by Ruth Wind
She jumped up. “I think it could be James!” Her throat hurt, and she laughed anyway, so excited. “Wow, what if he wins! Wouldn’t that be cool?”
“Not your young man, hmm?”
“We haven’t known each other but a few days.”
“Sometimes, Miranda, you just know. I met your father at a party when I was twenty-three and we’ve been inseparable ever since.”
Miranda bit her tongue. “I know, I’ve heard the story.”
“We love each other, you know. I don’t claim to be a perfect person, and God knows you had a bad time of it especially, but the one thing that’s true is your father and me.”
It was so passionately said that Miranda was shaken into a new look at her mother. “Is everything okay, Mom?”
“It’s fine.”
But Miranda saw the fine trembling of her mother’s lips and knew it wasn’t. She didn’t push it. For once, she just let things be. She put her arm around her mother and gave her a bracing little hug. “Let’s go cheer on the finishers, shall we?”
Carol nodded, looking suddenly every day of her sixty years. “I’m sorry about last night,” she said suddenly.
Miranda stared at her. “Apology accepted. Once you get to know Glory, you’ll fall in love with her. We all have.”
“I’m sure.”
A few more runners came around the top of the hill, but the one in front was still in the lead. His pace was steady, absolutely even, his shoulders back, head tall. As they stood there, a butterfly fluttered around her face, a mourning cloak butterfly with black and blue wings. Miranda felt it land on her shoulder, and just let it be, thanking it for the blessing of its presence, feeling absolutely connected to everything holy.
And she could see now that it was clearly James. He ran like a gazelle, as if it required no effort, his legs lifting, moving, lifting, moving, his arms pumping, hands loose.
Miranda had never been much for sports, or athletes, until Max, and that had not happened because of his skiing but in spite of it, on the off-season. She had always held a certain scorn for those who ran or cycled, pouring their passion into something so disciplined and unappealing.
But James, running, was one of the most beautiful sights she’d ever seen. As he ran down the mountain, his face a blank mask of concentration, her heart swelled.
“He is a beautiful runner,” her mother said beside her.
Miranda knew the exact moment when James spied her. He still did not break rhythm, just ran steadily, steadily, steadily toward her, his eyes burning. And suddenly, he was running very, very fast. The power surge.
If it wasn’t so damned geeky, she would have had tears in her eyes.
An old man waited nearby the ribbon drawn across the finish line, a stopwatch in his hand. A crew of other race coordinators were there, too, cameras and hats and papers in hand. As James crossed the finish, the old man chortled, pumping his fist in the air. “Three hours, thirty-one minutes! New record!”
James slowed to a walk, pacing out, his chest heaving. Sweat coated his chest, back, arms. His hair, slick and black above a red sweatband, was soaked through, and he took two cups of water, pouring one over his head, drinking the other down, still pacing. He raised a hand at Miranda and she, familiar with this part from years of her father’s races, waited until he went through his finishing routine. The judges gave him a medal, his picture was taken a dozen times and the crowd was cheering. The old man came over and gave him a hug, and Miranda felt her throat tighten.
“I think that’s Peter Bok,” Carol said. “He’s famous for winning this race for something like twenty years in a row.”
“Seventeen,” Miranda whispered.
The other racers, a trail of three, then another two, were nearing the last stretch. When they straggled across the finish line, Miranda waited to hear the time: three hours, forty-four minutes. She smiled at James, who was walking toward her, a grin on his angled, exotic face. Before she could say a word, he grabbed her and kissed her, and he smelled of sunlight and good, healthy sweat, and the pheromones in his scent just about knocked her flat. A blistering series of images flashed in her mind as he kissed her, and she didn’t pull away, though she giggled at his display. “Eww, ewww, eww!” she said as he let her go. “Man sweat. Cooties.”
He laughed and bent, putting his hands on his knees, stretching his lower back, maybe his hamstrings. “That was some race. Everything just flowed. I’m really pumped just this minute.”
“Congratulations,” she said. “New record. Oooh. That’s very sexy.”
He peered at her. “What happened to you?”
“Long story. Tell you later.”
He reached for the scarf around her neck and she grabbed his hand. Hard. “Leave it alone, James.”
His eyes burned. “For now,” he agreed.
Carol offered her hand politely. “Well done,” she said.
“Thank you.” He drank from a bottle of blue sports drink. “Listen, I’m going to go shower and get something to eat. Do you want to wait here, or come with me?”
“I’ll stay here and wait to see my dad come through.”
“You have time to go and come back before your father finishes, Miranda. He’ll be another hour.”
“I’ll wait with you,” she insisted.
James leaned in and gave her another kiss. “Won’t take me long and then I need some serious calories, and we can go see what the sheriff has turned up on Renate Franz.”
“It’s a deal.”
He raised a hand and walked off toward the hotel, three blocks away. To her mother Miranda said, “Look at those legs.”
“Very nice.” She raised an eyebrow. “And runners tend to have a lot of stamina, you know. Well into late life.”
Miranda clapped her hands over her ears. “Too much information, Mother!” But she was laughing.
Carol’s cell phone trilled politely in her handbag. “Oh, dear. Excuse me. Hello?” She listened. “Yes, she’s here. One moment, please.” She handed the phone to Miranda. “It’s Juliet.”
“Hello?” Miranda said. “Daddy hasn’t come in yet, but James won!”
“That’s great,” Juliet replied. “Listen, some very interesting DNA information has surfaced, and you might want to go with James to check it out. The deputy just called me.”
“Okay.” Her voice was starting to hurt. A lot. She cleared her throat, but that made it worse.
“Sorry. Don’t talk. It looks like they might drop the charges against Desi, completely.”
“Good.”
“Come back to the house when you’ve seen the evidence, and we’ll see what’s going on.”
Chapter 15
Miranda’s father made it over the finish line in a respectable 4:50—taking third place in his age group—but not in very good shape. She could tell he was very pleased to see her, and she pumped the air visibly for him, even though her voice wouldn’t allow her to cheer. He was gray and dehydrated and they took him to the Red Cross tent for tending. Carol fluttered around him and he growled her away, but allowed her to hold his hand as he took IV fluids.
She found James at the hotel restaurant eating dinner. “Where’s your phone?” he asked.
“I have a story to tell you,” she croaked, and unwound the scarf to reveal the bruises on her throat. “But I have to use few words, okay?”
His eyes blazed and he put down the fork, and moved close to put his head on her shoulder, and swore. “Who did it?”
“Dead. Desi’s cabin burned. We need to go to the police station, you can get the story from them.”
So they headed over to the sheriff’s department, which was abuzz with reporters and activity. A harassed young woman barked, “Can I help you?” when they approached the desk, but upon finding out who they were, led them back to a desk in the back of the room, where a stout, middle-aged man worked on a pile of papers. What remained of his hair stuck out all over his head, as if he’d had his fingers in it all day, and it ma
de Miranda feel protectively tender. He seemed to know it was a mess, and rubbed a smoothing hand over it. His nameplate read Sergeant Rinehart.
“How are you, Ms. Rousseau?”
She nodded, shrugged, gestured to her throat with widened eyes.
“It hurts,” James said. “I’d like to talk for her as much as possible. And I’d like more answers.”
“DNA,” she said.
“What?” James asked, but the deputy was already shuffling through the papers.
“We’ll get to last night in a minute. But first, yeah, there’s been an interesting bit of business that surfaced in this case. We ran DNA on the Franz woman, just to see where it stood with the murder, and it turns out she’s related to Claude Tsosie.”
“What?” Miranda couldn’t help herself. “Related how?”
“Siblings, maybe. Very close.”
“She has another sister in town,” James said. “Elsa Franz. You should run her, too.”
“If she cooperated, we could do it, but at the moment, she’s not speaking to the press or the police or anyone else. And unless there’s some reason to suspect her in the murders, there’s no reason to force her.”
Poor thing, Miranda thought. But her head buzzed with the implications and possibilities in the fact that Claude and Renate were related. She shook her head.
“Are you going to drop the charges against Desi now?” James asked.
“I don’t think she’s the killer.” He rubbed his forehead. “We’re on it.”
“Tell me what happened last night.”
The sheriff explained the basic details. Miranda had gone to the cabin to pick something up for her sister, who was in the hospital.
“A blanket,” she croaked. “For the dog.”
James gave her a look she couldn’t interpret. “A dog blanket? At ten o’clock at night.”
“He can’t sleep.”
He chuckled. “Okay.” To the sheriff he said, “Go on.”
“Someone rigged the house to blow when the front light switch was turned on, but there was a delay. As Miranda there was leaving, the explosives blew, knocking the front door out.”
James swore softly beneath his breath.
“Miranda,” Rinehart said, “correct me if I get any of this wrong.”
She nodded.
“It must have knocked you down—”
Another nod.
“—and then she went around to the back, hooked up the hose and turned on the water in the kitchen and bathroom.”
“Called 911,” she coughed out. “Cut off. Kept calling.”
“Right. At some point, it must have gotten through, because the dispatcher heard screams and sounds of a struggle. She used GPS to find the phone, saw that it was Desi’s place—she knows her—and sent a paramedic, too.
“By the time they got there, the guy was dead—trapped when a beam fell, and Miranda was passed out from smoke inhalation, outside in the grass.”
“You kicked his ass, huh?” James said, taking her bandaged hand gently, and kissing a spot that wasn’t bandaged.
“Did my best.”
“When you can,” the sergeant said, “we need a complete statement from you.”
“Who’s the perpetrator?” James asked.
“A petty thug from Denver. Haven’t been able to make a connection to anybody in particular, but it’s pretty obvious somebody hired him.”
James nodded. “All right. Is there anything else?”
“Nope. Not from our side.”
From behind them came an uproar, the reporters going nuts as someone came inside. Miranda turned, half expecting Desi. Instead she could see the top of a blond head over the tops of the reporters.
“Elsa,” she rasped out to James.
A trio came through the doors, all blond and fit and beautiful: Elsa, Christie, and Max. Christie hovered protectively close to Elsa, who was wearing Jackie O sunglasses herself, big, black glasses that hid half her face and still couldn’t hide the wanness of her complexion.
The desk clerk heard their comment, then brought them back to the sergeant. Miranda and James exchanged a look.
Max and Christie flanked the very tall, lovely Elsa, who looked shaky and unstable. When Max caught sight of Miranda, he looked visibly shaken, and he paused to give her a Continental greeting and look sympathetically at her bandaged hands. Christie ignored her, and helped settle Elsa in a chair.
“You want to hear this, too,” the desk clerk said to Miranda.
“I need to tell the truth,” she said, and pulled off her glasses. Her eyes were red from weeping. “About all the things I know that have happened.”
“I’m happy to hear whatever you want to tell me, miss. Start with your name, please.”
“Elsa Franz Biloxi. My sister was Renate Franz. My brother was Claude Franz, whom you know as Claude Tsosie.”
Miranda couldn’t help the gasp.
“I knew it,” James said with satisfaction.
“My sister killed my brother when he started seeing Christie. Christie was our friend from a long time ago, and Renate told him to leave her alone, because she is a talented athlete and Claude was not good to women. It was the last straw. Claude was greedy and he didn’t care about anyone but himself.”
Miranda looked at Christie. In this light, the girl looked painfully young, brokenhearted in the way only a young woman can be. She was sure she would never love again.
“Your sister shot him.”
“Yes.”
“Just because he wouldn’t leave Christie alone?”
Elsa sighed. “That was the—how do you say it?—the last thing.”
“Last straw,” Christie said.
“Yes.” She took a breath. “It is so complicated. We all wanted to come to America, become rich. Renate was a painter, and Claude—always so pretty, he was, and we came to the Grand Canyon? When he was a teenager, and he was wearing hair long, part of a rock band, you know? Everyone thought he was Indian.”
Miranda felt disoriented. She’d not known her brother-in-law particularly well, but it seemed everything about him was a lie. She wondered how Desi would take it.
Elsa continued, “Renate is very smart, you know? She is the oldest of us, and she thought and thought, and studied, and we went to New York first. I was very young, not yet twelve, and Renate set up her business. She was still painting, and started doing some very good work with the material from our trip to the Grand Canyon, all these native images that really spoke to her. She opened a gallery, to make money.”
Miranda the artist ached for Renate the artist, who’d been so used.
“Claude went to Arizona,” Elsa continued, “then studied at college and went to Peru, where he met Desi.” She gave an apologetic glance to Miranda. “Who was rich.”
Miranda nodded.
“And that was that. Claude pretended to be a painter. Renate sold his work in her gallery, and I met Bill, and we were all in the soup. No, the gravy.”
A couple of chuckles escaped. Elsa shrugged.
“But Claude couldn’t leave women alone. Lots of women, but he was careful for a long time. Then he had an affair with a dentist’s wife, and she was a little bit crazy. She didn’t like it when he broke it off and moved to Christie, and that was when everything started to fall apart with Desi, and we needed her because of the land.”
“Did you know about the aquifer?” the sergeant asked.
“Bill, my husband, had some surveys done for my land, for the spa, and they found the aquifer. The plan was to have Claude talk Desi into a partnership, and then we’d all get even richer from the energy sales. Richer than our wildest dreams.”
“But Claude couldn’t leave other women alone.”
“And Renate was fond of Christie. She believed in her, and didn’t want her chances for more gold to be hurt. He’d ruined everything by then—like our father did—and Renate felt it was her obligation, to protect me and her. After having Claude take all of her glory, then ign
ore her pleas to leave our friend alone. It was too much for her.”
Miranda felt unexpectedly moved by the story, and blinked away a tear. “Who killed her?”
“It was a thug, the one who started the fire.” She looked down. “There is a coalition to get the land. If Desi is gone, the land would be up for sale and they could get it. But Renate was going to tell everything. The reason she came here this summer was to make sure Desi didn’t go to jail. She was furious about Claude getting all the credit for her work, too.”
“So they killed her. And when Desi went home, she would have been killed, too.”
“Ya.” She bent over and began to weep. “She is the only person I had in the world!”
Max and Christie flanked her protectively. James said to Christie, “Did you know?”
Christie shook her head. “No. I know everyone thinks I’m a fool, but I loved him.”
James stood up. “I guess we’ll go spread the news, huh?”
Miranda paused. She knelt beside the weeping woman and touched her hair. “Thank you,” she whispered. “You can be our sister if you like. Because you saved Desi’s life.” Her own eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
And as if Miranda’s ruined, raw voice unlocked some terrible box, Elsa broke down entirely. She nodded.
James waited, then took Miranda’s elbow and they went out into the bright, sunny day. They stood side by side in silence, letting the sun wash down upon them.
Three days later, three sisters put on their hiking boots and carried their offerings up the hill. They had various broken parts among them—Miranda’s voice, and Desi’s broken arm and Juliet’s lingering nightmares, but they carried candles and flowers up the hill to the Shrine of Our Lady of Butterflies for another reason.
It was Miranda’s idea. The long moments in Desi’s cabin when she thought she would die had shattered the cocoon of cynicism she’d protectively built, and she saw that her family—imperfect, even terribly flawed—was still a family, and they needed to let go of the wounds of childhood to take the mantle of their new lives.
