A Question Of Honor

She accepted the business card without looking at it and slipped it into her jacket pocket. The attorney spoke again. “Hold on, I got the files you asked for.” She had almost forgotten he’d promised to get her copies of files from the Kenny setup that would be used in any case against her father. She turned to see Baron with a thumb drive. “Lots on there,” he said.

She took it from him and, without looking at her father, walked away. She retraced her path and checked the security screen by the side door. No one. Only falling snow and leafless trees bending in the growing wind.

Minutes later she reached the old import she’d bought from a private party two days ago. She couldn’t register the car in her name, so she chose not to register it. The tags were good until June, so she felt she had enough time to use it and keep her name off the title. She’d parked seven blocks away from the house and felt slightly breathless from the walk by the time she slipped behind the wheel.

She got the engine going, then set the heater on high, which, she’d found on the way there, meant warm enough. Sinking back into the seat, she stared at the red foil envelope in her hands and watched the snowflakes melting on the surface.

She tugged the sealed flap open with hands that were less than steady and looked inside. There was a small plastic card and a flat box in green foil. She caught the plastic card between her fingers and pulled it out. She almost cried at her father’s ability to hate what she was doing and yet help her if she had to do it, even when he was afraid for her. She’d emptied her back account and had enough cash to keep going for a good amount of time. But only her father would think of the one thing she hadn’t considered.

She was holding an Illinois driver’s license with her picture and vitals, the same ones on her real license. She was five feet two inches, 105 pounds, with black hair and blue eyes. But what wasn’t right was the name, Faith Marie Arden, or the address, somewhere in Rockford, Illinois. Arden had been her mother’s maiden name, and she didn’t even know anyone in Rockford.

She wasn’t about to try to figure out how her father had managed to get the license; she was just grateful that he had. “Thank you, Dad,” she whispered as she put it in her wallet. She opened the glove compartment and slipped her valid license under the sales papers for the car. She sat back and reached inside the foil envelope again to take out the only thing left. The box.

It had a single strand of ribbon around it, and she undid it, letting it fall to her lap. Opening the box, her eyes filled with hot tears as she took out a delicate gold bracelet with a single charm on it. It was a locket in the shape of a heart. Her mother’s. Something her father valued beyond measure. But he’d given it to her. Through a blur of tears, she manipulated the tiny lock and the heart fell open. Inside was a photo of her when she was just born, and on the other side was a photo of her mother and father on their wedding day.

When she had been very young, her father would open the locket and tell her stories about everything he could remember about Marie Arden. She heard how they met, fell in love and how thrilled they were when their daughter was born three days before Christmas.

She studied the images of three people at the start of their lives together. Her mother was gone. Her father was in real danger of being destroyed. And she was driving away from the only person who mattered in her life. She started to drop the bracelet back into the box, but spotted a folded piece of paper lying on the bottom.

She took it out, opened it and read, “Merry Christmas, Angel. You were the best Christmas present ever. Dad.”

Faith swiped at her face again, wishing she could wear the bracelet, but afraid to. It was so delicate. Still, she had it with her. She put the note and bracelet away and pushed the box into the glove compartment.

As she pulled away from the curb, she felt the tires slip on the fresh snow, then gain purchase. She was heading south, away from Chicago. She paid no attention to the Christmas decorations adorning the streets, and by the time the city was in her rearview mirror, she felt an overwhelming sadness mixed with a strong conviction that she was doing the best thing for everyone.

“Merry Christmas, Mom and Dad.”

CHAPTER TWO

Santa Fe, New Mexico

ADAM CAMERON HAD ARRIVED in town an hour ago and sat alone in a coffee shop near the airport. He was waiting for his ride home to Wolf Lake, two hours northeast. He’d chosen a booth by the window that overlooked the street, keeping an eye out for a police cruiser, the one his childhood friend John Longbow told him he would be driving.

John had been surprised by Adam’s call a few days ago, assuming that his friend would be back according to his normal timetable—get home the day before Christmas and leave as soon as he could.

To be honest, Adam had been surprised by his own decision to arrive home early. But it had ended up being an oddly easy one for him to make.

When he’d called home to let his mother know when he’d be there, he’d figured she wouldn’t be happy but that she’d understand how busy he was. And besides, she would have Jack, his older brother, and Gage, his younger brother, there, which would take some of the sting out of her disappointment. Lo and behold, he’d been wrong, very wrong.

The waitress appeared with his coffee. A cute blonde who never stopped smiling or calling him “hon” as she set the steaming mug in front of him. “You new around here, hon?” she asked with that smile still blazing.

Adam didn’t flirt well. He’d always thought that if something happened, it happened, but working to make it happen didn’t sit well with him. Been there, done that, he thought as he poured cream into his coffee. He hated playing games. That was why he liked relationships with no ties and no complications. He would admit to anyone that he had commitment phobia. He liked freedom and moving along when he had the urge to go. His latest stop had been Dallas, on the police force there, but already he was thinking about making a change, maybe heading to California.

The waitress was waiting for an answer, and he was vague. “I’m just here for a few days,” he said as he picked up his mug and turned back to the window.

He heard the waitress sigh, and in the window watched the reflection of her walking away. Then Adam’s image overlapped hers. With his ebony hair combed straight back from his sharp-featured face, one half of his heritage was emphasized, and it wasn’t the fair-skinned Irish side that rose to the surface. He could see his mother’s Navajo ancestry that defined him in more ways than one.

All three Carson boys were chiseled from the same mold physically, with decent height, tanned skin and bold features. But their characters were uniquely different. Jack was the homeboy who loved the land. Adam was the restless one, and their younger brother, Gage, was passionate about building anything. But right then it was Jack who filled Adam’s thoughts as he waited.

That simple call to his mother, but Jack answering the phone, and everything changed when he heard his brother’s voice come over the line.

As he picked up his mug, he spotted the police cruiser emblazoned with Wolf Lake P.D. on the door and John behind the wheel. Adam put down his coffee, slapped a five-dollar bill on top of his tab and then headed for the door. The waitress calling after him, “You come on back, hon, you hear?” He let the doors shut on her voice and he approached John, who had gotten out of the cruiser.

The men hugged, thumped each other on the back and got inside the car. “Welcome back, man,” John said, and in that moment, Adam experienced something unsettling and unusual for him. A huge wave of homesickness washed over him. He couldn’t remember that ever happening to him before, even as a kid. He’d always looked beyond the horizon.

Until now.

Adam murmured, “I appreciate the ride.”

“Glad to do it,” John said as he swung the cruiser out into traffic.

“Did you really have business in the city?” he asked, eyeing the man’s dark uniform, which looked rumpled from prolonged wear.

“Of course I had business in Santa Fe. Besides, I like having good company when I make this trek.”

They had barely gone a few blocks before Adam’s cell phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and glanced at the ID, expecting it to be work or even his mother. But he did a double take. The call was from his kid brother, Gage, and that surge of homesickness came again.

“Hey,” he heard over the line after he answered the call. “What are you up to?”

“Just off a plane in Santa Fe and heading for home.”

Gage didn’t sound surprised by that statement. “Good, Mom’s looking forward to it.”

“Mom called you about me coming back now?”

“No, actually. John did,” Gage answered. Adam was confused.

He turned to look at John, who was staring dead ahead out the window. “You called Gage about me coming early?”

John glanced dark eyes at him and nodded. Without saying a thing, he went back to his driving.

“Why?”

No hesitation. “Jack.”

Adam closed his eyes. There were no secrets in Wolf Lake. Everyone knew the Carson family’s history and circumstances, especially their good friend John. “Go on,” Adam said into the phone.

Gage spoke quickly. “I’m real busy here.” Where that was, he didn’t say. Gage’s design and construction company worked all over the globe, and Gage, who was a hands-on owner, went wherever the jobs were being done. “I won’t be home for Christmas, so I was glad to hear you would be.”

There was a commotion almost blotting out Gage’s voice. “Hold on,” he said, then, “Listen, Adam, I have to go. Just call me when you get there and see Jack.”

Adam barely had time to say “Okay” to his kid brother before the line went dead. He put his phone back into his pocket and looked at John again. “Why did you call him about Jack?”

John shrugged. “Worried.”

Adam was worried, too. He was worried enough to not only come home early, but block out a month of sick leave with the police force to give himself time to figure out what he needed to do to help his older brother.

John kept talking. “He’s not himself, although, I understand that after what he’s gone through. But he rides off for days alone into the high country. He’s at work on and off, mostly off, but he’s still living in the apartment above his law office. Going to tell me why you’re here early? What got to you to make you do that?”

Adam noted the landscape changing as they left Santa Fe. The old-world charm of the city, with its adobes and pueblolike housing clusters, morphed into vast, sprawling land, cut here and there by massive buttes and towering mesas. Home. He swallowed hard. “I talked to Jack. He was at Mom and Dad’s place, and he answered the phone when I called.”

“He asked you to come home?”

“No, he’d never do that. It wasn’t even anything Jack said, not really.” Adam remembered his brother talking about anything and everything except himself. His voice was different, flat and uninvolved in what he was saying. “When I asked him about some things, I could tell he’s not doing well.”

“He’s grieving, Adam.”

“I know. But it’s been a year and a half since Robyn was killed in the accident, and he’s not moving on. You said he’s staying by himself mostly. He lets Maureen take care of his cases, and those rides alone...” He thought of Jack going to law school, leaving the town for an extended time, then coming home, falling in love with Robyn and making a life with her that looked perfect.

They had lived in the loft over the offices in the center of town, everyone expecting they’d start building on Wolf land when they had kids. But there had been no kids, and not because they didn’t want them. They couldn’t, and they had been searching for answers, undergoing treatments. Robyn had taught on the reservation while they waited for their own children. Then, without warning, she was gone in the blink of an eye, in a single-car accident on her way home from work.

Adam closed his eyes for a moment. But he opened them as quickly as he’d closed them. He couldn’t take the images that came in the darkness. That night at the hospital, Jack, his face twisted with grief, the loss of Robyn so great that Adam had almost been surprised when Jack had gone on living.

By Christmas last year, Jack was back at his practice. He was doing what he’d always done, but the old Jack was gone, and the new Jack, left in his place, seemed numb and lost. On that Christmas, Gage and Adam had both been home, and they’d both told Jack that all he had to do was call, and they’d be back in Wolf Lake for him. He’d never called them on that promise. He never would. But Adam was calling himself on it now.

“There’s no time limit on grieving,” John said, snapping Adam away from the past.

“I know.” But he didn’t know at all. He’d been told that by others, as the only major loss in his life, his grandfather, made sense. His grandfather had lived eighty-four years before quietly leaving in his sleep three years ago. He missed the man so much, but he’d had a wonderful life. Robyn’s death made no sense to him at all—she’d been barely thirty with her whole life ahead of her. Adam had no idea about the hurt that Jack experienced.

“He’s lost, Adam. He’s breathing and walking and talking and even working some, but he’s not living.” Adam felt John’s eyes on him as he asked, “So you’re going back to do what?”

He didn’t know. He only knew he had to be there. “I’ll know that when I see Jack,” he replied honestly.

“I think when we get there, we should get Jack to come hunting or fishing or just plain old camping with us, maybe Moses, too, up in the high country where we used to go as kids.”

Adam agreed. The five of them—Jack, Gage, Moses, John and himself—had been inseparable when they were young. Now Moses Blackstar was the head of the local hospital, the driving force behind it being built and the one who kept it going. “Getting away from everything, maybe we can talk how we used to back in the day.”

“He’s turned down Moses’s invitations right along,” John said, “But if all of us do it, it could happen. It’s worth a try.” Without warning, John pulled off the highway and into the parking lot for a fast-food place next to a motel and gas station. “I’m hungry,” he said. “We can sit and talk for a bit, maybe make some plans, get them in place, then speak to Jack.”

Adam didn’t want to stop anywhere. He wanted to be in Wolf Lake. “Get it to go, and we can talk while you drive,” he said. He wasn’t even sure he could eat right then. His stomach had tightened painfully at the idea of what he’d find when he got home and saw Jack. He wasn’t at all certain what that would be. Not at all.

* * *

FAITH WAS EXHAUSTED. She’d been on the road for two weeks, stopping at motels in Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas as she traveled south, then west. Her plan had been to keep moving, spend a day or two in each place, nowhere too long, and go through the files when she could. She read and read, hoping to find something that wasn’t right. Something that might prove her father was innocent. Anything the others had missed.

But thus far, there had been nothing like that. So she just kept moving. At the moment, she was moving west on Highway 40 toward Albuquerque. She’d made the news quite regularly as a tagline to her father’s problems. One headline read Faith Sizemore Stays Out of Sight. It was another, though, that actually hit her the hardest. Sizemore’s Daughter Hiding—Subpoena for Grand Jury Fails. Below that, the story began, “While Federal investigators search her home again, Faith Sizemore is nowhere to be seen. An attempt to serve a subpoena for her testimony in front of the grand jury failed and prosecutors say they will keep trying, believing that her testimony could be vital to their case.” Did they know she’d run, or did they think she was just “secured” somewhere?

Her stomach grumbled, and at the same time, weariness almost overtook her. She realized she hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and she couldn’t remember when she’d actually slept for a good number of hours. She covered a yawn, cupped the back of her neck with one hand to knead at the tension. She was exhausted to the point she couldn’t concentrate. To keep herself going and to be of any use when reviewing those files, she had to have food, then rest. Real rest.

Peace and privacy for a week was what she needed. But where would she find that? The motels she’d been staying at were not exactly calm and quiet with people coming and going at all hours. And a hotel that would give her peace wouldn’t give her privacy, since she couldn’t use a credit card.

She rotated her head from side to side to ease the cramping in her muscles and felt as if she hadn’t taken an easy breath since leaving Chicago. Looking ahead, she saw a sign that towered into the graying sky, which was rapidly filling with dark clouds. Multicolored neon lights flashed Willie G’s Diner. The best food in town.

She almost smiled at that as she headed to the exit. The “town” was little more than a gas station, a tepee-shaped souvenir shop with a heavy emphasis on Native American and Western collectibles, and a cluster of trailers beyond the parking lot for the old adobe building that was Willie G’s Diner.

She slowed as she spotted a sign on a power pole near the diner’s entrance advertising The Wolf Lake Inn. The words were printed over a sepia depiction of what looked like a wolf baying at a crescent moon. But it was the last line that got her full attention: “As much or as little peace and quiet as you want. Rooms by the day or by the week. Come visit us at The Inn.”

She took the time to jot down a phone number and address from the sign before parking in front of Willie G’s. The building was low-roofed, with faded pinkish-beige walls that were chipped in spots to reveal adobe bricks underneath. Every arched window along the front held a wreath made out of sticks with twinkling lights threaded through them. The lot was barely full, with only four other cars, an 18-wheeler and an old motorcycle.

Faith sat for a long moment after she turned off the engine, fighting the urge to call her father, to hear his voice and feel as if she wasn’t totally alone. She had only called him twice from a throwaway cell, and each time, she’d been afraid to speak too long or to be too honest. She hadn’t wanted him to hear any fear or worry in her tone and she couldn’t bear to hear the somber resignation in his voice. She left the phone alone and got out into the snow and wind to hurry to the entrance. Pushing the door aside, she stepped into comforting warmth, enhanced by the fragrance of food being cooked and woodsmoke that came from a funnel-shaped fireplace set in the middle of the dining area.

The interior echoed the exterior character of the building. Rough, oxidized plaster walls, a ceiling with massive beams made from stripped timber. Well-worn stones underfoot were faded and chipped from years of use. Straight ahead was a counter and beyond that, swinging doors leading to the kitchen.

Booths lined the wall to the right and across the front by the windows, separated only by a large Christmas tree, fully decorated in silver and gold. Wooden tables were arranged in the middle of the room to take advantage of the fireplace. A young girl with brilliant red hair was serving two men at the counter. She looked up as the door thudded shut. “Sit anywhere you’d like,” she said with a smile. “I’ll be right there.”

Christmas music with a definite Western twang played in the background, blending with the customers’ conversations. Faith chose a booth by one of the windows. She sank down onto the dark red vinyl bench seat, slipped off her jacket and thought about the sign for the Wolf Lake Inn. “As much or as little Peace and Quiet as you want.” She craved both the way a man lost in the desert craved water.

The girl from the counter came over to her and smiled. “Welcome to Willie G’s. What will you be having today?” Faith ordered coffee and a hamburger with fries, then sat back as the girl took off for the kitchen. When the hamburger and stack of fries, both large enough to feed a small nation, came, she knew that she’d made a decision. She was going to find Wolf Lake Inn and stay put for a few days if it looked okay. And she could sleep, really sleep, so she could think straight. She was afraid of making a mistake and being recognized.

She ate half of her food. Pushing aside the plate, she reached for her wallet. She needed to get going.

“Food no good, lady?”

The blunt question startled Faith, and she looked up to find an older man standing by the booth. He was in his middle to late sixties, with weathered skin and long white hair piled under a cook’s hairnet. Wearing a white T-shirt and white pants, both liberally stained by various foods, he frowned at her plate, his hawkish nose twitching. “No good?” he repeated as he met her gaze.

She shook her head. “Oh, no, it was very good. It’s just so much food, enough for two or three meals.”

He folded his arms on his chest as a smile softened his lined, angular face. “I understand. You’re a little bit of a thing. For a minute I thought old Willie G. had lost the magic touch.”

“What I could eat was great.” She couldn’t stop a yawn. “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve been driving forever and I’m really tired.”

“Where you heading for?”

She hesitated, wondering if he could help. “Albuquerque, but I saw a sign for The Wolf Lake Inn when I pulled in here. Do you know it?”

“You looking to stay there?”

“Maybe, as long as it’s peaceful and private, and not too fancy or expensive.”

“That about describes it,” Willie said

“Is it very far from here?”

“It’s about fifteen miles north, near the res.”

“The res?”

“Indian reservation.”

Faith hadn’t realized until that moment that he was very much a Native American. “You’re from there?”

He nodded. “Born and bred. Wolf Lake is a good place. Some tourist stuff, but nothing too crazy. It’s pretty quiet most times. Shoot, they got a police force of four, and their main job is giving out tickets for illegal parking to tourists who wander through. That tells you how safe it is.”

It didn’t sound as if any of the four policemen would be looking for a financier’s daughter or even know about her. “How do I get there?”

He gave her directions, telling her to watch out for the inn just before the general store on the main drag of the town on the north side. “It’s a two-storied adobe with a carved eagle above the entrance. It was the first hotel ever in town. Now it’s more like what do you call those places...oh, yeah, a bed-and-breakfast. Six, eight rooms, nice place.” He hesitated and then said, “For the sake of truth in advertising, I should tell you my niece runs the inn. Name’s Mallory Sanchez. You can tell her I sent you, if you want.” He smiled slyly at her. “Probably won’t help you, but who knows?”

She answered his smile. “Thank you so much, Mr....?”

“Name’s Willie G. Lots of Willies around, but only one Willie G. in these parts.”

The waitress called out to him, “Got two orders, Willie.”

He waved a hand at her but didn’t turn. “What’s your name?”

“Faith.”

“Safe journey, Faith,” he said, moving toward the kitchen.

After the waitress boxed Faith’s leftover food and took the money for the bill, Faith stepped out into air that was just plain cold. Light snow was falling, gradually turning the land a pale gray-white. Faith got in her car, went back to the frontage road and headed east for two miles, then spotted the turn Willie had told her about. She drove onto the narrow two-lane road that was all but deserted in the early evening.

As she drove, there were fewer and fewer houses and buildings. The road cut through a vast desert area, with lots of rocks and rough ground, etched in white. Shadows fell on the snow from the mesas and buttes that rose in erratic patterns.The country looked bleak.