by J. A. Jance
Gabe had still been tribal chairman then. For Delia to go up against her own father-in-law and then lose in such a public fashion had caused a reservation-wide stir. It had also caused familial difficulties between Delia and her in-laws that lingered to this day and colored all Delia’s interactions with Gabe and Wanda Ortiz.
He’s dying, Delia thought, but he is fine. With that, she clicked the “reply” button and typed:
Dear Lani,
Gabe is fine. No need for you to rush home. I’ll let you know if anything changes.
Delia Cachora Ortiz
She punched “send” without giving herself a chance to reconsider. With the e-mail off in the ethers, Delia found she was far too upset to concentrate. Abandoning her plan to spend the morning working in her office, she switched off her computer, turned off the lights, locked the door, and left.
Out in the parking lot, she climbed into her aging Saab 9000 and headed for the little chapel at Topawa several miles south of Sells. It was the place where her mother had gone seeking refuge and comfort more than thirty-five years earlier. It was where Delia went looking for relief from her ever-present burden of guilt.
Delia knew that being at war with Lani Walker would only worsen the difficult situation with her father-in-law. Fat Crack Ortiz wasn’t simply Leo’s father and the grandfather of the child Delia carried. He wasn’t just the man who had hired her and brought her back to the reservation in triumph years after she and her mother had fled Manny Chavez’s house in Sells in abject terror. Fat Crack was, in fact, the one person who had made their escape possible even way back then. Everything else that had happened to her, good and bad, flowed from that.
Everything else.
I’m scared,” seven-year-old Delia had told her mother. “Do we have to go? Couldn’t we just stay here?”
Ellie Chavez shook her head and kept on packing. “This is my chance to become a teacher,” she told her daughter determinedly, pretending a bravery she didn’t feel. “Sister Justine got me into this special program at Arizona State University. If I don’t do it now, I never will. I’ll be a teacher’s aide all my life—an aide but not a teacher.”
“But why do Eddie and I have to go?” Delia asked. “Couldn’t we stay here with Daddy or with Aunt Julia?”
“No,” Ellie said firmly. “It wouldn’t work. Your father wouldn’t—”
“Your father wouldn’t what?” Manuel Chavez demanded, appearing unexpectedly in the doorway. He stood with his wide body blocking the glare of the afternoon sun and throwing a giant shadow that spread like a dark cloud all the way across the room.
Delia, standing a few feet from her mother, felt a sharp twinge of fear rise in her throat. Even at seven, she knew the danger signs. She could see the half-consumed quart bottle of tequila Manny Chavez held at his side, strategically concealing it behind the outside wall of their government-built house. From Delia’s position, she could see the bottle plainly. Her mother could not.
“I was saying that it would be too hard on you to work and take care of Delia and Eddie all by yourself. And Aunt Julia already has her own grandkids to look after. That’s why Delia and Eddie have to go to Tempe with me.”
“No, they don’t,” Manny said. “Nobody’s going to Tempe.” Stepping forward, he brought the bottle into full view, raised it to his lips, and took a long swig.
Ellie sighed. She and Manny had discussed the ASU program earlier, and she had thought the matter settled. At the time they had reached what she assumed to be a final decision, Manny was on the wagon. Now he was off. That was another reason—the real reason—Ellie couldn’t risk leaving the children alone with their father. There were reasons beyond that as well—painfully secret reasons she had never discussed with anyone, including her beloved auntie—Ni-thahth Julia.
If Ellie’s parents had still been alive, she might have discussed her worries with her mother. No doubt Anthony and Guadalupe Francisco would have been thrilled to look after their grandchildren while Ellie went off to school. Unfortunately, Ellie’s parents were dead. They had died six years earlier in a Saturday-night car wreck as they returned home after buying groceries in Tucson. When it came to taking care of her children, Ellie Chavez was definitely on her own.
“Come on, Manny,” Ellie said reasonably, hoping to cajole her way around him as she had countless times before. “We’ve been over all this. You said I could go and let me sign up.”
“I changed my mind,” Manny said. “Now you’re staying here.”
“Too bad,” Ellie returned. “I’m going anyway, and that’s final. Sister Justine pulled all kinds of strings to make this work. She’s even arranged a place for us to stay.”
“A place for you to stay,” Manny Chavez said pointedly. “I don’t remember being invited.” He paused and took another long swig from the bottle. “I don’t care what Sister Justine did. She’s a troublemaker,” he added. “She’s trying to break us up.”
“Manny!” Ellie exclaimed. “Don’t say that in front of Delia. Sister Justine’s doing no such thing. She thinks I’ll be a good teacher, that’s all. She thinks so, and so do I.”
Manuel Chavez stepped farther into the room. “We were doing just fine with you as an aide and with me driving a bus. Why isn’t that good enough?”
“Because being an aide isn’t the same as being a real teacher,” Ellie insisted. “I want to be one of the first Tohono O’odham teachers here at Sells. It’ll set a good example for our kids and for other kids, too. It’s not right that all the teachers on the reservation are Mil-gahn.”
“You’ll set an example, all right,” Manny Chavez muttered, taking another step forward. “If you leave here, you’ll never come back, and you won’t get the kids, either. I won’t let you.”
“Yes, you will.”
To most of the world, Ellie Chavez included, those three small words, spoken quietly but resolutely, might have been considered a minor act of disobedience. With Manny they provoked outright war. He attacked her with the bottle and with his one free fist while Delia cowered in one corner and Eddie screamed from his crib. Ellie Chavez fought back. Although her husband outweighed her, he was also very drunk. In the end, that cost him.
He landed several telling blows. Delia watched in horror as her mother went down, blood spouting from her nose and lips. She landed on the floor and lay still. Manny staggered over to her. “I told you,” he muttered. “Nobody’s going to Tempe.”
With that, Manny raised his foot and aimed a vicious kick at his stricken wife. Seeing her father raise his foot, Delia knew what he was going to do. It was more than she could stand. With a screech of outrage, Delia rushed from her hiding place. She tackled her father from behind, hitting him just at knee level. Since he was already off balance, Delia’s unexpected blow was enough to send Manny crashing face-first into a corner of the coffee table. As he fell, the bottle was still gripped in his hand. When it smashed into the concrete floor it exploded, sending a spray of tequila and broken glass across the room.
Delia watched him fall and lie still. For several awful moments she expected he would rise and come after her mother again, but he didn’t. Slowly, covering her bleeding mouth with one hand, Ellie struggled to her feet. Bright red blood spewed from her nose and from cuts on her upper and lower lips. A long bloody scrape stretched from the tip of her nose to the top of her forehead, where she had fallen on the side of one of three matching suitcases the nuns at Topawa had given her as a going-away present.
For a moment, Ellie, too, stood over her husband as if expecting he would lumber to his feet and renew the attack. Instead, worn out with a combination of booze and physical exertion, his breathing settled into a drunken snore. Afraid Eddie’s screams might waken him, Ellie grabbed the baby from his crib and tried to quiet him. Once he settled, she examined both children to see if they had been cut or injured by that shower of broken glass, but the blood on the children had come from her own wounds.
Relieved, she passed Eddie to
his sister. “Sit here and hold him,” she said. “I need to finish packing.”
Before Manny’s attack, Ellie had been carefully folding and sorting clothing prior to packing it. Now she threw in everything that would fit and then sat on the bulging cases to force the lids shut. Once they were closed she hurried outside with two of the suitcases, only to discover Manny’s pickup was nowhere to be found. Rather than bring it home, Manny had evidently hidden it. It was one more way of making sure his wife didn’t leave.
Had Ellie gone searching, she probably could have found the truck. It was most likely at Manny’s parents’ house or else at his brother’s, but there wasn’t time to play hide-and-seek. Praying Manny wouldn’t awaken before she returned, Ellie took the kids and trudged as far as the pay phone outside the trading post, where she placed a call to Sister Justine in Topawa.
Sister Justine came at once in the convent’s nine-passenger station wagon. She looked at Ellie’s bloodied face and shook her head. “You should go to the hospital,” she said.
Ellie shook her head. “No hospital,” she said. “He’ll know to look for me there. I have to get away.”
“All right, then,” Sister Justine said. “Let’s go.”
And they did.
Arriving at Topawa in the early-afternoon heat, Delia Ortiz found only a few dusty pickups scattered here and there in the dirt parking lot outside the small adobe-covered church. She parked her Saab as unobtrusively as possible among the other vehicles and went inside. It was early enough in the day that the gloomy sanctuary, like the parking lot outside, was still relatively deserted. She didn’t have to wait long before making her way into the confessional.
“Forgive me, Father,” she said as she closed the door behind her. “Forgive me, for I have sinned.”
Ten
It was just after noon when Larry Stryker came home from a charity golf tournament at Tucson National. Luckily his foursome had drawn an early tee time. They’d finished up before the worst heat of the day, but he’d been too beat to stay on for the afternoon’s festivities and the awarding of trophies. He told Al Parker he had things to attend to at home, and he did. He might be too tired to spend much time in the basement that afternoon, but he still needed to take food there. He owed the girl that much.
The spacious and solitary ranch house was coolly welcoming when he unlocked the front door and let himself inside. He had moved to The Flying C after Gayle’s mother died while Gayle stayed on in their El Encanto home. It was an arrangement that suited them, allowing both to maintain a public facade as a happily married couple while leaving them free to follow their individual pursuits.
Larry pulled a beer from the refrigerator under the wet bar and then settled into his recliner—a well-worn Stickley Morris chair—in the living room. He wondered sometimes what would happen when—not if—he was no longer able to live here on his own and look after things. Considering what lay beyond the locked basement door, his having household help—live-in or otherwise—was entirely out of the question. He maintained the parts of the house he used—the kitchen and living room as well as his bedroom and bath and the basement—in reasonably good order. As for the rest of the house? He shut the doors and left it alone.
In public Dr. Lawrence Stryker was often described as a man of action. Here, in the privacy of his own home—alone except for the presence of whatever girl awaited his attentions in the basement—he sometimes allowed himself to wallow in the past and to wonder what would have happened if he had never ventured down this path.
He never knew—Gayle never told him and he never asked—just how she had managed to entice Roseanne Orozco away from the hospital that Wednesday afternoon. It was clear Gayle had done so without being seen and without arousing any suspicion. Their carefully concocted alibis for the night Roseanne Orozco died proved to be unnecessary. No one from Law and Order or the Pima County Sheriff’s Department ever bothered asking either one of them about where they’d been or what they’d done.
What never failed to amaze Larry was how everything that had happened—the way his entire life had evolved—had grown out of a single misstep, one that had seemed entirely inconsequential at the time. He and the other young doctors on the reservation had regarded it as little more than a boyish prank, a well-deserved bonus for working at a dinky reservation hospital in the middle of Arizona’s godforsaken desert. All of them had been in on it together, the same way they all drank beer and played poker together—card poker, that is. This had been “poker” of another kind.
Whenever one of the girls from the high school—especially one of the good-looking ones—showed up as a patient in the hospital, whoever was in charge of her care would let the others know that the game was on. During evening rounds, the girl’s attending physician would administer a high dosage of a sedative—enough to put her under. Later on, one by one, the doctors would drop by her room and have a crack at her. To them it seemed like good clean fun.
The girl would wake up the next morning or after her surgery or procedure and go home none the wiser and no harm done. At least that was the way it was supposed to work—the way it had worked—for years.
AIDS wasn’t even a blip on the radar back then (Gayle’s brother, Winston, hadn’t died of AIDS until sometime during the mid-eighties), but Larry and the others had all, by mutual agreement, used condoms. They did it as much to protect themselves from whatever STDs the girls might be carrying as they did to protect the girls. But then came the night when Larry’s condom broke as he was screwing one of his own patients, a girl named Roseanne Orozco, who was due to be released the next day after being hospitalized for a ruptured appendix.
Larry felt the condom break the moment it happened, but he told no one. At first he thought everything would be okay—that he’d get away with it. Several times in the next weeks and months, Emma Orozco brought Roseanne back to the clinic complaining that her daughter wasn’t getting any better.
Roseanne was a good-looking but strange fifteen-year-old, who, as far as anyone at the hospital knew, never spoke to anyone. Suspecting the worst, Larry finally admitted Roseanne to the hospital for a whole battery of tests. A pregnancy test was the only one that turned out positive.
He wondered sometimes what would have happened to him if he hadn’t told Gayle that very afternoon as soon as he knew Roseanne’s test results. What if Gayle hadn’t taken matters into her own hands? No doubt he would no longer have a license to practice medicine, and he certainly wouldn’t have spent the last twenty-five years as one of Tucson’s most well-respected citizens. The aftermath of Roseanne Orozco’s murder changed him forever—and it changed Gayle as well.
In the months that followed, Gayle evolved into an entirely different person. He had known she was smart and ambitious, but now it seemed some previously unknown toggle switch had been moved to the “on” position. She was at him all the time. Sex had never before been an issue between them. Now it was.
Gayle would be waiting for him in the evenings when he came home from rounds. “Did you fuck anybody tonight?” She’d ask the question pleasantly enough, the same way she once might have inquired after his day, but they both knew there was far more to it than that.
Larry always told her no. As it turned out, that was the truth. In actual fact, Roseanne Orozco had cured Larry Stryker of abusing patients, but Gayle wasn’t buying it.
“Show me,” she’d say. “You may be passing it out across the street, but you’d by God better have plenty left for me when you get home.”
She’d take him to bed then, expecting him to perform—demanding that he perform—but the more she wanted, the less Larry could deliver. Then, after he’d done what he could, she’d drift off to sleep, and he’d lie in bed for hours, wakeful and yet aroused, wondering what was happening to him and imagining that sooner or later someone would catch on and come looking for them.
He got rid of the Camaro almost right away, within days of Roseanne’s murder. Worried that some hotshot detective
might find lingering traces of blood on the floorboards and seats, Larry drained most of the oil out of the crankcase before taking off, at high speed, to drive into Tucson. Not unexpectedly, the engine overheated and caught fire just west of Three Points. The charred remains of the vehicle were hauled off to a junkyard, and the insurance company made good on Larry’s claim without so much as a raised eyebrow.
One day, Larry arranged to be in the hospital records room all by himself and he picked up Roseanne’s file. He got a rush out of carrying it from the room in front of God and everybody. The next time he and Gayle went to visit The Flying C, Roseanne Orozco’s complete medical history went into Calvin Madison’s burning barrel along with the rest of that day’s trash.
With those two sets of damning details out of the way, Larry expected things to get better, but as time passed, they grew steadily worse. Caught between alternating bouts of arousal and paralyzing fear, there were some scary moments when Larry thought he might lose his mind completely. By Easter break of the following year, Larry was convinced he was headed for a nervous breakdown. That was when Gayle decided they should go to Mexico for the weekend.
They flew to Mazatlán from Phoenix and checked into one of the nicest hotels on the beach. Gayle, who had learned fluent Spanish from the braceros and housemaids who had worked on The Flying C, told Larry she was going out shopping. Rather than accompany her, he chose to spend most of the day brooding in the bar—drinking tequila and chasing shots of Jose Cuervo with chilled bottles of Dos Equis. He was more than a little drunk when he finally returned to their room in the late afternoon.
Gayle, wearing only a terry-cloth wraparound, met him at the door. “I have a surprise for you,” she said, letting him into a room darkened by blackout curtains. “Come in and close your eyes.”
Larry did as he was told. After leading him into the middle of the room, Gayle left him standing there long enough to switch on a bedside lamp.
