Page 43 of It Takes a Thief

Straight-faced, Galileo said, “It sounds like something that would happen around here.”

“And what’s that chopper for?” I asked, in the vein of the conversation.

The men looked up. Ellis said, “That’s an Arizona state police chopper.”

“Oh,” said Galileo. “I’ll bet they’re looking for that missing girl.”

Ellis and I looked at him. Galileo seemed surprised. “You didn’t know? Her name is Ashlynne Chee. She was playing with her brother in front of the school when some maroon van came and picked them up. That was yesterday. There are signs for her everywhere. The boy wandered home, said he left them in the area of Spider Rock Overlook.”

Ellis nodded. “I saw people in front of the hospital with homemade signs, photos of a girl about ten.”

“Eleven. We have no Amber Alert on the Rez,” said Galileo.

“I know,” said Ellis. “The board is working on that. We really should have that, especially with the number of people, mostly girls, who go missing around here.”

“It’s an epidemic?” I asked.

“You could say that,” said Ellis.

I shuddered. I didn’t know how I’d act if Fidelia was kidnapped. Ford had been absent the first four weekends I’d gone home to see my kids. Between June, Sabrina, Sapphire, and Bee, they’d worked out a schedule where Ford could’ve been in Costa Rica for all it mattered to Fidelia and Niko. The kids seemed to love spending the night at June’s up on Mormon Mountain. They could swim in the seasonal lake just at the foot of her property, and they could visit Pippa’s thriving Bud & Breakfast not far away. They were too young to “get” the name of Smoky Mountain High and they already knew what weed smelled like, so to them it was just a fun inn with a lot of piers they could jump off, wearing their water wings, of course.

Leaving them was heart-wrenching, but I always excitedly raced back to my job. This was truly the most thrilling thing I’d done in my entire life, caring for the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the forgotten. Ellis Chesbrough was truly a god and mentor to me, and I had to admit I was falling a little bit in love with him. So were the other girls, much to my irritation. I felt in competition with them.

But he was a single man who seemed to only care about medicine, nature, the socioeconomic world around him. He’d come from a wealthy family in Oklahoma and he’d determined to leave that world behind. I admired that. Ford had come from nothing, from a worthless scumbag of a father and a mother dying of alcoholism like many on the Rez. He’d picked himself up by his bootstraps and created a dynasty. Ellis was sort of the opposite. He’d left a dynasty behind to care for these people, and I could see it becoming his entire life until he died.

A radio Ellis had clipped to his belt crackled with a toothless voice. As Lead Surgeon and a member of the board, he needed to know about emergencies, day or night.

“Ellis. That girl was found. Ashlynne.”

“Where at?” Ellis asked.

“Underneath Face Rock.”

“Oh, my,” said Galileo. “Face Rock is remote.”

“Alive?” asked Ellis.

“No,” said the dispatcher.

“Where is she now?”

“In our ER, awaiting exam.”

“I’ll be there pronto,” said Ellis.

So the descent was much faster than the ascent, and we didn’t find a single mushroom. Desiree did, but it was the same sort in the baggie.

“You know,” said Ellis casually as we slid from step to sandy step. “There’s a sweat lodge I think you’d like. You could learn about more native healing techniques.”

“Oh, yes!” I said eagerly.

And I wondered if Ellis would be in the sweat lodge with me.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

FORD

We all pulled off at the Deuce of Clubs Avenue in Show Low to reconnoiter. Eerily, we were right by a mortuary.