He walked back through the parking lot and down the cul-de-sac. He lingered outside the house until the coroner’s team wheeled her out, wondering how to tell Ernest and the boys.
Two hours later when he pulled up, Ernest was standing on the Valley Center porch in the glow of a yellow bug light with a mug of coffee in his hand and the dogs alert at his feet.
42
The next afternoon Hood stood in the Valley Center barn while the sunlight slanted through the old boards and the pigeons cooed up in the eaves.
He felt that he owed Suzanne a good-faith search for the head and effects of Joaquin Murrieta, though he knew what he would find. Two hours in the house had yielded nothing and neither had the garage. The barn would be Joaquin’s last stand.
Ernest and the boys were up in L.A. Hood had explained that an autopsy was required by law after violent death, and Ernest and the boys had left at first light, wanting to be closer to her.
Hood understood. In his imagination he sheltered her body from the terrible saws and blades used for autopsy.
Ernest had wept openly when Hood told him-he’d known something was wrong.
Ernest had told Bradley and Jordan himself. A few hours later, when they left, Hood saw in Bradley a withering rage that reminded him of Suzanne on the night he betrayed her into arrest. Bradley was taller and fuller than Hood had remembered and there was something both controlled and wild in him.
Hood listened to the pigeons.
He looked down at the unmistakable stain left by Harold and Gerald Little Chief.
All this for forty-five thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds.
He sized up the big industrial shelves along one side of the building, the way they were filled with clear stacking plastic boxes, each labeled. She could hide things in plain sight, thought Hood, but it wasn’t likely.
Still, he carried over an extension ladder and searched the highest and most remote boxes. Old children’s clothing. Years of Mexican TV soap opera magazines, some of them with her mother on the cover. Old quilts and comforters redolent of naphthalene. He sneezed from the dust as he slid them back into place, moved the ladder, then opened more.
He poked through the cardboard boxes behind the bicycles, but they were all filled with outgrown toys. He walked the perimeter of the barn tapping for a false wall but found none.
Ditto the floor for some kind of basement, but the concrete slab was continuous and gave up nothing.
Suzanne would be laughing, wouldn’t she?
He sat on a hay bale and looked through the open door at the bright barnyard and the towering oak in which she had sat waiting for Lupercio.
The sun is coming up over the hills and colors are starting to form.
No more hills for you, he thought, no colors. He felt the diamond H against his chest.
Hood had never lost a lover to death before. His feelings were deep and clear-sorrow, regret, blame, anger, helplessness-all taking their separate turns to advance and retreat and then advance again, holding hands in varying combinations. But the most powerful feeling of all was one without a name and therefore unspeakable-a recognition of having lost forever someone singular and irreplaceable and beyond valuation.
There was a recently added bathroom built into one corner of the old barn, and Hood used it and drank from the tap and splashed water in his face and looked up at the too-noisy ceiling fan before he pulled the chain to turn it off.
He saw the access hatch. He walked out of the bathroom and across the barn enough to get a good perspective, and when he turned, he saw what he thought he might: the roof of the bathroom was a good seven feet higher than its ceiling. An attic.
He stood on his toes and popped the hatch and slid it under the insulation and away from the opening. He pushed on the insulation. He got a stepladder this time and stood on the first step, moving the sheets of batting to the side. The layers of it were neat, and the paper backing was in nearly perfect shape, and Hood could tell that it had been placed there to suggest that the space was dead, insulation only, without further utility. Maybe it was. It took him a while to make an opening for himself.
When he was finally able to stand and pull the chain for the ceiling light, the white walls of the attic came to life and Hood found himself facing a simple wooden picnic table. It was covered by a thin woven blanket beneath which Hood could see the shapes of things.
He ran his hands over the shapes, dubious but imagining.
Then like a magician he took up the corners of one end and lifted the blanket high and slowly, moving in small side steps to reveal the illusion beneath.
He dropped the blanket just beyond the edge of the table and it landed in a quiet puff of dust.
The head sat in a jar of vague yellow liquid, skin gray and eyes closed. Peaceful. Bald. The black hair was long and formed a loose bedding at the bottom. The neck was severed cleanly. Beside the jar was a lariat. Beside that was an oily red bandana, which Hood moved aside to see the Colt single-action revolver. An old handmade arrow with a small obsidian head lay in front of two topless, rough-hewn wooden boxes. In one was a nameless leather-bound book sitting atop a stack of carefully folded but very old clothes. In another were newspapers and photographs and a nearly empty bandoleer.
He sat down with his back to the wall and closed his eyes.
An hour later he covered the artifacts with the blanket and carefully replaced the insulation and finally slid the access cover back into place.
He was shouldering the stepladder from the bathroom back into the barn when Bradley appeared at the open door then stepped inside.
“What are you doing?”
“I didn’t hear you drive up.”
“They made us view her on a TV screen. I insisted that we see the actual body. There was an argument but I stayed patient and they let us.”
“I’m sorry, Bradley.”
“I asked you what you’re doing.”
“Looking for stolen property.”
“Find any?”
“None at all.”
“What’s the stepladder for?”
Hood looked at the boy, then at the stacked boxes he’d been through earlier. He saw the illogic of using a stepladder to reach the high boxes and knew that Bradley saw it, too.
“I need the extension ladder,” said Hood.
Bradley glanced toward the bathroom then gave Hood a hard stare that looked very much like his mother’s.
Hood saw his choices-either show Bradley the truth of his blood history, or show him nothing and let that truth either expire or be discovered later.
“I’ll help investigate,” said the boy.
“I can’t let you,” said Hood. “There’s a chain of evidence you need for court, and if it’s compromised by a citizen the case can be ruined.”
“Even the son of the accused?”
“Especially.”
“Then I’ll watch.”
“I’ll check a few of those boxes up there, then I’m done.”
“No stolen property so far?”
“None that I can see.”
Hood traded ladders then started up on top again and checked through different boxes. The pigeons watched him, heads down and cocked in curiosity. Bradley sat on the hay bale where Hood had sat.
“How old are you?”
“Almost seventeen.”
“Still thinking LAPD?”
“That’s a long time away.”
“You just started your junior year?”
“Yeah, but I’ll be done with all my solids at the end of it. I’ll have sixteen college units by the end of my senior year, something like that.”