Then, as though realizing what he’d done, he opened his fingers and let the wind take the gleaming feather.
“Free and glad of it,” he said. “But they’ve got a lot of work to do before winter, if they expect to survive. Out here, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
Calling Moki away from the jays, Cain resumed his swift pace. Christy’s eyes followed the brief, erratic flight of the single feather. She went to the shrub that had captured the feather, plucked it free, and tucked the fragment of blue into her pocket. Then she hurried to catch up.
As they approached the Sisters, they could hear the faint whistle of air currents playing around the twisted form of the white spire. The sounds were eerie, ghostly, flutelike in their purity. They belonged to a world and a time when spirits had walked with mankind in uneasy unity.
Moki reappeared and walked beside Christy. Cain’s pace slowed as his eyes scanned the landscape, seeking something only he knew.
“What are you looking for?” she asked finally.
“Anything that’s out of place.”
“Such as?”
“If I knew, I would have found it by now.”
She looked at the Sisters and the raw, rocky land. Fallen slabs of red and white sandstone lay in heaps at the base of the two spires, but the disorder looked quite natural. It was the result of eons of wind and water erosion. The rest of the mesa top was windswept and almost clean, like a well-kept floor.
The more she looked, the more she absorbed the rhythms of the land. For all its appearance of permanence to human eyes, the sandstone mesa was only temporary. Wind and weather and time ruled here, dissolving rock grain by grain and creating red sand that blew away on the wind.
The same forces worked on life. In the sheltered spots, the cedars and piñons were straight and healthy. In open spots where the wind blew freely, the trees were knotted and hunched, like old men with bodies twisted by time.
Cain walked to a small rock cornice that was a hundred yards from the base of the white spire. He checked an angle over his shoulder, then scrambled up.
Silently Christy watched as he inspected the rock.
“This is where the killer shot from,” he said after a few minutes.
“How do you know?”
“It’s where I’d shoot from if I expected to kill a man exploring around the Sisters.”
He quartered the stone ledge until he finally settled on a spot that was sheltered behind two waist-high boulders. He hunkered down behind the rocks and went through the motions of a sharpshooter looking for a place to rest a rifle barrel in the notch between the boulders.
When he found the best position, he raised an imaginary rifle and mimicked the actions of firing, working the bolt and reloading. His eyes traced the arc a spent cartridge case would make when it was ejected. He scrambled over to that spot and dropped out of sight, searching for something behind the boulders.
Alone with the wind, Christy waited for Cain to reappear. It took some time, but he finally emerged from the shadowed spot in the rock and jumped down. His smile was grim and triumphant.
“Three-oh-eight, just like I thought,” he said.
He held out a dark metal cylinder the size of a pencil stub and dropped it into her palm.
“It’s spent brass,” he said. “A shell casing.”
“I know. I’m from Wyoming, remember? I’ve seen a lot of old brass. But that was worn and dull from years out in the rain and snow. This casing is bright. It could have been dropped yesterday.”
“Makes you feel good to know the sheriff has done such a thorough job of investigating my shooting,” Cain said.
“How could he miss this?”
“Easy. He never looked.”
Cain took the casing from her and dropped it into his shirt pocket.
“Shouldn’t you wrap it up in cloth or something?” she asked. “Can’t someone use it as evidence, even if the sheriff doesn’t know his butt from a warm rock?”
Cain’s smile flashed, then faded. “Half the deer hunters in southwestern Colorado shoot that caliber Winchester. Unless I can come up with a weapon—and a motive—it would be like hunting red sand on the Colorado Plateau.”
“But somebody tried to kill you!”
“You sound like you believe me now.”
“I do.”
“There was more than one ‘somebody,’” he said.
“How can you be so sure?”
“I was there, Red. Remember?”
“At three hundred yards,” she said in a rush, “without binoculars, lying on your back and wondering what hit you—how could you be so sure it was deliberate, much less that Jo was involved?”
For a moment, he was too surprised by her intensity to respond.
“You said you weren’t ever lovers,” Christy continued fiercely, driven by fear and something more, emotions she couldn’t name and didn’t want to examine. “What motive would she have for wanting you dead?”
His eyes narrowed. “You sound like you changed your mind about believing me.”
“I believe someone tried to kill you. I have a hard time believing any man would turn down a woman like Jo.”
“She had a hard time believing it too. But I wasn’t nineteen anymore.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“A smart man needs only one Jo-Jo in a lifetime,” Cain said. “I had mine when I was nineteen.” The look in his eyes was a warning not to ask any more questions.
Christy ignored it. “You’re not making sense.”
“How about trusting me?”
“How about trusting me?”
For the space of several breaths, the only sound was the spectral fluting of the wind around the Sisters.
“Jo-Jo came on to me just like she did to every other man between the age of eighteen and eighty,” Cain said in a clipped voice. “When I didn’t send back the right signals, she got curious. We talked.”
Christy waited, breath held.
“Down underneath that beauty, she was a strange, scared kid,” he said. “But you had to dig damned hard to get under the varnish.”
“What was she afraid of?”
“Growing old. Getting ugly. Living. Dying.” He shrugged. “You name it. If she couldn’t control it with sex, it terrified her.”
Christy’s ragged sigh was covered by the eerie notes of the wind.
“From time to time she would show up at the cabin,” he said. “She wanted a place to sleep because Hutton was mad at her. At least, that’s what she said.”
“You didn’t believe her?”
“I don’t think she knew the difference between truth and lies. Whatever worked was fine with her.”
“So you think she came up there because she just couldn’t wait to trip you and beat you to the floor?” Christy asked acidly.
His mouth curved in a smile that was as thin as a new moon. “Jo-Jo would have put out for me if I’d asked. But that wasn’t what she was after.”
“Was she really afraid of Hutton?”
Again, Cain shrugged. “What interested her was my Anasazi stuff.”
“Jo?” Christy said, startled.
“Yeah, it surprised me too. But she was really excited about it, kept asking me questions.”
“So you let her stay.”
He nodded curtly.
Christy remembered what Cain had said earlier about what Moki wanted from people. Not much. Just a little company when he’s lonely or has something to share.
Cain had wanted to share his love of the Anasazi culture.
Jo-Jo had been willing to listen.
“Then,” he said, “I came back from a trip last winter and found Jo-Jo shacked up in my cabin with Hutton’s hotshot jet jockey. I threw both of them out so hard they bounced.”
Christy winced.
“Later I discovered some of my Anasazi bowls were missing,” he said.
“And you think Jo took them?”
He nodded.
“Why would the world’s best-paid model need to steal Anasazi artifacts?” she asked reasonably.
“Jo-Jo’s like that. She sees something she wants and she takes it.”
Christy thought about Gramma’s necklace. Jo-Jo had taken it, but not for the usual reasons. The money value of the nuggets didn’t matter to her. It was the loss to Christy that mattered.
Simple vengeance against someone Jo-Jo couldn’t control.
Someone like Cain.
“Were the artifacts especially valuable?” Christy asked, her voice raw.
“Just to me. They were key pieces of evidence supporting my theory of Anasazi settlement patterns. My paper had been accepted, but suddenly the best evidence was gone. If I cared about academic recognition…”
“It could have ruined you,” Christy finished.
“It sure didn’t help. Even with all the in situ photographs, I had a hell of a time getting the dissertation published.”
“So that’s why you hate Jo.”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“Leave it alone, Red.”
“I can’t,” she said starkly.
For a long moment, he watched her out of bleak eyes.
“Jo-Jo liked having men fight over her,” he said in a flat tone. “After I threw her out, I ran across her in a bar in Montrose. She had Johnny Ten Hats panting after her, but it wasn’t enough. She did everything but a hand job to get me interested. Then she tried to get me to fight Johnny over her.”
Christy stood so still she ached with tension. Like attempted murder, she didn’t want to believe it. But she did. “What happened?”
“Johnny was willing. Hell, he’d go to war over a bent penny. But I wasn’t nineteen anymore. I wasn’t going to fight over a lying piece of ass again. I walked away.”
A chill went over Christy. “Again? The fight in California? It was over a woman?”
He didn’t answer.
He didn’t have to. She saw the old rage and pain in the instant before he narrowed his eyes, shutting her out.
“I understand now why you hate Jo,” Christy said after a moment. “But…”
The look on Cain’s face was closed and cold. She took a deep breath and chose her words carefully.
“But just because Jo tried to get you to fight Johnny,” Christy said in a low voice, “is that any reason to think she tried to kill you?”
“Look around.”
She started to object, then did as he asked. She didn’t see anything that she hadn’t seen before.
“You see any way a man could follow me here and then scramble up into that niche without my spotting him?” Cain asked.
She looked around again, carefully, before she turned back to him and shook her head slowly.
“A few days after I walked out on Johnny in that bar, Jo-Jo called me,” Cain said.
An odd stillness settled over Christy. She wanted to tell him to stop talking, to stop telling her more than she wanted to know about the beautiful little angel who had grown up into something ugly. But she didn’t ask him to stop. Stopping wouldn’t change the truth.
Jo-Jo, what happened? Were you always like this and I just couldn’t see it?
“She apologized for taking the bowl that had a drawing of the Sisters with Kokopelli and his flute,” Cain said. “To make up for it, she told me she’d found a little ruin up here on the Sisters mesa.”
“No.”
He didn’t hear Christy’s low, ragged voice. He was caught in his own moment of agony when he’d nearly died trying to breathe icy air through a bullet hole in his chest.
“She said she wanted to explore the ruin but didn’t have—”
“No,” Christy whispered again.
“—time, so she thought she’d pass it on to me as a way of telling me how sorry she was.”
“There must be a mistake.”
“Yeah. It was made by the man who didn’t quite murder me.”
“Jo is selfish and sometimes cruel, but I can’t believe she’d set up a man for murder. I just can’t.”
Christy’s words stopped when she realized that Cain was watching her with predatory intensity.
“You sound like you know her real well,” he said.
“Yes.” She heard her own words and added quickly, “I have the same file on her that I have on Hutton.”
Black eyebrows lifted.
“Besides,” she said. “It’s…hard…to believe that beauty isn’t more than skin deep. I can’t believe that Jo…”
There wasn’t any comfort in Cain’s smile. “Yeah, I had a hard time myself. But I learned the truth of that old cliché at nineteen. Pretty is as pretty does.”
Christy opened her mouth to say, But she’s my sister! Then she closed her mouth and looked away.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “women like Jo-Jo are literally as ugly as sin. Any more questions?”
“No,” she said in a low voice.
“Good. Now let’s see if we can find that ruin.”
“You don’t think she lied about that too?”
“She might have, but this doesn’t lie.”
Cain held out his hand. On his palm was a potsherd crossed with black lines.
“Where did you find it?” she asked.
“Over there,” he said, gesturing with his hand.
“Today?”
“No. Just before I was shot.”
Chapter 24
“You take that side,” Cain said, pointing to the column of red rock rising up to the sky.
Without a word, Christy turned toward it. She wanted to talk about Jo-Jo some more, to protest more, to do something that would take the ice and nausea from her stomach.
But there was nothing to do except pull up her socks and help the man her sister had tried to murder.
“Look for pictographs or petroglyphs,” he said.
“Oh, sure,” she said. “I never remember which is which.”
“Pictographs are painted on. Petroglyphs are hammered in.”
“Got it.”
She circled out from him, following the irregular base of the red spire. She didn’t see drawings of any kind on the blocks of rubble or on the face of the pinnacle itself.
“Anything?” she asked when she met him on the other side.
“No. Let’s try the white Sister next.”
Christy circled one way and he went the other while the wind fluted its eerie music all around. When they met in back, neither had found anything.
“I was afraid of that,” he said. “Too exposed.”
“What is?”
“The Sisters. The wind has sandblasted them. Any drawings the Anasazi left are long since worn away.”
She studied the outlines of the two stones, Sisters that had spent unimaginable eons standing next to each other. She wondered if they understood each other any better for all the time together.
She doubted it.
“What did they look like a thousand years ago?” she asked.
“About the same as now. A thousand years isn’t a long time for rock.”
“The drawing in the bowl.”
“Yes?”
“How was it oriented?”
Cain glanced at Christy thoughtfully. Abruptly he nodded. “Good idea, Red.”
With that he turned and began walking so fast that she had to trot to keep up.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To look at things from another angle.”
She made a frustrated noise. Smiling slightly, he touched her cheek. The caress was gentle and so swift it was over before she had time to react.
“The Anasazis’ closest surviving relatives are the Pueblos over in eastern New Mexico,” he said as though nothing had happened. “Their shamans have one job—to keep track of the place the sun rises each morning.”
He scrambled up a low rock ledge onto another flat stone platform. The mesa top had many of them, frozen waves of sandstone. The tops of the low s
tone waves had been worn off by time and wind into random broad steps that came from nowhere and led nowhere.
“Here,” he said, holding out his hand. “It’s steeper than it looks.”
No sooner had she reached for him than his hand closed around her wrist. He pulled her up onto the new level with an easy strength that went against the idea he’d ever been shot, wounded, bleeding on stone.
But she knew he had. She’d seen the scar. She’d seen the pain in his face when he stretched a certain way.
“The most important day on the solar calendar is the solstice,” Cain said.
She followed his intent glance. He was examining the stone wall in front of him as though he expected to find a treasure map.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Any indication that this was a place of power and importance for the Anasazi. If it was, it would have to do with solar events.”
“Then we’re out of luck. The sun is hiding.”
His smile flashed briefly. “It will burn through before noon.”
She glanced up and saw that he was right. As the sun climbed, it slowly ate the clouds. Even behind the misty cover, the sun was an incandescent circle far too bright to look at.
Slowly Cain walked until he could see the sun disk bracketed by the Sisters. He circled to his left, walked a dozen paces, then stopped and stared back toward the Sisters. The red spire now blocked the sun. He adjusted his position a few feet, then gestured with his hand toward the gap between the rock needles.
“The sun would rise on the morning of the solstice right there,” he said, gesturing toward the eastern sky. “The first light would be visible back there somewhere.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m a shaman,” he said dryly. “Come on.”
Together, they headed across the windswept mesa toward a spot a quarter mile away. Behind them the wind swirled around the sandstone needles, wailing like a lost child.
When they came to another of the broad stone steps, he levered himself up and offered her his hand again. Moki danced around on the lower level and finally leaped up and scrambled over the rim. He stood between them, facing the wind and waving his plumed tail proudly.
Cain put his hands on Christy’s shoulders and turned her until she faced the Sisters.
The Secret Sister Page 15