She backed up a bit and pulled into a clearing among the trees, parked, shut down the engine, and considered her options. Somewhere on this same lake, Meredyth Sanger and Lucas Stonecoat were enjoying the warmth of their bed, wrapped in one another's embrace.
Sitting in the morning gloom, Lauralie thought of how she had posed Arthur's body, his heart on his sleeve, his dogs at his feet. She'd wanted Sanger and the others to find him in the mocking pose, and to find Mira's heart in the jar. After posing Arthur, she'd had to struggle with Mira's frozen half-corpse alone, wrapping her and transporting her to the car, breaking her nails and scarring her hands in the process. She had intentionally left her DNA in the freezer. Any idiot could put her together with the abduction and murder of Mira Lourdes by now. The investigation was a farce; any leads they enjoyed had, after all, been supplied by the Ripper herself.
"Catch me if you can, but not before I let you," she said to the empty woods around as she exited the car and began to walk the distance to the house, her purse slung over her shoulder, the weight of the gun pulling it down.
"Time for a neighborly visit…"
Cognac. Lucas and Meredyth had, early that morning, settled on aged, expensive cognac, and after a playful contest of who could hold the most liquor before falling into a much-needed, deep slumber, they had nestled into one another's arms and had melded into one another's cognac dreams. Now, at three in the afternoon, they awakened after eight hours of sleep to cognac hangovers.
Meredyth asked herself if she had keyed in the security code downstairs before they had gone to bed. The log cabin-style home was equipped with a state-of-the-art security system, and was built to be impenetrable from the outside-no exposed wires, no weak spots. She brought up the memory of punching in the code, and she also recalled having taken both her cell phone and Lucas's off ring to accept messages only, so as to get some uninterrupted sleep.
Now it was mid-afternoon and Lucas was administering more cognac to combat the hangover, and it worked. They showered together and made love under the warm spray until they took their lovemaking back to the bed. There they luxuriated in one another's embrace, passions, and playfulness.
Sated, lying in one another's arms again, they were moved by hunger to dress, go downstairs, and raid the kitchen for anything they could find in the fridge and on the shelves. As she prepared sandwiches for them, Lucas joked that a typical reservation house could fit into Meredyth's kitchen.
"Is that designed to make me feel guilty?" she asked, punctuating her words with the knife in her hand.
"No…just an observation."
"Well, I hear the Indian casinos are making a bundle," she countered. "So not everyone on the res is piss poor."
"Casinos pay a petty tribute to the tribe, not enough to make a difference to the common good. In effect, an Indian tribe on a modem reservation is a commune-everyone helping everyone, everyone doing his part, all that. But it doesn't ever work out that way, now does it?"
"No…it doesn't. Human nature being what it is."
"Most of the casinos are run by shrewd half-breeds who are as shameless as any CEO you have trading on Wall Street, NYC," he said.
"It can't be that bad."
"You haven't been out to the Coushatta."
"Well…perhaps we can get a little public awareness going, start a drive, have a marathon or something, generate some funds."
"You don't understand. It's not that simple."
"Why not?"
"Because of who we are-American Indians. We have been made charity cases by the state-the U.S. Government-for almost two hundred years now, since the 1820s."
"What's that got to do with what I'm proposing?"
"Damn, it's got everything to do with it. The Cherokee were robbed of their Eastern ancestral lands, an area covering most of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and portions of Kentucky. They were given Oklahoma before the Okies arrived, and it became an Indian state. My ancestors migrated from the Tallaquah, Oklahoma, promised lands to here, East Texas, and we cohabited with the Alabama, Coushatta, and other western tribes. What I'm saying is that the Texas Cherokee in particular didn't want any handouts from the U.S. Government. My people left the ancestral lands before Andrew Jackson forced all the southern tribes out of the Southeast on the Trail of Tears. They saw the writing on the wall, so to speak. They next left Oklahoma before the white man's treaty there was made and broken again. In Texas, we found a third home so as to not accept the white man's charity along with his worthless, stinking treaties."
"Nice history lesson, but I still don't see what it has to do with raising awareness and funds for the reservation families and children."
"They don't want your charity, however heartfelt it may be, Mere. Don't you get it?"
"You don't have to shout!"
He raised his hands as if arrested. "Sony…let's eat."
"I didn't know it was such a touchy subject with you."
"Not me…I'm no reservation Indian, remember? I got off the res a long time ago."
"I'm sorry White America has treated your people so wrongly, Lucas. I wish there was something I could do, that's all."
"Meredyth, no one, least of all this clansman, holds you responsible for the thefts and rapes and lies committed in the past by the U.S. Government and military in the name of Manifest Destiny and assimilation of the aboriginals. So let's leave it at that…and while we're at it, you've got no business feeling guilty in the least for Lauralie Blodgett's becoming a twisted and cold-blooded killer either."
"You saying that maybe I take on too much responsibility on my shoulders?"
"Precisely, yes."
They fell silent for a time, listening to the robins and sparrows circling and darting through the trees outside the kitchen window in what seemed an eternal dance, but was in fact a series of short-lived bursts of energy in a chase of give-and-take, back-and-forth. A Texas raven cried off in the distance, while hummingbirds, tasting of the nectar of oleander bushes, silently hovered about the windows. A mild scent of oleander wafted into them. Meredyth smiled and pointed at the hummingbirds, telling Lucas they had once had a family of hawks visit the cabin and take up residence for two months before they'd disappeared.
Together, they made their way out on the wide screened porch, taking their sandwiches and drinks with them. Here they looked out over the lake to one side, the horse stables to the other. "What shall we do now?" she asked. "Water play or horse play?"
A phone rang somewhere deep in the house. "That sounds like my cell phone," he said. "And I left it upstairs in the bedroom."
"It's most likely mine. I switched it back on when we woke. My secretary at the practice is likely wanting to know when she can begin scheduling patients again."
"So where's your cell?"
"Upstairs alongside yours. But I didn't activate yours again," she lied.
"So not even Sophia knows the phone number to the cabin?"
"Not even Sophia, no, since there is no phone in the house. It's my one sinful indulgence, this place, and I vow it will never be spoiled by TVs, telephones, radios, computers, E-mail, or any other gadgets of labor. If I have to make a call out from here, it's done on my cell."
"You mean to tell me you don't have one TV or radio in the entire house?"
"I thought you knew that from your last visit."
He blew out a lungful of air. "Guess I was having too much fun to notice."
"The only radio is the one in your car, Lucas."
"Hmmm…I see. And you're not curious about what's going on downtown?" he asked. "I mean with the case, any results on the APB on the girl or the car?"