He slipped his smartphone back into his pocket. “You came to Colorado to see the mountains and photograph wildlife, right?”
She nodded.
Chaska’s expression grew serious. “Don’t let that bastard steal this from you. You’ve worked so hard.”
Shehadworked hard, harder than anyone could know. “Okay. If you think we’ll be safe…”
“Iknowwe will.”
Chapter 12
His lunch eaten, Chaska scooted closer to Naomi so that he could see the images on her camera.
“This is the burrowing owl.” She had that same bright smile on her face that she had Thursday after spending the day at the clinic. “He bobbed his head and made a rattlesnake sound when I sat down to sketch him.”
“You sketched him? Show me.”
“Oookay.” She set the DSLR down on the table and reached for a sketchpad, opening it and flipping past several pages to find the owl. “They’re not very good.”
“Wait. Hey. Slow down. Go back to the beginning.”
She did as he asked, showing him a sketch of a raven. “I use the sketches to inspire jewelry, so they’re not meant to be art or anything.”
Art or not, Chaska was impressed. With a few strokes of pencil, she had managed to capture the essence of a raven in flight—the flare of its flight feathers, the stretch of its wings, the curve of its body. The next drawing showed a raven tumbling through the air, playing with the wind, the next a raven sitting on a fence post, the wind tousling its feathers. Page after page of drawings—mostly ravens—left him wondering how Naomi had gotten the idea that she wasn’t skilled at this.
“I don’t care what you say. These are good. Where did you take art classes?”
“I haven’t—just jewelry-making classes.”
Okay,thatblew his mind. “You have natural talent then.”
“I loved to draw, even as a kid.”
“You must really like ravens.”
“I watched them a lot when I was a little girl.” She smiled, but there was sadness in her eyes now. “They were free to fly wherever they wanted, free to do whatever they wanted. The couple who adopted me tried to keep them out of their corn, but it never worked. I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to fly away, to play with the wind like they did, to be as free as they were.”
“Were the people who adopted you strict?”
She hadn’t used the wordparents, so he didn’t use it either.
She seemed to hesitate. “They weren’t just strict. They were religious fanatics. Peter had his own church where his word was God’s word.”
There was nothing Chaska despised more than a hypocrite. “That’s convenient.”
“Isn’t it? He truly believed that God spoke through him, that he was among the chosen. His little congregation believed it, too. Ruth was his submissive helpmeet. On the outside, they looked like the perfect family—a husband and wife with nine children, one of whom they’d adopted.
“But Ruth bludgeoned people with the power that came with being Peter’s wife. And Peter took absolute control over every aspect of the lives of his congregants. He told them what to wear, how to talk, what to sing, when to plant, what to grow, when to harvest, how many babies to have, what to name those babies, how to raise their kids. He decided who could get married and when, marrying girls who were fourteen and fifteen years old to much older men as a reward for joining his church. I’m sure it wasn’t legal, but no one intervened.”
“It sounds like a cult, not a church.” It made him sick to think her childhood had been lost to that kind of … insanity.
Naomi gave a little laugh. “When you grow up with it, you don’t see that. It’s just how the world is. You believe it because all the adults around you believe it and you’re a child. Of course, I don’t believe any of it now. I don’t believe in anything.”
Chaska knew what it felt like to be disillusioned, to feel betrayed by one’s parents, to lose one’s beliefs. “Why did they adopt you if they had so many children?”
“Peter always said he felt called to adopt me the moment he heard about me on the TV news. He and Ruth told me over and over again how lucky I was that my birth mother abandoned me. Otherwise, I might have been raised by heathen Indians.” Naomi’s gaze shot to Chaska’s. “I don’t want to offend—”
He pressed a finger to her lips. “Don’t apologize. The words aren’t yours. I take it they weren’t Native?”