Borderline by Nevada Barr Page A

water. Steering the cow like a sled, Anna kicked to shore. Farther downstream, she saw Lori then Cyril, one on either side of the river, emerging from the water. Lori stumbled as if she were blind, and let Carmen, who had her by the upper arm, lead her.
    Steve was okay, Anna was sure. He’d waved as he floated past her and the cow. There was no sign of Chrissie or Paul. At this point, Anna didn’t care a whole hell of a lot about Miss Chrissie. Had it been a choice between rescuing her or Easter, Anna would have had a tough decision to make.
    Paul had to be upstream; Anna would have seen him if he’d passed her coming down. A horrifying image of the raft turning turtle, sucked down and pinned by the river, Paul trapped beneath, loosened her bowels.
    “Have you seen Chrissie?” Carmen called as Anna pulled enough of Easter from the water that the cow could breathe and would probably not get washed away.
    “No. I’m heading back.” Pushing the wet hair from her face, Anna trotted up the bank toward the jumble of boulders that shouldered both sides of the river where the slide provided such fine entertainment for the tourists.
    A scream stopped her.
    “Chrissie’s alive,” Anna said sourly.
    Before she had to leave a child screaming for help to check on her husband, Paul floated into sight and crawled gasping from the river.
    “Raft’s gone,” he said. “Easter got a horn in it. It and all the gear are gone.”
    Anna met him at the water’s edge and started helping him off with his life vest. Guilt ate at her that she hadn’t stayed to help, hadn’t somehow made it back, that she’d floated cheerily downstream steering a cow while Paul hung back trying to save their gear.
    The scream came again. In the instant Anna had laid eyes on Paul all thought of Chrissie had flown.
    “Chrissie,” Anna said before Paul could ask.
    Chucking the vest, he began to run down the shoreline toward the noise, Anna and Carmen on his heels. “Stay here,” she shouted at Cyril, Steven and Lori as they passed them. Cyril nodded. She was in the process of untying the cow’s legs. Apparently, she valued the life of Easter slightly more than she did Chrissie’s. Lori stood next to her, so close she was in the way, doing and saying nothing.
    “I’ll go with you,” Steve said, and none of them argued. He loped out to join them, his long thin legs showing the ungainly grace of a colt’s.
    A smaller slide of boulders marked the end of their beach. Anna and Carmen, more agile than the men, were up and over them first. Chrissie was on the other side. Apparently unhurt, she stood near the water by a strainer woven of tree branches and reeds. When she saw them she pointed at the strainer and screamed again.
    “Chrissie’s always had a way with the English language,” Steve said as he slid down the rock and landed lightly beside Anna. Paul landed with a thump and a grunt.
    Anna was tired and, seeing no blood gushing from Chrissie’s mouth, she walked the last ten yards to where the girl stood, gawping like a landed trout.
    “What you got?” Anna asked easily, expecting a snake or drowned nutria.
    “There,” Chrissie managed a word with her point.
    “God dammit!” Anna breathed. A woman’s body was tangled in the branches, her face only inches above the water, her dress washed up, exposing her legs and her very pregnant belly.

NINE
    T he strainer had formed between two rocks, one on the shore and one fifteen feet out into the water. An uprooted tree had been caught between the boulders and served as the net that caught smaller debris until a dangerous tangle of limbs and twigs and reeds and garbage was created.
    The cause of Chrissie’s screaming was nearly dead center, the current holding her fast to the strainer. Her hair was long and black and so intertwined with the nest of debris that had seined her from the Rio Grande that she seemed part of it, the human face of a nature god with the swollen belly of rebirth mocked by