“The Big House?”
“It was the main guest hall when this was still a dude ranch. You’ll like John and Lillian Alder. They’re retired now; all their kids are grown so it’s just the two of them rattling around the place. The house was in Lillian’s family; she’s been on the mountain even longer than Cooper.”
“And I’d venture a guess that John Alder is the reason you go by Fox and not Johnny, am I right?”
“You got it. John Alder and John Alder Junior. We got divided into John, J.J., and Fox fairly early on.”
“Well, it suits,” she said, leaving him to ponder just what she meant by that.
She steered the car through a mesquite grove of small, crooked trees, roots fed by a stream that ran through Red Springs Canyon and then disappeared underground. On the other side of the grove was a clearing where a simple, rustic adobe house stood, shaded by an old cottonwood tree, and guarded by three tall saguaro cactus with many heavy arms. A wide wooden porch ran entirely around the low, square building the color of wet sand. On the front porch, two weathered Mission rockers and a Mexican bench stood to either side of a heavy wood door painted indigo blue. A wisteria vine as old as the house arched over the porch with twisted, woody growth. Beside it a tall bougainvillea was weighted down with bright scarlet blooms. The flowers glowed like flames in the dusk, brightening the gloom of the approaching night. The woman cut the car’s engine, and the wind in the mesquite grew still.
They sat for a moment, in silence, for no reason he could fathom. Then he swung his long legs from the cramped little car, waited while she did the same, and followed her to Copper’s door. The porch light was busted. Another thing to fix. She fumbled with the heavy key, and finally it clicked open. He reached past her to turn on the light, and a blur of darkness came at him. Fox heard a sharp intake of breath, felt feathers brush against his skin. Something hit his shoulder hard, pushing him away from the door. A huge white owl swooped from the house, through the porch, and out into the trees. It must have measured a full five feet from outstretched wingtip to wingtip.
“My god,” she said in that low whiskey voice that sent a shiver through the core of him. Her eyes were wide, alarmed. “I’ve never seen a bird that big. How long has it been in the house? Has the place been empty since …”
Since Cooper was murdered, Fox finished the sentence silently. The old man had died some miles away, but he doubted that distance was comforting to her. Six months had passed since Cooper’s death, and the police had no clue who had killed him.
“I’ve been in and out of the house, doing repairs,” Fox assured her, “and I’ve never seen that owl before. It must have just gotten in somehow. There’s probably a broken window. I’ll take a look. Right now, I’m going to go turn on the water. If you go through the door there, into the kitchen, you’ll find a light switch to the left.”
He left her in the kitchen, looking curiously around her new home. It was strange to think of Cooper’s house that way … but the old man must have had his reasons for leaving his house to a lady friend he’d never even mentioned.
He stepped back out onto the porch and looked down the road toward the mesquite wood. The white horned owl had disappeared. He knew what Tomás would say about that. An owl was bad luck, a sudden death, or the ghost of someone who had died. Fox had lied to the woman. He had seen it before. Six months ago, over Deer Head Springs, on the night Davis Cooper was killed.
He stood on the porch for a few moments more, but the huge white owl did not reappear. He stood and listened to the song of the lone coyote somewhere farther up the canyon. He’d often seen its skinny figure skulking near the house since Cooper had died, smaller than the others in the hills, one eye white and blind. Fox yipped back to his four-legged friend, whose answer came an octave above. Then he headed back to the water pipes at the rear of his father’s house.
• • •
Dora put a tape on the tape deck as she maneuvered through the evening traffic on Speedway. R. Carlos Nakai’s Navajo flute filled the truck with haunting music soft as water on stone, a whisper of feathers, the wind in a high mountain pass. Nakai was a Tucson man, and his music perfectly suited the underlying rhythms of the desert land.
Outside the Bronco’s windows, however, the desert was decidedly less tranquil. The city’s traffic was beginning to swell with the autumn migration of college students and snowbirds—as the locals called winter residents—escaping cold northern climes. She was glad that the fierce summer heat had passed and the city was coming back to life, but she already missed the quiet of the season when only hard-core desert dwellers remained.
The day had been far from quiet at the Book Arts Gallery where she worked downtown. Two important collectors had come down from Santa Fe, purchasing several pricey handmade books between them. Then there were the chatty tourists from Des Moines, book lovers who spent an hour among the shelves, asking a million questions. Then twenty students
