by J. A. Jance
“Popovers?” he asked, brightening. His mother might just as well have waved a magic wand.
“That’s right. We’re going to San Xavier. There are usually ladies selling popovers in the parking lot”
The very mention of popovers put Davy in high gear. Tortillas and popovers. Beans and chili. He much preferred Indian food to Anglo. Maybe she would have to break down and learn to cook Indian food after all, and not just tortillas, either.
17
THEY SAY THIS happened long ago. Cottontail was sitting next to a tall cliff when Ban, Coyote, saw him sitting there. Coyote was very hungry. “Brother,” he said to Cottontail, I am going to eat you up.”
“Oh, no,” said Cottontail. “This you must not do, for I am holding up this cliff. If you eat me up, it will fall down and crush us both.”
Coyote looked up at the tall cliff, and he was afraid that Cottontail was right. “Come over here, Coyote,” said Cottontail. “You stand here and lean against the cliff. You hold it up while I go around to the back of the mountain and find a big stick to help hold it up.”
“All right,” said Coyote, and that’s just what happened. He came over and stood beside Cottontail to help hold up the cliff. As soon as Coyote was standing there, Cottontail ran off somewhere. Coyote stood there for a long, long time, leaning against the cliff, holding it. He waited and waited, but Cottontail didn’t come back.
Finally, Coyote got tired of just standing there. He thought that if he ran very fast, perhaps he could get out of the way before the cliff could fall on him. So Coyote let go of the cliff and ran as fast as he could. But when he let go, the cliff didn’t fall down after all. Thai was when Coyote knew Cottontail had tricked him.
This made Coyote very angry. “I will follow Cottontail’s trail,” he said. “The next time I see him, I will eat him up.”
And that, nawoj, is the story of the first time Cottontail tricked Coyote.
They stopped in front of an old two-story house along Speedway. “What’s this?” Myrna Louise asked.
Andrew reached in his pocket and pulled out an envelope. “Run this inside for me,” he said. “They’ll give you another envelope.”
“But what is this place?” she asked again.
“It’s a rental agency,” he said. “They’re helping the find a place to live. I’ll wait here in the car. Give them this and tell them your name.”
Myrna Louise started to say that she was a lot older than he was, and if anyone was going to sit in the car, it ought to be her, but it didn’t seem worth starting an argument when the day was going so well. She got out of the car.
Inside, behind a counter, a young woman was busy talking on the phone. Myrna Louise grew impatient standing there because the receptionist was only talking to her boyfriend. While waiting, she looked around. Nothing indicated that this was a real estate office. Shouldn’t there have been signs, something that said what kinds of properties they rented?
Finally, the young woman hung up. “May I help you?” she asked.
Wordlessly, Myrna Louise handed over the envelope. The receptionist opened it, removing a blank sheet of paper that had been wrapped around a small stack of bills. She counted them out, one at a time. “And what is your name?” she asked, when she’d finished counting out $150.
“Myrna Louise Spaulding, but it’s probably under my son’s name, which is…”
“Here it is,” the young woman interrupted, taking another envelope from a drawer. Myrna Louise was surprised to see her name, not Andrew’s, neatly typed on the envelope. So he really had intended for her to pick it up.
“Was that a deposit?” she asked, trying to make sense of the transaction.
The young woman laughed. “You could call it that.”
“Well, shouldn’t you give me a receipt or something?”
“No,” the receptionist replied. “That’s not the way we do business around here.”
Rebuffed, Myrna Louise took the envelope and went back to the car. Andrew looked decidedly unhappy. “What took so long?” he demanded. “I was afraid something had gone wrong.”
“She was on the phone,” Myrna Louise said.
Andrew reached out to take the envelope, but his mother placed it in her lap, letting both hands rest on it. Something was wrong with that place, she thought “They didn’t give me a receipt,” she said.
Andrew laughed. “That’s all right. I won’t need one.”
How could Andrew afford to throw away a whole $150 in cash like that and not even get a receipt? Myrna Louise wondered. She had rented houses and apartments before, and she always got a receipt, especially when she paid cash. Why wouldn’t Andrew insist on one—unless he had lied to her and the money was for something else entirely, not for a rental at all.
Suspicion born of years of being lied to made her hands itch with curiosity about what was in that envelope. She wished she had opened it for a peek before she ever came back out to the car.
“Where are we going now?” she asked.
“To the storage unit. I want a few things from there.”
“Couldn’t we stop and get something to drink first?” she asked. “I’m thirsty.”
Andrew sighed. “I suppose. What do you want?”
“A root-beer float would be nice. The Dairy Queen isn’t far.”
They stopped at a Dairy Queen, and Andrew went inside where several people were already in line ahead of him. Cautiously, keeping the dashboard’ between his sight line and her hands, Myrna Louise slipped a bony finger along the flap of the envelope. It came loose, tearing only a little along one edge. Inside were two pieces of paper.
She scanned through them in growing confusion. There was nothing at all about renting a house. She found herself reading some kind of police report about an auto accident. Finally, she noticed the names—Rita Antone and Diana Ladd, and someone else named David. The names of those two women were branded into Myrna Louise’s memory. David had to be Diana’s son, her baby. Why had Andrew paid so much money to have something about them? You’d think he’d want to forget all about them.
Hastily, she stuffed the papers back in the envelope and licked the flap. After a lifetime’s worth of snooping, she knew there would be enough glue left to make the flap stick fairly well. By the time Andrew returned to the car, the envelope was once more lying innocently in her lap.
He brought the root beer to the window on her side of the car. “Here,” he said, holding out his hand to take the envelope. “Let me have that before you spill something on it.”
Reluctantly, Myrna Louise handed it over. She worried that he would notice the frayed flap, but he stuffed it in his shirt pocket without even glancing at it Myrna Louise drank her root-beer float with her mind in turmoil, still trying to understand. Andrew was up to something, but what? He had paid good money for those two pieces of paper, more than he should have, but why? To get their addresses, said a tiny voice at the back of her mind. To find out where they live. Why? Why would Andrew be interested in knowing that?
For an answer, she heard only the nightmarish sound of a long-ago neighbor’s cat, screaming and dying.
Brandon Walker woke up late and got ready to go to work. The house was empty. His mother had spent the night at the hospital. He had offered to bring her home, but again Louella refused. She would stay there as long as it took, she told him. He wondered how long that would be.
At the office, his clerk shook her head as he walked in the door. “You’re in real hot water this time,” she said. “The Big Guy wants to see you.”
The Big Guy was Sheriff Jack DuShane himself. If one of the Shadows received a curt summons to the sheriffs private office, it probably wouldn’t be for a pleasant, early morning social chat or a hit from the bottle of Wild Turkey from the sheriffs private stash.
“On my way,” Brandon said, turning away.
“How’s your dad?” the clerk asked.
“Hanging in there,” he responded, “but that’s about all.”
Sheriff DuShane sat with an open newspaper spread out on his desk. “This is a hell of a note,” he said, glancing up as his secretary escorted Brandon Walker into the room. He pointed to the upper left-hand corner of the page. “You realize, of course, that this makes us all sound like a bunch of stupid jackasses?”
“Sorry,” Brandon said, “I haven’t seen a paper yet this morning.” Nonetheless, he had a pretty good idea about the contents of that offending article. He was sure it reported Toby Walker’s unauthorized use of a police vehicle.
“You in the habit of letting your whole goddamned family use county cars whenever they damned well please?”
“It never happened before,” Brandon began. “I had no idea my father would take the keys off the…”
“I don’t give a good goddamn how it happened, but let me tell you this. If it ever does again, you’re out of here, Walker. We don’t need this kind of shit. Can’t afford it. Lucky for you the car wasn’t damaged, or you’d be on administrative leave as of right now. So keep your damn car keys in your damn pocket, you hear?”
Brandon had seen news clips of DuShane out in public charming both the media and his constituents. He wondered if those people knew that, on his own turf, DuShane was incapable of speech free of profanity.
The detective waited to see if there was anything else. DuShane didn’t exactly dismiss him, but he turned back to the newspaper as though Walker had already left the room. The younger man stood there wavering, wondering if he shouldn’t let DuShane know of the possible problem brewing over Andrew Carlisle.
“Well,” the sheriff said. “What are you waiting for?”
“Nothing,” Brandon replied, deciding. “Nothing at all.”
If DuShane didn’t even have the good grace to ask how Toby Walker was doing, why the hell should Brandon tell him anything? After all, it wasn’t his case, not officially.
Sister Katherine met them in the office when Diana and Davy arrived at San Xavier. The nun, taking Davy under her wing with a promise of popovers, left at once. Diana was shown into a sparsely furnished office. She sat down on a rickety visitor chair facing a spare, balding old man who introduced himself as Father John.
“I hope my telephone call didn’t alarm you, Mrs. Ladd,” he said, “but I wanted you to understand that I consider this a matter of utmost importance.”
“About Rita?” Diana asked.
He nodded. “You see, her nephew and another man, a medicine man called Looks At Nothing, came to see me yesterday….”
“They came to see you, too?” she asked in some surprise. “I knew they had spoken to Brandon Walker, but why you?”
Father John seemed taken aback. “You mean they discussed this situation with someone else?”
Diana nodded. “With a detective at the Pima County Sheriffs Department. He came to the house last night and told me.”
Father John folded his hands in front of him, thoughtfully touching his fingers to his lips. “How very odd,” he said. “Why would a detective have any interest in Davy being baptized?”
Now, it was Diana’s turn to be puzzled. “Davy? Baptized? What are you talking about?”
“About the accident, Rita’s accident”
“What does that have to do with Davy?” Diana asked. “And what does his being baptized have to do with anything?”
“How long have you been here on the reservation?” he asked.
“Since sixty-seven.”
“Doing what?”
“Teaching.”
“Have you made any kind of study on the Papago belief system?” the priest asked.
“I’m a schoolteacher. Father John, a public schoolteacher. I don’t interfere in my students’ spiritual lives, and they don’t fool around in mine.”
“That may be where you’re wrong, Mrs. Ladd,” the priest said quietly. “It’s my understanding that you were raised in the Catholic Church, but that you’ve moved away from it as an adult.”
“Really, I don’t see what that has to do with…”
“Please, Mrs. Ladd, hear me out. It is true, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she answered reluctantly. “My husband was a Lutheran, for one thing, but there were other considerations as well.”
“Your husband is dead,” he pointed out.
“I’m well aware of that Father, but I haven’t changed my mind about the other things.”
“I see,” he said, nodding.
“What do you see?” Diana didn’t try to conceal her growing impatience. “You still haven’t told me what this is about.”
“As I said earlier, it’s about Dancing Quail….”
“Who?”
“Excuse me. About Rita. You know her as Rita Antone. Dancing Quail was her name when she was much younger, when I first knew her. She was still a child then, not many years older than your own boy. But to get back to what I was saying about Papago beliefs, these are people with a strong spiritual heritage, you know. They have accepted much the whites have to offer while at the same time keeping much of their own. The reverse hasn’t always been true.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we Anglos haven’t always been smart enough to learn from them. As a race, we’ve been very pigheaded, all caught up in teaching others, but not bothering to learn from our students. It’s a problem I’ve been trying to rectify in my old age. For instance, I’ve learned something about Indian beliefs concerning illness and shamanism.
“In his youth, Rita’s friend Looks At Nothing, that blind medicine man, probably was a victim of what the Indians call Whore Sickness, which results from giving way to the temptations of your dreams. Eye troubles in general and blindness in particular are considered to be the natural consequences of succumbing to Whore Sickness. Looks At Nothing could see as a child, but after he lost his sight in early adulthood, he went on to become a well-respected medicine man.
“Whore Sickness?” Diana repeated dubiously. “Do you really believe that?”
“Maybe I don’t, not entirely, but the Papagos do, and that’s the point. There’s tremendous power in belief, especially in ancient beliefs, and that’s what we’re dealing with as far as Davy is concerned—ancient beliefs. Looks At Nothing is convinced that Rita’s accident occurred because she lives in close proximity to an unbaptized baby. As such, your son is a danger to her, and will continue to be so until something is done to fix the problem.”
“This is outrageous!” Diana grumbled. “It sounds like some kind of trick to trap me into coming back to church.”
“Believe me, young lady, it’s no trick. My concern is far more straightforward than that In addition to the accident which has already happened, Rita is evidently suffering from what the Indians call ‘Forebodings.’ These pose an additional danger, a threat not only to Rita, but to Davy and yourself as well.”
“So what are you saying?”
“Would you have any objections to your child being brought up in the church?”
She shrugged. “I never thought about it that much one way or the other.”
“Mrs. Ladd, what I’d like to propose is this. Allow me to come give the boy some religious instruction. At his age, he ought to have some say in the matter. Once he’s baptized, we can work together to solve the catechism problem and prepare him for his first communion.”
Diana Ladd remained unconvinced. “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Father John sat forward and hunched his meager frame over the desk. “Mrs. Ladd,” he said earnestly. “I have been a priest in the Catholic Church for over fifty years. Priests are expected to live celibate, godly lives, and for most of my career, that has been true. But once, very early on, I made a terrible mistake. I fell in love with a beautiful young woman. I almost quit the priesthood to marry her, but an older priest, my superior, took matters into his own hands. He shipped her far away. Years later, I finally realized that I had a rival for her affections, a man of her own people. When she was sent away, not only did I l
ose her, so did he.”
“This is all very interesting, but I don’t see…”
Father John held up his hand, silencing her. “No, wait. Let me finish. Afterward, the other man, the rival, swore that he and I were enemies. I always believed that would be true until our dying day, but yesterday he came to see me here at San Xavier. We smoked the Peace Smoke, and he asked me for my help.”
“The blind medicine man?” Diana asked, finally beginning to grasp the situation. Father John nodded.
“Believe me,” he said, “Looks At Nothing never would have come to me for help unless he believed Dancing Quail to be in mortal danger. Naturally, I agreed to do whatever I could.”
The old priest fell suddenly silent. He turned away from her and sat gazing up at the rough saguaro-rib crucifix hanging on the wall behind his desk. He averted his gaze, but not before Diana detected a telltale trace of moisture on his weathered cheek. She could only guess what telling that story had cost him, but she knew it wasn’t an empty ploy. He had told her only as a last resort. Now, she sat quietly, trying to assimilate it all and understand exactly how it applied to her and to her situation.
First and by far most important was the fact that Father John, right along with everyone else, believed that Rita and she were in danger. On that score, Diana and the priest were in complete agreement, although she had difficulty accepting the idea that Davy’s being unbaptized was somehow the cause of it all.
Diana’s first choice of weapon to deal with the problem was a fully loaded .45 Peacemaker, but maybe a gun wasn’t the only weapon she should consider using. Diana Ladd wasn’t prepared to ignore anything that might prove helpful.
“When would you like to come speak to Davy?” she asked finally.
Father John’s shoulders sagged with relief. He wiped his eyes, said a brief prayer of thanksgiving, and then crossed himself before turning back to face her. “Today?” he asked. “Would later on this afternoon be all right?”
Committed to action, she saw no point in delay. “Yes,” she said. “That’ll be fine. I’ll give you the address.”