A Thief of Time Page 7

  Chee held the cable in his left hand and started down the slope, following the path broken by the backhoe, trying to keep his weight on his feet, trying to avoid the noise sliding would make.

  The slope was too steep. He slid a few feet, regained control. Slid again as the earth gave way under his feet. Then he lay on his back, motionless, breathing dust, cursing under his breath at the noise he had made. He listened, hand gripping the cable. Down here under the ridge, he could no longer hear the distant pump motor. The coyote yipped somewhere off to his left and provoked an answering yip from its partner. He saw the backhoe, partially visible through the brush, its motor silent. The half-moon lit the roof of its cab, the shovel, and part of the jointed arm that controlled it. Nails apparently had been frightened away. It didn’t matter. He had the backhoe. He had the truck that had hauled it here, and the record would show Nails had rented the truck.

  Chee gripped the cable and shifted his free hand to push himself erect. He felt cloth under his fingers. And a button. And the hard bone and cold skin of a wrist. He scrambled away from it.

  The form lay facedown, head upslope, in the deep darkness cast by a juniper—its left hand stretching out toward the cable. A man, Chee saw. He squatted, controlling the shock. And when it was controlled, he leaned forward and felt the wrist.

  Dead. Dead long enough to be stiff. He bent low over the corpse and turned on his flash. It wasn’t Nails. It was a Navajo. A young man, hair cut short, wearing a blue checked shirt with two stains on its back. Chee touched one of them with a tentative finger. Stiff. Dried blood. The man had apparently been shot twice. In the middle of the back and just above the hip.

  Chee snapped off the light. He thought of the Navajo’s ghost, hovering nearby. He turned his mind away from that. The chindi was out there, representing all that was evil in the dead man’s being. But one did not think of chindis out in the darkness. Where was Nails? Most likely, hours away from here. But why did he leave the truck? This Navajo must be the one seen with Nails when they’d stolen the backhoe. Maybe the Navajo had driven the truck, Nails had come in his own car. Odd, but possible.

  Chee moved cautiously the few remaining yards to the bottom of the hill. It was full dark here, the moonlight blocked by the high ground. Just enough reflected light to guide his feet. A falling out of thieves, Chee thought. A fight. Nails pulls a gun. The Navajo runs. Nails shoots him. He didn’t believe Nails would still be here, or anywhere near here. But he walked carefully.

  Even so he almost tripped over the bag before he saw it. It was black plastic, the sort sold in little boxes of a dozen to line wastebaskets. Chee untwisted the wire securing its top and felt inside. Fragments of pottery, just as he’d expected. Between him and the backhoe, more such bags were clustered. Chee walked past them to look at the machine.

  It had been turned off with the shovel locked high over the trench it had been digging into a low, brush-covered mound. Scattered along the excavation was a clutter of flat stones. Once they must have formed the wall of an Anasazi settlement. He didn’t notice the bones until he turned on his flash.

  They were everywhere. A shoulder blade, a thigh bone, part of a skull, ribs, four or five connected vertebrae, part of a foot, a lower jaw.

  Jim Chee was modern man built upon traditional Navajo. This was simply too much death. Too many ghosts disturbed. He backed away from the excavation, flashlight still on, careful no longer. He wanted only to be away from here. Into the sunlight. Into the cleansing heat of a sweat bath. To be surrounded by the healing, curing sounds of a Ghostway ceremonial. He started up the slope, pulling himself up by the cable.

  The panic receded. First he would check the backhoe cab. He trotted to it, guided by the flash. He checked the metal serial-number plate and the Navajo Nation Road Department number painted on its side. Then he flashed the light into the cab.

  A man was sitting there, slumped sideways against the opposite door, his open eyes reflecting white in Chee’s flash. The left side of his face was black with what must be blood. But Chee could see his mustache and enough of his face to know that he had found Joe Nails.

  SIX

  LEAPHORN CAME HOME to Window Rock long after midnight. He hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights. He drank from his cupped palms in the bathroom and folded his clothing over the bedside chair (where Emma had so often sat to read or knit, to do the thousand small things that Emma did). He had turned the bed ninety degrees so that his eyes would open in the morning to the shock of a different view. That broke his lifelong habit, the automatic waking thought of “Where’s Emma?” and what then followed. He had moved from his side of the bed to Emma’s—which had eliminated that once-happy habit of reaching out to touch her when he drifted into sleep.

  Now he lay flat on his back, feeling tired muscles relax, thinking about the food in Eleanor Friedman-Bernal’s refrigerator, drifting from that to her arrangement with Nakai to inspect contributed pots and from that to the notebook Nakai had described. He hadn’t noticed a pocket-sized leather notebook in her apartment—but then it might be almost anywhere in the room. Thatcher had made no real search. On the long drive homeward across the Checkerboard from Huerfano Mesa, he had thought of why Elliot hadn’t mentioned being sent by Friedman to see Nakai and collect a pot. It must have seemed odd to Elliot, this abortive mission. Why not mention it? Before Leaphorn could come to any conclusion, he drifted off to sleep, and it was morning.

  He showered, inspected his face, decided he could go another few days without a shave, made himself a breakfast of sausage and fried eggs—violating his diet with the same guilty feelings he always had when Emma was away visiting her family. He read the mail that Saturday had brought him, and the Gallup Independent. He snapped on the television, snapped it off again, stood at the window looking out on the autumn morning. Windless. Cloudless. Silent except for a truck rolling down Navajo Route 3. The little town of Window Rock was taking Sunday off. Leaphorn noticed the glass was dusty—a condition Emma had never tolerated. He got a handkerchief from his drawer and polished the pane.

  He polished other windows. Abruptly he walked to the telephone and called Chaco Canyon.

  Until recently telephone calls between the world outside and Chaco had traveled via a Navajo Communications Company telephone line. From Crownpoint northeast, the wire wandered across the rolling grassland, attached mostly to fence posts and relying on its own poles only when no fence was available going in the right direction. This system made telephone service subject to the same hazards as the ranch fence on which it piggybacked. Drifts of tumbleweeds, winter blizzards, dry rot, errant cattle, broke down both fences and communications. When it was operating, voices sometimes tended to fade in and out with the wind velocity. But recently this system had been modernized. Calls were now routed two hundred miles east to Santa Fe, then beamed to a satellite and rebroadcast to a receiving dish at Chaco. The space age system, like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration which made it possible, was frequently out of operation. When it operated at all, voices tended to fade in and out with the wind velocity. Today was no exception.

  A woman’s voice answered, strong at first, then drifting away into space. No, Bob Luna wasn’t in. No use ringing his number because she’d seen him driving away and she hadn’t seen him return.

  How about Maxie Davis?

  Just a minute. She might not be up yet. It was, after all, early Sunday morning.

  Maxie Davis was up. “Who?” she asked. “I’m sorry. I can hardly hear you.”

  Leaphorn could hear Maxie Davis perfectly—as if she were standing beside him. “Leaphorn,” he repeated. “The Navajo cop who was out there a couple of days ago.”

  “Oh. Have you found her?”

  “No luck,” Leaphorn said. “Do you remember a little leather-covered notebook she used? Probably carried in her shirt pocket?”

  “Notebook? Yeah. I remember it. She always used it when she was working.”

  “Know where she keeps it
? When it’s not with her?”

  “No idea. Probably in a drawer somewhere.”

  “You’ve known her long?”

  “Off and on, yes. Since we were graduate students.”

  “How about Dr. Elliot?”

  Maxie Davis laughed. “We’re sort of a team, I guess you’d say.” And then, perhaps thinking Leaphorn would misunderstand, added: “Professionally. We’re the two who are going to write the bible on the Anasazi.” She laughed again, the sound fading in and out. “After Randall Elliot and me, no more need for Anasazi research.”

  “Not Friedman-Bernal? She’s not part of it?”

  “Different field,” Davis said. “She’s ceramics. We’re people. She’s pots.”

  They had decided, he and Emma, to install the telephone in the kitchen. To hang it on the wall beside the refrigerator. Standing there, listening to Maxie Davis, Leaphorn inspected the room. It was neat. No dishes, dirty or otherwise, were in sight. Windows clean, sink clean, floor clean. Leaphorn leaned forward to the full reach of the telephone receiver cord and plucked a napkin from the back of the chair. He’d used it while he’d eaten his eggs. He held the receiver against his ear with his shoulder while he folded it.

  “I’m going to come back out there,” he said. “I’d like to talk to you. And to Elliot if he’s there.”

  “I doubt it,” Maxie Davis said. “He’s usually out in the field on Sunday.”

  But Elliot was there, leaning against the porch support watching Leaphorn as he parked his pickup in the apartment’s courtyard.

  “Ya tay,” Elliot said, getting the pronunciation of the Navajo greeting almost right. “Didn’t know policemen worked on Sunday.”

  “They don’t tell you that when they recruit you,” Leaphorn said, “but it happens now and then.”

  Maxie Davis appeared at the door. She was wearing a loose blue T-shirt decorated with a figure copied from a petroglyph. Short dark hair fell around her face. She looked feminine, intelligent, and beautiful.

  “I’ll bet I know where she keeps that notebook,” Davis said. “Do you still have the key?”

  Leaphorn shook his head. “I’ll get one from headquarters.” Or, he thought, failing that, it would be simple enough to get into the apartment. He’d noticed that when Thatcher had unlocked the door.

  “Luna’s away,” Elliot said. “We can get in through the patio door.”

  Elliot managed it with the long blade of his pocketknife, simply sliding the blade in and lifting the latch.

  “Something you learn in graduate school,” he said.

  Or in juvenile detention centers, Leaphorn thought. He wondered if Elliot had ever been in one of those. It didn’t seem likely. Jail is not socially acceptable for prep school boys.

  Everything seemed exactly as it had been when he’d been here with Thatcher—the same stale air, the same dustiness, the boxes of pots, the disarray. Thatcher had searched it, in his tentative way, looking for evidence that Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal was a violator of the Federal Antiquities Act. Now Leaphorn intended to search it in his own way, looking for the woman herself.

  “Ellie kept her purse in the dresser,” Maxie Davis said. She opened a bottom drawer. “In here. And I remember seeing her drop that notebook in it when she came in from work.”

  Davis extracted a purse and handed it to Leaphorn. It was beige leather. It looked new and it looked expensive. Leaphorn unsnapped it, checked through lipstick, small bottles, package of sugarless gum, Tums, small scissors, odds and ends. No small leather notebook. Emma had three purses—a very small one, a very good one, and a worn one used in the workaday world of shopping.

  “She had another purse?” Leaphorn said, making it half a question.

  Davis nodded. “This was her good one.” She checked into the drawer. “Not here.”

  Leaphorn’s mild disappointment at not finding the notebook was offset by mild surprise. The wrong purse was missing. Friedman-Bernal had not taken her social purse with her for the weekend. She had taken her working purse.

  “I want to take a sort of rough inventory,” Leaphorn said. “I’m going to rely on your memory. See if we can determine what she took with her.”

  There were the disclaimers he expected, from both Maxie Davis and Elliot, that they really didn’t know much about Ellie’s wardrobe or Ellie’s possessions. But within an hour, they had a rough list on the back of an envelope. Ellie had taken no suitcase. She had taken a small canvas gym bag. She’d probably taken no makeup or cosmetics. No skirt was missing. No dress. She had taken only jeans and a long-sleeved cotton shirt.

  Maxie Davis sat on the bed, examining her jottings, looking thoughtful. “No way of knowing about socks or underwear or things like that. But I don’t think she took any pajamas.” She motioned toward the chest of drawers. “There’s an old blue pair in there I’ve seen her wear, and a sort of worn-out checked set, and a fancy new pair. Silk.” Davis looked at him, checking the level of Leaphorn’s understanding of such things. “For company,” she explained. “I doubt if she would have a fourth set, or bring it out here anyway.”

  “Okay,” Leaphorn said. “Did she have a sleeping bag?”

  “Yeah,” Davis said. “Of course.” She sorted through the things on the closet shelf. “That’s gone too,” she said.

  “So she was camping out,” Leaphorn said. “Sleeping out. Probably nothing social. Probably working. Who did she work with?”

  “Nobody, really,” Elliot said. “It was a one-woman project. She worked by herself.”

  “Let’s settle down somewhere and talk about that,” Leaphorn said.

  They settled in the living room. Leaphorn perched on the edge of a sofa that looked and felt as if it would fold outward into a bed, Davis and Elliot on the Park Service Purchasing Office low-bid overstuffed couch. Much of what Leaphorn heard he already knew from his own studies a lifetime ago at Arizona State. He had considered telling the two about his master’s degree and decided against it. The time that might have saved had no value to Leaphorn now. And sometimes something might be gained by seeming to know less than you did. And so Leaphorn listened patiently to basic stuff, mostly from Davis, about how the Anasazi culture had risen on the Colorado Plateau, almost certainly a progression from the small, scattered families of hunters and seed collectors who lived in pit houses, and somehow learned to make baskets, and then the rudiments of agriculture, and then how to irrigate their crops by controlling runoff from rain, and—probably in the process of caulking baskets with fire-dried mud to make them waterproof—how to make pottery.

  “Important cultural breakthrough,” Elliot inserted. “Improved storage possibilities. Opened a door to art.” He laughed. “Also gave anthropology something a lot more durable than baskets to hunt, and measure, and study, and all that. But you already know a lot about this, don’t you?”

  “Why do you say that?” Leaphorn never allowed a subject to shift him from the role of interrogator unless Leaphorn wanted to be shifted.

  “Because you don’t ask any questions,” Elliot said. “Maxie isn’t always perfectly clear. Either you’re not interested in this background, or you already know it.”

  “I know something about it,” Leaphorn said. “You’ve said Friedman’s interest was in pottery. Apparently she was interested mostly in one kind of pot. Pots which have a kind of corrugated finish. Probably some other revealing details. Right?”

  “Ellie thought she had identified one specific potter,” Elliot said. “A distinctive individual touch.”

  Leaphorn said nothing. That sounded mildly interesting. But—even given the intense interest of anthropologists in the Anasazi culture and its mysterious fate—it didn’t seem very important. His expression told Elliot what he was thinking.

  “One potter. Dead probably seven hundred and fifty years.” Elliot put his boots on the battered coffee table. “So what’s the big deal? The big deal is, Ellie knows where he lived. Out there at BC57, across the wash from Pueblo Bonito, because
she found a lot of his pots there broken in the process of being made. Must have been where he worked….”

  “She,” Maxie Davis said. “Where she worked.”

  “Okay, she.” Elliot shook his head, regaining his chain of thought, showing no sign of irritation. It was part of a game they played, Leaphorn thought. Elliot’s boots were dusty, scarred, flat-heeled, practical. A soft brown leather, perfectly fitted, extremely expensive.

  Davis was leaning forward, wanting Leaphorn to understand this. “Nobody before had ever found a way to link the pot with the person who made it—not before Ellie began noticing this peculiar technique repeated in a lot of those BC57 pots. She had already noticed it in a couple of others from other places—and now she had found the source. Where they came from. And she was lucky in another way. Not only was this potter prolific, she was good. Her pots traded around. Ellie tracked one back to the Salmon Ruins over on the San Juan, and she thinks one came out of a burial near the White House Ruin in Canyon de Chelly, and…”

  If Elliot had any objection to Maxie Davis’s commandeering his story, his face hadn’t showed it. But now he said: “Get to the important point.”