And Condors Danced (7 page)

S
UNLIGHT FILTERING THROUGH
overhanging branches gleamed on black feathers where, only a few feet from the edge of the spring pool, a condor seemed to be crouching, its head held low and its enormous wings spread and trailing out on either side. The wings swayed slightly, the long finger feathers at their tips stirring the dust. Carly pulled Rosemary to a quick stop and sat motionless, her heart racing. Her attention was fixed so intently on the condor that it took her a moment to realize that Matt had slid off Barney and was approaching the spring. He was, in fact, only a few feet from the condor before Carly noticed him.

“Matt, stop,” she hissed.

Matt turned toward her and the look on his face was so strange that she seemed to feel, rather than see, it—like something hitting her in the pit of the stomach. “Why?” Matt said, in a voice as un-Mattlike as the expression on his face. “It’s dead.”

“Dead?” Carly stared at the condor in horror. It couldn’t be dead. She’d seen it move. She slid off Rosemary and scrambled down to where Matt was waiting. Then, together, they approached the enormous black bird. Matt was right. It was dead.

There was a sign near the pool. Father had painted the sign and Arthur and Charles had mounted it on a sturdy pole on the day that Carly had first visited the spring. The sign said,
NO TRESPASSING
.
THIS SPRING AND THE WATER IT PRODUCES IS THE PROPERTY OF THE CARLTON RANCH
. But obviously someone had trespassed at the spring, and had left the body of a dead condor hanging across the sign.

Carly walked around the dead bird slowly, staring in horrified fascination. Its huge wings had been extended along the length of the signboard and then allowed to trail downward, where they swayed slightly as the wide feathers caught the wind. The broad tail and long reddish legs hung almost to the earth, and on the far side of the sign the huge red head with its fierce gray beak dangled limply. There was blood on the beak, and beneath it, on the ground, the blood had dripped down to form a small pool. As Carly walked around and around the carcass, Matt crouched in front of it, staring.

“Do you think it’s the one we saw flying?” Carly whispered.

Matt reached out and lifted a wing and put it back down. Then he ran his hand through the feathers on the hunched shoulders.

“Naw, couldn’t be. This one’s been dead for at least a day or two. Somebody shot it when it came in to drink, and after it was dead they hung it across the sign thataway. Come on. Help me get it down.”

Matt took one wing and Carly took the other and together they lifted the condor off the sign, and spread it out on the ground. Stretched out that way, the span of its great dark wings was almost unbelievable. Just one of the wings was longer than Matt was tall.

Tiger, who’d been keeping a safe distance while the condor was still on the signpost, came up then, growling bravely. He sniffed all around the body with the hair up on his shoulders, acting fierce and kind of proud, as if he’d killed it himself. He might have started worrying it or even rolling on it—Tiger always rolled on dead things if he got a chance—but Matt and Carly chased him away.

Just about then Matt remembered his venison and apples, but when he got them out of the saddlebag Carly said she wasn’t hungry.

“That so?” Matt said. “First time I ever heard of you not being hungry.”

“Well, I’m not now,” Carly said crossly. She went over to Rosemary and leaned her face against the donkey’s neck. She didn’t want to look at the condor’s poor bloody body anymore. Looking at it while Matt crunched on an apple made her stomach do unpleasant things. And besides, it was time they were starting home.

“We ought to start back,” she said. “Father might be home early tonight, and I don’t want to be late.”

Matt didn’t argue. He stuck a piece of venison into his mouth, threw another piece to Tiger, and climbed up on Barney. “Let’s go, then,” he said, jerking Barney’s head up out of the green spring-watered grass. “I sure don’t want to take a chance on meeting up with your pa.”

The sun was already out of sight behind the ridge and the shadows that filled the valley floor were creeping up the slope toward them, as they started off up the trail. They rode in silence until they reached the summit of Grizzly Ridge, but when they stopped for a minute to breathe the donkeys, Matt started asking questions about the spring and why the Quigleys claimed it was partly theirs.

Carly sighed. She wanted to go on thinking about condors. And besides, the spring problem was hard to explain. Particularly since everybody in the family, including Aunt M. and Woo Ying, had a different way of explaining it, and they all got a little bit mixed up in Carly’s mind when she tried to sort it out.

“Well,” she said, hesitantly, “when my great-uncle, Edward Carlton, first came to California, he and Mr. Quigley were partners. They each owned their own land, but they shared a lot of things like a mill and a warehouse. And even though the spring was on Uncle Edward’s property, they shared the water from that too. There wasn’t any water company then and the spring was just about the only water there was. And Uncle Edward signed some kind of paper that said that he’d always share the water with Mr. Quigley. Only Aunt Mehitabel says what the writing on the paper meant was that they’d share all the water they had, not just the spring.”

“But there’s not enough of it,” Matt said. “You couldn’t irrigate all the Carlton and Quigley land from just that little old spring.”

“No. I guess not. At least not if you grew things like citrus trees. But in the early days they only grew winter wheat, and olives and cattle—things that don’t need much water. But then when Uncle Edward died old Alfred Quigley decided that Aunt M. should sell all of her land to him, only she didn’t want to.”

“Yeah, I heard about that,” Matt said, grinning. “My grandpa says that old A. B. Quigley wasn’t used to being told no, particularly by a little old lady. Grandpa laughs about how Mrs. Carlton told old Quigley a thing or two.”

“Yes.” Carly grinned too. She’d heard about what Aunt M. had said to old Quigley, and how angry it had made him. But then she sobered. “Old Quigley got the last laugh, I guess. Because after that he started the Santa Luisa Water Company and they got lots of water from wells and the river, and now all the people who belong to the company have lots of water, but the Quigleys won’t let my aunt or my father belong, so all we have is the spring, and that’s not enough to start citrus orchards. So my papa has to go on raising things that don’t make much money and at the same time paying lawyers to keep old Quigley from taking away half of our spring water too.”

“Quigley’s a bad’un,” Matt said, shaking his head.

“Quigley’s a…” Carly could think of a word or two that she’d overheard Arthur using, but not being too sure what they meant, she decided against it. Instead she only said, “Aiii!” under her breath and kicked poor Rosemary a little harder than necessary.

They were almost to the ranch house and Carly was thinking mostly about how late it was and if she was going to be in trouble, when Matt suddenly pulled up alongside and said, “It was Henry and Bucky that done it.”

“Done—did what?” Carly asked.

“Shot the condor.”

Carly stared in amazement. “Henry? Henry Babcock? And Bucky?” Bucky Hansen was Henry’s best friend and the second meanest boy in Santa Luisa.

“Sure,” Matt said. “Who else? Old Henry Quigley Babcock.”

“What makes you think it was Henry?” Carly asked.

“Well, first off, somebody tried to scratch off where it says Carlton Ranch on that there sign your pa put up. With a knife or something. You notice that? The way I figure, nobody’d do that but a Quigley.”

Carly nodded her head. She’d been too busy looking at the poor dead condor. It did sound like a Quigley trick, and Alfred Bennington Quigley’s brat of a grandson was certainly a likely suspect. Still, there were other Quigley friends and relatives who might have tried to ruin Father’s sign. “But how do you know it was Henry?”

“Well, Henry has a new rifle. Got it for his birthday not long before school was out and bragged about it for days. About how he and Bucky were going hunting and all the critters they were going to kill. And besides, whoever did it was using those ferns over to the west side of the pond to hide in like it was a blind, or something. The ground was all scuffed up and there was a wrapper for a jawbreaker near where they’d been waiting. And what’s more, they was playing mumblety-peg. I saw the knife marks. Don’t know of any other Quigley who eats jawbreakers and plays mumblety-peg. Do you?”

“Matt!” Carly said. “That is wonderful. That is absolutely wonderful.”

Matt looked suspicious. “What’s wonderful?”

“The way you detected all those clues. Just exactly like Sherlock Holmes.”

“That wasn’t detecting. It was reading signs—like the Indians do. An old Indian friend of Grandpa’s learned him how to do it, and he’s been learning me ever since I was a baby.”

“Well, I still think it’s wonderful.” Carly said. “I think…” What she was thinking was that she ought to promise Matt that the next time they played he could be Sherlock Holmes, but she really didn’t want to. Not with her costume almost finished and everything. Suddenly she had an inspiration. “What was your Grandpa’s Indian friend’s name?” she said.

“Eenzie,” Matt said. “That’s what Grandpa called him, anyways. Said he couldn’t get his mouth around his real Indian name.”

“All right—Eenzie. The next time we play detective you can be Eenzie. Sherlock Holmes and Eenzie.”

Matt didn’t say anything. He just handed her the Dr. Watson hat with a big grin. Carly gave him Rosemary’s reins, slid to the ground—and nearly collapsed. Her legs felt like they’d been permanently curved to fit a donkey’s back, and straightening them hurt like fury. “Aiii,” she said under her breath, as she pulled her shoes and stockings out of the hedge and started for the house at a stiff bowlegged run.

“C
ARLY! GOD IN
heaven, where have you been? What happened to you?” Nellie whispered fiercely. Her fingers dug into Carly’s shoulders and her eyes darted frantically from Carly’s bedraggled hair to her bare and dirty feet.

Following Nellie’s gaze, Carly looked down at herself. She was terribly dirty, there was no doubt about that, and barefooted. But nothing worse than that. She’d almost expected, from the look on Nellie’s face, to see a bloody wound or something else as horrible. “Nothing,” she began. “Nothing happened. I just went donkey riding with Matt. I told Charles I was going. I—”

“Shhh!” Nellie’s fingers dug deeper and she shook Carly like Tiger shaking a rat. “Get upstairs and clean up,” she whispered between her teeth. “And hurry. Dinner’s almost ready. I’ll talk to you later, young lady.” She grabbed Carly’s wrist, pulled her into the hall, and shoved her toward the stairs. “Hurry,” she whispered, “and be quiet. I’ll send Lila up to help.”

Carly didn’t ask questions. She knew what the problem was. The problem was Father, and what he would do and say if he knew that she had gone donkey riding and come home late—and dirty—and barefooted. But he didn’t know. Not yet, anyway. Dashing up the stairs on silent bare feet, Carly sped down the hall to her room.

In less than a minute she was out of her dress and pinafore and had poured the contents of the water pitcher into the wide china basin. In her camisole and petticoat, she dipped a washcloth into the cold water and scrubbed her face, neck, and arms. Then she lifted the heavy basin to the floor and put one filthy foot into the water while she ran the washcloth up and down her leg. The other foot followed and she was drying frantically when Lila arrived.

Lila’s anger was as unlike Nellie’s as was everything else about Carly’s two sisters. While Nellie’s anger sizzled and spattered like frying bacon, Lila’s glowed deep and silent as coals; deep and silent and beautiful, with a fiery sparkle in her wide eyes, and the frowning tilt of her eyebrows only emphasizing their perfect arch. Gliding to the closet, she snatched out Carly’s blue dress with the sailor collar.

“Hold up your arms, you little…” Lila’s voice was a sleek, silky threat. She jerked the dress over Carly’s head and began to button it up the back. “You selfish, spoiled little monster. Sit down here on the stool and I’ll brush your hair while you button your shoes.”

Tears filled Carly’s eyes. Real tears, now, from real hurt. Hurt that came from the coldness of Lila’s voice as well as from the rough whacking of the stiff brush bristles against her scalp. “Ouch,” she whispered, and turned her head to let Lila see the tears. But it didn’t help. In fact, it only made matters worse.

“Don’t try that old trick,” Lila muttered. “And stop it! Right now! If your eyes are all red he’ll want to know why. And then the rest of us will have to blacken our souls lying for you, like always, while you just sit there, not caring.
Not caring
,” she said again, giving Carly’s hair a final whacking brush before she retied the ribbon that pulled it back from her face. Then she turned her around roughly and stared at her. “There,” she said, starting for the door. “You’ll do. Now hurry.”

“Wait, Lila. Don’t be mad,” Carly began, but Lila was gone.

Father was helping Mama into her chair when Carly arrived in the dining room. Bowls and platters of steaming food were already on the table, and Charles and Arthur and Lila were standing behind their chairs. Standing because, at the Hartwicks’ table, everyone but Mama stood until after the blessing. As she moved quickly to her own place, Carly’s eyes flicked across faces, trying, as she always did, to read the secrets that hid behind eyes and lips.

Father first. One always looked for Father’s secrets first, knowing that they would not stay hidden for long, and that it sometimes helped to be prepared for their sudden revelation. One looked for narrowed eyes and twitching eyebrows, and sometimes a particular kind of smile. Carly watched as he bent over Mama, pushing in her chair, and then straightened to look quickly around the table. He was a tall man, and something about the way he always seemed to be looking down from a high place made him seem even taller. Head up and back, his quick gray eyes moved, without stopping, from face to face. Carly stifled a sigh of relief. At least there was no eagle-eyed, bone-chilling pause on her, or Nellie, or anyone else. Moving to the other end of the table, he took his place behind his high-backed chair.