The Salt Maiden (6 page)

She blinked at the tiny card, confused, then looked up. “It’s signed, ‘Bill Navarro.’ ”

Jay grinned. “It’s a lonely life out there ranching with his brother.”

“But I don’t know who he is…Oh, yeah,” she said, remembering a somewhat shaggy man, fortyish, with eyes
creased by the sun and a thin layer of grime she’d come to associate with the men of Rimrock County. And a cowboy hat, of course. “He was one of those guys skinning the snake behind the café.”

She made a face before adding, “He gave me his card before the helicopter showed up.”

Jay snorted. “I have to hand it to him. Man sees an opportunity, he seizes on it.”

“Like a pit bull, apparently.” Dana rubbed her nose, which itched from all the pollen.

“That’s Bill in a nutshell. Pit bull. Might want to keep that in mind when you talk to him.”

“Maybe just a note, then.”

The sheriff nodded in approval.

She sniffled, thinking she’d better have a nurse give the bouquet to a patient in need of cheering up, or she’d be sneezing her head off before day’s end.

“So what brings you here?” she asked. If he had had more questions, he could have called her as he had the past two days. Unless he had some news he didn’t want to share over the phone. “Is it something about Angie? Ha-have you found her?”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but there’s still no sign of your sister. I wanted to see for myself how you are, and I brought your car for you.”

Walking to her bedside, he passed her the keys, attached to a fob made from a photo of her corgis. The glimpse of Ben and Jerry made her homesick. Probably the two were having a ball playing with Lynette’s Australian cattle dog at her place, but she could really use some wagging tails and canine kisses at the moment.

“My car?” Bringing it seemed far beyond the call of duty.

“I thought maybe you’d need it here, whenever you’re up to driving. Besides that, I’ve always wanted to see what one of those little numbers could do if you redlined it.”

“You…you drove it here so you could race it?”

He pointed at her, smiling. “Gotcha. I promise you I shifted through those gears like an old lady. Mostly.”

She couldn’t help smiling back. Marlboro Man was making a convert of her in the cowboy department. Pretty soon she’d be drooling over the rodeo-guy pictures Lynette kept by her desk at the clinic.

“So, how’s the leg, Doc?” he asked.

“It’s
Dana
, please. And it’s better, thanks. They’re springing me tomorrow.”

“I’m glad. You had us pretty worried.”

She wondered whom he meant by “us.” Certainly not Judge Hooks. The only thing that worried that glorified fry cook was the thought of her returning. Had he sent the sheriff on a mission to keep her far away? The thought tossed a bucket of cold water over her new big-hat-and-boots fixation.

“I appreciate your bringing me the car,” she said, “but you know, I’ll still have to go back to Devil’s Claw to take care of Angie’s things.”

“My deputy and I’ll see to ’em,” he said. “We can have them boxed and shipped, though it might take me a week or two to arrange to have that loom trucked. We’ll want to make sure it’s not damaged in the move.”

She looked hard into Eversole’s blue eyes. “Such a friendly, helpful bunch.”

“We’re just—”

“Trying to make sure I have no reason to return to Rimrock County?”

She had expected an argument, but he said nothing; nor did he look away. His expression grave, he only stood there as the silence between them took on weight.

Dana couldn’t stand it any longer. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

He frowned. “I haven’t found out who put the snake in your car. No one saw anything. Or so they’re saying.”

“I see.”

“I don’t mean to stop investigating. And I haven’t given up on finding your sister, either. But I’d feel better if you stayed away till I get to the bottom of all this.”

“Or until Nikki Harrison dies and I lose interest.”

His expression darkened. “That’s the second time you’ve made that accusation. You were wrong before. You’re wrong now. I don’t want you hurt again, that’s all. Or maybe killed this time.”

Dana picked up her water cup from the rolling bedside table and sipped from the bent straw. But she couldn’t swallow back the question that still nagged her. “Like Angie, do you mean? You believe…You think she’s dead, don’t you?”

He hesitated before answering. “I don’t know that.”

“You suspect it.”

“I think it’s a possibility. One that would explain a few things.” He pulled the room’s single chair by the bedside.

She rearranged the sheets for better coverage. “Why? Why would anyone kill Angie? I know she was making noise about getting together some protest, but…”

“But what?”

Dana grimaced. “This isn’t easy to say about my own sister, but it’s true. She’s binged on drugs her whole adult life, and God knows she’s an alcoholic. Sure, she got worked up about this and that from time to time, but she was bound to lose her focus, fall off the wagon. Then she’d forget about the salt-dome project.”

“Maybe she convinced the wrong folks she was serious, that she could be a problem. That project, it’s pretty important to the people around Rimrock.” He hesitated, brushing dust from his hat.

She waited him out, sensing there was something more on his mind.

“Haz-Vestment’s held a series of meetings to gain community support,” he said. “I’ve been reading through the transcripts and…”

“And what?”

He shook his head. “I’d already heard that their spokes-woman’s a real piece of work. Flashy dresser, lots of jewelry, real compelling way about her. Shook the right hands, kissed the right asses, made a lot of slick-sounding promises.”

Dana nodded, recognizing the type. “Sounds like half the veterinary pharmaceutical reps I’ve met. Only she came to sell a company, not a product.”

“Oh, yeah. She was selling, all right. Selling dreams of a Devil’s Claw with fresh, clean-running water, of workers moving in and spending money in local businesses. Young females among them.”

“Water, workers, and women. Sounds like the Devil’s Claw trifecta.”

Jay smiled wryly. “According to the transcripts there weren’t many dissenters.”

“Other than Angie…”

He nodded in confirmation. “And she was shouted down every time she started asking questions.”

“Asking questions?” Dana echoed, imagining her sister on the warpath. “Or screaming accusations?”

“My deputy told me she
was
carrying on about the rape of the earth or…No, that wasn’t it. She talked about the Salt Woman being defiled.”

“The Salt Woman?” Dana found herself thinking of the digital photos Jay had e-mailed to her before she’d made the drive to Devil’s Claw, when he’d asked her if she could identify her sister’s things. One in particular came to mind—of the tapestry on the abandoned loom, with its tightly woven field of starlit desert backing the resplendent figure of an impossibly beautiful old woman, her white hair whirling around her naked body, her thin legs stepping forward, her dark, determined eyes locked on an unfinished horizon. The detail was incredible, by far the best work of Angie’s she had seen. “Is there some significance?”

Eversole shrugged. “Not that I’ve ever heard of. And
from the way Wallace talked about it, I got the idea it didn’t mean anything to him either.”

Dana thought of her sister’s long-standing interest in mythology and wondered if there might be some connection. She’d do an Internet search on this Salt Woman once she regained access to the laptop locked in her trunk. Probably a waste of time, she thought, just one more of her sister’s drunken outbursts.

With a sigh she changed the subject. “Before, when you were talking about those transcripts, I got the idea something bothered you about them. Was it the way that spokeswoman honed in on exactly what people in your county wanted?”

Again he hesitated before answering. “No, I’d have expected Miriam Piper-Gold—that’s the woman’s name—to make promises. And like I told you, I looked into Haz-Vestment’s reputation, found they’ve made a name for themselves with good corporate citizenship.”

“So what was it, then?”

He frowned off into space, his gaze shifting to the open blinds and the clear blue sky beyond them. “It was the warnings. Piper-Gold was pretty subtle, but she referred several times to the nervousness of her investors, how they’d been bitten twice when communities that seemed ready to welcome them ended up balking after considerable money had been spent. There was apparently some lawsuit by out-of-town interests. Environmentalists reacting on emotion and not facts, as she put it. The L-word came up a few times, too.”

“L-word?”

He smiled. “Liberal. That’s not something you call your worst enemy in Rimrock County.”

“Why does that not surprise me?”

“Because you salad-munchin’ eco nuts are all so intuitive.”

A laugh slipped free before she asked him, “So she was
hinting, I presume, that Haz-Vestment wasn’t interested in gracing a community of misguided hippies with its facility?”

“Exactly.”

Dana’s smile faded as the gravity of Eversole’s concern sank in. “And my sister was the one ‘misguided hippie’ in the county.”

As her eyes burned, she held off tears by telling herself the scenario he was suggesting wasn’t so much different from the one she had imagined when she’d first heard about the salt-dome project. At the time Dana had figured that Angie’s potential interference was the reason no one was too eager to find her sister. Though the specter of Angie’s death had since crept into Dana’s thinking, the suspicion had seemed almost as unreal as the thought of someone putting a live snake in her car. Until Jay Eversole admitted he shared her fear, Dana had been able to hold on to the idea that this was simply another false alarm, one of the countless rehearsals for grief that Angie had put her family through over the years.

“I promise you”—his blue gaze never wavered—“I’m going to find out what happened. And if there’s any way—any possibility whatsoever—that your sister’s alive somewhere in Rimrock County, I will personally escort her back to Houston so she can get her marrow tested. You can count on that, Dana.”

Since he’d be working in a county where nepotism was a way of life, where infighting was the only organized sport, and the name Vanover appeared to be a curse word, she would have to be an idiot to buy what he’d just said. Maybe she was, or maybe hearing him call her by her first name had kick-started dormant hormones, because she did believe him.

But then, she had believed in Alex Hilliard, too, right until the moment his damned text message lit up her cell phone’s screen.

I think I saw her last night, her white hair gleaming in the starlight as she strode across the flats. The Salt Woman, wandering the desert, looking for a home among those worthy of her gift.

More likely she was just another hallucination, a parting gift from the DTs—as if the puking and the shaking haven’t been enough. But I can tell you this much: before I saw her I was hell-bent on jumping in the beater and hauling ass to Pecos for a bottle. Afterward the craving lifted, and I stood staring in the direction of the salt domes as the rarest peace rained down from the night sky.

—Entry four, March 2
Angie’s sobriety journal

Saturday, June 30, 6:36
P.M.

101 Degrees Fahrenheit

The vehicle’s progress could be seen for miles as it churned up dust that stood out against the stark blue like a signal fire’s smoke plume. The Hunter lowered the binoculars and wiped sweat off the eyepieces with a shirtsleeve.

Foolish woman had come back to the desert. Not only to the desert, but to the perfect isolation of the dilapidated ranch house out near Lost Lake. She should have gone back to her fancy family to reclaim her fancy life. Should have taken the fluke that had saved her and run with it like a jackrabbit.

She’d been given a sporting chance the first time. An opportunity to learn from her mistakes and mend her ways.

But the Hunter did not believe in second chances, not with so very much at stake. Besides that, natural selection was less forgiving in Rimrock County than most places, and
if there was one thing to be respected, it was the ancient order of this most ancient land.

“Out here it’s survival of the fittest,” came the parched whisper, a rasping hiss barely tempered by a swig from the canteen. “And you’ve already proven, by returning, that the fittest isn’t you.”

Jay had just stopped by his office when the phone on his desk started ringing. With a sigh he reached for the receiver, though he’d been on his way home from another long day spent rechecking quadrants where others had supposedly looked for Angie Vanover. As much as Jay wanted to believe in both his deputy and his volunteers, he wasn’t taking any chances, especially after this morning’s phone conversation with Special Agent Tomlin from the FBI. Just thinking of it tempted him to pin his star to the corkboard and skip town before the proverbial shit hit the fan.

“Dennis Riggins,” the caller identified himself so loudly Jay moved the receiver six inches from his ear. Though he couldn’t be much older than his early fifties, the county commissioner was just about deaf. Too proud to wear a hearing aid, he compensated by speaking at top volume.

“What’s on your mind?” Jay bellowed back into the phone. Anything less and Dennis would simply shout back demands that he quit mumbling.

“Saw somethin’ you might want to check out today. I was passin’ by the old Webb place…” Named for the original rancher who had abandoned it decades earlier, the adobe had attracted any number of squatters over the years—including, most recently, the artist calling herself Angelina Morningstar. “I spotted this big, new-lookin’ Expedition parked there. Drove close enough to see it was a rental, but—”

“Did you see any people?” Jay asked, at the same time praying,
Please let it be Angie and whatever boyfriend she’s been off with.
His mind conjured an image of himself driving her
right up to the doorstep of Dana Vanover’s place, which, in his mind, was an immense, white-columned mansion. She’d come out on her crutches, then throw her arms around his neck and kiss him before tearfully reuniting with her wayward sister.

Pleasant as it was to imagine himself as Dana’s—or anybody’s—hero, it didn’t hold a candle to the dreams that had left him hard and hurting every night since meeting her.

“Didn’t spot a soul,” said Dennis. “You think that Vanover woman could be back with them protestors—or maybe some reporter?”

Dennis’s nervousness came through as loud and clear as his words. A rancher who derived most of his income from oil royalties off his land, he had put a lot of his personal money into Haz-Vestment as a show of faith in its plans. Jay felt sick to think of telling him the FBI’s suspicions. He’d been asked to keep the information to himself, since the principals had not yet been arrested. And, of course, the suspects remained innocent until proven guilty.

Bullshit. You know damned well that salt-dome project isn’t happening—and that Devil’s Claw has seen the last of Miriam Piper-Gold and her slick cronies.
Pied
Piper-Gold is what they ought to call that woman.

He said, “If it is Angie over there, you don’t have to worry. I promised I’d haul her troublemaking ass straight back to Houston, and I meant it. But what were you doing over by the Webb place?”

The abandoned ranch, near the dry salt flat called Lost Lake, was at least an hour away.

“Well, I…” Dennis started. “I was headin’ over to see if anybody’s been out to the salt domes. Equipment was supposed to start arrivin’ last week, but the gate across the access road’s still locked.”

Jay’s conscience gave him a swift kick. He owed the family friend who had helped get him this job when he’d been running out of options. He’d confessed to Dennis about the
bridge in Baghdad and how it haunted him, even admitted to the psychiatric evaluation that he’d undergone before his relocation.

“Far as I can see, you’re a goddamned hero, not a liability.”
A Vietnam vet himself, Dennis had been adamant—as well as loud enough that Jay had wished for earplugs.
“Besides that, you’re R.C.’s nephew, and that’s good enough for me.”

As far as Jay knew, Dennis had kept the knowledge of his recent history to himself, bragging of the “decorated veteran” part to others. To his way of thinking, the lives Jay had saved in an earlier incident, while stationed in Fallujah, absolved him of the possibility of guilt.

“I got a call this morning, Dennis,” Jay said, “from the FBI, about Haz-Vestment.”

“What?”

Jay realized he had unconsciously lowered his voice. For good reason, too. Estelle Hooks was working late this evening, and she was known to alleviate the boredom of tax-statement preparation by eavesdropping on his conversations.

“I’ll talk to you later,” Jay promised. “You still coming by the house tonight?”

More than anyone else, Dennis had thrown himself into the job of remodeling the late sheriff’s fire-damaged adobe house. Both Abe and Wallace Hooks insisted that, being a Riggins, Dennis came for the free beer Jay provided, but Jay suspected it was the man’s way of dealing with the death of an old friend, since he and Uncle R.C. had long been buddies. Drinking buddies, anyway, since the only thing Jay could remember the two doing together was sitting out on Uncle R.C.’s back steps and throwing back some cool ones at the end of a long day. While Jay, who had come to live with his bachelor relation at the age of twelve, attempted to do homework, Dennis—his hearing already fading—would boom out schemes to solve the county’s problems, most of which involved running the Hooks clan out of town. Uncle R.C. would smile and puff one of his cigars, pausing every so
often to speak of things he might have done if he had left the county, or to wave away a cloud of smelly smoke.

Jay smiled to recall it, though he’d been damned unhappy in those days after a single-car wreck killed his mother, and his father left abruptly to work on an offshore oil rig. As his father’s calls and visits dwindled down to nothing, Jay had given Uncle R.C. nine kinds of hell, something that now shamed him as much as his failure to come back for so much as a visit after escaping Devil’s Claw. Though his uncle had been the one to recommend that he “hit the ground runnin’ and never look back,” Jay regretted that he’d missed the chance to tell the man he was sorry for his behavior, or to thank R.C. for holding his rebellion in check with a firm but fair hand. God knew it was more than his old man—who had died five years back—had cared to do.

“I’ll be there,” Dennis told him. “But I wanted to let you know I called Haz-Vestment’s office, and the fella there assured me work’s gonna start on schedule.”

I’ll just bet he did
, Jay thought miserably—and hoped the special agent nailed the conniving bastards to the wall.

After excusing himself for a quick cleanup in the men’s room, Jay headed for the Webb place to find out who was there. Best-case scenario would be Angie: by herself and in one piece, though mad as hell that he had padlocked the house’s doors to secure her belongings. But there were other possibilities as well, visitors who would make short work of his security measure, the drug dealers and coyotes who occasionally used such isolated places as safe houses while smuggling dope or illegals out of Mexico.

Still, he hadn’t bothered calling Wallace, and he wouldn’t unless he saw something suspicious. With only the two of them in the department, backup was a luxury reserved for bigger things than long shots. He’d have to settle for the company of Max, who rode shotgun as the rough road jolted man and dog alike.

In the rearview mirror, a choking plume of dust rose in the
SUV’s wake. As he looked past the plastic hula dancer on the dashboard—a last vestige of his uncle’s aimless talk of retiring to Tahiti—Jay’s view was even less inviting. Tortilla-flat and hard-baked by a brutal sun, the Lost Lake area looked about as likely to support life as the surface of Mars. Jay tried to imagine what had prompted some misguided soul—Jonas Webb, according to local lore—to attempt to ranch along the salt flat’s edge decades earlier. Had to have been a freakishly wet season, one of those rare events that briefly veiled the desert’s harshness in soft green grasses. A joke played by the land to lure the unwitting into its grasp.

But all too soon the lush grass would have withered, leaving only the thorny seedpods of the devil’s claw to catch the hooves of starving stock and the dungarees of the defeated. Had Webb cursed this place when he’d abandoned the adobe shelter he had built of earth and sweat and hope? Had he wept to leave the crosses that still stood sentry over the pair of nameless graves whose mounds still scarred the stony soil? More than once during his search for the missing woman, Jay had paused beside those two mounds, which someone had decorated with colored stones and desiccated petals, even a few iridescent feathers and a single, tiny skull bleached white save for the long orange incisors. Maybe a ground squirrel’s, he figured, and most likely Angie’s work. He wondered if the company of the dead had disturbed her or given comfort.

Ahead he spotted the one-room dwelling she had claimed, an adobe with splotched, cracked walls painted gold by the late sunlight. Still some fifty yards distant, the house hunkered low and mean, a brick-shaped blot against the blue smudge of the distant foothills. Though a succession of squatters had attempted to improve it over the years, the covered front porch had collapsed on one end, and shutters dangled beside glassless windows. The peeling wooden screen door hung askew, as if in testimony to the pointlessness of his attempts to secure the place.

Angie’s ancient Buick crouched beside the building, decaying just as quickly. Since Jay had last stopped by, a third dry-rotted tire had gone flat, giving the rusty brown sedan a drunken tilt. But his attention focused on the unfamiliar Ford that Dennis had reported.

As Jay shifted the Suburban into park behind the vehicle, the hula dancer wriggled plastic hips. Staring past her, Max plunked his paws against the dashboard and raised his hackles with a growl.

“What’s the matter, boy?” Jay asked. In the two weeks since he’d found the dog, hungry and abandoned at a roadside rest stop, Max had shown no signs of aggression other than his ill-advised lunge toward the snake. But clearly something was troubling him now, something Jay could neither see nor hear.

Something that stirred the uneasiness he had been carrying inside him these past four months.

His gun hand quaked as wraithlike figures took form in the shimmer of heat that rose from every solid surface.

“Ali Baba, Ali Baba!”
Baghdad’s children cried out, using the generic term for bad guys as they gestured toward the house.

Jay looked in the direction their skinny fingers pointed, only to spot a sniper squatting with an AK-47 on the rooftop, his robe as black as his turban. A second terrorist peered out from the doorway, a Molotov cocktail in his hand.

With a strangled shout Jay ducked low, his heart pounding and his eyes stinging with sweat. Distracted from whatever had captured his attention outside, Max gave himself over to this new game, his tail wagging and his tongue licking at his master’s face.

“Shit.” Jay fended off the kisses and blinked hard, struggling to regain the when and where of his position. Once it came to him, he peered over the dash and forced himself to focus.

The house, though homely, was certainly West Texan, a crumbling adobe in a familiar land. The only Ali Baba had sprung from his damned imagination.

Screwing his eyes shut, Jay sat before the chill gale of the AC vents and cursed himself. He could have applied for work anywhere in the country, someplace with soft, green mountains or towering pine forests. The seaside might have been nice, or somewhere with a lake. Instead he’d dragged his sorry ass back to the one place whose sprawling expanses and limitless horizons kept him tied to that
other
desert, the desert that had swallowed up his foolish promises to bring all his men home safely.

When he looked again, he saw a woman in the shadows of the porch’s standing section. For a bare instant terror clothed her in a dark abaya, but Jay willed himself to stillness until the illusion bled away.

In its wake stood not Angie, as he’d hoped, but Dana Vanover, dressed in rumpled khaki shorts and a somewhat grimy pale green T-shirt. She held a broom in one hand, and her blond bangs had fallen limply across her eyes.

Had she heard him, seen him spook at nothing? Maybe not, for she smiled and raised a bottle of water toward him in a casual greeting, not in the least alarmed.

Thank God for that, at least…but still, she shouldn’t be here.