Devil’s Claw

“Did he say what kind of trouble?”

“He said Mom had a boyfriend at work and that the two of them were doing stuff together-secret stuff. Like spies or something. And then he told me he was going to talk to Mother about it and get her to quit. That’s when he gave me the diskette to keep for him. He said if Mother knew about it that she’d really be mad at him. He said once he talked to her, he’d take it back and get rid of it so nobody else would find it.

“As soon as she took it away from me that night while we were parked outside the Y, I should have known right then Dad was dead, that she’d already killed him. And that’s why she did it, too. She killed him because she thought he was going to tell on her, but he never would have. Mother was beautiful, and my dad loved her no matter what she did. I think he loved her even more than he loved me. It’s the same thing with Grandma Yates-she loved Mom better, too. The only people who ever really loved me were Sister Celeste; my ballet teacher, Mrs. Quick; and Grandma Bagwell, my great-grandmother, although now that I know she gave Mother a devil’s claw…” Without warning, Lucy’s voice faded away into nothing.

Joa

“We drove out to Cochise Stronghold. It was night when we got there, and cold, too. My mother cried the whole way there, and she kept saying stuff I couldn’t understand. It sounded like she was mad at everybody. She told me to lie down and go to sleep. I kept peeking out, though. The whole time we were driving there, I thought we were going to Grandma Yates’ place. Instead, we went straight to the entrance of Cochise Stronghold.

“When Mother opened the door to get out of the car, she told me to go to sleep. But I didn’t. I saw everything she did. First she pulled loose a bunch of rocks. She had a little plastic bowl along with her, the kind she used to take along to work when she packed a lunch. First she put something shiny into the bowl. That must have been the gun-a tiny gun. Then she added the diskette and closed the bowl’s lid. She put the bowl in among the rocks, then she covered it. When she came back to the car, I pretended to be asleep. Since we were so close to Grandma’s house, I thought we’d go there and say hello and maybe have something to eat, but we didn’t.

“Mother drove us straight back to Tucson. On the way, I fell asleep for real. I don’t remember going home, and when we got there, she must have carried me into the house. When I woke up the next morning, the house was full of police, and Dad was sitting in the chair in the living room. He was dead.”

Lucy sighed and shuddered, as though the effort of relating the story had been too much for her.

“What happened next?”

“Some man-a detective, maybe-came to the house and asked me a whole bunch of questions. He kept asking me if my father ever hit my mother. And I said, ”I never saw him hit her.“ Then he asked if Dad ever hit me, and I told him no. I kept waiting for him to ask me if my mother hit people or if she was a spy and did bad stuff, but nobody ever did. Then it was like they forgot all about me and nobody bothered to ask me any more questions. I figured out later that was because Mother confessed. She told them she did it. After that, a woman came to talk to me and told me they were going to send me to live with my grandmother and my great-grandmother.

“After I got there, I tried to tell a few people about what Dad said my mother had been doing, but no one would listen. Not even Grandma Bagwell. She and Grandma Yates both said my father was dead because he was a bad man and because he had beaten up my mother. I told them they were wrong about that-that it was my mother who was bad. I tried telling them the same thing Dad had told me about Mother getting into trouble at work. I thought if there was a trial, lawyers would ask me questions and I would have to tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

“But there wasn’t any trial. My mother said she shot Dad because she was tired of him beating her up. Afterward she said she was scared. She picked me up from ballet and then drove all over half the night trying to decide what to do. She said she didn’t know what happened to the gun-that she had thrown it away somewhere. But that wasn’t true, either, because I found the gun in the bowl along with the diskette.”

“And when was that?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy answered with a shrug. “A long time later. I was only a little kid then. I turned eight the next summer. Grandma Yates didn’t like me wandering around in the hills by myself, but Grandma Bagwell did. She said it was neat. The fact that I liked to be out scouting by myself proved I was a ”real‘ Apache, just like her grandfather Eskiminzin.

“Anyway, one day I went to the rock pile all by myself. I dug up the bowl, found the diskette, and took it home. I wanted it because Dad had given it to me to take care of. I wanted to know what was on it. I kept it hidden in another plastic bowl-one of Grandma Yates’ this time. I hid the bowl out in the shed because I didn’t want Grandma Yates to find it when she was cleaning my room. I knew it was from a computer, and I kept waiting for a chance to look at it. Finally, when I got to high school, there was a computer in the library. I tried looking at it there, but it must have been the wrong program or something. Or maybe the disk got wrecked when it was in plastic all those years. There wasn’t anything there.”

“That’s not true,” Joa

Lucy swung around to face Joa

“I don’t know. It’s encrypted.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means most people can’t read it because it’s written in a top-secret code-a government code. As far as we can tell, it seems to contain command and control codes for the military.”

Lucy’s mouth dropped open and her eyes widened. “Does that mean my father was right the whole time? My mother really was a spy?”

Joa

“See there?” Lucy was almost shouting now. “I told you so. I was glad when they sent Mother to prison, and I’m glad, too, that she’s dead now. Unlike my dad, she deserved what she got. I loved my father, Sheriff Brady. I hated it when people thought he had been mean to her, when they thought he was the kind of man who would beat us-beat both of us-when he didn’t-not once, not ever.”

“Let’s go back to the other night for a moment,” Joa

“Why?” Lucy asked.

“I need you to finish telling me what happened. It’s the only way we’re going to find out who killed your mother.”

“I don’t care who killed my mother. I already told you,” Lucy said fiercely. “I’m glad she’s dead. What does it matter who killed her?”

“Lucy,” Joa

Lucy nodded. “So?”

“That means no one ever knew about it-no one in authority, that is. Whoever investigated that case always assumed that the motive behind your father’s murder was related to what was going on between your parents. Domestic violence is a handy catch-all, especially when your father was already on record for being violent.”

“You mean that thing that happened back while he was in the army?” Lucy asked.

Joa

“That was my mother’s fault, too,” Lucy declared. “She and my dad were in a bar together. Like I said, that was before my father quit drinking. He told me he got mad because Mother was flirting with some other guy. Dad hit him and knocked him out. He didn’t find out until later that the guy was a superior officer. They made Dad leave the army over that, but he said he didn’t mind. He said by then the army was driving him crazy anyway.”