A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

Death of a Snowbird J. A. JANCE

Agnes Barkley did the dishes. She always did the dishes. After breakfast. After lunch. After dinner. For forty-six years she had done them. Maybe “always” was a slight exaggeration. Certainly there must have been a time or two when she had goofed off, when she had just rinsed them and stacked them in the sink to await the next meal; but mostly she kept the sink clear and the dishes dried and put away where they belonged. It was her job. Part of her job.

Back home in Westmont, Illinois, the single kitchen window was so high overhead that Agnes couldn’t see out at all. Here, in Oscar’s RV, the sink was situated directly in front of an eye-level window.

Agnes could stand there with her hands plunged deep in warm, sudsy dishwater and enjoy the view. While doing her chores she occasionally caught sight of hawks circling in a limitless blue sky.

In the evening she reveled in the flaming sunsets, with their spectacular orange glows that seemed to set the whole world on fire.

Even after years of coming back time and again, she wasn’t quite used to it. Every time Agnes looked out a January window, she couldn’t help being amazed. There before her, instead of Chicago’s gray, leaden cloud cover and bone-chilling cold, she found another world — the wide-open, brown desert landscape, topped by a vast expanse of sunny blue sky.

Agnes couldn’t get over the clean, clear air. She delighted in the crisp, hard-edged shadows left on the ground by the desert sun, and she loved the colors. When some of her neighbors back home had wondered how she could stand to live in such a barren, ugly place three months out of the year, Agnes had tried in vain to explain the lovely contrast of newly leafed mesquite against a red, rockbound earth. Her friends had looked at her sympathetically, smiled, shaken their heads, and said she was crazy.

And in truth she was — crazy about the desert. Agnes loved the stark wild plants that persisted in growing despite a perpetual lack of moisture — the spiny, leggy ocotillos and the sturdy, low-growing mesquite; the majestic saguaro; the cholla with its glowing halo of dangerous thorns. She loved catching glimpses of desert wild-life — coyotes and jackrabbits and kangaroo rats. She even loved the desert floor itself — the smooth sands and rocky shales, the expanses of rugged reds and soothing, round-rocked grays, all of which, over the great visible distances, would fade to uniform blue.

At first she had been dreadfully homesick for Westmont, but now all that had changed. Agnes Barkley’s love affair with the desert was such that, had she been in charge, their snowbird routine would have been completely reversed. They would have spent nine to ten months out of the year in Arizona and only two or so back home in Illinois.

No one could have been more surprised by this turn of events than Agnes Barkley herself. When Oscar had first talked about retiring from the post office and becoming a snowbird — about buying an RV and, wintering in Arizona — Agnes had been dead set against it. She had thought she would hate the godforsaken place, and she had done her best to change Oscar’s mind. As if anyone could do that.

In the end, she had given in gracefully. As she had in every other aspect of her married existence, Agnes put the best face on it she could muster and went along for the ride, just as Oscar must have known she would. After forty-six years of marriage, there weren’t that many surprises left.

In the past she would have grudgingly tolerated whatever it was Oscar wanted and more or less pretended to like it. But when it came to Arizona, no pretense was necessary. Agnes adored the place — once they got out of Mesa, that is.

Oscar couldn’t stand Mesa, either. He said there were too many old people there.

“What do you think you are?” Agnes had been tempted to ask him, although she never did, because the truth of the matter was, Agnes agreed with him — and for much the same reason. It bothered her to see all those senior citizens more or less locked up in the same place, year after year.

The park itself was nice enough, with a pool and all the appropriate amenities. Still, it made Agnes feel claustrophobic somehow, especially when, for two years running, their motor home was parked next to that of a divorced codger who snored so loudly that the racket came right through the walls into the Barkleys’ own bedroom — even with the RV’s air conditioner cranked up and running full blast.

So they set out to find someplace else to park their RV some-place a little off the beaten track, as Oscar said. That’s how they had ended up in Tombstone — The Town Too Tough to Die. Outside the Town Too Tough to Die was more like it.

The trailer park — that’s what they called it: the OK Trailer Park, Overnighters Welcome — was several miles out of town. The individual lots had been carved out of the desert by terracing up the northern flank of a steep hillside. Whoever had designed the place had done a good job of it. Each site was far enough below its neighbor that every RV or trailer had its own unobstructed view of the hillside on the opposite side of a rocky draw. The western horizon boasted the Huachuca Mountains. To the east were the Wheststones and beyond those the Chiricahuas.

The views of those distant purple mountain majesties were what Agnes Barkley liked most about the OK Trailer Park. The views and the distances and the clear, clean air. And the idea that she didn’t have to go to sleep listening to anyone snoring — anyone other than Oscar, that is. She was used to him.

“Yoo-hoo, Aggie. Anybody home?” Gretchen Dixon tapped on the doorframe. She didn’t bother to wait for Agnes to answer before shoving open the door and popping her head inside. “Ready for a little company?”

Agnes took one last careful swipe at the countertop before wringing out the dishrag and putting it away under the sink. “What are you up to, Gretchen?”

At seventy-nine, Gretchen Dixon was given to chartreuse tank tops and Day-Glo Bermuda shorts — a color combination that showed off her tanned hide to best advantage. She wore her hair in a lank pageboy that hadn’t changed — other than color — for forty years. It was one of fate’s great injustices that someone like Gretchen, who had spent years soaking ultraviolet rays into her leathery skin, should be walking around bareheaded and apparently healthy, while Dr.

Forsythe, Aggie’s physician back home in Westmont, after burning off a spot of skin cancer, had forbidden Aggie to venture outside at all without wearing sunblock and a hat.

Agnes Barkley and Gretchen Dixon were friends, but there were several things about Gretchen that annoyed hell out of Agnes. The main one at this moment was the fact that despite the midday sun, Gretchen was bareheaded. Agnes loathed hats.

Gretchen lounged against the cupboard door and shook a cigarette out of a pack she always kept handy in some pocket or other, “So where’s that worthless husband of yours?” she asked.

Not that Gretchen was really all that interested in knowing Oscar’s whereabouts. She didn’t like Oscar much, and the feeling was mutual. Rather than being worried about their mutual antipathy, Agnes found it oddly comforting. In fact, it was probably a very good idea to have friends your husband didn’t exactly approve of. Years earlier, there had been one or two of Aggie’s friends that Oscar had been crazy about. Too much so, in fact — with almost disastrous results for all concerned.

“Tramping around looking for arrowheads as per usual,” Aggie said. “Out along the San Pedro, I think. He and Jim Rathbone went off together right after lunch. They’ll be back in time for supper.”

“That figures,” Gretchen said disdainfully, rolling her eyes and blowing a plume of smoke high in the air as she slipped into the bench by the table.

“Aggie,” she said, “do you realize you’re the only woman around here who still cooks three square meals a day — breakfast, lunch, and dinner?”

“Why not?” Agnes objected. “I like to cook.”

Gretchen shook her head. “You don’t understand, Aggie. It gives all the rest of us a bad name. You maybe ought to let Oscar know that he’s not the only one who’s retired. It wouldn’t kill the man to take you into town once in a while. He could buy you a nice dinner at the Wagon Wheel or at one of those newer places over on Allen Street.”

“Oscar doesn’t like to eat anybody else’s cooking but mine,” Aggie said.

Gretchen was not impressed. “He likes your cooking because he’s cheap. Oscar’s so tight his farts squeak.”

Agnes Barkley laughed out loud. Gretchen Dixon was the most outrageous friend she had ever had. Agnes liked to listen to Gretchen just to hear what words would pop out of her mouth next. Even so, Agnes couldn’t let Gretchen’s attack on Oscar go unchallenged. After all, he was her husband.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on him,” she chided. “You’d like him if you ever spent any time with him.”

“How can I spend time with the man?” Gretchen returned sar-castically. “Whenever I’m around him, all he does is grouse about how it isn’t ladylike for women to smoke.”

“Oscar was raised a Southern Baptist,” Agnes countered.

“Oscar Barkley was raised under a rock.”

Agnes changed the subject. “Would you like some lemonade? A cup of coffee?”

“Aggie Barkley, I’m not your husband. I didn’t come over here to have you wait on me hand and foot the way you do him. I came to ask you a question. The senior citizens in town have chartered a bus to go up to Phoenix to the Heard Museum day after tomorrow. Me and Dolly Ann Parker and Lola Carlson are going to go. We were wondering if you’d like to come along.”

“You mean Oscar and me?”

“No, I mean you, silly. Aggie Barkley by her own little lone-some.

It’s an overnight. We’ll be staying someplace inexpensive, especially if we all four bunk in a single room. So you see, there wouldn’t be any place for Oscar to sleep. Besides, it’ll be fun. Just us girls. Think about it. It’ll be like an old-fashioned slumber party. Remember those?”

Agnes was already shaking her head. “Oscar would never let me go. Never in a million years.”

“Let?” Gretchen yelped, as though the very word wounded her.

“Do you mean to tell me that at your age you have to ask that man for permission to be away from home overnight?”

“Not really. It’s just that…”

“Say you’ll go, then. The bus is filling up fast, and Dolly Ann needs to call in our reservation by five this afternoon.”

“Where did you say it’s going?”

Gretchen grinned triumphantly and ground out her cigarette in the ashtray Agnes had unobtrusively slipped in front of her. “The Heard Museum. In Phoenix. It’s supposed to be full of all kinds of Indian stuff. Artifacts and baskets and all like that. I’m not that wild about Indians myself — I can take them or leave them — but the trip should be fun.”

Agnes thought about it for a minute. She didn’t want Gretchen to think she was a complete stick-in-the-mud. “If it’s only overnight, I suppose I could go.”

“That’s my girl,” Gretchen said. “I’ll go right home and call Dolly Ann.” She stood up and started briskly toward the door, then paused and turned back to Agnes. “By the way, have you ever played strip poker?”

“Me?” Agnes Barkley croaked. “Strip poker? Never!”

“Hold your breath, honey, because you’re going to learn. The trick is to start out wearing plenty of clothes to begin with, so if you lose some it doesn’t matter.”

With that Gretchen Dixon was out the door, her flip-flops slapping noisily on the loose gravel as she headed down the hill toward her own mobile, parked two doors away. Agnes sat at the table, stunned.

They would be playing strip poker? What on earth had she let herself in for?

Agnes wasn’t so sure she had said yes outright, but she certainly had implied that she would go. She could have jumped up right then, swung the door open, and called out to Gretchen that she’d changed her mind, but she didn’t. Instead she just sat there like a lump until she heard Gretchen’s screen door slam shut behind her.

In the silence that followed, Agnes wondered what Oscar would say. It wasn’t as though she had never left him alone. For years, she had spent one weekend in May — three whole days — at a Women’s Bible Study retreat held each year at the YMCA camp at Lake Zurich, north of Buffalo Grove. And always, before she left, she had cooked and frozen and labeled enough food to last two weeks rather than three days. All Oscar and the girls ever had to do was thaw it out and heat it up.

Well, a Bible study retreat at a YMCA camp and four old ladies sitting around playing strip poker in a cheap hotel room weren’t exactly the same thing, but Oscar didn’t need to know about the poker part of it. Actually, the idea of Agnes going off someplace with Gretchen Dixon and her pals might be enough to set Oscar off all by itself.

And what if it did? Agnes Barkley asked herself, with a sudden jolt of self-determination. Sauce for the goose and sauce for the gander, right? After all, she never balked at the idea of him going off and spending hours on end wandering all over the desert with Jimmy Rathbone, that windy old crony of his, did she? So if Oscar Barkley didn’t like the idea of her going to Phoenix with Gretchen, he could just as well lump it.

That was what Agnes thought at two o’clock in the afternoon, but by evening she had softened up some. Not that she’d changed her mind. She was still determined to go, but she’d figured out a way to ease it past Oscar.

As always her first line of attack was food. She made his favorite dinner — Italian meat loaf with baked potatoes and frozen French-cut green beans; a tossed salad with her own homemade Thousand Island dressing; and a lemon meringue pie for dessert. Agnes never failed to be amazed by the amount of food she could coax out of that little galley-sized kitchen with its tiny oven and stove. All it took was a little talent for both cooking and timing.

Dinner was ready at six, but Oscar wasn’t home. He still wasn’t there at six thirty or seven o’clock, either. Finally, at seven fifteen, with the meat loaf tough and dry in the cooling oven and with the baked potatoes shrivelled to death in their wrinkled, crusty skins, Agnes heard Oscar’s Honda crunch to a stop outside the RV. By then, Agnes had pushed the plates and silverware aside and was playing a game of solitaire on the kitchen-nook table.

When Oscar stepped in through the door, Agnes didn’t even glance up at him. “Sorry I’m so late, Aggie,” he said, pausing long enough to hang his jacket and John Deere cap in the closet. “I guess we just got a little carried away with what we were doing.”

“I just guess you did,” she returned coolly.

With an apprehensive glance in her direction, Oscar hurried to the kitchen sink, rolled up his sleeves, and began washing his hands.

“It smells good,” he said.

“It probably was once,” she replied. “I expect it’ll be a little past its’prime by the time I get it on the table.”

“Sorry,” he muttered again.

Deliberately, one line of cards at a time, she folded the solitaire hand away and then moved the dishes and silverware back to their respective places.

“Sit down and get out of the way,” she ordered. “There isn’t enough room for both of us to be milling around between the stove and the table while I’m trying to put food on the table.”

Obediently, Oscar sank into the bench. While Agnes shifted the lukewarm food from the stove to the table, he struggled his way out of the nylon fanny pack he customarily wore on his walking jaunts. Agnes wasn’t paying that much attention to what he was doing, but when she finished putting the last serving bowl on the table and went to sit down, she found a small earthen pot sitting next to her plate.

Agnes had seen Mexican ollas for sale at various curio shops on their travels through the Southwest. This one was shaped the same way most ollas were, with a rounded base and a small, narrow-necked lip. But most of those commercial pots were generally unmarked and made of a smooth reddish-brown clay. This was much smaller than any of the ones she had ever seen for sale. It was gray — almost black — with a few faintly etched white markings dimly visible.

“What’s that?” she asked, sitting down at her place and leaning over so she could get a better view of the pot.

“Aggie, honey,” Oscar said, “I believe you are looking at a winning lottery ticket.”

Agnes Barkley sat up and stared across the tiny tabletop at her husband. It wasn’t like Oscar to make jokes. Working in the post office all those years had pretty well wrung all the humor out of the man.-But when she saw his face, Agnes was startled. Oscar was actually beaming. He reminded her of the grinning young man who had been waiting beside the altar for her forty-six years earlier.

“It doesn’t look like any lottery ticket I’ve ever seen,” Agnes answered, with a disdainful sniff. “Have some meat loaf and pass it before it gets any colder.”

“Agnes,” he said, not moving a finger toward the platter, “you don’t understand. I think this is very important. Very valuable. I found it today. Down along the San Pedro just south of Saint David.

There’s a place where one of last winter’s floods must have caused a cave-in. This pot was just lying there in the sand, sticking up in the air and waiting for someone like me to come along and pick it up.”

Agnes regarded the pot with a little more respect. “You think it’s old, then?”

“Very.”

“And it could be worth a lot of money?”

“Tons of money. Well, maybe not tons.” Oscar Barkley never allowed himself to indulge in unnecessary exaggeration. “But enough to make our lives a whole lot easier.”

“It’s just a little chunk of clay. Why would it be worth money?”

“Because it’s all in one piece, dummy,” he replied with certainty.

Agnes was so inured to Oscar’s customary arrogance that she didn’t even notice it, much less let it bother her.

“If you read Archaeology, or Discovery, or National Geographic, once in a while,” he continued, “or if you even bothered to look at the pictures, you’d see that stuff like this is usually found smashed into a million pieces. People have to spend months and years fitting them all back together.”

Agnes reached out to pick up the pot. She had planned on examining it more closely, but as soon as she touched it, she inexplicably changed her mind and pushed it aside.

“It still doesn’t look like all that much to me,” she said. “Now, if you’re not going to bother with the meat loaf, would you please go ahead and pass it?”

The grin disappeared from Oscar’s face. He passed the platter without another word. Agnes saw at once that she had hurt his feelings. Usually, just a glimpse of that wounded look on his face would have been enough to melt her heart and cause her to make up with him, but tonight, for some reason, she still felt too hurt herself. Agnes was in no mood for making apologies.

“By the way,” she said, a few minutes later, as she slathered margarine on a stone-cold potato, “Gretchen and Dolly Ann invited me to come up to Phoenix with them on a senior citizen bus tour the day after tomorrow. I told them I’d go.”

“Oh? For how long?” Oscar asked.

“Just overnight. Why, do you have a problem with that?”

“No. No problem at all.”

He said it so easily — it slipped out so smoothly — that for a moment Agnes almost missed it. “You mean you don’t mind if I go, then?”

Oscar focused on her vaguely, as though his mind was pre-occupied with something far away. “Oh, no,” he said. “Not at all. You go right ahead and have a good time. Just one thing, though.”

Agnes gave him a sharp look. “What’s that?”

“Don’t mention a word about this pot to anyone. Not Gretchen, not Dolly Ann.”

“This is yours and Jimmy’s little secret, I suppose?” Agnes asked.

Oscar shook his head. “Jimmy was a good half mile down the river when I found it,” he said. “I brushed it off and put it straight in my pack. He doesn’t even know I found it, and I’m not going to tell him, either. After all, I’m the one who found it. If it turns out to be worth something, there’s no sense in splitting it with someone who wasn’t any help at all in finding it, do you think?”

Agnes thought about that for a moment. “No,” she said finally.

“I don’t suppose there is.”

The meat loaf tasted like old shoe leather. The potatoes were worse. When chewed, the green beans snapped tastelessly against their teeth like so many boiled rubber bands. Oscar and Agnes picked at their food with little interest, no appetite, and even less conversation. Finally, Agnes stood up and began clearing away the dishes.

“How about some lemon pie,” she offered, conciliatory at last.

“At least that’s supposed to be served cold.”

They went to bed right after the ten o’clock news ended on TV.

Oscar fell asleep instantly, planted firmly in the middle of the bed and snoring up a storm, while Agnes clung to her side of the mattress and held a pillow over her ear to help shut out some of the noise.

Eventually she fell asleep as well. It was close to morning when the dream awakened her.

Agnes was standing on a small knoll, watching a young child play in the dirt. The child — apparently a little girl — wasn’t one of Agnes Barkley’s own children. Both of her girls were fair-skinned blondes.

This child was brown-skinned, with a mane of thick black hair and white, shiny teeth. The child was bathed in warm sunlight, laughing and smiling. She spun around and around, kicking up dirt from around her, looking for all the world like a child-sized dust devil dancing across the desert floor.

Suddenly, for no clear reason, the scene darkened as though a huge cloud had passed in front of the sun. Somehow sensing danger, Agnes called out to the child: “Come here. Quick.”

The little girl looked up at her and frowned, but she didn’t seem to understand the warning Agnes was trying to give, and she didn’t move. Agnes heard the sound then, heard the incredible roar and rush of water and knew that a flash flood was bearing down on them from somewhere upstream.

“Come here!” she cried again, more urgently this time. “Now!”

The child looked up at Agnes once more, and then she glanced off to her side. Her eyes widened in terror at the sight of a solid wall of murky brown water, twelve to fourteen feet high, churning toward her. The little girl scrambled to her feet and started away, darting toward Agnes and safety. But then, when she was almost out of harm’s way, she stopped, turned, and went back. She was bending over to retrieve something from the dirt — something small and round and black — when the water hit. Agnes watched in helpless horror while the water crashed over her. Within seconds, the child was swept from view.

Agnes awakened drenched in sweat, just as she had years before when she was going through the change of life. Long after her heart quit pounding, the vivid, all-too-real dream stayed with her. Was that where the pot had come from? she wondered. Had the pot’s owner, some small Indian child — no one in Westmont ever used the term Native American — been swept to her death before her mother’s horrified eyes? And if it was true, if what Agnes had seen in the dream had really happened, it must have been a long time ago. How was it possible that it could be passed on to her — to a rock-solid Lutheran lady from Illinois, one not given to visions or wild flights of imagination?

Agnes crawled out of bed without disturbing the sleeping Oscar.

She fumbled on her glasses, then slipped into her robe and went to the bathroom. When she emerged she stopped by the kitchen table, where the pot, sitting by itself, was bathed in a shaft of silver moonlight. It seemed to glow and shimmer in that strange, pearlescent light, but rather than being frightened of it, Agnes found herself drawn to it.

Without thinking, she sat down at the table, pulled the pot toward her, and let her fingers explore its smooth, cool surface. How did you go about forming such a pot? Agnes wondered. Where did you find the clay? How was it fired? What was it used for? There were no answers to those questions, but Agnes felt oddly comforted simply by asking them. A few minutes later she slipped back into bed and slept soundly until well after her usual time to get up and make coffee.

Two nights later, at the hotel in Phoenix, Agnes Barkley was down to nothing but her bra and panties when Gretchen Dixon’s irritated voice brought her back to herself. “Well?” Gretchen demanded. “Do you want a card or not, Aggie? Either get in the game or get out.”

Agnes put down her cards. “I’m out,” she said. “I’m not very good at this. I can’t concentrate.”

“We should have played hearts instead,” Lola offered.

“Strip hearts isn’t all the same thing as strip poker,” Gretchen snapped. “How many cards?”

“Two,” Lola answered.

Agnes got up and pulled on her nightgown and robe. She had followed Gretchen’s advice and started the game wearing as many clothes as she could manage. It hadn’t helped. Although she was usually a quick study at games, she was hopeless when it came to the intricacies of poker. And now, with the room aswirl in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke, she was happy to be out of the game.

Agnes opened the sliding door and slipped out onto the tiny balcony. Although the temperature hovered in the low forties, it wasn’t that cold — not compared to Chicago in January. In fact, it seemed downright balmy. She looked out at the sparse traffic waiting for the light on Grand Avenue and heard the low, constant rumble of trucks on the Black Canyon Freeway behind her. The roar reminded her once more of the noise the water had made as it crashed down around the little girl and overwhelmed her.

Although she wasn’t cold, Agnes shivered and went back inside.

She propped three pillows behind her, then sat on the bed with a book positioned in front of her face. The other women may have thought she was reading, but she wasn’t.

Agnes Barkley was thinking about flash floods — remembering the real one she and Oscar had seen last winter. January had been one of the wettest ones on record. The fill-in manager at the trailer park commuted from Benson. He had told them one afternoon that a flood crest was expected over by Saint David shortly and that if they hurried, it would probably be worth seeing. They had been standing just off the bridge at Saint David when the wall of water came rumbling toward them, pushing ahead of it a jumbled collection of tires and rusty car fenders and even an old refrigerator, which bobbed along in the torrent as effortlessly as if it were nothing more than a bottle cork floating in a bathtub.

Agnes Barkley’s dream from the other night — that still too vivid dream — might very well have been nothing more than a holdover from that. But she was now convinced it was more than that, especially after what she’d learned that day at the Heard Museum. Just as Gretchen Dixon had told her, the museum had been loaded with what Agnes now knew enough to call Native American artifacts — baskets, pottery, beadwork.

Their group had been led through the tour by a fast-talking docent who had little time or patience for dawdlers or questions. Afterward, while the others milled in the gift shop or lined up for refreshments, Agnes made her way back to one display in particular, where she had seen a single pot that very closely resembled the one she had last seen sitting on the kitchen table of the RV.

The display was a mixture of Tohono O’othham artifacts. Some of the basketry was little more than fragments. And just as Oscar had mentioned, the pots all showed signs of having been broken and subsequently glued back together. What drew Agnes to this display was not only the pot but also the typed legend on a nearby wall, which explained how, upon the death of the potmaker, her pots were always destroyed lest her spirit remain trapped forever in that which she had made.

Oscar’s pot was whole, but surely the person who had crafted it was long since dead. Could the potmaker’s spirit somehow still be captured, inside that little lump of blackened clay? Had the mother made that tiny pot as some kind of plaything for her child? Was that what had made it so precious to the little girl? Did that explain why she had bolted back into the path of certain death in a vain attempt to save it? And had the mother’s restless spirit somehow managed to create a vision in order to convey the horror of that terrible event to Agnes?

As she stood staring at the lit display in the museum, that’s how Agnes came to see what had happened to her. She hadn’t dreamed a dream so much as she had seen a vision. And now, two days later, with the book positioned in front of her face and with the three-handed poker game continuing across the room, Agnes tried to sort out what it all meant and what she was supposed to do about it.

The poker game ended acrimoniously when Lola and Dolly Ann, both with next to nothing on, accused the fully dressed Gretchen of cheating. The other three women were still arguing about that when they came to bed. Not wanting to be drawn into the quarrel, Agnes closed her eyes and feigned sleep.

Long after the others were finally quiet, Agnes lay awake, puzzling about her responsibility to a woman she had never seen but through whose eyes she had witnessed that ancient and yet all too recent drowning. The child swept away in the rolling brown water was not Agnes Barkley’s own child, yet the Indian child’s death grieved Agnes as much as if she had been one of her own. It was growing light by the time Agnes reached a decision and was finally able to fall asleep.

The tour bus seemed to take forever to get them back to Tombstone. Oscar came to town to meet the bus and pick Agnes up. He greeted her with an exultant grin on his face and with an armload of library books sliding this way and that in the back seat of the Honda.

“I took a quick trip up to Tucson while you were gone,” he explained. “They made an exception and let me borrow these books from the university library. Wait until I show you.”

“I don’t want to see,” Agnes replied.

“You don’t? Why not? I pored over them half the night and again this morning, until my eyes were about to fall out of my head. That pot of ours really is worth a fortune.”

“You’re going to have to take it back,” Agnes said quietly.

“Take it back?” Oscar echoed in dismay. “What’s the matter with you? Have you gone nuts or something? All we have to do is sell the pot, and we’ll be on easy street from here on out.”

“That pot is not for sale,” Agnes asserted. “You’re going to have to take it right back where you found it and break it.”

Shaking his head, Oscar clamped his jaw shut, slammed the car in gear, and didn’t say another word until they were home at the trailer park and had dragged both the books and Agnes Barkley’s luggage inside.

“What in the hell has gotten into you?” Oscar demanded at last, his voice tight with barely suppressed anger.

Agnes realized she owed the man some kind of explanation.

“There’s a woman’s spirit caught inside that pot,” she began. “We have to let her out. The only way to do that is to break the pot. Otherwise she stays trapped in there forever.”

“That’s the craziest bunch of hocus-pocus nonsense I ever heard.

Where’d you come up with something like that? It sounds like something that fruitcake Gretchen Dixon would come up with. You didn’t tell her about this, did you?”

“No. I read about it. In a display at the museum, but I think I already knew it, even before I saw it there.”

“You already knew it?” Oscar sneered. “What’s that supposed to mean? Are you trying to tell me that the spirit who’s supposedly trapped in my pot is telling you I have to break it?”

“That’s right. And put it back where you found it.”

“Like hell I will!” Oscar growled.

He stomped outside and stayed there, making some pretense of checking fluids under the hood of the Honda. Oscar may have temporarily abandoned the field of battle, but Agnes knew the fight was far from over. She sat down and waited. It was two o’clock in the afternoon — time to start some arrangements about dinner — but she didn’t make a move toward either the stove or the refrigerator.

For forty-six years, things had been fine between them. Every time a compromise had been required, Agnes had made it cheerfully and without complaint. That was the way it had always been, and it was the way Oscar expected it to be now. But this time — this one time — Agnes Barkley was prepared to stand firm. This one time, she wasn’t going to bend.

Oscar came back inside half an hour later. “Look,” he said, his manner amiable and apologetic. “I’m sorry I flew off the handle.

You didn’t know the whole story, because I didn’t have a chance to tell you. While I was up in Tucson, I made some preliminary inquiries about the pot. Anonymously, of course. Hypothetically. I ended up talking to a guy who runs a trading post up near Oracle. He’s a dealer, and he says he could get us a ton of money. You’ll never guess how much.”

“How much?”

“One hundred thou. Free and clear. That’s what comes to us after the dealer’s cut. And that’s at a bare minimum. He says that if the collectors all end up in a bidding war, the price could go a whole lot higher than that. Do you have any idea what we could do with that kind of money?”

“I don’t care how much money it is,” Agnes replied stubbornly.

“It isn’t worth it. We’ve got to let her out, Oscar. She’s been trapped in there for hundreds of years.”

“Trapped?” Oscar demanded. “I’ll tell you about trapped. Trapped is having to go to work every day for thirty years, rain or shine, hoping some goddamned dog doesn’t take a chunk out of your leg.

Trapped is hoping like hell you won’t slip and fall on someone’s icy porch and break your damned neck. Trapped is always working and scrimping and hoping to put enough money together so that someday we won’t have to worry about outliving our money. And now, just when it’s almost within my grasp, you—”

He broke off in midsentence. They were sitting across from each other in the tiny kitchen nook. Agnes met and held Oscar’s eyes, her gaze serene and unwavering. He could see that nothing he said was having the slightest effect.

Suddenly it was all too much. How could Agnes betray him like that? Oscar lunged to his feet, his face contorted with outraged fury.

“So help me, Aggie…”

He raised his hand as if to strike her. For one fearful moment, Agnes waited for the blow to fall. It didn’t. Instead Oscar’s eyes bulged. The unfinished threat died in his throat. The only sound that escaped his distorted lips was a strangled sob.

Slowly, like a giant old-growth tree falling victim to a logger’s saw, Oscar Barkley began to tip over. Stiff and still, like a cigar store Indian, he tottered toward the wall and then bounced against the cupboard. Only then did the sudden terrible rigidity desert his body.

His bones seemed to turn to jelly. Disjointed and limp, he slid down the face of the cupboard like a lifeless Raggedy Andy doll.

Only when he landed on the floor was there any sound at all, and that was nothing but a muted thump — like someone dropping a waist-high bag of flour.

Agnes watched him fall and did nothing. Later, when the investigators asked her about the ten-minute interval between the time Oscar’s broken watch stopped and the time the 911 call came in to the emergency communications center, she was unable to explain them. Not that ten minutes one way or another would have made that much difference. Oscar Barkley’s one and only coronary episode was instantly fatal.

Oh, he had been warned to cut down on fat, to lower his choles-terol, but Oscar had never been one to take a doctor’s advice very seriously.

The day after the memorial service, Gretchen Dixon popped her head in the door of the RV just as Agnes, clad in jeans, a flannel shirt, and a straw hat, was tying the strings on her tennis shoes.

“How are you doing?” Gretchen asked.

“I’m fine,” Agnes answered mechanically. “Really I am.”

“You look like you’re going someplace.”

Agnes nodded toward the metal box of ashes the mortician had given her. “I’m going out to scatter the ashes,” she said. “Oscar always said he wanted to be left along the banks of the San Pedro.”

“Would you like me to go along?” Gretchen asked.

“No, thank you. I’ll be fine.”

“Is someone else going with you, then? The girls, maybe?”

“They caught a plane back home early this morning.”

“Don’t tell me that rascal Jimmy Rathbone is already making a move on you.”

“I’m going by myself,” Agnes answered firmly. “I don’t want any company.”

“Oh,” Gretchen said. “Sorry.”

When Agnes Barkley drove the Honda away from the RV a few minutes later, it looked as though she was all alone in the car, but strangely enough, she didn’t feel alone. And although Oscar hadn’t told Agnes exactly where along the riverbank he had found the pot, it was easy for Agnes to find her way there — almost as though someone were guiding each and every footstep.

As soon as she reached the crumbled wall of riverbank, Agnes Barkley fell to her knees. It was quiet there, with what was left of the river barely trickling along in its sandy bed some thirty paces behind her. The only sound was the faint drone of a Davis-Monthan Air Force Base jet flying far overhead. Part of Agnes heard the sound and recognized it for what it was — an airplane. Another part of her jumped like a startled hare when what she thought was a bee turned out to be something totally beyond her understanding and comprehension.

When Agnes had arrived home with Oscar’s ashes, she had immediately placed the pot inside the metal container. Now, with fumbling fingers, she drew it out. For one long moment, she held it lovingly to her breast. Then, with tears coursing down her face, she smashed the pot to pieces. Smashed it to smithereens on the metal container that held Oscar Barkley’s barely cooled ashes.

Now Agnes snatched up the container. Holding it in front of her, she let the contents cascade out as she spun around and around, imitating someone else who once had danced exactly the same way in this very place sometime long, long ago.

At last, losing her balance, Agnes Barkley fell to the ground, gasping and out of breath. Minutes later she realized, as if for the first time, that Oscar was gone. Really gone. And there, amid his scattered ashes and the broken potsherds, she wept real tears. Not only because Oscar was dead but also because she had done nothing to help him. Because she had sat there helplessly and watched him die, as surely as that mysterious other woman had watched the surging water overwhelm her child.

At last Agnes seemed to come to herself. When she stopped crying, she was surprised to find that she felt much better. Relieved somehow. Maybe it was just as well Oscar was dead, she thought. He would not have liked being married to both of them — to Agnes and to the ghost of that other woman, to the mother of that poor drowned child.

This is the only way it could possibly work, Agnes said to herself.

She picked up a tiny piece of black pottery, held it between her fingers, and let it catch the full blazing light of the warm afternoon sun.

This was the only way all three of them could be free.