The Secret of Everything (10 page)

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fter the priest went inside, Tessa wandered around the garden at the church, making notes. The harsh early-afternoon sun didn’t lend itself to photos, but she’d come back another time. She had planned to also explore the interior of the church, but when she peeked in, a handful of people were gathered in a circle, praying, and she didn’t want to intrude.

Exiting the garden, she wandered around the outside of the walls, half expecting to remember something. Although there was something intimately familiar about the hot sun and the smell of the earth, the church itself gave her nothing. Her mother had been a hippie, after all. Why would she have come into town to go to Mass?

In the distance, she spied a man with long dark hair, walking fiercely toward the back of the church. Reminded of the man—“the Coyote Man”—who had radiated such fury at the cantina, she followed him, curious. The smell of his cigarette fouled the air as she came around the corner.

Behind the church, nestled beneath the shade of elm trees that had shed a shower of twigs over the buffalo grass, was a
small graveyard. The man was gone, maybe up the path to the pilgrim site or on a path down toward the river.

She shrugged him off and shot a quick series of the shaded churchyard—very old, judging by the tilt of the headstones. Its picturesque light would appeal to her boss. It would look beautiful in the brochure.

Across the yard, on a park bench next to a chuckling little fountain, was a dark-haired woman and a white cat. Both were skinny, cat and woman, and the angles of the woman’s cheekbones were echoed in the sharpness of the cat’s triangular face. There was grace in their movements, something feline in the angle of the woman’s head, something female and hungrily human in the cat’s acceptance of the long strokes down her back. Around the woman’s wrists were tattoos, and her collarbones stuck out in sharp relief. Tessa took out her camera and focused her lens on the pair.

A press of sorrow sliced through her, and Tessa jerked involuntarily. She lowered the camera, pressed a hand to her heart. Maybe there
were
ghosts around here.

Maybe she didn’t want to bother these two. Or be here right now. She slipped away, around the tree, leaving them alone. She put the camera away in her pack, retied her left tennis shoe, and took out a bottle of water and an open weave hat she adored. Putting it on made her feel more in control, as if she was a tour leader who knew her stuff after all.

From the other direction came a ragged black-and-white dog. She glanced at him, then glanced back, suddenly recognizing him. It was her friend from the restaurant the other night.

“Hey, you,” she said, kneeling. She held out a hand, palm up. He glanced over his shoulder with a worried expression, then came over to her, head down apprehensively, and sniffed her fingers. Tessa murmured to him, running her hands over
his head, down his spine. Each bone was as big as a knuckle. She searched in her pack for food and gave him half of a protein bar. It took him a long time to chew it, but he didn’t give up.

“I have to go now, honey,” she said, and tossed a roll into the forest for him. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do, feed him. But how could she not? He dashed after the roll, white socks flashing. Turning her back, Tessa headed toward the lake. When she looked back after a minute, the dog was gone.

The trail headed up the mountain beneath stands of mixed pine, ponderosa with their long needles and spicy bark, paler spruce, and ordinary red pine. As she walked, Tessa made mental notes about the trail itself—well traveled and tamped down, with exposed rocks and roots in places. It would be a mess after a rain, the earth a deep clay red that would stain everything it touched, but in the worst spots the park service had laid railroad ties. The flora was standard Rocky Mountains at eight thousand feet—mixed in with the pines were yucca and prickly pear, scrub oak and wild raspberries. Another thousand feet of altitude and there would be aspens, but the trail toward the lake split off before it climbed that high.

The air smelled of sunbaked pine needles and freshness. She was alone, in her body, walking. Finally. Her foot was sore, and she made a conscious effort not to limp, but it wasn’t bad. Unused muscle came to life in her thighs and shoulders and glutes, and light sweat broke down her neck and over her chest. The altitude made her breathe a little harder than normal, and the climb got her blood pumping. Suddenly she felt little explosions of endorphins that flooded her with a happiness so fierce she almost wanted to weep.

This was her world. God, she was missing it!

Although Tessa and her father had always spent a fair
amount of time outside, sometimes camping, they’d never done any hiking. Sam preferred the water. And while Tessa had reluctantly learned to swim finally—at a pool, inside, at the YMCA—she had never found any love for the ocean or rivers or lakes. She wasn’t phobic; she just didn’t enjoy swimming that much.

So she’d tended to think of herself as a person without athletic inclinations. She loved reading. She loved movies and television and friends and music and dogs.

In college, she’d fallen for a guy who was an avid hiker and camper, and to spend more time with him, she tagged along, to Lake Tahoe and on trails overlooking the ocean and into the mountains. To her amazement, she found joy in the soft buzz in her legs and hips at the end of a long day of walking, the genial company on the trails, with the boots and packs and the reward of drinking beers with like-minded souls afterward.

Mostly she loved the feeling of being alive under the sky, touching the earth, being wholly herself. Sweating. Walking. Thinking. Admiring. On the trail, she didn’t bring her troubles. There was only room for wind and sky and sun and rain and humming under her breath.

As she did now, on the trail toward the lake above Los Ladrones. A breathy tune. She paused to listen: “Climb Every Mountain.” She laughed.
The Sound of Music
was in the regular rotation, but it was usually the title song.

“Corny, Tessa. Very corny.”

She made it to the lake in just under forty minutes, not a bad time for the distance and climb. It would be quite accessible for nearly anyone in her groups—even those who had not hiked a great deal before. The walk could take an hour up and an hour back down, and they could eat on the sandy shore of the small blue lake.

Nice.

She had expected that there would be more people, but on this side it was deserted. In the distance, on the other shore of the lake, were fishermen and picnickers, who must have driven up from the north end of the mountain. A trail ran around the water, maybe a couple of miles. Tumbles of boulders provided perches for sunning; the beach was flat and clean.

Beautiful. Tessa stood with her hands on her hips, sweating lightly, surveying the scene. Perfect! She could lead the group up the hill, around the lake, stop for a lunch, and walk back down. Most of their tours were more vigorous than that—with hikes of up to fifteen miles in a day, several days in a row—but there were always easy and/or optional days of mellower walks thrown in.

She sat down on a rock right at the waterline and took a long swallow of water from the bottle she carried. As the priest had promised, the views were stunning, postcard cutouts of mountains layering one against the next into the distance, with a long valley between. A river snaked through the valley floor, silvery in the bright afternoon. It must be the Ladrones River, she thought, orienting herself. And there, like a toy village, was the town of Los Ladrones.

Something about it—the colors or the angle, or the mountains, or maybe her dream from the night before—made her think, suddenly and with a piercing longing, of Tasmania. The island lay south of mainland Australia, an underpopulated landscape of mountains and water—equal parts Scotland and Australia and American West—that had captured her imagination completely.

Or, more truthfully, it had been Glenn who captured her. Tasmania was simply the landscape that had spawned him.

How could it sting so much, after two years? How could she,
who had made an art form of footloose, easy connections, have allowed herself to fall so madly, passionately,
blindly
in love? It was embarrassing how much she had loved him, how snivelingly devastated she’d been when he fell in love with a fellow scientist and cleanly, matter-of-factly broke Tessa’s heart in two.

Humiliating how much she
still
sometimes missed him, or at least the life they had created together. Missed Tasmania and a sense of having roots in a place.

“Don’t start, Harlow,” she said aloud, and irritably stripped off her shoes and socks. The scar where they’d had to clean out the infected spider bite was still angry and dark, nearly two solid inches across, in the shape of Texas. She poked the flesh, feeling the tenderness deep within. Not healed yet. After the long walk, it was sore, and tonight she would probably have to soak it before she went to sleep. She thought about sticking it in the lake, but maybe it would be better to avoid that for a while longer.

Time. Things took time to heal.

Taking a towel out of her pack, she stripped off her shirt and lay back on the beach in her sports bra, letting the hot sun sear her eyelids and belly and knees. The buzz of exercise moved in her limbs, and her brain was happily tired, too.

She must have dozed off, because she came awake sometime later to the breath of an animal in her ear. She sat upright, startled. A dog barked a greeting.

Her friend from the first day, the Akita mix, white and fluffy with black-tipped ears.

Again.

“What are you doing here, buddy?” she asked, reaching up to bury her hands in the fur around his neck. “How do you keep finding me? Are you my soul mate?”

He grinned at her, bowing happily before giving a cheery little bark-growl, like Scooby-Doo, then looked back toward the trail. Behind him trooped the three little girls he’d been with yesterday, the older girl looking hot and sweaty and annoyed. Bringing up the rear was a man, obviously their father.

He carried a midsize dog over his shoulder, and he wore no shirt, only a pair of jeans and hiking boots. A blue T-shirt was tucked into his back pocket, swaying like a tail. As he reached the beach, he bent down and tenderly put the old dog on the ground so she could make her pigeon-toed way toward the shade, panting hard but happy.

Tessa noticed that his biceps were ringed with tattoos and a star adorned his inner left wrist. It was only when he raised his head that she realized who it was. Vince. The guy from the restaurant.

Again she was captured by his hair, thick and dark and glossy, and the powerful cage of his ribs. His belly was faintly soft, pale, as if he didn’t go without his shirt very often. “Girls, slow down!” he roared.

Sitting there with the sun pouring down hard on her head, Tessa’s hands got sweaty and her starved libido sat up straight and said,
Okay, hell do
. Hot. Very hot.

Of course he had three little girls, and of course
this
dog was the crotch sniffer, and of course the owlish little creature who’d been so hostile in the plaza now glared at her again.

“He’s
my
dog,” the girl said, tugging on his collar. “Come on, Pedro.”

“Is it okay if I just pet him?” Tessa asked. “I think he likes me.”

“Natalie,” said her father. “Let him go. He’s fine.”

Pedro leaned heavily against Tessa, and she instinctively put
an arm around him. His lungs moved against her side, panting. “You must be his favorite,” Tessa said to appease the little girl.

“No,” she said with a very adult understanding. “He’s
my
favorite.” She wore an unfortunate combination of clothes—a shirt in horizontal stripes that was too small and showed a slice of smooth, plump tummy and a pair of shorts that rode up between her thighs. Her cheeks were flushed. “Our other dog just wants food.”

Tessa nodded. “My dad has three dogs, and one of his is like that. Lives to eat.”

“Three dogs?” Behind her glasses, the little girl’s eyes were the color of blue raspberry syrup. “That’s a lot.”

“It is,” Tessa agreed. “And one of them? Guess how old she is?”

The girl looked at the old dog panting in the shade. “Sasha is fifteen. Older than that?”

Tessa nodded and pointed her thumb at the sky.

“Eighteen?”

“Twenty-three,” Tessa said.

“No way.”

“True story.” Tessa raised her right hand to swear it.

The girl narrowed her eyes. “That’s impossible.”

Vince came up beside his daughter. “Get into your swimsuit, kiddo.” He held out a red one-piece and tilted his head toward the trees. “Nobody will see you over there.”

“I don’t want to go swimming.”

“Nonnegotiable. You want your surprise, don’t you?”

She glared at him from under her eyelashes. “It better be good.” She grabbed the suit and stomped off.

“Hello,” Tessa said, shading her eyes to look up at him. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

“Tessa, right?” He sat down beside her, arms resting on his knees. The tattoo on the right was an elaborate tribal, woven with color.

“That’s right.”

“I’m Vince.”

“
I
remembered.” She scrubbed the dog’s chest. “And this is your crotch sniffer, I guess.”

“Yep. Pedro the wild man.”

“And the girls, all yours?”

He nodded. “Guilty.” Looking in the direction of the trees, he said, “She’s not always a brat. Eight has not been the best year so far.”

“She’s not bratty. Just forthright.”

“Yeah. Just wait.”

He wore no wedding ring, but Tessa asked, “And where is their mother?”

“She’s dead. Three years.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t been expecting that. “I’m sorry.”

He nodded, scratching the dog’s head. “What’d you do to my dog? Give him a love potion? He’s not usually all that friendly.”

“I met him before I met you, actually,” she said, and traced the line of black on the tip of his ears. His eyes were half closed, and he suddenly fell over on his back and turned his belly up to her. She rubbed the silky tummy as she weighed how much to say. “He was chasing a rabbit, just outside of town.”