Borderline (25 page)

He didn’t keep her in the dark.

“I understand you’re on administrative leave from Rocky,” he said. “Down here on vacation?”

Bernard had called her chief ranger. Anna had hoped her lapse into tears in Vincent James’s office had been confidential, but she knew the hope was in vain. Nothing was confidential but that which was kept in one’s own skull. Records were subpoenaed, people talked or, if they didn’t talk, they told by their silences. Every move Bernard made, the inflections in his voice, the way his eyes slid away from her when she tried to meet his gaze, told her he believed her to be a broken vessel. The use of her married name let her know that he preferred it that way. When he’d first laid eyes on her—given that he’d erased Apostle Islands from his mind—she’d been holding a baby. That, too, would count against her. Women with babes in arms were seen as victims. Not that there was malice in it, but they were to be protected, given parking places nearer the supermarket doors, and first, in theory at least, to be handed into the lifeboats when the ship was going down.

Anna didn’t know whether to fight it, give in to it or laugh. In the end she did nothing; she answered the chief’s question. “Yes. Vacation.”

Relief flickered momentarily in Bernard’s eyes and she knew he was well aware of what he was doing, that he was intentionally putting her on a shelf—or out to pasture. She flattered herself that it was because he knew she would not let go of this, administrative leave or not, till she had found out who killed the three women and where Helena would go from here. Flattered herself because even as she enjoyed the thought, she was aware it was not true. Bernard just wanted her in a pigeonhole where he would not have to deal with her.

Anna smiled at him. This was one pigeon it was going to be hard to label and forget. The smile bothered him and he looked quickly to Paul. Anna was surprised until she caught sight of herself in the black mirrors night had made of the windows. The smile on her face had a wolfish quality, a tinge of the cold of a Michigan winter hardening the edges.

“Mr. Davidson—”

“Paul.” In the mirror of glass Anna saw her husband’s smile as he put things on a less formal basis. There was nothing cold in it. Nothing warm either. She suspected he was as aware of Bernard’s dismissal of her as she was and it was making him wary.

“Paul,” the chief said, more comfortable now. “Why don’t you sit down?”

Anna had known but not given any thought to the fact that Paul, as exhausted as he must be, had chosen to stand behind her and Helena rather than relax. Something, maybe just instinct or habit, was keeping him on guard.

He took the chair next to hers, reached over and lifted one of her hands from her lap and folded it into his, both resting on his thigh. The heat and the touch buoyed Anna up and the title Mrs. no longer nettled her. Not for a moment did she doubt it had been meant to belittle but, given her Mr., it never would. She closed her fingers around Paul’s and waited to see what Bernard had next on his “to do” list now that he believed she had been summarily disposed of.

“You’ve been through this with Jessie.” He nodded at the head of Law Enforcement, Jessie Wiggins. He’d been with the paramedic and the two rangers who had fetched them off the rim of the canyon. Jessie nodded. As far as Anna knew, Jessie didn’t have an agenda and hadn’t seemed to react to the news that she was on administrative leave for PTSD or whatever the park had chosen to call it. “I’m going to have to ask you to go through it once more for me. Mayor Pierson of Houston and her head of security, Darden White, are in the park for the border impact convention and asked if they could sit in.”

Because Bernard was being a twit, Anna was tempted to allow herself a small curl of the lip to let him know they were all aware that the mayor had railroaded him, but she was too tired to be petty. The mayor was an interesting woman. She was petite and, though she had a gym-toned body, she worked at hiding the fact with soft silk that flowed from her shoulders, lending fullness to small breasts and roundness to what Anna guessed would be sinewy arms. Her hair was incarcerated in what Anna thought of as a Texas bob, very expensively blond and done in stone. Rather like a toned-down, Bumble & Bumble version of Ann Richards’s coif.

The eyes were her most captivating aspect. She had schooled herself in dress and makeup, hair, nails, even body type and managed to create a package that was both attractive and businesslike, physically unremarkable, neither sexy nor unsexed, the fine line women in politics had to walk every day on the way to their closets. To a careful observer, though, her eyes gave her away, Anna thought. They did tonight, at any rate. Surely she hadn’t been entrusted with running a city with eyes like that. The Christian right wouldn’t allow it. Not in Texas.

Judith Pierson’s eyes burned. If Anna squinted, she believed she could almost see the conflagration behind the brownish green irises. The mayor had the eyes of a hungry vampire or a sainted lunatic in mid-vision.

“Mayor Pierson.”

The man Bernard had introduced as Darden White spoke from his corner. Anna had forgotten he was there and his voice startled her. Darden had drifted out of her consciousness as a fat old guy in the mayor’s entourage. When he spoke he was so very much
there
, she was surprised she could have overlooked him.

“Can I get you a coffee or a soda?” White asked his boss deferentially.

The mayor paused, took a breath, then said: “A soda if they’ve got it. Thank you, Darden.” When she turned back to the table the fire in her eyes might not have been extinguished but it was no longer in sight.

As he left the conference room it occurred to Anna that he might have intentionally disappeared into the woodwork, the way she often disappeared in plain sight along trails, situated where the natural line of sight would miss her, quiet and unmoving as a rock. People would hike within feet of her, chattering and laughing, never noticing that they were being watched.

“Paul, could you tell us what happened?” Bernard asked, and sat back as if he didn’t wish to have the messiness of their adventure splash on him during the telling.

Paul looked to Anna to see if she needed to say anything before he began. She didn’t. Paul started with the rescue of Easter, and then told of losing the raft. The chief ranger rolled his eyes at the mention of the cow but otherwise made no comments.

Anna watched Cyril and Steve and Chrissie. The twins were uncharacteristically quiet and Chrissie slumped in her chair with no more life than a deflated balloon. They were exhausted and, now that the adrenaline had been reabsorbed and they were no longer living from moment to moment trying to stay alive, the full impact of the deaths of Carmen, Lori and Helena’s mother would be hitting them.

The deaths were waiting to hit Anna. She could feel them like black shadows drifting between her and the overhead fluorescents, swimming past the corners of her eyes always just out of sight but for a gray wisp or a stealthy movement. Ghosts were not the spirits of the uneasy dead, but the projections of the living, drifts of guilt, fear, failure and mortality too great to be contained in the mind.

Anna didn’t know why they had chosen to join the specters that had followed her home from Isle Royale or whether or not they would remain with her. Logically she should have been able to banish them easily. She had neither caused nor contributed to the cause of any of the deaths. She had saved whom she could, doing the best she had with what was at hand. That used to be good enough to get her to sleep at night.

No more.

“Chrissie found the woman caught in the strainer,” Paul said, and he leaned over to pat Chrissie’s shoulder. He smiled at her with the full force of priest and father figure behind it. Chrissie visibly grew stronger; she sat up straighter and tossed her head. Her hair was so filthy and matted it more or less clunked but the gesture had a smidgeon of the old arrogance and Anna was pleased.

“Do you want to tell this part?” Paul asked. Years as a priest would have taught him the necessity of letting people share their horrors, Anna realized. There was much about her husband she did not know, they’d not been together long enough. Instead of making her uneasy she enjoyed a tickle of excitement at the wonders she had yet to discover in this man she had married.

“Yeah. Okay,” Chrissie said as she pulled herself together to be a productive member of the adult world.

“Paul, if you don’t mind . . .” Bernard left the sentence unfinished but his meaning was clear. He wanted to hear a real account, not one by a girl in her teens or a middle-aged woman who’d recently fallen apart.

Chrissie began to deflate again. “I wasn’t in on a lot of this part,” Paul said easily. “Chrissie’s the only one who was there start to finish.”

Paul leaned back, closed his mouth firmly and smiled encouragingly at the bedraggled teenager.

Chrissie regained the oxygen she’d lost and puffed up a bit. For a moment she scanned the table the way a practiced speaker might assess their audience. Anna’s eyes followed hers, interested to see how the mayor would respond to the change of narrators. Mayor Pierson had lit up again. The soda White had brought back—a diet 7UP—was at her elbow, the tab not yet pulled. She was leaning in, her lips slightly parted as if she wanted to lap this part of the story up like rich cream.

“I was down farther than everybody else,” Chrissie began. “And I was kind of freaked out, the water was so . . . you know . . . so pushy. I’d gotten turned around and I was walking away from everybody else instead of toward them when I saw this bunch of branches and things caught between two rocks, like a beaver dam or something, just a bunch of sticks and logs and brush.”

“The woman was caught there? Washed down by the river?” Judith jumped in, and Anna was glad to see Chrissie had recovered enough spirit to be annoyed by the interruption.

“I’m getting to that,” she said with exaggerated patience. “
Anyway
, there was this bunch of branches and things caught between two rocks.”

The backtracking was sawing at Judith Pierson’s nerves. Her lips were pursed as if her tongue was busy checking the sharpness of each tooth.

Satisfied the woman had been put in her place, Chrissie moved the story along. “I thought pieces of our stuff had got caught up and I went to see if maybe I could get it. When I got close I saw it was this Mexican woman. The water had tangled all her hair into the sticks and her arm was woven through it so she looked like one of those sculptures of people becoming trees, you know like the Greeks liked to do, people turning into different things?”

It wasn’t actually a question; Chrissie was in the habit of ending her sentences on an up note.

“She was dead,” Judith said. “My God, how awful for you.” She reached a hand across the table but Chrissie was having none of it.

“She was
not
dead,” she said repressively. “She was all alive and pregnant.”

The mayor reacted as if Chrissie had slapped her, unaccustomed to being rebuffed, probably. “She wasn’t dead?” she asked Paul.

“No,” Paul said. “She died later but she was alive when Chrissie first found her.”

“Did she say anything? Did she talk to you?” the mayor asked Paul.

“She did
not
say anything,” Chrissie took back the floor. “She was alive but she wasn’t exactly conversational. Jeez Louise, she’d probably drank about half of Colorado or wherever. She didn’t say anything.”

“Sorry,” Judith said, evidently recalling her manners. “Please go on.”

“Thank you,” Chrissie said, unappeased. “We made a line of us holding to each other and Anna cut her out of the sticks. Then we floated her back to shore and carried her up out of the water to the cliff where there was shade.”

“And the poor thing died there,” Judith said, shaking her head. “Such a waste.”

“Not yet,” Chrissie said. “She didn’t die right off. She said ‘my baby’ then she died, okay?”

“God, that is so sad,” the mayor said. “I suppose she was trying to cross the river so she could have the baby on American soil. As long as they think they can, they’ll try it. It’s not fair to anybody.”

Martinez put down his foam cup and unfolded his legs.

“We don’t need to go into the political ramifications now, Mrs. Pierson,” the chief said as he shot his river ranger a hostile glance.

Mrs
., not
Mayor
. Bernard definitely used the title as a way to strip a woman of her professional power, should she be so brazen as to have any.

“Did she have any ID on her?” Pierson asked Jessie Wiggins. “Do we know who in Mexico to inform?”

Wiggins shook his head, the bald spot flashing dully under the overhead lights. “Unless somebody comes asking after her, we may never know. If she was crossing to get to relatives here—that’s often the case—if they’re here illegally, they won’t come forward. Even if they did, identifying the body might be out of the question. The river will have taken it. Next time we find it, if we do, the turtles and fish won’t have left us much to go on.”

“I don’t think she was a poor Mexican woman crossing the river to have her baby in the U.S.,” Anna said.

Jessie and Bernard and Judith stared at her as if toads had just hopped out of her mouth.

“Mrs. Davidson,” Bernard began.

“Anna,” Anna said.

Bernard’s face settled fractionally and was made older and kinder. “Anna,” he said. “This kind of thing happens on the border every day. Not this tragic or dramatic, but people die trying to smuggle themselves in. Truckloads sometimes.”

“I read the papers,” Anna said. The breach in the chief’s charade when he was forced to say her name had been shored up. He was pushing to get her back into her assigned role. “I first thought she was washed away trying to cross so she could give her baby American citizenship. But she wasn’t a poor village woman with no resources. At least I don’t think she was.”