feel comfortable with him when he returned to shop for other treasures in the future.
The kitchen was redolent of baking corn bread, and from a large pot on the stove rose the beefy aroma of beanless chili.
Zina phoned her husband at work. They owned a gallery on Canyon Road. When he heard why Martie and Dusty had sought him out, he came home in less than ten minutes.
While waiting for him, Zina set out red ceramic mugs of strong coffee mellowed with cinnamon, and pinwheel cookies topped with toasted pine nuts.
Chase, when he arrived, appeared to earn his living not in an art gallery but as a cowboy on the range: tall and lanky, tousled straw-yellow hair, a handsome face abraded by wind and sun. He was one of those men who, just by walking through any stable, would win the trust of horses, which would nicker softly at him and strain their necks across stall doors to nuzzle his hands.
His voice was quiet but intense as he sat down at the kitchen table with them. “What has Ahriman done to you and yours?”
Martie told him about Susan. The worsening agoraphobia, the suspected rapes. The sudden suicide.
“He made her do it somehow,” Chase Glyson said. “I believe it. I absolutely do. You came all this way because of your friend?”
“Yes. My dearest friend.” Martie saw no reason to tell more.
“Over nineteen years,” Chase said, “since he ruined my family, and more than ten since he hauled his sick ass out of Santa Fe. For a while, I hoped he was dead. Then he got famous with his books.”
“Do you mind if we tape what you tell us?” Dusty asked.
“No, don’t mind at all. But what I’ve got to say…hell, I’ve said it all maybe a hundred times to the cops, to different district attorneys over the years, until I was bluer in the face than a blue coyote. No one listened to me. Well, the once when someone listened and thought I might be telling the truth, then some big-shot friends of Ahriman’s paid him a visit, taught him some religion, so he’d know what he damn well was
While Martie and Dusty taped Chase Glyson, Zina perched on a stool before an easel near the adobe fireplace, drawing a pencil study of a humble tableau that she’d earlier set up on one corner of the distressed-pine table at which the rest of them sat. Five pieces of Indian pottery in unusual shapes, including a double-spouted wedding pitcher.
The essence of Chase’s story was the same as in the clippings from Roy Closterman’s file. Teresa and Carl Glyson had for years operated a successful preschool, the Little Jackrabbit School, until they and three employees were accused of molesting children of both sexes. As in the Ornwahl case in Laguna Beach years later, Ahriman conducted supposedly careful, psychiatrically valid exploratory conversations with the kids, sometimes using hypnotic regression — and found a pattern of stories supporting the original accusations.
“The whole thing was a lot of bushwa, Mr. Rhodes,” said Chase Glyson. “My folks were the best people you’d want to meet.”
Zina said, “Terri, that was Chase’s mother, would have cut off her hand before she’d raise it to hurt a child.”
“My daddy, too,” said Chase. “Besides, he was hardly ever at the Little Jackrabbit. Only to do some repairs now and then, ’cause he was handy. The school was my mother’s business. Daddy was half owner of a car dealership, and it kept him busy. Lots of people in town, they never believed a word of it.”
“But there were those who did,” Zina added darkly.
“Oh,” said Chase, “there’s always those who’ll believe anything about anybody. You whisper in their ear that ’cause there was wine at the Last Supper, Jesus must’ve been a drunkard, and they’ll gossip their souls into perdition, passing it along. Most people figured it couldn’t be true, and with no physical evidence, it might never have resulted in convictions…until Valerie-Marie Padilla killed herself.”
Martie said, “One of the students, that five-year-old girl.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Chase’s face seemed to darken as if a cloud had passed between him and the ceiling lights. “She left that good-bye of hers, that colored-pencil drawing, that sad little scribble drawing that changed everything. Her and a man.”
“Anatomically correct,” Martie said.
“Worse, the man had a mustache…like my daddy. In the drawing, he’s wearing a cowboy hat, white with a red band, and a black feather tucked in it. Which is the type of hat my daddy always wore.”
With a violence that drew their attention, Zina Glyson tore off the top sheet from her drawing pad, balled it up, and threw it into the fireplace. “Chase’s father was my godfather, my own father’s best friend. I knew Carl from when I was a toddler. That man…he respected people, no matter who they were, no matter how little they had or what their faults. He respected children, too, and listened to them, and cared. Never once did he ever put his hand on me
“Easy, Zee,” her husband said softly. “It’s all over long ago.”
“Not for me, it isn’t.” She went to the ovens. “It won’t be over until he’s dead.” She slipped her right hand into an oven mitt. “And then I won’t believe his obituary.” She drew a pan of finished corn bread from the oven. “I’ll have to look at his corpse myself and stick a finger in its eye to see if he reacts.”
If she was Italian, then she was Sicilian, and if she was part Indian, she was not a peaceful Navajo but an Apache. There was an unusual strength in her, a toughness, and if she’d had the chance to finish Ahriman herself without being caught, she probably would have acted on the opportunity.
Martie liked her a lot.
“I was seventeen at the time,” Chase said, almost to himself. “God knows why they didn’t accuse me, too. How did I escape? When they’re burning witches, why not the whole family?”
Returning to something that Zina had said, Dusty raised a key question: “
“Tell him, Chase,” said Zina, moving from the corn bread to the pot of chili. “See if they think it sounds like something a little child would do to herself.”
“Her mother was in the next room,” Chase said. “She heard the gunshot, ran, found Valerie-Marie seconds after it happened. No one else could’ve been there. The girl definitely killed herself with her father’s pistol.”
“She had to get the pistol out of a box in the closet,” Zina said. “And a separate box of ammunition. And load the thing. A child who’d never handled a gun in her life.”
“Even that isn’t the hardest to believe,” Chase said. “What’s hardest is…” He hesitated. “This is awful stuff, Mrs. Rhodes.”
“I’m getting used to it,” Martie grimly assured him.
Chase said, “The way Valerie-Marie killed herself…the news quoted Ahriman as calling it ‘an act of self- loathing, of gender denial, an attempt to destroy the sexual aspect of herself that had led to her being molested.’ That little girl, you see, before she pulled the trigger, she undressed herself, and then she put the gun… inside….”
Martie was on her feet before she realized that she intended to get out of her chair. “Dear God.” She needed to move, to go somewhere, do something, but there was nowhere to go except — as she discovered when she got there — to Zina Glyson, around whom she put her arms as she would have put them around Susan at such a moment as this. “Were you dating Chase then?”
“Yes,” Zina said.
“And stood by him. And married him.”
“Thank God,” Chase murmured.
“What it must have been like,” Martie said, “after the suicide, to defend Carl to other women, and stand by his son.”
Zina had accepted Martie’s embrace as naturally as it had been given. The memory made this Southwest princess tremble after all these years, but both Sicilian and Apache women were loath to cry.
