Desert Shadows (9781615952250) (9 page)

“Zach's at the office. He's the managing editor of Patriot's Blood Press, you know, and with Gloriana dead, there is a mountain of details for him to tackle. Canceling most of the summer catalog, for one. Not to speak ill of the dead or anything, but you wouldn't believe some of the garbage his grandmother was about to publish.”

Neither Megan nor Zach sounded like National Alliance recruitment material, so I fished the flier out of my carry-all and thrust it at her. “This was stuck on your front door.”

She looked at it and scowled. “Fucking Nazis.” Then she wadded the flier up into a ball and rolled it across the floor, where several cats began to fight over shredding rights. “Jesus, to think that after all we've been through, Americans can still hate each other.”

“Why do you think the National Alliance picked this neighborhood to recruit from?” Unlike North Scottsdale's mostly White enclaves, South Scottsdale was racially mixed, with a large Hispanic and Asian contingent.

“Probably because of the economy,” Megan answered. “There've been a lot of layoffs around here, and these Aryan knuckleheads believe it's because minorities have taken all the jobs. The fact that corporate corruption might have something to do with it never enters their pointy heads. That's what Zach says, anyway, and I totally agree with him.”

Given such a liberal mind-set, I wondered how her husband could bear to work for Patriot's Blood in the first place. This wasn't the time to ask.

Instead, I said, “It's nice to hear that your husband is making some changes at Patriot's Blood. So he inherits?”

“Of course. He's executive editor
and
publisher now, which is only right. Other than Sandra, Vicky, and the aunts, he's Gloriana's only surviving relative.”

“Vicky?”

Megan brushed a cat hair off her cheek. “Victoria. Gloriana's daughter. But given her refusal to run Patriot's Blood, the chances of her inheriting anything sizeable have always been minimal. Same for Gloriana's older sisters, Leila and Lavelle. Identical twins. I heard through the family grapevine that Gloriana was thinking about taking over their affairs, but I don't know exactly why. They're not senile. Anyway, as I was saying, most of the estate comes to Zach.”

She looked around at her wreck of a house. “Gloriana's death is sad, of course, and don't think I don't care, because I do. But with the baby coming and everything else going on around here, we really need a bigger place. Zach's moving us into the Hacienda, up by the Paradise Valley Country Club. I'll admit that I'm a little worried about how those folks will react to my menagerie, but maybe we can work it out. The Hacienda is isolated and the lot's certainly big enough. Twenty rooms on three acres.”

Megan and her husband would need every inch of it, too. I had already counted seventeen cats and six dogs. I couldn't get a fix on the rabbits, because they stayed on the move. Or hop.

Animals weren't the only problem in the house, though. Several overflowing, mismatched bookcases lined the battered walls, with even more books stacked in tall columns on the fur-covered carpet. A glance at the pile nearest me revealed Wallace Stegner's
Angle of Repose
, Dean Koontz's
The Watchers
, Michael Cunningham's
The Hours
, and more than a dozen mysteries. Talk about eclectic taste.

“My animals need all the room they can get, so in one way, the Hacienda is the answer to a prayer,” Megan continued. “On the downside, the place is pretty old and the upkeep is astronomical. If we sold it, along with the acreage up north, we'd have more options. Maybe we could even buy a little ranch out in the desert where there are no neighbors or zoning to worry about, and build a no-kill animal shelter. I am so sick of complaining neighbors.”

I remembered Megan's reaction when she found out I wasn't here to adopt Boz. “How much do they complain?”

She frowned. “Last week they drew up a petition saying that if I don't get rid of my strays they'd take legal action. They don't care anything about the suffering that goes on out there, the dogs being dropped off in the desert, the cats being tortured, the poor ‘Easter Bunnies' abandoned in the park to die a week after Easter.…”

Having a soft spot for animals myself, I sympathized. “Did they give you a deadline?”

“Not yet, but it's only a matter of time.” Her voice was as gloomy as the room.

I wished her well, but her pet problem wasn't mine. I was about to ask her about funeral arrangements when I heard squeals coming from the direction of the backyard.

“Megan, did I hear a pig?”

She nodded. “That's Emma. One of those shady pet shops sold her as a miniature Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, but of course she wasn't. When she grew too large, her owners dumped her at the pound. That's where our rescuers found her.”

“Rescuers?” I wondered idly how the country club set would react to sharing their neighborhood with a pig.

“Oh. I thought you knew. I'm founder and president of Save Our Friends. Besides myself, about fifty volunteers take in strays and castoffs. We spay and neuter them, give them their shots, then foster them out to various homes until we find permanent adoptive parents. That's who I thought you were, Boz's new mom. She's due any minute now. Are you sure you don't want a dog? Or a cat? We have plenty up for adoption, and I can tell that you're good with animals. Black Bart certainly likes you.”

Black Bart sneezed, depositing something nasty-looking on my jeans. “I'm allergic to cats. Dogs, too,” I lied. “You mentioned something about Gloriana's daughter, that she refused to have anything to do with Patriot's Blood. Why?”

“Vicky has her own business to worry about. Maybe you've heard of her. She works under the name of Sappho.”

The name rang a bell, a bell that wasn't tied to the classical Greek poet. “The film-maker?”

“That's her. She's won a couple of Sundance awards, and I think there's a pretty good chance she'll actually snag an Oscar nomination with her new film, a documentary about gay archetypes in the Old West. She hasn't released it yet, but Zach and I have seen the rough cut and it's brilliant.”

During the past decade, Scottsdale had become a haven for creative types fleeing Hollywood's increasingly congested film colony, and I had met more than my share of actors, producers, and directors. Despite the public's perception, not all were wealthy. A big inheritance would buy a lot of expensive movie equipment.

“Did Vicky know her mother was leaving almost everything to Zach?” If not, she wouldn't have been the first person to murder someone while operating under the false belief of future riches.

“Of course she knew. Gloriana was up front about it, just like Gloriana was up front about me and my…ah, that she didn't like me.”

I found this admission surprising. Although Megan's home was obviously a wreck and her bond with her strays a bit much, she seemed likeable enough to me. “What did she have against you?” I asked.

Megan scowled. “What
didn't
she have against me! For starters, she didn't like the fact that Zach married one of his students. That's where we met, in his creative writing class at ASU. For seconds, she didn't like animals, and I was already involved in Save Our Friends. But the real deal-breaker was that I didn't have the right bloodlines. I'm Italian, but it wasn't the Italian thing she minded so much. After all, Christopher Columbus was Italian. What she hated was that my family came over on the wrong boat.” She laughed and tossed that glorious chestnut mane again. “As far as Gloriana was concerned, any boat but the Mayflower was the wrong boat. My grandparents arrived in steerage, on some leaky liner in the early 1900s, so you can see how many points that made with her.”

I frowned. “She cared that much about heredity?”

The laughter died. “Sounds like you didn't know her.”

I pretended ignorance. No point in telling her about my encounter with Gloriana at the Chamber of Commerce mixer. “Megan, at this point, I only know that Gloriana was wealthy, owned a publishing house, and got herself murdered.” I'll probably go to Hell for all the lies I tell.

Megan didn't answer right away, simply stroked her lap cats, making them purr even louder. Then, as if coming to a difficult decision, she leaned forward as far as her belly would allow, and looked me straight in the eye. “I'm sorry, but I really disliked the woman. So that means you'll have to take everything I say about her with a grain of salt.”

“Point taken.” I tried not to let my amusement show. She was the first person I had ever met who apologized for disliking an in-law.

“Gloriana was aggressive about her snobbery. You could have won the Nobel Peace Prize or cured cancer, but as far as she was concerned, it didn't make any difference if you had the wrong ancestry. The only thing she cared about, and I'm not exaggerating here, was a person's last name. Especially her own. The damned Aldens. And the double-damned, slave-owning Taylors.”

Considering Gloriana's remarks about my own DNA, I found Megan's statement odd. Or maybe there'd been a Jones on the Mayflower; I'd have to check. But Megan's comment did offer the chance to clear up a question that had intrigued me since I'd first heard of Gloriana. “Those double-barreled names are pretty rare outside England, aren't they?”

Megan smiled. “Feminists love them, too, don't forget. But I'll have to give the devil her due on that subject, at least. Gloriana didn't start that hyphen stuff. It happened back in the eighteen hundreds, when one of the lesser Alden women married a lesser grandson of Zachary Taylor. Two losers basking in the reflected glory of their ancestors. Today the damned name's nothing but trouble. With the hyphen, nobody knows how to file your name. Alden or Taylor? Taylor or Alden? Your insurance and mortgage records get screwed up.…”

Suddenly her face changed, and she shoved the cats aside to pat her stomach. “He's dancing again,” she said. “Want to feel?”

No, I didn't. Instead, I sat quietly for a moment, watching the wonder on her face. Had my mother ever looked like that when I was growing inside her?

Probably not. If she had, she wouldn't have shot me.

After a while, Megan settled back and let the cats climb back onto her lap. “I sound self-centered, don't I? Going on and on, as if I didn't care about the poor woman getting murdered.”

Not really. Megan was merely a pregnant woman with more immediate worries than the death of an in-law who had disliked her. At least she was honest. I took the opportunity to steer her back to her original subject. “You were talking about Gloriana's ancestry. Actually, it surprises me that a woman with her background would run something like Patriot's Blood. Why didn't she use her money for more, um, tasteful projects. Charity work, for instance?”

“That's how little you know,” Megan said.

Regardless of Gloriana's Plymouth Brethren connections, Megan explained, the Aldens never did as well in trade as the other Mayflower families. Then, as the Pilgrim blood thinned through the centuries, Gloriana's branch had degenerated into near penury. But Gloriana, who had apparently been quite the looker in her youth, married a fairly well-heeled stockbroker. When he keeled over from a coronary at the Phoenix Open Golf Tournament, she inherited his seven-figure estate, and the Alden-Taylors were relatively flush again.

“Zach tells me that she blew a lot of it fixing up the Hacienda,” Megan said. “By then, she'd started Patriot's Blood magazine, and the profits helped stem the flow. Then something happened that changed everything.”

She told me that in the Eighties and Nineties, the large New York publishing houses had merged into conglomerates. “The country wound up with, what, six major houses? And some of those houses had offshore owners, typically the Europeans. They brought in MBAs who fired editors wholesale, released writers from their contracts.…It was a literary bloodbath.”

I looked at the books piled beside her, around the room. “Looks to me like there are still plenty of books to go around.”

“Take a look at the spines,” she said. “Most of these come from publishing houses you've never heard of. Niche houses.”

Before I could ask what that meant, she explained.

“Niche houses are small, specialist presses like Patriot's Blood, companies who had the foresight to sign the writers the big houses released, even some new writers. Companies who were willing to take a chance on people
not
named Stephen King or John Grisham.”

Her eyes took on a dreamy look. “You know, for a while I wanted to be a writer myself. That's why I was in Zach's creative writing class.”

The revelation didn't surprise me. I could easily see Megan writing sensitive stories from an animal's point of view, possibly creating something like a modern version of
Black Beauty.
Or maybe even one of those cat detective books.

She patted her stomach. “As it turned out, I didn't want it enough. There were other things I wanted more. Like Zach. And all the little live things.” She leaned over and nuzzled the cats. “That's a Wallace Stegner title,
All the Little Live Things.
I'd planned to be like Stegner, to write the story of the Southwest. Instead, I got Zach and all my own little live things. And now my baby. I guess love isn't a bad trade-off for a writing career, is it?”

Given my own background, I had no idea. But I did know that if Megan loved her baby only half as much as she obviously did her strays, the baby would have a wonderful life. A wave of jealousy swept over me for a moment, and only with difficulty did I manage to quash it. What had Jim Morrison sung in that Doors song?
“Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night.”

I remembered my mother firing her gun in my face. My own endless night.