“Let’s not,” he said. She started off anyway as if she hadn’t heard him, setting a casual pace that would take them around a sharp corner past derelict-looking buildings toward the resource management office and another residential area.
After a brief hesitation, he walked with her. Anna allowed herself a small inward sigh of relief. Determined though he might be, Rory was not yet ready to lay hands on her to get what he wanted.
“Why don’t you want your dad investigated?” she asked mildly.
“I told you,” Rory snapped. “His health isn’t good.”
His wife’s health was considerably worse, Anna thought, but didn’t say so. She just walked and waited to see if whatever was under the surface of Rory’s filial concern would boil out into words. It didn’t, and that concerned her. Kids, normal kids with fair-to-middling parents, might bluster in their adolescent years about not trusting anyone over thirty, but beneath that bluster dwelt the child whose long habit had been to turn to adults when in need. Rory’d had that habit broken for him.
Anna kept on at the same easy pace. They reached the corner where the maintenance yard bent into an L-shape. This was the farthest they’d get from windows and ears, a walled canyon of buildings, machinery and trees between them and the scattered houses. Realizing she’d tensed, Anna relaxed her neck to keep herself alert and ready. Consciously, she monitored the speed of her steps.
“I don’t have any say in this investigation,” she said easily. “I’m just visiting from another park. I’ve done a few chores for Harry but that’s it. If you want your dad left out of things, the person you need to talk to is the chief ranger. I’d suggest you do it during regular business hours. Creeping around in people’s shrubbery could get a fellow shot.”
“It’s you I want to leave Dad alone,” Rory said and this time he did lay hands on her. Strong brown fingers curled around her upper arm forcing her to stop.
The touch triggered fear in Anna. If she were going to fight or run, now was the time. For small people without the skills or scriptwriters of Jackie Chan, exploding like a cherry bomb then running like hell was the best bet.
The spurt of fear was not enough. They were still talking.
“Like I said—” Anna began.
“No,” Rory cut her off. “You. You leave him alone.” The fingers tightened on her arm. “You’re different. You pry and pry and wriggle into people’s heads. You don’t just ask what they’ve done. You watch and you wait like some fast little snake that looks asleep. Then there’s that little tongue flicking out because you smell something. You pry into stuff that’s none of your affair. That has nothing to do with anything. Nothing to do with
this.
”
Rory was being his own pep squad, letting his own oratory whip him up like a speaker inflaming a mob of one.
Anna decided to break into it before he worked himself into trouble. “That’s enough,” she said quietly. With another boy she might have yelled, a verbal slap to get his attention, but she’d seen Rory with Harry Ruick. The boy definitely had a problem with authority. “Let go of my arm,” she said just as softly. “I bruise easily and it is swimsuit season.”
Either the tone or the absurdity got through and he let go. She began walking, glad to be leaving the spectral machines of the maintenance yard.
“Time we headed back,” she said. “I don’t know about you, but it’s way past my bedtime.” No longer curious as to what Rory wanted from her, Anna firmly dropped the subject.
After fifty feet of consideration, Rory picked it up again. The heat his speech had lent his words was gone. The icy edge that replaced it was far more alarming. “If you don’t lay off Les and just do the bear thing or whatever, you’ll be sorry. Real sorry.”
The clichéd threat should have sounded childish, empty, but it didn’t. No hollow undertone spoke of desperation or grasping at straws. Rory had something concrete in mind. Anna felt it with every chilled ounce of marrow in her bones.
Rory had missed his opportunity to thrash her. They walked now between two rows of neat houses, petunias, a riot of color in the light of day, spilling black as tar from window boxes. What could a high school boy do to her? Slash her tires? Leave burning dog droppings on her doorstep? Spray-paint “fuck you” on her garage door? If Rory planned a physical threat all she need do was report him to Harry and he would be shipped out of the park immediately with a ranger escort to the airport. Any threat he made would end the same way. Anna was grown up, connected. He was a child. He must know that.
“What will you do if I don’t stop investigating Les?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“I’ll tell everybody you sexually harassed me,” he said evenly.
Anna laughed.
“Pressured me,” he went on. “That you used your position to coerce me into having sex. That you seduced me and made me do things I’m ashamed of.”
Anna quit laughing. She quit walking. So did Rory. Together, face to face, they stood in the middle of the empty street. A horrible, gnawing anxiety began eating Anna from the inside. Rory had found the right threat. An accusation like that would get her, not him, shipped from the park. It wouldn’t matter if it was true or not. It wouldn’t matter if Harry Ruick believed it or not. The mere accusation would be enough. If Rory pressed charges, life as she knew and enjoyed it would dissolve into smirks, sneers, depositions, lawyers. Before it was over she’d be beggared emotionally and financially. The park service might back her, but they’d be running scared. Anxious to cut her loose and save themselves.
Even if they knew it wasn’t true.
Rory’s face changed and she realized she’d been fool enough to let her fear show on her face, writ so large a callow boy could read it by the meager light of a quarter moon.
“You’re joking,” she said, and, “It won’t work.” Both statements were untrue.
“When I was in junior high school this teacher got sent to prison for it,” he said.
Anna remembered the case. It had created a feeding frenzy in the media. In the blink of her mind’s eye, she saw herself with a hundred microphones shoved in her face. Bile rose in her throat. She gulped it back. Anger and fear mixed such a powerful potion in her blood she could feel the shaking from the inside out. Run, cry, smash the boy’s face, rant, beg; the need to do these things simultaneously and at the top of her lungs held her as paralyzed as she’d been in the dream of the bear. This time her brain was paralyzed as well. She couldn’t think.
Helpless. This was what it felt like, a squirming, raging flylike frustration caught in the fingers of an evil, wing-pulling boy.
“You wouldn’t actually do that,” Anna said hopefully.
“I’m sorry,” Rory said and the shred of hope vanished. Had he been mean or vindictive she might have had a chance. Rory believed what he did to be the regrettable but necessary means to some greater end.
“Shit,” Anna murmured and hated herself for her transparency. She turned and walked because she could think of nothing more to say or do. Repetitive movement fed her mind just enough; it could race, and thoughts began clamoring, scratching, fighting to find a way out of this predicament.
The moment she reached the house she could call Harry Ruick, drag him out of bed and tell him of Rory’s threat. Preemptive strike. Perhaps it would do a little to predispose the chief ranger to believe her, but not much. It would be too easy to believe Rory did threaten her but not with a lie, threatened her with exposure. And why was she out walking alone with an eighteen-year-old boy after midnight anyway?
Harry didn’t know her well. They’d been acquainted only a few days and only in a professional capacity. What did he know of her personal quirks or kinks? Only that she was a widow and had been without a man for many years. Rory was a nice enough looking boy. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. “Jesus,” Anna heard herself whisper and closed her teeth against any further involuntary outbursts.
Ruick would call her boss, John Brown Brown. But Brown didn’t know her either. He’d call her field rangers in the Port Gibson district on the Natchez Trace. At least one of them, Anna knew, would like nothing better than to insinuate the worst. The case she’d recently finished on the Trace had been fraught with adolescent boys, several of whom she’d leaned on pretty hard. What might they be tempted to say to even up old scores? Regardless of the final scene, the play would be long, exhausting and she would not emerge unscathed. Right off, she would be slapped on the first plane back to Mississippi. Even if Ruick could believe Anna was blameless, he wouldn’t dare keep her around; not on the case, not on the DNA project. Unlike Rory, she was not a minor, not a civilian. There would be no need to treat her with kid gloves. “Jesus,” Anna whispered again, unable to help herself. “You’re a fucking genius, Rory. You know that?”
“Sorry,” he repeated sadly, and Anna wanted to strangle him.
He had seen her fear, heard it in muttered blasphemies. He knew he had won; she was on the defensive if not actually beaten outright.
Anna would go with that.
They had returned by a circuitous loop to the original fork in the road that led to Joan’s house. As they turned down it, Anna let her steps falter and dragged her hand down over her face. “I don’t feel so good,” she said. It was no great stretch to make it sound believable.
“We’re almost there.”
Anna considered trying to squeeze out a few tears, but she was so long out of practice she didn’t think she could pull it off. She comforted herself with the thought that it was too dark to get the full theatrical effect from them anyway.
Given Rory’s staunch admiration for those who took no flack, Anna wasn’t trying to win his pity or compassion. He was more likely to scorn her as weak, pathetic. That was just fine. All she needed to do was to keep him emotionally engaged a bit longer.
When they reached Joan’s driveway, Anna allowed herself a weary sigh. “God, I’m thirsty,” she whispered. “I’ve got to get a drink of water.”
“You go,” Rory said, hanging back. “I got to get to bed.”
“No.” Anna felt panic rise. “Please,” she said. “I won’t wake up Joan. We’ve got to talk. Just let me get a drink.”
“You’ll wake her,” Rory said. “It won’t do you any good.”
“No, I won’t,” Anna promised. The last thing she wanted was to wake Joan Rand and force Rory to play his hand. “My day pack. It’s just inside the door. I’ve got water in it. Just let me grab it. I won’t be a second. I won’t even go inside.” Indecision worked across Rory’s face. Revulsion was there too, though whether for her or for himself, Anna couldn’t be sure. “Please,” she pleaded. “Please. We need to talk.”
“I won’t change my mind,” Rory said.
Anna took that as permission and dashed lightly up the concrete steps. Careful not to vanish from Rory’s line of sight, she opened the door and leaned in. Her pack was behind the Barcalounger where she’d dumped it. Having rummaged briefly through its innards she emerged again into the night, pack in one hand, water bottle in the other.
“Here,” Anna said and led him to the garage door. “We can talk here. Joan’s room is at the other end of the house. She won’t hear us.”
“What if somebody sees us?” Rory asked.
He was getting skittish. Anna had to work fast. “Wouldn’t that suit your purposes to a T?” she asked acidly. The sudden change in the emotional weather put him off balance.
“I guess,” he faltered.
“Sit down,” Anna commanded, the pleases and the pleadings gone from her voice. “If you’re to blackmail me you better damn well get the terms straight.”
Rory didn’t sit but he hunkered down on his heels. Close enough.
“I don’t see the point—” he began.
“The point is you don’t want me, personally, asking questions about Les, that right, Rory?”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“And let me get this straight, you kind of caught me off guard back there. If I don’t stop investigating your dad, you’re going to accuse me of sexually harassing you? Even though I never laid a hand on you or spoke to you in a sexual way ever?”
“I’m sorry,” Rory said for the third time.
“That’s what you’ve threatened to do, isn’t it?” Anna pressed. He was fidgeting, looking over his shoulder. Any second he would spring to his feet and she would have lost what might be her only chance.
“That’s it,” Rory said. “And I’ll do it, too.”
Anna almost breathed a sigh of relief but stopped herself in time. “Even though I never behaved toward you improperly in any way,” she pushed for good measure.
“Even so. I’ll do it,” Rory declared firmly.
Anna had what she needed. She relaxed back against the garage door, the day pack tucked protectively under one arm and at long last took a drink of the water she’d made such a fuss about needing.
“What’s your dad got to hide that you’d sell your immortal soul to the devil to keep me from finding?” she asked seriously.
Rory sensed that something had changed but he didn’t know what. Pushing himself to his feet, he glanced around as if expecting the neatly trimmed shrubs to be suddenly bristling with policemen. Nothing stirred.
“You’re not afraid I’ll find out Les killed his wife are you?” Anna asked sharply. “Or not just that. What is it?”
“I’ve got to go,” Rory said. “I’ll do what I said I’d do. Leave it alone.” With that he loped off into the street toward the dorm he shared with a couple of other boys.
Anna stayed where she was and watched until he ran around a corner and a house swallowed him from sight. After that, she listened. For half a minute she could hear footfalls as he ran, then that was gone and the eerie stillness of the Glacier summer night reclaimed the neighborhood. Opening the pack, she located her pocket-sized tape recorder by its red running light. Without taking it out of the protective canvas pack, she pressed Rewind for several seconds, then Play.
“
Even so. I’ll do it,
” Rory’s voice came out of the small machine. The batteries were okay.