Forcing Amaryllis

by Louise Ure

  I had to get behind him. I twisted left and right, then bucked him off like a wild horse. The knife clattered onto the rocks below. He was only inches away and still facedown.

  I gripped the sharp-edged shale between my bound hands and looped my arms over his head. The stone was not big enough to be a real weapon, but held by two manacled hands, it might become a blade. I clung to him and sawed back and forth at his throat. I retched with the dark, salty smell of blood that cascaded over my hands but held on with all my strength.

  Now it was his turn to buck against a deadly restraint. He clawed at my hands and twisted like a speared snake, but I held on. Then I pulled back as far as I could, pulled my knees up against my chest, and pushed.

  His body swung backwards over the cliff face, but my manacled hands around his neck kept him from falling the whole way. To a bystander I would have looked like his savior, like a mother clinging to a falling child.

  He gasped and scrabbled behind him, trying to find purchase on the top of the rocky ledge. A dark shadow of blood now coated the front of his shirt.

  He pulled me closer to the edge. I inched forward to take the weight of his body off my wrists, then craned my head as near to my hands as I could reach. My bloody elbows scraped across the rocks. One inch. One more inch. Salsipuedes’s head, circled by my arms, was as close as a lover’s. I bit hard into the cloth handcuffs and gnawed, chewed, and pulled. I ripped my head to the left and heard the cloth tear free.

  Salsipuedes’s body hit three of the five jagged shelves before he finally reached the rocks below.

  I sat bare chested in the desert night like the warrior princess Giulia had accused me of emulating.

  Salsipuedes was still alive; his pleas for help echoed from the canyon floor. I must not have cut deep enough into his throat to do much damage. I crawled back to where Cates lay, pulled the cell phone from the pocket of his pants, and watched the predawn desert lighten to dove gray around me.

  It took Tonio and Enrique over an hour to reach me. When they arrived, Cates was still alive, too, but his breath was filled with a liquid rasp.

  “I’ll call in a helicopter,” Enrique said.

  “Let’s wait,” Tonio said, looking at me for confirmation. I nodded. He had given me his blue plaid shirt to cover my nakedness and now shivered in his sleeveless undershirt.

  Enrique looked back and forth between us, weighing the options, then sat cross-legged on the ground. Strike sat down behind me, folded me in his arms, and wrapped his legs around me like a cradle. The chorus from “Volver, volver” swirled through my head—return, return to your arms once again.

  “I guess it took longer to find you here in the hills than I realized,” Enrique said, gesturing at the cell phone. He knew the authorities would be able to tell when I had called for help. But they couldn’t tell what time Strike and Enrique had arrived.

  We watched in silence as Cates drew his last breath.

  Salsipuedes called out that he needed help and that he wanted a lawyer.

  I stood, brushed myself off, and put a hand on Strike’s back to use him as a guide dog for the trip down the mountain. A blurry sun rose over the jagged ridge of Seven Falls.

  Epilogue

  I nestled Amy’s soft hand in mine.

  Tonio had come to the nursing home with me and had cooed encouragement to Amy as he brushed the hair off her face. I was wrong about him at first. He’s definitely a hopeful romantic. I saw him now outside the window, framed by a curtain of jasmine and bougainvillea as he lounged against the passenger door of the Shelby.

  “I don’t know where to start,” I told my sister’s sleeping form. My thoughts swirled from Cates’s last moments at Seven Falls to the night of my sister’s suicide attempt to the comfort I had come to know with Anthony Strike.

  I could have told her about Cates’s final transit in the early dawn hours from the rocky plateaus of Seven Falls to the parking lot near the visitors’ center. The black body bag was suspended from the helicopter by four strong steel cables. It swayed with the downdraft from the blades.

  They brought Salsipuedes out first. His back was broken in the fall, and he screamed whenever the rescuers touched him.

  I could have described all the too-late investigation that had proved Salsipuedes’s participation in the attacks. It was all there, if we’d just known where to look. Deputy Niles remembered a beat-up old pickup truck parked legally at Gates Pass the night that Lydia Chavez died, but he couldn’t confirm that the license number matched the old truck from Cates’s ranch. Providing an alibi for Cates cut two ways; it gave Salsipuedes an alibi, too.

  Most important was the DNA evidence. As Giulia said, “We’ve got science on our side.” If only we’d had it on our side sooner. Salsipuedes’s DNA matched the semen left in Bonnie DeGroot. He had killed DeGroot in an attempt to be “cleanup man” once again, to be the “good son” to George Cates, and to guarantee Ray a not-guilty verdict. Chavez’s body held no semen. The authorities speculated that he either wore a condom or he didn’t come. Salsipuedes did not confirm it.

  But his DNA also matched the saliva from the denim strips of Amy’s skirt and from her rape kit. Salsipuedes, the loyal retainer and handyman, had indeed taken his pleasure in Amy’s pain. But that DNA evidence would have proven his guilt only if I’d known who to match it to. He’d never been arrested before; his DNA would not have been in the sheriff’s database.

  Salsipuedes cut a deal. He pleaded guilty to both murders and to the attack on Amy in order to avoid the death penalty.

  We found out that Cates senior had smoked the cigarettes I found at Ray’s Tucson house. He had come to look for the gun he presumed would set his son free. Mercedes, the cleaning lady, was embarrassed not to have seen the ashtray sooner.

  George Cates had never known the truth. “I admit, I never thought Ray amounted to much, and Hector has always watched out for him,” he told the newspapers. “But I never thought it had gone this far.” He thought Salsipuedes was telling the truth with his alibi, and he had rewarded his courage by buying him a shiny new truck. Now George Cates wandered his ranch alone, like a lost calf.

  I could have told Amy about the gifts that arrived anonymously. The lush oil painting from an art gallery in Phoenix depicting the joyously upraised face of a mariachi in full voice. He was brandishing his guitar like a trophy. The police had found a sharp-sided chalcedony ring at Cates’s Tucson house. Now we knew for sure that he was Miranda’s Sweet Thing rapist. They never found the turquoise knife.

  Flowers arrived, but there was no name attached. Maybe from the new Sharon Hamishfender or whatever she was calling herself these days. The note said, “Thank you for standing up for all of us.” I could have told her it wasn’t courage at work, it was an instinct to survive—

  fueled by the bitter acid of revenge.

  I suppose I could have told Amy about the call from Jessica, asking me to come back to work. Apparently, Whitcomb, Merchant & Dryer was not anxious to file a lawsuit against me for breach of confidentiality. I didn’t respond to Jessica right away. I told her I needed time to think about it.

  Kevin McCullough was grinning like a baboon the afternoon he stopped by my house. He said that the law firm was getting calls from all over the country. They were legal heroes for having secured a not guilty verdict for a killer. Business had never been better.

  I wasn’t feeling as successful. Like that vowel-less crossword puzzle, all my investigation had done was to give me the words, not the solution. In the end, the only evidence I had against Cates was the Sleepy C brand he carved into his victims’ skin and the taunting refrain, Sweet Thing. Not enough to sway a jury. Not enough to even sway a county attorney. But certainly enough to rock and sway my world.

  I scratched at the bandages that still circled my hand. The gashes from the cholla cactus were healing, but they would leave fishhook scars across my palm. It looked like I’d have a brand as well.

  Cates’s words—Sweet Thing—used
to have such different connotations for me. They would have been said in dulcet tones, pleasant to the ear, soft as a mother’s breath on a baby’s cheek. A phrase for families—for lovers—for those generous and giving in spirit. Now they were the hard-edged words of death, bleak despair, and pain. He and Salsipuedes had changed my vocabulary. In fact, they taught me a whole new tongue: the language of lies.

  “It’s not real unless you say it out loud,” Momma had said. I could have told her that sometimes even then it’s not true. Cates said it out loud, and it was a lie, a protestation of innocence. Salsipuedes gave him an alibi, and it was also a lie, a dark, cold mist obscuring the truth.

  I don’t know that I could have told Amy about all the other women whose attackers were never found or never punished. I wanted those men to pay for all the raised fists and dashed hopes. All the loud voices and whispered lies. Beatrice Bonair, who chose suicide after her attack. Christie Parstac. Mary Katherine Carruthers. Sharon Hamishfender. I can still recite their names as if they were beads on a rosary. I know I’ll think about them every day.

  I probably wouldn’t mention Red Blanken, who was now back in jail for another home invasion charge. The police had released him soon after arresting Salsipuedes, but his freedom was short-lived. The next day he had the bad luck of choosing to invade a house with a German shepherd. The dog had happily chewed on Blanken’s red-stained fingers until the police arrived.

  At least I didn’t have to keep looking over my shoulder for a murderous highway patrolman anymore.

  And I most certainly should have told her about Strike. Like that long-ago lasso in a circle in the desert, his arms comforted but did not confine. We had begun to breathe in the same rhythm.

  Could there be a different life for the three of us someday? The doctors still held out hope for this new brain stimulation for Amy, a shiny bauble seen from afar. For now, Amy slept on.

  I mirrored her stillness. So many things to say, but nothing said aloud. Finally, I realized that only two things really mattered.

  “You did nothing wrong, Amy. You had nothing to be ashamed of.” That was one.

  And two: “It’s all over now.”

  There, I’d said it out loud. And it was true.