Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [77]
In the week and a half that followed, they’d had a great time together. She showed him the sights, his credit card provided the meals, and they availed themselves of the king-sized bed in his Dupont Plaza hotel room. Between times, Philip Cachora told Delia stories.
He was a charming and engaging storyteller. Ten years her senior, he had gone to both grade school and the first two years of high school on the reservation, at Topawa and Indian Oasis High School. He told her about going to rain dances and getting drunk on thick cactus-juice wine. He told her about his art and about some of the shows he’d been in. He told her about going to powwows around the country and trying to integrate what he saw there into his art.
Beguiled by his stories, Delia failed to question what he was editing out. Somehow, during that first evening and the whirlwind days that followed, he never mentioned a single one of his three ex-wives or why any of them had left him. And Delia never had the presence of mind to ask.
Gayle was glad Larry had been able to get it up with no difficulty. Once she took care of that item on her to-do list, Larry was out like a light, leaving Gayle free to slip out of bed and prowl around the familiar old house—the house of her childhood. Other than the relatively recent modifications in the basement, little else had changed. Much of the furniture was still the same high-quality and often re-covered highly serviceable stuff Great-Grandmother Madison had shipped by train from Ohio when she arrived at the ranch as a bride in 1901.
Sometime in the early seventies, Gayle’s mother, Gretchen, had replaced the creaking 1950s-era appliances with all new Maytag-brand versions. Gretchen’s once state-of-the-art appliances could now be considered museum pieces, but to Gayle’s amazement, they continued to plug along. As far as she was concerned, they would never be replaced. When the time came, they’d be bulldozed right along with the house.
The ranch had been Gayle’s father’s domain and her mother’s nightmare. He liked living there, while Gretchen preferred the social milieu of her own family’s house in Tucson—the home that was Gayle’s to this day. Had Winston lived, he would most likely have inherited that, just as Gayle had inherited the ranch. But Winston had died in the mid-1980s, and Gretchen, mourning her lost son, had soon followed. That left Gayle with both the ranch and the house in town and with her parents’ model on how to conduct herself.
It was strange for Gayle to realize how much her marriage to Larry Stryker resembled that of her parents—her home in town and his miles away on the ranch. In private, Calvin and Gretchen had made no secret of their mutual loathing, but in public they had maintained a smilingly polite decorum that had held gossipmongers at bay for decades. In their respective lairs, Calvin had kept a steady string of dark-eyed and curvaceous housekeepers, while Gretchen had carried on secret liaisons with several of Tucson’s highborn but decidedly “mannish” women. As for their children? Winston, permanently attached to his mother’s apron strings, had avoided the ranch like the plague, while Gayle, adoring her father, had loathed the city.
It amused Gayle sometimes to wonder what a therapist would make of her incestuous relationship with her father. Supposedly she should have minded, but she didn’t. Conventional wisdom said that she would grow up hating her father, but she hadn’t done that, either. Gayle had resented her mother’s mistreatment of Calvin and was glad to do what she could to cheer him up. Admittedly, she’d been jealous when a new housekeeper would show up, causing Calvin to absent himself temporarily from his daughter’s bed. Gayle supposed that, to some extent, maybe what she did to Larry’s girls—that wonderfully endless supply of lithe brown bodies—was a means of finding redress for the attentions Calvin’s mistresses had stolen from her.
Here in this house, Gayle could see how the way she’d been raised had contributed to what she’d become—smart, pragmatic,