'No,' Frieda said finally. Her voice was strained as if the effort of remembering had exacerbated the pain in her head. 'I had zillions of dreams. All bad. Not nightmare quality, just the can't-find-your-keys show-up-at-work-naked variety. On and on. Every time I'd think I was awake and could stop, something bizarre would happen and I'd realize I was back in the dreams.' She reached for the water bottle and Anna pressed it into her palm. When she drank, water spilled down her cheeks. Anna wanted to wipe it away but didn't. Frieda wouldn't appreciate being mothered, and it was an art Anna was not sufficiently skilled at to risk rebuff.
'You said 'It wasn't an accident.' Was that part of a dream?' Anna kept her voice intentionally casual. What she knew about head wounds would fit in chapter twelve of an EMT manual. A chapter she hadn't read in a while. It just made sense not to fever an already traumatized brain with unnecessary fears.
'Did I?' Frieda asked. Anna waited, letting her work things through at her own speed. 'Shit,' Frieda said after a time. 'Everything is like those stupid dreams. Piecemeal. Broken film.'
'It's okay,' Anna said.
'I remember all of us splitting up to follow a handful of leads. I remember going down a crack in the breakdown on the cavern floor. Maybe I heard something?'
Anna kept quiet. Anything she suggested would only add to Frieda's confusion.
'I must have been looking up.' Frieda fingered the bruise on her temple. 'Shit,' she said again. 'Maybe I saw something. I think I saw something. Somebody's hand. That might have been what I meant. I remember I saw a hand above me on a big fucking rock. Get thee behind me, Hodags.'
Anna thought Frieda had slipped back into her dream world, then remembered Hodags, like their German cousins, the Kobold, were spirits that didn't take kindly to foul language. Frieda was metaphorically throwing salt over her shoulder, knocking on wood.
'Did you see the hand before the rock hit you in the head or after?' Anna asked. The hand could have belonged to Zeddie, lifting the stone from Frieda's shoulder.
'I don't know.'
Anna could hear the weariness in her voice. She didn't want to overtire her. One more question, she promised herself, then she'd stop. 'Was it a man's hand or a woman's?'
'Gloved,' Frieda replied with certainty. 'Damn.'
'Don't push,' Anna said. 'It'll come back.'
'You won't go away, will you?' Frieda asked. Both women heard the fear in her voice. Frieda didn't approve of it. 'No big deal,' she said. 'It's probably all bullshit. Scrambled brains.'
'Probably,' Anna said, helping her save face. 'But I've got to stick close anyway.'
'Why?' Frieda sounded stubborn.
'So nobody will put me to work.'
Frieda tried to laugh, but it came out as a moan.
'Hey, is that Frieda talking?' Sondra McCarty was five yards off, pulling her lean frame up onto a rock. 'Oscar said to come back and see if you needed relieving or anything.'
If someone wanted Frieda dead, then comatose was surely the next best thing. Till Anna knew more, Frieda would be safer with the status quo. 'No, just muttering. She's still delirious.' Anna found Frieda's hand in the darkness and squeezed it. 'Delirious,' she repeated, and felt an answering pressure. Anna knew the ruse would not be foolproof. They could lie to Sondra and the others, but she was going to have to take Peter McCarty into her confidence. Frieda needed something for the pain. This far from the hospital, shock could kill her as surely as the most determined assassin.
Anna wanted Frieda to pretend she remembered nothing, but quoting 'in for a penny in for a pound' as her rationale, Frieda opted to tell Peter everything. Anna didn't put up an argument. For her own peace of mind, Frieda needed to trust her doctor. McCarty agreed to go along with the lie that she was still delirious-not because he deemed it necessary but because Frieda became upset when it looked as if he wouldn't. He seemed more annoyed than alarmed by the disembodied glove on the rock. Anna couldn't remember hearing a theory so thoroughly pooh- poohed since she'd told her sister, Molly, Jimmy Newton's idea that Dad and Santa were one and the same.
McCarty laughed, shrugged, did everything short of actually saying 'pshaw.' The fact that he did it with humor and a thick gob of charm didn't let him off the hook. He put Anna's hackles up. If she'd had a tail, by the end of the performance it would have been lashing. She kept her misgivings to herself. There were two possibilities: the doctor had a reason for wanting Frieda to think it was all a dream, or it actually was all a dream and, knowing a whole hell of a lot more about head injuries than Anna ever would, he had chosen this method of allaying his patient's fears.
However unsatisfying to the ego, Anna hoped it was the latter. Still, she watched him closely as he gave Frieda a shot for pain. Hovering, a suspicious and sweating guardian angel, Anna realized if McCarty wanted Frieda dead he could easily have killed her in the hours before Oscar, Holden, and she had arrived.
Unless he didn't think she'd wake up.
Unless he didn't think she'd remember if she did wake up.
Remember what? An attempt on her life? Surely there would have been a reason for attempted murder. Hope she would have forgotten that reason? Not likely, not unless that reason had occurred moments before the rock fell, and even then traumatic amnesia wasn't something anyone would count on, especially not a doctor of medicine. In a heretofore undiscovered crack in the earth there was no secret Frieda could stumble on, and it was unlikely, though not impossible, she'd overheard anything compromising. Peter McCarty's too hearty skepticism was making more and more sense.
The doctor left. Anna listened till the sound of his going was gone. 'Frieda, are you awake?' she whispered.
'Hard to tell,' came the reply.
'Do you have any idea why somebody would want to push a rock on you?'
'No reason. I'm a
Anna wasn't sure being a secretary was as harmless as Frieda thought, but she understood the thrust of the comment. And it was unlikely any NPS secrets-as if a bureaucracy the size of the Park Service could actually keep a secret-from Mesa Verde, Colorado, would get her killed this deep in New Mexico. In anything but James Bond stuff, the power of secrets tended to have only local jurisdiction.
'How about personal animosities,' Anna pushed. 'Somebody on the survey team?'
'No way. I'm a frigging saint. Oops. Make my apologies.'
Frieda was succumbing to the medication, and Anna had to quit badgering her. It was her opinion that 'frigging' would be acceptable to even the most persnickety spirits; still, on Frieda's behalf, she said, 'Sorry, little Hodags. She's not herself at the moment.'
6
If two people know a secret, it is no longer a secret. On long car trips Anna and her sister used to amuse themselves by planning the perfect murder. The catch was always that you couldn't tell anyone, not a soul. And where's the fun in doing anything perfectly if no one else knows about it?
Oscar was the first to pay his respects. McCarty, he said, felt duty bound to tell him and Holden of the change in the patient's condition. His tone left no doubt that he felt Anna had been remiss, as indeed she had. Extenuating circumstances, she told herself as she squirmed under his reproachful stare.
In the way of runaway secrets, the tale spread without any traceable source-each person told one other, someone overheard, someone deduced. Within an amazingly short period of time, Frieda's lucidity went from secret to news.
As the Stokes was moved up the incline, cavers greeted her, welcomed her back to the world of the living. Never comfortable with subterfuge, Dierkz dropped the pretense and answered as best the pain medication allowed until a squat clean-shaven caver from the outside, boasting EMT status, as if EMTs weren't a dime a dozen in this crew, got so officious Frieda became anxious. Then Holden asked the rescuers to dispense with their good cheer and let her get what rest she could, given she was being trundled up a steep slope.
For reasons of his own, which were possibly sinister but more likely intended to save Frieda from
