“His word? You’d take his word? And Buck’s?”
“Look, I’ll figure something out, Jo.” He eased his hand free.
She sat back, unhappy. “This is serious, Cork.”
“I know, believe me. But I think Kingbird’s right. Unless somebody does something, all hell could break loose around here. He’s trying to do something and he’s asked me to help. What can I say?”
“Are you getting paid for this?”
“Five Franklins up front and another five when the meeting goes down.”
She drilled him with her cold blue eyes. “What kind of casket can I possibly get with that?”
FOUR
Lucinda Kingbird was happy and that made her afraid. Though she had struggled all her life, all forty-four years, in the pursuit of real happiness, it had eluded her. So many people seemed happy that Lucinda had to accept on faith that it was a true thing. In a way, it was like the story of the Blessed Virgin and the conception of Jesus: illogical, irrational, a circumstance she had never experienced-never would experience-yet a whole world, a whole history of people, most far smarter than she, had believed and defended it, so how could it not be true? Happiness for her had always been a question of faith, not experience.
Lately, however, miraculously, she’d been happy. But having discovered happiness, she was terrified that it might be snatched from her.
That Sunday morning as she drove up the eastern shoreline of Iron Lake, all around her shafts of sunlight shot through the pines like gold arrows from heaven. She was a small, pretty woman with dark eyes and the light tan skin of a Latina. Her hair, long and black, still showed no hint of gray. She sang softly to herself, an old song from her childhood, one that her grandmother had crooned to her. “‘Duermete mi nino. Duermete solito. Que cuando te despiertes, Te dare atolito.’”
Until recently, she’d forgotten the sweet little lullaby. Now she often sang it to her granddaughter as she held the baby in her arms and felt, deep in her heart, a warmth she knew must be happiness.
As soon as she crossed onto the reservation, she took Pike Road east and followed it until she came to the gravel lane that cut off to the right through a stand of red pines that hid the house of her son Alejandro. She parked near the front door and waited. She was expected. Every Sunday morning, she drove from Aurora to pick up her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter and take them with her to Mass at St. Agnes.
She genuinely liked her daughter-in-law. Rayette was a smart cookie, tough, devoted to her husband and her child. Rayette often told Lucinda how much she appreciated her help with the baby. She seemed to enjoy as much as Lucinda did the Sunday drives to St. Agnes. Much of the time on the way there and back, they talked family, talked motherhood, even talked sometimes about deep things, things like God, which Lucinda never discussed with anyone else. She thought of her daughter-in-law as a friend and felt blessed.
There was so much now that made her happy.
The front door didn’t open, and Rayette didn’t appear with Misty in the car-seat carrier. Running late, Lucinda decided. With a baby, it was understandable. She got out, went to the door, and rang the bell. From inside came the sound of voices and the baby’s incessant crying.
Pobrecita, thought Lucinda. Poor little one.
She rang the bell again, then knocked long and hard to be heard above the baby’s wail. Finally she tried the knob. The door was locked, but she had a key, which she used.
“Rayette? Alejandro?” she called.
She knew that using her son’s Christian name-or the Spanish version of it, which was how she’d always addressed him-didn’t please him these days, but she refused to use any other. Alejandro was a good name. It would still be his long after this Red Boyz business had passed.
The talk, she discovered, came from the television, tuned to an infomercial hyping a revolutionary piece of exercise equipment. Except for the crying from the baby’s room, the house felt empty. Lucinda slipped her shoes off and left them beside the others already on the mat by the front door. She found her granddaughter in the crib, tangled up in her pink blanket.
“Oh, sweet one,” she cooed. She untangled the blanket, lifted the child, and held Misty against her breast. “Shhhhh. Shhhhh. It’s all right, nina. Grandma’s here.”
But where were Rayette and Alejandro?
The baby continued to scream while Lucinda checked the bedroom, where the bed was still neatly made. Had it been slept in at all? She returned to the baby’s room and changed Misty’s diaper, trying to keep her mounting sense of dread at bay. In the kitchen, she made a bottle of the formula Rayette kept in the cupboard. She settled in the rocker in the living room with Misty in her arms. The baby greedily sucked the bottle dry. Lucinda burped her and little Misty fell asleep almost immediately.
Now Lucinda allowed the worry to overwhelm her. No mother would willingly desert her child this way. And Alejandro, for all his macho posturing, was a good father and husband. He, too, would not be absent if he could help it.
She stood slowly and tried to return Misty to her crib, but the baby began to wake and Lucinda decided it was best to hold her a bit longer. Once again she checked the rooms of the house. Nothing seemed out of place, nothing amiss, though she wondered at the shoes on the mat beside the front door. In addition to her own, there were a pair of Skechers she knew belonged to Rayette, and a pair of Red Wing boots that were probably Alejandro’s. It seemed odd that these items were still there. Rayette usually picked up before she retired for the night. And if they’d gone out this morning, why hadn’t they put on their shoes?
She grabbed the soiled diaper she’d left on the changing table and took it to the utility room off the kitchen to dispose of it in the trash bin. The room had a door to the outside, facing the garage. The door frame was splintered, as if by a powerful blow, and the door itself stood open.
“Madre de Dios,” Lucinda whispered, hoarse with fear.
With the child still in her arms, she stumbled outside through the open door and gulped in the cool, pine- scented air. She hurried to the garage and peered in a window. Both her son’s Explorer and the Toyota Corolla that Rayette drove were parked inside. She stepped back, stepped into something slippery, and she looked down. She stood in the middle of a dark, irregular shape that might have been spilled oil, but looked more like blood.
Her legs went shaky. Misty felt too heavy in her arms. Something had happened, she knew it absolutely. Something bad.
“Call Will,” she said, speaking aloud to give herself courage. Her husband would know what to do.
The backyard had been carved out of a meadow, and tall wild grasses grew up against Alejandro’s neatly mowed lawn. A gathering of crows, noisy and contentious, fluttered about in the high grass a few yards into the meadow. She wanted to ignore their greedy cries, but crows were scavengers, she knew, and she found herself drawn toward them, pulled slowly across the yard by the dark need to know what it was they fought over. As she drew nearer, she saw an outline pressed down in the meadow grass where the birds had gathered. The sun had climbed above the pines along the east side of the meadow, and grass shimmered with drops of yellow dew and beads of a garnet color.
At her approach, the crows lifted, a black curtain rising, and they flew away.
When Lucinda saw the prize that had drawn them there, she screamed. The baby woke and echoed her.
FIVE
Occasionally on Sunday mornings in church, Cork just wasn’t there. His butt was in the pew but his mind was a million miles away. That was a blessing of ritual: Some Sundays you could fake it. This was one of those Sundays, and Cork went through Mass without thinking about it. In his head, he was going over the talk he would have with Buck Reinhardt afterward. It would be tricky, but he liked the challenge of bringing Buck and Kingbird together. The truth was that he was dying to know what the leader of the Red Boyz had to say. What was it he was willing to
