J. Jance - Day of the Dead

And what of Senora Duarte? Maria Elena wondered. Did she know what would become of the “lucky” girls she was sending to their supposed patrons, their benefactors? It was a question that haunted Maria Elena. She had struggled with it alone in the dark until she had finally reached a conclusion that had plunged her even deeper into despair. Of course, Senora Duarte had known. She had known everything. She was part of it. And that was why it had all happened so fast and with no warning. Once a girl was chosen, she went away that very day, without ever going back to the other children, without leaving any hint of what had happened or where she was going with the others-the unchosen ones-who remained.

No, she and Madelina and who knew how many others had disappeared without a trace, just as Maria Elena’s mother and brother had disappeared that day in Chiapas. Once Maria Elena had hoped and prayed to Mother Mary that Mama and Pepe were still alive. Now she prayed that they were dead. And she prayed that she might die, too. It was her only hope.

J. A. Jance

Day of the Dead

Four

At the end of a long, sleepless night, Erik LaGrange sat sipping coffee on his patio and welcomed the sun as it edged up over the Rincons. It was Saturday morning. He didn’t have to go in to work today, which meant he could put off facing the music until Monday at least.

You’re only thirty-five, he told himself again, as he had countless times overnight. Losing a job isn’t the end of the world. You’ve got no wife, no kids, no responsibilities. You can go somewhere else and start over. So what’s the problem?

The problem was, Erik knew he’d be going job hunting with no references and with the added burden of a huge black spot on his reputation. In even the best of times, nonprofit development jobs weren’t easy to come by. With corporate and private giving down, jobs like the cushy one he’d had for the past five years were now, as Grandma Johnson would have said, scarce as hen’s teeth. And since he’d spent most of those five years screwing his boss’s wife…

Grandma Johnson would have had more than a little to say on that subject as well. “You should have thought about that a long time ago” was the most likely one. Undoubtedly, she would have added something about making one’s bed and lying in it.

Erik missed Gladys Johnson dreadfully-her cheerful disposition, her way of always looking on the bright side of things, and yes, even that sometimes very sharp Scandinavian tongue of hers. She had read Erik the riot act often enough as he was growing up, but he had never doubted that those scoldings were rooted in love.

Grandma had been Erik’s rock. True north on his compass. The only parent he had ever known or needed or wanted. She had been everything to him-mother/father, aunt/uncle, sister/brother. And, until he made it into junior high, she had also been his best friend. He could remember riding in the car with her singing along with one of her well-worn cassette tapes. Erik’s favorite had always been the one where Helen Reddy sang “You and Me Against the World.” The song was supposedly about a mother and her little girl, but Erik always pretended the song had been written just for his grandma and him.

Right then, though, Gladys Johnson and her sage advice-which had grown even wiser the older Erik got-had been gone from his life for ten years. There was no way she could dose him with a firestorm of well-earned criticism for his foolishness and then help see him through to the other side of the problem. No, in this case, Erik was going to have to manage all by himself.

Down on Skyline, a car horn honked impatiently. Overhead, a noisy jet streaked toward a landing at Davis Monthan Air Force Base several miles away. The jarring background noises sliced through Erik’s reverie and intruded on his thoughts.

“That’s what’s wrong with living in the city,” Grandma Johnson had told him countless times. “With all the traffic and noise, I can’t hear myself think. That’s when I wish I was back on the island, where it was just me and the woods and the water. Then, all I could think or dream about was how boring it was and how much I wanted to get away. Now I wish I could go back.”

Isle Royale was a long damned way from Tucson, Arizona, but remembering Grandma’s voice made Erik know what he needed to do-hear himself think. Hurrying into the house, he grabbed up his knapsack. He loaded it up with sunscreen, several bottles of water, and some food-a couple of sandwiches, some cheese, and a package of dried apricots. Then he donned thick socks and hiking boots and headed out the door.

Outside, Erik paused beside his pickup and considered whether or not he should drive the Tacoma to the trailhead. Even though he had truck keys in his pocket, he finally decided against it. These days, leaving a vehicle-a company vehicle, at that-parked at a trailhead was pretty much an open invitation to have it broken into and/or stolen. Besides, the trailhead to Finger Rock was only a mile or so from the Catalina foothills home he was house-sitting for Professor Raymond Rice and his wife, Frieda, who were off on a year-long sabbatical in France.

After all, Erik thought, driving somewhere to go on a hike seems pretty dumb. Since the point is walking, why not start from here?

And so he did. Erik trudged off alone in the early-morning sunshine with the sky clean and blue above him. A few rock doves, a flock of quail, and a single watchful roadrunner noticed his solitary departure. So did a neighborhood dog or two, who barked briefly as he passed. In that upscale neighborhood people valued their privacy. Individual homes were set at least an acre apart and screened by carefully planted collections of native shrubbery and looming saguaros. As a consequence, none of Erik’s neighbors saw him go.

Since Erik’s pickup came and went from the driveway several times during the course of the day, those same privacy-loving neighbors assumed that the young man who was staying at the Rices’ place was spending a quiet Saturday going in and out and running errands just like everyone else. None of them saw or noticed anything at all out of the ordinary that day. For Erik LaGrange, that would make all the difference.

Fifteen miles across town, on the edge of the Tucson Mountains, Brandon Walker, too, had spent a sleepless night. But his lack of sleep was due to an entirely different reason. For the first time in years, former sheriff Brandon Walker was excited-too excited to sleep. He had spent the entire night going over the previous day’s conversation with Emma Orozco and wondering what the hell he was going to do about it.

He had come back into the living room carrying a tray of iced tea to find Emma staring up at one of Rita Antone’s best baskets-a two-foot-wide medallion featuring the Tohono O’odham’s sacred symbol, the Man in the Maze. Usually the design was woven onto the white yucca background in a tough black fiber harvested from devil’s-claw pods. For this particular basket, however, Rita had crafted the maze by using yucca root, which, without benefit of any dye, resulted in a rusty red hue that resembled dried blood. That, of course, was what made this particular basket so valuable and so special, as Rita had once explained.

“For this basket,” Nana Dahd had told Brandon Walker, “the yucca had to die.”

Emma Orozco stared up at the basket as if hoping that somewhere in the sacred curves of bloodred pattern she could find her own answers as well.

Brandon offered the tray of drinks. Emma murmured her thanks and daintily accepted an icy glass of tea while declining both lemon and sugar. Brandon helped himself to generous doses of both and then settled back into his favorite armchair.

He had lived with and among the Desert People for a long time-long enough to know that among the Tohono O’odham, direct questions were viewed as impolite. Rather than ask something that would be regarded as rude, he limited himself to making a single observation.