eyes under winged brows that had probably never known a pair of tweezers. She was model thin, with long slender arms and tapered fingers. When she talked her hands sketched graceful pictures in the air to accompany her words. Holden's wife was young enough and pretty enough to dislike on sight, but she gave Anna two homemade oatmeal cookies and a glass of white Zinfandel so Anna decided to overlook her faults.
Rhonda pushed aside a paper plate full of multicolored Play-Doh and put her elbows on the painted wood of the kitchen table. 'Holden's driving me nuts,' she said, and she and Anna fell into the easy camaraderie women often do when left to themselves. 'I thought I was going to have to wrap him in a towel and shove the painkillers down his throat the way I do with the cats.'
Anna broke off a chunk of cookie and washed it down with the wine. Beer last night, wine now. Two years of abstinence poured away. She just didn't give a damn. The terrors of the bottle had faded, the attendant weirdness an unreal memory. Not to mention, the stuff didn't seem to work anymore. Three beers had left her with a full bladder and no buzz. Still, she drank Rhonda's Zinfandel, was eager to drink it. A memory of comfort? Of forgetfulness? Maybe it was the only way she knew of handling death. Nobody important had kicked the bucket in a long time. No wonder sobriety had been a piece of cake.
'How's Holden doing?' Anna asked, tired of asking the same thing of herself.
'Not good,' Rhonda replied in her hushed nap-time voice. The softness made Anna lean across the table, her and Rhonda's heads together like conspirators. It was a nice feeling. Rhonda picked up a cookie with both hands, holding it between fingertips and thumbs as if it were a sandwich. Nibbling around the edge with little squirrel bites, she thought about her husband. 'Very bad, in fact,' she said at last. 'He's convinced himself he killed Frieda Dierkz. Now he's working on convincing himself he can't trust his own decisions. This morning he had Andrew in fits dithering about whether to let the little guy ride in the front seat. Poor old Holden. I can read him like a book. No, like a newspaper. His emotions are headlines. He was scared he'd crash the car, hurt Andrew.' She took a delicate sip of wine and resumed torturing her cookie to death.
''Tain't so,' Anna said. 'That's not how it happened.' She decided now was not the time for secrecy. 'Did he tell you what I found?'
Rhonda nodded, her hair shining in the overhead light. 'Holden no longer believes in your butt-print,' she said. 'It's like he won't let himself believe. Some sort of punishment. He said he would have known if somebody had gone up there.'
'No, he wouldn't have,' Anna argued. 'Sixty feet above him, in the blackety-black of that frigging cave, Godzilla and Puff the Magic Dragon could have been perched up there the whole time and none of us would have seen them.'
'Not seen,' Rhonda said.
'Damn it.' Anna was annoyed. 'It was my butt-print. I saw it. I should know. It was there. I could see pocket seams. It was an ideal, perfect, unassailable butt-print.'
'Talk to him?' Rhonda asked.
'Sure.'
'It won't do any good.'
'Probably not.' They sat in companionable silence for a while. A fat white cat with Siamese markings from one ancestor cut into tiger rings from another jumped up on the table and stretched out full length, his paws pushing gently against the base of Anna's glass.
'You know you're not allowed on the table when we have company,' Rhonda said. The cat twitched its tail in disdain.
'Are you a caver?' Anna asked.
'I used to be. Not so much anymore. When you're married to
Anna had not considered caving as having a political side. Naive of her; everything touched by humans was touched by politics. 'How so?' she asked to keep the visit from ending.
'I used to go to all the grotto meetings. Get involved in all that. My last year I was president of the local grotto. No more.'
Grottos. Local groups of cavers. That was the key. Anna had overlooked the inevitable: people couldn't resist joining up and forming clubs. Cavers were no different. She could let the AMA and the PTA alone. 'Grotto meetings!' she said as one might say 'Eureka!' 'Is Brent Roxbury a member? Is Zeddie?'
'Are you going to help Holden?'
Anna laughed. 'Unless he really did kill Frieda.'
'Not a problem. Holden hasn't killed anybody in years. He puts spiders outside. Even big hairy ones.' Rhonda got more cookies from a jar on the counter and refilled their wineglasses. 'Fire away.'
Anna outlined her theories. It didn't take long. If someone had attempted to kill, then finally had succeeded in killing Frieda, the list of suspects was mercifully short: the members of the core group with the exception of Oscar, Holden, and herself. If the fall in the Pigtail was unrelated to the rock that had broken Frieda's leg, then they were all suspects. Anna felt duty-bound to mention that but didn't give it much credence. The law of averages was meant to be broken, but it served as a fairly trustworthy guide.
'I don't know what I'm fishing for,' she admitted in the end. 'I need more information. More to go on. Other than Dr. McCarty's tendency to drop thou at the slightest provocation, I know almost nothing about anybody. With zip in the way of physical evidence, motive is the only thing I've got.'
Despite Rhonda's desire to be of help, the pickings were pretty slim. Frieda had a reputation in some circles for 'scooping booty,' the highly unpopular practice of dashing headlong down new passages to be the first without addressing the needs of the cave, i.e., surveying each new portion as it was explored. Rhonda assured Anna that emotions ran high when it came to scooping booty, but neither of them could see it as a motive for murder. Tinker's Hell was a dead end or, as Holden would have said, an end in itself. All the leads surveyed petered out. No booty to scoop.
Sondra McCarty was a neophyte, a whiner, not well liked. No news there.
Brent was well thought of by cavers. He was active with children's groups, taking even very little kids into the caves to teach them about bats and crickets, instill in them awe instead of fear of things subterranean. Brent was a good father-high praise from the mother of a four year-old. Rhonda said Andrew sometimes played with his daughters. They had a house in town a couple of miles from the Tillmans'.
Rumor had it Brent had exaggerated reports on occasion to protect the underground resource. The caving community loved him for it. The petroleum interests would have had a significantly different take on the issue, but Rhonda said it was just gossip. She doubted it had penetrated much outside the grotto.
Zeddie was new to caving. Enthusiastic, young, idealistic, she had all the makings of a life-long devotee. No rumors attached themselves to her, but Rhonda seemed reluctant to write her off as squeaky clean. They weren't too far apart in age. Zeddie a caver, Rhonda a mommy-Anna guessed it was just a natural jealousy.
Peter McCarty was known to be skilled and experienced. By some he was considered a lightweight-a bit of a dilettante-but Rhonda had never heard much against him besides the occasional snipe because his wife was too young, his equipment too new, his hair too well cut.
Schatz, Rhonda didn't know. She'd met him a couple times, but he was mostly an eastern caver, and she hadn't heard any stories about him either way.
This pleasant, if fruitless, exchange was brought to a close by the intrusion of the telephone bell.
'That tears it,' Rhonda said in exasperation.
'Is that the phone?' Holden's voice emanated from Andrew's room.
'See? Too good to last,' Rhonda muttered. 'I got it.'
Andrew slept on. Holden stumped out on crutches as Rhonda was hanging up.
'That was George Laymon,' she said. 'They're bringing out the body.'
12
Five hours passed before Frieda was brought into the open air. This time the reception was subdued. There
