“I’m not sure if this is important,” Cassidy said as he looked at the pictures. “Call it my chunk of blue sky, or flash of red.” She referenced their earlier conversation on jigsaw puzzle pieces. The photographs were mostly in color, showing people in brilliant costumes. Some photos were much older, carefully posed, black-and-white. In one, a familiar face looked out. “That’s me.”
“Yeah.” Cassidy produced a copy of the photo he had shown her at her hardware store. He realized that the machine hum he had heard while she was in her office had been a scanner—she had scanned the photo without him knowing it. She held it up beside the black-and-white photo. Even down to the length of hair, the faces were identical. “I came out yesterday and compared these two. If Alicia saw this, she might have recognized you. You haven’t changed much over the years.”
As in all the other places Ukiah had visited so far, the museum had a guest book on the front desk. He wondered what weird Oregon tradition led to the prevailing habit as he flipped back through the pages. They were marvelous tools for a private investigator; too bad most of the places in Pittsburgh didn’t have them.
Alicia signed in August 21, a week after being at the bead shop, and a little over a week before she disappeared. Either Rose hadn’t signed, or Alicia had come alone.
Armed with the date, Ukiah began questioning the staff. He held out little hope, however, of them remembering her. After buying the tickets, he and Cassidy had not seen one identifiable museum worker.
Luckily, he found a gift shop employee that thought she might remember Alicia.
The young Native American woman, however, shook her head even as she admitted recalling Alicia. “I see a lot of people this time of year. She looks vaguely familiar.”
Ukiah pulled out a copy of the Christmas photo, the one of Alicia standing beside him. It gave a size reference. People of extremes got noticed, and Alicia was a tall woman.
“Yes. I did see her. She was asking about one of the rodeo photos. I’m not sure which one. Apparently it didn’t have a name identifying the person in the photo. I told her that she would have to talk to a curator, who would be in on Monday.”
“Did she talk to you about anything else?”
“She bought one of the books. She said it was going to be a gift for a friend who was from one of the local tribes.”
Alicia bought a book for me? “Did she say anything about him being related to the photograph?”
The woman considered and nodded slowly. “Yes, she said something about that. She said she wanted to know the name of the family so she could contact them and see if they had lost a child several years ago. She asked me if I knew anyone in the area that lost a little boy.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I didn’t grow up around here.” She pressed a hand to her breast. “I’m Cree! I met my husband at a powwow and moved here only three years ago.”
“We didn’t put a name on it because we didn’t want reward seekers to know what Magic Boy looked like,” Cassidy explained the lack of a name on the photo. Zoey had rejoined them, explaining that the rodeo photos were new, and thus interesting.
“They could take a photo of it,” Cassidy said. “Play with it digitally and come up with proof of some sort that my grandfather would believe. He’s nearly a hundred years old. He was born before television was invented. He doesn’t realize what people can do with pictures now.”
Ukiah murmured his agreement while staring at his photo. What could Alicia have learned from it? They had kept Kraynak in the dark about his true nature, so Alicia couldn’t have known that this was him. She could have guessed, though, that this was a near relative. Certainly it seemed to confirm in her mind that he was from one of the three tribes on the reservation.
Had she handled the photo? He touched the frame edge lightly. Alicia’s ghost presence indicated she had most likely taken it off the wall. He lifted it up.
“What are you doing?” Cassidy hissed.
“Alicia took it down,” he said and flipped it over. “She undid the catches.” He undid them and lifted off the back. Written on the back, in ancient, faded script, was MAGIC BOY KICKING DEER, DIED SEPTEMBER 23, 1933.
Jared caught Ukiah’s right wrist, lifting his arm up to run a thumb over the unblemished line of his radius bone . . . “Lead the way, Magic Boy.”
Jared called Ukiah by his true name, but Ukiah hadn’t recognized it. Even now, it triggered no emotion in him.
“My name was Magic Boy?”
“What else would you call a two-hundred-year-old child?” Cassidy asked.
September 23. The day Rennie arrived at Pendleton.
Unsettled by the apparent coincidence, Ukiah replaced the back and rehung the picture. “So Alicia has a name.”
“We had nothing to do with her disappearing,” Cassidy said.
“I didn’t say you did.” Ukiah stared back at himself. “She wouldn’t realize this was me. She thinks I’m only twenty-one. She would look for relatives of Magic Boy, though, thinking I was a descendent.”
“She didn’t talk to anyone in the family that I heard,” Zoey said. “That’s who I would ask.”
“We’re not all on speaking terms, though,” Cassidy said. “Magic Boy’s death triggered a big family feud.”
“The family isn’t listed in the phone book,” Ukiah murmured. “She wouldn’t know how to contact them. She probably would have checked with county records.”
“Let’s go, then!” Zoey cried.
“It’s closed today,” Cassidy said. “I’m not sure she could have found anything. Magic Boy disappeared during the 1933 roundup, within hours of that picture being taken. My family has always believed that he was killed, but the police wouldn’t start an investigation. They said he just ran off. Alicia wouldn’t have found any birth or death certificates on file.”
“Census records,” Zoey stated. “In 2000, we had to fill out the names of everyone that lived in the house. She could have found who he was living with and then looked up their descendants. Boy, this is like a puzzle.”
“Obituaries list next of kin and how they are related,” Ukiah said. “If the library has microfilm of the local newspaper, and your family placed an obituary for Magic Boy, that’s one place she could have looked.”
Cassidy glanced at her watch. “I think the library might still be open. We can see what she found out.”
The library closed twenty minutes before they arrived. It was one wing of a large imposing red-brick building. Zoey rattled the doors and then proclaimed, “Major stinker.”
“No Sunday hours,” Ukiah observed.
“You can visit on Monday,” Cassidy said. “If you’re still here. Surely, this has nothing to do with her disappearance.”
“It’s a place she visited and maybe met someone,” Ukiah said. “She was only in town three times. Unless the kidnappers saw her at the campgrounds themselves, Pendleton is where they noticed her.”
Sam had picked out their rendezvous site, a park at the end of town next to the courthouse. A statue of a man on a horse presided over the park. A plaque explained that he was Til Taylor, first sheriff of Pendleton, killed during a jailbreak. Ukiah glanced at the bronze statue and heard Degas’s slight mocking voice, saying, “One would think he was a martyred saint or something, the way they carry on.”
Max and Sam sat opposite the statue, heads together in deep discussion. Ukiah caught the scent of their mutual attraction. Sam laughed at something Max said and turned to press her face against Max’s shoulder. There was softness to Max’s face that Ukiah had never seen before, as if some inner tension had released. The two looked up as Ukiah approached, a mix of guilt and mild annoyance.
Ukiah felt a twinge of jealousy and tried to soothe it away. The last few days had bruised him heart and soul as well as body, he told himself, and he was being oversensitive. “The gang’s all here and none the worse for wear.”
“Good,” Max said. “Dinner?”
“De
finitely,” Ukiah agreed. Food, sleep, and a phone call to Indigo would return him to balance. Sex with Indigo, though, would have been an even better tonic.
True to form, Max had found the best place to eat while doing his legwork. “I’ve heard Raphael’s is excellent.”
Sam cringed slightly. “Excellent but expensive.”
“Our treat,” Max said, “for putting Ukiah up for the night.”
“Oh!” Sam stood and bent her arm up behind her back. “Okay, okay, you twisted my arm enough. Raphael’s it is.”
Raphael’s turned out to be around the corner in a large Queen Anne–style house. Three tall gables looked out over a covered porch. The interior was rich with stained wood, leaded glass, and modern art from native artists. Just inside the door was the ever-present guest book.
“I love these things” Max murmured, signing in a flourish. “Alicia was a good little trooper and signed all the ones she came across.”
“So I noticed,” Ukiah said.
“Did you check to see if any of the names around hers repeated?”
“Same people visiting the same time as her?”
“Yeah.”
Ukiah called up the guest books. “No. No one had.”
Max made a slight noise of disappointment.
The hostess sat them at a window, gave them menus, and fetched them hot, fresh bread with a spicy herb crust.
Sam leaned across the table to murmur to Max, “Is that your foot?”
Max looked slightly surprised over the top of his menu. “Yes.”
She smiled. “Oh, good.”
Max looked smugly embarrassed and laughed.
Max ordered the smoked quail with browned huckleberry sauce. Sam had venison marsala. Ukiah ordered the salmon topped with huckleberry puree, the soup along with the salad, and asked for a second round of the bread.
The waitress clucked, “Growing boys,” and went off for the bread.
Sam took out her notebook. “If I ever disappear, I hope I’d leave more of a trace. Today almost inspires me to dye my hair purple or green.”
“At one time, Alicia dyed her hair purple,” Ukiah said.
“Too bad she stopped,” Sam murmured. “At most of the places I checked, no one remembered Alicia or Rose.”
Max considered Sam. “Green would be fetching on you.”
“Brat.” The corners of her mouth turned up into a Mona Lisa smile. “Kentucky Fried Chicken is a few blocks down from the coin laundry. As I hoped, Alicia stopped there while doing laundry. Andy Henry on the counter remembers her, but they talked about nothing more than chicken and the weather.”
“What’s this Henry like?” Max asked.
“He’s extremely short with huge feet. Looks like Mickey Mouse,” Sam said. “So desperate for a woman to notice him that he’ll remember any one that does.”
“Well, that doesn’t match up with any of our kidnappers,” Ukiah said.
“I solved our mystery location.” Sam tapped her list. Alicia had written Big Sink for the total of Wednesday, August 18. “I called Eastern Oregon University at La Grande and questioned one of their geology professors. The ‘big sink’ turns out to be a weird local geological thing that I hadn’t heard of before. The ‘sink’ is an area south of Jubilee Lake, which looks like a large piece of earth sank into the ground. The girls got directions at the Chevron service station last week on how to get to Jubilee Lake. The attendant was fairly sure it was Wednesday morning, and that they were going to drive out immediately. But it’s just a big hole in the ground, with a weird magnetic thing so compasses don’t always work correctly.”
“They don’t?” Max asked.
Sam shrugged. “Harold Grantz, that’s the professor, thinks there might be a large iron deposit, like a meteorite hit there at some point. He gave me directions: Forest Road 63, three miles south of the lake. Park and hike.”
“That last bit gets somewhat vague,” Max said. “So they spent that day out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Well, Jubilee Lake is a popular spot,” Sam said. “It’s well-stocked with rainbow trout, has a boat ramp, campground, picnic tables, and a footpath. They could have spent part of the day there and met up with someone.”
Max winced. “But the population isn’t constant, so we probably won’t find witnesses to any meeting.”
“At least it was only last week,” Ukiah said. “There might be someone still at the campground that saw them.”
“We better hit it tomorrow, then,” Max said.
“What about where Alicia was camped?” Sam asked.
“I talked to the FBI about that.” Max earned a surprised look from Ukiah. “Since this is now a kidnapping, and we might not be here for the full course of the investigation, I thought that we should work with them as much as possible.”
Max gave Ukiah an “I’m handling it” look in return as he spoke. Better Max than him. Ukiah supposed it was for the best—if they walked too meekly, the FBI might think they were up to something. As his Mom Lara often said of his baby sister, those who are quiet are often into the worst trouble.
“So, did they say anything?” Sam clearly thought this was a waste of time.
Max leaned back from his quail. “Not much, just that the search efforts, and especially the shooting, spooked away everyone at the girls’ campground. The FBI has a list of who was there, and is trying to find them for questioning now.” He glanced to Ukiah. “How did you do, kid?”
“The Underground Tour seems to be a bust,” Ukiah said. “The tour guide remembers her, but only vaguely. The Trading Shop is closed.”
“Oh, yes; it’s Saturday,” Sam said. “They’re at flea markets on Saturdays.”
That mystery solved. “But the woman at the bead shop remembered her, and that took me out to the cultural institute with Cassidy Kicking Deer.” Ukiah was unsure how much he should say in front of Sam. It was going to be tricky to dance all around the truth. “They have a photograph of the lost Kicking Deer boy. Alicia apparently saw how much it looked like me. She took it down and found the name in the back.”
“Which is?” Max asked.
“Magic Boy. It also listed date of death, but Cassidy says that there isn’t a death record on file.”
“Obits. Wasn’t there a comment on Ukiah obits?” Max took out the daily planner and flipped through. “Here. Ukiah history: obits.”
“This is the kid that disappeared in 1933, right?” Sam got nods from both Max and Ukiah. “You look that much like him?”
“Not now.” Ukiah tried not to squirm in his seat. “The photograph taken when I was found does. Cassidy was the one that figured out that Alicia could have seen the picture and made the connection.”
“So, your family has this weird genetic weakness for disappearing into the wilderness and running with a pack of wolves?” Sam asked.
“Well, yes,” Ukiah said unhappily.
Sam shook her head. “It’s amazing you keep finding girls to overlook that little oddity and produce the next generation to get lost all over again.”
Max coughed. “Alicia asked the post office clerk if they knew anyone by the name of Kicking Deer.” He consulted his PDA. “He told her that Elaine Kicking Deer works at the Watering Hole on Fridays and Saturdays.”
“She’s a waitress,” Sam said. “The Watering Hole is across town.”
“Being tonight is Saturday,” Max said, “it would be best if we work the crowd, see if anyone saw or talked to Alicia.”
“The crowd there tends to be a little rough around the edge,” Sam said. “They drink to get drunk.”
“Then we definitely all should hit this one,” Max said. “In case one of us needs backup.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Watering Hole, Pendleton, Oregon
Saturday, August 28, 2004
The Watering Hole was a sprawling set of buildings down by the shallow Umatilla River. The ceilings were low, smoke from a dozen different brands of cigarettes hazed the air, the rooms we
re dark, and the darkness was cut mostly by the neon lights of beer logos. The jukebox played at deafening levels. Max and Ukiah had trawled through bars like this in Pittsburgh, usually smaller in size, looking for skips. Most of the crowd was just the poorer ranks of good average people. Mixed in was a rougher crowd. Unfortunately, it was difficult to tell the good from bad. It amazed Ukiah sometimes that the rougher-looking of two men might be the hardworking father of four just looking for a drink or two before heading home. What gathered them together in a room so dark that it was hard to see who you were with, with noise so loud that you had to shout to be heard?
They found Elaine Kicking Deer weaving through a crowd of mostly men, doing an amazing balancing act with glasses filled with alcohol. She was remarkably blond and blue-eyed, although dusky-skinned, and had a look around her eyes that said that she had some ethnic blood. She nodded to Sam, and eyed Ukiah with interest.
“So this is him? The incredible stud muffin, Wolf Boy?”
“Me?” Ukiah pressed a startled hand to his chest.
“Stud muffin?” Sam echoed uneasily.
Elaine laughed, deftly avoiding an already staggering patron to keep her drinks intact. “I would think by now, Sammie, you would know how small a town this is.”
Sam threw a glance at Ukiah that almost seemed angry, then grew puzzled at whatever she saw on his face. “So?”
Elaine only laughed more, delivering the drinks around a crowded booth, nodding as the customers asked for nachos, wings, and a drink for a late arrival. The private investigators hung back, letting her work.
“What have you heard about my partner?” Max asked.
“A hell of lot more than about you,” Elaine said to Max, heading for the bar. “Between my family and the men in town, you’d think only one man flew in from Pittsburgh, not three.”
“What men?” Sam asked.
“Ricky Barkley, for one,” Elaine said.