Anger was flaring. Anna welcomed it. Like cocaine, anger was a wonderful stimulant. She needed the boost.
“I know you did,” Steve said. “I know. Frank—the sheriff you met—is a real good tracker. He said there were four sets of prints that he could find. Three big, probably the college boys, and a smaller set that might have been yours. By the way they were made, he’s sure there was a chase and the little prints were the ones being chased. So you’ve got no cause to worry on that front.” He was quiet for a minute, then asked plaintively, “You sure you don’t have any coffee? Cold from this morning would be fine.”
“No.”
The district ranger sighed. “You’re right,” he said. “Nasty habit,” as if Anna’s main concern were for the health of his digestive tract. “Did you know any of the boys?” he asked in the same conversational way he’d asked for coffee.
“No.”
“Ever seen them before?”
“No.”
“Too bad,” he said sincerely. “It would have made things easier.”
Like the high of cocaine, the fierce energy of anger didn’t last. It was hard to stay mad at Steve Gluck. Anna could feel the artificial heat draining from her belly, leaving cold dregs behind. The rangers had no idea who the monsters were. They were out and about enjoying their monstrous selves, and Anna was scared to be in the same room with three men she knew and worked with.
“Couldn’t Frontiersman Frank track them back to where they came from?” she snapped.
Steve shook his head slowly, ignoring her slight of the sheriff. “If anybody could, Frank could, but, if you remember, where the three started chasing you was in a natural swale, wind-filled with sand. Around it is bare sandstone. Even Hole-in-the-Rock Road is difficult to follow over the harder rock. Frank could follow them most of the way to where you were in the solution hole, though.
“They turned back a couple times—that or there were more than three of them, but Frank doesn’t think so. He got half a dozen fairly clear prints.”
“They turned back because, after they took care of me, they went back, got Kay, then threw her down with me,” Anna said.
“You say you buried her?” Steve asked.
“No, goddammit, I didn’t say I buried her!” Anna shouted.
Gluck held up both hands in a gesture of peace. “Just asking,” he said mildly.
On the edge of his chair, Jim watched like a devoted fan at a tennis match. Regis watched only Anna.
“I said I reburied her, and you weren’t just fucking asking,” she snarled. Snapping and snarling like a rabid dog, pacing behind the counter as if the kitchen were a cage and she the tiger: She forced herself to stop. Anna knew nothing about law enforcement and less about ranger enforcement, but she was fairly savvy when it came to the motivations and machinations of men in power. Lord knew she’d sat through Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Richard III enough times. Steve, Chief Ranger Andrew Madden, and even the sheriff of Dumbfuck County would find life a whole lot easier if it turned out she had brought this tragedy down on Kay and herself.
Because they were not evil or stupid men didn’t mean they couldn’t hurt her.
Stoicism: She would let in only as much as she could tolerate and show only what emotions she couldn’t mask.
“I’m sorry, Steve,” she said politely. “Can I make you some coffee?”
Engaging in what actors called a “secondary activity,” and normal people called keeping busy, calmed Anna. As she made coffee and got down cups, Steve asked her questions she’d already answered in various different ways. Though she disliked being made to repeat herself, and disliked the feeling of accusation, by the time the coffee was perked and the sugar spooned, she did remember a few more details.
The boy who merely watched was sandy-haired. He wore his hair long in front in what had once been termed a surfer cut. Acne ruined what might have been a handsome face. The kid whose face she’d never seen, the one stripping off his shorts, had a tattoo on the back of his right shoulder, a round shape like a planet or a tortoise. His hair was dark and curled at the nape of his neck. The third boy—the one who killed Kay—was big, tall and big.
Steve ran out of questions. For a moment he sat staring into his coffee cup. Then he heaved a great sigh and pushed himself up off the couch. “I think you’re in the clear on this,” he said.
“Thanks,” Anna said acidly. “Can I go back to being a victim now?”
The district ranger put his ball cap on, tugging the brim down low over his eyes. “Never go back to being a victim,” he said. He stood staring at the floor, thinking. “Skunk and box,” he said as if retrieving a mental list. “Come out and take a look at the box we brought, if you would.”
Obediently Anna followed the men out onto the porch. The instant largesse of space and light allowed her to expand her lungs. Muscles she hadn’t been aware she was tensing relaxed. Her shoulders squared, her spine straightened, and her chin came up. For a second she wondered how she could ever have felt at home and safe in the dark confines of a stage manager’s booth.
“This is it,” Gluck said unnecessarily. The packing box dominated the picnic table.
Because he wanted her to look at it, Anna became afraid of it. A startling image of folding back the flaps to a mass of tarantulas flashed behind her eyes, and momentarily she felt the panic that had overtaken her in the pit when she’d believed the tickle of her braid had been one of the hairy-legged things. Bugs shouldn’t have hair.
“What of it?” Anna asked warily.
“We were hoping you could tell us,” the district ranger said.
Anna took a couple of steps closer to the box but didn’t touch it.
“Why is it covered with black smudges?” she asked. Another ludicrous vision darted past her mind’s eye, Wile E. Coyote, black with smudges of blasting powder.
“Fingerprint powder,” Gluck said. When he didn’t volunteer any more, irritation overcame caution. Grabbing the box, she pulled it to the edge of the table. It was heavy, but she could have lifted it by herself. The tape had been cut. The box had been opened, then closed again by folding the flaps together.
Bracing herself for the eight-legged hordes, Anna curled her fingers around the edges of the flaps and yanked them open. On one, hidden before she’d unfolded it, was an address, typed on plain white paper and taped down with clear tape.
Anna recognized the address. “This was being sent to my sister, Molly?”
“It turned up in the outgoing mail at Wahweap,” Steve said. Jim Levitt hovered at the opposite end of the table, noticing everything and saying nothing. Anna suspected he might be in the doghouse for relaying to Jenny—and so to her—the information that Anna was considered a suspect. Regis had retreated to his own porch and leaned against the wall in the shade, an audience of one watching the play.
Anna looked in the box: NPS uniform shirts and shorts, bedding, underwear, black Levi’s, black Reeboks, a picture of Zach on the beach at Cape Cod. “These are my belongings,” she said. Confusion boiled out of the box in the place of tarantulas. “The stuff from my room. Somebody was mailing it to my sister?”
“Looks that way,” Steve said.
He was waiting for her to say she didn’t send the box or admit she did. Instead she said, “You dusted it for fingerprints. Whose were on it?”
“There were a lot of prints. Mail here gets picked up and hauled down to Wahweap sometimes in one boat, sometimes handed off to two, even three. Loaded and unloaded, then, finally, Wahweap. There are a lot of prints.”
“Are mine on it?” Anna asked, afraid that in this surreal place, where Disney and Dali and T. S. Eliot fought over landscape design, the whorls and ridges of her fingers had made it to the cardboard.