The Secret Sister

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Chapter 47

  Rio Arriba

  Afternoon

  The service station at the Rio Arriba County line was baked pale by the sun and haunted by wind. Cain parked beside one of the two old pumps and opened the door. As he got out, a pair of ravens flew off the branch of a cedar tree, cawing their displeasure at being disturbed.

  Without waiting for the attendant, Cain started filling the tank. He was halfway through the job when a slight middle-aged man in a greasy coverall and a Stetson emerged from the tarpaper shack that served as office and service bay.

  The attendant nodded a silent greeting and went to work on the windshield with a wet sponge and squeegee. There was a patch over his breast pocket that said he was HOMER. The man was clearly of southwestern ancestry—Spanish, Indian, Mexican, and Anglo, all intermixed in a weathered whole.

  Homer barely noticed Christy when she got out to stretch her legs.

  “We’re looking for a woman called Molly Faces-the-Sun,” Cain said casually. “I understand she lives around here.”

  For all the response Homer gave, he could have been deaf. He kept on working on the truck’s window in dogged silence. When he finished one side, he looked at Cain for the first time.

  “She lives out there,” Homer said.

  His chin jerked toward the general area of the desert beyond the tarpaper shack. With that, he circled around to the other side of the truck and began cleaning the second section of windshield.

  “‘Out there’ is a big place,” Cain said.

  “She likes big places because she don’t like visitors.”

  Cain and Christy exchanged a glance over the back of the truck. He shook his head very slightly, silently telling her to leave it to him. He finished pumping gas and racked the nozzle.

  An Indian woman appeared in the doorway of the shack. Dark and thick-bodied, her hair was absolutely black except for a few threads of silver at the temples. She wore a western shirt, jeans, and dark glasses that hid her eyes.

  A distinct feeling of being watched came over Christy. She turned and nodded to the woman politely.

  There was no reaction. The woman’s stare wasn’t friendly, curious, or even hostile. It was simply intense. Unreadable.

  “It’s important that we talk to Molly,” Cain said, choosing his words carefully.

  “Why?” the attendant asked baldly.

  “It has to do with her nephew, Johnny Ten Hats.”

  The attendant glanced once at the woman in the doorway. She didn’t move or make any sign. Homer laid down the sponge and went to work with his squeegee.

  “Molly is too busy,” the woman said in a clear voice. “And Johnny is dead.”

  “I know,” Cain said. “I heard his death song.”

  The woman stepped forward and took off her dark glasses. She looked at Cain, then at Christy.

  “How did he die?” she asked quietly.

  “Police say he was pushed, Eunice,” the attendant said. “Pushed by a white man.”

  Homer looked at Cain.

  When Cain met his glance, Homer went back to cleaning windows. For a few moments there was no sound but that of the squeegee, the ghostly exhalation of the wind, and the two huge ravens settling back into their cedar tree.

  “Johnny was acting crazy,” Cain said. “He was going to kill both of us.”

  Eunice and Homer turned to look at Christy.

  Cain was still talking. “We fought. When he tried to knock me over the edge of a cliff, I ducked. Johnny kept going.”

  The Indian woman’s eyes hadn’t left Christy, as if she was using the white woman’s face as a lie detector.

  “Cain didn’t want to kill anyone,” Christy said. “He risked his life trying not to kill. But Johnny—” She made a small, futile gesture with her hands, asking for understanding.

  Eunice and Homer didn’t say a word. They simply watched Christy’s haunted eyes.

  “Johnny wouldn’t stop,” Christy said in a low voice. “He just wouldn’t stop.”

  The ravens rasped at the wind and each other, flaring their wings and walking on stiff, springy legs along a dead branch.

  “Johnny was always a little crazy,” Homer admitted.

  He rubbed his hands on the legs of the coverall and went back to cleaning the window. But his expression was still sour, as if Johnny’s craziness didn’t excuse what Cain had done.

  Eunice looked in Homer’s direction. She seemed irritated with him, like a wife who thinks her husband is a fool.

  “What can Molly do for the man who killed her nephew?” Eunice asked.

  Again, her question was addressed to Cain, but it was Christy’s face she watched.

  “Johnny was involved in an important dig on a ranch in Colorado,” Cain said. “Now Johnny is dead. There were others involved in the dig. Some of them are also dead. We want to know why.”

  “Why would Molly know anything about a dig so far away?”

  “Johnny tried to get Molly out of trouble by selling information about the dig to Hoyt Jackson, who works for the BLM.”

  The raven-haired woman continued to study Christy’s face for a few moments longer. Then she nodded and replaced her sunglasses.

  And said nothing more.

  “One of the others who died was my sister,” Christy said.

  Eunice became very still. She pulled off her sunglasses again and looked at Christy. Into her.

  “Your sister?” Eunice asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know her well?”

  Cain’s eyes narrowed at the odd question. He stared at Eunice as intently as the woman was staring at Christy.

  “I thought I did,” Christy said. “But I didn’t. She was a mystery to me. Now she always will be.”

  “The secret sister,” Eunice whispered. Her breath came out in a hissing sigh. “She Who Faces the Sun must know. We have waited a long time.”

  The Indian woman turned and walked into the tarpaper shed.

  Homer straightened, wiped the squeegee on his pants, and turned to Cain. “Wait here. She’ll be back.”

  “What was that about the secret sister?” Cain asked.

  Homer went deaf again.

  Cain looked at Christy. She was rubbing her palms over her arms.

  “Need a jacket?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Just goose bumps.”

  Without a word, he stepped closer and put his arm around her, pulling her against his side. She stiffened but didn’t fight the intimacy. She was too frayed to turn away from the human closeness she needed right now as much as she needed air.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said softly. “Pueblo customs may seem strange to you, but they won’t hurt you.”

  “It’s unnerving to be part of something that belongs to a people and a religion I know nothing about.”

  His hand hesitated, then moved gently over her wild red hair.

  “The Pueblo people look at the world differently,” he said. “They don’t separate things into categories. It’s all of a piece. It could simply be that Eunice saw something in you that she liked. Therefore, you’re her sister.”

  For an instant Christy closed her eyes. Then she let out breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. “Sorry. I overreacted. I feel like I’m living inside out, every nerve exposed and screaming. No defenses.”

  His arm tightened. He wanted to protect her from what had happened, what might happen yet. And he knew he couldn’t. The same ancient customs that worried her also prevented him from sending her away.

  If she left, no one would talk to him.

  “It will get better,” Cain said softly.

  She let out another breath. “I hope so.”

  For a time there was no sound but the wind.

  “Honey?”

  Her head came up sharply. He was watching with eyes that were both compassionate and unflinching.

  “Are you sure you want to keep going?” he asked. “We can stop now.”

  “No.
”

  He’d expected that. Now he tried to make her understand. “She Who Faces the Sun may not talk to a man. You may have to go to her.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes. Can you do it?”

  She smiled uncertainly at him. “I’ll get back to you on that.”

  There was nothing tentative about Cain’s smile, or the approval in his eyes. For a few moments he tightened his arm, drawing her even closer.

  Then the wind blew, summoning him. He let go of her and walked toward the cedar trees at the edge of the desert. Hands in his pockets, he stood and looked out over the wild land.

  Restlessly, Christy jammed her own hands in her pockets. Her left hand found Jo-Jo’s key. Her right hand found the smooth, large bead from the kiva alcove. She wondered if Cain was fingering the oddly shaped piece of turquoise and remembering the hidden alcove where they had nearly died.

  And where Johnny Ten Hats had certainly died.

  “Cash or credit?” Homer asked from behind her.

  “Cash,” she said.

  She pulled a fifty out of her pocket. Homer made change from the grubby bills in his own jeans. Then he turned and went into the shack, leaving her alone.

  When five minutes had gone by, she walked impatiently over to Cain. At her approach, the two ravens leaped into the air, scolding and croaking about being disturbed. But it didn’t take long for the birds to settle on the cedar again, watching the humans with Kokopelli’s shrewd black eyes.

  When the birds stopped talking, she discovered that the wind had a different sound at the edge of the desert. Ancient. Solitary. Whispering of secrets better left unknown.

  “Are we waiting for a sign?” she asked tensely.

  “Patience, honey. These people don’t waste words and they don’t wear watches if they can avoid it. Relax and listen to the wind.”

  “I did.”

  “Listen some more. There’s peace in it.”

  She listened.

  She heard loneliness, not peace.

  High overhead a jet drew a white line across the empty sky, telling of people hurtling toward life in a place far removed from the ancient dry land.

  I should be on that plane. Away from here, going—where?

  Home? I don’t have one. There’s no one in New York tied to me by blood or choice.

  There’s no one anywhere.

  The shack’s door banged as Eunice emerged from the station. She headed toward them, carrying her dark glasses in her hand. When she approached, she ignored Cain and looked Christy straight in the eye.

  “She Who Faces the Sun will see you,” Eunice said.

  “When?” Cain asked.

  Eunice didn’t answer.

  “When?” Christy asked quietly.

  “Tomorrow at dawn.”

  “That long?” she said, dismayed. “Our business is urgent.”

  “Tomorrow at dawn,” Eunice repeated.

  “Where?” Christy asked.

  “At the great kiva in Chaco, the one you call Pueblo Bonito.”

  Christy looked at Cain.

  He nodded. “I know it. Now ask her why there and why tomorrow at dawn.”

  For the first time Eunice looked directly at Cain. Whatever she thought didn’t show in her expression.

  “Why—” Christy began.

  “Dawn is sacred,” Eunice said. “So is the great kiva. In it, all secrets are known to She Who Faces the Sun.”

  “We’ll be there at dawn,” Cain said.

  Though the Indian’s expression didn’t change, Christy was certain Eunice was both amused and pleased by Cain.

  “Good,” Eunice said.

  Then she looked past the white people to the desert. Her eyes moved across it easily, a woman enjoying an old friend’s face, remembering old conversations and restful silences….

  A light touch on Christy’s arm drew her attention back to Cain. Only then did she realize that she’d been staring out over the desert as Eunice had. Christy didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. She knew only that Eunice was gone and Cain’s hand was warm against her arm.

  The wind lifted, combing cool fingers through her hair, whispering to her of time and distance, past and future, and life like a rainbow arched between, connecting everything.

  “You’re right,” she said softly. “There’s peace in a desert wind.”

  Chapter 48

  Near Chaco Canyon

  Late afternoon

  The truck turned south off the narrow paved highway. The mindless rattle of tires on a washboard gravel road startled Christy out of her half sleep. She sat up straighter and looked around. Nothing she recognized looked back at her.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  Cain pointed behind them, toward the north. “See those white peaks way off in the distance?”

  The sky was like a huge inverted bowl of purest blue. It took Christy a minute to be sure she was seeing something more than faint clouds along the horizon.

  “You mean those things that look like chips in the rim of the sky’s upside-down bowl?”

  “Those chips are the San Juan Mountains, where we started,” he said. “The northern outliers.”

  “Outliers?”

  “Outlying Anasazi communities.”

  “Outlying what?” she asked, looking at the empty land.

  He smiled. “We’re on the road to the center of the ancient Anasazi world.”

  She turned back to the distant peaks. They were outlined in brilliant light, as if freshly dusted with snow.

  “How far away are they?” she asked.

  “About a hundred and thirty miles.”

  “Wow.” Then she thought about it. “The ancient ones lived in a universe that was only a few hundred miles across.”

  “It wasn’t small to them. It was filled with spirits and signs and mysteries, a world more complex than any man or woman could know in a lifetime. If a world is beyond understanding, does it really matter how big it is?”

  She thought about that while the land divided like a river and flowed around them. The farther south the truck went, the drier the country became. Juniper and cedar were limited to the ridges and a few arroyos. Bare dirt was everywhere. Rocks lay just beneath the thin layer of soil.

  “Life must have been precarious,” she said after a long silence.

  “It was. Short growing season. Harsh winds. Numbing cold and killing heat. Summer monsoons that sometimes didn’t come in time for the crops.”

  The road passed over a cattle guard and gave way to a dirt track that wandered off across the scrubland with no apparent destination.

  “You’re sure you know where you’re going?” she asked.

  “Are we talking philosophy or maps?”

  She laughed, surprising both of them. “Yes, I guess the land does that to you. Cosmic and pragmatic at once.”

  Smiling, he guided the truck over a particularly wretched piece of road.

  “Speaking in cosmic philosophical terms, I’m up for grabs,” he said. “But I do know the way to Pueblo Bonito.”

  The track wound up a low rise that dropped away steeply toward another rock ridge a half mile ahead. A dusty, faded sign on a steel post beside the road announced that they were entering Chaco Canyon National Monument.

  “This must be the back way in,” she said.

  “Yeah, but it’s not much worse than the main route.”

  “Is the government trying to discourage tourism?”

  “We’ve been driving across one of the richest archaeological areas on earth. Too big to fence. Too valuable to ignore. Too expensive to dig. Impossible to protect.”

  “So you limit access and hope for the best?”

  “That’s about it. If there’s a bulletin out on this truck, they’d catch us at the monument gate or in one of the campgrounds, so I’m keeping off the most-used roads.”

  “What about right now?” she asked uneasily.

  “This is the route an old Moki poacher showed me. H
ard on man and vehicle but discreet.”

  “You, of course, have never poached here.”

  He smiled thinly. “That’s right, Red. I’ve done a lot of exploring, though.”

  “Huh,” she said, but she smiled. Having seen Cain’s reaction to the destruction of the alcove, she didn’t believe any longer that he stole artifacts from public lands or merely looted private digs

  He pointed toward a distant ridge of rock, a splash of green perhaps half a mile away. “See that little stand of willows by the stock tank?”

  “Hard to miss. It’s the only real green for miles around.”

  “Look just to the left. See that notch?”

  She leaned forward and shaded her eyes. “Yes.”

  “That’s where the Great North Road came down from Pueblo Alto,” he said. “It was the imperial highway from Chaco to the northern outliers. It runs all the way back to the San Juan River.”

  He slowed as the road dropped down into a ravine where a stock tank was serviced by a creaking old windmill. The metal blades turned mindlessly in the stiff breeze, drawing water up from an aquifer far below the surface. The overflow from the tank fed the willows and a small grove of cedars. Everything was lush with the luxury of year-round water.

  The dirt track circled the grove and ended against a rock wall. He backed the truck into the cover of the cedars and shut down. The fitful wind died, bringing silence like invisible light over the land. Then the wind stirred and the windmill creaked its complaints to the sky.

  When Cain got out, so did Christy, following him around to the back of the truck.

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

  “Count how many times the windmill turns.”

  For an instant she took him seriously. Then she smiled and shook her head. He smiled in return.

  “Rest, honey. You’ve had a rough couple of days.”

  “What about you?”

  “It’s been interesting,” he agreed dryly.

  He wrestled Larry Moore’s camp box within reach and began pulling out what they would need. A pair of sleeping bags, self-inflating mattresses, a tarp, jackets, a small ax, cooking gear, and a supply of canned and dried food were soon lined up on the ground.

  “Nothing fancy,” Cain said.