Spider Web (40 page)

“Great idea,” she said.

We took Lin to our favorite Italian restaurant downtown, Daniello’s. Gabe and I were regular customers, so they accommodated our last-minute request for the private dining room in back. We ordered wine, antipasto, garlic bread, salad and lasagna. Daniello’s served their food family style.

While we filled our plates, I asked Gabe the first question. “I’m curious about something. When Lin walked into your office, am I crazy or did you call her Lieutenant Spider?”

Gabe grinned. “That was my nickname for her. When I was brought in with my injury from the Bouncing Betty, I also had a bad concussion and a high fever.”

“Malaria,” Lin said, sipping a glass of wine.

“I was in and out of it for a day or so,” Gabe continued. “She introduced herself, but my brain was so fuzzy that I thought she said her name was Lieutenant Spider. I called her that for days before someone finally corrected me. By then, it had become a kind of joke, and everyone started calling her that.”

“Yeah, thanks so much for that, Ortiz,” she said.

Gabe just couldn’t stop grinning. “Nicknames were big in ’Nam. It meant you were liked.”

“Unless it was a bad nickname,” Lin said.

Gabe nodded and winked at me.

“So, Lin was your nurse,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. Is that all? The photograph of Tessa kept coming back to me. Would Lin mention the girl?

“He was a big help to me once he got better,” Lin said. “Before they shipped him back.” She reached over and touched Gabe’s hand. “I missed you when you left.”

Gabe took her hand; his expression softened. “Do you ever hear from any of the other guys? Little Joe? Packie? Arturo?” He looked across the table at me. “We were the four amigos. At least, that’s what we called ourselves. We weren’t in the same platoon, but we all were Lieutenant Spider’s patients at the same time.”

Lin pulled her hand away and picked up her wine. “You didn’t keep up with them?”

Gabe looked down at his plate. “No, I got busy. You know.”

“Packie committed suicide in 1992. Pills and booze. His wife found my name and address in a journal he kept. The address was an old one, but the landlord knew where I was living, so he forwarded the funeral program to me. I wrote his wife and she wrote back telling me about how he died.”

A flicker of pain wrinkled Gabe’s forehead. “Man, that sucks.” “Yeah,” she said.

“What about Little Joe?” he asked. “And Arturo.”

“Little Joe lives in Oklahoma now. He’s been married and divorced four times. Works at a tire place. Drinks a lot, but he’s doing okay. He’s making it day by day.”

“Wow,” Gabe said, shaking his head.

“Yeah.”

“Arturo?”

She hesitated, and an expression of pain flickered in her eyes. “He died in a car accident.”

Gabe was silent for a moment. “When?”

“A long time ago. In 1978. On the Fourth of July. Crazy, huh?”

“I never knew. I didn’t . . . keep up with many people. Just a friend from Kansas. Dewey.” A friend who ended up betraying and almost killing him. “I didn’t really want to talk about ’Nam when I got back to the States so I never looked for anyone.”

“Most of us felt that way. It wasn’t that kind of war. Not like our fathers’ war.” She turned to me, attempting to include me in the conversation. “We didn’t come back in huge groups like our fathers did after World War II. It felt like once we were done with our tour in Vietnam, our country was ashamed of us. It felt like they were trying to sneak us back into society one by one through the back door. It almost felt like they didn’t want us to find each other. And what’s really awful is many of us accommodated them.”

Gabe nodded in agreement. “For almost ten years I didn’t tell anyone I was a Vietnam veteran.”

In the dim light of the restaurant, her half smile was sad. “That’s sort of what I want to talk to you about.” She reached down and pulled something out of her purse. It was the photo of Tessa in front of the bottlebrush bush in Los Angeles.

“Who’s this?” Gabe asked, picking up the photo.

“Tessa, my daughter.”

He studied the photo closely, then smiled. “She’s lovely. What a beautiful smile.” His words were sincere; his expression was not condescending or full of pity. He meant what he said. Which was one of the reasons why I loved him.

Looking at her face when he said it, seeing the expression of pride and shy joy at his compliments, I knew in that moment that whatever happened from this encounter, it could only be good.

“I need your help, Gabe,” she said, taking another sip of her wine. “Yours too, Benni. I don’t have anyone else and . . . Arturo . . . he always told me if I ever needed help, that I should come to you or Packie or Little Joe. That you were men who could be depended on . . . that you’d help me.”

Gabe set the photograph down. “What do you need?”

She looked down at the photo. “She’s Arturo’s daughter. She was conceived in Vietnam. The war will follow her always. He adored her.”

After hearing her first sentence, relief washed over me like a flooded river. My feelings shamed me, but selfishly, I was glad that Tessa wasn’t Gabe’s child.

“How can we help you, Lin?” Gabe asked.

“I want you to take my daughter.”

“What?” Gabe’s eyebrows moved together, perplexed.

“Please,” she said. “I’m dying.”

CHAPTER 22

“
T
HE CANCER IS INOPERABLE,” SHE SAID. “IT’S IN MY PANCREAS, my liver and now they’ve found spots in my brain. The doctors say it could be a month, six months, a year. No one knows. But I’m definitely dying.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Oh, Lin, I’m sorry.”

She looked from Gabe to me, clutching the photo of Tessa. “This is crazy, I know. But I have no family. Neither did Arturo. Tessa lives in an assisted living home with other Down syndrome adults. She’ll have my pension and my Social Security. I have it set up in a trust with an attorney. Financially, she’ll be fine, but . . .” Her voice faltered. “The people who run the home are great, but . . .”

“She needs a family,” I said.

“Yes, yes!” she said, tears flowing freely down her cheeks. “It’s crazy, but for the last month I’ve searched out six people who I knew back in ’Nam, people that Arturo knew and trusted. But none of them fit. None of them seemed right. I mean, it can’t just be them, but their family has to be okay with it and . . .”

Her blue eyes pleaded with me. “I’m sorry it appeared I was stalking you. I just had to know. I had to make sure that if I asked this of Gabe that his wife and family would be okay with it. I don’t want Tessa to live somewhere she isn’t wanted.”

“Why did you go through the ranch house where my first husband and I lived?” I asked.

She blushed, looking chagrined. “It’s silly, but I wanted to know all about you, who you were, what your life in this community was like before Gabe, how you and Gabe came to be together. There was something I liked right off about San Celina and about your family.” She smiled at me. “I envied you your life once I looked into it. You have a wonderful family.”

“I do,” I said. “Why the phony identity?”

“What phony identity?” Gabe asked.

Lin and I looked at each other and smiled.

“I’ll explain later,” I told Gabe.

“Honestly, I didn’t need to do it, but I had this crazy idea that I’d be recognized, so I wanted a cover of some kind. I realized, of course, that all I had to do was avoid Gabe. No one else knew me here. Avoiding him was easy enough to do since he was so completely absorbed in the sniper investigation he was rarely in the same place as you.”

She pushed her barely eaten pasta around on her plate. “I have a few other people on my list, but I don’t want to continue. I don’t need to continue. I want you to be Tessa’s legal guardians. I know it’s asking the moon and stars and . . .”

I squeezed Gabe’s hand. He squeezed back in silent agreement.

“Of course we will,” I said.

“It would be an honor,” Gabe added.

She looked directly at me. “You know the moment I knew you’d be the right one to ask?”

I shook my head.

“When you covered that little girl’s body with your own when we thought the sniper had attacked again.”

“What?” Gabe said, turning to me. “What is she talking about?”

“The Memory Festival,” I said. “It was firecrackers. But everyone thought it was the sniper. A little girl got away from her mother, and I went after her. What’s ironic was I was standing right next to the real sniper when that happened.”

“Life is strange,” Lin said.

“That,” Gabe replied, “is the truth.”

EPILOGUE

Eleven days later
Roundup

“
P
ASTOR MAC’S GETTING READY TO BLESS THE HERD AND THE workers before we start,” Dove said, looking up at me. “You and Bonnie will have to vaccinate. My fingers are hurtin’ too much this morning. Darn arthur-itis.”

I sat astride Trixie next to the sun-faded RV we’d used for the last twenty years during roundup as a combination office, women’s bathroom, prep kitchen and gossip central. Most of our herd was in the corrals waiting to be sorted, vaccinated, castrated, branded and tagged. The calves were big this year and a little wild. It would make for an interesting day.

“No problem,” I said.

Pressing the vaccination needle’s sticky plunger hundreds of times was tiring even for young fingers. No doubt I would be munching an extra-strength aspirin and Tylenol sandwich myself tonight. “But only if you save me a piece of red velvet cake.” Though she always made three of them, if you didn’t nab a piece right away, you were out of luck.

“Already set you a piece aside. But there’s plenty this year. We have five cakes now that Garnet’s helping. And her red velvet is much better than mine.”

I rested one hand on my saddle horn and resisted a smart-aleck comment. This detente between Dove and her sister still occasionally caught me by surprise, but I was not about to do anything to quell it.

“You know I’m partial to yours, Dove.” My gramma didn’t raise no dummy. The wise comment earned me a satisfied smile from her and probably a second piece of cake. “Tell Daddy I’ll be there in a little bit. That speckle-faced cow that he likes so much is still hiding. He wants me to find her.”

Trixie tip-tapped nervously beneath me. She and I had just ridden down from hills thick with rosy pink wild hollyhocks and dusty yellow clusters of footsteps of spring, a wildflower so appropriately named you had to smile when you heard it. Pollen coated everything with a fine, buttery dust, making the air thick, like breathing through a yellow fog. Aunt Garnet was handing out decongestant and antihistamine tablets like a Saturday night drug dealer trying to hook new customers.

For about twenty of us, the day had started before sunrise, driving cattle out of the valleys and hilltops where they’d been hanging out with their new calves. One of the riders this year was Daddy’s new lady friend, Dot, whom he officially introduced to the family last night at dinner.

“She’ll be riding with us tomorrow,” he’d said last night. He took off his white straw cowboy hat, holding it in front of him while he made his announcement. “We’re . . . courting.” He said the words with as much dignity as he could muster.

His ears had flushed a deep merlot when Sam let out a loud, enthusiastic, “Whoo-hoo, Ben! You hound dog.” We all laughed when Daddy smacked Sam with his hat.

“I’m looking forward to riding with you,” I said to Dot after dinner when she offered to go out to the barn with me to fetch more blackberries from our extra freezer.

“I care about your daddy.” Her words were clipped, no-nonsense, her small pointed chin level and firm. “I’m not after anything that belongs to you. And I’m not . . .” She left the sentence open, but we both knew what she meant. She wouldn’t try to take my mama’s place.

I smiled at her and handed her a frozen package of blackberries. “Daddy has been alone for way too long. I’m happy for him and for you.”

It was the truth. She seemed like the exact right person for my dad. Not flashy, an earthy, somewhat bawdy sense of humor and she loved cattle ranching. In fact, Dot reminded me more than a little of Dove.