hand-painted sign nailed to a fence post.
"It's not a town proper," Lorraine explained when Anna commented on it. "It's more of a commune. The New Canaanites own the land, an old ranch inherited by one of the founders of the community from what I gather."
"Why am I thinking of David Koresh and Jim Jones?" Anna said.
Lorraine laughed.
The "town" was laid out in a neat grid, as were some of the main-stream Mormon towns Anna had seen in Utah-Cedar City, St. George- but that was where the resemblance ended. This grid was laid out with an optimism that had yet to bear fruit. Like a number of the sorry "ranchette" developments carved out of Nevada's Smoke Creek Desert never to be populated, here the graveled roads were laid down in a tic-tac-toe pattern but only the intersections at the center had been developed, eight homes total. No trees or lawns, flower beds or foundation plantings graced these graceless houses. All were more or less alike, two-story unornamented structures that looked more like miniature low-income apartment buildings than individual homes. Each had a door at either end. There were no awnings, no porches, no swing sets or jungle gyms in the yards.
There were plenty of children. The girls, like Mrs. Dwayne and Mrs. Sheppard, in long dresses. The boys wore dark trousers and long-sleeved shirts despite the eighty-degree-plus enticements of summer's end.
"I can make a pretty good guess as to why the families are no friend to law enforcement," Anna said. "I've been through towns like this on the Utah-Arizona border."
"Polygamists," Lorraine said. The investigative part of the search would have uncovered that possibility.
"Has that look about it. Too many kids, too few houses, all too big."
"Hard to prosecute," the chief ranger said. "It's not illegal to live in sin, only to actually marry more than one of your fellow sinners at a time." She pulled the car over and parked neatly parallel to a curb that didn't exist. The children stopped their play-a desultory game that seemed based on a circle of dirt undoubtedly inhabited by some unfortunate insect. They didn't run over to the car or laugh or chatter. They just stared. It gave Anna a creepy feeling.
Neither Alexis nor Beth was among them.
The tableau of stupefied children held for a moment. Curtains in the house behind them flittered. A door opened and Mr. Sheppard emerged dressed, like the male children, in dark trousers and a long-sleeved shirt. Sheppard was bearded as the prophets from the Old Testament and his hair curled at the collar of his shirt. His face was pasty for a man who lived in a state with more sunny days than not. He didn't look welcoming. As he approached the car he tried to force his stern features into a joyous cast. The effect was more alarming than the original scowl.
The clot of children broke apart to drift along in his wake. A bark, a wave of his hand, and they turned and filed back into the house as orderly as good children at a grade school fire drill.
'Any word on Candace?" he asked as Anna and Lorraine got out of the car. Whether he was astute enough to have planned it or not, the ques-tion subtly shifted the balance of power in his favor. Before they'd had time to establish themselves, he'd put them on the defensive.
'Afraid not, Mr. Sheppard," Lorraine said, ignoring the shift if she'd felt it. "We'd like to have another talk with the girls and Robert Proffit. See if anything that might help us find Candace has been overlooked."
"They're being schooled right now. We're real conscientious about that."
Anna adjusted her face into a pleasant expectant mask and leaned against the fender of the patrol car. If the girls were at their lessons they were the only children in New Canaan who were. The curtains in the house behind Sheppard were fairly dancing with peeps and pushes from those within.
A short wordless battle of wills was fought between Sheppard and the chief ranger. "I'll get Robert," he compromised after a moment.
"That's okay," Lorraine said. "Just point out his house."
Sheppard ignored her request. "Wait here." He went back into the house he'd come out of. Curtains stopped moving. Anna was suddenly.ware of the silence: no people talking, no televisions murmuring behind closed doors, no phones ringing or lawn mowers buzzing, no traffic. The underlying pulse of life that is a constant where people gather together to live was missing. New Canaan felt comatose, all life locked deep within an inert body of which Mr. Sheppard was apparently the brain. Anna guessed if he wasn't the de facto bishop, he was one of the elders.
"Bet you could get a house here cheap," Lorraine.said with a wry smile.
"My soul as collateral for the mortgage?"
Lorraine shook her head. "I don't understand this kind of fanaticism, Trading today for an eternity elsewhere. Plain old life is the best fun I've ever had."
A door opened on the opposite end of the house from where the origi-nal activity had occurred. Mrs. Dwayne stepped out onto the packed dirt. "Why don't you come in for a cup of coffee?" she said brightly, as if they
were neighbor ladies paying a call.
The room they were ushered into was about three times the size of a standard living room in a tract house, and even less appealing. No win-dows let in the light of day. No pictures graced the walls. The room was Dare but for two rows of backless benches and a lectern. Mrs. Dwayne referred to it as the chapel but, to Anna's mind, it was the last place an omniscient being would choose to spend time. There wasn't any coffee.
Mr. Sheppard stood just to the right of the lectern, arms folded across his chest, beard thrust out pugnaciously. Robert Proffit hunched on the front bench, elbows on knees, hands buried in his hair like a proper renitent. The chief ranger took the bench behind him so he'd be forced to turn around. Anna stood to one side, her senses in a state of hyper-awareness. She didn't like the space, the New Caananites or the feel of crucified rodents in her brain.
"Mr. Proffit," Lorraine said, her voice warm and motherly, "we've been told Candace stayed with you when the other two girls went for their walk."
That brought his head out of his hands. He twisted around to face her. The shock on his face looked genuine enough but, were he a manipula-tive psychotic, it might have been shock that one of his victims had the temerity to rat him out.
"Who told you that?" he said. Not "It's not true" or "That's absurd," but a demand for identification of his accuser.
"Who would know?" the chief countered.
In conscious or habitual drama, he reburied his head in his hands, fin-gers raking the long curling hair into a crazed thatch. "The girls wouldn't tell you that," he muttered to the floor between his feet. "They know I love them. They're like my own children-God's children-put into my care. I love them in a way those not followers of the Lord can never know."
"You're barking up the wrong tree." Mr. Sheppard added a dash of the prosaic to Proffit's rhapsodizing.
"What would be the right tree?" Lorraine asked.
Her question went unanswered. Proffit began to pray or converse with his knees, Anna wasn't sure which. Lorraine met her eye for a second. Time to go to work. Straddling the bench beside Proffit, her knee nudg-ing his, Anna leaned into him and said, "Hey, Robert, what do you think of mice?"
"Mice!" he squawked and levitated at least six inches off the bench, looking around him wildly. Had he been a cartoon elephant he would have leaped atop the lectern and balanced on his four feeties. "Where?"
"Mice in general," Anna said when he'd settled a bit.
"Don't do that," he said with an odd mixture of ferocity and plaintive-ness. Then: "I don't much care for mice. They're filthy things. Diseased, a lot of them."
"So you kill them to clean up the planet?"
Proffit had recovered from Anna's mouse assault. Vulnerability went underground. The gaze he turned on her was sharp, focused. For the first time it occurred to her that he might be smart; not just clever but very; very smart. That was one more "very" than she could lay claim to and she warned herself to be careful around him.
"Why are we talking about mice?" he said with the lowest wattage of intensity she'd yet seen him use, which wasn't all that low by run-of-the-mill standards. "It has something to do with my kids, with Candace, doesn't it? Mice. Rocky. My kids. Something about Fern Lake Cabin."
He'd done the equation in record-breaking time. Either he was the X factor himself or a real whiz at brainteasers.
"We found thirteen dead mice there, nailed to the back of the out-house," Anna said. "They'd been nailed up alive." Mrs. Dwayne squeaked in a mouse-like fashion and Robert Proffit flinched. Anna was unsure whether the sudden cringing was due to mouse phobia or guilt.
"Who would do a thing like that to any one of God's creatures, how-ever lowly?"
The words rang hollow, gutted either by revulsion at the deed or because they were the oft-repeated platitude of a hypocrite.
"That's what we were wondering," she said as she rose. Proffit had had time to school his emotions and cool his febrile thought processes; she wasn't going to get any more out of him. At least not in this interview. Time had come to shake up the variables. Mr. Sheppard, with his quelling influence, couldn't be in two places at once. Since there was no legal way to send him out of his own chapel she decided to put him on edge. To Lorraine she said, "I think I'll go outside, get some air." The chief ranger nodded her permission.
Once outdoors Anna realized how desperately she did want to get some air. The windowless room, redolent with stifled dreams and isola-tion, had begun to close in on her, a sense of poison pressing in through the pores of her skin. Taking off her hat she combed her fingers through her thick hair. It was grown long enough to fall in her eyes and curl at the collar of her uniform shirt. She'd let it grow because Paul liked it. After years of independence it was good to have a man worth catering to now and again, especially if there was a payoff. With Paul, so far, the payoff had been pretty good. Higher praise than that, Anna chose not to voice, even in the sound-proofed rooms of her own skull. Hope and joy were double-edged things when their fulfillment depended upon another person.
Like a horse ridding itself of flies, Anna shook off the toxins that had settled on her skin. Breathing deep of air so dry and thin it burned her lungs, she wondered why life wasn't enough for most people, why they had to hide in cathedrals, mosques and temples and rehearse human-born fictions of something yet to come, practice infinite subtleties of castigation of flesh and mind, as if by limiting pleasure and freedom in their one guaranteed existence they might earn kudos in another, one from which no explorers had ever returned alive.
"Ranger Pigeon?"
The sound was but a whisper of air, soft as the voices one hears in the murmur of fast-moving streams. Anna might have thought she'd suffered a visitation but for the fact ghosts seldom called one by one's formal title.
Turning her face from the cleansing carcinogens of the sun, she replaced her hat. Mrs. Dwayne, looking older, frumpier and more care-worn in the uncompromising light of day, had followed her out.
"The girls aren't doing so good," she said in a whisper. A furtive look toward the chapel door confirmed Anna's suspicions of just who was not to overhear this tete-a-tete. "Especially Beth. She won't eat unless she eats with that crippled lady, and Mr. Sheppard doesn't like that even though I'm always with her. That other one's a woman doctor. They've not got husbands or kids, either one of them." This last was unquestion-ably a condemnation of Dr. Littleton's and Heath Jarrod's moral and spir-itual states. "But I keep on. Beth is so thin. And the dreams. Poor child tries to stay awake. I found her asleep on her feet in the doorjamb. She'd been walking so she wouldn't fall asleep. Alexis too. But not so bad. But then she has her dad for comfort."
The last was said with such bitterness, Anna wondered what Mrs. Dwayne had against the ubiquitous Mr. Sheppard. Before she could finish her thought, the woman suddenly sucked her breath back into her lungs as if she would suck back the words she'd spoken with it.
Anything she wasn't supposed to know was particularly attractive to Anna. "She has her dad," she echoed neutrally.
"Mr. Sheppard. A father makes you feel safer. He's a father to all of us. But especially some of us. Blood, you know." Mrs. Dwayne was babbling, still in a whisper, overbright smile discordantly pasted on her face, hands animated; an amateur actor's rendition of "Happy Talk."
Anna let her continue this peculiar whispering monologue till it was clear she wasn't going to say anything she oughtn't, then she interrupted, to Mrs. Dwayne's obvious relief. "Have Beth or Alexis told you anything about where they were? What happened? Anything about Candace?"
"Nothing. They say they don't remember anything. I really think they don't; even Mr. Sheppard couldn't get anything out of them."
The inference was that Mr. Sheppard could pry the thoughts from a marble statue. Maybe he could, but Anna doubted the statue would have much market value after he'd done with it.
"What do you think happened to them?"
Mrs. Dwayne looked slightly startled that anyone would want her opinion on what had befallen her child. "Satan," she said without hesita-tion. "He likes children best because they are precious to our Lord. This world is a battleground and he will use anything he can to get at God, he hates Him so. Even here, tucked away from the world, he is at work. Ritual tortures. Sacrifices. They are especially active around Halloween and Good Friday because that was the day they killed our Lord."