Rio Grande Wedding Part 3

Then a lot. The cough doubled her over for a minute, and she felt tiny stabbing pains in her chest. It wouldn't go away. It was always worse in the nighttime. The people at the clinic said it was asthma, and had given her a little thing to breathe with. She took it out of her pocket and used it, and it helped a little. The lady behind the counter frowned a little and asked her if she was sick.

"I'm okay," Josefina a.s.sured her. "Just asthma."

She couldn't carry the food all the way back to the orchard, so she took a chance and found a dark corner behind the dairy bar to sit and eat. n.o.body bothered her. n.o.body probably even saw her, except a little dog with raggedy furwho was so polite about begging that she saved the last bit of hot dog, then the last bite of ice cream, and gave them both to him. She was happy when he followed her.

He was warm next to her when she went back to the deserted part of the orchard where she'd slept the night before. And she didn't feel so scared with him sleeping along her stomach. Once he growled softly, and that made her happiest of all. He'd wake her up barking if the bad men came back.

In the morning, surelyTio would find her.

Molly knew she wasn't a good liar. There had never been much need for subterfuge in her life, after all, and it took practice to be good at something. Still, she thought as she approached the cafe, she needed a good excuse to ask the questions she had to ask, so she made up a story.

The Navajo Cafe had started as a dark little hole in the wall catering to bus pa.s.sengers who had a meal stop inVallejos. Over the years, the restaurant had doubled,then tripled its original size. A cowbell over the door rang as Molly went in, and she waved to several friendly faces as she made her way to the counter. "Hi, Maureen," she said to the waitress as she sat down. "Coffee, please."

"Special today is black-bean burritos," Maureen said, turning over a heavy ceramic cup.

"Soup is corn chowder."

"Soup, please." She glanced around casually. "Not too busy tonight, is it?" Across the room, she saw a familiar face, bent over a stack of papers, his blond hair tousled, as if he'd had his hands in it again. His regulation tie was loose. "Take it to my brother's table," she said, swinging off the stool.

"Will do, hon."

Josh, absorbed in whatever paperwork he had stacked up, didn't notice her, and for a minute, Molly was torn over the reality of what she was about to do. He looked exhausted, and that made her feel guilty. Unfortunately, she also knew he brought a lot of exhaustion on himself. Three years younger than she, twenty-seven to her thirty, he was honorable and loving, but also dogmatic and hard to live with sometimes. She kept hoping he'd grow into a little compa.s.sion, but it hadn't happened yet. He followed the straight and narrow, and expected the rest of the world to follow suit.

"Hi, stranger," she said, sliding into the booth.

He looked up, taking a minute to focus on her face. "Molly!" He scrambled to move some of the forms to give her room. "What's going on? Everything okay?"

"Fine." She helped him stack some of the papers into a pile. "Why are you still working so late?"

He put his hand in his hair, leaving it sticking up on top. "Can't seem to catch up."

Molly reached over the table and smoothed the pointy lock back down. "You should be home with Lynette by now."

"I can't get anything done there. I called her." His blue eyes lowered. "I feel bad, but the kids are just wired at night."

Molly almost offered to baby-sit so they could go out alone together this weekend,then remembered the secret asleep in her back room. "Hang in there, kiddo," she said.

"They'll be asking for the keys to the car any minute."

He tossed the pencil down. "Don't remind me."

"Have you eaten?"

"Nah. Just wanted to spend an hour away from all the distractions to see if I could make some progress here." He gestured toward the pile in front of him. "This is paperwork from that raid last night. I don't know why the h.e.l.l we had to process every" He gave her a rueful smile. "Never mind."

"I'll buy you some supper," she said, carefully not looking at the papers. Whatever she discovered had to be pure gossip between siblings. "A steak?"

"I can't let you do that, Molly."

"Don't be silly." He was supporting a family of four on the mediocre salary of a deputy sheriff. Molly not only had her job at the hospital as a floor nurse, but a sizable insurance settlement from Tim's death. He'd left her, if not rich, at least moderately well-to-do.

But she still had to bully her brother into taking so much as a quarter from her. When Maureen brought her coffee, Molly said, "Bring Josh theNew Yorksteak,please , and put it on my check."

"Got it." She took out her green ticket book and scribbled the order.

When the waitress left, Molly decided to get business out of the way first. "I'm glad to see you here, actually. I was going to call you later. Maybe you'll know about a little girl."

He frowned. "What?"

Molly took a deep breath, wondering what people did with their eyes when they weren't lying. The edges of her mouth felt stiff, but she said, "There was a little girl who used to come see me every morning, from the orchards."

He still looked puzzled. "What about her?"

"Did you guys pick her up last night? She didn't come to see me this morning." The lie was feeling a little less troublesome now. In her imagination, Molly could see a skinny eight-year-old with long black hair sitting in her garden. "I'm worried about her."

"You should know better than to get attached to those kids."

She nodded, smiling apologetically. "I know, but she's pretty cute. About eight. Her name is Josefina." She stirred her coffee. "Ring any bells?"

And just before he answered, Molly panicked. What if he asked what she looked like? She had no idea. Her heart actually pinched, and a ripple of radiating pain spread out from the spot.

Oh, she was not good at this.

"There were some kids," Josh said. "But none that age group. There were two really little, and some young teens, but that's it." He shook his head in disgust. "Somebody tipped them off. Probably old Wiley himself."

Molly nodded noncommittally. "Well, if you hear anything about this little girl, let me know, will you?"

"She's probably two hundred miles away by now, Moll."

"You're right." Glad to have that done, she changed the subject. "So, how do you like that new truck?"

She called her doctor at home from a pay phone at the grocery store. "Hi, Dr. Harris,"

she said. "I have that sore throat again. Would you phone in a prescription for me?"

"Nasty infection, isn't it? My wife couldn't kick it for weeks, either." He agreed to phone it into the pharmacy at Judson's right away.

The pharmacist was solicitous when he filled the scrip, and again Molly felt a little guilty. But not too guilty. Her patient would be in trouble without the antibiotics, and theconsequences of letting him go to the authorities was higher than he ought to pay. A white lie. Just a small one.

Still, it bothered her. People trusted her.

There wasn't anything else she could do tonight to find the mysterious Josefina, and she took the bottle of pills back home.

It had grown dark, and as she drove toward the house on the narrow, two-lane blacktop that wound toward her land, she instinctively slowed down. At a particularly nasty curve, she pa.s.sed thedescanso , a white painted cross and wreath that marked the spot where Willie Chacon had died in his '62 Buick seven years ago, and slowed down again.

Her driveway was not paved. It cut through uncultivated fields thick with sage, the gravel holding up, but the red clay beneath it beginning to waffle and pothole.

Looking at the wide bowl of black sky, at the depth of the darkness, she wondered about the little girl, where she was, what she was doing tonight. It broke her heart to imagine how terrified an eight-year-old would be on such a dark night. "Keep her safe,"

she prayed silently, turning off the engine of her car.

The house looked exactly the same as it had when she left it. A lamp burned in the back room where she'd left her patient, and the light cast a faint wash of gold over thespirea bushes at the side of the house. A ripple of nervousness, of the vastness of her actions, suddenly struck her, and she sat where she was, a little stunned with it.

Was she nuts? Taking a stranger, however wounded, into her home, with no protection to speak of, isolated out here on her one hundred acres where no one could hear her scream if he turned out to be a ma.s.s murderer? For one moment, the fanciful side of her imagination conjured up a gory picture of herself slaughtered in her bed, a statistic for theten o'clocknews. On the screen of her mind, a grave-faced anchorman said somberly, "In other news tonight, a young woman was found murdered in a small town in northernNew Mexicothis morning..."