2:40 P.M.
Boise looked pretty from the air. It was surrounded by desert, where irrigation channels cut furrows in the land and cultivated fields stood out in checkerboard relief against the brown. A river, flanked by greenbelt, snaked along the edge of the city center; tall buildings and the dome of the state capitol gleamed in the afternoon sun. Beyond them, housing tracts had begun their insidious creep toward the mountains to the north and east.
I’d learned from an article in the airline magazine that Boise, and Idaho as a whole, were among the fastest-growing areas in the country. State and federal government and a broad-based economy provided jobs of all sorts, and a low cost of living had lured skilled people from many other areas, including my own. The man seated next to me—the talkative type I generally try to avoid, but whose chatter I welcomed on this emotionally tense flight—commuted twice a week between his home in Santa Clara and his job at Micron Technology’s Boise offices, and he hoped to move his family to Idaho as soon as their Silicon Valley house sold.
Even the airport strengthened Boise’s appeal: although I had only a carry-on bag, as I walked by the carousel I noticed that the luggage from my flight was already coming up. There were no long lines at the rental-car counters, and the vehicles, for most companies at least, were only steps away. A friendly clerk highlighted on the map an uncomplicated route to Eighth Street in the north end of town, where Blackhawk & Blackhawk was located.
The law firm occupied an older house in a block of tree-shaded residences, many of which had been converted to commercial use. It was a frame, two stories, with a deep, pillared front porch and a steeply peaked roof above a round attic window. Satiny red-and-green trim stood out against light gray paint, and the lawn and hedges were well barbered; obviously my birth mother liked things well maintained, and her law practice was profitable.
I parked the car in the shade of an old Dutch elm whose leaves were beginning to turn and sat there for a while. The afternoon was warmish, the street quiet, but I felt chilled and my thoughts were anything but tranquil. A gray squirrel scampered across the pavement, and I watched it with rapt concentration. I was experiencing the same ambivalence as I had outside the restaurant in Monterey, before I confronted Austin DeCarlo. But this time the emotion was stronger and more complex, as feelings often are in a woman’s relationship to her mother; DeCarlo had hardly been a player in the drama surrounding my birth, but Saskia Hunter had been its leading lady.
On Monday night I could have turned and walked away without ever coming face to face with DeCarlo. I wasn’t in that deep, and merely knowing who my birth parents were might have been enough. But instead I’d taken that irrevocable step, and now that I’d heard his story, I needed to hear Saskia’s as well. So I began playing a mental game of devil’s advocate to make myself get out of the car.
You don’t have to do this. You can drive away and never look back.
But I’d regret it my whole life.
The woman gave you up at birth. She’s probably a lousy person. And friends and clients notwithstanding, you’re not wild about lawyers.
She gave me up so I wouldn’t fall into Joseph DeCarlo’s clutches. And she isn’t a typical lawyer; she works for the good of her people.
She won’t be happy to see you, though. She has two children of her own. She’s probably known where you were your whole life and didn’t care.
Maybe she had those children partly to make up for what she lost. Maybe Fenella didn’t tell her who adopted me.
Do you really believe that?
I want to, and I’m going in there.
Handwoven rugs in brilliant colors lay against the hardwood floor of the house’s entry. A steep staircase with a mahogany handrail rose to the second story. An arrow on a sign that said RECEPTION pointed to the right. I stepped through an archway, saw a young woman whose black hair was caught up in a ponytail and tied with a red scarf staring at a computer monitor. A woman who, in profile, looked very much as I had in my twenties. A plaque on the desk said ROBIN BLACKHAWK.
My half sister. I wanted to back out of the room and run like hell.
“Be with you in a minute,” she said without looking away from the screen. “This is a new machine, and I think it’s possessed by demons.” She moved the mouse, clicked, and exclaimed, “Dammit! D’you know anything about iMacs?”
“I have one myself. What’s the problem?”
“A friend loaned me this software, and apparently he didn’t register the game with the manufacturer. A warning popped up and now I can’t get it off there.”
I stepped around the desk so I could see the monitor. A poker game was displayed against a dark-green background, a window with a notice superimposed on it.
“What am I gonna do?” Robin Blackhawk muttered. “When I click on the window and try to go to something else, it just pops up again. My mother’ll kill me for playing on the job.”
“Just turn off the machine. And when you restart, don’t call up the game again.”
“You’re a genius!”
“Hardly. But I’ve had the same problem myself, when I didn’t realize some software I borrowed from my nephew wasn’t registered.”
She shut the machine off, then swiveled toward me, and I got my first straight-on view of her face. Her lips were fuller, her nose more prominent, her forehead higher, but we resembled each other strongly. She saw it too, and her eyes widened.
“Do I know you?” she asked.
“No, but we’re related.” I gave her one of my cards. When she glanced at it, I saw the name meant nothing to her. “I’d like to see your mother.”
“Mom’s in court all day, but I can make an appointment for you. How about eight o’clock this evening?”
“Eight’s fine. Does she usually take evening appointments?”
“Evening, midnight, six in the morning—you name it. Mom’s a workaholic, and it doesn’t help that we live upstairs.” She eyed me curiously. “You’re related on her side of the family, right?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never met any of the Hunters.”
“How come?”
“She hasn’t been on speaking terms with them since her teens. I don’t know why. She doesn’t like to talk about it. What’s your connection to us?”
“It’s kind of complicated. Maybe I’ll understand it better after I talk with her.”
8:03 P.M.
Lights glowed both upstairs and down in the Blackhawk house when I returned that evening. I didn’t have to talk myself out of the car this time, but my tension level went over the top as I approached. When I stepped inside I saw Robin, still seated at her desk.
“You getting along any better with that thing?” I asked, motioning at the iMac.
“Yeah. It’s an easy machine.” She shut it off and got up. “Mom’s not home yet. She had a dinner meeting with a client, and I expected her by now, but I guess it ran over. Would you like to wait in the parlor?”
“Sure. Thanks.” I followed her across the hall to a high-ceilinged room furnished with plain sofas and chairs upholstered in beige and brown. The walls were bare, except for an irregularly shaped piece of hide painted with buffalo, horses, and warriors that hung over the redbrick fireplace.
Robin saw me looking at it. “It’s elk hide, the only thing of her family’s that Mom has. Her favorite uncle gave it to her when she was a child.”
“Your father,” I said, sitting down on a sofa. “Was he Shoshone?”
“No, Sioux.” She sat down across from me, looked intently at my face. “You really resemble Mom and me. Darcy, too, except for the purple hair.”
“Darcy?”
“My younger brother. All through high school and college he’s the all-American kid. Then he hooks up with this weird crowd, and all of a sudden he’s got purple hair, a nose stud, earrings, and a nipple ring. Probably some other hardware that he hasn’t treated me to the sight of, thank God. If you ask me, twenty-four is too old to get into that kind of stuff.”
Great. I had a bemetaled half brother with purple hair. And I thought Joey was strange.…
“Where does Darcy work?”
“KIVI, local TV station. Channel Six. Behind the scenes, of course. He’s a video editor. Boise just isn’t ready for somebody with purple hair coanchoring the evening news.”
“And you work for your mother?”
“For now. I’m starting law school next spring. For years I resisted following in Mom’s and Dad’s footsteps, but I found out by working here that the law fascinates me.”
“You’re how many years older than Darcy?”
“Two years chronologically, two decades emotionally.”
So Saskia Blackhawk had waited fourteen years after my birth to have another child. Of course, at least seven of those would have been devoted to her education, the remainder to establishing the law practice.
Robin glanced at her watch. “I can’t imagine what’s keeping Mom. She budgets her time strictly. If she says she’ll be someplace, she’s there to the minute.”
“Did she check in with you after I made the appointment?” It occurred to me that if she heard my name, she might try to avoid seeing me.
“No, she—” The phone on the reception desk rang, and Robin went to answer it.
I got up and moved to the fireplace, studied the elk skin painting. The warriors were primitive, almost stick figures, but the buffalo and horses were fully and lovingly fleshed out. How on earth had I, who hated huge beasts, sprung from such a people?
Behind me I heard Robin gasp and then moan. The receiver clattered into its cradle. I turned, saw her coming across the hallway, pale and agitated.
“That was the emergency room at Saint Alphonsus,” she said. “Mom’s been hurt. Jesus, it sounds bad. I’ve got to go to her.”
My stomach lurched. “What happened?”
“Hit-and-run.” She began digging frantically through her purse. “Dammit, I can’t find my car keys!”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I’ll drive you.”
The media had already been alerted to the hit-and-run of a prominent activist attorney; press vans clogged the parking area in front of the emergency entrance of St. Alphonsus Hospital, and reporters with microphones and minicams waited on the sidewalk. I had to push them back as I guided Robin to the doors. Once inside, she was taken away by two detectives from the Boise P.D.’s Crimes Against Persons unit, who wanted to talk with her about her mother’s accident.
The presence of the detectives unnerved me. In most jurisdictions, such accidents were handled by uniformed officers from a traffic-safety detail; plainclothes officers indicated that this might be more than a simple hit-and-run. As I sat in the waiting room, I could do nothing more than agonize and speculate.
Emergency wards are awful places at any time, but particularly at night—full of glaring fluorescence, harried personnel, distraught and often bloodied people. St. Alphonsus’s was no exception. A long line snaked across the floor to the admitting desk. Friends and relatives of the seriously injured sat in stunned and anxious silence, while the less seriously injured suffered. Somewhere nearby a man kept uttering long, demented wails.
Normally I had difficulty dealing with such situations, but this was unbearable. Somewhere in the hospital my birth mother lay injured, possibly dying, and I was powerless to go to her, unable to learn the details of her condition. If only I’d told Robin I was her half sister, I might have been allowed in on the conversation with the officers. But to her I was nothing more than a distant relative, and to them, if they’d noticed me at all, simply someone who had volunteered to drive her here. Already Saskia Blackhawk could have died without either of us setting eyes upon the other—
“Sharon.” Robin’s voice. I stood up, saw she’d been crying.
“How is she?”
“In surgery, that’s all I know. The rest… it’s bad. The police say the hit-and-run wasn’t an accident. Somebody lured her away from the restaurant and deliberately ran her over.”
I took her arm, pulled her aside as an orderly pushed a gurney past us. “Let’s sit down and you can tell me about it.”
The police theory was well founded. Saskia had been having dinner with a representative of the Coeur d’ Alene tribe, who were suing the government over fishing rights on their native lands, at Milford’s Fish House in the Eighth Street Marketplace downtown. Her pager went off around seven forty-five, and she excused herself to find a pay phone and return the call. She didn’t come back to the table.
According to another patron, Saskia spoke on the phone for less than two minutes, then left the restaurant. An employee who had been taking his break out front told the detectives she had turned toward the river on Eighth Street, rather than toward the garage where Milford’s validated parking for diners. When the police checked, they found her 1999 Ford Escort still parked there.
Approximately fifteen minutes after she left Milford’s, Saskia was struck by a blue Datsun traveling at high speed along Tenth Street between Miller and River Streets—an industrial area, mostly deserted at night. A witness who was returning home to a nearby housing project called in the accident to 911. He told the responding officers that the car had been idling a block away when Saskia turned the corner onto Tenth; its driver gunned the engine, shot across the intersection, swerved to hit her, and sped away—but not before the witness got its license-plate number. Half an hour later the Datsun, which had been reported stolen late that afternoon, was found abandoned and wiped clean of prints several blocks away.
“Sounds like a professional job,” I said to Robin.
“That’s what the police think.”
“Those pagers—don’t they show the number of the last person who called?”
“It was smashed when Mom was hit. The police accessed the number she called from the restaurant—a cell phone whose ownership is proving difficult to trace.”
“Probably one of those illegal cloned ones.”
Robin nodded, running both hands over her face. “Sharon, they were asking about Mom’s enemies, and they want to come by in the morning to go over the files of her active cases. I said I couldn’t let them do that—confidentiality—but I agreed to summarize them.”
“It could help. Defending the causes she does, your mother must’ve made enemies.”
“Well, sure. But I can’t imagine… The client she was having dinner with? That has to do with the Coeur d’ Alene’s rights to fish lands that the feds’re leasing to a lumber company. The cause isn’t popular with the company and loggers in general, but you don’t run a person down for defending it. And there’s another case in California—most of her work is on the federal level—that she told me was turning personal. She’s going up against this developer that she’s got bad history with. But she didn’t seem afraid he’d kill her.”
Austin DeCarlo. Once the police started investigating, the story of that bad history would be dragged to light, and the press would get wind of it. Then neither he nor I nor any member of the Blackhawk or McCone families would be able to prevent it from becoming public.
I asked, “Did she say what this bad history was?”
“No. Mom’s a private person; I was surprised she told me anything at all. Normally she wouldn’t’ve, except he or his attorney did something to set her off.”
“When was this?”
“Last month. I don’t remember the exact—”
“Ms. Blackhawk?” A woman spoke behind us.
We both stood, turned to the doctor. She looked grim and tired; her attempt at a reassuring smile was a grotesque caricature.
“My mother,” Robin asked. “Is she going to be okay?”
“Why don’t we go someplace where we can talk quietly?”
The news was not encouraging. Saskia Blackhawk had suffered broken bones, extensive internal injuries, trauma to the head, and was in a coma. The surgeon had repaired the most serious injuries, and Saskia had been placed on the critical list and taken to intensive care.
Robin asked to see her mother. At first Dr. Bishop refused, but seeing her distress, she relented and allowed her a brief visit. Once again I, the outsider, was left to indulge my private fears.
The emergency-room business had picked up—a major crash on Interstate 84, someone said. Ambulances sped in and out of the drive, dropping off personnel and people on gurneys at the side entrance. Other people rushed in through the front, desperate for news of friends and loved ones. When I could take the pain and commotion no longer, I went to the deserted vending room and called Hy, who was staying at my house.
“Jesus, McCone,” he said after I’d filled him in, “do they think she’ll pull through?”
“They’re not saying either way.”
“Be a shame if you never got to talk with her. You gonna tell Robin you’re her sister?”
“I’ll have to, pretty soon. She’s already asked how we’re related, and when I tell her I’m staying around for a while, she’ll really start to wonder.”
“So you’ll be there how long?”
“Till the situation’s resolved one way or the other. I want to keep tabs on the police investigation; there may be something I can do to help. Besides, I want to see Saskia, even if—”
“I know, McCone. And I’ll be thinking of you.”
“Thanks. I—Oh, Robin just walked by looking for me. Got to go. Love you.”
“Love you too. Take care.”
Robin was crying softly when we got into my rental car. With far more conviction than I felt, I said, “It’ll be all right.”
“She’s so… It was like she was dead. And those beeping machines and the tubes… I hate this!”
“I know.”
“And now I’ve gotta call Darcy, and what am I gonna tell him that won’t send him over the edge?”
“Over the edge?”
She nodded, digging a tissue from her purse. “Darce is… He’s not exactly unstable. It’s just that when things don’t go right, he gets agitated in a major way.”
Meaning Darcy was unstable. “You said he works for Channel Six?”
“Right.”
“Then you’d better call him right away. They had a reporter at the hospital.”
“Oh, shit! For sure he already knows!”
I reached into my bag for my phone, handed it to her. She punched in the number, waited, ended the call. “No answer. God, I hope he hasn’t—”
“Hasn’t what?”
“I don’t know. I never know what he’ll do. Darce is my brother and I love him, but he’s… Oh, hell, he’s really a mess.”
Welcome to another dysfunctional family, McCone.
I said, “Okay, I’ll help you find him. We’ll deal with the problem.”
We’d reached her house, and I pulled to the curb and shut the engine off. Robin undid her seat belt and leaned toward me, eyes focused on my face. “Why’re you doing this for me?”
“I like you and I want to help.”
“And we’re family, but you won’t tell me how.”
“It’s not that I won’t—”
“Yes, it is. You’re avoiding the subject.”
“Look, you’ve had a difficult evening—”
“You know,” she said, still watching me closely, “a few years ago I was poking around in a box of Mom’s old papers, looking for a picture I’d drawn for her in third grade that I wanted to show my boyfriend. And I came across a letter to her from somebody called Fenella. It was dated 1963, and it said—I memorized most of it—it said, ‘Your little girl is doing fine. She’s healthy, bright, and happy with her family. You made a loving decision, the best you could under the circumstances.’
“When I showed the letter to Mom, she blew up, told me never to go through her things. I begged her to tell me why she gave the baby up and where she was. She said the subject was closed, and her tone scared me so much I never dared to try to find out anything on my own.” She paused, took a deep breath. “That baby was you, wasn’t she, Sharon?”
“… Yes.” In a way, it was a relief to have it out in the open.
Robin looked down at her hands and started to cry again.
Oh, God, I thought. She doesn’t need this, not now, and she’ll hate me for it!
I said, “I’m sorry this comes at such a bad time.”
She mumbled something.
“What?”
“I said there’s nothing to be sorry about. You don’t know how often I’ve dreamed of finding you. And then, on the absolute worst day of my life, you showed up and helped me get through it.”
As Robin and I climbed the porch steps, a figure moved in the shadows—a wiry figure of about my height, whose head looked misshapen. I braced myself for trouble, but she sighed in relief. “Darce! So this is where you’ve been.”
“Robbie? I heard about Mom, but I couldn’t stand to go to the hospital, so I came here.” The little-boy inflection of his words didn’t match the deep timbre of his voice.
Robin unlocked the door, reached inside to put on the overhead light, and I got my first look at my half brother. She’d told me about the purple hair, but hadn’t mentioned that it poufed high and wide above his scalp, so he resembled a stick of cotton candy. His face was a more masculine version of hers and his upper lip was stubbled with an unsuccessful attempt at a mustache; silver studs glittered in both nostrils; a feathered earring hung from his right lobe; a pair of small silver circlets pierced one eyebrow. He wore black jeans and a black tee emblazoned in glowing silver: DEEMONZ!
“Robbie?” he said again. “Is Mom…?”
“She’s out of surgery.” She went to him, took his arm. “Let’s go inside and I’ll tell you about it.”
“I want to stay here. Can’t you turn out that light?” He squinted up at it.
Robin took a closer look at him. “What’re you on?”
“I just smoked some dope, is all.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Look, don’t start on me, okay?”
“What good would it do?” She glanced apologetically at me, and Darcy noticed my presence.
“Who the hell’s this?”
“A friend. She drove me to the hospital.”
“She looks like Mom.”
“She’s also a relative.”
“Mom’s relative? She doesn’t deal with those people.”
“… Well, this one she will. Come on inside, Darce.”
He hung back, staring at me. “What’s your name?”
“Sharon McCone.” I offered my hand.
He ignored it. “How’re you related to my mother? Where’re you from?”
“Darcy!” Robin tugged hard on his arm. “Inside! We’ve got to talk about Mom.” This time he offered no resistance, but kept staring at me over his shoulder as they went through the door.
I stayed on the porch, leaning against a pillar and breathing in the cold midnight air. Robin would want to reassure her brother, and she would do better if she didn’t have to sugarcoat the truth in front of me.