by Louise Ure
A cry from the bedroom set me in motion again. In taking care of Guillermo and getting help, I’d forgotten all about that previous wail.
On the floor, Emily Markson squirmed to rid herself of the weights, but the bar across her neck kept her down.
Where was the little girl?
The sound was coming from the metal footlocker at the end of the bed. Two air holes had been drilled in the side. I unhooked the latches and pulled the lid open. A brown-haired three-year-old girl blinked away tears and recoiled into the far corner of the trunk.
“Hush, hush, it’s going to be okay.” My God, had she been here all along? Imprisoned in that trunk the day I was here raiding the car keys but too afraid to make a noise?
I lifted her from the metal tomb, singing soft nonsense syllables to quiet her, repeating them in a slow cadence until they sounded like two pieces of silk rubbing together.
I returned to the living room, cradling her like an overgrown doll. Chaco and Paul Willard’s blood had mingled into a work of macabre art on the floor. Guillermo had managed to prop himself up against the black couch and held a wad of paper napkins to his temple. His face was pale, but his eyes tracked me as I moved.
After Guillermo tucked Levin’s gun under his thigh, I set the little girl down next to him on the floor. He cradled her face against his chest, blocking much of her view of death and gore. She seemed to settle there, giving soft mewling sounds and rocking softly against him.
I stooped to pick up Bobby’s gun from the corner. A little triangular piece of hard rubber was missing from the grip. I’d been right about who ransacked my house. It was Catherine’s gun, used in a homicide the police could no longer try me for. But now it had new deaths to its credit.
The car alarm continued to scream from the front yard. I pushed aside the pizza box on the table. There, shoved under a flyer for free brake inspections, was a box of .38s. I loaded the gun.
“The cops are on their way,” Guillermo said, watching me spin the cylinder and click it into place.
“Make sure she gets back to her parents.”
“You don’t have to do this. They’ll catch him.”
“I know. So will I.” I didn’t have time to explain, but I was surer now than I’d ever been. I knew what I had to do.
I followed the first three zigzags I’d seen Bobby Levin make as he ran. Saguaro to cholla and back to duck behind a saguaro again. It looked like he’d slid at that point, leaving boot-heel gashes in the dirt. Twilight was deepening, I wouldn’t be able to see the tracks much longer.
A steep rocky hillside rose only a couple hundred yards from Chaco’s back door. I looked up. He was up there somewhere.
I climbed about a hundred feet, using only one hand to scramble up so I could keep the LadySmith out of the dirt. No sounds until the wail of an approaching siren echoed off the dark rock. I turned to look back at the house; a small army of police and fire trucks were turning into Chaco’s driveway, lights spinning like a carnival ride.
A cascade of dirt and pebbles to my left told me that Bobby Levin had heard the same thing and was on the move. I kept climbing; the old gash in my calf now no more than a goad, spurring me on. Another fifty feet up, the mountain ran out of dirt and reverted to its primitive volcanic self. Black spires of craggy rock offered few footholds but lots of places to hide.
“Come on down, Bobby! The cops are right behind me. You won’t get away!” No response. As far as I could tell, I was the only one of us with a gun, but that didn’t make me feel any better.
I scanned the shadowed hillside and settled on what looked like a javelina track between the largest outcroppings. The wind was light. No sound but the garbled radio transmissions from the cops below echoed around the canyon.
I moved cautiously around a barrel cactus in the narrow path and heard a groan. Bobby Levin slumped against a stony ledge, both hands holding his right knee.
“Hurt yourself?”
“Fuck you.”
I held the gun steady. Only eight feet away, I couldn’t miss.
“Give it up, Bobby.” I gestured with the gun for him to precede me down the hillside.
He panted, head hung down. I watched, transfixed, as his hand dropped from his knee to his boot. He came up snarling and clicked open the long, dark knife in his hand. He lunged at me, swiping right to left at waist level.
I pulled the trigger.
I told myself that I would have killed him anyway—that’s why I had chased him up the mountainside—but I wondered if I really could have done it without provocation. Bobby had saved me from finding out.
I scooped up the knife that had dropped from his fingers and flung it as far as I could to the west. Deke would have no reason to look for it there.
I was sitting cross-legged on the ground next to Bobby’s body when Deke and two uniformed officers reached me.
“What happened, Jessie? Are you all right?” Deke’s voice was ragged with exertion and anxiety.
“I killed him.”
“In self-defense?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t say anything else,” he cautioned, turning to look at the two cops behind him. “We’ll get you a good lawyer.”
“Don’t need one, Deke. I’m pleading guilty.”
“I’m so sorry about this,” he said, cuffing my hands in front for the trip down the steep hill.
Poor Deke. He’d tried so hard and for so long to believe in my innocence, but this time there was no way he could ignore my criminality. Sabin would have no trouble with my guilt. Neither would I.
But I did have one condition as part of my guilty plea: I wanted to make a Day of the Dead altar before going to jail. Deke was the first to agree. Len Sabin and the prosecutor, Ted Dresden, soon followed suit.
We made quite a crowd there at the cottonwood tree by the arroyo the next day. It was November 2, the last day of the Day of the Dead celebration.
Guillermo’s head wound had been wrapped and the doctors had cleared him to come with us. He’d brought pictures of Carlos and Felicia. I looped thin pieces of string through pinprick holes and hung them on the highest branches I could reach.
My dad brought a picture of Catherine, and had clipped a newspaper photo of Paul Willard and—my own private shame—Walter Racine. I gave Catherine and Walter pride of place, tucked into the strongest crook of the tree at eye level.
Darren Markson, Reuben Sanchez, Chaco, and Bobby Levin were on their own. They had been masters of their own destinies and had no business being remembered on my Day of the Dead altar.
I wondered if Aloma Willard ever put together an altar, and whether she would now yearn for the day that she could add Emily Markson to the list of the dead. I’d heard that Emily had hired my old pal Buckley Thurber to defend her. If he did his usual stellar job, she’d be growing old in prison. Unless Emily and I got assigned to the same facility, that is.
I placed a dozen votive candles around the base of the tree and lit them, although it was still too bright out for the candlelight to be seen. Just like the ghosts of all those children taken by the Braceros, the Marksons, and Robert Levin; young lives whose flames had not had a chance to blaze brightly enough.
A lavender smudge, in honor of the birth mother I’d never met, curled wispy gray smoke toward the group. I added a long pink satin ribbon for Catherine’s child and the unclaimed three-year-old from the trunk. Deke told me that her first name was Baila—Dance—but they hadn’t found her parents yet. As it should be, I thought. One Dancing ends her old life and another girl named Dance starts a new one.
I strung another card to the tree. That optical illusion drawing of a vase—or was it two faces in profile?—that was what I’d been doing the last three years. Looking at one image but not recognizing the truth of the other. I’d only seen the hard lines of the vase—Catherine’s story about the abuse—and not the faces, the truth. I’d even misinterpreted Racine’s actions that day he pushed Katie on the swing. It had been a pr
oud, loving great-uncle’s gaze, not that of a predator. My guilty plea now was the only way I could, even in part, pay my dues to Walter Racine and his family.
Guillermo was lost to me now, and he, too, had to be remembered on the altar. Giving him up, saying good-bye to whatever possibilities we might have had, would be one of the hardest parts of my incarceration. I lit an orange candle to signal a change of plans and to open new roads for him.
Mad Cow had taken the day off and driven down from Phoenix. She was the only one with tears in her eyes. The rest of us were already too steeped in pain to cry.
“Can I come visit you?” she asked.
I laughed and hugged her. “Yes. And you just won the Dumb Question contest.”
Finally, I knelt between the tree trunk and the orange candle and tucked away the broken shard of agate that I’d fingered, contemplating my own suicide. I’d built up a hard shell of anger these last three years, but could feel it melting away, leaving me strangely calm and at peace there in the clearing.
Deke gave me a few minutes, then stepped behind me and gently held my wrists in place for the handcuffs.
“I don’t understand, Jessie. You could have said it was self-defense. Nobody could prove you wrong.”
The wind came up, twirling the cards and photos and threatening the tiny flames.
“But it wasn’t.”
The undisputed queen of Liars Anonymous was back.
More from Louise Ure
“An original and gripping work, more proof—as if any was needed—that Louise Ure is an exciting new voice in the mystery field. And its nail-bitting suspense is balanced with a thoughtful, nuanced view of where blame truly begins. Cadence is an extraordinary character and Ure’s ability to capture her world is nothing less than remarkable.”—Laura Lippman, New York Times bestselling author
“By turns an accomplished procedural, an acute study of a fiercely independent heroine and a nail-biting suspenser.” —Kirkus
The Fault Tree
For one woman, the dark is a dangerous place to be, and it’s the one place she cannot escape.
Arizona auto mechanic Cadence Moran is no stranger to darkness. She was blinded in a horrific car accident eight years ago that also took the life of her three-year-old niece. She knows she was only partially to blame, but that doesn’t make the loss any easier to bear. She’s learned to get by, but there are still painful memories. When she is almost run down by a speeding car on the way home from work, Cadence at first thinks that she is the victim of road rage or a bad driver. But that’s not the case. In fact, she is the only witness to the murder of her elderly neighbor, and now the killer believes that she’s seen the getaway car. Louise Ure paints the glare of a Southwestern summer with the brush of a blind woman’s darkness in this novel of jeopardy and courage…and the fine line between them—as Cadence fights to stop a killer she can’t see.
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