Endangered Species (20 page)

going on about the bodies and all, never thinking.  It could've just as

easy been Norman, Ellen's daddy.  God, then I'd've been out of a job .

If you ask me, he ought to send the regional director a case of bourbon.

If he hadn't called Norm at the St.  Marys office and kept him on the

line, he'd've made that flight instead of Todd.

"Nope," Renee said finally ." I could've swore I had some Bufferin in

here somewhere but I guess they all got ate up.  Sorry." She flopped

down in her swivel chair and looked ready to kill a little more time in

idle chatter, but Anna didn't feel up to it.  She mumbled her thanks and

made her escape.

In the break room she stole a Coke, promising the honor system two

quarters when she had them.  Pressing the cold can against the lump on

her skull, she again braved the heat of the August sun.

Feeling like an exile, she cleaned out her room in the fire dorm and

drove to Plum Orchard.  If Guy wanted the truck back, he could damn well

come and get it.  Anna resented being sold down the river even as she

welcomed the solitude of the Belfores' apartment and the chance to lie

down before her head fell off.

The trip up the two flights of stairs took the last of her strength .

Abandoning her red fire pack on the first landing, she staggered in the

door.

The medicine cabinet was a disappointment.  Apparently the Belfores

treated only maladies of the ego.  A clutter of products promising to

restore hair, keep skin young, and grow strong fingernails filled the

shelves.  No analgesics.  Anna sat on the toilet and, head in hands,

indulged in a few tears of self-pity.

From a phone in the bedroom she called the Cumberland Island National

Seashore Visitors' Center in St.  Marys.  A cheerful female voice

answered.  Anna introduced herself and begged this happy soul to send

some aspirin over on whichever boat was going to the island next.

It must have been a slow day.  The woman kept Anna on the line for five

minutes, marveling at the recent tragedy and telling again the story of

the regional director's call saving Norman Hull from the jaws of death.

There was something in near misses, twists of fate, that rekindled in

the human psyche the desire to believe in a grand master plan.

Anna stayed on the line until the voice promised a bottle of Excedrin on

a maintenance boat leaving around three-thirty.

bence was a balm.  To lie down on a bed, exquisite.  Had some quiet

unobtrusive servant tiptoed in and turned on the air conditioner, Anna

would have believed in a kindly God.  As it was, she lay in the stifling

heat, feeling the trickles of sweat prick under her clothes.

Sleep pressed heavily on her limbs, forcing her eyelids closed .

Was she indeed concussed, she knew she mustn't give in to it .

Vaguely she remembered that people with head injuries needed to be

awakened periodically for the first ten hours.  For the life of her she

couldn't remember why.

Fending off the sandman's advances, she propped herself up against the

pillows and reached again for the bedside phone.

"Mesa Verde National Park."

"Hey, Frieda," she said wearily ." It's Anna."

Frieda was the dispatcher at Mesa Verde, the chief ranger , s secretary,

and, Anna hoped, a friend.

" What's up?" Frieda asked.

Directness: it was one of the many things for which Anna admired the

woman.  She gave Frieda a brief account of the airplane crash.  She

didn't mention the blow to the back of her head.  Not because Frieda

would tell anyone-Mesa Verde's dispatcher was a safe repository for even

the most sensitive information-but because the effort of convincing her

she wasn't hurt was too much to contemplate.

"See what you can dig up on Slattery Hammond," Anna said .

"He used to work for the Forest Service in Region Six.  Each pilot has

to be approved by the aviation department yearly.  The records ought to

be in Redmond or Portland.  And could you call m, back in half an hour

whether you find out anything or not?" Anna afraid that, left to her own

devices, she would sleep too long.

Frieda promised she would.  If she thought the request peculiar she kept

it to herself.  It wasn't in Frieda's job description to do

investigative background work but she was good at it and, when other

duties weren't pressing, enjoyed it.  Frieda had been with the NPS for

eighteen years, half her life.  Anybody who hadn't slept on her couch,

borrowed her car, or mooched a free meal off of her knew someone who

had.  The dispatcher had connections in odd and useful places.

"Hammond.  USFS.  Region Six.  Got it," Frieda said.

Anna let a sigh escape ." How's Piedmont?" she asked, her pain making

her homesick for the comforts of her cat.

"Misses his morn-other than that, good.  Bella's taken to coming with

me.  While I clean the cat box she plays with the cat.  As a team, we're

unbeatable."

Bella was the seven-year-old daughter of one of the park employces. Anna

had fallen in love with the child her first summer at Mesa Verde.

"Good deal," Anna said ." I've got to go." She hung up before the ache

in her head deprived her of the power of coherent speech.

Secure in the knowledge that Frieda wouldn't let her sleel) to death,

Anna let her eyes unfocus and her mind drift.  In the narrow and fuzzy

field of her vision was the bedroom door standing half open, a lacy pink

peignoir hanging from a hook on the back.  What looked like a tiny

little kid's purse or a giant padlock hung from the doorknob.  Because

she didn't know what it was, the object aggravated Anna.  Above it was a

dead bolt and above that a chain lock.  A chain lock on an inside door;

that wasn't the usual.  Taken in the context of the two locks, the

unidentified hanging object lost its mystery.  Anna had seen them

before.  They were traveler's intruder alarms, motion detectors.  When

disturbed they emitted a loud obnoxious noise.

Three security measures on the bedroom door.  Jesus, Anna thought, as

she slid into a heavy sleep.  At least one of the Belfores was sure as

hell afraid of something.

N N A WA S U P at four-thirty.  At six she was to pick up Dijon at the

lfire dorm and patrol the north end of the island.  Guy had made a

special trip to Plum Orchard the evening before to tell her her work

with fire crew was in no way alleviated by the nightly baby-sitting

chore.  The first was her job, the second her duty.

Anna was feeling anything but dutiful.  Her temples pounded as if

something vaguely equine were trapped in her skull hammering with

iron-shod hooves to get out.  Her neck was stiff from sleeping on the

sofa in the Belfores' living room.  Foraging for coffee in the

unfamiliar kitchen, she cursed Norman Hull, Guy, Tabby, and whoever had

tried to crack her skull.

The logical assumption was that whoever had hashed her over the head was

the same individual who sabotaged Slattery's Beechcraft.  Frieda's

inquiries had turned up some interesting connections .

Hammond had a reverse discrimination suit filed against Alice Ut

terback.  Prior to going to the Washington, D.C., office, Alice had been

head of aviation for Region Six.  She'd passed over Hammond's

application three times.  All three times she hired a female pilot to

fill the position he applied for.  When he finally crawled on board in a

seasonal capacity, he alleged Alice had discriminated against him in an

assortment of petty ways.  Anna's favorite was the accusation that Alice

had put up a poster of Charles Lindbergh over his picture of Miss

November in a hangar in Redmond, Oregon.

Alice certainly had the knowledge to wreck an airplane.  And was now in

an excellent position to screw up the investigation.  Not for a moment

did Anna believe that particular scenario.  Still, it made her

uncomfortable.

Being a woman of wisely maintained cynicism, Frieda had run not only

Hammond but all the possible targets of the saboteur through NCIC, the

National Criminal Information Center.  Hammond, Belfore, and Hull all

had clean records.

Anna had not thought to run the chief or district rangers.  People with

felonies on their records were automatically barred from carrying a law

enforcement commission.  Frieda knew better and told Anna horror stories

of a goodly number who'd slipped through the cracks: convicted murderers

wearing the green and gray, representing the NPS to a trusting public.

Through the grapevine, Frieda had also discovered that though Hammond

had no record, he'd had some run-ins with the local police in Hope,

Canada, the small town outside North Cascades National Park in

Washington where some of the park employees kept "city homes." Cops had

showed up at his apartment more than once.  What about was open for

speculation.

Caffeine, a shower, and two Excedrin transformed Anna into something

more closely resembling a human being, and at five a.m.  she slipped

quietly from the Belfores' apartment to greet the day.  The sun had not

yet deigned to rise but there was promise in the east .

Standing on the wooden landing halfway down the fire escape, she

absorbed the freedom to he had out of doors.

She had known her head hurt, realized the couch was lumpy .

What hadn't occurred to her till she was free of it was the tension and

sorrow that permeated every stick of furniture and scrap of fabric that

made up the Belfore home.  Even before Tabby returned from the mainland,

Anna had sensed it.  Fear was there in the many locks, in the unguents

and creams for maintaining youth; sadness in the pink chiffon dressing

gown unsuited for a widow, in the wide bed, lonely for one; in every

picture where, against a glorious backdrop of green mountains, a blond

woman smiled at a dead man.

Breathing deeply of the soft air, Anna let some of that tension leave

her.  Her mind sank into the holding warmth of a southern dawn as the

first light shamed the stars from the sky.  The horrid littles of being

human: life, death, birth, love and betrayal, were of no moment to her

today.  All she had to do was drive a truck and look for smoke.  Even

with a headache and a bad attitude, she should be able to do that.

As she neared the meadow by Stafford mansion, rusted shocks and rough

road were well on the way to undoing her resolve.  Early light poured

into the clearing.  Splashed over the sand-blasted windshield it was

blinding.  A small dark shape-a dog maybe-darted into the glare

obscuring the road in front of the truck and Anna slammed on the brakes.

She skidded to a stop without any sickening bumps.  To her left was the

meadow, to her right a wall cemented from sand and shell that separated

Stafford and its attendant cottage from the dirt road.

The critter she'd narrowly avoided sending to the promised land was

disappearing through a gate in the wall.  A glimpse of white tail and

spotted rump was all Anna was afforded.  Then, like a magical moment in

a fairy tale, a face peeked back around the gatepost.  A

fawn not more than a month old looked up at her with Disney eyes .