The spurt of fear was not enough. They were still talking.
"Like I said-" Anna began.
"No," Rory cut her off. "You. You leave him alone." The fingers tightened on her arm. "You're different. You pry and pry and wriggle into people's heads. You don't just ask what they've done. You watch and you wait like some fast little snake that looks asleep. Then there's that little tongue flicking out because you smell something. You pry into stuff that's none of your affair. That has nothing to do with anything. Nothing to do with this."
Rory was being his own pep squad, letting his own oratory whip him up like a speaker inflaming a mob of one.
Anna decided to break into it before he worked himself into trouble. "That's enough," she said quietly. With another boy she might have yelled, a verbal slap to get his attention, but she'd seen Rory with Harry Ruick. The boy definitely had a problem with authority. "Let go of my arm," she said just as softly. "I bruise easily and it is swimsuit season."
Either the tone or the absurdity got through and he let go. She began walking, glad to be leaving the spectral machines of the maintenance yard.
"Time we headed back," she said. "I don't know about you, but it's way past my bedtime." No longer curious as to what Rory wanted from her, Anna firmly dropped the subject.
After fifty feet of consideration, Rory picked it up again. The heat his speech had lent his words was gone. The icy edge that replaced it was far more alarming. "If you don't lay off Les and just do the bear thing or whatever, you'll be sorry. Real sorry."
The clichéd threat should have sounded childish, empty, but it didn't. No hollow undertone spoke of desperation or grasping at straws. Rory had something concrete in mind. Anna felt it with every chilled ounce of marrow in her bones.
Rory had missed his opportunity to thrash her. They walked now between two rows of neat houses, petunias, a riot of color in the light of day, spilling black as tar from window boxes. What could a high school boy do to her? Slash her tires? Leave burning dog droppings on her doorstep? Spray-paint "fuck you" on her garage door? If Rory planned a physical threat all she need do was report him to Harry and he would be shipped out of the park immediately with a ranger escort to the airport. Any threat he made would end the same way. Anna was grown up, connected. He was a child. He must know that.
"What will you do if I don't stop investigating Les?" she asked, genuinely curious.
"I'll tell everybody you sexually harassed me," he said evenly.
Anna laughed.
"Pressured me," he went on. "That you used your position to coerce me into having sex. That you seduced me and made me do things I'm ashamed of."
Anna quit laughing. She quit walking. So did Rory. Together, face to face, they stood in the middle of the empty street. A horrible, gnawing anxiety began eating Anna from the inside. Rory had found the right threat. An accusation like that would get her, not him, shipped from the park. It wouldn't matter if it was true or not. It wouldn't matter if Harry Ruick believed it or not. The mere accusation would be enough. If Rory pressed charges, life as she knew and enjoyed it would dissolve into smirks, sneers, depositions, lawyers. Before it was over she'd be beggared emotionally and financially. The park service might back her, but they'd be running scared. Anxious to cut her loose and save themselves.
Even if they knew it wasn't true.
Rory's face changed and she realized she'd been fool enough to let her fear show on her face, writ so large a callow boy could read it by the meager light of a quarter moon.
"You're joking," she said, and, "It won't work." Both statements were untrue.
"When I was in junior high school this teacher got sent to prison for it," he said.
Anna remembered the case. It had created a feeding frenzy in the media. In the blink of her mind's eye, she saw herself with a hundred microphones shoved in her face. Bile rose in her throat. She gulped it back. Anger and fear mixed such a powerful potion in her blood she could feel the shaking from the inside out. Run, cry, smash the boy's face, rant, beg; the need to do these things simultaneously and at the top of her lungs held her as paralyzed as she'd been in the dream of the bear. This time her brain was paralyzed as well. She couldn't think.
Helpless. This was what it felt like, a squirming, raging fly-like frustration caught in the fingers of an evil, wing-pulling boy.
"You wouldn't actually do that," Anna said hopefully.
"I'm sorry," Rory said and the shred of hope vanished. Had he been mean or vindictive she might have had a chance. Rory believed what he did to be the regrettable but necessary means to some greater end.
"Shit," Anna murmured and hated herself for her transparency. She turned and walked because she could think of nothing more to say or do. Repetitive movement fed her mind just enough; it could race, and thoughts began clamoring, scratching, fighting to find a way out of this predicament.
The moment she reached the house she could call Harry Ruick, drag him out of bed and tell him of Rory's threat. Preemptive strike. Perhaps it would do a little to predispose the chief ranger to believe her, but not much. It would be too easy to believe Rory did threaten her but not with a lie, threatened her with exposure. And why was she out walking alone with an eighteen-year-old boy after midnight anyway?
Harry didn't know her well. They'd been acquainted only a few days and only in a professional capacity. What did he know of her personal quirks or kinks? Only that she was a widow and had been without a man for many years. Rory was a nice enough looking boy. It wasn't out of the realm of possibility. "Jesus," Anna heard herself whisper and closed her teeth against any further involuntary outbursts.
Ruick would call her boss, John Brown. But Brown didn't know her either. He'd call her field rangers in the Port Gibson district on the Natchez Trace. At least one of them, Anna knew, would like nothing better than to insinuate the worst. The case she'd recently finished on the Trace had been fraught with adolescent boys, several of whom she'd leaned on pretty hard. What might they be tempted to say to even up old scores? Regardless of the final scene, the play would be long, exhausting and she would not emerge unscathed. Right off, she would be slapped on the first plane back to Mississippi. Even if Ruick could believe Anna was blameless, he wouldn't dare keep her around; not on the case, not on the DNA project. Unlike Rory, she was not a minor, not a civilian. There would be no need to treat her with kid gloves. "Jesus," Anna whispered again, unable to help herself. "You're a fucking genius, Rory. You know that?"
"Sorry," he repeated sadly, and Anna wanted to strangle him.
He had seen her fear, heard it in muttered blasphemies. He knew he had won; she was on the defensive if not actually beaten outright.
Anna would go with that.
They had returned by a circuitous loop to the original fork in the road that led to Joan's house. As they turned down it, Anna let her steps falter and dragged her hand down over her face. "I don't feel so good," she said. It was no great stretch to make it sound believable.
"We're almost there."
Anna considered trying to squeeze out a few tears, but she was so long out of practice she didn't think she could pull it off. She comforted herself with the thought that it was too dark to get the full theatrical effect from them anyway.
Given Rory's staunch admiration for those who took no flack, Anna wasn't trying to win his pity or compassion. He was more likely to scorn her as weak, pathetic. That was just fine. All she needed to do was to keep him emotionally engaged a bit longer.
When they reached Joan's driveway, Anna allowed herself a weary sigh. "God, I'm thirsty," she whispered. "I've got to get a drink of water."