CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR REBECCA ROTHENBERG’S AGATHA AND ANTHONY NOMINATED FIRST MYSTERY

THE BULRUSH MURDERS

“ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST.… Spellbinding… [an] intricate and action-rich plot.… At the story’s center, always, is an affecting and insightful portrait of a bright woman struggling for simple equality in an environment as prickly and hostile as some of the wild grasses the author describes so well.”

—Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A SOLID CONTRIBUTION TO THE WOMANSLEUTH GENRE.… Solid botanical research combines with a keen sense of local color to limn a bright portrait of one of the world’s great agricultural regions.”

—Mystery News

“THE SORT OF BOOK I ENJOY: solid botanical research, good local color in fruit-growing California, characters that aren’t too good to be true, a fast-moving story well told.”

—John Sherwood, author of the Cecelia Grant mystery series

“FULL OF WARMTH, HUMOR, AND INTELLIGENCE.”

—Nancy Pickard, author of Bum Steer in the
Agatha Award-winning Jenny Cain series

“THE ATMOSPHERIC SENSE THAT PERMEATES TONY HILLERMAN’S INDIAN COUNTRY MYSTERIES.”

—Fresno Bee

“A WELL WRITTEN BOOK WITH STRONGLY DRAWN CHARACTERS.”

—Knoxville News-Sentinel

“A COMPLICATED TANGLE OF SABOTAGE AND GREED… A SATISFYING MYSTERY.”

—Publishers Weekly

Also by Rebecca Rothenberg

The Bulrush Murders

Copyright

Somebody Should Leave

By: Harlan Howard and Chick Rains

Copyright © 1983 Tree Publishing Co., Inc./Cross Keys Publishing Co.,

Inc./Choskee Bottom Music. All rights on behalf of Tree Publishing Co.,

Inc. and Cross Keys Publishing Co., Inc., administered by Sony Music

Publishing, P.O. Box 1273, Nashville, TN 37202.

GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING EDITION

Copyright © 1994 by Rebecca Rothenberg

All rights reserved.

The Grand Central Publishing name and logo are registered trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Grand Central Publishing

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

First eBook Edition: November 2009

Originally published in hardcover by Mysterious Press

ISBN: 978-0-446-56999-6

Hector Cedillo stumbled, cursed violently in Spanish, and steadied himself against a post. Maybe this shortcut wasn’t a good idea, he thought, rubbing a bruised shin. And maybe that last beer at El Aguila hadn’t been such a good idea either. If he hadn’t had that last beer, he wouldn’t have gotten into a fight with that stupid Okie who always came into the bar to pick a fight with a Mexican. (He wondered who had won, rubbed sore right knuckles, and decided he had.) He wouldn’t have missed a ride home with Juan. He wouldn’t be wandering through this damned vineyard in the dark.

And he wouldn’t have had to pay for his bender tomorrow. Usually he didn’t drink on a Sunday night; he had to be up at four-thirty for work. But, hell, he was entitled to a few beers once in a while. He worked like a dog all week under a sun that would fry tortillas, and the beer helped him forget the aches in every joint and every muscle in his body, and this flu that he couldn’t seem to shake, and memories of his mother and four sisters, to whom he sent all his money, only saving out a little for himself and Lupe, and the future—

He paused in this litany of woes to think about Lupe, who lived in his hometown five hundred miles to the south and was sixteen and pure as the Virgin she was named for. His eyes filled with tears at the thought of her—or maybe it was just the flu. His eyes and nose were running like faucets these days; he could rent himself out for irrigation. A one-man irrigation system. The idea-made him laugh so hard, he stumbled again. And then he began to think about some other women who were not as beautiful as Lupe, and not as innocent, and a whole lot closer. Hector was nineteen, and even working seventy hours a week in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley didn’t quell his ardor. Take those two women at the bar tonight... Maybe he should go back to the bar. Only that would require threading his way back through these vines, which he most definitely did not want to do.

If anyone should have felt at home in this particular place, it was Hector. He must have spent thousands of hours in the vineyards over the past few years. Hell, he’d even worked here this spring, he thought. Yeah, he remembered these vines, thirty-year-olds, he reckoned; remembered pruning them to four or five canes in January, tying them to the wires, digging the furrows, piling up the berms… He fuzzily admired his handiwork. Grapes were good money, if you were fast and skilled, and a hell of a lot easier on your back than stoop labor. He was becoming a sort of specialist in grapes.

But it was different at night. At night the vineyard became a cemetery: the T-shaped lattices, rows of crosses; the dark vines whispering and winding along their wires, little Christs nailed to those crosses… And he, Hector Cedillo, had nailed them there.

Jesus, what an idea. He really shouldn’t have had that last beer. He lurched forward and stumbled again; the moon was bright, but the ground, booby-trapped by his own ditches and berms and irrigation pipes, was in shadow. He forced himself to slow to a cautious crawl, but damn! he wanted out of here. Thank God the vineyard ended about twenty yards ahead. Beyond that was the friendly shelter of an orange grove and beyond that the highway. Maybe he could even pick up a ride; it was only midnight—

Something huge rose up before him, white as the moon, man-shaped and faceless.

Hector gave a grunt of disbelief and terror. His heart slammed twice against his ribs, then seemed to stop beating altogether, the way it did sometimes.

The thing didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. Hector stared at it with blank panic for what must have been thirty seconds; then, because he was young and resilient and cocky and too drunk to sustain any emotion, even terror, for long, he addressed it.

“Hombre,” he said,’ “que susto me dio! Que hace usted?” (He was careful to use the polite form of the verb.)

No reply. Maybe it was an Okie ghost. “Man, what you do here?” he said in uncertain English.

Still no response. The figure moved toward him slowly, paused with what would have been indecision in something less menacing, and raised its right arm. Hector saw that it carried some kind of wand. Suddenly he was afraid again.

Involuntarily he stepped backward. “Hey, man, hombre, easy, todo está okay,” he gabbled.

His heel caught on a pipe, and he fell heavily. And then the figure was over him, closer and closer, until it filled the sky. The last thing Hector saw was its upraised arm, blotting out the moon.

Chapter 1

“Strike two!” The shrill exclamation came drifting in from the back yard, followed by a deeper male voice.

“Choke up on the bat a little, Shannon,” Sam said, and Claire looked out the kitchen window just as he leaned forward and released the Softball. It moved in a slow, fat arc toward the towheaded boy, who watched anxiously and slashed at it wildly a half second too soon. It landed with a thud at his feet.

“Strike three!” piped his little brother gleefully. “One away!” Taken with this phrase, he began to chant, “One-awayoneawayoneaway .;..” while doing a sort of war dance, bent-legged, dragging his toes in a circle. The boxy white sneakers at the ends of his skinny legs made him look impossibly thin and oddly graceful, like a stork in ski boots. Both boys dressed identically—T-shirts, Day-Glo shorts that reached to the tops of their knees, baseball caps turned backward (a perennial emblem of rebellion, from the Dead End Kids on)—and when they had first arrived they had seemed completely undifferentiated. But now she was beginning to see that eight-year-old Terry was already better coordinated and more athletic than his ten-year-old brother. Shannon, stocky and ungainly, was, she hoped, the intellectual.

The boys were up from Los Angeles to visit their dad in “the country,” if you could apply that epithet to the vast expanse of the San Joaquin Valley, which—Claire sometimes thought—managed to combine the bleakness of rural life and the charmlessness of suburbia. Luckily, Sam didn’t actually live in the Valley but along its eastern edge, in the dry hills that marked the beginning of the Sierras. It was here in Kaweah County that Sam and the boys’ mother, Debby, had grown up, married, reproduced, and separated, and it was here that the boys returned every summer like swallows, or locusts: last year in May, before Sam and Claire had gotten together, this year waiting until August, when the heat was intolerable anyway. And next year… well, next year, if, God help her, she was still in Kaweah County, Claire would arrange to be on a Mediterranean cruise. Or better still, in Maine, she thought dreamily, remembering a childhood of cool dark woods and rocky beaches…

And rain. There were places in the world where water came down all unbidden from the sky instead of on schedule through a sprinkler nozzle. Here only dust came out of the air, especially now, when the pickers, human and otherwise, moved through field and orchard, stirring the dry earth into gray clouds like powdered bone.

Commotion outside interrupted her reverie. Shannon was now advancing on Terry, brandishing the bat, and she retreated from the window just as Sam rushed to intervene. One week down, three to go, she thought morosely, collapsing on the living room couch. After a moment she retrieved the issue of the Journal of Agricultural Biology she had flung down on arriving from work and picked idly at the address sticker: “Dr. Claire Sharpies, P.O. Box 323, Riverdale, CA.” Futile to bring it home, really—it was impossible to think coherently with the kids screeching around like small antipersonnel devices.

At least she could escape to the lab during the day; Sam had taken the week off to be with them, carting home a pile of paperwork that was, naturally, gathering dust on the corner of the coffee table. But then Sam didn’t seem to find them as irritating as she did. He just worried about them incessantly, which was in itself irritating—Were they having a good time? Was he fulfilling his fatherly duties? Could he even maintain a relationship with them? etc. etc.—not to mention his qualms about them growing up in Los Angeles, which constituted a whole other catalog of anxieties.

Well, tomorrow, Wednesday, life would regain some sort of order. The kids would begin staying with à neighbor during the day, and Sam would return to work—to the Citrus Cove Agricultural Experimental Field Station down in the Valley, where Claire was in transition from effete academic researcher to can-do hands-on plant pathologist and Sam was the local UC Extension expert on stone fruit (peaches, nectarines, plums).

The screen door slammed and Sam walked in, wiping his glasses on his jeans, his damp T-shirt clinging to him in a very compelling way. She grabbed the tail of his shirt as he passed, peeled it up, and kissed his stomach. “Mmmm,” he responded, bending down to her, then straightening swiftly as the boys came spurting into the room.

“Dad, can we go down to the Mini-Mart and play Nintendo?”

“Yeah, please, will you take us?”

“I thought we agreed that you guys would play ball while I worked this afternoon,” Sam said weakly, a note of pleading creeping into his voice. Claire hated that helpless tone. It was so uncharacteristic. Whatever his other failings, Sam was resolute, resourceful, decisive—except with his kids. With his kids he was a patsy. Especially when they resorted to that magic phrase “Mom always lets us…,” usually followed by some outrageous clause: “Mom always lets us ride our bikes on the freeway”; “Mom always lets us watch Texas Chainsaw Murderers on Sorority Row.”

Sam, of course, exercised reasonable restraint, but he agonized over every denial, terrified of estranging them. His children realized this very well, thought Claire sourly, and now she waited for them to move in for the kill.

“It’s too hot to play catch. I feel sick!” stated Terry.

“Yeah, and we’re bored,” his big brother added, and watched his father flinch; what if Mom knew they’d been sick and bored at Dad’s house?

Sam looked at her in dismay. “I really have to read some of this before Saturday,” he said, indicating the pile of documents. “At least these reports on pesticide residues. I’m supposed to talk about them at the open house.”

The open house was the major event of the field station’s liturgical calendar; otherwise she wouldn’t have acquiesced. There was a brief silence, and then she replied ungraciously, “All right. I’ll take them.” She ignored his grateful smile and stomped out of the house, feeling like a sullen ten-year-old herself. Shannon and Terry swooped down the stairs before her and piled into the car.

The road down to the tiny settlement of Riverdale wound through steep bleached hills that were shaded by dark-leaved oaks and studded by gray boulders. The kids sat in the back of the Toyota and talked animatedly about various arcane elements of little-boy culture. Some mysterious objects called “transformers” loomed large in their world.

“What are ‘transformers’?” Claire asked brightly. As usual she sounded forced and condescending even to herself, and also as usual her conversational gambit fell on unresponsive little ears. “Don’t try so hard,” Sam kept saying (well, how hard was she supposed to try?). “It’ll come eventually. Right now they don’t have too much use for females, I’m afraid. It’s not really personal, it’s the age. And Chuck’s influence.” Chuck, their stepfather, was fourth on Sam’s list of kiddie worries, items one through three being too much TV, not enough fresh air and exercise, and the corrupting atmosphere of L.A., respectively.

“Toys,” Terry muttered reluctantly.

“Little-kids’ toys,” Shannon added in a lofty tone designed to provoke his brother, who immediately shot back:

“Then you must be a little kid, ‘cause you played with mine this morning!”

“I was just looking at it! “

“Liar! You were so playing with it—ow!”

Claire sighed and turned on the radio.

“Somebody should leave,” Reba McEntire warbled, “but which one should it be? You need the kids....” KCW, the country station out of Bakersfield. Claire furiously twirled the dial; Sam must have been driving the Toyota.

Ah, there it was. “Y volver, volver, volve-e-rr” she crooned along with the theatrical male singer—she was trying to teach herself Spanish from the local Mexican stations—“a tus brazos otra vez…”

“Oh, yeah, like you’re way cool... not!” came Shannon’s taunt from the back seat.

Scuffle. Muffled thumps. “Stop it... stop it... Claire!” somebody wailed—Terry, who was more willing than his brother to appeal to her alleged parental authority. “He put his toe on my toe!”

She didn’t even laugh; that’s how anxious the boys made her. “Well, um, Shannon,” she began uncertainly, “don’t put your toe—”

Too late; there was a crescendo of shrieked accusations, and in the rearview mirror she saw limbs flail as elbows were placed in other people’s eyes and toes on other people’s toes.

“Terry… Shannon…”

It was hard to remember that she had liked the idea of Sam having children. It had seemed to give him a kind of stature that she lacked: he had moved on to the adult phase of the species, while she was forever stalled in adolescence, a thirty-four-year-old teenager. In fact, before the boys had come she had even entertained fantasies of herself, warm, nurturing, maternal (qualities she had never aspired to possess), cookin’ up dinner for her menfolk...

That was in the abstract, of course. In the flesh these particular boys quickly made clear, through retching noises and other amusing reactions, that they despised her healthy, vegetarian, no-sugar-or-cholesterol meals, and after three days she had refused to reenter the kitchen. Now they were subsisting on frozen pizza and fast foods, which suited Shannon and Terry—and, she suspected, Sam—just fine.

Uh-oh, Terry was crying in earnest. “Are you all right?” she called worriedly. “Terry, what videos do you want to rent?” Her voice stretched desperately over the din, unheeded. Of course unheeded; nothing she did worked with them. Maybe if they had been younger—

And a little less male.

Because they were so male, these boys; that had surprised her. She had expected them to be softer somehow, but they seemed to be little concentrated pellets of all that was most competitive, most aggressive, most macho in male culture. And she was already drowning in a testosterone sea out here, even more than at MIT. With a few exceptions her colleagues were male, her clients were male, even her friends, such as they were, were men.

Terry had stopped crying, and now both boys were giggling. She shifted down for the hairpin turn that meant they had almost descended the thousand feet or so to Riverdale. As they rounded the curve the hills opened out suddenly, and to the west they looked out across the lead-colored sea of pollution that settled into the Valley every summer. Ah, yes, fresh air, she thought sardonically. And as for exercise and TV, sliding around on the floor of the car were five videos she was returning to the Riverdale Mini-Mart. Sam had held out about twenty-four hours before the anguished wail of his offspring had sent him rushing down to rent a television—his first—and a VCR and $20 worth of movies.

The road dead-ended into State 170, Riverdale’s main street, and she turned right and pulled into the Mini-Mart’s parking lot. The kids sprinted into the market and headed for the video game, but Claire halted by the front door and looked east.

Just beyond town the highway began to snake up the long western slope of the mountains. From this side the huge batholith of the Sierra swelled gradually to a fourteen-thousand-foot crest, then plunged abruptly in a sheer vertical escarpment, like a tremendous wave of granite forever poised to crash down on Nevada. And if it weren’t for the kids, she could be up there, in the high country somewhere, settled under some alpine tree—lodgepole or limber pine (Pinus contorta, Pinus flexilis, Sam’s voice corrected, in her head)—instead of in a damned convenience store parking lot, waiting for two crazed preadolescents to run out of quarters.

Well. She slipped back into the car and flipped through her journal.

The radio’s program of Música de Jalisco had ended, and a crisp male voice was reading the news. Since this particular station, Radio Campesino, served the Valley’s Spanish-speaking farmworkers and often reported events that no one else bothered to cover, she listened hard, frowning in a doomed effort to snatch some meaning from the torrent of words. But it was beyond her. “El Presidente de Mexico yahdala yahdala yahdala con los Estados Unidos yandala yahdala,” a pause, “yandala yandala Hector Cedalo...”

Eck-TOR Say-DEE-yo. Switching off the radio, she carefully repeated the syllables, savoring the voluptuous r and trying to remember who he might be. Minor functionary of the Mexican government? Central American despot/democratic leader? Freedom fighter/terrorist? Shrugging, she immersed herself in an article on Entyloma seritonum, an obscure fungus—smut, to be precise—in which she had developed an unnatural interest.

Twenty minutes later she looked up with a guilty start, remembering the kids, and walked to the window. Terry was, now sitting on the floor reading a Masters of the Universe comic book, but Shannon was still at the throttle of Super Mario Brothers in Hell, his face set and fanatical like a kamikaze pilot’s.

Or like Sam’s, she thought, surprised. Superficially the very blond boys bore little resemblance to their father, who was thin and dark, but Sam had that same expression of rapt attentiveness when he was examining some scrubby little specimen of native flora. Or sometimes when he was looking at her—which made up for a lot, but not for everything.

“Help me pick out some new movies,” she said. After some bitter negotiation during which they traded vetoes, Claire on grounds of excessive violence and degradation of women, the kids on grounds of dumbness, they grudgingly compromised on three cassettes, Ernest Saves Christmas (Terry), Home Alone (Shannon), Alien III (both). As they left, the lady behind the counter gave Claire a smile of maternal complicity, which she returned weakly, feeling like a fraud.

Frozen pizza for dinner and then some serious television watching: this was the nightly routine that had been established during the previous week. Claire read, and Sam pretended to read. Like many people who rarely watched TV, he was fascinated by it and attempted, to disguise this by making perfunctory scathing comments from time to time. But, being Sam, what he chose to object to was not, say, the inane scripts or the cardboard characters; it was the botanical inaccuracies.

“Look at that!” he said tonight. “They’re supposed to be in Korea and there’s Quercus agrifolia all over the place! Obviously Malibu Canyon or somewhere like that!” And later, “I don’t believe it! Washington, D.C., and there’s a goddamn Umbellularia californica in the front yard!”

“Da-a-ad!” the kids complained, and, “Sa-a-am!” Claire screamed silently. This was Sam at his nerdiest: slumped on his chair, television glittering in his lenses, hands folded across his thin chest (at least he was wearing the T-shirt instead of his workday uniform of pale green polyester shirt and strange trousers). How had it happened that after years , of exposure to his type—in high school science classes, college biology, graduate school microbiology—without the slightest attraction, she had found Sam irresistible? Was it heat stroke? His beauty of character? Or his pheromones?

All three, maybe, but mostly the latter, which was another black mark against the boys. Since their arrival she and Sam had barely shaken hands. He was preoccupied and reluctant to express affection in the kids’ presence—and since there was no privacy, not even a lock on the bedroom door, it was impossible to escape their presence—and she was sulky. Not exactly a good atmosphere for sex or even a decent argument, the two mainstays of a relationship.

She tolerated two hours of Family Life, then announced abruptly, “I have to go to the library,” and bolted.

Back down the hill. The sun was descending toward the Valley, slowly, like a fat man lowering himself into a tub of dirty water. By the time Claire reached downtown Parkerville, eleven miles below Riverdale, a glorious toxic pink sunset was smeared across the sky. The library was in fact the only reason she had found for visiting downtown Parkerville, and evidently everyone else felt the same: serious shopping was done in the suburban malls or in Bakersfield to the south or Fresno to the north, and Parkerville, like grander cities before it, was dying from the inside out. Broad, shady Main Street was now generally deserted; only the bars and the squalid old hotel that housed farmworkers were thriving.

And, of course, the library.

She drove around this cinder-block structure, which the city in its wisdom had just erected in place of the delightful thirties-era mission-style building that had preceded it, and finally parked. Before her was an old Volvo encrusted with ancient bumper stickers: BUY ORGANIC and BOYCOTT COORS peeked out from under MONDALE-FERRARO, which was half-covered by US OUT OF CENTRAL AMERICA, which shared space with EARTH ACTION! which overlapped I KNOW WATTS WRONG in a sort of pentimento of hopeless liberal causes.

In Cambridge, or Berkeley, or Eugene, this was a run-of-the-mill vehicle, maybe, but in Kaweah County there was only one person to whom it could belong. And in fact she nearly crashed into him as she rounded a corner at a brisk pace.

Emil Yankovich threw up his hands in an odd protective gesture—not, she thought unhappily, at the impending impact, but at the sight of her—and dropped his library books.

“God, Emil, I’m sorry. Here, let me help.”

“N-n-no!” he stammered fiercely, but it was too late; she had already stooped to help retrieve his books and so found herself knee to knee and eye to eye with him as he did the same. He croaked something through a constricted throat, and his brown eyes rolled like a trapped… animal’s. Cow’s, she had been thinking, but that was unkind, even though there was something bovine about him when he was like this, paralyzed by self-consciousness, gagged by a stutter.

There was a time when he had been relatively fluent and relaxed with her.

Then she had blown it.

“Desert Solitaire,” she read from the cover of the book she had picked up. Once, months ago, she had run into Emil (though not so literally) at the library, and he had also been carrying Desert Solitaire. “Again? You must have this memorized!” The sound of her own overly cheerful voice, sprightly as a kindergarten teacher’s, made her wince. It was the way she talked to the boys, and she knew it was the way women always talked to Emil. He reddened, mumbled something, and pulled away.

“I haven’t quite finished Monkeywrench,” she continued. Actually she had been unable to get past page three, but she was hoping to reestablish their rapport. “I’ll bring it by your house when I do.” She gave him her best smile.

“You c-can k-keep it,” he said brusquely, and swept past her toward the street. She felt a flash of disappointment and anger; it was humiliating to have once patronized someone and then find that you needed them more than they needed you.

Quickly she dumped this week’s load of sci-fi, procured another armful—between these and the videos she shouldn’t have to speak to anyone in her so-called family for a week— and stepped back out into the sultry night. Emil’s Volvo was still there, and she saw his lone figure standing under a streetlight by a newspaper vending box, reading the paper. When she called to him he jerked upright but didn’t look in her direction. Instead he slid into his car and drove away.

Angry all over again—he had heard her all right—she found herself automatically picking up the paper he’d flung, in a most un-Emil-like gesture, to the ground. (Litter! Waste!) As she headed for the recycling bin she scanned the headlines.

The Parkerville Sentinel’s front page was as usual culled from the papers of bigger cities: Fresno, Bakersfield. FRESNO REPORTER AND SENATOR TRADE CHARGES IN LIBEL CASE, she read, MORE KILLER BEES SIGHTED NEAR BAKERSFIELD. BODY FOUND IN CANAL IDENTIFIED.

Ah, a body in an irrigation canal. This was the local method of choice for the disposal of awkward corpses in Sam’s rural paradise. “The nude body of the man discovered Monday afternoon in the Friant-Kern Canal has been tentatively identified as Hector Cedillo, 19, a Mexican national.”

Claire frowned, then remembered—the radio. That’s what the broadcast had been about. Eck-TOR Say-DEE-yo, poor kid; not a head of state, just a statistic. She read on. “Cedillo apparently drowned last Sunday night, August 14. Police speculate that the victim may have stumbled into the canal while intoxicated. On August 1 another Mexican national, Juan Perez, drowned in an irrigation ditch about four miles north of Parkerville.”

The end. One lousy inch. It was a typical Sentinel account, and one that made her grit her teeth. There was the usual inexorable logic of the police—the guy was Mexican and therefore drunk—and the whole story was an inch long. The Lions Club elections had gotten three, and a whole column was devoted to the upcoming classic car show, at which, by the way, for a dollar a swing you could beat on a vehicle donated by Ernie’s Auto Wrecking, and bashers would considerately be provided with safety glasses.

She knew by now that the death of a “Mexican national” (read “unperson”) didn’t rate much copy in Parkerville. A couple of “Mexican nationals” get drunk and fall in a ditch? Knife each other on a Saturday night? Disappear from the face of the earth and turn up six years later in a shallow grave? Oh, well, They don’t value human life as We do. In a county that was upward of 40 percent Mexican in some seasons, it was astounding how few Anglos even spoke Spanish. It seemed to be regarded as a degraded language; the high school kids took French, for God’s sake—

Claire realized that she herself didn’t speak Spanish. But she was really going to learn.

Maybe that would make a difference in how she felt about this place—that and the farm adviser job Ray Copeland kept dangling in front of her. Because the Mexican farmworkers constituted a culture and a community that attracted her— that, to be frank, she romanticized, as was her wont—but that so far remained politely and implacably closed to her.

Of course, not long ago it had seemed to her that all of Kaweah County had bolted and barred itself against the interloper from the east. Before she had moved out here a year and a half ago she had been warned about the insularity and the racism.

And the heat. Most definitely the heat. But not about the violence, she thought, glancing at the paper before she tossed it into the recycling bin. Maybe they were related. Because a year ago on a blistering summer day her almost friend Tony Rodriguez had died, violently, precipitating upheaval, violent, in her own life.

And now here she was, she thought as she sped up the hill, somehow involved, with a man she had thought she disliked, somehow installed in an environment she more or less ab horred, and what was to have been a brief sojourn in the Cal ifornia countryside, a sabbatical from acadamic politics at MIT and Boston winters, had apparently become a life, her life, in fact…

She halted in mid-panic attack, reminded herself that she was not indentured to the field station or to Sam, not exactly; that she could leave any time; that anyway, “a life” was literally more than Hector Cedillo had, poor guy.,

At home the living room couch had already been unfolded so Shannon and Terry could go to sleep. The adults sat on the front porch in silence for a while; then they too went to sleep.