Solomon's Oak Read Online Free PDF Page B

distance. The nightly howls of coyotes sounded more like an anthem than a warning. Whenever she spotted a California condor, a species once near extinction that had been coaxed back, she felt proud to be a Californian. Sometimes, if humans put heart and mind into it, they could undo their mistakes. She wondered what Juniper McGuire would think if she saw one of those enormous black birds fly overhead. Glory would tell her its Latin name, Gymnogyps californianus , the scavenger that could live for half a century, feeding on carrion, picking bones clean to bleach in the sun.
    All week Glory had schooled herself on Dan’s digital camera so she could take the candid pictures, which in her opinion was the life of any wedding. While Angus and his groomsmen dipped into the wooden barrels she’d bought from a winery up north, Glory pointed and shot and let the camera collect memories. The couple was sailing to Catalina Island in the morning. She wished them a steady breeze like the one blowing through the oak’s branches just now. Surely even pirates knew marriage was the mother lode of risks.
    “Hey, Juniper,” Robynn called, and there she was, the one-night foster, covering the buffet trays with matching lids. “Come give us a hand with the plates?”
    Through the viewfinder Glory lined her up and snapped a picture. Then she focused on the oak tree. With its gnarled limbs and lobed leaves, the pirates posed beneath it looked like toy figures. Glory kept a bowl of fallen acorns on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. Before the missionaries arrived, sixty-four documented tribes had lived in this part of California, all of whom used acorn meal as a dietary staple. Three hundred and fifty years later, only a few people remained who could trace blood that far back—such as Lorna Candelaria and her husband, Juan. The cultures were long erased, the stories in fragments. Now acorns were strictly for squirrels. On horseback rides Glory sometimes pictured an Indian mother on her knees grinding the bitter meal for porridge to feed her children. Suppose she’d lost her husband early—a hunting accident, executed by the Spanish, or, like Dan, from plain old pneumonia. How had she managed? Become another man’s wife? Deep in La Cueva Pintada, the painted cave, pictographs hinted at those long-lost lives. Glory had studied the stick figures and the drawings of the sun. A California winter was bittersweet, a time for reflection. Then she snorted at herself for thinking such thoughts. The truth was like a mule: on the sunniest day it could kick your heart into pieces.
    Guests arrived. Before her, pirates streamed in for the party, dressed in jewel-tone outfits, velvet capes, swords at their sides. When an Anna’s hummingbird buzzed by her, claiming a nearby feeder, Glory stood still, hoping the tiny bird would linger, because among the Southwest Indian tribes, a hummingbird was considered good luck on a wedding day.
    At the entrance to the chapel, the Topgallant Troubadours performed a Celtic version of Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild.” The guitar player wore a gray kilt.
    “Aren’t you in the wrong era?” Glory asked.
    He continued playing. “Naw. I’m pretty sure pirates kidnapped Scotsmen, us bein’ so entertainin’ and all.”
    Glory did a visual sweep. The aisle cloth was unwrinkled. The minister, in his golden robe and matching miter, had bottled water with the cap already cracked and a folded handkerchief nearby for his brow. Despite the open windows, with so many candles blazing, the chapel was stuffy. The mother of the groom was dressed in a leafy green silk frock that looked Elizabethan, suggesting a lot of leeway in the pirate-costume department. Angus seated her, then escorted the mother of the bride to the front row on the other side. She still wasn’t smiling. Glory snapped pictures. She wanted to gently shake Karen’s mother by the shoulders and tell her, “Spend your smiles!”
    A movement caught her eye,