Endangered Species by NEVADA BARR

Author:NEVADA, BARR,
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER Eighteen

ANNA WAS FEELING bereft. The guys, including the usually rational Al, had gone jogging. Anna had escaped, though not unscathed. Gender and age had been touched upon with good-natured ridicule. Rick had been closest to the mark; Anna wasn’t so much lazy as genetically skinny and congenitally opposed to profitless exertion. Dijon had offered to chase her with a girl-hating reptile of some sort to give the exercise a point. Anna had declined his generous offer and slipped away to the ranger station for an uninterrupted evening with AT&T.

Neither Molly nor Frederick was home.

She’d called both three times over the past hour and three times had hung up without leaving a message. A message was a commitment. If she called again afterward it would prove she was desperate, or worse, pathetic. The etiquette of phone tag had grown more complex with the advent of the answering machine.

Anna broke off another chunk of a Nestle Crunch and chewed it slowly. Lights off, she sat in the chief ranger’s office, her feet on his agonizingly tidy desk. It wasn’t merely cleared of debris; everything was lined up in precise rows, like men on a chessboard: tape dispenser, stapler, electric pencil sharpener, each a careful two inches apart and square with the blotter. Lined up on the opposite side of the desk, the opponents faced off in the same two-inch formation: stamp dispenser, pencil holder, paper clip magnet.

Alone in the center of a rectangle of unmarked green, Anna’s candy wrapper looked craven, a malicious act of vandalism. Finishing the last of the chocolate, she folded the leftover paper neatly and set it two inches from the pencil sharpener.

Squat and colorless in a faint spill of moonlight, the phone sat like a malevolent toad at the edge of the desk. Years of isolation, of distance from family, friends, and lovers, had created in Anna a love/hate relationship with telephones. They were often her only contact with the people she cared about, and at the same time not only pointed up how fragile that connection was but, she was sure, in some arcane way managed to warp the very relationships it made possible.

Perhaps the plastic contained some dormant virus that came to life when pressed long enough against the warmth of human flesh. Once revived it would be in a unique position to penetrate the brain orally or aurally, causing a chemical imbalance that brought on obsessive calls to empty houses, fights with sweethearts, and long silences costing more than ten cents a minute.

The clock over the door insisted it was just nine p.m. She would wait another half hour. If nobody was home by then, she’d give it up as a lost cause.

Tilting back in Norman’s chair, she cast about for something with which to amuse herself. Tidy men were not particularly entertaining, no flotsam or jetsam to fiddle about in. Normal men, men who didn’t clean out their wallets but transferred the whole mess every few years when a new wallet appeared under the Christmas tree, carried their history in their back pockets.

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