Diamonds at Dawn Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE BOOK

  Picking up where Diamonds at Dusk left off, we follow the continuing friendship of Cassie and Ahzi now from Ahzi’s perspective. A delightfully entertaining read, Diamonds At Dawn is part mystery, part coming of age story, and full blooded adventure.

  Chris Lemme

  Editor, Silver City Quarterly Review

  Catalina Claussen captures the warmth of family, the tenderness of friendship, and the spirit of living in the southwest. A good read for young and old alike.

  Mary O'Loughlin, poet and fiber artist.

  Diamonds At Dawn is artfully put together, in a way that allows readers of Diamonds At Dusk to experience a different point of view. This book shows Ahzi’s pain and desires in life, while still keeping the happy, fluttery feeling that every YA novel should have when it comes to romance.

  Katrina Estrada

  High School Sophomore and Aspiring Film Director

  DIAMONDS AT DAWN

  By

  Catalina Claussen

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Text Copyright © 2018 Catalina Claussen

  All rights reserved.

  Published 2018 by Progressive Rising Phoenix Press, LLC

  www.progressiverisingphoenix.com

  ISBN: 978-1-946329-67-7

  Edited by: Dr. Diana Edwards

  Front and Back Cover photos “Wanderlust” and “Don’t Look Back” (model: McKenna Bean) by Banyan Claussen. Photo manipulation by Ajalaa Claussen. Copyright © 2018. Used with permission.

  Cover design by William Speir

  Visit: http://www.williamspeir.com

  Book interior design by Polgarus Studio

  Visit: http://www.polgarusstudio.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Praise God, we did it again! I am so grateful for the support of family and friends on the journey. To my children, Ajalaa and Banyan, you encourage me and partner with me in the creation of all my stories. Banyan, thank you for braving the cold to produce such a lush cover photo. And, Ajalaa, thank you for dedicating half of a Sunday to help create a gorgeous cover! McKenna Bean, we are grateful for your beauty, inside and out.

  Special thanks goes to my writing group for putting up with my creative process, where chapters “come to me” in not-so chronological order. Jane Janson, thank you for your meticulous attention to detail and high-spirited high jinx. Chris Lemme, we can count on you to make us blush while reading your work aloud. Mary O’Loughlin, you are a treasure, reminding us to laugh in the process. To the Ferraras, thank you so much for a delightful afternoon of hands-on gun research with Gila Rangers SASS (Single Action Shooting Society). Linda, you are the best for reading the first full printed draft. I am grateful for the Javalina baristas, who conjure various brews on Sunday afternoons to fuel our riotous editing sessions.

  I couldn’t do it without the love and encouragement from my dedicated early readers. Thank you to my editor, Diana Edwards, for diving in and not surfacing until you finished the draft. I am ever so grateful to Katrina Estrada for providing the first teen reader feedback and encouraging me along the way.

  Thanks again Amanda Thrasher, Publisher, and Anne Dunigan, Acquisitions Editor, for believing in my work and being willing to take a chance. Thank you William Speir for hanging in there through draft after draft of the interior and exterior design. Galeo Johnson, you are such an encouragement to me as you so graciously guide me through the social media jungle. Your patience has certainly paid off. Progressive Rising Phoenix Press is unsurpassed in its support of author creativity and voice. I am deeply honored to be part of the team.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 1

  December 21st the dark season. My grandpa, my Sicheii, is worried about me. Early this morning I felt the recurring wall of heat pressed up against my cheeks, warming my purple velvet skirt and blouse and the sterling silver squash blossom necklace, so that when he picked me up in his arms, the rich fabric and precious metal imprinted my mother’s death on my skin. And then I awoke in my seventeen year-old skin wrapped in a goose down comforter, Navajo blanket, and the stillness that follows a snowstorm. The heady scent of cinnamon tea fills the air.

  Sicheii never shows that he’s worried. I can tell by what he doesn’t do. I don’t hear the rhythmic rocking of his chair, nor the paper ripple as he turns each page of the Navajo Times. And in the silence that is his uncertainty, I feel helpless. I can’t shake the feeling of the flames on my skin that, year after year, on the eve of Winter Solstice, haunt my dreams. And I have a crush, but it’s more than that.

  The hardest part of all of this is the silence. In Navajoland I can’t talk about my mom because the elders say that kind of talk will interrupt her journey to the other side. But I live here in southwestern New Mexico, far from the rez and just about everything else. Here where the rattlesnakes sun themselves on the road in late August and deer come right up to you because they don’t know any better, this should be the place where memories take shape and the whole horizon opens up. And then there’s the crush. I can’t tell Sicheii because what girl in her right mind from anywhere on earth would do that. And I can’t tell my best friend, Cassie, ’cause, well, I just can’t.

  The sun is up, and so am I. I pull on my snow leopard print robe and shield my eyes from the glare bouncing rainbows off crystalized mounds, blanketing fairy rings, deer beds, and quail runs in white. That’s when I see a page from my journal caught in the wire surrounding Yas’ corral. I pull on my roping boots and make a grand but swift entrance into the living room, “Morning, Sicheii,” and head out the front door.

  Dressed in his tribal print PJs and his Dallas Cowboys robe, Sicheii glances up from his tea long enough to realize he needs a double take. If he was a regular, run of the mill grandpa, right about now I’d get first and last name treatment, a good clan calling out, followed by pointed questions leading to self-reflection and “personal growth.” Like this: “Ahzi Toadlena of the Sage Brush Hill clan born to the Bitter Water clan, where are you going dressed like that?!” But he’s not. He’s my Sicheii, and he doesn’t say anything. I pull the front door closed behind me and the screen door slaps shut.

  Yas saunters out of his barn and into his corral as soon as he hears me coming. He whinnies in greeting, shakes his head, and lets a shiver run across his thick white winter coat.

  “Good morning, boy,” I whisper as I press my cheek up against his, enjoying the depth of his fur. I pull back. He looks me over, telling me that a bathrobe and ropers is not proper riding attire, not to mention my long black hair that is currently in a tangle. “I know. But it’s urgent.”

  I walk around to where the fence wire meets the rough-hewn barn and pull the journal page into the safety of my pocket.

  “Aren’t
you a little underdressed for a ride?”

  My heart slams against my rib cage. I don’t know why I should be surprised to see Maverick Britton. He shows up almost every Saturday morning looking, as Cassie says, “devastatingly gorgeous,” and with some excuse to help Sicheii. Cassie Jennings is my best friend and newest member into the ranks of the flirting, so she has a tendency to exaggerate. But this morning I’d say she’s spot on. Maverick takes the nineteen-year-old bad boy look to the extreme with his black jeans, black Carhartt jacket, and black felt cowboy hat. And I like it.

  I stand up to my full height, look into his warm brown eyes, and prepare to say something devastatingly smart. All that comes out is, “Yeah right,” which is just about the most generic, one-size-fits-all comeback a girl can say. There’s something about his wild blond hair, broad shoulders, tanned complexion, even in December, and tapered waist that loses a girl in… thought.

  I turn and pull the robe closer, aware that the short skirt of it offers little protection against the elements and his curiosity. Grateful for the boots that come past midway on my calves, I walk back to the house through eight inches of fresh powder. Dangerous. Cassie nailed it the first time. Maverick is dangerous.

  The night Ama died,

  I was caught up in her arms

  My back curled against her,

  Matching my breath to the subtle rise and fall of her chest

  Dreaming of how her nimble fingers wove

  lightning-quick fish-tail braids

  In the early morning before school

  How she used to try on skirts and say: “How do I look?”

  Before tending to the lambs

  Of how she’d warm the house before Sicheii and I woke.

  Before…

  That was before she lost the ability to feel

  And her limbs curled.

  That was before her copper skin turned yellow

  Especially in her palms

  That was before…

  I knew in my bones that she was gone.

  The house turned cold.

  My hair tangled.

  And the lambs cried.

  That was before she became Kai Toadlena, RIP

  (retrieved from Yas’ corral)

  Chapter 2

  In the safety of my room, behind the closed door, I make plans to be here all day. I throw on a pair of jeans, a gray thermal top that I cut thumbholes in to keep the sleeves down over my knuckles, and a wool sweater, dark gray, collared in roses and kissed with snowflake designs, worn through on the right elbow where she used to lean and tell stories. It was hers. She made it. And when they came to take her things to bury them with her, I ran with it out across the snow-covered sagebrush and hid it in the summer hogan. They all knew, but no one had the heart to take it from me.

  Up on the bed I start brushing my hair from the ends up, she used to say, until it shines. I survey my artistic landscape—untitled and unfinished are two words that come to mind. Beaded earrings, three quarters of the way done; an easel full of my latest experiment in paint, a failed abstract cubist thing that lacks dimension ’cause all I want to do is press willow leaves in it; and a collage of Cassie and me, a Christmas present in progress that I wish I could sprinkle with snowflakes to make it sparkle in the light.

  Sicheii is up out of his chair, pouring a cinnamon tea for Maverick. Then I hear the mugs graze the surface of the pine-top table. Sicheii’s deep, halting baritone and occasional coyote laughter mingles with Maverick’s cool tenor that nudges up against my bedroom door planks.

  The spring in the screen door creaks, and excited, bulldozer knocking comes from outside.

  “Snow, snow, snow!” Cassie calls through the house as she explodes through the front door.

  Has no one heard of time for introspection? I love her. But sometimes I need silence, so I can hear myself.

  I slide off the bed, cover her collage with an old paint-spattered t-shirt, and come out to join them in the kitchen, just in time to witness Cassie in full Maverick meltdown, again. Cassie is a hugger. She is blathering on in single-syllables, if that is possible, while squeezing Sicheii from behind. Sicheii turns in his chair and gives her his version of a grin, which is a lifted chin and a sparkle in his eye.

  She says to me, “Snow. Hill. Sled. Coming?” with her eyes transfixed on Maverick as she fumbles for a logical place to stand.

  I start to laugh at her intensity, knowing that’s not really a question. And with that kind of eye contact, we might have Mr. Danger over there tumbling down some slopes with us.

  The thing is, I was just feeling it, that spark of completion on any one of those art projects, but I can see that’s impossible. And the last thing I want to do is stay here, watching Cassie turn to pure liquid. Besides, through the window I can see she’s saddled up Cinnamon, blown up two tractor inner tubes, and strapped them to her favorite all-terrain vehicle, Beau, a dappled gray Appaloosa. Who can say no to that kind of gumption this early in the day?

  Maverick, with his teacup pinky suspended in mid-air and questioning eyebrows directed at me, looks on expectantly.

  “Okay. Okay,” I say. “Let’s get outta here.”

  Mounted up on Cinnamon with Cassie in the driver’s seat, Maverick winks at me. Cassie fumbles the reins, and he makes it worse by grabbing her waist. From my seat up on Yas, I maneuver between Cinnamon and Beau and say, “You want me to take Beau?”

  “Sure, yeah. That’d be great,” Cassie says. She should leave it at that, but then she says, “’cause I can’t seem to, you know… do this.”

  Okay, Cass. Deep breath.

  Up on the mesa top, we free the horses and they run, galloping easily over volcanic rocks piled high with snow. Beau looks too cute with a bundle of flakes heaped on the tip of his muzzle.

  “Come on!” Cassie says, scooping me up from behind and plopping the both of us on a tube with enough force to put us in motion down the hill.

  With four feet in the air in a kind of dead bugs caught in a coffee can formation, we head down.

  “You’re crazy!” I scream with a huge grin on my face.

  “What about me?” Maverick shouts after us, as he belly flops on the other inner tube in a Superman position that threatens to either overtake us or obliterate us off the hillside completely. With the two of us aboard one tube, Cassie and I lose momentum. But Maverick, head down, hugging the front of his tube, is coming at us. He is a force to be reckoned with, gathering speed and rooster-tailing snow in his wake. He slams into a rock and is airborne.

  By some freak of nature, he lands right on top of us. The force of his landing sets us off balance, and our tube is ejected out from underneath us. Cassie and I land flat on our backs with gravel in the tramp-stamp region and snow threatening to go up our shirts. Maverick’s on top with his melt in your mouth eyes, tossed blond-brown waves, broad chest and open arms, gloating—awkward to say the least.

  But then it’s like that all day—fun, flirty, and no one gets hurt. All three of us dragging tubes up the snow-covered grassy bowl, whirling down the chute with Maverick in tow. The sun wanders across the sky and begins to nod off at the top off the mesa. The temperature change is our cue to exit. We set the tubes down at the base and hike to the mesa top. The cliff faces are in deep cool shadow as the sky fades to indigo. The horses by this time are nuzzling through the snow to find tasty grasses hidden in crags.

  At the top, I give Cassie a great big hug and kiss her on both chilly cheeks. “You know I love you, right?” She blushes at the attention, blinks her big blue eyes, and lets the curtain of her blond hair cover her face. “Well, I do,” I whisper.

  Now it’s Maverick’s turn to feel awkward. But he doesn’t. Instead he comes up and bear hugs us both in a kind of sister sandwich, with the golden sun setting his hair on fire.

  Late that night in my room, my cell phone, on silent, lights up. Cassie went through a phase of bedazzling everything, including my cell phone cover, so when I say lights up, I mean it throws
disco glitter in fuchsia, gold, and green, wall to ceiling in my room. It’s Chad. Chad Holbrook is a boy Cassie and I grew up with. He’s one of those urban cowboys, the kind who gets muddy on weekends and holidays. And we give him crap for it all the time.

  “Hey, homie,” I say. “How’s the concrete jungle?”

  “Seriously. Really?” he says.

  “Yeah, really.”

  He blows right by my tough guy scorn and says, “How’s New Year’s lookin’?”

  “New,” I say because I can’t resist a little more deadpan, and then I say with a laugh, “Naw, naw, for you dawg it looks gooooood.”

  He says, “So I got an idea, and I thought…”

  “You know I got you,” I say, all street-like.

  “Yeah,” he says slowly. “But I wanna plan it with you and not… Lil’ Wayne.”

  “Right,” I say, easing back into the pillows on my bed. “Right.” And we plan it from there.

  On the darkest day of the year

  The sun rose reluctantly

  But Ama didn’t.

  She lay curled around me

  While Sicheii gently unfolded me from her arms.

  Wrapped in a blanket,