Finally, the young woman hung up. “May I help you?” she asked.
Wordlessly, Myrna Louise handed over the envelope. The receptionist opened it, removing a blank sheet of paper that had been wrapped around a small stack of bills. She counted them out, one at a time. “And what is your name?” she asked, when she’d finished counting out $150.
“Myrna Louise Spaulding, but it’s probably under my son’s name, which is. .”
“Here it is,” the young woman interrupted, taking another envelope from a drawer. Myrna Louise was surprised to see her name, not Andrew’s, neatly typed on the envelope. So he really had intended for her to pick it up.
“Was that a deposit?” she asked, trying to make sense of the transaction.
The young woman laughed. “You could call it that.”
“Well, shouldn’t you give me a receipt or something?”
“No,” the receptionist replied. “That’s not the way we do business around here.”
Rebuffed, Myrna Louise took the envelope and went back to the car. Andrew looked decidedly unhappy. “What took so long?” he demanded. “I was afraid something had gone wrong.”
“She was on the phone,” Myrna Louise said.
Andrew reached out to take the envelope, but his mother placed it in her lap, letting both hands rest on it. Something was wrong with that place, she thought. “They didn’t give me a receipt,” she said.
Andrew laughed. “That’s all right. I won’t need one.”
How could Andrew afford to throw away a whole $150 in cash like that and not even get a receipt? Myrna Louise wondered. She had rented houses and apartments before, and she
Suspicion born of years of being lied to made her hands itch with curiosity about what was in that envelope. She wished she had opened it for a peek before she ever came back out to the car.
“Where are we going now?” she asked.
“To the storage unit. I want a few things from there.”
“Couldn’t we stop and get something to drink first?” she asked. “I’m thirsty.”
Andrew sighed. “I suppose. What do you want?”
“A root-beer float would be nice. The Dairy Queen isn’t far.”
They stopped at a Dairy Queen, and Andrew went inside where several people were already in line ahead of him. Cautiously, keeping the dashboard between his sight line and her hands, Myrna Louise slipped a bony finger along the flap of the envelope. It came loose, tearing only a little along one edge. Inside were two pieces of paper.
She scanned through them in growing confusion. There was nothing at all about renting a house. She found herself reading some kind of police report about an auto accident. Finally, she noticed the names-Rita Antone and Diana Ladd, and someone else named David. The names of those two women were branded into Myrna Louise’s memory. David had to be Diana’s son, her baby. Why had Andrew paid so much money to have something about them? You’d think he’d want to forget all about them.
Hastily, she stuffed the papers back in the envelope and licked the flap. After a lifetime’s worth of snooping, she knew there would be enough glue left to make the flap stick fairly well. By the time Andrew returned to the car, the envelope was once more lying innocently in her lap.
He brought the root beer to the window on her side of the car. “Here,” he said, holding out his hand to take the envelope. “Let me have that before you spill something on it.”
Reluctantly, Myrna Louise handed it over. She worried that he would notice the frayed flap, but he stuffed it in his shirt pocket without even glancing at it. Myrna Louise drank her root-beer float with her mind in turmoil, still trying to understand. Andrew was up to something, but what? He had paid good money for those two pieces of paper, more than he should have, but why? To get their addresses, said a tiny voice at the back of her mind. To find out where they live. Why? Why would Andrew be interested in knowing that?
For an answer, she heard only the nightmarish sound of a long-ago neighbor’s cat, screaming and dying.
Brandon Walker woke up late and got ready to go to work. The house was empty. His mother had spent the night at the hospital. He had offered to bring her home, but again Louella refused. She would stay there as long as it took, she told him. He wondered how long that would be.
At the office, his clerk shook her head as he walked in the door. “You’re in real hot water this time,” she said. “The Big Guy wants to see you.”
The Big Guy was Sheriff Jack DuShane himself. If one of the Shadows received a curt summons to the sheriff’s private office, it probably wouldn’t be for a pleasant, early morning social chat or a hit from the bottle of Wild Turkey from the sheriff’s private stash.
“On my way,” Brandon said, turning away.
“How’s your dad?” the clerk asked.
“Hanging in there,” he responded, “but that’s about all.”
Sheriff DuShane sat with an open newspaper spread out on his desk. “This is a hell of a note,” he said, glancing up as his secretary escorted Brandon Walker into the room. He pointed to the upper left-hand corner of the page. “You realize, of course, that this makes us all sound like a bunch of stupid jackasses?”
“Sorry,” Brandon said, “I haven’t seen a paper yet this morning.” Nonetheless, he had a pretty good idea about the contents of that offending article. He was sure it reported Toby Walker’s unauthorized use of a police vehicle.
“You in the habit of letting your whole goddamned family use county cars whenever they damned well please?”
“It never happened before,” Brandon began. “I had no idea my father would take the keys off the. .”
“I don’t give a good goddamn how it happened, but let me tell you this. If it ever does again, you’re out of here, Walker. We don’t need this kind of shit. Can’t afford it. Lucky for you the car wasn’t damaged, or you’d be on administrative leave as of right now. So keep your damn car keys in your damn pocket, you hear?”
Brandon had seen news clips of DuShane out in public charming both the media and his constituents. He wondered if those people knew that, on his own turf, DuShane was incapable of speech free of profanity.
The detective waited to see if there was anything else. DuShane didn’t exactly dismiss him, but he turned back to the newspaper as though Walker had already left the room. The younger man stood there wavering, wondering if he shouldn’t let DuShane know of the possible problem brewing over Andrew Carlisle.
“Well,” the sheriff said. “What are you waiting for?”
“Nothing,” Brandon replied, deciding. “Nothing at all.”
If DuShane didn’t even have the good grace to ask how Toby Walker was doing, why the hell should Brandon tell him anything? After all, it wasn’t his case, not officially.
Sister Katherine met them in the office when Diana and Davy arrived at San Xavier. The nun, taking Davy under her wing with a promise of popovers, left at once. Diana was shown into a sparsely furnished office. She sat down on a rickety visitor chair facing a spare, balding old man who introduced himself as Father John.
“I hope my telephone call didn’t alarm you, Mrs. Ladd,” he said, “but I wanted you to understand that I consider this a matter of utmost importance.”
“About Rita?” Diana asked.
He nodded. “You see, her nephew and another man, a medicine man called Looks At Nothing, came to see me yesterday. . ”
“They came to see you, too?” she asked in some surprise. “I knew they had spoken to Brandon Walker, but why you?”
Father John seemed taken aback. “You mean they discussed this situation with someone else?”
Diana nodded. “With a detective at the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. He came to the house last night and told me.”
Father John folded his hands in front of him, thoughtfully touching his fingers to his lips. “How very odd,” he said. “Why would a detective have any interest in Davy being baptized?”
Now, it was Diana’s turn to be puzzled. “Davy? Baptized? What are you talking about?”
