Michelle Owens kept her eyes lowered and didn't answer. I was outraged. Surely the Ironwood Ranch rumor mill was fully operational, particularly among the counselors. There was no reason to give Burton Joe the benefit of the doubt. He knew good and well whereof he spoke.
"Leave her alone," I snapped. "She's just fine."
I looked around, vainly hoping that Guy Owens would show up and come to his daughter's rescue, but family members weren't encouraged to arrive until a few minutes before the morning counseling sessions began at nine o'clock.
"My, my, we certainly are touchy this morning, aren't we."
"Yes," I replied tersely. "We certainly are. I didn't have much sleep last night and neither did Michelle here, so why don't you bug off and leave us alone."
Burton opened his mouth to say something in return, but just then several more people joined us at our table. They had been part of the expedition that had gone down to see the river, and they were busy speculating about how deep the water was and whether or not we'd have to evacuate some of the cabins if the water came up over the banks.
Under the cover of the table, Michelle Owens reached for my hand and squeezed it. "Thank you," she whispered.
Her gratitude at my small kindness was disconcerting. A forkful of egg and chorizo turned to dry pebbles in my mouth. I was no longer hungry.
"Want to go look at the river?" I asked.
She nodded wordlessly and rose to go, waiting for me beside the door while I took my plate back to the window to be rinsed.
We didn't speak at all as we walked down the muddy path to the Hassayampa. Somehow I got the feeling that there was something Michelle wanted to say to me, but every time she got close to doing it, she drew back, and I didn't force the issue. I couldn't think of any reason for her to confide in me with her problems, and I wasn't about to pry. She seemed to find a certain amount of comfort just being in my presence, and I was content to let it go at that.
When we got to the bank, the river was every bit as spectacular as the other clients had said it was. Off and on during the previous month, I had taken occasional walks along the sandy riverbed without seeing a trace of water, but now four days of rain had transformed it into a rushing, muddy torrent, running from bank to bank, seven or eight feet deep and at least a quarter of a mile wide. I never knew the desert had that much water in it.
Keeping well away from the bank, we stood there for some time watching in dumbstruck silence before Shorty Rojas joined us, shading his eyes against a sudden burst of sunlight as he stared across the raging flood.
"What do you think?" I asked. "Is this as high as it goes?"
He shook his head. "I hear it's still raining up in the mountains," he answered, "and the guy on the radio said it's running about seventy-four thousand cubic feet per second. They're calling it a hundred-year flood."
Michelle Owens looked alarmed. "What does that mean?"
"A flood this bad only happens on an average of every hundred years or so," I explained.
Shorty nodded. "That's what they say," he observed laconically, "but this here's the third one I've seen, so their hundred-year call ain't exactly scientific. I may have to move them horses up to a higher corral." He turned and walked away.
Eventually Michelle and I headed back as well. It was eight-thirty. People would be filtering into the various group-session rooms for the short, early morning mixed group with both clients and family members present. We had just passed Joey's and my cabin when I saw a patrol car go jouncing up the dirt road past the tennis courts. The lights were on. So was the siren.
It almost made me laugh aloud. An hour and a half late and the damn deputy shows up in response to my car prowl call with his lights flashing and siren blaring.
And to think Louise Crenshaw had called me melodramatic.
CHAPTER 4
I went on into the ranch house and hung around by the coffee table in the dining room, expecting at any moment to be summoned into Louise Crenshaw's presence to meet with the deputy, but that didn't happen. The deputy disappeared into thin air. Nobody bothered to come looking for me.
Karen and the kids showed up a few minutes later. Kelly still wasn't speaking to me, which didn't exactly make me feel terrific. She had her mother relay a message to ask me where Joey Rothman was, and I passed along the information that I didn't have the foggiest idea and couldn't care less. On that happy note we all filed into the portable, a semi-permanent, classroom-sized building which was the site of my group's mixed session.
I dreaded the morning's opening Round Robin when the counselors went around the room, calling on each person individually and inquiring after everybody's current state of mind. It was an exercise intended to bring out into the open whatever murky feelings might have surfaced overnight since the last session. During the course of family week, Round Robins often resulted in emotional fire storms.
One thing I had already learned from my three and a half weeks of treatment was that everybody involved, family members and addicts alike, had long since learned to function by putting on as normal an outward appearance as possible while keeping their real feelings buried far beneath the surface. In chemically dependent families, nobody dares say what they really think or feel for fear the entire house of cards will come tumbling down around their ears.
Living through Round Robins, "touching base exercises" as they called them in the Ironwood Ranch lexicon, is often a scary, treacherous process.
That particular morning it was especially so, and not just for me. I glanced around the room. Naturally, Joey Rothman was nowhere in evidence. Kelly, sullen and pouting, sat with her arms crossed staring moodily at the floor. Just because she wasn't speaking to me didn't mean she would have any compunction about letting loose with a full pyroclastic blast in front of the whole group. That unpleasant prospect made me more than a little nervous.
Directly across the open circle from Kelly sat Michelle Owens, still pale, red-eyed, and miserable. On Michelle's other side sat Guy Owens, tight-lipped and explosive, wound tight as a drum and waiting expectantly. Still searching for Joey, he eagerly scanned each new face every time the door opened and closed. I idly wondered if that little twerp of a Burton Joe and his female counterpart would be tough enough to handle the ensuing donnybrook if Joey Rothman was dumb enough to turn up in Group that morning. There were enough people present that Rothman probably wouldn't get hurt too badly, but Guy Owens would scare the living shit out of him. Of that, I was certain.
So while part of me looked forward to the coming confrontation, relishing it, another part of me empathized with Michelle Owens and wondered what would happen to her if her father lit into Rothman and beat the crap out of him. I also worried how Michelle would take it if Kelly happened to mention that her quarrel with me was also about Joey Rothman, the father of Michelle's unborn child. So sitting in that room waiting for things to happen was very much like sitting on a keg of dynamite.
But somewhere along the way, a little of the dynamite was unexpectedly defused. Before the session officially got under way, Nina Davis, Louise Crenshaw's personal secretary, hurried up to where Michelle and Guy Owens were sitting, said something to them in urgent undertones, and led them from the room. As the door closed behind them, I let out an audible sigh of relief. Unfortunately, Burton Joe heard it. As soon as the Round Robin started, he called on me. First.
"I heard you mention at breakfast that you hadn't slept well last night, Beau. Is there any specific problem you'd like to discuss with the group?"
Like hell I was going to discuss it with the whole group. "Not really," I replied as nonchalantly as possible. "I was waiting up to talk with Joey, but he never came in."