“Don’t worry,” she told him. “You can still have chocolate chips in yours.”
Later that evening, she apologized.
“I don’t understand what’s gotten into me. I thought I’d dropped it off, honestly. You know I don’t normally bring that stuff home.”
Ben rubbed her back, which made her want to purr along with the silver tabby on her lap. They were sacked out on the couch again.
“It’s okay. I just didn’t want the girl to get her hands on it. And you know she would have.”
Much like her hair, eyes, and copper skin, Heidi had inherited her curiosity from her mother. After each new disaster, Maria could almost hear her own mother saying, “Payback time!”
She shuddered at the image of her daughter trotting into the living room holding the arrowhead, her fingers stained with Dan’s dried blood. “What’s this, Mom?” Or, even worse, she might have managed to stab herself with it. (The klutziness she had inherited from her father.) “Good catch. Thank God someone is getting enough sleep for both of us.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Ben’s eyes were already half closed. She envied him – she still had a ton of paperwork to catch up on. “That was from the triple homicide?”
“What else? Weirdest thing too. Reese came to the campground today and he was the one who found it. In one of the tents, the same one our techs had spent hours going over.”
“Reese?” Her husband straightened, no longer looking sleepy. “Isn’t he the—”
“The survivor, yeah. Why? What does that matter?”
“You’re the professional dick, honey. I’m a rank amateur, but—”
“Ha ha.”
“—isn’t it possible he could have planted it in the tent himself?”
Her eyes widened. “What is it with you guys? Jorge said the same thing.”
“Yeah, well, Jorge is a smart man. How else could your techs have missed it? They’re trained to find a single hair in a shag carpet. I’m sure they could find an arrowhead in a tent.”
“I don’t know. I assumed it fell off the body when the coroner took Dan to the morgue.” She frowned. “Why would Reese plant it? How could it possibly benefit him?”
“Maybe that’s not Dan’s blood on it. Maybe it’s someone else’s. Some foreign DNA to lead you guys on a goose chase.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Reese isn’t even a suspect. Besides, he didn’t go inside the tent – I did. He only pointed it out.”
Ben stroked his beard like he always did when he was deep in thought or wanted to appear that way. It was the same fiery shade as his hair. “Could he have thrown it in the tent?”
She considered the possibility for a minute before shaking her head. “I don’t think so. I kept a pretty good watch on him.”
“So what were his reasons for revisiting the crime scene? Please don’t tell me he wanted his tent back.”
Maria swatted his leg. “Don’t be silly. No, he’s been having nightmares.”
“Ah, I see.” Ben cocked an eyebrow. “A guilty conscience, I presume.”
The subject had rapidly lost its appeal. “Maybe you should be Jorge’s partner. You two certainly think alike. I don’t feel Reese did anything wrong.”
He squeezed her foot. “I hope you’re right, honey; I really do. But I have to wonder about a guy who slept through three brutal murders, one of which happened right beside him. You have to wonder about a guy like that.”
* * *
The snow had hardened into a crisp crust overnight, and Lone Wolf moved across it without breaking through. His footsteps vanished with the wind.
“Are you the shaman of this tribe?” His voice thundered across the camp and everyone stiffened in fear, from the women who were beating dried berries with meat and fat for pemmican, to the men who sharpened their weapons as they sat around the fire.
Lone Wolf’s question was not for them, and neither was his anger, which gave them some comfort. But they feared for their chief.
“I am not. I am chief of this tribe. The title of shaman goes to you.” Chief White Fox lowered his head in deference, even though he was the chief. His people understood he was their leader in name only. Lone Wolf had the ear of the Creator, so he must be obeyed in all things.
Crack!
The women gasped as Lone Wolf’s hand shot out, striking Chief White Fox across the cheek. The smaller man fell to his knees, his face blooming red in his humiliation.
“Then why do you disobey me? I gave you a direct order, which you ignored. You are putting our people in danger with your foolish actions. You will be the death of us.”
Chief White Fox cowered on the snow, holding up his arms to deflect a second blow. “They…they were starving. I did not have the heart to turn them away.”
“They are not our brothers. If our children were going without, do you think they would inconvenience themselves for a second to come to our aid? They would NOT.”
Although he was smaller and the powerful shaman terrified him, White Fox was still a chief. He picked himself off the ground and brushed the snow from his furs. “The same Creator made us all. I will not let them starve in our shadow.”
The tall shaman stared at the chief, narrowing his eyes until they were slits. Finally, he spat at the leader’s feet. “Then you will die.”
He turned on his heel and stalked over the snow the same way he had come. Within minutes, he was gone. Everyone in the settlement began to talk, men and women, young and old alike.
The chief jumped at a soft touch at his elbow. He looked into the eyes of Little Dove, his third wife. “You shouldn’t have angered him,” she said, her voice as youthful as a child’s. “The people are afraid.”
“He is wrong, and he needs to be told so. We’ve let him have his way for too long.” The chief looked over to where his men huddled by the fire. How had everything gone so wrong? The shaman was supposed to heal them, protect them, chase the drought and bring forth the harvest. Instead, he had turned into a tyrant.
“How can the Creator be wrong?” The confusion was too much for Little Dove, whose face scrunched up as if she might cry. She was still so young.
“Perhaps he doesn’t speak through Lone Wolf,” White Fox said. “Perhaps he speaks through me.”
His words inspired another flurry of whispered conversation.
It was a bold pronouncement, but his people didn’t believe any of it.
Not for a second.
* * *
Maria’s mouth tasted horrible. As she raised her head, she realized she’d fallen asleep at her desk – again. Before she’d followed her father into the family business, she wouldn’t have thought it possible. When she was a child, and especially a teenager, she’d loved sleep. Without her ten hours, she’d been a miserable crank. Now she was lucky if she got five.
Something pinched her face, and she pulled off the Post-it note that had adhered to her cheek. The ink had smeared to a barely legible scribble. It would have been funny if it weren’t so depressing. Another wild and crazy Friday night for Maria Greyeyes.
She vaguely remembered the dream. It had been winter, and there had been something frightening. Some kind of threat? She rubbed her forehead, but it was no use. Nothing was going to straighten out the mess in there but twelve to fourteen hours of uninterrupted sleep.
When she pushed away from her desk, something crawled across her chest. A small cry escaped her lips as she swatted at it, swinging her arms around like hornets pursued her. Then she caught sight of her hands. Her fingers were covered with blood.
A late-season mosquito? But mosquitoes didn’t crawl; they bit. She hurried to the bathroom, holding out her bloody hands, terrified at what she would see in the mirror. The insect moved against her breastbone. It took every inch of willpower she had not to swat at it again, but if she touched its hard, loathsome body, she wo
uld scream. And neither her husband nor her daughter would be happy about having their beauty sleep disturbed.
She switched on the bathroom light, but its warm glow hardly comforted. Easing the door shut – the better to muffle her shouts and prevent whatever the heck it was from escaping into the rest of the house – she faced the mirror with her eyes squeezed shut. Slowly, she opened them in increments, like a kid watching a scary movie.
When she finally got a good look at the intruder, her eyes flew open. She blinked hard, unable to believe what she saw.
And then she blinked hard again.
The arrowhead hung from her neck on a rawhide cord. Its tip glistened as if it were wet. She ripped some toilet paper from the roll and wrapped it around her hand as a makeshift glove, the word EVIDENCE blazing through her brain, not that it mattered anymore. If there had been any fingerprints on it, surely they were already compromised.
The macabre pendant had a sharp smell, like damp river rock and old pennies. The glistening hadn’t been an illusion – the arrowhead was wet. No longer covered in dry, flaking blood, it was instead coated in fresh.
As she stared in horror, a perfect drop formed at the point of the arrowhead and then plummeted, splashing against the sink.
Chapter Fifteen
When the alarm I’d optimistically set went off for the third time, I almost threw it against the wall. It would be great to have one of those clocks you could throw – those ones shaped like baseballs, for instance. Instead, it was an old thing of my mother’s (an antique, as the woman never failed to remind me), and if I did what I very much wanted to do, it wouldn’t bounce. It would shatter.
Too bad I hadn’t asked her how to turn it off.
Burying it under a stack of pillows, I yanked the duvet over my head. Ever since I’d had that nightmare about Dan, I’d been exhausted. It didn’t seem to matter how much sleep I got. Nothing was ever enough.
On the night table, my phone buzzed. Shit. Before I could answer, the alarm started again. This time I shoved it between the mattress and the wall, but it fell through the gap and smashed against the hardwood with a fatalistic clanging. Whoops. Oh well. I’d just have to buy Mom a new one.
“’Lo?”
There was silence on the other end, and for a moment I thought it was the delay before a telemarketer came on the line. I nearly hung up…and then I heard breathing.
“You disgust me.”
If the caller had been speaking a foreign language, I would have understood the gist of what she’d said. Revulsion dripped from every word.
“Mom?” I asked, angling for a laugh if nothing else, but this chick was too far gone for that.
“Asshole,” the girl said, and hung up.
I shut the phone off before tossing it on the pillows, just in case the sweetheart wanted to make a follow-up call.
What was that about? I stared at the ceiling, following the brown water stains with my eyes. It was pebbly with popcorn stucco, the kind that rained down on your head in a light mist if something tapped it. My parents were the only people I knew who still had ceilings like that.
Maybe I should have thrown the alarm clock up there, convinced them to spring for an upgrade.
For one heart-splitting moment, I’d thought it was Jess on the phone, giving me grief about one transgression or another. And then I’d remembered.
Jess was never going to give me shit about anything again.
If someone had asked me a few days ago if that would bother me, I would have laughed in their face.
I knew better now.
“What are you going to do?”
I grazed my lip against her lower abdomen, knowing full well it drove her crazy. Peering at her through my beer haze, I winked. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
She shot out her foot, catching me in the gut.
“Oof!” I immediately felt something not very pleasant churn to the surface. “Don’t do that again. Unless you want to wear everything I’ve consumed during the last twenty-four hours.”
Ordinarily she’d make a face at a remark like that and call me revolting. But not this time. My shoulders slumped as I recognized her expression. Jessica wanted to be ‘serious’. I couldn’t understand why she set such stock in being serious. It was really only worrying with a different name, and it wasn’t like it accomplished anything.
In contrast, if we’d followed my plan for the evening, we both would have had orgasms. There was no question which option I would have chosen.
She propped herself on her elbows, the better to dissect me with her eyes. I touched my tongue to her smooth skin again, attempting to rush my way down to the sweet spot before she could stop me, but she threw her legs sharply to the right, practically breaking my neck in the process.
“Ow! What’s with the violence?” I rubbed my neck while glaring at her.
“I was trying to get your attention,” she said, yanking down her skirt while she lifted herself into a sitting position. It wasn’t an easy move to pull off with grace, but she managed it. “You weren’t listening to me.”
“I was listening. I just wasn’t in the mood for talking.”
“Don’t you think we should discuss our future?”
I groaned, letting myself fall over on the bed. If I hadn’t already lost my erection, that would have done it.
“Be serious.” She gave me a playful shove. Well, to the outside observer it would have appeared playful, but Jessica wasn’t the play-wrestling type. She tended to use aggression to send a message, and I got her message loud and clear. “I want to know what your plans are.”
Rolling over, I buried my face in her pillow. It smelled like a cupcake. Her entire fucking apartment smelled like vanilla – girl must have bathed in it. “Give me a break, Jess. We graduated two minutes ago.”
“It’s been two weeks. Then it will be a month, and then it will be a year. Can we please talk about this for a second, like adults?”
‘Like adults’ was one of her favorite expressions, along with ‘be serious’.
“I don’t feel like adulting right now.”
The guys had invited me over to watch the game, and I’d let my dick convince me otherwise. Now I greatly regretted that decision. When had Jess quit being fun?
She folded her arms across her chest. “So you don’t see a future for us.” Her casual tone was cultivated, but I could hear the hurt woven through the things she didn’t say.
“That’s not true.” I reached for her hand, but she pulled away from me, getting up from the bed and smoothing her skirt. “What is your problem? Why are you letting yourself get worked up? I thought we were going to have some fun.”
That was clearly the wrong thing to say, as Jessica’s eyes snapped sparks at me. “That’s all I am to you, isn’t it? Some kind of good-time girl.”
“What? What the fuck are you talking about? What did I do wrong?”
She ran a brush through her pale blonde hair and applied a fresh coat of strawberry-colored lip something-or-other, which I was sure would taste like vanilla. “You didn’t answer my question. That’s what you did wrong.”
“Fine. Fine. Ask me whatever you want, and I’ll answer.” I wished she wouldn’t ask so many questions about our future. We’d only recently started dating. How was I supposed to know how I felt this soon?
Problem was, I did know. I just didn’t want to admit it to her – or to myself.
“What are your plans? What do you want to do next?”
This again. “I thought I’d told you. I’m thinking of going to business school, getting my MBA.”
She leaned against her dresser, facing me, and I was relieved to see the angry light had left her eyes. “Yeah, that’s step one, Reese, but what’s after that? What do you want to do with your MBA?”
“I’m not sure. Start some kind of business, I guess.�
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“You want to be an entrepreneur?”
I shrugged. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about this stuff yet, but an MBA would open up a lot of options, and that was appealing. Getting my BSc had been difficult enough. Did I need another plan already?
“Are you planning to go to business school here?”
“Um….” Everything I’d read recommended doing your MBA at a different school from where you’d gotten your bachelor’s degree. There were some great business schools out there, and whenever I did think about this stuff, which wasn’t often – not yet – they seemed like good enough places to be. “I’m not sure.”
“Aren’t you going to ask about me and what I want to do?”
I started to shrug again, but caught myself before she saw it. “Sure, I just haven’t had a chance yet.”
“You don’t give a shit, do you?”
Ah, crap. She had seen it.
Her face turned a dark and ugly color. “The only thing you care about is what’s between my legs. What’s between my ears doesn’t matter.”
Neither location was giving me a lot of joy right then, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell her that. “You know that isn’t true, Jess. It’s just – we’ve talked about your plans a lot already. I feel like I know exactly what you’re going to do. You’re set.”
Hopefully she did something about her temper before she got her degree and started teaching little kids. Otherwise, she was going to destroy a whole lot of childhoods.
“Are you telling me the truth? Because I feel like every time I try to talk to you about our future, you check out.”
There was no point trying to keep the peace anymore, so I decided to be honest. At least then I could use this conversation as a chance to improve things between us. “Maybe that’s because I don’t like being criticized.”
“What are you talking about? I don’t criticize you.”
Dumbfounded, I was at a loss for words. I’m sure my jaw dropped. “Jess, you’re the most critical person I’ve ever met. You criticize everything, including me.”
Those Who Came Before Page 10
