nearly the color of the oak veneer on the desk tops, fell in a curtain hiding her face. Anna wondered if she dared ask Christina. She scarcely knew the woman. Christina Walters had entered on duty a month or so after Sheila Drury. Most of Anna's time was spent in the field and they had different days off so their paths seldom crossed.
Anna knew she had a little girl who rode a pink tricycle around the housing area on Saturday mornings, wasn't married at the moment, and seemed competent enough. But this was the first time Anna had really noticed her, really looked at her.
Walters was good-looking with a brand of prettiness that was rare in the Park Service. She looked soft. Her hair curled softly, arms and neck and breasts rounded with a softness that somehow fell short of fat. Her muscles weren't corded from carrying a pack, her hands not calloused from shooting or riding or climbing. Her skin wasn't burned brown and creased by the sun and wind.
Urban, Anna thought. Christina Walters had a traditional urban femininity. Strangely, Anna liked it. On another woman it might have set her teeth on edge, but on the fair-haired clerk it looked good. Perhaps, Anna explained the phenomenon to herself, because Christina didn't push it: she chose it.
It crossed Anna's mind to put on a little lipstick and perfume when she got home that night. There'd been a time she'd lived in the stuff, a time she'd required it to feel attractive. With a sudden sense of achievement, she knew she could go back to it now just for fun, just for the sheer sensual pleasure of the commercial feminine luxury.
'Do you need something?' Christina was asking in a low voice with a hint of a drawl and Anna realized she had been staring.
'Do I look that desperate?' she answered with a laugh.
Christina Walters studied her gravely. 'Yes.'
'I'm afraid I'm fouling up in triplicate here.' Anna almost said 'fucking up' but there was something about Christina that made her want to seem a gentler person than she was.
'Let me see.' Christina walked around the low wall and looked over Anna's shoulder. Delicate perfume drifted from her hair. White Linen, Anna guessed. It suited her.
'It's the 343 on the Drury Lion Kill,' Anna said. She half turned in her chair and saw the fleeting freeze on Christina's oval face. An aging, a minute dying, as if for a moment pain- or hatred-had jabbed deep.
'Sony,' Anna said with abrupt embarrassment. 'I didn't realize you knew her that well.'
Christina straightened up, her hair falling to hide her eyes. When she smoothed it back her face was working again. 'I didn't know her that well. Here-' she pulled the form out of the typewriter '-it'll only take me a minute.' Smiling with what looked like genuine warmth, she fluttered a manicured hand. 'Magic fingers.'
Anna's radio butted in before she had a chance to say thank you. 'Three-one-five; three-eleven.'
'Go ahead, Paul.
'Are you near a phone?'
'Ten-four.'
'Call me at Frijole. Three-eleven clear.'
Anna dialed the Ranger Division's extension and Paul picked up on the first ring. 'Mrs. Drury is here,' he said. By the formal measured tones, Anna knew Sheila's mother was there in the room with him. 'She's come to retrieve Ranger Drury's belongings. Would you accompany her to Dog Canyon and see to it she gets all the help she needs?'
'I'll need a vehicle. I'm in that damned jeep.'
'Take mine,' Paul said. 'Leave the keys in the jeep. I'll use it.'
Anna smiled. Paul wanted out from under this chore in a bad way. He was trying to buy her goodwill with the new one-ton Chevy with the fancy arrowheads and striping, flashing light-bars, air-conditioning, and radio console.
'I'll be there in about ten minutes, Paul.'
'Ranger Drury's pack will be in the back of the truck. And thanks, Anna.' Gratitude warmed his voice.
Perhaps Paul was an empath, she thought as she put the cover back on the abandoned typewriter. Like in the science fiction movies. Maybe other people's pain actually hurt him, even when they were strangers.
'Well, I'm off to Dog Canyon,' Anna said to Christina's back. 'Mrs. Drury's here to collect Sheila's things. Thanks,' she added. 'I owe you a beer.'
The clerk waved a
This beer was a social debt Anna actually considered paying. There was something intriguing about Christina Walters.
Probably just a classy flake, Anna thought uncharitably as she threw her satchel into the jeep. But she was looking forward to that beer.
Mrs. Drury-Mrs. Thomas Drury as she had corrected Paul when he'd introduced her-was in her late fifties or early sixties. Makeup, carefully applied, gave color to her pale skin and muddied her age without making her look younger. Her short, permed hair had been dyed a light brown. Anna assumed the shade was chosen to color the gray but not seem flashy or 'fast.' Mrs. Drury wore an inexpensive polyester pantsuit of sage green. A purse of the same white leatherette as her low-heeled pumps was clamped tightly beneath one arm. Respectable but not rich, Anna summed her up.
During the two-hour drive to Dog Canyon-twelve miles on foot over the high country, nearly a hundred by road around the park's perimeter-Mrs. Thomas Drury told Anna more than she'd ever wanted to know about the Drury family in general and Sheila in particular.
Sheila's father had died when she was ten '… but in the sixth grade, not the fifth. Sheila may have been odd but she was always bright.' Mrs. Drury had gone to work as a secretary then at Minnegasco in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was a good job. She still held it. During the drive from the Dark Canyon turnoff at Highway 62/180 to the Wildersens' goat farm six miles in, she listed the employee benefits.
At twenty-nine (Anna had been way off on Sheila's age. 'She'd never use a decent night cream, though heaven knows I bought her enough jars-' Mrs. Drury explained), Sheila had still been on the company's life insurance plan. 108,000 would now come to Mrs. Drury. Five years' salary.
Anna had agreed that Minnegasco had an excellent employee benefit plan and Mrs. Drury's monologue moved on to new subjects. Sheila was an only child. Mrs. Drury's second pregnancy had ended in miscarriage and she hadn't the heart to try again, though she'd often thought it might have been better for Sheila if she had. Sheila was an odd girl, headstrong and wayward.
From the scraps of information dropped amidst the drawn-out recitals of people whose names and indiscretions meant nothing to Anna, she came to believe that Sheila's 'waywardness' consisted mostly of a refusal to get her hair foiled though it was '… impossibly dark-almost like a Jewish person's'; her nails manicured '-though I offered to pay for it, and in the Cities manicures aren't cheap-'; and her steadfast refusal to date 'nice boys.'
By the time they reached the Queens Highway turnoff, Anna found she liked Sheila more in memoria that she would've guessed. For the first time since she'd stumbled across the body, she felt a personal sense of loss. She wished she'd gotten to know the Dog Canyon Ranger better. They might have been friends.
As they drove down the miles of winding road cutting back west through the Lincoln National Forest, Mrs. Drury asked: 'Are we in the park now?' She was pointing to the fenceline on both sides of the road. It was the first time Anna had noticed the new fencing edging nearly all of the Paulsen Ranch. 'That's Jerry Paulsen's property. He owns forty sections. Not really a big place in this part of the country. It abuts the park on the northern boundary outside of Dog Canyon.'
The fence cut down the middle of a lot of man-made divisions: it marked the border between Texas and New Mexico, between public and private lands. Deer jumped it, toads hopped under it, and birds and clouds floated over it without a downward glance. But in the petty depths of humanity it was an important line.
Paulsen had spared no expense: new green metal posts, shining silver wire with four-pronged barbs half an inch long and, every fifty or sixty feet, a brand-new sign reading NO TRESPASSING.
Paulsen was dead serious about private ownership. STAY OFF JERRY PAULSEN'S LAND was xeroxed on every page of the Boundary Patrol Report Forms to remind rangers riding fenceline. Anna wished he'd return the favor. The next time he flew his shiny new helicopter over so much as one corner of the park she would go to the Federal Aviation Agency.
There'd been bad blood between the park and the local ranchers from the beginning. The Guadalupes had been
