Tuve considered that. “Oh?”
“But he got killed,” Joanna said. “She didn’t get it.”
Tuve just looked at her, thinking about that. Nodded, with that expression that said he understood.
“Well,” Joanna said. “They’d got together when they got engaged. She was already pregnant.”
Tuve shrugged.
“They had a big wedding planned. Dress fitted. Invitations sent out. Lots of—” She stopped, trying to imagine a Hopi wedding, knowing she didn’t have a clue about that.
“Anyway, after my father died, his family wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Wouldn’t have anything to do with me, either.” She stopped. Why would Tuve care about any of this? But he seemed to. Seemed eager to hear more. His face was slightly lopsided, as if his right cheekbone had been smashed or something. It made his expression a little hard to read, but now he looked sympathetic. He shook his head again.
“Not even your grandparents,” Tuve said. “That’s too bad.”
“They lived a long ways off,” she said, and suddenly she realized she really, really wanted to tell this homely little man everything. He was obviously mentally retarded. But he’d been hurt, too. He could understand that.
“Yes,” Tuve was saying. “My grandmother taught me a lot of things. My grandfather taught me how to ride, how to hunt rabbits. When I was in the hospital, they both came. And they always brought me things.”
And so Joanna kept talking. Talking about how, when she had reached puberty, her mother told her the whole story, of her love affair with John Clarke, about their wedding plans, about going to the Clarke family’s huge house after John’s death and knowing right away that she wasn’t welcome. About how coldly they had treated her—especially John’s father. How she had left with nobody saying good-bye.
“Nobody even told her good-bye?” Tuve asked. That seemed to touch a memory.
Joanna had ordered lunch from room service. She talked on and on while they waited for it, about becoming a nurse, the death of the elderly engineering professor she had married, and about how after she had buried him, she’d come to the Grand Canyon to see if she could find the grave of her own father.
“I went to the cemetery they established at Northern Arizona University, but that was for all those killed in one of the airplanes—a great granite headstone with all the names on it was there, but my father was on the other plane and his name wasn’t there. So I came to the Grand Canyon, to the National Park Service Center. They have the names of those on his plane there at the Shrine of the Ages monument, where they buried body parts they couldn’t identify. An old man there told me that the plane my father was on had flown right into the wall of the cliff and sort of splattered, and then burned, but some of the bodies were thrown out, all torn up. I told him that my father told my mother he was bringing home a whole container full of diamonds for his company in New York, and the best one of them would be for her ring, and that he had the case all those diamonds were in handcuffed to his arm so nobody could steal it.”
With that, Joanna paused, wiped away a tear with the back of her hand. It was the ideal place for weeping to impress Tuve, but she hadn’t consciously planned it. The tears had been spontaneous. Since her childhood she had loved this man whom she was doomed never to see. And cried for him. Or perhaps it was for what his death had cost her.
“Sorry,” she said. “Anyway, the man told me that a lot of the bodies were all torn up, or burned up, and just put in mass graves. And he said people used to talk about one of the Grand Canyon people seeing an arm caught in a brush pile below one of the rapids that had a case of some sort handcuffed to it, but before it could be retrieved, it washed away.” She paused again, studying Tuve. His expression was blank.
“Do you see what I’m getting at?”
Tuve was silent a moment. Then: “No.”
“The man who you got the diamond from must have found that arm, and that case locked to it.”
“Yeah,” Tuve said, smiling. “You want me to help you find that man so you can find the diamonds. The ones that would make you rich.”
“I want to find the man so I can find the arm,” Joanna said. “I want to give it back to my father. Bury it where he is buried at the Shrine of the Ages. But if we find the arm, we will also find the diamonds, and that will prove you told the truth to the police and you didn’t steal it.”
That provoked another thoughtful silence. “Yes,” he said. “But about what you told me about burying that arm bone. Do you think that would make a difference?”
“I have dreams about it,” Joanna said. “I don’t see my father in them. I have never seen him. But I hear him. And he is crying for that arm. So it will quit hurting. So the pain will go away. So he can sleep in peace.”
Tuve considered. “You dream that a lot?”
“All the time,” Joanna said.
“Yes,” Tuve said. “Sometimes I am afraid to go to sleep. The dreams scare me.”
“I know. I woke up once just cold and shaking. In the dream I had been sleeping under a bridge, and I couldn’t find my purse, and I didn’t know anyplace to go where I could wash, or get warm.” She looked up at Tuve.
He seemed fascinated.
“And the rats were all around me,” she said.
“Sometimes it’s terrible,” Tuve said. “Once I dreamed I was under the horse and I couldn’t get out, and my head, well, it was almost flat, like a plate. And my eyeballs were out and there was no place I could put them.”
Joanna shuddered at that. “That’s worse than any I can remember. I think you understand why I think you and I should help each other.”
Someone was tapping on the door. Room service, Joanna thought. She glanced at Tuve. “Should I let them in?”
“It’s all right,” Tuve said. “I understand.”
8
The thunderstorm that had been moving steadily toward Gallup from the southwest produced a dazzling flash of lightning just as Navajo County Deputy Sheriff Cowboy Dashee and Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police climbed out of Chee’s car in the parking lot. A sharp clap of thunder came two seconds later, the characteristic ozone scent generated by electrically charged air, and then a gust of dusty wind that made the jail door hard to open and blew Chee’s hat into the room ahead of him.
“Well, now,” said the woman behind the desk. “Look what the wind blew in. I was hoping we’d finally get some rain.”
Dashee said, “It’s coming. Today’s the day the Zunis are having their rodeo. They did their rain dance last night.”
Chee rescued his cap, said, “Hello, Mrs. Sosi.”
Mrs. Sosi was laughing. “I asked one of them about that last year when they got rained out again. Told him they should do the dance after the rodeo. He said the rain-outs kept the cowboys from getting hurt. Cut down the medical bills. Did you two come in to get out of the weather?”
“I want to talk to one of your tenants,” Dashee said. “Billy Tuve. He’s my cousin.”
“Tuve?” Sosi said, frowning. She checked the roster on the desk in front of her. “Mr. Tuve is a popular man today. But you’re too late. He bonded out about an hour ago.”
“He what?! Wasn’t that bond set at fifty thousand dollars? Was it lowered? Tuve couldn’t have come up with any property valuable enough to cover that. And I guarantee he didn’t have the five thousand he’d have needed to cover the bond company fee.”
Mrs. Sosi looked down at her records, then looked up with an expression that registered amazed disbelief. “And it was a cash bond,” she said.
“Cash? Fifty thousand in cash?”
“Same as cash. Registered, certified cashier’s check,” Mrs. Sosi said. “Bank of America.”