"If I wanted to bury something out there, I'd want it near a marker more permanent than a juniper tree or cactus. I think we should search around those big boulders."
"Good idea." Julio stood, grimacing from his aches. "Let's work together this time. We can select a boulder, search around it, and move on to the next."
"We should search a few yards out in case he paced a certain number of steps away from the stone," Kella suggested. She sighed, giggled. "Did someone say this would be fun?"
Julio grinned at her. "That would be you, I believe."
"Let's give it another hour," Col said. "That's about all the fun I can stand."
They went to work. About ten minutes later, Col heard Julio give a grunt. His partner had migrated to a slab of rock a few yards away. "I think I've found something," he said, staring down at it.
Col and Kella went to where he stood and looked down at the slab partially buried in the ground. All around the perimeter there were fresh cylindrical marks in the soil, as if made with a pry bar.
They gazed in silence.
"I'm afraid to look," Kella whispered. "I didn't really expect we'd find something."
"Are you worried Old Juan himself might be under there?" Col asked.
"I guess we all thought we might find more than a map," Julio said.
No one made the first move toward the stone.
"Well, we know we can't leave without trying to move it, so we might as well get to it," Julio said, finally. "If we all grab one end, we might shift it a bit."
They lined up along the uphill end and pushed fingers as far under the stone as they would go. Once all six hands were inserted under the lip, Julio counted off. "One, two, LIFT..." The slab tilted up. "Don't let go. Now, shift right." In a single motion, the three pushed as directed. Grudgingly, the heavy stone moved six inches to the right before it came out of their hands and dropped with a thud that vibrated the ground. Col barely got his foot out of the way in time.
Julio knelt to look into the exposed depression. His face showed disappointed. "'There's no pit here that I can see. It's just flattened earth underneath." He rocked back on his heels. "Maybe the dig marks are from someone else trying to do exactly what we're doing." Sweat dripped down his face. All three were soaked in it.
Col put hands on hips. "Well, look. We've gone this far. Let's try to move it out of the depression. There could be a hole directly under the center of this slab, just large enough for a tin box." He wiped the sweat from his forehead. "We might as well finish what we started."
There was reluctant agreement. After a short rest, they positioned themselves as before and lifted and shifted. This time, the stone moved more easily, exposing much more of the area beneath. Again, they found nothing but flattened earth.
Julio prodded with his fingers. The dirt was hard as iron. "No one has dug into this soil, I guarantee you."
"One more push, and we'll know for sure," Col said.
Kella gaped at him. "You're a glutton for punishment." But she lined up with the boys. This time, they lifted from the side. With one long concerted effort they hefted the stone until it stood on its edge. It teetered for a moment, fell on over to expose its underside.
"Damn," Julio muttered, looking at the undisturbed earth. "Nothing."
Col prodded at it. The ground was consistently hard everywhere on the exposed surface. There was no hole. Both boys squatted, disappointed but also relieved.
"At least we didn't find a grave," Julio said.
Col stood, wiped his face with his sleeved arm. "I'm done. This is too much fun for me. Let's go back to camp and have a glass of wine."
Kella didn't respond. She was staring at the exposed surface of the stone. Bits of soil clung to it here and there; a dirt film covered it. She wiped an area clean with her palm. "Look."
The boys crowded close. Under the dust were scratches, deliberate etchings in the stone, dotted lines connecting crosses and squares and other markings. It was a map.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Even as his brain registered the image of the snake and its threat, Zack's hand began to close the wardrobe. His reflexes could not match the speed of the snake's strike, but his effort to close the door was just fast enough to nudge the snake's head and its protruding fangs aside, altering its course by inches. The smack of the door unbalanced the rattler and it fell. Zack threw himself backward against the wall. He watched the snake land on the carpet with a thump and disappear under the far twin bed.
"Jesus!" Zack's heart pumped in his ears, his pulse raced. With one eye on the bed, he reopened the wardrobe to check for any other surprises. There were none. He picked up his jacket where it had fallen to the floor and hung it up, then walked to the table near the door and picked up the phone.
"Hello? Front desk? I have a snake in my room. I'd like you to remove."
The motel Jack-of-all-trades arrived at the door within minutes, armed with a snake stick. It didn't take him long to secure the snake and deposit it in his bag. He gave Zack a lopsided grin. "We don't see this very often."
Not sure if it was an apology or simply a comment, Zack gave no reply. As the man left he handed him a five-dollar bill, wondering how much of a tip one should give for rattlesnake removal. It was a full hour before he could settle down enough to fall asleep.
Zack was still sleepy when he stepped outside his motel room next morning, but the crisp cold air jarred him awake. The post dawn sky was deep blue, still framed with red. The Colorado River basin remained in shadow. Where the river notched through the mountains the sky was a purple V, like the tip of a spear. The sight lifted his spirits.
His eyes on the distant horizon, he did not at first notice the two figures standing near the exterior stairwell. The taller one approached Zack.
"Hagaruajɨ, FBI?" It was the Chemehuevi Chief Dan Singletree.
"Hello, Chief."
The large man nodded toward his smaller companion. "I have brought Veronica Nimri to speak to you."
"The thing at the well you mentioned?"
"Yes," Singletree said, and motioned the girl forward.
The young woman stepped up to them. She was slim, dressed in T-shirt and jeans with a woolly vest against the morning chill. Her hair was cut short, draped across her forehead. If not for her deep brown eyes and high cheekbones, Zack would not have thought her a Native American.
Singletree glanced at her and back at Zack. "Veronica did not wish to talk about the creature she saw at the well, but I convinced her."
"I was just going to meet Eagle Feather for breakfast. You could join us."
Chief Singletree shook his head. "Veronica will talk to you only."
Zack shrugged, waved toward the McDonalds. "Okay, fine, let's go get a cup of coffee, anyway."
Zack and Singletree walked side by side toward the restaurant, Veronica following in their wake. The Chemehuevi chief was a larger man than he had seemed when seated at their last meeting, several inches taller than Zack, broad at the shoulders. He was an impressive man, Zack thought.
There were no other customers this early, they quickly received their order and sat on stools at a table. Chief Singletree spoke softly to Veronica in their native dialect. He seemed to be encouraging her. Her voice was soft, a little timid.
"She'll talk to you," Dan said. "She doesn't want her name mentioned, for fear of...well, angering spirits. Or white men," he added with a grin.
Zack gave Veronica an encouraging look.
The girl began in perfect English. "My friends and I go four-wheeling along the Mojave Trail once or twice a year."
"You know the area quite well, then?"
She nodded. "We pick a different section of the road each year and camp in the wilderness and visit together, away from everyone else."
"To reclaim her roots," Dan said.
She glanced at him. "In a manner of speaking."
"What about the creature?"
Singletree turned his gaze toward Zack. "Patience. She will g
et there."
The girl gave a timid smile. "This past June we decided to travel the Fort Piute section. Our third night, we camped near the New York Mountains road junction. We have stayed there before."
"Where is that, exactly?"
Chief Singletree used his finger on the table surface. "Here is Rock Spring. The road junction is just east of it, right here. Over here is Hidden Springs, the crime scene."
"What's that, a couple of miles?"
Singletree nodded.
"How many were you?" Zack looked at Veronica.
"Just three this time–– my girlfriend Ellie and her friend Tom."
"One vehicle?"
"Yes. My old Bronco." She rolled her eyes at Zack.
"Okay, no more questions. Please go on."
Veronica glanced at Dan and continued. "We hung around at our camp awhile, with a fire going, talking. It was our second night out; we had stayed at Piute Canyon the night before. We thought it would be good to replenish our water supply before traveling the next day, because the filtering system would take several hours to make the water potable. Ellie came with me but Tom decided to stay by the fire and enjoy his beer."
"What is Tom like?" Zack asked.
"He's a real sweet guy, kind 'a tall and skinny, but also athletic, you know?"
"How well did you know him?" Zack saw Veronica's expression shade toward annoyance again. "Okay, okay, no more questions."
"It was dusk by now. We knew the way; we'd gotten water from Hidden Springs many times before. The gate was open, like it usually is, and we drove the Bronco right up next to the well. We had to skim leaves and stuff off the water surface before we dipped our jugs to fill them, so it took a while. It grew dark quickly, we didn't realized the time, I guess." Veronica glanced at Dan. "Those roads are fun in bright sunshine, but they can be kind of tricky in the dark, so we loaded up in a hurry. I backed the Bronc around to go back the way we came, but I suddenly remembered I'd left my bracelet at the well. I took it off so it wouldn't get wet," she explained. Veronica lifted her left hand to show a turquoise and silver bracelet with dangling charms of some sort. "It's pretty expensive."
Zack admired it. "Very pretty."
Veronica smiled. "By now it was dark enough everything was shadowy and it was hard to see. As I turned to go back to the well, I thought I saw movement near it. I stopped and looked, but saw nothing. I finally decided I was imagining things so I went to the well, found my bracelet, and fastened it on my arm. When I looked up, it was standing there."
Zack saw Veronica's eyes were watery. Whatever she had seen scared her even now. "Go on."
"It was about ten feet away from me, up the slope toward the tree; you know the one with the broken windmill?"
Zack nodded. "Can you describe what you saw?"
"It was like a man, but not a human man, at least none I've ever seen. It had no clothes, just a lot of hair. Not as much as bears and stuff, though. You could still see lots of skin, and, well...stuff" Veronica blushed, paused.
"Physical details," Singletree prompted.
Veronica nodded. "Its arms were bare but the skin seemed tough, you know, kind of like a Gorilla's skin. It was very tall, way taller than you, Chief Dan, and its arms and chest were big and strong looking." Veronica paused to explain. "I didn't notice all that right then, it came back to me later as I thought about it. Right then I was just frightened."
"Understandably," Zack said.
"The other thing was its eyes; they were very scary, with a kind of a reddish glow, like you see when you shine a flashlight at a dog's eyes. But there was something in them that made me feel afraid, like real anger, or hate, or..." Veronica searched for the right word.
The men waited.
"I think what scared me was the coldness, a lack of feeling, like it saw me as, well, dinner. I've never felt that sort of thing directed at me before." She shivered.
"What happened next?"
"I just stood there, I was frozen. I...I don't know how long. Then Ellie called to me from the Jeep to come on, what was the problem."
"She didn't see it?"
"No, she was in her seat listening to the radio. She just called something like, "Are you coming, or what?" When she called, I turned to look her way, worried she might be coming and I wanted to warn her. When I looked back again, just seconds later, it was gone."
"Do you know where it went?" Dan asked.
Veronica shook her head. "No. There was no place to hide where it was standing. I guess it somehow blended into the shadows or something."
"Then what happened?" Zack asked.
Veronica's words came in a rush. "I ran to the Bronco. I never looked back. I didn't want to know if the thing was coming after me. I got to the Bronco, got it in gear and got out of there."
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Susan found the Needles Branch Library at the corner of J Street and Bailey Avenue, across from a large baseball diamond and next to the Needles Aquatics Center, which shared the parking lot. Before she climbed out she paused, rested her chin on both hands on the steering wheel and stared at the expanse of desert nearby, thinking an aquatics center in this place made as much sense as a beach umbrella in the Artic, until she remembered the Colorado River with its strong currents and dangerous whirlpools flowed nearby. Maybe it was smart to safeguard local children by teaching them to swim. Beyond that, a cool dip in the center's pools during the heat of the desert day sounded pretty nice.
Susan locked the Subaru. It was on loan from Butch Short. She'd asked him where to find a rental and he'd told her go ahead, take his car. "I'll be here in the office all day, it won't be used," he said, insisting. Susan thought the vehicle could use a good interior cleaning, and it smelled vaguely of cigar smoke, but it would get her where she needed to go, and she was grateful.
The librarian, a serious looking young man, peered up at her from his work. After listening to her request, he led her to the stacks. There was just one other person in the entire place, at a table reading a newspaper.
"We don't get a lot of people doing research in the mornings, most people, the school kids and their teachers, come in during the early afternoon. You'll have everything pretty much to yourself." He waved his arm toward a row of shelved books. "These are local history. We have an excellent base for local historic research right here. We are also part of the San Bernardino County Library System, which is huge. You can tap in from computers over there." He waved toward the phalanx of computers on a long table. "If you need anything else, just let me know." He moved off.
Susan oriented herself, found several likely volumes and hauled them to a table. She quickly learned the Mojave Desert was littered with buried treasures, weird creatures, mines for a wide variety of minerals, and, strangest of all, ships––if one were to subscribe to everything written about the place. Several legends were quite persistent. A story about a Spanish ship buried in the desert sands somewhere west of the Salton Sea, discovered once but never relocated, rang true enough to some people to launch an expedition from Los Angeles in 1870. A member of the Juan Bautista de Anza expedition had first discovered the galleon in 1774 and claimed it was filled with pearls. As a scientist and educator, Susan was aware the Salton Sea was the remnant of a far larger inland sea formed by the vagaries of the Colorado River delta over the centuries. It was entirely possible an early explorer might have sailed into this waterway and become trapped by the capricious ebb and flow of the great river's course––but the pearls, not so much. In any case, it was never found again, and for Susan's purposes lay too far south.
Another legend that refused to die was the story of an underground river discovered in a cavern beneath Kokoweef Mountain, said to flow over a bed of black sand permeated with gold. Susan studied a map, realized Kokoweef was in the Ivanpah Mountains in the Northeast corner of the Mojave Preserve, no more than fifteen miles from Hidden Springs. She creased open the book; this was more interesting. It was the usual story of discovery, sudden riches, the
only access dynamited to hide the hoard until the prospector returned, and, of course, he never did. There were other mines in the area, she read. In fact, traces of a ghost town named Kokoweef still existed at the end of Zinc Mine Road, which was no more than a set of ruts and tire-shredding rocks, according to a guide. Could some gold laden sand have been transported to Hidden Springs where water was more plentiful, perhaps to rinse the soil, or even build a sluice? Had the resulting gold been hidden there?
Susan discarded the idea. It seemed unlikely; there were closer water supplies than Hidden Springs. Besides, why not use the water from the reputed underground river itself?
She flipped pages, scanned more legends, including one about a seven-foot deer reputedly seen by hunters in the Kelso Valley region of the Preserve that left no tracks. She grinned. This story probably came from an embarrassed hunter attempting to explain his lack of luck.
Near the bottom of her stack was a loosely bound book containing a series of newspaper articles with notes written in ink. It looked like someone's personal scrapbook, no doubt a gift to the library from a community member cleaning out a closet. The articles were from a newspaper now extinct: The Kelso Times. She scanned through it, careful not to tear the yellowed pages. An article written in 1930 caught her eye. The title was "The Iron Door" and it related the story of two partners, settlers from Fairfield Valley seeking mining prospects on Table Top Mountain, who discovered an iron door to a mineshaft. It was another "find it and then lose it" story. One prospector slipped on a steep slope, grabbed at something as he fell, couldn't hold on, and careened to the bottom. When his friend reached him, the man said the object he had tried to seize, which he had barely glimpsed, was a partly open iron door to a shaft. In among the rocks that slid to the bottom with him they found an oar sample that proved to be rich in gold. But, of course, neither man was ever able to find the iron door again.
Susan chuckled at the oft-repeated story line, and looked on her map for Table Top Mountain. She found it about four miles from Hidden Springs. It was directly south of the crime site, just across the Watson Wash from Hackberry Mountain where the boys' shepherd camp was located. Her amusement turned to surprise. She sat back in her chair, thinking. After a few moments, she continued her research with increased interest.
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