Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02

by Land of Echoes

  That is, if the woman who had accompanied Julieta was indeed the mysterious Dr. Lucretia Black referred to. There were no photos on her site, so determining that would take a little more digging, something Nick Stephanovic could see to. Maybe he was just being paranoid, but paranoia had its uses. It had certainly saved his ass more than once.

  Donny stood up and went to the big window that covered most of the west wall of his office. There had never been much to see— Albuquerque was a flat town, and the nearby buildings of downtown blocked any views of the land beyond—but since they'd built the Maynard monstrosity across the street there was even less, just a bleak facade of blue-green glass and the wavy reflection of his own building. The sight only served to irritate him, as always.

  Mondays were straight CEO days, when what he had to do was the big-issue stuff: legal battles, major purchaser relations, regulatory lobbying, strategic planning, new technologies, energy market analysis. He was good at that stuff—better than Dad had been, certainly—but he looked forward to the end of the week when his role changed with his clothes and he conducted his round of site inspections. He agreed with Garrett's idea that for a family-owned company to succeed the boss had to stay in touch with conditions on the ground. It was how you earned the loyalty of the troops, maintained morale and motivation, kept a real sense of the men, machines, and mountains of rock that lay behind the figures. Donny made a point of dragging some of the number crunchers along with him, just to get their scrawny asses off their chairs and remind them what it really meant to dig coal out of the goddamned ground.

  And of course there were also the special projects that needed hands-on supervision, where leaving things to middle-management intermediaries would risk inconveniences and indiscretions.

  The sight of the Maynard building began to really get on his nerves, and Donny turned away. Checking his watch, he found that he had less than twenty minutes before he had to leave for the lunch meeting with the audit team. A bilious, burning sensation nagged under his breastbone, chronic heartburn or acid reflux or whatever. Stress related, his doctor insisted. To which Donny had replied, "Tell me something I don't know." Hung in gilt frames on the inner wall, the three oil portraits of his forebears stared back at him, and the eyes of his father seemed to meet his with a glint of contempt. "You're a worrier," Dad had always told him. "Can't be a nervous Nellie in this business. Gotta grow a thick skin."

  Garrett certainly hadn't been a worrier. He'd been a man of action. Old school: decisive, blunt, charming as hell, bulldog persistent, clever but not given to deliberation or self-criticism. Dad had neither understood nor accepted the growing complexity of the energy industry and the politics that went with it. Back in the 1890s when Great-grandfather McCarty had started out, even in 1964 when Garrett had taken over his father's holdings, the landscape had been pretty wide open. The rules of the Wild West still pertained, strong guys could still make the rules for themselves and their companies as they went along. If you ruffled some feathers, got some people's backs up, so be it and devil take 'em, you slugged it out and the best man won. But it wasn't that way anymore. Energy sources had diversified, coal had lost market share, margins had shrunk. Regulations had proliferated, citizen action groups had weighed in, the Indians had gotten restless, and politics with the big oil and nuke guys had gotten complex and devious: your good buddies one minute, competitors who would stick a knife in your back the next. Plus technology was changing so fast that by the time you finally decided to invest in the latest equipment it had already been replaced on the cutting edge by something even glitzier, more efficient, and more costly.

  Donny looked over the audit materials he'd be reviewing today, increasingly distracted by the gnawing under his ribs. He hated the sensation, but he'd learned to make use of it: The heartburn was often an indicator that something was on his mind and needed attention. So what was today's trigger?

  Simple: Julieta. That was it. What was she up to? Because, parapsychologist or no parapsychologist, Julieta didn't just visit the mine for the fun of it.

  Garrett's portrait caught his eye, and he could almost hear his father's derisive voice: Worrier! To which Donny replied, Yeah, Dad, I'm a worrier. Partly because you left me with so many things to worry about. One of them being your sweet ex-wife and all the crap that came with.

  A knock sounded at the door to the outer office, and after a pause the heavily paneled walnut slab swung open. Nick Stephanovic poked his blunt head in.

  "Sahib," Nick said. "Just to let you know I'm ready when you are." He extended a thick wrist and tapped his watch.

  "Hey, Nicko," Donny said. "I'm almost there. Come in for a minute. Shut the door."

  Nick stepped inside, swung the door shut, and stood waiting with his hands folded in front of him. His ancestors were immigrants who had come to cut timber and lay railroads in the 1880s and had stayed to work in the mines that had flourished throughout the region. His Czech blood notwithstanding, he had the classic pug nose of the shantytown Irish tough, and though when in Albuquerque he wore a suit expensive enough for a CEO, it tended to cling to his broad shoulders and bulky upper arms and did nothing to conceal what he really was: bodyguard, personal assistant, driver, confidential consultant, and odd-job man. Among the rules Garrett had instilled in Donny from childhood was that you had to build a core of absolutely loyal retainers around you. In Donny's experience, there was no such thing as absolute loyalty—human sentiment being almost infinitely malleable, offered the right persuasions—but Nick came close. He was forty-nine, and Donny had inherited him as his right-hand man, along with the rest of the company, when Garrett had died.

  Nothing would surprise Nick. After working for two generations of McCartys, he knew just about everything about McCarty family business, and what he didn't know he'd been given to surmise.

  Donny rolled down his shirtsleeves, took his jacket from the coat-rack behind his desk, slipped it on, shot his cuffs. He went back to sorting papers, taking his time, letting Nick wait as he thought things through.

  "Nick," Donny said finally, "remind me when we found those mutes out at Hunters Point—what was it, last year? Year before?"

  "What the hell?"

  "You remember our unannounced visitors to the site the other day? Mrs. Ex-McCarty and friend?"

  "That's what that was about? Mutes?" Nick grinned incredulously.

  Donny shrugged. "Supposedly. The woman with her claims to be a paranormal researcher. I've checked her out, she seems legit— for a purveyor of bull, anyway. I agreed to meet her tomorrow to talk about mutes. Like I'm some kind of expert."

  "Why meet with her?"

  Donny put the last of the papers into his briefcase and snapped it shut. He felt a hard smile on his lips. Because, he told the portrait of his father, there's more than one way to skin a cat. Sometimes it's better not to just bulldoze your way through. Sometimes you want subtlety, Dad. Finesse. "Call it counter-intelligence," he told Nick.

  Nick nodded, knowing what he meant: trying to figure out what Julieta was up to. "Last year. Spring. Two cut-up horses, over in the eastern end of Area Eighteen."

  "Anything strike you as coincidental about that location?"

  Nick's face changed, amused contempt for Julieta giving way to a thoughtful look and then a dangerous glower that Donny savored.

  "Oh" was all Nick said.

  They didn't say any more as they went through the outer offices, tossed a wave to the secretaries, and walked out to the elevator. They waited in silence, but once the doors had shushed shut, Donny turned to Nick. "So what's your day like?"

  "I got a couple of items, but they can wait if you've got something more pressing."

  "This Dr. Lucretia Black, 'Cree' Black. From Seattle. I need to find a photo of her from somewhere. Make sure we're talking about the same person before I meet her."

  "Okay. What else?"

  "Supposedly there's something oddball happening at the school. That's what Julieta implied, and I also got
one of those tantalizing wee-hours phone calls from our good friend, suggesting she knew of goings on there that might be of interest to us. It'll take the usual teasing out and flattery and playing games. But my thought here is, if Julieta has in mind making problems for us, I'd like to have something we can throw right back at her. Give her grief in return."

  "So I should call the nurse."

  "Set up a meet with her. Turn on the charm. Remind her how much we loved and relied upon her husband and the rest of it. And give her my fond regards, of course."

  Nick nodded. The elevator braked and the doors hissed open to the basement parking garage. They stepped out and walked to the silver Mercedes Donny kept for town use. Nick beeped the doors open, got in on the driver's side, and leaned across the seat to open the door for Donny. When they came up the ramp and into the daylight of downtown Albuquerque, the sun beat down off the Maynard building with the intensity of a green laser. They turned right and Nick accelerated down the street.

  Nick, bless his ugly Czech-Irish mug, knew when to keep quiet and let a man think.

  Donny was feeling the familiar weariness come over him, the sense that it was all too much or too pointless. That so much of what happened or what he did was unnecessary, that there had to be more to life. After this meeting, he'd return to the office and work until seven, then go home to his suburban mansion in its rectangle of irrigated green lawns so startling against the brown-dirt desert, and to Liz and the marginal sense of human company she provided. She was young and refreshingly crass and inventive in bed—more so than he deserved or needed, actually, given the state of his libido; no, he wasn't like the old bucks of his father's generation. When he'd let her move in, they'd been seeing each other for six months and he'd thought maybe something would grow between them. But all that had grown was habit. A habitual theater of cohabitation, as good as it could be given her indeterminate status and the lack of any deeper heat or sense of future. When he thought of coming in through the chilly, polished-limestone foyer of his house, calling her name, seeing her emerge from the too-large rooms, the routine faux kiss they'd give each other, he felt a pang of loneliness like a blade that went up through his groin right into the heartburn behind his breastbone.

  Another reason to hate the Maynard building, he thought blackly. Because if you stared hard enough at its wavery, bottle-green reflection of the windows of the McCarty Energy offices, you could pick out your own window and with effort even the solitary ghost of a figure standing there. Once he'd leaned close to the glass and waved to see his reflection, a barely discernible silhouette in the distorted surface light, wave back.

  It could have been different. He hadn't always been this way. In high school, there'd been girls he'd loved with innocent tenderness, the swooning devotion you saw in the movies. Later, there'd been Bernadette, with whom he'd shared a couple of fairly sweet years until his father had brought home with unnecessary forcefulness just how inappropriate it was to consider marrying a half-breed.

  And, admit it, for a short time, there'd been Julieta. An instant when he'd been able to see her as something other than his father's hated ex-wife. Her beauty and keen-edged intelligence had always intimidated him, but in the years right after her divorce she'd seemed to become so much more accessible. So skinny, so fragile. She had to be hurting, Donny knew that much for sure. She'd acquired appealing shadows under her eyes that spoke of sleepless nights and loneliness and doubts about life— all things Donny shared. For a short period, he had let himself imagine something about himself and about her. Almost-forgotten longings had blossomed in him and had made him act like a fool.

  Julieta had refused to talk to Garrett or allow him on her property, so Donny had served as the company's go-between about the right-of-way crap Garrett had insisted on fighting out with her after the court had partitioned the property. He'd tried to do it righteously, hadn't he? Treating her with respect, showing a willingness to compromise? Asking, not demanding or threatening? She had no idea what it had cost him with Dad, resisting the old man's pressure to up the ante, turn it hostile, even have Nick do some down and dirty.

  Yeah, Donny realized with a shock, that was the last time: that period with Julieta. The last time that whole species of feelings had awakened in him. Twelve, thirteen years ago! Sweet Jesus, what a mess of a life.

  And that one day he'd been desperate or deluded enough to broach it with her. She'd heard his suggestion—that he had feelings for her, that there might be something to explore between them, and most of all that he was not like Garrett—and what he'd seen in her face wasn't the contempt he'd feared but something far worse: sympathy. She'd put her hand to his cheek and said, "No, Donny. Look at me—what's left of me. One McCarty was more than enough for this lifetime. Thank you, but no." A wry and sad grin.

  Later, her comparative kindness rankled more than anger or contempt would have. But of course, she was right. Right right right. It had been a stupid impulse on his part, given the situation, given all that had gone down. Under the circumstances, getting together with her would have been something out of a Greek tragedy, what, Oedipus Rex or something. It went against the moral order of the universe. The gods didn't forgive such things.

  The thought brought Donny out of his musings. Funny how the distant past could smack you upside the head, catch you when you least expected it.

  But in this case, maybe there was a reason his subconscious had dredged all that up. He turned to Nick, who was driving placidly with one big-knuckled hand relaxed over the top of the steering wheel.

  "You probably still know the lay of the land pretty well out there, don't you?" he asked. "Around the school? The mesa there? You could still find your way around if you had to?"

  Puzzled, Nick glanced over at him, and then his eyebrows jumped with surprise. " What—you think this goes that far back?"

  Donny shrugged, feeling crappy, injured by life's burdens and impositions, pissed at Garrett, at Julieta, at himself, at everybody. If the audit team gave him any grief today, anything at all, he swore to himself he'd tear somebody's head off.

  "Just a thought," Donny told him. "I doubt it. But it always pays to be prepared."

  29

  THEY MET at the school. It was Joyce's first glimpse of the place, and Edgar had seen it only in the dark. When they got out of their vehicles in front of the infirmary, they both looked around with the cautious curiosity of strangers on new turf. The afternoon was comfortably warm and windless, the desert vast and without sound or movement; to the east, the mesa basked in sunshine.

  The school itself was very different. With the students back, the place was alive with energy. Classes were done for the day, and most of the kids were outside. Groups sat under the trellises, skateboarders racketed up and down steps and curbs; a basketball game was in full swing on the court behind the gym, voices calling in Navajo and English. Faculty members strode between buildings, and the main parking lot was full of cars.

  Cree felt drained after her session with Tommy. She'd left the hospital before his relatives returned, wanting to let him have an uncomplicated visit with them, and had driven straight back. Though the sparkle of adolescent activity and emotion here felt pleasant and warm, it only deepened the gloomy urgency she was feeling. It took her a moment to understand why: because Tommy should be part of it. Enjoying a warm afternoon outside with his friends. Instead, he was in a hospital room with nothing to do but feel the invader growing in him, infiltrating him, turning him moment by moment into more of a monster. He was becoming like . . . like one of the twisted, bloated things you used to see suspended in jars of formaldehyde at freak shows. It wasn't fair, it wasn't right. It had to end. The kid deserved a life.

  And it didn't help that as she was leaving Dr. Corcoran had sketched out the pharmaceutical protocols he was considering if Tommy didn't shape up soon: Thorazine, haloperidol, Risperdal, maybe clozapine. Try the empirical approach, see if his condition responded. The trial-and-error method that so often beca
me just that—a wrenching trial for the patient, a lot of errors. Dr. Corcoran talked as if he planned to have Tommy with him for a long time.

  Tommy Keeday was in deep trouble. And Cree Black, Mrs. Ultrasensitive Ghost Buster Queen, or whatever the hell she was, didn't have a clue how to help.

  "We need to have a conference right away," she told them as they came toward her. "Julieta McCarty is on her way over. I've asked the nurse to join us, too. I want everybody on the same page here."

  Ed gave her an appraising look. Joyce frowned and chided her, "Well, hello to you, too, Cree. We're glad to see you, too."

  Cree just dipped her chin, took their elbows, and led them up the walk to the infirmary porch.

  They convened in the dayroom, taking seats on the couch and chairs that surrounded an oval coffee table. Julieta arrived from the administration building, Lynn came in from her office.

  Once Cree had introduced everybody all around, she turned to Julieta."I've asked Lynn to join us because we need to be able to share information about every detail of Tommy's condition and behavior. Lynn has spent more time with him during his crises than anyone, and she may recall details that didn't strike her as significant at the time but might be crucial for our team. But for her to do that, she'll need to know exactly how we're thinking of the problem. Which means, Julieta, that I need your approval to share information with her. Per our confidentiality agreement."