Skeleton Canyon (2 page)

“Wait a minute, Bree. You know the rules. My girls aren’t allowed to walk off the field without permission in the middle of a game. If you go, I’ll have to kick you off the squad.”

“You can’t kick me off,” Brianna replied.. “I already quit.”

From her seat on the fifty-yard line, Katherine O’Brien had observed the unfolding drama both on the field and off it. At football games, regardless of what was happening to the team, Katherine’s eyes seldom left her daughter. Watching the action through the fine pall of dust raised by hundreds of shuffling feet, Katherine hadn’t heard a word of the heated exchange between Bree and C.J. Howell, but she had witnessed the assault. With a gasp of surprise, she had seen Bree’s hand flash and slap the other girl’s cheek. As Bree stalked down the aisle Katherine O’Brien, like Barbara Barker, rose to intercept

“Where are you going?” David demanded, reaching out to stop his wife.

“There’s something the matter with Bree,” Katherine said. “She needs me.”

“Leave her be,” David O’Brien admonished, taking Katherine by the hand. “She has to learn to sort these things out by herself. You can’t always go flying to her rescue, you know.”

Fifty years of continuous self-effacement made it difficult for Katherine O’Brien to tolerate making a scene in public. In this however, the unmasked rage she had seen on her daughter’s face somehow stiffened her spine.

“I’ve got to go to her,” Katherine insisted, pulling her wrist free of her husband’s grasp. “I’ll be right back.”

She reached Bree’s side just in time to see her daughter pull away from Barbara Barker in much the same way Katherine herself had just broken free of David’s restraining hand. “Bree,” Katherine demanded, “what’s going on?”

“A friend of mine is hurt,” Bree replied. “As soon as I get out of this uniform, I’m going to the hospital to see if he’s all right.”

 “You don’t want to do that,” Katherine said. “If you leave in the middle of the game, Ms. Barker may throw you off the squad.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Bree returned. “She already has.”

CHAPTER ONE

It was five o’clock on a Friday afternoon in June when Bree came into the kitchen. Even with the air-conditioning going full blast, the kitchen was hot compared to the rest of the house. Sweat rolled down Mrs. Vorevkin’s jowly cheeks as she stood bent over the kitchen sink, cleaning and chopping vegetables for the salad.

“I’m ready to go”

Olga turned and smiled at the young woman whose tan, lithe, and cheerful presence never failed to brighten any room she entered. “The cool chest is in the pantry,” Olga told her. “It’s all packed.” She put down her knife and dried both hands on her apron. “The soup is ready,” she added. “You should have some before you leave. Hot soup on a hot day will cool you off. Besides, it’s such a long drive. You should eat something besides sandwiches.”

Bree sniffed the air. Over the years, the O’Briens had gone through any number of cooks. Most of them hadn’t lasted because they couldn’t stand up to David O’Brien’s stringent demands for quality and impeccable service. Olga, however, had been with the O’Briens a little over three years. She was an excellent cook who had come to them, by some circuitous path, from a job with the U.S. embassy in Moscow with an unexplained stop-off in New Orleans along the way. During her three years’ tenure, she had developed a very loving friendship with this bright, golden-haired young woman who stood in her kitchen, waffling with indecision.

Bree glanced at her watch. Nacio, as she usually called him, would be off work in another hour. She wanted to be there in time to meet him when his shift ended, but there was just time for some of Mrs. V.’s delicious soup and a thick slab of the crusty white bread she made on a daily basis, summer and winter.

“All right,” Bree agreed at last, slipping into her favorite place at the kitchen table. “But I’ll have to hurry.”

The soup was a clear broth with a few green slivers of scallion floating on the top. Five or six tiny homemade meat-filled dumplings sat on the bottom of the bowl. It was wonderful.

“What time will Mom and Dad be home?” Bree asked, glancing casually at her watch. She wanted to be through the security gates, off Purdy Lane, and on the highway headed for Douglas long before her parents returned. Not that it mattered that much whether or not they were home when Bree left. She was going regardless. It was just always easier for her to leave without having to face them, without having to lie to them directly. Although, with practice, even that was easier now. Brianna was gelling used to it.

Finishing the soup, Bree pushed her chair from the table, carried her dishes to the counter, and plucked a plump radish from the pile of clean ones Mrs. V. had stacked next to the sink. “Take two,” Olga said with a smile. “They’re not very filling.”

Tossing her ponytail, Bree took a second radish and then hurried to the pantry. The cooler was right there, just as she had known it would be, packed with sandwiches, sodas, fruit, and, most likely, some little dessert surprise as well. Mrs. V. was a great believer in the Cajun tradition of
lagniappe—
something extra.

Bree lugged the cooler as far as the front door. As soon as she opened it, she almost choked on the raw stench of cigar smoke that lingered in a hazy cloud just outside. Alf Hastings, her father’s director of operations, was sitting in the shade of the verandah next to the fountain. He hurried to his feet as Bree came through the door. “Let me help you with that,” he offered.

Alf hadn’t been on Green Brush Ranch long. Bree didn’t know much about him other than he was one of those middle-aged men who gave her the creeps. She suspected there were times he made unnecessary security sweeps through the yard outside her bedroom window on the off chance he might catch her in the act of undressing.

“No, thanks,” she said. “I can manage on my own.”

Not one to take no for an answer, Hastings leered at her. “Looks pretty heavy to me,” he said. “At least let me open the gate to the camper.”

That was the last thing Brianna O’Brien wanted. If he opened the camper shell on the pickup, he was bound to see all the camping equipment she had smuggled out of the garage and stowed there without anyone—her parents especially—being the wiser.

“It goes in front,” she told him, quickly putting the cooler down on the ground. “I’ll have to go back inside to get the key.

He was still standing there puffing on what was left of his cigar when she came back out of the house with the key in hand.

“Off to Playas again?” he asked.

Bree gave him a sidelong look. Was he testing her? Had he seen her loading the stuff into the truck and figured out what was really going on? Or was he just making conversation?

“That’s right,” she said.

This time Alf made no offer to help, but she noticed that he had moved off to one side, no doubt hoping to look down her tank top when she bent down to pick up the cooler.
Give the dirty old man a thrill. If he’s looking at my boobs, that means he probably isn’t looking inside the camper.
Once the cooler was properly situated on the rider’s side of the seat, she slammed the door shut.

“Hope you keep the doors locked when you head off on your own like this,” Alf said. “A young girl like you can’t ever be too careful.”

“I’m careful,” she assured him, walking around to the driver’s side and letting herself in. “Very careful.”

As she turned the key in the ignition, she wondered if Alf would climb into the ATV parked under the portico, one of several used for routine security patrols around the ranch, and then follow her as far as the security gates. When she pulled out onto the road that led away from the house, he was still standing there, looking after her through a pall of cigar smoke.

“Asshole,” Bree hissed between clenched teeth as she watched his reflection grow smaller in her rearview mirror.

As the sun went down in the west, Nacio Ybarra stood in the shade of the gas station’s canopy and checked his watch. Bree should have been there by now. He was looking forward to seeing her, but he was dreading it, too. For a week now, Nacio’s Aunt Yolanda had been doubled over with excruciating stomach cramps. Late that afternoon, her local doctor, unable to make a solid diagnosis, had finally managed to secure an appointment with a specialist in Tucson for the following morning. The problem was, the appointment and accompanying tests required an overnight stay in the hospital. Naturally, Nacio’s Uncle Frank, the owner of Frank’s Union 76, was going to drive her there.

“I know you were planning on going camping with your friends,” Uncle Frank had said apologetically. He had come into the bay where Nacio was fixing a flat to tell him about it. “But I need you to stay. Ronnie’s way too new to be left to close up by himself. God knows what would happen if I did that. He can’t even change a tire by himself. And as for Hector ... ” Frank rolled his eyes.

Ever since he was thirteen, Nacio Ybarra had worked as a gas jockey and mechanic at his Uncle Frank’s Union 76, next door to the once-booming Kmart store on the outskirts of Douglas. There was no question about Frank’s assessment of his other two employees. Ronnie Torres was an eager beaver, hut he was only sixteen and had worked at the station for less than two weeks. Frank had hired Ron in hopes of grooming the younger boy to take his nephew’s place when Nacio left for college in the fall.

As for Hector… Yolanda’s younger brother was no doubt a skilled mechanic, but his penchant for Jose Cuervo made him a bad bet to be trusted with the day’s receipts or to show up on a Saturday morning with the cash register change bag intact.

“Don’t worry about it,” Nacio said. “I’ll stay long enough to close. What about opening in the morning?”

Frank nodded. “That too,” he said. “I’ll be here by early afternoon, so once Hector gets workwise, you could probably take off later in the morning.”

Frank Ybarra was the only father Ignacio Ybarra had ever known. Ignacio had never met his real one, whom he thought of only as a sperm donor. Nacio’s mother, sixteen years old and eight and a half months pregnant at the time, had crossed the border west of Douglas and walked as far as the emergency entrance to the Cochise County Hospital. Her water had broken along the way. She had arrived in the hospital lobby with just time enough to be put on a gurney and wheeled into an emergency room before her son catapulted into the world. For years, Uncle Frank had teased his nephew that there was more than one way to be a wetback.

Having assured her son’s U.S. citizenship, Imelda Ybarra had left him in the care of her older brother, Frank, and promptly returned to Mexico, resuming her designated role in a thriving business in Agua Prieta’s red-light district. She had died a few years later of what her son now suspected was probably an early case of heterosexually transmitted AIDS. Frank and Yolanda had raised the boy as one of their own, watching in wonder and with no small pride as this towering foster son of theirs totally eclipsed the physical, academic, and athletic accomplishments of their four natural children.

For almost five years, Nacio had worked in Frank’s gas station after school, on weekends, and during the summers. He was dependable and personable. The customers loved him, and most were aware that he was saving every penny toward college. Frank had always figured there would he plenty of scholarship help available to put someone as bright and talented as Nacio through school. That had seemed especially true when, it the beginning of his senior year in high school, he was as good as promised a full-ride football scholarship to Arizona State University in Tempe. Unfortunately, the football scholarship had disappeared the moment Nacio’s leg had been broken during the Bisbee-Douglas game the previous fall. Doctors had managed to save the leg and pin it back together, but Ignacio Ybarra’s football-playing days were gone forever.

The two academic scholarships Nacio had been granted instead of the athletic one were both to the University of Arizona hi Tucson. Taken together, they didn’t add up to nearly the some amount as the single sports scholarship would have been, and only one of them was renewable. That made Ignacio’s job at Frank’s Union 76 all the more important.

“Don’t worry, Uncle Frank,” Nacio had said. “You take care of Aunt Yoli. I’ll handle the station.”

A Tioga motor home with Kansas plates pulled in and swallowed up a huge tankful of fuel while Nacio washed the wind-shield and checked the oil. He was just finishing checking the air pressure in the last tire when Bree pulled up behind him. Naturally, Ronnie hurried out to wait on her before Nacio had a chance.

After running the motor home driver’s credit card through the machine, Nacio went over to the red Toyota Tacoma. “Hey, Ronnie,” he called, without looking in Bree’s direction but making sure his voice carried through her open window, “I’m going to grab a soda.”

With that, Nacio limped off across the parking lot. The doctors kept telling him that eventually the leg would get better, but he doubted it. He went inside, bought himself a soda, and then came outside to sit on the picnic bench left behind by a short-lived and now departed latte stand. There he waited for Bree to join him.

Nacio hated having to meet her this way, having to sit stiffly on the bench as though they were nothing more than a pair of strangers passing the time of day. It was only when they were alone that they could be themselves—free to be young and in love.

He was struck by the irony of their living a real-life version of the Romeo and Juliet roles they had played all those months earlier. According to Bree, her father hated Mexicans, and Ignacio’s Aunt Yolanda was forever pointing out the folly of mixed dating, which inevitably led to the far worse folly and inevitable heartbreak of mixed marriages. Such warnings had fallen on two sets of determinedly deaf ears.

Brianna O’Brien had returned to Nacio Ybarra’s hazy line of vision while he was still so groggy from the anesthetic and painkillers that at first he had imagined her to be some kind of ethereal being—an angel perhaps—rather than the same flesh-and-blood, blond-haired beauty whose lips had breathed fire into his one hot June night in Tucson several months earlier. Even after the drugs wore off, he still expected she would simply disappear. But she didn’t. Instead, she visited him every day of the three weeks he was stuck in the Copper Queen Hospital. Each time she came to his room, she brought with her a sense of joy and laughter and the hope that, although his leg was undeniably broken, his life was certainly not over.