Plant Them Deep

by Thurlo, Aimée

  “Sure, but you might consider paying her a visit anyway. I think you’d find her a knowledgeable ally, and she may just happen to have one of these primroses.”

  “Do you know Maria well?” Rose asked, forcing herself to keep her tone casual.

  “She and I have worked together in the past. She was my student at one time too. Of course, that was a long time ago.”

  “What do you think of her position on the plant issue?” Rose asked. Willie had worked with her, and become an ally she could depend on, but she was beginning to understand that people—and allies—were changeable.

  “I see no reason not to introduce new strains of plants to the reservation—ones that would give extra nutrients to both cattle and people—but I also see your point about making sure it doesn’t force out the plants that are already important to the tribe.” He paused, then added, “But, truth be told, this is the tribe’s business, not mine, and I only advise when I’m asked.”

  After checking another site along the way that Willie suggested, they headed for the one Clara Henderson had recommended. About halfway there, Rose asked Willie to make a small detour. “I need to talk to a friend who lives just up that rise,” she said, pointing with her lips, Navajo style. “It involves the death of the Plant Watcher we both knew.”

  “Do you think the person you’re going to see is involved?”

  “No, not at all, it’s just …” But she hesitated to say more. Curtis Largo had accused her of neglecting her business. If Willie really wasn’t her ally …

  “If it makes you uncomfortable to explain, you don’t have to say anything else. I’ll be happy to take you wherever you need to go.”

  She wanted to trust Professor Hoff, but his association with Maria had already raised too many questions in her mind. On the other hand, if he’d wanted to make trouble for her, he already had more than enough ammunition.

  “It’s complicated,” Rose said at last. She then told Willie about the second body and the matter of Charlie’s identity being in question. “No matter what his real name was, he was a friend of mine, and since he obviously wanted us to find the remains of this other man, I intend to follow it up until I learn the truth behind it all.”

  Willie nodded. “I suppose you also need to understand why a man you considered a good friend kept a secret like this from you,” he said, glancing over at her. “Right?”

  He’d managed to hit on the one thing that bothered her most about the situation. “Yes. I’ve always thought of myself as a good judge of character, and I need to know if I was wrong to trust him all these years.”

  “I understand.” Willie glanced at her and nodded. “I really do, you know.” He paused for a long moment before continuing. “I know firsthand how secrets can undermine everything—even the way we see ourselves.”

  She gave him a questioning look, but didn’t press him. Soon, he continued.

  “When I was fresh out of college,” he said in a faraway voice, “I fell in love with a Navajo woman while working on what became my first published handbook on southwestern plants. I was very ambitious back then, and knew I’d have to travel a great deal and do all I could to get my name known in order to get ahead. I asked her to marry me, and she said she wanted to, but she wouldn’t leave the reservation.”

  “So you left but never forgot her?” she asked, accurately reading his tone of voice and expression.

  He nodded. “But I returned to the area on business a few years later, and decided to look her up. When we saw each other again, it was as if our years apart had never existed. We spent the night together, but the following morning, all the problems that had kept us apart were still there. I couldn’t stay and she wouldn’t leave, so we parted for good.”

  Willie’s gaze was fixed in the distance. “A month or two later, I passed through again on my way to accept a teaching assistant’s position in Denver and heard she’d married someone from the tribe. Eight months after the night we spent together, a mutual friend of ours wrote to tell me that the woman I’d loved had died giving birth to a baby girl.”

  “You think it was your child she was carrying?” Rose asked quietly.

  “I never knew for sure, and to try and find out would have caused more harm than good, so I let the matter rest.”

  Rose nodded, understanding. He hadn’t given her any names, but she had a feeling that he believed that Maria was his lost child. If that was the case, then he was, at best, a dubious ally.

  They arrived at an old stone house at the edge of a small meadow southwest of Sanostee near a place called Old Pine Spring, partway up the Chuska Mountain Range. The Arizona state line was only three or four miles west of there, Rose knew.

  As they waited in Willie’s SUV for someone to invite them in, the professor leaned back in his seat. “Kenmore and I will wait in the car. If it gets too hot, I’ll walk with him over to the shade of those ponderosa pines,” he said.

  “I won’t take long,” Rose promised, “if I’m invited to visit.”

  A moment later, Rose saw an elderly man in faded jeans, a long-sleeved flannel shirt, and a headband come outside to greet them. Jeremiah hadn’t changed much, except for more gray in his long hair, and a bit less energy in his stride. He’d used a cane for many years, and now more than before. Rose left the truck and went to join him.

  Once inside and seated in a worn brown-and-yellow-striped couch, Rose explained to Jeremiah why she’d come. “I’m trying to find out who my friend really was,” she said after filling him in.

  “This story surprises me. I knew the same man you did. We fought the same campaigns and we went through Code Talker school together. I have no doubt he was who he said he was. Maybe the government made a mistake when they fingerprinted him. They processed a bunch of us Navajos back then.”

  Rose handed him the photo from the military papers. “Is this the man you knew?”

  “Sure looks like him. I remember those days clearly—sometimes better than things that happened a few days ago.”

  Rose laughed. “Yes, me too, sometimes.” She looked at the photo again and then placed it back in her purse. “Did you ever wonder why he never settled down anywhere?”

  “Some of us carried memories of the war we never could put behind us,” he said slowly. “I always thought that the war had scarred him somehow. His unit went through some tough times, I know. Half his battalion were casualties at Iwo Jima, though he escaped untouched, at least on his body.”

  Rose thanked Jeremiah, then went back outside to join Willie. She didn’t doubt that the horrors of war could follow a man until the day he died, but somehow she had a feeling there was more to Charlie’s story. The skeleton in the Marine Corps uniform with a Charlie Dodge dog tag was still unexplained.

  As Willie and she continued to search for “white at night.” Rose had to struggle against the fear that swelled up inside her as the hours passed and they failed to find any specimens of the plant. By the end of the afternoon, though the dog seemed to have had a great time, they still had nothing to show for their efforts.

  As they walked back up the hillside toward the road where the SUV was parked, Kenmore, who was sniffing the ground ahead of them, stopped and barked once. Rose spotted a man through a break in the treeline, about twenty yards ahead, digging up something. He turned and glanced in their direction, but Rose only managed to get a fleeting glimpse of his face.

  She quickened her pace, wondering if they’d gotten lucky enough to catch the thief at work. Kenmore, at Willie’s command, stayed with them without running ahead. As they drew near, Rose realized it was John Joe. He was digging up a small “wondering about medicine” plant.

  Glancing at the mastiff often, he continued working, picking up the plant and placing it carefully in a small pot made of fiber and peat. “This is for my garden, or should I say gardens,” he said, and his expression confirmed for the first time that he knew she’d been the one checking out the garden at his home. “I know there are only a few of
these plants around the Rez these days, but if I leave it here, it could soon become nothing more than forage for a wild animal. As you yourself said, we have to protect the endangered Plant People.”

  “Not by taking the best,” she answered, scowling.

  “There are other plants here, and I have left an offering for its neighbors,” he said, indicating several other examples of the herb, and a small piece of turquoise placed on a flat stone. “But we shouldn’t argue now. This is a holy time.” With that, he picked up the potted plant and, using a plastic water bottle, soaked the container thoroughly. Nodding to them, he walked to his blue truck, which they could now see was parked about fifty feet behind Willie’s SUV. He’d arrived after them, obviously, and she wondered if John had somehow followed them.

  Rose checked his footprints after he’d gone. His feet were larger than the ones left by the person who’d been with Charlie the day he’d died. John also wore cowboy boots, not the hiking kind with ripples that she’d seen in the area near Charlie’s body.

  “What are you doing?”

  Rose smiled. “Acting like my daughter, the policewoman,” she answered. “I’m no expert, but I’m searching for little details that might help me explain what happened to my friend.” She then realized that Willie’s shoe size was closer, but the wrong pattern. Of course, he could always change shoes, but then again, he’d already admitted to having been with Charlie that day.

  “The Singer didn’t have an entrenching tool,” he said.

  “I know, but someone with one of those GI shovels came here,” she said pointing to an area about twenty feet ahead where the ground was disturbed.

  Willie walked over and crouched by one of the holes, studying the remaining dried-out leaves and plant debris curiously. “Whoever is taking the plants is sure targeting the rarest ones.”

  “You were speaking of Maria Poyer before,” Rose said thoughtfully. “Do you think it could be her?”

  His eyes were sharp and alert as they focused on her. “What makes you say that?”

  “She may be trying to prove to everyone that we don’t need the Plant People as much as we think we do. One of the best ways to do that is to make sure no one can find any.”

  “I don’t think she’d do that,” he said firmly. “I could see her carefully collecting some of the plants and trying to graft or hybridize them into stronger versions of the original. But taking them so recklessly, and destroying so many others in the process like this?” He waved his hand over the desiccated plants that had been uprooted and shook his head. “No way. Whoever is doing this is in an awful hurry, or some kind of mad panic. Look how carelessly some of these have been dug up.”

  “Or that’s what he wants us to think. The thief has to be someone who either knows precisely what the plants mean to The People and wants to effect change—or someone who’s got some kind of secret agenda we still haven’t been able to uncover.”

  “You’ll probably come across this person someday when you least expect it,” he warned. “And if that happens, you could be in a great deal of danger.”

  He hadn’t said it, but she knew precisely what he meant. Whoever had killed Charlie wouldn’t hesitate to commit murder again. If she wasn’t careful, she might end up sharing Charlie Dodge’s fate.

  NINETEEN

  Hours later, Rose glanced around the kitchen, having just finished tidying up. Ella was in the living room with Dawn, and it was time for her to join her family.

  “Are you okay?” Ella asked as Rose entered the room. “You’ve been awfully quiet tonight.”

  Rose looked over at Dawn, who was engrossed in a cartoon video. “There was a letter in the mail for me when I got home. It was written by your child’s father, acting in his capacity as a tribal attorney It informed me that my friend’s savings account, which he bequeathed to me, is now legally mine. So are all his possessions, except for his new trailer house, which will be taken back by the finance company. I’ll donate most of his things to the church your father founded, but I have to figure out what to do with the money he left me. That represents a lifetime of savings and I want to use it in a way he would have approved.”

  “You could invest it in a program to reintroduce some of the native plants that are so scarce.”

  Rose nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a very good idea. He would have liked that,” she said, then sighed loudly. “I said that with such certainty, but since he wasn’t the man I thought he was, I obviously didn’t know him as well as I’d like to think. The simple truth is that I don’t even know what his real name was.” She told Ella about the photo and her visit with Jeremiah. “He believes my friend was who he said he was, but until I learn the identity of the person who was already in the ground, I can’t know for certain.”

  “Maybe I can help. But first I’ll have to take a look at the military service record that was faxed to the ME’s office. I’ll call my friend. I bet she’s still in her office. She can fax me a copy here at home, then I can help you look it over for clues that might give you a lead.”

  It didn’t take long to get Carolyn to fax a copy over to Ella’s combination fax/copy machine/printer in her small home office. Once all the pages had come through, Ella brought them into the living room and placed the papers on the coffee table, where they could both examine them.

  “They monitored all his passes off base carefully,” Ella said, “and from what I can see here, he only came home once on furlough—after basic training and before he went to the classified Code Talker school. That training was listed in code, of course, but there was an insert in his file added much later when the program was declassified.”

  “What about his family? Does it say anything about them?”

  “He had a younger brother by the name of Gilbert who was only sixteen in 1943. Both their parents were listed as deceased by the time Cha … he enlisted.” Ella barely avoided mentioning Charlie’s name, something that wasn’t normally done around a traditionalist until several days after the deceased had passed away.

  “But the brothers must have had other relatives. Who raised the boys if their parents were dead? And whatever became of the younger brother?”

  “It doesn’t say here.” Ella paused. “You could try and check the boarding school records—if they go back that far and if the boys went to school at all. But be aware that old records may be hard to find, or they may refuse to let you look even if they are available.”

  “In that case, I’ll ask Gishii’s oldest daughter. She used to work in administration at one of the boarding schools before they closed all of them down. She won’t refuse me.”

  Ella smiled. “If there’s anyone who knows how to cut corners, it’s you, Mom.”

  Ella turned around and saw that Dawn had turned off the television and was listening to her talking story book.

  Rose smiled. “At her age, you were never interested in stories or storytelling. You wanted to be outside running or playing. The hardest thing for you to do was sit still.”

  Ella nodded. “She’s her own person in a different time. Do you ever wish you could peer into the future and see who she’ll be in fifteen years?”

  Rose laughed. “No, thank you. I’ll take things one day at a time. That’s about all I can handle.”

  Rose watched her daughter tending to Dawn. How quickly time passed these days! She was proud of her family. Raymond and she had done well raising Clifford and Ella. The two were as different as could be, but both were strong and loving people in their own ways. And now there was Dawn, a part of her too. In her granddaughter, Rose saw a future that was yet to be determined, but one filled with infinite possibilities.

  “Mom? You have such a peculiar expression on your face.”

  Rose chuckled. “I’m thinking that someday she’ll grow up and have children, and you’ll be where I am right now.”

  “Is that a curse or a blessing?” Ella asked.

  “Both,” Rose said with a smile.

  The following morn
ing, after a much-welcomed rainy night, Rose set out early while there were still gray clouds overhead and actual humidity could be felt in the air. She’d received a call from Sadie Black Shawl and something in Sadie’s tone had worried her. The young woman had seemed too subdued.

  When Rose arrived at Lena’s home, she saw Sadie outside, kneeling by some plants in the garden. Seeing Rose, she waved.

  “I don’t know what made you stop by, but I’m glad you did,” Sadie said, brushing the dirt from her jeans as she stood.

  “I had a feeling something wasn’t right.”

  “Let’s go inside and I’ll tell you about it.”

  In the kitchen, Sadie poured them both a cup of coffee from the pot on the counter, then suddenly looked at Rose. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even think. Do you drink coffee?”

  “Sometimes, but I prefer it with cream and sugar, lots and lots of both.”

  Sadie brought over the sugar bowl and the container of coffee creamer. “My mom and I always discussed whatever was bothering us over coffee, and I got used to the ritual,” she said with a sheepish smile.

  Rose waited patiently for her to begin, noticing how ill at ease Sadie appeared to be.

  “Last night after I went to bed I heard a strange noise outside. The porch light was on, so I turned it off so I could see through the window. That’s when I spotted someone outside running back to his truck. It roared off before I could get a good look at the license plate.”

  “What was he after, do you know?”

  “I went out with a flashlight after he was gone and took a good look around, but I couldn’t see what he’d taken.” She hesitated, then added, “But I found footprints that prove he was by the garden. That’s why I wasn’t going to tell anyone. I knew that if the news got back to your friend that someone had been messing around in her garden again, it would really upset her.”