Father And Child Reunion Part 2 (36 Hours Serieal Book 6.2)

by Christine Flynn

  “There were so many,” she told him, sounding bewildered at the task of sorting through all the faces. “Mom had friends and business acquaintances I’d never met.” She pushed her fingers through her hair, trying to think. “It just seemed as if people were dropping off casseroles and flowers from the moment I got back from the hospital.”

  “Flowers?”

  Not sure why he thought that extraordinary, her voice went flat. “People do that when someone dies, Rio. Send flowers, I mean.”

  His bland expression mirrored hers. “But how did they do that? There were power lines and trees down everywhere, remember? Emergency vehicles could barely get through. And the businesses that weren’t damaged were closed because there was no electricity.”

  In other words, of the half-dozen florists in town, none had been delivering that day.

  “Maybe people were bringing them from their gardens,” she suggested. “I really don’t remember there being many that first day. The only reason I remember any at all was because someone brought a huge bowl of gardenias. I had to put it on the patio table before we went to bed that night because the scent was so overpowering.”

  Her words sent up an immediate red flag, but Rio kept his expression even. “Did you see who brought them?”

  Eve shook her head, trying to get through the haze that clouded those days. “Millicent must have answered the door. Or maybe one of the women from the church. I just remember thinking that I’d never be able to stand the smell of gardenias again.”

  “Do you know what happened to the bowl?”

  Eve had been watching his clasped hands. Strong, steady, still. She envied him his calm. Now, puzzled by his question, she glanced up. “It’s out in the garage, in a box of old vases and things to be donated to the thrift shop. Why?”

  “Was there a card with it?”

  “I’m sure there wasn’t. The florist cards all have the type of arrangement or plant written on the back of them. We did that when someone would bring something to the house, and the funeral home did it for arrangements that were sent there. I just finished the thank-you notes for all the remembrances last week, and I know I never came across anything for those flowers.” She cocked her head. “You didn’t answer me,” she reminded him. “Why are you so interested in this?”

  Rio figured that any fingerprints had probably already been obliterated. The bowl would have been handled by heaven only knew who by now, not to mention washed and wiped clean.

  “It’s a complete long shot,” he told her, refusing to get her hopes up. “But I’m going to mention this to Stone. He might want to have that bowl picked up. Don’t handle it anymore. Just leave it where it is.” In the meantime, he was going to pay Millicent Atwell a visit.

  “What’s this all about, Rio?”

  “Ask Stone. Okay?”

  She could have pointed out that one of the reasons she was answering his questions was because he’d agreed to give her information so she wouldn’t have to bother the police for it. But she had the feeling this was one of those details he’d promised his friend he wouldn’t discuss, and she knew Rio would never break his word. His basic sense of integrity wouldn’t allow it.

  Because she respected him for that, she wouldn’t ask any more questions. Except, maybe, one. “I know it frustrates you when I can’t remember things about those days, but has anything I’ve told you been any help at all?”

  She wouldn’t have asked had she not been feeling so powerless just then. But she knew the second the words were out of her mouth that she was seeking reassurance Rio couldn’t give.

  “Never mind,” she murmured, letting him off with a smile that didn’t quite work. “I’ll ask the detective. Would you hand me those pictures, please?”

  It wasn’t her request that had Rio hesitating. It was the thought of Stone or some other officer offering her the reassurance she so badly needed. Not that Stone would do anything other than talk to her.

  The thought didn’t help. Palming the stack of colorful photos, he slid them across the gleaming wood surface. He was battling enough where this woman was concerned without having to admit to jealousy.

  He started to hand the pictures over, but when her fingers closed around the opposite ends, he didn’t let go. “Do you want me to stay and help you with this?”

  She looked down at their hands, thumbs grasping from the top, fingers from below, contact separated by the smiling face of Hal at thirteen.

  “Why would you want to?”

  “It’s not that big a deal, Eve.”

  She didn’t buy the disclaimer. “It is to me,” she insisted, no longer willing to speculate. “Why are you helping me the way you have been? Don’t get me wrong,” she hurried on, loath to let him misunderstand. “I appreciate everything you’ve done. But you don’t have to help me so you can spend time with Molly. You have to know that.”

  “I do.”

  “Then, why?”

  Because I know you need to do this for your mother, but I can’t stand the thought of you doing it all alone. Because you haven’t accepted anyone else’s help, but you’ve accepted mine, and I like the way that makes me feel. “Because you’re my daughter’s mother.” The faintest hint of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “And it seemed the easiest way for us to get to know each other again.”

  She should have known he was just being practical. Still, she was grateful. For what he’d done, and for what he was doing now.

  “You can put those in that big box over there,” she quietly said, letting go of the snapshots. “That’s the one for Hal.” She turned to the pictures she’d been looking at when she’d heard Rio at the door. It was already easier with him here. “I really wanted him to do this with me.”

  “Then, why don’t you put it off for a while? Maybe he’ll have time later.”

  “Time isn’t really his problem,” she returned, pushing birthday party pictures toward him so he could divide them up. “He just doesn’t want to go through these. It’s too hard. But I’d hoped he’d come, anyway,” she continued as Rio, seeming to know exactly what she’d wanted, started picking out similar poses and putting them into two separate piles. “With him being so much older, we weren’t particularly close when we were growing up. I’d thought that going through these together might be good for us both.”

  She reached into the box at her elbow. “Hal could have told me more about our oldest brother,” she said, laying a photo on the table between them and pointed to the oldest child. “Roy ran away from home when I was two, so I don’t remember him at all. He was named after my father, so I guess he’s really Roy, Jr.”

  Rio picked up the photo, a Polaroid that had been taken in someone’s yard. Three blond kids faced the camera. The only one with a smile was the tiny little girl with huge blue eyes. The boys, one narrow-shouldered and thin, the other taller and beginning to show some muscle, looked as if they wanted only to get the shot over with.

  Rio was already aware of Eve’s older sibling. He’d come across a reference to him while searching the newspaper’s archives for possible enemies of Olivia. She had spoken about her runaway son when she’d first announced her candidacy for office. Her own circumstances had prompted much of her interest in helping other women who were raising families on their own.

  He mentioned the article to Eve and offered to get her a copy. She answered with a quiet “Thank you,” and took the picture back to study it herself.

  “Mom said he ran off after Dad died. That would be over twenty years ago now.” She shook her head, her brow furrowing. “I don’t know that she ever heard from him again. I remember asking about him once, but all she said was that he was a very brave and special boy. I never asked her about him after that,” she added, setting the picture aside. “It was too hard for her to talk about him. But it wasn’t long after she told me that, that I started picturing my missing oldest brother as the white knight my present big brother was not.”

  She made a face, the expressio
n amazingly reminiscent of Molly. “Until I was about ten, Hal had no time and less patience for watching after his kid sister. The way he’d carry on about having to take me to the movies with him and his friends, you’d think I was his personal albatross.”

  “What happened when you where ten?”

  “He moved away to college. In Denver.”

  At that, Rio smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile. Just enough to let her know he understood that separation had salvaged what little she and Hal had of a relationship, and to relieve the pensiveness she’d fought. It also encouraged a question of her own.

  “What about you?” she quietly asked. “You have a brother and a sister. Did you get along when you were growing up?”

  Rio had never said much about his siblings. With a glance that said he didn’t care to talk much about them now, either, he said, “Well enough, I guess.”

  He glanced from her as he spoke, clearly preparing to dismiss the subject.

  “Do they have names?” she asked before he could.

  Rocking back in his chair, he reached for another envelope. “Dusty and Shana. Dusty’s three years older. Shana’s two younger.”

  A middle child. She’d never known that before.

  She tipped her head, studying his features in the buttery light of the chandelier. He looked relaxed enough. But even with his attention on another batch of pictures, she could swear she felt him tensing.

  She wanted to know this man. Needed to know him. More important, she realized, she needed to understand what kept him from her.

  Leaning forward, she placed her hand over the photos.

  “Would you tell me what it was like, growing up on the reservation?”

  His eyes met hers, steady and as unreadable to her as petroglyphs. For a moment, she thought he might evade her question, that he’d turn back to the pictures she’d just covered and change the subject. The tactic would have been so typical of the man she’d once known.

  Instead, he pushed the stack aside.

  “It’s like growing up in a box.”

  She thought from his closed expression that he might mention the rampant unemployment and the alcohol and drug problems she remembered people talking about. At seventeen, she’d never associated him with any of that. Now she couldn’t avoid it.

  He said nothing of those matters, though.

  “There’s the res,” he continued. “Then, there’s what is off of it. On the res, you’re supposed to think and feel and act like everyone else. If you don’t, you’re criticized for not being in harmony with the people.” He paused, brow pinching. “Some people criticize you, anyway. The ones who say they care about you.

  “I guess it’s like living anywhere else,” he finally said, checking the bitterness creeping into his tone. “You learn to adapt. Or you leave.”

  Caution entered Eve’s expression. “Are you talking about the reservation, or your own home?”

  The muscle in his jaw jumped. “It’s the same thing.”

  For a moment, Eve said nothing. In less than a minute, he’d given her more insight to him than he had in all the time she’d known him. She could understand how the culture of a place would influence the people living in it, so she had no problem seeing how difficult it would be for him to divorce one from the other. But she was beginning to see that, while his heritage might have been the catalyst, it was his own family, or a member of it, that had instilled the unsettled need he’d felt to move beyond the bounds of the reservation.

  Long ago, he’d told her he didn’t belong anywhere. Recalling that now, she couldn’t help but think that, somehow, he hadn’t been accepted even in his own home. It was no wonder he’d felt in need of escape.

  “You sound as if you were searching for something when you left.”

  If her insight was at all accurate, she couldn’t tell from the quiet way he watched her. “Maybe I was.”

  “Did you ever find it?”

  He held her eyes, his face devoid of expression. A second passed. Then, another.

  Finally, his voice remote, he calmly said, “I have no idea what I’m looking for.”

  It was another moment before he looked way. But in those moments, Eve had the feeling she was only beginning to appreciate the enormity of his struggle.

  Wanting to help, having no idea how, she focused on the one thing she felt certain was weighing on his mind.

  “Have you told your family about Molly?”

  A full ten seconds passed before he answered. When he did, it was with the resignation of a man who’d already been wrestling with the question and had just made up his mind. “I’m going up tomorrow.”

  Chapter Eight

  In summer, the reservation where Rio grew up was a two-hour drive from Grand Springs. It could take twice as long in winter. Sometimes, if the wind blew hard enough and the snow got deep enough, the trip couldn’t be made at all. When the temperature dropped to freezing and the wind-driven snow obliterated everything but miles of low flats and barren hills, this stretch of land could be the most desolate place on earth. Now the land was rich with crops of wheat and sugar beets; the mountains beyond alive with grazing elk. But even the thought of all the summers he’d spent exploring this rugged and beautiful place couldn’t ease the tension knotting his insides.

  The closer Rio got to the highway sign proclaiming entry onto tribal land, the more he wished the streaky white clouds overhead would gray up and dump about thirty inches of the icy white stuff. He could use the excuse to turn around. A person needed to be careful what he wished for, though. There were those who believed thought itself could make something happen. His mother was one of them.

  Holding that thought at bay, he drove past clusters of old housing and new, a well-tended farm and another gone fallow. The wind was blowing cool when, fifteen miles in, he crossed a narrow bridge and pulled into the cluster of modest little houses and one large mobile home. The drop in temperature was an omen of his reception, Rio was sure.

  The cries of “Uncle!” made him smile despite himself. After his initial three-year absence, he’d come home because his grandfather had taken ill. After that, he’d made it back three or four times a year, though he never stayed more than a day. The little ones remembered him, though. And he always remembered them—along with the other small children who showed up with his cherub-faced little nieces.

  He was thinking how Molly would fit right in with this animated crowd of laughing, dark-haired children when a toddler on a Big Wheel came tearing across the patches of grass poking through the hard-packed dirt. Rio didn’t recognize the little boy, someone his mother was baby-sitting probably, but like the rest of the kids, he got a piece of the red licorice Rio doled out to the lot.

  “Something is wrong.”

  His mother’s voice came from behind him. Maria Redtree stood in the door of the long, gray-and-white trailer, wiping her hands on her apron, her dark eyes trained on her son. Her hair, drawn back in a single thick braid was still black as coal, though Rio could see hints of silver threading through it as he moved closer. Her body was rounding, but the years were settling well on her. Her bronze skin was smooth, with only a trace of the wrinkles she should have had, considering the grief he seemed to have given her.

  “Why is something wrong?” he asked, breathing in the scents of fry bread and wild herbs when he hugged her.

  She stepped back, shooing a brown puppy from behind her long tiered skirt. “Because you never come without calling first. And never in the middle of the week.”

  The omission had been deliberate. So was the timing. Midweek, his brother and sister would be working. Dusty at the tribal government office. His sister at the reservation clinic.

  He asked after them both, and about his uncles, and when Fawn, who tended the children with her mother-in-law while the others worked, walked in with her youngest on her hip, he asked after her family, too. A person didn’t just pop up and open Pandora’s box without first attending to amenities. Though his mother
wore her concern like a shield, something she always did when he was around, she wouldn’t have allowed it to be any other way.

  Fawn was feeding the children, the five that belonged to the family and the two that didn’t, when his mother decided they could talk best outside.

  “You know the Offerings Lodge was held here last week,” she said as they walked out toward the road. “Your brother made the prayer sacrifice.”

  There was as much censure as pride in the statements. Tribes from everywhere attended the weeklong event, the sacred occasion a source of strength and fulfillment for the people. It was a time, too, when everyone tried to focus on unity and avoid conflict of any kind. She might as well have said that Rio had failed her yet again by not having been there himself.

  “He is to be congratulated,” Rio replied, refusing to rise to her bait. “Dusty’s a good man. Mother, I came to ask you something,” he continued, needing badly to get this over with.

  Curious, she forgot to castigate. “Yes?”

  “About six years ago, a woman…a girl,” he corrected himself, because that’s what she’d been at the time, “called here looking for me. I know I’d mentioned her to you, because she and I had gone to school together. Her name was Eve.”

  “Six years is a long time.”

  “Not for your memory.”

  She gave him a smile, but there was enough hesitation behind it for Rio to know that her memory was, indeed, as unfailing as the sunrise.

  For a moment, she said nothing more. Her five feet five inches drawn perfectly erect, she simply stared straight ahead as they walked, oblivious to the ever-present wind blowing dust across the road and rattling the scrub oak lining it. “She was the girl Shana teased you about after she found you looking at her picture. You were unhappy over her. I remember.”

  “You didn’t give me the message.”

  The flatness in his tone spoke volumes. Rio was obviously aware now that the call had been made. Knowing that, he would also be aware of what was said. Maria was quick to figure that out, and just as quick to defend herself.