An Unearthly Undertaking Read online

  She went back in the house and grabbed her phone. Her hand trembled as she stared at it, thinking of what she’d tell her. The words tumbled and became garbled, unintelligible. Finally, she opted to text her. “I’ve got some time off, and I’m coming for a visit. See you when you get home from work tomorrow.”

  Charli had a key to her mother’s place. She could drive to the airport and catch a flight to New Orleans. She’d let herself into the apartment and catch her when she came home. Then she would demand answers... at least some.

  She had to tell Roger, she realized. Roger Tanner was her... well, he was her boyfriend. At least he was the man she had started dating, and since neither of them was seeing anyone else, that meant... she stopped her mind from going down that road. It was a dangerous tangent. How could she be sure of what their relationship was when she didn’t even know who she was?

  Roger was an early bird, always up early, eager to get to work at the ranger station at Reelfoot Lake. She needed to let him know. They were supposed to have dinner and now she would have to cancel. Getting answers couldn’t wait. Not any longer.

  She waited impatiently until she knew he'd be up, then called. “Good morning, sunshine,” he said, sounding far too chipper. She was sad to have to change his mood.

  “I'm afraid I can’t make dinner tonight,” she told him.

  “Are you okay?”

  She could hear his concern. “I'm fine, Roger. It's just that I decided that I have to go to see my mother.”

  “That’s sudden,” he said. “Not unexpected, but abrupt.”

  “I realized that need to confront her in her den. I need to show up unannounced and make her tell me why she’s never told me about my heritage.”

  He sighed softly. “And her den is located in New Orleans, as I recall?”

  She coughed. “Right.” Roger frequently managed to amaze her through his habit of simply paying attention. He seemed to remember everything she told him about herself and her family. But then he was a family person and family was important to him. And yet, she wondered why he was so concerned about her family? That was an interesting question to ask—eventually. Some time.

  “Wait a sec,” he said. She heard key clicks. “Flights start heading that way at nine and there are several. If I drive you to the airport, you can book something on the way and then you won’t have to deal with the parking lot. Then you can call me to pick you up whenever you come back.”

  “What about work? Your work? How will the animals get along without you?”

  He chuckled. “You can’t use that for an excuse. I can easily get someone to cover for me for the morning. That’s never a big problem and even though this is the slow season I'm sure the animals will find enough tourists to eat.”

  The idea of having company and not having to drive was a relief. “Thanks.” It dawned on her that Roger hadn’t even questioned why she suddenly needed to do this. “It’s important.”

  “I figured,” he said. “That’s why I’m heading out the door now.”

  That gave her time to get ready. “You are an angel.”

  “Only you and my mother think that,” he laughed. And then he hung up. “You can demonstrate that you appreciate me by having coffee ready.”

  As she dressed and packed, Charli knew she was going to skip breakfast. Starting the coffee she realized her stomach was knotted up. She inhaled slowly, trying to relax again, but she was tense, as if she perched on the precipice of something. It was more than anxiety about confronting her mother, but she couldn't say what, exactly had her worried. Whatever it was, it was too spooky for words.

  Chapter Three

  Family Matters

  “How was the visit with your mother?” Roger asked. She was just getting into his truck at the airport, where he'd picked her up, and the question jarred her. He'd been waiting outside baggage claim. Happy to see him, she'd put down her suitcase. He took her in his arms and kissed her... a warm, welcome kiss that made her melt in his arms. Then, under the watchful eye of airport security, he’d tossed her suitcase into the back seat, gotten her in the car, and asked his question as he pulled away from the curb.

  “Hmm,” she said. It was, on the face of it, a simple question, a straightforward question, but one that made her wince. The problem was that she wasn’t sure how to answer, and so, she was, frankly, stalling.

  He let her non-answer linger in the air. Finally, to dispel it, she attempted to tell him. “I’m not sure yet. She talked to me, but it was frustrating. For all the talking we did, she didn't say a lot. I know that much.”

  “She didn’t reveal the truth for all to see?” he asked cheerfully. Too cheerfully.

  “She doesn’t think about that time at all, and doesn’t want to. BTE, she calls it. Before the escape. I think she wants to believe that part of her life never happened, as if she and I were created in New Orleans. It’s maddening.”

  “You insisted she spill the beans and give you some details about your family, I hope. She kinda owes you that.”

  She had. “It made her incredibly grumpy. She accused me of ruining the visit.”

  “I’m eager to hear anything you learned,” he said.

  She knew he meant that. Roger was not a complicated man and didn’t go in for emotional game playing. She loved that about him.

  “I learned one thing that I should’ve realized. When I searched online, I could never find anything out about my father.” She laughed. “Dumb me has never looked at her own birth certificate except to note that I was born in Mescalero, New Mexico. So whenever I searched the Internet, I was looking for Kee Gordon. Mom had mentioned his first name was Kee. What I didn’t realize was that Indians keep their own names when they marry. And my father’s name was Kee Bonito.”

  “Isn’t that a Spanish name? It sounds Spanish; it certainly doesn't sound particularly Indian.”

  “Lots of Indians took their name from the Spaniards—the earlier invaders. There were chiefs whose last name was Garcia.”

  “That makes it less curious than Gordon,” Roger chuckled.

  “What's wrong with Gordon?”

  “Gordon never struck me as any kind of decent Indian name.” He cocked his head. “But then I wouldn’t have picked Bonito, either. Of course, given that history lesson, Bonito makes sense as a real Apache name. Of course, that’s me talking like I knew something, and what do I know about Indians that I didn’t learn on television?”

  “Gordon is easily explained,” she said. “My grandfather, Duncan Gordon, was a white man, from Virginia, who came to the reservation to teach for a couple of years. He met my Grandmother, who was also a teacher, and he never left.”

  “So your mother is only half Indian.”

  “And wishes she was not Indian at all. Daddy was a full-blooded Indian.”

  “Was?”

  “He died when I was very young. I already knew that much, because when I asked about my daddy as a little girl, she told me he'd died. She did manage to inform me that my father was killed by a drunk driver on the highway near the tribe's casino.” She held up a finger. “And before you fall into the drunk Indian cliche trap, which I did, by the way, it turns out the drunk in question was a farmer from Minnesota headed for Carlsbad Caverns on vacation.”

  He held up a hand. “Heaven forbid I should ever, even inadvertently, be so politically incorrect as all that. So, after your father died, how did you get to New Orleans?”

  “It was the excuse my mother needed to leave the reservation behind.”

  “So she never was into being Indian?”

  “Not much. According to her, she thought that the traditions were so old-fashioned and boring. She never had much use for reservation life. After she went off to college she got to see the outside world. She loved it so when she came home, being stuck there, as she called it, really sucked for her. It didn't help that in college she majored in clothing design. She had a flair for it, but there aren't a lot of cutting edge designers in that part of the
world. She got a job in a clothing store and was saving her money to leave as soon as possible.”

  “But she didn't.”

  “She happened to meet daddy and she fell in love. He loved her and his life was there, so she stayed.”

  Roger coughed. “Love happens to the best of us.”

  “Then, once he was gone, she had no reason to stay. She was ready to kick the dirt of the reservation off her heels and get on with her life. In that sense, I’ll admit she did the right thing. By following her bliss, she found the life she wanted. Once she hit New Orleans, she made her mark and never looked back.”

  “Why the Big Easy?”

  “Her college roommate and best friend, Katy Willows, lived there. The two of them were fast friends and shared a taste in clothing. All through school they talked about becoming partners in a high-end clothing business. Daddy had some life insurance and the drunk’s insurance company paid off too. Mom and Katy used the money to live on while they designed and launched their brand... and they made it big.”

  Roger reached over and took her hand. “Obviously there is more to the story than that.”

  Charli sighed. “Of course, but that’s the part I’m not getting out of her. She won’t say why I never got to visit my grandparents after that, or even heard from them. ‘Life,’ is all she’d say, and then laugh. And it isn't all about my family. I mean, it isn't like my mother is simply estranged from her parents and needs to reconcile with them. No, I get the sense that she is afraid to meet any Indians or even think about them. It really upsets her.”

  “That’s tough. But now you are in a position to fill in more of the gaps.” Roger put his hands back on the wheel and stared through the windshield. “Assuming that you want to fill them in, of course. I don’t mean to imply that you should or have to.”

  Charli sank back in the seat. Roger came from such a different background that it was hard to explain how she felt even if she had been sure. He had grown up in a large, closely knit family. He exchanged calls and messages with his two brothers and two sisters regularly. They shared their dreams and concerns. Charli had never had that. An only child with a single, working mother, she’d grown up confiding in no one. Elle had been the first truly close friend she’d had, and she’d only met her in college, when they’d been roommates.

  “I’m not sure what I want. I’m curious about my family, about my roots. And I'd like to know what's going on in my dreams, but poking into the past, especially past relationships can be treacherous.”

  “Sure it can,” he said with all too much enthusiasm. “But isn’t that exactly what you do for a living, poke into the past?”

  She burst out laughing. “I suppose you can accuse a cultural anthropologist of doing that. It’s not fair, but...”

  “And you examine the people’s lives, try to understand them so that their cultures make sense to you, right?”

  “Looking for their connection to the present,” she said. “Cultural anthropology tries to determine what other cultures did better than we do, and where they failed, so we can learn from that.”

  “Sure, but when you put your own family under a microscope...”

  “It can be painful.”

  He shrugged. “I guess it could be, but knowledge is dangerous that way. It has lots of sharp edges that can cut.” Then he shrugged. “But that’s me probably thinking about me; when it comes to your life, I want you to know that whatever you need to do is hunky dory with me.”

  “Hunky dory? Who says hunky dory?”

  “Me,” he said, puffing up his chest. “Get used to it. I’m a big fan of hunky dory. It's a great Americanism, said by all great Americans. I also like the hokey pokey, for that matter, and I’m not shamed to admit it. Just don’t tell my mother.”

  She sighed, happily this time. Roger was going to be stubbornly supportive, no matter how outrageous her behavior was. That, she realized, made him slightly irresistible, if you could shade the term in such fine ways. And she could. As a college professor, okay an associate professor, she felt entitled to do exactly that.

  And then there was the dream. There was the lightning in the sky and the words she’d heard. They weren't just words a character said in a dream. She knew that. She was being called but to where? Mescalero?

  As she leaned her head against the window, she saw the turnoff to her house fly past. “Am I correct in assuming that you didn’t forget where I live while I was gone and missing my street is intentional?”

  He stared straight ahead and grinned. “Yep. I’m not about to forget something as important as where you live.”

  She liked the sound of that. “So where the heck are we going?”

  “Well, I made an executive decision and I'm acting on it.”

  “An executive decision? And what decision was that?”

  “I decided that you deserve to have a nice lunch with someone who is not your mother,” he said. “It’s a sneaky plan to ease you back into the slow and genteel pace of Union City, Tennessee after toxic exposure to the big city.”

  That sounded good and made her feel warm and happy. “You mean lunch with you, I presume?”

  “Now that sounds like a truly great idea, young lady. And now that you’ve suggested it, I believe I would make an ideal candidate to be your luncheon companion. And to help push my bid for the job over the top, I’ll even pay for the meal.”

  “How gallant,” she said.

  “Seeing as I took the day off to be with you, I might as well do whatever I can to put a smile on your face.”

  She touched his arm. “The welcome kiss at the airport did that.”

  “Oh, but that was a mere start,” he said. “A solid, traditional, time-tested start, but one that requires substantial follow-through to ensure completion of the mission.”

  “And you intend to follow through?”

  “I do,” he said. “I'm well aware that the effort required means it will be a day-long task, but I’m ready to take it on.”

  As always, Roger’s cheerful optimism made her happy. Keeping a smile on her face was child’s play for this man, and when she reviewed her short list of relationships, she felt that the one with this man was a welcome first.

  “Oh, I do love seeing that look on your face,” he said.

  “What look?”

  “The one that says you are pleased with yourself.”

  “Well, I must admit that I am, as we cultural anthropologists like to say, starting to note some auspicious omens of this day.”

  “In my line of work, we just say, ‘looks like this just might be a corker of a day’,” he said.

  Charli laughed. “Minor translation glitches aside, I think we are saying the same thing.”

  “Great minds run in the same gutter,” he said.

  And when he pulled into the parking lot of a small Italian restaurant that she adored, Charli was sure that if she was sharing a gutter with Roger, for a change she was in the right gutter.

  Chapter Four

  A Missing Artifact

  “I need your help,” Elle Kramer said as she swept into the house without knocking. “And you want to help me.”

  The invasion, barging into Charli's house was Elle's normal mode of operating and despite that, Charli was glad to see her. “I do? Help you what?”

  “You do.” Elle’s face was tensed in an odd smile. “You absolutely do. And I'll get to the what momentarily.”

  Charli was sure Elle was right. Friends were supposed to help each other. Besides, dealing with someone else’s problem would be a respite, and might give her a chance to clear her head. She’d been back from her mother’s for three unsettling days.

  The night after her first day at home, coming back from dinner with Roger she’d seen the flash of light in the Southwest again. Her brain recalled the summons.

  “What’s that light?” she'd asked him, hoping for some simple, everyday explanation.

  “Heat lighting, most likely,” Roger said. “Unless there are s
ome UFO things going on or secret government experiments with ionization based on the theories of Nikola Tesla.”

  “Let’s go with heat lightning,” she said.

  “Good choice.”

  The next night she woke from misty dreams she couldn't remember at all and found herself compelled to go outside. Again she saw the light. A single flash, followed by the voices.

  “See my sign.”

  “Hear our call.”

  During the days she'd continued her studies, her efforts to make sense of things. But at times she thought she was going backward and that things made less sense, not more. She was ready to set aside her search for truth and do something else for a while.

  Anything that might push those voices into the dim recesses of her brain had to be a good thing. So Charli laughed and pointed to the bottle of Australian Merlot in her friend’s hand. “And that wine is supposed to be a bribe to get me to help you?”

  Elle looked surprised for a moment then laughed. “No. Of course not. I wouldn’t bribe a friend. Not only would that be unethical, I can’t afford to do that. Not often anyway. Besides, if I just gave this wine to you, you’d probably drink it by yourself. No, this is a libation for us to share while I explain a situation, appeal to your better nature, and get you tipsy enough to agree to a stupid plan.”

  The banter was typical of their conversations. Even when they were roommates in college Elle had been temperamentally unable to just come out and say something. It needed to be a joke. “Well, that’s okay then.”

  Elle put the bottle on the table. “I’ll get the glasses and the corkscrew.”

  “No one knows where they are better than you.”

  Elle returned with the glasses and sat down heavily on the couch. She grabbed up the bottle and began tearing off the foil to open the bottle.