Hold of the Bone (30 page)

The cobbled streambed leads deeper into the mossy cool. Sal stops at a cliff rising straight from the creek. They lift their heads, looking to where the wall disappears in an apse of needle and bough.

Sal insists, “You'll have to come back when the water's running.”

Almost afraid to break the churchly silence, but glancing at the tight sides of the canyon, Frank asks, “How do you get up here if the creek's full?”

“There's another trail. It's longer, but it comes out at the top of the falls.”

To Frank, the mountains are an impenetrable tangle, and she marvels, “You know this place as well as your own face in the mirror.”

Sal shakes her head. “Much better than that.” Turning Dune toward a jumble of boulders, she calls, “She won't want to, but you have to make Buttons jump up here. Hang on when she does.” With that, she digs her heels in, bends over Dune's neck, and sails onto a flat ledge.

“Oh, sure.”

Sal wheels to watch. “Walk her up to it, then give her a big kick in the ribs. She'll go.”

Frank rides up to the boulders. “How 'bout I get off and walk her up?”

Sal shakes her head. “She won't go that way. Just give her plenty of rein and a hard kick. Bend over her neck and hold tight with your knees.”

“This is crazy,” she says more to herself than Sal.

Frank pulls in a deep breath, savoring it as if it might be her last. She lets it out with a loud “Yah!” and jabs her heels into Buttons' ribs. With a great gathering of haunches, Buttons launches into the air and Frank loses a stirrup. She squeezes her eyes shut as Buttons lands with a jolt and clatter. Giddy with relief, Frank grins and feels for the loose stirrup. Before she can find it, Buttons shakes herself and Frank slides out of the saddle. She tries hanging on, but her other foot slips through the stirrup up to her shin.

The crack of bone on rock knocks her breath loose. She waits for Buttons to bolt and drag her to a gruesome death, but Sal has the reins and is twisting Frank's leg free. Her foot drops to the ground and Sal crouches next to her. “Are you alright?”

Frank studies the sky beyond the dome of trees. She murmurs, “I think you ask that every time I'm here.” Bone licks her cheek.

“Does anything hurt?”

Almost everything
, Frank thinks. Shifting her gaze from the sky to Sal, she grumbles, “You're the psychic healer. You tell me.”

Sal rolls her eyes. “Do you really want me to sit here and take the time to do that?”

“Yeah. I think I do.”

Sal shakes her head, but she gets up and ties the reins onto a sturdy bush. She sits back next to Frank and closes her eyes. Frank does too. She braced her neck to keep her head from slamming on to the rocks and it aches like a sonofabitch. The shoulder and hip she fell on, too. After she inventories the rest of her parts, she decides nothing's broken and sits up. “I'm okay,” she whispers.

Sal opens her eyes. “You seem to want proof.” She touches the stiff muscle in Frank's neck. “It's hot here.” Her hand falls to Frank's shoulder. “And a little bit here, but more right about. . . here.” She holds her hand a couple inches from Frank's hipbone. “We'll get some ice on that when we get back to the cabin, but for now . . .” Sal stands and reaches for a handful of bay leaves over her head. She crushes them between her hands, pours a little water on the mix, and rolls it into a loose ball. “Hold this on your hip. You're going to be sore, but this'll help with the swelling.”

Frank stuffs the fragrant mash into her jeans, wincing when she presses it in place.

“Can you ride?”

“I'm not getting back on that horse.”

“It's a long walk down.”

“I'll crawl.” Frank slaps dirt from her pants with a bloody palm. “What the hell's up here anyway?”

“You'll see.”

“And why's everything always such a goddamn mystery with you?”

Sal turns Buttons sideways to a boulder. “You're a detective. You should like mysteries.” She pats the rock. “It'll be easier if you get on from here.”

Frank swears but eases herself gently into the saddle. They climb a series of boulders that top out onto a wooded plateau and the dogs break into a run. She hears splashing, and rounding a fern-covered cliff sees them swimming in a pond as black and round as an eye.
After the horses drink, Sal hobbles them near a patch of swordlike grass, then sits and tugs her boots off.

“Don't tell me you're going in there.”

“Why not?”

“It's dirty. There's snakes and bugs and . . .
things
in there.”

Sal is out of her shirt and unbuttoning her jeans. Frank looks down until she has splashed into the water. She yells after her, “You're going to get a disease!”

Sal's laugh floats to her in a silvery tinkle. It echoes, rare and lovely, from the cliff on the other side and Frank wishes she could hear it more often.

“I've been swimming in this pond for sixty-two years and haven't caught anything yet.”

“That's a long time,” Frank admits.

“It is,” Sal answers. “Come on. You don't know what you're missing.”

Yes, she does, because before she's even left them Frank is missing Sal and the trees, the pond, and cabin, dogs and mountains, even Buttons.

“Come and soak for a minute. It'd be good for your hip.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake.”

Toeing her sneakers off, she shucks her clothes and limps into the pond before she can talk herself out of it. She dives, eyes squeezed tight, and surfaces gasping. “It's cold!”

Sal laughs while Bone and Cicero splash in circles. Kook barks and races around the rim of the pond. The big dogs tire and join him on shore. Cicero and Kook play a frenzied game of tag while Bone keeps a worried eye on his women. Copying Sal, Frank floats on her back. The dark water holds her, offering her tenderly to the brilliant blue bowl of sky between cliff and leaf. Frank is a willing sacrifice.

She turns over and watches Sal swim out, appreciating that she is as graceful in water as she is on a horse. Frank follows her, skimming beneath the surface. It is quiet under the water. Peaceful. If she drowned in the still, blackish pond, she would become the mud and trees and rain and sky and stay forever a part of the land. Her lungs pound for air and she rises. Bone wades out to meet her.

They dry themselves with their shirts, and when they are dressed, they sit in a patch of sun slanting through the trees.

Sal tells her, “You should see it when the lilacs and buckbrush are in bloom. Promise you'll come back in the spring.”

“You keep treating me like I'm some kind of tourist when I'm supposed to be investigating your father's murder.”

Sal pulls the tobacco from her pocket and Frank asks, “Who would want to kill him?”

“Who wouldn't?” She folds a paper, sprinkles tobacco in the crease. “He wasn't a bad guy, he really wasn't. He just—I think he truly believed that somehow, some way he'd get the ranch back into the Saladino name. He had so many ideas about the ranch, so many things he wanted to do with it, but he could never interest John in them. He was a dyed-in-the-wool rancher and didn't have any interest in converting rangeland into fields of broccoli or sweet peas. It drove my father crazy.”

The cigarette is rolled and sealed. Sal twists one end and tamps the other against the bag.

“My mother didn't help. She'd nag that he was always going to be John's hired help and that he should just get used to the idea. I think his dreams made them both miserable. And it was only when he drank that he was bad. When he was sober, he was really very nice. Very kind. Almost as if he were trying to make up for his drinking.”

“Do you know if he ever had an affair?”

Sal shakes her head adamantly. “It's a pretty small town. I'm sure we'd have heard.”

“How about your mother?”

“What about her?”

Frank shifts her attention from the pond to Sal. “Did you know she was having an affair with John Mazetti?”

Sal studies her unlit cigarette. “Where'd you hear that?”

“George Perales.”

Frank stopped by his place last night. Actually his daughter's place, in Greenfield. Twisted with arthritis, Perales sat in a wheelchair and watched his grandkids while his daughter was at work. “Useful even in this,” he'd said, patting the chair. And he was.

“Gonna smoke that?” Frank asks.

Sal hands it to her and fixes another.

“Did you know?”

Sal nods.

“How old were you when you found out?”

“I don't remember.”

“Did you know during or after the fact?”

“During.”

“How old were you?”

“I just told you, I don't remember.”

“A girl or a teenager?”

“A teen. I think it was my sophomore year. We'd have been seventeen.”

“How'd you find out?”

“We caught them in the barn together. They weren't doing anything blatant, but it was obvious we'd interrupted them. I think we'd kind of suspected anyway.”

“Did your father know?”

Again Sal gives a firm shake. “He was always jealous of John—they both courted my mother. My father would throw that in her face when he was drunk—accuse her of wishing she'd married John instead of him, how she could've been proud of her husband, and be the wife of a ranch owner instead of a ranch hand. But his jealousy came more from his failings than her deeds. With his temper when he drank, he couldn't have known, he'd have killed her.”

“That was pretty risky of her. Do you think she might have wanted to get caught?”

“Why would she want that?”

Frank shrugs. She keeps to herself all the homicides she's investigated, where spouse and lover provoke the other spouse into a rage so violent they can turn murder into a justifiable homicide. “Why do you think she was playing with fire like that? I mean, she must have known the consequences.”

“I'm sure I couldn't tell you. It's not the kind of conversation a teenage girl has with her mother.”

“No,” Frank agrees, considering her own mother's eccentric behavior.

Through gaps in the redwood needles, the sun shimmers across the water. A fly lands on Frank's arm and she leaves it to whatever delights it can find. The dogs nap, as still as the cliffs around the pond. Dune and Buttons munch their patch of grass. The air is languid. Time stretches. They might have dozed, Frank isn't sure. Redwood shadows reclaim the pond. Sal stirs and the dogs lift their heads.

“Why are you showing me all this?”

Cicero stands, shaking off dead needles and bits of rabbit dream.

“Someone has to remember it.”

“Why me? Why not show all this to someone who can stay here? Cassie or someone?”

“Because I trust you.”

“To do what?”

Sal won't answer, and Frank swats at a fly.

“This is ridiculous.” Frank stands, ignoring the throb in her hip. “You live this hermetic existence in this rarified air and have given me a very generous taste of it, but it's nothing I can ever make a meal of. I can't have any of this. I have to go back down to the real world. I can't just saddle up a horse anytime I feel like it and trot on up here. You're showing me things I never even knew I wanted until I came here, but I can't have them, so I don't know why you keep showing me.”

She stalks to Buttons and yanks the reins over the horse's head, but the hobbles thwart her. “How do you undo these goddamn things?”

Sal comes and unbuckles them. Too angry to be afraid, Frank swings painfully into the saddle. She trots from the glade, then stops. She has no idea which way to go.

Chapter 31

The return to the cabin is in chilly silence. When they drop from their horses, Frank says, “Look. I'm sorry. I have been incredibly unprofessional, and I just want you to know that my shortcomings are in no way representative of the LAPD. I am a rogue cop acting completely on my own.”

“That's too bad. From what I've heard, they could use more like you.”

“Not the way I've been lately. I'm starting to think you've put ranch crack in my food—this place is magical. It's all I can think about lately. And then the minute I'm here, my brain flies out the window.”

“Maybe that's not such a bad thing.”

After they feed the animals, Sal slices apples and puts a small wheel of cheese on the table. Frank is browsing the bookshelves, and says, “Hey, I've got all your books. Remind me when we get to my car.”

“Did you read them all?”

“I did. I really liked them. But it kinda freaked my girlfriend out that I was reading up on morphic resonance.”