They worked it out that she’d drive down to Flagstaff two weeks hence, in time for the exchange of discovery between the defense and the prosecution.
“You don’t need to sit in on the discovery session unless you want to,” her father said, in deference to what he probably realized were her strong misgivings. “Of course, I’m hoping you’ll choose to be present. You’re damn good at sniffing out the weaknesses in a defense case, you know. You might pick up on something I miss.”
He wants me there to throw David off base, she thought again, her earlier speculation strengthening. He doesn’t realize that, despite my anger over the shabby way David treated me, a part of me still yearns for him. Or else his fear of going out a loser is pretty strong. Whatever the reason for his comments, Kyra reflected, it was narrowly possible that her going wouldn’t be a mistake. While it was too much to expect that she’d feel nothing when she and the part-Navajo defense attorney she’d once loved came face-to-face, she might use the moment as a springboard for getting over him.
Three days later, thirty-six-year-old David Yazzie was currying his favorite saddle horse, Born for Water, outside the barn on his Yebetchai Ranch. A little tired, having just come off a case himself—one that he’d resolved in his client’s favor—he was glad to be home again. Living out of the motor home that became both office and sleeping quarters when he was on the road pleading cases in Wyoming, North Dakota or New Mexico was okay, he guessed. But it didn’t give him the sense of peace and rootedness he felt on his three-hundred-plus acreage studded with ponderosa pine and juniper. With all his heart he loved the ranch and the house he’d built of stone and cedar to his own specifications in the shadow of the sacred mountains.
So why did he feel so restless this morning? he wondered.
Most of what he consciously wanted was within his reach. From impoverished beginnings on the reservation, as the son of a widowed, mostly Navajo mother and a father of mixed Navajo, Anglo and Hispanic background, who’d been killed in a railroad accident before his birth, he’d come a long way. Thanks to the U.S. Army, which he’d joined in order to be eligible for the G.I. Bill, he’d earned a bachelor’s degree, then begged and borrowed his way into law school.
After serving as one of Jim Frakes’s assistants in Flag to establish some credentials for himself, he’d gone on to create a way of life that included a good income—by virtue of his successful lawsuits against negligent corporations— and the satisfaction of helping deserving underdogs win vindication or redress.
In many ways he’d achieved the best of what the Anglo world had to offer. Meanwhile, his Native American ancestors had bequeathed him a rich spiritual heritage. From his great-grandfather, who’d died of advanced old age several years earlier, he’d learned ancient medicine man secrets known only to a few, which allowed him to step beyond the distortions of the present and get at the hidden truth in situations.
Yet something fundamental was missing from his day-to-day existence. He felt it most whenever he finished a case and returned to Flag, with enough leisure to step back from the quotidian flow of work and think about his situation.
This time, because of the trouble that had befallen Paul Naminga, there wouldn’t be much time for reflection. Yet the prospect of defending the Hopi paramedic in what would probably be Jim Frakes’s last major case hadn’t assuaged his yearning.
A chance discovery had only made it worse. While going through some notes David had saved from the Leonard Naminga trial on his first night home, he’d run across a group snapshot taken in the county attorney’s office on the occasion of Tom Hanrahan’s fortieth birthday. In the picture, a smiling, slightly younger version of himself stood with his arm around slim, blond Kyra Frakes—Martin now, he reminded himself. Bronze in contrast to the freckled paleness of her skin, his fingers curled about her upper arm, which was bared by her sleeveless blouse.
He’d almost been able to smell the perfume she wore, feel the heat and vitality that radiated from her body as he stared at the photograph. I shouldn’t have let Jim talk me into walking out on her that way, he thought now, by the corral, for perhaps the thousandth time. I could have helped her finish law school—made whatever sacrifices it took. As husband and wife, we’d have lit up the sky with a fire that would be still burning.
If she cared at all after so much time had passed, that caring took the form of aversion, he guessed. He supposed he could count himself lucky that she wouldn’t be around during the trial to make the besotted thirty-year-old inside him, whose memories were alive and well, eat his heart out. Being civil to the former boss who’d wanted him out of her life for what in retrospect he considered offensive reasons would be difficult enough.
Finishing with the horse, David patted the glossy animal’s neck and led him to his stall. He was just closing the stall gate when the cellular phone in his hip pocket chirped.
His caller turned out to be Jim Frakes’s secretary since time immemorial, Jody Ann Daniels. “Hey, gorgeous. How ya doin’?” the fortyish mother of three greeted him. “The boss asked me to call and set up the discovery exchange in State v. Naminga for a week from Monday. That fit with your schedule?”
He hadn’t been able to do his usual thorough investigation yet. “So long as he’s willing to revisit if and when new information comes to light,” he conceded.
Jody Ann laughed outright. “Knowing you’d ask, he so stipulated. By the way…your old friend Kyra’s taking a leave of absence from her high-powered Kansas City job to help her pop, what with Tom Hanrahan bedridden in Missoula. Guess she’s a little freer to flit around the country, now that she’s divorced. It’s gonna be like old home week around here!”
Kyra was divorced. She was coming back to Flagstaff.
Folding the phone and slipping it back in his pocket after saying goodbye to Jody, David walked back to the corral and leaned over the fence. He rested the astonishing blue gaze he’d inherited from Anglo ancestors on his father’s side and W. W. Trask, the legendary Irish-American-Native American scout who’d been his mother’s great-great-great-grandfather, against the mountains’ enduring beauty.
Did he still have a chance with her? His thoughts in turmoil, he found himself staring into the void his estrangement from Kyra had created. Though he’d tried to phone her a year after they’d parted, around the time she’d graduated, he hadn’t been able to reach her. Soon afterward he’d heard she had been married. After that the notion of contacting her had seemed pointless.
They hadn’t talked or even glimpsed each other in passing since the day her father had pressured him into leaving her for her own good, and he’d been fool enough to swallow the bait.
Now fate had taken a hand.
Seeing her again will either cure me or reinfect me with the same old yearning, he thought. As he pondered what to do about it, a remark his mother’s grandfather had once made drifted through his head. You can’t change the past, even if you acquire the wisdom to visit it, Henry Many Horses had observed in his quiet way. But you can learn a great deal from the lessons it has to teach.
Thanks to a last-minute flurry of activity in Kansas City, where she was pressed into taking depositions for another assistant who had the flu, Kyra wasn’t able to leave until noon on Saturday. I probably won’t make it to Flag in time for the discovery exchange, she thought as she headed southwest on Interstate 35 toward Wichita in her cherry red Jeep Cherokee. And I’ll miss my first opportunity to come face-to-face with David. It’s almost as if I planned it that way.
Kyra didn’t bargain on the fact that her compulsion to see him again would build as the miles racked up, causing her to press her foot a little harder on the gas pedal. By the time she reached Gallup, New Mexico, late Sunday afternoon, her yearning