Raul laughed politely, and Buck told him about the pregnant cow and why he would rather be home tonight, except for the possibility of finding Lulu. Either way made for a long day.
He had asked Donna to brew a pot of strong coffee, and the four of them—even though Scoot and Carmela had just come on duty a couple of hours before—had shared it, then poured the remainder into a red steel thermos. Donna would stay in Elfrida to coordinate from there and to make sure that the heart of the valley wasn’t left completely unprotected, but she had the coffeepot and could always make more.
Buck stayed in touch with the Willcox unit by radio, and both groups closed on the sleepy town at about the same time, shortly after midnight. The rain had not let up, and Buck’s hands and shoulders ached from fighting the wheel, struggling against wind and water and tension. Sweat gathered under the Kevlar vest he wore beneath his uniform shirt. Excitement and something that might have been hope plucked at his nerves like a fiddler at an Elks Club dance.
The town of Dos Cabezas sat high enough in the foothills that the landscape looked like the mountainside had dropped off in jagged chunks and the houses had been built around them. Lights here and there indicated where occupied structures were. NO TRESPASSING signs decorated the properties close to the road, as if to warn off ghost town devotees who might mistake an inhabited home for an abandoned one. The effect from the road was to make the town look singularly unfriendly, an impression the wind and weather did little to correct.
High Springs Trail came up suddenly, after a hilly curve. One of the old adobes sagged at the corner of High Springs and 186, its eroded blocks jumbled around most of a single upright wall as if in miniature impersonation of the landscape. Raul pointed out the road sign, and Buck braked hard, skidding into the turn. “Thanks,” he said. “Almost missed it.”
“I knew it should be right around here,” Raul said. Buck had MapQuested the address before they left Elfrida, and Raul had been holding the printout in his lap, examining it now and again with a flashlight. “Almost a mile up here. Nine-point-three tenths.”
“Got to figure he probably won’t have a welcome sign out.”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
Buck glanced into his rearview and saw that Scoot’s vehicle had made the turn behind him. He radioed his Willcox contact, Patrol Lieutenant Randy Cummings. “Randy,” he said when they had connected. “We’re on High Springs.”
“I’m almost there,” Randy replied amid a wash of static. “Want to hang on and wait for us?”
“Roger that,” Buck said. He reported the plan to Scoot, and they both shut down their engines and lights. Less than five minutes had passed when two more sets of headlights turned off 186, from the north, and jounced up High Springs. Buck picked up the radio again. “That you, Randy?”
“If you’re blocking the road in front of me, yes.”
“I didn’t figure it would get a lot of traffic tonight.”
“Probably a safe bet. Ready to roll?”
Buck responded by gunning the ignition and switching his lights back on. “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’,” he said.
“Rawhide!” Randy finished with a laugh. He was older than Buck, in his mid-fifties, and Buck knew he was a huge fan of old TV and movie Westerns. Willcox was the home of Rex Allen, who had starred in both kinds, and every year for Rex Allen Days, Randy and some of his friends dressed up in B-movie cowboy finery and rode in the parade.
“You got a plan?” Randy asked him.
“I figure we knock on the door, say it’s a candygram.”
Randy laughed again. “‘Mongo like candy,’” he quoted.
“You got it. When he opens up, we identify ourselves, toss the warrant in his face, go in and find Lulu.”
“You know the girl, Buck?”
“I know her.”
“That’s good. You do the shouting, then, and we’ll hope she’s someplace where she can hear your voice.”
Buck didn’t reply. The road was rugged, climbing over rocks and dipping into washes filled with swiftly flowing water, and he had negotiated it fine, but now he’d come around a bend and there was the place they were looking for. He stopped, killed the lights. “Bingo,” he said into the radio. “Lights out, boys and girls. Let’s move in dark and quiet.”
The cabin was built almost up against the side of the mountain, which sloped up and away at a steep angle. Sycamores and twisted ash trees surrounded it, almost screening it from the road. A mailbox on a stone post stood at the road with the house number painted on it, and up close to the house, half-covered by a blue tarp that the wind had blown partly off, sat a dark pickup truck. The base of the house was made of stone, with wood starting above the lower edge of the windows. It was dark, but a yellow bug light burned in a little alcove over the front door. Buck couldn’t see behind the house—the trees and the mountainside and the house conspired to completely obscure everything beyond the cabin.
Without lights, he pulled slowly up to within a couple hundred feet of the place. There he shut off the Yukon. Behind him, the other four vehicles also stopped. Everyone climbed out into the lashing rain and wind and huddled beside Buck’s SUV for a quick conference. They agreed that Randy’s team would fan out behind the cabin, while Buck and Raul went in the front door. Scoot and Carmela would remain under cover in front, in case anyone came out the windows.
The approach settled, Buck switched on a Maglite and drew his service weapon. He walked toward the cabin, playing the light on the path ahead. The tarp snapped in the wind, and somewhere around the house an unseen shutter banged irregularly, like the reports of pellet rifles at a shooting gallery. Buck wished he could hear noises from inside the cabin, but at least the sound of his approach would be masked by the weather.
Training the light on the rear of the truck, he saw a broken left taillight.
She’s in there, he thought. Hang on, Lulu, we’re coming for you.
15
Jeannie tried to watch TV, but the wind blew too ferociously and the satellite signal kept fritzing in and out. She finally gave up and turned on a Miles Davis CD, then put on an oversized Mickey Mouse T-shirt, climbed into bed, pulled the covers up over her legs and tried to read. The CD helped, but it didn’t completely drown out the wind, which whistled and howled. Horror movie wind, it was, ghost story wind. She tried to tell herself she was being silly, but she was sorry that Oliver had gone to San Diego today. With the murders up the road still fresh in her thoughts, slasher flick sound effects were not conducive to relaxation.
Oliver had called from San Diego to say that his flight had been delayed because of weather in Tucson. Whenever he did land, he’d have a two-hour drive home. No closer airport could handle large planes—he could have flown into Sierra Vista, only an hour away, for another couple hundred dollars, but if a big commercial jetliner couldn’t get into Tucson, what chance would a little prop job have of landing there?
Three years before they bought the house, a Sulphur Springs Valley wind had wrenched off the roof; the upside was that the house had a brand-new roof, but Jeannie feared that it could happen again on a night like this. Sitting in bed with Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees propped against her thighs (she had become accustomed to the idea that she would be living in the Southwest—the real Southwest, not California—for a good long while, and that region, with its tripartite Indian, Spanish and Anglo heritage, was so different from her Northeastern roots that she wanted to understand it better), she uttered a loud “Fuck!” when the power went out. By the time she located her bookmark and slid it into place, flipped back the blankets and turned her legs off the bed, the lights had come on again, flickered twice and then stayed on. The digital clock on her nightstand and the one on the VCR beneath the bedroom TV blinked triple zeroes at her.
She froze on the edge of the mattress. “Stay on, stay on, stay on,” she whispered.
The power gods obeyed. The CD had stopped, but the lights kept shining. Jeannie blew out a breath
and put her feet on the floor anyway. She had to go around the house and fix all the clocks, and make sure nothing had stayed on that shouldn’t have.
Jeannie had just made it into the living room when she heard a pounding on the front door. She let out an inadvertent shriek and clutched her shirt collar, bunching Mickey’s ears into her fist. For a brief moment she tried to convince herself that it was only the wind banging something against the house, but then it happened again, louder and more insistent.
She didn’t expect anyone but Oliver, and he wouldn’t be home for hours yet—would maybe just be landing about now. Should she keep quiet and hope that the visitor outside would move on? But she had stepped into the living room, where four feet past the door a window, blinds wide open, looked out toward the covered walkway and the front yard. The unknown caller had only to take a couple of steps to see her.
Instead of trying to hide, Jeannie crossed to the door and leaned toward the peephole she had installed right after they moved in. At first she couldn’t focus on the person on the other side, who was not only sopped to the skin but moving rapidly, maybe stepping from foot to foot, trying to warm up. She saw plastered-down black hair and slender, dark, bare shoulders. When she finally did recognize her nighttime visitor, at first she didn’t believe what she saw.
She rattled the doorknob, but it wouldn’t turn. She had locked the knob with the thumb latch, so she twisted that and tried again. As she yanked the door open, the soaked girl outside practically fell into her arms. “Lulu!” Jeannie shouted. “Oh my God, Lulu!”
Lulu pressed herself against Jeannie, soaking through her Mickey T in seconds. Jeannie wrapped her arms around Lulu, drawing the weeping girl inside, shoving the door closed with her left foot. Lulu’s back and shoulders wrenched with each gasping sob, so that Jeannie felt like she was trying to contain a large, anxious puppy. “Lulu, Lulu,” she kept saying, lowering her voice, trying to be comforting. “It’s okay now, Lulu. It’s okay,” she said, knowing that it really wasn’t, that even though Lulu was here with her now, the girl’s family would never be with her again.
Moving Lulu across the floor so that they could sit down on the sofa, Jeannie noticed that Lulu’s feet tracked mud and blood over the carpet. “You’re bleeding!” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I…I…” was all Lulu could manage.
Jeannie made her stand on her own for long enough to look her over. She wore a pink cotton tank top, stained and soaked through, and red silk boxers with SpongeBob SquarePants on them. Her arms and legs had been scratched and cut, and her filthy bare feet bled as if she had walked across ground glass to get here.
“You’re hurt,” Jeannie said. “We should get you to the hospital.”
Lulu shook her head, her wet hair streaming out to its full length, shedding droplets over the couch, window and coffee table. “No,” she said, able to form words for the first time since coming inside. “No time for that.”
“Did he…?” She left the question unasked, not sure how to phrase it. Lulu seemed to know what she meant.
“No. He didn’t hurt me that way.”
Jeannie didn’t want to see her standing there in pain, shivering and bleeding. “You need a hot shower,” she said. “I’ll put some water on to boil while you’re in and then we’ll have tea and you can tell me what happened.”
Lulu nodded at this suggestion. “Cops?”
“Right, we should call the lieutenant. What was that guy’s name? He and Oliver are becoming buddies, it seems.” She remembered tucking his business card into the front of the phone book. Retrieving it and lifting the phone to her ear, she glanced back at Lulu. “Oliver’s out; he’ll be back sometime tonight.”
“O-okay.” Now that Lulu was more still, Jeannie could see that her lips were dry and split, her cheek bruised, her left eye purpled and swollen.
“Crap!” Jeannie said, pressing buttons and listening to the phone. “It’s dead. Must be the storm.” Cell service wasn’t an option at the house.
“Unless it’s…it’s him,” Lulu said. Her eyes welled with tears again.
Jeannie didn’t have to ask who she meant. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get you in the shower. You’re safe here; he can’t get to you anymore.”
“My…my family’s dead, aren’t they?”
Jeannie bit down hard on her lower lip. “Yes. I’m sorry, Lulu. They are.”
Another nod, and Lulu looked at the stained carpet as if assessing the damage her feet had done. “I figured.”
Jeannie led Lulu (who took tiny steps, as if she were a hundred years old) to the bathroom, took a couple of plush towels from the linen closet and started the water for her. She made it as hot as she could stand and figured that would work for Lulu. As the bathroom steamed up, she gave the girl another brief hug and then left her to her solitary ministrations, sure that the shower would give her a chance to mourn in peace and privacy.
Closing the door behind herself, she headed back to the living room to try the telephone again.
16
Oliver’s cell phone rang as he crossed the San Pedro River heading into the little Mormon-settled town of St. David on Highway 80, trying to peer through the darkness at the river. It was impossible to see, of course, a dozen or so feet beneath the roadway, unlit by moon or stars. But with the strength of this monsoon it was certainly down there, flowing south to north, a fact with which he liked to confuse his students until the realization dawned on them that rivers paid no attention to the artificial designations of cartographers and simply moved, like all water, downhill. The San Pedro River—like millions of people, it seemed—flowed from Mexico into Arizona. And like the tide of immigration, it had never been dammed. The river had dried up briefly, during times of drought and overuse, but it always returned, flowing ever northward toward its own future.
He had finally landed around eleven-thirty, a little more than an hour before. He had left his car in short-term parking, since he’d only been gone for the day, and the Tucson airport was still small enough that twenty minutes after disembarking he had been on the road. The rain had let up in Tucson, but here, off Interstate 10 between Benson and Tombstone (O.K. CORRAL GUNFIGHT DAILY! the sign read, with a picture of Kurt Russell in Earp garb; he wondered sometimes if tourists marveled at the actor’s resemblance to what they assumed was the historical Wyatt), he had already caught up to it. Lightning silhouetted gargantuan cottonwood trees standing beside the road.
He pawed at his blazer, found the phone, its screen glowing blue in the dark car as if imitating the lightning outside. Jeannie, he thought. He had tried calling as soon as he landed, but the call had gone to voice mail. Another attempt, from Benson, had met with the same result.
But it wasn’t Jeannie. It was a number he didn’t recognize, with an 858 area code. San Diego. “Hello?”
“Oliver, it’s Stan.”
“Stan,” Oliver repeated, surprised. He had almost reached St. David proper, where the speed limit would drop to thirty-five for about three minutes, then would jump back up to fifty. Shortly thereafter he would be out of cell range again. “Thanks again for this afternoon.”
“Sorry for calling so late.”
“No problem, I’m still driving home. If I lose you, it’s because I’m in the middle of nowhere.”
“I’ve been doing a little research into your situation,” Stan said. “And I’ve learned some things…Well, I honestly don’t know how to interpret them. So I thought I should tell you and let you see if you can make sense of it.”
“So far I haven’t been very good at making sense of any of this,” Oliver said. “But I’ll give it my best shot. What’d you come up with?”
“The thing is, Oliver, I think it’s all of a piece.”
“I’m not following, Stan. What do you mean?”
“The ‘white girl’ your blogger talks about, the miracle statue. I think it ties into the Cabeza de Vaca story.”
Oliver steered with his left hand, fighting
the temptation, in his excitement, to press down harder on the accelerator. The windshield wipers kept up their steady sweeps across the glass. “How do you mean?”
“The authoritative version of their ordeal is de Vaca’s own account, in his ‘relacion,’ the story he put down in writing for the king of Spain. But Andrés Dorantes had his own version of events. He didn’t write it down, but told it to interested parties, and eventually, after his death and de Vaca’s, it was written down and privately published in Spain. Much of what he told was told to him by his slave, Estevan—including secrets Estevan had sworn to Cabeza de Vaca that he would never reveal.”
“I’m with you,” Oliver said. He hoped the man would get to the point before he left town and lost the signal.
“According to Estevan’s tale—and this part, de Vaca didn’t put into his version—they did a lot more healing than de Vaca admitted to, and none of them really thought their Christian God was behind their powers. De Vaca had become the slave of an Indian shaman and had learned magic from him, and the rest of it, according to Estevan anyway, just seemed to come naturally, flowing from de Vaca into the rest of them. Especially Estevan. Of course, Estevan was dead by the time Dorantes revealed any of this, killed at the pueblos on the Marcos de Niza expedition. And Dorantes—not wanting to be burned at the stake—claimed that the magic had affected everyone but him. Point is, somewhere along the way, Estevan fell in love with a girl, a shaman’s daughter, and started sculpting her. He told Dorantes that his love was so strong that he put his magic into every bit of effort, that he had never been a sculptor but with magic guiding his hand, even working with the crudest of tools, the statue was coming out more beautiful and lifelike than the master sculptors of Renaissance Europe could have done.”
Missing White Girl Page 22
