Five hours passed before Frieda was brought into the open air. This time the reception was subdued. There were no floodlights, only one media crew, and the brass had thinned out considerably. Not a single caver had left. Standing in rain rapidly turning to sleet, a dismal army dotted the stony hillside.
Anna had no task to occupy her; when Frieda no longer needed her, she'd become superfluous. Knowing she'd failed her friend, Anna felt a crushing self-consciousness. The eyes of the surviving cavers seemed to follow her like the vacant sockets of so many masks. With a visible shake of her head, she told herself it was grief and guilt deluding her. The cavers' eyes followed Holden, too. On crutches, lower leg in a cast, he'd hobbled the mile and a half over rain-slicked desert. Pain too deep to be accounted for by broken bones paralyzed his muscles as surely as if he'd suffered a stroke.
Darkness hid the faces of the watchers, but Anna had little doubt that they looked on with respect and sympathy. Because she was with Holden, she was allowed down into the boulder-choked mouth of Lechuguilla. Desirous of staying out of the way, she found a niche in the rock behind the stunted oak that served as an anchor.
Flanked by George Laymon and the superintendent, Mrs. Dierkz was below her, partially sheltered from the rain by scrawny branches. An attempt had been made to convince Dottie to wait in a warm dry car down in the parking area, but she'd been firm. She'd walked all over Europe and China, she told the superintendent. She would walk this last little ways. Her leather shoes were soaked and muddied, her hair flattened beneath a yellow so'wester-style rain bonnet, but she stood straight and, as near as Anna could tell in the rain, didn't weep.
One by one the recovery team crawled up from darkness, their progress robbed of grace by a need to navigate boulders and spiny plants while roped in at waist, knee, and ankle. Oscar Iverson was first, wide eyed with fatigue. McCarty was next, his features closed down, as stony as Holden Tillman's. Curt Schatz was third. His strength was wonderful to watch, the muscles fluid as they brought the Stokes to the surface. Frieda had been wrapped up in toto as befitted her new status as a corpse: a faceless, shapeless bundle lashed in the wire basket. Not a scrap of flesh or hair or clothing was left visible to remind them of the woman inside.
As it should be, Anna thought. The woman was gone, the husk itself become an empty casket, deserving of respect but not reverence.
Zeddie and Kelly Munk followed the Stokes. Zeddie had more life in her than the rest. Relief wasn't evident, or sorrow. Anger was fueling her. In one so young it was impossible to mistake. She'd not yet learned to hide her feelings from the world's freezing indifference.
The source of her aggravation wasn't hard to find. Kelly Munk, close on her heels, got a snarl in return for his offer to help her off with her gear. "Anna," she snapped, seeing her hunched vulturelike in the rocks. "Make yourself useful."
Anna jumped down to help her derig, happy to be of service and happy to share in the snubbing of Munk. The man was unchastened. His face worked overtime. "Chewing up the scenery." Anna dredged up a phrase from Zach's theatrical lexicon. Kelly Munk labored under the delusion that all dramatic incidents were centered around Kelly Munk. As he hauled himself up the rocks at Anna's shoulder, she could see him trying on expressions. He settled on a look of heroic exhaustion, affixing it firmly in place as he made a beeline for the media.
Zeddie shot an evil look after his retreating form. "When I'm queen, different people are going to die," she said.
Anna scavenged a raincoat for Zeddie and gave back the sweater she'd worn all day. After so much time underground, none of the recovery team was prepared for the winter weather. Zeddie paid her respects to Frieda's mother, then cleared out. Anna stayed till the litter, with fresh bearers and a frighteningly stoic Dottie Dierkz, started down the hill. A handful of cavers from among those keeping vigil amid the rocks came to take over the derigging. Anna fell in step beside Curt and went with him to the cavers' tent. No pizza this time but beer and coffee and a plate of sandwiches that Dottie had insisted on providing. Blessing the woman's graciousness, the team fell on them as if they'd not eaten in a week.
Brent, Holden, Oscar, and Anna stood at the edges of the tent, wallflowers at the dance. Feeling bereft, Anna took a cup of coffee to be companionable. The sensation wasn't unfamiliar. Twice before in her career she'd pushed-once eighteen hours and once nearly twenty-four-bringing victims out of the backcountry only to have them die on her within sight of modern medical facilities. Too much time had passed; they hadn't been strangers anymore. Too much hope had been invested, and ego and energy. A strange and cosmic coitus interruptus; perfect communion denied. From the way the team wolfed down their food, backs to one another, little left to say, Anna knew she wasn't the only one feeling isolated.
Kelly Munk was the exception. Beer in one hand, untouched sandwich in the other, he was holding court. Most of the older cavers ignored him, but he'd gathered a newsman and a coterie of the less-experienced cavers. With becoming modesty, he outlined how he'd taken over the medical care of Frieda, explained how his rigging could have saved her life, and, at risk of losing his audience, moved on to a tale of paranormal prowess implying he heard Frieda's spirit crying in the darkness of the Pigtail. Zeddie looked as if she might be contemplating a queenly prerogative, and Brent Roxbury was so pale Anna was afraid he was going to faint. "I can't take this," she heard him murmuring. Even Schatz, who normally would allow Munk to make as much of a fool of himself as he wished, had taken on a look of if not malevolence then peevish irritation.
The story was in the worst possible taste. Not because of the grandstanding, trading on tragedy for a moment in the spotlight, but because there were those, Anna among them, who would have dearly loved a last word with Frieda. That Munk could suggest her spirit would have frittered it away on an ass like himself was too much to bear on freeze-dried food and too little sleep.
Hands were bunching into fists, faces screwing up for harsh words. Oscar stepped in. Anna thought Holden would do the honors, but he was too wrapped up in his own misery. With little fuss, Oscar herded Munk toward the tent's exit. Kelly didn't thank Iverson, but he should have. The men might have maintained a veneer of civility but Zeddie was ready to punch somebody's lights out. Tempered by two years on rope and rock, her fists would carry quite a wallop. Anna was sorry to see the fracas averted. Abusing Kelly Munk would have proved a catharsis. But Oscar, older, wiser, not nearly so much fun, spirited Kelly Munk away before the newsman got anything interesting to train his camera on.
Beer and sandwiches buoyed the team up sufficiently to make the hike back to the waiting vehicles, trudging along without speaking. With the exception of Oscar, Holden, and Brent, the core group gathered at Zeddie's home. None of them had anywhere else to go, and, with the instinct of a flock of birds or a battalion that's seen action, they needed to stay together.
Zeddie pulled an answering machine from a drawer, hooked it up, unplugged the phone, and turned the volume on the machine down so they could sleep in. McCarty didn't call home to let his wife know he was out of the cave. He behaved as if he and Zeddie were an accepted couple. In this age of technology Anna doubted a thousand miles of real estate could have given him such a feeling of privacy. Gossip traveled faster than light, faster than e-mail. Sins in New Mexico could be news in Minnesota before they'd had time to be properly committed. It could be that he just didn't care anymore. It could be that he knew for one reason or another that Sondra was beyond the grapevine, her threats no longer viable.
Anna and Curt bunked on the couch, heads at opposite ends, limbs vying for space in the middle. Mrs. Dierkz slept on the single bed in the spare room. In keeping with Peter's suddenly single status, he and Zeddie retired to the double bed in the master bedroom. Under the circumstances adultery seemed, if not natural, then inevitable, and no one commented. Frontline morality, Anna thought as she felt Calcite stomp up her belly to lie on her chest. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die. There was an attraction in that. The stuff of movies, the reason wars continued to delight in retrospect, if not in reality. To be so alive, so of the moment. No tedious consequences. No tawdry loose ends.
In this atmosphere of opportunistic hedonism, Anna noticed the warmth of Schatz's thigh pressed against hers. She could hear the hush of his breath and smell the soap he'd showered with. A lovely young man, she thought, and felt a pleasant tingle.
"Get thee behind me, Satan," she whispered.
"Anna?" Schatz said, and she felt her already weak resolve vanish utterly.
"What?" Her voice was husky, cliché; it embarrassed her.
"Are you going to hog the cat?"
She would have laughed but for the fact it might have disturbed Calcite. "She chose me. Get your own damn cat." Disappointment was canceled by relief. This wasn't war. Tomorrow they would all still be alive, and there would be pipers demanding to be paid. Best not to run up too much of a tab.
Morning came like a hangover. Everybody seemed lost. The survey Frieda's team had embarked on was scheduled to last four more days. No one had flights booked out till then. For a few days at least, Zeddie would have houseguests. Anna was glad. She could lose herself in the crowd.
Curt seemed content to stay where he was, though Anna couldn't tell whether it was due to her questionable charms, Calcite's allure, or the fact that he had nothing waiting for him at home. Peter McCarty opted to stay as well, but his motives were more transparent. Mrs. Dierkz had the corpse of her daughter waiting on ice in Carlsbad.
Peter reattached the phone line and made a duty call to his home in Minneapolis. The machine answered. He didn't strike Anna as worried, angry, relieved-he didn't strike her in any way at all. Did he know Sondra wouldn't be answering the phone? Sondra had flown out with the first group, but nobody had checked to see what her destination was. She could have gone any direction. Maybe McCarty had reasons he wasn't sharing for knowing she had bolted. Sondra could be running from the law or from her husband, or simply screening her calls.
During the night Zeddie's answering machine had taken one call. At 1:27 a.m., according to the impersonal voice of the recording, Brent Roxbury had called for Anna. He'd be at Big Manhole from noon till around three, checking reports of unauthorized digging. He needed to talk. From the late hour of the call, Anna inferred some urgency. While she had a car she would meet him and see if what he needed to tell had any relation to what she needed to hear.
According to Zeddie's map, Big Manhole was less than an hour's walk from park housing. There was no trail, but the way was not difficult, much the same as the terrain to Lechuguilla. A walk would do Anna good. Exercise underground was a different discipline, and she longed for the hard stretch of movement, feeling the world go by, seeing the earth pay out beneath her boots. A bitterly cold wind and the necessity of delivering Dottie Dierkz to town dissuaded her. Paved roads out of Carlsbad would take her most of the way, dirt tracks the rest.
Big Manhole was a cave on BLM land adjacent to the park, an unprepossessing hole more than fifty feet deep, the entrance a mere crack beside a low brow of stone. About ten feet down, the aperture widened abruptly into a bell-shaped cavern. On its own, Big Manhole had little to recommend it, but there were a number of people who believed it would prove to be a second entrance into Lechuguilla Cavern. Toward that end, various tunnels had been bored into the bottom of the cave. Some were dug with the knowledge and blessing of the Bureau of Land Management. Some were not. Holden had once remarked to Oscar that he always carried an extra padlock when he visited because, often as not, the last lock used to secure the gate closing the cave would have been pried off.
North of the park the country was beautiful only to an eye acclimatized to the desert's idiosyncratic allure. Broken hills, scabbed with rock and cactus, spread out to a horizon composed of faint blue mountain silhouettes. Dry washes, ancient stream- and riverbeds, slashed through, exposing the bones of the earth in stratifications of gray, white, and dun. Nothing eased the eye: no green trees, sparkle of water, or carpet of grasses. The sky failed to soften the blow. Cold and scoured by the icy winds, its blue was as unyielding as lapis lazuli.
North northwest of the park boundary Anna ran out of pavement. Turning off Highway 137, she edged the sedan over a gravel road. For a dirt track it was in good condition, recently resurfaced and leveled. Potholes, massive and unannounced, suggested heavy use. That and dust forced her to slow to an irritating creep. Dust was ubiquitous. Anna had spent a lot of years in a lot of deserts, and she couldn't remember seeing dust this bad. It was as if the land had been ground exceedingly fine, pulverized into white powder that settled over everything. Rocks, bushes, the few stalks of sparse grass were featureless under a suffocating blanket of grayish white. Clouds boiled from beneath the sedan's tires.
Suddenly a wind sucked the powdered earth up and wove it into veils, wings, plumes, fantastic blinding shapes. Anna stomped on the brake, and the car shuddered to a halt. The whirling devil wind that engulfed her in earthen fog pummeled the car, velvet fists pounding first one door, then another. The radio antenna whipped so hard she could hear its high faint singing over the wind. With a last, playful swat, a broken sage bush rolling tumbleweed fashion over the car's hood, the tiny tornado moved on.
Anna watched its progress, a jaunty white funnel skipping over the catsclaw. A dust devil in the steady winds that had raked the desert since morning was unusual but not the greatest of the natural phenomena spawned by the rugged landscape. The twister carried off only a drop in the ocean of dust that continued to pour across the roadway in a steady stream.
A rough track forked to the south. No signs marked the way. Anna guided herself by counting. Unless she'd missed a road during the bizarre storm, this was the third; the road that would carry her to Big Manhole.
Seconds after she left the gravel the dust was gone. Winds raged unabated. The road began to deteriorate. Zeddie had warned her she'd need a high-clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicle to navigate the backcountry. Anna would have preferred it. What she had was a 1993 Chevrolet and she would have to make do. Had it been her own car, she would have been more circumspect. Muttering a quick apology to the taxpayers, she forced the car over an imbedded spine of limestone that threatened to disembowel it.
Twenty minutes later she knew she'd have to abandon the car and walk the last couple of miles or risk having to walk the entire sixty back to Carlsbad. Despite her leather jacket and another of Zeddie's sweaters, wind found ways into her bones. Leaning into it, she shoved her hands in her pockets, lowered her head, and barged up the bleak hills. By the time she reached the last bump in a line of thick places along a low ridge, she felt a kinship with a baked Alaska. Exertion had raised her body temperature till, beneath her layers, she'd begun to sweat, but the bite of the wind had nearly frozen the flesh from her cheeks and ears.
Over the years she'd nearly forgotten the unceasing winds of a Trans-Pecos winter. Moaning, godless winds that ripped through, carrying away sanity. Jason's harpies could have taken lessons from the Texas wind. Relentless, it tore at human nerves, snatching hats, doors, packages, whipping people with their own hair, scouring with sand and cold, never letting up, never letting go, sawing at the eaves in the night and the mind in the day.
"The wind is my friend," Anna remembered a conservationist in Guadalupe telling her. "It blows the tourists away."
Sensible tourists, she thought as she pushed over the nub of the last hill. The sight of a four-wheel-drive Blazer rewarded her. If, after all the effort, Brent had stood her up, she might have been less than perfectly gracious when next they met.
Caves were well camouflaged in New Mexico. The entrances blended in with the scenery. One could easily pass within a foot of a major cavern and never notice it. Anna followed Zeddie's directions to the letter. She walked to the middle of the barren knoll where Brent had left the Blazer, pulled out her compass, and turned till she was facing south southeast. If she'd done it right, park headquarters should be several miles away, hidden by a swelling of the ground. Crossing to where the knoll rounded down into one of the shallow ravines that carried away water from the short but fierce monsoons, she looked for the cave.
Gray-brown hillsides rolled away in all directions, marked only by fragments of lichen-speckled stone and the unwelcoming beauty of desert plants. Anna turned her attention to the ground at her feet. At first nothing presented itself, but she was used to that. The desert was a mosaic; changes were subtle. After a moment a faint trail began to emerge as her eye picked out minute changes in color and texture. The experience was not unlike staring at a 3-D pattern. First there's nothing; then, once the picture forms, it's unmistakable. Enjoying the childlike delight this simple magic never failed to produce, she ran lightly down the trail, the wind at her back threatening to give her wings.
Fifty yards later the trail didn't so much stop as dwindle to nothing, and still Anna couldn't see anything suggesting a cave. What finally tipped her off that she was in the right place was a boot, an old hiking boot, protruding from the snarly fingers of a catsclaw bush. Beyond this unnatural formation she saw Big Manhole. Tucked up beside a low serrated bench of stone the entrance was right out of The Patchwork Girl of Oz, a place designed for the incarceration of flesh-eating ogres. Flush with the ground, a hole roughly the size of a hope chest leaked black shadow through whitened limestone. Rusted iron bars cemented into the rock formed a grid over the opening. A trapdoor of the same rusted iron was welded in, a heavy hasp wanting a padlock to secure it. To see the hairy knuckles of a giant poking elephantine fingers through the grid didn't take too great a stretch of the imagination.
"Brent?" Anna hollered as she stepped around the grabbing thorns of catsclaw. The wind snatched the words from her lips and hurled them over the desert. As it happened, they would have fallen on deaf ears anyway. The battered boot was not an ancient artifact. It was firmly laced to the foot of Brent Roxbury.
There are postures that the human body does not adopt in life.
Roxbury had the broken-doll look of someone struck down from a standing position and dead or unconscious before he hit the ground. His feet were splayed at uncomfortable angles, legs bent when the knees buckled. He'd landed on his hip, his left arm flung back from his torso and falling behind him. His right was trapped beneath; his face pressed against the grid over the cave.
"Brent?" Anna said again, but she was talking to herself. Crouching over his inert form she felt for a carotid pulse. Finding none, she took the liberty of rolling him onto his back. Spinal injuries were the least of his worries. Her hand came away from his navy windbreaker dripping with blood. Not marked or smeared but dripping as if she'd dipped it in a bucket. She could feel the salt sting of it in the myriad scrapes and cuts her Lechuguilla adventure had left on her knuckles.
"Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" came a line from Shakespeare's Scottish play, one in which her husband had carried a spear. Brent's soul had been gored from his body by a bullet from a high-powered weapon. No neat black hole between the eyes had let his life leak away. A furrow chewed up from his clavicle into his neck, severing the carotid artery on the left side of the pharynx, then continued up till it blew away the point of his jaw, much of his dental work, and his left cheekbone.
Due to the severe facial trauma there was no way Anna could have effected an airtight seal to begin rescue breathing. It was a moot point. Without blood to carry it, oxygen had no way of reaching the vital organs. The throat wound no longer spurted but merely seeped. No heart left to push the blood, no blood left to flow.
Feeling mildly insensitive, Anna wiped the gore from her hands on the dead man's trousers. Nothing else was available, and she sure as hell wasn't going to wipe it on her own.
Blood had become toxic waste. Paper trail: if she played out the paranoia, there'd be reports and doctors' offices visited to leave a record in case she tested positive for HIV after the incident. Every class, every lecture drummed precaution into the brain. The greater danger of being mowed down by a drunk driver did not worry the public. Maybe because it did not carry with it the horror of death by inches.
A crack of sound and the sting of needle-fine pieces of stone sown into her cheek jerked her back to more imminent danger. What with one thing and another, she'd overlooked the obvious. The shooter was not necessarily gone, nor was he necessarily finished. Not daring to look around for the rifleman, she flattened herself on top of Brent Roxbury. Blood, warm as bathwater, drenched her face and neck. He couldn't have been dead more than a minute or two. A second shot cracked, then sang high and angry off the rock inches beyond Anna's skull. She could feel-or imagined she could-the stirring of its wind in her hair.
She had two choices for cover: behind Roxbury's corpse or down through the rusted bars wiring the jaws of Big Manhole. As tempting as Brent's company was, a wall of flesh and bone would scarcely slow a bullet down. Unpleasant images of WWII executions clicked behind her eyes.
Quick as a wounded snake, she writhed over to the iron-barred trap and dropped through. The black enclosed well of the cave held no terrors for her. She figured the fall would kill her before claustrophobia could set in. Knuckles wrapped around the grid, she looked down expecting to see nothing but darkness. Today the gods were kind-or in a playful mood. The neck of the immense limestone bottle was not neat and sheer but a ragged crevice with plenty of ledges upon which a small and determined woman could find footholds.
Where Anna dangled, the aperture was no more than three feet across. Jamming both boots on a ledge eight inches wide, she planted her back against the opposite wall. Wedged in, she could wait a good long time. Confident she was secure, she peeled her hands from the metal of the bars. Her fingers weren't slippery with Roxbury's blood. The man was a good coagulator. His plasma glued her skin to the iron.
Two more shots rang out, lending the scream of lead and limestone to the shriek of the wind. Both times Anna winced, though she knew her cover was complete. In the security of the newfound shelter, her mind changed gears from instinct to intellect. Who would shoot Brent Roxbury? In the Southwest, particularly New Mexico, local militia groups had threatened to shoot BLM rangers on sight. Militia. Bubbas with IQs lower than the caliber of their handguns. Guys who felt cheated because "varmint hunts," the senseless competitive slaughter of coyotes that lived so far out on the desert they'd never so much as tasted chicken or lamb, had been interfered with. Men dispossessed because bicycle trails were infringing on traditional shooting ranges, and the government, afraid a few of the Spandex-and-ponytail set would catch a stray bullet, had closed more than one.
As near as Anna could remember, most of the ill will was centered in northern New Mexico, near Farmington. Southern New Mexico had been spared that particular ugliness. At least it had in the past.
That train of thought derailed. She loved the novels of Thomas Hardy and was a great believer in coincidence. But never when one needed it. Two members of the survey team meeting untimely ends from unrelated sources was highly unlikely.
Brent had been with them when Frieda died. He had been much distraught by her death. He'd wanted to speak with Anna and had foolishly left a message to that effect on the answering machine at Zeddie Dillard's. Everyone there-all the members of the core group, with the exception of Sondra-had heard it, right down to where and when he and Anna could meet. Zeddie had conveniently pointed out that it was an easy walk from park housing to Big Manhole. Before Brent had an opportunity to talk, he'd been killed. It didn't take a great thinker to trace the thread. Brent knew something about Frieda's "accident." Possibly he'd seen or suspected who had made Anna's cherished butt-print. That person had decided Brent was to carry his secret to the grave. A one-way ticket had been provided.
Lost in thought, Anna let a minute's silence tick by, then two. The shooter had given up. She would wait till he'd gone, then come out of hiding. Minute three passed and with it Anna's illusion of safety. She had no reason to believe the rifleman would slink away in defeat. Why should he? A glance disabused her of any hope she might have harbored regarding cover or alternative egress. The slot where she hid was eight feet long, two to four feet wide, and bottomless. Anna had incarcerated herself in the ideal trap. No place to hide, no place to go but down, and no way to get there but fall. Big Manhole, having no cause for regular visitation, didn't boast a standing line, and Brent had been gunned down before he'd rigged a descent.
Options skittered through her mind. They were few in number and low on appeal. She could remain in her chimney and wait to be shot. Slim possibilities occurred to her: the would-be attacker might make a mistake, create an opening she could parlay into an escape. A mistake of that magnitude would require a gunman both unbelievably stupid and a tad psychotic. Judging by the deadly efficiency with which Brent had been dispatched, this fellow was probably neither. There would be no long cinematic tortures or lengthy rationalizations. Chances were he'd not poke the rifle barrel through the bars to prod his caged quarry so she could wrest the weapon from him in a moment of glorious heroics. He'd point, shoot; she'd fall, die; a crumpled, dead, middle-aged lady on a heap of antique bat shit. No glamour there.
"Shit," Anna whispered, then, with a nod to the Hodags, "Shucks." She needed all the help she could get. The saw of the wind precluded any possibility of listening for approaching footsteps. Not that early warning would do her any good. Diving into a hole had been a serious error in judgment. Odds were, running, she'd have made it, if not unscathed, then at least alive. Moving targets were devilishly hard to hit with any kind of accuracy.
Now whoever it was would be closer, know precisely where she was, where she could and could not go.
Anna eyed the rectangular chunk of uncut blue in the iron grid. She was in fairly good physical shape, but climbing out was going to be considerably slower than dropping in. At best guess, there would be thirty to sixty seconds during which she'd be a tempting target.
Still, there was nothing but to do it, and she tensed up, gauging the distance with the concentration of an Olympic gymnast: eighteen inches, a jerk, a push, a scramble. Readying her muscles, she shifted her weight and flexed her fingers, mimicking the tiny nervous movements of a cat preparing to pounce. On three, she told herself.
Before she'd begun her countdown, a glittering ruby detached from the sky and fell to a narrow shelf of white limestone. The red was unreal, luminous. Blood, Brent's blood, dripping through the bars with mesmerizing slowness.
A second drop, perfect and beautiful in the harsh light of the winter sun, formed on the underside of the iron, quivered, sending thousands of microscopic reflections across its scarlet surface. Caught up in this minuscule drama, she watched as it grew too great to support its own weight, then fell three feet to explode in sudden and sparkling splendor. In this brief life and death of a droplet Anna's mind had time to paint a grisly future: her grabbing for the bars on either side of the trap, ramming her boots into the sides of her rock prison, and shoving her head and shoulders up through the grate. A bullet ripping through her spine, bits of bone, white and sharp as shrapnel splattering the rock beside her. Her bowels letting loose and her legs going numb as the nerves were severed. Fingers uncurling and the weight of her dead legs dragging her down. Light receding to a pinpoint as she fell to the bottom of Big Manhole.
The vision sucked the breath from her. She shook free of it and began to scream like a berserker warrior reminding himself of his own bravery. Intellect was over. Time for instinct.
She lunged upward toward the light.