The Searcher (5 page)

—
M
RS
.
C
ORONADO?

Holly Coronado stared down at her husband's coffin, a couple of handfuls of dry sand and stones scattered across the pine lid.

—
There's a fire blowing this way, Mrs. Coronado, and I been called away to help.

When the stones had first fallen onto the boards, the sound of the larger pebbles had seemed hollow to her. They had made her think, for a flickering moment, that maybe the coffin was actually empty and all this some kind of elaborate historical reenactment they had forgotten to tell her about.

—I'm supposed to stick around until after everyone's gone.

The coffin had not been her idea. Neither had the venue.

—I'm supposed to fill in the grave, Mrs. Coronado. Only they need me back in town . . . because of the fire.

She had gone along with everything only because she was numb from grief, or shock, or both, and knew that Jim would have loved the idea of being buried up here next to all the grim-faced pioneers and salty outlaws no one outside Redemption had ever heard of.

—I'm going to have to come back and finish up later, okay?

Jim had loved this town, all its history and legends. All the earnest foundations upon which it had been built.

—
Maybe you should come back with me, Mrs. Coronado. I can drop you back home, if you like.

He had told her about the strange little town in the desert the very first time she met him at that freshman mixer at the University of Chicago Law School. She remembered the light that had come into his eyes when he talked about where he was from. She was from a nondescript suburb of St. Louis, so a town in the desert in the shadow of red mountains seemed romantic and exciting to her—and so had he.

—
Mrs. Coronado? You okay, Mrs. Coronado?

She turned and studied the earnest, sinewy young man in dusty green overalls. He held a battered baseball cap in his hands and was wringing the life out of it in a mixture of awkwardness and respect, his short, honey-colored hair flopping forward over skin the same color.

“What's your name?” she asked him.

“Billy. Billy Walker.”

“Do you have a shovel, Billy?”

A line creased his forehead below the mark his cap had made. “Excuse me?”

“A shovel, do you have one?”

He shook his head as it dawned on him where this was headed. “You don't need to . . . I mean, I'll come straight back and finish up here after.”

“When? When will you come back?”

He looked away down the valley to where a moving wall of smoke was creeping across a large chunk of the desert. “Soon as the fire's under control, I guess.”

“What if you're dead?” The crease deepened in his forehead. “What if the whole town burns up and you along with it—who will come back and bury my husband then? You suppose I should just leave him here for the animals?”

“No, ma'am. Guess not.”

“People make all sorts of plans, Billy Walker. All sorts of promises that don't get kept. I planned on being married to the man in that box until we were old and gray. But I also promised I would get up out of bed this morning and comb my hair and fix my face and come up here to give my husband a decent burial. So that's what I'm fixing to do. And a shovel would sure help me keep that particular promise.”

Billy stared down at the twisted cap in his hands, opened his mouth to say something then closed it again, turned around, and loped away down the hill to where his truck was parked in the shade of the large cottonwood in the center of the graveyard. Tools bristled from a barrel in the back and a solid, ugly bulldog sat behind the wheel, ears pricked forward. It was watching the smoke rising up from the valley. It didn't even move when Billy jumped onto the flatbed and set the springs rocking, just kept its eyes on the distant fire, its tongue lolling wetly from its mouth.

The smoke filled almost a third of the sky now and continued to spread like a black veil being slowly drawn across the day. Vehicles and people were starting to congregate by the billboard at the edge of town, black dots against the orange roadside dust. A few weeks ago Jim would have been right at the center of it, organizing the effort, leading the charge to save the town, risking his life, if that's what it took. And in the end, that's exactly what it had taken.

Holly heard boots hurry up the hill then stop a few feet short of where she was standing. “I could drop you back home,” he said, talking to his feet rather than to her. “I'll come back before sundown to finish up here, I promise.”

“Give me the shovel, Billy.”

He held the shovel up and examined the blade. It looked new, the polished-steel surface catching the sun as he turned it.

“If you don't give me the damn thing, I'll bury my husband using my bare hands.”

He shook his head like he was disappointed or maybe just defeated. “Don't feel right,” he said. Then he flipped the shovel over and jabbed it into the dirt like a spear. “Just leave it around here someplace,” he said, turning away and hurrying down the hill. “I'll fetch it later.”

Holly waited until the noise of his engine faded, allowing the softer sounds of nature and the empty cemetery to creep back in. She stood for a long time, listening to the cord slapping against the flagpole by the entrance, the Arizona state flag fluttering at half-mast, the wind humming in the power lines that looped away down the hill. She wondered how many widows had stood here like her and listened to these same lonely sounds.

“Well, here we are, Jimbo,” she whispered to the wind. “Alone at last.”

The last time they'd been up here together was for a photo op about two or three months previously. They had not been alone back then, there had been a handful of other people—press, photographers. She had stood here by his side, framed by the grave markers with the town spread out below them while he outlined his plans for its future, not realizing he wouldn't be around to see it.

She walked over to a mound of dirt set to one side of the grave. She grabbed the edge of the stone-colored sheet of canvas covering it and started dragging it off, stumbling as her heels sank into the ground and her tailored dress restricted the movement of her legs. She had bought it for the investiture, a little black number designed to be
classy but not too showy so it wouldn't draw attention away from her handsome husband, the real star of the show. It was the only black dress she owned.

She stumbled again and nearly fell, the tight dress making it hard to keep her balance.

“SHIT!” she shouted into the silence. “SHIT FUCKING SHIT!”

She kicked her shoes off, sending her heels sailing away through the air. One skittered to a rest against the sword cluster of an agave plant, the other bounced off a painted board that marked the final resting place of one
J. J. James, died of sweats, 1882
.

She grabbed the hem of her dress on either side of the seam and wrenched it apart with a loud rip. She was never going to wear it again; no amount of dressing it up with a new scarf or belt was ever going to accessorize away this memory. She gave it another yank and it tore all the way up to her thigh. Then she planted her bare feet wide apart and felt the heat of the earth beneath them. It felt good to be free of the constricting dress and the heels. She felt more like herself. She grabbed the shovel and stabbed the blade into the pile of dirt, the muscles in her arms and shoulders straining against the weight of it as she heaved back and tipped it in the hole.

Dry earth
whumped
down on the wooden lid of her husband's coffin.

Wood. Fifth anniversary is wood.
Jim had told her that.

They had spent their first anniversary here in this town, a break from study so he could show her the place where he hoped to be sheriff one day. He had introduced her to everyone, taken her dancing at the band hall where everyone knew him, and taken her riding in the desert, where they'd made love on a blanket by a fire beneath the stars, like there was nothing else but him and her and they were the only two people on earth. She had bought him a tin star from one of the
souvenir shops and given it to him as a present, a toy sheriff's badge to keep him going until he got a real one.

First anniversary is paper—
he had told her with a smile—
tin is what you give on the tenth.

She had always loved it that he knew stuff like that, silly romantic stuff that was all the more sweet and surprising coming from the mouth of such a big guy's guy like he was—like he
had
been.

He never got to pin the real badge on, and the gift of wood she ended up getting him for their fifth anniversary was this pine box lying at the bottom of a six-foot hole.

She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and it came away wet.

Goddammit
. She had promised herself she was not going to cry. At least there was no one around to see it. She didn't want to give them the satisfaction. She didn't want to give them a damned thing, not after they had taken so much already.

She remembered the last time she had seen Jim alive, sitting behind his desk in his office at home, looking as if he had been crying.

I need to fix this
—was all he would tell her.
The town needs fixing.

Then he had stuffed some papers in his case and driven off into the evening. But it had been Mayor Cassidy who had driven back, knocking on her door at three in the morning to deliver the news personally, his words full of meaning but empty at the same time.

Tragic accident . . . So sorry for your loss . . . Anything the town can do . . . Anything at all . . .

She hauled another shovel load into the grave, then another, numbing herself against her sorrow and anger through the real physical pain of burying her husband. And with every shovelful of earth she whispered a prayer, but not for her dead husband. The prayer she offered up, as tears smeared her face and the smell of smoke drifted up
from the desert below, was that the wildfire was actually a judgment, sent by some higher power to sweep right through the town and burn the whole damned place to the ground.

Anything the town can do
—Cassidy had said, his hat in his hands and his eyes cast down.
Anything at all.

They could all die and burn in hell.

That was what they could do for her.

“H
OW DID HE DIE
?”
S
OLOMON KEPT HIS VOICE CALM BUT HE FELT LIKE
howling and breaking something. His frustration was like a physical thing, a storm raging inside him, a stone weighing him down. Being confined in the tin can of the ambulance wasn't helping.

“Car wreck,” Morgan said, his eyes still looking up and out of the side window, toward the slopes of the mountains. “He was driving late at night, fell asleep at the wheel or maybe swerved to avoid something and ended up in a ravine. Bashed his head and cracked his skull. He was dead by the time we found him.”

Dead by the time I found him too . . .

Solomon stared past Morgan and out of the window. The town was starting to rise from the desert in scraps of broken fence and crooked shacks with rusted tin roofs or no roofs at all. None of it seemed familiar. “Where are all the people?”

“Oh, those are the old miners' houses,” Morgan said. “They keep it like this for atmosphere, I guess, a curtain-raiser for the tourists before they get to Main Street. Most people live around the center nowadays.”

A large sign whipped past—old-style lettering telling travelers they were now entering “The Historic Old Town of Redemption”—and the town came suddenly to life. Pastel houses were lined up in neat rows behind white-painted picket fences along well-paved roads. A Wells Fargo wagon stood beneath the shade of a cottonwood tree, the horses tethered by their reins to a wooden rail running along a trough filled with water from an old-fashioned pump. They were twitching their heads, spooked by the smoke blowing their way and anxious to run from it. Solomon knew how they felt. He wanted to run too, away from the fire, away from this town and this strange feeling of responsibility to a man who was already dead.

“Did James Coronado have family?” he asked.

“Holly,” Gloria said, fixing a dressing over the burn mark on his arm. “His wife.”

“Holly Coronado,” Solomon repeated. “Maybe I should talk to her.”

Morgan shook his head. “I don't think that's a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“She just buried her husband. She'll want to be left alone, I should imagine.”

“She might know who I am.”

Morgan shifted in his seat like it had suddenly become uncomfortable. “She should be left alone, time like this.”

Solomon cocked his head to one side. “It's an odd custom, don't you think, to abandon people when they are at their loneliest? If her husband knew me, then she might know me too. And she might be glad to see an old friend.”

“I can run a check on your name, if you want,” Morgan said, fishing his phone from his pocket, “see if anything comes up.”

Solomon wondered why Morgan seemed reluctant to let him talk
to this woman. It only made him want to talk to her even more. He watched as he dialed a number, then fixed him with a level stare as he waited for someone to answer.

“Hey, Rollins, it's Morgan. Run a name for me, would ya—Solomon Creed.” He glanced down at the book, used the inscription to spell out the name, then looked back up. “He's about six feet tall, mid to late twenties, Caucasian—and by that I mean white: white skin, white hair.” He nodded. “Yeah, like an al-bino.” He split the word up and stretched it out, in the same way that he might say
neee
-
gro
. “No, I'll wait. Run it through NCIC, see if you get anything.”

Solomon felt the ball of anxiety expand in his stomach a little. The NCIC was the National Crime Information Center. Morgan was checking to see if he had a criminal record or was wanted on any outstanding warrants. And the fact that Solomon knew what NCIC stood for suggested to him that he might.

Solomon looked down at himself, his white skin glowing under the bright lights, no pigment, no marks at all except for the
I
branded on his arm, now hidden beneath a dressing. A blank page of a man. He crossed his arms in front of himself, feeling vulnerable and exposed with his shirt off.

The ambulance turned off the main road and a huge white building filled the ambulance with reflected light. Solomon narrowed his eyes and peered through the rear windows at the church, far too large for such a small town, its copper-clad spire needling its way up into the desert sky. He felt it tug at him, as if he recognized it, though he couldn't say for sure. Morgan had said the cross he wore around his neck was a replica of the one on the altar, and he felt a strong urge to slip out of the straps that held his legs and break out of the ambulance so he could run to it and see it for himself.

“Yeah, I'm here.” Morgan nodded and listened. “Okay, thanks.” He
hung up. “Well, Mr. Creed,” he said, tucking the book back into the folded jacket pocket. “You'll be pleased to learn that you are not in the criminal database.”

He sounded vaguely disappointed and Solomon was too, a little. At least if he had been in it he would have more of an idea of who he was.

The ambulance slowed, turned off the road, and pulled up in front of a large stone building. Gloria handed Solomon his shirt and moved with practiced speed, pushing past Morgan to the rear doors to throw them open in an explosion of sunlight and heat. She turned back and released the lock holding the gurney in place and the other medic appeared beside her, ready to pull Solomon out of the ambulance.

“I can walk,” Solomon said, slipping his arms into the shirt.

“You can't,” Gloria said. “It's hospital policy. Sit back.”

The driver tugged hard and the gurney slid out of the ambulance with Solomon still lying on it. The steel legs rattled as they unfolded and the sunlight made him screw his eyes shut. “I'm not hurt,” he said, squinting up at copper letters spelling out King Community Hospital across the facade of the building.

“Sir, you are injured and you have amnesia.”

“How was my PERLA test?” Solomon said, covering his eyes with his arm.

“It was . . . How did—have you had medical training?”

“Possibly. My pupils are both equal and reactive to light?” They were certainly reacting to the light now.

“Yes.”

“Then I don't need to go to the hospital.” He reached forward to undo the straps holding his legs in place, swung his legs free and down to the ground. The moment his bare feet touched the ground he felt calmer.

The driver moved forward and Solomon pulled the gurney between them and stepped out of reach. He wanted to run and get away from these people but he couldn't. Not yet. Morgan climbed down from the ambulance, the jacket dangling from his hand, the book sticking out from the pocket. “Why don't you just go with these people and let them run their tests,” he said. “Better safe than sorry.”

Safe.
Interesting word. Safe from who? Safe from what?

“My jacket,” Solomon said, holding his hand out.

Morgan held it up. “You want this? Go with these people and you can—”

Solomon darted forward, shoving the gurney at Morgan in a loud clatter that made him flinch. He instinctively reached out and the jacket swung close enough for Solomon to snatch it. He had moved away again before Morgan even realized what was happening.

“I don't need to go to the hospital,” Solomon repeated, slipping his arms into the jacket and backing away from the gurney, and the people, and whatever they wanted to do to him. “I need to go to the church.”