“Does your mother have any pets?” I asked.
Naomi nodded. “A cocker named Spade,” she said. “He’s eleven.”
“According to Lars, some of the residents have pets,” I hinted. “There may be a size restriction. You probably couldn’t get away with bringing along an Irish wolfhound, but I’m sure a cocker spaniel would qualify.”
“Mother won’t go,” Naomi said flatly.
“How do you know that?” I said. “Have you asked her?”
“No, but I know my mother,” Naomi replied. “She’d rather die than have to go live in a place like that.”
Watch out, I wanted to warn Naomi. You’re about to be suckered. But I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut because I’ve learned over the years that when it comes to minding other people’s business, I always wind up getting myself in trouble.
Alaska Air Lines Flight 790 had reached what the pilot called a “comfortable cruising altitude.” That was easy for him to say. He wasn’t jammed into the middle of a three-seat row. About that time the guy in front of me leaned his seat back all the way, crushing both my kneecaps. Is it any wonder I’m not much of a fan of air travel? I don’t know many people over six feet tall who are.
The weight lifter next to the window – the guy whose humongous shoulders overlapped my seat by a good three inches – suddenly needed to get up. Climbing over both me and Mr. Moving Lips, he removed a laptop computer from the overhead compartment and turned it on. I thought he was going to work on something interesting. Instead, he began playing solitaire. The only time he paused was during the couple of minutes it took him to plow his way through his English muffin/scrambled egg sandwich. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he had been any good at solitaire, but he wasn’t. He’d sit there not making moves that I could see and he couldn’t.
I would have gone back to thinking about Naomi, but between the lip-moving reader on one side and the solitaire player on the other, it wasn’t possible. Finally, with my seatmates seemingly preoccupied with their own activities, I opened my own briefcase, took out the Latisha Wall file, and commenced to reread the reports I found there. As soon as I started working, the weight lifter abandoned his solitaire game in favor of engaging me in polite conversation. Rather than let him read over my shoulder, I put the file away.
Guess what he wanted to talk about? Working out. It seems his father was a championship weight lifter in the age fifty-five-to-sixty-five category. Father and son worked out at the same gym, where all the other weight lifters thought the father-and-son act was cool. Since they had bonded so well this way, the weight lifter felt free to tell me that he thought everybody else should do the same thing. And so on and so on. At tedious length. I was tempted to tell him this would be difficult for me since I never knew my father, but even that probably wouldn’t have shut him up.
I was trapped with no means of escape. It reached a point where I would have welcomed a comment from the guy on the other side, but he continued to read his magazine in total, lip-moving concentration.
Eventually – and not nearly soon enough – the pilot announced that we were beginning our gradual descent into Tucson International, which – as far as I could see from my limited middle-seat view – seemed to consist of a vast sea of brown. Brown or not, I was looking forward to landing. That would mean the guy who was crushing my knees would have to put his seat back in the full upright and locked position. I thought my troubles would soon be over. They weren’t. Once I managed to escape from the plane, my life immediately got worse.
Compared to Sea-Tac, Tucson International Airport is small potatoes. I collected my luggage and walked down the car-rental aisle, looking for a counter called Saguaro Discount Rental, the car-rental agency listed on my itinerary. I finally stopped at the Alamo desk and asked one of the women working there.
“That’s pronounced ‘sa-waro,’ “ she told me, rolling her eyes. “It’s Spanish, so the g is pronounced like a w. They’re off-site. You have to call on their courtesy phone. It’s over there on the wall. They’ll send a shuttle to pick you up.”
No matter how you pronounce it, the office and lot for Saguaro Discount Rental was more than a mile from the airport. As soon as I saw their fleet of brightly colored KIAs – all of them last year’s model – I knew that the Washington State Attorney’s penny-pinching travel agent had struck again. My car was a four-cylinder automatic KIA Sportage SUV, a name that sounds a whole lot more sporting and exotic than it is.
I admit to being spoiled. At Seattle PD I often drove vehicles equipped with police pursuit engines. Meanwhile, parked on the P-3 level of the Belltown Terrace garage is my slick guard’s red 928. Even so, I do have some experience at driving four-cylinder vehicles. I spent eight years – the whole time I was in college and four years afterward – driving an old-time VW Beetle, but that was a standard four-speed, not an automatic. My rental Sportage did fine as long as I was driving on flat ground. It was only when I started up an incline, even a gradual one, that it lugged down so far that it seemed I was barely moving. Compared to the rest of the seventy-five-mile-an-hour traffic on the freeway, I wasn’t.
My printed MapQuest directions said it would take me two hours and twelve minutes to get from Tucson to Bisbee. It actually took forty-five minutes longer than that because the road was uphill most of the way. By the time I came chugging up over the mountain pass just north of Bisbee, I was beginning to think I’d never get there. The good news is, moving that slowly I had plenty of time to survey the scenery. I found myself regretting not having brought along a pair of sunglasses, but in the dark and wet of pre-dawn Seattle, sunglasses hadn’t seemed like a pressing necessity.
The mountainous terrain on either side of the highway leading to Bisbee was either reddish brown or gray. The hillsides were dotted with green specks I assumed to be bushes of some kind. Then, as I started up the north side of the Mule Mountains, I realized those bushes were really full-fledged trees after all. They’re not the kind of towering, stately evergreens we have in Washington. No, these starved and stunted trees did have leaves on them, but there was no hint that they were about to change colors or drop off.
Every once in a while, winding along what looked like a dry creek bed, I’d see a stand of much bigger trees that had leaves that were beginning to change, but just barely. I’ve never been much of a botanist, but I found this astonishing. Back home in Seattle, many of the trees that line the avenues were already mostly bare.
I drove through a tunnel – the Mule Mountain Tunnel, I believe it’s called – near the top of that range of mountains. When I emerged from the tunnel, the town of Bisbee lay nestled in a red-hued canyon that twisted down the other side. Seeing the town for the first time gave me an odd sensation. It seemed so isolated, as though the entire rest of the world were on the far side of those mountains. The Bisbee side – with a brilliant-blue sky above it – was a world unto itself, like a self-sufficient castle with a wide moat of desert all around it.
That’s when it struck me. This place – this small, isolated mining town – had been Anne Corley’s world when she was a young, innocent girl. This was where she had grown up and where she had first run off the rails. And that one thought about Anne Corley was enough to wipe all concerns about Naomi Pepper and her aging mother right out of my head.
I had arrived in town shortly after one on Saturday, probably far too early to check in to my hotel. Considering the car I was driving, I was under no delusions that I had been booked into luxury accommodations. And so, since I wasn’t on vacation anyway, I followed the next set of incredibly confusing directions that were supposed to take me to a place called the Cochise County Justice Center.