Picture Perfect Read online

  "And what's more," Ben Barrett, his father-in-law, sputtered, "I haven't heard from my little girl at all this year." Something had been edited here, so that when the camera cut back to Ben he was bleary-eyed. He nodded his head. "He's covering something up, ayuh."

  Alex took a deep breath and settled himself as deeply as possible into Michaela's office couch. Several feet in front of him Herb paced back and forth, riffling through every tabloid on the supermarket stand, all of which had different suggestions for what had happened to Cassie, ranging from kidnapping to murder at Alex's hand.

  It wouldn't have been a big deal--Alex had won slander suits before--but Cassiehad been gone for two months, and this was her own father. The more the rumors flew, the more the magazines questioned Alex's calm and Alex's silence. One of the tabloids had even gotten a statement from the latest private investigator Alex had hired--something noncommittal, but Alex had fired him immediately for talking.

  Cassie had called him that one time, but Alex hadn't told anyone. It had taken the edge off his fear for her safety, yet it had not altered his plan of action. He still had detectives digging for information. Cassie had said she would call again, and maybe she would, but if in the meantime Alex discovered her whereabouts, he'd be on his way. After all, if she had the right to leave, he had just as valid a right to convince her to come back.

  Michaela was the one who had initially spread the excuse of Cassie being with her sick father, and at the time, under the pressure of the Oscars, it had seemed like a good story. After the first couple of detectives couldn't turn up any clue to Cassie's whereabouts, Alex had even started to believe his own lie.

  The videotape of theHard Copy show fizzled to a series of black and white stripes, and Michaela heaved herself out of her chair and shut off the VCR. "Well," she said. "The proverbial shit has hit the fan."

  Alex rubbed his finger along his upper lip, trying not to feel as if he was on trial. Herb leaned toward him, so close that when he yelled Alex could see the spittle catch at the ends of his mustache. "Do you know what this could do to you?"

  "Herb," Alex said calmly, "I just won three Oscars. People aren't going to forget that so fast."

  Herb glared at Alex, shaking his head. "What they remember is the bad, the sensational. Like whether the Best Actor cut his wife up into little pieces and buried her in the basement."

  Alex stiffened. "Give me a break," he said. But his mind was already racing. Herb and Michaela would stand beside him, but they would demand the truth. They would want to know why they had been kept in the dark.

  He was going to have to give a flawless performance in front of the two people he'd trusted enough to see him with his guard down.

  Michaela settled into the wing chair across from him as if she had all the time in the world. Overhead, the ceiling fan whistled. "Okay," she said, drumming her fingers on her stomach. "What the fuck is going on?"

  Alex lowered his eyes, unwilling to give them the whole truth, but using instead the shock value of the statement they would never expect to hear. "Cassie left me," he murmured, and he let the ache he kept tight under wrap work its way to the surface all over again.

  THE BENT- WILLOW FRAMES OF THE SWEAT LODGE REMINDED CASSIE of a woolly mammoth. There was something about the curved bars of wood that made them look like ribs, as if a creature had sloughed its way to the middle of the plain to die. She sat down on the cold ground, opened the notebook she'd bought a month before, and pulled a pencil stub from her coat pocket. Flipping to a blank page, she surveyed the sketches she'd done to pass the time when she had first arrived: skull dimensions, 3-D images of the hand, a multilayered mock-up of an Australopithecine man she wanted to use as a handout in one of her courses. But in the weeks she'd spent on the reservation, her drawings had changed. She wasn't sketching skeletal figures from her research anymore. Here was a picture she'd done of Dorothea, asleep in the rocker; and one of a buffalo herd that she'd re-created from Cyrus's stories; and another, a memory left from a dream in which she'd seen the face of her baby.

  Maybe it was the stripped-down atmosphere of Pine Ridge that had changed her sketching style. In L.A., there was so much glitter surrounding you that cutting back to the basics was refreshing. But here, where there was little but the Spartan stretch of land and sky, every word you spoke and relationship you wove and picture you drew embellished itself into a thing of substance.

  Cassie tucked the pencil behind her ear and critically assessed her mammoth, then glanced at the rough willow frame that had inspired it. How strange it felt to look at things and--instead of reducing them to their skeletal elements, as she'd been trained--to see so much more than what had been laid before her.

  She was so engrossed in her mammoth sketch that she did not hear the footsteps behind her. "If that's ata-ta*ka ," Cyrus said, "you've got it all wrong."

  Cassie glanced up at him. "It's a mammoth," she explained. "Not a buffalo."

  Cyrus squinted. "Mammoth," he muttered. "Whatever you say." He waved his book of crosswords in front of her. "You gonna give me back my pencil?"

  Cassie flushed. "I didn't mean to steal it. I couldn't find any others."

  Cyrus made an indeterminate noise and held out a hand to Cassie. "Get up," he sighed. "You're going to freeze that baby."

  She waved him away. "Let me do the tusks. I'm almost finished." She sketched for a moment. "There," Cassie said, tilting her pad up to Cyrus. He looked at a picture of a sweat lodge that had a trunk and tusks growing out of its flap door. "What do you think?" she asked.

  Cyrus rubbed his hand down over his face to hide a smile. "I think it looks like a sweat lodge," he said. He reached for Cassie's hand and pulled her to her feet.

  "No imagination," Cassie pronounced.

  "It's not that," Cyrus said. "How come white people look at a puddle and try to tell us it's the ocean?"

  Cassie fell into step beside him. "Maybe I should watch a sweat," she suggested, offhand, thinking if she sounded nonchalant Cyrus would be more inclined to agree. Being an anthropologist, she had convinced herself that her interest was purely natural. She would have loved to know what went on inside the frames, which stood as testaments to the young boys who fasted under the tutelage of medicine men in an effort to understand themselves. She had seen the reverence with which Linda Laughing Dog's oldest son had prepared himself for the ritual. He had come back drained and exhausted, but glowing from the inside as if he now knew how to fit together the pieces that made up his life.

  If only it could be that easy.

  "Ecu*picasni yelo," Cyrus said. "It's impossible."

  "It would be an intriguing piece of research--"

  "No," Cyrus said.

  "I could sit--"

  "No."

  Cassie tossed him a smile, and for a moment, Cyrus forgot that she saw prehistoric beasts in the frames of sweat lodges, that she was using every trick in the book to be admitted to the inner circle of a Lakota rite of passage. He considered--not for the first time--how odd it was that Cassie, who had carved her place in his family, had come to them through Will, who had always wanted out.

  Shaking his head, Cyrus stretched his arms over his head. He laid the book of crosswords on the frame of the sweat lodge and started to walk over the ridge that swelled farther east of the house. "Leci u wo," he said. "Come here." When he reached a small copse of trees that rested at the base of a larger hill, he stopped. "This was where Will built his sweat lodge," he said.

  "Will?" Cassie said, surprised. "I didn't think he'd be into that sort of thing."

  Cyrus shrugged. "He was young at the time."

  "He never told me," Cassie said, realizing as the words were spoken that although Will knew the intimate details of her private life, there was a great wealth of information about Will Flying Horse that she did not know. She tried to imagine Will at the same age as Linda Laughing Dog's son, with his thick black hair long down his back and his muscles just starting to take a man's shape. "Did it work?"