Read Endangered Species Online
Authors: Nevada Barr
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Suspense, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Pigeon; Anna (Fictitious character), #Women park rangers, #Cumberland Island National Seashore (Ga.)
Hey, Lassie, Timmy's in the well, came a mocking thought, but it was the
only hope she had to go on and she clung to it.
A brief search located the fawn. He was standing at the edge of the
cleared ground behind Stafford House. On seeing Anna, he bleated once,
then stared into the black wall of woods. Afraid she would distract
him, she fell back and hid in the shadows of what once had served
Stafford as a servants' wing. For maybe a minute the animal trotted
back and forth at the tree line bleating; then he stepped delicately
into the foliage and was gone.
Anna followed as fast as she dared, entering the woods where he had
vanished. A fatted moon had deigned to rise and fragments of light
littered the forest floor. Relying on hope as much as hearing, she
trailed the little beast. Once he'd established his direction, he moved
along at a good pace. Near the salt marshes that skirted the sound, the
woods thinned.
The tide was in. Only the tips of the grasses showed above the water.
They ebbed and flowed with the currents. In the unrevealing light of
the moon, it was impossible to tell where grass ended and water began.
The shoreline was equally uncertain. Land and marsh and sea blended
seamlessly into one another. Fireflies added their stars and brought
the sky into this confluence of elements.
Trusting to the fawn's sense of smell, Anna followed in his wake.
Several times he stopped and wandered aimlessly along the edge of land
and marsh bleating plaintively. At each stop Anna found herself holding
her breath, afraid both that he'd lost the trail and that he'd found its
end. Bodies, weighted and submerged in the high saltwater grasses
beyond the low-tide mark would be effectively hidden from the world. The
natural action of the sea would wash away all signs of interference.
Carrion eaters would take care of the rest.
Flicka stopped a final time. Anna waited for him to pick up the scent.
Time dragged. The fawn paced and cried. Twice he lay down and curled
nose to tail as if he'd given up. He was as nervy as Anna and the
respites were short-lived. After a restless moment he'd leap up again
to run along the water's edge. At length he trotted back toward Anna,
stopped dead in the path, and sitting on his haunches, bleated at the
moon in a gentle parody of the wolf. Flicka was lost .
Then so were Dot and Mona.
That's what you get for trusting prey to track predator, Anna thought
acidly.
For lack of a better idea, she stayed where she was, eyes and ears
waiting for the night to tell her something. ]the moon had pushed above
the trees to the west. In this wan light, she noticed a scrap of white
suspended several feet above the ground. A piece of paper had fallen
and been caught on the spines of an oak seedling.
Wishing she had a flashlight and cursing whoever was responsible for
maintaining Cumberland Island's fire cache equipment, she lifted the
paper to her eyes. Of itself it told her nothing, but excited at the
possibilities it suggested, she walked along at a snail's pace,
searching each bush and blade of grass. Ten feet further on she was
rewarded for her diligence. A second bit of paper was trampled into the
wet earth in a footprint-it was too dark to see it without a flashlight
but Anna could feel the edges with the tips of her fingers .
By turning the paper this way and that she could discern what could have
been the marks of a sneaker tread.
Four yards further she found another. Eyes opened by this discovery,
she began looking for other sigris, and despite the poor light, found
them. Dot and Mona had dragged their feet, broken off twigs, dropped
bits of paper and, once, a button from a blouse. Crafty old women, Anna
thought, and smiled. With a more durable form of bread crumbs, they'd
left a trail a blind woman could follow. Cast in the role of that blind
woman, Anna inched along the narrow stretch of land between woods and
water noting unsmoked cigarettes, a pocketknife, Mona's Timex, Dot's
pinky ring, and three more buttons. She left the items where she found
them. If Rick had better luck with his flashlight, he was sure to
stumble across the trail more quickly than she had. She could use the
company.
Heartened by Anna's taking the lead, Flicka gave up mourning and trotted
at her side, poking at each new piece of information with a cool dry
nose.
Twenty minutes were marked off in butts and buttons, then thirty; still
Anna's ears picked up no sign of the other women. Going was slow, but
at a guess, she and the fawn had been following the trail for a mile to
a mile and a half. Schlessinger was walking Dot and Mona up the
waterline into the designated wilderness area of the park where, though
less than pristine or untrammeled, there was less likely to be any
future disturbance of her makeshift graveyard .
In wilderness areas no power equipment was allowed: no cars, ATVs, chain
saws, bulldozers. The less readily accessible an area, the less it was
used by visitors. Over the years Anna noticed even a modest walk-a half
or three quarters of a mile from the parking lot-and the tourist
component was reduced by ninety percent .
People were lazy, people loved their cars, felt insecure away from them.
Law enforcement officers-even federal law enforcement officers, contrary
to some opinions-were people. Without compelling evidence, the further
one had to walk from his patrol car, the less likely a search of that
area became.
To Anna's right the bank grew steep. Currents eddying through the sound
had undercut the soil and it had fallen away, exposing roots the size of
a man's thigh. In places trees had all but toppled into the marsh.
Clinging tenaciously to life, they hung over the sea grasses at right
angles. In the dark, with what appeared to be a vast meadow undulating
to her left' Anna found it unnerving. Her faith that she knew up from
down had been severely challenged over the previous thirty-six hours.
Navigable land narrowed between the crumbling bank and the muddy
commencement of the marsh. Losing options put Anna on edge but this was
where the VIPS' trail was to be found and she had no choice but to
follow it.
When she and the ever-faithful Flicka had traveled another mile or more,
her ears picked up the sounds they'd been straining for .
Voices, muted, distant, and suddenly stifled, hit her senses with the
impact of an air horn in a closed room. She stopped so suddenly Flicka
stumbled against her. The fawn, her admirable compatriot, had just
become a liability. When he caught the scent of his benefactresses he'd
trot bleating into their midst, effectively announcing that he'd been
freed and possibly followed. Anna's memory flashed back to a night in
west 'Texas when she'd nearly laid down lier life for a mountain lion.
For those who'd seen the light, animals made good hostages. Anna could
easily see Schlessinger, a knife at Flicka's throat, saying: "Nobody
moves or Bambi gets it." Chances were Dot, Mona, even she, would do as
they were told rather than see that perfect life cut down.
Sitting on a fallen log, Anna unlaced her boots. Beneath she wore two
pairs of socks, thin knee-highs next to her skin to wick away the sweat,
and thick cotton midcalf socks over those to cushion her feet from the
rude leather of her Red Wings. Having pulled off both pairs, she laced
her bare feet back into the boots, then fashioned a collar and leash for
Flicka by tying all four socks together. the end of this stretchy line
she jammed down over a stub of broken branch that stuck up from the log
where she sat.
"I'll be back," she whispered, and cupped his face between her hands ."
Please, please be quiet or I'll make you into a venison sandwich."
Flicka licked her hand.
"Stay," she whispered, and moved quickly away, afraid to look back lest
eye contact inspire a spate of hopeful bleating.
The collapsed bank reached to the edge of the sound, blocking her path
and providing cover. She stopped and listened. Flicka was blessedly
quiet. From beyond the irregular wall of soil and roots she could hear
Mona.
"I can't walk anymore." Mona's voice was too high, too loud. A thud,
the recognizable sound of metal striking flesh, followed.
"Quiet." Schlessinger.
Moaning as directionless as that of the wind in the mountains undercut
the command.
"You didn't have to-" Dot.
"Quiet!"
Quiet followed. Mona's bones were old, growing thin and brittle. Did
one's skull grow thin and brittle as well? Anna couldn't remember
reading anywhere that it did. Pressing her belly into the dirt, she
wriggled her way upward. The ridge was ten or twelve feet high on the
landward side and exposed the reaching claws of live oak root. Seaward
it dwindled to nothing where the current took and redistributed the
soil. Where Anna was it was maybe six feet high, and soft from its
recent separation from the island proper. Loose dirt served her well,
covering the noise of her ascent. Lizardlike, she reached the top of
the berm and lifted herself up on her arms to peek over the crest. A
lizard measuring distance, she thought as she bobbed on her short front
legs. Laughter, as unbidden as when she was stoned, built in her lungs
and she wondered if she'd become humor-impaired from her recent
adventures.
On the far side of her hiding place Dot, Mona, and Marty Schlessinger
were crowded onto a narrow neck of beach, squeezed between bank and
marsh. Schlessinger stood, her shoulders and butt resting against the
vertical wall of dirt. She held a six-cell flashlight in her left hand,
its powerful beam trained on the two VIPS. In her right was a handgun.
Not the simple cowboy six-cylinder wheel gun, but a Glock or a
Sig-Sauer. Anna wasn't enough of a weapons aficionado to know the
difference in the dark, but she could tell it was a semiauto with a
magazine holding ten to thirteen rounds and one in the chamber. Looking
at the familiar chunk of iron, she felt soft and naked. It wasn't at
all pleasant.
Mona was crumpled in a heap, hugging her left knee the way Anna had seen
injured hikers do. Dot knelt behind her in the mud, cradling her head
against her chest. From beneath her fingers, near Mona's temple, a line
of blood or slime crawled downward. By the indirect spill from the
flashlight, Anna couldn't be sure which it was. It just looked black
and viscous.
" She can't walk any further," Dot said firmly ." Your hitting her is
just going to make it worse."
"I told you, I've got a bad knee , Mona said in a reedy voice. 'It's
gone out on me before. I can't walk on it."
"An old football injury," Dot said.
Anna caught the wry and startled glance Mona shot her friend.
"Two choices," Schlessinger said ." You get up and walk or I shoot you
where YOLT Sit." Her body never changed position nor did the expression
on her face alter in any way. Because she held the light, Anna couldn't