Sulfur Springs

  “He told me a storm is coming,” Leah said as she handed us each a mug of tea.

  “But not from the sky.” Meloux’s eyes settled on Rainy. “What troubles you, Niece?”

  How the old Mide always knew when turmoil was coming was only one of the many mysteries in the puzzle that was Henry Meloux.

  We sat at the table.

  “I got a call from my son, Uncle Henry, a desperate call.” Rainy gave him the details, and the old man sipped his tea as he listened.

  “And you are afraid,” Meloux said at the end.

  “Yes.” Which was something she hadn’t admitted to, not even with me.

  “What is there to be afraid of?” Meloux asked.

  “He’s in trouble.”

  “What is there to be afraid of?” the old man asked again.

  “That he’ll be arrested, that he’ll be charged with murder, that he’s alone in all this.”

  “And are these things really so?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then you do not know what there is to be afraid of. There is only what you imagine.”

  “I can guess how these things usually go, Uncle Henry.”

  “Suppose,” Meloux said, “you imagined something different.”

  “Like what?”

  “What would give you comfort?”

  “To believe that it’s all some terrible mistake.”

  “Then why not imagine that?”

  “Because he was so afraid.”

  “That is his fear. It does not have to be yours. If you feed his fear with your own, what do you have?”

  “It’s hard, Uncle Henry.”

  “I did not say it was easy.” He eyed her with great compassion. “You have helped others do this.” A gentle reminder of her own training and work as a Mide.

  Rainy took a deep, calming breath.

  “Leah,” the old man said. “Light sage and smudge this room, cleanse the air and cleanse our spirits.” He reached across the table and took Rainy’s hands in his own callused, wrinkled palms. “You have work ahead of you, Niece. It will probably be hard work, work that will test you. That is one of the things love does. It tests us in difficult ways. But love is also fear’s worst enemy. In what is ahead of you, hold to your love and not your fear. And when you imagine, imagine the best of what might be.” He smiled and offered a little shrug. “What harm can it do?”

  * * *

  As we walked the long path back, I could tell that Rainy was comforted, and I marveled, as I often did, at the wisdom of Henry Meloux. What had he told her, really, that she didn’t already know? This was one of the old Mide’s greatest gifts, I thought, his ability to guide people to the place of their own wisdom, helping them see the truths they already knew but had lost sight of. He’d been right. With what little we knew about Peter’s situation, what could we do but imagine, and so why not imagine the best? That it was all some great misunderstanding, some terrible mistake. When everything was revealed to us and we knew all the facts, if the situation turned out to be different, we could deal with that. In the meantime, I thought, we would hold to love and to love’s companion, which is hope.

  Rainy took my hand as we walked, following the light our flashlights threw on the ground.

  “Migwech,” she said, which is the Ojibwe word for “thank you.”

  “What for?”

  “There are so many people alone in this world, but I have you. Whatever’s ahead, I have you.” She put her arms around me and lifted her face to mine and kissed me.

  It was nearing 1:00 a.m. when we returned to the house. Jenny and Daniel were waiting up, sitting at the kitchen table with mugs of coffee in front of them.

  “Annie called to wish us a happy Fourth of July,” Jenny said.

  Rainy and I joined them at the table. “And you told her about Peter?”

  She nodded.

  Annie is my second daughter, younger than Jenny by nearly two years. She was living in San Francisco.

  “If you need her help, you have it,” Jenny said.

  “We’ll see what happens.”

  “And she insisted I call Stephen and keep him in the loop.”

  My son, Stephen, is the youngest of my children. He was in West Texas, helping out on a cattle ranch owned by a family friend. Punching cows was something Stephen had done in past summers. It was that or working at Sam’s Place, the burger joint I own on Iron Lake. Given a choice between flipping burgers and pushing around that meat on the hoof, Stephen had often opted for the life of a cowpoke.

  “Did you get him?”

  She shook her head. “Apparently, he’s out driving cattle somewhere cell phones don’t reach.”

  “What did Uncle Henry say?” Daniel asked.

  “That until we know the whole truth, it’s best not to imagine the worst,” Rainy said. “Pretty simple but absolutely true.”

  My cell phone rang. Ed Larson. He told me he’d made some calls to a deputy he knew with the Coronado County Sheriff’s Department, which was located in Cadiz. Peter wasn’t on law enforcement’s radar there. Ed assured me he’d been discreet in his inquiry, and if I wanted, he could do some more checking, broaden his search. I told him we were flying down in the morning. He offered to help when we arrived. I said I’d call if I needed him.

  “We should pack, Rainy,” I told her, “and try to get a couple of hours of sleep before we head off.”

  We left Jenny and Daniel the task of turning out the lights. Upstairs, Rainy and I pulled our suitcases from the closet and filled them. I could tell something was still eating at her, but I waited until we were in bed to ask. She sat with her back to the headboard and drew her knees to her chest as if to protect herself. The streetlamp outside our window threw light into the dark room, and in the glow I studied Rainy’s face. For a very long time, she said nothing. Then, without looking at me, she reached out and took my hand.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “There are things you don’t know about me, Cork.”

  “I know the important things.”

  “I hate Arizona,” she said.

  “Well, that’s one I didn’t know.”

  She turned her face to me fully. Despite all the calm Henry Meloux had done his best to offer her, I could see the storm coming.

  “Here it is,” she said and took a deep breath. “Peter’s not the only Bisonette who’s killed a man there.”

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  Patience is a virtue that I learned as a cop. I waited a good, long while before Rainy said anything more.

  “I know you’ve killed men,” she finally went on. “I know about two of them anyway. Do I know about them all?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it might put you in a difficult situation, legally.”

  “Was it wrong, whatever the other killing you did?”

  “It was necessary. Or I thought it was. I still do.”

  The streetlamp on Gooseberry Lane seemed glaringly bright that night, and as the light pushed through our bedroom window, it cast shadows of the mullions on the wall, which reminded me way too much of the bars of a jail cell. Rainy stared at them with the same look I’d seen in the eyes of prison inmates. I understood that the past is never really past. We live our history over and over, the worst of our memories right there alongside us, step for step, our companions to the grave. In the dark hours of that long night, with sleep forsaking us, I thought I would hear Rainy’s story.

  Instead she said, “It’s like that for me.”

  “You can’t tell me about it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Does it have anything to do with Peter, whatever he’s involved in now?”

  “I can’t imagine that it does. It was so long ago.”

  I wanted to press her for the story she felt she couldn’t tell me, but I have my own secrets, so who was I to deny Rainy hers? I simply held her. Together we watched the light through the window give way
to a gray that signaled dawn, and we got up and dressed.

  * * *

  We landed at the Tucson airport in the early afternoon. Despite dozens of attempts, Rainy had not been able to reach Peter before we left. As soon as we landed, she tried once more. Same result.

  I’d been in Arizona only once, when the kids were young. In late May of that long-ago year, Jo and I had taken them out of school a week early and driven across the country to see the Grand Canyon. On the way, we’d stopped at Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly and Monument Valley, places where a sense of the sacred was still palpable. It was easy to understand why the ancient people had made their homes there, but why they’d chosen to abandon all they’d built was a great, lingering mystery. On the way back to Minnesota, we’d stayed north, hitting the stunning parks in Utah, so I’d never been in southern Arizona and never in the depth of summer. Hell couldn’t have been any hotter. We walked out of the airport and into a blast furnace. The heat, the glare, the unwelcoming aridness of every breath I took made me want to turn immediately and head back to the cool North Country of home.

  We rented a Jeep Cherokee and hit I-10 heading southeast out of the city. I had the air conditioner cranked up to max. The landscape surprised me. I’d expected flat desert, but everywhere I looked, the horizon was dominated by mountains. After half an hour, we turned off on a state road and began to climb into hills that were covered more in grassland and scrub trees than in cactus. I watched the exterior thermometer readout on the dash drop gradually from 108 degrees to a relatively cool 97.

  “They call these Los Conejos Hills,” Rainy said. “Jackrabbit Hills.”

  We crested a rise and came out onto a long, flat plateau set against mountains blue in the distance. The ground was covered with short, coarse grass and sectioned with wire. Ranchland, I guessed. This was far from the desert I’d been anticipating, so different from the Arizona I’d seen when I’d driven the family to the Grand Canyon those many years before. We came to a small town, not much more than a crossroads with a gas station, a little convenience store, and a building whose name surprised me as much as anything I’d seen: the Southern Arizona Wine Showroom.

  “Wine showroom?” I said.

  “A lot of vineyards down here, Cork. The wines are surprisingly good.”

  We followed the course of a dry riverbed that cut through a valley between two mountain ranges.

  “The San Gabriel River,” Rainy said. “Cadiz isn’t far now.”

  From the things she’d told me, I had a sense of the town. It was the seat of Coronado County and only a stone’s throw from Mexico. Somewhere on the outskirts was the Goodman Center for Recovery, where more than two years earlier Peter had spent three months kicking a painkiller addiction that had threatened everything in his life. Through most of it, Rainy had been there with him, living in a rented place near enough to offer support as a mother and her skills as a Mide.

  I had no idea what awaited us in Cadiz, but I could sense Rainy’s growing anxiety. She was normally a quiet woman, but quiet in a calming way. Her silence, as we followed the dry bed of the San Gabriel, was different, and her dark eyes, as they considered this landscape so alien to all I knew, were alert, watchful, as if she was aware of some danger here that she hadn’t shared with me. I thought again of the killing she wouldn’t tell me about. She’d said it was long ago in her history. I was beginning to wonder just how long.

  We continued to climb. The outside thermometer crept downward, and by the time we pulled into Cadiz, the temperature was ninety-five degrees, hot by Minnesota standards but pleasant in the middle of an Arizona summer.

  The San Gabriel River split Cadiz. The main thoroughfare, Clementine Street, ran along the west bank, with a stone bridge in the heart of the town connecting to the other side. The two blocks of the downtown were lined with shops and stores housed in revamped Old West buildings straight out of a John Wayne oater. The Stagecoach Inn occupied a prominent corner location. Although in its day it had probably served mostly dusty, weary cowpokes and prospectors, it had been restored to a glory I doubted it ever really knew before. Out front, instead of mules and quarter horses tethered to a hitching post, were parked some pricey sets of wheels—a Mercedes sedan, a couple of Lincoln Navigators, a beautifully restored roadster of some kind. With a clear sky above, mountains on two sides, and a moderate temperature, Cadiz was clearly a tourist destination. Banners celebrating the Fourth of July and the Independence Day Rodeo at the county fairgrounds still hung above the main street. All the shops were done up with decorations in red, white, and blue. There were bits and pieces of exploded fireworks lying in the street along the curbs.

  “Any idea where the county sheriff’s office is?” I asked Rainy.

  “Across the river at the far end of town.”

  We drove along the main street until we came to a second bridge over the San Gabriel, and on the other side, just as Rainy had said, stood the Coronado County Law Enforcement Center.

  “Been here before?” I asked.

  “Small town. After a couple of weeks, you know where everything is.”

  It was a relatively new brick structure with an incarceration wing that struck me as surprisingly large for what appeared to be a sparsely populated county. Rainy and I went in together. In the public contact area, several people sat in plastic chairs. All of them appeared to be Hispanic, and only the three children with an older lady, who was probably their grandmother, looked at us directly.

  We stepped up to the window. A woman not in uniform spoke to us through the microphone.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Just looking for a little information,” I said. “Have there been any arrests in the past twenty-four hours?”

  She was in her late twenties, brunette, with a tight, tanned face, all business. “Yes.”

  “Was someone named Peter Bisonette among them?”

  “Just a moment.” She pulled a sheet from several others that lay to her left and scanned it. “No one by that name.”

  “Have there been any fatalities reported in the past twenty-four hours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is the information public?”

  She almost smiled. “An accidental death. From snakebite, more or less.”

  “More or less?”

  “Most snakebites involve a male between the age of eighteen and thirty-four, with tattoos, who’s been drinking. This one fit the demographic perfectly. A biker. Got himself bit by a rattler, tried to ride back to Cadiz, ran off the road and into a fence post. Was actually the fence post that killed him.”

  “That’s it for fatalities?”

  “That’s it.” She considered us. “Is there something we should know about this Peter Bisonette?”

  “We’re having some trouble finding him.”

  “He’s missing? Would you like to file a report?”

  I said, “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  She finally smiled, in a reassuring way. “Cadiz isn’t that big and Coronado County isn’t that populous. If he’s here, I’m sure you’ll find him.”

  “You heard her,” I said to Rainy as we left. “We’ll find him.”

  We got into the car, which in just the few minutes we’d been inside the county building, had become an oven.

  “Where to now?” I said. I had some ideas, but this was Rainy’s show.

  “The Goodman Center. Maybe he’s working today.”

  “Point the way.”

  The Norman Goodman Center for Recovery sat atop a mesa east of town, with a million-dollar view of the mountains and the valley of the San Gabriel River. It looked like an old Spanish mission with whitewashed adobe walls, a red-tile roof, and a bell tower. Dotting the mesa around it were a lot of new, expansive homes built in what I thought of as mission style and that probably cost an arm and two legs. We pulled into an asphalt lot, where there were half a dozen other vehicles, all of them high-end. We walked through an archway into a courtyard with a bubbling fountain a
nd flower beds and palm trees. White benches were spaced around, inviting in the shade of the palms, but all were empty. Rainy had told me very little about the time she’d spent here with Peter, and I had no idea what to expect. Against the backdrop of the high mountains, the place looked like a little bit of paradise. A very expensive little bit.

  Rainy led the way through tinted, pneumatic doors, which opened with a whish of cool air into a reception area that smelled of gardenias. Behind the reception desk sat a young woman studying a computer monitor. She looked up and smiled as if she’d been expecting us and couldn’t be happier that we’d finally arrived.

  “Welcome to the Goodman Center. May I help you?”

  “Can you tell me if Peter Bisonette is working today?” Rainy said.

  “Peter?” The lovely smile faltered. “Peter doesn’t work here anymore.”

  That caught Rainy by surprise. Me, too.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “When did he leave?”

  “And you are?” Her dark eyebrows arched in a Hollywood pantomime of inquiry.

  “His mother, Rainy Bisonette.”

  The young woman considered this information, still maintaining her smile, and finally said, “Perhaps you should talk to our director, Dr. Saunders.”

  “Yes,” Rainy said. “I’d like that.”

  “Have a seat, and I’ll let her know you’re here.”

  The chairs in the waiting area were arranged around a large glass-topped coffee table on which sat an array of magazines—Elle, Allure, GQ, Forbes, Entrepreneur. The chair I sat in was more comfortable than anything I’d ever bought for myself. I looked at Rainy, who’d spent the last several years in a cabin on Crow Point with no electricity, running water, or even an indoor toilet, and I wondered how in the hell she’d managed to pay for her son’s treatment in a place that probably catered primarily to the kinds of people who didn’t blink at the cost of a new Jaguar.