Devil’s Claw

“I was afraid to. I was afraid if she knew someone like that was looking for me, she might not help me anymore.”

Joanna paused to get her bearings. “Tell me about this computer diskette. You said it was hidden in the plastic bowl along with your mother’s weapon.”

“Right,” Lucy said. “She hid them both that night-the night she shot my father.”

“I know how hard it is to talk about, Lucy,” Joanna prodded gently. “But I need you to tell me about that night- as much as you can remember.”

Lucy took a deep breath. “Mother came to the YMCA looking for me. We were in the middle of class, but that didn’t matter. She just barged right in. She told me to get dressed, that we had to leave. Her face was all bloody. Her lip was cut. She looked awful. Mrs. Quick tried to tell her that she shouldn’t be driving, that she needed to see a doctor. But she kept yelling at me to come on. And so I did.”

“What happened then?”

“She turned around in the car and said to me, ”All right, where is it? It isn’t at the house, and it isn’t in his truck. Give me your backpack.“ So I gave her my backpack, and she dug through it until she found the diskette right where Dad put it.”

“Your father gave you the diskette?”

Lucy nodded. “At lunch. He came to school that day and told Sister Celeste he had to talk to me. He took me across the street to the bakery. I can’t remember the name exactly. Something about a cave, I think. He bought us both doughnuts, but he was too upset to eat his. When he tried to tell me what was going on, he started crying. He told me my mother had done something bad at work, and that he had just found out about it. He said he was afraid she was going to get into serious trouble, that she might even have to go to jail if anyone ever found out.”

“Did he say what kind of trouble?”

“He said Mom had a boyfriend at work and that the two of them were doing stuff together-secret stuff. Like spies or something. And then he told me he was going to talk to Mother about it and get her to quit. That’s when he gave me the diskette to keep for him. He said if Mother knew about it that she’d really be mad at him. He said once he talked to her, he’d take it back and get rid of it so nobody else would find it.

“As soon as she took it away from me that night while we were parked outside the Y, I should have known right then Dad was dead, that she’d already killed him. And that’s why she did it, too. She killed him because she thought he was going to tell on her, but he never would have. Mother was beautiful, and my dad loved her no matter what she did. I think he loved her even more than he loved me. It’s the same thing with Grandma Yates-she loved Mom better, too. The only people who ever really loved me were Sister Celeste; my ballet teacher, Mrs. Quick; and Grandma Bagwell, my great-grandmother, although now that I know she gave Mother a devil’s claw…” Without warning, Lucy’s voice faded away into nothing.

Joanna tried to draw her away from that particular hurt. “Let’s go back to the diskette,” she urged. “You said your father gave it to you for safekeeping while he confronted your mother about whatever it was she was doing. Then your mother came to get you and took it away. What happened next?”

“We drove out to Cochise Stronghold. It was night when we got there, and cold, too. My mother cried the whole way there, and she kept saying stuff I couldn’t understand. It sounded like she was mad at everybody. She told me to lie down and go to sleep. I kept peeking out, though. The whole time we were driving there, I thought we were going to Grandma Yates’ place. Instead, we went straight to the entrance of Cochise Stronghold.

“When Mother opened the door to get out of the car, she told me to go to sleep. But I didn’t. I saw everything she did. First she pulled loose a bunch of rocks. She had a little plastic bowl along with her, the kind she used to take along to work when she packed a lunch. First she put something shiny into the bowl. That must have been the gun-a tiny gun. Then she added the diskette and closed the bowl’s lid. She put the bowl in among the rocks, then she covered it. When she came back to the car, I pretended to be asleep. Since we were so close to Grandma’s house, I thought we’d go there and say hello and maybe have something to eat, but we didn’t.

“Mother drove us straight back to Tucson. On the way, I fell asleep for real. I don’t remember going home, and when we got there, she must have carried me into the house. When I woke up the next morning, the house was full of police, and Dad was sitting in the chair in the living room. He was dead.”

Lucy sighed and shuddered, as though the effort of relating the story had been too much for her.

“What happened next?”

“Some man-a detective, maybe-came to the house and asked me a whole bunch of questions. He kept asking me if my father ever hit my mother. And I said, ”I never saw him hit her.“ Then he asked if Dad ever hit me, and I told him no. I kept waiting for him to ask me if my mother hit people or if she was a spy and did bad stuff, but nobody ever did. Then it was like they forgot all about me and nobody bothered to ask me any more questions. I figured out later that was because Mother confessed. She told them she did it. After that, a woman came to talk to me and told me they were going to send me to live with my grandmother and my great- grandmother.

“After I got there, I tried to tell a few people about what Dad said my mother had been doing, but no one would listen. Not even Grandma Bagwell. She and Grandma Yates both said my father was dead because he was a bad man and because he had beaten up my mother. I told them they were wrong about that-that it was my mother who was bad. I tried telling them the same thing Dad had told me about Mother getting into trouble at work. I thought if there was a trial, lawyers would ask me questions and I would have to tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

“But there wasn’t any trial. My mother said she shot Dad because she was tired of him beating her up. Afterward she said she was scared. She picked me up from ballet and then drove all over half the night trying to decide what to do. She said she didn’t know what happened to the gun-that she had thrown it away somewhere. But that wasn’t true, either, because I found the gun in the bowl along with the diskette.”

“And when was that?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy answered with a shrug. “A long time later. I was only a little kid then. I turned eight the next summer. Grandma Yates didn’t like me wandering around in the hills by myself, but Grandma Bagwell did. She said it was neat. The fact that I liked to be out scouting by myself proved I was a ”real‘ Apache, just like her grandfather Eskiminzin.

“Anyway, one day I went to the rock pile all by myself. I dug up the bowl, found the diskette, and took it home. I wanted it because Dad had given it to me to take care of. I wanted to know what was on it. I kept it hidden in another plastic bowl-one of Grandma Yates’ this time. I hid the bowl out in the shed because I didn’t want Grandma Yates to find it when she was cleaning my room. I knew it was from a computer, and I kept waiting for a chance to look at it. Finally, when I got to high school, there was a computer in the library. I tried looking at it there, but it must have been the wrong program or something. Or maybe the disk got wrecked when it was in plastic all those years. There wasn’t anything there.”

“That’s not true,” Joanna said quietly. “There is something there.”

Lucy swung around to face Joanna. “Really?” she demanded. “What?”

“I don’t know. It’s encrypted.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means most people can’t read it because it’s written in a top-secret code-a government code. As far as we can tell, it seems to contain command and control codes for the military.”

Lucy’s mouth dropped open and her eyes widened. “Does that mean my father was right the whole time? My mother really was a spy?”

Joanna nodded. “Possibly,” she replied, “although at this point we can’t say for sure.”

“See there?” Lucy was almost shouting now. “I told you so. I was glad when they sent Mother to prison, and I’m glad, too, that she’s dead now. Unlike my dad, she deserved what she got. I loved my father, Sheriff Brady. I hated it when people thought he had been mean to her, when they thought he was the kind of man who would beat us-beat both of us-when he didn’t-not once, not ever.”

“Let’s go back to the other night for a moment,” Joanna said.

“Why?” Lucy asked.

“I need you to finish telling me what happened. It’s the only way we’re going to find out who killed your mother.”

“I don’t care who killed my mother. I already told you,” Lucy said fiercely. “I’m glad she’s dead. What does it matter who killed her?”