THE LOWERING SUN HIT it again. The glimmer that had caught Blue’s eye, up ahead beside the trail, shone at him for the third time.
The breeze moving the aspen leaves shaded it sometimes, but when the light came through, whatever was glittering looked like something new. He rode up to it and saw that it hadn’t lain on the pine needles for long.
He got down, picked it up, and turned it in his hands. It wasn’t new. Its sheen of old steel is what had attracted him, the sun catching the edges of the blades of an old-fashioned pocketknife, covered in worn-down hide with the hair on. Several blades and a perfect size and heft for fitting in a man’s palm.
Most men carried one and most felt about their pocketknife the same way they felt about their hat or their horse. Blue hadn’t held such a personal article as this for ten years. No knives, no steel, no weapons, no tools, nothing fine that would give a person the feeling he could do something. None of that allowed in prison.
A piece of brass set in the middle with tiny brads had some writing on it, but even by turning it to the sun, he couldn’t read it. The words were gone to only scraps of letters.
Didn’t strike him as the kind of thing Shane would be carrying.
But it hadn’t been here for twenty-four hours. Blue would bet on that. No leaves or pine needles covered it and it showed no signs of weather.
He dropped it into the front pocket of his jeans and stuck his toe in the stirrup. Maybe Andie Lee would know if Shane had carried it. Or maybe not.
An addict’s life was not an open book. Shane might’ve stolen it.
Or Shane might not have been the one who dropped it.
Blue bent his head to duck the pine branches and got Micah’s horse moving again, faster this time, but still looking for tracks. There were so many pine needles he couldn’t see any clear hoofprints, but broken needles and scuff marks in the dirt made him think someone had come this way recently.
And not Andie Lee. Her shortcut had to come in farther up the main trail because he hadn’t seen its juncture yet.
He traveled another half mile or so with no more sign of another person, then he topped an incline and saw Andie Lee at the bottom, watering her horses. She stood between them, holding the reins and the lead rope, looking down into the fast-running creek. She didn’t know he was there.
She didn’t move while he watched her. She had fastened on to that look again. Fallen into it. This time it was at the bottom of the creek instead of the mountains, but it was the same.
Searching for answers in the earth. In the sky. In the water and the air, and tonight in the fire.
Like Tanasi Rose. Like his great-grandmother, Quaty Lucinda.
He remembered Auntie Cheyosie’s stories about her. His great-grandmother, who, after her husband died, had taken to stirring the fire for hours at a time—most nights all night long—staring into it for answers while, most days, her tired boys fell asleep on the porch after their long day of hunting and plowing and scratching out a living, waiting for her to get up and cook their suppers.
Instead of stirring the fire, Rose had run her car into a tree. What would Andie Lee do?
He nudged his horse and started down the hill.
Show her the knife and get back on the trail. Don’t linger.
Not to scare her, he called, “Hello.”
She was far gone into her thoughts. She didn’t even look up fast. Finally, she raised her head and turned to watch him come.
“I haven’t seen a single trace of them,” she said.
At the creek, he got down to let his horse drink, too.
“Look at this,” he said, and pulled the knife from his pocket.
She gasped and stared at it.
“It’s Shane’s,” she said, her hand to her heart, excited in an instant. “Where’d you find it?”
“Half mile back.”
“Oh, I’m so glad you found it—it’s his most prized possession.”
She frowned, staring at it, trying to make it talk.
“He’s had it hidden somewhere—and drugs, too, no doubt,” she said. “They don’t allow weapons in the Center.”
“Like the handgun that got him sent to jail,” Blue said.
Shane’s about to go back there for a long time. He’ll lose the privilege of having a prized possession, much less this one.
She knew that. He didn’t have to say it, even if he would.
“But how’d he lose it? Is anything on the blade? Was it open?”
Blue stuck his thumbnail into the slot of the biggest blade and pulled. It came way too quick and easy. The tip sliced open the side of his bent forefinger and his blood welled in the same heartbeat.
Andie Lee gave a little cry like she was the one hurt.
“Oh, no! Oh, I’m so sorry—here, Blue, let me see that.”
She was reaching for his hand with both of hers but he closed the knife against his hip and, switching it to his other hand, turned away.
“It’s nothing.”
He heard her boots in the rocks of the creek bank as he dropped the knife into his front pocket and reached into the back one for a handkerchief that wasn’t there. It was bleeding pretty freely. Trying to staunch it with his other hand, he turned toward the hasty pack he’d put together.
There was nothing in there but another shirt, though.
“Don’t touch anything,” Andie Lee ordered.
She was at her horse, untying a bag from the saddle.
“Stand right there,” she said. “Keep your hand in the air.”
He let go, jerked his shirttail out, and used both hands to tear a strip off the bottom. She was unzipping the bag, digging around in it, but she looked up over her horse’s back at the sound of the tearing.
“You heard me, Blue. Get your hand up. I’ve got sterile bandages right here.”
The concern and familiarity in her voice hit his ears as so strange. The worry in her eyes was for him.
He only glimpsed it before he put one end of the ragged strip of shirt in his teeth and wound it around the bleeding cut but it stayed with him.
“You are one damn-stubborn horse wrangler,” she said, angry now.
She came around the back of his mount with the open bag, laid it out on the rump of his horse.
“Step up there and rest your arm on your saddle,” she said, mean as a bad dog.
On his account. It brought back the wish to touch her as surely as an endearment could have done.
“Not your deal,” he said, and tucked in the end of the strip so it’d stay in place.
Her gray eyes flashed hot at him. “Step up, I said.”
“I’ll take care of myself.”
“You’ll take a shot of antibiotic into that neat butt of yours if I have to ride up behind you and slap it into you in the saddle.”
He felt the heat rush into his face. Heat rushing from the bursting of crazy feelings in him. He wanted to laugh, it was so unexpected. He was a little shocked and embarrassed at her bald talk, he couldn’t believe she was this determined to take care of him. He couldn’t even think.
She backed him up against his horse where he couldn’t get away without brushing against her—her feet set outside of his—and took hold of his arm, which he did have in the air at the moment. He hated it.
Her hand was surprisingly strong. And her fingers were long, nearly long enough to circle his wrist.
Anger surged in him. “Step aside,” he growled.
“All right, then,” she said, unfazed. “No shot. If you’ll hold still for a minute.”
She was everywhere at once, taking hold of his arm, reaching past him to get something from the bag, nearly getting close enough for those perfect breasts to brush his chest. He was furious.
He tried to lift his hand too high as she unwound his bandage and slapped something cold and alcohol-smelling onto the wound, but she was tall and long-armed, too. And really mad now.
Her eyes burned into his for a second before they went to the wound.
“Watch out,” she snapped. “Knock my supplies off this horse and you’ll be sorry if we find your horse hurt.”
He forced his panic and anger down. He never had liked feeling trapped, even before prison.
And he never had liked to be this close to a beautiful woman if he couldn’t touch her. What man would? But this time was okay. He was nothing but furious, now, with this one.
“You’re worse than a broncy horse,” she said, from between her teeth. “I should’ve brought my twitch. Use your brain, Blue.”
The sound of his name on her tongue again hit him with a deep, sharp sting like the alcohol had done. It was still a surprise to hear it from anybody. Micah called him son most of the time.
“I am going to clean this wound and bandage it,” she said, “so you might just as well stand here and take it like a man. What a baby!”
He stood there like a stubborn boy resisting his mother and a willow switch. He felt ridiculous.
Yet his anger was slipping a little.
Her breath was warm and sweet-smelling and the feel of her fingers when they brushed the inside of his wrist woke the sleeping skin all over his body.
Damn her.
“I meant what I said about the shot,” she said. “I’m not going to carry the guilt of you getting really sick on top of everything else.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“I’m nearly done.”
“Get away from me, Andie Lee.”
She worked quickly and she didn’t waste a motion. She smelled like a woman. No, like herself. He’d never known a woman who smelled or acted like this one.
All of sudden, she was done. And gone.
She gave him back his hand and stepped aside to get the bag, moving on behind his horse quicker than she’d trapped him.
His finger was wrapped with something pretty thin. It wouldn’t hinder him too much.
“Let’s get going,” she said. “Shane may be camping at the Sevenmile. Or we might even catch up with him between here and there.”
“How far?”
“Not more than a mile but part of it’s steep.”
They mounted and he let her lead the way. He had to tamp it all down inside and focus on the hunt again.
She felt guilty that he was hurt.
She had been hell-bent to take care of him.
She thought he had a neat butt.
Idiot. She’d have done the same for any horse or dog she came across.
Just keep your neat butt in the saddle and ride.
ANDIE LEE PUSHED her mount harder than she normally would have done, straining her eyes through the lowering light, her stomach nothing but a hard knot. Then, as she led the way into the clearing that was Sevenmile camp, she wanted so much to close her eyes that she almost did it. She couldn’t bear it if Shane wasn’t there.
But she kept them open and knew in a flashing, circular glance of trees and burnt-rock fire ring and stacked firewood that he wasn’t there. No one had been there for a long time.
“Let’s push on a little farther,” she said, starting to ride a half circle to head her horses toward the upper trail. “We might squeeze another hour out of the light and we can camp anywhere.”
Blue rode into the camp, stopped his horse and got down.
Just like that.
“Whoa,” she said, stopping to face him. “Blue, didn’t you hear me?”
“As someone once said, use your brain, Andie Lee. Dusk won’t last fifteen minutes now.”
“Well, but the moon’ll be up in a little while and I know the way,” she said.
She was behaving like a silly greenhorn and she knew it. This country was far too rough to be stumbling around in the dark.
In spite of that bit of good sense, she said, “Micah packed that flashlight with the big square battery.”
She sat there for a minute, unable to give up, her legs refusing to take her out of her saddle.
“Go ahead,” he said.
He turned his back to her, unbuckled the latigo strap on his saddle, and pulled it loose.
“What if he’s hurt?” she said. “He can’t be that far ahead of us. We know he came this way.”
“He had most of the night. He could be all the way to the Lininger cabin by now.”
Blue went to work in earnest, unsaddling, taking hobbles out of his meager pack, putting them on the horse and starting to brush him down. When he walked around to the off-side, he looked at her across the horse. It was getting dark fast. She could hardly see the details of his face under his hat.
But she could see his eyes flash.
“You’re a damn stubborn veterinarian,” he said. “No sense taking the chance of killing a couple of good horses.”
She gave it up.
“What about me?” she asked, standing in her stirrup and throwing her leg over.
He had better talk to her tonight. Or at least listen. She could not sit here for hours in the dark with these images of where Shane might be at this moment and in what condition assaulting her mind every moment.
“What about taking the chance of killing me?” she demanded.
At first she thought he wouldn’t answer.
She began to unsaddle her own horse.
“You’re too mean to die,” he said, right behind her.
“Thanks a lot,” she said sarcastically.
As she turned, he took the weight of the saddle from her hands.
His teeth flashed in the gathering dark. A rare, quick grin from him.
Her fury at Shane choked out her fear. Only now was she realizing—along with the fact that she might not be able to save him—how much pain and havoc he had caused and to how many people.
Not only to her and to Gordon and a dozen others, but even to this good man who tried so hard not to admit that a cut from a knife would make him bleed just like anybody else.
“THIS IS THE FIRST PLACE I ever camped out,” Andie Lee said. “And when full dark fell that night it felt like the end of the earth. If Micah hadn’t been here, I’d really have been scared.”
She was talking a lot. She’d talked to him, off and on, while they’d set up camp and cooked and eaten supper. It didn’t bother him, though. Her low voice was good to hear, even when she was nervous like this, and she didn’t seem to care if he listened or not.
“Are you a camper, Blue? Do you like to hunt and fish?”
His name on her tongue had a little hint of Texas in it that never failed to come to the surface. But he wasn’t going to be drawn into this memory-sharing talk.
“We’ll bank the fire after these burn down,” he said, arranging two fresh sticks of wood on the ones that were crumbling. “Won’t be long ’til morning and you need to rest.”
“I can ride as long on as little sleep as you can.”
“Not if you don’t rest your jaw some.”
She laughed a little.
“All your fault. You who won’t answer any question I ask you.”
She smiled and, with a sigh, leaned back against the trunk of the big pine where they’d eaten, sitting cross-legged on a bed of dry needles. For the first time since they’d met up, the tension was easing in her. Just a little. He’d like to take her in his arms and make her smile a lot more.
Would she? Would she smile or would she push him away?
“Micah brought us up here,” she said. “Me and my best friend from back home, Lacie Marie. It wasn’t long after we moved to the Splendid Sky and I had missed her so much.”
He stood up and took the coffeepot off the hook. It certainly didn’t need to boil again—it was already stiff enough to keep a horseshoe from sinking. He turned and offered it.
She held out her cup and picked up his with her other hand.
“Let’s split what’s left,” she said, smiling up at him.
Her mouth was even more beautiful when she smiled.
He poured the coffee, returned to the fire to set the empty pot down on a rock, and then walked out to the edge of the light to get a glimpse of the three horses grazing near the creek. They were fine.
“Your coffee’s getting cold,” she said. “Blue.”
As if she liked to say his name.
“Good thing we brought heavy jackets ’cause it gets colder at night even faster up here.”
He went back to sit beside her beneath the tree. As he sat down, he felt the knife’s weight against his crotch and stretched out his leg so he could dig it out of his front pocket. He handed it to her.
“Didn’t mean to keep it.”
She tilted her palm as she looked at it. The fire’s light caught the edges of the blades the way the sun had done.
“Chase would be devastated to lose this,” she said. Almost like she was talking to herself.
“Thought it was Shane’s.”
“Chase won this knife riding bareback right after we ran off together. First prize he ever won that they engraved his name on.”
She held the little brass plate toward the low glow of the fire.
“Now it’s worn away. That all seems like it happened a hundred years ago.”
Her voice grew huskier.
“And it seems like yesterday. As a baby, Shane loved to play with this knife and stroke the hide smooth, and when he was a little bigger he’d pretend to read ‘Chase Lomax’ on the plate. When we left, Chase gave it to him to remember him by.”
“How old was he?” Blue said.
She turned to look at him, lifting her chin in that way she had. “Chase? He’s five years older than I am….”
“Shane.”
Chase was on her mind. Maybe she still loved him.
“Oh. Five, turning six. I’d already kept him on the road until he missed kindergarten. I had to get settled in one place and put him in school.”
“That’s young to carry one.”
She jerked back and stared at him for a minute. “The knife? Do you think I’m insane?”
Then, with a bitter chuckle, she answered herself hotly.
“Well, why not? Look at how well-brought-up my son is now. Kidnapper, horse-thief, burglar and druggie. At least I suppose he could be called well-rounded.”
“I had a pocketknife and a .22 BB gun when I was six or seven. I hunted the woods behind our house every day. Squirrel’s good when it’s the only meat on the table.”
Surprised, she stared at him. “I’ll bet you were as responsible then as you are now.”
He bit his lip and looked back at her.
Keep your mouth shut, Bowman. She already thinks you’re something you’re not.
He needn’t worry. He’d lost her attention again. She took a sip of coffee and stared off into the distance. For too long.
“I probably should’ve stayed,” she said. “But, damn it, he still wouldn’t have had a daddy in the house unless we’d stayed on the road.”
She turned and looked a question at Blue as if he could tell her if she’d done right or not. The firelight barely reached them but her hair still caught it.
“I was sick to the bone of traveling,” she said. “And of no space. That trailer was way too little to live in and raise a child.”
It was none of his business and he couldn’t care less but he’d damn sure rather she talked than not. She looked too sad when she didn’t.
“Sounds pretty cold,” he said. “From where this guy Chase was sitting.”
She stared at him, surprised again.
“If that was all he could afford,” he said.
“It was—He wasn’t winning much back then,” she said. “But I couldn’t ask him to settle down and get a job and change his whole life when Shane wasn’t even his kid.”
It was Blue’s turn to be surprised. He threw the rest of his coffee into the dark.
“Chase offered to try to quit rodeoing, but I knew he’d never last,” she said. “I was scared to death to be on my own with Shane but I had to do it. And I had to know I could do it, if that makes any sense.”
He listened, his breath tight in his chest. She sure was one to blurt out her deep feelings to a stranger.
“I’ll always wonder if it would’ve made a difference with Shane if we’d gotten married then instead of waiting another eight years to even say the word out loud.”
She turned her head to catch Blue’s gaze and hold it.
There was some light from the moon beginning to rise. Her eyes glittered with the passion of her thoughts.
Five and eight made thirteen. Shane was fifteen now. Two years ago.
“Shane never forgave me for saying no to Chase,” she said. “He started with the drugs around then.”
She watched Blue, waiting for his opinion. How the hell could he know what she should’ve done?
Did that “no” drive Chase away forever, or do you still see him sometimes?
“They like to blame it on somebody else,” he said.
“Kids, you mean?”
“Addicts.”
She knew it. She didn’t wince. She had faced that truth, at least. Rose never had. With Rose, Dannie’s addiction had always been somebody else’s fault.
“For thirteen years, Shane was my joy. I’m still glad I didn’t have the abortion.”
Shock shot through him. Was there nothing she wouldn’t say? He’d never known that women could just open their mouths and say what they thought and felt about such private business like they were talking about the weather.
And to a man. A stranger.
Or maybe it was just Andie Lee. Neither his mother or his sister had been like that.
“Gordon and my mother tried threats and bribery and locking me in my room and everything else they could think of, but I wouldn’t give in,” she said. “I knew before I ever asked for Gordon’s help with Shane that he’d bring up the fact that I’d had choices. I knew he’d say he’d been right.”
“I’d bet the roan that Gordon always thinks he’s right.”
“How horrid is that?” she said. “Saying it would’ve been better if Shane had never been born?”
Horrid or not, he had had that thought. He had thought it about Dannie, trapped in her slavery and suffering.
But then he’d recalled those summer nights when they’d chased lightning bugs and looked at the stars with Auntie Cheyosie. To live one night like that, wild and free and surrounded by the dark in a place that was safe and full of love was worth being born. Years of growing up like that were worth a lot of suffering.
“The thought has occurred to me, though,” she said, “much as I hate to admit it. No matter what hell it’s put me through, Shane’s the one suffering the most in this. Caught in a trap, so completely demoralized he can’t even struggle to get free.”
“Don’t listen to Gordon,” he said. “You didn’t do what he told you. Even fifteen years won’t make him forget that. He likes to make people do his will.”
She looked toward the horses making snuffling sounds as they grazed.
“Then I think about his baby fingers stroking my cheek and Chase playing horse with him bouncing on his knee and later teaching him to ride and the way Shane used to say ‘Mom’ with so much love in his voice and I know it’s not true, no matter what a nightmare these last two years have been,” she said. “Shane could be happy again if he’d try to get off the drugs. He’s not trying.”
Anger rang in her voice.
“I don’t mean to sound like an addict here,” she said, “but it’s Gordon’s fault—and my mother’s—that I got pregnant at seventeen in the first place.”
“What?”
“No, no, I don’t mean he molested me. But he pushed and pushed me to date Trey Gebhardt because Trey’s dad was also a powerful man and the two of them together could make the legislature do what they wanted on some agriculture bills.”
“Bastard.”
“That’s the word he kept using,” she said, “as he tried to make me agree to marry Trey.”
And a word I’ve heard applied to me a few times. Thanks to Gordon. The hypocrite.
“Now it’s called date rape,” she said “Back then it was ‘boys will be boys if you let them.’ Or, ‘It’s the girl’s responsibility to hold the line.’”
Her face was half in shadow, but her voice told the whole story. Here was another piece of that load of guilt she’d mentioned when she doctored his hand. She was staring off into the darkness, sitting with a hopeless stiffness to her shoulders.
“All kids make mistakes,” he said.
She nodded without turning.
“I was trying to please Gordon and my mom,” she said, “by keeping Trey happy. But by the time I got back to my room that night I knew it wasn’t worth it. I was so upset I couldn’t even turn loose of myself to cry.”
Don’t tell me this. I can’t do anything about it. I don’t want to hear it.
“Later, when they were furious about the baby, I got courage that I didn’t know I had. I thought that my baby would always love me. All I’d wanted all the time was someone to love me. In fact, I might’ve even thought on some level that letting him have his way would make Trey love me.”
That hit Blue in the gut. At least he’d always known that Rose loved him. And so did Dannie.
“You don’t have any brothers or sisters?”
She shook her head.
“No one to turn to,” she said. “Except Chase. He was breaking colts for the ranch and we were flirting like crazy but Gordon wouldn’t let us date. He called Chase a saddle bum.”
She turned to look at Blue again and leaned toward him. The scent of her hair filled his nostrils.
“To be fair, I must tell you that Gordon offered more than once to make Trey marry me,” she said. “And it was only when I refused that he said I had to get rid of the baby.”
She held his attention to her story with every line of her body. She needed to tell him all about it.
“I climbed out of my window one bright, shining midnight and ran to Chase’s room in the barn. I told him everything. We left the Splendid Sky that night in his old truck with six hundred dollars between us.”
“Different kind of life for the princess,” Blue said.
“Better believe it. But Chase and I loved being wild and young. Freedom went straight to my head like the stars had done that night. I never saw such a splendid sky as the night we left the Splendid Sky.”
“Didn’t Gordon send somebody after you?”
“No. Come to think of it, he had the same attitude then that he had toward Shane this morning: Let me learn my lesson. Let me get what I deserved. Toni began coming to the rodeos to find us and begging me to let her help me, begging me to come back to the ranch, but I wouldn’t.”
She stared into the fire. For a long time, she sat, far-gone and silent. And sad to the bone. Like his mother.
Then she looked at him like she wanted to say something. Her full lips parted, but instead of saying whatever it was, she shook her head.
A strand of hair slipped across her mouth and she brushed it away to take a sip of coffee. Her eyes never left his, though, as if promising herself she was going to make herself say whatever it was.
She leaned a little bit closer as if to see the look in his eyes when she said it. The heavy silver clip at the nape of her neck was losing the battle on both sides of her face.
She reached up with one hand and took it out, then shook her hair back over her shoulders.
“I wanted my baby so I’d have someone to love me forever,” she said. “But now he doesn’t love me at all. He won’t even say the word ‘mom’ anymore.”
That wasn’t all of it, so he waited.
“Micah insisted I bring a gun with me,” she said. “He said it was because if the roan had to be put down I couldn’t get close to him with a needle. There’s that, and other reasons, too.”
She paused as if he would name some other reasons. He kept his silence.
“On the way up here I had a thought I can hardly bear,” she said. “One of those reasons might be that Shane has a gun. Micah’s wise and he’s had a lot of years to see a lot of human behavior. Do you suppose Shane would actually shoot at me, Blue?”
Her voice broke on the word shoot. In the growing moonlight, her eyes glistened with tears. She lifted her chin so they wouldn’t fall. Her breath felt warm and it smelled of coffee. Her lips trembled.
Blue leaned forward and kissed them.