THEY STAYED LATE at the place, until the last embers were extinguished, then drove all night to reach Moab. Day was asleep beside him, and Nick avoided the house where they lived together and took her to his trailer, instead.
His eyes were wide awake, alert with memory. He hadn’t stopped thinking, hadn’t been able to slow his heart, since he’d set eyes on the shack. The walls he’d burned still lived in his mind, and though the trapdoor was gone, he still knew what the underside looked like, how no light came from around the edges or from anywhere. He had knocked down the walls of the stone building, the springhouse with no spring, but he still felt what had been done to him there. He felt too dirty, too foul inside, to go to Day’s house. But he wanted her with him.
At the old Dewey Bridge, he steered the truck down the sand road. Day’s head was on his shoulder, and he swayed with the bumps, so that she wouldn’t fall away from him.
He parked under the cottonwoods. “Day.”
Stirring, she pressed her face to his neck, even though he could smell how he stank. It was how fear smelled.
When she opened her eyes and saw where they were, he said, “I’ll turn on the hot-water heater. If you want to sleep more, you can get in my bed.”
Day blinked at the trailer, looking confused. She was his wife, but Nick felt as though he’d abducted her. What else would bring his bride here? She’d come only once before, to drop something off. But Nick had loved it, as he’d loved her visiting his caves.
He explained nothing. She was his. That was enough.
Inside the trailer, he stood on the ladder of the loft to check that the sheets were clean, that everything was okay. He pulled back the sheets for her, then stepped down to the floor and let her climb up. She moved wearily, and he followed her, to tuck the sheets around her.
“I’m so dirty,” she said. She smelled like the fire, too.
“You’ll be clean again.”
Day turned her cheek against the pillow and curled up in a ball, chilled. He kissed her, and then she felt him slipping away, going down the ladder. The sound of him lighting the pilot on the hot-water heater was reassuring. The sound of the door shutting behind him as he went outside was not.
In a moment she heard water running and remembered that he had built an outdoor shower stall for the trailer. Nick would love a Craftsman home, she thought. It wouldn’t be bad to build one here, in this wild land by the river. Day sat up and peered through the long flat window and saw him take off his clothes outside the wooden stall. Cold water wouldn’t stop him. He seemed less vulnerable here than he had beside that shack, smashing things, out of control.
As the sound of splattering water made a hailstorm outside, she lay down, telling herself things would be normal soon.
The trailer was cool. It was spring, and Nick hadn’t bothered to light the wood stove, but without it the sheet and single blanket on the bed weren’t enough covering. Day knew she couldn’t sleep unless she was warmer.
It was almost dawn, growing light, when she climbed down from the bunk and opened the nearest door. Towels, sheets. No blankets. As the shower outside went off, she ducked beneath the loft to open other cabinets. One held a drill, hammer, tools. Another had shelves, and she crouched to peer back in them for a blanket.
The door opened behind her, and cold air rushed in.
“Nick, do you have any more blankets?”
She started to close the cabinet, then opened the door again, to squint at an object on the bottom shelf.
Pausing beside the towel closet—he’d forgotten a towel—Nick watched her remove the broken bowl from the cabinet.
“What’s this?”
“Mesa Verde black-on-white.”
“Where did you find it?” She glanced up innocently. “Is there a ruin here?”
On his land. The perfect explanation.
“No.”
Day quivered strangely. Why was he so silent? Her eyes floated up his naked body, glistening wet.
He grabbed a towel and came under the loft.
Day touched the sherds.
Here was the cart, Nick saw. Get in the cart if you want to see the queen.
If you want the queen.
“I…” The words stuck. How could he say it? Any combination of phrases would be equally repulsive to her. He didn’t want to pretend that it had only happened once or twice.
He wanted her to know everything.
“I stole it. From BLM land. Three years ago.”
“Nick.”
He heard the reproach, the disillusionment in her voice.
“I’ve done a lot of that.”
Day’s heart folded on itself. What was he saying? “What—like finding things hiking? Taking them? You’re not supposed to do that. It’s a felony.”
“No, Day.” Look at me. Believe your ears. “I was a pot hunter. I’ve made a lot of money that way. I’ve stopped.”
I was a pot hunter. Briefly the world changed. She hadn’t always known him; he was someone she’d just met, and he was telling her about his unsavory past, something long ago. Then reality overlapped.
He had been a pot hunter. When? “What do you mean, a lot of money?” She bit her lip, feeling her face coming apart. “That’s gross. You married me and didn’t tell me that. What do you mean you’ve stopped? You mean, like yesterday or something?” Understanding dawned. “Was that what the backpacking trip was about? One last run?”
“I was putting things back.”
Day couldn’t believe her ears. “What things? Are you telling me you’ve have stolen pots from public lands and sold them on the black market? How many pieces are we talking about? How many ruins did you loot while you worked as a guide for my father? That’s why he left you out of his will, isn’t it? I bet he knew!”
“He knew.”
She shoved him. Leaping up, she banged her head on the loft and swore. Nick followed her out from under the loft and stood before her, half-wet, a towel around his waist.
This was what she had loved and wanted for ten years. This was what she had pursued, what she had changed herself for. She had made love to him so many times, married him, and now this twisted human being was all hers. He disgusted her. “Did you dig up graves, too?”
“Yes.”
“How many ruins, Nick?”
“A hundred. Two hundred. I don’t know. You don’t count them.”
Wasn’t he going to deny one single thing?
She gave a loose laugh, on the verge of hysterical. “I’ve been in love with a career criminal. I married a career criminal. What are you, an idiot? You can’t even sleep with the windows shut. You want to go to jail? You think they’ll let you have the windows open, let you sleep outside?”
Nick shrank from her wrath. He was going to the springhouse, dragged there. His father had the ax handle. The scent of the fire filled his nostrils.
“Tell me what my father knew. Tell me what he said to you. Tell me what you’ve never once told me, and tell me now.”
He knew when to obey. He was wild without sleep, and he was afraid. “When I was a kid. I was sixteen. I found a ruin in one of the canyons on the river. You could only get there by boat or by a long hike from the Amasa Back. I had the pots in the cave where I was staying, and he saw them. He told me to put them back. I said I would, but I sold them, instead, and he knew. Because I had money. Later he asked me if I still did it, and he said if he ever caught me he’d turn me in. He said he didn’t want to see it.”
“But he knew.”
“Yes.”
Day wasn’t surprised. Her father had vacillated between bragging about Nick and disempowering him. Even when Nick was twenty-six years, old, their best guide, with perfect knowledge of every piece of equipment in the outfit, her father had questioned his judgment about basic things like which life vests should be retired. “You’ve said you stopped. When did you stop?”
“In January. When I lost you. People change. I’ve changed.”
“You changed kind of late, Nick. You didn’t tell me about this.”
“I’m telling you now. I made about two hundred thousand dollars altogether. I bought this land, and then—”
“You bought my sister’s half of Rapid Riggers.” Day wanted to leave and go home, but she didn’t even have a car. She was stuck, here in this trailer, with Nick, and she was stuck for good.
He was her husband now.
Day showered outside—he’d dismantled the indoor stall. When she emerged from behind the wood partition, Nick was sitting beside the river. Cold, she hurried inside and helped herself to some of his clothes, a pair of shorts with a drawstring and a T-shirt much too large for her. Feeling like a street urchin, she collapsed on the couch and twisted her wedding ring on her finger. Then she went to see the broken pot again. It couldn’t be pieced together because some of the sherds had disintegrated to dust.
While she was still examining it, Nick came back in and sat near her on the floor and began talking.
“I had four things that I kept. When I went down to the Four Corners, backpacking, I returned two of them. There were archaeologists digging at one site, and I left a note and told them everything I could remember.”
Day was aghast. Did he think that made up for it?
“I took the other thing back on our trip. It was a basket from a ruin on the San Juan.”
The San Juan? “You took me down that river to return an artifact you’d stolen?” Not to help her get over her fear of white water. Not to ask her to marry him. “How romantic!”
Nick’s stomach hurt. He got up and went to the sink, to make coffee, to pretend she wasn’t ridiculing him.
“You’re an outfitter.” She emerged from under the loft. “And before that you were a river guide. You’re supposed to protect the natural resource, not ravage it.”
Cut, hurting too much, he shouted at her. “I’ve stopped!”
“It doesn’t matter! You want to build a house on this land! We can’t do that. My God, you have the moral development of a five-year-old.”
He wanted to hit her. He had never struck another person in his life, and he wanted to hit Day. He rushed past her and went out of the trailer, slamming the door behind him.
The air was socked out of her. You went too far, Day.
She’d said what he deserved to hear. She didn’t want to think about how much he’d stolen. “I wish I didn’t know.” Seeing the pot inside the still-open cabinet, Day tried to remember how she had found out.
His voice spoke again in her mind. I stole it from BLM land.
He’d told her.
That was the only reason she knew.
HE SAT BESIDE the river while the sun came up. It had taken him twenty-nine years to become a man; it had taken too long. He’d screwed up the one relationship that mattered most to him. He could start all over now.
But not with Day.
She would tell her sister. Especially because of Sam. But nothing would happen to him. Not imprisonment. Not fines. Nothing could be proved. Even if she turned him in—which Nick couldn’t imagine—even if he confessed, they would be lenient. The penalty for repeated looting of ruins was up to five years’ imprisonment and $100,000 fine, but stiff sentences were rare. Nick had never feared getting caught. He’d never imagined prison, what Day had said—no windows, can’t go outside.
She’d called him an idiot. He felt like one.
With the thumb and fingertips of his right hand, he held his wedding ring where it circled his finger, squeezing the metal, holding on. The breeze rippled the river. He wanted to pump up his boat and go. He would float all the way to Cataract, all the way to Glen Canyon Dam, the way he had when he was fourteen and running from people he couldn’t see.
The door of the trailer banged. Day strode toward him and stopped halfway. “I want to go home.”
He didn’t have the courage to tell her that her home was with him. Or to remind her that his was with her.
AT HER HOUSE, as Day unlocked the side door, he yanked the dry bags from the truck bed. He didn’t bring them inside. They were red with mud from the river and needed to be washed off. Instead, he emptied them on the porch and brought the clothes into her laundry room, off the kitchen. Then he returned to the truck and retrieved their marriage certificate and license from the glove box.
Day was in the bedroom when he came back in. She was trying to zip up a black sheath with a Peter Pan collar. Nick did it for her, then sat on the bed they’d never bothered to make the morning they’d left for the San Juan. He watched her open her makeup chest and switch on a light on her dressing table.
Clutching the marriage certificate and marriage license, he said, “So do you want to get a…”
She didn’t stop lining her lips. She painted her mouth red, then took black-and-white spectator pumps from her closet.
“Do you want an annulment?”
An unspeakable weight fell on her. “I don’t even know you anymore, Nick. I always thought you were an environmentalist.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with the environment.”
“I disagree. What do you think archaeologists have been trying to learn about the Anasazi? Why they left. What they grew. All kinds of things, many of which are environmental. Anyhow, I think those things should be left just as people find them, like trees and rocks and petroglyphs, and…That’s what’s being practiced now. Conservation archaeology. They don’t dig every ruin they know about. They only dig if they believe they can learn something new.”
He held the two folded documents. “I asked you a question.”
An annulment.
If she said yes, it was over forever between them. Day knew that. But if she said no, would he think it didn’t matter?
She opened a drawer in her dresser and found the purse she wanted and transferred the contents from another purse.
“Day?”
“Don’t push me.”
He stood, clasped her shoulders and made her turn around. “You called me an idiot.”
“You did a stupid thing! Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stupid thing. Leave me alone.” She broke away from him and fled the room, and he heard her getting her car keys and the door shutting behind her as she left the house.
SUSAN WAS THERE when she reached the office.
“Hi.” Day managed a smile. “Thanks for holding down the fort. Tell me what’s happening.”
“Booked two Westwater trips and a Cataract trip. I hope the dates work. Mr. Musashi is coming into Grand Junction at three, and Zac’s going to pick him up. Now that you’re here, if it’s all right, I’ll leave to go get Bob.”
Mr. Musashi. The Japanese gentleman. Day looked at her schedule. Grand opening of the River Inn—tonight. Cataract Canyon—tomorrow. Oh, heavens. Cataract.
And Bob. Bob was coming home today. “Oh, yes,” she said. “You can go. Thank you for all you’ve done.”
As she gathered her keys, Susan asked, “How was the river? Ready for the big stuff?”
Day tried to laugh. She was in the big stuff. Over her head in a massive hole.
Dammit, Nick.
When Susan had left, Day got on the computer first thing and went to the Birthright Reunions web site, the way Susan had showed her. Nothing. No response to the message she’d posted on the bulletin board. And no sign of a message like the one Susan had said she’d seen months before, a message for Nick.
Probably someone had answered it. Another Nick.
He had given away his sister.
No wonder he’s such a mess.
But his land…Rapid Riggers.
Grace. She had to tell Grace.
Day picked up the phone and dialed the number of the River Inn, then hung up before it rang. Zac and Grace were preparing for the grand opening. She would go there.
THANKFULLY, ZAC HAD GONE for a run.
Sitting with Grace at a table in the Princess Room, while pots simmered and the smells of baking floated out of the restaurant kitchen, Day watched her sister absorb the shock. Everything. Kelly. Their marriage. Pot hunting.
The only thing Day left out was the visit to the shack.
“Where is he?” asked Grace at last.
“I don’t know. He didn’t seem like he was going to run away. Just like he thought I should accept it now that he’s stopped.”
Grace readjusted the crocheted tam covering her hair and almost knocked over a tray of filo dough she’d been using to roll miniature spinach pies. “Okay, so, he bought my half of Rapid Riggers with money he got stealing pots.”
“Well, he borrowed some of it, but yes, that’s the general idea. And he definitely bought his land that way.”
Grace sat back. “Well, to be fair, he has made good money at Rapid Riggers. Divide two hundred thousand dollars over ten or fifteen years, and it’s sort of like moonlighting. He sure wasn’t getting retail for those pots.”
“Are you trying to justify him?”
“I’m just pointing out that he’s probably made more money from honest sources. He works year-round, always has. Ski patrol in winter, guiding during the river season. He works hard, Day.” She winced. “And what you said about his sister…Since he has stopped, don’t you think you should just forgive him?”
“What about his land? He bought it with that money. Besides, he kept this from me, Grace. He wouldn’t have told me if I hadn’t found that pot.”
“That’s not how it sounds to me. If that’s true, why didn’t he lie to you? He wanted to tell you. Look, you knew from the minute you met him that he had problems. For heaven’s sake, he couldn’t read. So you’re surprised? At least it seems like you’ve hit the bottom of his troubles. Give him a little time.”
“He’s had a lot of time!”
“Not with you.” Grace picked up a piece of filo and dipped a fork into the bowl of filling. “Dad knew, huh? Well, he had those arrowheads. I saw him do an occasional wink-wink nudge-nudge when he said they all came from private land.”
Day had never before heard her sister admit that Sam Sutter was less than a holy man. “I can’t believe what you’re saying. It’s like you’re saying it’s okay. This is a felony. Can you imagine the disgusting people he’s dealt with?”
“Like whoever hit him?”
“It’s no excuse. Do you know what I’ve put up with from him?”
Grace’s lips tilted slightly as she contemplated her sister.
“What?”
“I know what you’ve put up with. Maybe it’s not the pot hunting that’s making you mad.”
Tears sprang to Day’s eyes, and she jerked her head away. What Grace said wasn’t true. It wasn’t. She hated even the suggestion. Because Grace was intimating that hers wasn’t righteous anger over a crime against the common good.
But the bile of jealousy and resentment too long suppressed.
RORY HAD RETURNED to Albuquerque for the weekend, to bring some bones to the lab. When she came home, as soon as she entered her house, she turned on the computer.
She made herself some tea, and while she waited for the water to boil, she checked her e-mail, switched on her printer, ran off notes from friends and colleagues at other universities.
The teakettle whistled, and she went into the kitchen to fix a cup, then returned to her computer. Leaving the tea to brew, she found her way onto the Birthright Reunions home page to scan the bulletin board, the file names.
“To Kelly from Nick.”
She’d named the message she’d left long ago “To Nick from Kelly.”
This new entry had to be a prank. Some Internet surfer out to twist her mind. Break her heart.
Don’t open it. Don’t open it. Don’t play his game.
She had to.
She double-clicked on the file and read, “KELLY: I AM LOOKING FOR YOU. WHAT IS THE NAME OF THE MOUSE? NICK.”
Her heart pounded.
What is the name of the mouse?
No crank had left that message. No crank could possibly know to ask that question. No one could know. No one but him.
There was no e-mail address, and it took her a few frantic minutes to remember how to post a message in the response section.
Shaking, she typed, “NICK: I AM LOOKING FOR YOU, TOO. THE MOUSE IS NAMED ROUSEL. KELLY.”