“Mother drove us straight back to Tucson. On the way, I fell asleep for real. I don’t remember going home, and when we got there, she must have carried me into the house. When I woke up the next morning, the house was full of police, and Dad was sitting in the chair in the living room. He was dead.”
Lucy sighed and shuddered, as though the effort of relating the story had been too much for her.
“What happened next?”
“Some man-a detective, maybe-came to the house and asked me a whole bunch of questions. He kept asking me if my father ever hit my mother. And I said, ”I never saw him hit her.“ Then he asked if Dad ever hit me, and I told him no. I kept waiting for him to ask me if my mother hit people or if she was a spy and did bad stuff, but nobody ever did. Then it was like they forgot all about me and nobody bothered to ask me any more questions. I figured out later that was because Mother confessed. She told them she did it. After that, a woman came to talk to me and told me they were going to send me to live with my grandmother and my great-grandmother.
“After I got there, I tried to tell a few people about what Dad said my mother had been doing, but no one would listen. Not even Grandma Bagwell. She and Grandma Yates both said my father was dead because he was a bad man and because he had beaten up my mother. I told them they were wrong about that-that it was my mother who was bad. I tried telling them the same thing Dad had told me about Mother getting into trouble at work. I thought if there was a trial, lawyers would ask me questions and I would have to tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
“But there wasn’t any trial. My mother said she shot Dad because she was tired of him beating her up. Afterward she said she was scared. She picked me up from ballet and then drove all over half the night trying to decide what to do. She said she didn’t know what happened to the gun-that she had thrown it away somewhere. But that wasn’t true, either, because I found the gun in the bowl along with the diskette.”
“And when was that?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy answered with a shrug. “A long time later. I was only a little kid then. I turned eight the next summer. Grandma Yates didn’t like me wandering around in the hills by myself, but Grandma Bagwell did. She said it was neat. The fact that I liked to be out scouting by myself proved I was a ”real‘ Apache, just like her grandfather Eskiminzin.
“Anyway, one day I went to the rock pile all by myself. I dug up the bowl, found the diskette, and took it home. I wanted it because Dad had given it to me to take care of. I wanted to know what was on it. I kept it hidden in another plastic bowl-one of Grandma Yates’ this time. I hid the bowl out in the shed because I didn’t want Grandma Yates to find it when she was cleaning my room. I knew it was from a computer, and I kept waiting for a chance to look at it. Finally, when I got to high school, there was a computer in the library. I tried looking at it there, but it must have been the wrong program or something. Or maybe the disk got wrecked when it was in plastic all those years. There wasn’t anything there.”
“That’s not true,” Joanna said quietly. “There is something there.”
Lucy swung around to face Joanna. “Really?” she demanded. “What?”
“I don’t know. It’s encrypted.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means most people can’t read it because it’s written in a top-secret code-a government code. As far as we can tell, it seems to contain command and control codes for the military.”
Lucy’s mouth dropped open and her eyes widened. “Does that mean my father was right the whole time? My mother really was a spy?”
Joanna nodded. “Possibly,” she replied, “although at this point we can’t say for sure.”
“See there?” Lucy was almost shouting now. “I told you so. I was glad when they sent Mother to prison, and I’m glad, too, that she’s dead now. Unlike my dad, she deserved what she got. I loved my father, Sheriff Brady. I hated it when people thought he had been mean to her, when they thought he was the kind of man who would beat us-beat both of us-when he didn’t-not once, not ever.”
“Let’s go back to the other night for a moment,” Joanna said.
“Why?” Lucy asked.
“I need you to finish telling me what happened. It’s the only way we’re going to find out who killed your mother.”
“I don’t care who killed my mother. I already told you,” Lucy said fiercely. “I’m glad she’s dead. What does it matter who killed her?”
“Lucy,” Joanna said, “you told me that the whole time your father’s death was being investigated, no one ever asked you about your mother’s alleged spying or about her having a boyfriend. Right?”
Lucy nodded. “So?”
“That means no one ever knew about it-no one in authority, that is. Whoever investigated that case always assumed that the motive behind your father’s murder was related to what was going on between your parents. Domestic violence is a handy catch-all, especially when your father was already on record for being violent.”
“You mean that thing that happened back while he was in the army?” Lucy asked.
Joanna nodded.
“That was my mother’s fault, too,” Lucy declared. “She and my dad were in a bar together. Like I said, that was before my father quit drinking. He told me he got mad because Mother was flirting with some other guy. Dad hit him and knocked him out. He didn’t find out until later that the guy was a superior officer. They made Dad leave the army over that, but he said he didn’t mind. He said by then the army was driving him crazy anyway.”
“Is that when he stopped drinking?”
“Yes,” Lucy said. “I liked him a lot better after he did. From then on Dad was different somehow. Nicer. Happier-until that morning at the bakery, the morning when he came to tell me about Mother. He cried the whole time he was telling me. Not really crying like a baby does, but there were tears in his eyes. He had to keep brushing them away. I pretended like I didn’t see them, but I did.”
“Your mother admitted that some of her injuries that day were self-inflicted,” Joanna said quietly. “What if she isn’t the one who shot him? What if someone else did? And what if someone else beat her up?”
Lucy seemed stunned by the very suggestion. “Is that possible?” she asked. “If Mother didn’t do it, why did she say she did? Why would she go to prison for something she didn’t do?”
“I don’t know,” Joanna replied. “Maybe she was scared. Maybe going to prison wasn’t as scary as what might have happened to her if she hadn’t. And it looks like it worked. As long as everyone had your mother pegged for being a killer, no one but you and your father ever suspected her of being a spy. Which is why we have to find out who killed your mother. Remember those devil’s-claw patterns woven into baskets? What if the person who killed your mother is the same person who killed your father and he’s gotten away with it all these years?”
“What more can I tell you?”
“After they drove away that night, what did you do?”
“I was scared,” Lucy said. “I knew I had what he wanted. I was afraid he might shoot me, too, or maybe even Grandma Yates, so I didn’t want to go home. That’s when I decided to run away for good. When I left Cochise Stronghold, I was going to ride my bike to Tucson. I forgot about the freeway and that I couldn’t ride my bike on it. On the way, I kept trying to figure out who I could ask for help. I finally made up a list-my ballet teacher, Mrs. Quick; my mother’s lawyer, Ms. Goodson; and Sister Celeste, my teacher from Santa Theresa’s. By the time Big Red and I made it as far as the rest area in Texas Canyon, I was too tired to ride any farther. And it seemed safe. There was a vending machine there with candy bars and drinks and a phone. That’s where I made phone calls to the people on my list.”