“And did he see her?”
“Only once. She reported that he was sullen, withdrawn, uncooperative. I insisted on a drug test. Instead of complying, he simply stopped coming to work. I had to let him go, Rainy. I’d be happy to help him. We did once. Sometimes it takes more than one stay.”
“He was clean,” Rainy said. “When I saw him in April, he was clean.”
“I’m sure that’s what he told you. And you believed him. We love them so much, we want to believe them.”
“Did he tell you what he was going to do?”
Saunders shook her head. “But I heard that he was working for Jayne and Frank Harris. They have vineyards on the other side of the Coronados.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Not since he left us.” Saunders leaned across her desk and put out her hands to take Rainy’s. The turquoise bracelet she wore slid over the polished wood with a sound like bone scraping across a dinner plate.
“You’re a healer, too,” she said. “When you find him, if you can convince him to come back to us, we’ll have another go. All of us together.”
She saw us out and hugged Rainy in parting.
We stepped outside, into the heat again, and the glare of the sun.
“Just a minute,” I said to Rainy and went back inside.
Jeanette Saunders was walking away. I called to her and she came back.
“Yes, Cork?”
“How much does it cost for treatment here?”
Her face betrayed a little concern, in her eyes a clear hesitation. Finally she said, “We charge thirty-five thousand dollars a month.” Then, as if to justify, “We’re very good and we’re very discreet and we’re very isolated.”
“Of course,” I said. “Thank you.”
Rainy was waiting in the shade of a palm. “What was it?”
“Nothing important.”
We walked out of that little piece of paradise, past the expensive cars shooting arrows of reflected sunlight off their chrome. No medical insurance plan I knew of would cover the cost of rehab in a place like the Goodman Center. I wondered how Rainy, who’d lived in self-imposed poverty on Crow Point for years, could afford to pay over $100,000 for the three months Peter had spent at the center during his recovery. It was only one of the many questions about Rainy that I was beginning to ask myself.
CHAPTER 4
* * *
“We should try Sulfur Springs,” Rainy suggested. “See if we can find where he lives.”
Peter had never been a young man who called or texted frequently. Instead, he preferred to communicate through letters, long, thoughtful missives, a habit from his days in the military, when he used the letters, he’d told Rainy, to get his head clear. The letters she’d received from him for the past year—ever since he’d been let go from the Goodman Center, I now understood—had a return address in Sulfur Springs, a tiny town another ten miles south, toward the border. Before that, he’d been living in Cadiz.
“All right,” I said. “Next stop, Sulfur Springs.”
We continued to follow the river, winding our way up the valley between the mountains until we came to a cutoff with a sign pointing southeast: SULFUR SPRINGS 8 MILES. The road we followed snaked steeply upward, then crested. Below, along the base of the range, lay a kind of alluvial plain, an apron of high desert with a clear view to the south. We could see for miles and miles. In the distance, unnatural against the pale, washed-out color of the desert it ran through, was a long black line that stretched all the way to the horizons east and west.
“The fence,” Rainy said.
I’d read about it. Hadn’t everybody by now? But I’d never seen it. The structure was often referred to as a fence, but along the line that separated Coronado County from Mexico, it was a tall, stark metal wall. Like a scar follows the shape of a body, the wall followed the contour of the land. And that’s exactly what it looked like—a dark, ugly scar. I thought it was probably not unlike the wall that had once divided Berlin. Except that this one had been erected to keep people out and not in. From what I understood, it wasn’t doing a stellar job.
We passed an abandoned ranch house, a weathered, gray derelict with fallen-down fences and a windmill that no longer pumped. Someone had made a go of it, at least for a while, in this desolate country. Then something had happened, harsh enough to drive them away. Or maybe it wasn’t a single thing, but the long struggle against a land that, I imagined, received too little rain and too much sun and, day after relentless day, was beset by heat that could bake your brain.
I saw Sulfur Springs long before we hit the outskirts. A gathering of buildings shaded by a few trees, the glint of sunlight reflected off steel and glass, the harsh, unnatural geometry of habitation.
“What do you know about this place?” I asked as we approached.
“Nothing, really. I never came here when Peter was in rehab. No reason to.”
“Why does he live here?”
“He told me he liked the simplicity.”
“Any idea where he lives?”
She shook her head. “His letters all have a return address with a P.O. box number.”
“That didn’t strike you as odd?”
“He told me he might be moving around a bit until he really settled in. He said it was easier.”
“Maybe we should start at the post office,” I suggested.
Sulfur Springs was a cross-hatching of a dozen or so streets. The houses were simple, single-story structures, the yards ornamented with cacti instead of flower beds, every one of them enclosed by adobe walls or metal fencing. The trees, when there were some, were thorny-looking things with sparse leafage, not what, in Minnesota, we would have called a tree at all.
The business section was a single block, old buildings not updated and boutiqued in the way they’d been in Cadiz. The effects of time and weather were evident on every storefront. There was a small grocery store, a barbershop, a little eatery called Rosa’s Cantina, a one-pump gas station, a real estate office, a few other businesses that appeared to be not particularly thriving. There was also a little police station, more a storefront operation, it looked like, and next to it was the post office, which was not much bigger than one of the stamps you could buy there.
Inside the post office, set into the wall to our left, was a small bank of P.O. boxes. On the wall to the right was a narrow counter with postal forms. Above the counter hung a bulletin board with both official notices—“Policies for the Apprehension, Detention, and Removal of Undocumented Immigrants”—and also notices of local interest—“Fiesta at St. Esteban’s, Wednesday, July 17.” Although the hours posted on the door said the office was open from 10:00 until 4:00, the place seemed empty. I could hear Tejano music playing somewhere in back.
“Hello!” I called.