Ill Wind (2 page)

Theodore Roosevelt Greeley of Greeley Construction had a job to do and was being paid handsomely to do it. Though Greeley had a veneer of bonhomie, he struck Anna as a hard-core capitalist. She suspected that to his modern Manifest Destiny mentality, the only good Indian was a profitable Indian.

Fingers ever-tensed on the purse strings, the chief ranger and the administrative officer leaned toward Greeley’s camp.

Anna and Hills Dutton, the district ranger, were the only noncombatants present. Dutton’s impressive form was slouched in a folding chair near the end of the table. He’d removed the ammunition from the magazine of his Sig Sauer nine-millimeter and appeared to be inventorying it bullet by bullet.

“Anna?”

As was his wont, the chief ranger was mumbling and it took her a second to recognize her name.

“What?”

“Any input?” The chief was just shifting the heat from himself. None of this august body gave two hoots about what she thought. She and Hills were there only because the secretary refused to go for coffee.

“Well, if all nonessential personnel were required to live out of the park the problem would be alleviated considerably.” Nonessential included not only seasonal interpreters, but also archaeologists, department heads, the administrative officer, the chief ranger, and the superintendent himself. Anna’s suggestion was met with annoyed silence. Satisfied she’d offended everyone at the table and it would be a good long time before they again bothered her for her “input,” Anna retreated back into her own world.

 

 

WHEN visitors left for the day and evening light replaced noon’s scientific glare, she escaped the hubbub.

It soothed her to be where the people weren’t. After working backcountry in wilderness parks—Guadalupe Mountains in Texas and Isle Royale in Lake Superior—Mesa Verde, with its quarter million-plus visitors each year, struck her as urban. During the day, when the ruins were open to the public, she couldn’t walk far enough to escape the hum of traffic and the sullen growl of buses idling as they disgorged tour groups.

After closing time, on the pretext of a patrol, she would slip down into the new quiet of Cliff Palace, one of the largest of the Anasazi villages ever discovered. Climbing as high as was allowed, she would sit with her back to the still-warm stone of the ancient walls, around her rooms and turrets and towers, sunken chambers connected by tunnels, plazas with stone depressions for grinding.

The pueblo hung above a world that fell away for a hundred miles, mesas, buttes, and green valleys fading to the blue of the distant mountain ranges that drifted into the blue of the sky. The air was crisp and thin. Without moisture to laden it with perfumes, it carried only the sharp scent baked from piñon and ponderosa.

From her perch high in the ruin she would gaze down Cliff Canyon. Dwellings appeared singly, first one, then two, then half a dozen, like the hidden pictures in a child’s puzzle.

Tiny jewel cities tucked in natural alcoves beneath the mesa stood sentinel over the twisting valleys. Nearly all faced west or southwest, catching the heat of the winters’ sun, providing shade through the summers. The towns were built with fine craftsmanship, the work of practiced masons evident in the hand-chipped and fitted stones. Walls were whitewashed and painted, and decorations of stars and handprints enlivened the sandstone. Doorways were made in the shape of keyholes. Ladders, constructed of juniper and hide, reached rooms built on shelves forty and fifty feet above the slate of the alcove’s floor.

These were not tents for folding and slipping away silently into the night. These were edifices, art, architecture. Homes built to last the centuries. If the builders had been driven out, surely the marauders would have taken up residence, enjoyed their spoils?

If the Old Ones had not died and they’d not left of their own volition and they’d not been driven out...

Then what? Anna thought.

Food for thought.

Plots for Von Daniken.

 

 

ANNA’S radio crackled to life and everyone at the table, including Al, looked at her as if she’d made a rude noise.

“Excuse me,” she murmured.

As she left the room she found herself hoping for something dire: a brawl at the concession dorm, another medical at Cliff Palace, a bus wreck—anything to keep her out of the staff meeting.

“Seven hundred, three-one-two,” she answered the call.

“Could you come by the CRO?” the dispatcher asked. Frieda, the chief ranger’s secretary and the park dispatcher, was always even-toned and professional. From her voice one could never tell whether a bloody nose or grand-theft auto awaited at the chief ranger’s office.

“I’m on my way. And thank you.”

“KFC seven hundred, fourteen-eighteen.”

The chief ranger’s office was built from blocks of native stone and beamed-in logs darkened by time. Like the museum and the upper-echelon permanent employees’ houses, the CRO was a historic structure built in the nineteen thirties by the Civilian Conservation Corps when “another day, another dollar” was the literal truth.

Anna banged through the screen door and leaned on the glass-topped counter. In true bureaucratic fashion, the inside of the graceful little building had been cobbled into cramped “work areas” and further vandalized by the addition of indoor-outdoor carpeting and cheap metal desks.

Frieda Dierkz looked up from her computer. In her thirties, with short reddish-brown hair cut in an ear-length wedge, more hips than shoulders and more brains than just about anybody else in the Visitor Protection and Fire Management Division, Frieda was the heart of the office. Or, more correctly, as the computer-generated sign on the bulletin board above her desk announced, Queen of the Office. Anna guessed there’d been a time, maybe not yet quite past, when Frieda had hoped to be Queen of a more intimate realm. But a plain face and, more damaging to matrimonial prospects, an air of absolute competence, had made her a career woman.

Though Frieda might have seen that as a bad thing, Anna didn’t. It was always the breadwinner, she’d noticed, who had the adventures. Support staff—whether at work or in the kitchen—seemed ever relegated to keeping the tedious home fires burning.

“So . . .” Anna said for openers.

“Patsy called. Tom’s in the park.” As ever, Frieda was economical with words.

Patsy Silva was the superintendent’s secretary; Tom the estranged husband. Ex-husband. “What this time? Bad guitar music at three A.M.?”

“Suicide notes and chocolates. The chocolates were put through her mail slot. The dog opened them. Half melted on May’s bank statement. The dog threw up the other half on a four-hundred-dollar Indian rug.” Frieda laughed. In his capacity as two parts joke, one part pathos, Tom Silva had been a thorn in law enforcement’s side since Patsy had been hired the previous winter. Had they lived outside the park they would have been the problem of the Colorado police. Inside park boundaries the task fell to the rangers.

Anna hated domestic disputes. The good guys and the bad guys kept switching roles; an outsider didn’t stand a chance. “Where’s Stacy?” Anna hoped to drag another ranger along for moral support.

“Occupado. Another medical at Cliff Palace. Elderly lady.”

“Damn. What does Patsy want us to do about it?”

“Just go talk to her, I guess. She wasn’t too specific. ‘Do something but don’t say I said.’ ”

Anna nodded. “On my way.” Halfway out the door she stopped and turned back. “Frieda, can I come visit Piedmont tonight?”

“Anytime,” the dispatcher returned, already back at her computer. “If I’m not there, let yourself in. Door’s never locked.”

THE tower house was the most picturesque, if not the most convenient, of the historical homes. Named for the round tower that housed the master bedroom, the staircase, and a small round living room, it sat on a gentle hill just west of the museum behind the more conventional homes. For one person it would have been perfect. For a woman with two teenage daughters it had proved a nightmare of bathroom scheduling and closet-space allotment.

Rumor had it, because of the girls, Patsy would be moved as soon as a two-bedroom became available, leaving the tower house up for grabs. Due to the housing shortage, when Anna entered on duty eight weeks before, the district ranger had parked her in the seasonal women’s dormitory till more suitable quarters could be found, so it was with a more than slightly proprietary eye that she allowed herself to be ushered in.

Patsy Silva was compact, with the voluptuous curves of a woman who has borne children. Her hair was close-cropped and honey-blond, her eyes made impossibly blue by tinted contact lenses. Teeth as straight as an orthodontist’s slide rule were shown off by hot-pink lipstick drawn on slightly fuller than her natural lip line.

Patsy smiled and waved distractedly toward the living room with its mess of clothes and magazines littering every flat surface. “Missy and Mindy are over at Frieda’s watching the VCR,” she said, as if the temptation of video explained a hasty and untidy departure. “She’s got quite a movie collection and lets the girls watch almost anytime. It helps.”

Anna nodded. Bucolic park living was fine for adults and children but could weigh heavily on adolescents with a long summer on their hands.

“Sit down. Sit.” Patsy shooed Anna toward the kitchen. “Coffee or anything?” With the offer, as with most of Patsy’s communications, came a tight bright smile. More a habit of placating, Anna suspected, than a genuine show of happiness.

“Coffee’d be fine.”

The kitchen, the only square room in the house, was small but efficiently made, with wood cabinets and a restaurant-style booth under one of the two windows. Anna slid into the booth. Patsy busied herself at the counter. Anna wasn’t particularly fond of reheated coffee, but people seemed more comfortable after their hospitality had been accepted. Maybe some ancient instinct about breaking bread together. Or maybe it was just the comfort of having something to keep their hands and eyes occupied.

Patsy put the cups on the table along with a sugar bowl and creamer in the shape of ceramic ducks wearing blue calico bonnets.

“Thanks.” Anna pulled the cup to her and poured pale bluish milk out of the duck’s bill. Patsy’s smile clicked on then faded slowly, the effort for once proving too great.

“It’s Tom,” she said, as if admitting a tiresome fact.

“Chocolates.”

“And a note. It’s awful. How can you protect yourself from that? The police act like I’m lucky to have such an attentive husband.”

“Ex-husband.”

“Yes. Thank you. He makes me forget. Ex-husband. Ex, ex, ex as in exit, finito, gone. Except that he’s not.” She put her fingers to her temples, looking as if she would have run them distractedly through her hair had not each wave been expertly coaxed into place.

“What makes him more than a nuisance?” Anna asked. At a guess, she might have added “other than guilt?” How could a woman not feel guilty for walking out on flowers, candy, and serenades?

“I was afraid you were going to ask her that,” Patsy replied with an explosive sigh. She slumped back in the booth. “I don’t know. I mean, he doesn’t really do anything. It’s just kind of an increasing sense of weird. Know what I mean? As if my not folding like I always did with the flowery courtship business is pushing him near some edge. This last note seemed, well... edgy.” Patsy apologized with a particularly bright smile.

Anna would have laid odds that Patsy Silva had apologized a lot in her thirty-seven years; sorries and smiles poured like oil on life’s troubled waters. “Can I see the note?”

“Yes. I kept it. At least I’ve learned that since the divorce. Anything edgy, I keep. You can’t imagine how silly this all sounds, even to me, when I try to tell it to some big burly policeman who thinks his wife would die and go straight to pig heaven if he ever paid her this kind of attention. Here it is.”

While she talked, Patsy rummaged through a doll-sized bureau complete with miniature vanity mirror. Decals of ducks matching the creamer were centered on each tiny drawer. From the bottom drawer she pinched up a scrap of paper. Holding it by the edge as if she didn’t want to smudge incriminating prints, she laid it on the table.

In a childish but legible scrawl, more printing than script, was written: “What do you want, Pats? I’ve give you everything. A car, nice close, everything. What do you want? Maybe you want me to do like that guy you told me sent somebody his ear. I’ll go him one better. I’m not living without you, Pats. I’m not.”

“And you think it’s a suicide note,” Anna said. To her it read more like a threat but she was not privy to the inner workings of Tom Silva’s mind. Being the new kid on the block, Anna’d not yet caught up on the gossip.

“I wish it was a suicide note!” Patsy snapped.

Anna liked the anger better than the shiny smiles. At least it rang true.