Hard Truth- Pigeon 13 by Nevada Barr Page B

around him.

"Why are we talking about mice?" he said with the lowest wattage of intensity she'd yet seen him use, which wasn't all that low by run-of-the-mill standards. "It has something to do with my kids, with Candace, doesn't it? Mice. Rocky. My kids. Something about Fern Lake Cabin."

He'd done the equation in record-breaking time. Either he was the X factor himself or a real whiz at brainteasers.

"We found thirteen dead mice there, nailed to the back of the out-house," Anna said. "They'd been nailed up alive." Mrs. Dwayne squeaked in a mouse-like fashion and Robert Proffit flinched. Anna was unsure whether the sudden cringing was due to mouse phobia or guilt.

"Who would do a thing like that to any one of God's creatures, how-ever lowly?"

The words rang hollow, gutted either by revulsion at the deed or because they were the oft-repeated platitude of a hypocrite.

"That's what we were wondering," she said as she rose. Proffit had had time to school his emotions and cool his febrile thought processes; she wasn't going to get any more out of him. At least not in this interview. Time had come to shake up the variables. Mr. Sheppard, with his quelling influence, couldn't be in two places at once. Since there was no legal way to send him out of his own chapel she decided to put him on edge. To Lorraine she said, "I think I'll go outside, get some air." The chief ranger nodded her permission.

Once outdoors Anna realized how desperately she did want to get some air. The windowless room, redolent with stifled dreams and isola-tion, had begun to close in on her, a sense of poison pressing in through the pores of her skin. Taking off her hat she combed her fingers through her thick hair. It was grown long enough to fall in her eyes and curl at the collar of her uniform shirt. She'd let it grow because Paul liked it. After years of independence it was good to have a man worth catering to now and again, especially if there was a payoff. With Paul, so far, the payoff had been pretty good. Higher praise than that, Anna chose not to voice, even in the sound-proofed rooms of her own skull. Hope and joy were double-edged things when their fulfillment depended upon another person.

Like a horse ridding itself of flies, Anna shook off the toxins that had settled on her skin. Breathing deep of air so dry and thin it burned her lungs, she wondered why life wasn't enough for most people, why they had to hide in cathedrals, mosques and temples and rehearse human-born fictions of something yet to come, practice infinite subtleties of castigation of flesh and mind, as if by limiting pleasure and freedom in their one guaranteed existence they might earn kudos in another, one from which no explorers had ever returned alive.

"Ranger Pigeon?"

The sound was but a whisper of air, soft as the voices one hears in the murmur of fast-moving streams. Anna might have thought she'd suffered a visitation but for the fact ghosts seldom called one by one's formal title.

Turning her face from the cleansing carcinogens of the sun, she replaced her hat. Mrs. Dwayne, looking older, frumpier and more care-worn in the uncompromising light of day, had followed her out.

"The girls aren't doing so good," she said in a whisper. A furtive look toward the chapel door confirmed Anna's suspicions of just who was not to overhear this tete-a-tete. "Especially Beth. She won't eat unless she eats with that crippled lady, and Mr. Sheppard doesn't like that even though I'm always with her. That other one's a woman doctor. They've not got husbands or kids, either one of them." This last was unquestion-ably a condemnation of Dr. Littleton's and Heath Jarrod's moral and spir-itual states. "But I keep on. Beth is so thin. And the dreams. Poor child tries to stay awake. I found her asleep on her feet in the doorjamb. She'd been walking so she wouldn't fall asleep. Alexis too. But not so bad. But then she has her dad for comfort."

The last was said with such bitterness, Anna