The Secret Sister

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “The kid-catcher is still solid,” he said.

  “Kid-catcher? Oh, the low wall. Is that what it’s called?”

  “That’s what I call it.” He looked around. “This must have been one of the first rooms built.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “It’s full of rubbish now. The Anasazi often filled in old rooms and built new ones. Sometimes they buried the dead in the rooms. Sometimes they threw them in the midden with the rest of the garbage.”

  She frowned. “A status thing?”

  “Some say yes. More say no.”

  “What do you say?”

  “No one that I know of has ever found grave goods with human bones in a midden. Grave goods have been found in room or crevice burials.”

  “Status.”

  “Looks that way to me, but I’m just a Moki-poaching son of a bitch.”

  Christy winced.

  He went a little farther along the wall, testing his footing and the stability of the ruin every bit of the way. When nothing gave, he returned.

  “If I tell you to stay here?” he said.

  “I will, for a while.”

  “How long?”

  “Until you turn your back.”

  His eyes narrowed. “About what I figured.”

  “I’m your good luck charm, remember? You don’t want to leave me behind.”

  Unwillingly he smiled. “Okay, my redheaded rabbit’s foot. Move softly, like a ghost. I don’t trust that sandstone flake. I swear I felt it shiver when I leaned on it.”

  She looked at the heavy slab, swallowed hard, and nodded.

  Cain walked back along the wall, his shoulder only inches from the tons of rock he’d felt shiver at a touch.

  Christy followed carefully, steadying herself with one hand on the massive slab of rock. It felt cool and steady enough, but she wouldn’t have trusted it no matter what Cain had said.

  “This looks like an apartment building,” she said.

  “Close enough.”

  The second room they came to was empty except for a huge mound of sticks and debris. The musty smell was thicker here, almost overwhelming.

  “Thousands of generations of pack rats have lived there, adding their little bit to the pile,” he said. “Reminds me of New York. Except it smells better.”

  “New York does?”

  “Not in summer. It stinks.”

  “You sound like you spend time there,” she said.

  “Only when I can’t help it.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That’s so western.”

  He smiled. “Now you’re talking.”

  The floor of the third room was flat and relatively clean. He ducked in through the low doorway and let his eyes adjust to the near darkness inside. She followed and stood close beside him.

  Gradually they made out the details of the room’s construction. The walls had been plastered with red mud. In places the mud had fallen away, revealing a lattice of sticks beneath the plaster.

  “Willow,” he said in response to her unspoken question.

  “Look,” she said. “The pattern.”

  Her hand traced a ragged ellipse of tiny white stones that had been set into an unusually thick layer of mortar.

  “This didn’t add to the wall’s strength,” she said. “It was done purely to please the eye.”

  “Like the paint.”

  Startled, she looked up. The upper part of the room had once been painted in designs that reminded her of the pottery she’d seen.

  “Look closely at the plaster,” he said. “See the handprints?”

  She eased closer to examine the wall. He was right. There were many clear handprints in the plaster surface. Lightly she laid her hand over one of them.

  The hand that had built the room was smaller than her own, with short, blunt fingers, but her own palm fit easily in the cool depression that had been made almost a thousand years ago. She ran her other hand gently over the rest of the wall, trying to absorb through sheer touch what the life of those other people had been like.

  “So much time,” she whispered. “So human.”

  He laid his own hand over hers, measuring the difference in their sizes. The act was curiously intimate.

  “Yes,” he said simply. “So human.”

  Delicate currents of warmth shivered through her. She was caught between the cool plaster surface of the past and the living warmth of the present.

  “And nobody’s touched this place for a thousand years,” she whispered.

  He was on the point of agreeing when something caught his eyes. “Well, shit.”

  He lifted his hand, bent over, and snatched up something from the floor. He held his fingers in the vague light coming in through the doorway so she could see too.

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  “Oh, yes.”

  He was holding the burned butt of a very modern, machine-rolled cigarette. He held it to his nose and grimaced. “No more than six months or a year old.” He turned the butt over and read the small print on it. “Dunhill.”

  “Dunhill? Do you know him?”

  “Not him. It. Dunhill is a brand of cigarette.”

  She looked blank.

  “The Remington Super-Valu doesn’t stock them,” Cain said. “Westerners like their cigarettes plain and simple. It takes a self-consciously exotic type to smoke Dunhills.”

  A chill replaced the warmth Christy had felt only a moment ago. Memories came, a beautiful blond fourteen-year-old who’d seen a cigarette ad in a fashion magazine and driven the local boys crazy until one of them somehow found a way to get her a pack.

  “Do you—” She cleared her throat. “Do you know anyone who smokes Dunhills?”

  “Guess.”

  “Jo,” Christy whispered.

  It wasn’t a question, but he answered anyway. “Yeah, the cowboys’ walking, talking wet dream.”

  With a hissed word, he flicked the butt into a corner and wiped his fingers on his jeans. “Well, let’s see how badly her boyfriend trashed the place.”

  “Hutton?”

  “Doubt it. Last I saw Jo-Jo, she was flat-backing with the Indians, not the drugstore cowboys.”

  Christy wanted to protest his contempt, but didn’t. The more she learned what her sister had become, the less she liked it. Wonder what I’ll find out next.

  Then she shivered as though a dead finger had touched her nape.

  Chapter 28

  Cain ducked back underneath the lintel and into the alcove. Moving quickly, no longer worried about accidentally damaging something, he strode along the low wall at the front of the room block. He stopped at each doorway to stare into the dark recesses.

  Only once did he step into the darkness. When he came out a moment later, there were potsherds in his hand.

  “They cherry-picked the entire site,” he said harshly. “I guess they didn’t think this was worth taking out.”

  The sherds joined perfectly, becoming the painted bowl of a ladle. Even with the handle missing, it was a handsome piece.

  He tipped his palm and let the pieces slide to the floor. She started to object, but when she saw him wipe his palms on his jeans as though he’d touched something unclean, she bit back her words. He had a bone-deep contempt for Jo-Jo and all she stood for. Everything she touched.

  Looking at the wreckage of beauty, so did Christy. A child’s selfishness was one thing. This was adult.

  This was criminal.

  Jo-Jo, why?

  But the cry was only in Christy’s mind, echo of a past when anything had been possible, even an unselfish Jo-Jo.

  I never really knew her.

  Now I never want to.

  And that hurts me more than it does her. Nothing has changed. Except one thing. I’m through letting her hurt me.

  It’s finished.

  With tears burning the back of her eyes, Christy watched Cain climb up a short, irregular stairway of rubble to the second story of the building. The rooms were even smalle
r there. Some of the walls were smoke-blackened. Every space was bare. Except for a broken clay mug and a few rough, tiny corncobs preserved perfectly in the dry air, the rooms had been looted to their floors.

  Operating from instinct and experience gained in the exploration of a hundred ruins, he picked his way to a block of rooms that formed a right angle to the line of the original building. He stood there, staring down at the remnants of a small plaza in the crook of the L-shaped structure.

  She paced him on the ground level. As she stepped over a low wall onto the floor of the plaza, there was a low, hollow groan, as though she had stepped on a ghost. She jumped back, more in surprise than fear.

  “Stay put,” he said quickly. “There’s probably a kiva under that debris. Don’t trust the roof to hold your weight.”

  She skirted the little plaza, peering into gloomy corners. When a metallic glint caught her eye, she eased a little closer.

  If he hadn’t already told her about Anasazi underworld myths, she might not have recognized the square black hole in the plaza floor as an entrance. A few inches of aluminum ladder stuck up out of the hole.

  “There’s a ladder here,” she said.

  “Wait where you are.”

  Using one of the thick vigas, he swung down off the roof of the room and walked toward her, skirting the level area that was a kiva roof of uncertain strength.

  Moki looked out from one of the upper windows of the building block. He was thoroughly filthy and quite pleased with himself. Resting his chin on the windowsill, he watched his master below.

  Cain poked around in a pile of rubble until he found a piece of cedar bark. From the pocket of his shirt, he pulled a pack of survival matches and lit one. The bark flared quickly into flame, casting an eerie, flickering light on the walls of the alcove.

  Leaning down into the hole with the makeshift torch, he looked around the kiva. “Cleaned out.”

  His voice was like the line of his mouth. Flat. Hard.

  She ducked underneath his arm and looked into her first kiva. The wavering light showed a dusty, circular chamber beneath a low, roughly plastered ceiling that was supported by four straight log pillars. Niches had been carved into the curving walls of the kiva.

  “They look like stations of the cross,” she said.

  “You’ve got it. You’re looking at an Anasazi church whose icons have been looted for sale to the unbelievers.”

  The bark torch guttered. Its fading light caught something shiny on the kiva floor.

  “Hold this,” he said.

  He handed the nub of bark to her, showed her where he wanted it to be held, and dropped quickly down the ladder. A moment later he struck another match, touched it to the wick of a kerosene lantern, and lowered the glass chimney in place.

  Christy dropped the makeshift torch just as her fingers became uncomfortably hot. The fire winked out before the bark reached the kiva floor.

  “Come on down,” he said. “See what real Moki poaching looks like.”

  Silently she climbed down the ladder into a room that seemed to vibrate with his cold rage. It didn’t take her long to understand why he was furious.

  The poachers had attacked the floor of the kiva with pickaxes and shovels. They’d hacked at one of the log pillars for no reason Christy could see. Pale potsherds mixed with dirt and twentieth-century plastic trash.

  Kneeling, Cain scooped up a double handful of the sherds and examined them.

  “This pot could be salvaged,” he said. “They just junked anything that wasn’t whole.”

  Angrily he put the sherds back when he’d found them. As he straightened, he saw a hint of pattern. He froze, utterly intent on the low, curving sill that went around the whole kiva. Parts of the sill had been cut away. The segment that remained was painted with an unusual design featuring Kokopelli in many incarnations.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” he said in a low voice.

  “What?”

  “The painted sill. Once it must have gone all the way around the room.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “The sill? No. But to have the painting preserved…it’s a miracle. And those bastards hacked it up like firewood and hauled it out of here.”

  She knelt where some of the rubble showed painted surfaces. Carefully she fitted several together. As she did, a distinctive black-on-white pattern formed, a flowing abstraction that was a pure distillation of style. Unique, vivid, the design was a painted message sent from one millennium to the next.

  Ancient, yet oddly familiar.

  After a few moments Christy figured out why. “Oh, my God,” she said, horrified. “This looks just like one of the motifs Hutton is using in his new collection.”

  “You going to write about that in your magazine, Red?” Cain asked bitterly. “You going to tell all the fashionable folks how Hutton raped a priceless Anasazi site to come up with the inspiration for some city threads?”

  She winced at his tone but didn’t throw it back in his face. There was no defense for what had been done to this ancient place.

  He snatched the lantern and held it head high, inspecting the shambles of the past with naked yearning on his face.

  “God, but I wish I could have seen what it was like,” he said in a low, intense voice. “There may not be another kiva this good in the whole world. And now it’s…”

  She closed her eyes, not wanting to see his pain.

  “Gone,” he said. “Just gone. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put this mess back together again.”

  He kicked at a pile of rubble. A piece of thin rough rope sprang free of the dirt. The rope was attached to a small mat of fibers.

  “This was a shoe,” he said. “A sandal made of yucca fiber. Not as rare as cloth or turkey feathers, but a miracle of preservation against the odds just the same.”

  His fists clenched. He drew in a quick, ripping breath.

  “And they threw it away like it was trash,” he said savagely. “God knows what kind of stuff they kept. A king’s ransom. Feast for a hundred scholars. And for what? For a few thousand dollars to keep a lying slut happy. Christ. If Johnny wasn’t so stupid I’d feel sorry for him.”

  “Johnny Ten Hats?”

  “Yeah. He’s the cigar-store idiot who was banging Jo-Jo when I was shot. Of course, that was six months ago. She’s probably had a hundred like him since then.”

  Contempt resonated in the space within the kiva. Cain was like a priest enraged at the desecration of a church. Christy tried to find words that might ease his anger, but there weren’t any. Something irreplaceable had been lost for no better reason than greed. In the face of that barbaric act, anger was not only justified, it was necessary.

  Silently she went from niche to niche in the kiva, hoping to find some hint of the artifacts that once had been the focus of Anasazi religious tradition. In the fifth niche, she found a small fragment of smooth black stone. It had been worked into a bead, perhaps part of a necklace. No one would ever know, now. Whatever the bead belonged to was gone. All that remained was the polished bead itself, overlooked in the destructive rush to wealth.

  She held the rounded stone between her fingers. It had a smooth, cool, soapy feel.

  “Is there any way of salvaging the site?” she asked quietly.

  “No. They might as well have gone through here with a backhoe.”

  “They might have overlooked something.”

  He made a curt gesture. “Sure, some of the pots might be put together again. More might be discovered. But the potential for knowledge is gone.”

  She looked around at the combination of plastic garbage and ancient debris and hated to her soul that Jo-Jo had had a part in the rape of a sacred place.

  “Can’t something be salvaged?” she asked finally.

  “The layers are trashed. Fireplace ash from the early years is mixed in with the later ashes. There’s no way anybody could even get a decent date out of the hearth. It’s a tot
al write-off. Null. Zero.”

  Silently he lifted the lamp and looked around the interior again, hoping to find something the looters had overlooked. There was nothing but blackness receding before the lamp, then flowing back to claim the kiva as the light moved on.

  The lantern light cast eerie shadows in the dark niches and irregularities of the curving kiva walls. Shapes glided and vanished, only to reappear as though squeezed out of the stone itself.

  Christy’s skin prickled with a primal sense of other. There were spirits here. Some were benign. Some were as vicious as the ones she’d seen in the paintings in Peter Hutton’s hallway.

  “All those niches,” Cain said grimly. “I haven’t seen that many outside of Pueblo Bonito.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Chaco Canyon.”

  For a few more breaths he studied the kiva in silence. Then he made an inarticulate sound of pain or rage.

  “No ruins have been found this far north,” he said. “From the size of this kiva, this was an important place to the Anasazi. A vital place. And now we’ll never know why. Goddamn all pothunters.”

  He lowered the lantern with a speed that made light and shadows mix dizzyingly. “I’ve seen about as much as I can take.”

  Lantern in one hand, he climbed back to the plaza. Christy followed without a word. There wasn’t anything she wanted to say. The lantern gave new illumination into the destruction of the little village that had been hidden behind the sandstone slab. Protected, but not well enough.

  He walked from room to room. Everywhere he looked there were telltale pits where pots or other artifacts had been dug out and carted off with no thought to their intrinsic worth. Only money counted in the world of the Moki poacher.

  In a corner close to the sill where he and Christy had entered, there was a partially collapsed wall. At first glance it looked like it was a keystone holding the rest of the block of rooms in place.

  “If you have to come in here,” he said softly, “don’t kick anything. Don’t even sneeze. This place is waiting for an excuse to fall.”

  He eased closer to see if the area was as dangerous as it looked. His breath came in with a harsh sound. Along the back wall of the alcove, there was a framework of modern timbers. Not enough for the job. Not nearly enough.