by Beverly Bird
“She’s organized and practical and you’d think she wouldn’t have patience with anything so untenable as emotion. But she could make a rock laugh and the sand weep. She can feel time in a bone and she respects silence and she believes.” God help him, but she had believed in him. And to what end?
“So where did she go?” Juan asked.
“Home. She has family.”
“We all have family, señor.”
Mac’s face turned mean. “No.”
The bartender pushed on anyway. “That is where you are wrong. Me, I’m an orphan. I have no mother, no father. I have no wife. But down there near the boats there is a cabin. A woman lives there who can make me warm. She is my family, my home. It does not necessarily have to be blood or legal ties.”
Warm? Home? His choice of words jolted Mac.
“So why don’t you marry her?” he demanded.
“Ah, señor, she has a very big, very mean husband already, one who will not let her go.”
Mac didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. He raked a hand through his hair and felt momentarily lost to find so little of it.
He hadn’t changed anything. She had. She had changed everything.
“Even so, she will be there for me forever,” Juan went on. “This I know. I know it here.” He slapped a hand against his heart. “Her love for me is as strong as the sun and no matter what Jorge does to her, it will endure.”
Endure? “Who the hell are you? Some kind of Navajo Holy One?”
“Señor?”
“I love her,” Mac muttered wonderingly. “Good Lord.”
His eyes ran up and down the empty street again. The cow was gone. Fear caught his throat. He had no doubt that it was every bit as strong as what she had felt when those arrows had started flying.
“That is good,” the bartender said from behind him, “but señor, you are here alone. Perhaps you should go find her.”
“I don’t know where she is.” But a good place to start looking would be the Navajo reservation, he realized. Somewhere east of the canyon. Shiprock. She’d said she’d go to the subagency there. But he still didn’t even know her last name.
“I might never find her,” he admitted aloud.
The pain came back, burning a hole right through the middle of him. He winced. “I love her,” he said again, and it didn’t shock him quite as much this time.
“Well, señor, I think you should do something about it.”
* * *
Three days later, Jericho’s house finally emptied out. All the clan relatives had left. The sing was over and Shadow’s parents had gone home. Paddy had finally been convinced to go back to Boston and Uncle Ernie was out in the carport, singing for her spirit.
Shadow sat at the kitchenette counter and sighed. She hadn’t told the old shaman all that had happened. She hadn’t told any of them. In the end, it had just felt too private. And knowledge of the thief’s cache wasn’t something she needed to burden them with anyway. It was her own problem.
Still, one mention of Kokopelli’s Canyon had been enough to convince Ernie that Jericho’s Blessing Way wasn’t nearly all the medicine she’d need. But it had been. Shadow felt purged inside, clean, strong. Restored.
But maybe that was only because she had made a few decisions while Jericho had been singing the ghost poison free of her soul.
She looked up when Catherine settled on the stool next to her. Ellen hovered behind her, watching Shadow critically. For all their differences, the three of them were a sort of necessary sisterhood. This isolated Navajo land made friendships vital and necessary.
“So what are you going to do now?” Cat asked. “You never really did answer your mother.”
“I’m going to take a leave of absence from the museum, for starters.”
Ellen looked aghast as only a Navajo could. “You’re not going back to that chindi place!”
Shadow shook her head. “No. I guess I’ll start with the Baja.”
“You’re going to Mexico?” That seemed to shock her just as much.
Shadow shrugged. “I don’t know where else to look.” Something constricted in the area of her throat. “I may not ever find him,” she admitted on a whisper. “But I have to try.”
And when—if—she did, what would he do then? Perhaps he would call her Sergeant again and send her packing. But in the meantime, only one thing felt clear in her heart now. She had been wrong when she’d thought she could simply walk away. In the end, she found she couldn’t succumb to this pain, this loss, this emptiness inside. She couldn’t withdraw into the hollow shell of her heart and live each day as something to get through, as a prelude to dying, and tell herself that she was lucky to have had that one steamy week in the sun. She wanted more.
Maybe she was bossy. She’d even accept high-handed. But, damn it, she wasn’t going to walk away from him just because he thought she should. It simply wasn’t her nature.
She realized that Jericho had come to stand behind Catherine. “How long a leave of absence?” he demanded.
“That depends.”
His brows went up in a look that was uniquely his. “You’re thinking of leaving the Res?” he asked incredulously.
Shadow swallowed carefully. “If I have to.”
“Oh, Shadow,” Catherine gasped, “who is this guy?”
For the first time since she had come home, Shadow felt her mouth pull into a smile. “He’s...hard. A loner. He doesn’t think he needs anybody or anything. But he won’t shoot a deer with a gun, because it might somehow know it’s going to die. And he apologized to a bunch of seven-hundred-year-old bones.” She saw them exchange a look. “He holds forever in his hands.”
“You love him,” Catherine said quietly.
Shadow felt her heart punch into her ribs. “Yeah. I guess I do.” She had thought so before, but now that she had left him she felt it so much more strongly, like something irrefutable she knew she would never escape from.
“You thought you loved Kevin,” Jericho pointed out harshly, “but it wasn’t enough.”
“Then that wasn’t love,” Catherine interrupted calmly, tilting her head back to look up at her husband. “When it’s the real thing you can leave everything you know and dwell on the moon, if that’s where your man wants to be.”
Shadow saw something hot flare in her brother’s eyes and she looked away, feeling as if she were intruding. But she knew Catherine spoke from deep within her heart. She had been born and raised in the East, but she had turned down a residency with the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta to remain on the Res with the Navajo shaman she loved.
Inadvertently, Shadow’s gaze fell on Ellen. That woman’s face was as pained as Catherine’s was loving and satisfied. Shadow knew she wasn’t thinking of Jericho this time, but of a love that hadn’t been the real thing and the hearts it had broken.
Shadow stood. “The baby’s crying. Better go take care of him and stop looking at each other like that or you guys are going to have twelve kids.”
“There’s a thought.” Catherine laughed, but Jericho was already gone, hustling into the bedroom to see to the baby. Cat looked back at Shadow. “I hope you’ll be here when we name him.”
Shadow was startled. “I thought you were calling him Ryan.”
Catherine laughed again. “That’s his Irish name. He’ll be a little bit of both, I guess.”
Shadow nodded. It was Navajo tradition to hold off on a naming ceremony until a child said or did something indicative of his spirit.
“I’ll be here,” she vowed fervently, “if I have to travel a thousand miles to get back.” How far was the Baja? she wondered wildly. About that, probably. “Can you convince your husband to leave his son long enough to give me a ride to the airport?” she went on.
“I can do it,” Ellen volunteered, but Cat shook her head.
“You need to get back to the clinic. I’ll get Jericho to go. He won’t like it, but I’ll just threaten to do it myself.”
&nbs
p; “Thanks.” She hugged her quickly. “I’ve got to go talk to Diamond Eddie. Tell Jericho to meet me at the museum.” She glanced down at her watch. “In about an hour.”
* * *
What the hell was he supposed to say to her when he found her?
Mac drove north again, scowling hard. I love you. In all his memory, he had never spoken those words to another living soul, although he imagined that at some point he had probably said them to his mother. A lot of good that had done. Come with me. Give up everything you love and tag along. I like camping with you. He gave a raw, ugly laugh at that one.
The hell of it was, he was pretty sure she’d do it. More incredibly, he was beginning to think she might even stay. For so long now, he had mistaken selfishness and coldness for strength in the women he had chosen to touch and leave. Until Shadow, he had never understood that it took passion and caring to make a woman strong.
Mac took one hand off the wheel to rub his eyes, grainy from too little sleep. Somewhere in this world, he figured there was probably a man who could handle this situation with charm and finesse. But he wasn’t that man and he decided he needed an excuse. Some reason for finding her again. Then, later, they could tackle the rest, whenever he figured out what that might be. Right now, he only knew that he needed to be with her. Without her, the world was too cold.
He could go to that Shiprock substation, he realized. He could report the cache in Kokopelli’s Canyon. He could ask if a woman had already been by to tell them about it. They would probably have taken her full name, maybe even her address. Then he could find her and tell her that he just wanted to make sure she was okay. That he wanted to assure himself that their thief hadn’t tracked her out of the canyon.
He crossed from California into Arizona again and pressed down on the accelerator a little harder, his heart skipping a single, cautious beat. Had the guy tracked her out of the canyon? God in heaven, he had been so preoccupied with her leaving, with what he was going to do next, that he’d never even considered that she could be in danger.
He swore violently and shook the possibility out of his head. But it came back, nudging him, haunting him.
No. If the thief had hung around after closing them in the cave, then he would have been witness to their last lovemaking on the cliffside. If the thief had been around, what better way to dispose of them both than when they were both so completely absorbed in each other? Shadow was safe. She was home somewhere, maybe right there in Shiprock.
Safe. Except...
Suddenly he pulled the Explorer off onto the side of the road, its breaks screaming. Why had he not realized the connection before?
Because his senses had been filled with her. Because he had been too busy wanting her and not touching her, then too busy losing himself in her heat. Because he’d really given relatively little thought to their prankster until now, until he needed to use him to find her again.
And now he realized that the thief hadn’t started tormenting them until after she’d arrived. Not one suspicious occurrence had happened before she’d plunged down the canyon wall to land at his feet, and he’d already been there for three weeks at that point. But no one had been trying to scare him away then because no one had known yet that he was there. No one had known until she’d told them where she was going and why.
His blood turned to ice. Could it be one of her family? He thought that would probably destroy her, although he had no trouble accepting such an idea.
He hauled on the wheel of the Explorer and aimed it back onto the road, burying the speedometer needle.
Chapter 16
Shadow’s thoughts were working hard and fast when she pushed through the museum door. Her truck needed a tune-up, so she would leave it down the street at the Exxon station while she was gone. When Jericho came for her, they could swing by her hogan—it was right on the way to Albuquerque. She could grab some clean clothes and her bank card. She had no use for credit cards on the Res, but she could take cash from her bank account through one of those nifty machines in the airport.
It would all work out very expeditiously, she decided. She headed for her own little office to call the airlines and shouted into Diamond Eddie’s room as she passed it.
“Hey, when you get a minute, I need to talk to you about something.”
There was silence, then a resounding crash from inside. She hesitated, frowning. “Eddie? Are you all right?”
There was no answer. His door was open a crack and she leaned forward to peer through it. As soon as she did, he yanked it open from the other side and she reeled backward.
“Oh! You startled me.”
He was looking at her strangely. His mouth was half open, making him look like a small pinch-faced frog. His breath was coming too fast and he was pale. She reached a hand out to him.
“Eddie, what’s wrong? Are you sick?”
His expression cleared slowly and he closed his mouth. “Not now that you’ve returned. But what are you doing here? I thought you were taking time off, beautiful one.”
“I did. I’m back. I’m leaving again.” She turned away from him and headed into her office. “And don’t call me that.”
He followed her. “Shadow, Shadow, you’ve used up all of your leave time. I can’t give you any more. Don’t tell me you’re going back to that canyon?”
“No—oh, that reminds me.” She sat down at her desk and reached for the phone.
“Reminds you of what, señorita?”
“Would you stop with the Spanish? I’ve got to call over to the substation. You would not believe what we found up there.”
“I can imagine.”
“No, I’m not kidding. There’s a cave up in one of the cliff dwellings and—” She broke off midway through the number she was punching out when a familiar clicking sound came from behind her.
It was the sound of a revolver being cocked. Shadow looked over her shoulder at him, confused, and her heart went suddenly still.
She stood slowly to face him. He kept the gun level on her chest.
“Eddie,” she whispered disbelievingly. “You?”
“You were supposed to be dead by now, little one. For a moment, when you came in, I thought I was hearing a chindi. You and your friend should both be dead. Where is he?”
“I...don’t know.”
He looked genuinely pained. “You lie to me, señorita. I watched you together. Neither of you was going anywhere without the other.”
“You watched us?” Suddenly she felt as if she were going to throw up. He had managed to do what all of Mac’s cynicism had not achieved. He had taken something beautiful, something sweet and good, and had made it sordid and vile.
Diamond Eddie only shrugged. “Don’t look at me that way. If I were coldhearted I would have shot him in the back while you were cowering there in your sleeping bag, afraid of old Kokopelli. Did you like that trick?” He didn’t allow her time to answer. “That’s when I should have shot him,” he mused aloud. “But I was too curious to find out if you were really made of ice or if it was just me you didn’t want.”
“Now you know,” she retorted and regretted it immediately. His finger curled tensely around the trigger.
“Now I know,” he agreed bitterly. “I was waiting for an encore, but you didn’t cooperate, at least not while I was there.”
That brought her breath back a little. Her stomach settled. He hadn’t seen everything then. He hadn’t ruined and tarnished the whole glorious time.
“Shadow, my friend, you are simply too hardheaded for your own good,” he went on. “Why didn’t you run? I gave you so much opportunity. Do you care for him so much that you couldn’t bear to part with him even in the face of chindis? That’s really too bad. I hope you love him enough to die for him.” His finger tightened.
Shadow stared at it. “Jericho’s coming!” she burst out.
His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I think you’re lying again.”
Shadow shook her head hard. “No. No, I’
m not. He’s going to meet me here, to take me to the airport. That’s what I came to tell you. I’m leaving—with Mac. I quit, Eddie. I’m going away. And I haven’t told the cops yet what we found. Don’t you see, you don’t have to kill anybody else! You certainly don’t have to kill me.”
“Ah, señorita, that’s a risk I can’t take. This is my whole life we’re talking about here. You saw my treasure. I can live off it forever. But I wouldn’t live happily if I thought maybe you could come back and ruin it all.”
“Eddie, for God’s sake, you don’t want to do this!” For the first time she felt true fear, thick and black, rolling through her. It took her breath; it made her legs feel light and empty.
He shook his head. She wasn’t reaching him.
“No,” he agreed. “I don’t. I would really have preferred it if you had just stayed in the cave. I truly do think you’re beautiful, you know, and I hate to mar a work of art. But since you didn’t stay put, we can’t take chances. If you say your brother’s coming here, then I must believe you and take you back to the canyon. That’s best, anyway. They won’t find your body there. People will think what they’ve been thinking all week—that you’ve just suddenly gone crazy and now you have disappeared.”
She thought wildly of trying to fight him. If she hurled herself at him fast enough, suddenly enough, maybe she could take him by surprise. Maybe she could knock the gun from his hand without it going off. He was small....
But then she remembered the rock he had used to hide the hole in the ground that Kokopelli’s cutout figure had made. Yes, he was small, but he was also strong. She’d had no idea he was that strong.
She moved unsteadily away from the desk and let him catch her arm, propelling her back toward the door. Surely she would find some opportunity to get away from him on the mountain.
She closed her eyes, feeling a horrible, impotent helplessness. It was a long shot. Her memories of Mac wouldn’t grow old and fade after all. She’d never have a chance to find him. She could only pray that he was long gone from the canyon himself by now, that he was in the Baja or at another dig, somewhere where Diamond Eddie could never find him.