Cold Betrayal (7 page)

Athena paused again and seemed to be thinking about what to say next. “I can see now how wrong it was for us to rush into marriage. We were both too young. He wasn’t ready to settle down; he still wanted to sow some wild oats—which he did, by the way. We ended up in different National Guard units. Mine deployed; his didn’t. I found out he was cheating on me with Janice before I even shipped out. Jack started talking divorce while I was still in Iraq. He had me served with the papers while I was deployed, and the divorce became final while I was in Walter Reed. I didn’t fight it because by then a divorce was what I wanted, too. Still, it blew me away to think that he and Janice were already married and expecting a baby before I got out of rehab and made it back home to Bemidji.”

Ali remained quiet. She knew more than most how much loving and losing at a very young age can hurt. If there was more to this story, she needed to wait patiently until it finally spilled out.

“There was no way I was going to go back home and live with my folks, so I stayed with Gram instead,” Athena went on. “She had a wheelchair ramp built on the front of the house and let me sleep in her downstairs bedroom. I felt guilty that she had to go up and down the stairs, but she said climbing stairs was good for her. I lived with her while I went through rehab, got fitted with my prostheses, and got my teaching degree. I was able to sign up for school with one of the earliest distance-learning programs, one that allowed me to take courses online and go at my own pace. I finished my degree in three years and took the first job I was offered—here in Sedona.”

Ali nodded. “What happened when you and Chris went back to visit?”

Athena sighed. “I didn’t tell my folks we were coming. I told Gram, of course, because we were going to stay with her, but I asked her not to tell my parents. I wanted to surprise them. They were surprised, all right, and so was I. It turns out that Janice now works in my dad’s office as a receptionist, and Mom takes care of Jack and Janice’s son, Jason, while they’re at work. While Jack was away at school, Janice and the boy stayed with my parents, living in my old room. I found that out when I went by the house. Mom wasn’t exactly overjoyed to see me. I left and haven’t been back.”

Ali already knew that Athena’s parents had never bothered to acknowledge the arrival of Chris and Athena’s twins, which made their betrayal of volunteering to look after a non-grandchild all the more hurtful to their daughter.

“That must have been a shock,” Ali said. “Why didn’t Betsy warn you?”

Athena shrugged. “She probably didn’t know about it. She and my mother aren’t exactly pals. Never have been; never will be. Mom and Dad try to boss Gram around the same way they tried to with me.” Athena paused. “So what am I supposed to do now?”

Ali thought for a moment before she answered. “We make sure your grandmother knows that we’re behind her—that we believe that someone did indeed try to harm her last night. Now, tell me. Does Betsy have a security system?”

“Yes, but she turned it off when she came home from bingo. She doesn’t leave it on when she’s at home because it’s inconvenient when she has to take the dog out. Thank goodness Princess smelled the gas and woke Gram up.”

“But she didn’t bark earlier when whoever turned the burners on was in the house?” Ali mused.

“I guess not.”

A dog that didn’t bark? Ali didn’t like where that thought was taking her. The last time that had happened it had been because the intruder had been someone the dog in question knew quite well.

“Okay,” Ali said, without passing along that last conclusion. “Tell your grandmother that from now on, inconvenient or not, the alarm stays on.”

Athena nodded.

“Is there anyone left in town that you trust who could stay with your grandmother for the next little while?”

“Not really.”

“Does Betsy’s house have Internet access?”

“It does. She had Wi-Fi installed while I was there, but she may have discontinued the service. She had a computer, but it’s most likely dead by now. She doesn’t use it.”

“Tell her she needs to reinstate her Wi-Fi because she’ll have a new computer shortly,” Ali said.

“Why?”

“Because your grandmother is about to become a client of High Noon Enterprises,” Ali said with a smile. “I’ll talk to B. and to Stuart and see what kind of security equipment is needed in this particular situation. Come to think of it, I may even have to go to Bemidji myself to oversee the installation.”

“You’d do that?” Athena asked.

“Of course,” Ali said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Athena glanced briefly at her watch, then she sprang out of her chair, came over to Ali, and bent down to give her mother-in-law a hug. “Thank you,” she whispered in Ali’s ear. “Thank you so much.”

5

W
alking close to the buildings with her eyes modestly lowered, Enid didn’t worry about being recognized. People would know from her manner of dress—the ankle-length gingham dress and the heavy oxford shoes—and from the way she wore her hair—in long braids wrapped around the crown of her head—that she most likely belonged to one of the religious sects that had taken up residence in this far-flung corner of Mohave County.

When voters in and around Colorado City had suggested creating a local law enforcement district and hiring their own marshal, Bishop Lowell had organized enough opposition to defeat the proposal. For one thing, the Mohave County deputy they had now, Amos Sellers, was a member in good standing of The Family. When the next vacancy occurred, he’d most likely be elevated to the status of Elder. Besides, Bishop Lowell was opposed to having any more law enforcement scrutiny than absolutely necessary.

Even though women in The Family weren’t allowed to vote, Enid had heard all the pro and con discussions before the election. She knew that the Colorado City area fell under the jurisdiction of the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office, which was headquartered in the town of Kingman, a place she had never seen. Because the Grand Canyon—another place Enid had never seen and often wondered about—lay between The Encampment and Kingman, travel between the two places wasn’t easy. The most direct route took four hours and required crossing three separate state lines. The other, all inside Arizona, made for a seven-hour one-way trip. Lack of law enforcement oversight was one of the reasons The Family and groups like them had chosen to settle in this remote part of the state.

Kids and women from The Family weren’t allowed to spend time in town without being supervised. Just being caught walking alone on the street would have been enough to call for a public caning from Bishop Lowell. Although Enid didn’t worry about people in town recognizing her, she was anxious that someone from The Family might see her—someone who had come to town that day to pick up a tractor part or stop by the bank. If the person who found her turned out to be one of the Elders, there would be hell to pay. As far as the townsfolk were concerned, though, the only people who knew her, other than the nurses in Dr. Johnson’s office, were the clerks and bag boys in the supermarket and maybe, just maybe, the clerk at the gas station where Enid was headed.

On those occasions when Aunt Edith had stopped to gas up before heading home, Enid was allowed to go inside and use the restroom. She may have paused briefly to admire some of the items under the glass counters, but because she never had any spending money, she never bought anything. That made it unlikely that the clerk would know her on sight. Still, once Enid got to the station, she waited until several people entered the market at once and inserted herself in the middle of the group.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. From her visits to the grocery store and from watching people standing in line at the checkout counter, Enid knew this was the time of day when tourists who had spent the day wandering the Vermillion Cliffs or the North Rim of the Grand Canyon headed south to Flagstaff or Phoenix. These were folks who loved taking their hulking RVs and minivans off the beaten track. Enid understood from what they said and from the curious glances they sent in her direction that Colorado City was definitely off the beaten path. She was hoping she’d be able to convince one of those hardy-type travelers to take her along wherever they were going.

The first group waiting for stalls in the restroom consisted of two families with several school-age children. Standing in line behind them, Enid gathered from their conversation that they were all on spring break—whatever that was—and they were heading home to Phoenix. The kids went into the stalls first. Then, after washing their hands, they ducked out into the market to buy treats. When the first mother emerged from one of the three stalls and went to the washbasin, Enid found the courage to speak to her.

“Is there a chance of getting a ride from here to Flagstaff?” she asked.

The woman looked her up and down, with her gaze pausing a moment too long on Enid’s bulging tummy.

“Certainly not,” she said firmly. “I’ve warned my children to never have anything to do with strangers, and I have no intention of setting a bad example.”

Flushing with embarrassment, Enid fled into the nearest unoccupied stall and stayed there. Once the group left, she stripped out of her dress. Then, wearing only her shift, she sat on the toilet and used the stolen pair of scissors from her cloth bag to remove a foot or so from the bottoms of both the dress and the shift. She didn’t worry about the jagged cuts on the shift as she whacked that off just above her knee. After all, the shift wouldn’t show. The hem of the dress was the problem.

The full gathered skirt contained plenty of material, and the scissors were small. By the time Enid had cut her way around the whole thing—trying to keep to the same line of checks as she went—her hand ached and a blister was forming on her thumb. She wadded up the discarded material and tossed it into the trash, then she took out the needle and thread. She could have done a better job of hemming if she’d had straight pins and an iron to work with, but the best she could do was turn up a tiny hem as she went, tacking it with long, efficient stitches.

As she worked on the dress, Enid tried to reassure herself,
Not all the people on the Outside will be like that
.

Several women came and went while she was sewing. One of them rattled the door on Enid’s stall and demanded, “What are you doing in there, having a baby?”

Enid had to stifle a giggle because, in a way, that was exactly what she was doing—having an Outside baby.

With the hemming job complete, Enid slipped the dress back on over her head. The new length seemed strange. She wasn’t used to seeing bare skin above the tops of her heavy-duty shoes. Ducking out of the stall, she examined herself in the mirror, but the one above the sink was too short for her to see the bottom of her dress.

More women came and went. Most of them were older women with silver hair and with varicose-veined legs sticking out from under Bermuda shorts. The weather seemed cold to Enid. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would be dressed in summer clothes. They talked about places like Wisconsin and Minnesota—more places that Enid could hardly imagine. The women generally took turns using the single handicapped stall, although, as far as Enid could see, none of them looked handicapped. They met her requests for a ride with somewhat more gentleness than the first one had employed, but the answer was still the same—N-O.

In The Family, women were not allowed to wear jewelry of any kind except a plain gold wedding band. Any other jewelry, including watches, was considered vain, ungodly, and wicked. From fifteen on, boys were allowed to wear watches, while the womenfolk were forced to tell time by following the positions of the sun. There was no window in Enid’s restroom refuge, so the sun’s timekeeping abilities were lost to her. Even so, she knew that more than an hour had passed, and she was starting to grow anxious. By now Aunt Edith, finished with her errands, was probably at home or very nearly so. Soon someone would sound the alarm that Enid had gone missing, and the search for her would be on in dead earnest.

The restroom door opened again. The two women who entered wore boots and jeans and hiking boots. Their hair was cut short. They weren’t wearing lipstick or makeup. In fact, they looked more like men than women, although they went inside the stalls the same way the others had. Through the intervening walls, they talked easily of the hike they had taken and how soon they would arrive back at their RV park. They weren’t particularly threatening, and they seemed kind enough, nodding to Enid as they left. Still, their mannish appearances was so far outside her realm of experience that she let them leave without asking them for help.

The woman who arrived immediately after they left was an older Indian lady with iron-gray hair pulled back into a complicated knot at the back of her neck. Enid knew a little about Indians. The ones who came through town occasionally were mostly Navajo. The men wore jeans, cowboy shirts, and boots along with shiny silver and turquoise bolo ties or handmade belt buckles. The women often wore brightly colored dresses and amazing turquoise necklaces, similar to the ones that were for sale in this very gas station, where handmade jewelry was arranged in a glass display case near the register.

Boys from The Family always made fun of the “squaws wearing their squaw dresses,” but Enid often found herself envying those brightly colored, flowing dresses that bore little resemblance to the bland, home-sewn shapeless things she and the other women in The Family wore until their colors faded away to nothing.

Some of the older boys liked to tease the younger girls, telling them that the Indians came to town looking for women and girls they could kidnap for their scalps and claiming that Indians liked blond-haired scalps more than any others.

Based on what she’d been told, Enid should have been terrified of the new arrival, but she wasn’t. The old Indian woman had a wise, kind face that was creased with a network of sun-deepened smile lines. When she came out of the stall and went to the basin, she nodded at Enid’s reflection in the faded mirror.