He raised it to his shoulder.

"Judy, honey, step away from Anna. You can relax, I've got it covered. Go ahead and lose the gun, Judy. Let me do this."

Judith Pierson half turned to look back at Darden. The death's head was still upon her, skin pulled tight across her cheekbones and away from her teeth. "If you want something done right . . ." she began, her finger tightening on the trigger.

Then half her throat disappeared in mist. In silence her body fell backward. Her arms opened and the gun fell from her hand. Anna s.n.a.t.c.hed Helena as Judith went under the water.

"Catch her," Darden cried, but Anna did not give a d.a.m.n about Judith.

Darden dropped the high-powered rifle and walked into the river until it was too deep for his feet to touch bottom. Anna watched him flounder, trying to keep his head above water, and realized why he'd stayed on the far bank. The man couldn't swim.

He had saved her life, he had saved Helena's life. Anna felt no compunction to save his. As he sputtered and gasped and flung his arms wildly, she supposed, had she two good arms and no baby to take care of, she'd probably fish him out just to keep her credit good. Things being what they were, she excused herself.

Sirens and flashing blue lights came down the incline from the direction of Lajitas. Darden must have called somebody. Anna wanted it to be rangers, not police, wanted it to be Paul. Three vehicles pulled up behind the SUVs and people grew up around them, seemingly woven from blue lights and darkness.

Oddly uninterested in the newcomers, Anna turned her attention back to Darden White. The water was over his head but not by much and grew shallower quickly. He did not drown but caught up with the body of his mayor and pulled her and himselfeer and h onto a gravelly sandbar several feet from the riverbank. Legs splayed on the sand, Darden gathered the corpse of Judy Pierson onto his lap, supporting the nearly severed head the way a mother supports the head of a child too young to do it herself.

Judith's face was caught in the coming flashlight beams and Anna saw she was young again. The hatred had gone and she looked almost childlike, almost peaceful in Darden's arms. In that moment Anna knew what the love between them was. It was the love of a father for an only daughter and an orphan for the only father she'd ever known. Holding Helena, cried-out and hiccoughing in the crook of her good arm, Anna turned her back on the two figures on the sandbar. Whatever Judith was, whatever she had done or tried to do, however complicit Darden may or may not have been in it, the love and grief was real and Anna gave it the respect it deserved.

A man broke away from the cl.u.s.ter of lights she waded toward, skidded down the bank and ran splashing into the Rio Grande till it was deep enough he could swim.

Paul.

An old hymn Anna had heard in Mississippi played through her mind. I'll be waiting on the far side banks of Jordan, I'll be sitting drawing pictures in the sand, and when I see you coming I will rise up with a shout and come running through the shallow water reaching for your hand.

Anna began to run.

FORTY.

The Rio Grande River, where it flowed between Mexico and Texas, had seen so much blood the addition of Anna's and Judith's didn't leave even a ghost of violence on the water. Leaning back against the center seat and pulling her legs up, Paul, Chrissie and the current doing the work for her, Anna tilted her face to the sun. The wild country didn't harbor memories the way manmade places did. Wind didn't retain stench or perfume from days past, water and sand and scrub shed their old skins and drew on new with each sunrise.

There were places that haunted Anna: the avenue in New York City where her first husband, Zach, had been killed, the nursing home where her mother had died, theaters where she'd seen plays, buildings that were no longer there and buildings still standing.

No place in the unpeopled lands haunted her. Though Isle Royale had been the background for an incident that had shaken her to her core, when she returned to the island, it would be new again.

So it was with the river. More than once in the last few days she had believed she was going to die there or be left with memories that would hound her back to the broken place where she'd been when she left Colorado. Yet the river could hold no ghosts; all of it was living and moving; there were no dusty attics or dank cellars in nature. Even caves were alive, growing, changing, renewing, becoming.

The gunshot she'd suffered had done amazingly little damage. Judith was shooting small-caliber bullets and the one that struck Anna pa.s.sed through the flesh just under her armpit, missing bones and vital organs. The park's EMTs patci...hed her up and she'd been driven eighty miles to Alpine in the ambulance. A doctor there cleaned and closed the wound. She had been spared even a moment in a hospital, a place she dreaded.

Helena had gone with them but she had not returned to Big Bend the following day. She was taken to the hospital. The baby was not injured but she had suffered rough treatment and the doctor felt she should be placed in the neonatal care unit for observation. When Anna and Paul went to the hospital the following morning to say their good-byes, Charles Pierson was there.

Gone was the debonair facade; he had lost weight and aged. Grief and the shock of the deaths, most especially of the woman he loved, the mother of his child, had carved lines in his face that would only deepen with time. Charles had been sitting by the ba.s.sinet where his daughter lay, holding one of her little hands with thumb and forefinger. There was no doubting that this little girl was the light of his life, at the moment the only light. Helena would be loved and cherished. Charles named her Eleanor Helena Pierson for her mother and for Anna, who had kept her alive.

Anna was satisfied.

Darden White was in a legal no-man's-land, and would be until the investigation was complete, but it looked as if he had no connection to the deaths of Carmen, Lori and Eleanor. It was he, not Judith, who had placed Eleanor at the Lajitas resort hotel. Judith had wanted him to kill her but, he said, he'd believed the mayor to be venting her rage, not plotting murder.

He'd been wrong.

Kevin, his subordinate, had been co-opted by Judith and convinced to dump Charles's girlfriend in the river. It was unclear whether or not Judith told him to follow the river and shoot the woman if she survived. Darden insisted she hadn't known and, when she'd found out, she'd demanded Kevin be fired. Kevin had been arrested and was waiting arraignment in El Paso.

The two impostors who tried to s.n.a.t.c.h Helena from the Martinezes' home had not been killed. They'd been tracked down through the car rental agency in Midland. They told police Judith hired them to kidnap the child but not to harm it. Whether that was true or whether at that point Judith had decided to kill Charles's child would never be known.

"Hard to believe this is the same river, isn't it?" Cyril asked from the other canoe. "This is like the Lazy River instead of the one we rafted with Carmen."

It pleased Anna to hear in her voice the simple joy of being out of doors, the easy way she could say the murdered river guide's name. The three surviving college students had recovered with the natural resilience of youth. There would be nightmares, but they would be able to tell their tale not a mere three times for medicinal purposes but hundreds of times throughout the length of their lives, which Anna hoped would be long and happy.

Since the killings the kids had spent their time scouring the banks of the river to the east of Santa Elena Canyon in the hope of finding Easter. The quest, though unfulfilled, had given them back their sense of control in the mysterious way being in nature bong in nalows the chaff off of humanity.

It had been Steve who suggested they rent canoes and finish the float trip that had been so violently aborted. For all of them it was the last day of their vacation. The word closure had been bandied about, but it wasn't closure they'd set out seeking, it was continuance. Life went on and they would go on as well.

The canoe trip through the canyon had been blissfully uneventful. They had floated and chattered like magpies, dreamed in silence and picnicked near Fern Canyon. The rockslide was an easy chute in low water, enough of a rush to be fun but without so much as a hint of the power it had shown during the flash flooding.

Anna was back in tune with the wild places but it wasn't that which had changed her. And she was changed; she could sense the abyss that she'd been running from was gone. There was a sorrow there, regret for her sins and the sins of others, for things done and undone that brought such pain into being, but the hopelessness had been banished. Helena had done that for her. That she had been instrumental in saving that spark of life and, to her awe, that Helena had been such a strong, determined little person that she hadn't allowed the poor treatment the world had greeted her with to kill her, had evened the scales. It was okay that people were monstrous. It was okay that people were G.o.dlike. Anna was content to have fallen ever so slightly on the side of the G.o.ds this time around.

She was half asleep when the shouting started.

"It's Easter! Look, there on the Mexican bank. It's Easter," Cyril was yelling.

"You've chased after so many Mexican cows that they won't come near the river," her brother said. "I bet you will be responsible for the whole of the agrarian economy collapsing because cows will thirst to death rather than come near the water."

"No, this time it is," Cyril insisted.

Chrissie laughed. "It always is. They all look like Easter. They're cows. They all look like cows."

"No they don't," Cyril said. "I'd know Easter. I'd know her in a herd."

"The last 'Easter' you knew had gonads the size of Staten Island," her brother said without rancor.

"We have to stop," Cyril stated.

Chrissie moaned. "We are a mile from the takeout. I'm tired. Can't you just order a steak for dinner and be done with the cow thing for this lifetime?"

"It's Easter." Cyril began paddling for sh.o.r.e and Steve, in the back of the canoe, sighed and steered toward the right bank. They'd floated free of the canyon and were on the flatlands where the park ended and Mexico began. Along the water, owners of livestock had built pens of sticks and wire that came into the river far enough the animals could drink without escaping. It was to the latest of these ramshackle corrals that Cyril paddled with such fierce determination.

Anna pulled herself upright. The long day had brought the ache back to her injured shoulder, but she didn't mind. The easy pain of knitting flesh was rea.s.suring in the way the desert and the mountains were.

Four scrofulous-looking cows stood dispiritedly beneath scrub trees no more prosperous than they.

Cyril and Steve beached their canoe in thick black mud liberally mixed with cow manure.

"I'm not getting out," Chrissie announced. This once, Anna was with Chrissie.

"Me neither," she said.

"That makes three on the neither end of things," Steve added. Paul laughed and remained uncommitted.

Cyril hopped into the muck. The first stride the stuff sucked her river sandal off her foot. Undeterred, she fished it out and slathered it back on a foot as vile and muddy as the shoe. "Be careful," Paul called as Cyril threaded through loose barbed wire so rusty and filthy it would inject lockjaw directly into the bloodstream if given the opportunity.

The cows scattered into the scrub.

"Nooo," Cyril cried. "Easter, it's me. Here, Easter, Easter, Easter."

"It's not a cat," Chrissie said. "I don't think that's how you're supposed to call cows. Come on. Let's go."

A bit of the old Chrissie whine was back and that, too, Anna was happy to hear. The natural orders reestablishing themselves. Maybe the physicists were wrong and the universe wasn't in a long downhill slide toward chaos.

Cyril's heartfelt coaxing resulted in a crashing as the cows fled deeper into the scrub.

"Come on," Steve said. "Easter's probably getting fat on somebody's spread in Louisiana by now."

Cyril crawled back through the wire and began pushing the canoe free of its muddy berth.

"Hey," Paul called. He was pointing to the shadows under the stubby trees. A cow had come back.

Cyril stopped what she was doing and turned slowly toward the wire enclosure. No one made a sound. After a moment's hesitation the cow stepped out of the shadows and lumbered to the middle of the pen several feet from the edge of the water.

"It's Easter," Cyril whispered.

"It's thirsty," her brother whispered back.

"She's come because I called her," Cyril returned.

Steve didn't say anything. osay anytThe cow said it for him. Instead of coming toward Cyril's now-outstretched hand, it came warily down to the water and drank.

"Not Easter," Cyril said sadly.

"Look at the horns," Paul told her.

Blue threads, the color of the towel they had used to protect the raft from Easter's horns, were duct-taped to the base of one horn.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

My deepest thanks to Bill Wellman, Raymond Skiles, Mark Spier and David Ekowitz for their kindness, generosity and knowledge, but mostly for their love of and service to the national parks. For humor, inspiration, att.i.tude and knowledge of the river, I will always be grateful to Marcos Peredes, Big Bend's river ranger. And, with great affection and fond memories, I thank our boatman, Carmen.

ALSO BY NEVADA BARR.

FICTION.

Winter Study.

Hard Truth

High Country.

Flashback

Hunting Season

Blood Lure

Deep South.

Liberty Falling

Blind Descent