“Daniel?” the old man asked.

All Dan could do was stare and nod wordlessly.

The stranger held out his hand, but Dan backed away from him.

“My name is Micah,” the old man said. “Micah Duarte. Rebecca, your mother, was my daughter. I’ve come to take you home.”

Was. Dan heard the word and understood at once what he had just been told, what the smiling woman hadn’t been willing to tell him. This was like in the movie when Bambi’s father comes to Bambi after hunting season and says, “Your mother can’t be with you anymore.”

Leaving the stranger on the porch, Dan walked away from the door, climbed back up on the couch, and clutched his paper bag to his chest. He did his best not to cry.

His father hated it when he cried. “Don’t be a sissy,” Adam Pardee always said. “Only sissies cry.” Dan had cried in the movie when Bambi lost his mother, but he didn’t cry for his own mother, not then, not with that strange Indian man watching him.

The woman bustled in from the kitchen, smiling and wiping her hands on a towel as she approached the man who still waited outside on the porch. He wasn’t smiling. Neither was Dan.

“You must be Mr. Duarte,” she said. “Please do come in. I’m Hilda Romero. I see you two have already met.” She turned to Dan. “Are you ready to go?”

“I don’t want to go,” he said, shaking his head. “I want to stay here. I want to live here.”

Mrs. Romero smiled again. It seemed to him that she was always smiling, but he didn’t believe that, either.

“But Mr. Duarte is family,” she said. “Your real family. He’s going to take you home with him. He’s going to look after you.”

“I don’t want him to,” Dan insisted stubbornly. “I want my mother to look after me.”

Micah Duarte said nothing. He gave only the smallest shake of his head, a gesture that meant exactly what Bambi’s father had meant. Dan’s mother was gone-gone forever. She wasn’t coming back for him, but still Dan didn’t move. He stayed where he was, on the couch.

“We have to go,” Micah Duarte said softly. “Safford is a long way away. My boss would only let me have today off. I drove all night to get here, and I told Maxine we’d be back home tonight.”

Dan didn’t know who Maxine was and he didn’t want to.

“But I don’t know you,” Dan objected, practically shouting.

Micah Duarte nodded. “I know,” he said. “Your mother didn’t like being an Indian. She hated it. That’s why she ran away and came here. She was very beautiful. She thought she’d be able to be a movie star.”

He shrugged as if to underscore the futility of his daughter’s empty dream.

Dan, who had never heard anything at all about his mother’s people, was thunderstruck. “My mother isn’t an Indian,” he declared. “She can’t be.”

“She was,” Micah insisted, using that terrible word again, “was” spoken softly and sadly. “She was Apache, and you are, too, Daniel. Come now. We need to go. We can talk along the way.”

He held out his hand. Once again Dan shook his head.

For a moment longer Dan sat there, resisting, but the force behind Micah Duarte’s command was like a physical presence. Finally, as if his feet had minds of their own, they hopped down from the couch and carried him across the room. He stepped out through the door and onto the porch. Then, almost against his will, Dan reached up and took his grandfather’s hand.

Even though Adam Pardee was a stunt man doing pretend tricks for the movies, his hands had always been smooth and soft. That was one of the reasons he always used the belt-on his son and on his wife. He didn’t want anything to damage the looks of his hands; he couldn’t afford to bark or scrape his knuckles.

Micah Duarte’s hands were large and anything but smooth. They were cracked and rough and covered with bumps Dan would later learn were calluses-calluses that came from working long hours with tools and doing hard physical labor. Micah made real stuff happen, and he didn’t care how his hands looked or felt.

Together Daniel and Micah walked across the porch, down the steep steps, and along the short walkway. Outside the yard, a very old pickup was parked next to the sidewalk. Micah walked up to the passenger door, opened it, and gestured for Daniel to get inside.

He didn’t. He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “I want my mother,” he said. “Where is she?”

Micah’s eyes misted over. He turned away from the boy’s question and for a long time said nothing. Instead, he walked as far as the front of the truck and planted one booted foot on the front bumper the same way Thomas Rios was doing right now.

“Your mother is dead,” he said at last. He patted the pocket of his shirt. “She sent us a letter. She was afraid your father might do something bad. He was drinking too much and doing other stuff. She wrote to see if Maxine and I would let her come home. We would have, but the letter came too late for us to help her. Since I couldn’t come to get her, I came to get you. Understand?”

D an hadn’t understood all of it right then, not really, but he hadn’t cried, either. Not because Micah Duarte might think he was a sissy. It was because Dan knew enough about Indians to know that they didn’t cry. Ever.

In view of everything his own grandparents had done for him, Daniel Pardee could only hope, for Angie Enos’s sake, that there was someone in her life, someone like Micah and Maxine Duarte, who would step up to the plate, take in a poor motherless child, and lavish her with love and affection.

A silence fell over the small group of men gathered around Thomas Rios’s F-100.

“Anything else?” Detective Fellows asked, glancing questioningly at the other officers.

All three shook their heads. Dan had no additional questions to ask primarily because he hadn’t been paying attention. He had been far away in another place and time. When he came back on track, Detective Fellows was speaking to Thomas Rios in what sounded to Dan like pitch-perfect Tohono O’odham.

The two Law and Order officers seemed surprised by that. Nawoj was the only word Dan was able to pick out from the string of conversation. He knew nawoj meant friend or friendly gift. When Detective Fellows finished speaking, Thomas Rios nodded and the two men shared a brief handshake. After that, the old man got back in his pickup and drove away.

“What did you say to him?” Dan asked.

“That I’m sorry for his loss,” Brian Fellows answered.

“How’d you learn to speak the language?”

“I learned from some friends here on the reservation,” Fellows said with an unassuming shrug, as though it was no big deal. “I had a friend, an Anglo guy named Davy Ladd. He taught me, and so did an Indian lady named Rita Antone and an old medicine man everyone called Fat Crack. The three of them taught me everything I know.”

Now I understand, Dan thought. No wonder he’s the detective they assigned to this case.