The following morning Anna took possession of Joan's office. On her way in she'd been greeted with a few friendly hellos and had the coffee machine pointed out to her, but there'd been no questions about the murder or anything related to it. Researchers were wonderful in their dedication. If it wasn't about bears, virtually no one in the great rambling building gave two hoots about it.
With Ruick's blessing, she had taken copies of every report generated, every piece of evidence gathered and any and all lab reports returned. Joan's office was devoid of clean flat surfaces. Every inch of space was covered in folders, papers, pamphlets, books and pieces of bears gathered over the years. Knowing this well-feathered nest was as Joan wished it to be, the sprawling form dictated by her professional needs, Anna chose to disturb nothing. The relics of her investigation she placed carefully on top of Joan's piles. She sat in the midst of them and opened her mind to let plans and patterns form if they might.
Carolyn Van Slyke's autopsy report was to the right of the computer on a half-consumed bag of gummi bears. Anna reread it, looking for any connection to McCaskil. Other than the coat, there was nothing. As a matter of course the body had been checked for sexual assault. None. If Carolyn had been involved with McCaskil, the sex had been consensual and a condom had been used.
Anna had only Lester Van Slyke's word that Carolyn had been adulterous. Though she believed him, there was a remote possibility he'd been inspired by the army jacket, seen the accusation as a way of casting suspicion on McCaskil, not realizing in doing so he was giving himself yet another motive for killing his own wife. Since Anna had no positive leads, she took the negative.
Having found Carolyn Van Slyke's work number and address in Seattle, Anna called her place of business. Francine Cuckor, Carolyn's assistant, was happy to answer questions. Whether divorce attorneys were more open than most about adultery or whether Francine just liked to talk, Anna would never know, but according to Ms. Cuckor's bawdy tales, a few of which sounded apocryphal and bordered on admiration, Carolyn not only had sex with a large number of men but was open about it. Francine did say that Carolyn was an ethical practitioner of the law. Her exact words were: "She'd never fuck a client or a client's husband until the case was settled." From the way Ms. Cuckor said it, Anna guessed she pretty much thought Carolyn a candidate for the Lawyer's Hall of Fame on grounds of self-control.
Francine went so far as to offer Anna the names and phone numbers of others who could confirm her stories. Anna declined. She was merely fact-checking, not gathering material for letters to Penthouse.
She hung up and filched a gummi bear to cleanse her palate. She was not a prude. She'd enjoyed her share of fornication. Still, she was old-fashioned enough to feel adultery should be done on the sly, in great secrecy, and that it behooved the adulterers to feel ashamed and guilty. The libertine sentiments of Ms. Cuckor and the late Mrs. Van Slyke left her with a sense of sleaze that was unsettling. Anna had never cheated on Zach. A cynic had once told her it was because he died before their marriage reached the philandering years. Anna chose to believe otherwise. If she married again she would bring to the new union that same Pollyanna belief in fidelity.
If she married again.Thinking that startled her. Several years earlier she'd finally extinguished the torch she carried for her first husband. It had never crossed her mind that she might marry again.
She ate another gummi bear and picked up the reports generated by a computer search on one William Adkins McCaskil, a.k.a. Bill McLellan, Bill Fetterman, and Will Skillman. It was a point in the man's favor that he had registered for a backcountry permit under his own name. That he'd registered for a permit at all suggested that either his pursuits were innocent or, given he was well versed in the ways of crime and law enforcement, he knew in obeying the minor rules one was far more apt to get away with the major infractions. A significant number of felons were rotting in the federal penitentiaries because they got pulled over for failing to signal on a right turn and then one thing led to another.
McCaskil had been born in Sarasota, Florida, on December 27, 1949, to Gerald and Suzanne McCaskil. At sixteen, he'd gotten his driver's license suspended in Tampa, Florida. At twenty-nine, he'd been convicted of mail fraud, selling low-cost life insurance policies through the mail to elderly people. He'd served six months. At forty-eight, he'd been convicted of real estate fraud, selling one-acre lots over the internet that belonged to the Florida fish and wildlife service. For that, he'd served eighteen months and gotten five years' probation. Because of the light sentences, Anna guessed large sums of money had not been involved. That or McCaskil had connections.
Connections. Anna stared at the report without really seeing it. There was something there that was jiggling a lever in her mind trying to turn a light on. Again she read the first paragraph: a.k.a. Bill McLellan, a.k.a. Bill Fetterman, a.k.a. Will Skillman. McLellan and Skillman were of a piece. People often chose the initials of, or aplay on, their given names when choosing an alias. Fetterman seemed out of place. Fetterman rang some distant bell.
Anna started with NCIC, the National Crime Information Center. Two Fettermans had wants or warrants, one was a twenty-two-year-old black male out of Philadelphia wanted on a burglary charge, the other was a thirty-one-year-old white male from Los Banos, California, wanted for grand theft auto. No tie-in that Anna could see with her a.k.a.
The obvious route petering out, she began a people search starting with the Fettermans of Sarasota, Florida. Fortunately, Fetterman was not a common name. Only three turned up: Dr. Peter Fetterman, A. Fetterman, and Fetterman Marine supplies.
A. Fetterman was Amanda Fetterman, the spinster daughter of the owner of Fetterman Marine. Anna told her she was from the Florida State Alumni Association trying to track down a William or Bill Fetterman for the class of '74's upcoming reunion.
Amanda knew no Bill or William. Anna tried McCaskil and McClellan out on her and struck out both times. Finally, too many questions made Amanda suspicious and she began asking questions of her own. Making a hasty retreat fueled with "thank yous," Anna disconnected. She called the marine supply store next and spoke with Papa Fetterman. Same story told in less time: he knew no Bill Fetterman, McCaskil or McClellan, no Skillman either and what the hell was this all about anyway?
Peter Fetterman was a doctor of marine biology. The number Anna'd gotten off the internet was apparently his home. Being an efficient man, his answering machine informed callers of a work number where he could be reached. Just because he sounded so sensible, when Anna reached him, she told him that she was doing background checks for three men who'd applied for law enforcement positions. The doctor knew no men by those names. The only Fetterman he knew of was a man in Tampa. Their paths had crossed over an incident regarding a shark poached illegally from a study area. He wouldn't tell Anna where, other than to say "off the coast." He seemed to suffer from the delusion that few people could resist the lure of frequenting shark-infested waters.
Tampa was where young Bill McCaskil had his first recorded brush with the law. Anna moved on. To have phoned three people and gotten hold of them on, if not the first, then the second try was a phenomenal bit of luck. It seemed the more electronic paraphernalia people purchased to remain in touch with an ever-scattering herd served only to separate them further. In the course of various investigations Anna had spent days of her life on pointless rounds from answering machines to pagers to voice mail, never once speaking to a real live human being.
Consequently it was no surprise that Lady Luck dumped her in Tampa. No Fetterman was listed, either as an individual or as a business. Anna taxed the phone company's much-touted, new-and-improved information system that promised to find numbers to places with forgotten names. Nowhere in or around Tampa was a place of business with the name Fetterman in the title. The telephone operator Anna had hooked up with was probably as close to a saint as the phone company had on its rosters. She was willing to keep on trying when Anna decided to throw in the towel.
"We could try recently disconnected numbers," the operator suggested.
"You can do that?" Anna was amazed not at the technology but at the operator's access to those files, and her willingness to take the time.
"It'll take a second."
Anna couldn't think what good a disconnected number could do, but she felt an obligation to wait. After all, the woman had worked so hard it seemed ungrateful somehow.
The strange quiet of telephone lines, not pushed full of Muzak, trickled into Anna's ear; faint hushing as of a distant sea, barely audible clicks and hums; the intercourse of the world kept at bay by a thin wall of rubber.
"Well," the operator came back on the line. "We've got something."
"Let's have it," Anna said. To prove she was paying attention, she sat up straight and held a pen at the ready over a sheet of scrap paper she'd nearly obliterated with doodles.
"Fetterman's Adventure Trails on Highway Forty-One."
Anna repeated it back to her. A name had been found, the operator seemed to feel at last her job was done and she could leave Anna in good conscience.
Rubbing the ear she'd compressed into the phone receiver for so long, Anna looked at the words angled in amongst the rococo permutations of bear tracks inked on the page. The name Fetterman had rung a bell. Fetterman's Adventure Trails set half a dozen clanging. Leaving the office in its state of productive disarray, she jogged the half-mile back to the headquarters building.
Harry was out to lunch. Maryanne was eating at her desk, delicately holding a sandwich in one hand away from the keyboard while she hunt-and-pecked corrections with the other. Anna hoped Harry knew how lucky he was.
The sandwich and the typing were set aside while Anna was settled in Harry's chair and copies of the past three weeks' 10-343s and 10-344s case and criminal incident reports were lifted from the files and placed before her.
On a case incident report submitted ten days earlier by the district ranger on the northwest side of the park, Anna found what she was looking for. No crime had been committed; it was the report of the truck and trailer abandoned off-road within park boundaries. The truck was registered to a Carl G. Micou out of Tampa, Florida. Anna rechecked the report on the abandoned truck. The only phone number on the vehicle registration turned out to belong to a business phone that had been disconnected, the phone number of Fetterman's Adventure Trails on Highway 41.
Anna had what she wanted but she didn't know what she had. For the next hour she read reports from the time the truck and trailer were found to the present but there was nothing else pertinent. A call to the Polebridge ranger station and another to dispatch let her know that no one had come forward to claim the vehicles. Anna photocopied the 10-343, thanked Maryanne and walked back to the resource management office.
The secretary's sandwich reminded Anna it was lunchtime but she was too preoccupied to take time hunting and gathering. Back in Joan's office she made do with candy. She was going to owe the researcher a bag of gummi bears before the day was through.
To impose order where none naturally suggested itself, Anna rearranged her papers atop those left by Joan Rand: Carolyn Van Slyke's autopsy report; the list of items found on the body, including the coat with McCaskil's topographical map in the pocket; then what information they had on Bill McCaskil a.k.a. Bill Fetterman; Anna's much-doodled-on notes tracing Fetterman to Fetterman's Adventure Trails; and, last in this papered line of thought, the 10-343 connecting a truck and horse trailer abandoned near the northwest corner of Glacier to the defunct business on Highway 41 outside Tampa, Florida.
Too much for coincidence, not enough for sense. Could the truck and horse trailer belong to McCaskil or have been borrowed or stolen by McCaskil? Sure. But then why was his own legally registered vehicle parked in a frontcountry parking lot? Who was Carl Micou? Did McCaskil have a confederate and, if so, a confederate in what?
None of this brought Anna any closer to a connection between McCaskil and the murder victim; still, she was pleased with herself. The morning had not been wasted.
Back on the phone, she reconnected with Francine Cuckor. Ms. Cuckor had her own brand of professional ethics. She'd been only too happy to share in gory detail the fact that her boss had had sex with all creatures great and small. When asked to say yea or nay to names of clients, she got cagey. Eventually Anna was bumped upstairs to Claude Winger, a junior partner in the firm.
It was not advisable to spin tales for a past master at the art of professional dissimulation, so Anna told him, as her father would have said, "the whole truth, nothing but the truth and damn little of that."
"I'm Officer Anna Pigeon investigating the death of Carolyn Van Slyke. Could you answer afew questions for me?"
A pause, then a careful voice as devoid of regional inflections as that of a radio announcer said, "Ask your questions." Anna noted the lack of commitment to answering them.
"We have a couple leads, both weak at this point. We're trying to establish any prior connection between Mrs. Van Slyke and our possible suspects," Anna said, using frankness like bread upon the waters.
It was not returned tenfold. "And you want me to…," the voice came back.
"Answer a few questions, if you would."
"Ask your questions."
There would be no softening up or slithering around Claude. Anna cut to it. "Has or was Carolyn Van Slyke working on any case involving a Bill McCaskil, Will Skillman, Bill McClellan or Bill Fetterman?"
"We can't divulge any client information."
"The fact that a person has engaged the services of an attorney does not fall under attorney-client privilege," Anna said. So often the attorney, doctor, priest and whoever-else client privilege was claimed for wasn't for the protection of clients. It was claimed, legally or not, because people were either too lazy to bother giving information to help out the police, or harbored vague worries that to cooperate would open up their own activities to scrutiny. Anna suspected Claude claimed it as a matter of course to avoid involvement and work. She thought of threatening to subpoena his files but knew it was an empty threat. The rank-and-file investigated and reported. It wasn't for the likes of her to go throwing around legal ultimatums. Claude Winger would know that.
She waited through a clearly audible sigh breathed out in an office in Seattle. "I'll put you through to the secretary. Give her the names. She will tell you if any of them have engaged the professional services of Carolyn Van Slyke in the past year. She won't go back further than that and she will not tell you anything else."
"Thank you," Anna said but he'd already put her on hold. Minutes later, when she was beginning to think she'd been put on hold to grow old and die, Francine came on the line. Winger had evidently spoken to her firmly. She was businesslike to the point of rudeness. Anna read off her list of names, adding Carl Micou as an afterthought. She was answered by the huffy snicking sound of fingernails on a keyboard.
"No persons by those names have contacted Ms. Van Slyke in her professional capacity," Francine said mimicking an automaton.
Had the sentence with its convoluted precision come from someone else, Anna might have suspected them of hiding something. From Francine it just sounded petty and pompous.
"Thank you," Anna said again and pulled her soul back from the black and voice-filled void of the telephone to Joan's homey office.
No cheese down that hole,Anna remembered one of her field rangers, Barth Dinkins, saying. "No cheese," she said aloud.
Carl G. Micou, registered owner of the abandoned truck and trailer, the man who'd given the Florida motor vehicles department the number of Fetterman's Adventure Trails as his home number, remained a mystery. Anna turned back to her electronics.
Mentally apologizing to Joan for a phone bill she would probably have a devil of a time getting her department reimbursed for, Anna called Information and, throwing caution to the winds, charged the extra fifty cents and let them dial the Tampa Better Business Bureau for her. A pleasant young man, at least he sounded young and handsome and virile but may well have been a nasty old poop with a nice voice, told her Fetterman's Adventure Trails was a licensed business owned and operated by Woody Fetterman. Fetterman's Adventure Trails had operated at the same location for twenty-six years. The only address for Woody was that of Adventure Trails. There had been no complaints against Fetterman's from either the buying public or other businesses. Fetterman's Adventure Trails had recently closed its doors but he did not know why. He suggested she call the Tampa tourism department, as he thought Adventure Trails was a theme park with rides and so forth. They might be able to help her.
The department of tourism could tell her little more. The woman who answered the phone offered to send Anna a brochure, then couldn't find one. They'd gone out of business, Anna said, possibly the brochures had been thrown out. That was probably it, the woman agreed. She wrote down Anna's address at Glacier anyway, promising to send it along if she found it. Anna would have been touched by the desire to please if so long on the phone finding out so little hadn't made her crabby.
An hour's work had provided her with one first name, if "Woody" was legit and not a nickname. Maybe Woodrow. Since Woody had been in business in the same place for twenty-six years he was no fly-by-night. It had been in the back of Anna's mind that Fetterman of Fetterman's Adventure Trails and Bill McCaskil might be one and the same. Twenty-six years, changed that. She couldn't see McCaskil quietly running a business while being indicted and arrested repeatedly for fraud under a handful of other names.
McCaskil was from the Tampa area-or had been there as a teenager. He could've seen the name Fetterman on his way to work or school every day and remembered it when he needed an alias. If it wasn't for the name cropping up again by way of the owner of the abandoned truck, Anna would have chosen to believe that.
"Woody Fetterman." Anna wended her way through the phone lines to the Tampa courthouse, records department. Yes, there was a certificate of death for a Woodrow Fetterman. He had died at age eighty-one of natural causes six weeks before.
Another possibility exhausted. Bill McCaskil a.k.a. Fetterman was not the Fetterman of Adventure Trails. He was not connected with Carolyn Van Slyke by way of divorce. According to Lester, McCaskil hadn't known her before they met at Fifty Mountain Camp.
"Damn," Anna whispered. The truck and the trailer. The name Fetterman. McCaskil and his aliases. Another possibility entered her mind and she went back to the 10343 report. Carl G. Micou was born August 4, 1938, considerably older than McCaskil. Still, "Micou" could he one of McCaskil's aliases. Perhaps it wasn't listed because it was unknown or not yet used at the time William McCaskil was indicted for real estate fraud.
She spent forty more minutes on the phone and eventually ended up back at the records department in Tampa. The search took longer this time but Mr. Micou's death certificate was found. He had died of congestive heart failure in April of 1995, nearly six years ago.
"His truck is still alive," Anna said wearily.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Never mind. Thanks." Dead men, dead ends.
Sprinkled around the edges of Joan's office was all the information that, by any wild stretch of the imagination, could pertain to the death of Carolyn Van Slyke. Anna had already run to ground what little Fetterman, Fetterman and Micou had to offer. She'd verified that Lester's wife was indeed the queen of sluts. Swiveling Joan's chair slowly she let the other bits and pieces slide by: the army jacket with the topo and the file card. Anna rolled over and, without touching it, reread a copy of the card found in the pocket of what would undoubtedly be Bill McCaskil's coat. "B amp; C" was written in a loose hand across the top. Below those initials were numbers, measurements by the look of them: 12 11/16, 17 13/16, 30 12/16. The last, 30 8/19, was underlined in heavy ink.
When they caught McCaskil, if she were around, Anna'd ask him what the numbers meant. Probably nothing. His waist size. Who knew? She examined the photocopy of the topo. It had been reduced in size till it fit on two fourteen-and-a-half-inch sheets of paper taped together. Most of the type was too tiny for eyes that had seen more than forty years. There was nothing new since she'd looked at the original, no nifty clues pencilled in the margins, no big red X where the body had been found.
Anna rotated the chair another quarter turn and glanced briefly at her notes on Rory Van Slyke. Rory's dad was an abuse victim. Rory'd gone missing for thirty-six hours. Rory'd turned up having lost a sweatshirt and gained a water bottle, probably his dead stepmother's. Anna's mind drifted and she let it. No lunch, half a bag of gummi bears, her blood sugar was sufficiently screwed up her mind might actually go someplace interesting. It didn't. It merely cast back to the night on Flattop when Joan had divvied up the scattered remnants of the bear-ravaged camp, the ones she and Anna had stuffed unceremoniously in a sack before jaunting off with Harry in search of the lost boy. It was then Anna'd noted the extraneous water bottle in the bag beside the strange stick she'd picked up just outside the camp.
Rory had denied any knowledge of that stick, Anna remembered, just as he'd denied knowing how the water bottles had proliferated. A foot long, worn smooth, of hardwood, not pine or aspen, unweathered, Anna and Joan had known it was carried in recently so when they'd found it they'd saved it. Rory said he'd never seen it. Anna hadn't thought much about it at the time. It was a stick of wood not a stick of dynamite. Now she worried it around because it fit neatly into her collection of bizarre things that didn't fit.
Anna had kept the stick. Force of habit caused her to pack it out as she would any piece of litter. Unless the house had been burglarized by beavers it was probably on the floor of Joan's spare room, where it had been dumped when she unpacked before the last foray into the wilderness.
Thinking about it, she picked up a ruler, close in length to the mystery stick, though a good deal skinnier, and began to fiddle with it. If Rory had not been lying about the stick then it had been dropped in the little meadow by someone else on or about the time they'd been camped out there. Not more than a day or two prior to their arrival. Wood, even hardwood, weathers quickly out-of-doors.
Experimentally Anna waved the ruler about, trying to ascertain the possible uses for a finished length of hardwood, several times the thickness of a ruler, packed into the backcountry. Perhaps a woodcarver, seeking his muse in the mountains, might carry in a prize piece of wood. If she remembered right, the piece she and Joan found had been battered and worn smooth with much handling. Perhaps a woodcarver who went for long periods of time between artistic inspirations.
To the detriment of the ruler's edge, she drummed it lightly against the chair arm as she thought. The minor cracking sound as she played startled her. Before and, she thought but wasn't sure, during the attack on their camp by the bear, she'd heard the crack of wood on wood. That same sound had awakened her from her troubled sleep in the rocks on the flank of Cathedral Peak. Both times she'd written it off to twigs snapping under the weight of real or imagined marauders. Whacking the chair's arm again she noted the distinct quality of the sound.
So what? So somebody was banging pieces of wood together while a bear ransacked the camp or, even less likely, while a bear thoughtfully returned Anna's water bottle to her. Did Rory hear in his dreams the crack of wood before his mother's water bottle was left beside him the night he'd been lost? Why? A signal? Nervous habit? Voodoo ritual?
"Damn," Anna repeated to herself. All roads led to blasphemy. She put the ruler back where she'd found it.
The rest of the reports had little more information to be wrung out of them. The lab report on the blue stuff sack had yet to be returned but she expected no surprises. From her intimate and prolonged traverse across the alpine talus with its moth-bearing rocks, she had no doubt the traces on the bag were just as Joan had said: rock and moth-wing dust. The bloody traces within might be other than that of Carolyn Van Slyke, but Anna doubted it. The lab report on the peanut and biscuit fragment would probably be equally unenlightening. Most often things were precisely what they appeared to be.
Because she was there and could think of nothing better to do, she filled out a BIMS, a bear incident management systems report on the sow and two cubs she'd seen feeding in the cirque below Cathedral Peak. After she'd finished, she thumbed through BIMS submitted since she'd come to Glacier. She didn't know what she hoped for.
"Validation," she said aloud. Since she had no hard evidence to base it on, she'd not bothered to put it into words for Harry Ruick, or even more damning, into writing on any reports, but she had an overweening sense of bear, a bear padding through the incidents in Glacier. The obvious was the tearing apart of the camp. Less so was the flesh of the victim cached out of reach of a bear. A man digging the food of and dwelling in the den of a bear. The water bottle with teethmarks of a bear.
Nothing striking presented itself. The BIMS that were totally bogus, the lavender ink describing the bear juggling the hedgehog and the report of the dancing bear, Anna set aside. The rest, including the report of the attack on their camp, painted an active but not extraordinarily so, picture of bears being bears.
Shuffling the crazies back into the pile, Anna felt a sudden sympathy with the lavender ink. Things were not necessarily untrue simply because they were unbelievable.
She had done what she could. Her ear was hot from being pressed to a phone all day. Her stomach was full of complaining gummi bears and the light was going from Joan's window.
Anna went "home." Home for so many years had been wherever she fed the cat. Walking through a rapidly cooling twilight enlivened by mosquitoes bent on fueling reproduction with her blood, Anna found herself terribly lonely for her critters, Piedmont's comforting purr and even Taco's three-legged bounding, leaping, licking, declaration of welcome that she'd come to expect whenever she opened the front door. Sheriff Davidson, Paul, the new man in her life, she missed as well but not with the same childish want. Davidson hadn't seen her cry like Piedmont had, hadn't saved her life like Taco had.
The next morning Anna slept in, then typed up the scraps and snippets of information she'd gleaned in a day's calling and turned them in to Harry. He read them through carefully and, in the end, could find nothing more enlightening than she had.
"We'll follow up on this Fetterman thing," he said. "I'll call Tampa and see if we can't get the local police to make a few inquiries for us."
He didn't sound overly enthused. Anna didn't blame him. If they could connect the name of Fetterman to Van Slyke, which they'd failed to do, it might be of some interest but probably wouldn't go far toward solving their murder.
"We got the lab reports back," Ruick said. "Rush job because I hinted it was part of the murder investigation but I think what you stumbled across on Cathedral Peak was an amateur entomologist with a dog off leash." He pushed the folder across the desk and Anna read it without picking it up. The peanut was, near as they could tell, a peanut. The crust of biscuit she'd found was broken down: twenty-three percent protein, four percent fat, ten percent fiber, seven percent ash, a little calcium and a dash of phosphorus. The rest was dry matter and moisture.
"Dog food." Being a responsible pet owner she'd read the backs of dog food bags to make sure Taco got a balanced diet.
They sat for a bit. Maryanne stuck her head in the office and reminded Harry that the fire management officer from Waterton was due in a few minutes.
"Well," Harry said, "I hate to keep you tied up when there's no point in it. Not to mention when I borrowed you, Glacier started paying your salary." He smiled to let Anna know it was a joke. Anna smiled back politely, pretending she believed him. Budgets were counted out by nickels and dimes. Money was always tight. "You can either pack it in and go back to the Trace or go on up. Joan's got another four days before this round of traps is completed. You can probably pick up enough about DNA testing to convince John Brown we didn't waste your time completely."
"I'll give him a call," Anna said. "See what he wants me to do." The interview was over. She pushed up out of the chair.
"I'll see an official letter of thanks gets into your personnel file," Ruick said. He stood and shook hands with her. He was warm and friendly, but she could tell she was already sinking out of his sight. Chances were he'd barely remember her name when next they met. The chief ranger was moving on to the next crisis to threaten his park. Or his career.
"You can leave your gear with the receptionist any time today," Maryanne told her as she left. A nice way of reminding her the radio needed to be checked in ASAP. Ponce had already gone back to the comfort of his paddock.
"Will do," Anna said, feeling mildly miffed. In her mind she heard her ti ny, m e an, l o ng-d ead gra n d m other cac k ling: "Think you're so important? Put your finger in a bucket of water, pull it out and see how big a hole it leaves."