Blind Descent-pigeion 6 (10 page)

  Professor Schatz's vee-necked undershirt, more brown than white from dirt, was plastered to his body with sweat. He climbed stolidly up what looked, from Anna's viewpoint, to be an impossible incline. Around his waist, pulleys, trolleys, ascenders, carabiners, and webbing in gaudy hues hung like the tool belt of a carpenter from another galaxy. Crossed over his chest were two coils of rope, sixty pounds of gear at a conservative estimate. He moved with the supercilious good humor of a bear everybody thinks is tame.

  Zeddie Dillard's thick frame flitted from place to place with astonishing speed. She carried nothing, and Anna surmised she was checking the rigging, though she'd thought that was Oscar's job.

  Halfway down Tinker's, McCarty could be seen, a mere scrap of color bobbing on a rough sea of stone. Freed from stretcher-bearing duties, he made his way back to the old camp to gather packs that had been left behind.

  Anna's eyes slid back through the kaleidoscopic darkness in time to catch Sondra looking after her husband with an expression of disgust. Mrs. McCarty wrinkled her long nose and curled her lovely lips as if she'd just sucked up a mouthful of sour milk.

  On Sondra the expression didn't seem out of place, and Anna realized that the young woman spoiled her looks with a mask of discontent. Chances were she'd been asked to fetch packs, had turned the request down, and now felt she'd somehow been cheated out of the good assignment. A saying of Anna's long-deceased father floated to the surface of her mind and made her smile: "That woman would complain if you hung her with a brand-new rope."

  Oscar was lost in the throng. Helmeted, dirty, flitting between light beams, the cavers were nearly indistinguishable. Anna spotted Holden only because of his bright pink shirt and silver helmet. He'd already reached the balcony. There he directed a symphony of ropes. The Stokes would be hand-carried, but it had to be rigged.

  Anna's home park, Mesa Verde, was reached by a winding road cut into steep hillsides. She had worked her share of low-angle rescues, dragging the victims of automobile accidents up through the oak brush to the road. There was no way to avoid the back-breaking work. On a near-vertical, the Stokes would be rigged, a line fore and aft, so, should the carriers slip, the patient wouldn't be dropped unceremoniously back down the way she'd come, but the weight of the litter would be borne by human arms and backs. The only thing that could be depended on was that wherever one ended up standing there was never room to lift the way the safety films advised. Hands clutched where they could, held where they had to, and moved the litter on. Doan's Pills and Ben-Gay took care of the details after the party was over.

  Anna caught sight of Brent Roxbury climbing stairsteps of stone three and four feet high. Below, a man laughed, and Lisa, her braids swinging in loops beneath her helmet, averted her eyes. Evidently Brent's attire was exposing his shortcomings.

  "Anna?"

  "Yeah?" Anna said, trying to catch a glimpse of Brent's retreating form for the same reason people stare at car wrecks.

  "Anna?"

  "What?" she demanded, mildly irritated. As the word fell from her lips she realized who was doing the talking. Crabbiness vanished, replaced by a relief so powerful it bordered on euphoria. She scooted over to Frieda, wrapped mummylike in the coffin-shaped Stokes. "Welcome back," she said. Frieda struggled feebly. Picking at the knots in the bandages, Anna explained, "Sorry. We tied your arms in so they wouldn't fall against anything and get hurt. The main rescue team is here. You're in a Stokes at the end of Tinker's Hell. They're rigging the lines to haul you up. See?" She leaned back so Frieda could see the activity on the rock wall and know that she was safe and cared for.

  Frieda tried to lift her head and moaned. The helmet and cervical collar kept her from moving much, but the effort had caused her head to hurt.

  Anna cursed herself for her exuberance. She'd all but told Frieda to sit up and have a look around.

  "What's wrong with me?" Worry colored her words, but Frieda sounded calm, in control. Anna was so proud she felt her heart swell until it became a lump in her throat. Trussed up helpless, deep underground, she doubted she would behave as admirably. To banish the lump, she reminded herself that Frieda liked burrowing in the dirt.

  Fussing with bandages and buckles, she told Frieda all she knew of her injuries. She was careful to relate nothing of the speculation surrounding the accident. Frieda's mind would still be vulnerable, open to suggestion. When she finished, she forced herself to stop fiddling with Frieda's packaging. The woman was stable. Anna was only reassuring herself.

  Frieda blinked up through the clear Plexiglas safety screen on the helmet they'd fitted her with. Seeing her friend's discomfort, Anna eased it off, careful not to change the alignment of Frieda's cervical spine.

  "Thanks," Frieda said. "Let me sit up."

  "Better not."

  "Shit. I feel like such an idiot. I'm fine. If my leg wasn't broken, I could walk out of here. I'm tempted to call the whole circus off and crawl out. It's been done."

  Anna knew that. Years before, after the last big publicized rescue, a caver had broken an ankle a long way in, near the Leaning Tower of Lechuguilla. Rather than subject himself to the Sturm und Drang of a grand rescue, he crawled the two days out. He wore through his own kneepads and the kneepads of every member of his team, but he self-rescued.

  "It's not your ankle," Anna reminded Frieda. "It's your knee. Not to mention your brains are scrambled. Besides"-she gestured to the cascading humanity on the wall, each caver busy and intent-"everybody is having such a good time."

  Frieda snorted, but there was a thread of laughter in the rude sound. A good sign.

  Anna questioned her about her hurts, asked all the things she'd been taught to ask to test for disorientation or brain injury. Frieda had a vicious headache that hurt down into her left shoulder, and her leg throbbed, but she knew who she was, where she was, and who was president of the United States. The only question she'd missed was "What day is it?" and since Anna wasn't all that sure either, she'd let it pass.

  Anna backed off, let the patient rest. Frieda lay staring at an invisible sky. Her jaw-length red hair was stuck to her cheeks. In a sudden spill of light from above, the freckles across her face stood out black against her unnatural pallor. McCarty had cleaned and bandaged the wound on her temple, but an ugly bruise spread from beneath the dressing, blacking the corner of Frieda's eye and suffusing her cheekbone with angry purple.

  "Last night you woke up and talked to me," Anna said. "Do you remember?"

  Frieda thought for so long that Anna worried this was not an end of the crazies but only another moment of clarity in ongoing delirium.

  "No," Frieda said finally. Her voice was strained as if the effort of remembering had exacerbated the pain in her head. "I had zillions of dreams. All bad. Not nightmare quality, just the can't-find-your-keys show-up-at-work-naked variety. On and on. Every time I'd think I was awake and could stop, something bizarre would happen and I'd realize I was back in the dreams." She reached for the water bottle and Anna pressed it into her palm. When she drank, water spilled down her cheeks. Anna wanted to wipe it away but didn't. Frieda wouldn't appreciate being mothered, and it was an art Anna was not sufficiently skilled at to risk rebuff.

  "You said 'It wasn't an accident.' Was that part of a dream?" Anna kept her voice intentionally casual. What she knew about head wounds would fit in chapter twelve of an EMT manual. A chapter she hadn't read in a while. It just made sense not to fever an already traumatized brain with unnecessary fears.

  "Did I?" Frieda asked. Anna waited, letting her work things through at her own speed. "Shit," Frieda said after a time. "Everything is like those stupid dreams. Piecemeal. Broken film."

  "It's okay," Anna said.

  "I remember all of us splitting up to follow a handful of leads. I remember going down a crack in the breakdown on the cavern floor. Maybe I heard something?"

  Anna kept quiet. Anything she suggested would only add to Frieda's confusion.

  "I must have been looking up." Frieda fingered the bruise on her temple. "Shit," she said again. "Maybe I saw something. I think I saw something. Somebody's hand. That might have been what I meant. I remember I saw a hand above me on a big fucking rock. Get thee behind me, Hodags."

  Anna thought Frieda had slipped back into her dream world, then remembered Hodags, like their German cousins, the Kobold, were spirits that didn't take kindly to foul language. Frieda was metaphorically throwing salt over her shoulder, knocking on wood.

  "Did you see the hand before the rock hit you in the head or after?" Anna asked. The hand could have belonged to Zeddie, lifting the stone from Frieda's shoulder.

  "I don't know."

  Anna could hear the weariness in her voice. She didn't want to overtire her. One more question, she promised herself, then she'd stop. "Was it a man's hand or a woman's?"

  "Gloved," Frieda replied with certainty. "Damn."

  "Don't push," Anna said. "It'll come back."

  "You won't go away, will you?" Frieda asked. Both women heard the fear in her voice. Frieda didn't approve of it. "No big deal," she said. "It's probably all bullshit. Scrambled brains."

  "Probably," Anna said, helping her save face. "But I've got to stick close anyway."

  "Why?" Frieda sounded stubborn.

  "So nobody will put me to work."

  Frieda tried to laugh, but it came out as a moan.

  "Hey, is that Frieda talking?" Sondra McCarty was five yards off, pulling her lean frame up onto a rock. "Oscar said to come back and see if you needed relieving or anything."

  If someone wanted Frieda dead, then comatose was surely the next best thing. Till Anna knew more, Frieda would be safer with the status quo. "No, just muttering. She's still delirious." Anna found Frieda's hand in the darkness and squeezed it. "Delirious," she repeated, and felt an answering pressure. Anna knew the ruse would not be foolproof. They could lie to Sondra and the others, but she was going to have to take Peter McCarty into her confidence. Frieda needed something for the pain. This far from the hospital, shock could kill her as surely as the most determined assassin.

  Anna wanted Frieda to pretend she remembered nothing, but quoting "in for a penny in for a pound" as her rationale, Frieda opted to tell Peter everything. Anna didn't put up an argument. For her own peace of mind, Frieda needed to trust her doctor. McCarty agreed to go along with the lie that she was still delirious-not because he deemed it necessary but because Frieda became upset when it looked as if he wouldn't. He seemed more annoyed than alarmed by the disembodied glove on the rock. Anna couldn't remember hearing a theory so thoroughly pooh-poohed since she'd told her sister, Molly, Jimmy Newton's idea that Dad and Santa were one and the same.

  McCarty laughed, shrugged, did everything short of actually saying "pshaw." The fact that he did it with humor and a thick gob of charm didn't let him off the hook. He put Anna's hackles up. If she'd had a tail, by the end of the performance it would have been lashing. She kept her misgivings to herself. There were two possibilities: the doctor had a reason for wanting Frieda to think it was all a dream, or it actually was all a dream and, knowing a whole hell of a lot more about head injuries than Anna ever would, he had chosen this method of allaying his patient's fears.

  However unsatisfying to the ego, Anna hoped it was the latter. Still, she watched him closely as he gave Frieda a shot for pain. Hovering, a suspicious and sweating guardian angel, Anna realized if McCarty wanted Frieda dead he could easily have killed her in the hours before Oscar, Holden, and she had arrived.

  Unless he didn't think she'd wake up.

  Unless he didn't think she'd remember if she did wake up.

  Remember what? An attempt on her life? Surely there would have been a reason for attempted murder. Hope she would have forgotten that reason? Not likely, not unless that reason had occurred moments before the rock fell, and even then traumatic amnesia wasn't something anyone would count on, especially not a doctor of medicine. In a heretofore undiscovered crack in the earth there was no secret Frieda could stumble on, and it was unlikely, though not impossible, she'd overheard anything compromising. Peter McCarty's too hearty skepticism was making more and more sense.

  The doctor left. Anna listened till the sound of his going was gone. "Frieda, are you awake?" she whispered.

  "Hard to tell," came the reply.

  "Do you have any idea why somebody would want to push a rock on you?"

  "No reason. I'm a secretary, for Chrissake."

  Anna wasn't sure being a secretary was as harmless as Frieda thought, but she understood the thrust of the comment. And it was unlikely any NPS secrets-as if a bureaucracy the size of the Park Service could actually keep a secret-from Mesa Verde, Colorado, would get her killed this deep in New Mexico. In anything but James Bond stuff, the power of secrets tended to have only local jurisdiction.

  "How about personal animosities," Anna pushed. "Somebody on the survey team?"

  "No way. I'm a frigging saint. Oops. Make my apologies."