AHMM, June 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Just that Burt and Sally decided that if Tommy wouldn't agree to sell the business that night, Burt would kill him, and that Sally stayed behind at the club to give herself an in-case-it-came-to-that alibi.”

  “But why do you think she's involved?”

  “Did you see her photo from that night? She looked all tense. Sally never looks tense. Something was up.” I shrugged. “Anyway, that's all I made up. Everything else is real. The news said that Burt will never see a dime of the money from selling the restaurant because you can't profit from a crime. So guess who's walking away with the whole shebang? Sally.”

  “You think she got Burt to confess?”

  “Uh-huh. Probably she convinced him that with all the circumstantial evidence—his tiepin found clutched in Tommy's hand; the footprint, which matches shoes in his closet; and the torn tie, which I can't believe he stashed in a drawer, I mean, really, how stupid is that?—he was a goner anyway. ‘Take the deal and I'll give you half when you get out,’ is what I bet she told him. Ha, ha. As if.” I shrugged again. “I can't prove it or anything, but that's what I think. I don't believe in coincidences, so her staying behind had to be explained somehow. This is the only explanation that makes sense.”

  “Laney, you have a diabolical mind.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Doesn't that mean devilish?”

  “Sometimes. I meant it as a compliment—fiendishly clever.”

  I smiled. “Cool.”

  I finished my Coke and slid the glass onto the table, then turned to stare out the window into the twilight. Another Sunday almost survived. We used to play games on Sundays. Risk, my dad's favorite. Scrabble, my mom's. And Boggle, mine. When I turned back, Mr. S. was looking at me.

  “I have some angst, Mr. S.”

  He rattled the ice in his glass, saw it was empty, and stood up. “Me, too, Laney. Me, too. But I know something that's almost guaranteed to help chase it away, at least for awhile. Dinner with a good friend. Ready to go?”

  “You bet,” I said, carrying my glass to the sink. “So how'd you end up as a shortstop, anyway?”

  Copyright © 2012 Jane K. Cleland

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  Department: MYSTERIOUS PHOTOGRAPH

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  Copyright 2012, Smit/Shutterstock.com

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  CROSSING THE ROAD WAS GOING TO BE AN ISSUE

  We will give a prize of $25 to the person who invents the best mystery story (in 250 words or less, and be sure to include a crime) based on the above photograph. The story will be printed in a future issue. Reply to AHMM, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, New York, New York 10007-2352. Please label your entry “June Contest,” and be sure your name and address are written on the story you submit. If you would like your story returned, please include an SASE.

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  Fiction: THE POT HUNTERS

  by David Hagerty

  Aditsan sat under the shadow of Tsé Bit'a'i. The great butte of the winged rock rose nearly as high as the clouds, protruding from the landscape like a lone tooth. It gave the only shelter from a desert sun that burned the landscape red. Far around on the wide plateau, his aunt's sheep grazed on scrub brush. He contemplated sending out his dog to round up the herd, but the heat combined with a persistent cough left him feeling weak and frail. He lay back on the prickly rock and gazed off toward the far horizon, daydreaming about the raids and battles his elders had described.

  A growl from the dog alerted him that a lone rider approached, a Bilagaana with the Stetson hat and deerskin vest of a cowboy. He was long and lean, with a face burned nearly as red as Aditsan's, but his squint suggested discomfort in the desert. The rider pulled up, with the sun directly behind him, creating a burst of light around his head.

  “Speak English?” the man said.

  Aditsan nodded but said nothing.

  “That's good, ‘cause I don't know Navajo. My name's Will Griffiths. What's yours?”

  The railroads that pushed across the Southwest and into the New Mexico territory had brought many Bilagaana emissaries. First were the traders and miners who sought wealth in the Wild West. Then came the missionaries who wanted to remake the Indians in their own image. Later came the tourists who wanted to experience firsthand the beauty and barbarity of Indian Territory. Aditsan had met many of these as they spread out across the reservation and even spent half of his dozen years under their tutelage. He had learned to use two names for everything. His tribe, the Diné, were called the Navajo; his hometown of Tsé Bit'a'i was called Shiprock; even his name had to be reinterpreted.

  “People call me Abe,” he said.

  “Well, Abe, I'm hoping you can help me. See, I'm looking for a great kiva buried near here, but I've been traveling two months now and can't find a thing.”

  Aditsan was intrigued. Not in many years had he traveled to the ancient kivas that lay buried under heavy sand drifts several day's ride from his family's hogan. Though familiar to him, they seemed foreign in ways that were exciting.

  “I can show you a place,” he said.

  * * * *

  Ten days of riding brought them to a circular depression in a sand drift at the edge of the reservation. They set up camp—Will in a white canvas tent, Aditsan with a bedroll of blankets given to him by his aunt—and built a hitching post for their horses. A few days later, they rode into the nearby village of Bis Dah Cleets, which the Bilagaana called Two Grey Hills, and hired three Navajo men with promises of coffee and a paycheck later.

  Many days of excavations proved them right about the great kiva that lay buried there. Just below the sand's hard crust they found a ring of mud brick and desiccated wood taller than a man. With pails and hand tools, the men cleared away debris that had accumulated for centuries. They were looking for pots, gourds, tools, anything that may have been left behind by those who once lived and worshipped there. However, the few artifacts they unearthed—a chipped pot painted white and black, and a small mat of woven yucca that might once have been a sandal—were fragmented or broken.

  One day, the cowboy approached the boy as he sat beneath a butte as shelter from the sun.

  “Abe, come here. I need you to translate for me.”

  Will had retained the boy not for his muscle but for his English. Six years of education at an Indian School in Fort Collins had made him bilingual. The persistent cough he developed there had also made him thin and weak. Although he was dispatched each morning to a cave which collected water from an aquifer, the boy did no labor on the excavation.

  “Somebody's been stealing from me,” Will said.

  Will stared down at him with eyes that seemed to change in the sunlight from blue to green to brown, like a river reflecting what was around it. Never before had Aditsan seen someone whose appearance shifted so, and it made him uneasy.

  Will led the boy across the mudflats to the kiva, where the three Navajo men pulled apart stones by hand, walked twenty paces, and replaced them into rows and columns like Spanish soldiers lined up for an attack.

  “Ask them what they've done with the pot.”

  When they heard the boy speak, the men set down their stones and wiped their dusty hands on the thighs of their deerskin pants. They all contemplated the question as though translating the words themselves and looked away in the direction of the sun as though seeking the phrases to respond. The first to speak was Klah, whose long, slim muscles made his arms look like rope. He pointed at the boy with his left hand.

  “You would not say that to us if we were alone,” he said in his own language.

  Because Aditsan was weak and not yet a man, the laborers hated that they had to take orders from him, even if they knew the words were not his but the Bilagaana's. The others stared in silence until Aditsan spoke again.

  “He expects an answer.”

  The next to speak was Niyol, who looked in the direction of the wind. It blew his long, black hair behind
him, despite the rag he wore twisted around his forehead. Being the oldest, he was more patient with the boy.

  “There is nothing here worth stealing.”

  Aditsan looked out to the round shape of the kiva, whose low stone walls were now visible on one side. Following its line he could see that it would be fifty paces across. From what his mother taught him, the boy knew Niyol was right.

  He explained all this to the Bilagaana, but the cowboy shook his head no.

  “They don't get it. The things buried here are as great as anything the Greeks or Romans made. They've got to be saved.”

  Aditsan was surprised the men had agreed to dig at all. This place belonged to the Anasazi, the enemy ancestors of the Diné. Of course they all knew of its existence, had passed it by many times, and had been told of other, even larger ruins by their elders. Always they were warned not to stay, that spirits of the dead lay buried there. Before he left home, Aditsan's grandmother had given him a necklace of juniper seeds as protection. The other men agreed to dig in the kiva only because they thought no bodies would be buried there.

  “If these pieces are stolen, they'll be lost forever. No one will know where they come from. Tell them that.”

  The boy translated to the workers, knowing it would make them angry.

  “If anything is missing, it is because others come here at night,” Klah said.

  He stood from the pile and walked toward where the sun would fall.

  “No,” the Bilagaana said. “Nobody else knows about this place. Look around. Do you see anybody?”

  In two cycles of the moon no one had passed. Once, a young girl on horseback had stood upon the hill far away and watched them work, but she had not approached nor returned.

  “Those pots have been here hundreds of years waiting for someone to find them.”

  The boy didn't bother to translate, knowing that the men viewed time differently than the Bilagaana, not as something that can be measured or counted.

  Finally, the third of the workers, who was called Tse for his rocky solidity, replied.

  “If he believes we are thieves, we should go.”

  He walked to where their bedding was rolled up, threw a blanket across his shoulders, mounted his horse, and waited for the others to follow. The cowboy eyed them, his face unreadable in the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, then walked to his tent and withdrew a rifle, holding it at his hip in the direction of the Navajo. They ignored him, finished packing, and mounted their horses. The boy considered following the men, but sensing that they were angry and that he was a proxy for the cowboy, he decided to stay. He watched the horses stumble through the thick dust until the men were far enough away not to hear.

  “Calling them thieves is an insult.”

  “Stealing from me is a bigger insult.”

  “How do you know they were stealing?”

  The Bilagaana sat down on a boulder and lay the rifle next to him.

  “Last night I heard something moving through the camp.”

  Aditsan thought back to the restless night he had endured and how to respond.

  “It may be a ringtail or . . .” The boy tried to recall the English name from his lessons in school. “. . . a kie-o-tee.”

  The cowboy clenched his teeth and shook his head no.

  “This morning, the bricks were moved. No animal would do that.”

  He walked to the tent and began removing his food, stuffing it in a saddlebag.

  “Will you follow them?”

  “What for? They're not coming back.”

  “They were afraid of being arrested.”

  “By who? There's no law in this territory. Look around. Do you see Pat Garrett?”

  The boy did not know who this meant, but could see that Will was angry, and walked back to the shade of the mesa. A few minutes later, he awoke to see the cowboy standing over him.

  “Come on,” Will said.

  “Where?”

  “To find those pots.”

  * * * *

  For two days, they rode into the sun toward Gallop, past rocky outcroppings that lay like cow dung on the landscape. They stopped only to sleep and eat their ration of cornmeal and jerky. The cowboy never spoke except to direct the boy over sand drifts and cracked mud. Even where he knew the path was incorrect, the boy said nothing. For they were not friends, despite the weeks they had spent together.

  Although he'd been born under the shadow of Tsé Bit'a'i, at the age of six Aditsan was taken away by Bilagaana missionaries to the school at Fort Collins. For the next six years he had studied with them: English, blacksmithing, and, most importantly, Christianity, for the missionaries told him that he “needed to be saved,” though he did not understand from what. They dressed him in a soldier's uniform, cut off his hair, and beat him when he tried to speak his own language. They sat him at desks next to Utes and Hopis, historic enemies of the Diné, and treated them all as though they were of the same tribe. They even changed his name to Abe, after President Lincoln, because they could not pronounce his given name, Aditsan, which meant listener.

  When he was twelve, and had not seen his family for three years, Fort Collins was converted to a high school focused on agriculture and mechanical arts. The missionaries offered to let Abe stay on with them, but as a teenager Aditsan longed for freedom. He left the school in April 1910, by their calendar, and walked back to his home at Naat'anii Nééz, following the ruts of the wagon trails that had transported him six years earlier. Unsure of the way, he stopped at every intersection and used the sun as his guide; after ten days he reached familiar ground. Along the way, he picked up a rattling cough that bent him over double and left him breathless.

  His family welcomed Aditsan back like the prodigal son in Luke, redressing him in deerskin clothing hand-stitched by his mother and a chief's blanket woven by his aunt, which he kept with him always thereafter. Despite these garments, he experienced the same displacement at home as at school. The hogan where his family lived felt smaller than he remembered, a low earth mound built over bent tree limbs with barely enough room for all five of them to sleep, and nothing like the dormitory of bunk beds where he'd lived at the Indian school. Other Diné who had not lived off the reservation looked at him with suspicion because of his short hair and cough. The only work available was watching the flock of Churro sheep that his aunt kept for her weaving. After six years of strict scheduling at the school, the boy found it tedious standing outside in the endless sun. Under the shadow of Tsé Bit'a'i, he daydreamed about the battles and raiding parties described by his elders.

  So when the cowboy rode into town seeking a navigator and translator, the boy had been captivated. He explained to his family that he would return shortly, that they needed the money the cowboy was offering, and that the isolation would give him time to recover from his illness.

  Now, plodding through arid desert, the boy wondered when he would see his family and home again. They passed by flocks of sheep and lone horseman who stared silently after them. Fields of dry corn grew near the few sources of water. Stray dogs snarled as they approached, then followed them for miles. In the distance, Aditsan saw smoke rising from the chimneys of hogans.

  At the village of Dibé Bito', Aditsan hoped they would stop to rest, but the cowboy merely nodded to the Diné as they emerged from their hogans and coaxed his horse onward. Outside the settlement, they turned toward the setting sun and began to climb into mountain passes stripped of vegetation. Their horses plodded ever slower and stumbled over loose rock slabs and cracked clay. The air smelled of pinyon, even as it froze in Aditsan's nostrils.

  Near the top of the Narbona Pass, they stopped to camp for the night. Running low on food, the boy collected yucca leaves and pinyon nuts for himself, while the cowboy made a fire of desiccated wood and grilled a rabbit he'd shot earlier in the day. The boy offered to share some of his yucca flower with the cowboy, but Will waved it away.

  “I can't eat your kind of food,” he said.

  “It
tastes like potato.”

  The Bilagaana shook his head and prodded the fire, which blew smoke into Aditsan's face and made him cough until his lungs and throat ached.

  “Where do we go?” the boy said.

  “Crystal. I know a trader there who can help us get back those pots.”

  The boy remembered a town called Tonits'ili where his aunt sometimes sold her rugs. He had been there only once, since she usually dealt with other traders in nearby Naat'anii Nééz.

  For the first time, Aditsan began to wonder if he could trust this Bilagaana. He knew nothing of the cowboy's origins, and when asked Will would change the subject. The cowboy never mentioned his family and used the word wife only once in a reference to things past. Religion seemed to play little part in his outlook. Though he wore a cross about his neck, he offered no prayers to it. Wealth seeped from him like rain running off a plateau. He didn't work but had limitless cash for supplies and labor. The only thing about which Will spoke with fondness were the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and the even greater civilization of Chaco Canyon. These ancient sites, which had been dug up by Bilagaana over the past thirty years, were the “heritage of a great culture” that needed preservation, he said.

  * * * *

  That night, not even his heavy, wool chief's blanket could keep Aditsan warm or stave off his coughing. Winds blew over the ridge unchecked by the few, thin trees and carried great storms of sand that coated him. By morning Aditsan felt exhausted, yet the cowboy saddled his horse at dawn, waiting wordlessly as the boy slowly packed. When they were underway, the boy tried to keep himself awake by cataloging all the plants he knew: prickly pear, which he ate but hated, rabbit brush, which his aunt used in dying her rugs, sumac berries for smoking, and the violet flowers of the bee plant.

  Descending to a plain, the boy saw through the pinyon trees a low, flat building like the dormitories at his old school. As they drew closer, he saw a Bilagaana standing in front who dressed like the cowboy, with a broad white hat, a deerskin vest over a white shirt, and heavy boots. He waved to them with his hat and called to Will by name. After tethering their horses, this stranger shook Will's hands and lead them inside.