Finding Their Son (2 page)

Mom’s in love. Again. His name is Devon, but she calls him D. Short for divine. He isn’t. Not even close. I don’t know why she can’t see what a creep he is. Even the old black woman agrees he’s trouble.

Char licked the tip of her finger to flip ahead in rapid succession. She didn’t need to read what came next. To this day, she couldn’t be around a bonfire without picturing the entire scene unfold in front of her eyes. The
Hustler
magazines. The trash can. The flames that jumped far higher than she’d expected after she tossed in a match.

She skimmed to the bottom of the page.

Devon moved out this morning. Mom’s not talking to me. She stopped crying long enough to say it was
all my fault.

Char sighed. Her troubled relationship with her mother had gotten more troubled after that. Pam might have been more supportive if she hadn’t been so upset about the smoke damage. Only the old black woman took Char’s side.

What kind of man leaves his dirty magazines around for his girlfriend’s daughter to find? A man who got hisself a problem. That’s who.

The sudden and unexpected tinkle of the bell over the door made Char slam the notebook closed. Her heart rate spiked guiltily. “Hello,” she called out, looking left and right, trying to spot the new arrival. “Welcome.”

A man.

She rose on her toes.

The man from the road.

She looked over her shoulder. Sure enough, the solitary figure who had last been standing near the highway was gone.

Hmm. She didn’t believe in prejudging people—a guy driving a Lexus might be just as dangerous as a fellow on foot—but it suddenly struck her that she was alone and help was several minutes away.

She reached under the counter to reassure herself that her pellet gun was there.

“May I help you?” she asked, pleased by the relative calmness in her voice.

The man stumbled slightly, nearly knocking over a rack of greeting cards by the door. “No…um…no, thanks.”

She let go of her journal and reached for the portable phone. She had 9–1-1 on speed dial, just in case.

He edged a bit farther into the shop, veering to the left toward the book display. She looked at the monitor again.
Damn
. A rainbow arch of multisize dream catchers obscured her view of him, but what she saw confirmed her earlier impression—no backpack and not enough warm clothes.

Maybe the guy’s ride stood him up, she thought. Her heart rate started to return to normal. Being stranded on the road didn’t make him a bad person. Generally she’d learned to trust her instincts where strangers were concerned, and at the moment her radar didn’t feel threatened.

“There’s coffee and cookies on a table near where those Navajo rugs are hanging,” she told him.

His low grunt brought to mind her grandfather, a loud,
vitriolic figure who passed away shortly after Char and her mother moved to Pierre. Unfortunately Char’s sainted grandmother soon followed.

Char followed the man’s slow meandering on the screen. She’d scoffed when her friend Jenna first broached the idea of setting up in-store surveillance. But after Jenna’s family’s business, the Mystery Spot, got vandalized, Char decided to invest in a scaled-down version of the same system. Now the unit didn’t seem so frivolous.

When she saw him stop beside the refreshment table, she went back to her reading. Helping a traveler in need was supposed to be good karma—something she could always use.

Keeping one ear primed for anything suspicious, she quickly flipped ahead. Her mother’s anger had turned to depression, evidenced by her nightly visits to the bar.

I hid Mom’s car keys. She knew it, but she didn’t get mad or nothing. Instead she smiled all pretty and sweet and said, “The weather is so nice I believe I’ll walk to Frenchie’s.” She didn’t get arrested for drunk driving but she wound up with a big cut on her knee from falling down. Aunt Pam made me give Mom back her keys.

Char used to wish that her life was more like the Brady Bunch, but following the Hollywood gossip magazines was a good way to see that acting in a fake perfect life didn’t mean your real life was guaranteed to turn out well. And there were so many things you had not an ounce of control over. Like the size of your breasts.

Pam took me shopping for school clothes ’cause Mom was hung over. I went up another bra size. Pam said I inherited my grandma’s bosom. Great. Just what I need. A crazy voice in my head
and
big boobs. Life sucks.

Char didn’t actually remember writing any of the diatribes she could point out from her freshman year, but she had a deep abiding sympathy for the girl who felt ugly, different and odd. Big hair had been the rage in Pierre at that time, and, unfortunately, Char’s hair didn’t have the first clue how to behave.

As for her figure…She skimmed down the page until she found what she was looking for.

Are they ever going to stop growing? I asked Pam about getting surgery and she yelled at me. Said I needed to accept who I was and not try so hard to fit someone else’s idea of who I should be. She didn’t even listen when I told her Becky Halverson said someone drew a picture of me on the bathroom door in the boys’ locker room. When Bec told me what they were doing when they looked at it, I nearly puked.

She slammed the journal shut. She didn’t know why that still got to her. Was it unpleasant being the butt of a joke? Of course. But that had been seventeen years ago.
Get over it,
she told herself. She had a business to run. Balloons to fill.

Instead of walking to the helium tank, she leaned as far to the left as possible, trying to spot her lurker. He’d left
the refreshment table and was now hanging around the display of authentic reproductions of early Native American hunting spears. Carl Tanninger, a rancher down by Custer, had researched arrowhead production and made each piece by hand.

Given their value—and price tags—she’d tethered them to the display with a steel gauge wire locking system. She’d never felt more relieved.

“Um…pretty cold out there today, isn’t it?” she asked, feebly attempting to be social. She never pestered customers but most were a bit friendlier than this guy.

His back to her, he asked, “Bathroom?”

“Push your way through the Navajo rugs. The restroom is on your right,” she said. Was she thrilled about sending him out of sight? No, but even if he wandered into the teepee there wasn’t anything of great value to steal. Mostly summer clothes and kids’ things.

Kids. Megan’s balloons.

She abandoned her notebook on the counter and hurried to the upright tank where she’d set out the balloons she planned to fill. Gift balloons hardly fit the theme of her store, but she was a retailer first and balloons were good for business. Guys would come in for a balloon bouquet for their girlfriends and wind up buying a nice piece of jewelry, too.

Tinker Bell, first
. Char was dying to see the special balloon-within-a-balloon inflated.

She smiled as she watched the little blond fairy take shape. She’d ordered it a month ago for Megan’s actual day of birth, but so much had been happening family-wise, Mac had postponed the party by a couple of weeks. Once it was filled to capacity, she clamped the end and attached
the wrapped gift that had come with it. Soon, Megan and Tinker Bell would be wearing matching necklaces.

She attached one of the ribbons she already had cut and released the balloon. It bobbled to the end of its tether, but didn’t soar away thanks to the extra weight of the present. Still, Char carefully secured the ribbon to the handle of the tank’s cart while she filled the next balloon.

She’d managed to inflate all the character balloons—party favors for Megan’s friends—and was starting on the solid colors when her customer returned. At first, she thought he was going to head her way, but he took one glance at the balloons and fled toward the pottery.

Fine. Pretty hard to shoplift pottery.

As she filled the last balloon—an extra-large fuchsia one, she noticed her notebook had flopped open. Even from a few steps away, she could see her doodles. Her name and Eli’s paired in flowery hearts. Line after line of Eli Robideaux and Char Jones. Or rather, Mrs. Char Robideaux. Did every dumb girl suffering from unrequited love doodle the object of her daydream’s name, over and over?

The old black woman had warned her not to pin her heart on the first cute boy who looked her way. But Char had been caught up in something she hadn’t expected and apparently had no control over.

She knew what Kat would call it:
swoo
. Kat Petroski, Char’s friend who had fallen for the wrong swoo twice, defined it as that indefinable element that makes a certain girl gaga over a certain guy. Love was different, Kat said. That came later…if you were lucky. Swoo was first strike. Wham, bam, damn.

That was how it had been for Char when she first met Eli—an upper classman jock heartthrob who didn’t know
she was alive. That fine spring day of her freshman year when she literally bumped into him in the hallway of school, every stupid thing she’d ever seen in a movie or read in a book about love, lust and sex hit her square in the chest.

Being a shy outsider, she’d adored him from afar until opportunity—God? Luck? Fate?—had intervened. What happened next was written in black and white on the pages of her journal.

A hissing sound made her fumble slightly as she remembered to cut off the flow of helium before the balloon exploded. Impatient with herself for zoning out, she quickly applied the clamp. Her fingers felt thick and out of touch as she attempted to attach the last remaining ribbon.

“Damn,” she muttered the same moment the stranger entered her peripheral vision. He’d probably been standing close by for a second or two, but she’d been so involved in her trip down memory lane she’d overlooked his presence.

“Oh. Hello. Sorry. What can I do for you?”

The hood of his thermal-weave sweatshirt had fallen away and was scrunched around his neck. Chin down, his gaze seemed fixed on something inside the lighted display that separated them. His straight black hair—oily and clumped together in spots as if he’d been wearing a stocking cap at some point—was her first clue to his ethnicity. His skin tone was several shades darker than Char’s. That could have been attributed to the sun or the cold wind, but his cheekbones cried Native American. Char guessed him to be her age or a little bit older. Overall, he had an I-clean-up-better-than-I-look-at-the-moment way about him.

He brought his hand up and coughed into his fist. Some
thing in the gesture set all sorts of alarms off in her mind, rendering her fingers useless. The balloon she was holding slipped from her grasp. She made a wild reach to grab it, but the brush of air merely encouraged it to go up, until it reached the ceiling, where it bounced along until becoming trapped in the acrylic dome skylight.

The stranger turned slightly to follow the pink escape artist as it made its brave drive for freedom. In profile, she could see his scrubby black beard. It contained a hint of silver.

The fluttering sensation in her chest grew.

“Hey, do I know—” Her words got stuck in her throat the instant his gaze met hers. Those eyes. She would never in a million years forget those eyes.

Yep, chickadee, that’s him,
the voice in her head chortled.
Eli Robideaux. The source of all your moanin’ and groanin’ and weepin’ and carryin’ on all these years.

And, if I’m not mistaken, he’s here to rob you.

“I
DON’T WANT TO DO THIS
, ma’am, but, um…give me all the cash you got and I won’t…I won’t hurt you.”

Eli had been plotting the best way to rob this place ever since he spotted the stupid-looking teepee from the road. The guy who’d picked him up near Hermosa—not something Eli would have done if he’d been a white guy looking at a scruffy, stinky red man—was only going as far as the Sentinel Pass turnoff.

“Hurt me?” the clerk with the odd hairdo repeated.

“I could tie you up if that would help. After you give me the money, I mean.” He wasn’t making sense. Why would he? He wasn’t a felon. Usually he was the one arresting people like him.

The thought aggravated the pounding in his head. “Now. I need the money now.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you robbing me? Haven’t you caused me enough heartache over the years?”

He shook his head, as if that might rearrange her words in a way that would make sense. Was he supposed to know her? She had to be a good five or six years younger than him. Maybe he’d arrested her once.

“For the record, I’m not robbing you. I’ll sign an IOU for whoever owns this place. He’s Indian, right? He’ll understand.”

“She’s not Native American,” she said, her tone primly politically correct. “She’s me. And I don’t understand.”

Eli swore under his breath. “That old bastard lied to me,” he said, swiping at the bead of sweat on his brow. Fever. He’d assumed it was the residual effect of the sweat lodge or his body’s way of purging all the toxins he’d put into it. But now he was beginning to suspect his uncle of spiking the water Joseph had slipped him before guiding Eli on the “going up on the hill” aspect of his journey.

His goddamn uncle had tricked him. Eli could only remember bits and pieces of what happened after the sweat lodge, but when he’d woken up this morning in a crappy sleeping bag in the middle of nowhere, fully dressed but shivering so hard his teeth were clattering, Eli knew he’d been the victim of his own stupidity. Whatever made him trust his father’s brother—an alcoholic who claimed to hear the voice of the Great Spirit—proved how messed up he was.

“I knew it,” he cried, not caring that he was probably scaring the shit out of the woman across from him. He pounded his fist on the glass countertop, making the book she’d been reading bounce off. It landed at his feet, along with half a dozen cheap plastic trinkets. The kind of crap every tourist trap in the state carried. Fake Indian stuff.

That felt like another betrayal, and what little control he still possessed evaporated. He grabbed a wooden stick that was leaning against the counter and swung it overhead. He wasn’t planning to hurt the woman but he sure as hell was
going to do some damage. He’d take his frustration out on the made-in-China junk peddled for a worthless society that didn’t honor vows or truth or—

“Drop the talking stick or I’ll shoot.”

He’d forgotten the woman with the strange hair was still there. When he spotted the gun in her hand, he froze.

“You don’t recognize me, do you, Eli?”

She knew him?
Shit
.

“I’m not surprised. It’s been a long time. Pierre High. I was a freshman when you were a senior.”

He’d gone to Pierre instead of a reservation school because of his basketball ability. His father’s dream had been for Eli to parlay that skill into a full ride at a Big-10 college until…yeah, well, until everything changed.

“What kind of gun is that?”

“A Lugar. Hollow point bullets. The kind that will chop you up inside at close range. So put the talking stick down. Libby would kill me if you broke it.”

He lowered his hands, glancing at the gnarled hunk of wood. He knew what a talking stick was and normally would have shown someone’s spiritual icons more consideration. At the moment, he was tempted to break the limb over his knee. The only thing stopping him was the fear he’d embarrass himself by not being strong enough to crack it. “Who’s Libby?”

“None of your business,” she answered saucily. “That’s right. Set it down carefully. Now, leave before I have to tie you up and call the police.”

He didn’t believe her…about the gun. It wasn’t a Lugar. And he didn’t think she’d shoot him. Women weren’t as quick to pull the trigger as men were when faced with the same option. Fourteen years with the tribal police had
taught him that. But the way his luck was running at the moment the last thing he should do was test the odds.

“I…Who are you? What’s wrong with your hair?”

She put one hand to her head self-consciously. “Nothing. I like color. It’s my statement.”

“It says you’re odd.”

“You got that right, but I’m not the one trying to rob a store in the middle of the day. With no weapon and no getaway car. There’s odd and then there’s dumb.”

Dumb. Stupid. Insane.
His life had been turned upside down and inside out from the moment his wife tossed him the results of a DNA test and left. Right, wrong. Good, honorable. Truth, reality. Son, not-your-son. None of the words made sense anymore. Which was how Joseph got to him. He’d played on Eli’s weakness and sent him off on this foolish journey to nowhere.

Wrong. The minute he’d spotted this place, he recalled Joseph’s last words to him, muttered in that strange, singsong tone his uncle used when he was trying to act like a medicine man. “Follow the spirit path to the big white teepee in the shadow of
Paha Sapa
.” The Black Hills.

Eli had thumbed a ride from a guy headed north. He’d planned to track down his uncle, who supposedly had a lady friend living near Sturgis. He’d completely blanked out the part about the white teepee until the guy pulled into the parking lot, telling him, “This is as far north as I’m going.” The guy had been blathering for miles about meeting his fiancée at a little girl’s birthday party in Sentinel Pass. Like Eli gave a shit about anybody else’s kids. His were probably messed up for life and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

Eli had managed to mumble some sort of “Thanks”
before getting out of the truck. Normally he had better manners. He would have given the guy his card and offered to return the favor if the man was ever stranded in the middle of the state. Unfortunately that was before Eli’s life turned upside down and he grabbed at the damn, spiritual straws his uncle had held out. As if the answer to his problems could be revealed in a hellhole filled with hot rocks and sweaty men at a ranch somewhere on the Pine Ridge reservation.

For a moment there, in the blackness, he thought he’d glimpsed something—someone—that might hold the answer to how his life had gotten so far off track. But the elusive image had fluttered out of sight, like a wild bird, and he’d agreed to give the quest one more try—on a bitterly cold hilltop in the Badlands, where Eli spent one of the worst nights of his life.

He’d awoken that morning, curled in a ball, shivering like a drug addict in need of a fix. No uncle. No car. No money or credit cards in his billfold. Bankrupt in every sense of the word. So desperate he’d stooped to taking what he needed—even though he planned to pay it back someday. And the person keeping him from going on with his journey was someone who knew him.

He looked at her again. There was something familiar about her. She reminded him of the little bird in his sweat-lodge-slash-hallucinogenic induced dream.

“Who did you say you are?”

“Charlene Jones. My aunt was a nurse-practitioner in Pierre. The last time I saw you your cousin, Robert, dropped you off at her place after your bachelor party. You were getting married the next day.”

He touched his finger to a little scar mostly hidden by his eyebrow. “Your aunt saved my butt.”

She made a scoffing sound. “My aunt wasn’t there. She was working at the hospital that night. I stitched your cut. You were my first—and only—patient.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why was I the only one?”

She looked at the book that had fallen on the floor, then made an impatient gesture with the gun. “Just go. Now. My assistant will be here in a—”

From the corner of his eye, he spotted a movement on the screen of the surveillance monitor. A white compact pulled to a stop, and a young woman got out.

Crap. Someone else to witness his fall from grace. He reacted without thinking. He vaulted across the counter and quickly, efficiently disarmed her so she couldn’t shoot him in the back as he made his getaway. He was about to dash for the exit that he’d scoped out earlier when the little bell over the door tinkled.

“Goodbye again, Eli.”

He froze. He knew that voice. He’d heard it before. But where? He turned and looked at her hard. A hint of memory filtered through the haze in his mind. A gawky girl with pretty, intelligent eyes who hid her voluptuous body beneath funky clothes, her wild hair tucked beneath a crocheted beret.

“Boobs?” he croaked.

Charlene “Boobs” Jones had been a popular source of fantasy for his pals on the basketball team. Eli had had his hands full with Bobbi by that time, but he was honest enough to admit that he might have imagined Boobs naked,
once or twice, when he was making out with his less-generously endowed girlfriend and eventual wife.

Her initial look of surprise turned to hurt. “Oh, sure,
that
you remember. Why am I surprised?”

He didn’t recall anything else about her. Why would he? She’d been several years behind him. Her family was odd—to say the least. Plus, she belonged to a past he’d mostly managed to forget. High school went from a stepping stone in a life filled with promise to the high point in a life filled with reality. His dad’s hopes and dreams of glory for his only son wound up turning to dust as gritty and choking as dried gumbo—the quicksandlike clay that turned a normal road into a mire of no return. A metaphor that fit his life all too well.

He didn’t need any more memories dogging his heels. This whole stupid vision quest was about exorcising the past so he could start over. Start new. Start right. “Well, listen, Boo—um…Charlene, I’m really sorry about this, but I need to borrow some money. Whatever you can spare. I’ll pay you back. I promise.”

He put out his hand, intending to return the gun and take whatever handout she might offer in exchange.

A sudden, shrill, heart-stopping scream filled the store.

“Damn.” He didn’t need a degree in law enforcement to know how incriminating this looked to the young woman standing a few feet away, swaying as if she might pass out.

Charlene let out a low groan and shook her head from side to side. He was probably going to go to jail, which meant he wouldn’t be able to complete the task his uncle had laid out for him. According to Joseph, if Eli didn’t do this right, his kids—his two daughters and the son he’d
loved and raised as his own—would never know the man he might have been.

Boobs, er, Charlene suddenly grabbed his shoulders and gave him a little shake. “Go. Out the back door. My car is unlocked, but the key’s in my purse so don’t think about stealing it. I’ll handle Pia.”

“I’m not a car thief.”

“Good,” she muttered. “Here. Take these.” She pried the gun out of his hand—a freakin’ pellet gun, he realized—and exchanged it for a wad of pink ribbons with balloons attached. “Lose even one and I’ll shoot you myself. Now, go.”

He was a good cop. He knew how to take orders. He’d never ridden herd on a bouquet of floating balloons, but he’d figure it out as he went. Pretty much the way he did everything in life.

C
HAR KNEW THERE WAS NO
such thing as coincidence. She’d witnessed enough strange and unbelievable touches of grace in her life and in the lives of her friends to know that Eli Robideaux hadn’t stumbled into her store by accident. He was here for a reason, just as he’d landed in her hands that night so many years earlier.

She didn’t know what his presence meant or foretold, but he obviously needed her help. And she couldn’t say no, any more than she’d been able to avoid what happened between them that night in Pierre.

And you need him, too, chickadee.

She ignored the voice.

“Pia,” she said, returning the unloaded pellet gun to its hiding spot. “Deep breaths. Slow and steady. That wasn’t what you think.”

“He…but…you…I saw…He’s an Indian,” Pia whispered.

Char didn’t have the time or inclination to deal with this young woman’s probably deeply ingrained bigotry. Native American tribes and whites in the Black Hills had a long, turbulent history, and while Char did her best to help break down preconceived notions and assumptions, she couldn’t dictate her personnel’s fears—irrational though they might be.

“Eli’s an old friend and I was showing him my gun when you came in.”

She hurried around the counter, pausing to grab the folding step stool from the corner. “Here,” she said, pushing the two-foot ladder into Pia’s hands. “One of Megan’s balloons got away. Would you mind catching it while I get my things together?”

Pia hesitated. “You know him? For sure? He looked like a homeless person.”

Char snatched her purse from under the cash register and double-checked to make sure her keys were inside.

“We were in school together,” Char said, stooping to pick up her journal, which had fallen on the wrong side of the counter when Eli threw his little hissy fit. She stuffed it in her purse and cleared the distance between them. “Eli was Homecoming King when I was a freshman.”

Pia didn’t look impressed but she did open the stool, march up the steps and grab the wayward balloon’s lifeline. She leaned down to hand it to Char. “Here.”

Pia, who was in her early twenties and worked at Native Arts solely to flirt with male travelers and earn enough money to fund her shoe addiction, glanced toward the door
once more. “Are you sure you don’t want me to call the cops?”

“He
is
a cop, Pia. On the reservation.” The last she’d heard anyway. “He’s on some kind of spiritual quest. I’m going to give him a lift into town after I deliver the balloons to Megan’s party. You can handle things here, right?”