Skinwalkers. Part 11

"It probably wasn't that way," Chee said. "Different people, probably. Some friend called you, not knowing that this madman was coming along."

"I'm getting to be a jinx," Janet Pete said. "Typhoid Mary. A sort of curse."

Chee waited for the explanation. Janet Pete offered none. She sat, her square shoulders slumped a little, and looked sadly at her hands.

"Why jinx?" Chee said.

"This is the second time this happened," Janet Pete said, without looking at Chee. "Last time it was Irma. Irma Onesalt."

"The woman who got killed over by ... You knew her?"

"Not very well," Janet said. She produced a humorless laugh. "A client."

"I want to hear about it," Chee said. Leaphorn seemed to think there might be some connection between the Onesalt killing and the Sam and Endocheeney cases. The lieutenant had been very interested when Chee had told him about the letter Endocheeney received from Onesalt's office. It didn't seem likely, but maybe there was some sort of link.

"That's how I heard about Officer Jim Chee," Janet Pete said, studying him. "Irma Onesalt said you did her a favor, but she didn't like you."

"I don't understand," Chee said. And he didn't. He felt foolish. The only time he'd met Onesalt, the only time he could remember, had been that business about picking up the patient at the clinic-the wrong Begay business.

"She told me you were supposed to deliver a witness to a chapter meeting and you showed up with the wrong man and screwed everything all up. But she said she owed you something. That you'd done her a favor."

"What?"

"She didn't say. I think it must have been some sort of accident. I remember she said you helped her out and you didn't even know it."

"I sure didn't," Chee said. "And don't." He waved at the man behind the counter, signaling a need for refills. "How was she your client?"

"That's pretty vague too," Janet Pete said. "She called one day and made an appointment. And when she came by, she mostly just asked a lot of questions." She paused while her gla.s.s was refilled and then stirred sugar into her tea-two teaspoons.

How did she keep so slim? Chee wondered. Nervous, he guessed. Runs it off. Mary was like that. Always moving.

"I don't think she trusted me. Asked a lot of questions about our relations.h.i.+p at DNA with the tribal bureaucracy and the BIA and all that. When we got that out of the way, she had a lot of questions about what I could find out for her. Financial records, things like that. What was public. What wasn't. How to get doc.u.ments. I asked her what she was working on, and she said she would tell me later. That maybe it wasn't much of anything and then she wouldn't bother me. Otherwise, she would call me back."

"Did she?"

"Somebody shot her," Janet Pete said. "About ten days later."

"Did you report talking to her?"

"Probably no connection, but finally I did. I checked to find out who was handling the case and then called him and told him-Streib I think it was." She shrugged. "The fed at Gallup."

"Dilly Streib," Chee said. "What did he say?"

She made a wry face. "You know the FBI," she said. "Nothing."

"How about you? Any idea what she was after?"

"Not really." She sipped the tea, slim fingers around the tall gla.s.s.

A Navajo complexion, Chee thought. Perfect skin. Smooth, glossy. Janet Pete would never have a freckle. Janet Pete wouldn't have a wrinkle until she was old.

"But she said something that I remembered. It made me curious. Let's see if I can remember just how she put it." She raised a slim hand to her cheek, thinking. "I asked what she would want to look for and she said maybe some answers to some questions, and I said what questions and she said ... she said how people can look so healthy after they're dead. And then I asked her what that meant. Didn't really ask her exactly, you know. Just looked puzzled, raised my eyebrows or something like that. And she just laughed."

"How people can look healthy after they're dead?"

"That's it," she said. "Maybe not the exact words, but that was the sense of it. Mean anything to you?"

"Absolutely nothing," Chee said, thinking about it so hard that he forgot the refill, and gulped scalding coffee, and spilled it on his uniform s.h.i.+rt-which was not at all what Jim Chee wanted to do in front of Janet Pete.

> 17 <>

THE FIRST THING Joe Leaphorn noticed when he rolled Emma's old Chevy sedan to a halt in the yard of the Short Mountain Trading Post was that McGinnis had repainted his Sale sign. The sign had been there the first time Leaphorn had seen the place, coming on some long-forgotten a.s.signment when he was a green new patrolman working in the Tuba City subagency. He sat a.s.sessing the pain in his forearm. And remembering. Even then the sign had been weather-beaten. Then, as now, it proclaimed in large block letters: Joe Leaphorn noticed when he rolled Emma's old Chevy sedan to a halt in the yard of the Short Mountain Trading Post was that McGinnis had repainted his Sale sign. The sign had been there the first time Leaphorn had seen the place, coming on some long-forgotten a.s.signment when he was a green new patrolman working in the Tuba City subagency. He sat a.s.sessing the pain in his forearm. And remembering. Even then the sign had been weather-beaten. Then, as now, it proclaimed in large block letters: THIS E ESTABLISHMENT.

FOR S SALE.

INQUIRE W WITHIN.

Around Short Mountain, they said that the store on the rim of Short Mountain Wash had been established sometime before the First World War by a Mormon who, it was said, noticed the lack of compet.i.tion without noticing the lack of customers. It was also said that he had been convinced that the oil prosperity he saw far to the north around Aneth and Montezuma Creek would spread inexorably and inevitably south and west-that the Just Creator must have blessed this area somehow with something. And since the surface itself offered nothing but scanty gra.s.s, scarce wood, and a wilderness of erosion, there surely must be a bountiful treasure of oil below those sterile rocks. But his optimism had finally faltered with the Aneth field, and when his church ruled against multiple wives, he'd opted to join the polygamist faction in its trek to tolerant Mexico. Everyone around Short Mountain Wash seemed to remember the legend. No one remembered the man himself, but those who knew McGinnis marveled at the Mormon's salesmans.h.i.+p.

McGinnis now appeared in his doorway, talking to a departing customer, a tall Navajo woman with a sack of cornmeal draped over her shoulder. While he talked he stared at Emma's Chevy. A strange car out here usually meant a stranger was driving it. Among the scattered people who occupied the emptiness of Short Mountain country, strangers provoked intense curiosity. In Old Man McGinnis, almost anything provoked intense curiosity. Which was one reason Leaphorn wanted to talk to Old Man McGinnis, and had been talking to him for more than twenty years, and had become in some odd way his friend. The other reason was more complicated. It had something to do with the fact that McGinnis, alone, without wife, friend, or family, endured. Leaphorn appreciated those who endured.

But Leaphorn was in no hurry. First he would give his arm a chance to quit throbbing. "Don't move it," the doctor had told him. "If you move it, it's going to hurt." Which made sense, and was why Leaphorn had decided to drive Emma's sedan-which had automatic transmission. Emma had been delighted to see him when he'd come home from the hospital. She had fussed over him and scolded and seemed the genuine Emma. But then her face had frozen into that baffled look Leaphorn had come to dread. She said something meaningless, something that had nothing at all to do with the conversation, and turned her head in that odd way she'd developed-looking down and to her right. When she'd looked back, Leaphorn was sure she no longer recognized him. The next few moments formed another of those all too familiar, agonizing episodes of confusion. He and Agnes had taken her into the bedroom, Emma talking in a muddled attempt to communicate something, and then lying on the coverlet, looking lost and helpless. "I can't remember," she'd said suddenly and clearly, and then she'd fallen instantly asleep. Tomorrow they would keep their appointment with the specialist at the Gallup hospital. Then they would know. "Alzheimer's," the doctor would say, and then the doctor would explain Alzheimer's, all that information Leaphorn had already read and reread in "The Facts About Alzheimer's Disease" sent him by the Alzheimer's a.s.sociation. Cure unknown. Cause unknown. Possibly a virus. Possibly an imbalance in blood metals. Whatever the cause, the effect was disruption of the cells on the outer surface of the brain, destroying the reasoning process, eroding the memory until only the moment of existence remains, until-in merciful finality-there is no longer a signal to keep the lungs breathing, no longer the impulse to keep the heart beating. Cure unknown. For Emma, he had watched this process of unlearning begin. Where had she left her keys? Walking home from the grocery with the car left parked in the grocery lot. Being brought home by a neighbor after she'd forgotten how to find the house they'd lived in for years. Forgetting how to finish a sentence. Who you are. Who your husband is. The literature had warned him what would be coming next. Fairly early, all speech would go. How to talk. How to walk. How to dress. Who is this man who says he is my husband? Alzheimer's, the doctor would say. And then Leaphorn would put aside pretense and prepare Emma, and himself, for whatever would be left of life.

Leaphorn shook his head. Now he would think of something else. Of business. Of whatever it was that was killing the people he was paid to protect.

He had the cast propped against the steering wheel, letting the pain drain away, sorting what he hoped to learn from this visit to Old Man McGinnis. Witchcraft, he guessed. Much as he hated to admit it, he was probably involved again in the sick and unreal business of the skinwalker superst.i.tion. The bits of bone seemed to link Jim Chee, and Roosevelt Bistie, and Dugai Endocheeney. Dilly Streib's call had confirmed that.

"Jim Chee's gossip had it right," Streib had said. "They found a little bead down in one of the knife wounds. Thread, little dirt, and a bead. I've got it. I'll have it checked to see if it matches the first one." And then Streib had asked Leaphorn what it meant, beyond the obvious connection it made between the Endocheeney and Bistie killings and the attempt on Chee. Leaphorn had said he really didn't know.

And he didn't. He knew what it might mean. It might mean that the killer thought Endocheeney was a witch. He might have thought that Endocheeney, the skinwalker, had given him corpse sickness by shooting the prescribed bit of bone into him. Then, instead of relying on an Enemy Way ritual to reverse the witchcraft, he had reversed it himself by putting the lethal bone back into the witch. Or it might mean that the killer in some crazy way thought himself to be a witch and was witching Endocheeney, putting the bone into him at the very moment he killed him with the knife. That seemed farfetched, but then everything about Navajo witchcraft seemed farfetched to Leaphorn. Or it might mean that the killer inserted the notion of witchcraft into this peculiar crime simply to cause confusion. If that had been the goal, the project had succeeded. Leaphorn was thoroughly confused. If only Chee had wormed it out of Bistie. If only Bistie had told them why he was carrying the bone bead in his wallet, what he planned to do with it, why he wanted to kill Endocheeney.

The pain in his arm had subsided. He climbed out of the Chevy, and walked across the hard-packed earth toward the sign that proclaimed the willingness of McGinnis to leave Short Mountain Wash for a better world, and stepped through McGinnis's doorway-out of the glare and heat and into the cool darkness.

"Well, now," the voice of McGinnis said from somewhere. "I wondered who it was parked out there. Who sold you that car?"

McGinnis was sitting on a wooden kitchen chair, its back tilted against the counter beside his old black-and-chrome cash register. He was wearing the only uniform Leaphorn had ever seen him wear, a pair of blue-and-white-striped overalls faded by years of was.h.i.+ngs, and under them a blue work s.h.i.+rt like those that convicts wear.

"It's Emma's car," Leaphorn said.

" 'Cause it's got automatic s.h.i.+ft and you got your arm hurt," McGinnis said, looking at Leaphorn's cast. "Old John Manymules was in here with his boys a little while ago and said a cop had got shot over in the Chuskas, but I didn't know it was you."

"Unfortunately it was," Leaphorn said.

"The way Manymules was telling it, old fella got killed up there at his hogan and when the police came to see about it, one of the policemen got shot right in the middle."

"Just the arm." Leaphorn was no longer surprised by the dazzling speed with which McGinnis acc.u.mulated information, but he was still impressed.

"What brings you out here to the wrong side of the reservation?" McGinnis said. "Broke arm and all."

"Just visiting," Leaphorn said.

McGinnis eyed him through his wire-rimmed bifocals, expression skeptical. He rubbed his hand across the gray stubble on his chin. Leaphorn remembered him as a smallish man, short but with a barrel-chested strength. Now he seemed smaller, shrunken into his overalls, the st.u.r.diness missing. The face, too, had lost the remembered roundness, and in the dimness of the trading post, his blue eyes seemed faded.

"Well, now," McGinnis said. "That's nice. I guess I ought to offer you a drink. Be hospitable. That is, if my customers can spare me."

There were no customers. The tall woman was gone and the only vehicle in the yard was Emma's Chevy. McGinnis walked to the door, limping a little and more stooped than Leaphorn remembered. He closed it, slipped the bolt lock. "Got to lock her up, then," he said, half to Leaphorn. "G.o.ddam Navajos they'll steal the panes outta the windows if they need it." He limped toward the doorway into his living quarters, motioning Leaphorn to follow. "But only if they need it. White man, now, he'll steal just for the h.e.l.l of it. I've known 'em to steal something and then just throw it away. You Navajos, now, if you steal a sack of my meal I know somebody's hungry. Screwdriver's missing, I know somebody lost his screwdriver and has a screw that needs driving. I think it was your granddaddy that first explained that to me, when I was new out here."

"Yeah," Leaphorn said. "I think you told me that."

"Get so I repeat myself," McGinnis said, with no sound of repentance in his voice. "Hosteen Klee, they called him before he died. Your mother's father. I knew him when they was still calling him Horse Kicker." McGinnis had opened the door of a huge old refrigerator. "I ain't offering you a drink because you don't drink whiskey, or at least you never did, and whiskey's all I got," he said into the refrigerator. "Unless you want a drink of water."

"No, thanks," Leaphorn said.

McGinnis emerged, holding a bourbon bottle and a Coca Cola gla.s.s. He carried these to a rocking chair, sat, poured bourbon into the gla.s.s, examined it, then, with the gla.s.s close to his eyes, dripped in more until the level reached the bottom of the trademark. That done, he set the bottle on the floor and motioned Leaphorn to sit. The only place open was a sofa upholstered with some sort of green plastic. Leaphorn sat. The stiff plastic crackled under his weight and a puff of dust arose around him.

"You're here on business," McGinnis declared.

Leaphorn nodded.

McGinnis sipped. "You're here because you think old McGinnis knows something about Wilson Sam. He'll tell you, and you'll put it with what you already know and figure out who killed him."

Leaphorn nodded.

"Outta luck," McGinnis said. "I've known that young fella since he was a buck Indian and I don't know anything about him that's going to help."

"You've been thinking about it," Leaphorn said.

"Sure," McGinnis said. "Fella you've known gets killed, you think about it." He sipped again. "Lost a customer," he said.

"Anything in that?" Leaphorn said. "Unusual, I mean. Like him coming in with money to pay off his p.a.w.n. Or buying anything unusual. People coming to ask where to find him."

"Nothing," McGinnis said.

"He make any trips? Go anyplace? Been sick? Any ceremonials for him?"

"Nothing like that," McGinnis said. "He used to come in now and then to do his buying. Sell me his wool. Things like that. Get his mail. I remember he cut his hand bad way back last winter and he went into that clinic that Sioux Indian opened there at Badwater Wash and they sewed it up for him and gave him a teta.n.u.s shot. But no sickness. No sings for him. No trips anyplace, except he told me couple of months ago he went into Farmington with his daughter to get himself some clothes." McGinnis took another sip of bourbon. "Too d.a.m.n fas.h.i.+onable to buy his clothes from me anymore. Everybody's wearing designer jeans."

"How about his mail? Do you write his letters for him? He get anything unusual?"

"He could read and write," McGinnis said. "But he ain't bought no stamps this year. Not from me, anyway. Or mailed any letters. Or got any unusual mail. Only thing unusual, couple of months ago he got a letter in the middle of the month." He didn't explain that, or need to. On the far reaches of the reservation, mail consists primarily of subsistence checks, from the tribal offices in Window Rock or some federal agency. They arrive on the second day of the month, in brown stacks.

"In June was it?" That was when Chee had said Endocheeney received his letter from Irma Onesalt's office. "About the second week?"

"That's what I said," McGinnis said. "Two months ago."

Leaphorn had managed to find a way to be fairly comfortable on the sofa. He had been watching McGinnis, who in turn had kept his watery eyes focused on the bourbon while he talked. And while he talked, he rocked, slowly and steadily, coordinating a motion in his forearm with the motion of his chair. The net result of this was that while the bourbon gla.s.s seemed to move, the liquid in it remained level and motionless. Leaphorn had noticed this lesson in hydraulic motion before, but it still intrigued him. But what McGinnis had said about the letter regained his full attention. He leaned forward.

"Don't get excited," McGinnis said. "You gonna expect me to tell you that inside that envelope there was a letter from somebody telling Wilson Sam to hold still because he was coming to kill him. Something like that." McGinnis chuckled. "You got your hopes up too high. It wasn't from anybody. It was from Window Rock."

Leaphorn wasn't surprised McGinnis had noticed this, or that he remembered it. A midmonth letter would have been an oddity.

"What was it about?"

McGinnis's placid expression soured. "I don't read folks' mail."

"All right then, who was it from?"

"One of them bureaus there in Window Rock," McGinnis said. "Like I said."

"You remember which one?"

"Why would I remember something like that?" McGinnis said. "None of my business."

Because everything out here is your business, Leaphorn thought. Because the letter would have lain around somewhere for days while you waited for Wilson Sam to come in, or for some relative to come in who could take it to him, and every day you would look at it and wonder what was in it. And because you remember everything.

"I just thought you might," Leaphorn said, overcoming a temptation to tell McGinnis the letter was from Social Services.

"Social Services," McGinnis said.

Social Services. Exactly. He wished he had found time to check. If the letter wasn't in the file, if no one there remembered writing to Endocheeney, or to Wilson Sam, it would be fair circ.u.mstantial evidence that Onesalt had done the writing, and that the letters were in some way unofficial. Why would Social Services be writing to either man?

"Did it have a name on it? I mean on the return address. Or just the office?"

"Come to think of it, yeah." McGinnis sipped again and inspected the bourbon level with watery eyes. "That might be of some interest to you," he said, without taking his eyes off the gla.s.s. "Because that woman who had her name on the return address, she was the one that got shot a little later over there in your part of the reservation. Same name, anyway."

"Irma Onesalt," Leaphorn said.

"Yessir," McGinnis said. "Irma Onesalt."

The circle was thus complete. The bone beads linked Wilson Sam and Endocheeney and Jim Chee and Roosevelt Bistie. The letters linked Onesalt into the pattern. Now he had what he needed to solve this puzzle. He had no idea how. But he knew himself. He knew he would solve it.

> 18 <>

IT WAS A day off for Chee, and in a little while it would be time to leave for the long drive to the place of Hildegarde Goldtooth, to meet with Alice Yazzie. Ninety miles or so, some of it on bad roads, and he intended to leave early. He planned to detour past the Badwater Clinic to see if he could learn anything there. And he didn't want to keep Alice Yazzie waiting. He wanted to do her Blessing Way. Now Chee was pa.s.sing the time in what Captain Largo called his "laboratory." Largo had laughed about it. "Laboratory, or maybe it's your studio," Largo had said when he found Chee working there. In fact, it was nothing but a flat, hard-packed earthen surface up the slope from Chee's trailer. Chee had chosen it because a gnarled old cottonwood shaded the place. He had prepared it carefully, digging it up, leveling it, raking out bits of gravel and weed roots, making it an approximation of the size and shape of a hogan floor. He used it to practice dry painting the images used in the ceremonials he was learning. day off for Chee, and in a little while it would be time to leave for the long drive to the place of Hildegarde Goldtooth, to meet with Alice Yazzie. Ninety miles or so, some of it on bad roads, and he intended to leave early. He planned to detour past the Badwater Clinic to see if he could learn anything there. And he didn't want to keep Alice Yazzie waiting. He wanted to do her Blessing Way. Now Chee was pa.s.sing the time in what Captain Largo called his "laboratory." Largo had laughed about it. "Laboratory, or maybe it's your studio," Largo had said when he found Chee working there. In fact, it was nothing but a flat, hard-packed earthen surface up the slope from Chee's trailer. Chee had chosen it because a gnarled old cottonwood shaded the place. He had prepared it carefully, digging it up, leveling it, raking out bits of gravel and weed roots, making it an approximation of the size and shape of a hogan floor. He used it to practice dry painting the images used in the ceremonials he was learning.

At the moment, Chee was squatting at the edge of this floor. He was finis.h.i.+ng the picture of Sun's Creation, an episode from the origin story used in the second night of the Blessing Way. Chee was humming, mouthing the words of the poetry that recounted this episode, letting a controlled trickle of blue sand sift between his fingers to form the tip of the feather that was hung from Sun's left horn.

Sun will be created-they say it is planned to happen.Sun will be created-they say he has planned it all.Its face will be blue-they say he has planned it all.Its eyes will be yellow-they say he planned it all.Its forehead will be white-they say he planned it all.

Feather finished, Chee rocked back on his heels, poured the surplus blue sand from his palm into the coffee can that held it, wiped his hand on the leg of his jeans, and surveyed his work. It was good. He had left off one of the three plumes that should have extended eastward from the headdress of Pollen Boy, standing against Sun's face-thus not completing the power of the holy image at this inappropriate time and place. Otherwise, the dry painting looked perfect. The lines of sand-black, blue, yellow, red, and white-were neatly defined. The symbols were correct. The red sand was a bit too coa.r.s.e, but he would fix that by running a can of it through the coffee grinder again. He was ready. He knew this version of the Blessing Way precisely and exactly-every word of every song, every symbol of the dry paintings. It would cure for him. He squatted, memorizing again the complicated formula of symbols he had created on the earth before him, feeling its beauty. Soon he would be performing this old and holy act as it had been intended, to return one of his people to beauty and harmony. Chee felt the joy of that rising in him, and turned away the thought. All things in moderation.

The cat was watching him from the hillside above its juniper. It had been in sight much of the morning, vanis.h.i.+ng down the bank of the San Juan for a while but returning after less than an hour to lie in the juniper's shade. Chee had put the s.h.i.+pping case under the tree the previous evening-fitting it beneath the limbs as near to the cat's sleeping place as he could force it. In it he'd put an old denim jacket, which the cat sometimes sat on when it came into the trailer. He had added, as lure, a hamburger patty from his refrigerator. He'd been saving the patty for some future lunch, but the edges had curled and turned dark. This morning he noticed the meat was missing and he presumed the cat had gone into the case to retrieve it. But he could see no sign that the cat had slept there. No problem. Chee was patient.

The case was really a cage with a carrying handle and had cost Chee almost forty dollars with taxes. It had been Janet Pete's idea. He had brought up the problem of cat and coyote as they left the Turquoise Cafe, trying to extend the conversation-to think of something to say that would prevent Miss Pete from getting into her clean white official Chevy sedan and leaving him standing there on the sidewalk.