games, she was hopeless when it came to the intricacies of poker. And now, with the room aswirl in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke, she was happy to be out of the game.
Agnes opened the sliding door and slipped out onto the tiny balcony. Although the temperature hovered in the low forties, it wasn’t that cold — not compared to Chicago in January. In fact, it seemed downright balmy. She looked out at the sparse traffic waiting for the light on Grand Avenue and heard the low, constant rumble of trucks on the Black Canyon Freeway behind her. The roar reminded her once more of the noise the water had made as it crashed down around the little girl and overwhelmed her.
Although she wasn’t cold, Agnes shivered and went back inside.
She propped three pillows behind her, then sat on the bed with a book positioned in front of her face. The other women may have thought she was reading, but she wasn’t.
Agnes Barkley was thinking about flash floods — remembering the real one she and Oscar had seen last winter. January had been one of the wettest ones on record. The fill-in manager at the trailer park commuted from Benson. He had told them one afternoon that a flood crest was expected over by Saint David shortly and that if they hurried, it would probably be worth seeing. They had been standing just off the bridge at Saint David when the wall of water came rumbling toward them, pushing ahead of it a jumbled collection of tires and rusty car fenders and even an old refrigerator, which bobbed along in the torrent as effortlessly as if it were nothing more than a bottle cork floating in a bathtub.
Agnes Barkley’s dream from the other night — that still too vivid dream — might very well have been nothing more than a holdover from that. But she was now convinced it was more than that, especially after what she’d learned that day at the Heard Museum. Just as Gretchen Dixon had told her, the museum had been loaded with what Agnes now knew enough to call Native American artifacts — baskets, pottery, beadwork.
Their group had been led through the tour by a fast-talking docent who had little time or patience for dawdlers or questions. Afterward, while the others milled in the gift shop or lined up for refreshments, Agnes made her way back to one display in particular, where she had seen a single pot that very closely resembled the one she had last seen sitting on the kitchen table of the RV.
The display was a mixture of
Oscar’s pot was whole, but surely the person who had crafted it was long since dead. Could the potmaker’s spirit somehow still be captured, inside that little lump of blackened clay? Had the mother made that tiny pot as some kind of plaything for her child? Was that what had made it so precious to the little girl? Did that explain why she had bolted back into the path of certain death in a vain attempt to save it? And had the mother’s restless spirit somehow managed to create a vision in order to convey the horror of that terrible event to Agnes?
As she stood staring at the lit display in the museum, that’s how Agnes came to see what had happened to her. She hadn’t dreamed a dream so much as she had seen a vision. And now, two days later, with the book positioned in front of her face and with the three-handed poker game continuing across the room, Agnes tried to sort out what it all meant and what she was supposed to do about it.
The poker game ended acrimoniously when Lola and Dolly Ann, both with next to nothing on, accused the fully dressed Gretchen of cheating. The other three women were still arguing about that when they came to bed. Not wanting to be drawn into the quarrel, Agnes closed her eyes and feigned sleep.
Long after the others were finally quiet, Agnes lay awake, puzzling about her responsibility to a woman she had never seen but through whose eyes she had witnessed that ancient and yet all too recent drowning. The child swept away in the rolling brown water was not Agnes Barkley’s own child, yet the Indian child’s death grieved Agnes as much as if she had been one of her own. It was growing light by the time Agnes reached a decision and was finally able to fall asleep.
The tour bus seemed to take forever to get them back to Tombstone. Oscar came to town to meet the bus and pick Agnes up. He greeted her with an exultant grin on his face and with an armload of library books sliding this way and that in the back seat of the Honda.
“I took a quick trip up to Tucson while you were gone,” he explained. “They made an exception and let me borrow these books from the university library. Wait until I show you.”
“I don’t want to see,” Agnes replied.
“You don’t? Why not? I pored over them half the night and again this morning, until my eyes were about to fall out of my head. That pot of ours really is worth a fortune.”
“You’re going to have to take it back,” Agnes said quietly.
“Take it back?” Oscar echoed in dismay. “What’s the matter with you? Have you gone nuts or something? All we have to do is sell the pot, and we’ll be on easy street from here on out.”
“That pot is not for sale,” Agnes asserted. “You’re going to have to take it right back where you found it and break it.”
Shaking his head, Oscar clamped his jaw shut, slammed the car in gear, and didn’t say another word until they were home at the trailer park and had dragged both the books and Agnes Barkley’s luggage inside.
“What in the hell has gotten into you?” Oscar demanded at last, his voice tight with barely suppressed anger.
Agnes realized she owed the man some kind of explanation.
“There’s a woman’s spirit caught inside that pot,” she began. “We have to let her out. The only way to do that is to break the pot. Otherwise she stays trapped in there forever.”
“That’s the craziest bunch of hocus-pocus nonsense I ever heard.
Where’d you come up with something like that? It sounds like something that fruitcake Gretchen Dixon would come up with. You didn’t tell her about this, did you?”
“No. I read about it. In a display at the museum, but I think I already knew it, even before I saw it there.”
“You already
“That’s right. And put it back where you found it.”
“Like hell I will!” Oscar growled.
He stomped outside and stayed there, making some pretense of checking fluids under the hood of the Honda. Oscar may have temporarily abandoned the field of battle, but Agnes knew the fight was far from over. She sat down and waited. It was two o’clock in the afternoon — time to start some arrangements about dinner — but she didn’t make a move toward either the stove or the refrigerator.
For forty-six years, things had been fine between them. Every time a compromise had been required, Agnes had made it cheerfully and without complaint. That was the way it had always been, and it was the way Oscar expected it to be now. But this time — this one time — Agnes Barkley was prepared to stand firm. This one time, she wasn’t going to bend.
Oscar came back inside half an hour later. “Look,” he said, his manner amiable and apologetic. “I’m sorry I flew off the handle.
You didn’t know the whole story, because I didn’t have a chance to tell you. While I was up in Tucson, I made some preliminary inquiries about the pot. Anonymously, of course. Hypothetically. I ended up talking to a guy who runs a trading post up near Oracle. He’s a dealer, and he says he could get us a ton of money. You’ll never guess how much.”
“How much?”
“One hundred thou. Free and clear. That’s what comes to us after the dealer’s cut. And that’s at a bare minimum. He says that if the collectors all end up in a bidding war, the price could go a whole lot higher than that. Do you have any idea what we could do with that kind of money?”
“I don’t care how much money it is,” Agnes replied stubbornly.
“It isn’t worth it. We’ve got to let her out, Oscar. She’s been trapped in there for hundreds of years.”
“Trapped?” Oscar demanded. “I’ll tell you about trapped. Trapped is having to go to work every day for thirty years, rain or shine, hoping some goddamned dog doesn’t take a chunk out of your leg.
Trapped is hoping like hell you won’t slip and fall on someone’s icy porch and break your damned neck.
