Heaven to Betsy (Emily #1) (26 page)

“You look beautiful, as always.” Paul kissed my hand and then tugged me through the front door into a hug. His sheer size made me feel Lilliputian. “And how’s my attorney?” He released me and clasped Jack’s hand in a bro shake to his chest, clapping him on the back at the same time. “Can’t tell you how glad I am to have the two of you here. The bar’s out on the back patio.” He winked. “A little hair of the dog.”

“Thanks, Paul,” I said.

I moved far enough away to keep him out of my personal space. His effusive greeting was just too familiar for me, especially after the weird last twenty-four hours.

Galvanized by the newly rekindled fire to find Valentina, I decided I was done feeling guilty. I saw Jack’s stern jaw from the corner of my eye. He looked like a man who’d eaten a mess of bad eggs. Well, good. He deserved to feel bad. He’d overreacted and shut me out when I’d tried to explain. I ignored him and turned for the bar.

The entry hall emptied into a room with an amazing ceiling that pulled my eyes upward, and I marveled at the octagonal cupola lined with rafters across intricate tongue-in-groove boarding. Inset windows alternated levels on each of the cupola’s sides. Below it was a sitting area of oversized leather and cowhide couches and armchairs. An enormous rug in caramel brown and white spots with darker brown sections every few feet anchored the furniture. It was one of the most uniquely beautiful floor coverings I had ever seen. The chandelier of two metal hoops, one suspended three feet above and within the circumference of the other, hung from fifteen-foot chains. An immense stone fireplace dominated one wall and its opposite wall opened onto a bustling kitchen. Huge wood-framed glass doors and windows covered the back wall and opened onto a patio. The doors were propped open, and a brisk breeze coursed through the space carrying the dry smell of pine and sage.

I wanted to find a quiet place where Jack and I could continue our conversation about Spike’s tattoo. I walked ahead of Jack through the room toward the back patio, where a few on-time guests like us milled about. When I got outside, I stopped, mesmerized by the view. Paul’s backyard ended in a high, rock-faced hillside with trees hugging the edge of its summit, their coniferous branches bouncing and swaying in the wind. It was pure, rugged drama, and I stared at it for long seconds before I turned back to Jack, but he’d disappeared.

I started to look for him, but was interrupted by a teenage boy.

“Drink, ma’am?”

A tattoo of a snake wound around his neck, but his real attention grabber was a nose ring. Where I came from, you used those things to clip a lead to an animal that needed a little extra motivation to behave. And the tattoo? I wanted to tell him that he didn’t need to brand himself like a steer, but I held my tongue.

I almost ordered wine, but last night had left me tired and dehydrated, which more alcohol would only make worse. “Sparkling water with lime, please.”

“No problem.”

Round metal tables and chairs dotted the patio with centerpieces of stone and cactus weighting down each table. Movement to my right caught my eye, and I saw Paul’s daughter Stella leaning against the far back edge of the house smoking a cigarette. She looked angry, and incredibly alone.

“Thanks for your note,” a woman’s voice said, from my left.

I followed the voice and saw Jack’s secretary, Judith. With makeup on, she was strikingly beautiful. Jack had told me all of his employees were invited, and I’d hoped she’d be here, that I’d get another chance with her.

“Hi, Judith,” I said. “Isn’t this house amazing?”

“Yes. Big. And very expensive,” she said. “Lots of people from the reservation have worked on it.”

Something about Judith whispered to me of ancient things, of traditions that lived on in more than photographs. She looked timeless in turquoise and silver dangling earrings and a matching neck cuff that looked as old as the land around us. Her low, thick ponytail was fastened with a large clip, and it, too, was silver, with round pieces of turquoise set within etched scrolls.

“Did you know Paul before he became a client?” I asked her.

“No, he’s not from around here—the Mescalero reservation, I mean, or Tularosa. But my brother worked construction here. At this house.”

“Oh really? What does your brother do?”

“He’s an electrician.”

The teenage cocktail waiter returned with my drink. “Here you go, one club soda with lime. And for you, ma’am?”

My phone chimed. While Judith gave her order, I checked the text. Wallace, in a group text to Nadine and me:
Nadine and I visited Harvey today.

I typed a quick reply:
Any sign of Valentina?

Wallace:
No. He swears he’s never met Sofia or her, and that he lost track of Spike when they got out of prison.

Me:
Impossible. He was seen running away from the hotel the night Sofia shot Spike.

Harvey’s denial made me want to dig deeper with Wallace. What did you ask him? What did you see? How did he explain that tattoo? But I reminded myself that I could count on Wallace and Nadine to handle it. I had to.

Wallace:
We’ll take another pass at him.

Me:
Thank you, guys.

I needed to stay off the phone at a work function. I slipped it in my pocket and returned my attention to Judith, who stood gazing up at the rock face. Without turning toward me, she started talking again.

“I used to come out here with my friends when I was a girl,” she said. “There were fences, but we didn’t care.” The wind blew a wisp of hair from her clip and it fluttered to the side of her sharp cheekbones. She pointed to the top of the rocks. “When we first came out here, we convinced ourselves we’d seen Mountain Spirits dancing up there. Who knows, maybe we did.”

She tucked the hair behind her ear. The sun reflected off her earring. “It became our place. We started to dance when we came here, like them, facing the Sacred Mountain.” She pointed north to the white-capped Sierra Blanca Peak in the distance. She turned to me and smiled for the first time since I’d met her, then returned her gaze to the rocks.

You know of the Mountain Spirit dancers?” Judith asked.

“Yes. Mickey told me about them,” I said.

She nodded. “I was always the clown, painting myself white, wearing the nose and the ears. I liked scaring the little ones.”

How to say this nicely? “I’ll bet you were good at it.”

“I was.”

“I was a clown, too. A rodeo clown.”

As I looked at her profile, images ran through my head, of my recent dreams of the Clown Dancer, and of something else. A crude drawing in Crayola, a man in a skirt, an oversized crown of sticks on his head, his skin crayoned white. Animal ears and nose. Was Valentina’s drawing of the Mountain Spirit Dancer’s clown? If she had come to the U.S. through southern New Mexico, it could be. That brought up interesting possibilities. But maybe I was just projecting my thoughts onto her picture.

“We have that in common.” She sighed. “I worked for Jack when he was with the DA in Las Cruces, did you know that?”

“I didn’t.”

“Yeah. I moved to the city when I was younger, but I always wanted to come back here.”

“I can see why. It’s magical, spectacular.”

“That day when the bomb went off, I was there. Before it happened, I saw the Dancers, I saw the Clown. They were in front of the building, by the flags.”

She’d lost me, lost me in a way so profound I didn’t know how to ask what she was talking about. She wasn’t making sense. Was she crazy, or was I missing something? It felt important, game-changing even, so I didn’t dare interrupt.

“The Clown took the Dancers to the parking lot, to Jack’s car,” Judith said. “And I followed them. Then he cried, the Clown did. I didn’t know what he meant, so I looked around, to ask someone else, but I was the only one there.”

I held my breath, literally. Judith’s eyes had teared up, and I didn’t think it was from the wind. I stayed silent.

“Nobody else saw them. And later, when it happened, I knew they had been real, and what the Clown had been trying to tell me.”

She turned to me again, tears now streaming down her face. “Being here, it forces me to remember. I still feel guilty—I didn’t understand what the Clown meant, and I should have. I could have saved Mrs. Holden and the children from the bomb. I could have kept them out of Jack’s car. They would be alive today.”

A chill ran through me, and my mouth hung open uselessly. Jack’s wife hadn’t left him and taken the kids. They were dead.
Dead
. Judith looked into my eyes, and I realized that she needed me to respond.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

She backed away. “Please tell Jack I was here,” she said. “I just don’t think I can stay. Because of the memories.”

***

In the wake of Judith’s revelations, I couldn’t stay either. My mind reeled, sifting through her words for the facts. A car bomb at the courthouse? Jack’s wife and kids
dead
? It was so much worse than anything I’d imagined about Jack’s past. Losing your whole family to a car bomb—one I had to assume was meant for him since it was in his car at his workplace—how did you ever recover from that? I choked on a sob and took off from the patio toward some outbuildings in the distance. I needed a place to hide, a place to think, a place to mourn Jack’s family. My rapid walk morphed into a slow, blind jog.

Loss was everywhere. My loss. Sofia’s. Valentina’s. And now Jack’s loss—his loss swallowing mine up whole in its immensity. Mickey had mentioned Jack not smiling for five years. I wondered if Jack fled to Amarillo after the bomb, had lived in his office shrine for this whole time, hiding from everything but his memories, only for me to come along and defile his sanctuary. My jog sped into a blind run, until I planted my booted foot on a rock, stumbled, and went down on my hands and knees.

“Oomph.”

I lifted my palms. Dirt and rocks and blood. I rose and lifted my skirt. More rocks, dirt, and blood. There was a gaping hole in my black stockings on my right knee, but my long, black skirt would cover it. I brushed off my knees and let go of the fabric. Hair fell around my face, and I probed for the bobby pins that held my back-teased strands in place. I pulled one out and re-secured it. That would have to do. The fall had sobered me a little, and I started walking again, aimless but still generally toward the three green metal buildings now only a hundred feet away.

When I reached them, I walked to the back of the first one, out of sight of Paul’s party. I crouched with my back against it.
Breathe. You can’t make sense of this unless you breathe, and think.
Maybe it was time to ask for help, too. Like from the Big Guy. But I was really rusty. Sure, I muttered pithy little prayers now and then, but when was the last time I’d truly meant it? I didn’t really need to ask myself that, though. I knew exactly when. My senior year at Tech. When Christmas and my birthday passed without hearing from my father, I quit religion cold turkey. In retrospect, I could admit that God probably wasn’t the one to blame, but it was easier at the time. In the ensuing years, my problem was more organized religion than Him, but the result was the same either way.

Ever since then—and especially lately—I’d done a little too much of the
why me
and the
not fair
instead of just being thankful for what I did have. I probably didn’t deserve to ask for help now, but I was going to give it my best shot anyway. I pressed my hands together and closed my eyes, but all that came out of me was
why me,
why this, why anyone, you have to make it better
. I tried again, softly, under my breath.

“God, I don’t understand all this.”

Long moments passed, silent except for my deliberate breaths. In. Out. In. Out. The rhythm hypnotized me, and underneath my closed lids, my eyes fluttered. Just as I faded out, I realized with a sudden clarity, a certainty, that things in my life were as they should be, that I was where I should be. I closed my eyes again.

“Thank you for bringing me home and to a new career and new friends, and a chance to help make a difference in things that really matter. And I promise I am going to find a church, just not that Believers one or any church that Melinda Stafford would consider attending. Amen.”

Men’s voices interrupted me, close and moving my way. I looked harder at the outside of the building where I’d taken refuge. It appeared to be a warehouse of sorts. To my right was a huge roll-up door, open about halfway. The voices came from inside the building. Instinct took over; I stood and crept to the edge of the door, craning to hear.

A deep voice spoke. “Mr. Johnson said the police don’t have a clue that’s Alejandro they found dead at Wrong Turn Ranch. And I haven’t heard any talk about the stupid bastard taking his silver mine story to the Apaches. You may have dodged a bullet, this time. But we need to make an example out of him to the others, because this can’t ever happen again. Or next time we’ll be making an example of you.”

A higher, thinner voice answered. “Alejandro was our only problem. The rest of ’em are scared shitless. Once they see we got the girl back—and what we do to the little brat—they’ll be back down in that mine diggin’ Apache silver for all they’re worth—with their mouths shut.”

Their words had frozen me in place, once again forcing me to decipher the truth from half the story. While I didn’t have enough to get the full picture, I got the gist. Making examples out of people, problems with a terrorized labor force, silver belonging to the Apaches, a recovered little girl, them knowing who the dead guy was at Jack’s place: trouble that all added up to bad, bad stuff here on Paul’s ranch.

I had to get out of there, and I had to get to Jack. I gathered my skirt in one hand and placed my feet one in front of the other gently and carefully, but quickly. As I crested the side of the building back toward the house, I broke into a run. An arm snaked out and grabbed mine, jerking me to a stop.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa now,” the higher-pitched man said.

I yelped and clawed at the hand cuffed around my arm, at the fingers biting into my flesh. I couldn’t get the hand to budge, so I turned to face the body at the end of the arm.