Ill Wind (8 page)

Anna didn’t like to think Stacy would swing an iron hook at her head.

Before she left she presumed on Frieda’s hospitality one more time and borrowed her phone. If Greeley was home he wasn’t answering.

“I’ll try him again first thing in the morning,” Frieda promised.

 

 

WHEN Anna got back to the dorm it was after three and all the lights were blazing. Laughter and the rattle of voices met her at the door. “You were there, did it happen or not?” Jamie was shouting.

On Mesa Verde, it would seem, no one but Anna had any interest in sleep.

“Jimmy, you saw it—” A thud followed by laughter interrupted.

“Jimmy’s had so much he couldn’t see past his own nose.” Jennifer Short’s Memphis drawl.

“The spirit veil, oooooooh.” Another voice, probably Jimmy Russell’s, wailed like the ghosts in the Saturday morning cartoons. Then laughter shouted down by Jamie’s: “Funny, real funny, you guys—”

Anna banged through the kitchen door. Moaning like Casper the Friendly Ghost, Jimmy Russell was traipsing around the living room in a drunken parody of a wraith. His face was flushed and his eyes bright but he was steady on his feet. Anna had known he was a drinker. Noting how well he’d learned to cope, she couldn’t help but wonder if, at twenty, he was an habitual drunk.

A study in superiority, Jamie was leaning in the entrance to the hall. “Laugh away,” she was saying. “They’re here. I’ve seen them before. Are you going to pretend you didn’t, Jennifer? You were practically peeing your pants tonight.”

“My, my, Jamie. Such a ladylike phrase,” Jennifer drawled.

Rolling his eyes and fluttering his hands, Jimmy wailed.

“Keep it up. Keep it up,” Jamie said with exaggerated patience.

Sprawled in one of the armchairs, her body limp, Jennifer percolated giggles in support of Jimmy’s antics. “Aw, come on, Jamie. He’s only teasin’ yew.”

“It’s not me he needs to worry about.” Jamie had taken on an air of secret knowledge.

“Excuse me,” Anna cut in. “Could you guys take the party elsewhere? I’ve got to be up at six.”

“We’re sorry, Anna,” Russell said contritely. Head slightly lowered, he looked at her from under thick blond lashes.

Undoubtedly it had been irresistible when he was six.

“Jamie saw the third world or whatever coming through that thing... a see-poo-poo—” Dissolving into giggles, Jennifer couldn’t go on.

“Sipapu. See. Pah. Pooh.” Jamie pronounced the word with the care one might employ when conversing with an imbecilic and not much loved child. “It’s too bad law enforcement doesn’t require their rangers to learn about the places they are supposedly protecting.”

The merriment went out of Jennifer’s face and a hardness came into it that Anna had never seen before. “Y’all can piss and moan the rest of the night if you want to. I’m going to bed. ’Night Anna.”

The magnolia blossom apparently had a core of good Southern steel.

“ ’Night,” Anna returned automatically.

“Jamie really did see something. She’s got a weird sense like that—you know, ghosts and shit,” Jimmy Russell said somberly.

The boy was so transparent, if she’d not been tired and cranky, Anna might have found him amusing. Jennifer gone, Russell was trying to re-ingratiate himself with Jamie. Somebody wants to get laid tonight, she thought without charity but with undoubted accuracy.

Russell fell back on the sofa, his feet splayed out in front of him. Brown cowboy boots. Anna had no trouble picturing him with an implement of destruction. Environmental concerns didn’t seem to be the Kentucky boy’s mainstay but drunken pranks might be. After a six-pack or two Jamie could probably talk him into almost anything.

Anna began to wonder if all the ghostly theatrics were designed as a cover story for more practical measures taken to protect the Anasazi heritage.

Jamie interrupted Anna’s train of thought. Stalking to one of the two refrigerators in the kitchen, she took out a Tupperware container and kicked the refrigerator door shut. “Bonegrinder!” As she spat out the word, she jerked open a drawer. In one continuous motion she fished out a serving spoon and popped the plastic lid off the food container.

“If somebody took one of those huge ditchers and started chewing a trench through Forest Lawn you can bet there’d be an outcry. It just wouldn’t happen.” Ladling a bite of some pasta concoction into her mouth as if to calm her nerves, Jamie went on. “You can’t go around digging up white people’s cemeteries. Oh no. Big sacrilege. They won’t get away with it.” Jamie inhaled another serving-spoonful of pasta. “The whole mesa is sacred ground.”

Though it had been in vogue at one time, there wasn’t any archaeological evidence to support that theory, but Anna didn’t say anything. She dumped her hat and gun on the dinette table and collapsed in one of the straight-backed chairs.

“They’re not going to get away with grinding our bones up. Not this time.”

Anna noted the “our.” She also noted that Jamie’s brown roots were just beginning to show at the base of her part. Raising her eyebrows politely, she invited Jamie to continue ranting.

“Solstice is coming,” the interpreter said with finality.

June twenty-first; perhaps that was the proposed date of some planned event. Anna let the idea filter through her mind. Why would Jamie divulge that bit of information in the presence of a law enforcement ranger? Unless, as was often the case in publicity stunts, the law was necessary to provide the drama required to lure out the press. It was illegal for government employees to “tattle” to the press on touchy issues. But bringing down the wrath of the six o’clock news was almost the only way to effect any real change. Like any other entrenched bureaucracy, the Park Service was filled with people passing the buck and covering the hindmost parts of their anatomy.

“What happens on solstice?” Anna asked.

“It’s a sacred day to the Old Ones,” Jamie replied, with the air of an insider who only hands out information in pre-approved sound bites.

“Are they going to hold those Indian dances or something?” Jimmy Russell wanted to know.

“Not likely. ‘They’ have been dead for seven hundred years,” Anna told him.

“They might,” Jamie said cryptically.

“Ah. Chindi.” Anna was suddenly too tired to play along.

“The spirit veil, ooooo—” Jimmy’s wail ended abruptly at the look on her face.

“Are you driving, Jimmy?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He dangled his car keys.

Anna took them and slipped them into her pocket. If Russell was her chain-swinging eco-terrorist, he was too far gone to do much damage till morning.

“You’re drunk. Sleep on the couch. I’ll leave your keys on the table when I go to work. Good night.”

A few minutes of murmuring came through the wall as Jamie dragged out bedding for the inebriated helitacker, then the house was blessedly quiet. Anna took two aspirins for her head. For her nerves she recited the only prayer she knew all the way through: “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties/And things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!”

AT EIGHT A .M., WHEN STACY PULLED UP IN THE PATROL car, Jimmy Russell was still curled up on the couch. He didn’t even twitch when Anna walked through. Without so much as a twinge of guilt, she let the door bang shut behind her.

Usually Stacy’s aesthetic countenance was a welcome sight, but lack of sleep had left Anna surly. Evidently the night’s festivities had left their mark on him as well. In lieu of “good morning” he said: “Mind if we stop by my house? Rose’s going to Farmington and Bella needs a ride to Maintenance. Drew said he’d keep an eye on her till six.”

Anna wanted to ask why Rose didn’t take the kid along, but she minded her own business. The radio was tuned to a Navajo station and a language that sounded like Chinese sawed at her nerves. With an abrupt movement, she switched it off.

“Wrong side of the bed?” Stacy asked.

“Tired. My housemates kept me up after our rendezvous in Maintenance. Jamie said she’d seen a veil or some damn thing. Chindi passing from the underworld to this one. They were out at Cliff Palace, drinking and scaring each other is my guess.”

“I checked the book.” Stacy sounded alarmed. “There were no permits for Cliff Palace last night.”

Any employee going anywhere—or anytime—the public was not allowed had to have a backcountry permit signed by the chief ranger. Cliff Palace after hours fell under that restriction.

Anna wondered if Stacy entertained the same suspicions she did about possible monkeywrenching business. “If that’s really where they were then I doubt much harm was done.”

“When I made my sweep at eleven I didn’t see any cars,” he said stubbornly.

“Maybe they were on bicycles.” Leaning her head back against the seat, she closed her eyes and let the subject drop.

At the housing loop, she fiddled with the radio while Stacy went in to fetch Bella. A little mental arithmetic told Anna that Bella was his stepdaughter. She was a first- or second-grader and he’d met his wife three years ago. Taking on the responsibility, not only of someone else’s child, but a child with a disability, spoke of powerful love—or powerful need.

“Hello, my little pine nut,” she heard Stacy call when he was halfway up the walk. He disappeared into the house to reappear moments later with Bella. The child’s face was a testament to her mother’s youthful good looks. A rounded heart set off by a crop of carefully tended curls. Brown hair, several shades lighter than Rose’s, caught the morning sun and glinted with blond highlights. Wide-spaced eyes sparkled above a small straight nose. This loveliness made more pathetic the rolling gait and bowed legs, far too short for her upper body.

Hand in hand with Stacy, Bella chattered up at him. For every glitter of hero worship in her eyes, there was an answering glow of adoration in his. Stacy’s slender frame shaped itself into a question mark as he curbed his steps, leaning down to hear her.

What Anna had seen as a burden clearly lightened the load Stacy professed to have carried after his first wife left him.

“You’re Anna Pigeon,” the child announced when they reached the car.

“You got me there.” Anna leaned over the seat-back to shove briefcases and hats out of Bella’s way. Fleetingly, she wondered if Stacy had been talking about her.

“I read your name tag,” the child explained as she swung herself into the rear seat. “That’s in case you thought I might be a psycho or something.”

Stacy laughed. “Psychic, pine nut. Psycho is crazy.”

“I’m not old enough to be crazy,” she said confidently. “Do you have children, Mrs. Pigeon?”

“None to speak of.”

“Oh.” Bella sounded disappointed.

“I have a cat.” Anna tried to exonerate herself.

“Don’t you like children?”

“Some of my best friends are children.” Anna was thinking of Alison, her Michigan housemate’s daughter.

The truth must have rung through the words. Bella brightened immediately. “That’s okay then. If the cat has kittens, can I play with them?”

“Your mom’s allergic, pine nut,” Stacy reminded gently.

“Not have, Stacy. Play with. I’d wash after.”

“Piedmont’s a boy cat,” Anna said. “So no kittens. But he might like it if you’d come play with him. Sometimes I suspect he misses the little girl we used to live with.”

“Does he try to hide it?” Bella asked, and Anna sensed she was already adept at hiding hurt and loneliness.

“Yes. Sometimes he goes out and kills mice. Then I think he feels better.”

“I like mice.”

“So does Piedmont.” Anna was losing ground in this conversation. A smile played on Stacy’s lips. She was willing to bet it was at her expense.

 

 

THE maintenance yard was loud with heavy equipment. Stacy pulled up in front of the fire cache. “Stay in the car, honey. Too much traffic. I’ll find Drew.”

“Are you married?” Bella resumed the interrogation as Stacy disappeared into the cache.

“Used to be,” Anna replied.

“Did he divorce you?”

“He died.” Anna wished Stacy would come back. “Maybe I’d better go and see what’s keeping your dad.”

Her cowardly exit was thwarted. “No. Stay. Stacy’ll be right back. He never forgets. My first dad divorced us because I wasn’t born normal,” Bella stated matter-of-factly. “Momma said.”

Anna didn’t know what to say to that. She was saved by Stacy’s reappearance, Drew beside him. Drew Kinder was as close to a “mountain of a man” as Anna’d ever met, made of a core of stone-hard muscle covered with a layer of baby fat a couple of inches deep. Unruly eyebrows and a moth-eaten mustache grew like lichen on his round face.

Next to the helitacker, Stacy’s six-foot-two looked average, short even, and his slenderness was accentuated. Seeing the two men together, an image of a bass fiddle and bow flashed through her mind.

“Hiya, Drew,” Bella called.

“Hiya, beautiful.” Drew leaned down, hands on the door frame. His head filled the window. “I gotta fuel the truck, then we hit the road.”

“Hit the road,” Bella repeated, as if the phrase had struck a harmonious chord within her.

“I’ll help you with the truck,” Anna volunteered. She didn’t want to be left alone with Bella again. The child’s unrelenting forthrightness was unsettling.

“Can’t hack it?” Stacy asked over the roof of the patrol car as she climbed out.

Anna just laughed.

While Drew filled the fire truck with diesel, she leaned against the fender. In his huge hands the nozzle looked like a child’s water pistol.

“Bella’s quite a girl,” he said.

“Seems smart enough. Too bad she’s . . .” Aware she was giving pity where none was asked, Anna left the sentence unfinished.

Drew straightened up. The sun was behind his head. In silhouette he loomed as solid as the proverbial brick outhouse. “Maybe that’s what makes her so strong, so smart. She sees right through people. Maybe she got that from being the way she is. Ever think of that?”