Deep Purple

by Parris Afton Bonds

  Elizabeth was the first to be called to the stand this morning. “Jessie Howard was a bastard child of my stepson's,” she said with a despairing shake of her head. “I did everything I could to give her some sort of a home. I even saw that she received an excellent education. But she was a wild sort of thing. I never knew which of our cowhands she might be . . .” Elizabeth paused and coughed discreetly.

  “We understand how difficult this is for you, Mrs. Godwin. That will be enough.”

  “Do you want to take the stand?” Jessie’s lawyer, John Pate, asked.

  What would be the use? She shook her head negatively. The prosecution was doing its work well.

  The prosecutor, a tall dignified gentleman with a kindly face and a shock of silver hair, next called Dan O'Rourke. For the first time Jessie was shaken. The dapper man had not changed, except perhaps he was even more slender. She marked his eyes, the distended pupils. He was caught up in the poppy's spell after all.

  “Yes," he acknowledged, “that is the woman who worked for me, except we knew her as the Primrose—Rose.”

  “Besides dealing the cards. Mr. O’Rourke, did this lady have any clientele—er—in the rooms above?”

  Every head jutted forward in anticipation. “I don’t promote that sort of—participation—in my establishment, sir.”

  “Of course, we realize that. There are two types of women, we all know. But usually a certain type of woman works in a gambling house.”

  Dan glanced at her, and she caught a flicker of concern before the lids drooped over the pupils. “What Rose—Miss Howard— did in her spare time I could not tell you.”

  “Miss Cashman is my next witness,” the prosecutor announced smoothly.

  Nellie Cashman made her way to the stand among the buzzing of the crowd. “We understand that Miss Howard roomed at the Russ House.”

  Nellie put her trumpet to her ear. “Eh?”

  “Was Miss Howard one of your roomers?” the prosecutor repeated, louder this time;

  “Yes, yes,” she answered, nearly shouting. “And a good one, too, always paid her rent on time."

  “Just answer the question, please, Miss Cashman. Did any men come to visit her.’’

  “For the pity’s sake, no! I don't allow such goings-on at the Russ House."

  “But you’ll admit there was something unusual about her?” the prosecutor prodded.

  The woman fidgeted. She looked at Jessie anxiously.

  "Yes?” the prosecutor demanded, leaning against the witness stand’s wooden railing, practically atop the nervous New England woman now.

  "Well, one of my boarders, old man Stevens, claimed he saw her making her way to Hop Town several times."

  Pate jumped to his feet. “I object, your honor. Old Hiram is as blind as a bat, and everyone knows it!"

  "Objection overruled!”

  "And you think Jessie Howard was involved in the opium dens there?” the prosecutor continued, like a hound dog hot on the scent.

  “Oh my, no, I wouldn't know anything about such goings-on!”

  “But you will agree, Miss Cashman, that Jessie Howard did act strangely whenever she would return to the Russ House—like she was in a daze, maybe?”

  “Well, yes, but she did have to keep late hours.”

  “And then she just disappeared, didn't she, Miss Cashman? Never returning for her clothing or to pay the back rent."

  "What's that you say?”

  "Witness dismissed. The prosecution rests its case.”

  The jury adjourned to an upstairs room to go into deliberation. The deputy had taken Jessie’s arm to lead her to a room on the other side when she saw the tall Oriental standing at the back of the courtroom. “Taro,” she whispered. For the first time in all the horror of the testimonies, tears came to her eyes.

  Taro threaded his way through the crowd. He said nothing but simply took her hand. Yet it was enough for her. Just his touch gave her the strength she needed. "I guess this is the karma you talked about,” she said, a slight smile curving her tremulous lips.

  His hand went up to cup the side of her face, but the deputy grabbed Taro’s shirt collar and began jerking, even though the two were of even height. “Listen here, you chink, you have no business in a white man’s court. This whore may mean something to you, but as far as—”

  The deputy’s words broke off as Taro’s hand neatly clipped him on the neck. The man slumped to the floor at Jessie’s feet. Pandemonium seemed to break out. Men roughly hauled Taro out the double front door. Jessie screamed, afraid they would kill him, but she was quickly ushered into the small anteroom.

  She hurried to the one window, hoping she could see Taro, but the window opened onto the courtyard . . . and a chilling view of the hangman’s gallows with its thirteen steps.

  Mr. Pate walked in, and she ran to him. “What will happen to Taro?” she demanded.

  “The Chinaman?”

  “He’s Japanese.”

  He shrugged. “They all look the same. Marshal Slaughter is putting him behind bars for the night—for the man’s own safety. He'll be turned loose before dawn,” he reassured her. “Did you meet him in Hop Town?”

  She went back to stand at the window. “I guess you might say that. He saved my life there."

  The deliberation took less than an hour—which lent her little hope. Obviously every member of the male jury, with their wives sitting in the audience, was already decided against her. She looked at each of the solemn twelve faces as they led her back into the courtroom. One by one, as she filed past them, they turned their gazes away from her.

  “The foreman will render the verdict," the judge said.

  She held her breath, feeling that when it did come, she would shatter.

  The beanpole of a man rose. "We find the defendant . . . guilty."

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  PART III

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  CHAPTER 42

  1928

  Amanda Shima was drawn to her enemy from that very first meeting, there in the time-eroded foothills, the bajadas of the Huachuca Mountains. She was only a child at the time of that meeting, perhaps ten or eleven. But sometimes at that age things stand out more clearly in the memory than at any other time in one’s life.

  And the memory of Nick Godwin was etched in her mind forever, as indelible as the Indian hieroglyphics on the rocky walls of Arizona’s Casa Grande.

  Thinking back over her childhood, she supposed that it was inevitable she would meet Nick, for she often wandered the boundaries of Cristo Rey. She was a loner, preferring her own company to that of the snobbish families of the soldiers stationed at Fort Huachuca. But then, she was different. Everything about her was different.

  For one thing, unlike the other children at the military post, she had no mother. Her mother had died soon after her birth. The post doctor said that at fifty-one her mother had been too old to bear a change-of-life child. But Amanda thought it was more than age. It was the many years, six to be exact, that her mother had spent in the Yuma Territorial Prison.

  A shocking fact, for only one other woman, Pearl Hart, had ever been sent to that infamous jail. Fortunately, it was so long ago that not too many people ever recalled the sentencing of Jessie Howard for highway robbery.

  Amanda sometimes thought that after her mother was paroled she must have welcomed the isolation of Taro Shima’s cabin in the Mule Mountains and the refuge his love offered her. And that brought about another reason Amanda was different.

  Her father was Japanese.

  She could remember his telling her one night as he prepared dinner at their post quarters how he and her mother journeyed into Tombstone to get married. “The justice of the peace refused to perform the ceremony, Amanda, because it was against the Arizona state law for a Caucasian to marry an Oriental.”

  Taro smiled then, and Amanda thought how handsome, how gigantic, her father was. “But your mother’s adamant statement that she was Mexican, which was only partially true, and there
fore not fully under the Anglo jurisdiction, finally persuaded the old man, and the ceremony was performed.”

  When the Lotus Land Mine eventually played out and there was no money left to support Taro and his wife, he was forced to sell the Lotus Land and seek employment. The Tombstone mines had flooded, but the mines at Bisbee, twenty-five miles to the south, were bursting with untapped copper. Yet Amanda thought her father realized that her mother would never be happy in the hustle-bustle of a booming mining town.

  Instead he accepted the job at the Fort Huachuca military post as cook, which Amanda sensed must have been demoralizing to such an independent person as he. It was at the post she was born. Her father, whom she came to realize possessed unsuspected depths of humor and who was himself born in the Year of the Tiger in the fourth moon, claimed Amanda was born in the Year of the Villa Raids, 1917.

  However, it was not the stories of Pancho Villa's raid on the Arizona border, twenty miles southward, that occupied Amanda’s inquisitive mind. It was the stories of the Ghost Lady. Of course, all the children at the fort had heard the tales of the woman who rode horseback over Cristo Rey, whose borders were only some miles distant from the fort.

  But Amanda had more than a vague interest invested in the Ghost Lady. From the time she had been old enough to ask questions, her father had explained patiently about her mother, her past, and her heritage. He spoke quite candidly, without bitterness, but she suspected her mother had to have been bitter. The legendary Cristo Rey had been Jessie’s, and she had been cheated of it by the Godwin family.

  Oh, Taro Shima never stated the fact as such. Nevertheless, some uncanny instinct told Amanda otherwise. Though she had never actually seen the Stronghold, she had seen photos of it in an article Arizona Highways had done on the famous villas of the state. She had found the thumbed-through magazine in the post’s stables trash barrel, and as she leafed through it the words “Cristo Rey’s Stronghold” had jumped out at her.

  She would hardly have called the mansion in the photo a villa. But it certainly was imposing—a majestic combination of territorial adobe and Gothic castle. The castle, the magazine said, was added during the early years of the twentieth century, copied after the robber barons’ baronial mansions at Bar Harbor and Newport.

  Falling in love with it at once, she tacked the magazine’s photo above her bunk. And from that day on the image of the Stronghold danced through her dreams at night—taunting and teasing her with its Babylon-like gardens inside the compound, the wide marble staircase that both blended with and complemented the older heavy-beamed ceilings and ornate wrought-iron grillwork, and the tasteful and elegant furniture and accessories.

  From that one impregnable, fortified adobe had risen, growing bigger and more beautiful over the years, that vital and magnificent work of architecture which became an obsession with Amanda. She could even more now understand her mother’s loss. And as her mother had sought her revenge, she knew she also would one day, though she did not know how. But she did know that her vengeance would be more clever, more subtle.

  How arrogant, how presumptuous are the young! In those early years of formation she had not met her adversary. Not until her tenth summer did she chance upon Nick. At that time she had wangled the privilege of riding some of the older cavalry mounts by working in the stables in the heat of the afternoon after school let out.

  She figured she must have had some of her grandmother’s, the Ghost Lady’s, love for riding, for it was only when she was astride a horse, galloping across the grassy rangeland or boulder-sheltered canyons, that she felt really free . . . free of her past and free of the taunt of her peers.

  That particular sun-baked August afternoon she left the gray two-story earthen barracks behind her and struck out for the sycamore-shaded canyon that emptied via a sagging section of barbed-wire fence into the rich Cristo Rey lands.

  Once inside its borders, she came alive. She tossed back the straw hat so that it flopped against her narrow shoulder blades, held by the rawhide ties, and let her hair—long and as black and tangled as the mane of the bay she rode—blow free. She would have quite readily shed her overalls and khaki shirt and ridden buck naked but for the fear of being sighted by some of the post scouts.

  The scouts still patrolled the border, more to intercept the Mexicans and Chinese who continued to flow across the international boundary than to guard against Apache attacks. The last one Amanda recalled had been some three years before in ’24.

  It was fortunate that on that day she did not strip down, for she didn't see the Ghost Lady she’d feared and hoped to encounter but a boy not much older than herself. When she spotted the horse dancing in the shadowy grove of Joshua trees her mind shouted, for just a fleeting second. It’s the Ghost Lady! She really does exist!

  So great was her disappointment when the magnificent steed cantered out of the grove and she recognized the rider as a mere boy that if a glare could kill, the boy would have been roasted. "That’s a dumb stunt!" she reproached in her best imitation of a sergeant's dress-down. "You could have spooked my horse!"

  Whatever quelling effects her haughty manner had on the post children, it did not produce the same result with the boy, who looked to be thirteen or fourteen. He boldly edged his larger horse near hers and looked down at her with such careless insolence that the urge to hop him like a cat on a June bug was overpowering.

  Those cool blue eyes raked over her, and his mouth, damn that mouth—it actually curved in amusement. "That’s a pretty dumb stunt—riding a nag like that in this kind of country.”

  "Nag! And just who do you think you are, the landowner or something, to tell me where I should ride and shouldn't?”

  "More or less,” he replied indifferently, leaning forward, his palms on the cantle supporting his bulk.

  "More or less what?” she asked, not having actually anticipated a direct answer.

  "More or less the owner. You know, for a girl, you sure aren’t much, are you?”

  Coming from a boy, she thought it most likely a compliment. But she was too stunned at that moment to give the statement much consideration. She had to be facing her archenemy, someone she had never expected to encounter face to face. “You a Godwin?” she asked cautiously.

  “Nick Godwin. And you?”

  “Amanda Shima,” she replied, knowing the name would mean nothing to him. Would it have had significance to him if she replied, “Amanda Davalos Shima”? She wasn’t to know, for at that moment another horseman rode into view.

  “My stepbrother, Paul,” Nick said, noting the direction of her gaze.

  Curious if this was the man who controlled Cristo Rey, she studied the rider as he loped his mount toward the two of them. When he was near enough she could see he was an old man, maybe thirty-five or forty she judged from her limited experience in such matters. He had none of Nick’s black arrogance; yet there were the classic patrician looks about his face—a slim face with dark hair already gray at the temples. He bestowed a somewhat vague smile on her. “Lost, little one?”

  “Hardly,” she retorted. “Since this is my land we’re on!”

  Brows shot up in both of the brothers’ faces, and they flashed each other questioning looks—about her sanity, she was sure. But she did not wait to explain. Instead, she whirled the bay about and heeled her into a gallop (as much as the horse’s bony body would take) back toward the post.

  Thereafter she saw Nick Godwin several times, and each time was as charged with current as a live electrical wire. Sometimes she thought it was as if the two of them were expecting to chance upon one another, though their meetings were certainly irregular and covered a span of two or three years.

  One spring—she had to have been going on twelve—she happened upon him as he dismounted to water his horse at Canelo Springs. He acknowledged her with an indifferent nod of his head. Chagrined, she said with acid sweetness, “Mind if I water my horse on your property, Nicholas?”

  He removed the dust-stained hat and
knelt to dip it in the stagnant water. “Name's not Nicholas,” he said, swashing the water about in its crown. “It's Dominic—for Dominica Davalos.”

  Rage exploded through her. Before she realized what she was doing, she leaped from her bay onto Nick’s back. Unaware of his peril, his head was bent to drink from the hat. The two floundered in the water. She pummeled his face and chest. Her cheeks streamed with water that had nothing to do with the springs in which they sloshed.

  “Whoa, you little jackass!” Nick yelled out, finally gaining control of her flailing fists. With a deft roll he came up on top, straddling her small, slender body. “What’s got you so fired up?”

  Her eyes, their mint-green color a legacy of her grandmother's, narrowed to slits. “Get off me, you—you—" No words would come that seemed vile enough. But it did not matter, for Nick’s attention had left her face to slide down to the burgeoning rosebuds that thrust imperiously against her wet, clinging shirt. She felt the sudden tightening of his thighs about her boyishly slim hips and saw the blue eyes cloud over like a violent summer storm.

  His dark gaze swung up to meet her puzzled one. “You could get yourself in a lot of trouble,” he said, his voice sounding a timbre deeper to her, “riding alone like this and—everything.”

  “I can handle myself!" she began, then clamped her lips together as she realized she was in the weaker position. “Well, I can if I don’t let my anger get the best of me.”

  “That wasn’t exactly what I was getting at.” he said dryly and rolled from her to stand above her in one fluid movement. He retrieved his hat and swatted it against his thigh, beating out the water.

  Looking up into his face, she thought how strong the features were—so unlike the baby-roundness of the boys she knew at the post. But then he was somewhat older; maybe that accounted for the squared-off jaw and arrogant jutting nose. Only the shaggy brown hair that fell across his forehead lent a boyish cast to the promise of the coming virile features.