Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

The old woman was hoeing in a rocky vegetable patch behind her house. She wore laced boots, a man’s oversized wool trousers, and a khaki shirt, and a shawl was wrapped around her head. In the distance the wet land sloped toward the Divide, where the mountains thrust up violently against the sky, their sheer cliffs now purple with shadow. Up high it had snowed, and the ponderosa was white on the crests and through the saddles. The old woman glanced sideways at me when I opened her wood gate and walked into the yard, then continued chopping weeds in the rows as though I were not there.

“Darlene American Horse is your daughter, isn’t she?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. Her white hair bunched out under her shawl, and the corners of her eyes were creased with concentration on her work.

“Mrs. Desmarteau, believe me, I’m a friend,” I said. “I want to find out what happened to your son. I want to help Darlene, if I can.”

She thudded and raked the hoe in the dirt and stones and notched out weeds between the cabbages without ever touching a leaf.

“I think Darlene lives among some bad people. I want to get her away from them,” I said.

She pulled back the door of an abandoned, dilapidated privy, put away the hoe and took out a shovel. In the back of the privy a calico cat was nursing her litter on top of a pile of gunnysacks. Mrs. Desmarteau laid the shovel across a wheelbarrow loaded with manure and began pushing it toward the edge of the vegetable patch. I took the handles out of her hands and wheeled it across the dirt yard, then began spreading the manure at the end of each row. The clouds were purple on top of the mountains, and snow was blowing off the edges of the canyons. Behind me I heard the plastic sheets of insulation rattling on her windows.

“She’s your daughter, isn’t she?” I said again.

“Are you one of the FBI?” she said.

“No, I’m not. But I used to be a policeman. I’m not any longer. I’m just a man who’s in some trouble.”

For the first time her eyes looked directly at mine.

“If you know Darlene, why are you asking me if she’s my daughter?” she said. “Why are you here and asking that question? You don’t make sense.”

Then I realized that perhaps I had underestimated this elderly lady. And like most people who consider themselves educated, I had perhaps presumed that an elderly person—like someone who is foreign-speaking or unschooled—could not understand the complexities of my life and intellect.

“I didn’t relate the name to yours,” I said. “But I should have. She wears her brother’s First Cav army jacket, doesn’t she? She also has turquoise eyes. Your family name is French-Canadian, not Indian. Darlene and Clayton’s father was part white, wasn’t he?”

“Why do you say she lives among bad people?”

“The man she stays with isn’t bad, but the people he works for are. I believe she should come back home and not sta

y with these people on the lake.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Yes.”

“Are they criminals?”

“Some of them are.”

Her hand slipped down over mine and took the shovel. Her palm was rough and edged with callus. She was motionless, the shovel propped against her wool trousers, her eyes fixed on the jagged outline of the mountains against the sky. The clouds on the high peaks looked full of snow.

“Are they the ones that killed my boy?” she said.

“Maybe they were involved in some way. I don’t know.”

“Why is she with them?”

“She thinks she can find out what happened to Clayton and his cousin. She worked in a bar. Where is it?”

“Five miles down the road. You passed it when you came here.”

“Do you know a man named Dixie Lee Pugh?”

“No.”

“Do you see Darlene?”