“Let’s find out who they are,” Echo said. Her eyes were so glazed with tears that Avalon was just a white haze with a patch of pink—her panting tongue—in the middle.
Doc reached down and patted Echo’s shoulder. “I’ll take care of it, if you’ll just step out for a few moments,” he said. “And call you as soon as I hear back from the lab.” He paused as Echo got awkwardly to her feet, and Avalon rose off her haunches, ready to follow. “Sometimes,” he went on, “the chips are faulty, or they get damaged. It’s possible we won’t be able to recover anything.”
She waited in the hall, and when Doc Swann opened the door and handed her the leash, Avalon sported a small bandage on her right ear.
As much as Echo hated the idea of losing this dog, the prospect of never finding her rightful owners made her feel even worse.
This was about doing the right thing for an innocent, trusting animal, she reminded herself. Not about her.
Now, where had she heard that before?
*
“I KNEW YOU’D BE BACK,” Keegan said on Tuesday morning, when Rance showed up at McKettrickCo in shoes that looked spit-shined and the least uncomfortable of his three-piece suits. “I just thought it would take longer.”
“I’ve got meetings in Taiwan,” Rance said. “I called San Antonio, and the company jet is on its way here as we speak.”
Keegan opened his eyes wide, then narrowed them. He looked frazzled, as usual, sitting behind his too-tidy desk. “Meetings in Taiwan,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Rance, what the hell is going on with you? What happened to the gentleman-rancher plan? Did you mean that speech about spending more time with Rianna and Maeve, or were you just blowing smoke?”
Rance’s back molars ground together, and he made a conscious and none-too-successful effort to relax his jaw. At this rate, he’d be gumming his food before he was forty. “You know something?” he challenged, leaning over the top of Keegan’s desk, his hands braced on the smooth wood. “This isn’t the reaction I expected from you. You did your damnedest to talk me out of resigning, remember?”
“I remember,” Keegan replied, undaunted by the overbearing approach, which, because of his size, Rance had used effectively ever since he reached his full height.
Realizing that, he backed off a little.
“What are you running away from?” Keegan pressed, pushing back in his chair and tenting his fingers under his chin. “Or should I say, whom? As if I didn’t know.”
“It isn’t Echo,” Rance said, a mite too quickly. Who was he kidding? This had everything to do with the lady in pink.
“Right,” Keegan agreed with wry skepticism. “Spare me the bullshit, all right?” His frown deepened. “Taiwan. I’ll say this for you, cousin—when you run away, you don’t fool around.”
“This trip could make a big difference in the company’s bottom line,” Rance argued, straightening his tie. God, he hated ties, and herding this conversation in another direction was like funneling a pack of feral cats into a gunny sack, but something made him try, hopeless as it was.
“Save it,” Keegan said. “You’re not worried about the bottom line. That’s another thing you told me when you resigned.”
Rance’s steam finally ran out. He looked around for a chair, dragged one up and fell into it. “Why is talking to you harder than driving nails into a rock with no hammer?”
Keegan laughed. “Because you’re lying through your teeth, mainly.”
“I’ll be away for a week, Keeg. Not six months. I can make this up to the girls when I get back.”
“You used to say that about Julie,” Keegan recalled. Like Jesse, he could be a hard-ass when he thought the situation called for it—more of the McKettrick DNA. “Every time she had to change plans because you were making a last-minute business trip. The day came, obviously, when there were no more chances to make things up.”
Rance let out a whoosh of breath, as though he’d caught a ramrod square in the center of his solar plexus. “Man, Keeg. That was harsh.”
“The truth usually is. You want to go to Taiwan and make this company bigger, you go right ahead. Just keep this in mind—you never know when the bill’s going to come due. Julie’s death ought to have taught you that.”
Rance closed his eyes momentarily, and when he opened them again, he couldn’t quite look Keegan in the face. “Are you through yet?”
“I’m through,” Keegan confirmed. “Can you turn that jet back?”
“Probably not,” Rance answered. “The folks over in Taiwan won’t be too happy if I cancel, either. They did a lot of scrambling to make this work—I was on the phone with them half the night.”
“Then I guess I’ll see you in a week.”
“I guess so,” Rance said. He walked out of Keegan’s office on his own two feet then, but it didn’t feel that way on the inside. In the figurative sense, he crawled on his hands and knees.
*
“MY DADDY’S GONE TO TAIWAN,” Rianna told Echo glumly, on Wednesday afternoon, when she came to story time at the bookstore. The weekly event had been Ayanna’s idea, and on this, the first day, it had drawn a good crowd of bored kids. She was also starting a readers’ group for the parents.
Echo had felt Rance’s absence like a dry socket after a tooth was pulled, even though no one had said anything about his leaving, until just now. She realized with deep chagrin that a part of her had been waiting for some news of Rance, or to catch a glimpse of him, however distant or brief.
But it wasn’t as if she’d been pining. The shop kept her busy, even with Ayanna’s help, and she’d been listening for the telephone ever since she’d taken Avalon to see Dr. Swann on Monday afternoon.
“Where’s Maeve?” Echo asked, wanting to take Rianna in her arms and give her a reassuring hug, but not quite daring. She could identify with the child’s dejection; despite the obvious differences, such as wealth and the fact that Rianna had a father, however preoccupied he was with his own concerns, as well as a sister and a devoted grandmother, loneliness was loneliness. Adults had choices, but kids had to accept whatever was offered, whether it was enough or not.
“She says she’s too old for story time,” Rianna said. She glanced over one small shoulder at the other children, gathering around Ayanna in an eager circle. Avalon, lying in her usual patch of sunlight, got up to walk stiffly to Rianna and give her an affectionate nose-nuzzle.
Rianna giggled and patted Avalon’s head. Nothing like a little dog therapy when life got you down, Echo thought. Her heart ached. When would Avalon’s owners be found? When would the call come?
As if the universe had heard the questions, and decided to give the rare, immediate answer, the telephone rang exactly then.
“Echo’s Books and Gifts,” Echo said, talking a little too loud, hoping it was another kind of call and knowing it wasn’t.
“This is Cindy at Dr. Swann’s office” came the cheerful reply. “We’ve heard back from the lab in Flagstaff. Do you have a pencil handy?”
Do you have a pencil handy?
Such an ordinary and entirely reasonable question.
Tears glazed Echo’s eyes. “Yes,” she said, with a slight sniffle.
Rianna, still watching, gazed at her curiously.
Avalon’s expression was one of purest trust.
“Let’s see,” Cindy said, the words accompanied by the brisk tapping of a keyboard. “The animal’s name is Snowball. Her owners are Herb and Marge Ademoye, of Santa Fe, New Mexico.” She followed up with a telephone number in the 505 area code.
Snowball, Echo thought, oddly detached. Snowball, like the mare she’d ridden with Rance on the Triple M.
She thanked Cindy, hung up and rounded the end of the counter to sit on her haunches, looking into Avalon’s saintly brown eyes. “Hello, Snowball,” she said.
Snowball made a soft, whimperlike sound and licked her face.
“I thought her name was Avalon,” Rianna said, looking concerned.
“Nope
,” Echo answered, bravely sucking a torrent of tears back up into her sinuses. “Snowball.”
“We have a horse named Snowball,” Rianna replied. “She belonged to my Aunt Cassidy.”
Echo blinked. Rance hadn’t mentioned a sibling, but, then, there was a lot she didn’t know about him. Even with her heart splitting down the middle, she noticed that Rianna had spoken of her aunt in the past tense.
Of course, that didn’t mean Cassidy was dead or anything. People outgrew horses, and sold them or left them behind for others to look after.
“She was only seventeen when she died,” Rianna said. “I wasn’t born yet, so I didn’t know her.”
Suddenly, it was almost too much to bear, the way the world was. If she hadn’t had to call the Ademoyes and finish the workday, Echo would have fled upstairs, thrown herself down on her bed and cried herself into a stupor.
She touched Rianna’s cheek. “You’d better hurry,” she said gently, “or you’ll miss the beginning of the story.”
Rianna nodded, gave Echo and Avalon/Snowball another long, pensive look, and went to join the other kids.
Echo straightened, went behind the counter again and picked up the telephone. She made three tries, each time transposing the digits of the Ademoyes’ number, before the call went through.
“Hello,” answered a woman’s recorded voice. “You’ve reached Herb and Marge Ademoye. We’re not available to take your call, but we check our messages regularly. Please leave your name and number, and we’ll get back to you at the first opportunity. Thank you.”
Echo, always self-conscious talking to a machine, said awkwardly, “This is Echo Wells, and I live in Indian Rock, Arizona. I have your dog, Av—Snowball—”
Snowball’s ears perked at the sound of her name.
Echo’s throat tightened so that she could barely give her contact numbers.
She hung up, but she was already waiting for the Ademoyes to call.
Waiting for Rance McKettrick to return from Taiwan.
Waiting.
She had a long history of that.
As a little girl, she’d waited for her parents to come and take her home.
Then, finally realizing that they never would, she’d waited for her aunt and uncle to love her.
Giving up on that, too, eventually, she’d waited to meet the right man.
She’d met Justin and thought he was the right man. Unfortunately, he hadn’t agreed.
Swallowing the lump in her throat, Echo straightened her spine and lifted her chin. She would not indulge in self-pity. Everybody had sorrows, secret and otherwise. Everybody, at one time or another, felt lonely.
The day went on.
Ayanna finished the story hour.
Grateful mothers returned to collect their children and bought stacks of books in the process. Ayanna, full of quiet triumph, helped Echo ring up the purchases, tally the day’s receipts and close the store.
After Ayanna went home, Echo loaded Snowball into the car and drove to the supermarket, where she bought fried chicken and potato salad in the deli section. Back at the shop again, the two of them shared the meal.
Although she liked her apartment, Echo was reluctant to go upstairs. She might as well have been in a lighted aquarium, she thought, as the shop at night, with all the lights burning, but in a strange way it made her feel less lonely, knowing pedestrians and people driving by in cars could see her.
“That’s pretty pathetic, isn’t it?” she asked Snowball, who was munching on a big piece of chicken skin. She didn’t seem as fond of the potato salad.
The telephone rang.
That was what telephones did, on a fairly regular basis, but Echo was still so startled, she nearly dropped her fork.
“Echo’s Books and Gifts,” she said.
Silence.
“Hello?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said a familiar feminine voice. “I’m trying to drive and talk on the phone at the same time. I’ve got to get one of those earpiece things before I end up committing vehicular homicide.”
Echo blinked.
The woman laughed warmly. “This is Marge Ademoye,” she said. “I’m calling about Snowball. H-how is she?”
Echo didn’t miss the catch in Mrs. Ademoye’s voice when she asked about her dog.
“Snowball,” Echo said, “is just fine.”
“Thank God,” Marge said. “Herb and I have been just frantic.”
“She’s good,” Echo reiterated.
“She got away from us, almost three months ago now, at a rest area along Highway 10,” Marge explained, and Echo knew the other woman was crying. “We looked and looked, and called until our throats were raw, but she was just—gone.” There was a pause, then Marge said, in a muffled, over-the-shoulder tone, meant for someone else, “I’m talking to the woman who found Snowball,” she said, probably addressing her husband. “Herb’s been in the back of the RV, taking a nap,” she explained, speaking to Echo again. “You said you live in Indian Rock, Arizona?”
“Yes,” Echo answered, while Snowball watched her with her head tilted to one side, her brow furrowed and her ears cocked slightly forward.
“We’re in—where are we, Herb?—South Dakota. We travel a lot, with Herb retired, and all. Herb was a dentist for thirty-two years.”
Echo smiled, even though her eyes were burning again and the glands under her ears and in her neck felt swollen to the bursting point. “Snowball will be right here waiting for you,” she managed. “I’ll take good care of her until you arrive.”
Marge’s words were heartfelt. “Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome,” Echo answered.
Goodbyes were said, and she hung up the phone.
“Your people are coming to get you,” she told Snowball.
Then, blinking away more tears, she looked up and was surprised to see her own reflection in the darkened glass of the display window.
Darned if she wasn’t visible, which meant she was not transparent, she was solid.
Go figure.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ECHO KNEW SHE WAS DREAMING.
Knew she was really lying in her own grown-up bed, in the apartment above the bookshop in Indian Rock, Arizona, with Snowball-aka-Avalon snoring snug and furry and warm against her side.
Somebody else’s dog.
The knowledge bubbled up from the bedrock of her sleeping mind, and she might have made a soft, despairing sound of protest and clung a little more tightly to the lost dog that had, paradoxically, found her.
She was seven years old in the dream she knew she was dreaming, and couldn’t seem to escape. If she’d looked into a mirror, she would certainly have seen Rianna’s face, not her own, but she was, in that peculiar and conflicting way of dreams, still herself.
She stood in a discount superstore with her aunt, uncle and cousins, and it was almost Christmas. Almost Christmas, because, for Echo, Christmas never really arrived. It was always a promise, shining out there ahead somewhere, the special preserve of children who were loved and wanted.
Even at seven, she understood that she didn’t fall into that category.
But there was the doll.
The magnificent doll, nearly as tall as she was. It wore a sparkly blue dress, the skirt a cascade of starched ruffles. Margaret, that was her name, and she smiled down at Echo from her splendid box, through the cellophane window protecting her from eager little fingers and reflecting the colored lights from the big, glittering tree at the end of the aisle. She had long, curly auburn hair, a tiny tiara and a wand in one hand, with a jeweled star at the top. Her shoes looked as though they were made of glass, like the ones Cinderella wore to the ball, though even as small as she was, Echo was sure they must have been plastic.
I had forgotten that doll, said the wakeful part of Echo’s mind.
Had you? asked the Universe, gently skeptical.
In the dream, the child-Echo swallowed, gazing up at the doll in forlorn wonder. She touched her u
ncle’s hand—tugged at it. It was an act of unprecedented bravery; her mother’s brother and his harried wife never abused her. They just never seemed to actually see her. Like the stray cat that sometimes slunk up onto the back porch, looking for a handout, Echo was expected to eat and go away.
“That’s what I want for Christmas,” Echo told her uncle, very quietly, although no one had asked. “That doll.”
Her cousins, two girls and a boy, clamored for skates and soccer balls and boom boxes.
Her uncle looked down at her, in a rare noticing moment, and frowned, as though surprised to find her there, standing beside him, zipped up in her hand-me-down coat. But Echo felt a stirring of hope, just the same. She whispered a prayer—back then, she still called the Universe “God”—please.
It was all she knew to say.
When Christmas morning came, the skates and the boom-boxes and the soccer balls were there, but no doll.
She got a coloring book and crayons, and a jewelry box with a little ballerina inside. It danced on a tiny circle of glass when the key was turned. She sat, among gifts she would otherwise have cherished, and wondered what Christmas tree Margaret, that magical doll, stood under, in what living room.
Somebody else’s doll.
Echo awakened with tears on her face and Snowball trying to lick them away.
Somebody else’s doll.
Somebody else’s dog.
And Rance, whether she liked it or not, was somebody else’s man. Rianna and Maeve were somebody else’s daughters. It didn’t matter that Julie McKettrick was dead and gone. She’d been there first, Julie had—first with Rance, first with the children.
Julie’s life, however brief, had been a shout.
And I am only the echo.
Echo clung to Snowball, and she sobbed.
*
BUD WILLAND STUDIED THE picture on the front page of the Indian Rock Gazette, which he’d found on a table in one of the casino restaurants, way down in Phoenix, and figured it for a sign. Echo Wells and that piece-of-shit dog, with a cake between them.
The payoff, given to him by her fancy boyfriend, was gone. He’d poked the last of it into a slot machine, not fifteen minutes back. They were all rigged, those damn machines. Suckered you in, with lights and music and motion and color. Made you think you had a chance, but all the time, they were bleeding you dry.
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