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The water was unknotting her hair, unweaving the copper and the silver strands from the single braid she kept them locked in and spreading them around her shoulders like seaweed.
Ophelia drowned, A
A dead woman.
What was left of Sheila Drury had been wrapped in garbage bags. The park, bless its optimistic little heart, didn't boast a body bag. The green shiny bundle that had once been the Dog Canyon Ranger had been loaded onto a Stokes litter- a rolling wire-mesh stretcher-and trundled, carried, and wrestled down the stone-filled canyons.
Paul had been consummately professional. A
A high percentage of National Park Service employees were summer seasonals. Winter found Guadalupe Mountains down to a skeleton staff. Most of the seasonals were highly educated. A number had advanced degrees. Some had families to support. Yet they left jobs and homes and husbands and wives for the privilege of living in a dormitory and working for six dollars and fifty-four cents an hour, no retirement, no benefits, and rent deducted automatically.
Many hoped, one day, to become permanent but the openings were few and closely guarded by tangled thickets of red tape. A
Craig Eastern's situation was a little different. He was a herpetologist on a two-year detail from the University of Texas at El Paso. A
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Ma
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The bath was growing tepid. A
Cheryl Light was new to the park, entering on duty only a couple of weeks before. Stocky-around five-foot-five and maybe a hundred and fifty pounds-with shoulder-length permed hair. A
Usually Cheryl laughed a lot. The kind of laugh that made others laugh too, even before they knew what the joke was. There'd been no laughter that day.
Cheryl had carried Drury's pack and, over the rough spots, one end of the Stokes litter. The woman was powerful but that's not what stuck in A
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If Cheryl's kindness was legitimate, A
"I think too much to be kind," she excused herself to a disinterested cat. Had Cheryl found a way to laugh about it by now? Though she and Craig and Ma
Karl Johnson, the man who tended Guadalupe's stock, had been with the Park Service for fifteen years yet he'd never been promoted higher than GS-5, the grade of a begi
And the death of Sheila Drury, was it finished? A
That had been about it. The Feds would have it now-the park was federal land. But they would rubber-stamp it, A
Everyone would be surprised, here in the "wilderness," that lion kills didn't happen more often. "More often," A
It was she they had delivered the body to. Looking more like Aunt Bea than the keeper of the dead, she'd been waiting with the ambulance in the McKittrick Visitors Center parking lot. She'd ridden with Paul as he'd driven the body away.
No more Sheila Drury.
And, one day, no more A
The front door opened, then clicked softly shut again. Piedmont slunk away to hide under the kitchen table. A
Rogelio.
Now, for a while, there would be other things to think about.
"Ana." A tap on the bathroom door and it swung inward. A