Brown-Eyed Girl (16 page)

They should have made Pueblo by lunchtime, but instead, dusk was coming on. More and more they were quiet. Hawk listened to the AM radio, hoping for reliable weather reports. The blizzard let up some in south Colorado, but the news wasn't good—this was a huge, wet storm, stretching all the way back to the Sierra Nevada, which was only getting a running start on dumping a hell of a lot of snow on everything north of Albuquerque. They pulled off the interstate at a Pancake Inn in Pueblo, debated whether to push on over more coffee and onion rings that had evidently been fried in motor oil. This place made the Wrangler look like Chez Panisse. “We could get a room and start out real early tomorrow and still make Tucson by late tomorrow night,” Sally tried lamely.

“I'd rather keep going as long as we can,” Hawk said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes and hoping to put a dent in his fatigue with the lousy coffee. “Depending on how much it snows tonight, we could end up stuck wherever we stop for a couple of days.”

Man, he had good brown eyes. Big and dark and deep, and his eyelashes were longer than any girl's she'd ever known. It was a lucky thing he was so nearsighted and wore those John Lennon spectacles. Otherwise, she'd be beating off the competition with a two-by-four. “In that case,” said Sally, “I vote for Santa Fe. At least there'll be good coffee and hot chile.”

“And an amusing California chardonnay, if it comes to that,” Hawk sneered lightly at her as he put his glasses back on. “Next best thing to being in Santa Monica.”

“I wouldn't turn it down,” Sally admitted.

Sally was driving as they fought whiteouts between Raton and Glorieta. She was actually a much better driver in rotten weather, which made her careful. It was dark but bright with swirling snow. They'd decided that what they really wanted was a motel room with a hot tub, and they figured Santa Fe was the only town between Denver and Tucson that would be full enough of bicoastals to have the amenities. Their necks and backs ached and their eyes burned from staring into the dappled blackness. Sally's insides felt like poisoned rocks from bad coffee and worse food.

And then suddenly, sometime around ten o'clock, a hole opened up in the storm. They drove through a ground blizzard into a clear place where a huge, spotlit billboard reared up in front of them advertising the Legacy of Conquest Inn on Cerillos Road, an establishment claiming to be “New Mexico's most authentic hostelry,” boasting “inroom movies, Jacuzzis, and HBO.”

“Conquest my ass,” said Sally.

“My pleasure,” said Hawk, giving her thigh a little squeeze as she navigated her way off the freeway, down the icy artery, and into the motel parking lot. “But I think they're really thinking about conquering our credit cards.”

He was, of course, right. A room with a Jacuzzi at the Legacy of Conquest set them back $185. Hawk was liable to get stubborn and decide that he'd rather stomp out in disgust and sleep in the back of the truck. So Sally slapped her Visa on the counter and said, “It's on the Dunwoodie Foundation research and travel fund. We're conducting an experiment on the rigors of winter travel in the intermountain West. Very historically significant.”

He gave her a look, but said nothing until they were heading out to the car to pick up their bags. “For a hundred and eighty-five bucks, I expect a blow job along with the room.”

“For my hundred and eighty-five bucks, I reckon that one's on you,” she said haughtily, giving him a good pinch on the ass.

They were both bone tired, but the room conquered them immediately. It was somebody's idea of what authentic New Mexico looked like if you added reliable hot and cold running water, a gorgeous bathroom with a sunken tiled bathtub big enough for a YMCA, a Sony Trinitron TV, a bed you could park a truck in—either direction—more pillows than a slumber party, a wellstocked fridge and wet bar, and a kiva fireplace, fire all laid out, close by a balcony loaded with more piñon logs than most authentic New Mexicans would see in three seasons of salvage woodcutting.

Sally went to the bathroom. Hawk listened to his joints snap and pop as he stretched his muscles and rubbed a few of the dozen places he ached. His head was still filled with the white noise of the road, but the sense of having found sanctuary was starting to sink in a little and loosen some of the knots. He lit the fire, turned off the lights, put some ice in a couple of glasses and poured them each three fingers of Jim Beam. “Now about you taking off that top,” he said, turning around to find her standing there in a long clinging ivory silk nightgown that left exactly enough to his imagination.

He handed her a glass, and she took a hard swig, tossing her head back and letting the bourbon burn down her throat. She was letting her hair grow out, and it swung back with her head, catching a gleam of firelight. He stroked the back of his fingers down the path the bourbon had taken, down warm skin to graze the silk that fell low between her breasts. He took another swallow. “Where'd you get this thing? It looks like something out of an old movie.”

During a rummage in Meg's attic, Sally had found trunks full of such things, shimmery romantic garments from a long time ago, carefully packed in tissue paper and quilted satin bags and boxes. She had decided that no one would mind her borrowing just one nightgown for a perfect snowy evening.

Hawk moved his hand a little to the left and closed it over one of those breasts he'd admired all these years. She sighed and shuddered and stretched. He teased the nipple a little with his thumb, and it poked hard against the silk. He put his drink down and closed his mouth over the place his thumb had been. Their original plan had been to get a drink and then soak in the big tub for a while, but they were both old and young enough to change plans.

Hawk was a man who ran hot. Sleeping next to him was like snuggling up to a furnace. She wanted to feel the heat of his skin, and thought briefly about ripping his shirt off, but she didn't want to give him ideas about what he might do to Meg's nightgown. So she settled for sending her mouth down after every button she unbuttoned, wished she could just take a big bite out of his nice hard chest. Instead, he pulled her tight against him, moving body to body with his hands stroking her all up and down, and she took his face in her hands and kissed and kissed him. He pulled back and very gently kissed her closed eyes and the corner of her mouth and several places on her neck. He really had become an amazing kisser. Then he pulled down the strap of her gown and bit her on the shoulder, and she went so goddamned crazy she didn't remember anything very precisely after that except the sound of silk ripping and two people gasping and getting hotter and sweatier and slicker and saltier and coming and coming until he begged her to go over one more time, just one more, baby, one,
more
.

Later on, in the big bathtub, they had another drink and examined with slightly painful amusement the rug burns on their knees, backs, and behinds. This led, after a while, to some very slow, lazy foreplay and a slippery underwater encore. Rosy, happy and tuckered out, they stoked up the fire and looked out the window and figured they were likely to be snowbound in Santa Fe for another day anyhow. Sally allowed as how at forty-five they were entitled to at least one high-rent rendezvous and they should chalk it up to that. Hawk was way too tired and satisfied to argue. They got into the big bed and were asleep almost before they had both feet under the covers, curled up against each other, while outside the snow fell and fell and fell.

Chapter 17
Jumping Cholla

Thanksgiving had come and gone by the time Dickie tracked Sally down at Crawford and Maria's trailer in Jumping Cholla, Arizona. There hadn't been any telephone listing for a Crawford Green anywhere in or around Tucson, a fact that had held Dickie up until Tuesday, when Delice remembered that Hawk's father was married to a woman named Maria Mendoza. Maria had a cellular phone number and an address listed simply as “Jumping Cholla.” Jumping Cholla was not even close to being a town, but was instead a loose clutter of double-wides, domes, yurts, and other bizarre structures scattered among the spiny flora and fauna of the Tortolita Mountains. The motley inhabitants, who avoided all contact with each other and humans in general, had incorporated themselves as a “town” in defense against the gobbling sprawl of Tucson.

The cellphone was usually turned off. Crawford considered telephones to be tools of the devil, and Maria used hers only for essential purposes. But being less misanthropic, more obligated, and more practical than her husband, she did have voice mail. That was how they'd gotten the message from Hawk and Sally that they were delayed in Santa Fe and might not arrive until Monday.

Sally was a little nervous about the whole thing. She had met Hawk's father and stepmother eighteen years ago, when they'd passed through Laramie on a summer driving vacation once when Hawk was around. They'd come over to Sally's apartment, barbecued steaks, and hit it off splendidly. She'd thought then, as she did now, that if Hawk looked like that in twenty-five years, whip-thin and white-haired and intense, she'd still be thinking about changing his oil every ten minutes or so. She and Hawk had gone to meet them a couple of weeks later for a camping trip on Battle Mountain in the Sierra Madre. That weekend, listening to Crawford talk, seeing in his eyes all he'd had and all he'd lost, and watching the way he watched and touched Maria, she'd learned why Hawk described Crawford as a near-tragic genius. Hawk's father had run away, brokenhearted when his wife died, leaving a three-year-old son in the care of austere Yankee grandparents. He'd made and lost more fortunes as a mining geologist than Hawk liked to think about, through a combination of scientific brilliance and financial innocence. Hawk spent his childhood in Hamden, Connecticut, with a grandmother who was determined to have him uphold the family name despite his failure of a father, the father who sent him interesting postcards from exotic places when he wasn't too far away or too drunk or too ashamed to write.

The best thing that had ever happened to Crawford was Maria Mendoza, a ninth-generation Sonoran and a graduate in economics from the University of Arizona. Maria had saved Crawford from his own abundant self-destructive tendencies. He'd fetched up in Tucson in 1962, working for Phelps Dodge in a job he hated but couldn't afford to quit. He'd given up on love and hope when Maria walked into the bar where he was working on a mortal dose of tequila . She'd seen something in him not apparent to the naked eye (she was already an accomplished amateur astronomer), and taken him home with her. It was still a mystery why a highly intelligent, ambitious, beautiful, and evidently sane woman would have saddled herself with a thirty-five-year-old wreck, but her instincts proved to be excellent.

It turned out that Crawford was a drunkard because he was horribly unhappy, not because he was biochemically destined. Make him happy and he cleaned up pretty good, though he never got to where he felt like hanging around civilization again. Maria brought home a regular paycheck, and meanwhile got him back to where he was willing to resort to the telephone now and again, and call up a few old contacts who were delighted to pay him to go somewhere extremely remote to look at rocks. Most of the time, Maria supported him by working as an office manager at a Tucson bank. At night they sat on the front porch of their trailer, far out of town amid the ocotillo and the cholla and the saguaros, drinking wine and looking at the clear sky through an excellent amateur telescope. Maria still hoped to discover a new star.

Crawford had asked Maria to marry him in 1964, and she had agreed on one condition: that they bring little Jody out to live with them. Without calling ahead, they jumped in Maria's Oldsmobile 88 and drove out to Hamden to get him. Hawk, at twelve, had long since given up praying that the day would come when his father would want him back, and when they pulled up in front of the house, he didn't recognize Crawford. “That's your father,” said his furious grandmother, “and that's his new wife, the one with the foreign-sounding name.”

Grandmama had drilled manners into him, so he stuck out his hand and said, “How do you do, sir?” Maria had started to cry and hugged him so hard and warm it very nearly hugged all the hurt out of him. She promised she'd never let him go. Forever after, he idolized her. But it didn 't make him any more willing to trust people in general.

Maria and Crawford knew all about Sally's betrayal of the older Jody, and Sally worried that they wouldn't be real excited about welcoming her back. But they did. Crawford, of all people, knew that nobody was perfect. Maria whispered to her, as Sally helped wash up after a wonderful dinner of
camarones al mojo de ajo
, that Jody looked skinny but pretty happy. Sally experienced the bliss of mercy, and relaxed.

She loved Arizona. Maria and Crawford took them on long fascinating walks in the low hot mountains, in the Sonoran desert staggeringly lush with things that stung and bit and pricked. They drank wine and looked through the telescope and had a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat. They were all having such a good time that Maria didn't even check her messages again until Friday.

Surprisingly, Sally didn't totally freak Friday morning when she heard about the break-in. She was much more worried about Maude than she was about the burglary attempt. The young Sally Alder would have given way instantly to hollering and tears, but this older one just poured a cup of coffee, took it and the cellphone out onto the porch, and got to work dealing with the situation. Dickie assured Sally that Maude was recovering faster than anyone expected, and that the hardest part was keeping her quiet. The cops had done their best not to wreck the basement further, but it was pretty bad anyway. When Sally got back and got ready to straighten things up, Dickie would be wanting a full account of anything that seemed to have particularly drawn the intruder's attention, and anything that might be missing.

That was the one thing that almost set her off. Her voice rose as she told Dickie that she had promised not to divulge what she found until the book was done, and in her mind, that included telling the police. Dickie said that he could easily get a subpoena for everything in the basement if he needed to, and decided to start cluing her in on some things. “I already know that there are some original manuscripts of unpublished poems down there, Mustang,” he said. “The bastard put out a cigarette on one of 'em.”

“A fucking smoker,” Sally muttered. “Figures.”

Maude had ID'd the prime suspect, Dickie said, a skinhead moron named Shane Parker, who happened to be a distant relative of Meg's. He hadn't been seen since the break-in, though they'd found his car in West Laramie. Dickie was still trying to track him down, although he couldn't give the matter his full time since the snowstorm had stranded some unattractive people in Laramie and had brought out the usual nasty behavior in the locals.

Dickie did not explain, just yet, that he had reason to believe that Parker had been staking out her house for some time, with clear intent to do harm. There was that story about a filed brake line on the Mustang that Hawk had told Dickie. Knowing about that, and with this breakin, Hawk would probably put two and two together, and he might well tell her what he knew.

And Dickie would have to tell her about the mutilated cat. “You'd better come on home, Sal,” Dickie told Sally. “I'll fill you in on everything we've been able to piece together then.”

Then Sally called Maude, who insisted that she was just fine, was furious that she hadn't been able to shoot the son of a bitch, and was having a burglar alarm installed. Sally told her that she and Hawk would start for home a day early, and Maude said it wasn't necessary. “I've been staying here since I got out of the hospital,” she said. “I bought a new Winchester. If he comes again I'll be ready.” Sally explained that she didn't find the idea of Maude sitting in her house with a loaded rifle, waiting for a skinhead, all that reassuring. Maude told her that she'd seen and done worse in her time, and left it at that.

Her third phone call went to Edna McCaffrey, to tell her that the Dunwoodie Foundation ought to be notified about the burglary attempt. Edna had already heard, and had called Ezra Sonnenschein, who was still out of the country. She had also called around and finally found Egan Crain, the archivist, who was having Thanksgiving at his Uncle Malcolm's ranch. Egan had immediately started demanding that Meg's papers be removed from the house and sent to the archive. Edna had persuaded him to put off thinking or doing anything, at least until everybody was back in Laramie after the holiday. She reminded Egan that nothing could actually be done until the Foundation was notified through Sonnenschein. Sally asked Edna for the phone number at the Crain ranch, so she could call and mollify Egan herself.

Before she could dial, Maria's cellphone rang. It was Delice, who said that she was generally concerned about everything that had happened, including the prospect that whoever had broken in and bashed Maude might return and do real and permanent harm not only to the occupants, but to the house. Sally remained calm, but her patience was wearing thin. “Don't worry, Dee,” she said. “It's good to have the house be a notorious crime scene. You can put that on your application for the Historic Register.” Delice apologized for sounding mercenary, and said that really she was worried about Sally. Sally admitted that she was a little worried, too.

Two calls later, she'd had it with the phone and was itching to get on the road. While she'd talked, Hawk had fixed bacon and eggs and hash browns for everyone, eaten breakfast and drunk coffee, loaded all the stuff from the Tuff Shed into the back of the pickup, packed his bag, and had started making turkey sandwiches for the drive. He'd run crews on many a road and knew how to keep the operation moving when the hitches set in. She finished talking to Ezra Sonnenschein's answering machine and went into the trailer's guest bedroom to pack her clothes. Now that she was no longer collecting information, reassuring upset friends, or dealing with future possibilities, the impact of what had happened hit her. That was when the tears came. When Hawk found her, she was sobbing into a Neville Brothers T-shirt.

For a long while, he just held on to her and rubbed her back and kissed her hair and let her cry. Then he gave her his handkerchief. Hawk kept his possessions spare and useful, but he always had a clean handkerchief. “Don't talk now,” he said. “I know it's awful, but this demands some thinking. And it'll give us something to talk about on the drive.”

“I sh-shouldn't t-talk about it at ah-all,” she hiccupped. “That was the d-deal.”

“The deal's off. The rules change when it gets dangerous to stick to them. Somebody wants something out of that house, and you've got to figure out what that something is. I'll help you figure, if you want. That doesn't mean you should go around blabbing about everything you've found to everyone you know. But hell, Sal, you're going to have to give Dickie the rundown at the very least.”

“Thanks a lot!” she snapped. “I'm too sure I'd go around spilling my guts to everyone I know just because some dickhead busted into my house and beat up my housekeeper. I mean, that happens all the time in LA— shit, you practically can't rent a house without signing something that says you agree to be robbed once a month.”

“No offense, honey, but there was a time when you would have been runnin' your mouth about something like this. You weren't exactly known for your stoic demeanor.” He gave her a grin so quizzical she had to snuffle up a smile in return. He was, of course, correct.

“All right, all right. But you do acknowledge that I've grown up,” she said, folding the T-shirt and zipping up her bag.

“I do,” said Hawk. He was being pulled further into Sally Alder's grown-up world, a more complicated world than he'd bargained for. “Now get moving so we can get out of here.”

As so often happens, the back side of a Rocky Mountain blizzard brought warm weather and dazzling blue sky. Hawk did most of the driving, and Sally did most of the talking. As they wound north through canyons and mountains, then sped east a while on I–40, she told him everything she knew about Meg Dunwoodie's life, her house, her papers. He listened mostly, asked a rare question here or there, and his questions helped her get things clear in her own mind, see things anew. He was a wonderful thinking partner.

By the time they made Albuquerque, they were dragging. It was almost ten. They checked into a La Quinta Inn that looked relatively new. They took showers, got into bed, and then they hashed and rehashed everything. First, what kinds of things did burglars generally want? Jewelry, electronics, stock certificates, cash. Sally assumed Meg had had jewelry, but if there was any in the house, it was in that locked office closet upstairs. The same went for stock certificates and cash, and the television and stereo were also in the office. Anyone who had cased the house and looked for such things would, if they had half a brain, have stayed in the office and tried to break into the closet. Instead, this thief had spent his time in the basement, riffling through papers.

That could mean any number of things. The poetry manuscripts were, Sally believed, the most valuable things in the house, and probably worth stealing. Insanely, however, this burglar had so little interest in those that he'd put out a cigarette in the middle of a poem. So clearly, he was looking for something else. What?