The Salt Maiden (4 page)

“Really?” She leaned toward him to ask. “Even if Angie was about to stop this county’s latest salt-dome scheme?”

Throughout history, salt has meant many things to many people. Some cultures considered it wealth, while others believed it an essential component of religious and magical ceremonies. People worshiped it, fought for it, died for it. And in some civilizations it became a weapon, best remembered in ancient Rome’s legendary destruction of Carthage by the salting of its fields.

So with such a rich and varied history, why shouldn’t the same salt that’s deprived this community of so much for so long end up being its salvation?

—Miriam Piper-Gold,
Spokeswoman for Haz-Vestment,
from the transcripts of community meeting 1A,
Devil’s Claw, Texas

Jay had dreaded this moment, had braced himself for the explosion the way he’d once braced himself for incoming mortar fire. Yet in spite of her narrowed green eyes and angry tone, he realized that Dana Vanover—
Dr.
Vanover, he mentally corrected—had yet to connect the last dots of the ugly picture that had cost him so much sleep of late.

She still had not allowed herself to understand that while she’d been looking for her sister, he’d been searching for a corpse—and praying like hell his suspicion would prove false. Inconvenient as it would be if Angie Vanover—or Angelina Morningstar, as she had called herself here—turned up dead, he had made a thorough search. Far too thorough to please his new constituents, many of whom had been showing up most evenings to help with the restoration of Uncle R.C.’s charred home. Over the past few nights their collective disapproval had taken on the bitterness of ash.

“Don’t know if I’d call the waste-disposal plan a ‘scheme,’” he said cautiously. “I’ve looked over the specs, read up on the science. Haz-Vestment, Inc.’s got no record of complaints. No accidents, no leaks, and a history of positive community involvement. And Lord knows this county’s about due for a little taste of progress.”

Jay could have said more but didn’t. He needed to find out what Dana Vanover knew already and who had been her source. For sure it hadn’t been any of those who had complained he was squandering county resources on a troublemaking drifter. All week they’d been reminding him of how his deputy, Wallace Hooks, had found “Angelina” passed out in the middle of the road outside of town. The theory was, she’d gotten plastered because no one would sign that fool petition she’d been shoving under every nose in the county. Jay found it easy to imagine she’d moved on after that humiliation and rejection—if someone hadn’t taken a notion to kill her.

“Waste disposal? What kind?”

“Low-level radiation. From what I hear it’s mostly medical waste. About as safe as you can get.”

Dana was shaking her head. “Angie wouldn’t have been won over by any corporate propaganda. About sixteen, seventeen years back, she was wrapped up in some environmental protest group, picked up a few arrests for being part of human chains across the entrances of public buildings and busy intersections, mostly nuisance stuff.”

“Nuisance stuff,” he echoed flatly, chilled to the bone by the memory of a lone Iraqi woman whose idea of protest involved strapping explosives beneath her traditional black abaya and begging American soldiers to help the horribly burned child she held in her arms.

And just that quickly, Jay was back there, breathing the bitter smoke stench of that other desert, his stomach cramping as Angie Vanover’s kohled eyes glared out at him from behind a thick, dark veil.
Run
, he tried to shout at his
men, but the word caught in his throat, and the woman was reaching for the detonator, and—

“Are you listening?” Dana’s gaze had zeroed in on him. A hunting cat’s eyes, with a patient stillness masking predatory instinct.

Careful there.
His muscles tensing, Jay sucked in a breath to clear his head, reminded himself he was back in the Texas desert and that he had seen Angie Vanover only in mug shots and outdated family photos of an unsmiling girl with long, ash-blond hair.

“Sorry,” he said. “Little too much sun today, and anyway, it surprised me to hear that your sister was mixed up with radicals.” Slowly and deliberately he drank from a plastic cup as damp with condensation as he was with sweat.

From outside he heard a car door slam, followed by the rumbling rev of an engine. Estelle leaving, he guessed, though she’d neglected to turn off the building’s air-conditioning.

“It was mostly in the Northwest,” Dana said, “and they weren’t radicals, just a bunch of college dropouts trying to be heard. I managed to track down one of her old friends from those days. Trent said Angie called a few months back, trying to drum up interest in a lawsuit. He told her he’d left his rabble-rousing days behind him. Sells insurance now in Portland. But Angie barely listened, she was so wound up about some plan she had for getting word out to the media to cover demonstrations.”

A new chill shook him. Protestors here, and reporters from the outside. What the hell would he do if that happened? If they started digging into his recent history—including the reasons his own police force had declined to welcome him back?

He shifted in his seat before shrugging. “Rimrock County might be small in terms of population, but we’re big enough to handle a little difference of opinion.”

Dana looked skeptical. “What are you, the president of the chamber of commerce, too?”

He tried for a smile. “If we ever get one, I’ll be sure to put my hat in the ring for the position.”

She didn’t smile back. “I’m not leaving without her.”

“Then you could be here a long stretch.” Her stubbornness reminded him of the few women who made their homes in Rimrock County, the kind who hunkered down, teeth gritted, and toughed out this tough land. But that was where the similarity ended. Everything else about Dana Vanover, from the silk and linen she wore, to the high-dollar convertible she drove, to the shoulder-length, salon-highlighted hairstyle, bespoke the kind of privilege those born to it took for granted. That sense of entitlement didn’t sit too well with people around here, and, fair or not, they especially didn’t appreciate it in a woman.

The building’s AC shuddered to a stop, and in the silence that followed Jay caught the
tap-slide
,
tap-slide
of Estelle’s retreating footsteps. Must not have been her car he’d heard before. This close to dinnertime it was more likely a couple of oilfield workers or a rancher heading to the café than someone coming in to see him. At least, he hoped that was the case, for with the thought of food his stomach rumbled loudly.

Dana’s expression eased a little. “Am I keeping you from dinner?”

“Missed lunch earlier,” he said. “Went out to have a look around the Apache Mesa pour-off.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s one of those spots where rain runs down from the mountains, about a forty-minute drive down some pretty bumpy dirt roads.”

“You mean there’s another kind here?”

He ignored the comment and the smile that went with it. He might have to deal with the woman for now, but he didn’t have to—and didn’t want to—like her. Didn’t want to notice the way she was put together, either, or that pretty face.

“Whenever there’s a storm up in the higher elevations,” he said, “the water ends up drizzling off the flat top of the mesa. When I was a kid we used to drive out and splash around in the little freshwater pool that forms down at the bottom from time to time.”

“You thought my sister might’ve gone there?”

He shrugged. “People do, and it was a place to look, somewhere I haven’t been all over ten times. So I took a shot.”

It had been a wasted trip. The rocky bowl at the pour-off had been bone dry, and the cave punched into the mesa just above it held no sign of life but ten thousand restless dreamers—Mexican free-tailed bats that rose like smoke each summer night to scour the skies for insects. Jay had clambered atop a van-sized rock and shone his flashlight back into the darkness, then sighed in relief at the realization that he wouldn’t have to crawl inside. The thick layer of guano appeared undisturbed; there was no sign that anyone had wormed his or her way into the cave’s dark recesses. No sign that anybody had shoved a body back there either.

“Thank you,” Dana told him as she rose from her chair. “For giving up your lunch to go there. And for looking for my sister all this week. I’d offer to buy you some dinner for your trouble, but I’m afraid I’ve already gotten crosswise with the cook.”

Enticing as her smile was, he couldn’t let it get to him. “That’s all right. I’m too filthy, anyway. And besides that, my trouble’s not for sale. It’s already bought and paid for by the people of this county. If your sister was still one of ’em, I’d have already found her by this time.”

Dana cut a swath through the heat, her strides long and swift, her mind seething with frustration. Still, the image of Jay Eversole stayed with her, an image that sparked and crackled along her nerve endings. She had to get clear of this one-horse hell pit—and that meant finding Angie and hauling her straight back to Houston to have her marrow
tested. Dana had brought her own car, despite the long drive, in case simple persuasion wasn’t enough to convince her sister to cooperate. She had headaches enough without allowing one of Angie’s fits to get them both escorted off a plane—and Dana refused to take no for an answer.

But the Angie situation wasn’t the only thing under Dana’s skin. As much as she hated to admit it, Eversole’s body had reminded hers that she was still female, whatever the surgeons had removed.

Idiot
, she told herself.
Leave the Marlboro men to Lynette.
Jay Eversole was just another roadblock between her and what she needed. He was simply humoring her, going through the motions of looking for her sister so she wouldn’t pull some family strings to drag in the Texas Rangers. Wouldn’t look good for the big, bad, new sheriff if outsiders barged in and elbowed him aside.

She opened her car door and slid inside, only to wince as the leather seat seared her thighs. Jamming the key in the ignition, she started up the engine and turned the air-conditioning somewhere between arctic and subzero…

And felt a rough brush scrape past her left ankle. Adrenaline pulled its ripcord, jerking her attention downward. But before her eyes could make sense of the slide of scales, raw instinct kicked in at the rattling.

At the sound her muscles exploded into reflex, flinging the door open and sending her bursting from the car—or, rather, falling.

She hit the hard-baked dirt with both knees and felt flesh tear with the bruising impact. Yet it wasn’t pain but horror that had her shrieking as she scrabbled several yards away.

Rattlesnake.
In her car. A damned big one, from what she’d seen. And chances were it hadn’t gotten inside on its own.

Hey, sis,

I’m afraid there’s more bad news from the doctor today. It’s a relapse, as we feared, which has left no choice except to wipe out Nikki’s marrow to keep the cancer cells from spreading. Which means her immune system will be history, totally destroyed. So John and I have to wear masks when we see her. We’ll scrub with antibacterial soap and wear paper gowns over our clothing and pray to God that this hug or that kiss won’t be the one to kill her.

I’m not sure how much more I can handle. I feel so damned helpless, I can’t stop crying and lashing out at John. He can’t seem to cry, so he keeps lashing back—and storming out. God help us if we can’t find the right donor before it all comes crashing down.

We’ve never needed your prayers more, so keep ’em coming. Nikki sends her love and says she can’t wait to hold the new baby once she’s well again.

—E-mail message from Laurie Harrison

Dana had stopped screaming by the time Jay was halfway down the sidewalk, but a glimpse of blood across her legs kept him running, his pulse pounding in his ears.

“Snakesnakesnake,” she blurted the moment she saw him.

“Where?” he asked, scanning the area. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted Hooks and a couple of regulars boiling out the front door of the Broken Spur. Mamie Lockett, who lived next door to the café, poked her gray head through her front window to stare, too.

Dana climbed to her feet and put more distance between herself and the open car door. Pointing toward it, she shouted, “A
humongous
freaking snake. In my car, across the floorboard.”

In spite of the heat her teeth chattered, and her eyes were wide. Yet she was already bolstering herself against the terror, gathering whatever reserves of courage she could muster.

Though he still refused to like her, he appreciated that. Hysteria solved nothing—and inconvenienced the hell out of those working to set matters right.

“Somebody put it in there.” Her whole body was shaking, her flesh crawling with revulsion. Her gaze locked onto his face. “What kind of nutcase puts a rattlesnake in someone’s car?”

“You sure it was a real snake?” This place spooked some of those more used to human commerce. The quiet he needed to stay sane worked at city nerves. Though Dana Vanover had struck him as anything but flighty, she wouldn’t be the first to mistake a purse strap or a set of jumper cables for a hissing viper.

“Are you crazy?” she demanded. “If you don’t believe me, why don’t you stick your head in there and see for yourself?”

“Don’t need to,” he said as he looked down past her knees. “You’ve already convinced me.”

Or the wounds had. A pair of them, some four inches above the outside point of her left ankle. A few drops of blood marked the spots one fang had scratched and another had sunk into. Already the flesh around the wound looked puffy. As if that weren’t proof enough, he heard the telltale buzz of rattling from the direction of the car.

She followed his gaze downward, then yelped as she saw the bites.

“Oh, God. I didn’t even feel it. Now I do, though, plenty.” After a pause she added, “Guess he didn’t like being shut up in the heat.”

As if to confirm it, an arrow-shaped head poked out of the door, and a tan-and-brown snake as thick as her forearm lowered itself to the ground. As she had claimed, a damned big snake—a Western diamondback. The dog leaped toward it, snarling, but Jay beat him to the punch, drawing his
sidearm and shooting the serpent through its head. As the body twitched he put the sole of his boot across the rattler’s neck and pulled the tail end from the vehicle. A lot more snake spilled out than he’d expected, five—no—five and a half feet of well-fed viper, which terminated in a set of rattles bordered by telltale black-and-white stripes.

Dana stared at it, her fair face flushing and her skin gleaming with perspiration. “Holy…”

When her knees wobbled he holstered his Colt Commander and scooped her up before she fell. She made a nice armful, all long legs and slender curves.

But she wasn’t too far gone to protest. “Put me down. I don’t need—”

“Keep real still. I’m getting you inside, where it’s cooler. Then I’m calling an air ambulance.” He remembered the deputy, Wallace, pointing out the number of the El Paso-based service posted on a corkboard in the office. Glancing up, he told their audience, “She’s been bitten—going to need a medevac.”

“Bring her on in here.” Abe waved to indicate the Broken Spur, and his two customers, the Navarro brothers, rushed over to lend a hand.

Since the café was closer—and probably cooler—than the courthouse, Jay didn’t argue.

“Let me take her legs.” Bill, the older of the brothers, slid a grease-stained hand beneath Dana’s thigh—or tried to.

When Jay caught the look in his eye, he stepped neatly out of range. “I’ve got her, thanks.”

Eagerness turned to a scowl, reminding Jay of Bill’s reputation for dealing with frustration with his fists. He and his more easygoing brother, Carl, considered themselves ranchers but earned most of their income in the oil patch. Both could always be counted on to help their neighbors, but neither could be trusted to resist the temptation to feel up a good-looking woman if the chance arose.

It didn’t very often, since the county’s female population
came in only two varieties: spoken for and old. Rumor had it that the Navarro brothers, both in their early forties, had grown so desperate that Bill was e-mailing foreign ladies eager to come to the U.S. Carl scoffed at the idea, but the area’s other ranchers joked that in the last few years their livestock acted skittish when he showed up on a property alone.

With both Navarros and the dog, Max, bringing up the rear, Jay carried Dana into the café. Abe had pushed aside one of the three wooden tables.

“I’ll need a chair,” said Dana. “We’ll want to keep the bite below heart level.”

Since that meshed with what Jay knew, he bent to set her down on the chair Bill Navarro pulled out. Before he could straighten, Mrs. Lockett burst inside, too. Bird thin, she flapped around them, twisting an embroidered hankie in her liver-spotted hands.

“Oh, dear,” she kept exclaiming, her faded yellow housedress aswirl around her stick legs. “You’d better cut a big X and suck out all that poison. My boy Nestor liked to’ve died when he got snakebit, and that rattler wasn’t half the size of that Goliath you got out there.”

After pulling off his apron, Abe wiped his hands on it and tossed it onto the chipped Formica countertop. “Get you anything, Dr. Vanover? Water? Soda?”

Dana slid a sharp look his way. “So you’re okay with my being here?”

Hooks flushed beneath his mop of white hair. “I told him to bring you on in, didn’t I? And I’m sorry about earlier. Shouldn’ta been hard on you for the way your sister acted.”

“Water would be fine, thanks,” she said stiffly before bending down to grasp her leg above the bite.

Max wagged his stub tail and attempted to lick her face as her fingers dug into the flesh of her calf muscle. Trying to squeeze back the pain, Jay figured. But as much as it must hurt, she didn’t whimper and her eyes remained dry.

He found himself praying that the bite was dry, too, that
the rattler hadn’t cut loose with its venom. In around half the cases he’d seen growing up here, it worked out that way. But just in case it didn’t this time, he’d best get his ass across the street and make that call.

Before he reached the door, Mamie went to search the grill area behind the counter. “What we really need’s a big knife.”

“Nobody’s cutting me.” Dana’s gaze swept the room, touching on each of them in turn. “That old nonsense about sucking out the venom does more harm than good.”

Carl Navarro scrubbed a calloused hand over three days’ growth of beard, probably to hide his disappointment at not being allowed a chance to put his ugly mouth to that sleek leg.

“Are you sure?” his older brother asked. “Our daddy always said to—”

“There’ll be no cutting on Dr. Vanover,” Jay said firmly. “Could you keep an eye on her, Abe, while I go call up that chopper?”

Abe cracked open a bottle of water from the icebox and handed it to Dana. Though he’d complained tirelessly about the cost of a search plane to look for her sister, Hooks nodded and said, “You can count on it,” before asking Dana what else he could get her.

As Jay strode outside, both Navarros followed.

“Got any plans for that big boy out there, Sheriff?” Bill asked him.

Jay hesitated. “Not particularly. Why?”

Catching on, his brother flashed a crooked grin. “Rattlesnake chili, that’s why. Come on, Bill, and let’s go skin ’im.”

As Jay broke into a jog, he glanced down at the dog beside him. “You know something, Toto, buddy? I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Baghdad anymore.”

“How’re you doing?” Judge Hooks asked her for what seemed like the thousandth time as they waited for the
sheriff to return. “You sure you don’t want to lie down? I can push over this here table and spread a clean cloth for you.”

To Dana, his tone sounded as insincere as his apology.

“That sounds like a wonderful idea,” the old woman chirped. “I’ll run next door to get a pillow.”

“I’m fine right here in this chair.” Dana would rather have a root canal than admit her leg was throbbing and her heart was racing. Especially since she was more than half convinced that Hooks and his two snake charmers had been the ones who had left the rattler in her car, unless he’d put Clark Kent Woman up to it. Of course the bastard was being magnanimous now that he had figured a quick way to drive her out of Rimrock County. Idiot probably imagined he was getting rid of her for good.

“I’ll be right back with that pillow,” the gray-haired woman sang as she hurried out, leaving Dana on her own with Abe Hooks and the greasy, burned stink of years’ worth of burgers.

“
I’ll
be right back, too,” Dana promised, looking square into the small man’s eyes. “I promise you I’ll find my sister, Judge Hooks. This isn’t going to stop me.”

“Of course it won’t.”

The patronizing runt had the nerve to pat her hand. If her leg didn’t hurt so badly, she swore she’d give him a swift kick.

“I mean it. This bite—it’s not bad at all,” she said, though already her mouth tasted of metal and her skin felt clammy-cool. Staying on top of her panic left her feeling strung out, reckless. And mad as all hell. “A vial or two of antivenin and I’ll show up again—with help. Or maybe I’ll just call in some reporters, let them get a whiff of how you people are trying to obstruct me. Let them put a camera on that dying girl, too, and interview her parents. Then you’ll have more media in Devil’s Claw than you know what to do with. And you can’t run ’em all off with the local wildlife.”

The county judge’s face darkened, making his blue eyes appear brighter. “You have a lot of nerve,
Doctor
, sitting in my place and leveling an accusation like that. I don’t know
and I don’t care what kind of pull you and your people have in Houston. You’re in
my
county now, and it’s about time you understood what that means.”

“All I want is Angie,” Dana repeated. “Once I find her, neither one of us will ever trouble you again.”

“As appealing as that sounds”—Hooks’s voice softened to a serpent’s whisper—“how can you be so sure your sister’s still alive?”