Jude Devine Mystery Series (39 page)

“You mean date?”

“Why not? We don’t have to be obvious about it. We could meet after you finish work sometimes. Have a drink. Have dinner at each other’s houses like a normal couple.”

“We’re not a couple, and I’m not ready for that.”

“I’m not suggesting we get married.”

“Aren’t you?” Mercy’s eyes chilled a little.

“Give me a break.” Jude said softly. “We’re both grown-ups. I don’t suffer from romantic delusions any more than you do. But I think we’re being overly paranoid. We like each other’s company. All I’m saying is why don’t we accept that and make the most of it. You’ve said you’re lonely.”

“Yes, but it’s not so bad anymore. It makes a big difference knowing that you’re there.”

Jude rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. Did she really want to be nothing but a convenient port in a storm, a lover who, like a toy, could be picked up and put down at will? Restive, her mind working, she asked, “Mercy, what exactly do you want from me?”

Mercy trailed a hand over Jude’s breasts to her stomach and down to the wet parting of her flesh. Slowly, deliberately, she aroused her. “I want this. I want someone I can let go with. I want there to be one place in my life where I don’t have to be careful all the time. You give me that.”

Jude could barely hold a coherent thought together. Catching Mercy’s hand by the wrist, she arrested its distracting pressure and took a risk. “I could give you more than that. I don’t want us to be closed to other possibilities.”

“This isn’t enough for you?” Mercy picked up her strokes with the other hand. With an intent expression, she got to her knees and moved over Jude, lowering her mouth to her throat, biting slightly harder than usual. “The way I see it,” she lifted her head, bright blue eyes challenging Jude, “Why mess with a good thing?”

Why indeed? There were people who’d kill for what they had. Jude wanted to discuss this some more, but it could wait. For the moment, her body had another agenda. Ignoring the part of her that craved a deeper connection, she drew Mercy down and kissed the breath from her.

Eight hundred years ago, the Anasazi abandoned their pueblo villages in the Dolores valley and built a city beneath the massive overhangs of the Mesa Verde 8,000 feet above sea level. They lived in the canyon walls for a century, then vanished without trace, leaving only abstract designs and a few petroglyphs. Little remained of their cliff dwellings now. The Ute, the Navajo, and the Apache had left them undisturbed in the centuries that followed, but time took its toll.

Jude stood on the rim of the mesa and allowed her eyes to drift slowly along the canyon sandstone ledges. In the harsh sunlight, it was easy to miss the shadow of a doorway or a window tucked into a niche or shrouded by a rocky overhang. But eventually, the eroding remnants of walls and buildings took shape, almost miragelike in the afternoon haze, and she could make out the telltale indentations the Anasazi had gouged into the cliffs as hand and footholds. These, more than anything else, whispered to her of the people who had once clung to them, driven by some unknown fear or yearning.

She wondered what had happened to them. They had cultivated their corn and squash on the mesa top, building dams and irrigations channels; one of their reservoirs, the Mummy Lake, was still visible from the Far View pueblo. They had hunted deer and buried their dead infants wrapped in rabbit skins. They constructed hundreds of miles of roads, but for what purpose? There was no sign that they used wheels or pack animals. Without a written language, they could leave no explanations for the curious latecomers to this land. The evening before, she had strolled along the Knife Edge trail to watch the sun set over the Montezuma Valley. A few decades earlier, some optimists had built a road along the western face of the mesa, but the gods that ruled this ancient kingdom had rained down boulders and torn at it from below until it was inaccessible. Before long, it would vanish completely, the lost evidence of another civilization. Watching the sun sink behind Sleeping Ute Mountain, drowning the canyons in red, Jude had felt as insignificant as any human was in the greater scheme of things. It was just the feeling she was seeking. Her mom would call it getting things in perspective.

She had made the journey days earlier, through the Dolores rift to the ruins of Chapin Mesa, unable to shake from her mind the image of Summer and the little boy who died with her. She felt responsible, snared by the what ifs she’d been taught to let go of. Hindsight was a rod any detective could use to beat herself up. In the split second when she’d grabbed Kelly and the teenage girl, she’d made a choice to leave the others. Had she chosen differently, they might still be alive. The team would have reached Kelly and the girl first.

Everyone said she’d done the right thing, and that had she gone back alone for the two who died, she would probably have been killed as well. Jude could follow their reasoning but it didn’t help. She would always see those two innocents, trapped in that moment before their lives were stolen. She would always feel that terrible powerlessness. The best she could hope for was to reach an accommodation with the events of that day, to forgive herself for not being able to arrest time and entice a different outcome from the Fates.

Jude left the mesa rim and took a circuitous route back to her truck at the Morfield Campground, halting at a cairn one of the guides had pointed out during the walking tour she’d taken soon after she first arrived. It was an ancient shrine near a yellow-leaved cottonwood tree, a mound of gray river cobbles caressed smooth and round by eons of water. The Navajo still prayed and left offerings there—small turquoise beads, feathers, obsidian, and twigs. They only did this on their way to a destination, the guide said; never on the return trip.

Jude broke a twig from a pine tree nearby and placed it with the other offerings, making a wish for luck on her journey. In theory, she was on her return trip, but somehow it didn’t feel like that. It felt like she was moving forward, heading into the unknown, trusting in the promise and possibility of tomorrow.

She strolled the rest of the way to her tent and packed up, one of several campers watched warily by a group of deer wandering through the high grass, then drove slowly between the piñon pines and junipers, down the winding, treacherous road toward U.S. 160. Ahead of her lay the Mancos Valley, once Darlene Huntsberger’s home. Her parents had raised a small stone monument to her on their farm, just below a tree she liked to climb. They had invited Jude and Tulley out to see it, and Mrs Huntsberger had made a pie for them. The family seemed to think justice had been done, even if it came without the niceties of a trial. This was the general sentiment about town. Little was known about Jude and Tulley’s role beyond the official story—two MCSO officers were dispatched to arrest the prime suspect in the Huntsberger homicide, only to find themselves caught up in a confrontation between the FLDS sect and the FBI. Tulley said he didn’t care if their story was not going to end up on TV. He was still getting his promotion.

At Towaoc, Jude took the turnoff to Eddie House’s place and pulled into the driveway as the late afternoon light was fading. The air had a chill in it, the first whisper of the coming winter. It would be a relief to see snow, she thought, as she fished around in the back of the Dakota and found her backpack. She slung it over her shoulder and headed for the house, pausing opposite one of Eddie House’s bird enclosures. A peregrine falcon studied her from its feeding platform. She whistled and it hopped down and bounced across the ground toward her. One of its wings was extensively taped, but Eddie was hoping it would fly again. The bird remembered her from last time—the visitor with the dead rodent in her coat pocket. It waited expectantly and Jude offered a few pieces of jerky. These the peregrine husbanded in a corner of its cage, apparently planning for lean times ahead.

Waiting at Eddie’s door, Jude opened her backpack and removed a plastic binder. “This is for you,” she said when he answered her knock. “I’m sorry it’s not the original.”

Eddie invited her in, asking, “Beer?”

“No, I won’t stay, thanks. I just wanted to drop the book by.”

Eddie didn’t pay this much attention. Waving her indoors, he led her to the living room at the back of the house. Ranch sliders faced onto a small patio with some cedar furniture.

They sat down outdoors and Jude smiled at the sight of Zach and the ghost gray wolf rolling and growling on the small square of lawn Eddie had coaxed from the sullen earth. She’d been visiting a couple of times a week since bringing Zach to him. The kid must have put on ten pounds over the past month, and he was taller. The young man was suddenly emerging from the child.

“Is this the diary?” Eddie asked.

“Yes.”

He opened it and read a few pages. “How did she get here?”

Jude took her time answering. She’d learned that replying to Eddie after a normal interval denied him the option to converse at his own pace. Which was why Sheriff Pratt described him as “the strong silent type,” she supposed. Their conversations were punctuated by long silences, the kind most people felt the need to fill. Once she’d grown used to this pattern, she found it relaxing.

“I’m not sure,” she said, “but it seems as if her mother might have been instructed to kill her, but instead drove her out of the area and told her never to come back.”

“Her name was Valerie?”

“Yes.”

“Poppy is better.”

“I think so, too.”

He flipped to the final pages in their plastic envelopes and read the one that had disturbed Jude perhaps more than any. Poppy had drawn a picture of herself with liquid spilling from her mouth, and written, “Mom says I talk too much.”

“I think she must have known about the murders for a long time, and her father suddenly decided she was a risk,” Jude said.

She pictured a little girl, silently witnessing crimes, knowing there were bodies buried, amassing information until, as a young woman forced to marry her own father, she started questioning what she’d seen and the life she was leading. Perhaps she’d said something to one of the other wives and Nathaniel heard about it. Naoma had remained uncooperative, insisting that her daughter Valerie was in Canada.

“It’s good you shot him,” Eddie said.

Jude accepted the credit for it. One of her bullets had hit Epperson, one of the eight the M.E. dug out of him. She watched the antics on the lawn as Eddie continued to examine the diary.

“What’s your wolf’s name?” she asked eventually.

“Hinhan Okuwa. It means Chased By Owls. That’s how he came to cross my path. He was a cub. An owl was attacking him.”

Jude mused on that, and half a minute later said, “He eluded the harbinger of death.”

“The owl gave him to me.” More silence. “A Two Kettle Sioux warrior called Hinhan Okuwa fought at Little Big Horn. He did not elude death.”

“Ah. So, you decided his name would live on?”

Eddie studied her. As always his expression was hard to read. “Your ancestors…no Native American?”

“Not as far as I know. Irish on my father’s side and Scottish on my mother’s.”

He nodded. “Warrior people.”

“Yes, very tribal. One of my ancestors, a Cameron, fought the English at the battle of Culloden. I guess you could say that was the Wounded Knee of my people.”

“I know of it.”

“The circumstances were very different, of course. My people were armed men who died on the battlefield. They had a fighting chance.”

The comparison lay in what each event symbolized—the systematic destruction of a people and a way of life. She had visited Inverness the year she turned thirty and had driven out to the site of Culloden, expecting an innocent field like any other, sluiced of its history by the passage of time. But Drumrossie moor was an eerie place, the air heavy, the sound of the wind uncannily like distant weeping. Even at the scenes of unimaginably brutal crimes, Jude had never allowed her imagination to run away with her, yet Culloden seemed haunted.

Standing in silence at the tall stone commemorative cairn, she’d felt the hair on her neck prickle. It was as if the blood that had soaked the earth that day could never be washed away. The dead were present in every blade of grass, in the bark and branches of every tree, in the purple heather that stained the field, as if all that was living had been nourished by the broken, bleeding hearts of the fallen.