Burn- pigeon 16 by Nevada Barr Page B

beaten into leaves. The only other furniture in the room was a lawn chair, the kind Anna remembered from picnics as a kid, an aluminum tubing frame with woven plastic strips riveted on for the seat and back.
    Having opened the French doors wide, she blew out the lamp and dragged the patio chair to the edge of the balcony. When she'd first arrived she'd hazarded a step out from the doors, but the resulting creaks and groans had undermined any faith she might have had in its structural integrity.
    Settling in, the breeze stirring life into the rain-wet leaves of her bower till they twinkled with captured fragments of city lights, she dug her cell phone out of her backpack to call Paul. Her husband's home and work numbers were both on her contact list, but she didn't use it. Numbers important to her she kept sharp in memory because somewhere, sometime, technology always failed and one was left to rely on one's wits.
    Before she had punched in the last number, movement in the courtyard below caught her attention. Folding the phone shut, she stood and stepped silently to one side of the French doors. The tail end of the thunderstorms that had racketed around the city for the past few hours tossed tendrils of vines and stirred the leaves of the oak that sheltered several houses under its wide umbrella.
    Abandoning a phone call to her lover to watch in silence and darkness was natural to Anna. Fleetingly she wondered if that in itself was unnatural. Did other people habitually still themselves to listen and wait to see what or who walked unknown and uninvited into their camp? Anna's watchfulness wasn't born of fear, or at least it wasn't most of the time. It was because she loved watching creatures--deer, grizzlies, mountain lions, foxes, jackrabbits--in their natural habitat. At ease in their perceived privacy, they would startle and run if she intruded, so she'd learned to be still.
    Relaxed, breathing gently, she waited to see if the marauding neighbor cat had come in to hunt. It could even be a raccoon. Absurd as it seemed, raccoons did occasionally find their way into the gardens in the Quarter.
    A slim shadow slipped out from the walkway on the far side of the house. Jordan, probably out for a smoke. Anna was about to leave him to it when he looked furtively up at her darkened windows; not a casual glance or a voyeuristic stare but a hunch-shouldered, head-ducking peek that would have landed him the role of Uriah Heep if she were holding auditions for David Copperfield.
    He didn't see her; that was obvious by the way his eyes, dark smudges in a pale oval face, darted quickly from her balcony. Determining he was unobserved, he hurried across the courtyard with quick catlike steps. Cradled in his left arm was a parcel wrapped in white paper or cloth. As quietly as the feral cat he put her in mind of, he turned down Geneva's side of the house. Another iron door at the end of the alley on his side opened to the sidewalk. Anna had seen it from the street; separate entrances provided a nice bit of privacy for both landlady and tenant. Given he didn't need to cross by both Anna's and Geneva's glass houses to come or go, why creep down Geneva's alley in the dead of night?
    Anna drifted back from the windows and padded quickly down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor. She wasted no time trying to be sneaky; each step had its own complaint. Traversed they sounded like a chorus of very old women levering themselves out of overstuffed chairs.
    Reaching the front of the cottage, she stopped. The panes of glass in the door were wavy with age and fogged with grime but clear enough to let her see a grown man less than twenty feet away. The only reason Anna could think of for a nocturnal foray into the landlady's territory was mischief. Halfway down the skinny ribbon of path, another set of French doors let into Geneva's kitchen. She never used them. Her aunt had nailed them shut for reasons she'd taken with her to the crypt. Jordan