Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

Jewel's face twisted from the mouth out as if smart-ass retorts were trying to escape the carmine lips. "Whaddya want?"

"I haven't had any luck getting in touch with Sondra McCarty," Anna told her.

"I don't have her phone number or nothing."

"I've got all that. She's not answering. You said she flew out of here the day after she came out of Lechuguilla."

"Yeah?" Jewel was getting antsy. She sensed the net closing around her but hadn't a clue as to what kind or why.

"Did you see her?"

"Whaddya think, I run a taxi service to the airport?"

"You didn't see her after the accident, didn't talk to her on the phone, didn't hand her a ticket, anything?"

Anna took Jewel's mute stare for a negative.

"Why are you so sure she left?"

Another glance at the blind screen, another at her nemesis, and Jewel apparently decided the only way to get rid of Anna was to answer. "Her name was on a list." The satisfaction in her voice suggested that what was written was fact, a result of living in a world of secondhand information.

"But you didn't see her?"

"Would ya quit?" Jewel snapped in exasperation.

"Who put her name on the list?"

"I did."

"All by yourself?" The words were out before Anna realized how patronizing they would sound. She was punished by a baleful glare from eyes so black the pupils were indistinguishable from the irises.

"I typed it," Jewel said tersely.

"Who wrote it?"

"Oscar gave it to me. Why don't you go badger him?"

Anna would probably get around to that, but for the moment she was perfectly happy badgering Jewel. "Did you-the park-make the plane reservations?"

"We don't make 'em for cavers."

Anna digested that. Becky-or whoever filled Becky's loafers at Carlsbad's airport this morning-would be no more likely to hand over passenger manifests to Jewel than to Anna. "So you only know who was scheduled to go down to the airport, not who went?"

"Like I been telling you. Can I get back to work now?"

"Can I see the list?"

Petty triumph glowed in Jewel's midnight stare. "Sorry. That's personnel stuff. Nobody gets to mess with it."

Anna doubted that. Maybe this was one of those situations her grandmother had warned her about where more flies were caught with honey. Too late; the vinegar had already been served.

"How is class going?" Anna asked.

Jewel's demeanor transformed. Sullenness was replaced with excitement. Tension went out of the taloned fingers on the desktop. "Good. I've got-" Suspicion clouded the briefly sunny disposition. "What class?"

"Yesterday I noticed you were working on-what? Your master's thesis? Too many footnotes for anything else. Looks like you've put in a lot of hours on it."

Jewel's right hand skittered furtively toward the keyboard. A spider in crimson shoes, it seemed to move without her permission. "There's nothing says I can't educate myself." Jewel was on the defensive. That was where Anna wanted her. Saying nothing, she let the silence weigh down. Jewel was using government time to do personal work. Maybe not a firing offense, but most certainly one that would get her a stern lecture and, worse, put her under Laymon's careful eye. Her activities would be curtailed.

"Maybe I still got that list somewhere," Jewel said coldly.

Anna was careful not to smile or show any sort of gloating. Her edge was tenuous. Jewel wasn't the sort of woman to be jerked around too often. A sheet of paper was smacked down at Anna's elbow. "This is a terrific help," she said as if Jewel had handed it over in the spirit of cooperation. "Can I copy it?"

Jewel pointed toward the copier.

Anna ran off a copy, folded it, and tucked it in her hip pocket. The original she brought back to Jewel's desk. "Thanks a million."

"You're welcome." Jewel snatched the paper and crammed it in the out part of her in-out basket.

"There's one other little thing."

"Oh, Jeez…"

"Brent Roxbury's SF-171."

"We don't use 'em no more."

"Brent would have. He's worked here off and on for four years. He'd have had to fill one out to get his first position." The SF-171 was an agonizingly detailed application form the Park Service had required for most of Anna's career. Pages of constipated little boxes for the answering of complex questions.

"You can't look at that," Jewel said. "It really is a personnel thing."

"What are you getting your master's in?" Anna asked interestedly.

"Oh, give it a rest," Jewel growled. Then, because she couldn't hide her pride, she said, "Abnormal psychology."

"Cool," Anna said, and meant it.

"I've got two kids. I got no time at home," Jewel said. Then, "George doesn't know."

"I won't tell him," Anna promised. "I wouldn't have anyway. I just need a break on this Frieda thing. It's making me crazy."

"So I noticed. We studied people like you second semester."

Anna laughed. "Will you look up Roxbury for me?"

Jewel thought about it. Anna had called her own bluff and waited without much hope. "What the heck," Jewel said after Anna had suffered a sufficient length of time. "It's not like the guy's not dead."

Armed with Brent's SF-171, the list of cavers with whom Sondra had presumably flown out, and her AT amp;T credit card number, Anna settled down at Zeddie's dining table for an afternoon of telephonic sleuthing. Midmorning on a weekday it took her thirty minutes before a real live human being answered in place of a machine. Stan Daggert, the long-bearded caver from Kentucky, worked the graveyard shift at a plant producing electrical cable. Anna dragged him out of a sound sleep and had to talk a minute till the fog cleared. Once he was oriented to time, place, and task, he was very clear. Sondra had not been with the group on Jewel's list. She'd not ridden down the hill with them; she'd not flown with them. He remembered her, "a leggy looker." He had not seen her when leaving Lechuguilla or at any point thereafter.

Lisa, the lady with the looping braids, was Anna's next success. She was at home in Palo Alto, grading papers. With the exception of describing Sondra as "a looker," she echoed Daggert's words. Sondra had not been with them. Lisa, like Daggert, insisted she would have remembered Sondra but for entirely different reasons: "Sondra was a royal pain in the patootie."

Of the five others on the list, Anna tracked down the phone numbers of four and left messages asking them to call her at Zeddie's. Their ratification of events would be nice, but she didn't need it. Sondra had not flown home or anywhere else.

Brent's SF-171 was next. From it she verified everything Amy Roxbury had told her and filled in some of the blanks. Brent was born in Black Gap, Pennsylvania, and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia. He'd been drafted in 1971. As a private in the army he was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, a base in Missouri. He'd served seventeen months. The dishonorable discharge box on his application was checked. Beneath, in the meager space allotted for explanations, he had written "conscientious objector." A good choice. It explained nothing yet came off sounding morally righteous.

Tracking down a fact a quarter of a century old, even one that was a matter of public record, proved harder than anticipated. During the military downsizing of the early nineties, the army base in Missouri was decimated. Personnel, already nomadic by profession, had been scattered all over the world.

Anna was forwarded, patched through, brushed off, put on hold, and disconnected until she finally landed in an office of records in Washington, D.C. A mealy-voiced man went to some length to let her know that, though he worked for the army, he wasn't an army man. Why she was supposed to care was beyond her, but she made a few appreciative noises so as not to alienate the fellow. His civilian status established, he was willing to look up the information she requested. Seconds ticked by like dimes clinking into a pay phone while he muttered and fiddled with his computer. "Got it," he said at last. Anna was not yet allowed to relax. Hemming and hawing, he fussed, pretending the matter might be sensitive or classified. He was bored. He was unimportant. He wanted to be cajoled. Pepper-spraying him being out of the question, Anna grasped the ragged edge of patience and cajoled.