means—” I broke off, my brain catching up to my tongue and immediately forgetting the words I needed. I hadn’t spoken Cherokee regularly since I’d been a kid, less than ten years old. But Les was grinning at me, and shaking his head.
“Maybe you didn’t learn that here, Joanne. Maybe you learned it out there on the road with Joe, but as far as I’m concerned, it means you grew up in the Qualla. So you’re part of the People, even if your ma was white. Besides, most of us have white blood anyway. I mean, look at Sara.”
I actually looked over my shoulder, half expecting her to be there. She wasn’t, but I knew what he meant. Sara was honey-blonde with brown eyes and perpetually tanned skin, making her look like more of a California golden girl than somebody who laid claim to a quarter Cherokee blood. But kind of like me, her heritage came out in black and white: the high school yearbook snapshots emphasized the Indian aspects of her features, making the light hair seem less relevant. I turned back around and crooked a smile at Les. “Right. Christ, Les, were you this—”
His eyebrows rose as my face reddened again. “I was going to say this easy-going in high school, but my dim recollection is you were about as easy-going as anybody could be. This nice. Were you this nice in high school?”
“Yeah, pretty much. Bounced off you a few times, though, and figured you weren’t interested.”
I wasn’t especially good at reading between the lines, but I was reasonably certain that Cherokee County Sheriff Lester Lee had just confessed to having had a crush on me in high school. I sat there speechless long enough for him to get uncomfortable and to go back to the topic at hand. “Anyway, so white blood or not, it doesn’t mean the mountain hollers aren’t our story. I’ll call somebody to cover the station and I’ll take you up there now, if you want.”
Light changed behind me, somebody coming through the still-open front door, and a woman’s voice, cool enough to shave ice, said, “Don’t worry about it, Les. I’ll take her up myself.”
Oh, God. Caught between unrequited high school love and unforgiven high school rivalry. I slumped in my seat, trying to disappear myself. It didn’t work, and after a minute, Sara Isaac, Archnemesis, said, “Come on, Joanne. It already took you long enough to get here. We haven’t got all damned day.”
Chapter Two
“It—!” My voice rose and broke on the one-syllable word. My splendid white leather coat flared over the chair as I surged to my feet and faced her.
Sara, who was about six inches shorter than I was, took in the coat with a scathing, raking glance and managed to look down her nose at me. “Oh, please. Are you serious? What do you think this is, Joanne, a movie? The good guys wear white hats? My God, I thought you’d grown up a little.”
A better person than I would have remembered that this was a woman whose husband had been missing for almost a week. That this was a woman who’d been obliged to call in her rival to try to find her husband. That this was a woman who looked like she hadn’t slept much in the past several days, and who was gaunter than she’d been last I’d seen her.
I was by definition not that person. I snarled, “Yeah, actually, I am serious. Maybe the good guys should wear white hats, Sara. Maybe it makes them better target practice, but maybe it’s more reassuring than a bunch of grim-faced mooks in black jackets muttering, ‘We’re the FB freaking I.’ Jesus Christ, Lucas and my dad are missing and you’re worried about my fashion choices? I got here as fast as I damned well could. I don’t have an unlimited budget for international travel.” In fact, having maxed out my credit card buying a last-minute ticket to Ireland and then the leather coat, I’d had to borrow the ticket-change fee from my friend Gary, who I’d then left in Ireland to keep an eye on my cousin, the new Irish Mage.
“What the hell were you doing in Ireland anyway?”
“I was burying my mother, okay?”
Sara’s jaw snapped shut so definitively I heard the click. She had the grace to flush an attractive dusky red, and after a moment said in a much less antagonistic tone, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t even, um...” and decided she should stop there.
I finished for her, out of something I’d like to call the goodness of my heart and which I suspected was more like a gleeful willingness to twist the knife. “I didn’t know her. Not well, anyway, and not at all until the very end. So I got here as fast as I could, Sara, and if you’d told me Lucas had gone missing almost a week ago I might have tried getting here that much sooner.”
She stiffened all the way from her heels to the top of her head. I swear if it could have, all that honey-blond hair would have stood straight out like an angry cat’s. “I didn’t know it was—”
“‘My kind of thing’?” I asked when she broke off, then couldn’t help relenting a bit, palms turned up in something like apology. “Yeah, okay, that’s fair. Look, do we have to do this, Sara? Didn’t we get it out of the way in December?”
From her expression, no, we hadn’t. Or rather, we had, but only when Lucas wasn’t actually part of the physical scenario. Reintroducing him and me added a whole new level to the emotional mess we’d created in high school, or at least it apparently did in Sara’s mind. “I don’t,” I said to the ceiling, since I figured it was more inclined to listen than Sara was, “have designs on your man.”
“How do you know? You haven’t seen him in thirteen years.”
I reversed my gaze to peer at Sara. “You really think he and I are going to, what, Sara? Fall into each other’s arms in a fit of storybook love? He never even liked me, you idiot.”
“He got you pregnant!”
“And then he turned tail and ran. Sara, I don’t think liking somebody has much to do with sex for your average teenage boy. Opportunity, yes, fondness, not so much.”
Les, whom I’d more or less forgotten about, cleared his throat. Sara and I both looked at him accusingly and he said, “Don’t paint all of us with the same brush.”
I wrinkled my face. “I don’t need you being the voice of reason in the middle of my rant, Les.”
He shrugged expressively. “I’m just saying some things are more worth doing if you like the person.”
“So he did like you,” Sara said, which was such a wild extrapolation from Les’s statement that I flung my hands up in exasperation.
“Did or didn’t, it was half a lifetime ago, Sara. Get over it. Or would you rather I tried really hard not to find Lucas while I’m looking for my dad?”
She turned ever-more scarlet, spun on her heel and stalked out of the sheriff’s office. I stood there a moment, watching sunlight eat her silhouette, then turned to Les. “Is this what it’s like for people who never leave their hometowns? Does everybody get permanently stuck in high school?”
“Sara left,” he pointed out, but gave another shrug, this time one of agreement. “I think coming back makes us revert to form, maybe. Everybody knew who we were then. It’s pretty easy to fall right back into those expectations. Try being the stoner who comes home a cop. That’ll mess you right up.”
“You ever tempted to slide?”
Les looked thoughtful, but shook his head.
