by J. A. Jance
“Just checking things out,” Quentin said. “Making sure nothing had happened to any of this stuff since the last time I was here. It turns out nothing did. The pots are all still here. Come take a look.” As Quentin spoke, he aimed the beam from his flashlight at something in the far corner of the room. “What do you think?” he added.
Mitch Johnson thrust Lani aside and hurried past her. There on the floor, half-buried in the dirt, lay the shiny white bones of a human skeleton. And around those bleached bones, spilled onto their sides as though having been investigated by some marauding, hungry beast, lay a whole collection of pots—medium-sized ones for holding corn and piñon nuts, grain and pinole, and larger ones as well—the kind used for carrying water and for cooking meat and beans.
“It doesn’t look like all that much to me,” Mitch said, “but the guy I told you about wants them, so we’d better pack ’em up and get ’em out of here.”
“You can’t,” Lani Walker said. Those were the first words she had spoken since Mitch had dragged her out of the Bronco down by the wash. She hadn’t intended to say anything at all, but the words came choking out of her in spite of her best effort to hold them back.
Mitch swung around and looked at her. “We can’t what?”
“Take the pots,” she answered. “It’s wrong. The spirit of the woman who made them is always trapped inside the pots she makes. That’s why a woman’s pottery is always broken when she dies, so her spirit won’t be trapped. So she can go free.”
“Trapped in her pots? Right!” Mitch scoffed. “If you asked me, it looks more like she was trapped in the mountain, not in her damn pots. Now sit down and shut the hell up,” he added. “I don’t remember anybody asking for your opinion.”
Without a word, Lani sank down and sat cross-legged on the caliche-covered floor. When Mitch looked back at Quentin, he was staring at the girl while a puzzled frown knotted his forehead.
“What’s she doing here anyway?” he asked. “I don’t understand.”
“She just came along for the ride, Quentin,” Mitch said jokingly. “For the fun of it. Once we get all these pots out of here, the three of us are going to have a little party.” Mitch paused and patted his shirt pocket. “I brought along a few mood-altering substances, Quentin. When the work’s all done, the three of us can have a blast.”
“You mean Little Miss Perfect here takes drugs, too?” Quentin’s frown dissolved into a grin. “I never would have guessed it. Neither would Dad, I’ll bet. He’ll have a cow if he ever finds out.”
Lani started to reply, but before she could answer, a swift and vicious kick from the toe of Mitch’s hiking boot smashed into her thigh. She said nothing.
“Tripping out is for dessert,” Mitch said quickly. “First let’s worry about the pots.”
“How are we going to carry them out?” Quentin asked.
“In your backpack.”
“But we only have one.”
“You should have thought of that before. I guess you’ll have to do it by yourself then, won’t you?”
“By myself?”
“Sure,” Mitch responded. “You’re the one getting paid for it, aren’t you?”
“But if everybody does their share…” Quentin began.
“I said for you to do it,” Mitch said, his voice hardening as he spoke. “If the damned pots don’t get down the mountain to that car of yours, you don’t get your five thousand bucks, understand?”
Obligingly, Quentin slipped off his backpack, went over to the corner, and loaded three of the larger pots into it. “That’s all that’ll fit for right now,” he said.
“That’s all right,” Mitch said. “Make as many trips as you need to. We have all the time in the world.”
As Quentin turned to leave, Mitch breathed a sigh of relief. The drug was still working well enough. With Mitch’s knee acting up, he needed Quentin’s physical strength to haul the pots down the mountain to the car. After that, all bets were off.
As Quentin took flashlight in hand and started back through the passage, Lani sat on the floor of the cave, staring at the bones glowing with an eerie phosphorescence in the indirect haze of moonlight.
Looking at the skeleton, Lani knew immediately that the bones belonged to a woman of some wealth. The pots alone were an indication of that. Most likely there had been baskets once as well, but those, like the woman’s flesh, had long since decayed and melted back into the earth—leaving behind only the harder stuff—the clay pottery and the bones. And one day, Lani’s bones would be found here as well. Unknown and unrelated to one another in life, she and this other woman would be sisters in death. Lani took some small comfort in knowing that she would not be left there alone.
Across from her, Mitch sat down on something hard, something that supported his weight—a rock of some kind. In the moments before he switched off his flashlight, Lani realized he was rubbing his knee, massaging it, as though he had twisted it perhaps. It was a small thing, but nevertheless something to remember.
Sitting cross-legged on the hard ground, Lani reached out one arm, expecting to rest some of her weight on that one hand. Instead of encountering the dirt floor, her hand blundered into one of the remaining pots—one of the smaller ones. As Lani’s exploring fingers strayed silently around the smooth edge of the neck of the pot, a powerful realization shot through her, something that was as much chehchki—dream—as it was understanding.
This pot had once belonged to Oks Gagda—to Betraying Woman. Lani knew the story. She had heard the legend from Nana Dahd and from Davy as well. The legend—the ha’icha ahgidathag—of Betraying Woman—was a cautionary tale that told how a young girl whose birth name had long since disappeared into oblivion had once fallen in love with an Apache—an Ohb. When an enemy war party had attacked her village, the girl had betrayed her people to their dreaded enemy. Much later, the bad girl was brought back home and punished. According to the legend, I’itoi locked her in a cave and then called the mountain down around her, leaving her to die alone and in the dark.
Lani had lived all her life with those beloved I’itoi stories and traditions, but there was a part of her that discounted them. Over the years she had stopped believing in them in much the same way she eventually had stopped believing in Santa Claus. Although legends of Saint Nicholas and the I’itoi stories as well may both have had some distant basis in fact, by age sixteen Lani no longer regarded them as true. The stories and the lessons to be learned from them were part of her culture but not necessarily part of her life.
She had been eight years old when Davy broke the bad news to her, that Santa Claus didn’t exist. Nana Dahd was gone by then, so Lani hadn’t been able to go to her for consolation. For the first time, without Rita there to comfort her, Lani had turned to her mother—to Diana Ladd Walker. And it was in her mother’s arms that she had learned that the wonder and magic of Christmas hadn’t gone out of her life forever.
Feeling the cool, smooth clay under her fingertips, Lani felt the return of another kind of magic. Oks Gagda—Betraying Woman—did exist. She had been locked in a cave by the falling mountain just the way Nana Dahd had said. But now Lani knew something about that story that she had never known before. Betraying Woman had been locked in a cave with two entrances. If she had known about the other entrance, she might have simply walked away, rather than staying to endure her punishment. In a way she would never be able to explain to anyone else, Lani Walker grasped the significance of what had happened. Oks Gagda had willingly chosen to remain where she was, choosing the honor of jehka’ich—of suffering the consequences of her wickedness—rather than taking the coward’s path and running away.
A wave of gooseflesh raced across Lani’s body. She had left her people-hair basket behind, but I’itoi had sent her another talisman to take the basket’s place. Carefully, making as little noise as possible, she lifted the small sturdy pot from where it had sat undisturbed for all those years and placed it, out of sight, in the triangular space for
med by her crossed legs.
“What are you doing over there?” Mitch demanded, shining a blinding beam from his flashlight directly in her eyes.
“Nothing,” Lani said. “Just trying to get comfortable.”
“You stay right where you are,” Mitch warned. “No funny business.”
Lani said nothing more. Covering the perfectly round opening of the pot with the palm of her hand, Lani closed her eyes. With the cool rim of clay touching her skin, Lani let the words of Nana Dahd’s long-ago song flow silently through her whole being.
Do not look at me, Little Olhoni
Do not look at me when I sing to you
So this man will not know we are speaking
So this evil man will think he is winning.
Do not look at me when I sing, Little Olhoni,
But listen to what I say. This man is evil.
This man is the enemy. This man is Ohb.
Do not let this frighten you.
Whatever happens, we must not let him win.
I am singing a war song, Little Olhoni.
A hunter’s song, a killer’s song.
I am singing a song to I’itoi, asking him to help us.
Asking him to guide us in the battle
So the evil Ohb does not win.
Do not look at me, Little Olhoni,
Do not look at me when I sing to you.
I must sing this song four times,
For all of nature goes in fours,
But when the trouble starts
You must listen very carefully
And do exactly what I say.
If I tell you to run, you must run,
Run fast, and do not look back.
Whatever happens, Little Olhoni.
You must run and not look back.
Remember in the story how I’itoi made himself a fly
And hid in the smallest crack when Eagleman
Came searching for him. Be like I’itoi,
Little Olhoni. Be like I’itoi and hide yourself
In the smallest crack. Hide yourself somewhere
And do not come out again until the battle is over.
Listen to what I sing to you, Little Olhoni.
Do not look at me but do exactly as I say.
Lani paused sometimes between verses to listen. Outside the cave’s entrance, cool nighttime air rustled through the manzanita, making a sighing sound like people whispering—or like a’ali chum—little children—gossiping and sharing secrets. Maybe it was that sound that brought Betraying Woman back to Lani’s attention. Not only had she been left to die in the cave, her spirit was still there, trapped forever in the prison of her unbroken pots.
“Pots are made to be broken,” Nana Dahd had told her time and again. “Always he pots must be broken.”
And that was why, in Rita’s medicine basket, there had once been a single shard of pottery with the figure of a turtle etched into it. The piece of reddish-brown clay had come from a pot Rita’s grandmother, Oks Amichuda—Understanding Woman—had made when she was a young woman. After Understanding Woman’s death, Rita herself had smashed the pot to pieces, releasing her grandmother’s spirit. The only thing Rita had saved was that one jaggededged piece.
For just a moment, in that dim gray light, Lani thought she saw the pale figure of a woman glide behind the man who called himself Mitch Vega. Lani saw the figure pause and then move on.
The shadowy shape was there for such a brief moment that at first Lani thought, perhaps, she had made her up. But then, as Lani kept on singing, a strange peace enveloped her. She felt perfectly calm—as though she were being swept along in the untroubled stillness inside a whirlwind. And since Lani understood by then that, like Betraying Woman, she was going to die anyway, there was no longer any reason for her to remain silent.
“Why do you hate them?” she asked.
“Hate who?” Mitch returned.
“My parents,” Lani answered. “That’s why you’ve done all this—drugged me, drugged Quentin, brought us here. That’s the reason you drew that awful picture of me, as well. To get at my parents, but I still don’t understand why.”
“It’s not your parents,” Mitch said agreeably enough. “It’s your father.”
“My father? What did he do to you?”
“Did your father ever mention the name Mitch Johnson to you?”
“Mitch Johnson? I don’t think so. Is that you? I thought your name was Vega.”
“Mitch Whatever. It doesn’t really matter, does it?” He laughed then. The brittle laughter rattled hollowly off the walls of the cave. “That’s a pisser, isn’t it! Brandon Walker cost me my family, my future, and twenty years out of my life, but I’m not important enough for even the smallest mention to Brandon Walker’s nearest and dearest.”
“What did my father do to you?” Lani persisted.
“I’ll tell you what he did. He locked me up, and for no good reason. Those goddamned wetbacks are sucking the lifeblood out of this country. They were wrecking things back then, and it’s worse now. All I was trying to do was stop it.”
The word “wetbacks” brought the story back. “You’re him,” Lani said.
“Him who?”
“The man who shot those poor Mexicans out in the desert.”
“So your father did tell you about me after all. What did he say?”
“He wasn’t talking about you,” Lani answered. “He was talking about the award. I was dusting in his study and I asked him about some of his awards. The Parade Magazine Detective of the Year Award was—”
“He was talking about his damned award?”
Lani heard the change in the tenor of his voice, the sudden surge of anger. The lesson she should have learned when she had slapped the drug-laden cup away from her lips seemed so distant now, so far in the past, that it no longer applied. What difference did it make? He was going to kill her anyway.
“That’s why they gave it to him,” she said quietly. “For sending you to prison. You killed two people and wounded another. I think you got what you deserved.”
“Shut up,” Mitch Vega-Johnson snarled. “Shut the hell up. You don’t know the first goddamned thing about it.”
Listen to me, Little Olhoni, and do exactly as I say.
Once again Nana Dahd’s song came to mind and she began to sing quietly—jupij ne’e. She whispered the strength-giving words, not loud enough for Mitch to hear, but loud enough that they might fall on the ears of Betraying Woman, that they might reach out to that other trapped spirit who had spent so long shut up in the cave.
When Mitch had taken her prisoner and when he had hurt her, he had caught her unawares. Lani had learned enough about him now to realize that he was simply waiting for Quentin to finish loading the pots. When that task was accomplished, Mitch would come after Lani again—after Lani and Quentin both.
Minute by minute, the danger was coming closer, and singing Nana Dahd’s song was the only way Lani knew to prepare for it, to achieve ih’in. This time, when he came after her, she would be ready. Perhaps she would not escape—escape did not seem possible—but with the help of I’itoi and of Betraying Woman, Lani would meet her fate in a way that would make Nana Dahd proud. In the face of whatever Mitch Vega-Johnson had to offer, Lani would be bamustk—unflinching.
That was the other thing Siakam meant—to be a hero, to endure. Nana Dahd had given her that word as part of her name. Dolores Lanita Walker was determined that, no matter what, she would somehow live up to the legend of that other Mualig Siakam, to the other woman from long ago, the one who had been Kissed by the Bees.
Driving to the department, Brandon and Diana Walker said very little. Brandon had always thought that having a child die a violent death had to be a parent’s worst nightmare. But it turned out that wasn’t true, because having one child murdered by another was worse by far. There was no way for him to come to grips with the enormity of the tragedy, so he took refuge in action and drove.
Pulling into the
familiar parking lot, he was struck by the difference between then and now, between when he used to park in the slot marked RESERVED FOR SHERIFF. Back then, he would have walked into the building to issue orders and direct the action. Tonight, instead of calling the shots, he was coming in as a family member—as the father of both victim and perpetrator. Instead of being able to tell people what to do, he was going to have to ask, maybe even beg, for someone to help him.
Shaking his head at his own powerlessness, he parked the car in a slot marked VISITOR.
“What are we going to tell them?” Diana asked, as they headed for the public entrance.
Brandon was still carrying the paper bag that held the cassette tape and plastic case. “Before I tell anybody anything, I’m going to try to get these to Alvin. That way he can start lifting prints. Once he’s done with the tape, we’ll try to get someone to hold still long enough to listen to it.”
“Will they believe it?”
“That depends,” Brandon told her.
“On what?”
“On the luck of the draw,” he answered. “With any kind of luck, Detective Myers will still be home in bed.”
Walking into the reception area, the young clerk recognized Brandon Walker immediately. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I’m looking for Alvin Miller,” Brandon answered.
The clerk frowned. “I doubt he’s here. I’m not showing him on the ‘in’ list.”
“Do me a favor,” Brandon said. “Try calling the fingerprint lab and see if he answers.”
And he did. Within minutes, Alvin Miller had come out to the reception area to escort Brandon and Diana back to the lab. “What’s going on?” he asked.
Brandon handed over the bag. “Do me a favor,” he said. “We need prints lifted off these.”
“All right,” Alvin returned.
“Then I’ll need something else.”
“What’s that?”
“You can call up prints by name, can’t you?”
“Sure,” Alvin answered. “If the prints went into the system with a name, then we can get them out that way, too. Whose name are we looking for?”