Molly had hinted as much. Anna had chosen not to hear. Now she heard it in her own voice and knew, absurd and childish as it was, that was precisely what she’d been doing. Grief was not coin to purchase the beneficence of the gods, regardless of what self-flagellating hair-shirt-wearing religions might suggest.
Bereft of hope and free of despair, Anna tilted her head back and felt the clean desert heat on her skin.
“Regis said you’d gone,” Bethy said in the tone of a woman quoting the ultimate authority. Off came the saucer, up came the can, three tiny little sips. Can back on the planking, saucer on top, she said, “We all said you cut and ran. I mean, why wouldn’t you? All those stage-door Johnnys.”
Anna laughed. The only place she’d ever heard those words uttered was in old movies. Even there the stage manager never got a single Johnny.
Her laughter seemed to bother Bethy. Sounding almost accusing, she said, “Regis kept going to your place like he could find out why you’d left. None of us would have bothered. Lucky that old drunk told him you were in a hole.”
Saucer off, can up, three little sips; Bethy was getting on Anna’s nerves. The plump little interpretive ranger had a bobblehead-doll quality about her, as if her words and movements were caused by outside forces rather than any inner logic. Anna checked her watch. Naked skin.
She wished Gluck would show up. With Bethy’s help, she had come around to where she was actually looking forward to it.
“Lucky,” Anna said.
It was lucky, freakishly, unbelievably lucky. An old drunk overhears boys talk of putting a woman in a solution hole. Old drunk actually knows what a solution hole is; drunk finds a ranger and tells the ranger not only what the boys said but where that one solution hole is—in a zillion acres of solution holes—where the woman was put.
The last ten years of her adult life, Anna had watched many of the finest actors in the country blow their lines. Remembering dialogue was hard enough for trained sober people. That a chemically impaired amateur could get it so right bordered on the miraculous. Miracle number two was that Regis believes old drunk, climbs a ruin of a trail by moonlight, no less, onto a mesa that’s another zillion acres of holes and bumps, and, in the dark, finds the very one that Anna is in the bottom of.
“Very lucky, indeed,” Anna said. Had Regis invented the story of the vanishing inebriate? Anna hadn’t heard he’d been turned up by any of the rangers. Not surprising on a vast lake crowded with inebriates of various ages. The only reason she could think of for making up a story like that was to protect the person who did tell him where Anna was.
Regis wasn’t more than twenty-eight or thirty. He could have friends or brothers of college age. If he was covering for someone, then he knew more about the perpetrators than he was sharing, possibly even knew who they were.
He’d come alone and at night. All the better to tidy up any clues left by his murderous friends? Or his murderous brother’s murderous friends? “Clues” was the wrong word. Miss Marple, Inspector Clouseau, Sam Spade, Lord Peter Wimsey: They looked for clues. Tree cops looked for tracks, spoor, fire rings, toilet paper, and graffiti.
“Does Regis have any brothers or sisters?” Anna asked abruptly. Bethy’s head bobbled side to side as she reached for the saucer atop the soda can. Next time, Anna promised herself, she would try to be more subtle in her interrogation techniques.
Bethy concluded her beverage intake ritual, then said, “He’s an only,” with the air of admitting something she oughtn’t.
Anna heard an ATV engine and retrieved Buddy. She couldn’t keep him; it wouldn’t be fair to him, but she didn’t want Jim or Steve to take the decision away from her by snatching the little skunk. By the time she had him settled in his drawer, big feet were clomping up the porch steps.
“Jenny will take care of you if they haul me off to jail,” Anna whispered to Buddy, then went out to see what the next act in this unexpected drama held.
To her surprise Steve was accompanied not by the chief ranger but by Regis and Jim. Letting herself out the screen door, rather than inviting them in, she heard Bethy whine, “I thought you had to work today.”
“I am working,” Regis informed his wife coldly.
Bethy picked up her drinking paraphernalia and disappeared into the gloom of their side of the duplex.
Regis was carrying a cardboard box three feet long and two feet high, a packing box sealed with clear tape and covered with black smudges, as if a cat had walked through soot, then tracked it all over the box.
Steve Gluck sat down on the picnic bench. Everything about him was heavy: the drooping belly, the jowls, the bags under his eyes. He looked as if he carried the sins of mankind on his back and they were dragging him down.
“Okay,” he said, rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger, the brim of his NPS baseball-style cap pushed up like the flag on Opie and Aunt Bee’s mailbox.
Regis set the cardboard box down on the table. He didn’t sit down. Jim put one foot on the bench and folded his arms over his raised knee.
“Are you going to arrest me?” Anna asked and immediately wished she hadn’t.
Steve’s hand dropped to his lap, and he squinted up into her face. “Should we?” he asked.
“No. No. Not at all,” Anna said lamely. “I was just asking to be polite.”
“Mind if we go inside out of the sun?” Steve asked.
She did. Not because she was afraid Buddy would call attention to himself. They already knew she had the kit, and she was hoping Steve could find a good place for him to live and be a proper skunk. The thought of being inside, in a small dim living room with three large men—and without Jenny—gave her an unpleasant hollow feeling.
“Sure. Come in.” And that was how vampires got into the manor house, she thought as Steve clomped in. Jim was behind him, and Regis followed, leaving the packing box outside.
Anna’s New York instincts twitched. She ignored them. The box could probably sit out there for years and nobody would steal it.
Both windows behind the battered couch had the blinds drawn. Neither Anna nor Jenny spent much time inside, and when they did, they wanted their privacy. The single window in the side wall was blocked by a swamp cooler. Anna retreated behind the kitchen counter, wanting a barrier between herself and the men at least until her eyes adjusted and the giant killer butterflies in her stomach settled. Steve, Jim, and Regis hulked in the middle of the small living space, blinking.
“Sit,” Anna said brusquely.
“Thanks. Good to take a load off.” With a sigh, Steve lowered himself into the armchair matching the sofa in both hideousness and decrepitude. Jim perched on the edge of the couch, his belt bristling with too much law enforcement gear to allow him to sit back. Regis claimed one of the stools at the kitchen counter, crowding Anna’s space.
“You don’t happen to have any coffee on, do you?” Steve asked.
“No,” Anna said.
“Okay, then. Okay.” He took off his ball cap and arranged it neatly, using his knee as a hat stand. “Why did you think we were going to arrest you?” he asked amiably.
Anna didn’t want to talk or answer or be in this shrinking space. Breathing deeply, she reminded herself it was only a dim crowded room, not a trap. Maybe not a trap.
“Jenny said you thought maybe I knew Kay before, that maybe I killed her. I didn’t and I didn’t.”
“That did cross my mind,” Steve said with what sounded like reluctance. “Professionally speaking, it’s important to look at the ugly what-ifs. You didn’t know her?”
“No. I didn’t. I didn’t push her into the hole. I didn’t fall into the hole. Both of us were thrown down into it by three college-age men. I told you all this.”