Deep in the Valley (16 page)

With that, she smiled. Hadn’t she just been thinking, with all the fuss the women made over John Stone, that she’d never had that kind of welcome? Come to that, she’d had to live with the fact that there were still people who sought out her father first.

So this was what they really felt, she thought with secret satisfaction. They loved her. They valued her, after all.

“Good thing you weren’t hurt bad,” Elmer said. “You’d have to rent a Quonset hut.”

J
une knew with reasonable certainty that Tom could be found at the café in the morning. In fact, it was typical for their paths to cross several times a day, whether as they were catching a meal or a coffee break, or when some medical emergency threw them together. Like the accident. But with a sense of urgency, she decided to see him at once.

“I’d like to run out to the Toopeeks,” June told Elmer as they were clearing the front porch of gifts. “And…let’s take some of this stuff out there. Much as I appreciate the gestures, there’s no way I can make use of it all.”

“Goody,” Elmer said. “I haven’t had a piece of Philana’s pie in weeks. You know, she makes a new pie every afternoon. Puts George Fuller and Burt Crandall completely to shame. As I remember, she could make ’em that good even back when she was working with nothing but a campfire and mud-pit oven.”

Back when…

When June was small her favorite thing in the
whole world was to spend the night with the Toopeek family. They had a fire in the yard and slept in bedrolls on the hard-packed dirt floor of their dark, musty little house. It was more of a lean-to than a cabin. The family had moved to the valley when Tom was three, the fourth of what would be seven Toopeek children.

Their barren camplike life-style was not some Native American custom, but due to poverty. By almost anyone’s standards. But June never remembered a time that she considered the Toopeeks poor. She didn’t even realize they’d
been
poor until junior high, when they weren’t anymore. And she was nearly grown before she learned that a few Valley people had had to fight against their neighbors to support Lincoln’s right to settle where he had. Elmer, Judge—who had not yet been a judge but had always been called one—Sam, Myrna, Bud Burnham, old Cliff Bender—who had been old since June was a kid—and Mikos Silva… They were an odd lot. It seemed some of the people in the area had a problem with Indians living off the reservation. What they didn’t understand was there was no reservation in California for Lincoln and Philana; they had left their people in Oklahoma. But apparently there were a number of white townspeople who would have run the Toopeeks off if they hadn’t been stopped. Many times June wished she could have witnessed that battle.

Marilyn Hudson not only defended the Toopeeks’ right to homestead, she also befriended Philana. The women took to each other at once; they shared their philosophies and customs regarding domestic arts, child rearing and marriage. But the idea of June sleeping
overnight there horrified her. “They sleep on the
ground,
Elmer,” she had complained.

And Elmer countered, “They sleep on bedrolls and keep each other very well. Let her go. She’ll learn something.”

June didn’t learn the things her mother had envisioned. She didn’t learn how lucky she was that her family had a Maytag washer and Frigidaire refrigerator. Instead, she learned the names of all the stars, how to cook fish on a stick over the fire, how to track a deer by its droppings, how to make an herb plaster to cure poison ivy and oak. She ran wild with Tom and a couple of the other Valley boys. She went home dirty, exhilarated and smelling gamey.

Lincoln and Philana had been in their twenties when they’d hobbled into town in a dilapidated old pickup with four little kids and a fifth imminent. They’d had some sort of disagreement with their families and left them, using the last little bit of their money to buy a small parcel of land from an aging farmer. They lived first in tents—a state of affairs that drove some Valley people crazy—then they built the little cabin with trees they cleared and cut with primitive tools. That cabin was still the anchor of the current house, the house Tom and Ursula had built to hold their own brood of five. Lincoln and Philana still lived in the original cabin, though they shared the rest of Tom’s house.

Ursula was Navajo. She and Tom had met when both were students at Sacramento State University. She often joked that she had to get him quick before he went all the way back to the Cherokee Nation for a wife. Tom, of all the Toopeek children, was the one most
interested in preserving some native customs; he even took his degree in history. But then law enforcement drew him, first in Sacramento and eventually back home. Most of Grace Valley welcomed him back gratefully, in need of an experienced lawman, but there were still those who didn’t think he and his should even live there, much less hold a position as authoritative as chief of police. They were probably the same ones who wouldn’t use June as a doctor because she was a woman.

It was from Ursula that June learned how ethnocentric the tribes were. You weren’t simply Native American, you were Cherokee or Sioux, Navajo or Cheyenne. And despite the fact that the Toopeeks had left their reservation and taken land among the whites, they clung to old ways and were not quick to change. Recently, within the past year, June had heard Lincoln say to his daughter-in-law, “That may be the way the Navajo do it, Ursula, but the Cherokee do it so.”

Of all the things June learned from the Toopeeks, the most important was their sense of abundance. Even when they had next to nothing, they always seemed to have a little left over to share. Whereas Elmer would grouse at June, “Turn that damn light off—you think we’re made of money?” Lincoln would say to her, “Our table is your table, and bring your mother and father.”

When Elmer and June arrived at the Toopeek house, there was a light on in every window and the glow from a campfire behind the house. There were strict burning regulations in northern California, but the old father of the police chief would have his ritual fire whenever he pleased.

“June!” Tanya Toopeek said in surprise when she answered the door. “You’re just in time. Grandfather is praying for you.”

“Good deal. Get your brothers and sisters to get some stuff out of the truck, will you?”

“Sure. What stuff?”

Ursula came to the door, a dish towel in her hands. “What stuff?”

“The town came to my house while I was sleeping off my knock on the head. They left their get-well gifts. More than I will ever eat or use, I’m afraid.”

“If you’re looking for people to help you eat, this is the place. Let me see,” Ursula said, leaning close and squinting at the stitches in June’s hairline. “Ouch.”

“Doesn’t hurt much anymore,” she said. “But damn, did I have a headache this morning.”

Elmer reached the front door with laden arms. “Ursula, you have coffee?”

“For you, I’ll make fresh. June, I feel guilty. I didn’t bring any gifts to your porch.”

“Thank God. Really, you can’t imagine all the stuff….”

“But doesn’t it make you feel wonderful? To know the town values you so highly?”

“It’s a little staggering,” June said. “I’ve never felt unappreciated, but…” She stopped. Five Toopeek children led by Tanya pushed past her to the front drive. “I can’t remember anything like that ever happening in Grace Valley. Do you?”

“Birdie had a nice kitchen full of casseroles,” Ursula said. Her eyes grew round and astonished as her children, aged eight to fifteen, begin to reenter the
house carrying covered dishes, plastic containers, boxes, bags and pans filled with goodies. “My God,” she whispered, aghast. “June, this qualifies as an outpouring!”

“This isn’t even the half of it,” June said. “The porch was covered. I had to leave Sadie home because we nearly filled the truck bed. And now that she’s gotten used to going everywhere with me, she was expressly unhappy to be left. You should have seen the look she gave me.”

“Well, come in. We’ll have coffee and start packaging and freezing your goodies and casseroles.”

“I’d like that, but actually, I have to see Tom about something. Shouldn’t take a minute.”

“He’s out back, whittling while Lincoln chants. He’s praying for you, you know.”

“Tanya said that,” June said, surprised anew. “Do you suppose his prayers had something to do with all my casseroles and desserts?”

“There were many times he managed to cover his own table and feed seven children when their means were slim. I suspect he has great influence.”

Wish I could get him on a special project, June thought. But she kept silent.

June carried two cups of coffee into the backyard. Tom crouched on one side of the small campfire and Lincoln sat cross-legged on the ground on the other side. She shivered slightly inside her wool jacket. The late spring afternoons had begun to be warm and humid from the rains, but in the evening the temperature dropped, and the night air was crisp. The fire felt good. “I brought coffee,” she said.

“June,” Tom said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

“Long enough for Ursula to brew a fresh pot.” She held out a mug toward Tom, who accepted, and toward Lincoln, who held up a hand to decline.

“I’ll go inside for some in a few minutes,” Lincoln told her. “You have that one.”

“Thanks. And Elmer is inside, Lincoln. Probably sitting behind a big slice of Philana’s pie.”

Lincoln smiled. “Today would be rhubarb. The favorite of the house.”

Then he seemed to withdraw into himself and resume meditating, shutting them out.

“I want to talk to you about a couple of things. I need your help with something,” June told Tom. “A very delicate matter.”

He straightened up and waved a hand toward the picnic table. “Step into my office.”

“I still can’t believe this is happening. It has to do with John Stone….”

“John?”

“I did a routine check of his references. He graduated from medical school with honors, did a residency in OB-GYN and later went back east, to Boston, for a second residency in family medicine. He gave me a list of doctors to talk to for character references and they recommended him highly.

“Then I had a young, pregnant patient refuse to see John again. She panicked at the suggestion, and she needs a specialist. She implied he was improper with her.”

“Did you speak to John about it?” Tom inquired.

“No. And in waiting, I waited too long. At a loss, I
called the founder and CEO of the OB-GYN clinic he was a partner in before his second residency. This doctor was not on John’s list of references, and for good reason. He appears to despise John, but wouldn’t be specific about his reasons. He would only say they parted on bad terms, something about John wanting to be bought out of the partnership his clinic gave him. It was easy for me to brush off—economic differences have nothing to do with me. Besides, that’s not so unusual. John would have built equity into his share by investing his own time and work, patients he would have to leave behind.

“But John realized what I had done, who I had talked to. Assuming I wanted a list of references from that California clinic, he gave me a new list of names—his old OB nurse, an office manager, a physician’s assistant. I talked to the nurse, who sang his praises.”

“Back and forth, back and forth,” Tom observed.

“You don’t know the half. After John stitched up my head, spent the night looking after me, saw all my patients so I could rest, I wondered how I could ever have doubted him. He’s a good guy, Tom, I just know it. But this afternoon I got a call from a woman, a doctor who knew John well some years ago just before he left the Fairfield Clinic. She gave me a laundry list of personal problems John suffered. Then she topped it off by telling me she had him arrested for sexually assaulting her.”

Tom was frozen silent by the allegation, the quick shrinking of his black pupils, barely visible, the only outward sign he was stunned.

“Now I don’t know what to think. I really can’t talk
to him about it, not until I get some information. The only place I can think of to look is public records. Police records.”

“That’s easily done,” Tom said. “And…if there’s no record of this assault…?”

“Why wouldn’t there be?”

“Any number of reasons. He could have been picked up and not charged, in which case certain baseless records are expunged regularly to make room for real arrests. Or he could have been charged and dismissed. Or—”

“But will you check?”

“Of course. My advice, however, is that you speak to John about these allegations. And look closely at his eyes as he explains.”

“Yes, you’re right. But not just yet. First let’s see if we find anything.”

Tom smiled. “We?”

She smiled back. “You. Thanks in advance. I’m going to do my best to put this from my mind until I hear something about your investigation.”

He took a sip of coffee. “You said there were a couple of things.”

“Oh! I nearly forgot.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a bloodstained rag. “When Cliff woke me, this rag was pressed to the cut on my head. When John stitched me up, I instinctively stuffed it into my pocket. Look at it.”

He did so without touching it. Folded, it was about six inches long, three inches wide and a triple thickness. “Cheesecloth?” he asked.

“More like homespun. Or maybe muslin. It isn’t mine…didn’t come from my bag.”

“Cliff?”

“Nope. Cliff thinks I was thrown out of the Jeep, but I wasn’t, Tom. I was pulled out of the burning Jeep by a thirty-year-old man who kept his pants up with rope suspenders and carried an ax. In fact, he said he used the ax to open the Jeep and get me out. He put this on my head and rinsed it out in a stream that wasn’t there.”

“I get the impression you haven’t told anyone about this,” Tom said.

“It was him, Tom. Wyatt. There’s no question in my mind.”

“Wyatt is a very prevalent folktale. It’s possible you dreamed him.”

“And this?” she said, eyeing the rag still resting in her palm. “Did I dream this?”

“There are a number of possible explanations. It could have been lying on the roadside.”

“Except for the blood, it’s perfectly clean! I’m sending it off to a lab. I’d like to know what kind of fabric this is and how old it is.”

“I’ll be anxious for the results as well, but if I may, you might wish to limit the people you share this story with.”

“You think no one will believe me?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Some would, some wouldn’t. I’d just hate to see them lift an eyebrow, the way they do at Jerry Powell’s spaceship ride.”