Blind Descent

'Frieda,' she began again, as asked. Monitoring Dottie from the corner of her eye as she talked, trying to gauge what to tell, what to omit, whether to go on or turn the subject to other matters, Anna told her of the accident, the rescue, the second and fatal fall. She left out the part where her knee crushed the life from Frieda. Maybe she did it to protect Dottie, maybe to protect herself. There was nothing in it but gratuitous angst for all concerned. Mostly she focused on Frieda's love for the underground, her courage, her humor, and how deeply admired she was by her fellows. Or all but one of her fellows, an addendum Anna kept to herself.

By the time they started the twisting ascent to the park quarters, Anna had pretty much talked herself out. Whether or not Dottie had taken all she could of Frieda's last days, Anna certainly had. Lumps formed like salt licks in her throat, and tears burned beneath her eyelids. The last thing Dottie needed was to see Anna break down.

Yet abandoning the topic altogether seemed not only callous but impossible. Now, and for a while, it was the only topic in the world. So Anna skewed the tales around till she was gossiping about the other members of the survey team. Curt Schatz's claim to mouse bones, Tillman's mainlining caffeine-anything to distract herself or Dottie for a moment. She described Brent Roxbury's caving ensemble and elicited a small smile, brief but genuine, a break from the bigger brighter ones. Mrs. Dierkz didn't recognize Roxbury's name and that surprised Anna somewhat. Brent had been so upset by Frieda's injury and then her death, Anna assumed they'd been close. Perhaps they had. Mothers weren't necessarily privy to all information. Time and distance made them strangers even in the best of relationships. And, too, Brent's distress could have been just the stress of the situation or the sensitivity of one caver for another.

Zeddie Dillard was an old family friend. Her older sister and Frieda had gone to college together. When her own sister died, Zeddie had attached herself to Frieda and her sister.

Dottie knew Curt, but 'just to say hello to.' They had met in Minnesota. Dr. McCarty she had known for years. He'd inherited her when her gynecologist retired. Dottie had recommended him to her daughter.

Dottie and her husband, Gordon, had been invited to his wedding. They'd been in Italy at the time and hadn't gone, but she'd heard it had been beautiful. 'Quite lavish,' she said, and managed to convey disapproval without so much as a lifted eyebrow or a lowered tone. 'I don't know his wife well.' She sounded like she didn't care to rectify that situation in the foreseeable future.

Piqued, Anna pushed a little. 'I only just met her,' she said. 'But I got a feeling there was trouble in paradise.'

For a minute it seemed Mrs. Dierkz was too dull with grief or too refined to go for the bait. A need to keep her mind off worse things won out. 'I think it might have been one of those hurry-up deals,' Dottie said without much interest. 'Gilda, Frieda's… my youngest girl knew her from graduate school. Just to say hi to, you know. They didn't travel with the same crowd. I guess there was some trouble with one of the professors and this girl. Then we hear Dr. McCarty's marrying her.'

'You think she was pregnant?' Anna asked bluntly.

Too bluntly for Dottie Dierkz. 'Who can know?' she said. 'We've all got to live our own lives, I guess. Me as much as anybody.'

Anna left it alone. It would be easy enough to find out if there'd been a baby. What that might tell her, she was uncertain. Having babies out of wedlock was an epidemic among the poor and a fashion trend among the rich. Not the weapon for serious blackmail it had once been.

'I thought they might get together at one point,' Dottie said wistfully.

'Sondra and Peter?' Anna asked.

'Peter and Frieda.' Staring out the rain-streaked window at the broken hillsides they climbed through, her face was turned away, perhaps mourning not only her daughter but grandchildren she would never know.

'Dr. McCarty and Frieda,' Anna repeated, more sharply than she'd intended.

'They went together for a year or two. Frieda seemed like she might be getting serious at one point. Both Dad and I would have liked that. Frieda was always an independent girl. A little too independent to be a doctor's wife, I think.'

McCarty and Frieda.

McCarty and Sondra.

McCarty and Zeddie Dillard.

Anna was beginning to wonder if she was the only woman in the western hemisphere who'd not enjoyed the doctor's bedside manner.

A good deed actually paid off, and Anna was enjoying a mildly righteous glow of virtue's own reward. This good deed had begun as the lesser of two evils; to hang around Zeddie's and soak in the palpable pain of Frieda's mother or to make a cowardly retreat to town with the excuse of checking on Holden Tillman.

Her first choice, pursuing background information on the members of Frieda's survey team, had ended against several blank walls. Sondra wasn't answering her phone in St. Paul, and, since she was freelance, there was no place of business whose business it was to keep tabs on her whereabouts. Just for the hell of it Anna had called the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The fourth person she'd been forwarded to had actually heard of Sondra McCarty-the doctor's wife wasn't as regular a contributor as she liked people to believe-but had no inkling as to where she could be found. Anna left messages and Zeddie's phone number. As for the rest, she hadn't the foggiest idea where to begin. She doubted McCarty's medical colleagues would know much about his caving contacts. The same went for Curt's academic associates. That left Zeddie and Brent. Zeddie was a little too close to home. Staying in her house, on the heels of the disaster, with her still underground toiling to bring Frieda's body out to her mother, Anna wasn't comfortable questioning her friends. The park was too small, the mood too highly charged. As Anna's grandmother would have phrased it, she was liable to get a thick finger stirring in that pot. A little time needed to pass before she could cast her aspersions before peers.

Brent, Anna could and did get to. The man wanted to talk. She could hear the craving over the phone. Till then she'd not realized how strong the need was in her to talk it all over with someone who had been there. In a way, had the cave not been growing ever tighter and more malevolent, staying with the body recovery team would have been a comfort.

Unfortunately, when Anna reached him, Roxbury was on a cellular phone in a Jeep on BLM land adjacent to the park. His cure for the crazies had been to throw himself into his work. Their phone connection started out bad and rapidly went to worse. The last intelligible words were mutually desperate promises to get in touch.

Dead ends.

That was when, faced with an afternoon basking in Dottie Dierkz's grief, Anna had decided to hang on to the borrowed sedan a few more hours and call on the Tillmans. She didn't phone ahead for the obvious reason that she didn't want to be told not to come and thus have an honorable avenue of escape denied her.

Holden and his wife lived in a modest house on the outskirts of the town of Carlsbad. Outbuildings, a requisite in the West, cluttered the lot beside and behind the house: an old garage with a door that wouldn't close, two trucks, a horse trailer with one flat tire, a barn with a horse without sense enough to get in out of the rain standing miserably nearby, and a dog house, sans dog, with a peeling tar-paper roof. Other items scattered around completed a look that Anna, through long familiarity, had come to find homey. Rubber tires, a staple of western decor, were tumbled near the woodpile; an aluminum canoe, partly filled with brackish water, was grounded under a leafless tree.

She parked the sedan in front of a picket fence denuded of paint by wind-blown sand and let herself through the gate. The tiny porch was overflowing with cowboy detritus: deer antlers, rusting metal pieces of machinery that, like bleached skulls and pine cones, created their own artistic statement. To one side of the door a square picture window framed a book-covered table lit by a single lamp. On such a gray day, the golden glow was welcoming. Anna was glad she'd come.

The door was opened before her knuckles could fall a second time. A woman a good ten or fifteen years Holden's junior smiled at her with the hushed apologetic look that unmistakably says 'nap time.' Anna had forgotten the Tillmans' four-year-old. Waking the boy was a sin on two counts, once against the child and once against his mom. Anna found herself whispering.

Holden was napping as well. He and Andrew were curled up together on the boy's little bed. Anna was warmed by a glimpse of them as Rhonda Tillman closed the door off the kitchen.

Tillman's wife was classically beautiful, with thick lustrous hair that fell past her shoulders and wide-set green