him coming from here.”
Jupe smiled. Dusty hadn’t been hiding when she found the rifle. He was being trussed up with Brit’s expert knots. Mercedes had missed all the action by only a few minutes. From where Bob had thrown the rifle, she wouldn’t have been able to see the entrance to Brit’s cave. So she had missed that, too.
Mercedes was smiling again. “How did you guess I was Brit’s mother?” she asked. “You’ve never heard me speak anything but Spanish before. And I don’t look much like an American in this thing.”
She lowered her shawl and tugged off the black wig with its pigtails. She stuffed it into her pocket. Then she ran her fingers through her own blond hair.
“It was really a hunch. A lucky hunch,” Jupe explained. “But I did have a couple of things to go on. When we were talking by the campfire that night, your watch had slipped down your wrist. I saw a band of much lighter skin. ”
He held out his left arm. His skin had become deeply tanned on the trip. He unfastened the strap of his digital watch, exposing the white band on his wrist where the sun hadn’t reached.
“Most Mexicans have brown skin,” he went on. “Even if they tan on top of that, they wouldn’t have a strip of dead-white skin under a watchband. But Anglos with pale skin could.”
She nodded. “You’re smart — just like my Brit.”
“It wasn’t only me. My friend Bob caught something too. Your contact lenses. Actors sometimes use them in movies to change the color of their eyes. So I had two hunches about you. Maybe brown wasn’t the natural color of your skin. And maybe you didn’t have a Mexican’s dark brown eyes either.”
“No, I don’t.” She ducked her head and slipped out the two lenses. “They’re the same color as Brit’s.” She looked up again, showing her blue eyes. She put the lenses into a plastic case and slipped it into her skirt pocket.
“Besides, I’ve heard you speak English,” Jupe reminded her. “Although I admit I didn’t recognize your voice in Spanish. You called me at the ranch and asked me to meet you on the other side of the lake.”
Brit’s mother reached out and squeezed Jupe’s hand. “I’m sorry about that. Ascención told me it was a stupid thing to do. But I didn’t realize just how dangerous that lake is. I wasn’t trying to kill you. Only hoping to scare you off — ”
“To keep Blondie from leading me up here.”
She nodded. “I was so frightened. I knew Dusty might kill Tom and Brit if he found them. He’d do anything to get his hands on those pesos.” She paused. “I was so scared I did some other stupid things too. Paying that Mexican to try to keep you off the bus. Then trying to steal Blondie that night. I should have known she wouldn’t let me near her.”
She searched behind a rock and pulled out a walkie-talkie. Looping its strap over her shoulder, she picked up the rifle. “Now, please, take me to Brit’s cave,” she said. “I’m dying to see him.”
“Have you managed to contact Ascención lately?” Jupe asked as they led the two burros back along the trail toward Brit’s hideout.
“So you know about that too, Jupiter?”
“Well, Mercedes. ” Jupe smiled. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your real name.”
“It’s Grace. That’s
“Grace Douglas. You can go on calling me Mercedes if you like.”
“Okay, Mercedes.” Jupe went on. “I knew Ascención had a walkie-talkie. I fixed it for him at the ranch. And Bob spotted yours on the burro that night you came to talk to us.”
She shook her head in a worried way. “I tried to call Ascención again and again this morning. But there was no answer. I did get through to him one night on the trip and he was only a day’s ride behind me then. So he should have been here by now unless. ” She hesitated, suddenly anxious. “Unless Dusty found him and killed him.”
“Dusty knew Ascención was following him?”
“He must have guessed it. That’s why he pretended his horse went lame. So he could keep circling back over his own trail. Watching for Ascención. Dusty wouldn’t have worried about a Mexican woman on a burro if he saw me. But if he spotted Ascención up in these mountains, he’d kill him.” She hesitated. “And maybe he has.”
“Mercedes.” Jupe touched her shoulder, trying to reassure her. “I wouldn’t worry too much about Ascención. I know Dusty’s smart. But Ascención is something else.”
“Yeah.” Mercedes nodded hopefully. “Yeah, he sure is.”
As they hurried on, Jupe asked Brit’s mother how she had come to suspect Dusty was planning to use Jupiter to find Villa’s cave.
She was in close touch with Brit, she explained, sending tapes to him at the village on the other side of the mountain and receiving his taped answers in Los Angeles. So she knew the whole story about Blondie’s blindness and the long trek to Dusty’s ranch for a vet. Brit had also warned her that the rancher might try to use the little burro to find Brit and his father in the mountains.
Then she received a letter from Ascención, saying Dusty was planning to go to L.A. Ascención enclosed a copy of the crossword puzzle that Dusty had printed in Lareto. The Mexican hadn’t understood what the puzzle was all about. But he knew Dusty was up to something.
“Well, I didn’t figure it all out at once,” Mercedes went on, “but I did know who Dagwood’s wife was: Blondie. So I started watching that store where the contest entries were sent. It wasn’t long before Dusty showed up there to collect his mail. I tried to break into the store the next day. But the burglar alarm scared me off.”
After that she kept a close watch on the rancher and found out where he was staying. Then one day she followed him out to The Jones Salvage Yard. Driving slowly past the house, she saw Dusty talking to Jupe on the porch. She hid her car and crept back to the house.
“I could hear you talking,” she said. “And what struck me at once was your voice. It was just like Brit’s!”
So she had started to fit things together. Disguising herself as a Mexican, she followed Jupe and his two friends to Lareto.
“I saw Dusty pick you up there in his Jeep. So I moved into a room in the village on the other side of the lake and got in touch with Ascención again. I spied on you in the woods. And when Blondie made friends with you right away, well, it wasn’t hard to figure out the rest.”
They walked on for a while in silence.
“Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?” Jupe asked.
“Go ahead.”
“How do you know Ascención? And what happened between you and Dusty that made you — ”
“That made us hate each other so much?”
“Yeah.”
“It goes back a long way,” Mercedes told him. “My mother died when I was a child. My father was a mining engineer working for a Mexican company. I was brought up in Mexico. Ascención used to take care of me as a kid when my father was away on mining trips. In those days Ascención owned the whole ranch. He was doing fine, raising cattle and horses until Dusty came along — ”
