Endangered Species (4 page)

boys dancing attendance.  She was not yet thirty, single, and

good-enough looking, but it was more than just her physical charms.

Somehow she'd managed to strike the perfect balance between being one of

the boys and being one of the girls.  A tomboy with a strong maternal

instinct; the combination drew men like flies.  Everything they could

want: mother, buddy, and lover rolled into one.

For all Anna could tell, it was genuine-Lynette to the coreand she found

it as attractive as the men did though probably not for the same

reasons.

the chairs were occupied by Cumberland's district ranger and his

alarmingly pregnant wife.  The district ranger, lodd Belfore, spent much

of each day with fire crew.  He'd only been on the island five months

and already he was bored.  Mostly he grumbled about being in charge of

law enforcement where enforcing law wasn't allowed.  Word had come down

that the wealthy denizens of Cumberland were "not accustomed to

interference." Tourists were fair game but they were disappointingly

well behaved.

Anna had met Tabby, his wife, only once before.  The woman was so big

with child that when Anna first laid eyes on her, she'd made a mental

note to review her emergency childbirth procedures .

Mrs.  Belfore was a small-boned woman, pale and blond and clingy .

There weren't many moments when she wasn't clutching some part of her

husband's anatomy.  In a pinch even a sleeve or shirttail sufficed.

Tonight she seemed particularly in need of reassurance.  She held his

right forearm in a death rip, his hand palm up on her lap like a dead

white spider.  Under the circumstances Anna didn't hold Tabby's

neediness against her but she hadn't found much to say to the woman

either.

Lynette said something indecipherable and Rick laughed too loud and too

long.

"Party.  Party," AI said neutrally.  Anna couldn't tell if he was being

sarcastic or merely observant.

She dug in her pocket for a coin ." Heads or tails?"

"The phone's all your'n, His.  Pigeon," he replied ." If jimmy's not in

bed by now, he should be."

Anna traded up, leaving the pumper truck for Guy's ATV.  When he'd

claimed the four-wheeler the crew boss made noises about convenience and

flexibility, but he was fooling no one.  He took it because it was fun.

And he was entitled.  No one begrudged him.

On the all-terrain vehicle the night swirled around Anna, dried the

sweat in her hair.  Even the noise of its little engine didn't detract.

Over the short trip to the office she passed four armadillos rooting

alongside the road.  The weird little beasts delighted her .

Since coming to the island she'd spent a good chunk of time stalking

them.  The animals were nearsighted and not terribly bright.  Rick, who

hailed from the Natchez'Frace Parkway in southern Mississippi and

claimed to be an armadillo expert, told her if she could sneak up and

touch one, catch it by surprise, it would spring straight up in the air

a couple of feet.  Anna didn't know if he was pulling her leg or not.

She didn't much care.  It was something to do.

The office housing the telephone was on the inland waterway between the

coast of Georgia and Cumberland Island.  just to the south was a

one-room museum and a covered bridge that led to the boat-docking area.

One light shone like a star on the waters where the houseboat Mitch

Hanson shared with his wife was docked .

Trees had been cut away to protect the structures from wildfire and

windfall.  In this man-made meadow a herd of twenty or thirty small

island deer grazed.

Anna pulled into the dirt parking lot, switched off the ATV, and let the

silence settle before she went to the door.

Inside she took a Baby Ruth from the cupboard in the kitchenette and

left fifty cents in a coffee cup set aside for that purpose .

Blissful in solitude, she sat in the chief ranger's chair and put her

feet on his desk, the better to savor her candy and her telephone call.

OLLY I)ICKED UP on the second ring.  At thesound of hersister's M gruff

"Hello" Anna felt muscles relax that she hadn't known were tensed.

" Am I interrupting anything?" she asked.

"Nope.  Letterman's a bust tonight." There was a sound of stretching at

the tail end of Molly's sentence and Anna suspected she was reaching for

an ashtray.  The nicotine bone's connected to the phone bone, her sister

had once told her and Anna wondered if her calls were cutting years off

Molly's life.

"Why do you do that?" she asked irritably.

"Because it's politically incorrect, noxious, and potentially lethal,"

Molly replied, unperturbed ." Are you still a castaway?"

"Still.  Three weeks is a lot longer when you're wearing fire boots."

Molly cackled ." Time and a haIP"

"The big bucks," Anna said ." Pays my phone bills."

"You know, I would call you if you were ever anywhere real.  Two nights

in a row.  To what do I owe the honor?  I thought it was Frederick's

turn."

"I'm playing hard-to-get."

" Hah."

"I wanted to talk," Anna said seriously ." And not have to be nice."

"Or witty or charming," Molly added.  She wasn't being sarcastic; she

understood the burden of maintaining one's good behavior for any length

of time.

For the past year Anna had been carrying on a long-distance love affair

with Frederick Stanton, an FBI agent she'd worked with on a couple of

homicides.  'They'd fallen "in love"-for lack of a better phrase-over

their third corpse.

There had been an intoxicating night, an awkward breakfast, and a

I)rcathlcss goodbye.  'Then letters, letters and phone calls, eleven

months' worth.  Soon, Anna knew, she would have to leave this

comfortable limbo and det] with Frederic]( on a more flesh-andblood

basis: shoes under the bed, dual vacations, Mutual friends.

He was beginning to talk about the FU t are, urging her to come to

Chicago.

Anna wasn't sure she cared for that.  Conversations about the future

always seemed to pivot on how much one was willing to sacrifice in the

here and now.

When she'd married Zach-in what now seemed a past as distant and

distorted as King Arthur's court or the Ice Age-life had been simple.

She litid nothing.  Zach had nothin .  No home, no pets, o jobs. Merging

was easy.  'They commingled their I)apcrback books, bought a I)rctty

good mattress, borrowed money to make their security deposit, and

started a future with all the forethought of a blue jay planting an

acorn.

For seven years it grew and flourished; then Zach had been killed.  To

look ahead became too lonely, and out of self-preservation Anna had

started living each day as it came.  Now it was habit.

She carried his ashes from park to park, promising herself one day she

would pour them-and the dreams of her early twenties to the four winds

to scatter.  The time had never seemed right.  Before leaving Mesa Verde

for Cumberland Island, she'd even gone so far as to take the ash tin

from her underwear drawer and pry loose the lid.  She'd gotten them no

further than the coffee table.

Now there was Frederick, and with him, baggage, his and hers: jobs,

geography, his kids, Anna's cat, his bird, houses.  After years of

kicking around amid the mouse droppings and leaky faucets of National

Park Service housing, Anna had finally landed a plum: a house of native

stone with a tiny tower bedroom that overlooked the green mesas of

southern Colorado.  During the past year she'd noted an odd tingling

sensation in the soles of her feet and thought perhaps she was beginning

to put down a few tentative roots.

Not a good time to be calling Atlas and breaking out the bubble wrap.

"Come to think of it," Anna said, meaning Frederick, boys, and the

conjugal life in general, "I don't even want to talk about it."

Instead, she told Molly of the turtles and Marty Schlessinger.  After

ten minutes it dawned on her she was doing all the talking and she shut

up, letting the line cool, waiting to see if Molly needed to talk.

Nothing but the sucking sound of a Camel drawn straight into dying lungs

came over the wire.  Molly had been a psychiatrist for over twenty

years.  Listening had become a habit, as had keeping herself to herself.

Born, Anna suspected, from knowing how easily one , s words, however

carefully couched, could expose weakness .

"What have you been up to?" she coaxed.

Another second or two ticked by and Anna's antennae went up.

Silence could mean nothing; aggravated silence was a clue.  Psychiatry

wasn't the only profession taught to listen for weakness.

"What?" Anna demanded.

" Another death threat." Molly laughed.  Annoyance, edginess,

defensiveness, and maybe a small thread of fear wove through the short

patch of sound.

Momentarily Anna was stunned as both ends of the statement smacked into

her ." Another," she said flatly, and was pleased that her voice lacked

any trace of warmth.  Molly sensed warmth as cannily as the Cumberland

Island ticks.  In seconds she could worm herself into it and evade the

conversational thrust.

"It's only the second , Molly defended herself.  She was trying to shrug

it off.  Anna could see her as clearly as if she stood on the other side

of the chief ranger's desk.  This close to bedtime she would be wearing

a sweat suit-the expensive embroidered kind never meant to be sweated

in-probably in lavender, crimson, or pink.  On her feet, big feet for so

small a woman, would be fuzzy white ankle socks with tiger stripes on

them.  The day's mascara would have migrated down to form smudges

beneath her lower lashes, and her short, thiel,, gray-streaked hair

would be worked into a frenzy of curls from fingers being constantly

thrust through it.

Molly saw herself as piano wire: strong, sharp, unbreakable .

When she was encased in Dior suits, high heels, and a wall full of

formidable diplomas and awards, this probably wasn't too far off the

mark.  In downy pink Pjs and tiger paws, she looked tiny and vulnerable.

Wet, she wouldn't weigh more than II 0 pounds.

Anna closed her eyes and wished for a lass of Mondavi red, room

temperature; a large glass with a sturdy stern filled too close to the

top for polite society.  Reluctantly she let the image go ." You'd

better tell me the whole story," she said ." If you leave any parts out

it'll give me bad dreams."

"What about AI?" Molly had grown accustomed to Anna's phone-sharing

dilemmas.

" He lost the coin toss.  You may begin."

There was a pause, tense and poised, the kind divers make on the high

board as the strategies of their controlled fall coalesce into their

muscles.

"Part of it is me being dramatic, no doubt.  Believe it or not, death

threats are fairly common-macroscopically speaking.  We get our share:

husbands whose wives decided to divorce them after getting therapy,

patients who spent a ton of money and are still crazy as bedbugs. Mostly

threats are like obscene phone calls-the kick is in the words and the