After they left the lights of Tucson behind them and all the time they were driving the familiar roads to Cochise County’s Dragoon Mountains, Lucy had assumed they were going to see her two grandmothers. Grandma Yates, her mother’s mother, and her great-grandmother, Christina Bagwell, lived just off Middlemarch Road in the foothills of the Dragoon Mountains. Instead, Sandra had driven her Nissan someplace else—to a place that was nearby and almost as familiar as Grandma Yates’ ranch—Cochise Stronghold. The Ridders and Lucy’s two grandmothers had often had family picnics in the campground there. This time, though, Sandra had pulled over and stopped right beside the entrance. As she put the car in park, Sandra had told Lucy to get in the backseat. “Go to sleep,” she said. “And don’t you make a sound.”
Lucy hadn’t made a sound, but she hadn’t gone to sleep, either. Instead, peering out through the back window, Lucy had watched as her mother carefully removed a stack of fist-sized rocks from beneath the rough-hewn forest service sign at the entrance to the park. Then, once the rocks had been moved aside, Sandra had hidden something deep in the earthen cavity created by the missing rocks. In the dark, Lucy had been unable to see the object her mother was so carefully and secretly burying, covering it over once again with the stack of rocks. Lucy assumed it had to be the diskette Sandra had retrieved from Lucy’s backpack, but in the dark there was no way to tell for sure.
Sometime later, breathless with exertion, Sandra Ridder had returned to the car. By then Lucy was lying flat in the backseat, breathing deeply and pretending to be asleep. She had expected that once her mother finished whatever she was doing they would go to Grandma Yates’ to visit and maybe have something to eat before heading back to Tucson. They had not. Instead, Lucy had ridden all the way back to Tucson listening to her stomach growl.
Somewhere along the way, she had fallen asleep for real. She did not remember arriving back at the little brick house on Seventeenth Street, nor did she remember her mother carrying her inside from the car. What she did remember, all too vividly, was awaking the next morning to find the house full of policemen. Her father, his body covered by a sheet, lay dead in a chair in the living room and her mother was being hustled into a police car.
At the time of Sandra Ridder’s arrest, no one had been particularly interested in what her daughter had to say. Within days the child had been shunted out of town and sent off to live with her grandmother and great-grandmother. Instinctively, Lucy had known that the diskette and whatever else her mother had hidden that night had to have something to do with her father’s death, but she didn’t know what. And she didn’t know what to do about it. Her father had come to school earlier that day, at lunch. He had taken her across the street for a doughnut and had warned her that Sandra might be in some kind of trouble at work. He had said something about Sandra being a spy, but that had seemed too silly, too far-fetched to be real. That was something that only happened in the movies or on TV.
Grieving for her father, lost, angry, and isolated, Lucy had kept quiet. She had told no one about that nighttime trek to the entrance of Cochise Stronghold, not even her Grandma Bagwell. Instead, Lucy had waited. It was almost two years later when, leaving the house without permission, she had taken a solitary hike back to Cochise Stronghold.
Working quickly, she had wrestled the heavy rocks out of the way. Underneath, she had discovered one of the plastic containers her father had used to pack canned peaches or pears into their sack lunches. Inside the container, Lucy had found two things—the blue computer disk and a tiny gun. Touching the metal handle, Lucy recognized that this wasn’t a toy. It was a real gun, and Lucy knew at once that this was most likely the weapon—the long-missing weapon—that had killed her father. Her fingers shrank away from the cold steel, but she grabbed the diskette. This was something her father had given her, something Tom Ridder had obviously meant for Lucy to have. Her mother had taken it from her, and now Lucy was taking it back.
Now, once again within yards and spying distance of the entrance to Cochise Stronghold, Lucy walked her bike off the roadway and hid it in the brush. She walked up to the sign. She was relieved to see that none of the rocks seemed to have been disturbed. That meant that if her mother was coming here, she had not yet arrived.
Returning to her hiding place just beyond the crest of the creek bank, Lucy snuggled herself deep into the protective warmth of her bedroll. With Big Red keeping watch from the branches of a nearby oak, girl and hawk settled in to wait. Despite her intention of staying wide awake, physical exertion worked its magic, and Lucy fell sound asleep. She might have missed the whole thing if a warning squawk from Big Red hadn’t brought her wide awake.
The last time Lucy had looked at the entrance sign it had been bathed in the faded glow of moonlight. Now it was fully illuminated in the glow of headlights from a nearby parked car. And on the ground, under the sign, was a woman on her hands and knees, struggling to shift the rocks from place to place.