Up on the Permian Ridge two miles north of Middle McKittrick Canyon a lioness had been shot and killed. Harland Roberts, Corinne Mathers, and two men from the New Mexico State Department of Fish and Wildlife had brought the body back to the park.
Anna's first lion had flies crawling from its mouth and blood, black as tar, matting the fur of its neck. The animal was five to seven years of age, weighed seventy-five pounds and was nursing at least one, possibly two kittens. The park's Public Information Officer released this information to the local papers suggesting it as the reason for the attack.
The kittens were not found.
The following day Anna rode Gideon up the four-mile trail to the ridge. As long as the light lasted she combed the area looking for the den. Near dark, when she knew her time was running out, she hobbled Gideon in a grassy place and climbed part way down the slope into Big Canyon, a wild area just to the north of the park's boundary over the Texas/ New Mexico border in the Lincoln National Forest.
Perched on an outcropping of limestone, she called down into the forested recesses of the ravines. "Come on kittens, here kitty, kitties. Come on."
The pathetic absurdity of it stung her eyes but she hoped, her heart in her voice, it would trigger some response; a sound from the cougar kittens. For an instant, as the call died away, swallowed by the trees, she thought she heard something. Not mewing, but a strange bird's call, or the wind on a stony bottleneck: four notes from a half-remembered song.
Again and again she called but never heard the sound a second time. Finally she came to doubt she'd really heard anything. Hope was such a creative companion.
Till the moon rose to light their way, Gideon had to pick his way down the mountain in darkness.
That had been nearly a week past. The moon was waning now, the nights dark till after midnight, the moon still up at nine a.m.
Anna could see it, pale against blue sky, over El Capitan. She forced her eyes back down to the 10-343 Case Incident Record she was typing up on the Drury Lion Kill. Offense/ Incident #50-01-00: DEATHS/ACCIDENTAL. Five copies. Five copies of every typographical error she made. This 343 had to be perfect, no strike-overs. This would be the official report requested by Sheila Drury's insurance company. Anna knew she'd end up redoing it half a dozen times unless she could con the secretary or the clerk-typist into typing it for her.
Carpeted half-walls corralled the two clericals in the central area of the administrative offices. The rooms with windows were parceled out to the higher-ups. Government Service and Private Industry did not differ in all respects.
Marta Freeman, the superintendent's secretary, was in the area furthest away. Marta, a determinedly blond, well-endowed woman in her fifties, was given to cleavage, knowing looks, and innuendo. Anna had never felt comfortable with her.
In the next corral, Christina Walters, the clerk-typist, bent over a computer terminal. Her pale brown hair, nearly the color of the oak veneer on the desk tops, fell in a curtain hiding her face. Anna wondered if she dared ask Christina. She scarcely knew the woman. Christina Walters had entered on duty a month or so after Sheila Drury. Most of Anna's time was spent in the field and they had different days off so their paths seldom crossed.
Anna knew she had a little girl who rode a pink tricycle around the housing area on Saturday mornings, wasn't married at the moment, and seemed competent enough. But this was the first time Anna had really noticed her, really looked at her.
Walters was good-looking with a brand of prettiness that was rare in the Park Service. She looked soft. Her hair curled softly, arms and neck and breasts rounded with a softness that somehow fell short of fat. Her muscles weren't corded from carrying a pack, her hands not calloused from shooting or riding or climbing. Her skin wasn't burned brown and creased by the sun and wind.
Urban, Anna thought. Christina Walters had a traditional urban femininity. Strangely, Anna liked it. On another woman it might have set her teeth on edge, but on the fair-haired clerk it looked good. Perhaps, Anna explained the phenomenon to herself, because Christina didn't push it: she chose it.
It crossed Anna's mind to put on a little lipstick and perfume when she got home that night. There'd been a time she'd lived in the stuff, a time she'd required it to feel attractive. With a sudden sense of achievement, she knew she could go back to it now just for fun, just for the sheer sensual pleasure of the commercial feminine luxury.
"Do you need something?" Christina was asking in a low voice with a hint of a drawl and Anna realized she had been staring.
"Do I look that desperate?" she answered with a laugh.
Christina Walters studied her gravely. "Yes."
"I'm afraid I'm fouling up in triplicate here." Anna almost said "fucking up" but there was something about Christina that made her want to seem a gentler person than she was.
"Let me see." Christina walked around the low wall and looked over Anna's shoulder. Delicate perfume drifted from her hair. White Linen, Anna guessed. It suited her.
"It's the 343 on the Drury Lion Kill," Anna said. She half turned in her chair and saw the fleeting freeze on Christina's oval face. An aging, a minute dying, as if for a moment pain- or hatred-had jabbed deep.
"Sony," Anna said with abrupt embarrassment. "I didn't realize you knew her that well."
Christina straightened up, her hair falling to hide her eyes. When she smoothed it back her face was working again. "I didn't know her that well. Here-" she pulled the form out of the typewriter "-it'll only take me a minute." Smiling with what looked like genuine warmth, she fluttered a manicured hand. "Magic fingers."
Anna's radio butted in before she had a chance to say thank you. "Three-one-five; three-eleven."
"Go ahead, Paul.
"Are you near a phone?"
"Ten-four."
"Call me at Frijole. Three-eleven clear."
Anna dialed the Ranger Division's extension and Paul picked up on the first ring. "Mrs. Drury is here," he said. By the formal measured tones, Anna knew Sheila's mother was there in the room with him. "She's come to retrieve Ranger Drury's belongings. Would you accompany her to Dog Canyon and see to it she gets all the help she needs?"
"I'll need a vehicle. I'm in that damned jeep."
"Take mine," Paul said. "Leave the keys in the jeep. I'll use it."
Anna smiled. Paul wanted out from under this chore in a bad way. He was trying to buy her goodwill with the new one-ton Chevy with the fancy arrowheads and striping, flashing light-bars, air-conditioning, and radio console.
"I'll be there in about ten minutes, Paul."
"Ranger Drury's pack will be in the back of the truck. And thanks, Anna." Gratitude warmed his voice.
Perhaps Paul was an empath, she thought as she put the cover back on the abandoned typewriter. Like in the science fiction movies. Maybe other people's pain actually hurt him, even when they were strangers.
"Well, I'm off to Dog Canyon," Anna said to Christina's back. "Mrs. Drury's here to collect Sheila's things. Thanks," she added. "I owe you a beer."
The clerk waved a "De nada."
This beer was a social debt Anna actually considered paying. There was something intriguing about Christina Walters.
Probably just a classy flake, Anna thought uncharitably as she threw her satchel into the jeep. But she was looking forward to that beer.
Mrs. Drury-Mrs. Thomas Drury as she had corrected Paul when he'd introduced her-was in her late fifties or early sixties. Makeup, carefully applied, gave color to her pale skin and muddied her age without making her look younger. Her short, permed hair had been dyed a light brown. Anna assumed the shade was chosen to color the gray but not seem flashy or "fast." Mrs. Drury wore an inexpensive polyester pantsuit of sage green. A purse of the same white leatherette as her low-heeled pumps was clamped tightly beneath one arm. Respectable but not rich, Anna summed her up.
During the two-hour drive to Dog Canyon-twelve miles on foot over the high country, nearly a hundred by road around the park's perimeter-Mrs. Thomas Drury told Anna more than she'd ever wanted to know about the Drury family in general and Sheila in particular.
Sheila's father had died when she was ten "… but in the sixth grade, not the fifth. Sheila may have been odd but she was always bright." Mrs. Drury had gone to work as a secretary then at Minnegasco in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was a good job. She still held it. During the drive from the Dark Canyon turnoff at Highway 62/180 to the Wildersens' goat farm six miles in, she listed the employee benefits.
At twenty-nine (Anna had been way off on Sheila's age. "She'd never use a decent night cream, though heaven knows I bought her enough jars-" Mrs. Drury explained), Sheila had still been on the company's life insurance plan. 108,000 would now come to Mrs. Drury. Five years' salary.
Anna had agreed that Minnegasco had an excellent employee benefit plan and Mrs. Drury's monologue moved on to new subjects. Sheila was an only child. Mrs. Drury's second pregnancy had ended in miscarriage and she hadn't the heart to try again, though she'd often thought it might have been better for Sheila if she had. Sheila was an odd girl, headstrong and wayward.
From the scraps of information dropped amidst the drawn-out recitals of people whose names and indiscretions meant nothing to Anna, she came to believe that Sheila's "waywardness" consisted mostly of a refusal to get her hair foiled though it was "… impossibly dark-almost like a Jewish person's"; her nails manicured "-though I offered to pay for it, and in the Cities manicures aren't cheap-"; and her steadfast refusal to date "nice boys."
By the time they reached the Queens Highway turnoff, Anna found she liked Sheila more in memoria that she would've guessed. For the first time since she'd stumbled across the body, she felt a personal sense of loss. She wished she'd gotten to know the Dog Canyon Ranger better. They might have been friends.
As they drove down the miles of winding road cutting back west through the Lincoln National Forest, Mrs. Drury asked: "Are we in the park now?" She was pointing to the fenceline on both sides of the road. It was the first time Anna had noticed the new fencing edging nearly all of the Paulsen Ranch. "That's Jerry Paulsen's property. He owns forty sections. Not really a big place in this part of the country. It abuts the park on the northern boundary outside of Dog Canyon."
The fence cut down the middle of a lot of man-made divisions: it marked the border between Texas and New Mexico, between public and private lands. Deer jumped it, toads hopped under it, and birds and clouds floated over it without a downward glance. But in the petty depths of humanity it was an important line.
Paulsen had spared no expense: new green metal posts, shining silver wire with four-pronged barbs half an inch long and, every fifty or sixty feet, a brand-new sign reading NO TRESPASSING.
Paulsen was dead serious about private ownership. STAY OFF JERRY PAULSEN'S LAND was xeroxed on every page of the Boundary Patrol Report Forms to remind rangers riding fenceline. Anna wished he'd return the favor. The next time he flew his shiny new helicopter over so much as one corner of the park she would go to the Federal Aviation Agency.
There'd been bad blood between the park and the local ranchers from the beginning. The Guadalupes had been their backyard for generations. They hunted and camped, drew water from the springs, grazed cattle and goats in the high country. Then suddenly in 1972 it was off-limits.
Though they had been quick enough to accept the sale money when the government bought it, some ranchers refused to accept that it was no longer their private preserve.
Anna knew Paulsen had been suspected on more than one occasion of shooting the park's elk.
"Paulsen," Mrs. Drury nursed the name between her lips as if it tasted familiar. "Oh. Sheila wrote of him. He sounded like a very nice man."
Anna blinked her surprise, but said nothing. It was possible Sheila had gotten along with him. More likely, Mrs. Drury said it to express her approval of the conservative way of life. To Anna's ears it sounded vaguely like a snipe at Sheila. Tired of the constant dripping of Mrs. Drury's voice, she switched on the radio. Paul had it tuned to a country western station out of Carlsbad. Travis's "Diggin' Up Bones" was playing.
Anna turned it up hoping she might silence Mrs. Drury without actually appearing rude.
Near noon they pulled into Dog Canyon. The terrain on the northern edge of the Guadalupe Mountains was very different from that on the Frijole District side. Small hills rolled away to the north in tufted golden grass and juniper trees. Once there'd been prairie dog colonies; hence the name Dog Canyon. They'd long since been exterminated by ranchers. Now and then there was talk of reintroducing them into the park but so far no superintendent had been willing to antagonize the local landowners over such an unglamorous species. And Drury'd been dead set against it. The little creatures were too destructive when loosed on "improved" campsites.
Rogelio had talked for a while of smuggling in a few breeding pairs and turning them loose, see how they fared. Rogelio talked of a lot of things. When Sheila Drury had started pushing for a recreational vehicle campground in Dog Canyon, he talked for a while of pipe bombs and monkey-wrenching bulldozers.
All just talk on both sides. Neither the RVs nor the prairie dogs had ever materialized, though the RV camp might have become a reality had Sheila Drury lived.
"This is it," Anna said. To the left of the road was a campground. Hardened sites were sprinkled amid big old cottonwood trees above a dry creekbed. Ahead several hundred yards the road ended in a loop at the barn and machine shed.
Sheila's trailer was to the right, set back from the road. Her battered Subaru wagon was parked in the scant shade of a juniper near the end of the trailer. Anna pulled the truck in behind it and climbed out, glad to straighten her legs and stretch her back. Mrs. Drury didn't move. It crossed Anna's mind that, despite her complaints, she must have loved her daughter. At least at one time. Going into her house, seeing all of her things left behind, would not be easy. Anna walked around the truck and opened the passenger door. "This is it," she said again.
Mrs. Drury took Anna's proffered hand and allowed herself to be helped down from the cab.
Anna preceded her up the scattered white gravel that served as Sheila's front walk. A pot, cheaply painted in a pseudo Mexican motif, stood beside the metal steps. In it was a thoroughly dead geranium. Anna expected a remark from Mrs. Drury, but the heart really seemed to have gone out of the woman.
Anna climbed the steps and unlocked the door. The cluttered living room was a mare's nest of magazines, old newspapers, books, folders, memos with coffee rings on them. Everywhere there were snapshots: in shoe boxes and envelopes, piled in ashtrays. Under the sofa's one end table was a basket two feet high and half that wide almost full of them.
Leaving Mrs. Drury to come to terms with the relics of her daughter's life, Anna busied herself opening windows and turning on fans. The trailer was hot as an oven but not as bad as Anna had anticipated. At least it didn't stink. The dishes were done and the garbage taken out. Given the mess the living room was in, this tidiness was surprising.
When the day came for her to die, Anna wondered if she'd have as much foresight. Zachary hadn't. He'd left the stereo on and a steak defrosting on the kitchen counter. But Zachary had meant to come back. Had Sheila? Again Anna considered a suicide. Again she rejected the idea.
Opening the refrigerator, she saw a jar of dill pickles, three Old Milwaukees, a shoe box lid full of film, half a stick of margarine still in its paper wrapper, some processed American cheese slices, half a loaf of bread, and a shriveled carrot. A bachelor's refrigerator. The freezer wasn't any more appetizing. There was a bag of frozen french fries and a pint of ice cream, open with a spoon with a bamboo handle and one serrated edge stuck in it.
Anna went back into the living room. Mrs. Drury still stood just inside the door but at least she had put her handbag down. "We'll start with her pictures," the woman said, a weary eye traversing the boxes and bowls and piles of photographs. "I expect most will have to be thrown away but there may be a few I'll want to keep. Or you might want some." She looked at Anna hopefully, as if wanting her to be Sheila's friend.
"Yes," Anna said, unsure what Mrs. Drury would want to keep-would want her to keep. Anything with Sheila in it, she decided.
Since Sheila was the photographer, Anna had thought there wouldn't be many of those. Evidently Drury had had a camera with a tripod. She'd put herself in nearly half the pictures.
The snicking sound of snapshots shuffling and the hot, still air quickly dulled Anna's mind. The photos, for the most part, were not interesting enough to offset her growing drowsiness. There were two shots of Craig Eastern that Anna studied with more care than the rest. Both were of him crouching beside a snow-dusted prickly pear. He was smiling. It must've been in December or January before the RV site proposal and the ensuing smear campaign he'd launched.
"Someone has already been through my daughter's things," Mrs. Drury said sharply.
Anna's head snapped up at the accusing tone. "Not that I know of, Mrs. Drury," she replied soothingly. "No one's been over here to do it until today."
Sheila's mother just glared.
"Just you and me," Anna added helplessly.
Mrs. Drury seemed to think that over, her lips pursed, wrinkles radiating from beneath her nose like a cat's whiskers. After a moment, she shook her head. "No," she stated flatly. "Not just you and I. Look." Grabbing the edges of the basket between her feet, she gave it a shake. Anna looked. Like everything else in the room, it was tumbled full of snapshots. "You of all people should have noticed," Mrs. Drury said and Anna knew that in the woman's mind she had been turned into Sheila's dearest friend.
"What?" she asked politely.
"There's all different things in here," Mrs. Drury explained with exaggerated patience. "Look: horses." She threw two snapshots onto the coffee table. "Flowers." A picture of blooming cholla was tossed on the pile. "Here's some kind "of dog." A long shot of a coyote looking back over its shoulder was thrust into Anna's hand. "Sheila was not tidy, but she was organized. She kept her pictures according to subject. Even when she was little, she'd take pictures with her Brownie Instamatic. Then when they came back, she'd sort them into things and put each thing in a box."
Tears were running down Mrs. Drury's face, runneling her makeup, dripping spots of pale orange onto her jacket. Anna liked her better at that moment than she had since they'd met.
"I should have noticed," Anna agreed, knowing she should have. The pictures were canted at funny angles. Some of them were super close-ups-so close it was hard to tell what they were of. Lots were shot through things: knotholes, doorways, cans with both ends cut out. Attempts at Art, Anna surmised. But every container she had looked through had been of one subject: rock pictures in the mason jar, birds in the ashtray, Sheila in uniform in the candy dish.
A wooden shoe, a ceramic vase made to look like a paper bag, and several other containers stood empty on the coffee table. Someone had dumped their contents into the basket.
"Is there something to drink?" Mrs. Drury asked plaintively.
"I'll get you a glass of water," Anna said, glad to have something to do.
"No," Mrs. Drury said. "To drink."
"Beer?"
"That would be all right."
Anna got two beers from the refrigerator. There was a six-pack under the counter. She put it in to cool. Later they might need it. Bringing the beers and one glass into the living room, she sat beside Sheila's mother on the couch.
They drank in silence, Anna from the can, Mrs. Drury pouring the beer into the glass half an inch at a time like a woman measuring out medicine.
"Why would somebody go through your daughter's pictures?" Anna asked finally.
"I don't know," Mrs. Drury said. "They weren't any good."
They finished the beers. Anna carried the cans into the kitchen, rinsed them, and crushed them into neat circles under her heavy boots. Beneath the sink, where she guessed it would be, was Sheila's recycle bag.
"Might Sheila have taken photographs of something someone didn't want her to see?" Anna hunched down to look under the cups and across the Formica counter that separated the kitchen from the living area.
Mrs. Drury was shaking her head. Her face sagged with confusion and fatigue. "I couldn't ever see why she took any of the pictures that she did. They weren't ever of anything. Just things you see every day. She might've, I suppose. Sheila took pictures of everything and she wasn't ever socially ept."
Anna didn't know if Mrs. Drury meant socially apt or if she believed "ept" was the opposite of "inept." But Sheila did, from the looks of it, take pictures of everything. "Everything" might include something someone wanted to go unrecorded.
By late afternoon they had finished sorting through the photos, collecting boxes from the two bedrooms and even the bath. They found nothing suspicious. No sinister types exchanging packages, no car license numbers, no middle-aged men in motel lobbies with blondes. Either they'd been found and removed or never existed.
Mrs. Drury had a surprisingly little pile she'd chosen to keep. Mostly to be polite, Anna had selected three or four of Sheila to take home.
Mrs. Drury made toasted cheese sandwiches for supper. They washed them down with a second beer. Mrs. Drury turned on the television and they listened to Channel 9 predict more hot and dry for West Texas and New Mexico. At least, tonight, there would be no lightning.
After the news, Mrs. Drury left the set on to watch a rerun of an old Andy of Mayberry and Anna went out to the truck and brought in the backpack Sheila had been carrying the day she was killed.
It smelled faintly of decay and there were specks of dark brown on it that Anna chose to think were mud. The police had wrapped a yellow "Police Line Do Not Cross" tape around it.
Probably not the police, Anna thought. Probably the puffing deputy.
Having lain the pack on the living room rug, she sliced through the tape with the blade of her Swiss army knife. "I need to go through Sheila's pack, if you don't mind, Mrs. Drury. Most of the gear is NPS stuff. There may be some personal effects, if you'd like to help me…"
Mrs. Drury rose obediently from the table, her eyes on Andy Griffith's comforting face until her body had turned so far, her head finally had to follow. Sitting on the couch, she fixed her attention on the soiled pack.
Anna took it as a signal she could begin. There wasn't much to see: freeze-dried food for one supper and one lunch, a first-aid kit, a change of clothes, a few toilet articles, a stove and cook kit. Anna separated out the items marked GUMO. As uneuphonious as it was, national parks often went by the name formed by the first two letters of the first two words in their title. Carlsbad Caverns was fated to be known as "CACA." When all the gear from the GUMO backcountry cache had been removed all that remained was a little pile of rumpled clothes. Anna pushed them toward Sheila's mother.
Not much, Anna thought. Not enough. What was missing? Something wasn't there that she expected to see. It nagged like a forgotten name. "What's missing?" she demanded sharply.
Too spent to take offense at the tone, Mrs. Drury concentrated on Anna's question. "Sheila's camera?" she ventured after a moment.
"Must be," Anna said, surveying the contents spread out over the carpet. Pictures rifled, a camera missing: a puzzle was forming but one made not of pieces but of pieces missing, of holes.
Anna stuffed the park's things into the pack and zipped it closed.
"We may as well do the rest," Mrs. Drury said resignedly. "Then we can go home tomorrow and forget about the whole thing."
The phrase jarred Anna. She wished Mrs. Drury could afford Molly. The woman obviously had some emotions that needed sorting out.
Collecting Sheila Drury's belongings took very little time. She didn't have much, and half of that was still sealed with tape in moving boxes she'd never gotten around to unpacking. As Mrs. Drury packed the kitchen utensils into a lidless plastic foam cooler, Anna packed Sheila's clothes-mostly uniforms-into one of two identical suitcases that had been pushed out of sight under the bed.
A gray canvas daypack was dumped in the corner of the closet. Anna grabbed it to put the boots and shoes in. The pack wasn't empty. When she poured the contents onto the bed one hole of the fledgling mystery was filled: Sheila's camera, a pocket 35mm, was in the bottom of the pack with a pair of NPS binoculars and the remains of a salami and cheese sandwich. Sixteen of the thirty-six pictures on the roll had been taken.
A noise made Anna look up. Mrs. Drury stood in the bedroom doorway, a dish towel between her hands.
"I found it," Anna said, holding up the little camera. On impulse she said: "I'd like to keep the film if I may."
"Those little cameras are worth a lot of money," Mrs. Drury said and Anna was both irritated and embarrassed. She wasn't going to steal the damn thing.
"Not the camera," she said evenly. "Just the film. Maybe it will tell me something."
Mrs. Drury nodded. She'd lost interest. Flicking the dish towel in the direction of the uniforms, she said: "You can have that book-bag thing, too, and her park outfits. I'd just throw them out." Without saying what she had come for, she left and it crossed Anna's mind that she'd just been checking up on her. Quickly, she clicked through the last twenty pictures and tossed the exposed film into the daypack.
All of Ranger Drury's worldly goods fitted easily in the back of Paul's patrol vehicle, a fact Mrs. Drury remarked upon unfavorably more than once. She seemed to think a person should leave a bigger pile of consumer goods behind when they died.
Anna declined comment. In the hope it would take the edge off the night, she drank a third Old Milwaukee as she lashed a tarp down over the back of the pickup. It wouldn't rain, probably not for weeks, but it was an excuse to stay outside for a few minutes more. Mrs. Drury had retreated to the solace of Channel 9.
It was after ten p.m. when Anna came in. The beer was a failure: the Drury Problem was not alcohol-soluble. Mrs. Drury was pale and crumpled-looking. Anna took pity. "We'll stay here tonight. I'll drive you back first thing tomorrow."
The old woman-for now she looked older than her years- nodded. "I'll sleep in the little room," she told Anna, meaning Sheila's spare room.
Anna fetched the suitcase full of linens from the truck and made up the bed. Mrs. Drury seemed to expect it. And it was something to do.
When Mrs. Drury finally went to bed, Anna was relieved. Not wanting to leave her alone, Anna had stayed up watching a late-night local talk show with her.
It felt like a reprieve to go into the bedroom and close the door. Anna realized she had not spent that much time with anyone-other than occasionally Rogelio-in years. It was exhausting.
Having unrolled Sheila's sleeping bag-a new North Face from the cache-she lay down on the double bed. Her muscles twitched she was so tired but she was hardly sleepy at all. Staring up at the acoustical tile ceiling, she let her mind wander.
Somebody was looking for pictures. Somebody had either found them, not found them, or somebody was a figment of her imagination.
If the pictures were dangerous, Sheila would have hidden them. Everything she owned had been dismantled, packed into boxes, and removed from the trailer. There were no alarming photographs found.
Where, Anna asked herself, would she hide something in a mobile home? Mattress? Under the wall-to-wall? Behind the fake wood paneling? The ideas bothered her till she got up and checked them out. The carpet was glued down tight, the paneling all of a piece.
Even with the windows open, the trailer was hot. Anna divested herself of all but her underpants-lacy peach confections, the last vestige of a former clothes horse. Having folded her uniform trousers over the pipe in the closet, she lay back down.
"Pretty damn mysterious," she said to herself and laughed. "No shit, Sherlock. Go to sleep." Clicking off the lamp, she closed her eyes.
When she was in college, she remembered trying to hide her stash from the fabled Narcs. Every place she put it would suddenly seem glaringly obvious and, in a fit of paranoia, she'd move it.
Some enterprising authors had described the phenomenon perfectly. Anna wracked her brain but she couldn't recall their names. They'd written a clever book about marijuana cultivation. Anna recalled very little of it, only the introduction. "We've never tried marijuana," it said-or words to that effect. "We got all our information from our friend, Ernie. Ernie keeps his stash in the shower rod. Sorry, Ernie, we don't need you anymore."
Shower rod.
The clothes rod.
Anna clicked on the light. The clothes rod in the closet was a length of iron pipe dropped into two U-shaped brackets. She padded over and lifted it out. Her trousers slid to the floor as she peered in. A roll of paper corked one end.
Careful not to tear anything, Anna coiled it smaller and eased it out. A dozen snapshots, curled from their incarceration, sprang apart. She carried them to the bed, knelt on the rug, and spread them in the circle of light.
These were the pictures that had been sought. A naked woman laughing, her hair soft around her shoulders, posed on the slickrock in Middle McKittrick about a mile downstream from where the body had been found.
Christina Walters, her white breasts full and round, catching the sun, her knees coyly together, invitingly apart.
Sheila had set the timer for the last three: she and Christina making love, the tight brown wire of Ranger Drury's body close against the soft cream of the other woman's.
Anna gathered them up, sorry, almost to have pried. The pictures did not repulse her. They were, in their way, beautiful. Certainly Sheila Drury's best effort.
They might be a reason to kill. Anna didn't know. It seemed melodramatic. But sometimes people died. And sometimes people killed them. People killed people for all sorts of reasons.
Like many rangers, Anna chose Law Enforcement not because she wanted to bust perpetrators but because the Protection Divisions in most parks did all the search and rescue and emergency medicine. The serious cop stuff most rangers preferred to leave to the police.
This was beginning to smack of serious cop stuff.
Fear licked around Anna's ankles. She wished she had brought her.357. Rangers were required to carry defensive equipment whenever on duty. Not for the first time, Anna wished she paid a little more attention to the rules.