A Town Called Why

By Rick Lenz

Colleagues of Frank Gaines, a half-Apache, Arizona desert town police detective, know him as a courageous man. Gaines doubts that. He suspects he's afraid of not behaving courageously. He goes into therapy. This creates a new problem: he is falling in love with his therapist, a striking, full-blooded Apache woman, Sunny Kacheenay, granddaughter of a great shaman, who has mystical gifts of her own.

 

A distant maternal relative of Gaines dies by shotgun blast. Against her own best professional instincts, Sunny is forced to tell Gaines that by ancient, ancestral law, his sacred duty is to find, torture and kill the murderer.

 

Jokingly, Gaines tells her it's not the 1800s anymore.

 

Sunny doesn't laugh.

 

In the process of trying to hunt down the most malignant villain Gaines has ever heard of, he begins to test his courage for real and to recognize his true feelings about life, love, and courage.

 

PRAISE FOR A TOWN CALLED WHY

 

"Spirited, interwoven characters enrich this sharply written desert thriller mystery." — Kirkus Reviews
 

"I thoroughly enjoyed reading this tale … wonderful descriptions … dynamic … beautiful … mesmerizing. Mr. Lenz is an author I want to read again." —Manhattan Book Review
 

"Character driven and culture steeped … A Town Called Why is a vivid portrait of self-doubt, new directions, cultural and social influences, and murder … filled with atmosphere and intrigue … Remarkable … Outstanding." — Diane Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
 

"... An evocative exploration of the nature of evil and the extent to which people will go to combat it. Rick Lenz's A Town Called Why is a detective story with a difference.— Seattle Book Reviews.
 

"Though too frequently overused, this is a novel that actually earns that dog-eared cliché of being a book you won't want to put down." — RECOMMENDED by the US Review of Books

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chromodroid Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9780984844296

Rick Lenz

Rick Lenz has been a working actor almost all his adult life. He is as at home on the stage as he is in front of the camera. His acting ranges from the serious to the comedic, and he has been featured in both starring and supporting roles on TV and in film. In addition to acting opposite many of the entertainment industry’s biggest stars over the years, he is a playwright and artist. Rick lives in North Hollywood with his wife, and his favorite roles are husband, father and, recently, grandfather.

Book preview

1

AMexican gray wolf, then three, then a dozen stare at the desert, immense, motionless, aglow. As if with a single eye, they see the unshadowed forms of sheep bones, an empty prairie dog town, rabbit brush, piñon, creosote bushes, and a half dozen kinds of cactus. A purple block mesa looms ageless in the distance.

The only noise, apart from the insects, is a gourd rattle, sounding like a diamondback in an upside-down kettledrum on a sheet of granite.

The eye, the perception, focuses on a human female, a hundred yards away.

• • •

The woman, called Shana, stands, bent over, staring at something on the ground next to a low slab of pink sandstone. She gets down on her knees, brushes aside pieces of caked sand and exposes something green and luminescent. She picks it up and whisks more grains of sand away.

It’s the size of an egg, but almost flat, like a stone that could be skipped on water, if there were water in the middle of this expanse of Southeast Arizona.

She stares at it, frowns, gets up painfully and puts it into the pocket of her fringed cotton jacket.

She knows she’s being watched. Standing directly behind her, no more than five feet away, is a young Apache boy wearing shirt, leggings, and moccasins of buckskin.

She looks up and sees a hawk drop like a meteorite onto a trapped gopher. It seizes its prey and soars off into the late afternoon sky.

As she touches a tourmaline pendant she wears on a silver chain around her neck, the boy disappears.

The perception turns and breaks across the desert.

• • •

Geneva Wright sits in the passenger seat of a black Mercedes E-Class. Driving the coupe is Jason Flint. Many women find him appealing, at least at first, despite the fact that his cobalt blue eyes are cold and jarring and make impositions upon little acquaintance. Sometimes they question, seeming to plead for help, but more often, they are that familiar captain of all he surveys combination of arrogance and its lifeline, ignorance.

Geneva concentrates on not looking at his profile and gazes out at what seems, at the speed Flint is driving, like a forest of mesquite trees.

And now the mesquites have vanished and the passing desert is transformed into its stereotypical state, barren except for cactuses and scattered limestone rocks, absorbing the last rays of the sun.

After he’s pulled over, Geneva follows him out onto a granite ledge where he stares down at the valley below. As afternoon turns to evening, the sky is still a dazzling azure blue beneath a flotilla of pure white cirrus clouds, the air fresh and clean. The desert floor is a mosaic of russets and ambers, speckled with the shadowed greens and grays of brushland vegetation. The waning light of the setting sun outlines the contours of the cliffs to the east, turning a jutting upthrust of sandstone on the horizon into an elongated nugget of gold, rimmed in black marble and set far beneath the clouds.

She frowns, recognizing something more tonight—a glow to this valley, as if it were lit from within.

All the way to those cliffs, says Flint, pointing to their darkening forms three or four miles away.

They haven’t spoken for several minutes and his voice has startled her. She turns to the east again, following his gaze. What about the court appeals?

A disdainful laugh. It’s mine ... or it will be. Every square, pathetic inch of Cottonwood Springs.

I get a funny feeling here. The sun’s almost set, but it feels like it’s getting brighter.

He looks at the valley and scowls. It’s a trick of nature. He emits a thin hissing noise, puts a hand on her neck, squeezing firmly, and walks her back to the Mercedes. As they stop, he grips her harder, until she lifts her face to him.

A wolf howls in the distance.

Those things give me the whim-whams. He lets her go.

It’s only a Mexican gray, she says. They’re not very big.

They can tear a sheep to pieces in ten seconds.

You’re no sheep.

He gives her a lewd grin, pinches her cheek, and opens the door for her. Sure I am. I’m a black sheep—just not the same way you are. He closes her door and walks around to the driver’s side.

It’s not the man’s white skin that bothers her, it’s his yellow streak.

• • •

Sunny Kacheenay, a striking Apache woman with long, straight black hair pulled back into a chignon, gets out of her white Honda, parked amid scrubby desert foliage next to a dry drainage ditch.

She turns back and looks behind her at a black smudge just below the horizon. A brush fire has galloped over several hundred acres, cremating the chaparral and everything else in its path, including a dozen or so Apache shacks, now blackened ruins at the end of a purposeless dirt road.

A coyote yips nearby. Sunny turns back and walks up a shallow grade on a series of sandstone steps that lead to a plank bridge over the ditch. As she crosses it, she looks up at a Windstar trailer, half-nestled into a stand of juniper trees.

In front, next to a crudely poured chunk of cement that serves as a front step, is a cast-iron devil’s claw, a jagged lightning design, the bolts spreading out from the center like sharply buckling rays of sun, the whole piece welded onto an iron stake that’s been hammered into the hard earth.

Shana steps out onto the cement slab.

Seeing her, Sunny is struck by a subtle furrowing of the lines on her grandmother’s forehead. I can’t stay, she says. I’ve got an appointment.

Shana’s expression doesn’t change. A lot of people work, she says. You got time to look at the sunset?

Yes, I’ve got time for that.

They look to the west and the red half-sun at the far end of the desert floor, sinking beneath the notched and jagged baseboard of the distant headlands. High in the sky, a fragile veil of rain evaporates before it can fall.

They watch in silence, but Sunny’s mind wanders from the stillness she can’t stay with, even here with Shana, her polestar. She’s lost the feel for the appropriate length of time to let a soundless moment hold.

Looks like another windstorm, she says.

Shana nods.

What will you do? says Sunny.

Your mind is in a knot, dear. Try to relax.

Shana’s eyes are kind. As she feels their connection, Sunny breathes deeply and almost does relax.

She tries for a deeper breath, from the diaphragm, but a single instance of serenity hasn’t deceived her underlying distress.

I’ll find a place to rent, says Shana. It does no good to look back.

Move in with me.

Shana turns back toward the disappearing sun. I can’t live in the city. And don’t even say reservation. My people drive me almost as crazy as the white man.

I hate for you to be a victim, says Sunny.

I’m not a victim.

I know you’re not, but ...

I’m a daughter of the earth—like you.

I wish you’d get a cell phone or a computer or both, like other people.

We don’t need phones, you and I. Shana reaches into her pocket. I want you to do something for me. She pulls from her pocket the flat green stone she found earlier and holds it out to her. It glitters phosphorescently, even in the gathering dusk. Have this analyzed, will you?

What is it?

That’s what I want you to find out, little goose.

Sunny looks closely at it. Where did you come across it?

Shana points at the desert. Out there. It’s all over.

Sunny looks at the land around them, squinting. The desert’s glowing. Why?

I don’t know. It happens every few generations. This year it’s happened since the rain and the windstorms began.

Sunny looks puzzled.

We look out of shortsighted eyes, my dear, says Shana. We tell ourselves, from living our little ‘lifetimes,’ that what happened this year will happen again next year—and I’m not talking about climate change. We forget that the earth never stops being a new version of itself. Nature loves to surprise us. It’s very good at that. She flashes a frowning gaze at the wilderness around them, then shrugs and makes wide, comic eyes. So now, we’re ‘shocked’ to see more change on the horizon, and we find ourselves, like a duck, stunned in the jaws of a dog.

So what do we do?

What we have to. We get creative. We shake off our paralysis and work our way out of the jaws we’re trapped in, before that dog delivers us to ‘the great white hunter.’

You sound so sure of yourself, says Sunny."

Do I?

Staring at Shana, trying to decide what ‘Do I?’ means, Sunny notices the pendant. Is it tourmaline—out there?

Maybe. But that’s not all it is.

It looks a little like yours. Sunny studies the newfound piece again. Not as nice, but there’s a sparkle to it.

• • •

Shana’s trailer is filled with Native American artifacts—on one shelf, a goatskin drum, a cup-and-ball toy, and various tin tinkler necklaces and purses; on another, a turquoise concho belt, a ceremonial gourd, and a small burden basket made of bear grass, buckskin, and red cotton trade cloth. From a third shelf, several clay dolls look off at some vague horizon that could be the distant past, when life was more clear-cut.

They are seated at a plain wooden table. Shana pours water from a jug covered with piñon pitch into two Target glasses and they both have a drink.

After they’ve put their glasses down, Shana says, I’ve seen Reed. He’s with us.

Sunny’s hand jerks involuntarily to her eye, as if fending off the words.

Shana looks up at the dolls.

Sunny doesn’t follow her gaze, but after a long moment: What are they saying—The Ancient Ones?

They may be telling me that I’m wrong—that sometimes we must look back, so that we don’t repeat our mistakes.

Sunny holds back tears. It’s too late for me. I’ve already made mine.

My love, says Shana. It wasn’t your fault. Why won’t you believe that?

I want to, says Sunny, shaking her head. She gets up and looks out the open trailer door at the desert around them, increasingly aglow as the sun sets. She frowns, shivering. There’s something about the light out there … I feel … exposed.

Me too.

• • •

Mercy Ranaldi has mixed feelings about both her name and her nickname. Some people—schoolmates, her relatives, and a few others—came to know her as Spoonful. Around the time most young teenagers begin to have the normal adolescent growth spurt, Spoonful did not. That nickname was given to her by her Uncle Willie, although as often happens with such things, eventually nobody knew for sure where it came from.

This evening, after about two hours of waking up from restless dreaming and nodding off again, she turns off the television, praying she can still get a decent night’s sleep. Watching TV usually helps her drop off, but lately her hair-trigger nerves have become even more than usually agitated. Her neighbors, the McConkeys, have been calling the police more than ever recently, complaining about the sound level of her soporific—the television, or the rock music Spoonful plays at thumpingly high volume. She knows the McConkeys have no trouble sleeping; she can tell that just by looking at them.

Later, if she falls asleep and wakes up, turning the TV or the music off usually works, but tonight, during the no-music-or-TV stretch, she still can’t mute her buzzing mind; and thinking about it, it’s not just tonight, but more and more often recently. Another odd thing, the last three or four years are a confusing tumble of time, one year impossible to tell from the others. Maybe this has been going on a little longer, or maybe it started many years earlier; she can’t say for sure. What she does know is that this particular moment could be now, or it could be a few years earlier. She knows that everyone, however they might deny it, feels at least a little this way sometimes.

In the silence, she hears a noise—a squirrel on the roof, maybe a raccoon. She hears it again, then it stops.

She counts, whispering, to nine.

She hears the noise again. It’s not on the roof. It’s downstairs in her two-story clapboard house in a not exactly upscale area of Dupree. It sounds as if someone is moving around in the kitchen. She gets up, slips on her faded blue terry cloth robe in the dark, and moves toward the top of the stairs.

The floor has squeaked every step of the way, but she’s over halfway there and can’t go back.

She stops at the top of the stairs, listening, straining to hear.

Someone is in the kitchen.

She knows she locked both the front and the back door. It feels as if ice water is being pumped through every link in her nervous system. If she went back into her bedroom and called 911, whoever is down there would know. The floor would squeak all the way back, and this time whoever is down there would certainly catch on that someone was moving around upstairs. She feels a clutching in her chest.

Am I going to have a heart attack?

She can’t go back for her cell phone or her flashlight. They’re on the table next to the clock, on the other side of her double bed. She has to do something. If she stays where she is, at the top of the stairs, she’ll have a heart attack.

Within reach is a small dresser with three or four candles in the top left drawer. She gets matches out, and a candle, lights it and starts down the stairs, the candle flame making little impression on the darkness of the stairwell.

She descends, treading as gingerly as she can. Her adrenalin is dictating to her that it’s better to confront this now, rather than going back up into the bedroom only to be shot in the back, or to turn around and see an attacker flying at her. People have recently reported trouble reaching 911. She heard that just the other day … or so, which causes her to wonder again what year this is.

The old staircase is more solid toward the bottom, no squeaking. Whoever is in there couldn’t have heard her coming down the stairs, could they? The noises she hears—from the kitchen—are louder now. Someone is in there.

What are they doing? What do they want in my kitchen?

At the bottom of the stairs, there’s only a tiny foyer and dining room between her and whoever has invaded her house. As quietly as she can, she inches open the top right drawer of the credenza, and slides out a carving knife.

She blows the candle out, squeezes the wick till it’s no longer hot, and carefully sets the candle on the credenza. She turns and, holding the carving knife behind her, tiptoes barefooted toward the kitchen.

The swinging door between the dining room and the kitchen is shut. She stands, listening, terrified to push the door open enough to look in, terrified not to.

She forces herself to press the door open very slightly. It makes no noise. It’s two inches ajar. She can’t see much. The crookneck lamp next to the sink that she leaves on all night, hoping to keep prowlers away, provides the only illumination.

She pushes the door open enough to barely see the entire kitchen.

A man is hunkered down in the furthest corner, looking through the bottom cupboard.

Who would want to see what’s in my cupboard?

If she says anything, breathes too loudly, she’s dead. She can’t question him.

As in some other moments of her life, moments she can’t quite recall right now, she has no options.

As silently as the havoc running through her will allow, she strides four steps toward him, drawing the carving knife from behind her back and raising it over her head.

The man has not heard her.

Standing two feet behind him, adrenalin pumping with life-or-death force, using both hands and every bit of weight in her body, Spoonful plunges the knife’s eight-inch blade between the shoulder blades of the man’s back. She can’t believe she’s summoned that much strength.

She lets go, pulls up, and looks down at him. The knife handle isn’t even vibrating, the blade is buried that deeply into his back.

Frozen, she watches as the man stands up and turns around. He seems to be moving in slow motion. After what seems like a very long time, he is looking at her. His expression, as much as she can make it out, doesn’t contain anger or even surprise; he just looks puzzled.

Studying her face, his questioning expression dissolves into recognition as he reaches out, puts his arms around her, draws her to him and speaks; his words feel as if they’re being artificially produced—slow, automaton-like: It’s all right, sweetie. It’s all right, Spoonful. It’s only me. I’m the one you’ve been waiting for, remember? I do have a suggestion though. Next time, why don’t you find out who the intruder is before you stab him?

Her eyes are still as round as golf balls, but very slowly, she recognizes who it is. After a few more seconds, she trusts her intuition, and relaxes into his arms.

Tears are flowing out of her eyes. Uncle Willie! What are you doing here? I thought you died … or before that, you disappeared and then you died … or maybe you just left without saying goodbye. Is that what happened?

It’s dark, he says. "How could you be sure it might not be me? This is our place, remember?"

She straightens up, looking at where she thinks his eyes are and says, "I wasn’t sure I remembered you, but I do, don’t I?"

He smiles, reaches behind him and up, manages to grab the handle of the carving knife and pulls it out of his back. He must still be very strong, she thinks. He holds it out toward her. No blood drips from it. See? he says. You didn’t hurt me. Not to worry, Spoonful. No harm, no foul.

She frowns. How long have you been gone? she says. Sometimes I feel as if I’m responsible for driving you …

He looks away—at least it feels as if he does—then slowly gazes back at her.

You never did anything wrong, he says. "You need to get that out of your head.