Borderline (15 page)

The far end of the divided beach was walled off by the huge stones forming the rapids. Water piled up between the rocks, its foam a dirty brown, its force enough to pull trees up by the roots and roll stones the size of trucks. Since Anna had floated through steering the cow, the river had risen at least a foot. Either it would drop soon or they would have to head for higher ground. Slow-rising water was a pain. Flash flood was deadly and, a thousand feet down in a crack, she had no idea what was coming.

Like her brother, Cyril could probably hide in a mail slot. But as far as Anna could see the boulders between the water and cliff were too close together to provide sanctuary for the cow. Quiet, unmoving, she tried to see around corners and through solid obstacles.

Movement caught her eye and she looked up nearer the cliff where the sand piled up and the Bermuda grass was rich and thick. Cyril and Easter were not hiding anywhere. Basking in sunlight and bucolic splendor, the cow was grazing unconcernedly while the young woman sat cross-legged on the grass talking to her.

Cyril hadn’t seen Carmen fall. She’d undoubtedly heard the shots and written the sound off to some nonlethal source. The tranquil scene, unsullied by the knowledge of violent death by gunshot, of fear for life and limb, was in such juxtaposition to the mad race for cover Anna had just left that it was hard to believe she hadn’t made the whole thing up, or dreamed it. It remained real enough, however, that she wasn’t anxious to dash out from under her rock and join the lovely targets on the green. Staying as close as she could to her big friendly rocks, she worked her way toward the cliff till she was nearer Cyril.

“Cyril,” Anna whispered.

Cyril’s dark head turned and she shaded her eyes with her hand, her ball cap lost to the river. Anna didn’t want to shout. If the rifleman was still around and still feeling hateful, she wasn’t going to draw his attention down on them.

“Over here,” Anna said softly.

Cyril finally found where this tiny pest of a noise that was Anna was coming from and pivoted around to face her. They were twenty feet apart; she in the sun, Anna tucked in the shadows.

“Is that you, Anna?” Cyril squinted into the glare.

“Yeah.”

Cyril waited for Anna to explain why she was cowering in crevasses. Anna didn’t know where to begin. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Easter and me are fine.”

“Easter and I,” Anna corrected her automatically, and wondered why the shade of her first and beloved mother-in-law had chosen that moment to visit her mind.

“Why?” Cyril asked.

“Could you come over to me? Walk slowly, okay?”

“What’s going on?” Cyril asked as she stood and began to walk casually toward where Anna was hidden. Alarm had crept into her voice. Cyril and Steve were smart kids, smarter than most people, Anna guessed. It hadn’t taken her long to figure out that something was very wrong and that her best bet was to do as Anna suggested.

The next leap of logic was easy for the young woman: “Were those gunshots?” she asked as she snuggled into the small alcove where Anna was.

“They were.”

“What’s with that? Why would anybody be shooting? Hunters . . . Are you guys okay?” she asked, and Anna knew she’d grasped the seriousness of the situation.

“Nobody was hurt but Carmen,” Anna said, trying to put the good news before the bad. “She was nearly to the rim of the canyon when the first shot hit her and she fell.”

“Dead?” Cyril asked. The younger woman wasn’t cold or uncaring; Anna didn’t get that sense at all. Cyril was a realist: a shot and a fall from the height Carmen was would probably be fatal.

“I don’t know,” Anna said. “We can’t assume she is. I’ve seen people survive worse falls than she took, and we don’t know where the bullet hit her—or even if it did; it could have been a shard of rock from the impact—only that there was blood left on the rock where she bounced on her way down.”

“We have to check,” Cyril said.

“We do,” Anna agreed. The prospect of leaving a wounded woman to die alone in a heap of rocks in the desert was too miserable to contemplate. That vision, added to Anna’s existing nightmares, and even Paul’s arms couldn’t shut out the horrors waiting behind closed lids.

“We also have to get ourselves out of here,” Anna said.

“Another raft will be along,” Cyril returned. “Why not wait? They can take the baby with them and call somebody for us when they get out.”

“Look at the river,” Anna said.

In the time it had taken Anna to get Cyril’s attention and explain what had happened it had come up the beach a yard or more. The ribbon of land they occupied had been reduced from a generous forty feet of sand to less than half that.

“It has quit raining, won’t it go down?”

“Not if it’s still raining in the mountains.”

“I can’t leave Easter,” Cyril said with that sad and determined edge Anna had heard before.

“If you don’t leave the cow I will personally slit its throat,” Anna said.

Cyril looked hard into her face. She could see Anna would do exactly what she said she would, whether she wanted to or not.

“Okay,” Cyril said, and stood. “We should get back with the others.”

Anna had not been chatting in the shade while rivers rose and bodies rotted because she was a lazy beast. She’d been hoping the passage of time would enlighten them in some way, shape or form as to what the shooter was up to. That or give him time to get over his killing rage and leave the premises. “Let me go first,” she said. “See if our buddy on the rim is still mad at us.”

As she rose and walked back to where they could get over the spit of rocks most easily, she wondered if she was doing Cyril any favors by going first. Maybe she’d bring the shooter’s attention to them, and when Cyril showed, he’d be all ready and aimed. The thought didn’t take root; she knew that there were too many variables and too much was given to chance to win every hand.

Walking quickly, she hugged the rocks where she could but she couldn’t shake the feeling of a bull’s-eye on her chest and was aware that she was checking her person for the red laser dot that preceded death on occasion. When nothing untoward occurred she turned around and motioned for Cyril to follow.

No shots. Maybe he was gone. Maybe he was a she. That was a thought that usually came late to law enforcement. Anna was no exception. Violent crime wasn’t solely a man’s profession, but it tended to stick to the old traditional gender roles: men committed violence in the home and at work, to loved ones and strangers, for profit and sexual entertainment; women committed violence in the home and to family members for the most part. Women tended to outshoot the men in training for some reason, but it seldom translated to shooting animals for the fun of it, or hunting down people.

For now, Anna would think of the shooter as
he
.

She and Cyril scaled the rock, slid down the other side and made their way back to where Paul and Steve waited. Lori was with them now, and Chrissie, having no intention of leaving the really terrific shelter she’d dived into, was carrying on a campaign of questions in an attempt to ascertain precisely whose fault all this was and what they were going to do about it.

“Chrissie is the daughter of Mother’s best friend from high school,” Cyril said, distancing herself from the complainer.

“Ah,” Anna returned.

They squished themselves into the crevice, Cyril tight against her brother, Anna pressing into the comfort of Paul’s right arm. Without her knowing how it happened, she was also holding Helena. The baby was so still and quiet Anna wondered if she’d died, and a searing pain rose up from her chest into her throat. Desperately she pressed an ear to the tiny chest and was reassured by a steady pulse of heartbeat.

Coma was her next thought but she resisted the impulse to wake the baby up. If she was sleeping, that was a good thing. If she was comatose, there was nothing that could be done about it.

“Helena’s going to get dehydrated,” Anna said. “We can drink river water if we have to but I’d hate to give her anything that could induce diarrhea or vomiting. Little as she is, she has no reserves.”

“There’s some bottled water in the dry-bag we fished out of the river,” Paul said.

“That’s my water.” Chrissie’s voice came from the crack next door.

Nobody responded.

“I take it there was nothing in the bag that she could eat,” Anna said.

“Not unless she’ll eat chocolate-covered cherries.”

“Those are mine,” Chrissie’s disembodied voice said.

“They’re melted,” Steve called back.

He was answered by a pathetic groan, then: “They’re still mine.” Steve rolled his eyes.

“Can I hold her?” It was the first time Anna heard Lori speak. It was easy to forget she was there. For no good reason, Anna didn’t want to give her Helena, but she did. Lori was more centered, more present when she was caring for someone. Not a bad trait.

“We wait here for the next raft?” Paul was asking Anna.

“Maybe we can’t,” Anna said.

“The water’s way up,” Cyril added. “You can really see how far it’s risen on the other side.”

“Nobody shot at you two. Maybe whoever it was has gone,” Steve said hopefully. “We can climb partway up and wait it out. These river things don’t last all that long, do they?”

“Depends,” Anna said. “But usually, no.”

“Good thing we have all those chocolate-covered cherries to live on,” Steve said.

“Those are mine,” came predictably from the ether. Steve and Cyril joined in on the “mine” to keep Chrissie company.

For a time nobody said anything. Helena’s breathing, soft and tiny and regular, comforted Anna in an odd way. The baby was a cradle of life and Anna had, by lucky timing and an old jackknife, been able to preserve that life. It didn’t make up for the rest of the mess the world was in but she treasured it anyway.

The silence went from active and listening for dangers from above to empty as thought drained out of brains and it became clear to the Kesslers, to Lori, maybe even to the quiescent Chrissie in her private condo that their leader was dead or dying and that Anna and Paul had no miracles to produce on their behalf.

Unable to remain torpid for long, Anna was the first to rouse. “I’ve got to find Carmen. She may not be dead.”

“Correction,” Paul said. “
We’ve
got to find Carmen.”

“We’ve got to find Carmen,” Anna amended. Using the inclusive form of the verb was still new to her.

“I’m getting wet all over again,” Chrissie wailed. She was a few feet closer to the river than the rest of them. Steve, closest to the exit of their miniature fortress, leaned out.

“River’s at the doorstep,” he said.

“We could float down feetfirst, like you showed us with Easter,” Cyril said.

“Baby,” Anna replied.

“Where did we leave our life jackets?” Paul asked. It was a rhetorical question. Glad to be on solid ground, they’d all doffed their vests and dumped them by the water’s edge. They’d be long gone by now.

The day had worn on; the sun was no longer in the canyon. In the not too distant future it would no longer be in Texas. Darkness might protect them from the rifleman, assuming he was still on the rim, but it would not protect them from the river, and climbing in the dark was not an option.

“We all go,” she said. “Paul and I will go first, see if we attract any undue attention from our hateful buddy, and get as close to where we saw Carmen go down as we can. Lori, you take care of Helena for the time being.” Anna did not intend to let the plumpish, distracted young woman go boulder hopping with her baby if she could help it. “The four of you come behind us as far as there’s cover of some kind. Everybody got that?”

“Easter . . .” Cyril made one last try.

Anna drew her finger across her throat from ear to ear and the younger woman desisted.

Chrissie hurtled into their crevasse, sprawling onto her knees and nearly knocking Cyril over. “It’s way wet back there,” she said as she bulldozed a place for herself between the twins.

Anna suppressed the urge to deal with Chrissie the way she’d threatened to deal with the cow. “How does that sound to you, Paul?” She wasn’t asking her husband to be polite. She—they—needed all the help they could get.

“We need to get the bottled water for the baby,” he said. It meant a trip into the open.

“I’ll do it,” Steve said.

“We should wait here,” Chrissie said. “Somebody will come get us. No way I’m going to climb up there and get shot to death.”

“I’m afraid of heights,” Lori confessed in a rush.

“I’ve heard drowning is one of the nicest ways to die,” Steve said. “Be sure and come back from the Other Side and let me know if it’s true.”

For once Chrissie had nothing to say.

The faces of the college kids looked pale and drawn. The four of them were tired and scared, hungry and thirsty and in a situation they had never been trained to deal with. The twins were resilient but Lori and Chrissie had not been taught to face adversity. They were products of the Barney generation where everybody always wins, trophies are given all around regardless of which team wins and playground insults are dealt with by the courts. They had been trained to passivity and entitlement, skills that were useless in the present situation. Had they also been trained to obedience it would have helped, but in Barney’s world everyone was a leader, regardless of ability.

Anna didn’t have any trophies to hand out for not being drowned or shot yet, but she could offer them comfort. She hoped it would be enough to motivate them to climb.

“With luck, when we find Carmen, we’ll find her sat phone,” Anna said. “Then, when we get to the top, we’ll just call park headquarters and they’ll send a helicopter for us.” Anna doubted Big Bend had a helicopter on tap to rescue people but she thought it would sound spiffier than a three-hour wait while the rangers hiked in or came on horseback. There were backcountry roads in Big Bend but Anna couldn’t remember one that ran along the edge of Santa Elena.