Stealing Fire Read online

  Helen turned and looked at Iris, really taking her in. Helen showed us one slate-stormy face.

  “Before I head to the set,” she said, “is there a phone here I could use?”

  I gave Iris a look like if you talk again, I will have a heart attack, and she didn’t make one sound.

  “Honey,” I said to her, “why don’t you make sure Grandfather’s drinking enough water for that cold? His chest sounds terrible.”

  Iris turned, waved good-bye over her shoulder, and headed in a direction that was not near our room. I had no idea where she was going.

  “Right over here, to Mr. Goulding’s office,” I said to Helen. “I’m sure he’ll let you use the phone.”

  “I’ll leave a few dollars for the call.”

  “That’s considerate of you.”

  She stood in the doorway of Harry’s office, and so did I. I waited for her to make a call. She waited for me to leave. There was no way in the world I was going to let that woman out of my sight, and no way I would leave her alone in Harry’s office. I wouldn’t leave anyone alone, but Helen? Sure not.

  “May I have some privacy, please?”

  “I’m overstepping my bounds by letting you in Mr. Goulding’s office. We have a working relationship and we’re friends. I can’t let you lock yourself up in his office.”

  “Seems rather stodgy.”

  “You can drive to another phone. There’s one about twenty-five miles away, a pay phone, if privacy is truly important.”

  She ran that through her brain.

  “This will do. Thank you.”

  I was never one of those guys who could close their eyes and count the clicks and decipher the phone number, but I do have good ears. I’d listen while acting preoccupied. I took down a book and leaned against the farthest wall.

  She muffled her hand around the receiver. Her words were absolutely unintelligible. She didn’t say much, and what I did hear, I didn’t understand.

  She hung up the phone, and I put the book back on Harry’s shelf. The storm had passed—whoever she’d spoken to had taken care of that. She was nonchalant, breezy, and light. Not a care in the world. It was a new, sunny day for Helen.

  “Everything okay at Taliesin?”

  She looked puzzled. “What? Oh, no, that was a personal call,” she said. “You know what? I’m just going to make a little vacation out of this and enjoy the landscape, take some pictures, go for a few walks, see a few movie people.”

  “No photos of the stars.”

  “I understand.”

  I stood on my toes to see where she was going. She walked toward the largest tent, the one with two security guards, and disappeared inside. Helen came out with Finnerty and sat on a rock with him just to the left of the camera. Apparently, his willingness to carry luggage had won her heart … or it was something else.

  The sun was streaming on the stone faces behind Goulding’s. I walked outside and called Iris’s name. I heard not a sound but autumn’s last breath teasing the tamarisks.

  Forty-six

  Then I saw her. My relief was a carnival balloon flying toward the clouds. Iris ran down the back steps from Mike Goulding’s kitchen. She pulled me into the shade of sandstone, more monumental than time, and kissed me long and hard.

  “Did you hear that?” she said.

  “Hear what?”

  “Helen on the phone.”

  “It was impossible. Her hand was squeezed around the mouthpiece so hard I don’t know how the operator heard her.”

  “Oh, God, Yazzie! You do that, and it turns your voice into a miniature megaphone, you know, the words focused into the receiver.”

  “Iris, don’t get carried away, okay?”

  “She called Daddy.”

  “What?”

  “She called her father,” Iris said, “Mr. Fine.”

  “What in the world?”

  “Seems she feels a dilemma coming on, and dear old Dad is on his way, muy pronto.”

  “I wonder what … Wait. How do you know this?”

  “The extension up in Mike’s kitchen. Yellow, made especially for her. Remember she and Harry got tired of running up and down the stairs when the trading post phone rings at night?”

  “Iris.”

  “I know!” She was practically jumping out of her sandals, she was so excited. “Did you tell the Wrights about Payton? I missed the first part of Helen’s conversation.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Because of his lifestyle, Mrs. Wright was bereft but not entirely surprised. She thought he was having a fling or gambling in a Vegas casino.”

  “Is that what we should call the afterlife now? The Big Casino in the Sky?”

  “Let’s hope we don’t end up there.”

  “Get serious. It’s all coming together.”

  I wasn’t going to let her drink coffee for about three years. She could wind herself up more than any person I’d ever met.

  “What are you thinking?” she said.

  “I am trying to reorganize my brain,” I said.

  “If Daddy Dear leaves now, he can hole up in Flagstaff and get up here by midafternoon tomorrow.”

  “That’s what I’d do,” I said.

  “You want to intercept him there?”

  I wished I thought she was kidding. I know her—she wasn’t. “Absolutely not. You’re already too acquainted with the cops in Flagstaff,” I said. “Let me think a minute.”

  “We could get there before he does.”

  “Iris, I want him on home ground. My home ground. He’s the key to this—I feel it—and I’m strongest here.”

  “You going to tell Mr. Ford?”

  “If I tell him, he’ll send out cars looking for Fine, and we’ll never get to the bottom of this. If I don’t tell him, he’ll be madder than hell.”

  “And?”

  “He’s been mad before, and he can bite my head off if he wants. But he’ll get over it.”

  I walked Iris back to our room, and Grandpa was gone. I told her to bolt up. He’d left a note saying he’d started to keep an eye on the ginger-haired guard Finnerty, but then he ran into a man named Mr. Wopsock. He was walking around, talking with him about this and that.

  That was fine. I hadn’t had a chance to tell Grandfather about Wopsock’s cockamamie idea, and I’d just as soon let Mose explode on him than me. I had enough going on.

  Iris was settled in, and promised she would stay that way.

  I helped the Wrights get ready for a nap or a solid sleep, whatever they needed, and told them to bolt the doors. To open up to nobody but me.

  Mrs. Wright was back to eyeing nails at me. I’d stopped taking it personally. She was riled about more things than one, and I was just in the way of her mad. Nothing personal about it. If she ever spoke to me again, I’d tell her I understood.

  I’d brought an extra quilt from our room, one that I thought was particularly fine. Butterflies were stitched together from curtains that I remembered hanging in Mike’s kitchen when I was a kid. I spotted a few fabrics sewn into the wings from our house, too. The quilt was filled with good dreams—I knew that, and I told them so. Mrs. Wright relaxed a little. She needed sweet dreams and plenty of them. That’s what I thought.

  I had two calls to make. The first was to our Santa Fe house. I learned that, yes, the PI was still on duty. In the course of two days our mothers had fed him and babied him to the gills. I hoped he wasn’t getting so comfortable he’d forgotten his duties. I hoped he’d want to go home someday.

  I asked Frieda to stick him on the phone. I said a few words to him, sharp. He called me “sir” twice, and then I spoke to my mother. I told her to stop fussing over him. She could baby the dog, but that was it. She reminded me that they’d soon have a real baby to fuss over. This had not slipped my mind. It was in the forefront of every move I had made since Iris had given me the news. Specifically? Since my grandfather had explained to me how and why a rabbit had given his life to determine that we had a child percolating.


  When I finished making my calls, I got back to our room and slipped into bed with Iris. Grandpa was already in bed, snoring. Iris and I listened to the night birds. Soon their songs would fill the air, somewhere to the south, for the winter. We love birdsong. Our legs wrapped around each other until we couldn’t tell which body belonged to who.

  “Hey, you kids. I already told you. Any fooling around, you warn me and I’ll stick the pillow over my head.”

  “I’m not fooling around with my wife while you’re in the room. Besides, she’s expecting. Jeez!”

  “Yazzie,” Iris said patiently, “people don’t have to, you know, have to stop doing it because the woman is going to have a baby.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Grandpa stuck the pillow over his head, but I could hear him laughing through the goose feathers and pillow slip.

  Forty-seven

  “Even when he is cold sober, I don’t trust the man.”

  That was Grandpa coming in first thing the next morning, before I’d had time to rub one brain cell against the other, and he was grumping.

  “Are we talking about the Irishman again?” I’d asked him to keep an eye on the guy yesterday.

  “They think they’re better than the rest of us,” he said.

  “This coming from one of God’s chosen people?”

  Grandpa harrumphed.

  “For God’s sake, you don’t need to like him, just watch him.”

  “I have been,” he said. “The man is a damned bore.”

  “He’s doing a job. Probably feels humiliated around you—ever think of that? You said unkind things about his tribe, and you tricked him when you were drinking together.”

  “That’s true. I probably wouldn’t like me much if I was him, either.”

  “I am amazed. Grandpa, as I said, Finnerty is on duty. He’s not allowed to be colorful.”

  “I liked that young man, Colin, they had here last year. Remember? The one Iris had a crush on before you two got together. He was always good company when he was off duty.”

  “There was no crush. Anyway, he’s dead. Only time Finnerty was off duty around you was when you were twitting him.”

  “True.”

  “I have a question for you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “While you are here indulging my prejudice, where is your wife?”

  My mind did a 360. “There are so many things going on—”

  “That you can’t hold them all in your head. Very Navajo, Yazzie.”

  “Oh, stop.”

  I was trying to yank my jeans on so fast that it took twice as long as usual. Grandpa handed me a denim shirt that buttoned up the front. “You look a little worse for the wear. I brought enough clean clothes to last. Our tribe, you know, some of us are tailors.”

  “Are you done?”

  “I doubt it,” he said.

  “I’m setting off to find Iris. Then I’ve got to get over to the Wrights’ cabin and check on them.”

  “How did Iris get out without either one of us hearing her?” Grandpa said.

  “Small, hardly makes a peep.”

  “Good thing she’s never had a mind to fool around behind your back,” he said. “I told you I probably wasn’t done razzing you. You’re so easy.”

  I took the stairs in three leaps. First to the movie set. There was Iris, hanging around the edges with her sketchpad. I went over to her, she jumped nervously, and I asked her to stay put. She was doing what she loves—drawing pictures of the crew—and doing what Mr. Ford loves—not bothering the movie stars and staying quiet.

  Iris had her colored pastels carefully spread before her. She and I, we’re both kind of slobs, except for two things. She keeps her art supplies in perfect order. When she wants to pick up a blue, she doesn’t want to rustle through her colors. She wants her dark blue next to her middle blue, and they have names I can’t remember. I keep my work notes in perfect order. I don’t take them in a way that makes sense while I’m working. I’d miss something while I was dotting i’s. But when it’s over I spend a day taking meticulous notes. I want a notebook to hand to the railroad, to my bosses. I also want to keep notes so that in twenty years, if I’m still working this kind of job, I can look back and see if I can use anything for a new case. Iris thinks I should write a book someday. I can’t imagine ever being old enough to want to sit at a desk all day, no thanks. Plus, my handwriting is terrible and my typing is worse.

  I sat down and kissed her on the cheek, still sunny pink and red with the last of summer. “Iris, I’ve got to go take care of the Wrights. You be okay?”

  Her energy was in low gear. She was dreamlike. “I just need to draw … everything … We’ve been pretending that I didn’t see that a couple of days ago. I need to relax.”

  “Yes. You do.”

  She raised her face to me. She was naked in her honesty. “Everything is good, Yazzie. It will all be fine.”

  I shuddered. I can’t tell you how many soldiers I saw in the infirmary whose last words were very similar, whose faces wore that dreamy look. It was as if they were reassuring the living it was okay for them to go on, that things would be okay here without them. I can tell you one thing—my world would not be okay if Iris wasn’t fully herself and with me.

  When I came back to the set, I’d have the Wrights with me. There were plenty of folding chairs around. They could be themselves—eccentric gems—and it would be interesting to see who was the bigger star, Wayne or Wright. Wayne’s cronies were used to him, but they’d never met Wright.

  Oddly, the filming of The Fountainhead was going on, too, and stories flew about Ayn Rand and this old genius, Wright. The movie was scheduled for release next year. There was talk about Cooper and Patricia Neal. Talk about Wright as Rand’s model for the movie. I’d already heard him rail about that once, so I hoped no one brought it up.

  When I got to their little cottage, I knocked on the door. The bolt slid open.

  “Everything okay in here?”

  Neither of them said a word. “What?”

  Olgivanna looked washed out. “Mr. Wright and I … The news of Payton’s death is beginning to feel real.”

  “Yes, the young man on the train with you. It’s a tragedy. Very handsome.”

  “And smart, when he got down to business,” Wright said. “Mother, I think you even fell for him a little.”

  “You’re my husband.” She took on a tone that was less stern than was her normal. “But in my younger days, maybe I would have found him attractive.”

  He patted her hand. “And no one would blame you.”

  “He certainly was not,” she said, “husband material. He was strictly a good-time man.”

  I said, “Have you told Helen?” I waited for the shoe to drop. They looked at me as if I’d just fallen in from another planet.

  “We talked about it with her this morning,” said Mr. Wright. “She was there, but she didn’t see who…”

  Mrs. Wright said, “She held his body. He was in love with her. At least that’s what he said.”

  “And it turns out two campers found his body,” Wright said. “Terrible for them, too.”

  “I don’t know what to say.” And I didn’t.

  “I think the girl had an idea that, somehow, things would come together if she let him sow enough wild oats.”

  “She must be heartbroken.”

  “More than that. She said she was going to her cottage to lie down, terrible migraine. Frank walked her over and gave her some aspirin.”

  They looked at each other, wanting to say more, not wanting to say more. Olgivanna squeezed her husband’s hand.

  My mind was screaming one thing. Who did it? And they were talking about everything but.

  “They had a very explosive relationship. One day yelling at each other, sounding like two cats. Next day the cold-shoulder routine. Next day they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.”

  “Who killed him?” I said.

  Mr
s. Wright said, “I told them it would be easier to work it out if they’d made a commitment to each other.”

  “I suggested the same thing,” said Mr. Wright. “Their spats and making up never interfered with their work. He was good. She was brilliant. They were a solid team, able to put all else aside.”

  What was wrong with these people? I couldn’t help raising my voice. “Who did it?”

  “Please don’t ask again,” said Wright. “We don’t know.”

  Okay. “So, why didn’t they get married?”

  Wright said, “Her father.” The two words fell like anvils. “No one crosses Mr. Fine, and he was against it.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Payton was an orphan, basically, but he was from old money, went to Yale. Hoity-toity, had a trust fund, but it wasn’t a bottomless pit.”

  “Sounds pretty close to most fathers’ dream.”

  “You’d think,” Wright said, “but Payton was an Episcopalian, and she was Jewish. Marriage was never going to happen, not if Helen wanted to keep her father.”

  Wright stood up and paced the cabin floor, each board complaining under his steps. I wanted to leave, but I needed information.

  “Religion!” he said. “Can you imagine anything sillier? How do we raise the children? Which holiday do we celebrate? Will we spend eternity together? Raise the children with love and they’ll find the belief that nurtures their spirit. Celebrate every holiday, and make up a few, too. As for eternity? Eternity happens right now, it happens all the time, and it continues to happen.”

  “My husband, I’m sure, told you he is a Druid.”

  “He did.”

  “He believes, actually, we believe, that time is like…”

  “Time is like a band, like a ring on your finger. It is circular and happens in a forever loop,” I said.

  “How did you know that?”

  “There’s a lot of Indians believe that—all different tribes.”

  “We Celts, I’ve always thought,” Wright said, “are the Indian people of Europe.”

  Silence filled the room like a fourth person.

  “Mr. Wright,” I said, “where is Payton’s body?” It was a crude thing to ask, but necessary.

  “His body … They found his body near Flagstaff. Just out in the open, exposed to the elements. His ID was in his wallet. He … he was difficult to recognize,” he said. “Impossible to recognize. But his wallet and keys were tossed to the side.”