Healing Sands (15 page)

I sat next to him and pulled my chair in close. “What does
whereas
mean?”

He stopped picking at the mole on his arm. “What?”

“
Whereas
. What does it mean?”

“I don't know,” he said.

“How about
inalienable
? Do you know that one?”

He squinted at his hands. “No.”

“Inalienable rights?”

“I don't
know
. It's, like, in the Constitution or something.”

“Or something,” I said. “Can you spell it?”

Jake's miserable gaze went to the ceiling. “You know I can't. Why do you always have to rub that in?”

“I'm not rubbing it in. I'm trying to show you how I can save your butt.”

The gaze came down in a glare. “You said you weren't asking me questions about that.”

“I'm asking questions about you, and the answers prove that you did not write that note they found in the truck with you.”

He went back to the mole. “Okay, so maybe I do know what that stuff means.”

“No, you don't. Listen, I'm going to share this with your lawyer, not to embarrass you—”

“Why can't you just leave it alone?” Jake's voice cracked, and he shoved the chair back and knocked it onto its back on the plank floor. “I'm not afraid of going to prison, so just leave it alone.”

There was nothing
but
fear in his eyes as he left the chair lying there and escaped from me once more. I righted it before Ginger could emerge from her lair and accuse me of busting up the furniture—or pick the thing up and swing it at me.

When I returned to the backyard, Alex was kicking at the dirt with his toe between two of the orange cones I'd picked up at a sporting goods store. As soon as he saw me, he smiled an automatic smile.

“Juggle for me,” I said.

He immediately obliged, bouncing the ball off his knee.

“So are you pretty good friends with Cade and those guys?” I said.

“I am with Felipe and Bryan. Cade's kinda bossy sometimes.”

Cade didn't take after anybody strange.

“Do you know any kids on the other teams in the league?” I said.

Alex grinned and popped the ball onto his shoulder where he was able to bounce it three times before it dropped. “I know everybody.”

“Everybody?”

The grin grew wider. “And everybody knows me.”

“Fibber,” I said.

“No. Serious. Ask anybody at Burn Lake.”

His eyes teased me as he smacked the ball with his instep in my direction. I trapped it, the only skill I had actually mastered.

“Do you know Miguel Sanchez?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, just before his face froze. “Well, maybe I don't know
him.
”

“Alex.”

I pushed the ball aside and nodded him toward a cable-spool table just beyond the porch. It had a rooster weather vane coming up through its center, but there was room to sit at it on smaller spool stools. Alex took one as if he were placing himself into a dentist's chair.

“You do know Miguel,” I said.

He nodded.

“How well do you know him?”

“Not that good. He's Jake's friend, not mine.”

I could barely keep my chin from dropping to my chest. “So Jake and Miguel are friends. Good friends?”

“Yeah.” Alex still wasn't looking at me. All the little-boy charm had slipped way.

“Like, spend-the-night-at-each-other's-houses friends?”

“No. They just played soccer.”

“Miguel's in the same soccer league as you guys.”

Alex shook his head. You would think I was beating the information out of him.

“He wasn't at first. He just hung around Burn Lake, and me and Jake and Ian would mess around with the ball while we were waiting for Dad to get out of meetings and stuff. Jake asked him to play with us.”

I groped for control. “So—is he pretty good at soccer?”

“Oh yeah.” First light came back into Alex's eyes. “He played like those guys from South America on TV.”

“That good?”

“Jake even told him to try out for the select team.”

“That sounds important.”

“It's like the best players in the whole league. They get to travel out of town, all the way to Albuquerque and stuff.”

Alex went on for five minutes about the glory of being on the select team. I nodded and made occasional appreciative noises while my mind raced elsewhere.

If Jake was impressed by Miguel Sanchez and befriended him, how could he possibly have tried to kill him? And why hadn't Jake volunteered any of this information himself? I felt my eyes narrow as I wondered if Dan knew—but again I dismissed the possibility. He wouldn't just let Jake go down like this.

Alex was looking at me, his eyes clouded again with misgiving.

“What's wrong, guy?” I said.

“Are you gonna tell Jake I told you?” he asked.

“Wouldn't he want you to?”

Alex shrugged.

“What does that mean?” I mimicked his lifted shoulders.

“He doesn't like me saying stuff about him to people. This one time, I told Dad that Jake stopped these guys from picking on this girl on the bus, and Jake got all mad.” He widened his brown eyes. “I don't get that, but he just says he doesn't like people talking about him, so I don't.”

“This is a little bit different. People are saying Jake hurt Miguel. It would help if people knew they were friends.”

Alex gave a quick nod and stood up. “Can we practice some more? You gotta work on your passing, Mom.”

“Just one more question. You said Jake and Miguel and Ian all played soccer together—”

“I knew it. I knew you were trying to drag Ian into this.”

I looked up at the back porch in time to see Ginger slap the screen door behind her—and burst into tears. She came to the railing, leaned on the pole, and openly cried.

I had lain awake nights with the images of starving African children rattling in my brain, their ladder-ribs and rickety femurs knocking at my memory and making sleep itself a mere dream. But when Ginger started to cry, I stifled a yawn. One more tear and I would doze off. A few more sobs and I might lapse into a coma.

“I am not dragging your precious Ian into anything,” I said. “I'm talking to my son about his friends.”

I turned back to Alex, who was watching Ginger with just about as much concern as I was feeling.

“I guess we better talk about this later,” I said to him with a wink.

“Yeah.” He attempted to wink back and looked as if he had a bug in his eye.

“No! Don't you talk about my son, ever!”

I only looked at Ginger to make sure she wasn't going to throw a flowerpot at me, but she wasn't in rage mode. She was just bawling, mouth open, howling out of her throat. It was enough to bring Ian and Jake from around the side of the house, and Dan up the walkway from the studio. Was that all it took to get this group's attention? You just brought out the crocodile tears, and they all came running?

Ian went straight to his mother and put his arm around her. He looked at me, face puzzled.

“Is there a problem?” he asked.

“Nothing you need to worry about,” I said.

“I kind of do.” He pulled Ginger to arm's length. “Mom, go get a Kleenex or something, will ya?”

She nodded and melted into the house. I stared as Ian joined Alex and me at the table. Jake was still standing just beyond the patio.

“She flips out easy,” Ian said to me. “Right, Alex?”

Alex rolled his eyes.

“But seriously, did something go down here? If I know what it is, I can calm her down.”

In spite of my agitation, I had to stop and study this kid. While most teenage boys weren't as sullen with their mothers as Jake was, they weren't usually this solicitous with them either. Even now, he glanced at the door like he was totally responsible for the woman. “Look,” I said, “I was just sitting here having a conversation with Alex. It didn't have anything to do with her.”

“What's up, buddy?” Dan said behind me.

“Mom's upset, and Jake's mom and I were just trying to deal with it.”

“Actually, no,” I said. “
I
was just trying to spend some time with my sons.”

“Not this son.” Jake stepped onto the patio, arms jammed into the pouch of his sweatshirt, eyes bulleted at me. “I'm over it, okay? I'm not talking to you again, about anything, I don't care what it is.” He glanced at his brother. “You shouldn't either, Alex. She doesn't care about you. She's just trying to get to me—”

“Stop!” I said. “Jake—you just stop.”

I stormed across the bricks at him. Ian stepped between us.

“Come on, guys,” he said.

“Step aside.”

“Danny, do something!” Ginger cried from the doorway.

“Ryan—”

“All of you, just
stop
!” I had both hands up, and I could feel them shaking. My breath heaved in and out of my nose as I jabbed a finger at Ian. “You do not come between me and my son. And you”—I jockeyed around him and pointed at Jake—“do not misrepresent me to your brother. And you”—I whirled on Dan, who was now mere steps behind me—“need to ask the nymphette over there to stand clear when I'm spending time with my boys.”

I took a step into Dan's space. He looked down at me with the first faint stirrings of anger in his eyes. “Don't fight me on this, Dan. We have enough problems as it is.”

I stopped counting the number of doors that slammed after that. Jake's bedroom. Ginger's screen door. Dan's studio. When Ian had taken off after his mother, only Alex was left, and I advised him to scoot on and get his homework done, which he did without a murmur.

By the time I got to my car, I was too drained to slam anything myself, and I didn't feel any better having opened up on my ex-husband's new family like a submachine gun. As I started the engine, I looked at the hourglass on the dashboard.
God, where were you? Why didn't you stop me?
Where
are those images?

The sun had already dropped behind the hills when I made my way slowly down Dan's driveway, and the artsy forms I passed were mere blobs in the fading light. I had gotten child soldiers, hard as cast-iron skillets, to sob their stories into my lap. And yet I couldn't make my own son tell me what he was so obviously hiding. Either one of my sons.

I stopped at the end of the driveway and squared my shoulders in the darkness. All right, then. If they wouldn't tell me, I was going to have to find out from someplace else. And in the first God-image I'd had in days, I knew where that might be.

CHAPTER TWELVE

S
ully had just finished praying before his session Tuesday afternoon when his cell phone rang, which was a good thing. He'd forgotten all about it, and all he needed was for it to go off while he was talking to Ryan.

He did answer it now, though, in case Porphyria was calling. It was Tess Lightfoot.

“I have your age progression ready,” she said.

“You do?”

“Well—yeah. Isn't that why you're paying me the big bucks?”

Sully laughed. “I'm just surprised. That was quick.”

“That's the other reason you're paying me the big bucks.”

Her voice was as smooth as he remembered it.

“You might want to come by my office so we can look at it on the computer. I have a few questions that could mean some changes.”

“So you were able to scan it with the computer.”

“Still another reason why—”

“I'm paying you the big bucks.” Sully felt himself grinning. “I'm starting to worry about my bill.”

“You should.”

She gave him an address, and he agreed to meet her at six. Then he turned off his phone and tapped it on the desk.

His conversation with Porphyria had reassured him for a few days, but now that he was about to see the face he'd been looking for, anxiety crept along his nerve endings again. Saying he could discern the difference between normal anger and bloody-stump revenge was one thing. Knowing he could do it when Belinda Cox was looking back at him was another. And if he was this worried about just seeing her picture, what was going to happen when he confronted her in person?

Sully wiped the sudden beads of sweat from his upper lip and stood up to go out and meet Ryan.
One God-thing at a time, Dr. Crisp,
he could hear Porphyria saying.
One God-thing at a time.

Ryan was literally pacing the reception room when Sully got there. This was either going to be productive—or it was going to be a disaster.

Once again she eschewed the polite greetings and small talk and went straight for the chair. She dropped the hourglass onto the trunk between them. “Did you expect this to work?”

“I assume it didn't,” Sully said.

“Not at all.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

“Is that like ‘How did it make you feel?'”

Sully shook his head, still watching her try to look bigger in the chair as he settled in his own. “No, it's just ‘You want to tell me about it.' Although I guess journalists misuse the ‘How did it make you feel' line as much as therapists.”

“I think it's a cheap shot,” she said. “I don't ask that many questions anyway. I just make pictures.”

“Speaking of which, I saw some of your work in the paper. I was impressed.”

Ryan put a hand on top of her head and closed her eyes. “Look, don't try to get me to loosen up. I need
help
here.”

“That's exactly where we're going, Ryan,” Sully said. “Nobody can look at this stuff wound up like a spring.”

He saw her swallow, but otherwise she didn't respond.

“What
I
see in your pictures is that you share in the emotion of what's going on in front of the camera. Doesn't matter that it's kindergartners in tutus, there's heart and soul in there.” He tilted his head at her. “I don't see a tough, no-nonsense person behind that camera.”