Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 3 - Venus Besieged Read online

"I've started buying all my pants loose at the waist." I sighed and allowed her to do with me what she would, which at this moment seemed to be merely fooling around with me enough to make me sexually crazy and keeping me in a state of constant desire.

  "I was thinking"...she began and looked deeply into my eyes as I groaned over what great hands she had..."that we should get married." My eyes snapped open wide and all formerly receptive orifices clamped shut. Seeing my startled look she released her hold on me and giggled.

  Is my near-death experience coming down to a wedding band? What in the world had prompted a woman who heretofore wouldn't live with me suddenly to want to marry me? My mind locked up as I tried to decide what exactly marriage meant between the two of us, since no one really offered marriage to lesbians in the way I'd come to think of it—two nervous people in monochromatic colors meeting at the end of an aisle alongside a quartet of women all wearing brightly colored clothing—the colors alone telling you who the happy people were.

  "Married?" My voice didn't sound like my voice at all, but more like a voice I'd rented from some very nervous person.

  "You said you wanted us to live together—"

  "I do!" I said, aware I'd uttered the very words that in another context had me freaked out. Lesbians didn't have to get married; that was in fact the beauty of being a lesbian. You could get up any morning and decide this wasn't the bed you wanted to share or the relationship you wanted to wear. Good-bye was no more complicated than tossing your clothes in a bag and computer and books into the Jeep.

  Then straight people started muddying the water by denying gay people marriage, and pretty soon perfectly normal gay people were demanding it. If straight people wanted to punish gay people, they should demand they get married. Let them have to hire divorce attorneys and pay alimony and suffer like straights.

  "Somehow I don't think you mean that," Callie said, waiting for me to return from my mental machinations.

  "I do!" I repeated and wondered why in hell those two words kept coming out of my mouth at every opportunity. "It's simply that we haven't even lived together yet. Don't you think we should live together first? You didn't want to do that and now you want to get married."

  "We're living together now in this cabin. Living together isn't a matter of physical location. It's a matter of being physically, mentally, and spiritually in tune."

  "You always act like I'm off-key—out of tune," I squeaked.

  "You're afraid of being married to me, aren't you?" She leaned back, observing me and smiling slightly.

  "Absolutely not!" I said and broke into a sweat. "We got cheated out of our first Thanksgiving—we didn't get to eat the turkey." I changed the subject abruptly.

  "We've had the best Thanksgiving ever. Turkey's in the fridge waiting for you."

  I went immediately to the fridge as if the wire shelves held the meaning of life and put my head inside to cool off. Admittedly I was having a hot flash and couldn't decide if it was biochemical or matrimonial.

  Callie's proposal was startling and I couldn't think about anything else. She didn't mention it again, but it couldn't have been more present for me. I was afraid—she had that right—afraid. What am I afraid of? I'll tell you what I'm afraid of—the ring. The ring signifies that life as I know it is over. No more private dinners with Barrett Silvers, that's what the ring means. No worrying about anyone showing up bringing Tupper suppers and looking for a quickie. I would be forced to see things differently—to analyze my every move to determine if a particular act could be construed as cheating on her: is that lying to her, would that be disloyal to her? The simplest thing could become a reason for her to take the ring off and throw it across the room at me. That's it, then, the ring is a weapon! It's a marital weapon used as mind control. If my mind strays, look at the ring. Wow! Lord of the Rings has an entirely different...ring to it.

  I glanced over to see if Callie was reading my mind, but she seemed engrossed in her computer screen and not tapping into my thoughts, for which I was grateful.

  We dropped matrimony as a general topic for the rest of the day, and by the following afternoon I thought we'd deserted all serious topics in favor of sightseeing, including a trip to a riverbed where Indian artifacts were routinely found. For centuries Native American women had knelt on the rocky soil to fill pots with drinking water, catch fish for the evening meal, or wade into the icy stream where perhaps dirt and worry fell like the leaves from the overhanging trees to drift away on the river's current.

  The tranquility of the open spaces took me by surprise, and I sighed deeply, which seemed to release decades of anxiety and bring me into some kind of harmony with the earth. Red clay beneath my feet needed only water to become an earthen vessel or adobe bricks, and perhaps God, when no one was looking, had scooped up the rich red clay into a celestial hand and morphed this beautiful substance into the red people themselves: hard but fragile, faces painted like pottery, fighting until broken.

  The bright light on Callie's golden hair held me transfixed as she offered her hand to pull me up from the ground for a climb to the top of a mesa where tribal elders had once offered prayers. Walking hand in hand, we now felt even closer as a couple, seemingly baked together in Sedona's kiln, only poor Elmo fretting over the workout his short legs were getting.

  We roamed around in the red dirt for what seemed like hours, then got back in the Jeep, where Elmo promptly passed out and Callie insisted we stop next at a Navajo trading post.

  Made of huge unsplit logs, the trading post was rustic and beautiful. Inside, rows of squash-blossom necklaces, lined wood-framed cases, Kachina dolls, and religious icons carved from Cottonwood root and painted as mythological figures, some of whom looked like Phyllis Diller on a bad-hair day, filled floor-to-ceiling shelves. Hand-tooled belts coiled snakelike in baskets, and beautiful handwoven blankets swung from wooden dowel rods attached at one end to the wall.

  Callie strayed over to a glass case full of fine jewelry and pointed to something. A dark-haired, heavyset woman behind the counter swooshed over in her native dress and unlocked the case. Callie said how elegantly crafted the rings were, then pointed to an unusual pair. "Are these patterned after traditional Navajo wedding bands?"

  I bobbed my head up from the Kachina dolls and stared at Callie.

  The woman smiled and said they were.

  "Come over here, Teague, and try one of these on." Callie looked up at me and gave me the most angelic smile, the light dancing in her eyes.

  I couldn't have been more permanently planted to the floor if someone had nailed me there, the mystical experience by the red river momentarily forgotten. Commitment in the abstract always played in my head, but commitment in the now was final, permanent. I panicked. Callie is looking at wedding bands so the woman behind the counter will know we’re thinking of—what: weddings, honeymoons—fucking?

  The woman smiled sweetly at me as if wondering nothing more than my finger size. "If you will come over here, I will measure you," she said and held out the ring sizer.

  I glanced at Callie, who hadn't stopped smiling since she'd gone to the jewelry case, and held out my left hand.

  "I was thinking we should get matching rings," she said quietly, and the woman looked up, still smiling.

  "What a lovely idea," she said, and for an insane moment I thought she and Callie were thinking of getting matching rings. That's what always happened to me when I got freaked—my brain short-circuited and information got jumbled.

  "This pair would look lovely on the two of you," the woman said, seemingly untroubled by the idea of two women wearing matching rings.

  But hey, it was a sale so maybe money talked louder than prejudice, although this lady didn't look prejudiced; she looked joyful. Flushed, I could feel heat on my earlobes and my chest.

  "Do you like this design?" Callie asked me.

  "Sure," I said as if I were okaying her purchase for someone else.

  "Tell the truth," Callie said.

&nbs
p; "I like whatever you like," I whispered, not meaning to whisper, but I'd lost my voice.

  "I prefer these with the stones cut at an angle. They say Native American but of the future." Callie took the larger ring and slipped it on the ring finger of my left hand.

  A chill raced up my spine and my neck and over my ears as she held her hand there for a moment, and I felt like at this very instant I stood at an altar in front of a priest who was a Native American shopkeeper, taking a vow in full view of whoever else was walking through the store.

  "There," Callie said, slowly taking her hand off mine. "You belong to me."

  Could she really have said that in public, in front of the priest-shopkeeper, in front of the shopper-parishioners; but the sound of her voice and the ring against my finger felt so good. She carefully lifted the smaller matching ring out of its resting place in the dark blue velvet and slipped it on the identical finger of her left hand, then leaned over and kissed me on the lips.

  I laid my hand down next to Callie's, letting my eyes rest for the first time on the two identical rings now side by side. Identical rings. Rings others could spot and in doing so either accept or reject us without even knowing us. Risk rings, I thought, my riverbed tranquility all but disintegrated. Am I mature enough to accept that hind of risk? Why not, life is short. Pleasing strangers isn't nearly as important as pleasing one another.

  "Will that be cash or charge," the priest-keeper asked as I was about to say something, and I thought her remark was no different than a priest's sermon on tithing, directing us to the paper envelope in our pew and offering the ability to put it on our charge card.

  Callie suddenly took my hand and slipped the rings off my finger and hers, offering the beautiful gold bands with the dark blue stones and sprinkle of diamonds back to the woman, who locked them up in the case.

  "A dress rehearsal," Callie said. "We'll think about whether or not we want to buy them."

  I'd tensed up so much in preparing for this event that, suddenly exhausted, I thanked the lady and headed for the car, suggesting to Callie that we go up to the vortex and sit on top of the mountain and watch the sunset at the ceremonial site. I needed to breathe a lot of fresh air and unwind.

  "Did we almost get married?" I asked, slightly confused now that the magical feeling of her body near mine was reaching a more sustainable level.

  "Let's say we had an opportunity to buy matching wedding bands."

  "But we—changed our minds?" I was hoping I hadn't offended her by showing no real support for the idea.

  "One of us did." Callie's voice sounded melancholy.

  "Are there instances where there are matching wedding bands without marriage?"

  Callie laughed. "That would be called two girls who have the same taste in jewelry."

  "Nothing wrong with that," I said, more comfortable now. "If you saw us on the street wearing matching rings, what would you think it meant?"

  "Anything you want it to mean," she said. "Now if I was one of those people wearing one of the matching wedding rings, for me it would mean you would never fall off a cliff without me, you would never think about another woman but me, and you would always be in my bed."

  Elmo let out a moan of deep longing, and we both giggled as I gave Callie a quick kiss. Rounding a bend in the road that would take us to the ceremonial site, I tried to take the conversation to a more philosophical level.

  "I think that's all happening now, with or without rings," I said and gave it a few beats. "So tell me more about what wearing matching wedding bands says to you?"

  Callie apparently couldn't tolerate my squirming any more. "It means nothing, relax."

  Discussion over. I was sad. How ironic. I had chased Callie Rivers across the western half of the United States, begged her to live with me forever, and was determined never to let her go, and now that she'd turned the tables on me, I was moonwalking like Michael Jackson.

  "Speaking of being pursued and attacked," I teased, "why did I see the wolf and go over the cliff and you never even saw it. Normally you would look up ten astrological charts on that question, but you haven't even mentioned it."

  "I guess I've been having such a great day with you, I wanted to forget all the negatives. They're trying to get to me through you, Teague. He knows I care so much about you. He feels that energy."

  "Callie, you have to tell me who this guy is."

  Callie looked like a dozen private conversations were taking place in her head. Sometimes I wished I knew everything she was thinking and sometimes I was grateful I didn't. Who in the world did she fear so much that she wouldn't even utter his name?

  "A man half Indian."

  "Who is he?"

  "Luther Drake," she breathed.

  A bolt of lightning lit up the sky and flashed above the horizon, a deafening clap of thunder slapped the heavens, and a torrent of rain blasted our windshield and obscured our view. Nature's energy had exploded violently and without warning. I quickly turned on the windshield wipers and shivered at the suddenness of the rainstorm. Neither of us spoke.

  Chapter Twelve

  The skies were as clear as they had been before the quick deluge, which was now only a passing freak of nature.

  "Aren't we climbing up the rock face?" Callie asked.

  "Not now that I know about the road on the backside. I'm driving, parking the car, and letting all the tourists on the front side of this rock wonder how I got a car up there." I stepped on the gas and the Jeep shot up the steep cliff, tires spinning and spitting dirt as Callie shouted for me to slow down, perhaps certain I would overshoot the short, flat plateau and take us over the opposite side like Thelma and Louise.

  Jamming on the brakes, I staunched her fears and we both hopped out. I took Callie by the hand and together we walked to the ceremonial circle, our arms around each other, breathing in the fresh air that carried the scent of red dirt and cactus and desert flowers and, from somewhere, the smell of mossy creek beds and the down of small animals burrowed in their nests.

  Suddenly, I felt as much a part of the earth as any of its other elements, and Callie and I seemed to be alone on top of the world, brushed by the same desert winds that propelled the tumbleweed, swayed by the same celestial breezes that whipped the sagebrush. Forces blowing around us seemed to encourage us to move with the wind, and before I knew it we were whirling in dramatic swirls and turns, dancing in the wind, dust at our heels, the clouds moving around us kitelike as if tied to strings anchored by our hearts.

  "It's amazing how we move together so effortlessly," Callie said, smiling up at me, both of us aware that we had never danced together before.

  "Even when there's no music."

  "I hear music," she said, and we moved in one another's arms as if we were a single being, and perhaps we were. "What do you vow?" she asked me.

  "To be yours throughout all time, beyond time, beyond forever. And what do you vow?"

  "I vow to be one with you forever," she said, then paused. "How do you know we didn't, at this very moment, get married?"

  "You love to mess with my head." I rested my forehead on hers as we spun in circles in the wind, giddy and dizzy.

  "Marriage is merely a ceremony where a person says 'I now pronounce you'...so what if the wind and rocks and sand are all whispering 'I now pronounce you.'"

  Coyotes howled in the distance and the wind picked up around us. Our conversation muted by nature's sounds, my body too cold to remain still, I ran from the wind and the rocks and the sand and any messages they might be carrying, pretending the cold was forcing us back to the car, holding Callie's hand once we finally climbed inside.

  Callie snuggled into me as we drove, and that odd yin-and-yang energy that had cursed my entire life began to whir around me. The energy that guaranteed if something spectacular happened to me, then immediately something of opposite and equal magnitude balanced it out. Yin rear-ended by yang, like winning two thousand dollars only to find out an hour later I needed it for a dental
bill. I told Callie about this phenomenon the minute it came to mind.

  "Think of it as a blessing preceding the need."

  "Sometimes I want random blessings that hang around without a need, but this balancing force seems to dog me, keeps me uncomfortable. It always reminds me that everything changes, and I feel it tonight. Tonight is simply too good to stand on its own."

  "Push that negative energy away. Don't accept it. You can, you know."

  We rounded a tight bend in the mountain road and suddenly, out of nowhere, a huge animal rushed our vehicle and leaped onto the hood of the car, its claws scraping across the paint on the Jeep's hood, its bared teeth and face smashing into the windshield as we both screamed and I slammed on the brakes.

  Elmo's deep growl rose to a sharp squeal as our car careened off the rocky road. I fought to gain control of it, knowing any moment the wolf would slide off, but terrifyingly, its animal face morphed into a diabolical human visage smiling hideously at us through the tempered glass. Callie and I shrieked even louder, like teenagers on a thrill ride, and then the face morphed into that of a corpse and disappeared. The car skidded back onto the road and everything was as it had been, except our nerves were shattered.

  "Shit, what the hell was that?" I shouted as Callie and Elmo panted beside me.

  "Shape-shifter," Callie breathed, hugging Elmo to her.

  "Next time we take a vacation let's stay home. This tribal thing is too intense." My body was shaking, my nerves were jangled, I hated whoever was dogging us, and I wanted revenge.

  "The man I told you about—" Callie began.

  "The half-Indian?"

  "He knows about the wolf visiting us, and he's appearing in similar form to try to trick us. He's the one who showed up at the cabin and tried to entice you into the woods."

  "Did you know who he was then?" I asked, and Callie nodded that she did. "That's why you got so upset. And he's the one who showed up in the form of the wolf and sent me over the canyon edge?" Now I knew who the wolf was... and somehow I felt worse and not better. "So where are you, you chicken sonofabitch? I want to meet you in the flesh," I shouted into the windshield.