“There are so many people alone in this world, but I have you. Whatever’s ahead, I have you.” She put her arms around me and lifted her face to mine and kissed me.
It was nearing 1:00 a.m. when we returned to the house. Jenny and Daniel were waiting up, sitting at the kitchen table with mugs of coffee in front of them.
“Annie called to wish us a happy Fourth of July,” Jenny said.
Rainy and I joined them at the table. “And you told her about Peter?”
She nodded.
Annie is my second daughter, younger than Jenny by nearly two years. She was living in San Francisco.
“If you need her help, you have it,” Jenny said.
“We’ll see what happens.”
“And she insisted I call Stephen and keep him in the loop.”
My son, Stephen, is the youngest of my children. He was in West Texas, helping out on a cattle ranch owned by a family friend. Punching cows was something Stephen had done in past summers. It was that or working at Sam’s Place, the burger joint I own on Iron Lake. Given a choice between flipping burgers and pushing around that meat on the hoof, Stephen had often opted for the life of a cowpoke.
“Did you get him?”
She shook her head. “Apparently, he’s out driving cattle somewhere cell phones don’t reach.”
“What did Uncle Henry say?” Daniel asked.
“That until we know the whole truth, it’s best not to imagine the worst,” Rainy said. “Pretty simple but absolutely true.”
My cell phone rang. Ed Larson. He told me he’d made some calls to a deputy he knew with the Coronado County Sheriff’s Department, which was located in Cadiz. Peter wasn’t on law enforcement’s radar there. Ed assured me he’d been discreet in his inquiry, and if I wanted, he could do some more checking, broaden his search. I told him we were flying down in the morning. He offered to help when we arrived. I said I’d call if I needed him.
“We should pack, Rainy,” I told her, “and try to get a couple of hours of sleep before we head off.”
We left Jenny and Daniel the task of turning out the lights. Upstairs, Rainy and I pulled our suitcases from the closet and filled them. I could tell something was still eating at her, but I waited until we were in bed to ask. She sat with her back to the headboard and drew her knees to her chest as if to protect herself. The streetlamp outside our window threw light into the dark room, and in the glow I studied Rainy’s face. For a very long time, she said nothing. Then, without looking at me, she reached out and took my hand.
“What is it?” I asked.
“There are things you don’t know about me, Cork.”
“I know the important things.”
“I hate Arizona,” she said.
“Well, that’s one I didn’t know.”
She turned her face to me fully. Despite all the calm Henry Meloux had done his best to offer her, I could see the storm coming.
“Here it is,” she said and took a deep breath. “Peter’s not the only Bisonette who’s killed a man there.”
CHAPTER 3
* * *
Patience is a virtue that I learned as a cop. I waited a good, long while before Rainy said anything more.
“I know you’ve killed men,” she finally went on. “I know about two of them anyway. Do I know about them all?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it might put you in a difficult situation, legally.”
“Was it wrong, whatever the other killing you did?”
“It was necessary. Or I thought it was. I still do.”
The streetlamp on Gooseberry Lane seemed glaringly bright that night, and as the light pushed through our bedroom window, it cast shadows of the mullions on the wall, which reminded me way too much of the bars of a jail cell. Rainy stared at them with the same look I’d seen in the eyes of prison inmates. I understood that the past is never really past. We live our history over and over, the worst of our memories right there alongside us, step for step, our companions to the grave. In the dark hours of that long night, with sleep forsaking us, I thought I would hear Rainy’s story.
Instead she said, “It’s like that for me.”
“You can’t tell me about it?”
She shook her head.
“Does it have anything to do with Peter, whatever he’s involved in now?”
“I can’t imagine that it does. It was so long ago.”
I wanted to press her for the story she felt she couldn’t tell me, but I have my own secrets, so who was I to deny Rainy hers? I simply held her. Together we watched the light through the window give way to a gray that signaled dawn, and we got up and dressed.
*
We landed at the Tucson airport in the early afternoon. Despite dozens of attempts, Rainy had not been able to reach Peter before we left. As soon as we landed, she tried once more. Same result.
I’d been in Arizona only once, when the kids were young. In late May of that long-ago year, Jo and I had taken them out of school a week early and driven across the country to see the Grand Canyon. On the way, we’d stopped at Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly and Monument Valley, places where a sense of the sacred was still palpable. It was easy to understand why the ancient people had made their homes there, but why they’d chosen to abandon all they’d built was a great, lingering mystery. On the way back to Minnesota, we’d stayed north, hitting the stunning parks in Utah, so I’d never been in southern Arizona and never in the depth of summer. Hell couldn’t have been any hotter. We walked out of the airport and into a blast furnace. The heat, the glare, the unwelcoming aridness of every breath I took made me want to turn immediately and head back to the cool North Country of home.
We rented a Jeep Cherokee and hit I-10 heading southeast out of the city. I had the air conditioner cranked up to max. The landscape surprised me. I’d expected flat desert, but everywhere I looked, the horizon was dominated by mountains. After half an hour, we turned off on a state road and began to climb into hills that were covered more in grassland and scrub trees than in cactus. I watched the exterior thermometer readout on the dash drop gradually from 108 degrees to a relatively cool 97.
“They call these Los Conejos Hills,” Rainy said. “Jackrabbit Hills.”
We crested a rise and came out onto a long, flat plateau set against mountains blue in the distance. The ground was covered with short, coarse grass and sectioned with wire. Ranchland, I guessed. This was far from the desert I’d been anticipating, so different from the Arizona I’d seen when I’d driven the family to the Grand Canyon those many years before. We came to a small town, not much more than a crossroads with a gas station, a little convenience store, and a building whose name surprised me as much as anything I’d seen: the Southern Arizona Wine Showroom.
“Wine showroom?” I said.
“A lot of vineyards down here, Cork. The wines are surprisingly good.”
We followed the course of a dry riverbed that cut through a valley between two mountain ranges.