CHAPTER FIFTEEN
On Thursday morning Eris rose earlier than usual and was brushing his teeth in the bathroom when his phone rang. He spat out toothpaste and wiped his mouth before answering. He was surprised to hear Sheila Lyman identify herself.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I ain't sure,” she said, her voice low. “I'm only gonna tell this once, and I'm tellin' it to you because you're the only person who ever stuck up for me against Ronnie, and I want you to know the truth if anything should happen to me. I want him to pay for what happened to my baby Kayla.”
“Why should he pay?” Eris asked.
“Because he set the whole thing up. He made his drunk old mama take Kayla and then told everyone she disappeared, when she was with his mama at her place.”
Eris stood very still. “The disappearance was faked?”
“Ronnie the genius had it all worked out, figurin' to get sympathy and money from people. He told me what to say on television and everything. He had a deal with his mama for her to bring Kayla and drop her off at the Haven, that bait shop up on the access road there. Only he called and had his mama drop her off early on account of you kickin' us out of the park. He thought folks would get mad and maybe send more money if our little girl showed up the day after we had to leave.”
Eris was holding his breath, his mind whirring. Finally he inhaled and said, “His mother dropped her off at the Haven as scheduled, and that's the last anyone saw of Kayla, is that it?”
“That's it. Ronnie said some crazy got her in front of the store. I ain't so sure it wasn't him, greedy as he is. No tellin' what he thought, that maybe folks would feel even sorrier if she turned up ... well, the way she did.”
Eris didn't know what to say. Worse, he didn't know what he could do about it, short of adding a few other charges to those Lyman already faced.
“Will you testify to any of this?” Eris asked, already knowing the answer.
“I can't. Ronnie hurt me bad once, and he'll do it again if he has the chance. I just wanted someone to know what he did, and what he made me a part of. I was scared from the start and didn't wanna do it, and look what happened. All I want now is for me and my girls to start over, and I don't know if we're gonna be able to do it here, not while he's still lookin' for us. We may have to go somewhere else.”
“They won't be able to do anything to him unless you testify, Mrs. Lyman. You have to tell other people about the hoax.”
“I want to, but I can't. You gotta understand that. I gotta go now. Bye.”
She hung up, and Eris shook his head as he replaced the receiver.
A hoax. The whole thing had been faked. All those man-hours spent searching, all that misery. All for a few stinking goddamned dollars of sympathy money.
Eris took out his phone again to call his superior when he realized it was still too early. The man wouldn't be in his office yet.
One thing made him feel only minutely better. It was possible, if Kayla had been taken from in front of the Haven that it was someone only passing through and not a member of the lake community at all.
When he saw Dale Russell drive up to Madeleine's cabin a few minutes later he headed out the door and walked up to see what the other man wanted.
“She's been sick,” he said, before Russell could knock.
Dale turned, surprised to see him. “Has she?”
“Very.”
“You her doctor?” said Russell, grinning.
“The next best thing,” said Eris. “You want me to give her a message?”
Russell turned and held up his hands. “Just tell her I came by. You headed out this morning?”
“After I check on her.”
“Okay. See you around.”
Eris waited until Russell was in his pickup and driving up the road before approaching the cabin. He let himself in with the key Manuel gave him after purchasing the place. Eris had agreed to look after the cabin during the winter.
He was surprised to see Madeleine sitting at the kitchen counter and drinking a cup of tea.
“Hi,” she said when she turned, and he thought to himself that she looked surprised to see him. “Did I hear you talking to someone out there?”
“Dale Russell. He was coming by to see you.”
Madeleine rolled her eyes, and Eris nearly smiled.
‘‘You look better this morning,” he said and moved to stand beside her. “Fever all gone?”
“Seems to be,” she said. “And as for looking better, I scared myself when I glanced in the mirror a while ago.”
“Your face is thinner,” he agreed, and he spied a plate of toast going uneaten in front of her. She followed his eyes and handed him a piece.
“Want some jelly?”
“No.” He took a bite. “You need to eat.”
“I will.” She turned on the stool. “I called Jacqueline a minute ago. She's still sick, so they don't know if they'll be coming up this weekend. I thought I'd ask if you want to go to a movie, or maybe out to dinner somewhere ... as payment for your excellent nursing services,” she quickly added.
“No payment is required,” he said, and he saw a flash of disappointment in her eyes. “We'd end up driving half the night,” he explained. “There's nothing close.”
“Just a thought,” she said her mouth suddenly tight. She got off the stool and muttered something about Dale Russell as she dumped her tea into the sink.
“What?”
She kept her back to him. “Nothing.”
“If you can't afford cat food, you can't buy dinner or a movie,” he told her.
“You're right,” she said, angry now. “It was stupid of me to ask. I don't know what I was thinking.”
Eris didn't know why she was so mad; he was only trying to save her money. He finished the toast and was preparing to leave when the beeper on his belt sounded. He moved toward the phone in the kitchen. “May I? Cell service here is iffy at best.”
She lifted a hand. “Of course.”
Two minutes later Eris was hearing about a pair of raccoons trapped in a woman's garage thirty miles away. She didn't want to hurt them, but she was afraid they would poop on her father's precious Packard, parked in the garage for years and years. Eris said he would be there shortly and hung up the phone.
He paused at the door, something in him not wanting to leave Madeleine mad at him.
“Teach me this weekend,” he said, and saw her head swivel.
“Teach you?”
“If Mr. and Mrs. Ortiz don't come.”
They eyed each other a moment, then she nodded.
Eris used a catch pole on the raccoons and had them out of the woman's garage in less than half an hour. He had to stop and marvel at the Packard a while after that, because the old woman wouldn't let him leave without doing so. He managed to escape soon afterward and he drove directly to the lake office to call his superior and tell him about Sheila Lyman's call early that morning. Jaws dropped as Eris related what he had been told, and Ronnie Lyman had more than one employee of the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks promising to put a tranquilizer gun up his ass if he ever showed his face in a park again.
Later that afternoon, Eris was stunned to learn Ronnie Lyman had been released from jail. Sheila and her two girls had disappeared that morning, and once Ronnie's attorney learned she was gone, he called a judge. With no one to complain against him in court, Ronnie got off with time served and waltzed out of the crowded jail a free man.
Eris hoped wherever Sheila had gone after talking to him, it was somewhere safe.
He ran across Bruce Beckworth and a friend just after seven, out on a county road, where they were shooting at birds from the window of Beckworth's SUV. Eris cuffed them, arrested them, and took them to jail, ignoring their pleas to be let off with only a warning.
He went home then and frowned to see Dale Russell's truck parked in the log cabin's drive.
The bastard didn't give up, Eris gave him that, and
suddenly all he could think about was Madeleine's muttered comment that he couldn't hear that morning.
A part of him wanted to go up and knock on her door, but he couldn't make himself do it. He didn't know why he was feeling so proprietary suddenly, as if he had a right to question who came to see her.
He relaxed when he saw Russell come out the door a few moments later. Madeleine stood behind him, a forced smile fixed on her mouth, and Eris felt better. She was booting him out.
Here was one woman unmoved by the charms of Dale Russell, and seemingly impressed with Eris Renard. He felt as if a lifelong fantasy was about to come true, where the pretty, intelligent woman spurned the charmers with their devastatingly good looks and opted for someone with no looks but lots of character.
He shook his head at himself and went on watching as Dale got in his truck and backed out of the drive. He glanced back to Madeleine and saw her looking down the yard at him in his kitchen window. She lifted a hand to wave.
Eris gave her a nod in response.
The next day was relatively quiet, and around six o'clock Eris found he was getting nervous. He would have to go home soon and change his clothes. He wasn't going to wear his uniform over to see her. His uniform was all she ever saw him in.
At home he changed into a white pullover and a faded pair of jeans and put on some Nikes. He checked the window constantly to see if Manuel's Jeep Cherokee had arrived, but when seven o'clock came and it hadn't appeared, he forced himself out the door and up to the log cabin.
She looked pleased when she opened the door and saw him standing there. She wore a pink sun dress that made him think only of what she looked like without it, and before she could read the thought in his eyes, he stepped past her to go inside. He saw several books on the kitchen counter, and she followed his glance.
“I've been to the library. Come in and sit down. We can sit on the couch, it's more comfortable.”
He went to the couch and sat, and she brought the books over to put on the cocktail table in front of him.
“Do you want something to drink? I think I have a Diet Coke around somewhere.”
“Fine,” he said, wondering suddenly if he should consider this a date. He wasn't sure. He wiped his damp palms on the tops of his thighs.
“Okay.” She brought him a Diet Coke and plopped down onto the cushion beside him. “You're probably already aware that the Fox are closely related to the Sauk, speaking the same language and having similar cultures. The Fox called themselves Meshwahki Haki or were otherwise known as Mesquakie. It means, The Red Earths.”
Eris sat with the unopened Diet Coke in his hand, staring at her. She was jumping right into it. A real teacher.
“The Fox and the Sauk were allies for years, and during the colonial period they fought together against the French, not that they were so enamored of the English, but because they were tired of being cheated by French traders. Like many other tribes, they were actually quite passive. In the fall and winter they lived in camps of rush mat lodges while they hunted and trapped for furs to trade, and in the summer they moved near river bottoms and became farmers of corn, beans, and squash. They—” She paused and smiled at him. “Am I going too fast? Too pedantic? You have an odd expression on your face.”
It was sudden discomfort on Eris's part that caused his expression. He tried to ignore it.
“Am I going to be tested on this material?”
“Of course,” she said with a smile.
“All right. Thanks for the warning. Did the Fox have enemies among other Indians?”
“Chippewa and Dakota were the most bitter. Sauk-Fox Indian allies included the Potawatomi, Winnebago, and Iowa. Nearly a century after the French were beaten came the Black Hawk War, in 1832, when the Fox and Sauk were defeated by the good old US Army and sent right here to Kansas.”
“From the Northeast?”
“Well, from Iowa, which is where they were located by that time. A lot of them left Kansas and went back to Iowa during the 1850s. Many of the Fox in Kansas joined with the Sauk a few years after the Civil War and moved to the Indian Territory.”
“Oklahoma,” said Eris.
“Yes. If you were born here in Kansas, then it was from one of the few Fox and Sauk families that remained.”
“You know all this from memory?” asked Eris, more impressed than he could say, but still uncomfortable.
“I've been refreshing my memory with these books,” she said, and pointed to the stack on the cocktail table. “It would be difficult for anyone to know everything about every nation. There are so many.”
Eris finally opened his Diet Coke to take a drink, and Madeleine continued, telling him about Sauk-Fox rituals and patrilineal clans, all the things he would have learned if he had ever actually opened a book about the Sauk-Fox and read it. Something had always stopped him short of learning more than the most perfunctory information. An anger, perhaps, that he should be forced to learn from a book, and not from his own blood relatives.
Now he sat, listening to a blonde-haired white woman who stood no taller than his collar bone and was no more Indian than the actors in black and white Westerns, while she told him about his ancestors.
When she paused he sat forward and put his Diet Coke down on the cocktail table.
“I have to go, Madeleine.”
Her mouth fell open and she looked at him in surprise. “Why?”
He got up and walked to the door, unable to tell her what he was feeling, unable to make himself seem small or childish to her for having such problems dealing with his lack of identity and his anger toward people he had never even met. She would not understand.
“Eris?”
The hurt and confusion in her eyes nearly made him stop and go back, fight his way through his feelings just to be near her a while longer.
But then she was confusing him even more, making him wonder if she needed to do exactly what she was doing, if he was, after all, someone she wanted to be friendly with because their interests were ostensibly the same, him being an Indian and all her degrees and work having to do with Native Americans.
“I can't learn from you,” he said as he opened the door. “And I can't tell you why.”
He turned to leave then, and the breath left him in a whoosh a second later as a tremendous force struck him square in the middle of the back. He wheeled in surprise and saw a book lying on the floor behind him. Madeleine was picking up another book to throw at him, and he took one look at her flushed cheeks and trembling mouth and said, “Don't.”
Too late. The next book struck him in the face, glancing off his still sore cheekbone and causing his ear to begin ringing. She picked up another book and he hurried to take it away from her before she could wing it at close range. He grabbed her by the wrist and squeezed until she cried out and dropped the book.
“Stop,” he said, his tone warning.
“You stop,” she said fiercely. “Who's using who, Eris? And what are you using me for? As a whipping post for the people who've mistreated you? What do I have to do to get through to you?”
He stared at her, his hand still holding her wrist, and when he spoke, his voice didn't sound like his.
“I don't understand what you want from me.”
“I don't either,” she said. “How can I? You're not exactly constant in the way you treat me. How am I supposed to understand anything to do with you when you can't make up your mind how to feel about me?”
Eris dropped her wrist and said, “I know exactly how I feel about you.”
Madeleine blinked, and the anger in her slowly diminished as she looked into his face. “Don't say that. Don't say you know exactly, when you have to be just as confused as I am. You keep running away from me.”
“What I know, Madeleine,” said Eris “is what I want to do with you. What I don't know is how you'll react if I try.”
She froze, as if the breath had been knocked out of her, and Eris felt suddenly damned, believing he had gone too far and sa
id too much, scaring her with his confession.
“Are you saying that's all you want?” she asked her voice breathless.
“No.”
Her lashes lowered and she looked at the floor, and Eris found he was thinking this was the part where she explained she wanted to be just friends.
She said, “I know I said I was going to examine why I feel the way I do about you, but I'm no clearer now than I was a week ago. I still think you're a good man.”
Eris's heart began pounding. He lifted a hand to touch her on one cheek, causing her to lift her head and look at him. He searched her eyes while she gazed at him, and Madeleine suddenly lifted herself on her tiptoes to place her arms around his neck. She raised herself up and kissed him on the center of his chin, her lips soft and moist. She moved to his cheek, and along his jaw, planting kisses on the scarred skin of his face while he tentatively placed his hands on her waist and fought to breathe.
When she came to his mouth, she placed a light kiss on his lips and looked at him. He sensed her waiting, and he gently picked her up in his arms and lifted her against his chest, bringing her mouth to his.
Eris nearly came to orgasm just parting her lips. When she made a noise into his mouth and touched her tongue to his, his knees threatened to buckle. His limbs began to shake as he held her against him and kissed her, and when he felt her press herself along the length of him he thought he would fall down. He had never tasted anything sweeter, or held anything softer.
While he could still walk he carried her to the sofa and sat down with her, tearing his mouth away from her lips long enough to ask if he could touch her.
Madeleine guided his hand to her breasts and reached behind herself to unzip her dress. His hand covered hers, and once the zipper was down the two of them pushed the dress over her hips until she was free of the garment. Eris touched the silky skin of her breasts and fought for control while she tugged his pullover free of his jeans, kissing his mouth and neck until he pulled the shirt over his head. When his chest was bare she wrapped herself around him, pressing her naked breasts against him and sweetly pushing her face against his neck and the underside of his jaw.
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