The Tooth of Time

by Sue Henry

  Instead, I put in a call to Herrera’s office and left a message for him to call me when he had time. Then I turned my attention to getting ready for the evening with Butch at the opening reception at Weaving Southwest with dinner following.

  Those plans brightened my mood considerably.

  EIGHTEEN

  ON MY EXPLORATION OF THE TAOS PLAZA I HAD picked up a silky, rust-colored skirt that was gathered in horizontal bands and swung nicely a few inches from the floor. Alaskans dress quite casually for almost everything and I have never ascribed to the dress-for-success principle, so I seldom wear dressy skirts, feeling more comfortable in denim, or in slacks. But I decided to gussy up a bit for the reception, wear it with a black blouse and carry along the ruana I had knit of yarn from the shop in case the evening was cool.

  I was adding my silver bracelets and earrings when Butch arrived to collect me. I was glad I had taken the trouble to dress, for he had abandoned his jeans and cowboy shirt in favor of slacks and a dress shirt open at the collar.

  “You look very presentable,” I told him.

  “Well.” He grinned, raising a pant leg enough to let me see that he still wore Western boots, though this pair was of beautifully tooled leather and had probably cost the moon. “You can take the boy out of the country, but—well, you know the rest. I was born and raised just north of Missoula, Montana, so I hardly know how to walk in a pair of shoes. And so do you—look very presentable—by the way.”

  Leaving Stretch on guard duty, we took Butch’s truck and arrived at Weaving Southwest at approximately seven thirty, to find a number of people there ahead of us. Some of them were friends and family of the weavers, but several appeared to be potential customers, and all were enjoying flutes of champagne as they strolled around admiring the rich colors and designs of the attractive rugs and tapestries displayed on the walls.

  “Where’s Stretch?” Pat inquired, after I had introduced her to Butch and he had wandered off to take a look around. “I thought you two were inseparably joined at the leash.”

  “He’s pulling sentry duty at home to make sure no one breaks in again,” I told her, forgetting that she didn’t know about the previous night’s incident.

  “You had a burglary?”

  I explained, then pulled her away to the back of the shop and briefly told her all that had happened in the last—could it possibly have been only twenty-four hours? I apologized for not calling her and explained that I felt it would be better to share it all in person. Hearing that Shirley was dead brought the expected surprise to her face, followed immediately by a frown of concern and regret.

  “I can’t believe it. How could she fool both of us so completely in denying that she had tried to kill herself?” she said. “Are they really sure she did it?”

  I had to admit that it was possible it hadn’t been suicide, but asked her not to say anything, especially to Connie, the gossip.

  “If she doesn’t already know, she soon will,” Pat said in disgust. “She lies in wait for just such opportunities and will undoubtedly be showing up here. Just wait and see.”

  Sure enough—ten minutes after we had rejoined the rest of the crowd, Connie came hurrying in the door and made a beeline for Pat. Before she could open her mouth, Pat took her firmly by the elbow and towed her off to the back, with me following in case she needed help, though I very much doubted she would.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she told Connie sternly. “I already know about Shirley and I don’t want a fuss made now, with a show in progress. Just keep it to yourself, or leave if you can’t.”

  “But—but—” Connie sputtered.

  “I mean it,” Pat snapped, glowering. “This is neither the time nor the place.”

  “But she—”

  “There,” said Pat, pointing, “is the back door. Use it!”

  Furious, Connie stomped out, giving us one black look before she disappeared.

  “What was that all about?” Bettye Sullivan asked, coming up behind us and witnessing the dramatic exit.

  “You really don’t want to know,” Pat told her, shaking her head as we moved back toward the center of the shop.

  A young couple, clearly tourists who knew little about weaving and its tradition in the Southwest, came up with questions about one of the rugs that hung facing the front windows.

  “We saw it from the street,” the young woman said. “It was so gorgeous we had to come in and see it up close. How do you get such brilliant blues and reds?”

  “Ask the expert,” Pat told her, indicating Bettye, who was standing next to me. “Bettye dyes almost all our yarns, so she can tell you more than I ever could.”

  They moved across the room with her to take another look at the piece that had interested them, but Bettye turned back to me for a moment before following.

  “You said you’d like to see the dyeing process. If you can come out tomorrow—I’ve decided to go ahead and do the reds.”

  “I’d love to. What time?”

  “Ten or eleven in the morning will give me time to heat the water. Don’t leave till I come back and draw you a map.”

  Butch had come ambling back to stand beside me and listened to this exchange.

  “Come and see the rug I’ve fallen in lust with,” he said, leading me off to see a medium-sized black, brown, and cream striped wool rug with a ruby red diamond pattern in the center that matched thin lines woven between the other three, alternating colors. It was a striking combination and I wasn’t surprised when he turned to Pat with a grin.

  “I’ll take it,” he told her. “I have just the place for it in my apartment in Santa Fe, but not on the floor. It’ll go on the wall, just like this. Keep it away from the oil and grease I sometimes track in on my boots.”

  “Mechanic?” Pat asked.

  “Trucker,” he told her. “Well—ex-trucker, really. Accident on the Alaska Highway sort of changed my direction. That’s where I met Maxie a while back.”

  In answer to Pat’s questioning look, we explained how we met and the wreck of his truck. Back to business, he agreed to leave the rug on display for the time being, with a SOLD sign firmly attached.

  “Or I could ship it down to you,” Pat offered. “I appreciate your leaving it. It’s nice to have the walls full for a few days after we’ve opened a new show.”

  “Not a problem,” he told her. “But don’t bother to ship it. I’ll be back in two or three weeks for another evening of good food and music at the Taos Inn. I’ll pick it up then, if that’s okay.”

  “It’ll be fine. Thanks.”

  She looked up from the sales slip she had been writing and waved as she called out, “Hey, Ford. I just sold your rug. Want to meet the new owner?”

  I hadn’t seen Ford Whitaker come in, but was pleased to introduce him to Butch and they seemed to hit it off. The two of them went back across the room—Ford answering questions about the materials and how the piece had been woven.

  “Nice guy,” Pat commented about Butch, when they were out of hearing distance.

  I agreed—both were.

  Bettye came back with the young couple she had been talking to and Pat had another sale to write up. While she did that, Bettye drew me a map of how to locate her adobe house on the mesa west of town.

  “It’s pretty easy to find. You’ll know it’s the right place when you see an old yellow pickup in front. It doesn’t run anymore, I use it as a planter and fill the bed with flowers every year.”

  The map securely tucked away in my bag, I circled the shop, sipping champagne as I examined all the weavings on display. They made a colorful and interesting impression, many clearly influenced by the traditional southwestern patterns established by the Indians of the area. I was tempted by several, but considered the space available in the Winnebago and chose two colorful woven pillows instead.

  Small profiles of the weavers were placed with their creations and I found it interesting that Alex George Sullivan, Bettye’s husband, had a m
aster’s degree in art therapy and worked with emotionally disturbed adolescents in addition to his weaving and dyeing. Several others had come to weaving from backgrounds in other artistic techniques or schools. One was a retired airline pilot. Another had begun weaving in a Benedictine monastery, drawn to the rhythms of both monastic and artistic life, including the meditative, hypnotic quality of “the process of passing the shuttle through the warp and filling design areas with color.”

  There was much more to weaving than I would have anticipated. It made me eager to start my own process with Pat as a guide, though on a much smaller scale.

  I was considering it when Butch arrived beside me.

  “This is great,” he said enthusiastically. “I’ve never paid much attention to weaving, but I’m going to now. From that small loom I noticed in your motor home, I’d guess you’re about to try it out yourself.”

  I told him about my upcoming lessons scheduled for the next week. Then we crossed the room to say good night to Pat and headed out to dinner.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind eating somewhere other than the Taos Inn?” I teased him as we cruised south on Paseo del Pueblo.

  “Not at all. I’ve been to Bravo before and like it a lot. You will too.”

  Settled at a table toward the back of the restaurant, I found the menu full of appealing suggestions, but finally settled on a shrimp fettuccine dish.

  While we waited for our food, I told Butch about my invitation to watch Bettye dye yarn the next day and asked if he would like to go along.

  “Sure,” he agreed. “It would be interesting to see how the yarn gets dyed all those great colors.”

  We decided on a time and I offered to give him lunch after driving out to the Sullivan house.

  “Now,” Butch said, leaning forward with both elbows on the table, “speaking of dyeing vats, what’s this about a body being found in one this week? Someone was talking about it at the shop earlier.”

  I could have guessed that it would come up in conversation at the opening of the show, but with everything else that had gone on since I read about it in the paper I simply hadn’t thought about it much. Remembering that I had folded the article after showing it to Pat and still had it in my bag, I took it out and handed it across the table.

  Butch read it and looked up at me with a grimace.

  “Can you imagine the shock of finding some dead guy in a boiling pot?” he asked. “If you’ll excuse the observation, it gives a whole new meaning to the term dyeing—or dying, as the case may be.”

  What could I do but groan?

  “Have you heard any more about it—who it was, who put it there?”

  “The paper only comes out on Thursdays and I haven’t heard any more—hadn’t even thought about it. But I’ve been more than a bit distracted, with the break-in and then everything that went on this afternoon.”

  I told him all about going to see Ann, finding Shirley, and my subsequent conversation with Herrera.

  “Good Lord—you’ve had quite a day,” he said. “Do you think it’s connected to the break-in—or to this guy in the vat, for that matter? Everyone involved seems to be associated with weaving in one way or another.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  The idea of connections hadn’t occurred to me. But why should it have? Weaving seemed only peripheral. But it was interesting that Butch had seen that kind of correlation in hearing about all that had happened in the last few days.

  I carried the idea home with me in the back of my mind and—after we had found the rig unintruded upon, Stretch eager for company, had coffee with Jameson, and Butch had driven off into the night—it surfaced again as I readied myself for bed.

  Sometimes it’s true that you simply can’t see the forest for the trees. There was a connection through the weaving, which he had identified, but I couldn’t see that it was anything but circumstantial. Was it? Shrugging it off, I went to sleep almost at once. I didn’t wake until the sun was shining brightly on another beautiful day and I could hear a multitude of birds in the trees outside cheerfully greeting it.

  NINETEEN

  DRIVING OUT OF TOWN AND UP TO THE WESTERN mesa, we found the Sullivan house easily enough from the map Bettye had drawn for me the evening before and were soon pulling into a wide parking space in front. Off to one side I was delighted to see that she had meant what she said about the pickup, for there it sat, a faded yellow antique, minus tires, not yet full of the flowers she had mentioned, but I could imagine the colorful show they would make in such an amusing planter.

  While I have no taste for cutesy decorating, I admire the humor in slightly twisted caricatures—recycling uses for things that they were never intended for in the first place. In general, I detest birdbaths that look like giant daisies, garishly colored plaster dwarves and cartoon characters, and plastic flamingos as yard decoration. But I have a friend who has created a covert “flamingo refuge” in the woods near her rural home. Friends and acquaintances send her the pink plastic critters they find in garage sales or secondhand stores—broken or whole, missing legs, necks taped to hold the heads on—whatever. Tongue firmly in cheek, she cares for them by putting them with others of their kind in a hilarious kindred grouping that staggers the imagination. Of this I wholeheartedly approve.

  If I were asked to judge any contest of similar humorous bent, Bettye’s pickup planter would have taken a blue ribbon.

  She had evidently heard the tires-on-gravel sound of Butch’s truck coming up the drive, for she stood waiting to meet us between the double doors of a gateway set into an adobe wall. She led us up a walk to the door of the attractive flat-roofed house of matching adobe through a front garden enclosed with a “coyote fence”—traditionally made of vertical aspen saplings or juniper branches held upright between posts. At several places along the edge the roof was indented with what Bettye called canales, meant to carry off melting snow or rainwater. She also told us that she and her husband had designed the house themselves and helped in the building of it, reminding me that many Alaskans do the same with logs as building material, making each cabin or house unique.

  For some reason I had imagined that adobe houses would be dark inside, but the lovely room we stepped into quashed all such notions. Through large windows set deep in the thick earthen walls light streamed in to brighten the colors of tapestries, rugs, and pillows, along with pottery and other items of local artistry, bringing the room to vivid life. The ceiling reminded me of what I had seen at the Taos Inn—latillas, or peeled aspen saplings—laid close together and further reflecting the light from their pale surfaces.

  Looking through the window in the eastern wall I could see the town of Taos in the distance, nestled against the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos.

  “Must be a great view at night when you can see the lights in the distance.”

  “It is,” Bettye agreed. “We planned it that way.”

  In another room full of natural light toward the back of the house sat her large loom, warped and ready for her to start a new tapestry. On shelves and in baskets on the floor were many kinds and colors of yarn in complementary and contrasting hues. It made me want to get started on a weaving of my own, though I knew I would never be dedicated enough to come anywhere near the expertise that was evident in her wonderful tapestries that I had seen at the shop and now saw on the walls of her house.

  “Let’s go out to the vats,” she suggested, showing us through a back door. “The water should be just about the right temperature to add the dye.”

  As we left the house, I listened as Bettye answered several questions Butch put to her concerning the process and kinds of dye she used. He was more enthusiastic than I had thought he would be and I was glad I had taken him along to the show the night before. What a surprising interest for a former trucker to take in what is often thought of as a woman’s art form. But, I remembered, Butch had been a pleasant surprise from the moment we met—in a coffee shop at Steamboat, just before the ro
ad plunged into a deep valley, as we headed north on the Alaska Highway. People are seldom what you stereotypically imagine they will be. Many of the “outlaws” that pass you on the highway riding Harleys are weekend warriors from business and industry off on jaunts, and the most sophisticated, moneyed men of professional repute can be the worst of bandits and thieves. That thought turned my mind to Anthony Cole and his theft of Shirley’s money and trust while pretending to be a businessman of some standing.

  We went around the end of another coyote fence by a storage shed and were suddenly standing next to two huge vats enclosed in insulating walls of rectangular concrete bricks. Steam was rising from one of them, evidently the one in which Bettye meant to dye the yarn.

  Butch started to ask the question that had leaped to my mind as well.

  “That dead man the other day? Was it . . .”

  Bettye turned and gave him a straight look with a concerned expression on her face.

  “Not in these vats,” she told him.

  “No—no. I mean like these.”

  “Well, yes—at least it was similar. Doris Matthews doesn’t do commercial work, but she had one large vat that she used sometimes to dye large amounts of wool for the rugs she wove so it would all be exactly the same color.”

  I hurried to ask a question that would take us away from the uncomfortable subject. “Where does the yarn you dye come from, Bettye?”

  “From a company back east that spins and prepares it for dyeing.” She waved a hand at maybe a dozen fat hanks of yarn, each with its own separating cord. They hung all together from a huge hook that would allow them to be lowered into the water of the vat.

  “That’s wool, isn’t it? I always thought wool would shrink if you put it in hot water.”

  She smiled. “A lot of people think that, but it’s really agitation that felts wool. Besides, the water is heated first and the fire put out before I add the dye, then the wool.”

  Butch had hunkered down to look under the vat to where the remains of a fire were still smoking slightly.