Arches Enemy. Scott Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ out to be a real headache for you. Seems it could cost you down the line—it could cost your bottom line—is all I’m saying.”

      Chuck spread his hands on either side of his glass. “I’ve been doing this kind of work for a lot of years, Clarence. Most of my contracts have had ancestral findings associated with them in one way or another, which means I’ve been making the bulk of my living for more than twenty years digging up and cataloguing all the stuff left behind by the ancient ones who lived all around here a thousand years ago. Now, finally, I have the chance to offer a little payback to them and to their modern-day descendants.” He turned his palms up. “So that’s what I’m going to do.”

      Clarence popped the stolen nuts in his mouth and raised his pint to Chuck. “Respect, man,” he said. He chewed and swallowed. “That’s why I call you jefe, jefe. ’Cause you’re da boss.”

      Chuck considered Clarence’s warning as he watched Sanford slog back up the muddy trail from the Devil’s Garden parking lot.

      The chief ranger disappeared between the low walls of sandstone flanking the sides of the trail fifty yards north of the trailhead, returning to the collapsed arch.

      Chuck sighed and said to Janelle beside him, “I guess it’s time.”

      Taking out his phone, he dialed Sheila’s number. Since moving from Los Angeles to Moab six months ago and reestablishing contact with Chuck after years of silence, Sheila had answered a number of his calls. This morning, however, he reached her voicemail.

      A few bars of classical harp music played. The music died away and Sheila’s voice, soft and muted like the music that preceded it, invited “all seekers of truly enlightened energy” to describe to her their “desires for fulfillment, whether personal, emotional, or—” her tone grew husky “—physical.”

      Chuck gulped. Sanford’s familiarity with Sheila’s “enlightened energy” voicemail pitch meant that since arriving in Moab in the spring, her marketing efforts had reached all the way to park headquarters.

      Her voice fell to a whisper as she ended her recorded message with the promise to provide “complete satisfaction” to all those who reached out to her.

      “It’s me,” Chuck said when the message ended. “Chuck. We’re all settled at Devil’s Garden.” No need to mention that they’d been settled in the park for three days now. “I’ve got a break in my work schedule and wanted to see if today might be a good time for us to swing by and say hello.”

      He ended the call and drummed his phone against his leg. Why hadn’t she answered? Did she really know the woman crushed beneath the arch, as Sanford had indicated?

      “Okay, the wheels are in motion,” he said to Janelle.

      She eyed his phone as he tapped it against his thigh. “You’re nervous.”

      He returned his phone to his pocket. “I should be. It’s been a long time.”

      “Which is all her fault, you say.”

      “All those years, she never called. She wouldn’t return my calls, either. She wanted to be forgotten after she moved to California, and she wanted to forget me, too, as near as I could tell.”

      “Until she came to Moab, just a couple hours’ drive from Durango …”

      “… and all of a sudden she decided to pick up the phone and dial my number. That was the first chance I’d had to tell her about you and the girls.”

      “She’s been in touch pretty regularly since.”

      “Almost every week,” Chuck agreed. “She’s been asking me all sorts of questions about you and Carm and Rosie the last few months—which is what makes me nervous about your meeting her.”

      “The girls and I will be fine. It’s you I’m worried about.”

      “She has this way about her.”

      “Which you’ve brought up, what, a million times now?”

      “She uses people. She used me.” Chuck blinked, angered at the tears welling suddenly in his eyes. He was a grown man, for Christ’s sake, in his mid-forties.

      Janelle gave his arm a squeeze. “I get it,” she said gently. “She had responsibilities to you as your mother that you don’t feel she kept.”

      “She didn’t keep them.”

      “I know what you’ve told me, Chuck. She drank, she partied, she slept around. I get that she was troubled. But you’ve said she always kept a roof over your head.”

      “Depends on what you call a roof. A boyfriend’s dumpy apartment, a crappy motel room, a falling-down trailer.”

      Janelle’s lips curled upward. “You’ve got us living in a trailer right now ourselves.”

      “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

      “I was a single mom, too.”

      He pulled her close. “I know that,” he said in her ear, his lips to her hair. He leaned back, his hands at her waist. “But you stood by your girls. When they came along, you made them the center of your world. You were, you are, the best mom Carm and Rosie could ever have asked for. Sheila, on the other hand, barely acknowledged my existence the whole time I was growing up. She made it clear I was a mistake, like I was some sort of penalty she was paying. She never beat me, I’ll grant her that. But that’s about the best I can say for her.”

      “People can change, Chuck.”

      “You were a good mom from day one, and you’ve stayed a good mom.”

      “I’m not talking about me.”

      “I know.”

      “It’s been five years since you saw her last, right? I remember you telling me she came through Durango the year before you and I met.”

      “She called out of the blue, looking for a place to stay. I happened to be in town between contracts.”

      “You told me you got her a motel room.”

      “If I had let her stay with me, she’d probably still be there on my couch.”

      Janelle smiled as she looked up at him. “At least, if that was the case, the girls and I would have gotten to know her long before now.”

      Chuck tightened his grip on Janelle’s waist and rocked her back and forth. “I admit it sounds like she may finally be getting her act together. And I know it’s time you met her.”

      “I guess we can thank Sanford for making it happen.”

      He dropped his hands from her sides. “Speaking of whom, I’d like to go check on the site, seeing’s how we’ve got a little time since Sheila didn’t answer.”

      Janelle’s dark brows drew together. “You honestly think the collapsed arch and your contract might be related somehow?”

      “I СКАЧАТЬ