Free High Country Nocturne by Jon Talton Page B

him to be tortured and killed by the U.S. Army. It was an act of treachery that helped ensure twenty years of war. But this wasn’t engraved on the fountain.
    And people like Chris Melton didn’t even know or care. They moved into their new subdivisions far from the heart of the city and thought the only history was back home in the Midwest. I would bet he had never read this plaque.
    The water trickled in a melody that should have been comforting. Not tonight. Because I knew. Too much and not enough.
    Maybe even Mike Peralta was a scoundrel who would throw everything away for a case of diamonds. And here I am carrying that damned badge. I never should have come back here. Not to this building. Not to this city.
    Better to be teaching history in Southern California or Denver, Portland, or Seattle, even in a community college if need be. Anywhere but here.
    Yet Peralta never stopped trying to get me back to the Sheriff’s Office and he had finally succeeded. When I didn’t get tenure in San Diego and returned to Phoenix, intending to sell the house and move on, he hired me to clean up some old cases. And I stayed.
    I never should have stayed.
    Phoenix is not my city now.
    It belongs to the millions of newcomers drawn here by sun, a pool in the backyard, and big wide freeways to drive. To the ones that bulldoze its history and throw down gravel and concrete where there once were flowers and oleanders and canopies of cottonwoods, eucalyptus, and Arizona ash over open irrigation ditches.
    I hear the ghosts of the Hohokam and love it when it rains. Newcomers want championship golf and endless sunshine.
    They own this place now, not me.
    They tell me every place changes, but why did my place have to get worse? It’s not as if we traded the Valley of Heart’s Delight to become Silicon Valley.
    What right have I to hate them? They have no memory of my garden city when the air was so clear it seemed as if you could reach out and touch the mountains. They don’t miss the passenger trains at Union Station or the busy stores and movie palaces downtown.
    How could they miss what had been wiped away?
    The problem is me, for loving Phoenix still.
    The blame rests with me, for coming back, for staying.
    I should have sold the house in Willo, where the historic districts carry strands of the old city’s loveliness—sold it and left for good.
    But it had been built by my grandfather, had always been in the family. How could I endure seeing a photo of it on the Web, knowing a stranger owned it, and had probably put rocks in place of Grandmother’s gardens?
    But it is a house, nothing more, and sentimentality disables me.
    What fool would mourn Phoenix? It makes as much sense as pining for Muncie, Indiana, in the nineteenth century.
    My fool’s punishment is that I am from nowhere.
    â€œDavid, this is your home, your hometown.”
    I have no hometown.
    I am a fraud.
    I’ll never make it home again.
    Had I not come back, I never would have met Lindsey, the young Sheriff’s Office computer genius with the nose stud and wicked sense of humor. She would have been so much better off without me.
    I should not be here.
    It’s not healthy.
    It’s not sane.
    I am like a mad archeologist trying to conjure ruins back to their past glory.
    Or like a dog that can’t leave his master’s grave, ending up a stray that howls all night in the cemetery, crying, loss…loss…loss…
    So help me, God, I am so lost.
    The water shut off, as if on a timer.
    I made my legs stand and take the steps two at a time up to the grand arched main entrance where I buzzed the night bell.
    â€œMapstone! I haven’t seen you in forever. How the hell’s it hanging?”
    The deputy didn’t even realize I had left the department.
    A metal detector and X-ray machine with a belt had been installed inside, but otherwise the lobby and airy atrium looked the same. No, better. The county had