Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries (10 page)

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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

BOOK: Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries
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Sage reached out with arthritic hands, wiping them on her apron as she stepped back from the door. “You know, girl, for centuries our people left that place alone. It’s only these fool White people that don’t have sense enough to let the White Houses be.”
“I know, Aunt.”
Magpie looked around as she stepped into the trailer. The battered old couch, the picture of a young white man in a brown World War II army uniform, the teapots and cups were in their familiar places. The kitchen table overflowed with magazines, letters, and open tin cans, which held pencils, screwdrivers, pliers, a ruler, knife handles, and scissors.
One entire living-room wall was covered with a huge
loom. Stretched across it, an intricately woven rug was half-finished, multicolored warp hung expectantly. A shuttle waited between the weft, ready for use. Magpie didn’t have to step close to see the dust on it.
“You gonna finish that rug?” she asked.
Sage chuckled dryly. “Not in this lifetime. Maybe in the next.”
“I wish you’d go to the hospital.”
“I’ve been to the hospital.” Sage wobbled her way to the kitchen table and seated herself in one of the plastic-covered kitchen chairs, breathing hard. “That last dose of chemo almost killed me. Your favorite doctor says there’s nothing to be done.” She winced. “Anyway, I’m ready to go. Nothing is worth enduring this pain. It’s like giving birth. No, worse. It never ends.”
“They can give you medicine for the pain. Morphine. They have something called a hospice in Albuquerque—”
“I’m gonna die here,” Sage insisted. “The Shiwana know to look for me here. Besides, I’ve been talking to my sisters lately. That Slumber, she’d talk your ear off.”
Sage paused for a moment, and said, “You said you wanted to talk, child.”
“
Na’ya
, something happened at the park. Something bad. I need you to explain it to me. Not as my
na’ya
, but as ‘Empty Eyes,’ the woman who sees the dead.” She took a breath to nerve herself for her aunt’s answers. “I always thought the gift that you and your sisters shared had passed my generation. But last night Dale Emerson Robertson, the anthropologist … do you remember him?”
“Yes. We called him ‘Sharp Nose.’ Him and his students. Always trying to see into the past. To know more than we wanted him to know.”
“He was murdered in the park last night,
Na’ya.
Someone cut the soles off of his feet and buried him upside down in the ground. I was there when they dug
him out.” Magpie rubbed her hands together. “And there were other things.”
The old woman straightened, and the years seemed to retreat from her cancerous body. “Somebody didn’t want him walking to the Land of the Dead. He was making sure old Sharp Nose would be a homeless ghost, wandering the earth forever. Go on. I have to know everything.”
Officer Warren sat in the recliner across from the overstuffed Spanish leather sofa, a notebook in his hand. Dale’s living room seemed oddly dark despite the bright sunshine pouring through the big picture window.
Dusty sat beside Maureen. An expression of either panic or rage sparkled in his eyes. She couldn’t tell for sure. She leaned closer, her thigh pressing reassuringly against his.
Officer Warren asked, “Were you here last night?” “No,” Dusty answered. “We stayed at my place in Santa Fe.”
“Did anyone call you there?”
Dusty didn’t answer. He seemed to be lost in thought, or perhaps memories of Dale.
Maureen said, “Sylvia Rhone. One of Dale’s employees. She told Dusty that she couldn’t reach Dale. This morning, Maggie Walking Hawk Taylor—a park ranger—called from Chaco Canyon. She said Dale’s truck had been in the parking lot overnight.”
Maureen’s mind had recovered enough from the shock to begin putting the pieces together. Officer Warren didn’t ask where Chaco was. He already knew. From her experience working with various police forces in Ontario, she could see where this was going.
“Officer Warren,” she said, “I’m a board-certified forensic anthropologist. You’re obviously conducting
an investigation, which means Dale’s death is suspicious. Why?”
Warren gave her that bland look, the one cops use when they don’t want their faces read. “He was found in Chaco Canyon.”
Dusty looked up suddenly. “What part of the canyon?”
“I don’t know that, sir.” Warren seemed sincere. “Just that he was dug up in the canyon.”
“Dug up?” Dusty and Maureen asked in unison. Dusty continued, “What do you mean, dug up? Someone buried him?”
“That’s all I’ve been told, sir. I’m sure those details will be released as they are uncovered.” His expression didn’t change. “Did you come here for a reason this morning? I take it you have a key to Dr. Robertson’s house?”
Grief tightened Dusty’s eyes. “Dale raised me. I consider him to be my father. Yes, I have a key.”
Warren seemed to weigh the words, his keen gaze taking in Dusty’s gray pallor. “How much did Ms. Taylor tell you?”
“Only that Dale’s truck had been located this morning in the Casa Rinconada parking lot. She’s known Dale for many years. She was concerned.”
“Did Dr. Robertson spend much time at Chaco Canyon?”
“He was a New Mexico archaeologist, for God’s sake!” Dusty cried. “Of course, he did!”
Maureen calmly said, “And in anticipation of your next question, Officer, no, Dale didn’t tell us he was going to Chaco, or what he intended to do there. The first we heard of it was when Maggie called this morning.”
“Did he give you any indication that anyone had been bothering him? Maybe threats? Any hint that he was worried about anything or anyone?”
“No, he … wait a minute,” Dusty said. He walked
over and pulled the tape out of the answering machine. “A woman called him a few nights ago. She sounded scared. And—and there was an angry message from a man with an English accent on our office machine.”
“Could I have that?” Officer Warren held out his hand and Dusty put the tape in it. “I’ll need the tape at your office, too.”
Dusty nodded and wiped his palms on his jeans, as though they’d been somehow soiled by the woman’s voice on the tape. “Tell me how he died. I take it he did not have a heart attack, or a stroke, or die from other natural causes. Is that right?”
Warren replied, “Mr. Stewart, if everything you say checks out, I’ll refer you to the agent in charge.”
“You mean you’re not in charge?” Dusty looked suddenly hostile, as though the officer had been wasting his precious time.
“I’m local,” Warren answered. “Dr. Robertson was found on a national monument. That’s federal jurisdiction. I was asked to check the residence on a drive-by. When I saw a vehicle in the driveway, I called it in, and they asked me to check out why someone with a Sante Fe address would be in Dr. Robertson’s house.” He rose to his feet. “You’ll need to talk to the FBI.”
 
 
BROWSER THREW HIS blanket to one side and shivered. His white breath lingered, ghostlike in the cold air. Around him, the plastered walls of the room seemed to close in, pressing on his souls. Someone in the distant past had painted a row of interlinking black
diamonds just below the ceiling poles. The design had faded over the sun cycles. A water stain marked one wall where rain had leaked down from the abandoned floors above. Like so much of his world, this place, too, was falling apart.
He hadn’t slept well, preoccupied by the curious words Gray Thunder had spoken, and Stone Ghost’s insistence that today they would seek the young man out and interrogate him thoroughly.
So many questions came tumbling out of Browser’s mind. Poor Singer had been one of his ancestors. He had married the Blessed Cornsilk who had given birth to Browser’s great-grandfather, Snowbird, who had given birth to Grandmother Painted Turtle, and then to Prairie Flower, Browser’s mother. And last night, he had heard that Poor Singer and Cornsilk were both present when the Blessed Sternlight was killed by Jay Bird. This was
his
family history he was learning from the Fire Dogs.
But why should the Fire Dogs care if Poor Singer’s prophecy had been mistaken by the Katsinas’ People? It had been so long ago.
He rubbed his eyes and reached for his war shirt, pulling it over his shoulders as he stood and searched for his sandals. With his weapons in hand, he ducked out through the low, T-shaped doorway into the gray light of dawn. A thin white coating of snow had fallen to leave the battered town looking oddly frail.
The block of rooms they had been given lay along the upper story on the eastern wall of Dusk House. Wind and weather had eroded the plaster that had once covered the roof poles. The protruding ends had been laboriously sanded smooth by long dead slaves, but the wood had weathered and cracked anyway, as gray now as the surrounding soil. As he walked across the roof to the ladder that led down past a line of kivas to the plaza, he wondered why the First People had come to this drab place. The river provided a constant supply
of water that Straight Path Canyon did not, but why hadn’t they gone farther upriver where the country was more pleasing to the eye?
He was considering this as he climbed down the ice-slick ladder and crossed the snow in the plaza to where Stone Ghost hunched over a small fire. Browser massaged his hands and squatted beside him. Through a gap in the wall, he could see to the World Kiva that had been constructed astride the Great North Road, and on to Sunrise Town, its lines softened by the thin layer of snow. Blue tendrils of smoke rose to merge with the predawn light.
“You are up early, Uncle.”
Stone Ghost added another twig to the blaze. “It wasn’t a night for sleep, was it, Nephew?” Stone Ghost turned curious eyes his way. “If you are worried, Catkin has already seen to the guards.”
Browser suffered a pang of guilt. After a moment, he said, “I’m not a good War Chief, Uncle. I haven’t been since my son died. Perhaps I should relinquish that duty to Catkin. She is better suited to it.”
Browser extended his hands to the fire, grateful for the heat. All he’d ever wanted was a quiet life with his family. “Do you believe this Gray Thunder? Was any of what he said true?”
Stone Ghost stared up at the gray clouds scudding to the east. “Yes, at least it matched what my grandmother told me. But I was more surprised by Blue Corn’s reaction. I think the Matron is hiding something.”
“We are all hiding something, Uncle. We live in a world of secrets.”
He looked across at Sunrise Town and the curved line of rooms where the Fire Dogs stayed.
“A secret is kept for a reason, Nephew.” Stone Ghost’s brown age-lined face turned somber. “Everything seems to return to the First People, and the days when their world began to crumble.” He raised a hand
to the ruined walls around them. “Everything returns to the moment when they came here.”
Browser grimaced at the town. “This is a dismal place, Uncle. Why did they come to these gray hills when they could have gone upriver to better soil and a nicer place to live?”
Stone Ghost pointed across to the World Kiva and the Great North Road. “Because this place has Power. It lies due north of Center Place. Their Sunwatcher led them here, guided by the North Star. This place was to be the rebirth of the First People’s Straight Path Nation. From here, they would grow bigger and better than they had been in Straight Path Canyon.”
Browser looked around at the winter-fallow fields, and the gray hills visible beyond the river. “I don’t think it worked out the way they planned.”
“They didn’t anticipate the anger of the Made People. Or that the Blessed Ravenfire would betray them.” “Ravenfire was Cornsilk’s firstborn son, wasn’t he? He was the one who betrayed Night Sun to the Made People, didn’t he?”
“Yes, they enslaved her and finally tortured her to death.” Stone Ghost’s gnarled hands clenched over the fire. “I had heard the story that Gray Thunder told last night, though with a different twist. My grandmother taught me that Poor Singer’s anger was so great that he, with the help of the katsinas, built a fire that burned into the lower world. That the fire laid waste to the land, and with it, he destroyed the man who raped Cornsilk—Ravenfire’s father. Only after he burned away the man’s crime did he give his prophecy.”
“I don’t recall hearing stories about Poor Singer being an angry man.” Browser didn’t know if the shiver that stalked his shoulders was from the cold, or the implications of what that might mean about the Katsinas’ People’s greatest prophet.
After a moment, Stone Ghost asked, “Have you heard what they are saying about your recently murdered
Matron? Some say that she became a katsina and flew to the clouds.”
“Yes, I know. But you and I buried her, Uncle.”
“But do not forget that her body was dug up,” Stone Ghost reminded. “The grave was empty. We know that Shadow Woman and Two Hearts took her, but the rest of the world would rather believe that your Matron flew to the clouds.”
Browser frowned. In a low voice, he said, “That’s crazy.”
Stone Ghost shrugged. “Come, Nephew, let us walk over to Sunrise Town and present ourselves to Gray Thunder. If we do, perhaps he will tell us how he plans to end this craziness, and maybe he will share some of that fine piki bread they brought. From the looks of things, their packs are fuller than ours.”
“They must be, given that we have almost nothing.” Browser watched the last of the twigs burn to white ash before he stood and gripped his uncle’s elbow. “The snow is slick, Uncle. Let me help you.”
As they walked, Browser noted the location of his warriors. Straw Shield huddled under a blanket on the corner of the roof where he could see down the line of rooms occupied by the Katsinas’ People. He nodded to Browser.
As they passed out of the confines of Dusk House, Catkin appeared on the north wall, her face haggard from lack of sleep. At the sight of her lithe form, Browser felt his heart lift. Her slim body moved with a feline grace. She had wrapped her long legs in leggings made from twists of rabbit hide. A turkey-feather cloak draped loosely over her shoulders, allowing unhampered access to her war club and the bow slung over her back.
She walked to the edge of the roof above them, and called, “Are you well, War Chief?”
“Fine, Catkin. We are on the way to speak with Gray Thunder.”
She hesitated, that familiar look in her eyes as she glanced toward the Fire Dog guards.
Browser told her, “We will not be gone long.”
She went to the nearest ladder and climbed down. When she fell into step beside him, the tension went out of his shoulders. Why was it that when she was away he felt in danger? He studied her from the corner of his eye. Cold had reddened her beautiful face, especially the tip of her turned-up nose. Her dark eyes scanned the surroundings as she walked warily ahead.
She had saved his life back at the White Moccasin’s caverns. But for her quick reflexes he would have been killed. And how many times had he saved her? From the Mogollon, from Ash Girl, and in countless battles. They were tied, somehow, their destinies bound together. So, why, he wondered, had he never surrendered to his manhood and shared her blankets?
A smarter man would have made her his wife. A hollow sensation spread in his stomach. His last marriage had been a disaster.
They passed just south of the World Kiva with its three concentric walls. The story was that the First People had built it that way to initiate the young. That unlike the usual kiva where the different benches represented the worlds through which their ancestors had come, this was more accurate, that each level had its own initiation.
They entered the gap between the western and southern walls of Sunrise Town. Browser waved a greeting to the vigilant warrior who perched on the wall above them. The young man gave a nod, barely acknowledging their presence. As Stone Ghost led them around the curved wall and into the plaza, a cry carried on the still air.
Browser stopped, listened, and said, “Stay here, Uncle,” before he trotted down the line of rooms.
Another shout broke the stillness. As he and Catkin rushed toward Gray Thunder’s room, one of the Fire
Dog warriors, a woman, stumbled out of Gray Thunder’s doorway, ripping the hanging aside. Blood dripped from her hands.
It took Browser a moment to decipher the words spoken in the anguished Fire Dog’s language: “We are betrayed! Betrayed!”
Browser broke into a run, his hands up as the woman spun on one foot, her war club raised. “Stay back!” she shouted.
“Who betrayed you?” he shouted back. “How?”
The woman hesitated at the confusion in his eyes, then cried,
“Gray Thunder has been murdered!”
Warriors boiled out of the adjacent rooms, some half-dressed, their weapons lifted. Many blinked themselves awake as they searched for the threat, and their eyes settled hungrily on Browser and Catkin.
“Wait!” Stone Ghost cried in the Mogollon tongue. He rushed forward, hands up. “We did not do this thing! Stop! Or we are all dead!”
Catkin held her war club at the ready, prepared to strike.
“Stop this!” Browser called to the Fire Dog woman. “You know we didn’t do this! We just arrived!”
She seemed to waver, unsure of whether to strike him down or not.
Instinctively Browser dropped to his knees before her and offered his war club. “We are not your enemies! Upon my life, you must believe that!”
The panic in her eyes began to ebb as her own warriors crowded around. Their confused mutters sounded like the babbling of a brook to Browser’s ears.
“Gray Thunder is dead,” she repeated, and her voice broke. “What they did to him … it’s terrible.” And then her eyes widened, mouth open in awe. “It is … as he said.”
“Who?” Stone Ghost asked, his command of Mogollon better than Browser’s. “Who said? Who did this?”
“I don’t know!” Tears glittered in her eyes. “I didn’t see them!” She swallowed hard. “It was as he said.” Her stunned eyes fixed on Browser. “Are you the one?”
In confusion, Browser asked, “What one? Tell us what you know. What—?”
“Browser!”
Catkin’s call brought him to his feet. He spun and saw warriors tumbling out of the rooms in Sunrise Town. Blue Corn’s burly War Chief, Rain Crow, led them, a stone-headed war club in his hand.
The Fire Dogs began to line out for battle. This was madness. In the blink of an eye, an arrow would be loosed, or an insult called, and nothing would stop the ensuing massacre.
Browser pushed the grief-stricken woman behind him as he raised his arms. “Stop! Come no closer! Rain Crow, do not let this happen!”
“What is this?” Rain Crow had pulled up, a dark look on his ruined face. “I heard cries. Did I hear right? That we are betrayed?”
“No!” Stone Ghost stepped between the factions, his thin white hair shining in the predawn glow. “Gray Thunder is dead. Murdered.”
“Not by us!” Rain Crow turned his head and spat on the ground. “Do they think we did it?”
Browser heard the whispers passing between the agitated Fire Dogs. “Murdered?” “We are betrayed!” “Straight Path dogs!” “They planned this!” “Kill them all!”
Browser hung his war club on his belt and opened his hands to them. “Matron Blue Corn promised you safety, and she has kept her promise! You can’t—”
“Gray Thunder is
dead!”
A young man pointed the tip of his bow at Browser. “Just the way he said! Is that what you call safe, dung eater!”
A chorus of assent went up as the Fire Dogs strengthened their resolve.
“Please. Wait!” Browser pleaded. “Whoever killed
Gray Thunder wants us to kill each other. I, for one, wished to hear Gray Thunder’s words. Do not let this happen!”
“Let’s just kill them all and end this foolishness,” Rain Crow growled. “This nonsense has gone far enough.”
Stone Ghost strode to Rain Crow and looked up. “Don’t be a fool, War Chief. Browser is right. We’re being played with. Do you want to be like a little girl’s doll? Dressed up, made to do what someone wishes you to? Kill these Fire Dogs and you will unleash a whirlwind of war like nothing we’ve seen in a hundred sun cycles.”

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