“And the Navajo thing?” I asked. I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around that part of the story. “Marie’s mother was Navajo…was Andre’s mother, too?”
“Grandmother, I think. Like I said, I don’t pay a huge amount of attention. There are people in the family who keep track of all the genealogy, but I’m not one of them.”
“But after what Jeremiah did — ”
“More than a hundred years ago, Angela.” He sighed and turned his head into the wind, too-long hair whipping in the brisk breeze, gleaming like the wings of the ravens that made northern Arizona their home. In that moment, I wondered what he would look like if he let his hair grow all the way out, let it be straight and silky and free, like that of his own long-ago Navajo forebears. “There’s bad blood, no doubt about it, but the Navajo aren’t one huge monolithic tribe. They all have their own hopes and dreams and fears. Maybe a pretty girl looked at her future on the reservation and decided being with a Wilcox wasn’t so bad. After all, if you’re not married to the primus, you’ll probably have a pretty good life. Also, if that girl has any kind of magical gifts, she’s better off away from the res. The Navajo don’t have the same view of witchcraft that we do, and shun it, apart from the powers of their shamans. Whereas we’d welcome someone like that. Why do you think Marie is so powerful? It’s not all Wilcox blood.”
For a minute I didn’t say anything, just stood there and let the cool water lap at my feet and the wind pull at my own hair. My thoughts were as chaotic and complex as the patterns of the waves breaking a few yards away from us. “Did he ever come back?” I asked abruptly.
“Who? Andre? No. He just…disappeared.”
Twenty-two years was a long time to be disappeared. Maybe he’d met the same fate as my mother, wiped out on a highway in a traffic accident. Or maybe he’d just picked up stakes and moved across the country, although that wasn’t as easy for someone with witch blood as it was for the world’s civilian population. You had to find someone willing to take you in.
Willing to take you in…. I blinked, thinking of what Connor had told me on the drive here, of how Maya de la Paz had allowed some of the refugees from Southern California to settle in her territory. Maybe my long-lost father’s lie had become truth. Maybe Andre Wilcox had never gone back to Flagstaff because he’d ended up in Scottsdale or Tempe or Mesa, somewhere on de la Paz land.
“Do you think he could have gone to take refuge with the de la Paz clan?”
“I have no idea.” Connor frowned at me, obviously attempting to follow my logic. “What makes you think that?”
“Because you said a while ago Maya had taken in some of the Southern California witches. Why not my father?”
“Aside from the fact that he’s a Wilcox?” A shake of the head, followed by, “Maya’s a generous soul, but I think she might have drawn the line there.”
“Well, it’s worth asking, isn’t it? We’ll be going through Phoenix on the way home, so what could it hurt to go see her and ask?”
I could tell by his expression that Connor wasn’t buying it but didn’t want to get into an argument with me. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt. Just — just don’t get your hopes up, okay?”
Too late for that. True, there were many other places he could have gone, but it seemed logical to start with the closest and easiest first. Well, relatively close, anyway. It was still a good five hours or more to Phoenix, depending on the traffic.
“I won’t,” I told him. “But we’d better get back to the hotel and get packed up. I don’t know when rush hour starts around here, but the sooner we’re on the road, the better chance we have of avoiding it.”
“And that’s it?” he asked. “We haven’t even been here twenty-four hours. Isn’t there anything else you want to do, anyone else you might want to see?”
“No,” I said firmly, staring across the beach to Linda Sanderson’s house. “I’ve found out everything I needed to know.”
7
Rocky Road
Lucas had made our reservation for three nights, so the clerk at the front desk looked a little puzzled when we appeared and said we wanted to check out. “Is there anything wrong with the accommodations?” she inquired, a worried little frown pulling at her expertly plucked brows.
“No, not at all,” I said at once. “The room was perfect. I hope we can come back someday. But we just had some urgent family business come up, so — ”