J Jance - Queen of the Night

Micah’s eyes misted over. He turned away from the boy’s question and for a long time said nothing. Instead, he walked as far as the front of the truck and planted one booted foot on the front bumper the same way Thomas Rios was doing right now.

“Your mother is dead,” he said at last. He patted the pocket of his shirt. “She sent us a letter. She was afraid your father might do something bad. He was drinking too much and doing other stuff. She wrote to see if Maxine and I would let her come home. We would have, but the letter came too late for us to help her. Since I couldn’t come to get her, I came to get you. Understand?”

D an hadn’t understood all of it right then, not really, but he hadn’t cried, either. Not because Micah Duarte might think he was a sissy. It was because Dan knew enough about Indians to know that they didn’t cry. Ever.

In view of everything his own grandparents had done for him, Daniel Pardee could only hope, for Angie Enos’s sake, that there was someone in her life, someone like Micah and Maxine Duarte, who would step up to the plate, take in a poor motherless child, and lavish her with love and affection.

A silence fell over the small group of men gathered around Thomas Rios’s F-100.

“Anything else?” Detective Fellows asked, glancing questioningly at the other officers.

All three shook their heads. Dan had no additional questions to ask primarily because he hadn’t been paying attention. He had been far away in another place and time. When he came back on track, Detective Fellows was speaking to Thomas Rios in what sounded to Dan like pitch-perfect Tohono O’odham.

The two Law and Order officers seemed surprised by that. Nawoj was the only word Dan was able to pick out from the string of conversation. He knew nawoj meant friend or friendly gift. When Detective Fellows finished speaking, Thomas Rios nodded and the two men shared a brief handshake. After that, the old man got back in his pickup and drove away.

“What did you say to him?” Dan asked.

“That I’m sorry for his loss,” Brian Fellows answered.

“How’d you learn to speak the language?”

“I learned from some friends here on the reservation,” Fellows said with an unassuming shrug, as though it was no big deal. “I had a friend, an Anglo guy named Davy Ladd. He taught me, and so did an Indian lady named Rita Antone and an old medicine man everyone called Fat Crack. The three of them taught me everything I know.”

Now I understand, Dan thought. No wonder he’s the detective they assigned to this case.

Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 11:30 p.m.

71º Fahrenheit

Gabe fell asleep again soon after Lani finished telling him the story. Even though she believed Gabe hadn’t lied when he told her about seeing the image of Andrew Carlisle sitting with her mother, she knew it wasn’t true, not in any real physical sense. The man was dead, after all-he had died in prison years earlier. But she also understood that something about his brooding spirit-his dangerous, ohb -like presence-was once again intruding into the lives of Diana Ladd and Brandon Walker. Lani also understood why her mother had vehemently denied seeing him. That was clear enough. Adults who were known to speak to people who weren’t there were usually thought to be crazy.

On the other hand, children who conducted conversations with imaginary friends were often considered to be bright and creative. Little Gabe Ortiz certainly qualified as bright and creative, but Lani feared there was far more to this than simply an overly active imagination on his part.

Gabe hadn’t made up the burned and puckered skin on the ghostly apparition’s face. Lani knew about the panful of hot grease her mother had flung at Andrew Carlisle when he had broken into the house in Gates Pass and attacked her. Lani had seen photos of Carlisle’s face both before and after their life-and-death encounter. The two photos sat side by side in the photo section of Lani’s mother’s prizewinning book, Shadow of Death. One featured a head shot of a handsome but arrogant young man whose smug expression had spoken volumes about his contempt for others. The second pictured the grotesque features of that same face wrecked by mounds of scar tissue and with a pair of sightless eyes staring out at nothing.

Yes, they were both photos of the same man-the same one Gabe had evidently seen as well, but for Lani the most worrisome part in all of this was something he must have told her mother that had resulted in Diana’s pointed question about Mitch Johnson and what he had done to Lani when he had kidnapped her and held her hostage years earlier.

Once Mitch Johnson was dead, Lani had gone to great lengths to keep her mother from knowing all of what had happened during that dreadful time, and especially about the welt of puckered scar tissue his red-hot tongs had seared into the flesh of her breast. Now, though, her mother’s question seemed to indicate that she had been given some hints about what had happened that night and about Lani’s carefully guarded secret.

Lani was convinced that something else was at work here, something sinister. She felt as though she’d been given a warning of some kind-a glimpse into the future that told her something dangerous was coming. She wished once again that there had been time tonight to sit down and discuss it with her father. Or with Fat Crack. The old medicine man would have known what these evil forebodings meant and how one should deal with them.

The full moon was shining high overhead, and it was close to eleven thirty when Lani and Gabe finally arrived in Sells, sixty miles from Tucson. She drove straight to the hospital housing compound and stumble-walked Gabe into her house and down the hall to her second guest bedroom. Once he was tucked into bed, Lani showered and dressed in a pair of scrubs.

By then it was only a matter of minutes before her shift was due to start at midnight. There was no sense in trying to grab a quick nap. Besides, Lani wasn’t sleepy. Her body was still accustomed to the sleep-deprived schedule she had maintained as both an intern and as a resident. Tomorrow, after she got off shift, there would be plenty of time to sleep.

She fixed a cup of instant coffee-plastic coffee, as her father called it-and then sat at her small kitchen table to drink it. She didn’t worry about leaving Gabe alone. He spent the night with her often enough. He knew that, if there was a problem-any kind of problem-all he had to do was walk across the parking lot to the hospital to find her.

Lani wished she could take Fat Crack’s deerskin pouch, his huashomi, out of her medicine basket and put it to good use, but there wasn’t enough time for one of the old medicine man’s discerning ceremonies. She needed uninterrupted time to smoke the sacred tobacco, the wiw, or to examine whatever images might be hidden in Fat Crack’s collection of crystals. Those were things that could be done only on Indian time. The hospital ran on Anglo time, with a time clock for punching in and punching out.

Lani had lived in both the Anglo and Indian worlds all her life, and she was accustomed to the accompanying dichotomy. She was also used to being more than one person at one time. That, too, had been part of her lifelong reality.

Before her adoption by Brandon Walker and Diana Ladd, Lani had been known as Clemencia Escalante from the village of Nolic. Her biological mother, a teenager more interested in partying than in raising a child, had left her baby in the care of an aging grandmother. Once the older kids in the village had gone off to school, Clemencia, still a toddler, had wandered into an ant bed and had almost died of multiple ant bites. The superstitious Escalantes had regarded Clemencia as a dangerous object and had refused to take her back. Fat Crack’s wife, Wanda, a social worker, had brought the abandoned baby to the attention of her husband’s aunt Rita Antone. It was at Rita’s instigation that Brandon Walker and Diana Ladd had adopted her.