Reason To Believe (2 page)

Today Clara wanted to talk to him about Annie. She'd said so over the phone, taking refuge in a tone she'd once reserved for salespeople and bill collectors. He should have just said, "Talk. I'm listening." That was usually the way it was anyway these days. She'd talk. He'd listen. It was always about Annie. Clara wouldn't talk to him about much else.

By now she'd have seen his pickup in the driveway, and would be waiting for him to come to the door. He didn't have time for a cigarette, but he sure could have used one.

It wasn't that he didn't want to see her. He did. He always did. Even when he knew he wasn't going to enjoy seeing the look that inevitably crept into her autumn-colored eyes whenever she saw him these days. She always managed to coat that sad look with something harder—a cool glaze, an angry sheen—but at the core of it he could see the hurt. It was always there for him to see, which was as it should have been, for he had been the one to put it there.

The last time he'd mounted the front steps, all hell had broken loose when he'd walked right on in and announced his presence. In the interest of trying to keep the peace, he slowly extended one finger toward the doorbell, but he couldn't quite bring himself to punch the button. Granted, she'd been making most of the house payments since she'd kicked him out, but before that it had always been "we," "us," and "ours." He couldn't see ringing his own doorbell unless he was locked out.

Which, he discovered, he was. The door opened just as he'd thrust his hand into the pocket of his jeans in search of his key. He was greeted by enthusiastic paws, nose, tongue, and wagging tail.

"Hey, Pancho. You still remember me, huh?" Ben plunged both hands into the shepherd's plush ruff and squatted to greet his old pal, eye to eye. "How's the mutt?" he crooned, playfully shaking the dog's head. "How's the ol' bruiser?"

"Pleased to see you, obviously."

Straightening slowly as the smile slid from his face, he tried to remember how her voice had sounded when she'd been pleased to see him. He dusted off the warm, soft echo from the annals in his head and let it light a spark in his eyes. "Hello, Clara."

Once caught, she couldn't look away, but her tone didn't change. "Thank you for coming. I know how busy you are."

The stiff greeting rankled. How in the hell could she possibly know whether he was busy?

But he shrugged it off. "You said the magic word," he reminded her as he patted Pancho again, who was whining and wagging to beat the band. "Annie."

"Yes. The magic word." A word that was slightly different for her than it was for him, much like most of the magic they'd shared over the years.
"Anna
is going through a difficult time, and I'm at my wits' end."

"Your wits' end," he repeated thoughtfully. "Can't imagine anybody goin' quite that far, Clara."

"Of course you can. You've driven me there many times." She gave him a sharp glare as she stepped aside to let him in. "You and this dog. Go on out, now, Pancho."

"Driven you or taken you?" He couldn't help smiling a little when Pancho had to be shooed along. "Are we thinking about the same place? Clara Pipestone's wits' end, where thinking leaves off and—"

"Stupidity takes over."

There it was. The bruised look. Her parti-colored eyes reflected it perfectly, and whenever he saw it, that small but troublesome good thing that dwelled deep in his gut got to feeling a little sick. It was the kind of morning-after sick that made the drinking man head straight for the refrigerator or the liquor store or the bar—wherever he had to go to find a can of beer. Ben knew the procedure only too well.

"Wrong subject," he admitted, stepping into the living room as Clara closed the door. "Is Annie here?"

"No, and she should be." She checked her watch. It was a gesture she used often to convey any number of messages. Ben recognized the worry-nuance when she glanced at the mantel clock for a second opinion. "I thought she would be. I had a call at work from one of her teachers who had trouble with her in class today, and that's when I called you."

He could tell the call had been a last resort.

Clara sighed. "But she didn't come home on the bus. I've searched both malls. I've called everyone I can think of. All her friends."

"The police?"

"No," she said quietly. "Not yet. If they pick her up, they'll take her to the police station again." She hit him with one of her meaningful looks. "Yes,
again."

Annie and the police? His brain refused to put the two together. "What's goin' on?"

"Her parents have split up; that's what's going on. Not to mention the fact that she's a thirteen-year-old female, and she can't decide whether that particular fate or her mother is the worse bitch." She challenged him with a cold stare. "I'm sure you can set her straight."

He saw her stare and raised her one cocked eyebrow. "I'd only be guessing."

"Yes, well..."

She folded, sinking slowly into an overstuffed brocade chair. Her fluttery gesture invited him to occupy the matching one, so he took a tentative seat on the chair's front edge. They'd called them the mama and papa chairs. He wondered when she'd had them reupholstered.

"She's so much like you, it's scary, Ben. She's reckless. She takes awful chances just to prove..." The small, pale hand made another powerless gesture. "Whatever it is she's trying to prove. Independence, maybe."

There was something a little scary about Clara's apparent undoing, even if it was only temporary. She was not easily undone.

"Maybe she's not trying to prove anything. Maybe she's not thinking all that straight. Did you check with security at the malls?"

"No. I checked all the fast-food places and searched the stores she goes to. I looked all over."

"All over?" She probably believed her own bullshit, too, but the fact was, he'd never known Clara to look carefully for anything. He gave a knowing smile. "What you did was, you marched up one side and down the other, blinders cuttin' off your view and smoke rollin' out your ears so you couldn't hear a damn freight train howling at your heels."

"That's not true at all, but I'll tell you what is true." She wagged a finger at him, and he silently congratulated himself for getting her back up so quickly, with added starch. "You have no idea what it's like to worry about someone else's safety and well-being, to be angry because they don't have sense enough to call home, and then to feel scared because—" Her finger came down, and her gaze drifted to the clock on the mantel. "Because there's always the remote chance that something terrible might have happened."

"If it's so damned remote, why is it always the first thing that comes into your head? Can't you just..."

She slashed at his throat with her eyes.

He surrendered with a sigh. "Jesus, here we go." He closed his eyes briefly, regrouping. "Look, I'm sorry. I don't want to argue."

"Then let's just stick to the problem at hand, which is finding our daughter."

"I'll make the rounds again while you stay by the phone. Maybe she saw you coming, and she just ducked out of sight."

"And I suppose if she sees you, she'll come running."

"She's just a kid, Clara. Who knows what kind of a game she's playing?"

Her smile was slight and smug. "Her father wouldn't, that's for sure."

"Looks like she's got her mother buffaloed, too."

"Like father, like daughter."

"You wanna back off, just a little?" Her eyes said no. He braced his hands on his knees and pushed to his feet. "Forget it. I'm outta here. I'll call you if I find her. If I don't..."

"Call me anyway."

The soft plea drew his head around. Her eyes pleaded, too, and he nodded.

"If I have to go to the police..."

He was sure she'd never so much as pocketed a pen at a cash register.
The policeman is your friend,
she used to tell Annie. But now she seemed to have some misgivings about that. That, too, he could see in her eyes. "If it comes to that, I'll do it," he said.

"She's already on probation," she said sadly, then added, "Sort of."

"Sort of?"

He stopped at each of the places Clara had already covered, made himself clearly visible for a time, then moved on. He knew his best hope was not
finding
but being found, assuming Annie really did want to see him. That was the case he chose to presume, even though he was probably stretching it to suit his own needs.

He figured Annie was probably having a good time somewhere, and since she was on her own turf, she wasn't going to turn up until she was ready. He knew the game well. He'd played it a lot himself. The futility of the search frustrated him, but he didn't know what else to do. He was a relative newcomer to the role of being "the responsible one" in this kind of situation, and he was spinning his wheels, running in circles.

He'd been doing that a lot lately. His father was always expounding about the sacredness of the circle, but this was more like spinning his wheels in the clay ruts of his own private hell. His father was a holy man, a pipe carrier—
the
pipe carrier, to hear him tell it. Not all the Lakota agreed that Dewey Pipestone was rightfully the keeper of the pipe given to the people by the White Buffalo Calf Woman during a time that lived, at least in Ben's mind, only in legend and lore. Ben would have been hard-pressed to think of
anything
that all the Lakota were likely to agree on, but the "traditionals" upheld Dewey's claim to the title, and that was all that mattered to the old man. He took his calling seriously, even though the ravages of age made it more difficult all the time.

Ben respected his father, and he didn't discount tradition, but he couldn't see himself as pipe-carrier material. The fact that he'd screwed up his marriage notwithstanding, he just wasn't big on ceremony. Besides that, he himself had been a shitty father. His daughter was thirteen, and he'd been out of the house for almost two years. He didn't know what she was taking in school this year or what kind of music she was listening to on the radio these days, whether she had a boyfriend yet or wanted one.

Or where she was. Goddamn, he had no idea where she was or where else to look, and it was getting cold, and it was already darker than hell.

He drove the length and breadth of Bismarck, dragging Main like a youth on the prowl, scouting out cars, scanning the sidewalks. But the Main he'd once dragged had been a hell of a lot shorter than this one. Fewer corners. Fewer white kids. More Indians.

And it sure was a whole lot different when a man was looking for his daughter.

Every carload of boys raised his hackles. Take a good look at these young bucks, he told himself. Cruising for tail. Horny as hell, every last one of them. Annie was thirteen, but she looked older, especially now that she was using makeup. What was her mother thinking about, anyway, letting her put that stuff on her face?

Christ, he hoped she hadn't met up with a load of testosterone on wheels like the one in the slick red Mustang he'd just passed. A guy oughta carry a shotgun loaded for teenage boys, just in case. Blast his ass with saltpeter if he comes sniffin' around your daughter. Especially if he wears a cowboy hat and a pair of sharp-toed Tony Lamas with worn-down riding heels.

Actually, his father had met her first. The minute he saw the little white Escort turn off the blacktop and come bouncing along the rutted dirt road toward the house, Ben knew somebody from off the rez was looking for an "Indian expert." Anybody local would have skimmed the ruts and created a wing-shaped dust wake. Long before she drove into the yard, he'd figured the driver for a woman with a mission, and he also guessed she didn't know a hell of a lot about cars.

She stepped out, closed the door, straightened her nice white skirt, and approached him without giving her poor gasping car a second glance. She carried a folded piece of paper. Clearly she had business to attend to.

She also had great legs.

"Is this where Dewey Pipestone lives?"

Ben nodded.

She shaded her eyes with a cupped hand. The warm breeze lifted her dark blond hair like a billowing cape. "Is he home?"

Ben sat back against the hood of the car he'd been working on all afternoon. He'd gotten it started, but it wasn't going far without a whole bunch of parts he didn't have. He tipped his straw cowboy hat back with one finger. Let her get a better look.

"Who wants to know? You a social worker?"

"I'm a student, actually."

Ahh. "Studying
to be a social worker?"

"Studying the history of the indigenous people of North America, particularly the Great Plains." She smiled, accepting his low, ostensibly appreciative whistle as an indication that he was duly impressed.

He was, but not necessarily with her academic pursuits. She had several assets going for her besides the legs. He liked the way her lips were shaped like a dime-store valentine. And he was glad she wasn't a social worker. They could be damn meddlesome.