Skeleton Canyon (18 page)

“Is that why they call the place we’re going to Skeleton Canyon?” Winfield asked. “Because people died out there?” Joanna nodded.

“Of thirst?”

“They were mostly murdered,
^”
Joanna answered. “You ever hear of the Clanton gang?”

“As in Wyatt Earp?”

“Before they tangled with him, the Clantons ambushed a band of Mexican gold smugglers here in the Peloncillos. According to legend, the Clantons made off with a shipment of stolen gold, only to be caught by the survivors a few miles away. In the ensuing fight, a few more people died and the gold disappeared. It’s still supposed to be out there somewhere.”

“Amazing,” George Winfield murmured.

“The Peloncillos have always been a haven for smugglers. It’s a mountain range that’s almost impossible to patrol. The Baker Wilderness Area, between Skeleton Canyon and the international border, is supposed to be closed to vehicular traffic. Unfortunately, smugglers don’t necessarily pay any attention to the edicts of the Environmental Protection Agency
or
the U.S. Forest Service.”

“Amazing,” George Winfield said again, settling back in his seat and staring out the window at a landscape that was waist-high in yellow grass. “I can’t believe I’m living in a place where those names are part of history and not just something that used to turn up in Saturday matinees. Coming here I thought this would all be real desert, maybe even sand dunes. This almost looks like wheat.”

Joanna considered explaining to him how Anglos had encouraged the spread of mesquite, which had killed off the native grasses, but she let it go.
Let him learn some of that stuff on his own,
she thought.

They drove in silence for several more miles before George spoke again, clearing his throat as he did so. “By the way, Joanna, has Ellie said much of anything to you about . . .” He paused. “Well, about us,” he finished lamely.

There he was, using the name Ellie again to bring up a topic Joanna wasn’t at all eager to discuss. “Not really,” she returned coolly. “Why?”

“She hasn’t happened to mention that we’re . . . er . . married?”

Joanna turned to look at him and in the process ran the right-hand tires onto the shoulder of the road. She had to struggle with the steering wheel for a moment before the Eagle returned to the sun-cracked pavement.

“Married?” she demanded, her face pale. “You can’t be serious!
^”

George shook his head. “I wouldn’t kid around about some-thing like this. I’ve been telling her for weeks now that she needed to let you know. In case you haven’t noticed, your mother’s a little stubborn. We eloped, Joanna. Last month. We got married in a little chapel up in Vegas. I’ve booked an Alaskan cruise for our honeymoon in August. I wanted you to know about it before then.”

Joanna couldn’t think of a single word to say in reply. George hurried on. “I hope you’re not too shocked. At our ages, you know, it’s hard to tell how much time we have. And your mother and I are just alike. High-fidelity and low-frequency, if you know what I mean.”

He chuckled at his own joke and then looked at Joanna to see if she was laughing. She wasn’t. They were approaching the turnoff to Skeleton Canyon. With her chin set and her
eyes
staring straight ahead, Joanna jammed on the brakes. She swung the Eagle onto the gravel road with such force that, had George Winfield not been wearing his seat belt, he would have come sliding into her lap.

“I guess you’re a little angry about this,” he murmured a little later.

“Angry?” Joanna repeated. “Whatever makes you think that?”

“I suppose that’s why Ellie was so reluctant to tell you in the first place. She was afraid you’d react this way.”

In front of them a trio of three black-tailed deer gracefully leaped across the sandy track, clearing the barbed-wire fences on both sides as though they didn’t exist and then disappearing into the waist-high grass. Seeing them gave Joanna a chance to gather her resources. The last thing she ever wanted to do was react just the way her mother said she would. If Eleanor had thought Joanna was going to be angry, then, by God, angry was the last thing she’d be!

“I’m surprised,” she said carefully. “Surprised and shocked, but not angry.”

George Winfield sighed. “That’s a relief, then,” he said. “What about your brother? What do you think he’ll say?”

Bob Brundage, Joanna’s long-lost brother, was another one of Eleanor Lathrop’s little secrets. Born out of wedlock before D.H. Lathrop and Eleanor married, Bob had been put up for adoption as an infant. Joanna had first learned of his existence at Thanksgiving the previous year, when he had tracked down his birth mother after the deaths of both his adoptive parents.

“I have no idea what Bob will say,” Joanna replied, curbing a desire to snap. “You’ll have to ask him yourself.”

“I thought we’d invite him and his wife to the reception,” George continued.

“What reception?”

“The one we’ll have when we get back from the cruise. Maybe in September sometime. That’ll be fun, don’t you think? Nothing too fancy. Maybe just a little get-together at the club-house out at Rob Roy Links. That’s where we went on our first real date, you see.”

“I’m sure it’ll be a ball,” Joanna said. “I can hardly wait.”

They came around a sharp curve where the road was blocked by a barbed-wire gate. Parked in front of the gate was a battered green Range Rover. A slender woman in a dark blue dress and wearing huge, wraparound sunglasses stood next to the vehicle, studying a map.

Joanna rolled down her window. “Excuse me,” she called. “Would you mind moving out of the way? We need to get past.”

The woman looked up. “Maybe you can help me. I’m looking for Skeleton Canyon, but when I came to this gate, I was afraid I had missed a turn. Am I going the right way
?”

Leaving the Eagle idling, Joanna climbed out. “I’m sorry,” she said, pulling out her badge. “I’m Sheriff Brady. There’s been a serious accident up in Skeleton Canyon today. A fatality. We’re expecting emergency vehicles in and out of here on this road. If you don’t mind, it would probably be better if you could postpone your visit to some other time.”

“But that’s why I’m here,” the woman replied. “Because of the accident. I heard about it on my police scanner and came straight on out.” She reached into her purse and pulled out an ID wallet of her own that she handed over to Joanna.

“Frances G. Stoddard,” the identification card said. “Private Investigator.”

Suddenly, a day Joanna Brady was convinced had already bottomed out got that much worse. “You’re David O’Brien’s private eye
.”

“Bingo,” Frances Stoddard said with a smile.
^“
You can call me Frankie. Everybody else does. What was your name again?”

“Brady,” Joanna said wearily. “And you can call me Sheriff.”

If Frankie Stoddard was offended by Joanna’s brusque reply, she certainly didn’t let it show. “Glad to meet you, Sheriff,” she said. “I understand you’ve been traveling in a vehicle with no radio, so you probably don’t know what’s going on.”

“What now?”

“If this is the right road, two of your officers are up ahead. Stuck in a wash. They’ve called for a wrecker to come get them out. I have a winch on the Rover. I thought if I could get up to where they are ...”

Joanna closed her eyes and shook her head.
From bad to worse and worse again.

“Come on,” she said to Frankie. “If you can move your vehicle out of the way, I’ll go first. And if you can winch them out, I’ll be eternally grateful. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck here half the day without getting anywhere near where we’re supposed to be.”

At the turnoff in Apache, the road to Skeleton Canyon had been a fairly generous gravel affair that soon dwindled to dirt. On the other side of the closed gate, however, it was comprised of two rocky tracks with foot-high grass growing up in the middle. A few hundred yards beyond the gate, the road opened out again into a wide, sandy wash. Ernie Carpenter’s van sat stuck in the middle of it, mired in sand up to the hubcaps.

Ernie sat on a nearby rock, wiping the sweat off his forehead. As soon as Detective Carbajal saw Joanna, he came hurrying up to her Eagle. “Sorry about this, Sheriff Brady,” Jaime apologized. “I thought I had enough momentum going into the wash to get us through. The sand just reached out and grabbed us.”

There was no sense in ripping into him about it. “Tell you what, Jaime,” Joanna said. “Load what you can of Ernie’s equipment into the back of this. The lady behind me, Frankie Stoddard, is a private detective working for David O’Brien. She says she has a winch, and she thinks maybe her Range Rover can haul you out of here. Meantime, I’ll take Doc Winfield and Ernie on up the line to see if we can make it to the accident scene.”

“Sure thing, Sheriff Brady,” Jaime said. “I’ll get right on it.”

Twenty minutes later, Joanna was ready to set out again with George Winfield in the front seat and with Ernie scrunched into the backseat along with as much of his equipment as would fit. Shifting into four-wheel drive, she negotiated the wash with no difficulty.

“Who was that lady?” Ernie asked again. “The one with the Range Rover?”

“Her name’s Frankie Stoddard,” Joanna answered. “She’s David O’Brien’s private eye.”

“Great,” Ernie muttered.

“That’s what I say,” Joanna said.

Angie Kellogg heard the sirens. Sitting in a thicket of mesquite, she watched the drama below. She saw an agitated Dennis Hacker bound off the hillside and into the little clearing where the Hummer was parked, saw him look around anxiously for her, heard him calling her name and talking on his cell phone, but Angie didn’t move. She was too hurt. Too angry.

It wasn
^’
t that she liked Dennis Hacker that much. She had seen him just the two times. What was important about him, though, was what he represented. Joanna Brady, Marianne Maculyea, Jeff Daniels, and Bobo Jenkins had all tried to convince Angie that she could leave her past behind and live a normal life. And it had seemed to her in the past few months that she was doing so, that she was succeeding. She had made some friends at work. At home, she was learning to deal with neighbors, some of whom she liked and some she didn’t.

The former included Effie Spangler, Angie’s spry, octogenarian neighbor, who despite her years and having a working clothes dryer in her laundry room, nevertheless preferred drying her wash on a clothesline. The latter included Richard, Effie’s obnoxious husband, who always seemed to find something to do in the backyard whenever Angie was sunbathing and who never failed to complain that her bird feeders were bound to attract rats.

For Angie, there was much to be proud of. There was a normalcy and a regularity to her existence now that would have astonished her family back home in Battle Creek. Some of that normalcy included things her parents themselves had never achieved. For instance, Angie’s snug little house in Galena was completely paid for. She had a job and a car and insurance premiums. She had her own driver’s license and her very own voter’s registration card. All of those achievements should have said she was real.

Yet, in spite of all that, once she told Dennis Hacker the truth, he’d had the nerve to laugh at her. That hurt like hell.

She heard him now, calling her name. “Angie, Angie. Where are you?”

I’m up here,
she thought determinedly,
and I’m not coming down.

From her vantage point high on the hillside, she could see north to a road—a paved highway of some kind. Every ten minutes or so a vehicle would pass slowly in one direction or the other. She knew this wasn’t the road she and Dennis had taken from Douglas early that morning because what Dennis had called Old Geronimo Trail had been dirt most of the way.

That’s what I’ll do,
she told herself, watching a pickup wend its way along that same paved road.
When he finally gives up and leaves, I’ll walk down there and hitchhike home.

But what would she do when she got there? Stay or go? Work her heart out to get along, knowing all the time that as soon as people knew the real story, they would reject her out of hand? What was the use of fighting it? Maybe she should leave for a while, go someplace else. She’d have to give Bobo notice, of course. Give him a chance to find someone to take her place, but that probably wouldn’t be all that hard.

Just then, with that thought barely formed in her head, she felt a whirring past her ear. A high squeak shrilled in her ear as a beautiful, multicolored Lucifer Hummingbird settled on a branch not five feet from where Angie was sitting. He was close enough that she could see the distinctive downcurved bill, the rich purple feathers on the underside of his throat, and the bronze-green hues from crown to rump. Although Angie was careful not to move, he stayed for only a few seconds, then he was off, buzzing down the mountainside.

It was like a fairy tale. It seemed almost as if the beautiful bird had given her permission to go. She stood up as he disappeared from view.

“Good-bye,” she whispered aloud. “I’m leaving, too.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Standing on the edge of the ridge, Joanna looked down on the shattered remains of the pickup far below. It lay on its top, parallel to the road, with a spray of silvery glass shards glittering around it. “Where’s the body?” she asked Dennis Hacker, who was standing beside her.

“Under the cab,” he replied. “I couldn’t see it, but I know it’s there.”

“how?” Joanna asked.

Hacker nodded skyward toward three vultures circling lazily high overhead. “A little bird told me,” he said. “When I got closer, I could figure it out for myself.”

Joanna turned to Ernie Carpenter and George Winfield, who had been walking back and forth along the cliff, trying to determine exactly where Brianna had run off the edge and why. Now they stood nearby, conferring in low voices.

“No sign of braking or skidding. No sign of her meeting another vehicle and being forced off the cliff.”