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beat his wife and children, and played with his daughter, you know how. Anyhow, Justin was the oldest and grew to be able to handle his father. They say their fights were vicious.”
    “He was a fighter, all right,” Dan mumbled.
    “Roscoe went into Denver to the cattle show and got piss-assed drunk and ended up raping a woman and trying to rob a bank. He’s in the state penitentiary in Cañon City. Twenty years. The wife and kidswent to relatives in Arizona. Justin joined the Marine Corps.”
    Dan’s voice cracked, but he knew he had to keep talking, keep thinking. “Well, too bad he didn’t get to play out his scholarship at the University…or…have all the valley girls falling all over him.”
    “Sergeant Dan, Justin never had a scholarship. He never completed high school. As for the girls, no one wanted to come near the Quinn family.”
     
    Dan sat by the window all night. “Fucking liar,” he said under his voice.
    Siobhan felt for him in bed, then propped herself up on an elbow. The betrayal had left Dan robbed of his sacred moment. Nothing had ever clutched him so, not even the word of Quinn’s death. “Fucking liar.”
    “Why can’t you feel for the pain in his life that forced him to live a lie?” she challenged.
    “I do! Poor Quinn! The sonofabitch! We all lie, but nothing like this. Me? Brooklyn cop. Sure, I exaggerated about cuffing gangsters. We all lie. Impressing each other is a craft. But this was a big fucking lie!”
    “Justin had a lot to lie about.”
    He felt her hand on his shoulder. Oh, Jaysus, that felt fine enough. He turned around and found her breasts for his head to rest on and breathed uneasily to hold back sobs.
    “He lied from day one about his grand house and prize beef. About his football scholarship. Maybe he wasn’t even American. He had kind of dark skin. The Corps was taking in Mexicans and Indians. We had three Navajos. But we never had no blacks in the Corps!”
    “Dan, that’s an ugly word, I don’t like it.”
    “Well, you never had to walk the beat in the colored neighborhood.”
    “Shut up. You sound like a bigot.”
    Dan wept.
    “I feel for your sorrow,” she said. Siobhan slipped on her bathrobe and went out onto the veranda. For the first time she saw the moonlight up a string of mountaintops. Troublesome Mesa lay at the bottom of a glen in a steep, winding valley. Snow blankets and a silver sliver of a stream. What a land, indeed. She’d never known of a place like this.
    “Jesus, I’m sorry,” Dan said, coming from the bedroom. “I’m really sorry. That Martinez fellow has been a good, sensitive man. I guess they import a lot of these people from Mexico. It’s nice to see a good one, I mean, not just another Mexican who would multiply and go on relief.”
    “Consuelo told me that Pedro served six years in the Navy. He is from an old Colorado family, and he was wounded at Pearl Harbor, or maybe you didn’t notice that he’s blind in one eye.”
    “I seem to have everything upside down,” he said softly.
    “That is because your world has been set upside down. We’ll have to set it right, then.”
    “Can I touch you, Siobhan? The blow goes away.”
    She knew now how to fit into his big, strong arms. “Quinn knew that you would come here,” she said.
    “You really think that?”
    “Yeah,” she said.
    “What does it mean, then?”
    “Hard to say what might have gone ’round in his head. But I know he wanted you to come here.”

Chapter 3
    LATE 1945—ONWARD
    The banker’s chair from the turn of the century was worn through in several spots, just as the decrepit First National Bank of Troublesome Mesa had survived the land rushes, the silver crash, and everpresent drought.
    Mr. Dancy, a Mormon, knew every tree in the valley and beyond. He was strikingly direct. “I was able to close on the Malkovich boys just in time. Frankly, I couldn’t have sold the M/M if I threw in the Brooklyn Bridge. Anyhow, Pedro there comes home from the