husband of her plans. None but the four newcomers seemed to think that unusual. Anna wasn't the only one who'd noted the relationship between Peter and Sondra was strained.
Consensus was that Sondra had gone out. Either that or she lay under the rock and dirt of the slide. Despite the slimness of this possibility, Anna knew Holden would have spent the night digging but for the fact that by the time Peter McCarty had mentioned she was missing it was too late, she'd have been long dead. Holden wasn't one to risk the living for the dead no matter how good it might look on paper.
Chewing, swallowing, drinking warm water, it occurred to Anna that Peter might have waited on purpose. A rock slide would be a convenient end to an inconvenient marriage. Anna had no idea what power Sondra thought she had to jerk her husband's medical license, but if it was true and half an hour's malicious silence could remove the threat for all time…
Anna's punch-drunk brain fumbled at the thought for a while, then let it go. Odds were against it. At any rate it would be unprovable.
Oscar and Holden did a commendable job with their pep talks. Oscar's was filtered through fatigue and Holden's a near-crippling sense of guilt, but they served their purpose. The team was given hope and cohesion. Lisa, the long-braided caver who had been trapped with the core group, was a practicing Buddhist. She said a prayer for Frieda that Anna was too tired to follow, but she appreciated the gesture.
One by one they made the creeping journey from their bivouac to the mouth of the Pigtail where there was a good 'squatting rock' and they could perform their evening ablutions. Limited space precluded both a ladies' room and a men's, so an empty water bottle was set in the trail. If the bottle was upright, the loo was available, if on its side,
Throughout the bustling and munching, the coming and going, Holden and Oscar sat huddled in conversation. If asked a direct question or detecting a need of a team member, they would break from their tete-a-tete, only to return to it the moment they were no longer wanted. They spoke so quietly Anna couldn't discern individual words. She didn't have to. She knew as surely as if she sat with them that they were rigging and rerigging the traverse, mentally stalking around the anchor boulder, asking each other if they could have seen something that signaled instability, if they'd missed a tell-tale sign that might have saved Frieda's life. Unless cause and effect were established, this was a conversation Holden Tillman was going to have with himself for many years to come.
Finally, tucked in close as sardines in a can, the cavers bedded down. Anna was sandwiched between Curt Schatz and Lisa. Where she would have expected a deepening of claustrophobia, she found comfort. Lamps were extinguished. Before the heavy night of the underground could oppress, Zeddie began to sing. Her rich alto reverberated from the stone and filled all the cracks and crevices with humanity, pushing back the unforgiving dark. A truth Anna had long suspected was ratified: we are one another's angels. No unearthly sound could have been so glorious.
'Life is like a mountain railroad with an engineer that's brave. We must make the run successful from the cradle to the grave,' soared through their miserable night, powered by notes of youth, tones of raw faith in the inherent goodness of existence. Old-time gospel had a healing power bloodless intellectual faith could not lay claim to.
Sleep came before the song ended, not in the pleasant drift Anna was accustomed to, but with the suddenness of a trapdoor falling shut. Deep and dreamless, a little death, it held her paralyzed for a time, then loosed her into the conscious world as rudely as it had snatched her from it.
In an instant she was hideously awake, clawing at the air above in a vain attempt to rip away the suffocating tonnage of bedrock. Her heart pounded and her breath came in staccato gasps. A light, she needed a light in order to breathe. Elbowing her companions, she dug into her pockets for the little Maglite she had rescued from her pack.
A heavy hand closed on her shoulder, the weight of an arm was laid across her chest. 'Anna, it's Curt,' came a whisper in her ear. 'Are you okay? Do you know where you are?'
Whether it was the human contact or the fact her fingers closed around the shaft of the Maglite, she wasn't sure, but the panic ebbed slightly.
'The twilight zone?' she whispered back.
He must have smiled; she felt his beard tickle her cheek. 'Do you have to go to the bathroom? Do you want a drink of water?'
Reassured by the childhood litany, Anna breathed out slowly. 'I'm old enough to be your mother,' she said to cover the fact his simple stratagem was working.
'You're old enough to be my sister,' he corrected her. 'I always thought she was pretty hot stuff. If you let me watch you put on your makeup, I'll be your slave.'
'Believe it or not, I've been known to wear it.' Lipstick and perfume seemed far away, artifacts from a past life. Reflexively she raised her hand to touch her face, count the creases time had carved there. A furry brush stroked her cheek, and she realized she clutched a feathery rope-end in her fist, caught up, no doubt, in her scrabble from sleep. It took a second to figure out where she'd come by such an oddment. It was the end of one of Lisa's braids. Stealthily, though the darkness had masked her thievery, Anna put the pigtail back on its owner's chest.
Rolling onto her shoulder, she groaned as the bruised flesh reminded her of her transgressions.
'If I let you use me as a pillow will you stop squirming and go back to sleep?' Curt whispered.
'I'll try,' Anna promised.
Schatz raised his arm so she could move onto her uninjured side and rest her head on his shoulder. Anna didn't know if he was a Boy Scout, an opportunist, or a friend when she needed one. She didn't much care. His warmth brought her courage, the sound of his heart beating soothed her like the ticking of a clock is said to soothe orphaned puppies.
Curt's breathing evened out, but sleep refused to return for Anna. Shielding the glow so it wouldn't disturb her bedmates, Anna flicked on the Mag. Brent was missing, and down the stoop-walk corridor to the rift she could see the water bottle in the 'occupied' position. Even the time-honored remedy for insomnia of going to the bathroom and getting a snack was denied her.
Encased in perfect darkness the meager brilliance of her covered light showed everything clearly. Pressed between Lisa and Holden, Peter lay next to Zeddie. Like she and Curt, they'd found a degree of solace in each other's arms. Zeddie's head nestled in the crook of Peter's neck. His arm and one knee were thrown across her body. The embrace looked practiced; there was an ease of familiarity in the intimacy. Embarrassed, Anna turned off the light. She remembered Sondra's accusations. 'Everybody's laughing themselves sick at my expense,' Sondra had said, and, 'Is there anything you wouldn't do to make yourself necessary to women?' That smacked of a fight over infidelity. Peter had said something about Frieda, then Sondra said, 'Maybe I wasn't talking about Frieda.' Zeddie. She'd been talking about Zeddie.
Homicide by avalanche struck Anna as a little over the top to get time alone with one's inamorata, but if avoiding an ugly divorce was thrown in as an added inducement it might tip the scales.
The absurdity hit Anna with its obvious counterpart. Peter wasn't the one with something to gain in the rockfall. Sondra said she was going ahead. As far as they knew, she was the last to head up for the Distributor Cap. An avalanche had started. She was out free. Her husband and his lover were trapped, possibly dead.
Holy smoke, Anna thought, consciously using one of the newly proffered cowboy curses. Following this epiphany was a wave of white-hot fury that shook her so hard she clenched her fists in Schatz's shirt and he swatted at her like a man conditioned to sleeping with pesky felines. An act of God or Mother Nature, Anna would accept. The deadly conniving of her fellow man, never. She could live with the fact that Frieda had lost her life, but not that she'd been robbed of it. Holden was not the only one anxious to know just what had caused the avalanche.
In a perverse way, Anna hoped it was Sondra. Unless she wanted to spend the rest of her days in jail, she would have to forgo the pleasure of wringing Sondra's neck but, given the mood she was in, it would feel good to knock her around a bit. Surely a jury would allow her that. After Lechuguilla, a plea of temporary insanity would sound not only believable but probably downright conservative.
Fantasies of revenge did what counting sheep could not. When next Anna stirred, the others were up and moving. Curt had slipped his bulk from under her and left a cold place at her side. Lying on the dirt floor of the cave, letting the pain of her shoulder bring her slowly into the new 'day,' she thought about how long it had been since she'd slept curled in a man's arms. More than a year. Two summers before, a long-distance affair with an FBI agent had dribbled unspectacularly to a close. On some level, Anna had known it was for the best-too many old wounds on both sides-but she'd never properly laid the affair to rest. Except for the final good-bye over the phone she'd not
