Wind Song (4 page)

“Did you see Robert Tsinnijinnie leave?” she asked Becky Radley.

Becky looked up from the letter she was writing to her new boyfriend, a lumberjack in Flagstaff. “Uh-uh,” she replied vaguely.

Abbie tried to contain her exasperation. The young woman showed far less interest in the children than she did in young men.

I’m definitely approaching old age, Abbie thought. Or was I ever that uninhibited? Maybe that was my problem, why I couldn’t be as free-thinking as Brad wanted. Maybe that explained the rumors of his interest in an eighteen- year-old waitress at the Philadelphia Lawyer’s Club. Eighteen. The same age as the twins. Becky, for that matter, wasn’t much older.

Abbie shook off the intruding thoughts. “Could Robert have gone for a drink of water?” Becky plucked at an oily lock of mud brown hair. “Gee, I don’t know. I didn’t see—”

Abbie whirled and went back to the classroom. Empty. Robert’s picture of Navajo Mountain still lay on the table. She started down the hallway, looking in the vacant classrooms. The heels of her sandals clicked on the tile, echoing up and down the green-tinted hall. Maybe the dormitory. She found Dalah in the linen room, shoving an armload of sheets into the mouth of the monstrous dryer.

“No, I haven’t seen him,” the young Indian girl said. She clacked the dryer door shut and straightened, shoving back the curtain of ebony hair that had fallen over her shoulder. “He could have run away. Often the children go back home.”

“How far away does he live?”

A frown etched Dalah’s lovely features as she tried to remember. “Too far,” she said at last. “His father is a migrant worker somewhere in California.”

“Do you have any idea where he might go?” Abbie demanded.

“Well, he seems to be interested in silversmith ing. He once came to Cody’s house when I . . .” Dalah blushed.

Abbie guessed the rest—and was surprised that Cody’s amorous interest in the attractive Indian girl should nettle her. “How far away does Cody live?”

Dalah pursed her lips in the Navajo fashion of estimating. “Oh, just beyond the trading post, maybe a mile or so back up the canyon draw—in the old Spanish mission.”

Abbie sighed. To the Navajo, a mile or so could be a block or nine miles. It all depended on how far the lips and chin jutted. And that was something Abbie had not learned to judge yet. She could use the government Jeep—this
was
an emergency—but she didn’t know how to drive a stick-shift vehicle. Besides, she didn’t dare alert Miss Halliburton unless it was necessary. Losing a child was not the way to start a successful teaching career.

Abbie didn’t even consider the old wagon and the two burros corralled behind the Jeep’s shed as possible transportation. The school sometimes used the wagon for outings, but Abbie had never hitched up a burro. She doubted if she knew a harness from a hackamore.

She had gone no more than five hundred yards down the road when she gave up and took off her high-heeled sandals. Her hose would be ruined, but the sand wedged between the leather and her toes had abraded her skin unmercifully. Sandals in hand, she stopped in at the trading post, hoping that Robert might have come there. She found Orville back in the pawn room. Like all trading post owners, he kept a pawn room where the Navajos traded their jewelry for credit. Turquoise and silver ornaments, tagged with the owner’s name, were mounted all over the walls.

Orville draped a heavy squash-blossom necklace over a hook and shook his shaggy head. “Nope, haven’t seen the little devil.”

Abbie thanked him and set out again, following the dirt road that paralleled the bend of the cliff on one side and Kaibeto Wash on the other. Ahead in the distance rose Navajo Mountain, which was actually in the state of Utah. Dalah had told her that the Navajo believed that when you died your spirit would go to the sacred mountain.

Though rain clouds squalled now over Navajo Mountain, her bronze silk sheath clung to her waist and breasts where she was freely perspiring. The sandals seemed to weigh twenty-five pounds. A mile or so turned out, she figured, to be two and a half miles. She sighted the rusted green pickup parked next to a mesquite-palisaded corral before she did the mission. In the corral an Appaloosa eyed her suspiciously.

The Jesuit padres had built the mission where the draw angled up to the north, creating an expanse of greasewood-studded plateau. Large, shady olive and fig trees, which the padres must have planted, belted the mission. No large cross topped the pink-tiled roof, but the ochre- plastered bell tower still housed a copper bell that rang irregularly with the breeze.

Abbie approached the open massive, hand- carved double doors. She found it incongruous that she should feel a natural reverence toward the abandoned place of worship, when the man who lived there obviously carried on his affairs of passion without any consideration for religious desecration.

“Hello?” she called out. No answer.

She stepped inside the outer room. It was like stepping into a refrigerator. The adobe tiles cooled her aching feet. When her pupils adjusted to the dim interior, she found not the barnyard condition that she had expected of a pariah like Cody Strawhand but a well-planned though sparsely decorated room. It was dominated by masculine furniture of good quality. The man was obviously not a starving artist.

The randomly hung paintings above the rust- and-salmon-splashed sofa captured her interest. Vivid colors and strokes—scenes of southwestern landscape, weathered Indians and cowpunchers, maverick cattle and grazing sheep—leaped out at her. She inspected the paintings more closely. The name in the bottom right-hand corner was Deborah Strawhand. His wife? One of his wives?

Feeling like an intruder, she stepped to the room’s far end and called out again. What if he were asleep—or, worse, otherwise occupied in bed? A flush of heat swept over her and she swore silently. Her imagination had to be as vivid as those paintings! Still, she couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to be kissed by Cody. Different. Exciting? Yes, damn it. Funny, she couldn’t begin to imagine anything further— going to bed with him. Brad had been the only man she had ever given herself to.

Hesitantly, she followed an arched corridor that opened into a courtyard. Then, from beyond the flagstoned well where a clapboard building formed the fourth wall of the courtyard, she heard a steady thudding. Curious, she moved along the shaded portico that rimmed the courtyard. At the door to the dingy gray frame building a blast of heat hit her. Inside, the pegs hung with saddles and reins indicated that the place must have once been a carriage house.

Before an anvil Cody, naked to the waist, wielded a hammer. A leather apron was tied over his faded jeans. The reflection of the forge’s blaze flickered across the copper flesh of his torso. Sweat sheened his skin and ran down the channels where his tendons and muscles and ligaments came together, then separated, with each lithe movement of his chest and arms. A swath of hair fell over the red bandana knotted about his forehead.

She stood transfixed, awed by the man’s beauty. Her heart seemed to pound in tempo with the thud of his hammer against the silver bar. Then after a moment it seemed she forgot how to breathe altogether.

Cody lifted his forearm to wipe it across the flannel headband and halted in mid-action. His dark eyes locked with hers, and embarrassment washed over her. He couldn’t have failed to see the open admiration in her gaze. Only then did she notice the boy who silently watched at his side. Robert. A sigh of relief expanded her air- starved lungs.

Cody laid aside the hammer and wiped his hands on the back of his soot-smudged jeans. During this time his gaze never wavered from hers. When at last he crossed to her, she was able to collect her scattered wits. Had she not faced too many dignitaries to let this single man bemuse her?

“Yes?” he asked.

Again, that electrical current charging the air around them. So stong she caught herself from swayig. With an effort to recollect herself, she nodded toward Robert. Not a flicker of fear showed in the boy’s face. “Robert—he ran off from school. I’ve come for him.”

* * * * *

Purposely Cody let his gaze move insolently from her eyes—breathtakingly shaped but a frosty blue at that moment—down to her breasts. They were full and round with feminine maturity. And decidedly sensual with the sweat-dampened silk clinging to pouting nipples. He clamped down the urge that stiffened his jeans. He had had enough of her kind of woman.

The chic sorority girls at Arizona State University, later the sophisticated socialites who had more interest in him than merely being a patron of the arts, who appreciated more than his jewelry. To them he was an Indian and thus different. And that made the Anglo women want him. It amused him that they found his Indian blood intriguing when he was seven-eighths white.

And then there was his mother, the Anglo who had abandoned him—a woman much like the lovely one before him. Strikingly blond, obviously wealthy, undoubtedly spoiled. And with a brittle veneer that would crack under pressure.

He said as much. Bluntly. “Aren’t you, too, running away from yourself? Why don’t you hightail your pretty, expensive ass back wherever you came from and face your mid-life crisis there instead of taking it out on Indian children?”

She blanched, and he prepared himself for the inevitable slap of a scorned woman. But a slow smile—a dazzling smile—formed faint creases in her otherwise smooth complexion, a complexion as creamy as his was bronze. A slight flicker of admiration for her composure and self-restraint registered on his mental scorecard.

“Mr. Strawhand,” she said stiffly, “my concern is for the children, not my feminine libido.”

He saw her eyes, eyes as blue as the sky in a second-grader’s coloring book, widen at her mistaken choice of words. A lopsided grin eased his harsh features. “Is libido a Freudian slip, Mrs. Dennis?”

At the vulnerable look that suddenly replaced her frigid gaze, he was almost sorry for his sarcasm. But her socialite’s mask quickly slipped back into place. “Hardly. Only the truth, which I doubt you would recognize. The truth is, I suspect that you are also running, Mr. Strawhand.”

She waved her hand in a gesture disdainful of their surroundings. “Your façade of anger protects real fear, I susupect.  Yes, I suspect you’re afraid to face society’s demands, so you hide out here, don’t you? Play-acting at being a craftsman.”

He wanted to wipe the supercilious smile from her face, to grab her to him and kiss away the haughtiness that iced her expression. He promised himself that he would if she ever so much as crossed his threshold again. He would play the role of the savage Indian to her affronted maiden.

His lips formed a mocking smile. “Since communication on any level but the most superficial appears impossible, I will address myself to the problem of Robert. Some Indian children adapt wonderfully to boarding school life. Others are desperately miserable away from their families and never adapt. Robert tells me that he’s worked in the fields alongside his father since he was almost four. He misses him terribly. When you take Robert back with you, don’t punish—”

“I would never do that,” she protested.

‘‘They
do. Indian boarding schools use forms of discipline that are dehumanizing. I won’t traumatize you with the details. Suffice it to say that Miss Halliburton, at least, relies only on a good, swift willow switch for the more difficult children. But with some—like Robert—that won’t work. Patience”—he shrugged—“and even then I couldn’t guarantee your rate of success.”

Before she could protest he took her shoes from her and knelt before her. One hand firmly grasped her ankle and lifted. Involuntarily she caught his shoulder for balance while he slid her left foot into the high-heeled sandal. His flesh was warm beneath her touch. She repressed the desire to stroke the velvety skin. His dark hair brushed tantalizing near the hem of her skirt. She thought of the runs that were probably ruining her hosiery and wanted to cringe.

How like her, Brad would have said. How practical she had been in the face of what should have been wild, uninhibited lovemaking. She had often wanted to cry out that it wasn’t her fault, that she couldn’t help the direction of her wandering thoughts.

Frigid.
Such a repulsive word.

“Keep to the rim of the wash,” Cody said as he slipped her other foot into its shoe. “The rain has washed the banks smooth of pebbles there and packed the sand.”

He stood, and she looked up into his inscrutable face. “Thank you.” The words were almost inaudible.

“Walk in beauty.” It was the ancient Navajo form of a combination blessing and farewell. He turned then to Robert, who had never moved throughout the verbal sparring, and nodded curtly at the boy. Like a puppet whose strings had been released, Robert moved forward to join Abbie.