“It’s hard for someone outside of our culture to understand, I guess. To see anything more sacred than Mom and Dad and little red baby makes three.”

“What do you see?”

Annawake hesitates. “First choice? I’d rather have seen her go into a Cherokee home, with relatives, that’s always the best thing. But we can’t always get first choice. And now that she’s been taken out, it’s way complicated. My boss thinks I’m on the warpath. Annawake Crazy Horse.”

“Are you?”

“Well, sure. Taylor should have gotten permission from the tribe. And Turtle should have connections with her people. She should know…” Annawake pauses, corrects her aim. “There are ways of letting her know about who she is.

My position is essentially neutral. I have information Taylor could use.”

“Neutral snootral. You know that thing they say about getting between a mother bear and her cub? Annie dear, you might think you’re just out picking blueberries, but that’s highly irrelevant to Mama Bear.”

“I accept your point.”

A small breeze seems to come right up out of the ground, stirring the tree branches in every direction. Voices drift down from the large stone house on the hill, fragments of laughter, and a chorus of bird chatter rises from the mesquite thicket.

Annawake listens to the bird music, identifying some of its individual parts: the monotonous croon of a dove, a wood-pecker’s laugh, and stitched through it all, the intermittent shriek of crickets. She stops listening so closely then, prefer-ring the whole song to any of its solo voices.

Jax slaps his knee abruptly. “Damn this,” he says.

“I agree.”

“You don’t know the half of it, listen. Taylor is the woman my mama used to tell me to save myself for. I swear, I kind of wish I had. You ever feel that way about a person?”

“Not one person, no,” Annawake says. She doesn’t have to think about it.

“Well, then, maybe you can’t understand what I’m going through. If I went in and played it on the piano, you’d understand. You’d say, This Jax, boy, I think he going to lie down here and die if that woman stays away past the fourth of July.”

The clouds in the western sky are still lit brightly on their undersides like the yellowy-silver bellies of fish, but overhead some stars are out. “There you go,” Jax tells Annawake.

“That’s Venus, the goddess of love. Don’t ask me why she comes out at eight o’clock when people are still washing their supper dishes.”

“Prime time,” Annawake says. Listening to Jax encourages free association.

“You bet.”

“You know the thing that first really got my attention about this case?”

Jax says, “The sheer awesome height of Hoover Dam.”

“No, I missed that part of the show, believe it or not. What got me interested is that her story doesn’t square up. On TV

she said Turtle was a foundling, more or less. That some Cherokee woman handed her this kid in a coffee shop. But the records show two parents who voluntarily gave Turtle up.”

“Did anyone ever tell you that you, personally, are beautiful beyond the speed of light?”

She stares at Jax for a minute, then laughs. “In those words, no.”

“Just wondering. Could I kiss you?”

“Is this a diversionary tactic?”

“Yes, more or less. Although I’d probably have a good time.”

“Your heart’s not in it, Jax. Nice try, though.”

“Thank you.”

“So apparently, from what I’ve found out, the story of the foundling in the coffee shop is the true one. Strange but true.

They fixed up that adoption, didn’t they?”

“Righty-o.”

“Why?”

“Well, you know. You need papers in this big old world.

Some social worker here in Tucson figured out that legalwise Taylor’s goose was cooked, finding the birth parents was hopeless. So she put her onto some official in Okie City that apparently is not obsessed with the long arm of the law. Taylor went back there with two friends that posed as Turtle’s parents.”

“So Steven and Hope Two Two are a fraud.”

Jax runs a hand through his ragged hair. “You’d already figured that out, don’t play Little Bo Peep. But you’ll never find Steven and Hope; they were Guatemalans without papers and they’ve disappeared into America the beautiful. And the guy that approved the adoption, he was old, Taylor says.