Ill Wind (12 page)

Leaving the Four-Way, she drove slowly around the Museum Loop, stopping to check the picnic grounds for illegal campers. It was blessedly empty and she was spared the un-savory task of rousting out people in their nightgowns.

As Anna was passing the Administration Building, Patsy Silva flagged her down. The clerical staff wasn’t required to wear uniforms and Patsy was in a flame-orange blouse and close-fitting gray trousers. Her lipstick echoed the color of her top.

Though immaculately dressed and every hair characteristically in place, Patsy looked somehow disheveled, as if she’d had a bad night or bad news.

“What’s up?” Anna asked as she rolled down the pickup’s window.

“Can you believe it, I lost my keys!” Patsy smiled apologetically. “Would you radio one of the Maintenance guys to let me in?”

Anna made the call.

Patsy didn’t look relieved. “Are you all right?” Anna asked.

“I need to talk to you.”

A slight gray-haired man with a dowager’s hump came from the direction of the museum. When he saw them, he jangled a ring of keys.

“The superintendent’s having a breakfast meeting. I’ve got to set it up. Can you come over to the house around twelve?” Patsy pleaded.

“Will do.”

Patsy clicked on her smile and started thanking the janitor before she’d closed the distance between them.

Anna managed to kill twenty minutes cruising the ruins road. Cliff Palace was about halfway around a six-mile loop. Just before the parking lot the two-lane road became one way. Beyond the ruin a mile or so, at Soda Point, it crossed onto the Ute Indian Reservation. When the road had first been designed it had been incorrectly surveyed and a quarter-mile stretch crossed the park’s boundary onto the reservation. A dirt track, never used anymore, ran for several miles into the piñon/juniper forest owned by the Utes. Brush had been piled across it to deter wandering visitors. A plan to barricade it had been in the works for years but nothing had ever been done.

Where the dirt road started into the woods, on a wide graveled turnout, was a curio shop and a trailer selling Navajo tacos and Sno-Kones. Short of rerouting the existing road, Mesa Verde’s superintendent had little recourse but to accept this unauthorized invasion of commercialism. Authorized park concessionaires had jacked food prices so high the little stand did a booming business, especially among the rangers.

Past Soda Point, back on park lands, the one-way road widened into a parking lot at the Balcony House ruin. A mile or so farther on, the loop completed, traffic rejoined the two-lane road.

On Isle Royale Anna had patrolled in a boat, in Guadalupe Mountains on horseback. Both were preferable to the automobile. Anna wondered what it was that was so alienating about cars. Somehow, more than any other machine, they seemed to create a world of their own, a mobile pack-rat midden full of personal artifacts that utterly separated man from the natural environment he hurtled through. Maybe, she thought as she crept along in the line of cars trolling for parking spaces at Balcony House, that was why Americans were so enamored of them: power without connection, movement without real direction.

At nine, she returned to Far View, picked up Jennifer, and took her to Maintenance, where the patrol car was parked. As the seasonal dragged her briefcase from behind the seat, she volunteered to pick up Stacy when he came on duty. Anna remembered the poaching threat but forbore comment. If the Catholics were right and the thought was as bad as the deed, she was in no position to cast any stones.

With two rangers on duty and nothing happening, Anna felt lazy. She parked the truck and wandered over to the fire cache to find someone to amuse her. Helitack was gone. Physical training, she recalled. Every morning for PT Drew ran his firefighters two miles down the Spruce Canyon trail, then back up the steep pathway to the mesa top.

As she turned to leave, a clattering arrested her attention. Moments later a child’s bicycle with pink training wheels came into view around the corner of the cache. It wasn’t one of the modern plastic monstrosities, but a classic, old-fashioned, metal bicycle. Extensions had been welded onto the pedals so Bella Meyers could ride.

She rolled to a stop in the shade beside Anna. “Drew’s not here, Mrs. Pigeon. He’s supposed to be back by nine but he’s always late. He says it takes him longer to shower because there’s so much of him. I’m always early.”

“That’s good to know. Does your dad know you’re here?” Anna was thinking of Stacy’s concern about traffic the only other time she’d seen Bella in Maintenance.

“Stacy’d already gone to work. Me and Momma only got back from Albaturkey this morning.”

Stacy didn’t come on duty till later and it crossed Anna’s mind that the child was lying. But Bella didn’t seem the type. Life, for her, had to be full of personal triumphs and grown-up dramas. She had no need to fabricate.

“I thought Stacy was on project shift,” Anna probed gently. Project days were scheduled from nine-thirty till six.

“Sometimes he goes early. He likes to go off by himself and look at birds and things. Sometimes he takes me. I like being by myself with Stacy.”

Anna leaned back against a workbench set up outside the cache.

“That’s where they clean their chain saws,” Bella warned. “You’ll get grease on your behind.”

“Too late now.”

“Glad I’m not your mom.”

“Doesn’t your mom approve of greasy behinds?”

“Hates ’em,” Bella returned. “You know why Stacy always looks so good?”

Anna shook her head.

“Momma dresses him. Stacy’d just put on whatever was laying closest on the floor. Never iron it or anything. When we got him he was a mess.”

Anna smiled. “Like a stray dog brought home from the pound?”

“Not that bad,” Bella answered seriously. “He didn’t have fleas or anything. But he was pretty scruffy.”

Anna glanced at her watch more out of habit than anything. There was no place she had to be, nothing she had to do. In parks with backcountry her days had been spent walking, looking for people in—or causing—trouble. In the automobile-oriented front country of Mesa Verde the days were spent waiting for Dispatch to send her on an emergency or visitor assist.

“You’re too old to have anyone dress you,” Bella said, giving Anna a frank appraisal. “You do pretty good.”

“Not as good as your mom?”

“No,” the child answered honestly. “Mom’s going to buy her and me all new stuff when she gets thin again and I get my legs fixed.”

Bella seemed disinterested and Anna suspected the new clothes promised a greater delight to Mrs. Meyers than to her daughter.

“I got to go,” Bella announced. “Drew comes walking over now.” Having carefully looked both ways, she rode across the maintenance yard toward the asphalt path that wound down to the housing loop several hundred yards away and invisible behind a fragrant curtain of evergreens.

No one left to play with, Anna decided to head for the chief ranger’s office to fill out a few forms and pester Frieda. As she crossed the tarmac to where she’d parked, Greeley’s six-pac rolled in. The contractor wasn’t in evidence and a man she recognized but had never met was driving. Tom Silva rode shotgun. The pickup pulled in close to her truck. Since there wasn’t room for both vehicle doors to open at once, Anna waited while they got out.

Silva was completely dressed; everything buttoned, belted, and tucked in. “ ’Morning,” he said as he slammed the door. He didn’t meet her eye and, for once, there was nothing bantering in the way he spoke.

“Good morning, Tom. Have you gotten any closer to Bachelor of the Year?”

His head jerked up as if she poked him with a cattle prod. There was something different about his face as well as his demeanor. He struck Anna as older, less alive.

“I was just messing around,” he said sullenly. “I didn’t mean anything by that. ’Scuse me.” He pushed by her and disappeared into the shop where the soda-pop machine was housed.

Anna speculated as to whether this new subdued Tom had anything to do with Patsy’s lunch invitation. The day was definitely getting more interesting.

ANNA reached the tower house before Patsy and sat in the sun on a stone wall by the front door fantasizing about how she’d arrange the furniture if she inherited the house. She’d just gotten around to hanging curtains when Patsy hurried up the walk.

“Sorry I’m late,” she panted. “You could have let yourself in!”

“I’ve only been here a minute,” Anna assured her. “I was early.”

“You didn’t have to sit out here all that time.”

Anna gave up and let herself be apologized to.

Patsy bustled around the kitchen making bologna sandwiches and small talk. Anna kept up her end of the conversation. Perhaps they were to follow formal rules of dining: no business discussed until brandy and cigars were served.

After every condiment and chip had been taken out of cupboards and put on the table, Patsy sat down. Anna noticed she no longer wore the expensive wristwatch. A Timex with Pluto’s face on the dial had taken its place.

Anna bit into her sandwich. Patsy pushed her untouched plate away as if she’d already eaten. “It’s about Tom,” she said.

Anna nodded encouragement.

“He’s been so full of himself lately. He was bragging and giving the girls school money. You saw the watch he gave me. I guess he thought he’d bought his way back in. When I said no, he got sore.”

Anna waited but Patsy showed no inclination to finish the story unprompted. “What happened to the watch?” she asked to get the wheels turning again.

“I threw it in his face. He made a lot of noise about the money having nothing to do with anything, but I noticed he took it with him when he left.”

Anna washed the sandwich down with Diet Pepsi. “I saw Tom this morning. He didn’t seem like his old self.”

“He’s not.” Patsy picked up a potato chip and began breaking it into small pieces. “Or else he’s so much more like his old self it’s scary. He gave me a gun.”

“Did he say what the gun was for?”

Patsy shook her head. “I didn’t see him. He left it sometime last night. A couple of times I woke up thinking I heard something—the girls are in Gunnison with their grandma. When I’m alone I don’t sleep well. I hear things—you know: branches scraping and the wind. I scare myself silly thinking it’s an escaped murderer or a crazy person.”

“With a hook instead of a hand?”

Patsy laughed. “You know him?”

“I first heard of him at a pajama party at Mercy High School. When I moved to Manhattan I swear he had a sublet under my bed.”

“Campfire Girls,” Patsy explained her arcane knowledge.

“Anyway . . .” Anna brought the subject back to Tom and his gun.

“Anyway last night I woke up a couple of times but I never came downstairs. I scare myself more if I start peeking in closets and under beds. For once it wasn’t all my imagination. This morning there was a gun in the middle of the kitchen table.”

Patsy got up and opened a cupboard door. Bundled onto a high shelf was a blue apron with white eyelet ruffling. She took it down and unwrapped the apron from around the gun.

“It’s a derringer,” Anna told her. “A twenty-two.” The flashy little gun seemed in keeping with Tom Silva. “Do you know for sure it was Tom who left it?”

“I recognize it. He won it in a stock-car race. And there was a note.” Patsy had tucked the note in the pocket of the apron. She unfolded it and handed it to Anna.

“‘Pats, see how easy it is to get into this place? Get yourself new locks,’ ” Anna read aloud. “Definitely edgy.”

“I thought so.”

“I’ll look into it,” Anna promised. “Meanwhile I’d do what he suggests: get new locks. Give Maintenance a call, okay?”

Patsy said she would. As Anna was leaving, she stopped her. “Do you want to take the gun?”

Anna thought about it for a moment, thought of Tom, of the girls. “Do you know how to use it?” she asked. Patsy nodded. “Then why don’t you keep it for a while.”

 

 

ANNA went off duty at three-thirty. Ninety minutes before tradition allowed cocktails. She peeled off her uniform and, sitting on her bed, opened the top drawer of the dresser. Expensive lace underwear, a legacy of more intimate times, mingled with cordovan-colored uniform socks, hollow-point bullets, and half a dozen ragged handkerchiefs.

In the back, lying on its side, was a metal container. With its fitted lid and wire handle, it was much like a paint can sans label.

Jamie Burke professed singular discomfort living in a house tainted by the presence of a firearm. Anna wondered what the interpreter would think if she knew that the remains of Anna’s husband rested amid her underwear.

“You were always happiest when you were in my pants, Zach.” Anna smiled as she closed the drawer.

The clock on the dresser read 3:47.