Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries (60 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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Dusty slowly lowered his hand. “I thought he was supposed to be in Washington. Cancer? For the love of God, is the entire world dying around me?”
Just as they turned to leave, a man stuck his head out of the cabin next door and called, “You looking for Dr. Brown?”
“Yes, have you seen him?”
“He jumped in his truck and flew out of here spinning gravel about a half hour ago.”
Dusty lifted a hand, called, “Thanks! Hey, you don’t know where Maggie is, do you?”
The guy shrugged. “She left to find Reggie about an hour ago. Him and his trash truck didn’t check in at quitting time.”
“Thanks, again. Good night.”
The guy closed his door.
Dusty looked across the canyon. Headlights sparkled on the road leading to Casa Rinconada.
As he watched them moving toward the kiva parking lot, Dusty suddenly felt weak. A rush of information seemed to fall out of his brain. Things that Sage had said, that Lupe had just said, about Rupert and the old painted box, and Reggie being on parole, and working part-time for his grandfather.
Dusty opened the flute bag. The instrument was beautiful, made of red cedar with a turquoise inlay. In the center, just above the finger holes, surrounded by turquoise, a beautifully carved basilisk had been inset. The single coral eye would stare at the player.
An attached note read:
“Dad, here’s my best yet. If you need more of the little snakes, give me a call. They don’t take but half a day to carve. Hope this flute makes you well. Love, Lupe.”
A witch survives through misdirection.
“Dusty?” Maureen asked as she walked up behind him. “Did you hear a word I said?”
He tugged the laces closed on the bag and reached out, steadying himself on her shoulder. “Come on. We have to hurry.”
 
 
OWL IS FLYING above Piper, his wings puffing air on her face where she huddles behind Stone Ghost.
She stares up, waiting in silence as a man’s legs drop into the kiva. Browser shifts, as if a smoky shadow. For an instant she sees the Blue God—as
Browser times the swing of his war club. The man coming down the ladder has just seen Mother’s naked body, just realized that Grandfather’s bedding is soaked in blood.
She watches the breath going into his lungs to shout as Browser’s war club smacks loudly into the back of the man’s neck. His eyes go blank and he falls to the floor.
Owl whispers, “You have been born to a time of war, little Bone Walker. Death swirls around you. Listen, listen for its soft footsteps.”
She knows the sound. Mother’s breath-heart soul hisses as it slips away past her tongue, then makes the faintest rasping as it scampers around the kiva, trying to get away from the body.
Stone Ghost lifts a heavy grinding stone, grunts, and drops it onto Grandfather’s head.
As he staggers back, he says, “I need another stone.”
Piper points to one of the bench slabs that is loose in its setting.
As Stone Ghost rocks it free, Browser lifts the dead warrior’s body with his good arm and drapes it over his shoulder. Then he begins the hard climb up the ladder.
Piper jumps when Stone Ghost drops the big stone on her mother’s head. Mother will never look at her again with dead flying squirrel eyes.
Voices call from outside.
Piper stares up at the hole in the roof.
Owl whispers, “The Blue God is feeding.”
Piper swallows the sourness that rises into her throat. She’s dizzy.
Owl whispers, “Shh. Shh. Shh.”
 
 
OBSIDIAN FOLDED HER arms and looked up at Owl House. As the twilight deepened, a chill settled on the canyon. She rubbed her cold skin. The screams had stopped, but no one had summoned her for the ritual preparations. Obsidian had no interest in seeing Browser’s torture and death. She didn’t want to witness his heart being extracted from his chest. Until Shadow had captured her, she had still hoped Browser might be her way out. She would have taken him for a husband. A woman could do worse. But now? She looked around at the White Moccasins, trying to see a future with any of them.
How did this go so badly for me?
What did Shadow think, that Obsidian was going to stand down here until after dark? It was getting cold and she was tired of being ogled. She wished the hungry-eyed warriors would look elsewhere.
“Something is wrong,” she said to Old Pigeontail.
The wrinkles that wrapped his fleshy nose deepened as he frowned. “Perhaps.” He was watching her with an unusual amusement in his eyes.
“Do you know something I do not?”
He shrugged, a smile hidden behind his thin brown lips. “The preparations took longer than usual, that’s all. Browser was a strong man. He might have withstood the torture longer than anticipated.”
“I don’t see why they had to torture him at all. They wanted his heart. That should have been a simple matter of throwing him down, cutting his chest open, and pulling out his heart.” Obsidian rubbed her cold arms again, then pointed. “You, young warrior, what is your name?”
The black-haired youth came forward and bowed respectfully,
though his gaze was fixed on her breasts. “I am Star Knife, Blessed Obsidian.”
“Good. Go up there and see what is happening. By now, Shadow should have Browser’s heart boiling in her pot. This is taking too long.”
Star Knife continued to stare at her chest as he nodded; then he turned and trotted the short distance up the hill. His white cape swayed with his gait.
Obsidian glanced at the other warriors in irritation.
They were all watching with speculative eyes, probably waiting for their turn to bed her, as they did her sister. Well, they would have a long wait.
Star Knife climbed onto the kiva roof. He cupped a hand to his mouth and called out, but Wind Baby had been gusting ferociously all day, Obsidian couldn’t hear his words.
Star Knife climbed down and disappeared into the kiva.
He didn’t come back out.
Obsidian had opened her mouth to shout to him when Pigeontail muttered, “Blessed Flute Player, something isn’t right about this. Shadow should have had his answer by now, and that youth should have been sent scurrying.”
“Answer?” Obsidian asked. “What answer?”
Pigeontail gave her a disgusted look. “You don’t think this is just about you, do you? It’s about the future. If Shadow can’t turn him … Oh, never mind. The gods made you to be beautiful, not smart.” He raised his voice. “Something is wrong! Half of you, come with me!”
Pigeontail started up the hill toward Owl House with a cluster of warriors following in his wake.
Obsidian frowned. A pale blue finger of smoke rose from the kiva and twisted into the evening sky. Obsidian started forward, but stopped when a body flopped out of the entrance. Then, a moment later, a second body was shoved out, and a man emerged.
“It’s Browser!”
The White Moccasins stopped short, suddenly uncertain. Old Pigeontail leapt up on the roof and shouted, “Kill him!”
Warriors surged forward. One young man vaulted to the roof, his war club held high. In less than a heartbeat, an arrow shaft sliced through the youth’s chest. It flashed as he staggered, eyes blinking, blood gushing from his mouth.
Obsidian waved both arms at the warriors. “Get up there!”
As the white-caped men dashed around her, she tried to understand. Browser, half hidden by the smoke, helped old Stone Ghost from the kiva, then lifted Piper out. The three of them turned to run for the rocks under the rim, a bow shot south of Owl House.
“Stop them!” Obsidian shouted. The next warrior reached the roof—only to stumble backward, a fletched shaft piercing his abdomen. As he kicked and screamed, hands clasping the arrow that lodged in his guts, the others charged past.
Obsidian stopped short when another warrior, no more than five paces ahead of her, screamed as an arrow lanced his arm. Obsidian leapt to the roof and looked up the ridge to the rimrock.
Jackrabbit and Straighthorn shot their bows from behind the tumbled rocks.
Obsidian grabbed one of the warriors who ran past. “There are only two of them! You can rush them!”
The young warrior gaped at her in panic.
“Go!” Obsidian ordered. “Now! Take them.”
Flames crackled wildly inside the kiva. Tongues of fire leapt up the ladder and caught in the dry matting around the entryway.
Obsidian ran past the bodies to the entryway and bent down, waving at the smoke and heat. Someone had piled firewood around the base of the ladder and kicked coals from the hearth into the tinder. In the
gaudy flickering glare, Obsidian saw the bodies with huge stones atop their heads.
Saved! I am saved!
A laugh came bubbling up from inside her as she backed away, coughing, and stumbled to the edge of the kiva.
It took several instants before she could identify the cluster of warriors charging up the slope from Corner Kiva. A woman ran in front. “Catkin? What are you doing here?”
Obsidian spun around. The White Moccasins ran southward along the rim, ducking arrows, as they chased Browser and his party.
Obsidian pulled herself up and shouted, “Catkin! Hurry! They have Browser trapped! You can still …”
Catkin’s arrow caught Obsidian squarely in the chest, and the force of the blow knocked her off her feet. She landed hard.
“No!” Obsidian clawed at the ground. When she coughed, blood bubbled from her mouth and soaked into the packed earth of the kiva roof, frothy and bright.
Catkin and several of the Mogollon warriors ran past. Over the shouts and screams, the crackling of the fire, Obsidian heard the impact as Catkin swung her war club and crushed the right side of Pigeontail’s skull.
As her vision began to fade, Obsidian saw the White Moccasins break before Catkin’s war party. One long shrill shout carried as they fled into the falling evening …
 
 
“GOD, I PRAY I’m wrong,” Dusty said as he drove maniacally down the loop road.
“About what?” Maureen shouted, and braced her feet for the next curve. “Tell me what you’re talking about!”
Dusty pummeled the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “Do you know what Reggie does? Why he’s on parole in El Paso?”
“No, why?”
“He’s a burglar, Maureen. Breaking and entering. He broke into houses in El Paso, loaded stuff in his trunk, and fenced it across the line in Juarez.”
Dusty slid the Bronco onto the Casa Rinconada drive.
“What does that have to—”
“Reggie stole the diaries! I’m sure of it!”
Not only were two sickly green Park Service pickups parked in the Casa Rinconada lot, but so was a familiar Ford Explorer, as well as Reggie’s trash truck. As Dusty pulled up and shut off the ignition, he just stared at the Explorer.
“What’s your mother doing here?” Maureen asked.
“I don’t know.” Dusty opened his door and stepped out.
The moon hung, nearly full, over the canyon walls. The pewter gleam seemed to set the world afire.
Maureen zipped up her coat and cast a nervous glance at Dusty. What was running through his head?
He pulled a flashlight and his pistol from under the
driver’s seat. He tucked the pistol into the back of his jeans, then walked over to Ruth Ann’s Explorer. With his hand he wiped some of the frozen mud and dust from the rear window and shone the light into the back.
“What are you looking for?”
“Bodies.”
He stepped over to the first Park Service truck, opened the door, and reached for the coffee cup sitting on the dash. “Warm. Rupert hasn’t been gone long. Come on.”
“This is Rupert’s truck?”
“Yes. The other truck is Maggie’s.”
“How do you know?” They looked identical to her.
“I just know, okay?”
Maureen shrugged and walked along behind him, aware of the darkness, the cold, and the silence of Chaco Canyon at night. Her heart had begun to beat a staccato in her chest. She kept sniffing the clear cold air, as if for a hint of Shondowekowur’s foul breath.
“Dusty? Damn it, you’re scaring me.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m scaring me, too.” After a second, he told her: “If anything happens, Maureen, promise me that you’ll run straight back to the Bronco and get out of here.”
“I will, but it would help if you’d tell me what you’re afraid might happen.”
“The same thing that happened almost forty years ago.”
The electric feeling grew in her heart. She’d never heard such fear in his voice. “Which is?”
“I’m not sure yet. A ritual. Something about witching souls.”
They had passed Tseh So, and started up the trail toward Casa Rinconada. The only sound was the gravel under their boots, and the faint rasping of their clothing.
Dusty whispered, “I can’t believe this. This is a nightmare.”
“What?” Maureen asked.
“Rupert and my mother,” Dusty said, voice husky.
Maureen’s boot slipped off a rock in the dark trail and she stumbled sideways before she caught her balance. “You think Rupert and your mother—”
“I think she’s the woman he loved with all his heart. The woman he lost to another man.”
They scrambled up the incline and Dusty shone the flashlight down into the great kiva. There, in the hollow stone box that once supported the foot drum, a bound figure looked up, eyes slitted against the light.
“Maggie?” Maureen called, recognizing her face. Duct tape made a gray smear across her mouth. Maggie struggled to scream and thrashed back and forth against the foot drum.
On the kiva floor stood a wooden box, beautifully painted, measuring about two feet square. Inside were quart-size glass jars filled with different colors of sand, some with their lids removed. In the center of the kiva, a painting spread across the floor, the image indistinct, unfinished.
Dusty wheeled, flashing the light around, its beam revealing nothing but rabbitbrush and chamisa, though the brush could have hidden anyone.
“Come on”—Maureen tugged at him—“we have to cut her loose and call Nichols.”
“Where’s my mother?” Dusty asked and flashed the light toward the low ridge to the south. “Oh, my God. Is that firelight? You don’t think he already has her up there, do you? In the witch kiva?”
Maureen grabbed his arm. “One thing at a time. Let’s turn Maggie loose, call Nichols, then we’ll go up there and look.”
They hurried for the southern stairway that led down into the great kiva. Maureen climbed down, ducked the lintel, and stepped out onto the dirt floor. She ran to Maggie and started untying the ropes on her hands.
Low laughter echoed from the kiva walls, as if issuing
from the niches themselves, and a deep voice boomed,
“Get away from her!”
Maureen whirled, eyes following the wavering flashlight as Dusty played the beam back and forth.
“Rupert!”
Dusty cried where he stood over Maggie. “It’s over!”
More laughter rolled down as if from the star-filled sky, and the voice sounded muffled, somehow inhuman. “Circles come full.”
“Where’s my mother?” He stared up at the kiva rim.
Maggie was shouting against the tape. Dusty reached down to pull it off.
“Don’t!”
the shout echoed. “If you do, I’ll shoot you dead, Dusty. And her, too. The end of it all. Over with. Dale’s seed dies here, where it was planted.”
Maureen’s blood ran cold. Even now he could be drawing a bead, centering a bullet on the middle of her back. She started to shake.
“Put the flashlight down, Dusty!” The hollow voice echoed around the kiva.
When Dusty continued to hold it, the hearth burst into flame as though previously soaked in gasoline.
“Rupert, for God’s sake!” Dusty threw the flashlight down. He stood defiantly beside Maggie, one arm up to shield his face from the heat of the roaring fire, while the other hand reached behind him for his own gun. “Let’s talk! You’re like a father to me. We could always talk!”
A figure moved on the kiva rim twelve feet above Maureen’s head. He stood there, illuminated by the firelight, a tall man, wearing what appeared to be an ancient wolf mask, the leather worn and cracked. Matted gray fur still clung to the collar. The eyes, irregular round holes, seemed possessed. The muzzle had been sewn on, the teeth, perhaps real, had cracked, and now hung by threads. The thing might have been brittle and antique, but it projected a menace that froze Maureen’s
soul. She could feel it, as though an ancient evil walked the kiva around her.
“I am Kwewur,” the man slurred the words and weaved on his feet. “I am reborn!”
Maureen could see that something was wrong with him. Drunk? Drugged? That’s why the voice didn’t sound quite right.
“Come on, Rupert. You don’t have to do this. I know about the cancer! Let me help you! I’ve known you all of my life. That’s got to count for something. We can make this work.”
“You know nothing!” The wolf figure raised a small black pistol and aimed it at Dusty’s chest.
Dusty spread his arms wide and Maureen saw a swallow go down his throat.
Dusty said, “Agent Nichols knows all about this, Rupert. He knows how much you loved my mother. How you wrote to her for years after she left you. He knows about h-how you were attacked by the dead witch after you potted the site up the hill. I’m sure you probably started studying witchcraft to defend yourself. Nichols knows you hired Reggie to steal the diaries. He-he—” Dusty stuttered, as though frantically putting facts together, but not knowing the proper order. “They’ll make him talk, you know, and Reggie will roll for them. Yeah, you were here that day, with us, but you damn well knew that Reggie had plenty of time to go in and take the diaries. Damn, you didn’t even know they existed until you rode out here with us and saw the one in the backseat! So, you called Reggie and, piece of cake, he used Dale’s keys, taken off his body, to drive up, open the front door, pack up the journals, and walk out.”
“Nichols knows nothing,” Kwewur slurred.
“Sure he does. Your name is on the park rolls. You were working here thirty-seven years ago. You were potting sites at night. Is that where you found the mask? Up the ridge? In the witch kiva? Let me guess,
that’s what was in the niche where you left the beer can and the cigarettes. What a sight that must have been. Two witches laid out on the floor, and a wolf mask in an old painted box in the wall crypt. Dale had a suspicion, didn’t he? That’s why he rode up Tsegi Canyon, and why he wouldn’t let me come. He was afraid the Wolf Witch would be someone he knew.”
“He deserved to die.” The wolf extended the pistol again.
Dusty hesitated. “Why did he deserve to die?”
“He took everything!”
“And Hawsworth? What did he do?”
“He
stole
! He—he stole my
secrets …
my
woman
!”
Maureen’s heart thundered in her chest.
Carter and his witch. Hawsworth had been learning about witchcraft from Rupert.
Maureen edged toward the stairs.
The wolf cast a sharp look in her direction. “Don’t try it, Dr. Cole.”
Maureen moved back to Maggie and propped her hand on the stone foot drum near Maggie’s face.
Dusty’s voice broke, “For God’s sake, what will this solve? Those things happened almost forty years ago!”
The wolf head tilted back, and the black eyeholes looked like deep dark caverns. “Dale and Hawsworth took everything from me! They
humiliated
me. I loved her with all my heart! I wrote her a hundred letters begging her to come back. They were in that old painted box! That’s when I started learning to be a witch. Two crazy old women over at Zuni taught me. I knew someday I’d pay them back for what they did to me! And then the cancer … Out of time. I’m out of time.”
Dusty slowly walked toward the rim where the Wolf Witch stood. “Rupert, please listen to me. I know—”
“You don’t know!” the man sobbed suddenly, and choked it back. “I wouldn’t be dying if it wasn’t for your mother! She’s the one who wanted to pot that
kiva. Don’t you understand? When I touched those old witches the evil entered me! Your—your mother … she knew what I was, who I was becoming. She’s the one who told me to take the box with this mask! She was there at the birth of it all!” He desperately sucked in a breath, as though his lungs were starving. “And then, just a few days later, I found them! Here! I heard them.” Rupert silently moved around the rim. The wolf mask bobbed and the teeth flashed in the firelight. “There they were. Dale Robertson, my good friend, naked, screwing the woman I loved. Right there!” He pointed with the pistol to the partially finished sand painting.
“I wasn’t strong enough to punish them when I first found out. But I was heartbroken. How could anyone have done that? She was screwing four men at once! I’m going to kill all of you. Everyone who ever hurt me. You will all die before I do, and then I—”
“Grandfather, no!”
The deep voice came from the darkness up the hill.
Rupert spun around and almost lost his footing. He staggered. “R-Reggie?”
Maureen reached down and quietly pulled the tape from Maggie’s mouth and whispered,
“Stay down!”

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