Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries (22 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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“What man?” Nichols asked.
Maureen turned her attention to Nichols. “That’s right. He was standing behind you, Agent Nichols, on that rocky point. It was like he took one look and left. He had gray hair and curious eyes, light blue.”
“Behind me?” Nichols asked. “As though he didn’t want to get caught in any photos?”
“I didn’t think of that.” Maureen rubbed her arms as though suddenly chilled.
Nichols reached into his pocket and handed Maureen a photo. “Does this look like him?”
Maureen’s eyes widened. “That’s him. Who is he?”
“Are you
sure
?” Nichols asked.
“Yes, no question about it.” She handed the photo to Dusty.
He studied it. The silver-haired man had a narrow, almost predatory face. Dusty thought the guy looked like the actor, Willem Dafoe, but older.
“I wish I’d seen him,” Nichols said. “I need to have a word with him.”
“Why? Who is he?” Dusty asked and handed the photo back to Nichols.
Nichols returned it to his pocket. “That’s your old friend, Carter Hawsworth.”
 
 
CATKIN WALKED A few paces behind Browser, studying him from the corner of her eye. In the slanting morning light, he seemed truly alive for the first time in moons. It was as though the brooding man he’d been for the past sun cycle had died, and a new War Chief had been born in his place. That cunning glint had returned to his eye, and his steps had the light wary quality of a bobcat’s.
Catkin followed as Browser led their party down the trail into Singing Bird Canyon, a deeply cut fissure that time, wind, and water had worn into the northern side of Straight Path Canyon. Normally they would have followed the Great North Road past the ruins of Center Place, then across the mounds of broken soul pots that remained as mute testimony to the departed dead that had been set free to follow their way northward to the Land of the Dead. Catkin hoped the White Moccasins had followed that trail. But she couldn’t be sure. None of them could. Though they’d tried very hard to hide their tracks, a party this large left sign.
Catkin looked at Browser. His thick black brows had drawn together as his dark eyes searched the landscape. She smiled to herself. She had missed this man, this calculating War Chief she’d met two sun cycles ago. She had seen him diminished by the illness and death of his son, the loss of his long-time lover, Hophorn, and the betrayal and death of his hideously soul-diseased wife. Each blow had whittled away a piece of him. Then came the horrors they’d survived at Aspen village, and the destruction of Longtail village. He had watched those children burn to death, and it had damaged him deep down.
But, today, knowing they were being hunted, he seemed to have returned to his old self.
When the trail begin to narrow, Catkin dropped back and let everyone else go before her. She walked last in line, placing her feet carefully on the trail that clung tortuously to the frozen soil of the canyon side. She slipped her bow from her shoulder and pulled two arrows from her quiver. As they descended into the canyon, they became easy targets. Any pair of sharp eyes on the canyon rim could spot them.
She gazed up at the spindly chamisa and rabbitbrush that had taken hold since the old days when every scrap of brush had been plucked from within two days’ walk of the canyon, and scanned for signs of ambush.
Ahead of her, Straighthorn walked beside the strange little girl. He was paying close attention to the child, closer than Catkin thought prudent.
“Keep your eyes on the canyon, warrior,” Catkin reminded softly. “If the White Moccasins jump us here, we’ll be spitted on their roasting fire before dusk.”
Straighthorn turned, and his thin face tensed. Despite the cold morning wind, sweat shone on his hooked nose and beaded his short black hair. “It’s the girl,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m not sure but …” He hesitated, studied the child’s filthy face, and shook his head. “Maybe if she were clean I would know where I’ve seen her before.”
“Straighthorn,” Catkin replied, “think of the number of refugees who passed through Longtail village, and after that, the orphans who ran into Dry Creek village, and the desperate children who flooded Flowing Waters Town. They’ve all been dirty, half starved, and ragged.”
“Yes, but, this is different. There’s something about her eyes,” he answered. “They’re not … human.”
Catkin searched the sandstone ledges above them before answering. “I’m not sure mine are either. I suspect this child has seen some terrible things. If you think looking into her eyes is unsettling, imagine what she must see when she closes them.”
Straighthorn pulled the front of his threadbare red cape closed and stared down at the girl. “Perhaps that’s why she won’t speak, except to ask for food. She can’t trust anyone.”
The girl bit her lower lip and watched her moccasins, but Catkin could tell she was listening intently to their conversation.
Catkin said, “Traitors like Springbank have taught us all valuable lessons, warrior.”
Straighthorn looked over his shoulder again, and his crudely chopped-off hair fluttered in the wind. “Do you trust anyone, Catkin?”
“Oh, yes. I trust the four of us: Browser, me, you, and Jackrabbit. We can be sure of each other as no other four people in the world.”
During the fight with the White Moccasins, the bond between them had hardened like rawhide in the desert sun. Only death could separate them now.
Straighthorn nodded somberly. “Yes, I believe that.” Then he used his chin to gesture to the people ahead of them. “And Obsidian? What do you think of her? Is she truly leading us to the old witch’s lair, or to our doom?”
The little girl’s head tipped to the side, as if to hear better.
Catkin took a moment to carefully step around a rock in the trail. People often made the mistake of talking openly in front of children and were horrified later when the child repeated their words at exactly the wrong instant. She said, “I am certain of only one thing, Straighthorn; she is doing what is best for her.”
As they rounded a curve in the trail, sunlight shone on the cliff wall to the right, and Catkin saw the images that had been carved into the tan sandstone. Four spirals, two handprints, and four geometric figures surrounded a worn image of the Flute Player. Catkin breathed in the cool morning air and wondered about them. The priests of the First People had used stone tools to peck them into the rock, but few of the Made People knew what the symbols meant. Thunderbird spread his wings on the rock high above Catkin’s head. She looked up and could make out smaller images of lizards, a rattlesnake, and a frog.
An eerie presence filled Straight Path Canyon. Though it had been more than one hundred sun cycles since the First People left, echoes of their Power lingered.
The trail widened ahead, and the canyon bottom spread before them. Talon Town sat like a huge crescent moon at the base of the northern cliff. Catkin saw
Browser’s shoulders tense, and her souls replayed the memories that he must be seeing behind his eyes: his dying son coughing up blood, a woman’s corpse lying facedown in a grave with a stone crushing her head, Whiproot’s mutilated body in a ruined room in Talon Town, and that fateful moment when Browser drove an arrow through his wife’s spirit-possessed body.
As they emerged from Singing Bird Canyon, Browser kept them to the low ground, following the channel of the arroyo, moving in a half crouch.
Catkin could hear the wheezing breath of the two elders and Obsidian.
To Catkin’s relief the arroyo deepened as it cut through the flats. By the time they had reached the main channel, the dry creek bed cut twice a man’s height into the tan soil; they remained completely hidden.
Browser lifted a hand to halt the procession and waved to Jackrabbit and Straighthorn. The two young warriors ran forward, and Browser sent them scurrying up the sides of the arroyo to scout for pursuers.
Stone Ghost and White Cone whispered to each other as they sat down on the frosty sand under the south wall. Obsidian wearily sank to the ground two paces away and leaned her head against the cliff. Her beautiful face bore a coating of dust, but her dark eyes gleamed. One of the Mogollon, a youth named Yucca Whip, smiled and offered Obsidian his canteen. He flushed when Obsidian returned his smile and took it.
Browser walked to stand over Obsidian. “You brought us here. Now what?”
Obsidian handed the canteen back to Yucca Whip. “I don’t know exactly, but their lair is here, hidden like a wolf’s den. This was the center of the First People’s world, and it’s the place where they keep the old gods alive. Like the heroes of legend, they expect to rise from the very earth and reconquer the Made People.” She shook her head. “It’s foolishness. Only death remains
for us, Browser. Nothing else. Our time is gone.”
Catkin started. Browser shot a worried look at the Mogollon. Had Obsidian lost her wits to speak so candidly of the First People?
Catkin said, “This canyon is filled with abandoned towns, kivas, shrines, and old pit houses, Obsidian. There are caves and hidden recesses, piles of fallen boulders. Surely you must have some idea of where Two Hearts hides? Is his lair along the north wall of the canyon, or the south wall?”
Obsidian’s cloak blew in the wind, revealing the bare tops of her breasts, and the wealth of sparkling jewels she wore on her wrists and around her throat. “All I know is that they brought him here, wounded and dying—and this is where Shadow was supposed to bring me.”
“He is here,” Stone Ghost said from where he slumped against the water-worn earth.
“How do you know, Uncle?” Browser asked.
Stone Ghost scanned the attentive faces of the Mogollon and replied, “If you listen closely enough you can almost hear the footsteps of the Blue God as she sniffs for us in the greasewood.”
Catkin’s eyes shifted to the little girl. The child had turned to stare absently at the arroyo wall.
“What about tonight?” White Cone asked. “Where will we sleep?”
Browser caught sight of Jackrabbit as he stuck his head over the lip of the arroyo. “I see no one,” he said. “As far as I can tell, we haven’t been observed.”
“Good.” Browser fingered his war club, considered, and said, “We will work our way downstream. The new moon won’t rise until late. In the darkness between sunset and moonrise we will make our way across the flats to Kettle Town.”
“Why Kettle Town?” Catkin asked.
The little girl moved up beside Catkin, gripped a handful of Catkin’s cape, and began drawing in the dirt
with the holey toe of her moccasin. She sketched the likeness of a clay cooking pot between her feet.
Browser started walking, but said, “If we are discovered and attacked, it is like a pack rat’s warren, with escape holes running in all directions. It should be safe, if anywhere in this canyon is.”
Stone Ghost grunted as he rose to his feet and offered a hand to White Cone. “Yes, assuming that Two Hearts isn’t lying in wait for us there, precisely because it has many escape routes. He always has a back way out of his hole.”
“Well, if he is there, Uncle,” Browser said, “the element of surprise will be with us.” He used his war club to point to the Mogollon warriors. “And perhaps numbers as well.”
The Mogollon lined out behind Browser. Catkin and the girl waited to go last.
“Go on,” Catkin said, and put a hand against the girl’s back to urge her forward. “Follow the others.”
The little girl gave Catkin a wide-eyed look, then opened her mouth and started to sing. The strains of an ancient lullaby rose, carried by her sweet little girl voice:
“The Creator calls you,
The Divine Mother has seen you on your journey,
She has seen your worn moccasins,
She offers her life-giving breath,
Her breath of birth,
Her breath of water,
Her breath of seeds,
Her breath of death,
Asking for your breath,
To add to her own,
That the one great life of all might continue unbroken.”
Catkin remembered her grandmother singing it to her when she’d been a child. It was old, very old. No one sang it these days. At least no one Catkin knew.
The girl skipped down the trail, as if suddenly happy.
Catkin’s heart pounded, wondering why.
 
 
MAUREEN REACHED BEHIND the seat for the thermos. It was a calculated risk: Her coffee mug had been empty for nearly an hour, but what were the chances that she could fill it without splashing coffee all over herself and the Bronco’s interior? The road here, a crowned-and-ditched berm bladed across the desert, reminded her more of a motocross track than a thoroughfare.
The Bronco jounced over a rutted section.
“Do me a favor, Dusty, slow down just long enough for me to pour a cup of coffee.”
“Sure.” He slowed to a crawl.
Maureen unscrewed the thermos, pulled the top off of her travel mug, and poured hot black coffee. She recapped everything and pointed straight ahead. “Okay, hit it.”
Dusty eased the Bronco forward across the flat wasteland. Or at least, that’s how she classified this high desert with its rabbitbrush, sparse bunchgrasses, and patches of low prickly pear. Old snowdrifts filled the arroyos and cowered behind the low rises. Above, occasional snowflakes twirled down from the gray sky. The way had deteriorated since they’d left U.S. 44,
until they pitched and rolled along this feeble excuse for a road.
She picked up Dale’s diary and tried to synchronize her reading with the bouncing of the book.
“What did you learn?” Dusty asked as he gripped the steering wheel.
She almost chipped a tooth when she took a sip from her coffee mug. She swallowed and answered, “Are you sure you don’t want to read this yourself?”
Dusty made a face. “Yes, I do, Maureen. But right now, I’m driving. Tell me what you’ve discovered.”
“All right, I’m most of the way through 1959. Remember, Dale meets Ruth Ann at a dig in Maryland in ’57, and is smitten by her. Their first date is that summer. He’s worried because he’s ten years older than she is. They correspond after the field season. In ’58, she gets her B.A. and comes to work for him in Arizona at a salvage excavation near Phoenix. It’s a Hohokam site that’s going to be destroyed during canal building. In mid-July they become lovers.”
Dusty hesitated. “Is it—well, graphic—the way it’s written?”
She sipped her coffee. “No, all he says is ‘Last night it happened. I don’t know whether to scream for joy, or to shoot myself in the head. I’m in love. God knows where this will end. Ruth is the woman of my dreams. Can I marry her? Can I muster the courage to ask, and if so, will she say yes?’”
He steered around a big puddle in the center of the road. Recent traffic had broken the ice, and it had refrozen into a jagged surface. “Did he ask?”
“Not yet. He and Ruth work together on the site. They go to other southwestern sites for fun. Tuzigoot one weekend, Casa Grande the next. Dale’s writing is almost poetic, things like: ‘Went to a restaurant on Camelback. When we came out the sunset set fire to my soul.’”
“Set fire to his soul? Dale said that?” Dusty gave her an incredulous look.
She braced herself as they bounded across a washout in the road. “Boy, Maggie drives this all the time. Her kidneys must be flat.”
“Are you kidding?” Dusty’s mirrored sunglasses glinted as he turned. “This is a good road. As good as the last time you were over it.”
She braced one hand against the roof. “That was a long time ago, and it doesn’t look like they’ve had a road grader on it since.”
“It’s winter,” he told her. “There aren’t any tourists here.” Dusty waved as they passed a mud-spattered pickup headed the other way. “And the Navajo don’t seem to mind.”
“Dale might have had poetry in his soul, Stewart, but you seem gloomily pragmatic.” She shook her head. “Anyway, back to the diary. Summer ends and Ruth Ann heads back East. Dale goes into a funk. His diary talks about how he can’t work. He calls her every night.” She noted how Dusty had clamped his jaw. “Is this bothering you?”
His gaze fixed on the road. “Finding out that the man who raised me was sleeping with my mother is a disconcerting thing. I wonder why he never told me?”
She considered that, unwilling to answer. Dale knew how much Dusty hated his mother. If she’d been Dale, she doubted she’d have told Dusty.
“Look,” she finally told him, “it doesn’t matter. This was long before your father came along. In the 1963 diary, they break up. She wrote to Dale that she was seeing someone else at school that semester.”
“So how did Dad and Ruth Ann get together out here?” Dusty was flexing his grip on the steering wheel.
“I haven’t read that far yet.” Maureen lifted a foot to prop herself on the dash, wishing yet again that she had a seat belt.
“It’s just so much to take in,” Dusty said. “Dale’s death … then finding all these things out. I feel like I’ve been pulled sideways through one of those machines that make hamburger.”
They bounced across a cattle guard and onto the pavement past the Chaco Culture sign. Dusty slowed, rolling down his window as a battered old Chevy pickup approached. Dusty stuck his arm out as the pickup slowed.
“Hey, Lupe!”
“Hi, ya, Dusty,” Lupe called, his elbow out the window. “Hey there, Maureen! Dad said you were going to be up here. He’s waiting for you at the office.” Lupe’s face narrowed with concern. “You okay, man?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look so good.”
Dusty pointed to the journal in Maureen’s hands. “Been reading Dale’s diaries. Some of the things I’m learning, well, it’s like a whole different Dale than I ever knew.”
Lupe pursed his lips, a frown incising his forehead under the brim of a black Stetson. “I think sometimes we forget that our folks are people, too, you know? Anything in there about me?”
“Not yet. I’m still back at the early years. I’ll let you know if there’s anything juicy after we get up to the times you and me got into trouble.”
“Yeah, do.” Lupe grinned. “You know that FBI guy really put the screws to me this morning. Wanted to know if I had it in for Dale. He brought up that thing with the car.”
“What did you say?”
Lupe laughed. “I told him that ten years ago I could have been suspect number one on his list of suspects with motive.” His expression sobered. “Dusty, you know that Dale and I worked it all out. I forgave him for that. He was just trying to help. He told me it was the two-by-four approach to get my attention. Hell, for
all I know, maybe he actually did. I hadn’t been sober that long for years.”
“He loved you, Lupe.”
“Yeah, and I loved him.” He looked oddly stricken at that. “You can’t take your folks for granted. Hey, I gotta go. I gotta get to Santa Fe. Got a couple of flutes to deliver. Take care, huh?”
“You, too.” Dusty accelerated, face pensive as he rolled up the window.
“Lupe’s worried about you.” Maureen studied him thoughtfully. “He was your best friend?”
“We had a lot of fun when we were little. I think I told you about the kiva initiation. I did that with Lupe. Then things changed. I started digging and Lupe wasn’t into it. He got married too young. It was a nasty divorce. Lupe was drunk half the time and in trouble the rest. The court refused to give the boy to either his mother or his father. Rupert and his wife, Sandy, took Reggie in and raised him. But by then the boy was pretty screwed up. He suffered a lot of depression, and was in and out of detention schools for about ten years, mostly for fighting. Lupe blamed himself and sank deeper and deeper into the bottle.”
Maureen thought about child abuse and the toll it took on Indian children every year. “I’m glad Reggie was taken in by his grandparents. Most children like that wind up in foster homes being cared for by strangers. I knew I liked Rupert.”
Dusty smiled. “He was a sort of second father to me when I was a teenager. Before that he and Dale had been on some kind of outs. I never knew what, but after Dad killed himself, Rupert started coming around. Lupe was there, he was my age, and well, things just happened, you know?”
“Where was Dale when you and Lupe were getting into trouble?”
“Home cataloging artifacts. Dale once told me that if I ever landed in jail I’d better learn to like the food,
because I was staying there.” He looked at Maureen through his mirrored sunglasses, and smiled. “He meant it.”
Dusty’s entire life had been upended, and yet he could still smile. It amazed her.
As they wound down through Mocking Bird Canyon, toward the scene of the crime, she studied him, curious that the “Madman of New Mexico,” as he had been called so often, seemed to be holding himself together through sheer force of will. But she wondered what was going to happen when he stood over the place where Dale had spent his last moments.
Would I be strong enough to deal with this if Dale had been my father?
She doubted it.
“Dusty,” she said as they rolled up to the stop sign, “we’ll get through this. You know that, don’t you?”
He gave her a tired smile. “Worried about me, Doctor?”
“I’m worried about both of us.” She reached out and cupped her hand over his where it rested on the gearshift.
“You’ll be all right, Maureen. I know you.” Her hand on his, he shifted the Bronco into low and took the turn toward the headquarters building. “And I’m all right, too.”
The simple words filled her breast with an unfamiliar warmth—mostly because she knew he wasn’t. She smiled, and felt as if a part of her soul that had lain dormant for years was stirring, coming back to life.
 
 
BROWSER TUCKED HIS blanket around his shoulders and stared out at the night from one of the half-collapsed doorways on Kettle Town’s ruined third
floor. Behind him the roof had fallen in, the supporting poles rotted through and splintered. Rain had eroded the packed earth that had once covered it. Most of the plaster had cracked off to expose the stone wall beneath. What had once been a residence for the First People’s elite now made a home for bats, pack rats, and wasps.
His ancestors had lived here. Crow Beard, Night Sun, and Sternlight had walked here. Perhaps they had stood in this very doorway and looked out across this same vista.
Was that the cold sensation at the back of his neck? Was it the faint caress of the lost souls of the dead?
I am one of the First People
. The truth still left him eerily uncomfortable.
He worked his hand into a fist and watched the muscles and tendons flex. Where was the difference? A Made Person’s hand looked and worked the same. He had seen Made People and First People die. The same arteries, bones, and nerves ceased to function. In death they looked the same, smelled the same, and rotted the same.
If the difference between First People and Made People were not a thing of the body, was it a thing of the souls?
High over his head, a sliver of new moon blazed amid the sparkling Evening People. He could see across the flats to Straight Path Wash, and still farther to the rimrock that hemmed the canyon on the south. Here and there humps of distant buildings marred the washed clay of the canyon floor. All were dark. Only ten moons ago when he’d lived here, the villages south of the wash had twinkled. Had even those few tenacious farmers given up and left?
In the pale light his breath fogged. Silence lay heavily upon the canyon’s cold sandstone and clay.
Browser crouched in the doorway and propped his war club across his knees. He’d promised himself when
he’d left here a few moons ago that he would never return. Just a short run to the west, on the other side of Talon Town’s ominous ruins, a shallow pit entombed the remains of his son. Closing his eyes, he could imagine the earth, cold and unforgiving, pressing against the boy’s body. Did the pain of watching a child die ever go away? He could face the deaths of adults. They had lived. They had loved. But a child …
Browser’s chest ached.
He turned to look westward to the place where Matron Flame Carrier and Cloudblower had dropped a heavy stone atop his wife’s body, then shoved dirt over her grave.
This place haunted him, as though he could feel the eyes of the dead watching.
The soft rasp of a moccasin on rubble sent a quiver down his nerves. He eased farther into the shadows, turning.
“Browser?” Catkin slipped past the fallen wreckage of the roof and knelt beside him.
“What did you see?” he whispered.
“The back wall is mostly intact. Through there”—she gestured at a darkened doorway with her war club—“is the anteroom to a tower kiva. Three rooms back a doorway leads you out onto the long porch that runs the length of the town. We’ll need to look at it in the light. I’m not sure it’s safe to walk on it.”
“How’s the view?”
“Good. From that porch, you can see the stairs cut into the cliff and monitor the abandoned houses at the base of the slope. Everything seems quiet tonight. I didn’t see any sign of life.”
He nodded, indicating the small houses across the wash. “I haven’t seen a single sign of life out there either. Ten moons ago the towns on the opposite canyon wall were occupied.” A sadness went through him. “This place is dying.”

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