A Thief of Time (16 page)

“I have a description of the site, and it sounds unusual,” Chee said. He told Pedwell what Amos Whistler had told him.

“Yeah,” Pedwell said. “Sounds familiar. Let me check my files. I have photos of most of them.”

Chee heard the telephone click against something. He waited and waited. Sighed. Leaned a hip against the desk.

“Trouble?” Janet Pete asked.

Pedwell's voice was in his ear before he could respond.

“Found it,” Pedwell said. “It's N.R. 723. Anasazi. Circa 1280–1310. And there's two other sites right there with it. Probably connected.”

“Great!” Chee said. “How do you get there?”

“Well, it ain't going to be easy. I remember that. We packed into some of them on horse back. Others we floated down the San Juan and walked up the canyon. This one I think we floated. Let's see. Notes say it's five point seven miles up from the mouth of the canyon.”

“Dr. Friedman. She apply to dig that one?”

“Not her,” Pedwell said. “Another of those people out at Chaco did. Dr. Randall Elliot. They working together?”

“I don't think so,” Chee said. “Does the application say he was collecting St. John's Polychrome pots?”

“Lemme look.” Papers rustled. “Doesn't sound like pots. Says he is studying Anasazi migrations.” Mumbling sounds of Pedwell reading to himself. “Says his interest is tracing genetic patterns.” More mumbling. “Studying bones. Skull thickness. Six-fingeredness. Aberrant jaw formation.” More mumbling. “I don't think it has anything to do with ceramics,” Pedwell said, finally. “He's looking at the skeletons. Or will be if your famous Navajo bureaucracy, of which I am a part, ever gets this processed. Six-fingeredness. Lot of that among the Anasazi, but hard to study, because hands don't survive intact after a thousand years. But it sounds like he's found some family patterns. Too many fingers. An extra tooth in the right side of the lower jaw. A second hole where those nerves and blood vessels go through the back of the jaw, and something or other about the fibula. Physical anthropology isn't my area.”

“But he hasn't gotten his permit yet?”

“Wait a minute. I guess we weren't so slow on this one. Here's a carbon of a letter to Elliot from the Park Service.” Paper rustled. “Turn-down,” Pedwell said. “More documentation needed of previous work in this field. That do it?”

“Thanks a lot,” Chee said.

Janet Pete was watching him.

“Sounds like you scored,” she said.

“I'll fill you in,” he said.

“On the way back to my car.” She looked embarrassed. “I'm normally the usual stolid, dull lawyer,” she said. “This morning I just ran off in hysterics and left everything undone. People coming in to see me. People waiting for me to finish things. I feel awful.”

He walked to the car with her, opened the door.

“I'm glad you called on me,” he said. “You honored me.”

“Oh, Jim!” she said, and hugged him around the chest with such strength that he caught his breath. She stood, holding him like that, pressed against him. He sensed she was about to cry again. He didn't want that to happen.

He put his hand on her hair and stroked it.

“I don't know what you'll decide about your Successful Attorney,” he said. “But if you decide against him, maybe you and I could see if we could fall in love. You know, both Navajos and all that.”

It was the wrong thing to say. She was crying as she drove away.

Chee stood there, watching her motor pool sedan speed toward the U.S. 666 junction and the route to Window Rock. He didn't want to think about this. It was confusing. And it hurt. Instead he thought of a question he should have asked Pedwell. Had Randall Elliot also filed an application to dig in that now-despoiled site where Etcitty and Nails had died?

He walked back into the station, remembering those jawbones so carefully set aside amid the chaos.

T
O
L
EAPHORN
,
the saddle had seemed a promising possibility. She had borrowed it from a biologist named Arnold, who lived in Bluff. Other trails led to Bluff. The site of the polychrome pots seemed to be somewhere west of the town, in roadless country where a horse would be necessary. She would go to Arnold's place. If he could loan her a saddle, he could probably loan her a horse. From Arnold he would learn where Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had headed. The first step was finding Arnold, which shouldn't be difficult.

It wasn't. The Recapture Lodge had been Bluff's center of hospitality for as long as Leaphorn could remember. The man at the reception desk loaned Leaphorn his telephone to call Chee. Chee confirmed what Leaphorn had feared. Whether or not Dr. Friedman was killing pot hunters, her pistol was. The man at the desk also knew Arnold.

“Bo Arnold,” he said. “Scientists around here are mostly anthropologists or geologists, but Dr. Arnold is a lichen man. Botanist. Go up to where the highway bends left, and take the right toward Montezuma Creek. It's the little redbrick house with lilac bushes on both sides of the gate. Except I think Bo let the lilacs die. He drives a Jeep. If he's home, you'll see it there.”

The lilacs were indeed almost dead, and a dusty early-model Jeep was parked in the weeds beside the little house. Leaphorn parked beside it and stepped out of his pickup into a gust of chilly, dusty wind. The front door opened just as he walked up the porch steps. A lanky man in jeans and faded red shirt emerged. “Yessir,” he said. “Good morning.” He was grinning broadly, an array of white teeth in a face of weathered brown leather.

“Good morning,” Leaphorn said. “I'm looking for Dr. Arnold.”

“Yessir,” the man said. “That's me.” He stuck out a hand, which Leaphorn shook. He showed Arnold his identification.

“I'm looking for Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal,” Leaphorn said.

“Me too,” Arnold said enthusiastically. “That biddy got off with my kayak and didn't bring it back.”

“Oh,” Leaphorn said. “When?”

“When I was gone,” Arnold said, still grinning. “Caught me away from home, and off she goes with it.”

“I want to hear all about that,” Leaphorn said.

Arnold held the door wide, welcomed Leaphorn in with a sweep of his hand. Inside the front door was a room crowded with tables, each table crowded with rocks of all sizes and shapes—their only common denominator being lichens. They were covered with these odd plants in every shade from white through black. Arnold led Leaphorn past them, down a narrow hall.

“No place to sit in there,” he said. “That's where I work. Here's where I live.”

Where Arnold lived was a small bedroom. Every flat surface, including the narrow single bed, was covered with boards on which flat glass dishes were lined. The dishes had something in them that Leaphorn assumed must be lichens. “Let me make you a place,” Arnold said, and cleared off chairs for each of them.

“Why you looking for Ellie?” he asked. “She been looting ruins?” And he laughed.

“Does she do that?”

“She's an anthropologist,” Arnold said, his chuckle reduced again to a grin. “You translate the word from academic into English and that's what it means: ruins looter, one who robs graves, preferably old ones. Well-educated person who steals artifact in dignified manner.” Arnold, overcome by the wit of this, laughed. “Somebody else does it, they call 'em vandals. That's the word for the competition. Somebody gets there first, gets off with the stuff before the archaeologists can grab it, they call 'em Thieves of Time.” His vision of such hypocrisy left him in high good humor, as did the thought of his missing kayak.

“Tell me about that,” Leaphorn said. “How do you know she took it?”

“She left a full, signed confession,” Arnold said, fumbling in a box from which assorted scraps of papers overflowed. He extracted a small sheet of lined yellow notepaper and handed it to Leaphorn.

Leaphorn handed it back to him. “When did she leave it?”

“I just know when I found it. I'd been up there on Lime Ridge collecting specimens for a week or so and when I got back, the saddle was on the floor in the workroom up front with this note pinned on it. Looked in the garage, and the kayak was gone.”

“When?” Leaphorn repeated.

“Oh,” Arnold said. “Let's see. Almost a month ago.”

Leaphorn told him the date Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had made her early-morning departure from Chaco Canyon. “That sound right?”

“I think I got back on a Monday or Tuesday. Three or four days after that.”

“So the saddle might have been sitting there three or four days?”

“Could have been.” Arnold laughed again. “Don't have a cleaning lady coming in. Guess you noticed that.”

“How did she get in?”

“Key's over there under the flower box,” Arnold said. “She knew where. Been here before. Go all the way back to the University of Wisconsin.” Abruptly Arnold's amusement evaporated. His bony, sun-beaten face became somber. “She's really missing? People worried about her? She didn't just walk off for a few days of humanity?”

“I think it's serious,” Leaphorn said. “Almost a month. And she left too much behind. Where would she go in your kayak?”

Arnold shook his head. “Just one place to go. Downstream. I use it to play around with. Like a toy. But she'd have been going down the river. Plenty of sites along the river until you get into the deep canyon where there's nothing to live on. And then there's hundreds of ruins up the side canyons.” There was no humor at all left in Arnold's face. He looked at least his age, which Leaphorn guessed at forty. He looked worn and worried.

“Ceramics. That's what Ellie would be looking for. Potsherds.” He paused, stared at Leaphorn. “I guess you know we had a man killed here just the other day. Man named Houk. The son of a bitch was a notorious pot dealer. Somebody shot him. Any connection?”

“Who knows?” Leaphorn said. “Maybe so. You have any more specific idea where she took your kayak?”

“Nothing more than I said. She borrowed it before and went down into the canyons. Just poking around in the ruins looking at the potsherds. I'd guess she did it again.”

“Any idea how far down?”

“She'd ask me to pick her up the next evening at the landing upstream from the bridge at Mexican Hat. Only place to get off the river for miles. So it would have to be between Sand Island and Hat.”

Her car too could be found between Sand Island and Mexican Hat, Leaphorn was sure. She would have to have hauled the kayak within dragging distance of the river. But there was no reason now to look for the car.

“That narrows it down quite a bit,” Leaphorn said, thinking Ellie's trips were into the area Etcitty had described in his falsified documentation, the area Amos Whistler had pointed to in his talk with Chee. He would find a boat and go looking for Arnold's kayak. Maybe, when he found it, he would find Eleanor Friedman, and what Harrison Houk meant in that unfinished note. “…shes still alive up.” But first he wanted a look at that barn.

 

Irene Musket came to the door at Harrison Houk's old house. She recognized him instantly and let him in. She was a handsome woman, as Leaphorn remembered, but today she looked years older, and tired. She told him about finding the note, about finding the body. She confirmed that she had found absolutely nothing missing from the house. She told him nothing he didn't already know. Then she walked with him up the long slope toward the barn.

“It happened right in here,” she said. “Right in that horse stall there. The third one.”

Leaphorn looked back. From the barn you could see the driveway, and the old gate with its warning bell. Only the front porch was obscured. Houk might well have seen his killer coming for him.

Irene Musket stood at the barn door. Kept out, perhaps, by her fear of the
chindi
Harrison Houk had left behind him and the ghost sickness it would cause her. Or perhaps by the sorrow that looking at the spot where Houk had died would bring to her.

Leaphorn's career had made him immune to the
chindi
of the dead, immune through indifference to all but one of them. He walked out of the wind and into the dimness.

The floor of the third horse stall had been swept clean of the old alfalfa and prairie-hay straw that littered the rest of the place. That debris now formed a pile in one corner, where the Utah crime lab crew had dumped it after sorting through it. Leaphorn stood on the dirt packed by a hundred years of hooves and wondered what he had expected to find. He walked across the barn floor, inspected the piles of alfalfa bales. It did, indeed, seem that Houk might have been rearranging them to form a hiding place. That touched him oddly, but taught him nothing. Nothing except that Houk, the hard man, the scoundrel, had set aside a chance to hide to make time to leave him a message. “Tell Leaphorn shes still alive up”—up the canyon? That seemed likely. Up which canyon? But why would Houk have put his own life at greater risk to help a woman who must have been nothing more than one of his many customers? It seemed out of character. Not the Houk he knew about. That Houk's only weakness seemed to have been a schizophrenic son, now long dead.

Outside the barn the wind shifted direction slightly and howled through the cracks, raising a small flurry of straw and dust on the packed floor and bringing autumn smells to compete with the ancient urine. He was wasting his time. He walked back toward where Irene Musket was standing, checking the stalls as he passed. In the last one, a black nylon kayak was leaning against the wall.

Bo Arnold's kayak. Leaphorn stared at it. How could it have gotten here? And why?

It was inflated, standing on one pointed end in the stall corner. He walked in for a closer look. Of course it wasn't Arnold's kayak. He had described his as dark brown, with what he called “white racing stripes.”

Leaphorn knelt beside it, inspecting it. It seemed remarkably clean for this dusty barn. He felt inside, between the rubber-coated nylon of its bottom and the inflated tubes that formed its walls, hoping to find something telltale left behind. His fingers encountered paper. He pulled it out. The crumpled, water-stained wrapper from a Mr. Goodbar. He ran his fingers down toward the bow.

Water.

Leaphorn pulled out his hand and examined his wet fingers. Whatever water had been left in the kayak had drained down into this crevice. How long could it have been there? How long would evaporation take in this no-humidity climate?

He walked to the door.

“The inflated kayak in there. You know when it was used?”

“I think four days ago,” Irene Musket said.

“By Mr. Houk?”

She nodded.

“His arthritis didn't bother him?”

“His arthritis hurt all the time,” she said. “It didn't keep him from that boat.” She sounded as if this represented an argument lost, an old hurt.

“Where did he go? Do you know?”

She made a vague gesture. “Just down the river.”

“Do you know how far?”

“Not very far. He would have me pick him up down there near Mexican Hat.”

“He did this a lot?”

“Every full moon.”

“He went down at night? Late?”

“Sometimes he would watch the ten o'clock news and then we would go down to Sand Island. We'd make sure nobody was there. Then we'd put it in.” The wind whipped dust around Mrs. Musket's ankles and blew up her long skirt. She held it down, pressed back against the barn door. “We would put it in, and then the next morning, I would drive the pickup down to that landing place upstream from Mexican Hat and I'd wait for him there. And then…” She paused, swallowed. Stood a moment, silently. Leaphorn noticed her eyes were wet, and looked away. Hard as he was, Harrison Houk had left someone to grieve for him.

“Then we would drive back to the house together,” she concluded.

Leaphorn waited awhile. When he had given her enough time, he asked: “Did he tell you what he did when he went down the river?”

The silence lasted so long that Leaphorn wondered if his question had been lost in the wind. He glanced at her.

“He didn't tell me,” she said.

Leaphorn thought about the answer.

“But you know,” he said.

“I think so,” she said. “One time he told me not to guess. And he said, ‘If you guess anyway, then don't ever tell anybody!'”

“Do you know who killed him?”

“I don't,” she said. “I wish they would have killed me, instead.”

“I think we will find the one who did it,” Leaphorn said. “I really do.”

“He was a good man. People talked about how mean he was. He was good to good people and just mean to the mean ones. I guess they killed him for that.”

Leaphorn touched her arm. “Would you help me put the kayak in? And then tomorrow, drive my truck down to Mexican Hat and pick me up?”

“All right,” Irene Musket said.

“First I have to make a telephone call. Can I use your telephone?”

He called Jim Chee from Houk's house. It was after six. Chee had gone home for the day. No telephone, of course. Typical of Chee. He left Houk's number for a call back.

They slid the kayak into the back of his truck, with its double-bladed paddle and Houk's worn orange jacket, tied it down, and drove south to Sand Island launch site. Bureau of Land Management signs there warned that the river was closed for the season, that a license was required, that the San Juan catfish was on the extinction list and taking it was prohibited.