Lucy waited until she knew her grandmother was asleep
before she left the house and quietly wheeled her bike out
of the shed. The afternoon's bitter quarrel had continued
to torment her the whole time she had sorted through the
few possessions she would need to take with hera bedroll,
a few clothes, a heavy, sheepskin-lined jacket, a canteen
of water, some food pilfered from the kitchen, her
grandmother's .22 pistol, and, of course, the diskette.
Her mother's precious diskette. The diskette that had
meant more to Sandra Ridder than anything else. That
diskette, Lucy Ridder knew, was the whole reason her
father had died.
It was cold enough outside that she could see her breath.
Across the Sulphur Springs Valley the full moon had risen
high over the horizon, casting enough of an eerie yellow
glow across the landscape that Lucy could see to ride.
After pushing the bike for the better part of half a mile,
Lucy stopped and once again sent that same wild and
keening cry off across the night-still desert. She called
and waited. Moments later, she was rewarded by the flap of
Big Red's wings overhead. Once he settled gently onto her
leather-thong-wrapped handlebar, Lucy no longer felt
nearly as alone or as frightened.
"Will she come, do you think?" Lucy asked the bird.
Big Red didn't answer, but then he didn't need to. After
all, Lucy knew the answer to that question herself, She
had known it all along. Of course Sandra Ridder would
come, just as she had eight years earlier -- in secret, in
the middle of the night, and without Grandma Yates'
knowledge.
Big Red had learned to ride on the handlebars of Lucy's
bike long before he could fly. From the time he was little
more than a ball of fluff, he had loved riding perched on
the leatherwrapped handlebar with his wings half-spread
and his hooked beak pointing into the wind. As he had
grown, it seemed to Lucy that Big Red's partially unfurled
wings always served to make them more aerodynamic.
They often took long weekend jaunts to the upper end of
Cochise Stronghold. In the wild and protected reaches of
the cliff-bound canyon where the noted Apache chieftain,
Cochise, had often secluded his band, Lucy and her
unlikely companion would while away the long weekend
hours. This, however, was the first time that the two of
them had made this pilgrimage together in the dark of
night.
Three different times Lucy heard vehicles approaching from
behind, and twice she met vehicles driving toward her. On
each occasion, Lucy wheeled the sturdy mountain bike off
the road. While Big Red hustled onto low-lying branches,
Lucy disappeared into underbrush to wait until the danger
of discovery was past.
Pumping along, Lucy felt physical warmth seeping back into
her body right along with the anger she harbored toward
her mother. And as she rode, the memory of that other
nighttime trip to Cochise Stronghold -- one made from
Tucson and in her mother's old Nissan -- was still vivid
in Lucy's mind.
Sandra Ridder had come to the Lohse YMCA to collect
herdaughter. Even though the ballet class had barely
started, she had ordered Lucy to get dressed and come
along. Her face had been bruised and bleeding and she
seemed so agitated that at first Lucy had thought Sandra
was drunk. That did happen at times, although it happened
far less frequently now that Lucy's father had gone to
treatment and quit drinking.
Once in the car, Lucy learned that her mother wasn't
drunk. She was angry. Furious! As soon as the car doors
closed, she had wrestled Lucy's backpack away from her
daughter and dug through it, pawing all the way to the
bottom.
"That son of a bitch!" she had exclaimed at last, pulling
out the diskette Lucy's father had given her at lunchtime.
"I knew it had to be here!" Sandra continued. "They looked
everywhere else, so I knew he must have given it to YOU."
Lucy didn't know who "they" were. But she did know that
her father had placed the diskette in her backpack. She
also knew that real physical danger lurked in her mother's
anger, and right then fear overpowered everything else.
She had shrunk into the far corner of the car seat and had
tried not to listen as her mother ranted and raved about
her father and about the terrible things he had done.
After they left the lights of Tucson behind them and all
the time they were driving the familiar roads to Cochise
County's Dragoon Mountains, Lucy had assumed they were
going to see her two grandmothers. Grandma Yates, her
mother's mother, and her great-grandmother, Christina
Bagwell, lived just off Middlemarch Road in the foothills
of the Dragoon Mountains. Instead, Sandra had driven her
Nissan someplace else -- to a place that was nearby and
almost as familiar as Grandma Yates' ranch -- Cochise
Stronghold. The Ridders and Lucy's two grandmothers had
often had family picnics in the campground there. This
time, though, Sandra had pulled overand stopped right
beside the entrance. As she put the car in park, Sandra
had told Lucy to get in the backseat. "Go to sleep," she
said. "And don't you make a sound."
Lucy hadn't made a sound, but she hadn't gone to sleep,
either. Instead, peering out through the back window, Lucy
had watched as her mother carefully removed a stack of
fistsized rocks from beneath the rough-hewn FOREST SERVICE
sign at the entrance to the park. Then, once the rocks had
been moved aside, Sandra had hidden something deep in the
earthen cavity created by the missing rocks. In the dark,
Lucy had been unable to see the object her mother was so
carefully and secretly burying, covering it over once
again with the stack of rocks. Lucy assumed it had to be
the diskette Sandra had retrieved from Lucy's backpack,
but in the dark there was no way to tell for sure...
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