“I can think of no better way to honor Rey. He would have preferred séance over service.”
“How can you bear to have us affiliated with a hoaxer?”
“Darling, whether her powers are real or not, Josie is a true believer. She doesn’t think she’s hoaxing anybody. There’s not an ounce of harm in her.”
“There’s plenty of harm in telling people she can talk to their dead.”
He folded his arms. “Don’t you talk to Evelyn?”
She had not expected to feel so wounded—but then she had not expected him to sound so gleeful in catching her out, either. He was only aware of her furtive confabs with their dead daughter because Nora had confessed to them in an agitated state, at the very edge of sleep, some distant night when Emmett had returned from town so maudlin with Christmas punch she’d believed him incapable of retaining a single word she said. “She was only just beginning to laugh,” he’d whispered through unexpected tears. “How I miss her.” It had felt safe, even necessary, to tell him how that laugh had grown and changed with the girl she still imagined roaming this house.
That he had remembered after all, and could now bring himself to fling it at her in defense of Josie, blew through her like cold rain.
“That,” she managed, “is not the same thing.”
THERE WAS STILL NO ONE else on the road when she climbed up out of the valley to the last stretch of hardpan, and urged her horse to the edge of the Cortez aguaje. It was a brackish tank, near-empty now and tenanted by a few stranded frogs that peered up at her from the mud. Once, in a summer almost as dry as this one, Nora had carried this brown mire home and the boys had rigged up a sieving line with nothing but two buckets and a silk scarf they’d begged her to sacrifice for this purpose. “Trust me, Mama,” Dolan had said, small and newly spectacled, humming with the prospect of replicating a trick he’d read about. “Silk’ll work best.” It had been a miraculous transformation to watch: the steady fall of the loam in one bucket, the rise of clear water in the other, like a single, interminably drawn-out exchange of breath. “See?” Dolan had said. But that had been years ago. Any surface water she’d passed these recent weeks was true mud, thick and still, fit for nothing but sucking down your boots. No amount of alchemy or patience could turn it into water. There was so much silt in the aguaje now that even Bill wouldn’t drink. He just stood there dripping foam, looking dazedly around. Still. She could give it a try.
No. It would not come to that. Emmett was likely back at the house by now. And if night should fall to find him further delayed—well. Surely someone would come along. She looked around. Save for the blinding white arses of a couple of antelope bouncing away, the flat lay empty in all directions.
Whoever had thought to instate a watering hole in this spot could not have been a woman. It was impossible to linger here without feeling observed. The goblin barrens rose up on either side of the path ahead: bulbous gnomons; knotted terraces; wedge-headed hoodoos, each a narrows into some otherworld. Eastern dudes were known to pay good money to be brought through here and stand around in their frills, trying to guess where, in this maze of stone, some outlaw or another had laired in the old days.
This seemed to be the place to fall out with other men. The boys had come home as recently as last week covered in this telltale red dust, and waved her off when she pressed them about it, telling her the matter was “settled.” There was finality to this summation, a tone that suggested no further inquiry would be suffered—which, of course, only infuriated her. They had taken to cordoning off their affairs, whispering, veering into Spanish when they heard her step in the hallway, as if she were some enemy, and not the woman who had rubbed nettle tea on their pustule-cratered chins for years, or caught them eating elk velvet in a misguided attempt to gain a few inches of height.
All her boys had augured themselves in this valley. Rob—her son through and through, bullheaded and quick-tempered, beloved abroad and withdrawn at home—was a wild and unheeding child of the silver camps. In the eerie,