And Candace-or at least some third girlish voice-had been with them. For a shuddering moment Anna was put in mind of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, a study of the Salem witch trials and the pack of young girls who grew wild and drunk on power till the town was strewn with corpses. Children were not inherently good. They were inherently ignorant and usually helpless. Once that helplessness was removed, the ignorance and ego of the young could be more heartless than anything adults dreamed up. It was possible they'd even done it without Robert Proffit's assistance. In the country, it wasn't unusual for twelve- and thirteen-year-olds to drive.
Earlier, while she'd waited for the warrant, Anna had returned to the RV park. The low angle of the light was superb for tracking, yet she'd found little to corroborate Heath's tale but scuff marks that could have been made anytime since the last good rain made it out of the mountains and down to the flats.
Anna turned back to the room where her captive audience watched her with an attention that would have flattered the most jaded actor. She looked at the girls' shoes. They were well-used but clean. If they'd been rampaging the previous night, they had literally and figuratively covered their tracks.
"Heath Jarrod told me you paid her a visit last night," Anna said abruptly. "Tell me about that, Beth."
The girl looked dumbfounded: eyes wide and uncomprehending, mouth slightly agape. Genuine surprise. Anna was about to consign Heath to the loony bin, then Beth's eyes filled with tears and the unlined face contorted in a spasm of guilt so heartfelt Anna felt guilty for seeing it.
"Is Heath all right?" she asked, her voice returned to the babyish tremor it had been when she'd first walked out of the woods.
Alexis took Beth's hand. It wasn't to comfort her; Anna could see the smaller girl wince from the pressure Alexis put into the squeeze. "We were here all night. Both of us," Alexis said. "Praying and reading our Bibles. Ask my... my mother."
Anna wondered whom she was going to say at first. Robert Proffit? Maybe she'd concluded his nocturnal visit to the bedroom window of two underage girls had damaged his credibility in the eyes of the law.
Because she'd been invited to, Anna said, "Well, Mrs. Sheppard?"
Mrs. Sheppard was looking at her daughter in a new way. The feature-less stoicism-or repressed pain-that had kept her face locked since Anna had first seen her was broken. She stared at Alexis as if she'd meta-morphosed into a Kafka-esque cockroach before their very eyes.
"The window isn't nailed shut," she said flatly.
Alexis began to cry again, her face hidden in her hands. "Sharon!" Alexis cried in shock. Her mother slapped her.
Sharon. She called her mother "Sharon" and her father "Mr. Sheppard." Such a warm, fuzzy family.
The bedroom door opened. "Proffit's gone," Lorraine said without preamble. "He took some clothes and his car."
"He went to find Candace," Beth volunteered. "He told us last night when he came to say goodbye. He said he wouldn't come back with-out her."
"Jesus," Anna said.
'Amen," Sharon Sheppard murmured.
"May we walk the rangers out?" Alexis asked politely as Anna rose to leave with Lorraine. Mrs. Sheppard looked at her watch.
"You've seven minutes left."
"Please?"
"Don't tell Mr. Sheppard."
The girls leaped up with alacrity. Anna doubted good manners or a love for herself or her boss fomented this seven-minute revolt against the powers that be in the form of the clan's patriarch. The girls probably just wanted out. To Anna, this was completely understandable. There were studies showing the threat of prison wasn't much of a crime deterrent but it deterred her most effectively. Life in a box, as far as she was concerned, was not better than no life at all.
Mindful their early release was only on sufferance, Beth and Alexis dutifully walked down the long hall with Anna and Lorraine, through the chapel, and out toward where the Crown Vie was parked.
A ring of boys, ranging in age from seven to sixteen, had formed in the dirt yard. In another setting they would have been laughing and yelling as they pursued whatever game they were at. Here in New Canaan they muttered and snickered. Though this was probably due to the discipline of their pieced-together culture, it lent them an air of conspiracy and underhandedness.
So intent were they on their game, they didn't hear the women and girls approaching. Two of the boys knelt. Anna glanced over their heads to see what all the suppressed excitement was about. Within the circle of knees and booted feet was a kitten, nine to twelve weeks by the look of it, but it might have been older. When an animal is half-starved, size is an unreliable indicator of age. The kitten was black, with white paws and a white ascot.
The poor thing was terrified. Each time it tried to escape, to break through the line of boys, it was thrust back with sticks, kicks, thrown atones.
Anna's blood pressure shot up thirty points. Her vision turned red at the edges. In the instant before she might have done something that would jet her sentenced to life in a box, Beth, the limpet, shot by, long skirts fly-ing, hair tumbling down. Shrieking like a demented banshee, the girl tore into the first boy she collided with, scratching and biting and kicking.
Anna waded into the melee. Under the guise of controlling Beth, she managed to send three boys sprawling and bloody the nose of the leader, a boy bigger than she was but a coward all the same.
The fracas was over almost before it started. Boys were sitting in the dirt stunned. Boys were crying. Three boys were bleeding, one from Anna's elbow in his face, two from the fierce onslaught of the diminutive Beth. Anna was not dissatisfied with the carnage. Little remained in the world that could trigger a Viking's berserker rage in her soul, but these boys had managed to stumble upon it.
She picked up the kitten. It was sitting in the wreck of boys, head low, panting like a dog. By the time an opportunity to escape had been pre-sented, it was too exhausted or sick or weak to take advantage of it. The cat didn't fight but pushed its head down into the crook of Anna's arm to hide there.
Cat taken care of, Anna turned to Beth. Whatever had moved the girl to rush to the defense of the kitten had not receded once the battle was won. Beth was no longer violent, she was hysterical. Tears poured down her face in staggering quantities, dripping from her jaw. Snot poured from her nose. Saliva frothed at the corners of her mouth. She clawed at her face and hair as if it were she and not the boys in need of punishment. By rights she should have been wailing, screaming, but the noises she made were shut behind clenched lips and sounded like the keening of whales. Alexis and Mrs. Sheppard held her between them. Mrs. Sheppard was alternately crooning and making sharp commands to snap out of it. Alexis had her arms around her friend but that was where the show of comfort ended. The taller girl's face was as pale as her hair and utterly blank. Even in sleep the human face has emotion, an inner working that lends anima-tion though the muscles are relaxed. The only faces Anna could remem-ber seeing that were as empty as that of Alexis were the death masks on the marble tombs of medieval fighting men. Taking Beth's hand, Anna set it gently on the kitten's back so she could feel its warm living fur. The strangled internal whoops slowed, then ceased. Beth opened her eyes.
"See," Anna said. "You saved the kitty cat. See how he's all poked down in my arm? You saved him. He's okay. I bet he's even purring. Put your ear on him and see."
Beth mopped some of the mess off of her face with the backs of her hands and carefully laid her ear on the cat's side.
"Is he purring?" Anna asked.
"He is," Beth said with surprise.
"He's happy you saved him," Anna said. Cats not only purred when they were happy but often when they were hungry or scared, but Beth didn't need to know that.
'Are you going to be okay?" Anna asked.
Beth stopped petting the kitten and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. "Okay," she managed. The tears began again.
"What are you going to name your kitty?" Mrs. Sheppard asked kindly, relieved that a key to the child's sanity had been recovered.
"No," Beth cried. "I don't want it." She tore free of Alexis' embrace and ran for the house. Mrs. Sheppard ran after her.
Alexis never moved. Her face remained a death mask. Anna reached toward her then hesitated, overtaken by the unsettling fancy that if she touched her the girl would shatter. Or her flesh would be as cold as the morgue.
fourteen
Lying on her back on a slab of sun-warmed granite, Anna watched the afternoon thunderheads build to the southeast. Customarily her thoughts would drift to fog and reknit black and powerful as the storms, but today there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell of that happening. Civ-ilization, so-called, had screwed around with her head so much an eight-mile hike and a few hours of Mother Nature's glamour weren't going to straighten it. Anna quit trying and let herself think about what she was going to think about even if every Zen master in the world gave her his secret mantra.
The girls. The room where they were sent to pray. The pitter-patter of little demon hooves with little children's voices around Heath's trailer. Demons poking at Heath with sticks. Demonic boys poking at a kitten with sticks. Beth saving the cat. The cat's failure to save Beth. Beth running for the house. Alexis turned to a pillar of salt as sure as if she'd looked back at Sodom and Gomorrah.
Beth. Alexis. Alexis and Beth. They'd left the camp, if the missing Proffit were to be believed, alone and under their own power. They'd reappeared near Heath's camp alone and under their own power. They both claimed complete amnesia. Both lied-maybe-about Candace. Both their voices were recognized by Heath as mocking and threatening.
As counterintuitive as it was for Anna, who had seen the cuts and bruises and battered feet, the tears and the fear and the blood, she made herself consider that these girls were in a dark drama of their own making.
Amnesia, total amnesia, amnesia not following severe trauma to the head and lasting for days, was exceedingly rare. For two people, both with skulls intact, to come down with it simultaneously was beyond the realm of the believable. Sheppard and his flock, as well as the psychotherapist who worked for the hospital, muttered about shock, denial, blocking, regression, repression but Anna didn't buy it. She'd called the only men-tal health professional she knew to be sane and not in deep denial about the limitations in her field's provable knowledge, her sister, Molly, an overpriced, extremely bright and ethical psychiatrist who practiced on Manhattan's Upper West Side. In over thirty years of practice, Molly had never seen a single case of long-term amnesia without severe head trauma. She mentioned that in the late eighteenth century it had been all the rage for young men of fashion to go into fugue states, vanish from London to turn up a week later in Paris or Bath having no recollection of the days in between. It was undoubtedly a handy epidemic but short-lived. Nobody much suffered from fugue states anymore.
Molly had confirmed what Anna had suspected: the girls were lying. They remembered and, for their own reasons, had decided not to tell anyone. Lying was as valid a response to handling trauma as amnesia or hysterics but it wasn't nearly as socially acceptable. People believed if one was doing something consciously then one could stop doing it on command. Not always true. What Anna needed to know was why they were lying.
Guilt and fear of consequences were common and powerful motiva-tors. Beth and Alexis were clearly feeling desperately guilty about some-thing. Leaving Candace? Guilty they lied about her staying with Proffit? Guilty about getting Proffit in trouble so they lied about lying?
Proffit had run, that was three days ago, and no one had heard from him since. He'd said he'd gone to find Candace. Unless the girls had lied about that, too. Law enforcement in Colorado was keeping an eye out for him as a courtesy but, so far as anyone could prove, he'd broken no laws.
Had the three girls and Proffit planned the disappearance between them and something went terribly awry? Or was the guilt Beth and Alexis suffered not because they'd left Candace behind but because they had killed her themselves in a girlish rendition of Lord of the Flies? That would certainly account for the persistent bout of amnesia.
And why had Beth been willing to take on every boy in town to rescue a kitten, then fled in horror when it was suggested she keep it herself?
The only silver lining so far was that Anna had gotten a heck of a nice cat out of the deal. She'd named him Hector, then changed it to Hecuba when the vet informed her she'd sexed it incorrectly. When Piedmont came to Estes Park she would have some explaining to do. It was bad enough that she'd brought home Taco. But Taco, after all, was only a dog. Another cat could be viewed as serious competition.
Anna looked at her watch. Ray was late. Much as she enjoyed lounging about in glorious solitude, the thunderheads were getting ever more seri-ous. This time of year outings in the Rockies were timed around the inevitable lightning. Today Raymond was to take Anna up to Gabletop Mountain, one of the less used climbing areas. The eastern face of it rose in a steep fractured cliff-face above Tourmaline, a jewel of a lake. The hike in was longer and rougher than that to Longs Peak and the climbing routes less varied and spectacular, so fewer people scaled it.
