The Salt Maiden (10 page)

“Okay, and then I’ll follow you out to the adobe.”

He hesitated before saying, “I don’t think so, Dana.”

“Look—if it’s about this…disagreement, we’re both adults. We should be able to put aside our differences and do what needs to be—”

“It’s not that. I just think it would be better if you stay here, out of sight.”

“If I’m not with you, how will you and Wallace know where to look? Max’s the only other witness, and he’s not much of a talker.”

“Just give me a description of the area and let me take care of it. It’ll be a lot of walking on that bad leg, and the terrain around there’s dangerous. You could meet up with tarantulas or scorpions, maybe another snake. Or you might get heatstroke. Stay here and keep Max company—I’m leaving him at home today.”

Yesterday morning at the courthouse the normally well-behaved dog had knocked over a trash can, torn up the contents, and left a steaming tribute outside of Estelle’s office. Estelle had raised such a hue and cry that, after cleaning up the evidence, Jay figured he had better keep
canis non grata
out of sight for a few days.

“You don’t want me around,” she guessed. “Or are you really worried your deputy will see us and put two and two together about what happened here last night?” A light flush stole over her, but she didn’t look away.

He reached out on an impulse, meaning to caress the curve of her cheek, but she turned her head to avoid the contact.

“I’m not ashamed,” he told her, a truth he tainted by adding, “and I’m not sorry, either.”

“Then prove it,” she challenged. “We’ll ride there together.”

As the Suburban parted the Red Sea of desert stillness, a deeper silence welled between its occupants.

Dana wished she’d taken her own vehicle. At least then she wouldn’t be trapped in this pocket of awkwardness, unwilling to speak of what had happened last night and unable to pretend that it meant nothing to her.

She wished that she could take it back, that she’d insisted upon sleeping on the floor last night—or even driving back to Pecos to rent a hotel room. Because she couldn’t stop
worrying whether she had pushed him too far, and wondering whether Angie’s accusations would put an end to their relationship.

What relationship?
As a light breeze snaked ribbons of dust across the road before them, Dana gave herself a mental kick, then recalled a detail she’d let slip.

The key.
Digging into her shorts pocket, she said, “I forgot to show you what I found with the journal.”

She pulled it free, letting it dangle on its deep blue necklace. When he glanced over, she explained, “The yarn’s from Angie’s tapestry, but I don’t know what the key’s for. It’s not to her car, and I didn’t see another lock around there.”

“Except the one you pried off the door,” he reminded her.

“But this can’t be to your lock,” she said. “It was left inside the wall.”

He looked over again before staring past the gyrations of the idiotically smiling hula girl toward the rutted dirt road. A small desert cottontail looked up from where it had been nibbling the sparse grasses at the margin, then raised its tail like a white flag as it zigzagged toward the shelter of scraggly tarbush. Silhouetted against the morning sky, a dark-winged hunter changed course but was too far off to pose a threat.

“Looks to me like a key to the same kind of padlock,” he said. “But I can’t think of where I’ve seen another…”

She waited for him to continue before quickly losing patience. “What?”

He shook his head. “It’s just a hunch, but we’re going to make a little detour.”

Though he didn’t explain further, Dana’s heart picked up speed when he radioed his deputy to tell him he was making a stop to check the salt-dome access road.

“Do you remember that part in Angie’s journal about the Salt Woman and her womb?” she asked excitedly when Jay replaced the radio’s handset. “There’s really a cavern, isn’t
there? A salt cavern somewhere past the ‘round breasts’ of the domes? West of them, maybe?”

“I never heard of any cavern,” he said. “But this land is known for keeping secrets, so I wouldn’t rule it out.”

As they turned onto an even rougher dirt road, Dana caught a flash at the corner of her eye. Glancing behind them, she was distracted by the sight of the hawk tucking in its wings and dropping well beyond the dust of the suburban’s passage.

When it rose again its flight was burdened by the weight of the young rabbit dangling limp beneath its claws.

To the uninitiated, the Chihuahuan Desert’s basins appeared as flat and unbroken as the surface of a windless sea. But the Hunter had learned its creosote-lined ridges and its deeply carved arroyos. He knew the hidden places prowled by coyotes and bobcats, and even an occasional mountain lion ranging down out of the foothills.

He knew because during the past two months he had become one with the predators that stalked these arid lands. Not out of choice, but because
she
had driven him to it—his wicked Angelina.

While he chewed the strip of raw flesh from his last kill, his memory marked out the best spots to linger in the shade to wait out the murderous afternoon sun. As well as the places where a good pair of field glasses could reward a watcher with a glimmer from a windshield miles distant.

As the breeze shifted, it streamed across the cavern’s gaping mouth behind him, dragging a mournful echo from the depths below.

Untroubled by its lament, he raised his binoculars to follow the movement of the new sheriff’s Suburban across a rural ranch road some twenty miles away. He watched for a long time as the SUV drew nearer, but still he couldn’t discern whether it was carrying one occupant or two.

Swearing under his breath, he willed the image to come clearer. Willed Jay Eversole to be alone.

Because that would mean that he’d left Dana Vanover at his place. That she would be unarmed and alone while the lawman wasted hours searching the area around the abandoned Webb ranch.

But instead of continuing in the direction of the dry lake, Eversole slowed and took the turnoff that would lead him to the salt domes, the very access road the Hunter had used the night before.

He crossed a stony wash and trudged up a rocky outcrop to a spot that overlooked the locked gate. Squatting low so as to remain unnoticed, he watched from that vantage point as the sheriff climbed out of his vehicle.

Moments later, he was joined by a second figure, smaller, with a flutter of wheat-gold hair. He recognized the woman. The same woman the Hunter would have taken down last night, if he had had surprise on his side.

The pair approached the gate and apparently unlocked it, for the sheriff pushed it open with a creaking sound that carried on the wind.

The Hunter didn’t wait around to track their progress further. Instead he trotted off to get his rifle and find the perfect cover, the perfect spot from which to make his kill.

He comes to me by night, on the heels of the Salt Woman’s visitations.

As hard and hurried as he ever was, he is a selfish lover, often rough, skirting the edges of raw violence.

He’s pissed off I have come again.

Even more pissed when I come first.

Because, as unevolved as it seems,
his animal rutting turns me on at some elemental level.

No matter how I protest and wish it wasn’t so.

Has the goddess sent him as a warning, Or a way to pass this endless night of my withdrawal?

—Entry nine, March (illegible)

Angie’s sobriety journal

As Jay used binoculars to survey the hillside rising from the end of the access road, Dana shaded her vision and looked, too, until the windblown sand forced her to turn away. As she wiped her watering eyes, she listened intently but registered nothing but silence.

“Where
are
you, Angie?” she asked through gritted teeth.

Jay gave her a bare nod of understanding before returning his attention to the land.

Lifeless, lonely, and far too vast to search on foot, it rose gently, shielding what she imagined as a limitless expanse. If the cavern wasn’t somewhere in sight, the two of them could search for weeks—for
years
—and never find it.

Despair billowing inside her, Dana turned back toward the Suburban, then cocked her head at a faint sound. It was
only a dry hiss: coarse grains blown over rocks and rattling through desiccated creosote as brown and barren as the sun-bleached soil.

“Where are all the cactus?” she asked, realizing this area was missing the friendly forms that desert travelers expected. Organ-pipe, saguaro, barrel cactus with their bright flowers. Even a stand of prickly pear would be a welcome patch of green amid the scraggly scrub.

“Too dry and too salty for most of ’em,” Jay said before glancing down around their feet. After walking a few paces to the left, he pointed out a pile of small, fissured gray rocks. “Here’s your cactus.”

She moved closer and bent forward, then lifted her fluttering hair away to look. “That’s the best you can do? A dead one?”

“Oh, it’s alive, just waiting for a rain to perk it up and help it put out big, pink blossoms. They call this one living rock. There’s a resurrection plant, too—and if you’re not careful you’ll pick up some hitchhikers: seedpods from the devil’s claw and half a dozen thorny relatives. Life’s tough as all hell out here. Yet it hangs on against all odds.”

His words fanned the embers of a hope that somehow so had Angie. But before Dana could say as much, another sound intruded on the quiet. The hollow tone reminded her of childhood, when she and her sister would drive their mother crazy blowing across the glass tops of old-fashioned soda bottles. Only this note droned far deeper, as if the vessel held not eight ounces but untold thousands.

“Hear that?” she asked, half convinced she was dredging up the note from memory.

But Jay’s stance told her he was listening, too, his head turned toward the hill’s right side.

“Sounds like the wind’s blowing across an opening or between some rocks,” he said. “But let’s not read too much
into it even if we do find something. There are lots of little caves around here, and most of ’em…”

But Dana was already scrambling uphill like a mountain goat, heading toward a spot that she had at first taken for a band of shadow. The harder she looked, the more she imagined it was a hole of some sort, perhaps the same cavern Angie had mentioned in her journal.

“Slow down,” Jay called from behind her. “You’ll break an ankle in those sandals.”

But Dana couldn’t slow down, not with the low tone growing deeper and more ominous with each step. It drew her like a siren’s song, her skin prickling with the conviction that this was the place where her sister, like the living rock, lay waiting for a signal to spring forth and flourish. This was the battleground where Nikki’s life would be won.

Dana ignored the throbbing of her healing leg, the burning of the dry air in her lungs. Jay’s footsteps closed in, his boots sending pebbles clattering downhill.

Blood thrumming with exertion, she approached a mouthlike opening. Larger than it had looked from below, perhaps twelve feet wide and four and a half feet high at the tallest, it seemed to frown at her as she drew level with it. As they watched, a pair of cave swallows swooped out past a dangling spider, their beaks snapping at a host of tiny insects.

“Stop.” Jay forced the issue, grasping her arm. The shadowed void returned his word an instant later, but was too black to offer up its secrets.

“Let go of me.” She panted and cupped a hand around her mouth.
“Angie. Angie!”

The shouted word reverberated in the emptiness around them, echoing not only from the cave but from the rocky slope itself. No other sound came back to them; even the wind had fallen silent.

“She has to be around here,” Dana insisted.

“She
was
.” He pointed downward, where Dana would have stepped.

Dried petals lay at their feet, along with feathers weighted down by pebbles in a pattern far too regular to be explained by random chance, a subtle mosaic that underscored the mouth from one corner to the other. At the center of it sat a skull, clearly canine. And probably coyote, considering the scabrous patch of clinging hairs.

Though the sun shone warm at her back, a sick chill rippled along her sides. “I’ve seen…I’ve seen this somewhere before.”

He nodded. “Near the adobe. There are a couple of old graves, and I’m pretty sure your sister marked them this way. Looks like something somebody like Angie—I mean an artist—would’ve done.”

As Dana stared, it came to her: “That same pattern’s in her star field, the one she was weaving in the tapestry. This is
Angie’s
place, my sister’s.
This
is where she went.”

She pulled away from him, or tried to, but Jay’s grip tightened.

“Those petals have been here a long time, but someone’s come since your sister.” He gestured toward the ground beneath the opening’s tallest point. “See that? It’s disturbed there—and that looks like a footprint.”

Dana didn’t care about that, not now, with her instincts shouting that Angie was nearby. “I’ll need that flashlight,” she said, nodding toward the leather holster he’d attached to his belt next to his weapon before they’d left the SUV. “I have to know if she’s still in there.”

She noted the grim set of his jaw, the sweat gleaming at his temple. In his eyes she saw what he was thinking, what she was trying so hard not to let herself understand.

“If she’s inside,” he started, “she can’t possibly be living. It’s been two months since she vanished, Dana. Two months without water, food…”

She held his gaze and resisted the urge to blink back
moisture. “I ran away from what I had to face in Houston. I’m not running from this, too.”

Yet she did a moment later, when the first gunshots rang out.

Police responded Saturday to an incident at the AMC 16 at the Valley View Center, where witnesses claim a patron assaulted a man of Arabic descent as he carried a snack tray into a movie theater. The victim was transported to a minor emergency center with a head laceration but declined to press charges. The alleged assailant, recently separated from military service overseas, was escorted to Dallas VA Medical Center, where he agreed to undergo voluntary psychiatric evaluation.

—Police blotter item,
Dallas Morning News

Behind and between them, rock exploded with a crack that instantly took Jay back to a Baghdad hotspot his unit had been defending.

“What was tha—” Dana started before a second report echoed from everywhere at once.

Jay was already reaching for her when she leaped out of range, instinct and adrenaline pushing her to bolt. Which would take her out into the open, straight into harm’s way.

He’d seen it before in his men, so he was ready, propelling himself after her, hooking his left arm around her waist and dragging her to the closest cover—the black maw of the cave.

He bent low to hurry them inside, pulling her past a row of rocks that jutted upward like a crone’s teeth. Dana lost a sandal, but he couldn’t stop to grab it.

“Quiet,” he barked before she had the chance to cry out. He hauled her farther back, picking his way by feel amid the stony rubble.

He didn’t dare turn on his flashlight, couldn’t give the sniper any greater advantage than he had already. Leaving
her behind him, Jay growled, “Don’t move; don’t speak,” and belly-crawled behind a large rock to peer outside.

The pistol in his hand felt all wrong. What he needed was his AK-47 and enough battle rattle to encase his head and body like a beetle’s. He felt naked out here with the hajji firing on their position, with the terrorists who’d streamed in like a swarm of stinging ants on a fresh carcass—

That’s not right
, Jay realized. He wasn’t in
that
desert, wasn’t even someplace it was okay to call them hajjis, much less tackle a man wearing a turban as he walked into a matinee.

Horror body-slammed him, the same shame that had hit after he’d realized the man wasn’t some bomb-strapped radical but an adjunct professor from a local college who’d been taking popcorn to his twelve-year-old son.

“What…what’s happening?” Dana whispered from the spot where she crouched, breathing hard.

He glanced back at her, looking for confirmation that the shots he’d heard had been real. That she wasn’t cowering because she’d been dragged in here by an insane man.

“Can you see him? Is he coming?” Her expression was barely visible, but she was clearly tense. Yet he saw trust in her eyes, enough to reassure him that he hadn’t just assaulted her over a mirage.

“Can’t see anyone,” he said. “Did
you
, before I pulled you in here?”

His words reverberated in what sounded like a good-size space. Bigger than any of the wormhole caves he’d seen around here. Maybe they’d found Angie’s cavern, after all, or at least its antechamber.

“No, I just…I heard the shots, and I remembered the man with the gun last night. After that all I could think of was running back to the Suburban, where I left my purse and phone. If you hadn’t pulled me in here…”

So what he’d heard
had
been real. Jay would have been relieved—except a live sniper wasn’t a reality worth celebrating.

“You might’ve made it,” he said. “It’s tough to hit a running target. But we’re better off here, behind cover—except the bastard can keep us pinned down for a while. At least till Wallace comes looking for us.”

“Will he?”

Jay nodded. “If I don’t check in within the next hour he’ll start to wonder. We don’t carry handheld radios—they don’t work around here well enough to bother, and it’s a dead zone for my cell phone, too. But when I don’t answer my truck radio, he’ll worry something’s happened and drive out here.”

Wallace might not be his number-one fan, but he knew as well as Jay did that they had to watch each other’s backs. In a place this desolate, every mother’s son—and daughter—respected the necessity of mutual assistance. Especially in the hot months, when the “inconvenience” of a dead battery or flat tire could prove fatal.

Jay tried to think of some way to warn his deputy. If the shooter lingered, he could easily take Wallace by surprise.

“But what if he climbs up here first—the man who fired at us?” Dana asked him. “What if he—”

“He’ll have to leave cover to get to a spot where he can sight us. For a decent angle he’ll have to come in close, too. And if he does that, I’ll drop him.”
Just another enemy target
, he thought.
Not an old friend or a neighbor.
He couldn’t afford to hesitate, couldn’t afford to let the shooter squeeze off another round.

“Chances are he won’t risk it,” Jay added. “After all, he’s already blown his best chance, when he had both time and surprise on his side. That tells me he’s nervous, just like he got nervous last night when Max started barking. If he ran then, he’ll run now. More than likely.”

“More than likely,” Dana echoed with prayerlike fervor.

They remained in place a long time, but no matter how hard Jay stared he saw no movement except that caused by
the renewed stirring of the wind, heard no sound but its haunted voice whispering across the cave’s face.

“I can’t take this anymore,” said Dana. “It…it stinks in here. Like death. G-give me the flashlight.”

He had smelled it, too, and had been hoping that she hadn’t: a pungent background odor mingled with the moldy, barnyard reek of guano. “No, Dana.”

“He’s gone by now; he has to be. But I’ll point the beam away from the opening in case he’s watching.”

“There’re other things to think of, too. Bats have been here. They’ll be deeper than the swallows’ nests, but they could be close enough, covering the ceiling. You disturb them and they’ll swarm out, maybe by the thousands. And it only takes one with rabies. Besides that, snakes hole up where there’s shade, and—”

“Ugh—does this place have any
non
disgusting fauna?” she asked sharply. Without waiting for an answer she said, “I’ll keep my voice down and my beam low. So come on, Jay. Let me look.”

Still he hesitated, until she said, “I’ve been to vet school. I’ve done necropsies on dead dogs. I’ve put down sick and injured animals while their owners stood there bawling. I’ll handle this the same way. Because I have to.”

Even if it’s Angie?
He couldn’t ask her that, though, couldn’t give voice to the suspicion. Because he’d smelled the odor that hovered in this cave before, a peculiar strain that had him thinking,
Human
.

“It’s not my sister,” she said nonetheless. “Do you really think Angie would’ve stopped on her way to her own death to decorate the tomb?”

When he’d patrolled the streets of Dallas, Jay had been first responder to a lot of strange stuff. Suicides, in particular, had a tendency to ritualize their own deaths, maybe in some last-ditch quest for meaning. Considering what he’d read of her journal, “Angelina Morningstar” would have been the type.

Again he scanned the slope below them. This time he spotted movement, but it was only the agitated darting of the swallows and a trio of scaled quails pecking among the scraggly brown weeds. He could have cited the pretty little birds as examples of the land’s “nondisgusting” creatures, but he didn’t have the heart.

Instead he passed the flashlight back toward Dana. When she grasped its end, he did not immediately let go.

“First you have to promise me,” he told her, “you won’t move from where you’re sitting. No matter what you see, you stay put. There could be holes and passages and side chambers, and I’m
not
running after you again. You hear that?”

There could also be a crime scene, one that needed to be preserved.

“I hear you,” she said grudgingly. “And I promise I’ll stay right here.”

With a nod, he let go of the light, and then looked back out on the desert. Though he was nearly convinced they were alone here, he’d seen men and women die when they took things for granted.

A split second later Dana’s gasp turned him around. A circle of light skimmed along the guano-stained floor and rocky walls that glittered white with sparkling crystals.

“This has to be it,” she said, her voice bouncing off of salted walls.

The space was smaller than he’d imagined, smaller than his RV. But as her beam shifted, he saw a darker spot off to the right, a second opening that led downward, deeper inside the hill.

It might have been his imagination, but the smell of death seemed to come from that direction. From the blackness of that hole.

“I’ll bet an animal wandered in here.” Thin and eerily childlike, Dana’s voice floated in the darkness. “It got confused and lost, and when Angie found its body later she built the tribute outside. Because this spot was sacred to her.”

Turning from the cave’s mouth, Jay holstered his pistol and then crept over rock to reach her. He laid a hand on her bare leg where she crouched.

“Let me take the flashlight,” he said softly. “Let me have a look.”

Nodding, she relinquished it and waited, her tension a more palpable presence than the unseen sea of living fur above. After taking one last glance back toward daylight, he stood up awkwardly and made his way toward the cavern’s throat.

The smell strengthened with his progress, a stench he had smelled far too often overseas. Though he hoped—prayed—he was wrong and that he would discover a mule deer or a bobcat, the closer he came to the opening the more convinced he was he’d find a human, a body already partly mummified within the chamber’s arid confines.

He reached the nearly round portal and, using one hand, braced himself within its rock frame. Then, leaning in, he shone the flashlight downward—down into a grotto whose sole inhabitant lay curled and naked as a fetus on its floor.