“Freezing. I had no idea when I moved to Kanab the nights would be so cold.”
“Well,” said Rod. “It’s a desert. That’s kind of what happens at night. Hang on.” He got up and went into his tent.
Tara turned her attention to Maria. “So, how are you adjusting? Are you figuring out the way things work around here?”
“Not really.” Maria pushed her hands into the front pocket of her hoodie. Her baseball cap and UGG boots kept everything but her fingers warm. In survival training, she’d learned heat escapes through the head or feet. Keeping those two body parts covered allowed a person to withstand cold temperatures.
Tara wore flip-flops. She’d changed into them first thing after arriving at camp, possibly to show off her new bling pedicure.
“I haven’t done much but investigate the mayor’s murder.” Maria watched Tara shake from the cold. She was about to suggest she should put her shoes back on, but she then decided Tara was not the kind of person who took advice very well.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” said Tara. Out of the corner of her eye, the woman watched every movement Rod made by his tent. “Listen, I’d be happy to introduce you to some people who are more your type. You know, people you’d like to hang with.”
Maria laughed. “And what type is that?”
“Oh, you know,” explained Tara, “earthy.” The way Tara’s lips puckered when she said the word made it clear she didn’t consider it a compliment.
Earthy? There were worse things to be called, but Maria had never thought of herself as a tree hugger, more just a naturalist. Typically she liked things the way they were. She ate vegetables without ranch dressing, drank water without a flavor packet, and if a spider wasn’t bothering her, she didn’t bother it either.
Rod returned holding a thin blanket. “Look what I’ve got.”
Instead of covering the two of them with the blanket, Rod surprised Maria by simply handing it to Tara. “Wrap yourself up like you’re in a cocoon.”
Tara’s fallen expression said it all. She only wanted to be wrapped up like in a cocoon if Rod was wrapped up with her. But Rod sat back down on the log they were using as chairs at least a foot away from her.
Tara’s eyes studied the best way to get closer to Rod. She huddled under the blanket and attempted to inch her way toward Rod just like a caterpillar would. Seriously, the woman had no shame.
At last, Tara was close enough to Rod to lean her head on his shoulder and sigh.
Rod cleared his throat and asked, “So, Maria, what did you do in the CIA?”
Maria’s hands fidgeted inside the pocket of her hoodie. “Not much. Mostly office work.”
“Sherrie Mercer said you were a communications analyst.” Rod swiveled his torso to the left so he could see Maria better. The motion dislodged Tara from his shoulder. She made a squawking noise and about fell over sideways. “What does being a communications analyst entail exactly?”
“Basically, I analyzed … communications.”
“I figured out that much by myself.” Rod snorted. “What kind of communications? Like did you crack enemy codes or take care of the agency’s cell phone bill?”
Tara was trying to make her way back into Rod’s personal space again.
“Neither.” Maria laughed. “I looked at the number and types of cyber messages coming out of various foreign countries, taking their ‘temperature,’ so to speak, about different political issues and ideologies.”
Tara purposefully yawned. “Wow. That sounds so lonely. I studied public relations because I do so much better with people. I could never sit in front of a computer all day long. I’m definitely a people person.” With that, she moved too quickly in Rod’s direction, and her entire body slid off the back of the log. She screamed.
Sheepishly Rod looked at Maria, who tried to contain an unruly smile from spreading across her face.
Rod shocked Maria by smiling back—not in his I’m-the-sexy-lawyer sort of way. But instead, his lopsided grin—the kind he shared with his brother Grant—emerged. And it was … adorable.
Just look at his nose, Maria scolded herself.
Rod turned and held out his hand to Tara, whose feet flailed back and forth in the air. “Grab on. I’ll pull you up.”
Once in sitting position, Tara could not stop shaking. Her teeth chattered in rhythm. “Hon-honestly, R-rod,” she managed to get out. “Y-you n-need to h-hold s-still. Y-you b-bumped m-me off.”
Rod unzipped his jacket and handed it to her. “Here, you’d better use this.” He took the blanket and wrapped his upper body tightly in it, crossing his covered arms in front to keep everything in place.
Tara squealed and put the jacket on. “Oh, th-this f-feels so much b-better. You’re a sweetie.”
Rod threw another log on the fire while Maria stirred it with a long stick. Tara glued herself to Rod’s side. The three of them watched the flames dance mesmerizingly up into the night air, warming them more.
“I love Kanab,” said Maria suddenly. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. It was a thought that had become verbal all on its own.
“You’ve only been here two weeks,” huffed Tara. “How can you already love it?”
Rod answered Tara’s question. “Maria lived her when she was younger.” He threw a piece of tree bark into the flames.
“How did you know that?” Maria asked, eyebrows raised.
“I grew up in Kanab. I’m a year older than you, but I remember when you came to visit Beth Hill for a month when she was in ninth grade. You went to the first month of school with us. I was a sophomore.”
“You remember me?” Maria was shocked. Her time in Kanab had consisted mostly of her and Beth being glued at the hip. She hadn’t hung out with many of the other kids as she’d gotten older.
“I do.” Rod chuckled. “You probably don’t remember me. I was the skinny kid who played chess and wrote bad poetry. I didn’t hit puberty until after high school. I grew four and a half inches my freshman year in college. My legs hurt all the time.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Tara.
Maria had a hard time imagining the man sitting across from her—with his broad shoulders, defined forearms, firm jawline, and strong hands—as a nerd in high school. The most refreshing part was that he readily admitted it.
Tara didn’t think so. “You shouldn’t tell people that. It’s more advantageous to let others always think the best of you. I’d never admit it if I had been a geek in high school.”
“If?” Rod smirked.
“I was not a nerd.” Tara stomped her practically frozen foot in its flimsy flip flop on the dirt. “Honestly, you are getting on my nerves tonight, Rod. For your information, I had tons of boyfriends.”
“How about you, Maria?” Rod asked. “Were you a heartbreaker in high school also?”
“Nope,” Maria answered. “I had one boyfriend in high school. He was a nice guy, but he wanted me to stay in Pittsburgh and go to the community college with him. I had too many other dreams. I couldn’t stay.”
Tara snickered. “And so you ended up in Kanab?”
Rod glared at Tara.
A sick feeling flooded Maria’s insides. What Tara said struck home. Yes, Maria’s dream had been to someday end up in this beautiful place, but first she’d wanted to travel the world. Make a name for herself in the CIA. Become fulfilled. All of that malarkey people feed kids these days.
But what was she? A dried up “has-been.” A broken piece of equipment the CIA had sent to the junkyard. Something not worth fixing.
Tara was right. Maria was a disappointment. To her parents. To herself. To the agents she worked with. But those were private thoughts, and she wasn’t going to let Tara get the best of her.
“As I said, I love Kanab.” Maria stood up slowly. “There’s no other place like it. It has a history all its own. If these canyon walls could talk, they would probably have quite a story to tell. But personally, I’m done chatting. I’ve got to go to bed. You two h
ave a good night.”
*
As usual, sleep didn’t come. Maria’s mind drifted everywhere but always ended up in Tehran. With her ghosts. Tonight her thoughts moved to the ghost she had seen in the cave. “The Aztec” as she now called him, after reading the scuba diver’s description of the ghost he saw in Three Lakes.
He had been different from the usual creations her traumatized mind formulated. He’d actually touched her, and she’d felt it. He’d felt real, which of course was stupid. Maria was completely cognizant that her ghosts weren’t corporeal. She feared them not because they could hurt her physically, but because of what their presence meant—that her sanity was still in question.
The thought of her wrapped in an orange afghan, drool dripping from the corner of her mouth, moving back and forth in an old rickety rocking chair on the front porch of a rundown insane asylum haunted her. That would mean one thing—utter failure. Her life would be over.
Another hour in the stuffy tent was all Maria could take. Taking her sleeping bag with her, she unzipped her tent and quietly moved about camp. She thought about putting a log on the fire to get it going again, but she worried the smell of smoke might wake someone else.
Instead, she huddled close to the fire pit, stealing from it any residual warmth she could and staring at the desert moths as they attacked the beams of light coming from the one electric lantern that was still on. She wouldn’t admit it to Rod or Tara, but nights in Kanab were colder than she remembered too. She wrapped her sleeping bag around her and wondered how long it would be until the sun rose over the mountains. It was something she’d been looking forward to ever since deciding to spend the night out here. A sunrise held such hope.
As she sat, mesmerized by the flutter of moth wings, Maria’s eyelids started to droop and her body relaxed.
A noise to her left abruptly woke her. The zipper to Rod’s tent slowly opened.
This was annoying. Maria had hoped she wouldn’t have to play the part of chaperone tonight.
But only Rod came out of the tent. At first, he didn’t see Maria. He walked a few yards away from his tent, to a spot just outside the borders of “command central,” and started to fiddle with the zipper on his pants.
Whoa! The last thing Maria wanted was to have him take a leak and then turn to find she’d been watching him.
“There’s a makeshift port-a-potty over there.” Maria called out quickly.
Rod spun around, hand still holding onto the zipper pull of his pants. “What the …”
“It’s just me.” Maria waved awkwardly. The situation called for nothing less. “I just wanted you to know we set up a little station over that ways. To uhm … you know … go to the bathroom.”
“Oh.” Rod breathed heavily. She’d obviously scared the pants off him. Or on him. It all depended on how you looked at it.
“Thanks. I’ll just go a little further … uh … this way.”
Rod took a flashlight out of his jacket pocket and flipped it on. He walked south, past a grouping of juniper trees, and out of sight of command central.
Besides the steady chirping of crickets, the night was absolutely quiet.
Talk about stage fright.
Just to be nice, Maria started singing a song she’d learned from her grandfather. The one about loving the mountains and rolling hills. As a child, she adored singing it as a round with both of her grandparents.
A minute later, Rod appeared from behind the juniper trees. Right on beat, he began singing the second part of the song with her. “Boom-di-ada, boom-di-ada, boom-di-ada, boom-di-ay.”
Maria faltered a moment from surprise and then began the second verse. Rod sang with her, making the tune into a round, as he searched the supplies for a bottle of hand sanitizer, which he found and used abundantly.
Now that, thought Maria, is attractive. Nose aside, a man who practiced personal hygiene ranked high on her list.
After the second verse ended, Maria stopped. She’d never learned the third.
Rod walked closer to her. “Can’t sleep?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she answered. “Sleep is way overrated.”
Rod grunted and sat down not too close but not too far from her either.
Good, Maria commented to herself, he knows his place.
Rod turned off his flashlight, and the two sat in the peaceful quiet for several minutes. Maria felt no great need to talk, nor, evidently, did Rod.
The darkness frosted them like icing on a cake. It covered all of their imperfections, lopsidedness, and bumpy ridges. In the dark, Maria felt more at ease. Less like she had to prove herself. Keep up a happy face. Act normal.
Rod rustled about for a minute, pulling something from his backpack he’d left by the fire earlier. “Can you turn off that electric lantern for a minute,” he asked.
It was a weird request, thought Maria, but she did it anyway.
Rod turned on the small device he’d retrieved and a straight, incredibly long green beam of light shot into the night sky.
“You brought a green laser?” Maria asked, slightly incredulous.
“Yes,” answered Rod. “It’s probably one of my favorite toys, if you don’t count my Star Wars action figures and collection cards.”
Maria laughed.
“I’m not kidding.” Rod’s face sported a wide grin.
“So what did you bring it here for?” Maria motioned to the object, which looked like a mini flashlight, in Rod’s hand.
“Besides for blinding people?” He whipped the beam across Maria’s eyes, and she immediately shielded herself with her arms.
“Watch it,” she ordered, in her most police-like voice.
Rod laughed. “I like looking at constellations with it.”
“So you’re an astronomy geek in addition to being a chess geek?” She gently elbowed him and noticed there wasn’t much in the form of flab anywhere on his torso.
“I’m an everything geek.” Rod flipped the green laser up into the sky again and began outlining the borders of the big dipper. “I love anything sci-fi. Star Wars, Battle Star Galactica, you name it. You know something is not quite right with a man when his all-time favorite character was played by Sigourney Weaver in the movie Alien.”
“I think my older brothers liked that movie.”
“Hey, watch it,” he said, pretending like he was going to shoot her with his green laser. “I’m armed and dangerous.”
“Bossy, maybe. But not dangerous.” Maria laughed.
Rod sat up, acting like his dignity had been hurt. “I’m really not bossy. I know you think I am, but that is where you are wrong, wrong, wrong.”
“Now that sounds like something an extremely humble guy would say.” Maria giggled. An actual giggle. Horrified, she turned her head and acted like something was stuck in her throat. “Excuse me.”
Rod eyed her.
Keep it casual, Maria told herself. “All right, astronomy geek, show me a few of your favorite constellations. I know some, but it sounds like your stargazing expertise surpasses my talents by far.”
As excited as a nerd at a Star Trek convention, Rod pointed out constellation after constellation. Some were Greek, some Egyptian, and others were modern, as recent as the 1900s. The green laser was perfect for pointing out which stars she should look at. It was like the sky opened up into a large mosaic of art.
Once again, Maria was reminded her problems were just a small part of the universe. There was more to life than she could imagine. Right now was just a speck of who she was as a whole. Life contained possibilities. And maybe, just maybe, there was even a future with possibilities for her.
A life after Tehran.
As the two of them had been looking at constellations, their positions had changed. It was hard for Maria not to notice the fact that her back was pressed up against his warm chest, and she could feel his steady breathing, in and out.
“I’ve got to say,” she whispered, looking up into the night, “this is cool. Have you al
ways loved looking at stars?”
“You have to, growing up in Kanab. I’m mean, the sky is incredible here. No city lights. No pollution. When I was at Arizona State, going to law school, I formed an astronomy club. But the sky there couldn’t even compare.”
“So you did law at ASU?”
Rod cleared his throat, scooted back, and grabbed a stick next to the fire. As he stirred the coals, puffs of smoke escaped. A few embers sparked. “Uh, yeah.”
“Did you like it?”
“Most of it.” Rod moved further away from her.
Something was up. And Maria was determined to find out what made this attractive, geeky nerd of a Search and Rescue captain tick. “So what part didn’t you like?”
Rod coughed. “My clerkship. That pretty much sucked.”
Maria sat up a little straighter, listening.
Rod waited a second to continue. “My story is kind of … a mess, I guess you’d say. Most everyone knows it. I’m sure you’ll find out one way or another.”
Maria kept quiet. She couldn’t disagree. As police chief she probably would learn most secrets.
Rod poked at the fire a little more. “Right after I graduated I did a clerkship in a small Arizona town. I met a girl. Got married … really fast. I was twenty-seven, Dakota was twenty-six. It seemed like the right thing to do.”
The thought of Rod married twisted Maria’s insides. But, of course, he’d had to have been married at one point. Guys who look like him don’t stay single into their thirties, unless they’re players, which more and more Rod didn’t seem the type.
Rod picked up a medium-sized log and gently placed it on the smoking embers. He sighed. “We were married for a whopping three months before she left. And when I say left, I mean like completely left. I came home from working late one night and she wasn’t there. Instead, I found a note on the table saying goodbye. It was strange. I didn’t quite believe it until she didn’t come home the next day either. After two days, I reported her as missing to the police, so they opened an investigation and made me their chief suspect.”
Despite the wood that was slowly catching afire, the air chilled. Maria couldn’t have pegged Rod more incorrectly. She thought he’d been fed with a golden spoon his whole life, but it sounded more like a steak knife—a sharp point and painful edges. A failed marriage was no easy thing to swallow.
Robbed of Soul: Legends of Treasure Book 1 Page 8
