by Lynne Hinton
Daniel shut the trunk. “I just like to have the right clothes,” he answered, heading over to the driver’s side. He opened the door.
Eve walked to the passenger’s side and then turned back toward the front door of the house. “Let me just make sure he’s okay,” she said and headed up the stairs.
She was met at the door by Jackson’s booming voice. “I have the insulin. I know there are meals in the freezer. I can drive myself to work and I will not drive out of town. I know how to call you on your cell phone. GET OUT OF HERE!” he bellowed.
“Don’t forget to feed Daisy and give her some milk. She likes milk,” she said as she backed away from the front porch, down the steps, and got into the car. “He’s fine, by the way,” she said to Daniel, who was grinning.
He started the engine and they made their way down the driveway and out onto Highway 14. They headed south, where they would pick up Interstate 40 and drive west. It was early, just after dawn, and they knew they had a full day’s drive to get to Las Vegas. Eve took out her rosary and began to pray. Daniel turned to his passenger, saw what she was doing, faced the highway, and did not interrupt. After finishing her morning prayers, she wrapped her rosary around the rearview mirror and reached for the cup of coffee she had placed in the holder between the seats.
“When was the last time you were in Vegas?”
Daniel shrugged. “It’s been about six months. I usually go twice a year.”
Eve was surprised. She didn’t know her father’s former partner made the trip that often. “You like the tables or the ladies?” she asked, smiling.
He shook his head. “No, it isn’t for the gambling,” he answered. “Or for the women,” he added. “Well, maybe just one.” He turned to Eve and winked.
Eve didn’t respond. She thought about what he was saying and soon caught on. “I can’t believe it. You go out there to check on her,” she surmised.
Daniel glanced back in her direction. He didn’t respond at first.
“How long have you been doing this?” she asked.
He shrugged. “A while. It always worried Jackson that she was out there without anybody watching over her. And it worried him even more after she married that boy. So, I got nothing better to do and I’ve always enjoyed a road trip. I figure Vegas is as good a place to visit as any.”
Eve placed her coffee back in the holder and leaned back in her seat. The news surprised her at first, but then it seemed exactly in the man’s character. She even wondered whether he had driven over to Pecos to check on her. “Do you visit with her when you go? Does she know you’re in town?”
“Sometimes,” he replied. “I used to take her out for dinner, give her a little extra money. She seemed to like the company. But a few years ago, after she got married, it seemed like she resented my trips. She said I was a spy and that I shouldn’t waste my money driving down there just to go back to Madrid and give a report to the Captain. By then I was sort of enjoying my little getaways and decided to keep going. I found a great hotel at the end of the Strip, a cheap dinner buffet that serves the best crab legs you can find in the Southwest, and a few stores where I like to shop. I relax when I’m there. I told her that, but she didn’t believe me. So since then I haven’t called her or tried to meet her for a meal. I just go to the lounge where she works, eyeball her, make sure she looks okay.”
“And the last few times, was she okay?”
Daniel chewed on the inside of his bottom lip. He shook his head. “I couldn’t tell. She’s talked to me less and less in the last couple of years. She acts jumpy a lot of the time. That boy, Robbie, he’s a troublemaker, that’s for sure.”
Eve thought about her sister’s husband. The truth was that she didn’t know much about him. Dorisanne had met him when she moved to Las Vegas, and since Eve didn’t travel so much while living at the monastery and Dorisanne never came home, she had only met her brother-in-law a couple of times. Once at the wedding and the other time at her mother’s funeral. He was polite in his conversations with the Divine family, but their interaction certainly wasn’t anything close to intimate.
“She told me once that he had money problems,” she said, as if to prove to herself that she knew a little bit about her sister’s life. It was the only thing she could say with certainty.
Daniel laughed. “That’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one.”
“Why?”
“He has a gambling problem, and he borrows from the wrong sort of people. Dorisanne keeps finding ways to bail him out.”
Eve thought about this and began to wonder how much money the Captain really had given to her. There were a lot of things about her sister’s relationship with their parents that she never knew.
“Of course I tried to tell her that she can’t keep doing that. And she told me that she gave him an ultimatum, but it’s like a woman in an abusive situation. She keeps making excuses for him, saying he’s getting help, that he’s stopped.” He shook his head. “I don’t understand you women.”
Eve looked in his direction. “Excuse me?”
“Oh, I’m not talking about you. I never worried about you getting hooked up with the wrong guy. You were always too smart for that.”
“How do you know that?”
“Girl, I’ve been watching you and your sister since the time you were in pigtails and braces.”
“Yeah, but how come you never worried about me?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t worry about you. I said I didn’t worry about you getting hooked up with the wrong guy. You brought along your own set of issues for me to worry about.”
“Like what?” This conversation intrigued Eve.
“Like you on them horses and then on the bikes. You about drove your mama crazy with how fast you would go.”
She knew her mother’s concern, but hearing this made her wonder about something else. “What did the Captain think?”
Daniel smiled. “He worried a little, but for some reason he figured you would be okay. He thought you were more like him—strong, tough. He always thought you could handle the hard stuff.”
Eve considered this explanation regarding Jackson’s parenting. When her mother would complain about her recreational outings, when she would try to make her husband curb Eve’s enthusiasm for speed and danger, and when he would shrug off the worry, Eve had simply thought he was ignoring her, didn’t really care about her. Now she was hearing that he did notice what she was doing, that he did keep up with her activities, he just thought she was smart or not as vulnerable somehow as her sister. She felt surprised and a little pleased at learning this.
“What made you think I wouldn’t get all girly and date bad boys like Dorisanne?”
Daniel looked over at Eve. “I guess I was like Jackson. I could always see you were too smart for that kind of thing. You never seemed to care too much about what people thought about you.”
“I cared,” she responded.
“Yeah, I know. Everybody cares about that at some level. But you just always seemed to know yourself better than most kids. You always seemed to know what was important to you, what you wanted, and you went for it. You never waited for somebody else’s approval. Barrel racing, dirt bike contests, going overseas for that semester, joining the convent—you always seem to know what’s right for you.”
Eve thought about her friend’s assessment and wondered if that’s how her life appeared to others. She also wondered, if that was true, when it had all changed. She was certainly not nearly so confident in her desires or choices at the present time. She wondered if Daniel could see that as well, and she was just about to ask when the phone in her pocket began to ring.
EIGHTEEN
“Hello,” she answered as she flipped open the phone and took the call.
Daniel glanced over at Eve as he drove and then reached inside a plastic bag that had been placed between them. He took out a handful of trail mix and began snacking.
“It’s me,” came the loud and gruff
response.
“Jackson?” Daniel asked.
Eve nodded. “Yes, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” he yelled.
“You don’t have to talk so loud,” Eve explained. “I can hear you fine.”
“Right,” he yelled again.
“So why did you call?” she wanted to know.
“The files Daniel brought,” came the answer.
“Yes, what about them?” She’d gone to bed reading the files from 1891 but had not found any mention of the miner Caleb Alford. She had put those back in the box and left the box on the kitchen counter. She told the Captain that before she left. He must have started his reading of them right away.
“I found something,” he reported.
“Is it a police report?” she asked.
“No, not anything like that. This was in a different set of files, a book, a county record book.”
“Okay,” she responded, waiting for the rest of the news.
“The record book of marriage licenses,” he explained.
“Caleb Alford was already married,” she responded.
“Yep.”
“So what did you find in the book?”
There was a pause. Eve realized he was waiting for her to figure it out on her own. And in a few seconds she did.
“You found his name in there?”
“Yep.”
Eve considered this bit of news. “So he came to Madrid telling his family back in North Carolina that he would send for them, and instead he came out here and married somebody else.”
“Yep,” was the repeated answer.
“Huh.” Eve was surprised. Suddenly, she thought of the man who had hired the two of them, the man from Virginia who was hoping to find out how his great-grandfather had died, what had happened to him that prevented him from ever returning to his family. She wondered how he would take this bit of news, and she wondered how the Captain planned to tell him.
“I’m going to let you break the news,” he said as if he had read her mind. “When you get back from Vegas, you can tell him his great-grandfather was a polygamist. I figure you’d be the better one to offer that bit of information than me.”
“What makes you think that?” She turned to look at Daniel, who was watching the road and eating.
“You should be able to figure out how to wrap it up nice. That’s what you religious people seem to know how to do real good. Wrap up the bad news in a nice package and make it sound not so bad.”
Eve shook her head. “I’ll tell him when I get home,” she said. “In the meantime, you need to call Epi Salazar and find out what he wants us to do about finding that gold. He’s still trying to hire you, and I told him you’d call him today. It sounds like there might be more than gold buried out there, so be careful.”
“Right,” the Captain noted. “I’ll drive over there later and talk to him in person.”
“Okay.”
“How far have you gotten?” he wanted to know.
Eve dropped the phone away from her mouth. “He wants to know how far we’ve driven,” she said to Daniel.
“Tell him we’re in Gallup,” Daniel replied. He dusted off the crumbs from the front of his legs and held out the bag to Eve, offering some of his trail mix.
She shook her head. “Gal—”
“I heard him,” Jackson interrupted her. “Call me when you get to Nevada,” he said, and then, before she could reply, he hung up.
She looked at the cell phone in her hand. “Well, it doesn’t appear as if the cell phone has improved his telephone manners.”
Daniel laughed. “Made him talk louder,” he commented.
“There’s that,” she said.
“So the old miner had two families.” Daniel had overheard the report. “Hey, can you hand me a soda from the cooler?”
“Looks like it.” Eve closed the phone and placed it in her pocket before bending down to open the cooler at her feet. She took out a drink and handed it to Daniel. “He thinks I should be the one to tell his great-grandson,” she added.
“Heard that too,” he said, popping the top and taking a swallow.
He turned to face her. “You up for that?”
Eve shrugged. “I don’t know,” she answered. And then she studied him. “How about you? How do you break that kind of bad news?”
He placed the drink in the holder near the console and turned back to face the road. “You mean the kind of bad news that says your family member, your loved one, isn’t the person you thought he was? You talking about that bit of bad news?”
“Yeah.”
He shook his head. “Just the facts, ma’am,” he answered and smiled. “Just tell them the facts.”
Eve hoped there was more advice coming. And there was.
“They usually don’t believe it at first, want to see the proof. So then you show them the arrest warrants or the explicit photographs or the confession document, whatever you got, and then they usually ask that you leave them alone.”
“And do you?” she asked, curious about this police procedure.
“Sometimes, I mean I do if I can. But sometimes if you’re up against a deadline, you have to ask them some questions. ‘When did you see him last? Do you know where he is? Did you have any idea about this behavior?’ That kind of thing. But yeah, mostly I try to give them a day to sit with the bad news and then come back with the questions. But it’s hard,” he admitted. “Nobody likes to know they’ve been duped.”
“Duped,” she repeated. “That’s a nice way to put it.”
“How would you put it?” he asked.
“Betrayed, lied to, deceived . . .”
“Duped doesn’t sting as much,” he noted.
Eve nodded. She thought about the client from Virginia. Mr. Alford had never expressed a great loyalty for his long-lost family member, but she figured he hadn’t thought the worst about him either. Even if he was a few generations removed, the news that his great-grandfather had left his young wife and soon-to-be-born son, moved to another state, waited a brief time, and then married again, was not news anyone would want to hear.
“What do you think about that?” she asked.
“About what?”
“About having a second family, about never getting a divorce, never breaking things off with the original family, but just starting up all over again as if you were single, as if you didn’t have another wife and child?”
Daniel reached up and pulled on the shoulder strap of his seat belt. “It happens more often than you think,” he responded. “People can pretend a lot of things about themselves—that they’re single, that they’re in love for the first time, that they’re faithful, that they won’t get caught. I’ve been doing police business a long time, and I’ve seen people make choices I can’t figure out for the life of me. Maybe your boy got out here and learned things about himself he never got to know back home. Maybe he realized he wasn’t really the guy he thought he was and he didn’t want to face it so he just started over. Maybe he got away from his mama and daddy and the childhood sweetheart he’d married and realized that all he really wanted was to get out of the South, not to start a family and run a farm, not even to mine for treasures; maybe all he really wanted was just to get away.”
Eve turned away from him and faced ahead. Something about what Daniel said rang true and felt somehow a little too familiar. She gazed out the window. The New Mexico sky was bright blue with only a few clouds moving across the horizon. The hills were a bit more green because of the recent rain, and she drew in a deep breath, watching the land she loved, the desert, as they sped past.
NINETEEN
“Two rooms,” she heard Daniel telling the clerk at the front desk. “And it’s Divine,” he said, pronouncing her name correctly. “Not Divine,” the way it was usually voiced. Eve was standing in the small lobby looking out the window in the direction of what Daniel had told her was “the Strip.” There was a small sitting area near the counter with an overst
uffed sofa, two chairs, and a long table situated in the center. The lobby appeared to have been recently renovated and painted, the walls were bright and without blemish, and the furniture showed no wear.
The clerk was wearing a blue blazer and a red tie, and suddenly Eve felt a bit underdressed. She looked down at the outfit she had been wearing most days since leaving the monastery, old jeans and a long-sleeved Western shirt. She noticed the mud on her boots and looked around, hoping she hadn’t tracked dirt onto the clean tan carpet. She wondered if she should have just worn her habit, if wearing the jeans and snap-button shirt didn’t set her apart even more than the long robes. She still felt so unaccustomed to the ways of the world.
She turned back to the view out the window. It was late, and yet there were so many neon flashing lights you couldn’t even tell that night had fallen. On the way to the hotel, Daniel had driven right through it all, giving her a close look at the entertainment center of the town. It was like nothing she had ever seen. She knew Daniel drove that way just so he could watch her jaws drop.
Dorisanne had sent pictures and Eve had certainly heard lots of stories, but Las Vegas was bigger and brighter and more of everything than Eve had ever imagined. It was like an amusement park or the midway at the New Mexico State Fair, only flashier and bolder. She stood at the hotel lobby window and remembered a conversation with her sister in which she had asked her what it was that she liked about the gambling town set down in the middle of the desert, why it was she had chosen it for her home.
Dorisanne, back in New Mexico for some holiday or short vacation, had thought about the question, and then her face had softened into a big grin. “It’s just so wide open,” she had answered Eve. “There’s nothing that you can’t find or do or try. It’s like anything’s possible there.”
And according to what Daniel had explained as they arrived at the outskirts of the city, over the last ten years it had only gotten wider. She turned just as he was heading in her direction.
“You want to grab something to eat?” he asked.