After the carnival troupe returned and supper had been served, Janeal kissed her father at the dining room table and went outside, leaving Jason with the advisers and close companions who usually took meals with their leader. The day had been profitable, and there was plenty of happy discussion to cover her quick exit.
She walked every evening atop the lowest mesa, which only took about fifteen minutes to climb. Often Robert or Katie or both of them came with her. Not tonight, though. Tonight she slipped out before either of them could ask her about going. Tonight she needed to work some things out in her own mind about Robert and Katie and her own future with this little traveling family.
A few short yards from the kitchen’s rear door, Janeal took her favorite passage across the narrow river. She’d traversed the series of fifteen umbrella-size boulders so many times over the years that she could leap them in the dark without getting wet. On the other side, she leaned her body into the angle of the steep slope and started to climb. The air and the earth shared the scent of fresh rain, which had passed through before nightfall like a politician, quickly and with only enough substance to be convincing.
She did not want to stay put in this cycle of Gypsy life, spending summers in New Mexico and winters in California. She despised their way of earning a living, hustling the gajé for whatever money they would part with or settling for blue-collar work. This attitude made her an alien in her own community but wasn’t enough to win the favor of outsiders, who scorned her because she was Rom.
Part Rom. She was fair enough that the average person wouldn’t guess it, but when she went to the carnival, guilt by association was all the average person needed to convict her. And she resented what the others murmured about her mother, who was indeed a wife Jason had taken from among the non-Gypsies. But Rosa Mikkado’s mind if not her body was Rom through and through. She had died fifteen years ago with Janeal’s other siblings when a tornado ripped through their Kansas community.
Janeal’s foot slipped on a skittering layer of loose rock, so she dropped to her hands until the earth stopped sliding, then resumed her climb.
Did she fit anywhere?
At the top of the mesa, she dropped to her bottom and swung her legs over the edge, looking down on her summer home. Interior lanterns had turned some of the tents into evening fireflies. A few families were building campfires outside. Someone had turned up a radio. With the weekend festivals at an end, tomorrow the camp would rest and play.
Maybe she’d sneak out. Drive to Santa Fe. If her little beater could get her there and her father wouldn’t find out.
She heard a sound behind her. Footsteps on gravel. Had Robert come up another way, looking for her? He knew better than to follow if she was in one of her “moods,” as he called these times. She resented that too—even her contemplative nature could be held against her in this place. She twisted her waist to see.
“Robert?”
Two people she did not recognize approached her. A woman, she thought, and a man. The sunset had faded, and one held up a flashlight directly into her face. She threw up an arm to shield her eyes.
“Janeal Mikkado?”
“Who’s asking?”
“A friend of your father’s.”
A friend of her father’s would come to the camp to inquire about her. Any other approach would be inappropriate. Even the gajé knew this.
“I doubt it,” she said. She scrabbled to her knees, debating whether she ought to bolt. Curiosity and something else she couldn’t name held her in place. The palm of her hand tingled where she had zapped it on the stairway banister.
The flashlight beam dropped, and the man laughed.
“You were right about her,” he said, speaking to the woman but looking at Janeal. He handed the light to his companion and stuck his hands into the pockets of his dark slacks. In four long strides he put himself at the edge of the dark mesa but kept enough distance from Janeal to hold off any inkling that he meant her harm.
It was the first time she’d ever encountered a stranger up here, let alone one who knew her name.
From what she could see in the poor light, the man was younger than her father but much older than she. He was nicely dressed in belted slacks and a button-front shirt. Long-sleeved, even though it was summer. Moonlight reflected off his shoes. A neatly trimmed black beard matched his neatly trimmed wavy black hair. It had been slicked back off his forehead and touched the tops of his shoulders. She smelled a sharp-edged spice and wondered if he styled his locks with clove oil. She wanted to touch his hair.
The desire startled her.
He was slender, handsome. Beautiful. In fact, more stunning than Robert— more delicate than rugged, more intellectual, she assumed. More powerful, or capable of commanding at the very least. She realized she was staring.
Something glinted in his earlobes. Diamonds. She’d seen plenty of those. Most of the men in her kumpanía wore such jewels to the carnivals, joking they were safest there among gajé who assumed the Gypsies were poor and their jewelry fake.
“Do you love your father?” The man’s voice shocked Janeal out of her musings.
“What?”
“Do you love your father?”
The question was so unexpected that the easy answer escaped her. “What does that—”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.”
Janeal’s own breath sounded like wind in a tunnel to her. “Of course I love him.”
“Does your father love you?”
Janeal frowned, mystified.
“I guess you’d have to ask him.”
“No. No, I don’t. Children know when they are recipients of their fathers' love. Are you?”
“I—yes. What is this?”
“A verification of—”
“Who are you?” she asked. “And why are you here?”
He turned his eyes to hers for the first time, and she could not hold his gaze. She didn’t believe he was angry at her, but his eyes were like spotlights that exposed her.
Exposed what? She had nothing to hide.
“I am Salazar Sanso. And I am here because I want you to save your father’s life.”
Alarm caused Janeal’s breath to quicken. “His life isn’t in danger,” she said, feigning confidence.
He took his hands out of his pockets and wove together his fingers. “I wasn’t sure you’d be willing to do this thing if you did not feel he loves you.”
“What thing?”
Sanso gestured and Janeal’s eyes followed the line of his arm, which pointed to a shadowy hulk of a car.
“Will you allow me to show you?”
She turned back to him. She should have been terrified. That’s what she thought at the moment she realized she was only anxious, and perhaps curious, which sent a small thrill of excitement through her chest. But it didn’t eclipse her caution. She wasn’t a fool; she was a young woman in the dusky desert with a man of unknown intentions.
“What do you need to show me that can’t be discussed here?”
“That I am trustworthy.”
She had not expected that. A reply evaded her.
“If you come with me, and I return you unharmed in two hours, you will doubt me less than if I preach to you and then leave you to question my spontaneous visit.”
The strength of her desire to go with him surprised her, but she said, “Or I could go with you and never be heard from again.”
“You are safe, and I am telling you the truth: your father’s life is in danger, and unless you save him from his enemies, he will be dead by Wednesday morning. Come. Let me show you. I will not harm the one person in the world who can help him.”
Maybe she was a fool after all. More than that, though, she was a daughter who would step between her father and death without having to think about it.
And perhaps if she was forced to tell the truth, she would acknowledge she was a daughter who would be willing to leave her father after all.
He extended his hand out to her, beckoning, palm turned up with the smooth skin of a man who’d never known manual labor.
Janeal slipped her fingers into his.