Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [59]
While he waited for PeeWee Segura to show up, Brian called home as well. “I’m still on that case,” he told Kath when she answered. “It’s just starting to heat up. No telling when I’ll be home.”
As an experienced officer for the Border Patrol, Kath Fellows knew all about the vagaries of law enforcement. “Fair enough,” she told him. “I won’t wait up.”
Thirteen
Andrea Tashquinth climbed into Brandon’s Suburban and shut the door. “I don’t know why Mother’s doing this,” she said. “Bringing it up after all this time won’t do any good.”
“Your mother’s looking for closure,” Brandon told her.
“Closure?” Andrea repeated bitterly. “What’s the point? Roseanne died, and the cops always thought my father did it. They never arrested him. Nobody ever proved it, but it wrecked Daddy’s life. People talked about him behind his back. He knew it. We all did.” As she spoke, Andrea Tashquinth had been staring down at her lap. Now she looked up at Brandon defiantly.
“Mother told Sam—”
“Sam?” Brandon interrupted.
“My husband. He’s the one who gave Mother a ride into town yesterday.”
Brandon nodded, remembering the invisible son-in-law who had waited patiently outside their Gates Pass home for several long hours the previous day.
“Mother told him,” Andrea resumed, “that you’re doing this for free. I can’t believe that’s true. Mother doesn’t have much money, Mr. Walker. She won’t be able to pay you anything.”
“As I told her yesterday, Ms. Tashquinth, your mother doesn’t have to pay. Neither do you. TLC offers its services free to people like her. We take on old homicide cases and try to solve them. There’s no charge—no financial charge, that is—but there is a cost,” he added.
Andrea’s dark eyes narrowed. “What’s that?” she demanded.
“The cost is in pain for you, your mother, and for everyone else connected to your sister—the very real pain of bringing it up again. You may think you’ve forgotten all about it,” he added, “but once you allow yourselves to remember, it’ll be as real as if it happened yesterday.”
Suddenly, amazingly, Andrea Tashquinth began to sob. “I know,” she said. “It already is. I think about it every day because…” she added, “it’s all my fault.”
The story came out then in fits and starts. “I was almost two years older than Roseanne,” Andrea said. “When I went to first grade, there weren’t many jobs on the reservation and our parents were both migrant workers. They went away for months at a time. Whenever they were gone—to California or Washington or Oregon—Roseanne and I stayed at home with our grandmother—our father’s mother—in Ak Chin.”
“Arroyo Mouth,” Brandon Walker responded in English.
Andrea cast him a sidelong glance. She wasn’t accustomed to Mil-gahn who spoke Tohono O’odham. Once again, just as it had with Andrea’s mother the day before, Brandon’s facility with the Desert People’s native language allowed her to relax a little as she continued.
“When I went off to school on the bus that first day, Roseanne cried and cried. Our grandmother was a mean old woman, and Roseanne didn’t want to be left alone with her. When I came home, I told Roseanne there were kids her age in another class, and she begged me to take her along. The next day, I told my grandmother that Roseanne was supposed to go, too. It was a lie, of course, but Grandmother didn’t know any better. She let us go.
“When we got to school, everything was fine until Roseanne realized that she couldn’t be in the same class with me. She got scared and started to cry. She cried so hard that finally the principal came. He was a big man—a huge man. He picked Roseanne up and carried her under his arm like a sack of potatoes. She kicked and screamed the whole way down the hall. I went after him and kept telling him to put her down, put her down, but he didn’t. He carried her all the way back to his office. He threw her into a closet—a coat closet with no light inside it—and slammed the door. Then he made me go back to class. I heard her crying all the way down the hall.
“I didn’t see her again until after school—until it was time for us to get