'Yeah. The marriage was over. They were just dickering over the details.'
'What details?'
'Kids, dogs, house. Shh.'
Anna hushed and, jamming her hands deep in pockets devoid of warmth, watched her suspect pool flood over its banks.
An estranged wife, a new boyfriend, a custody battle; as potentially illuminating as these bits of information were, Anna did not welcome them. Like an obsessed scientist, she wanted only data that proved her theory. This new twist could indicate Brent Roxbury's death had no connection whatsoever to Frieda's. Anna had used the Roxbury incident to prove that Dierkz was murdered. If it was freak coincidence, she was back to Frieda's testimony-recanted-and the butt-print- buried. Holden, her one ally in this quest, would desert her for the seductive realm of the guilt-ridden.
A sickening possibility stirred her thoughts with an icy finger. Could it be she was dead wrong and making a world-class ass of herself? A shudder vibrated her bones. Curt's strong arm threaded between her elbow and her ribs. He snugged her up against his side and kept her there till the last clods were thrown and the mourners were allowed to escape the grave.
'What's the matter, don't you like dead people?' he asked as they followed Peter and Zeddie back to Zeddie's rusting Volvo. 'They seem inordinately fond of you, judging by the numbers dropping at your feet.'
'I like them fine,' Anna replied distractedly. 'It just occurred to me that I might be totally mistaken about nearly everything.'
'I wouldn't have any idea what that was like,' Curt said with apparent sincerity.
'Bloody awful.'
'I love it when you talk dirty in foreign languages.'
In the car, Anna pressed Zeddie for details regarding the Roxburys' marriage.
'I thought I shot Brent,' she said. 'Don't tell me you're going to bump me in favor of his wife? I've already opened negotiations with Meryl Streep to play me in the movie.'
Anna squirmed uncomfortably in the backseat. Curt, who'd retained her arm, gave it a squeeze. 'C'mon, Zeddie,' he said. 'One teensy-weensy little murder accusation and you get all bent out of shape. Where's your sense of humor?'
To Anna's relief, both Zeddie and Dr. McCarty laughed. The cold shoulder was still there but, Anna dared hope, a shade less glacial. Caught up in the mood of generosity, Anna admitted she could have been wrong.
'Gee, yuh
'Would he have gotten them?'
'Ah ha! You have replaced me. What do you think, little Mrs.
Roxbury toddled over the desert in her high heels with the dentist's deer rifle?'
'Maybe the dentist did it for her,' Peter suggested.
'Right. 'Local Dentist Goes Berserk in Love Triangle.' He's got three kids of his own. I doubt he'd risk everything to bring the total up to five. She was the one who ended the marriage,' Zeddie admitted. 'My bet is the dentist has been fixing more than her teeth. She might have lost a custody battle.'
Not wanting to waste a perfectly good trip to town, Zeddie pulled in at the supermarket before they started back up for the park. As soon as she and Peter wandered off down aisle six, Anna asked Curt if he'd made the calls, located Sondra.
'You never give up, do you?' he said with a hint of exasperation.
'I may have to,' Anna said. 'But not quite yet. Did you?'
Curt sighed, took the basket from her arm, and began sniffing apples. 'I called a bunch of people. Pete's mom, Sondra's dad. The
The bad news was waiting for Anna when they got back to the park. George Laymon had taken the liberty of making an appointment for her with a psychologist in Carlsbad. Whatever plans she'd made for the afternoon had to be postponed. To keep her credit good and her lies all in a row, she was duty-bound to go.
Anna swallowed a little lunch, climbed into the Neon, and started back down the long and twisting road out of the park. Desert views, usually captivating, failed to interest her. Lost in thought, she drove like an automaton. A list formed in her mind: things to do in town. As it grew, her resentment toward Laymon for wasting half her day began to wane. She would stop at the airport and see if she could unearth any record of when Sondra had flown out and what her destination was. On one pretext or another she would worm her way into the Roxburys' house and have a chat with the widow. Coincidences were part of life. They happened with a regularity that flew in the face of statistics and common sense. Bad things quite often did come in threes. It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that Brent's shooting was in no way connected with Frieda's death. Should that be the case, Anna swore she would bow out, leave the investigation to the sheriff's department or the BLM-whoever had jurisdiction over that particular part of the desert.
And Sondra's disappearance?
Anna pondered that while the pseudo-frontier village of White's City, a tourist town clinging to the shirttails of the park, flashed by the Neon's windows. Was that yet another coincidence? The third in a string of evils? A hoax designed to bring a straying husband to heel?
The clock set into the Neon's dash read 1:27. Anna's appointment with Dr. Coontz was at 1:45. She had no idea what she would say to the guy. Yes, her knee had crushed the esophagus of her friend. No, she didn't feel guilty about it. Yes, she thought the fall had been orchestrated. No, she had no proof. No, she didn't know who did it. No, nobody else agreed with her. Yes, she had been under a psychiatrist's care before. Yes, she was an alcoholic. Yes, she was drinking again.
The litany clicked through her mind with the familiar resonance of rosary beads, and Anna laughed out loud. An hour wouldn't even scratch the surface of her psyche. Visions of weekly visits for the next thirty years would dance sugarplumlike through the psychologist's head. Coontz would think he'd stumbled onto a veritable gold mine.
No sense getting his hopes up.
Deciding to be late, Anna turned off the highway into the Carlsbad municipal air terminal. The airstrip wasn't much different from a dozen other small-town airstrips she had flown into for one reason or another. Meager landscape vegetation, planted with the best intentions then abandoned, clung to life around the front of the terminal. Small aircraft, belonging to those with the money or the passion to support a private plane, were tied down beside the taxiway.
Anna parked in the same spot she'd used when she came to fetch Frieda's mother and went inside. A young woman stood behind the counter, her chin propped in her hands, talking to a boy dressed in the uniform of the West: cowboy boots, Levi's, western shirt, and tractor cap.
As Anna blew in on a gust of cold wind, the conversation stopped. Wide intelligent eyes lit up a face already half smiling and ready to be of assistance; someone who enjoyed her work and was good at it. Given that Anna wanted rules broken, this was not an auspicious sign.
With patience and unfailing good manners Becky-or so the name tag on her chest proclaimed-repeated the regulations about divulging the contents of passenger lists on commercial flights. Anna pushed until the woman began running out of new ways to say the same thing, then accepted that this cat would have to be skinned another way.
Having no appreciable weight to throw around in New Mexico, she couldn't lean on Becky. But she could lean on Jewel. Before Laymon's secretary had managed to blank her computer screen, Anna had gotten a glimpse and an inkling as to why she was such a mumbling idiot around her boss. When she got back up the hill, she would approach this issue from another angle.
Dr. Coontz was a woman. The hour went quickly, and Anna enjoyed herself. She walked a thin line trying to maintain her integrity, to show just enough neurosis to be of interest but not so much she'd have to live it down
