Shortly before the ten o'clock news, she devolved from stalking to outright snooping. Access with permission and no supervision to the home of one of the five people who could have had a hand-or a butt-in Frieda's demise: this was opportunity knocking loud and clear. Anna would have been a fool to ignore it. Or so she told herself as she poked through her generous hostess's private things.

The photos weren't hidden away like a dirty secret but proudly displayed on bedside table and mantel: Zeddie and Peter McCarty grinning out from hot-colored Polartec pullovers on a ski slope. Zed-die in back of Peter hugging his neck, her chin on his shoulder, behind them autumn leaves vivid and plentiful-St. Paul, most likely.

Did this flaunting of an adulterous relationship indicate that Zeddie knew it would soon be on the road to legit? Did she hope Mrs. McCarty might drop by to borrow a cup of carabiners, see the pictures, and run screaming for a divorce lawyer? Was it indicative of a sixties-like scorn for traditional values in keeping with Ms. Dillard's nuevo-hippie armpit hair? Or was it as simple as a girl wanting to show off her boyfriend and trusting that a twelve-hundred-mile separation from his significant other would keep her from getting caught?

The skiing picture was several years old, judging by the length of Zeddie's hair, a good six to eight inches shorter than she wore it now. The autumn leaves shot was more recent, not last autumn but this one. Zeddie had been with McCarty before and during his marriage. It wasn't unlikely she had plans to be around after. Would those plans include pushing several dump trucks' worth of dirt down on his bride? Earlier suspicions to the contrary, Sondra McCarty was nowhere to be found, and Zeddie had spent the night in her husband's arms. If Sondra had counted on the rock slide to solve her marital woes, she'd been sorely disappointed. Zeddie, on the other hand, had come out smelling like a rose.

Experience told Anna the odds against two unrelated murder plots hatched in a small space and over a short period of time were astronomical. Going on the assumption Frieda had been correct, and someone had pushed a rock down on her, then statistics dictated Frieda was the one and only target both times.

Unless Zeddie thought Sondra was down in the hole when she shoved the rock. Unless Sondra thought it was Zeddie when she pushed the rock. In the perilous midnight of a cave, a case of mistaken identity wasn't too far-fetched. But the second time someone had actually died: Frieda. Coincidence? Luck of the draw? Frieda and Anna had been easily the most vulnerable. Could the pusher-of-stones have been so cold as to write off extraneous casualties as the cost of doing business?

The mechanism of the crimes carried with it no gender connotations. Opportunistic, unprofessional sabotage-possibly even spur of the moment-was as likely to be attempted by a woman as a man. Like poison, it wasn't hands-on violence. If one was agile, no blood need spatter on one's person.

Circular thinking; it tired Anna and she shelved the line of thought for the time being.

Other than the photos, she found little of interest. Zeddie had submerged herself more or less completely into the NPS lifestyle. Wall pictures were of wilderness views and sports, magazines focused on wildlife and land management issues. Anna did find one outdated Allure stuffed down behind the toilet like a shameful bit of pornography. Even the most stalwart feminist was entitled to the occasional slip into girlishness.

She was back out on the patio, basking in the light from the stars and ignoring the increasing cold when the telephone began ringing. Though she'd spent less than forty-eight hours buried in Lechuguilla, the things of the world had become alien to her. The phone bell jarred, a mildly upsetting intrusion that had little to do with her. Any moment now the caller would hang up or the machine would answer. She turned back to the desert, a breathtaking vista separated from her only by a low cinder-block wall. Zeddie's house was on a rise; her patio looked down over the Carlsbad complex, across miles of silvered desert to the shadowy beak of El Capitan, forty miles away in Texas.

The ringing continued. Anna cursed Zeddie's fundamentalism. Even Ed Abbey would have an answering machine, for Christ's sake.

Stomping back into the house, she snatched the receiver from the cradle.

"Yeah?" Phone etiquette had deserted her.

"Anna?"

It had never crossed her mind that the call might be for her. Staying in another woman's house in another woman's park, she'd felt as isolated as if she'd borrowed a condo on Pluto.

"This is she," she said formally, phone etiquette returning with a vengeance. "May I ask who is calling?"

"It's Frederick."

Anna said nothing, both the English and the Spanish languages gone from her head.

"Frederick Stanton?" she blurted out after a painfully long silence.

"Come on, Anna, it hasn't been that long." His voice was rich with intimacy and humor.

Hers wasn't. "It has." Excitement, the sick variety, wallowed in her belly, mixing with anxiety, embarrassment, and cheap beer.

"I guess it has," he admitted, and she relaxed a degree or two. She knew she was spoiling for a fight: with him, with Mother Teresa, with anybody. This conversation was a tightrope she must walk, a high wire between the maudlin and the shrewish. Unarmed, in a stranger's sweats, she felt unequal to the task. She felt unequal to anything but a cup of cocoa and a Perry Mason rerun.

Groping for a neutral remark, she said, "How did you find me?"

"I'm the FBI guy, remember?"

"It's coming back to me." Self-preservation kept her from saying anything more.

"You were on the news," he said. "Coming out of that cave. They said Frieda didn't survive."

Anna had forgotten that Frederick had met Frieda the summer they worked a case together in Mesa Verde. A couple of emotions did brief battle with her. Guilt because he was a fellow mourner, and anger that he, who scarcely knew Frieda, had the unmitigated gall to presume on his brief acquaintance to reach out and touch Anna in her hiding place.

Guilt won. It was amazing that a Methodist childhood could be so completely eclipsed by four years at a Catholic high school.

"The anchor we'd tied into gave out. Frieda and I fell thirty feet. I landed on top of her, my knee on her windpipe. My weight crushed her larynx. Either she suffocated or I snapped her spine." Anna heard herself, angry and cruel, and knew she lashed out at both of them.

Herself for the deed, and Frederick for not loving Frieda sufficiently in the brief time he'd known her.

"Do you want me to beat you up about it?" he asked calmly.

That was a shrink question, a Molly question. Guilt vanished to be replaced by tears. Anger was still very much extant.

Anna took a deep pull on the beer she'd carried in with her. The problem wasn't that she'd consumed alcohol after abstaining so long, but that she hadn't consumed enough. Alcoholic thinking, came the words of a mentor she'd lost contact with. Eat my shorts, she told the memory, borrowing an epithet from Holden's accepted vocabulary list.

"I've had a real bad day," she said, and laughed. Laughter turned to tears. She hid them with silence. Zach, her husband, lover, soulmate, so many years dead she'd almost managed to lose count, would have known why that was funny. 1988, Broadway, Crimes of the Heart. Mom hanged herself in the cellar, along with the family cat. Why? She'd had a real bad day.

Feeling doomed to a lifetime of loneliness, Anna sucked down another draught of beer. Mentally, she removed a cold chisel from an imaginary toolbox. With it she chipped the tears from her face and voice.

"Thanks for calling, Frederick," she said evenly, and was rewarded by a brief frisson of pride. "I didn't know I'd made the news. I'd better call Molly and let her know I'm okay."