By the time I reached the lobby, I finally had my head screwed on straight. I stepped outside and climbed into the backseat of Scott’s Acura. Fortunately for me, Cherisse is a little bit of a thing. Once she moved her seat forward, I had plenty of leg room.

“How’s it going?” Scott asked from the driver’s seat.

“Fine,” I answered. “Just fine.”

It was a Mel Soames “fine”—­a two-­raised-­eyebrows “fine.” What I meant but didn’t say was that I may have been fine now, but I sure as hell hadn’t been fine a few minutes ago.

“I’m so glad you decided to come along after all,” Cherisse said. “It’ll be great fun.”

“I’m sure it will,” I said.

I doubted it would be any kind of fun, but since I was going anyway, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and decided to enjoy it.

CHAPTER 6

THE ­PEOPLE OF RATTLESNAKE SKULL village were angry with the Apache for stealing their food, but they were even angrier at Young Girl. Even though she had tried to warn them of the attack, they thought she had betrayed them. And so the council changed her name and said that from that time on she would be called Betraying Woman—­Gagdathag O’oks.

Young Man had been badly hurt when the women beat him. They carried Young Man back to the cave. Then they brought Betraying Woman there as well along with everything she owned—­her pots and baskets, her blankets and awl. Then, leaving Young Man and Betraying Woman inside to die, they asked I’itoi to bring down the mountain and close the entrance to the cave.

Betraying Woman stayed with Young Man until he died, caring for him as best she could. And even to this day, nawoj, my friend, when you hear the wind whispering through the manzanita—­the bush for which Ioligam is named—­you will know it is only Betraying Woman singing a song to Young Man.

Go to sleep, Sweet Ohb. Do not be afraid.

I will not let them hurt you. I will not let them come again

To beat you with their clubs and call you evil names.

No matter what they think, Sweet Ohb, we did not betray them.

They did not listen when I tried to warn them.

They did not listen when I tried to tell them

That you were not the one who stole from them,

That you were not the enemy who spoiled their fields.

No, Sweet Ohb, although we tried to tell them

They did not listen. But do not worry. I will not leave you.

We will stay here together, Sweet Ohb,

You and I together—­alone and in the dark.

IT SEEMED TO BRANDON THAT they’d escaped the Authors’ Dinner a little earlier than usual. They drove most of the way home in companionable silence. Speedway Boulevard narrowed first from three lanes in each direction, to two, and finally to one as they followed the winding road up into Gates Pass and off onto the dirt track that led to the house.

As the city lights fell away behind them, the stars and a rising moon appeared in a now jet-­black sky. When Brandon and Diana married and he had moved in with her and Davy, the house had been a long way out of town, and neighbors had been few and far between. Now the surrounding hillsides were dotted with McMansions, most of them far larger than the river rock relic Diana and her friend Rita Antone had turned from wreckage into a livable home. Their house and pool were far smaller and humbler than those of most of their neighbors, but they were also something most of the others were not—­completely paid for.

Leaving the Escalade parked in the detached garage, Diana and Brandon headed for the house. As they did so, Bozo, their aging grand-­dog, rose stiffly from his heated bed on the back patio and limped forward, tail a-­wag, to greet them. Their son-­in-­law, Dan Pardee, had been Bozo’s original owner, or maybe, as Diana often pointed out, it had been the other way around. Dan had been Bozo’s handler in Iraq and credited him with saving his life in combat. When Dan’s deployment ended, he had used his own money to bring Bozo home to the United States. They had worked together as a K-­9 unit attached to the Border Patrol’s Shadow Wolves.

Three years earlier, Dan and Bozo had gone after an illegal border crosser who had been packing two kilos of meth. Fleeing up the side of a mountain, the smuggler had, deliberately or not, sent an avalanche of rocks and boulders roaring down the mountainside behind him. Dan had managed to escape injury by diving out of the way. Bozo wasn’t as lucky. A vet had been able to save the dog’s life and wire his shattered shoulder back together, but Bozo’s resulting limp meant that his K-­9 unit days were over. When Dan’s next K-­9 partner, Hulk, arrived, Bozo had gone into mourning every day when Dan and the new dog left to go on duty. The best solution anyone could come up with, supplied by Lani, had been for Bozo to go live with Grandpa and Grandma.

There was a doggy door in the back of the house, one that Bozo steadfastly refused to use. He much preferred to be outside rather than in, but wherever he was, inside or out, he would wait patiently until a passing human opened the door before entering or exiting. Brandon suspected that the plastic sheeting hitting his shoulder bothered Bozo too much, and Brandon was the one who had insisted on installing a heated dog bed outside on the patio for Bozo to use on these still very chilly desert spring evenings.

“You’re making him soft,” Dan had objected when he saw the bed. “He never needed anything like that when we were in Iraq.”

“He isn’t in Iraq,” Brandon had countered. “He’s a veteran. He’s home now. He gets a heated bed. End of story.”

And it was.

Brandon unlocked the back door, switched on the kitchen light, and let Diana inside. “You go on to bed,” he told her. “Bozo and I are going to sit out here and be quiet together for a little while. Being stuck in crowds of ­people with all of them talking at once wears me out.”

“Suit yourself,” Diana said. “But if you’re going to be out here very long, turn on your heater, too.”

Flicking the switch, Brandon turned on one of the infrared heat lamps that lined the wooden ceiling of the patio and dropped into one of the chairs. Bozo stood beside him long enough to have his ears rubbed. Then, as if realizing they’d be there for a while, the dog limped back to his bed. He circled twice. With a contented sigh, Bozo lay down to sleep while Brandon leaned back to think.

That was what he needed at the end of a far too social ­evening—­a little peace and quiet, with the delicate perfume of orange blossoms drifting on the chilly air.

AFTER LEO LEFT LANI AND Gabe alone on the mountain, the first order of business was to build a fire pit. While Gabe reluctantly set about doing that, Lani unpacked the food and dishes. Once the fire was going, she emptied a bowl of precooked beans into the pot to heat. They were tepary beans, the ones the Tohono O’odham had traditionally grown and used long before the arrival of pinto beans.

The beans in question may have been part of Tohono O’odham’s ancient customs and traditions, but Lani’s manner of transporting them was not. She had loaded them into the backpack inside a sturdy plastic Ziploc container. She realized with some satisfaction, however, that the battered enameled pot she’d brought to heat them was the same one Fat Crack had used to prepare her evening meals during her sixteen-­day purification ceremony. The dishes into which she ladled the steaming beans were also the ones she and Fat Crack had used back then.