A Novel Idea

by Melissa Bowersock

  Chapter 1

  JESSIE Evans looked around tentatively through the car windows, biting her lower lip and hoping to see someone striding toward her. She’d never been on an Indian reservation before and wasn’t sure what she should or shouldn’t do. She hoped the sticker in the corner of her windshield that identified her as a journalist would signal someone, but no one seemed to notice.

  Her boss, Roy Barker, had promised someone would be there to meet her. She was unfamiliar with the Hopi Indians—and just about every other kind, for that matter—but Roy had said she’d have a guide to help her research her cover article for Arizona Lifestyles.

  But there was no one.

  She squared her shoulders and decided to get out of the car. Couldn’t research a story sitting behind the wheel. She stood up behind the open car door and looked around. The simple pueblo-style architecture of Oraibi was completely foreign to her. She had seen pictures but had never imagined the feel of the thousand-plus year old village. The stone and adobe houses, built in unbroken rows with several upper stories added on, had to look just as they did when the Spanish conquistadores first saw them, she thought. The wooden poles that jutted from the flat faces of the buildings were bleached gray by the Arizona sun and the buildings themselves were the same weathered tan of the hard-baked earth on which they sat. If it weren’t for the haphazard distribution of pick-up trucks and visitor’s cars, she could easily imagine herself a thousand years in the past.

  She glanced toward the festivities of the dance. Ringed with people both Indian and white, the dancing ground was a simple unassuming place, just a wide area centered in the village, yet alive with movement and somehow strangely reverent. The dancers that were entering the dance ground were in sharp contrast to the muted tans and browns of the high desert. Dressed in ancient costumes of gods and heroes, their bodies were painted with brilliant red and turquoise and black. Intricate wooden headdresses were adorned with feathers and fur, and woven belts sported startling geometric designs. Anklets of copper bells broadcast the beat of the dance to everyone in the village. Those watching from the sidelines seemed willingly mesmerized by the ancient ritual.

  She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but it wasn’t quite this. The Hopi people did not seem either resentful of the whites who came to watch their ceremony nor gratified by them. There were neither any hateful stares nor crass commercialism. The Hopi’s existence and the dance simply were what they were, no more and no less. There was an overwhelming rightness about the whole place, as if the Hopi people belonged there—and knew they did—and that was all that mattered.

  It was a feeling Jessie hadn’t noticed anyplace else in Arizona. Ever since she’d moved to Phoenix eight months earlier, she’d seen more than her share of Indians, both the government-supported and the self-sufficient, and yet none of them had quite the sense of belonging that these people had. It was in their faces, in the deeply-etched lines of the old ones’ expressions and in the smoother copper color of the very smallest. Immediately Jessie began to put together the words that would convey this feeling for her article, and she reached back in the car for her camera.

  She wanted to see if she could capture those looks, if only to remind herself later when she was writing her story. Hurriedly, she twisted her wide-angle off the digital SLR and put a zoom lens in its place. She had already loaded a new 4-gigabyte card; she didn’t want to run out of memory at the wrong moment. As a precaution, she grabbed a handful of her business cards and jammed them into her shirt’s breast pocket. Pushing her blonde hair back behind her ears and out of the way, she walked around to the front of the car and leaned against it while she brought the camera up to her eye.

  The faces were so wonderful! She zoomed in on a small boy, surely no more than six, and the delight in his eyes as he watched the dancers. Double-checking the LED readout for light, she held the camera steady and waited for just the right break of a smile, just the right glimmer in those joyful black eyes.

  “I wouldn’t,” a voice said and suddenly the camera was pulled away from her by the length of the zoom.

  “Hey!” Jessie cried in a tight voice.

  The man might not have noticed. He flipped the camera over, found the card slot and expertly ejected the memory card.

  “What are you doing?” Jessie demanded. “You can’t do that! I haven’t even taken one shot on that card! Give me my camera!”

  Without looking at her, the man frowned. His face was deeply tanned and only shadowed more by the wide brim of his straw cowboy hat. His casual western clothes and sun-etched face branded him as an Arizona native, but none of that explained his arrogant behavior. Jessie was shaking with anger.

  “Can’t take pictures of the dances,” he said in a low voice. With deft fingers he slid the card into his shirt pocket. He handed the camera back to Jessie without a word.

  Jessie almost strangled on her own anger. “I wasn’t taking pictures of the dancers,” she managed in a scathing voice. “I was taking pictures of the people watching.”

  He shrugged, his black eyes intent on her. “Can’t do that, either. You’re lucky one of the others didn’t see what you were doing. A lot of tourists have come away from Oraibi with broken cameras or none at all. This is a private and serious religious ceremony, not a Macy’s parade.”

  His unemotional lecture only served to offset Jessie’s anger, but she couldn’t seem to get herself under the same kind of control. Her cobalt blue eyes shot daggers at him.

  “I’m well aware of what this is,” she retorted. “I’m a journalist; I’m here on assignment. And you have stolen my card.”

  “You’ve got your camera,” he said, nodding at the digital. “Count yourself lucky.”

  His quick glance at her camera traveled over her as well, noting the breezy camp shirt and the tight-fitting jeans that molded her body so well. On their upward sweep, his eyes caught the white edges of the cards in her pocket. Acting again without an ounce of explanation, he reached out for her, plucked a card from the place over her breast and drew it back.

  Jessie sucked in a raging breath. “Why, you—you—”

  “Save it,” he said, pocketing the business card along with the appropriated memory card. He half turned toward the dancers. “You can look around all you want, but lock that camera in the car. I won’t be responsible for it if you don’t.” Hooking his thumbs in his belt loops, he looked back over his shoulder at her. “Just rely on your journalistic talents for this one.” And he walked casually away.

  Jessie was seething. What an arrogant, rude, snobbish, son of a bitch! She couldn’t believe the man’s audacity. Here she had just been thinking what a wonderful people these Hopi were and then he had to crawl out from under a rock. What a great PR man he was!

  Still shaking with barely controlled anger, she whipped around the car and yanked the door open. She was sure the man was not watching her—he’d been too sure of himself to think she might disobey—but it still rankled as she slid the camera under the car seat and locked the door.

  Of all the—she slammed the car door resoundly. Oh! Right now she’d have much rather gotten back into the damn car and driven back to Flagstaff and forgotten all about this assignment. Not only had he ruined her mood, he’d erased any creative thoughts she’d had and the anger that filled her was not the kind that would dissipate quickly. Feeling spiteful and grouchy, she propped herself against the side of the car and watched the dancers sourly.

  Roy was going to hear from her about this, she decided. Always before when she’d accepted a freelance assignment, his contacts had been prompt and friendly. This time not only did her contact not show at all, but what did show was a disrespectful, ill-mannered …

  She shook her head. She had to get a hold of herself or the whole day would be ruined. She wasn’t very good at positive thinking, but she’d tried recently to keep a better lid on her temper and she turned her mind to that now. It had become an exercise with her, and she had to fight to keep he
rself from flowing blindly along with her negative thoughts. Come on, she told herself. Isn’t this the best assignment you’ve had? Isn’t this a cover story? Pass it off. Don’t let the bastard upset you.

  She took a deep breath and forced her eyes to focus on the people before her. She forced herself to see their pride, their concentration, their rightness in this preserved corner of the Painted Desert. All around them the land fell away in gentle folds of muted color, or rose broken and stark in sudden mesas. The people and the land were similar: strange to her, yet in context here. Forcing her mind into its journalist mode, she began to compose her article and finally dug back into her car for her notebook.

  That evening, Jessie returned to the vacation house in Flagstaff where she was staying at Roy’s insistence and showered off the dust and sweat of her day. She couldn’t really complain about the heat, not when it was 115º down in Phoenix and only 85º here in the high country, but the dry thin air still affected her. She’d been excited at first about the idea of basing in Flagstaff and getting out of the June heat, so much so that she’d turned off her air-conditioning as soon as she’d driven up over the Mogollon Rim yesterday morning, and she’d refused to turn it on again even when she’d dropped down to the desert of the reservation today. Back in Flag it was cooler, but she still eyed the air-conditioning unit Roy had installed in the living room window. She decided against it. Once clean, she put on a fresh pair of jeans and a cool, gauze shirt and let the open windows produce a crosswind that kept the place comfortable.

  She had to admit, Roy’s little “cabin” was nice. It would certainly do for the next three weeks while she hammered out her article. Built of rich warm wood, it hugged the side of a wooded hill above Flagstaff and had all the comforts. Her boss, of course, could afford it. As owner of the Arizona Lifestyle magazine, he could afford just about anything he wanted, and usually did. Jessie couldn’t begrudge him its extravagances, though, not when he paid her as well as he did for her articles. They had a very nice, simple working relationship, and as long as they did, and Roy put no restrictions on Jessie, they’d do their best to keep Arizona Lifestyles one of the best magazines out.

  As if in answer to her thoughts, the phone rang. She knew it would be Roy. He was the only one who knew where to reach her.

  “Hey, Jess,” he said, “how do you like my place?”

  “Nice, Roy. Very nice. I should have known when you said ‘cabin’ that you meant ‘house.’”

  “Well, you know what I meant. Dianne is the one who named it the cabin; I just got in the habit.”

  Jessie understood. Roy’s wife, Dianne, was a born and bred poor little rich girl, or at least that was what Jessie had heard. She’d never met the woman.

  “So what’s going on? Did you meet Lucas?”

  “He was a no-show,” she said, feeling the heat of today’s anger rising in her again. “I was out there in Oraibi almost all day and never saw hide nor hair of the man. Except for some self-styled watchdog who threatened to break my camera for me, no one paid any more attention to me than if I were a rock.”

  “Really?” Roy said. “Hmm. Can’t understand that. I’ve sent people up to see Lucas for information before and he’s always been good. I’ll call him. Maybe he got hung up on a job. He’s a contractor and he’s really just doing me a favor when he agrees to help out one of my journalists.”

  “Well listen, Roy, if he’s got a full schedule, don’t bother. I can go to the library and scout the local monuments just as well by myself. I don’t think there’s any shortage of material on the unsung Indian heritage of Arizona.”

  “No, no, you need Lucas. He’s a gold mine of information. He’s part Hopi himself, so he knows things you won’t find in any library or online. I’ll call him.”

  Jessie gave in. “Whatever you want, Roy.”

  “What about someone wanting to break your camera?”

  “Oh, out there on the reservation I was firmly lectured on the sins of photography. I had no idea they were so secretive.”

  Roy made an apologetic sound. “I’m, sorry, I should have told you. It’s been so long since I’ve been on the reservation that I forgot to mention that to you. The Hopi are one of the few tribes that are that dead set against outside commercialism, but you can’t really blame them. They were exploited shamelessly in the early 1900s. Don’t worry about pictures—we’ve got lots of stock photos we can dig out. You concentrate on the article. If you can put together this cover story as well as those short articles you’ve been doing, I think we may just have a place for you on the staff. I’ve been talking to Jerry, and he’s very enthusiastic about you.”

  Jessie held her breath for a moment. Jerry Corwin was the editor in chief and she knew he’d liked her earlier articles. But a staff job? She wasn’t sure she was ready to get that entrenched in the magazine.

  “We’ll see how this one goes,” she said carefully. “You never know. I may get three pages in and go under.”

  Roy laughed. “I doubt it. Well, I’ll let you go and I’ll give Lucas a call. Enjoy the cabin. I’ll check back with you in a day or two but if you run into any problems, don’t hesitate to call.”

  “All right, Roy. Thanks for everything.”

  “No sweat. What else are bosses for?”

  Yes, thought Jessie as she hung up the phone, what else? She’d never worked for a man that was as supportive as Roy, or as trusting in her instincts. From the first article she’d submitted to him while she still lived in Berkeley, he’d been nothing but encouraging, even helping her find a place in Phoenix when she’d made the move south. She doubted if she would find a better boss, but the idea of having a staff job scared her. That was a little more permanent than she liked. She needed her freedom.

  Again shrugging off the idea until she did more on this article, she turned to the compact, economizing kitchen and began to make herself some dinner.

  Lucas Shay was sitting in his Jeep later when the half moon glittered through the pine trees that night. He’d pushed back his straw hat and toyed idly with the memory card in his hand. Up the slight incline to his right sat Roy’s house.

  The lights were on, and occasionally he’d seen the ghost of a shadow ripple across the drapes.

  He wasn’t looking forward to facing Miss Jessica Evans again. He knew now that he should have told her who he was but he’d reacted so instinctively out at Oraibi, and she’d taken such offense at it that he decided to let his identity slide until he could introduce himself more rationally. Now, sitting here in his Jeep, the idea of going up there didn’t seem rational at all.

  She hadn’t been what he’d expected. When Roy had called and asked him to help out another fledgling journalist, Lucas had pictured the other not-too-bright, not-too-pretty would-be writers that Roy had sent him from time to time. They were invariably unimaginative, unintelligent and almost each had, at one time or another, been Roy’s mistress. But this one seemed out of Roy’s league.

  She’d caught his eye from the time she first stepped out of her car, first because she was a blonde, then because she was almost classic in her simple beauty. He didn’t see that often on the reservation. Most of the whites that came to watch the ceremonial dances were grass-roots American tourists, tall and skinny Californians or short and round Nebraskans. Some towed big-breasted teenage daughters, some of the woman sidled around in tight designer jeans, but none of them caught his attention like this one.

  She had slid out of the car with supple grace, her jeans provocative but functional over battered cowboy boots, her cap-sleeved shirt practical in the summer heat. He had all the intentions of going over and offering his services as a guide when she’d pulled out the camera. Then he acted impulsively, knowing that if he didn’t jerk the camera away from her one of the others would, and they wouldn’t give it back.

  By the time he’d seen the sticker in her car window and connected the dots, it’d been too late. He smiled grimly to himself in the darkness of his Jeep. She sure h
ad a temper. She’d flung that honey-blonde hair back off her shoulders and narrowed her eyes at him like a cornered cat. It had been exactly that reaction that had made him want to catch the back of her head in his large hand and pull her to him. That combination of earthy beauty and hellfire was a weakness Lucas suffered from, and he had never expected to see it in one of Roy’s protégés.

  Lucas remembered what Roy had said when he’d first called his boyhood friend a few days ago.

  “She’s the best freelancer I’ve got,” Roy had insisted. “She’s working on a cover article, and she’s good.” Then his tone had dropped to a conspiratorial level. “I promise you, it’ll be worth your while.”

  Lucas had recognized that remark. Roy had never had any compunction about sharing his bedmates, and if Lucas had wanted any of them that Roy sent up, Roy had always made it clear that his friend had his blessing to indulge himself. Lucas rarely did, but there was no point in telling Roy that he found most of these women vapid and unattractive. Roy was like a kid with these illicit toys he kept hidden away from his wife; no sense spoiling the man’s fun.

  Now, thinking that Jessica Evans was one of those toys knocked her down several pegs on Lucas’s yardstick.

  But, hell, he had to go up there. So what if she wasn’t as smart as she looked, or if she had mediocre taste? He’d given Roy his word he’d help her and he would. When Roy had called that evening and asked where he’d been today, Lucas slid into the lie and said he’d been too busy to meet Miss Evans, sorry. Yes, he’d go over to the house and meet her tonight. His mouth had twisted into a grim frown. Roy had never offered his vacation house to any of the other ones. Maybe this one was more than just a fling for the man. And wouldn’t Dianne have a fit if she knew Roy was keeping a girl in her ‘cabin’?

  Looking up now, Lucas saw the lithe shape of her shadow slide across the drapes. Cursing silently, he jammed the memory card into his shirt pocket and pushed open the door of the Jeep.

  Jessie had been trying to put together some of her impressions of the day but the screen on her laptop insisted on remaining mostly blank. She was too restless to work. She had cleaned up the kitchen, fixed herself some iced tea, flicked on the TV, then just as quickly flicked it off, and in between it all she had slid into the chair at the dining room table only to stare at the damn blank screen.

  The piecemeal impressions she’d gotten at Oraibi today just wouldn’t gel, not when she thought about the intense stare of the rude stranger she’d met there or Roy’s offer of the staff job or the emotional claustrophobia that she could feel closing in on her. She didn’t want to be tied to a job. She didn’t want to be tied to anything. For seventeen years she’d watched her parents struggle against the yokes of marriage, kids, jobs, and that greatest of chains, home, and she wanted none of it. She never wanted to surrender her freedom to any ideal, and everything she’d chosen in the last seven years had been a calculated assault against that same claustrophobia that threatened her now.

  Back at the laptop again, she forced herself to tap out a half sentence, then couldn’t finish it. She stared moodily at the screen, chin in hand, then almost jumped out of her chair when the doorbell sounded.

  Now what? she thought in frustration. Girl Scouts out selling candy on a Sunday night? She crossed the lushly carpeted living room and yanked open the door.

  The sight of the black-eyed cowboy standing slack-hipped on her porch hit her like a fist in the stomach. She stepped back in angry surprise, then straightened.

  “What do you want?” she demanded, immediately spouting fire. “Did you decide you wanted to break my camera after all? And how did you find me?”

  The cowboy seemed to smile grimly with one side of his mouth while his eyes glittered like obsidian. Jessie noted with rising temper how he dared to flick those eyes over her, as if she stood for his inspection.

  “Miss Jessica Evans?” he asked, holding up the small business card in his hand. “I’m Lucas Shay.”

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