Demon Lover (18 page)

And then another problem arose: The camp’s water supply dwindled to a trickle and then ceased altogether. Julie was surprised to learn there was a water supply after Chayne’s remarks about the scarcity of fresh water in Baja California. Now it struck her as ironic that on the morning after torrents of water had fallen from the sky they should be completely out of it.

"There is a spring," Rita told her. "In the canyon—" she pointed to the south "—near the old mission. It is an oasis, with palm trees, really very pretty but too rocky and steep to build houses in. After the flood destroyed the village and the church was abandoned, Sebastien built a rock ditch to bring the water here. It isn’t much, just a trickle, and even that dries up if there is a bad dry spell. But it is enough for the garden and the animals. But now, after such a rain, there should be plenty. I don’t understand." She was frowning perplexedly at the little wooden trough that should have carried a precious stream into a barrel beside the thick adobe wall of Sebastien’s house. The wood was still damp but drying rapidly in the warm sunshine. The barrel itself had been knocked askew by the collapse of the goat shed and was nearly empty.

"We must have water," Rita said, looking worried. "The animals…"

"The ditch has been washed away," old Juanita said in her dry, ageless voice. "It has happened before." She rarely said anything, and when she did it was like wind blowing through sagebrush. It was hard to believe, sometimes, that she had spoken at all.

"It must be mended," Juanita announced, and as the three younger women watched in silent amazement, she turned, hiked up her voluminous black skirts and waddled off down the beach, looking, Julie thought, like an indignant penguin.

After a moment’s bemused hesitation, Rita, Linda and Julie looked at each other and followed.

The old woman halted at the edge of the little circle of masculine camaraderie and waited impassively, arms akimbo. Silence fell.

"There is no water."

Three pairs of dark eyes slowly lifted to the broad, seamed face. The fourth pair, clear electric blue, sought Julie’s and crinkled in amusement. Julie caught her breath, surprised by a lurch in her stomach, and jerked her eyes away.

Sebastien was stroking his beard and nodding sagely.
"Sí.
The ditch has washed away."

"It must be mended."

"Sí,"
Sebastien murmured, "
manana
."

"No," Juanita said in an implacable monotone. "Now. The goats must have water. The ditch must be mended."

And that, she was clearly saying, is
your
job.

Julie was fascinated. Those male bastions were breachable, it seemed, if the occasion was important enough to warrant the trouble. She was beginning to realize, in spite of all that masculine power and authority, that the real strength was there in that patient, implacable little woman.

Sebastien stared straight ahead, stroking his beard and unhappily digesting the unpalatable but inescapable truth in her words. "Ah, well," he said finally, philosophically. "The goats must have water." He began slowly to get to his feet.

Chayne beat him to it without difficulty. "Sebastien must go with Pepe and Geraldo in the camper, to show them where to cut the
cardon, Tia
. I will mend the ditch."

To Julie’s utter astonishment, the ancient, lined face split in a nearly toothless smile. Juanita murmured, "Muchas gracias, Señor Chayne," and reached up to touch him on the arm.

Julie thought:
Even Juanita. You would think he was some kind of saint!

Sebastien, Pepe and Geraldo restored the missing components to the truck’s engine and went bouncing off into the interior to cut cardon cactus.

Alive and growing, the desert giants were fleshy green candelabras reaching fifty feet into the sky. Rita explained to Julie that when they died they left skeletons of hardwood, long poles with the strength of iron. In that treeless land those poles were used to build fences and animal shelters, even houses. They formed the framework for the thatched roofs. The door of poles Julie had noticed that first night in the hut, the door through which she had eavesdropped on Geraldo and Chayne, was made of cardon skeletons.

A kind of lazy, sun–drenched somnolence settled over the camp as the high whine of the truck’s powerful engine died away beyond the granite ridges. Julie was on her knees beside a bucket of sand outside Geraldo’s hut, scouring dishes. In the open doorway old Juanita sat with her lap full of dried pinto beans still in their crackly yellow pods. She was shelling them largely by feel, half dozing, rocking slightly in the sunshine and crooning to Carlito, who, after the excitement of the night, had fallen asleep with his head propped against her ample hip. Inside the hut, Rita was chopping onions for the stew; Julie could hear her intermittent sniffles. Linda, as usual, had disappeared.

Chayne came around the corner of the hut, a shovel on his shoulder. He had on a shirt for a change—blue chambray—but it did nothing to disguise his wild, almost feline beauty. Once again he had tied a rolled bandana around his head, a dark blue one this time. Beneath it his eyes had a smoky look.

At his sudden appearance Julie felt that peculiar spasm in the area of her diaphragm again and thought, Good heavens, what is that?

He stood looking down at her, and she felt her skin grow hot. Her fingers became boneless. She thought wildly,
Oh, help.

"Come with me." It was a command, spoken very softly in English, for her ears alone. She wanted to, desperately, and so perversely she shook her head and went on doggedly scrubbing plates with handfuls of clean sand.

"I have to finish. Rita has so much to do. I should stay and help. She needs me."

"I need you."

She couldn’t have heard that. It was so softly spoken, and when she looked up his face was impassive, his eyes veiled. She must have been mistaken.

"Finish, then," he said gruffly. "I’ll wait." He lowered the shovel and leaned it against the wall, then stooped and hoisted the sleeping Carlito into his arms. The little boy promptly snuggled his face against the chambray–covered chest, gave a small sigh and put his thumb into his mouth. Chayne stood for a moment regarding the tousled dark head and then abruptly disappeared into the hut.

Julie scrubbed blindly at a plate, not at all surprised at the shimmering tears that obscured her vision. It was, she told herself, just the sort of corny, schmaltzy scene that always made her choke up. Damn it.

Rita came out of the hut, squeezing past Juanita’s oblivious bulk and wiping her hands on a towel. Her eyes were red from the onions, and there was an anxious frown on her forehead.

"Julie," she said earnestly, struggling with the unfamiliar consonant, "you go with Señor Chayne. Leave the dishes. I will finish."

"But I’m nearly finished."

"Leave them." She touched Julie’s shoulder. "The dishes are not important. Señor Chayne is important. Go. Hurry." The last word was an urgent whisper accompanied by a little nudge as Chayne came back outside, pausing to say something to Juanita that elicited another sleepy, toothless smile.

Julie took a deep breath and stood up, brushing sand from her hands.

"Ready?" Chayne asked, smiling crookedly down at her.

She started to speak, then cleared her throat and nodded.

"All right, then—let’s go."

* * *

"You didn’t seem very anxious to come with me," Chayne said casually. "What’s the matter?"

They had left the beach behind and were following the narrow ditch of rock and concrete uphill, angling inland over the low ridge to the south.

"I wanted to come with you," Julie retorted. "I just wasn’t sure I should."

"Why not? I told you I’d show you the mission."

"Well, there was Rita…"

"Baloney. What’s the real reason?"

"Oh," Julie said lightly, hedging because she couldn’t explain the real reason, even to herself, "I thought it might be against the rules. You know—a mere woman tagging along on a man’s job."

Chayne chuckled and swung the shovel from his shoulder to scoop a bit of brush from the ditch. His laughter had a soft, carefree sound.

"How can you use the term ‘mere woman’ after Juanita’s performance this morning? You have it backwards, you know. It’s we men who don’t dare intrude in the women’s domain."

Julie could have argued that a dozen ways, but chose not to. Her silence prompted Chayne to say quietly, "It must be pretty hard for you to take. Not exactly what you’re used to, I imagine."

It was Julie’s turn to laugh without mirth. "No. Not hardly."

"You’ve adjusted nicely, Guerita." His voice sounded gravelly. "In fact, you’ve handled this much better than I thought you would."

Julie threw him a startled glance and went back to watching the path for rattlesnakes. "Thank you," she said dryly.

It seemed an odd sort of conversation to be having. There they were, only hours away from a night of shared intimacy beyond anything Julie could have imagined, and he’d never seemed more a stranger. But of course they
were
strangers, and were going to remain so. Chayne didn’t want to know her, and she couldn’t allow herself to know him. But it wasn’t possible to have conversations with a person without beginning to know him, so what could they say to each other?

Chayne gave her a long, silent look. Julie saw a shutter blot the light from his eyes and a look of bleak acceptance settle over his dark features. His mouth tightened almost imperceptibly, and he hefted the shovel and walked on. Pain, unexpected and inexplicable, clutched at her throat as she hurried doggedly after him.

Chayne became a tour guide, informative, impersonal. Sebastien’s rock ditch took them up a narrowing canyon, a steep–walled arroyo that would have been like all the other deep dry scars in the landscape except for the miracle of the spring. Even though the waters had been channeled by the mission padres into cisterns and irrigation ditches long ago, the underground moisture supported cottonwoods and palm trees, and the granite rocks were covered with mosaics of algae in brilliant red, yellow, black and pale bluish gray. There were signs and sounds of life all over—the hum of bees, the mosquitoes’ whine, frog song, and the blue flash of a lizard.

The cistern was located in the mouth of the canyon oasis,  where it joined another, wider and shallower valley. By a quirk of random convolutions in the earth’s crust, the narrow, rocky gorge that held the spring was flashflood safe—and uninhabitable—while the adjoining valley was wide, fertile and tempting, its topsoil laid down over countless centuries by floodwaters.

"The padres must have come during a dry spell," Chayne said, pointing out the crumbling fragments of adobe walls from the ridge above the cistern. "They had time to build the church, start a school, channel the spring and plant crops before the big one came. They must have had little floods before that, but nothing they couldn’t cope with. Like this one." He gestured with his shovel to where the water had come down the valley, leaving pale fingers of sandy silt on the older, darker soil.

"This was only a little one—the damage isn’t bad. I think it’s just filled the ditch with sand and plugged the outlet." Chayne was probing around the base of the cistern with his shovel, his voice fading into little grunts of exertion as he began to clean out the half–buried ditch.

Julie watched for a minute and then, feeling superfluous, went to explore, following the shade of the cistern’s rock and concrete wall. It was hot this far inland, and the grasses that grew lush and green near the base of the wall were cool on her unprotected toes. She paused to lean against the wall, lulled by the heat and the hum of insects and the steady scraping of Chayne’s shovel.

In the next instant her heart, her breathing, her brain stopped cold, quick–frozen by the most chilling sound on earth: the whir of a rattlesnake’s warning.

It was so close—but where? She didn’t dare move her head or even her eyes.

There
—a small one, neatly coiled at the base of the wall, seeking shelter from the midday sun. It might have been just another sandy brown rock but for the deadly heart–shaped head and cold yellow eyes, and the tiny movements of flicking tongue and shivering tail.

After the first congealing stab of terror, Julie felt  calm, almost detached. She knew she couldn’t move away—the snake wasn’t more than two feet away from her toes, bare and pink in the open huaraches. There was nothing with which she could defend herself, not even a rock or stick she could lay hands on. The next move belonged to the snake.

The ugly brown head swayed slightly; the slender tongue darted in and out, gathering sensory data on this unfamiliar and bewilderingly oversized prey. Julie only hoped her toes wouldn’t be mistaken for a nest of pink baby mice. She felt a kind of sympathy for the creature, so hideous its stare alone could immobilize its prey, so fearsome that the sound of its warning rattle could freeze the reflexes of self preservation.

It occurred to her that in her uniform, with her service revolver handy, she’d have killed it without a thought— except, perhaps, of revulsion. Though maybe not, on second thought, with her revolver. She remembered vividly the time she and Franconi had disturbed a sleeping rattler while on stakeout and Franconi had chosen that method of dispatching it. The red tape and bureaucratic hassle had been a damn nuisance. She and Franconi had both had to explain—in triplicate—why a weapon had been discharged while they were on duty.

But here
she
was the intruder. The snake had only sought a comfortable place, and she, not watching where she was going, had blundered into it. It had every right to be here. She did not.

Please, she telegraphed with all her might, please go away; I don’t mean you any harm.

After what seemed an age, but was probably only a few seconds, the snake darted its head sideways, folded backward upon itself and began to move slowly away, following the base of the wall. A quick movement at the perimeter of her vision caught Julie’s eye. She jerked her head up and cried in a hoarse whisper, "No! Don’t!" And then intently, urgently, "Please, Chayne, don’t kill it—let it go."