Darkmoon(74)

“What is it?” I asked.

A pause, during which he reached out and cupped my cheek, ran those long, sensitive artist’s fingers of his along my jaw. “He just heard back from the private investigator.

“He found your father.”





13





On the Reservation





No big surprise that I had a hard time sleeping that night. The P.I. had done enough poking around that eventually he found someone who admitted that an Andre Bedonie was living a few miles outside Cameron. I’d asked Connor where Cameron was, and he said, “It’s a wide spot in the road about fifty miles due north of Flagstaff. There’s a trading post — kind of a tourist trap, but they have good food.”

At the time I’d thought that was a good sign. Even if we drove out there and it was the wrong Andre Bedonie, or it turned out no one with that name lived there at all, we could at least get a decent meal to assuage our disappointment.

Now, though, I lay in the unfamiliar bed and stared at the unfamiliar ceiling, hearing the exotic night sounds of the forest outside. In fact, the only thing around me that was familiar was Connor, sleeping soundly, breaths too light to quite be called snores escaping from his open mouth. I wanted to reach out, snuggle into him, but he needed his rest, since he’d been slinging boxes with the rest of the cousins that afternoon.

I was tired but not sleepy, my mind roiling with the news of this latest development. My father, only fifty miles away. For how long? How many years had he lived there, tucked away on Navajo lands? Ever since he got back from California?

From what his mother had said — I still couldn’t think of her as my grandmother — it sounded as if that was exactly what he’d done. Gone up there to hide. What else could you call it, when he’d discarded his father’s last name and taken that of his maternal grandmother’s family? Clearly he’d taken some pains to hide who he was, where he had come from.

I had no idea how he’d react when I came knocking at his door….



* * *



Although I’d had grand plans for getting up early and driving out to Cameron around nine, my body had different ideas. Between the moving stress and the sex and those tiny little people inside me who needed every spare ounce of energy I had, I crashed hard that night, and didn’t even wake up until it was almost eight-thirty. And then there was hardly any food in the house, and of course here we couldn’t just stroll out the back door and be in downtown Flagstaff, with plenty of places to get something to eat. We ended up showering and getting dressed, and then finally making it to breakfast at the country club around ten-thirty. Thank goodness it was a Sunday, a day when people liked to brunch, so we didn’t need to worry about it being too late to get some actual breakfast food.

How they knew we were members, I really didn’t know — some seamless behind-the-scenes magic of their own, I supposed. But no one challenged us as we gave our names, and after a short wait we were shown to a table next to the window, where we could look down at a putting green and the calm blue of a manmade lake.

“So are you going to take up golf?” I inquired with a grin, after watching Connor gaze out the window at a group taking their turns on the green.

“God, no,” he said with such vehemence that I knew he didn’t find my question amusing in the slightest. “That’s Lucas’ thing, not mine. Can you really imagine me in khakis and a polo shirt?”

“Um, no,” I replied. Since we were coming here to eat, he’d actually tucked his shirt in, but Connor wasn’t exactly what you’d call buttoned-down when it came to his clothes. Jeans all the time, long-sleeved henleys in the winter, short-sleeved ones in the summer. In fact, the only time I’d ever seen him wear actual trousers was at Damon’s funeral.

A waiter came up and asked what we’d like, and I ordered a glass of cranberry juice and Connor some mineral water, since he knew better than to drink any coffee around me. Afterward he said, “So, from here it’ll take us about an hour to get out to Cameron. It might be kind of busy, since it’s the weekend and that’s one route you can take to get to the Grand Canyon.”

“Have you been there a lot? To Cameron, I mean.”

“Couple of times when I was driving someplace else. It’s not exactly what you’d call a destination.” He hesitated, fingers playing nervously with the edge of the napkin in his lap. “It’s Navajo territory, so we need to be respectful and understand that they’re allowing us to be on their land.”

“I get it,” I said, although I wasn’t sure I did, not completely. The Navajo nation truly was another country embedded within our own.