The Secret of Everything (4 page)

A woman in a long purple India cotton skirt leaned on the wall, smoking. Her long blond hair was tangled, as if she had not combed it at all, and she eyed Tessa with faint hostility, drawing in on her cigarette, blowing it out. Her eyes looked hollow. A tongue of cold lapped at Tessa’s throat, and she
thought of what her father said about evil spirits walking in Los Ladrones. She hurried on, glancing back over her shoulder. The woman had gone inside.

The ranchero tunes were coming from a covered patio at the end of the lane. The band was arranged at one side, dressed in crisp white shirts and black slacks and cowboy boots. The woman singing had long red hair and abundant cleavage displayed in a sweetheart neckline. In front of them, couples of all ages danced a lively two-step. Little girls danced on their brothers’ feet, grandmothers were whirled around by grandsons, and young couples showed off their skill. Tessa, snared, watched them and felt a soft breathless sense of expectation.

Here I am
, said that little voice inside her again.

Tessa sat at a table near the wall and took out her camera. She shot the dancers lit from the west by rosy light, and the ropes of plastic flowers looping around the posts holding up the roof, and a little girl with an aqua dress swinging her feet as she drank a cola.

Everything in Tessa’s body relaxed, as if she’d come home to her own living room. When a bosomy waitress stopped by the table, she ordered a cheeseburger. “What kind of beer do you have?”

The woman reeled off a long list. Tessa stopped her. “How about Tecate? With lime.”

“I can do that.”

A man dressed in jeans and a dark-blue T-shirt leaned on the wall nearby. Behind him, a dog as thin as a shadow slunk into the patio area, head down, and slipped under Tessa’s legs. The waitress brought Tessa’s beer, along with a glass rimmed with kosher salt. “Gorgeous,” she said happily, squeezed the lime and poured the beer carefully, then took a long swallow. Cold, golden, thirst quenching. Fantastic.

The dog leaned against her ankle. “Hey, sweetie,” she said. Beneath the table, she knocked off her sandal and put a foot against his skinny ribs. Poor baby. He was shivering a little, even though it was a warm night. Her toes skidded over burrs. When her burger came, she fed him meat and cheese and a little bread, and most of her fries. He was surprisingly polite, and Tessa figured this wasn’t his first begging gig.

She watched the man by the wall with apprehension. Rage radiated from him in red waves, heating the space around him until it was faintly uncomfortable against Tessa’s left arm. He smoked, exhaling blue clouds into the night with hard blows, his attention utterly focused on someone in the middle of the dancing, though it wasn’t clear who was the object of his fury.

Out of the corner of her eye, Tessa could make out a few details—his hair was thick and black, long, tied back from hard cheekbones and a mouth that turned down at the corners. Fiercely handsome, like a coyote, but Tessa felt only repulsed. That radiating hatred began to make her feel faintly ill, and she was looking for the waitress when he abruptly straightened, tossed down his cigarette and ground it beneath his heel, then left, boot heels clicking on the stones of the alleyway. The eggplant softness of the gloaming swallowed him suddenly.

“Creepy,” she said aloud. A shudder moved through the dog and into her foot. “One of the bad spirits, huh?” she said quietly to him. “You’re okay now. He’s gone.”

“Sorry?” said a voice at her elbow.

Startled, Tessa looked up at a different man, who had come over to her table, two beers in hand. “Um. Talking to myself.”

“Sign of intelligence, they say.” He was a big man, with a rumbling voice. If the scary guy was a coyote, this one was an elk—tall, with muscular shoulders and thick dark hair. Not her type, but those thighs were something else. Solid. Enormous.
Probably a mountain biker, she thought, bane of hiking trails the world over. Inwardly, she scowled.

“I brought you this,” he said, offering her another Tecate with a lime wedge balanced on the top. “If it’s all right with your dog.”

“My—? oh. Right. He’s not mine.”

“Is that so.” His smile was very, very faint. And very, very sexy. As if the dog were a plant, he licked her foot.

Tessa gestured toward the empty seat on the other side of the little table. “Please. Have a seat.”

“Thanks.” He put one beer down in front of her, then wiped condensation off his fingers and held out his hand. “Vince Grasso.”

“Tessa,” she said, but didn’t give her last name. “Are you a local?”

“Born and raised,” he said, with slight sigh. “I left for a couple of decades, but here I am, back again. Where are you from?”

“All over. My dad was a magician for Renaissance festivals, so we traveled.”

He inclined his head, and his hair caught the light and shone, glossy as a pelt. “Now, that’s a new one. Did you like it?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “I liked the clothes, and the people were generally really great—smart and eccentric. But it got old, traveling around. Eventually, we settled in Santa Cruz.”

“And now?”

She took a sip of beer. It was a reasonable question, but she didn’t have an answer. “Now I lead tours for a small outdoor-travel company.”

“Like bungee jumping and white-water adventures?”

“No, not that adventurous. Mostly hiking, some rafting occasionally, and good food at the end of the day.”

“Is there a tour here?”

“There might be in the future. I’m exploring the possibilities.”

He lifted his chin at her turquoise cast, resting on the table. “Is that how you broke your arm, on a tour?”

She looked down at it. Thought of Lisa. “Yeah.”

He took a sip of his own beer, as if waiting for her to add more. When she didn’t, he nodded. “Do you get lonely? Traveling all the time?” He held up a hand. “Sorry, that sounds like a bad line, but I meant it at face value. I’m not looking to take anybody home.”

“That’s pretty forthright.”

“Curse of the West, to say what you’re thinking.”

Tessa raised her beer in a toast. “To straightforwardness.”

He lifted his beer, too, and Tessa saw that he thought she was beautiful, and it felt good on so many, many levels.

“So is it?” he asked. “Lonely?”

“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s exciting. It’s like anything else—a mixed bag.” A ripple of memory—her bleeding foot, the deep water of the river—made her left eye twitch once, hard. “I’m not really sure I’m going to keep up with it, honestly.”

A cell phone rang on his belt, and he made a face. “Sorry, I’m search and rescue. I’ve gotta answer.”

She waved her hand. He stood up and barked hello into the phone. Tessa wanted to shoot his photo, the red light from the stage touching the edge of his jaw, his arm rivered with veins. His hands were enormous, graceful, beautiful, and she wanted to look at them more closely, shoot the fingernails, the scars, see the lines on his palms. She lifted her camera and looked through the viewfinder, captured a quick series.

So she saw the moment he closed the phone and spied her
looking at him through the camera. She zoomed in on his eyes, very brown, with the heavy black lashes of a buck. He stared directly at the camera and she clicked the shutter.

“Do you mind?” she asked, lowering it.

“No.” He tucked the phone into his pocket. “Unfortunately, I’ve gotta go to work.” He held out his hand. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

She reached for his hand, taking a mental snapshot of the taut, wide palm, and shook it, surprised to discover she was disappointed. “Maybe so.”

“Are you—” He smiled regretfully. “Never mind. Enjoy your stay.” He lifted a hand and disappeared into the crowd.

Tessa finished her beer, listening to the music. The dog slept on her foot. Yes, she thought, eyeing the nearly untouched beer the man had left behind. Sometimes hers was a lonely life.

Eventually the dog got up, licked her hand in gratitude, and slipped out. She could see now that he was a pup, not much more than five or six months, ragged and dirty, maybe a border collie mix of some kind. From somewhere came a blessing for dogs, a prayer to St. Francis. “Bless that little dog,” she whispered.
Take care, little one
.

She took her cue and headed back to the hotel. It was almost entirely dark, and as she moved through the plaza, she heard a woman weeping and weeping.

Although she was not superstitious, she couldn’t help hurrying a little, as something rushed up the back of her neck. She was glad to get to her room and lock the door.

   T
essa awakened very early. For a long moment she hung between worlds, wondering where she was. One of the side effects of traveling for a living.

Birds chirped somewhere. The air was light and dry. She opened one eye and saw the kiva fireplace in the corner, the elegant, worm-marked vigas in the ceiling. Oh, yes, New Mexico.

Wrapped in a sweater to stave off the sharp morning air, she used the coffeemaker to boil water and carried a cup of tea out to the balcony overlooking the plaza. Again that soft sweetness rushed through her—
here I am!
—and she sipped the sweet, milky brew until her brain woke up. It never took very long—she was very much a morning person, just like her father. Even as a teenager, she had awakened automatically by six and fallen dead asleep by ten over homework or—more likely—a novel. Healthy, wealthy, and wise, as good old Ben Franklin said.

She fired up her laptop and read over the notes she’d compiled for the town, mulling over her plans for the day. The farmers’ market would take place in the plaza, and there were already a few early arrivals trailing into the area, carrying tents and tables. Of course she’d spend some time exploring that,
shooting some photos, offering it to her boss as a possible feature of the tour.

She also wanted to find the church, which was a little to the north of the plaza itself. It was the first thing that had been built here, erected in 1632 by Spanish missionaries. They had been slaughtered in an Indian uprising a decade later, and the Spanish left it alone for twenty years or more. The Indians used the church to house animals, mainly the merino sheep the missionaries had brought with them, and learned to weave the long, elegant wool.

When the Spanish returned, they quelled the Indians and built the plaza around the tree—as Tessa had suspected. It couldn’t possibly be the same tree, could it? Did a cottonwood live to be almost four hundred years old? She put her notes down and admired it once again. In the early quiet, its leaves clattered lightly in a soft breeze, and the deeply patterned bark caught only the gray notes of dawn, like a rubbing with a very hard pencil.

In sudden decision, she gulped the last of her tea, scrambled into some jeans and a T-shirt, and headed down to shoot the sunrise as it crept into the plaza.

Just as she emerged from the hotel, the first fingers of sunlight tipped over the roofs at the eastern edge of the plaza. The light was a delicate pale butter, washing the ruddy color of the adobe to soft peach, hazing the edges of the vigas, and catching on the point of a tent going up. The very top leaves of the tree were illuminated, waking up the inhabitants in its branches. Birds whirred and whistled. A pair of squirrels ran in circles around the mountainous terrain of the roots.

She looked at it all through the square eye of her viewfinder. It had been so long since she’d lost herself in the joy of seeing the world this way! Giddy, she shot frame after frame, each one
a split second of truth. A few shopkeepers began to appear, bringing out freshly chalked signs, tables for their customers, mannequins, racks of T-shirts, and even a cigar-store Indian. Locals greeted one another, stopped to chat in a mingling of Spanish and English. For a moment she closed her eyes, letting the harmonious sound of the two mingled languages fill her. The best sound, she thought. Friendly.

The air held the crispness of mountain-born water and autumn lurking in the shadows creeping down the mountains. She smelled, faintly, burning leaves.