She handed me two wafer-thin cards. High tech meets Bambi, I thought. I thanked her, then we drove over to our cabin. I perched myself on the picnic table while the others unpacked, turning slowly to take in the view. The place was as pretty as I’d remembered it. One time, when Roy and I began to realize things weren’t going too great in our marriage, we’d hired a baby-sitter and come up here to talk things over. I’d never forgotten the sheer beauty of the trip, even thouglrwe’d argued constantly.
Lori and Miranda would take the back bedroom, with Kip sleeping on an air mattress on the floor. Murray, White Deer, and I would share the other bedroom. I asked Randa and Lori to go fetch some wood. They raced off, giggling. It was good to see my daughter happy. Sometimes I worried that she’d never find a close friend.
While I put away the food, Murray went outside to set up the fire pit. White Deer and Kip finished carting in the last of the supplies.
“Mom, can we go exploring?” Randa asked after she and Lori brought in several armloads of wood. I excused them on the promise that they wear their whistles at all times and be careful if they meet any strangers.
“I want to go look at the stream! It’s right inside the woods over there.” Kip pointed to the edge of the woods encroaching on the open meadow.
We walked over toward Salmonbeny Creek. Wide and shallow at this point, it tumbled down from the glacier-clad
mountain, with narrow forks diverting off into the forest all along its route. Eventually, these forks wore down the soil, forming ravines throughout the woods. Even from ten yards away, I could hear the roar of the whitecaps.
“The glacial runoff is too high. It’s white-water season, and the current is rolling along at a pretty good clip. I don’t think you’d better go over there alone, you’d drown if you slipped and fell in.”
“I’ll go with him,” White Deer volunteered.
I laughed. “Hey, if you want to go frog hunting with Kip, be my guest.” They took off, leaving Murray and me alone. We walked back to our cabin in silence, letting the cool mountain air play over us. I inhaled deeply to flush out the stress of the last few days.
“I’m going to start dinner,” I said. Murray followed me, and while I got out the ingredients for mac ‘n cheese, she lit a fire in the woodstove. The gas heat would make a nice backup, but there was nothing like the smell of woodsmoke to whet the appetite. We worked in silence, listening to the birdsong echo through the meadow as they winged their way home to their nests for the night.
Murray stretched out in the rocking chair that sat by the bay window overlooking the back of the meadow. “I’m so glad I came,” she said.
I poured noodles into the boiling water and began slicing tomatoes for the salad. “It’s good, isn’t it?” And it was. I sat down at the table and yawned, rolling my neck first to the left, then to the right. I eased into a full stretch. “Oh, yeah, I needed this.”
Murray tried to smile but her facade quickly dissolved. “I’ve been so stressed out the past month that I never sleep anymore, and I haven’t had any time to give to Sid and Nancy.” Sid, a red-tailed boa, was always overanxious to make friends, and Nancy, a toothy gnarly green tree boa, delighted in climbing onto wall fixtures and leaning out to flick her tongue at unsuspecting guests. Murray doted on her reptilian babies and didn’t understand why some of her visitors cautiously sidestepped the constrictors.
“You really hate the new job, don’t you?” I opened my purse and pulled out a Hershey’s Krackle bar. I snapped it in two and tossed her half. “Here.” I firmly subscribed to the idea that chocolate was a wonder drug whose benefits had been long overlooked by the AMA.
She put the candy in.her mouth and sucked on it a moment. Then she shrugged. “What can I say? There’s no going back. I don’t want to sell my house and move away, so I have to learn to accept it.”
Sometimes her fatalism got to me, but usually, I kept my mouth shut. That primal acceptance of what befell her was an essential part of Murray. Today, however, I was in one of my stubborn moods. “I know you like to go with the flow, but it seems to me that the current’s heading directly for the sewer with you in tow. How can you let Coughlan get away with the bull he’s pulling?”
She tried to explain. “Don’t you see? If I complain, I’ll be labelled a snitch, and nobody will ever trust me again. This isn’t a high-powered division in the city where bad PR will pose a threat to their image. We’re talking about the Chiqetaw police station.”
I shook my head. “So, if they came out and said, ‘Murray, we don’t want you here because you’re Indian’ or ‘because you’re a woman,’ you’d accept it and go peacefully? Don’t ask me to buy that—”
“This is different, Em. I can’t explain. It… it’s just different. If I do my job and prove myself, Coughlan will eventually have to respect me.”
Different my ass, but I could see she didn’t want to talk about it. She was deliberately blinding herself from the truth, a trait Murray had never before exhibited as long as I’d known her. Something was going on, but I had enough
to handle with the problems piling up in my own life. I decided to back off. I stood up and dusted my hands on my jeans, then leaned out the door, my voice echoing as I called for everybody to hightail it back to the cabin for dinner.
White Deer and Kip trudged up from the creek; Kip’s sneakers and the cuffs of his jeans were soaked. I raised one eyebrow.
“Frog chasing,” White Deer said. “It wasn’t the creek; he ran through a little rivulet that feeds into the stream. Ankle deep at the highest.”
Kip grinned at me. “The whitecaps on the stream were pretty rough. I promised I wouldn’t go in, and I didn’t.”
“Honestly. You’d manage to get wet if the nearest mud puddle were a hundred miles away. Go change and hang those near the stove so they dry out.” How boys’ clothes always managed to find the quickest route from the closet to the hamper was beyond me, but Kip kept a never-ending stream of laundry flowing my way.
He grinned and raced off to the bathroom. A few minutes later, he handed me the wet jeans, and I draped them over a hanger and hooked it near the stove.
While the girls washed their hands, White Deer set the table. “Oh, that smells heavenly,” she said as I dished up dinner for the kids.
Lori wrinkled her nose as she slid into her place and grabbed her fork. “We don’t get to eat macaroni and cheese at home. Mom says it’s bur-gee-swa, but I like it. I always buy my lunch at school when they have spaghetti ‘n stuff like that.”
Bourgeois, huh? That told me just which rung on society’s ladder Lori’s parents had me pegged for. I poured her a glass of milk. “So, your parents are both lawyers?”
She nodded, a white ring forming around her lips from the milk. “Yeah, though Mom’s on leave on account of she had a nervous breakdown a year ago when she lost a big case and got fired from her firm. Dad was offered a partnership up here by some old college friend of his. We lived in Bellevue.” That explained a lot. Bellevue, land of the uber shoppers and high-tech millionaires. I bet anything they lived on Mercer Island, where the water ran brown and the blood ran blue.
“Well, I hope you enjoy the weekend,” I said. She gave me a thumbs-up and dug into her food. After dinner was over and the dishes put away, Miranda asked if we could bundle up and go stargazing. We gathered up graham crackers, marshmallows, chocolate bars, blankets, and her telescope, and headed outside where the night sky had deepened into a brilliant indigo, and stars twinkled overhead like icicles on a Christmas tree. We gathered around the stone-ringed pit as Murray and White Deer set a fire to crackling.
After watching the flames for a while, I put myself in charge of the assembly line of graham crackers and chocolate bars. S’mores. Yum. White Deer had brought one of those old-fashioned cast-iron popcorn poppers, and she shook it over the fire, waiting for the kernels to explode into white cotton. Twenty minutes later, covered with melted chocolate, strings of marshmallow, graham cracker crumbs,
and salt from the popcorn, we looked like we’d just finished looting Wonka-Land. We’re just a gang of rogue Oompa Loompas, I thought, passing out the Wet-Wipes.
Randa and Lori headed out into the middle of the meadow, telescope in hand. Deciding to brave the chill, the rest of us followed, oohing and aahing over the vista of sky that unfolded over our heads. We took turns with the scope as the girls pointed out constellations and planets until we were all thoroughly chilled and our heads were spinning with visions of stars.
On our way back to camp, Kip froze, pointing out two deer standing silent on the other side of the lea. Randa worked her hand into mine and leaned against me, resting her head on my arm. Lori nudged her way closer to me on the other side, and I reached out to encircle her shoulders with my free arm. She relaxed when she felt my arm, and I could sense her mingled fear and wonder as she watched the hinds. Murray and White Deer knelt near the rocks. Kip followed suit.
The deer were vigilant but unafraid, and they continued their feed until, satiated, they picked their way across the lea and vanished into the forest. As I watched them go, I had a sudden, swift longing, wishing that they would stay, that we could stay and leave everything behind. When the deer were out of sight, White Deer laughed. Her voice tinkled through the night air. “On that note, it’s time to douse the fire and go inside.”
Kip yawned and slipped into his sleeping bag without any prompting. Lori and Randa followed suit, climbing into bed without a murmur of complaint. I left a night-light burning so they could find their way to the bathroom and opened their door just a crack so we could hear them if something happened during the night.
We turned off the lights so that only the crackling flames from the woodstove lit the cabin. White Deer and I curled up on the sofa. Murray stood at the window, staring out into the night. She squinted, then said, “I see two bats.”
White Deer gave her a long look. “You know what that means. Renewal through rebirth. The choice of transformation.” Murray tried to shush her, but White Deer brushed her off. “You hate your new job; you’re not being treated fairly, yet you refuse to do anything about it.”
“I am doing something—my job!” Murray turned away from the window. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said abruptly. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
After she left the room, I leaned over and said in a low voice, “She’s stubborn.”
White Deer grinned. “She’s always been stubborn. So is Lila, her mother. Murray could be her twin. That’s why they don’t get along very well. They lived with me, you know, when Murray was a little girl. I’ve never seen such a willful child.”
She gave me a long look; her eyes reflecting the glow of the flames. My psychic radar jumped. I had long known that White Deer possessed strong medicine; her totem was the lynx, the bearer of secrets. For as little as she spoke, she was an excellent teacher. Now that we were out in the mountains, her strength and power illuminated her like a beacon.
“Yeah, she told me. She said you put them up for several years, including Harvey.” An alcoholic, Murray’s brother was in jail more often than he was out of it. Harv wasn’t a violent man, just lost.
As if reading my mind, White Deer said, “I think she tries so hard because of her brother. He’s the black sheep of the family, you know. Lila and Charley were disappointed by the way he turned out, and Murray does her best to make up for his mistakes. The sad thing is, she doesn’t have to. She chooses to accept a burden that they never placed on her shoulders. Lila and Charley love her for herself, and they love Harvey, too, even though he’s always in trouble.”
“What are they up to now?” Every September, we drove over to the Quinault reservation for the Murray family fish fry, where Charley’s parents threw a party on the reservation that lasted three days. All their children came home for the annual event, along with everybody they considered part of their extended family. Lila and Charley always included us in their invitation, and we stayed on their ranch, making our camp in the loft in the barn.
White Deer shook her head. “Charley and Lila opened a small store. Souvenirs and stuff, you know—tourist crap, fry bread, a few groceries. They make enough to get by. I help out when I can.”
The bathroom door opened, and we changed the subject as Murray returned. I felt a vague sense of guilt, as if we’d been talking behind her back, even though we really hadn’t. As the ink-stained night engulfed the wilderness, a brilliant flare streaked by, arcing across the heavens.
“A shooting star! Make a wish.” Murray put her arm around my shoulder as we stood side by side at the window; watching.
A wish … I closed my eyes tight and wished that things would sort themselves out… for me, for Murray … for everybody I knew and loved.
THE NEXT MORNING, we awoke to birdsong and the glimmerings of a clear morning. Murray volunteered to make blueberry hotcakes while White Deer commandeered Kip and the girls for an early-morning hike and then a plunge into the hot tub. I glanced at my watch. Eight-thirty.
“Murray, in your opinion—your gut feeling, not your official position as a detective—do you really think Jimbo attacked the Roberts woman?”
She stirred the batter, pouring in a dollop of vanilla and a scoop of blueberries. “I don’t know, Em. As I said, he’s been in and out of trouble since he was fifteen, but the truth is that Jimbo hasn’t ever attacked a woman. For all of his charges, rape or attempted rape never entered into them, and he’s never been charged with battery of any kind against a woman. Every man he’s been in a brawl with was just as mean as he was.”
“If they catch him, can the judge just let him go free?”
She shrugged. “Depends on whether he can make bail. Anyway, the issue is moot if the department can’t catch him.” She poured batter in the pan and adjusted the flame. “Do I think Jimbo attacked Norma? Honestly, I don’t know.
I just wish we could find him. The fact that he’s running doesn’t look good. Why do you think I made sure I left work on time yesterday? I wasn’t about to let you come up here alone.”
Grateful, I gave her a quick squeeze around the shoulders. “So, where does that leave me? I’ve got a security system at the store, but I feel weird getting one for the house. We didn’t move to Chiqetaw just to become prisoners in our own home.” As the heady aroma of hotcakes filled the room, I arranged the bacon on a square griddle pan and slid it on the back burner. Then I set the table with butter and syrup.
Murray cleared her throat. “Look, I know you don’t like it, but your first concern should be the safety of your family. If you get a security system that just ties into the doors and windows, then you won’t have to worry about Kip setting it off when he gets up to go to the bathroom.”
“Yeah, but won’t the kids have to remember the alarm every time they run in and out? And what about Miranda and her star watching on the roof? She comes and goes through her window. Eventually somebody’s going to forget.”
“There are ways around that; security systems are a lot more flexible than they used to be. The question should be: Do you trust Jimbo enough to think that he won’t hurt you or the kids?”
I lowered myself into a chair by the table. “That was hitting below the belt, but you’re right. I guess for safety’s sake, I’d better call Safety-Tech when we get home.”
“I know how much you hate the idea, but honestly, it’s going to be a lot safer for you.” The bacon sputtered as she slid another pancake onto the warming plate. We heard voices. White Deer and the kids were back. Breakfast time.
At one-thirty p.m., I left the kids with White Deer and Murray and drove into Glacier. Mary Sanders’s house wasn’t hard to find, and as I pulled into the driveway, I saw her peeking out the window. She must have been waiting for me.
Mary wasn’t anything like I’d expected her to be. Harlow’s artsy friends were usually polished and honed to a sharp edge. More often than not, they would greet me with a polite murmur, then totally ignore me the rest of the night. Mary San
ders was rounded, apple-cheeked, wearing a dress and apron that would have been a hit back in the fifties with the suburban-mom crowd.
“Come in, please, make yourself at home.” She steered me to the kitchen table, where a teapot and two teacups rested. “I thought you might like a cup of tea. Harlow says you own the Chintz ‘n China Tea Room, and I thought, Why, Mary, I think that’s where Edward said he got the tea set that he gave you for Christmas, so I asked him, and sure enough, he bought it at your shop last December.”
Her words fluttered around my head like a bevy of birds. When I finally realized she’d stopped talking, I graciously accepted her offer. “Thank you for seeing me today. Harlow said you might be able to figure out a puzzle I’ve gotten myself into.”
She poured our tea and settled herself at the table. “Harlow said you were searching for information on a statue?”
I pulled out the bubble-wrapped package. “A figurine* really. Your specialty is the Ming dynasty?” My preconception of what Mary Sanders would be like ran smack up against the image of the woman sitting across the table from me.
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