Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [21]
As Erik labored up the mountain toward Finger Rock, he dodged other hikers by steering clear of the main trail. He struck off on his own, heading for one of the steeper but less-traveled canyons. Once, crossing a ravine, he smelled a distinctly musky odor and knew, without seeing them, that a herd of javelina must be resting in a nearby patch of mesquite and manzanita. Unless startled or threatened, the peccaries—mostly nocturnal, boarlike creatures with coarse black-and-silver fur—weren’t dangerous, but Erik was more than happy to go out of his way to avoid them. Twice he saw coyotes disappear into the underbrush, and once he narrowly avoided stepping on a rattlesnake sunning itself in an open space between rocks.
As the temperature warmed, Erik sat on a rock ledge, sipped water, mopped sweat from his brow, and watched a pair of A-10s circle lazily over the valley before settling in to land at Davis Monthan. The pilots knew just where they were going. Erik had no such delusions.
Tucson had always been home to him. His grandmother had raised him here. His mother had been a girl when Grandma Johnson brought her daughter and her disabled World War II vet husband to Tucson so he could be cared for at the VA hospital. But both of Erik’s grandparents were gone now. So was his mother. As for his father? Erik had no idea where he was or whether the man was alive or dead. Erik still had a few friends in town—grade school and high school buddies who had grown up here and had never left. But with no remaining family connections tying him to Tucson, and without his job, Erik would need to find some other place to live and work. Looking over the city-filled desert below him, he felt a clutch in his gut. He loved this place and didn’t want to leave. Would he be like Grandma when she had moved away from Lake Superior’s Isle Royale—leave and never return?
One night when Erik was five or six, after Grandma came home from her job as a checker at Safeway, Erik had asked her about that while they ate supper. Through the years he had heard her tell countless stories about her childhood on Isle Royale. To Erik it always sounded like a magic, idyllic place—one he wanted to see with his own eyes.
“Couldn’t we go back there sometime?” he asked. “Just to visit?”
“Oh, no,” Grandma said. A wistful cloud of sadness wafted across her face. “It’s different now—a national park—nothing at all like it used to be. No one I knew still lives there.”
“But if it’s a park, couldn’t we go look at it?” Erik had insisted. “I could see where you used to play on the rocks and pick berries.”
Grandma had put down her fork, reached over, and pulled him to her. “No,” she said. “Sometimes you have to leave the past in the past. Otherwise it hurts too much.”
Hunkered down on the flank of the mountain, Erik LaGrange could see how that might be true for him, too. Once he left Tucson, he wouldn’t be coming back. If he didn’t burn all his bridges, Gayle Stryker was sure to do it for him.
She had cut him out of the herd at a big-donor alumni function where, as a lowly junior-grade University of Arizona fund-raiser adrift in a sea of movers and shakers, Erik LaGrange had been keeping a suitably low profile.
“So who are you?” she had demanded, walking up to him with a drink in one bejeweled hand and with her other hand resting provocatively on a curvaceous hip. “I suppose you’re the son of somebody important,” she added with an ironic smile.
Some of the U of A’s most well-heeled graduates were milling about La Paloma’s glitzy ballroom. In Tucson, men seldom fought their way into tuxes, but the University of Arizona’s Alumni Association’s President’s Ball was a notable exception. Tuxes were out in force and bolo ties banished. Among the sparkling collection of women