The Big Dirt Nap

'Don't get too mushy,' I said. 'No one paid any attention until I reported your car as stolen.'

'Nevertheless,' she said, 'you're a real friend.'

So was Babe. If it hadn't been for her, Lucy and I would still be on the mountain with two angry Ukrainians trudging up to meet us. Maybe I wasn't quite as alone in the world as I sometimes felt. And maybe I shouldn't keep quite so tight a grip on that F word.

A handful of stragglers were hanging out in the Titans lobby when we entered. Hector chatted with a young Hispanic couple near the corpse flower and gave me a nod as I came in, then a longer look when he saw Babe and Lucy trailing behind me. On our way to the elevator, Helayne, the bartender, waved. I knew she wanted me to go over, but I pretended it was just a hello wave; I'd had as much excitement and new information as I could handle for one night.

'What, is this your new hangout?' Lucy asked. 'Does everyone here know you?'

'It's your fault. I've spent so much time in this lobby waiting for you, I was beginning to feel like an employee . . . or a hooker.'

In the room we dumped our things and I put on the television for white noise. Lucy took the love seat, Babe and I the double beds. Before long we'd spread out and had Hoovered the contents of the minibar; we sat in our underwear drinking little nips as if it was a pajama party.

'How did you ever get mixed up with these guys?' Babe asked.

'The Titans casino is never going to happen,' Lucy said, popping peanut M&M's into the air and catching them in her mouth. 'At least that's my story. The Crawford brothers don't want the casino,' she said, searching for the last nut in the bag. They'd seen what had happened on other reservations when the casino operators came in. A handful of tribal leaders got fabulously wealthy, and the majority of the members—if they really were members— got stipends, which turned the young people into drug addicts and wastrels—chronically unemployed, undereducated, and more interested in flashy cars and electronics than in preserving their culture.

'That may be honorable, but is it really up to them if that's what most of the tribe wants?' I asked.

'According to them, they are most of the tribe, one of the seven original families of record in the 1910 census, at least legitimate ones—although Daniel Smallwood has been quietly recruiting members for the last few years with the promise of a big casino payoff,' Lucy said. 'The newest legitimate member of the tribe is their nephew, the famous baby Sean.'

When Lucy agreed to meet with the Crawfords, they had suggested she also get in touch with their old friend Nick Vigoriti. They knew the tribal side of the story and Nick knew the hotel side.

'What did he have against the casino?' Babe asked.

Lucy shook her head. 'I never found out,' she said, crumpling the M&M bag.

Just then, in the same way that your eyes eventually get used to the dark and you can make out things you couldn't moments earlier, the white noise of the television turned into real words, 'Breaking News.'

Detective Stacy Winters spoke. Claude Crawford had been apprehended near the old Yankee Shoe factory. William James Crawford is a fugitive but we have good information and feel that he will be in custody soon. The two brothers are believed to have been responsible for the recent murder of Nicholas Anthony Vigoriti. Anyone with information on the whereabouts of William Crawford is urged to dial the number on your screen.

The reporter went on to chronicle the brothers' past offenses, including the covered wagon fire. File footage showed the blaze and two staggeringly handsome men being led away. 'Now I know why you stayed,' Babe said.

'And now you know why he didn't come back,' I said.

'How can they say this stuff without being sure?' Babe said. She knew how; we all did. And being even a small part of the system, Lucy felt rotten about it.

'You met him,' Babe said. 'Did he seem like a killer to you?'

Lucy didn't think so, but she had been so taken with Claude that she hadn't paid much attention to Billy.

'He was younger than Claude. He had a Michael's shopping bag with him.'

'Does that make him a nice guy?'

'No! But it made him look . . . I don't know, craft-y . . . safe, normal,' she said.

Unless there was a gun in the bag, I thought. I could tell Babe was thinking the same thing.

Four loud knocks on the door jolted us. Lucy yelped; Babe jumped up and ran for her handbag.

'Do criminals knock?' Lucy whispered.

Sometimes. If they don't want you to think they're criminals. 'Who is it?' I asked, trying to sound tough.

'It's Hector, ma'am. And the police.'

Thirty-five

Lucy and I asked for a few minutes to dress.

'Hector, we have to stop meeting like this,' I said, opening the door. The roly-poly security guard was flanked by the same two cops who'd found Lucy's car in the parking lot.

'One of you ladies Lucinda Cavanaugh?'

Lucy raised her hand shyly as if she was in school; that was probably the last time anyone had called her Lucinda.

The two cops were following up on an anonymous report of a woman stranded in a cabin on the Quepochas reservation. We all looked at Lucy to see what she'd say; it took her all of thirty seconds to get her story together.

'I was stranded, briefly, but my friends came and gave me a lift home.' That was one way to put it—I was a novice liar compared to Lucy.

'Ms. Cavanaugh, you do know that that domicile has been used as a hiding place for William and Claude Crawford, who are wanted for questioning in the murder of Nick Vigoriti?'

'I don't know anything about that. No one was there when I arrived.' Which was technically true at the time. 'I was hiking and I ran out of trail mix so I got tired. The cabin seemed like a good place to wait it out until my friends could come to get me.' Now she was pushing it. I wished I could tell her to keep it simple.

'You were hiking on the Quepochas reservation? Ms. Cavanaugh, we have information that suggests you were brought to that cabin against your will.'

'Absolutely not. Who knew you weren't supposed to hike there? I thought it was part of the Appalachian Trail.' Even Hector snorted at that one. 'My friends will tell you what a health nut I am. I'd had a long drive from New York City and simply wanted to stretch my legs.' If Lucy didn't watch it, she'd tick these guys off and finish telling her story at the police station. Strangely enough, they seemed to believe her.

'It's true,' I said. 'She's a walker. She even counts steps.' The exchange was surreal.

Babe said nothing. She stood in her underwear and a Rush T-shirt, with her arms folded, looking tough. The cops seemed to know they weren't going to get anything out of her, but they tried anyway. She gave one-word answers that were vague enough to be useless. And Lucy and I had branded ourselves as flakes—first, me by reporting Lucy's car as stolen when it was right there in the Titans parking lot, and now Lucy for having gone walkabout on a strange trail with only a bag of gorp in her back pocket.

If Lucy didn't tell the cops that Claude took her to the cabin, he couldn't be charged with abducting her; that would solve at least one of his legal problems. Like Betty had, Lucy helped Claude dodge a big bullet.

Just then, the elevator bell rang and I heard voices in the hall. One of them I recognized as Stacy Winters's. She was yakking on a cell phone and hung up just as she got to my room.

'What do we have here? Have you girls been grilling cheese sandwiches on the hotel radiator? No, it's something else, isn't it?'

We all waited for her routine to finish, then one of the uniformed cops spoke up.

'This is Ms. Cavanaugh,' he said, pointing to Lucy. 'She has assured us that she's all right and in fact went to the Crawfords' cabin alone and of her own volition.'

'So, you weren't abducted, not missing, just out.' She resisted the urge to use the