J. Jance - Skeleton Canyon

With Joanna’s Crown Victoria right on the Miata’s back bumper, they raced down through the back side of Lowell and then onto the traffic circle. Around and around they went, time and again. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the Miata simply stopped. As Joanna approached the vehicle, weapon in hand, the driver’s side door popped open and a woman stepped out. She was tall and blond, wearing a miniskirt and a pair of impossibly high heels.

“Hands on your head,” Joanna ordered.

“You can’t do this to me, Joanna Brady,” Rowena Sharp Bonham screeched. “You can’t pull me over like a common criminal. I won’t stand for it. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

“Yes, you were,” Joanna told her calmly. “You were cheating.”

She woke up then, laughing. For a moment she was disoriented by waking up outside the house rather than in her own bedroom, but that momentary jar gave way to a feeling of well-being. Mourning doves cooed their early morning wake-up calls. Across the Sulphur Springs Valley, dawn was tinging the sky a vivid orange. But something was different.

For weeks now , clouds had drifted up from the south each afternoon, bringing with them the tantalizing promise of much-needed rain. By morning they would retreat back into the interior of Mexico without leaving behind a trace of moisture. This time, though, the clouds were still there, billowing up in tall, puffy columns above the far horizon. From miles away across the thirsty desert came the welcome scent of an approaching storm.

Joanna had grown to adulthood with a desert dweller’s unbridled delight in the prospect of a summer rainstorm. What she wanted to do more than anything that morning was to sit on her porch and watch the storm build. She wanted to track the wind and surging clouds of dust as they marched across the desert just ahead of the rain. She wanted to sit back and watch jagged flashes of lightning electrify the entire sky, and to listen to the rolling drums of thunder, but first, she wanted to make a pot of coffee and read the Sunday paper. In order to do that, she’d have to collect the paper from the tube down by the cattle guard.

She went inside. The house had been dreadfully hot when she came home the night before. To counteract the heat, she had left the swamp cooler running all night long. Overnight, both indoor and outdoor temperatures had dropped enough that now the house seemed almost chilly. The first thing she did was switch off the cooler. As soon as she did so, she was startled by how quiet it was. Far too quiet.

Don’t stand around dwelling on it, she told herself firmly. Do something.

Throwing on a pair of jeans and one of Andy’s old khaki shirts, she hurried into the kitchen to start the coffee. Then, after stuffing a carrot into her pocket and with both dogs trailing eagerly behind, she walked out to the corral.

In the last few months, since Bucky Buckwalter’s horse Kiddo had come to live on High Lonesome Ranch, one of Jenny’s weekend duties had been to ride the horse down to the end of the road to bring back the Sunday paper. Before Kiddo’s arrival on the scene, Joanna herself would have driven down in the Eagle. This morning, while water dripped through the grounds in the coffeemaker, Joanna decided to take the horse herself and go get her newspaper.

As soon as the nine-year-old sorrel gelding heard the back door slam shut, he came to the side of the corral and peered eagerly over the fence. Ears up, whickering, and stamping his hooves, he shook his blond mane impatiently while Joanna stopped in the tack room long enough to collect a bridle. When she came into the corral, Kiddo gobbled the carrot and accepted the bridle without complaint.

“I’ll bet you miss Jenny, too, don’t you?” Joanna said soothingly, scratching the horse’s soft muzzle once the bridle was in place. “That makes four of us.”

Joanna had worried initially that Kiddo would be too much horse for Jenny to handle, but the two of them-horse and child-had become great friends. Jenny had taken to riding with an ease that had surprised everyone, including her mother. She preferred riding bareback whenever possible. Girl and horse-both with matching blond tresses flowing in the wind-made a captivating picture.

Joanna herself was a reasonably capable rider. For this early morning jaunt down to the cattle guard, she too rode bareback. The sun was well up by then. On the way there, she held Kiddo to a sedate walk, enjoying the quiet, reading the tracks overnight visitors had layered into the roadway over the marks of her tires from the night before. A small herd of delicately hoofed javelina-five or six of them-had wandered down from the hills, following the sandy bed of a dry wash. In one spot Joanna spied the telltale path left behind by a long-gone sidewinder. There were paw prints left by a solitary coyote. She saw the distinctive scratchings of a covey of quail as well as the prints of some other reasonably large bird, most likely a roadrunner.

Butch Dixon-a city slicker from Chicago-had come to visit the High Lonesome and had marveled at how empty it was.

It isn’t empty at all, Joanna thought. I have all kinds of nearby neighbors. It’s just that none of them happen to be human.

Coming back from the gate, with the folded newspaper safely stowed under her shirt, Joanna gave Kiddo his head. They thundered back down the road with the wind rushing into Joanna’s face. It was an exhilarating way to start the morning.

No wonder Jenny liked Kiddo so much. It was almost like magic. On the back of a galloping horse it was impossible for Joanna Brady to remember to be sad.

Angie and Dennis arrived in the meadow off the south fork of Skeleton Canyon just as the sun came up. Settling into a rocky cleft, Dennis reached into his backpack and pulled out two pairs of powerful binoculars, one of which he handed to Angie. “There’s no real trick to this,” he said. “You just have to be patient. They’ll show up eventually.”

As promised, the hummingbirds appeared half an hour later. There they were, hundreds of them, hovering in vivid color against an overcast sky. “The dark green ones with the black bills are Magnificent Hummingbirds or Eugenes fulgens,” Dennis explained. “The lighter greens-chartreuse almost with the orange bills-are called Broad-billed or Cynanthus latinostris. The ones with distinct red caps are male Anna’s -Calypte anna.”

Enchanted but also self-conscious that he knew so much more than she did, Angie held the binoculars glued to her eyes. “And the ones with the purple throats?” she asked.

“Male Lucifers- Calothorax Lucifer. I spotted some Black-chinned in here the other day, but I don’t see any of them now.

Angie watched until her arms grew tired of holding the binoculars. When she took them down, she was surprised to find Dennis Hacker looking at her rather than the birds. Nervously, she cast around for something to say. “It doesn’t seem fair that the males are always so much prettier than the females,” she said.

“That may be true for birds,” Dennis told her, “but it certainly isn’t true of humans.”

Embarrassed, Angie looked back at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He grinned. “It means you’re beautiful,” he said. “You’re willing to hike a mile and a half uphill to watch birds at six o’clock in the morning. You’re interested in my parrot project. What else is there? I think I’m in love.”

Not knowing how to reply, Angie put the binoculars back to her eyes and said nothing.

“I’m serious, you know,” Hacker continued. “I told my parents once that I was going to marry the first woman I ever found who was as interested in birds as I am.”