Anna Pigeon 10 Hunting Season by Nevada Barr

Author:Nevada Barr [Barr, Nevada]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction, Suspense, Mystery & Detective, Mystery Fiction, Women Sleuths, Pigeon; Anna (Fictitious character), Women park rangers, Mississippi, Natchez Trace Parkway
ISBN: 9780425188781
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2003-02-04T08:00:00+00:00

11

Seven o'clock: Anna had been up for two hours and had her uniform on for half that. Sleep had been so filled with dreams of dead bodies and empty graves it contained little in the way of rest, and she was anxious to get back to work. Interviewing people about possible sex crimes and sorting moldy bones might not be the most captivating of pastimes but at least it was something to do.

Seven o'clock in Mississippi, eight o'clock in New York. It was late enough to legally call her sister Molly. Her Park Avenue practice didn't open till ten but she was an early riser. Frederick Stanton, Anna's erstwhile lover, now Molly's husband, answered on the second ring.

In the thirteen months he'd been married to Molly, Frederick had been well trained in the Pigeon sisters' unique phone etiquette. After the briefest of in-law chitchat, he handed the phone over to Molly.

Connected to the world by the sound of her sister's voice, Anna unloaded the feelings she'd kept pent up in a skull that was coming to feel too small to house them. She didn't talk of the professional dramas that beset her: murder, vandalism, Thigpen's new leaf. That was business as usual, things she could discuss with Clintus, Barth or, in a pinch, even Randy Thigpen. Girl talk was what she needed. She told the story Molly'd heard a dozen times before: of Paul and the Mrs., frustrations, gossip, conflicted feelings. When she'd finished, there was silence, true silence, and Anna was grateful for it. Over the thirty years they'd been paying AT&T blood money for the privilege of staying close, most of the gaps in their conversations had been punctuated by the hush of cigarette smoke entering and exiting her sister's precious lungs. No more. Thigpen wasn't the only human being capable of change.

Because geography dictated that Anna and Molly's relationship be conducted primarily over the phone lines, Anna had learned to read her sister's silences the way others read body language. This one held a hint of exasperation and, even more alarming, a strong undercurrent of sympathy.

"Married is married," Molly said finally. "Statistically your chances of happiness are not good."

"Lies, damn lies, and statistics," Anna voiced a half-remembered quote from somewhere.

Molly laughed. A wonderful sound. The years of scotch whiskey and unfiltered Camels had given her voice a gravel quality that warmed the listener's soul like the embers of a dying fire. Molly was a top-notch psychiatrist, but Anna had always suspected it was her voice that prompted her patients to fork over the big bucks for a fifty-minute hour.

"He's getting a divorce," Anna said, hating herself for sounding hopeful, hating having to defend Paul Davidson.

"When?"

Anna said nothing.

Another silence ensued. Anna could feel sympathy and love leaking through the black distance and it made her squirm. Taco, sensing discomfort, came over to where she sat on the hall floor tethered to the wall by the phone cord and stuck his tongue in her free ear to comfort her.

"I understand that he's got a lot to lose," Molly said finally.

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