Missing White Girl

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  20

  Buck didn’t get home to the Circle S until after ten. When he got inside, he found Tammy sitting at her computer, posting on a religious message board. She gave him a dry peck on the cheek and shut down. He had sat down to reheated steak, potatoes and corn in the kitchen, at a table crowded with the materials for the rag dolls she was making for her church rummage sale (Buck always thought of it as her church, even though he attended occasionally) when she joined him. Her hair was loose, her housedress baggy. He could hardly remember a time when she had paid attention to the way she looked, except when she dressed for church.

  “How was your day?” she asked him, drawing out a chair and sitting across from him at the table.

  “Shitty,” he said, knowing that it was the wrong thing to say, that he was baiting her.

  “Hawthorn!” she said, going for the unused first name, as she did when he offended her or pissed her off. “What a thing to say.”

  “I’m sorry, Tam. But you asked. That poor Lavender girl is still missing. I called out the Search and Rescue Team and went to the press. Now Ed Gatlin is going to be riding my ass and I’ve still got nothing.”

  “Well, you can pray for her in church on Sunday,” Tammy suggested.

  “I doubt that I’ll be in church Sunday.”

  She looked like she’d been swatted in the ass with a two- by-four. It wasn’t like he never skipped church. Lately, he been skipping more than he attended. “How can you not go to church, Buck? If you want to find this girl—”

  “It’s precisely because I want to find her that I need to be out there looking for her, and not sitting in a nice building with pretty windows asking for help that’s not going to come.”

  “I’m surprised at you, Buck. Truly. How can you even think that way? As if the Lord would turn His back on someone in need.”

  “Tammy, He already turned His back on Lulu Lavender and her family. He let her get kidnapped, let her family get killed. If that’s how God does things, I don’t want any part of it. And don’t give me that business about working in mysterious ways, because I got enough mystery in my life right now.”

  Tammy sat across from him, her mouth working but no sound coming out. He wasn’t sure why he had chosen now to turn their difference of opinion into a battle, but he had done it. Probably the frustrations of the Lavender case, which he directed at his wife and her God because he had no place better to put it. Not fair, he knew. It had been imminent for some time, though. Probably just as well to get it out in the open.

  “Do you honestly feel that way?” she asked. Her forehead had rippled like corrugated cardboard. She had pressed her hands flat against the table so hard that her fingers showed white.

  “I do, Tammy. I know it’s hard for you to hear, but that’s what I believe.”

  “Well, I…I don’t quite know what to say, I guess. I’ll pray for you. But beyond that…”

  “You don’t need to say anything, Tammy. I guess we have some stuff to talk about, but maybe not just now.”

  She nodded vigorously, her hair flopping around her face as she did. “We certainly seem to, Buck,” she said, standing abruptly. “I pray that the Lord sees fit to burn some sense into you, because if He doesn’t I fear for your immortal soul.”

  Without another word, or even eye contact, she rushed from the kitchen. “And I guess I’ll be sleeping in the living room tonight,” Buck said to himself, watching her shapeless form go out the door.

  As it happened, he didn’t get much sleep. He poured himself a shot of Jack Daniel’s, a rare vice to which he felt entitled, and sat in his big leather chair to mull over his day. He left one light burning, a floor lamp, which he sometimes used to read by. He hoped the Jack would help him sleep, but he didn’t intend to drink enough to guarantee that result.

  He guessed he should have known it was coming. His father had also combined ranching with the law, and it hadn’t worked out that well for him either. Dwayne Shelton had been a city cop in Sierra Vista back in the days when it was a sleepy little army town called Fry, established mainly to serve Fort Huachuca’s needs. From the stories he told, it seemed that many of his professional difficulties came about because the army had its own police force, and they wanted to be the ones to handle infractions involving soldiers. Which, as it turned out, were most of the town’s crimes in those days. Dwayne’s status as a veteran had earned him no breaks with the military police.

  But the sixties turned into the seventies, and the nation’s appetite for drugs kept increasing, pot but also heroin, cocaine and the rest. Southern Arizona became a convenient entry point for much of it, which meant that suddenly the old man’s life turned a lot more interesting. Of course, the fledgling DEA caught many of the drug cases, and Customs turned up some drugs that smugglers tried to bring across. But plenty made it over, which led to increased levels of crime in Fry as well, as the occasional dealer or smuggler arrest.

  During this time, Buck remembered, his folks’ marriage seemed to catch on a snag. They had always seemed perfectly matched, meant for each other as far as he could tell. But the more hours his dad put in on the job, the more arrests he made, the less he was willing, or able, to tell his wife. The two essentially stopped talking. This all happened around the time that the cash started flowing more freely than it had before. Dad explained it away by saying he’d been picking up a lot of overtime hours, which certainly seemed true. But he expanded the ranch and bought a new sports car and upgraded his wardrobe, and no one believed it was just overtime money paying for everything.

  The marriage finally ended, and Buck and his mother moved out of the house into an apartment in town. Buck spent weekends at the ranch except when his dad’s job got in the way. It didn’t last, however, because less than a month later Buck’s father took three 9mm slugs in the back of the head. His body was found halfway to Tombstone, near the long-abandoned mining town of Fairbank.

  The money dried up then, as did the enmity between his parents. Suddenly Buck’s mom seemed to forget that she’d moved out on the old man, and she returned to the ranch for an extended mourning period. Buck, as the man of the house, had gotten a job and started contributing what he could to the family coffers.

  When he told his mother he was joining the CCSO, she cried for the first time since his father’s funeral.

  She died well before he made lieutenant.

  Knowing he came from the seed of a dirty cop made Buck determined to keep his career on the up-and-up. This turned out not to be a problem, as no one offered to throw huge amounts of cash his way anyhow. He decided early on that he would not be one of those cops who let the suspicion and freedom and power and fear that came with wearing a badge and a gun destroy his family and warp his values.

  He had married young, to a “nice” girl his mother would have appreciated. Buck appreciated her too, in those days. She wasn’t so nice that they couldn’t have a good time together, in and out of the bedroom. He’d met her on a case, when she was working at a convenience store that had become a target for holdup artists. On his third trip to the store he’d asked her out. On the six-month anniversary of their first date he’d proposed.

  And yet here he was, back in the living room, sipping Jack Daniel’s straight up as outside the stars wheeled overhead, dragging the night toward morning.

  21

  “Ken, another day ends with no word on the whereabouts of the missing Elayne Lippincott. The young would-be model has been missing now for more than thirteen days, and authorities are beginning, privately, to admit that they fear the worst, although Cochise County Sheriff Ed Gatlin still insists that he remains optimistic.

  “Elayne Lippincot’s parents have increased the reward they’ve offered for her safe return, to half a million dollars. Speaking through Jim Jennings, their attorney, the Lippincotts say money has no meaning without their daughter, so they’ll mortgage the family estate to come up with the reward money, if that’s what it takes. The increased reward spurred a new
flood of calls to the sheriff’s office’s dedicated tip line, and Sheriff Gatlin says every available deputy is working those leads.

  “In other area news, the sheriff’s office has revealed that four people were slain, and a teenage girl kidnapped, in the rural community of Elfrida late yesterday morning. We’re putting a picture of eighteen-year-old Lulu Lavender on the screen next to the picture of Elayne Lippincott, and asking anyone with any information as to the whereabouts of either of these young women to call the sheriff’s office or 911.

  “Up next, Ken has a story on Tucson’s growing bat problem. Stay tuned for that.”

  22

  Across the county, in their ranch house under the shadows of the Swisshelm Mountains, Jeannie Bowles wasn’t sleeping either.

  Oliver had come back from visiting the Lavender place in a strange mood. Quiet, reflective, with something clearly on his mind. At first he wouldn’t talk about it. She prodded and poked, but he retreated deeper into himself, so she left him alone and went back to her own business. She had been researching livestock and native plants, hoping to turn their few acres into something that could help support them instead of simply taking up space.

  Later, he had emerged from his office with a printout in his hands. “I’m making a quick trip back to San Diego,” he announced.

  “Really? Why?”

  “Lieutenant Shelton asked me for a favor,” Oliver said.

  “What kind of favor?”

  “Lulu kept a blog,” he explained. “There’s some pretty strange stuff in it, and he thought maybe someone in the academic community could shed some light on it. Now that I’ve read it over, I think Stan Gilfredson might be just the guy.”

  “And you can’t call him up, talk to him over the phone?”

  “Sure, I could,” Oliver agreed. “And he’d have what interest in helping me, exactly? It’s not like we were ever particularly close, and after…what happened…I’m not sure he’d even return my call.”

  Vivian Stiles, she remembered, had been a favorite student of Stan’s. Vivian hadn’t necessarily been harmed in any way by her affair with Oliver, but she had felt used, manipulated by his position of authority. Probably she had been. Stan Gilfredson had been one of the professors who had confronted Oliver personally after the news started to spread, and Jeannie suspected there were still strained feelings between them.

  “Then what’s being there in person going to accomplish?” she asked.

  Oliver shrugged. “I’m hoping that if I’m standing in his office he’ll at least hear me out. Once he sees what I’ve got, I’m counting on his professional curiosity to bring him on board.”

  “Are you planning to see anyone else while you’re there?”

  “I may run into some people on campus,” Oliver said. “No one in particular, though.”

  He let it go at that. Now, standing by the window watching moonlight etch the peaks of the Pedregosas, Jeannie realized that what bothered her was the possibility that he would see Vivian. She understood how unlikely that was—Vivian had made it clear after Oliver broke it off that there would be no going back.

  Jeannie rubbed her bare arms. The nights here turned cool, even in summer, and the window glass was cold to the touch. She’d been trying to sleep in cotton shorts and a tank top, but finally her restlessness had gotten the better of her. She got out of bed, poured herself a glass of water and went into the living room to try to sort out what she felt.

  Jealousy was not, she had always believed, part of her makeup. She didn’t believe that people should, or could, own others. If two people loved each other, as she and Oliver did, then having intimate relations with others wouldn’t threaten their marriage. The important thing was not who slept with who but that Oliver always came back to Jeannie, and she to him, often with new and interesting variations to introduce.

  Sex was great, especially with Oliver. But it was fun with others too. Variety, that old spice of life, only made it more interesting.

  So where did that reaction to the possibility that he might see Vivian come from? It was especially strange since the chance that he would want to, or that Vivian would, was slim to none.

  Maybe, she thought, it was because Vivian had been a violation of their agreed upon rules. She’d been too young, and a student besides. And that affair, with its broken rules, had threatened their livelihoods, uprooted them, changed the direction Jeannie had believed their life together was headed.

  She had grown up in the Northeast, daughter of a philosophy professor—the head of his department—and a successful attorney. Her parents had been liberal, politically active, generous with time and money. Her childhood home had vine-covered brick walls and a steady stream of intelligent visitors who engaged her in their wide-ranging conversations. She had ready access to books, played with expensive dolls and Steiff teddy bears and Stave puzzles, went Christmas shopping in Manhattan and saw Broadway shows and vacationed on the Vineyard.

  Life had taken her to Europe and eventually to California, where she met Oliver. She had stayed, willingly. But even though it was on the opposite coast, somehow she had always believed that they would have a life like her family’s. Instead, they were childless—her body’s statement, apparently, about her life goals—and living in rural Arizona instead of a coastal center of academia. She loved it here, more than she had expected. That didn’t mean it wasn’t a huge adjustment, though. Anytime life’s plans were turned upside down, anxiety followed. That, she convinced herself, was all her sleepless night meant. Vivian was a symptom of her unease, not the cause. Aggravated, no doubt, by the murder of the Lavenders, just down the road. But if Oliver wanted to go back to California—particularly if it could help find Lulu—then he absolutely should do so.

  She would be fine here, Jeannie decided, for the day or two he’d be gone.

  Interlude: 1536

  From five hundred and eighty men, the expedition of Pámfilo de Narváez had been reduced to four hundred, then forty, and finally four. They had wandered lands without roads, without visible paths, following ancient traces that their Indian hosts knew deep in their hearts, needing no signpost or marker to indicate. They had visited villages where starvation and sickness were common, where the three Spaniards and the Moor had to heal and heal, hour after hour, villages in which they could barely walk because the people who had nothing wanted no more from life than to touch them, even though their skin was burned and dried by the sun, their hair and beards unkempt, tangled, their bodies naked as the Indians among whom they tried to pass. They had also traveled into towns made from blocks of dried mud, with permanent houses and cultivated fields. In these wealthier towns people could spare time and effort for art, and so they were given jewelry and blankets and pottery. And they did not lack for people to carry what they were given, because the number of Indians who followed them had swollen beyond counting, into the thousands.

  These were pleasant villages and the people were kind and hardworking. European peasants tended to be mistrustful of strangers, while these welcomed their visitors with gifts and smiles and dances. They offered their crafts, what food they had, their wives and daughters and sisters—offers which, surprisingly, Estevan refused, because he still lay only with the one girl, whose name was Akta, or something like it. He continued his sculpture, as well, and Alvar was surprised to seethat, although the black man had never sculpted before, he had a gift for it, working away like a man possessed. The strange white stone they had found took on her likeness, a little more each day, and in skill Estevan seemed to match the greatest of the Roman sculptors (although in fact, Alvar knew, he might have misremembered their statues; memories of Europe had grown hazy, as if that part of his life, albeit the largest part, had happened to someone else, an accomplished storyteller, and he had only seen Sevilla and Ravenna and Cádiz and Madrid and his home in Jérez in his mind’s eye, through pictures planted there by the speaker’s words).

  At times, Alvar worried that Estevan had been possessed, so
steadily did he work on his sculpture, creating such beautiful art. He had often feared, over these months, that there would be a price to pay for using un-Christian magic, for opening their souls to forces they could neither understand nor control. God had created the Heavens and the Earth, but the people they lived among did not recognize Alvar’s God, and yet he had seen more miracles here than he ever had in Europe. Estevan had stopped healing, saying that he needed his energies for his sculpture, and Alvar could not help but wonder exactly what role native magics played in its creation.

  The Indians gladly hauled the crude wagon Andrés and Alonso had told them how to build. Estevan left the block of stone in the back of the wagon, rather than removing it each time he wanted to work. He climbed in back with it, and using his stone tools (which he kept having to replace, as they wore out against the white rock) he chipped and molded and formed. The girl, Akta, seemed endlessly patient, posing for him with her mischievous grin. Perhaps she took some perverse pleasure in covering her breasts before him, when ordinarily she went about with them exposed. Perhaps she simply enjoyed being looked at and knowing that Estevan created an image of her which would last, unchanging, for many years after she had aged and died.

  Her young man, her betrothed, however, did not look upon her continued involvement with the Moor as happily. His name, Alvar had learned, was something like Ukuka. Alvarsaw him watching Akta and Estevan from a distance, his arms folded over his chest, chin up, eyes narrowed to angry slits. Alvar lived in fear that the young man would explode one day, that his anger would get the better of him and he would lash out.

  The night it finally happened was a dark one with a bare sliver of a moon rising late over the eastern mountains. They had crossed through a pass between two taller ranges several days before, then traveled south through a wide, flat valley filled with lush grasses and yucca plants holding their spikes in the air like the spears of triumphant Christian warriors. They stopped for the night in a grassy meadow where enormous trees grew along the banks of large pools of water, fed, Alvar guessed, by underground springs. Water had been scarce for most of the trip, and the Indians could barely contain themselves long enough to ask the Christians to bless the ponds before they leapt in, splashing and drinking and even fornicating in watery bliss.