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41 7 “Time’s up, sweetheart. Move it.” The female police officer spoke with a growl that sounded as if it came from some sort of disgruntled animal. She stood with her feet shoulder-width apart, one hand on her nightstick and the other in front of her .38 Smith and Wesson. Rosalee Singer placed the grimy receiver back on the wall phone and followed the woman back to the tiny jail cell in the basement of a building she thought must have been built around the turn of the century. The Cherokee County Courthouse was indeed a landmark. The gray limestone building took up an entire block near the middle of Tahlequah. It housed the county sheriff and jail, as well as a myriad of county offices, courtrooms, and judges—a convenience for anyone entangled with the county bureaucracy. Rosalee winced and her body stiffened when the door clanged shut behind her, leaving her alone once more in the cold, lonely cubicle. Realizing she was about to be shut off from the rest of humanity again, she yelled after the officer who was walking away. “He said he already wired the money. How am I going to find out what happened to it?” The officer turned and frowned at Rosalee. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’m sure someone will let you know.” Then she turned on her heel and disappeared through the doorway at the end of the hall. Rosalee leaned against the wall and slid into a heap on the floor. How in the world had she ended up here? “Oh, Logan, how could you leave me like this?” she wailed. She dropped her face into her hands and sobbed. When she stopped crying, she thought of her friend, Logan Ross, who had literally saved her life. He had been a drummer for a local band, a baby-boomer trying to relive his youth by losing himself in forty-year-old rock songs. She loved his passion for life. The first time she met him he had been trying to coax a bass drum into the backseat of a Ford Mustang 42 behind a bar on Highway 10 north of Tahlequah. As usual, she had drunk too much and wandered out the back door of the bar looking for a place to throw up. Just before she fell onto the shiny hood of his car, he abandoned the drum and ran to steady her on her feet. Then he walked her around the parking lot until she began to sober. He took her home, cleaned her up, and introduced her to Alcoholics Anonymous. It was the organization, he said, that had already saved his life and the lives of many of his friends. That night changed her life. She had now been sober for more than six months, following all of the rules, doing all the right things. She attended AA three times a week, learned and lived by the guidelines. By the time her old gang had graduated to manufacturing their own methamphetamine, she had already moved away, hoping none of them would ever find her in northeastern Oklahoma. Even though they knew she had grown up there, they would never believe she could return to such an economically barren part of the country. She had no idea she could ever care about anyone like Logan— especially since he was a Cherokee. It seemed everywhere she went she found herself surrounded by Indians of some sort. She had grown up around plenty of Native people, but her mother had forbidden her to have Indian friends. Indians were drunks, her mother told her, and lived off government handouts and welfare. Certainly not the kind of people Rosalee should ever hang around. That had been years ago. An older and wiser Rosalee realized her philosophy of life did not necessarily need to reflect her mother’s. She loved Logan and his gentle ways. He helped her face the day without a bottle in her hand and remained by her side no matter what time she needed him, day or night. That was, until the night a brawl broke out in the bar where his band performed every weekend. A stray bullet found the brawny Cherokee in the middle of the melee, where he was banging people in the head with his drumsticks trying to break up the fight. Now it was all over. He was gone. Everything was ruined. They said he died quickly, but that didn’t make...
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