Desert Shadows (9781615952250) (3 page)

Without bothering to ask him first. “But she didn't go. Why not?”

“She was due to lead some morning seminar on niche publishing, whatever that is. I…I wish she'd come with us, then maybe.…” His big hands clenched and unclenched. Then he forced them still. “The creek was running pretty heavy and flowers were blooming. We walked around for a couple of hours, and I gave everybody a rundown on desert wildlife, the bobcats, the javalina. You know, the usual. I identified the prickly pear blooms, Colorado four o'clock, blue eyes.…”

Owen sounded like he was ready to reel off the entire Arizona botanical litany, so I hurried him along. “And the water hemlock, right?”

A pause. “Yeah. And the water hemlock.” He looked down at the floor.

“Was the water hemlock blooming? Was that why you pointed it out?”

He looked back up at me through thick, dark lashes. I couldn't read his eyes. “No, Lena, hemlock doesn't bloom creekside until later in the season. The problem was, since all those books have come out on herbal medicines, everybody thinks they're experts. I caught a couple of people picking flowers, parsley, harmless stuff like that. The water hemlock looks an awful lot like the wild celery we've got around here, so I picked a handful of the hemlock and passed it around, pointing out the differences. I told them that just a few crushed leaves or root shavings could kill a thousand-pound horse in minutes, let alone a human being.”

And by doing so, Owen had delivered a recipe for murder. “When everyone finished looking at the water hemlock, did they give it back to you?”

“Sure. I watched them every minute and I made sure none of them took any. I'm not dumb.”

“I never said you were.” I thought for a moment, then asked, “What did you do with the hemlock?”

“I put it in my jacket pocket.” His brown eyes darkened to black, and his tic, back once more, jumped like a live thing. “I wanted to dispose of it where it wouldn't hurt any animals. Or people.”

It all sounded strange to me, the impromptu hike, the flower-picking. But stranger things have happened here in the desert. “I have to ask you this. Other than your squabbles over working hours, how did you and Gloriana get along?”

He looked down at the floor, but not before I saw his tic increase big time. “She wasn't an easy woman, but I didn't get along with her worse than anyone else.”

What a terrible liar. My excitement over the eight other suspects began to fade. “Had she threatened to fire you before?”

He gave me the first smile I'd seen since I entered the visitor's room. Damn, he was a good-looking man. “Only about once a week. Like I told you, Gloriana wasn't easy. But I needed that job. My house is running me double of what I thought it would. We've got the baby now.…”

I still didn't understand why he hadn't left Gloriana long before. “Owen, with your background, you could have found another job.”

“Gloriana told me that if I left her she'd give me a bad reference, say I stole from her.”

I knew Owen well enough not to ask him if Gloriana's claim was true. At the same time, I could understand his concern. Not every prospective employer had my knowledge of his character. To most of them, he would be branded as just another thieving Indian.

I asked Owen a few questions about Gloriana and her relationships with her family, especially the niece who lived over the garage. He told me that Sandra worked for Gloriana's publishing company, as did Gloriana's grandson. Both sounded like they were pretty much under the old lady's thumb, but I guessed that wasn't unusual in those old families.

“Just a niece and grandson? No sons or daughters?”

“Her son was killed a while back in a car crash along with his wife. She has a daughter, but doesn't…didn't talk to her much. There's also a couple of older sisters over in the Arcadia District. Twins. When I took her over there just before the SOBOP thing started, she said she was calling her attorney, probably to sue them over something. I don't know what about because she always made me wait outside. Anyway, she was always talking about taking someone to court. Lawyers loved her.”

So Gloriana was the litigious type. More fruitful territory for investigation. Perhaps an unknown party had decided to settle a lawsuit out of court via water hemlock.

But there was always the obvious motive: money. “Do you know who inherits Gloriana's estate?”

“Zach, probably. Her grandson. Once I heard her talking to him about, uh, what do you call it, primo genser? Primo.…”

“Primogeniture?”
Everything to the oldest male.

He nodded. “Gloriana was very old-fashioned, always going on about her ancestors, saying she was descended from that Mayflower gang. She said
primo
whatever kept estates intact.”

I'd known Gloriana had money, but the way Owen told it, she sounded loaded. I said so.

He shrugged. “It's Scottsdale, and I've seen richer. But yeah, she sure had more money than I do. Almost everybody does.” He managed another smile, and once more reminded me how handsome he was.

I was just beginning to muse about lonely old women and handsome young men when the corrections officer told me my time was up. Before I left, I had Owen give me the names of everyone who had accompanied Owen on the hike. I repeated them to myself twice, consigning them to memory.

Randall Ott, Emil Ramos, David Zhang, Zachary Alden-Taylor, Sandra Alden-Taylor, Myra Gordon, Arizona State Representative Lynn Tinsley, and…

The Reverend Melvin Giblin.

My foster father.

Chapter 3

When I was four years old, an undocumented Mexican national found me lying unconscious by the side of a Phoenix street, a bullet in my head. She carried me to the nearest emergency room, then dashed back out into the night.

I survived the coma, but the bullet left only an empty space where my childhood memories should have been. Mother, father—their names and my own—were as lost to me as the blood that had seeped into the Phoenix pavement. In dreams, sometimes, I could hear the singing of a dozen voices, understood that I was a passenger on a brightly lit bus hurtling through the night. The songs always ended in gunshots and pain.

Who am I? I don't know and possibly never will. My true name and the reason I was a passenger on that bus remain mysteries. But of the identity of the woman sitting next to me, the woman aiming the gun at me, there can be no mistake. She looked then as I do now.

My mother.

When I recovered from my coma, Child Protective Services sent me off to a series of foster homes that I endured until my eighteenth birthday and my entrance as a scholarship student into the criminal justice program at Arizona State University.

If you're a gambling person, you can lay odds that most foster homes are semi-adequate places to warehouse bereft children. Most of these people mean well, and they do everything possible to quell the fears of their tiny wards. Some, however, are lured into the program only to get the check that arrives every month. If their foster children are lucky, they are simply ignored. If they're not lucky.…Well, things happen in foster care. Things that sometimes make the newspapers.

This much I can tell you about my own luck: I hadn't reached Reverend Melvin Giblin's foster home soon enough.

As soon as I exited the jail and climbed back into my Jeep, I fished a pad and pen out of my carry-all and jotted down the other names Owen had given me. That accomplished, I punched the Rev's number into my cell phone.

After three rings, the answering machine picked up and I heard the Rev's warm baritone. “Sorry you missed me, but I'm attending the Southwest Book Publishers Association Expo at Desert Shadows Resort. Starting Friday, I'll be manning SOBOP's sales booth at the Festival of the West, at WestWorld. If it's an emergency, you can call my cell phone at (602) 555-5550. And always remember, Jesus loves you.”

After the beep, I didn't leave a message. I just started the Jeep and headed north.

***

WestWorld occupies what used to be empty desert and a few Arabian horse farms. Now the horse farms were gone, and so, almost, was the surrounding desert.

The massive equestrian complex hosted roping contests, rodeos, polo matches, Western trade shows, and once a year, the Festival of the West. The festival was attended by tens of thousands of folks, both locals and tourists, all eager to gawk at a few bored bison and perhaps even meet a real live tobacco-spitting cowboy or two. For added excitement, the Overland Stage, pulled by teams of wooly-footed Clydesdales, offered rides to the kiddies, and local actors reenacted the Gunfight at the OK Corral for the millionth time. Because of the money to be made with Western nostalgia, anyone who ran a remotely Western-themed business rented a booth at the festival, so it wasn't surprising that the Southwest Book Publishers Association had signed up, too.

Upon entering WestWorld's grounds, I aimed the Jeep toward an empty slot next to a similarly battered pickup truck, but I couldn't help noticing the rows and rows of yuppymobiles pretending to be work vehicles. As I rolled past a silver Hummer which had obviously never even seen a dirt road, much less a battlefield, I could almost feel the Jeep sneer.

Once parked, I followed a gaggle of tourists toward the festival entrance, situated midway between two large exhibit halls. A sign over the gate informed me that those who arrived in Western wear got in free, which explained the profusion of Yves St. Laurent cowboys surrounding me. I was clad in my usual black jeans and T-shirt, so the ticket-taker, an overly made-up woman dressed like a nineteenth-century hooker, made me fork over the entrance fee. After I'd given her five dollars, I asked for a receipt, at which point she whipped a Cross pen out of her SuperBra and scrawled one. She added a smiley face wearing a cowboy hat at the bottom.

“Have fun, cowgirl,” she said.

I tipped an imaginary cowboy hat and entered the nearest hall. Facing me was a maze of stalls offering hand-tooled cowboy boots, Indian baskets, turquoise jewelry, and gaudy paintings of saguaro-sprinkled sunsets. I wandered among them until I found myself in front of a long, book-strewn table flanked by several tall bookcases. A banner draped over the booth declared,
SOUTHWEST BOOK PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION—WE WRITE THE WEST
.

“Lena!” Before I could step back, a big man detached himself from the other people manning the table and enveloped me in his arms. “What's it been, girl, three months, four?”

I tried not to pull back too quickly. It wasn't Reverend Giblin's fault that I hated to be touched. In my two years with him, he and his wife had been nothing but kind. But when Mrs. Giblin suffered a fatal stroke, Child Protective Services removed me and the other foster kids from his home. The next family CPS placed me with wasn't half as kind, although they took care never to let their “discipline” show on one of those rare occasions when a social worker dropped by. By the time CPS realized their mistake and moved me to the next home, I had developed malnutrition along with several hairline fractures.

Bearing up as well as I could at the unwelcome physical contact, I gave the Rev a quick peck on the cheek. “It's great to see you, too, but I need to warn you that I'm here on business.”

The Rev let his arms fall and stepped back. Other than a few new wrinkles and a hardly perceptible softening of his jaw line, he looked pretty much like he had when I'd lived with him twenty-five years earlier. Silver now blended with the wild black hair he'd never been able to tame. The deep crow's feet framing his bright blue eyes merely added to their friendliness. His plaid polyester shirt and slacks looked like they'd been bought at a Salvation Army clearance sale—they probably had—and his rough-out cowboy boots could have used a good cleaning. He had packed on a few pounds, too. Judging from the big silver and turquoise belt buckle (a gift from me) which called attention to his newly plump belly, those pounds didn't embarrass him one bit. The Rev distrusted vanity, believing it to be one of Satan's many lures.

And yet he had always taken great care to compliment me on my own appearance, perhaps because as a child I'd been so self-conscious about my scar. My foster father may have held strong fundamentalist beliefs, but he never let them conflict with his fundamental kindness.

“Business, Lena? Don't tell me you're investigating Gloriana Alden-Taylor's death.” His voice took on a note of caution.

“Owen's been arrested for her murder, Rev. That means I have to ask why you went along on that Oak Creek hike when I know you've been up there many times before. With me and your other foster kids, as a matter of fact.”

He didn't answer right away, and during his silence, I became aware of the crowd surrounding us.

A woman with a well-bred Boston accent complained about the dearth of histories on women who'd helped settle the West. “Those miners and cowboys had to marry somebody, didn't they? Well, where are their wives? Where are
their
contributions? Why aren't women even
mentioned
in any of these books? Why is it always just men, men, men?”

Nearby, an elderly man grumped that he'd found eighteen typos in the first chapter of the book he'd bought from the SOBOP booth the day before. “Slipshod editing, young man. When I was your age, books came without mistakes like these.”

But still the Rev said nothing, and his long silence began to worry me. After all, he had been on the hike and must have seen the water hemlock himself. Why was he so loathe to talk about it?

“Rev.…”

“Yes, I remember taking you kids up to Oak Creek,” he finally answered, his eyes no more eager to meet mine than Owen's had been. “It's beautiful up there, all that red rock. Even now, I grasp at any chance to go back again. And then there are the memories. You, Brian, Malik.…”

Before he could finish recounting those few happy days of my childhood, an elderly woman wearing a purple Stetson and matching ostrich cowboy boots tapped him on the shoulder.

“I need God's magnificent love,” she said.

So did I, but it wouldn't occur to me to go around asking for it.

The Rev merely smiled. “It's on special today for only $12.98.” Then, when he saw my face, he began to laugh.
“God's Magnificent Love
was my first book and so far, it's been my best seller.”

He dug into his pocket and made change for a twenty, then stepped back to the table and picked up a slim volume. “Want me to autograph it for you?” After the woman nodded, he scribbled something onto the title page, then handed it to her. “Enjoy. And remember, Jesus loves you,” he said, as she trundled off, her feet obviously hurting.

The Rev motioned toward the bookshelves surrounding the table, and for the first time, I noticed his name on several books.
God's Magnificent Love. God's Magnificent Mercy. God's Magnificent Justice.

“Why, Rev, you've been keeping secrets from me. You told me you'd gone into publishing, but I didn't know you were publishing your own books.”

“Only a few of the books are mine at this point. That's the way a lot of small presses get started. You write a book but can't find a publisher, so you publish it yourself. Maybe it doesn't do very well, but that's neither here nor there because you've scratched an itch by only spending a couple of thousand dollars. Sometimes, though, you make a profit. Then a friend who's just finished his manuscript asks you to show him the publishing ropes, and you do. Then someone else asks. The next time it happens, you start thinking, ‘Why don't I just publish these things myself?'

“There you are, the story of God's Love Press. We have twenty-four titles now, with three more due out next month. Most of the manuscripts come from other ministers around the country, but I'm still throwing a few of my own into the mix.”

His smile dimmed for a moment. “Religious publishing houses are seeing a big increase in business these days. People need hope more now than ever before.”

While I was no longer an atheist (a near-death experience in the desert had ended that)
¹
the Rev's simple faith still made me uncomfortable. I hurried to change the subject. “Let's get back to Gloriana's murder, Rev. I need to interview everyone who sat near her at the banquet last night, and that includes you.”

An unfathomable look. “I wasn't the only one there, you know.” He glanced over at the SOBOP sales table. It was manned at one end by a yuppie-slick Asian, the counter card in front of him reading
ARIZONA TRAILS PUBLISHING
. In the middle of the table, behind a counter card that said
VERDAD PRESS
, sat a distinguished-looking Hispanic gentleman whose face seemed vaguely familiar.

Holding down the other end of the table, as far away from those two as was possible in the cramped area, sat another familiar face. A blond man in his forties, who—judging from his expression as he eyed his table mates—appeared unlikely to break out in a chorus of
Kumbayah.
The book displayed in front of him was titled
Losing America.

The notorious Randall Ott.

With dismay, I saw the long line of people, all Anglos, waiting to have their books autographed by Ott. I also noted that his counter card proclaimed
PATRIOT'S BLOOD PRESS
. Considering everything I'd learned so far, I wasn't surprised to discover he was one of Gloriana's authors. His Whites-only views on immigration alone would have warmed her cold heart. He had gone on the fatal hike, too. Could he have been having—I hoped, I hoped—publisher troubles? I'd love to nail him for her murder.

The Rev ignored Ott's glower and waved. Ott didn't wave back. Was the Rev's hair too dark for Ott? Suspiciously curly? The Rev appeared not to notice the snub. “Tell you what, Lena. A few of us are breaking for lunch in a few minutes, so why don't you talk to us all at the same time?”

“Try to bring Ott along, too.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “I'll try, but he's…well, let's just say he marches to his own drummer.”

A big White drum with a military beat. Ott wouldn't be satisfied until Arizona and the rest of America were lily-white, and if it took a few armed encounters to bring that about, he proclaimed himself up for it. Word on the desert pipeline was that he had already begun amassing the arsenal.

While I much preferred talking to each of the SOBOP people separately, an immediate solo interview with each was not that critical. There was an up side to interviewing them together. Lulled by their associates' presence, they might be off guard, thus possibly more truthful. Satisfied, I arranged to meet the Rev and the others outside, at the picnic table closest to the Pima fry bread stand.

Before I left the exhibit hall, I browsed through some of SOBOP's books, finally choosing
Arizona Flora and Fauna
from Arizona Trails Publishing and
History of Arizona's Yaqui Indians
from Verdad Press. I purchased nothing from Patriot's Blood, but did take note of Gloriana's offerings.
Marriage or Miscegenation?
Finding Your Patriot Ancestors through DNA Testing.
Recreational Explosives and How to Build Them.

Recreational explosives? God save our crazy state.

More curious than ever, I picked up a Patriot's Blood brochure, stepped to a less crowded area of the tent, and began reading.

Thank you for your interest in Patriot's Blood Press. We were founded as
Patriot's Blood Magazine
on the very day of America's Bicentennial—July 4, 1976—by Mayflower descendant Gloriana Alden-Taylor. At that time, we specialized in articles on the Revolutionary War. Eventually, our magazine branched out to include other conflicts: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, Panama, the World Wars, and of course, Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Anywhere a patriot's blood has been shed.