Borderline (29 page)

“Don’t ask me why I want you to fire him.” Her mouth against the soft folds of his flannel robe, she sounded so young. Darden continued to stroke her hair absently but he didn’t answer. Firing problem employees was only a good idea if they were all of the problem. If the boss was half of it—especially the half that the tabloids would love to buy an exclusive story about—the aftermath usually cost more than it would take to turn a bad employee into a good retainer.

“Please?” Judith looked up at him through wet eyelashes.

Darden was surprised. He doubted she’d cried any more recently than he had, but it was a night for realizing she no longer told him all her secrets.

“I don’t want to pry into your personal affairs,” he said, and heard the stiffness in his own voice. Had he missed it for some reason her deep sigh would have enlightened him as to its existence. “I really don’t, Judy. You’re a grown woman and can do what you like. I’m asking because why’s going to dictate how. We fire him out of hand right now and he goes running to the press or—if Gerry’s around and gets wind of it—the press runs to him and the governor’s mansion might as well be on Jupiter for as close as you’re going to get to it.”

Judith pushed herself to her feet, using his knees for leverage. The old plaid robe fell partly open and Darden could see his leg from knee to beat-up slipper. A white leg with dark hairs, skinny at the shin and heavy at the knee, where muscles had melted away and bones had taken over: it was the leg of an old man. A year ago, a month, even a week ago and he’d known he was in his sixties, he’d known he wasn’t in the best physical condition, and he’d used it to play old to put people off their guard. When in the past seventy-two hours had playing old slid into being old?

“I can’t have him around me, Darden,” Judith said. She’d walked over to the bathroom counter and was looking at herself in the mirror. From where he sat he could see her in profile.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Tell me this: Can it wait a day or two or better a week or two? At least till we can get off this godforsaken mountain and back into civilization where I can get a handle on what he’s likely to do if we fire him?” Though Judith was besotted with her worthless husband—or maybe because she was—she’d had several affairs over the years. Very discreet, very upscale—Darden had known about them but only because she had wanted him to for security reasons. Out of respect for him—or so he’d once thought, now he wasn’t sure, maybe it was because she didn’t trust him anymore, not like she did when she was a little girl and he was the biggest, strongest, bravest, handsomest man in her world—she’d not asked him to shuttle lovers in and out of back doors or watch outside hotel rooms. He’d done that kind of work for other politicians and always felt like a bit of a pimp when he did.

Judith’s liaisons had always been upper crust; rich, married men with as much or more to lose as she had if the secret were to get out. He’d always believed her too smart and too cold to go the route Clinton or Edwards had and get mixed up with somebody who could use the affair to blackmail her one way or another.

Kevin didn’t seem like a likely candidate for her first try at slumming. Except that he looked like Charles had when he was young. A rough and dirty version of Charles; what better way to get even with him.

“We’ll get rid of him,” Darden promised. “I’ll fix it so he won’t be able to come back at you and do you any damage.”

“It might be too late,” Judith said, still staring at her reflection in the mirror. She picked up Darden’s hairbrush and began brushing her hair methodically, her hand following the bristles, smoothing the spikes down into a neat gold cap.

When it was all flat and tidy, she dropped the brush and closed her skull between her hands as if it might blow apart if she didn’t.

“Where is Charles?” Darden asked gently. He might not care much for his boss’s husband but if Judith needed him, Darden would get him for her, if he had to drag him out of bed with a Supreme Court justice to do it.

“I don’t know.” Judith didn’t move, didn’t stop holding her brain between her hands.

“Did he get another room?”

“I think so.”

“He knows that’s verboten on these junkets,” Darden fumed.

“I think this time things are different,” she said. Dropping her hands to her sides, she turned from the mirror and he could see all of her face. The sadness he’d expected was there, and the fury, but what shone naked and cruel was fear.

Judith was absolutely terrified.

She’d been afraid when she’d come into the chief ranger’s conference, he recalled. The fact had gotten lost in the myriad other emotional currents he’d been following. At the time he’d thought it was fear of the unknown, of the rumors that were flying and how they would affect what she was trying to do by spending a week in the Chisos Mountains instead of running the city that had elected her mayor.

There was more to it than that. Judith was scared of Kevin, one of her own security men. By the depth of terror he read in her eyes, Kevin must have threatened her with murder—either of herself or her career, a kind of murder that she couldn’t protect herself against with money and connections.

“What has he threatened you with?” Darden asked softly.

Judith shook her head. “Nothing.”

“But you want him fired?”

“Yes.”

“And you won’t tell me why?” Darden sighed in exasperation and stood, folding his bathrobe closer around him. The window was open and the night had grown cold. The smell of pine and sage came in with the cool air. Darden would have preferred the smells of diesel and rain-washed pavement.

“No.” Her face grew less rigid and her eyes took on the shine they did when she wanted something. She walked across the room and leaned against his chest, her arms around his waist.

“What is it? What do you want, Judy?” he asked warily.

“This isn’t going to go away. Not if we pour money on it or shake our big guns.”

For a minute they stood without moving, her head on his chest, his arms loose at his sides. Darden had known what she was asking for from the minute she’d started across the worn carpet toward him.

For once he didn’t want to give her what she wanted.

O
h. It’s you,” Freddy said.

The Glock was lowered but still held at his side. Anna had never been on the wrong end of a gun when it was this close. The bore, not much more than a quarter inch in diameter, if that, had appeared the size of a fifty-cent piece when it was pointed at her. Witnesses left alive after being threatened with guns were notoriously unable to tell law enforcement anything useful and now Anna knew why. With that terrible black eye of a death Cyclops staring one in the face, it took in the entire world for that instant. Everything outside the hole’s perimeter disappeared in a fog of incipient mortality.

Anna pushed herself and Helena to her feet.

“What did you hear?” Freddy asked. His head was cocked to one side, listening. Anna had written off the idea of voices in her own head but she wasn’t all that sure about the river ranger’s.

“Nothing,” she said cautiously. “I didn’t hear anything. Why?”

“I heard a noise. We’ve been having trouble around here lately. A bunch of punks—lost teenage nomads with lots of piercings and no hygiene to speak of—have been hanging around Terlingua for a couple weeks, homesteading in an old miner’s shack. There’ve been several break-ins. Wake Paul. I’m going to check around outside.”

Freddy left her standing there holding Helena. Once again, baby in arms, Anna had been excused from danger. Once again, baby in arms, Anna let herself be.

Paul woke quickly and, because they were closest, pulled on the ragged, filthy shorts and river shoes that Anna had deemed unsalvageable garbage the night before. Under different circumstances, Anna would have left the baby in Lisa’s capable hands and gotten dressed to lend a third pair of eyes to the search. Since it was her butt that had made the offending bump, she knew there was no danger to Freddy or Paul. She returned to the laundry room to finish what she had started.

“Everything okay?”

It was Lisa. Clad in a T-shirt and a pair of Freddy’s boxer shorts, she stood in the doorway to the hall.

“I think so,” Anna said. Freddy had seemed to be after punks in the night but Anna wasn’t convinced. Why he would stoop to such elaborate theatrics when he could have shot her and told everyone he’d mistaken her for a burglar in the dark, she couldn’t fathom. “I think he heard Helena and me banging around in the kitchen.”

The baby was laid out on the paper diaper and Anna was deftly taping it in place. Disposable diapers made infant care easier by far, if less environmentally friendly.

Lisa drifted over to watch, her hand reaching out and holding on to one little foot, fingers caressing toes no bigger than pencil erasers.

Helena liked the attention and was lying on the changing mat looking up at the huge faces looming between her and the overhead light, her eyes wide in awe as if such amazingly huge creatures who floated in the ether were a new miracle to her.

She was looking at Anna and Anna was looking at her. “Hazel!” Anna blurted out.

“Like the maid in that old sitcom? I like Helena better.”

“Her eyes are hazel,” Anna said.

Lisa leaned close, blocking Anna’s view of the child’s face.

“Didn’t we learn in biology that brown always wins out genetically?” Lisa asked.

Anna was remembering the same lesson but she couldn’t remember precisely what eye color came from what parent or if it mattered.

“Her mother looked Hispanic,” Anna said.

“What color were her eyes?”

Casting back to when the woman had opened her eyes, once on the strainer then a second time under the overhang in the alcove, Anna tried to see. “I don’t know,” she admitted finally. “I thought they were brown but I might have just assumed that. The light was funky and my mind was on other things.”

Clattering from the kitchen let them know Freddy and Paul were back from patrol. Lisa helped Anna thread the baby into the yellow onesie then followed the two of them out.

Lisa put four glasses and a carton of orange juice on the table, Paul took Helena and the five of them sat around the kitchen table, no one quite ready to go back to bed.

“Helena’s eyes are hazel,” Anna said to her husband. “Do you recall what color her mom’s eyes were?”

“I don’t,” he said, and held the baby away so he could look into her face. “They are. Am I to assume this is anything more than just an observation?”

“If her mother was a poor Mexican woman swimming the Rio Grande at the eleventh hour, wouldn’t her eyes be brown?”

“Not necessarily,” Freddy said after a moment’s thought. “This close to the border there’s a lot of cross-pollination. Her dad or her mom could have been white.”

“She’d still have had brown eyes, wouldn’t she?” Anna asked.

“I guess she would at that,” Paul put in. “But Helena wouldn’t necessarily, not if her father didn’t.”

“Helena’s father was a white man,” Anna concluded. “If her mother was married to a white person and most white persons are American in this part of the United States, why would her mother have to sneak across the border at the height of the river’s flooding?”

“Because he never married her,” Freddy said flatly.

The four of them digested that unsavory thought for a minute. Paul kissed a sleeping Helena on top of her feathery head. “Lucky for you Hollywood made being born out of wedlock a badge of honor,” he told the baby.

 

 

 

A
NNA WOULD HAVE liked to sleep in—she would have loved to sleep for a week—but it was not to be. Helena and the National Park Service deemed the Davidson and the Martinez families were to rise early. Anna was still in the changing room, marveling at how much stuff it took to tend to one small scrap of humanity, when Freddy grumbled out of the master bedroom and called Paul to the phone.

Curious, Anna carried the baby back into the kitchen to listen in on the conversation.

“Sure,” Paul said. “We can be there in an hour, does that work for you?” He listened and Anna listened and his face grew stonier.

“What?” she whispered.

He ignored her. Into the phone he said: “No. Anna’s the only one who saw her. Your best bet is Anna. Do you want to talk to her?”

Anna was reaching for the phone with her free hand but evidently whoever was on the other end of the line did not want to talk to her.

“No,” Paul said again and coldly. “I’m afraid I can’t be of much help.” Again he listened briefly. His face softened up. “Sure, no problem, we’ll see you in an hour or so.”

“That was Jessie Wiggins,” he told Anna before she could ask. “They’re doing the body recovery today. They want us to go with them and show them where Carmen fell.”

“They want
you
to go show them where Carmen fell,” Anna said hollowly. Immediately she was ashamed at her naked emotion. Evil she could deal with, stupid was harder, pathetic curled her insides. Where was her righteous anger? Righteous rage was what she needed right now, a shot of good old-fashioned hate to buck her up. She couldn’t find it.

Hollowness wasn’t precisely an emotion; it was a lack thereof, a confusion of nothing because, other than the elusive anger, Anna didn’t know what to feel. A little insanity, a little maternity and she was cut out of the life she’d known for the past decade or more. Sexism was a word she’d never use out loud, not in front of the boys, certainly. It wasn’t near as bad as it had been when she started out and she dared to hope it would be virtually nonexistent to the women coming of age in the twenty-first century. For now it was damped down but it was not gone. Societal pressures had forced old practitioners of the dark art underground, but time had yet to cull them from the collective conscious.