Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 3 - Venus Besieged

by Andrews

  "She said I only look at your surface."

  Callie smiled at my being troubled by the accusation.

  "Life's so crazy, there's no time to sit and stare deeply into your eyes, but I would like to. However, I have no idea why I'm defending myself."

  "We're all evolving."

  "That wolf that flew onto our windshield and then morphed into a tortured face—I think that's the white man I saw in the dream."

  "Who is he?" Callie asked.

  "You know who it is. The man whose name we don't mention." And this time I wasn't making fun of the energy of names. This time I truly didn't want to conjure him up.

  I backed up, then sped across the sand, heading for the goat path to retrace our drive home.

  "I liked the shaman boffing the good-looking maiden—best part about the dream."

  "You seem to have that on your mind. Remember that a snapshot of any two people in the position of the shaman and the young Indian girl could have many interpretations: were they making love, or is one giving the other CPR, or is one attacking the other?"

  I almost thought Callie didn't want to see Manaba with someone. "Looked like a midnight rodeo to me."

  "It could be none of those things or all of those things."

  "All? That would be interesting—being attacked, revived, and made love to all by the same woman. Too rough a night for me."

  Callie was ignoring me now, which she often did when she felt I was bantering with her. "There's something we're not getting. I feel Manaba is blocking my energy because there's a piece of this she doesn't want me to know. Maybe Ramona's not missing. Maybe she left of her own accord."

  "What if she is missing and Manaba killed her too?" At Callie's look, I quickly added, "Every mass murderer in the U.S. always has a neighbor who says he's the nicest guy they ever met—mowed their lawn, babysat their kids. All I'm saying is that you may not know Manaba like you think you do."

  We drove back to the cabin, the light a panoply of colors across the distant red rocks, as if God's own lighting director had determined this was the stage against which life should be played. I wondered why I happened to be here on this stage at this time with this gorgeous woman beside me. Perhaps life was a lottery and I had merely drawn the lucky numbers.

  "You're overthinking things again," Callie said without even looking at me, and before I could deny it she added, "The world is full of mysteries we don't yet understand, but that doesn't mean in the scope of things they don't make perfect sense."

  "Like murder makes sense?"

  "It's part of...the plot," she said in an attempt to explain something in my vernacular.

  "So God is a writer?"

  Callie let that thought dangle, taking my hand instead and kissing the palm.

  When we pulled into the driveway, Elmo was beside himself, having been given no heads-up about our being away so long, and I apologized profusely.

  "Mom drank pond scum, Elmo, and passed out, and that's why I'm late taking you out."

  He licked his lips in a gesture of empathy, no doubt recalling occasions when he had drunk from a toilet. Quickly watering the nearest bush, he headed back inside where Callie helped him up on the couch and hand-fed him bites of leftover turkey. He had his paws on her leg and tiny slobber marks on her pants.

  "Sorry," I said about the drool and she shook her head slightly, letting me know it was of no consequence. After finding a small space to snug in on the couch next to them, I put my arm around her.

  "You put yourself in too much danger, Callie. I mean, if I weren't around, I know you'd go right ahead and drive into danger in the middle of the night, go to remote locations without letting someone know where you are. I feel like I have to keep an eye on you all the time to make sure you're safe. Is that a sign I'm insane or in love?"

  "You're a protector...and you may be passionately in love." Callie snuggled up in my arms and I kissed the top of her head as she ran her hands up under my shirt, massaging my breasts.

  I asked Elmo to give us a little room on the couch and had begun kissing Callie and unbuttoning her blouse when there was a knock at the door. I got up to answer it, and Barrett Silvers, looking worn and worried, slumped into the room to report that she'd gone to the police station and personally taken an officer over to Ramona's cabin and searched her belongings for a note or information that might tell them if she'd left voluntarily.

  After a few attempts at calming her, reassuring her Ramona would be found, we were absolutely out of conversation.

  Barrett began to fill the dead air with strange musings. "She's a painter, did you know that?"

  I stared at Barrett, thinking her voice had a soft lilt I didn't know it possessed.

  "No, we don't know much about her," Callie said.

  "Well, she paints beautiful landscapes of the plains with the oil derricks and cattle. She said she's going to paint one for me..."

  Barrett sagged down into a chair with her head in her hands and I looked over at Callie, having no idea what to say or do. This was a new Barrett, a lovesick woman.

  "You gotta cut this out," I demanded gruffly. "I like the cocky, arrogant, oversexed, studio shark. This lovesick thing is not attractive."

  "Go fuck yourself," she whispered.

  "That's starting to look like an option, since distraught dykes have been repeatedly appearing on my doorstep and derailing my love life."

  "What did you find in the cabin?" Callie asked, as if she knew Barrett was concealing something.

  "Nothing, really..." Sheepishly she added, "Something I took off her dresser." Barrett fished deep in her pocket and pulled out a small green slate arrowhead, obviously a trinket and not an artifact.

  Callie took the item from Barrett and rolled it around in her fingers. "Did she buy this somewhere recently?"

  "I don't know." Barrett seemed too upset to think clearly.

  "I've seen these somewhere.. .Teague?"

  I looked at the arrowhead about the size of my thumb, and the image of a small wicker basket full of children's arrowheads popped into my head. "Trading post."

  "Yes," Callie said, grabbing her coat. "We know Ramona most likely didn't carry this around with her in Oklahoma and she'd only been here a short while, so she either bought it at a store, or her kidnapper did, and maybe she left it on the dresser as a clue."

  "Unlikely there would be time for that if someone dragged her away," I said quietly, not wanting to take away all hope but wanting to be realistic nonetheless.

  "Maybe the kidnapper left it," Callie said.

  "Why would a kidnapper be that careless?" I asked.

  "Maybe he left it there on purpose to help us find her." Callie smiled, quite proud of her theory.

  "Why do you kidnap someone and then ask to be caught?" Barrett stared at us.

  "Maybe the kidnapper was working against his will, or maybe he knew it would be us who would find it," Callie said. "Things can look one way and be something entirely different. Come on."

  And like a battalion commander, Callie herded us both toward the door, leaving Elmo on the couch in a turkey-induced tryptophanic trance.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We were only ten minutes from the jewelry store, and I smiled nervously at Callie as we walked up the wooden steps and entered the rustic building made expansive with its tree-sized logs that acted as beams and room dividers to separate rugs from jewelry and trinkets.

  "Over here." Callie quickly located the basket of green arrowheads and compared them to the one in her hand.

  "Identical," I said, picking up a few of them.

  The beautiful Indian woman in the pleated dress and elaborate turquoise jewelry greeted us. "You're here to make your ring purchase?" she asked me with a broad teasing smile on her wide, open face.

  "Still getting comfortable with the idea," I said, and tried to seem casual.

  Barrett listened to the exchange and glanced down at the rings in the case for the first time. "Are you getting married?" She look
ed at me quizzically but without her usual tone of condemnation or even the slightest hint of jealousy.

  I couldn't formulate a sentence so Callie stepped in. "I asked her to marry me but she thought I was joking." Callie turned her attention to the shopkeeper, leaving me to my own demons and to Barrett's stare. "We're looking for someone who bought an arrowhead like these green ones you sell...she bought it no more than a few days ago."

  "It's a very common keepsake for people who want to put it in their pocket as a remembrance of their trip or as a good-luck charm. They're under a dollar," the shopkeeper said and set the ring tray out as if I'd made a silent request to see the rings again. I fingered the matching pair.

  "A tall, elegant, silver-haired woman—are you sure she didn't come in? Her nails are long and tapered and she wears a pale silver polish on them and her watch is a Cartier gold band..." Barrett asked, and the shopkeeper paused.

  "I don't remember anyone like that."

  We stood around for a moment, not knowing what to do next. Then the shopkeeper broke the silence. "She will most likely return, I believe."

  "Directions would be more helpful than beliefs," I muttered.

  "Little Horse," the shopkeeper said quickly. "The man who buys the most of these is the trapper-trader who has the mule-team trail rides. Everybody calls him Little Horse. He buys them by the boxful because he gives them to everybody who goes on the trail ride. He also has a guide service. He'll take you on foot into remote areas, or by canoe down the river, or to a sweat lodge, stuff like that."

  "Where is he?" Barrett's words leapt from her lips. Barrett, who had bedded every woman in Hollywood, was obsessed now with finding a silver-haired, bisexual studio executive twenty years her senior.

  The shopkeeper laughed. "Well, that's the big trick. He doesn't have a cell phone or pager. He shows up to buy groceries and goes back to his camp."

  "Where's his camp?" Callie asked.

  "Way up in the hills, you would need a guide," the shopkeeper said.

  "Where does he buy groceries?" I asked.

  "Little Mojo's Corner." She pointed toward the front of her shop and south up a hill.

  "We'll find her." I turned to address Barrett but she was already headed for the door. For all her butch elegance, her sophisticated not-caring, her chic it's-all-about-me attitude, she was beyond merely upset, and it flashed through my mind that Ramona Mathers must not have been popular with oilmen for nothing—she was obviously a good lay. After all, Barrett had known her for only a couple of days—hell, a couple of hours really—and most likely only slept with her once. I asked myself if I was sorry I'd passed on the opportunity to find out how good a lay, but looked over at Callie with pride as she said, "I know exactly what you're thinking."

  I didn't know how to block energy, but I gave it my best, thinking of a giant brick wall separating my mind from Callie's.

  "You could have slept with Ramona."

  "Wrong. I was thinking it would be fun to know how good in bed Ramona was, if one didn't have to sleep with her to find out."

  Callie raised an eyebrow. Honesty had its hazards.

  In only minutes we were headed for Little Mojo's Corner to find out if Little Horse came there often and when they'd last seen him. The store was a small former gas station sitting back off the two streets that crossed in front of it. Barrett went inside to question the clerk, who apparently described Little Horse as a short, stocky man who was only slightly bowlegged, or enough to comment on, while Callie and I tried to organize our thoughts.

  "So let's do a little Indian update," I proposed. "Kai, high-school friend of Manaba, dies mysteriously. We don't know why. In 1997 Manaba's grandmother dies. We don't know why. Nizhoni may be dead. We don't know why. Are you getting the pattern here?"

  "We do know that the grandmother's land was special to women of the tribe. They came by the hundreds from the surrounding hills and danced all night by the campfires to honor the female spirit. With the grandmother gone, the land was somehow deeded over to Blackstone Construction. The transaction might not have been filed at the courthouse until recently, when they wanted to develop the land." Callie paused to study me intently. "It's the besiegement the chart indicated. In 1997 women were being attacked, their power under siege. This land mass is female and has large energy connecting those attacks to the present ones and until the energy is redirected—"

  "You lost me on the big female land mass."

  "Women, hundreds, perhaps thousands have danced in the dust and sand of this sacred place—many moccasins. The sound of their voices, the energy of their hearts, the prayers emanating from their spirits... all of that is still here and people feel it. The construction crews feel it as they cut into her soul, and the energy of the violated land frightens them, and they run, quitting their jobs."

  "Wow, Callie, the way you see things—"

  "Disturbs you, I know."

  "No. It's so.. .well, it makes me feel better. Like there's beauty and sense to the world and you're its cheerleader." I realized I was choking emotionally on the words.

  She paused. "I love you, Teague." She kissed me, her mouth warm like the ocean on a cold night.

  "So what does women's energy have to do with the missing and dead?" I murmured.

  "I don't know."

  "Do you ever worry that maybe there is no connection, that maybe we're trying to tie things together that make no sense?"

  At that moment, we saw them—Manaba and Cy Blackstone across the street in the shadows of the trading post. Their bodies close in conversation.

  Without waiting, I towed Callie across the street, dodging traffic, and got within earshot of the two, their conversation barely audible.

  "He knows," Manaba said.

  "How?" Blackstone shifted his weight and glanced over his shoulder.

  "We exhumed the grave," Manaba said.

  A pause while Blackstone breathed. "So he knows."

  Manaba said nothing in reply, turned, and hurried away.

  "I thought those two were mortal enemies," I said. "That night at the ceremony they looked like it to me. Let's follow him." We raced back across the street and jumped in our car.

  "What about Barrett?" Callie reminded me as we squealed out of the driveway, tailing Blackstone in his black pickup truck roughly an eighth of a mile behind him.

  "Can't help that, she'll have to find her own way home. I don't want to lose Blackstone."

  We were headed back toward the Indian reservation near the area where the cemetery was located. The land was wide-open and cars easy to spot, so I had to drop back even farther to avoid Blackstone's seeing me.

  About five miles up into hillier country a white pickup, perched on a side road like a marauder in an old-fashioned train robbery, bolted from the intersection, spraying sand across the horizon. It headed down the incline onto the roadway, throwing more dust into the air and blocking Blackstone's path. When he tried to cut a sharp left and get around the truck, it veered even more sharply, blocking him. He swerved right and the white truck roared into reverse and charged left, blocking him again, sagebrush sacrificed under skidding tires, flying like confetti.

  Two metal cutting horses, they swung and blocked and spun until Blackstone whirled a full three-sixty to spray sand in his opponent's windshield and, while he had him blinded, plowed forward. But the white vehicle was in his path and he crashed into the truck bed. The driver jumped out and slung open Blackstone's pickup door and threw him on the ground in a stranglehold. Blackstone lay still. Suddenly the attacker spotted us, and in a split second he was off the ground, limping to his truck and fleeing across the sand in a grinding of tires.

  "That's the Dwayne-Wayne guy," I shouted as we pulled up to the scene, having recognized the limp. I rang the police department to say we needed an officer and an ambulance right away, and described our location outside of town.

  "He said he knew Blackstone," I told Callie as I hung up the phone.

  "Apparently he does." Calli
e knelt beside Blackstone, assuring him an ambulance was on the way.

  I couldn't see if his head had hit the steering wheel or Wayne had pulverized his nose with his fists. Whichever, the guy was pretty smashed up.

  Callie looked up at me. "He's breathing, but he's bleeding from the mouth and his eyes are rolled back."

  "I've got a lot of questions I'd like to ask him, but I don't think he's going to have answers any time soon."

  Chapter Sixteen

  The ambulance and the police officer arrived almost simultaneously, so while Blackstone was being strapped on a stretcher the officer asked me what we knew about the mugging. Not wanting to admit we were following Blackstone, I lied, making a mental distinction between telling Callie the truth and coming clean with Officer Tumbleweed.

  I said we were taking a ride to see the surrounding countryside and stumbled on the two guys trying to kill one another.

  The officer, whose name tag pinned to his shirt said Sgt. Striker, wrote as I spoke, never taking off his dark wraparound sunglasses. His crisply pressed shirt and his military demeanor told me he was one of those cops who took himself seriously.

  "So why are you in Sedona?"

  "We're here on a combined writing project and vacation," I said. "We've seen this guy in the white truck before. His name is Dwayne-Wayne and he showed up at our cabin—"

  "Dwayne or Wayne?" the officer interrupted, to let me know that he controlled the interview, not me. He stopped writing and raised an eyebrow at me for no apparent reason other than perhaps he'd seen the expression on a cop show. I would have bet money he stood in the bathroom mirror for hours practicing getting that eyebrow to arch up that high over the top of his sunglasses.

  "First name Dwayne, middle name Wayne, and he's the same guy who came to our cabin to tell us that a friend of ours, Ramona Mathers, is missing."

  "We know about the Mathers report," Sergeant Striker said, this time letting me know he'd "let me know" if he wanted more discussion about the Mathers case. "Why do you say he's the same guy?"