J. Jance - Day of the Dead

Maybe you should, Brian thought. He said, “You mentioned the driver made several trips back and forth to the truck?”

“Yes.”

“Was he carrying something each time?”

“Yes.”

Brian was about to ask Sue Lammers another question when Deputy Gomez hurried up to them. “Excuse me, Detective Fellows,” he said. “I think we just found something important.”

“What’s that?”

“A bundle of bloody clothing,” Gomez said.

“You think it belongs to the girl?” Brian asked.

“It’s a pretty good guess,” Gomez replied. “This was in one of the pockets.”

He held out a glassine bag. Inside it was a business card. Brian had to squint to read the print. “Erik LaGrange,” the card said. “Development Officer, Medicos for Mexico.” Brian turned the bag over. On the back of the card was a handwritten telephone number.

Brian jotted it down. “Well,” he said, “at least this gives us a place to start.”

Tohono O’odham tribal attorney Delia Ortiz waddled into her office. Dropping heavily into her desk chair, she rolled it close enough to the desk so she could reach her computer keyboard over the hefty mound of her protruding belly. She usually didn’t come into her office on Saturdays, but with the baby due in two weeks and with her office’s budget proposal expected to appear before the tribal council the week after her due date, Delia was determined to be ahead of the game.

No one was more surprised than Delia to find herself pregnant at age forty-three. She hadn’t expected to be pregnant at age forty, either. She’d lost that one-a boy they’d named Adam-due to a late-term miscarriage during her sixth month of pregnancy. She had felt the baby’s loss keenly, but her grief had been nothing compared to her husband’s. Leo Ortiz had been utterly heartbroken. It was at his insistence and only partially because they were good Catholics that they’d done nothing about birth control. Now, here she was-three years later and three years older-pregnant again.

Wedged up against the edge of her desk, the baby-another boy-gave Delia’s tummy a solid kick. Remembering how it had felt when Adam had stopped kicking, she welcomed this minor disturbance-a reminder this new child was eager to make his grand entrance into the world.

Leo had been lobbying for them to pick out a name, but Delia had resisted. She had named Adam and then lost him. She was afraid that if she named this baby too soon, the same thing might happen.

Delia browsed through her new e-mail. Midway down she spotted Mualig Siakam, Lani Walker’s screen name, Forever Spinning, named after the young girl who had turned into Whirlwind. The subject line of Lani’s message said: “How’s he doing?”

Just as Lani Walker had done prior to sending the e-mail, Delia Cachora Ortiz stared at her screen for a long time before opening the message. She knew Lani was writing out of real concern for Gabe Ortiz’s health. Delia was concerned, too. In large measure, everything Delia treasured in life had its origin in Fat Crack Ortiz. To a certain extent, that was true of Lani and Davy Walker as well. Delia knew Wanda and Gabe Ortiz were Lani’s and Davy’s godparents. Still, a surge of resentment boiled up in Delia’s heart the moment she saw the listing.

What business was it of Lani Walker’s to ask about Fat Crack’s health and well-being? Delia herself owed her own debt of gratitude to Gabe Ortiz, but she was sick and tired of seeing Leo-her husband and one of Gabe and Wanda’s two real sons-being pushed aside by what Delia couldn’t help but regard as a pair of interlopers.

Biting back her anger, Delia opened the message:

Dear Delia,

It’s Friday night and I can’t sleep. I’m really worried about Fat Crack. Would you please drop me a line and let me know how he is? It’s almost the end of the semester. If he’s really bad and needs me to, I can come home early.

Lani

That was the last straw! If he needs me? What did that mean? Did Lani Walker expect to come traipsing out to Gabe and Wanda’s place and push Leo and Richard aside so she could keep her own death watch?

Delia had heard all the talk about Lani Walker growing up to be a medicine woman and a doctor. She had spent too many years in the Anglo world to put much store in all the medicine-woman mumbo-jumbo, but she had taken a serious interest in how Fat Crack Ortiz intended to turn Lani Walker into a physician. He had insisted that if Lani Walker was going to come home and serve as a doctor on the reservation, the Tohono O’odham needed to pony up the money.

Having a realistic idea of exactly how expensive sending a student through medical school would be, Delia had tried to derail the idea. As tribal attorney, she had argued long and hard before the tribal council about the fiscal irresponsibility of doing just that. Of course, the Tohono O’odham tribe needed to have home-grown health care professionals-doctors and nurses whose first loyalty would be to the Desert People-but Delia thought it was wrong to use tribal funds to educate someone whose parents could well afford to pay the tuition themselves.

Gabe had still been tribal chairman then. For Delia to go up against her own father-in-law and then lose in such a public fashion had caused a reservation-wide stir. It had also caused familial difficulties between Delia and her in-laws that lingered to this day and colored all Delia’s interactions with Gabe and Wanda Ortiz.

He’s dying, Delia thought, but he is fine. With that, she clicked the “reply” button and typed:

Dear Lani,

Gabe is fine. No need for you to rush home. I’ll let you know if anything changes.

Delia Cachora Ortiz

She punched “send” without giving herself a chance to reconsider. With the e-mail off in the ethers, Delia found she was far too upset to concentrate. Abandoning her plan to spend the morning working in her office, she switched off her computer, turned off the lights, locked the door, and left.

Out in the parking lot, she climbed into her aging Saab 9000 and headed for the little chapel at Topawa several miles south of Sells. It was the place where her mother had gone seeking refuge and comfort more than thirty-five years earlier. It was where Delia went looking for relief from her ever-present burden of guilt.

Delia knew that being at war with Lani Walker would only worsen the difficult situation with her father-in-law. Fat Crack Ortiz wasn’t simply Leo’s father and the grandfather of the child Delia carried. He wasn’t just the man who had hired her and brought her back to the reservation in triumph years after she and her mother had fled Manny Chavez’s house in Sells in abject terror. Fat Crack was, in fact, the one person who had made their escape possible even way back then. Everything else that had happened to her, good and bad, flowed from that.

Everything else.

I’m scared,” seven-year-old Delia had told her mother. “Do we have to go? Couldn’t we just stay here?”

Ellie Chavez shook her head and kept on packing. “This is my chance to become a teacher,” she told her daughter determinedly, pretending a bravery she didn’t feel. “Sister Justine got me into this special program at Arizona State University. If I don’t do it now, I never will. I’ll be a teacher’s aide all my life-an aide but not a teacher.”

“But why do Eddie and I have to go?” Delia asked. “Couldn’t we stay here with Daddy or with Aunt Julia?”

“No,” Ellie said firmly. “It wouldn’t work. Your father wouldn’t-”

“Your father wouldn’t what?” Manuel Chavez demanded, appearing unexpectedly in the doorway. He stood with his wide body blocking the glare of the afternoon sun and throwing a giant shadow that spread like a dark cloud all the way across the room.