“Go ahead,” Chee said. “Why don’t you just take charge? I’ll keep looking through files, tracking down dead ends, spinning my wheels. Your new pal at the FBI would rather work with you anyway.”
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have shushed you. I thought Jackson might come up with something important if you pretended to be interested.”
“That ruffled my feathers.”
She stared out the window, watched the lava-formed landscape stretch to the blue rim of mountains to the west, thinking about Ellie who’d disappeared and her involvement in all this. Thinking about her promise to Leaphorn and how far she was from fulfilling it.
“You’re quiet,” Chee said.
“I’m frustrated. Wrapping up this appraisal stuff for the lieutenant should have been as easy as one phone call to EFB. Instead, we get another puzzle.”
Chee waited. “What else?”
Bernie sighed. “I don’t like the way the lieutenant looks in that hospital bed. He’s not getting any better. Seeing him that way also makes me realize I need to spend more time with Mama. And I’m worried about Darleen. I tried to call her a couple times today. No answer.”
She paused so long, it seemed she was done. Then she said, “Mostly, though, it’s the case. Our leads vanish or turn into complications when we examine them twice. It’s so disappointing. It’s driving me crazy. I can’t stop thinking about it, wondering what we’ve missed.”
She reached over and put her hand on his leg, felt the warmth of his body through the denim of his jeans. “And I’m wondering if whoever shot the lieutenant might try to kill you, or Largo, or someone else we work with next. What if the feds are wrong, and the shooter is a crazed cop hater?”
Chee took one hand off the steering wheel and put it around her shoulders. She scooted closer to him, glad that the truck had a bench seat. “You have to let it go, honey,” he said. “We’re doing the best we can.”
“Then there’s you,” she said. “There’s us. Not enough time for that, either. If we didn’t work together, we’d hardly see each other.”
“You’re right,” he said. “When we’re done with this, let’s take a little trip up to Monument Valley. We can stay with my relatives up there. Hike around. Not think about work for a day or two.”
They passed the gaudy lights of Casino Hollywood, another successful Indian attempt to even the score with Spanish and Anglo usurpers and their descendants. At Bernalillo, Chee turned northwest onto US 550 toward Zia Pueblo. After about twenty minutes, he put on the turn signal, slowed, and moved toward the shoulder.
“Something wrong?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Getting sleepy? Want me to drive?”
He shut off the engine. Clicked his seat belt free, then reached over to release hers, too. He climbed out and walked around to open her door. He reached for her hand.
“Mrs. Chee, would you stand here with me and savor the moment?”
The sky was majestic. The Sandia Mountains rose like a rugged blue monolith to the east, glowing in the reflected oranges, vivid reds, and brilliant sunflower hues of the sunset. He put his arm around her as they watched the light change from magenta to smoky rose and dissolve into the soft gray of summer predarkness. “I worry about you,” he said. “The happy girl I married has too much to do. Too many burdens.”
She snuggled in closer to him. “Sunday night, when you came home so late, I told myself everything was fine. But still. And after what happened to Leaphorn . . .”
“Life goes too fast,” he said. “We don’t want to live like crazy Santa Fe people.”
She laughed. “Yeah. We want to live like crazy Shiprock Navajos.”
As he held her, she noticed the gentle flirting light of evening’s first star. So’ Tsoh, “Big Star.” Venus, the goddess of love.
Bernie drove through the twilight into Cuba, a speck of a town known for its restaurant, El Bruno’s, which served some of the best New Mexican food in Sandoval County. They both ordered enchiladas, Bernie’s cheese with green chile and Chee’s with roast beef and Christmas chile—red and green. They had stopped here a few times with the lieutenant after a long day of meetings in Albuquerque. Leaphorn always had a burger, Bernie remembered, with no cheese or onion, and followed up with a piece of pie topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
They walked back to the truck, a nearly full rising moon lighting their way.
“How far is it from here to Chaco Canyon?” Bernie asked. “I’d like to see the place where those darn pots came from. And since you don’t have to be at work early . . .” She let the sentence hang.
“It’s a quick fifty miles to the turnoff, then another slow twenty to the ruins.”
“Do you have camping gear in here?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Two sleeping bags. Even a sack of trail mix we can have for breakfast.”
“Let’s spend the night at Chaco. Get up early, see some of the park before we have to go to work.”
Bernie drove the paved highway to Nageezi. Driving NM 550 after dark used to scare her, with its deadly combination of big trucks, long distances, and occasional random crossroads. The alcoholism that plagues Indian country added to the lethal mix, along with sleepy, inattentive drivers. Then the New Mexico Highway Department widened the road and added rumble ridges to startle drivers who drifted onto the shoulder. Bernie passed trucks hauling cattle, semis on their way west, and a scattering of pickups, station wagons, and SUVs. She made a left when she saw the sign for Chaco Canyon National Historic Site, driving first on pavement and, when it ended, on hard-packed dirt that became washboard and sand. Not another car in sight.
Chee said, “I haven’t been here since the lieutenant and I handled that case where Ellie disappeared the first time. She worked here.”
Bernie nodded. “That the time you rented a helicopter? Did you just put it on your credit card?”
Chee laughed. “That’s a long story. Actually, there were two helicopters. The guy who hurt Ellie was a pilot as well as an archaeologist. He had been digging in the graves of the old ones, and Ellie found out. It was a fascinating case. Leaphorn never talked to me about how he solved it. Except to say he didn’t understand the white culture’s fixation on revenge, getting even.”
“Wasn’t that right after Emma died?” Bernie always wished she’d had a chance to meet Leaphorn’s wife.
“Yes,” Chee said. “He put in for retirement after that, but changed his mind. I think finding Ellie gave him a reason to stay with police work for a few more years.”
“Are you surprised he and Louisa haven’t gotten married?”
“I asked him about that once.” Chee chuckled. “He told me he’d proposed to her and she turned him down. She said she’d already been married and it didn’t agree with her.”
Bernie leaned toward the windshield. “I think I saw something big out there.”
“Yeah,” Chee said. “I got a glimpse of it, too.”
“Makes me edgy,” Bernie said. She had grown up with stories of skinwalkers, the legendary Navajo shape shifters who assumed various animal forms and roamed in the darkness looking for and causing trouble. She vividly recalled the hair-raising tales her grandmother told of the evil they created. The unexpected motion on this still, moon-filled night made her feel like a nervous five-year-old.
“Elk have come back to this area,” Chee said. “Maybe some cougar or even a Mexican gray wolf is following them.”
“I just hope all critters stay out of the road.”
“Oh, no,” Chee said. “What about the cat? We won’t be home to feed her.”
“You fed her this morning,” she said. “She had a full bowl of water, too. You can feed her first thing when we get home.”
“Yeah, I know. But still. Poor little thing.”
Bernie kept the truck at a brisk forty-five miles an
hour to smooth out the washboards. Around the next curve the headlights bounced off the red coats of three lean Herefords, a small herd in the center of the road. She took her foot off the gas and with both hands on the wheel tapped the brake. She steered to the right, and the lights hit a fourth cow, this one walking toward its companions, sauntering toward the spot the truck would have hit if Bernie had not corrected again, moving farther to the right. She felt a front tire against the soft sand at the edge of the road. The cows looked up and took an interest in the approaching truck.
Bernie thought: Truck, don’t roll. Cow, stand still, be calm. All cows, be calm.
She steered farther off the clay washboard, the tires sinking into the deep ridge of sand at the edge of the hard pack. The truck jolted and slowed, and then the back tires found the solid surface below. She gave it a bit of gas and brought it back to the road.
She heard Chee exhale. The headlights flashed on a road sign, a yellow triangle with a black drawing of a cow.
“Thank goodness that sign is there,” he said. “Good driving. Let me take it awhile.”
She stopped the truck, and they both climbed out. Even though the temperature had probably reached the nineties here during the day, the night air felt cool, pleasant, perfect against her sweaty back. Overhead, despite the brightness of the moon, she could see hundreds of stars. Thousands. Argo Navis, Coyote Star in the southern sky, glittering with a whisper of red and orange. The North Star, or Central Fire, Nahookos Baka’. The music of crickets and other creatures, sounds she didn’t recognize, animated the evening.
“My grandmother never liked any of us to be out at night,” she said. “Chindi roaming around, sniffing out trouble.”
Chee stood next to her, studying the stars. “Mine was the same. It took me years to be comfortable in the dark. I still have my moments.”
“That’s just your good cop sense. And who is to say that those grandmothers were wrong?”
They bounced along for another twenty minutes, grateful for lunar illumination and the lack of cattle, elk, feral horses, or even another vehicle on the road. They could see the iconic bulk of Fajada Butte rising in the distance.
“I’ve never seen this place at night,” Chee said. “It’s even more deserted, lonelier, mysterious.”
“Is the mystery still where the people went?”
“That one has been pretty much solved,” he said. “It used to be said that they disappeared. Better research showed that they moved on when conditions here got too hard. No one yet really knows why they settled here in the first place, built these huge structures and miles of wide roadway to connect them. And of course we don’t know what went on in their kivas.”
“I remember my uncle telling me stories about our people and the old ones who lived here,” she said. “How they were related to us Navajos, especially to the Kiiyaa’áanii.”
“I heard how that clan was named for a stone tower somewhere out here. Or was that in Canyon de Chelly? Did your uncle tell you about Pueblo Pintado?” Chee said.
“Probably. I’m sorry I don’t remember everything he said. But I know he told me that without the Diné, there would have been no civilization here.”
They felt and heard the difference as the truck’s tires rolled from dirt to pavement. Bernie noticed a sign: “Chaco Canyon Visitor Center .5 mile.” It would be good to stretch out and get to sleep.
Then she saw something move. “In the road.”
Chee braked.
Large black shapes loomed ahead. The glare from the truck’s headlights flashed in their eyes. Unlike the sleepy cattle, the elk bounded off the roadway and kept going.
“They’re huge,” she said.
“Yeah,” Chee said. “They get bigger here at lower altitude. The ones you’re used to are up in the Chuskas. Smaller there.”
She laughed. “So that’s why the trout swim in mountain streams and whales live in the ocean?”
“Exactly,” he said. “I always knew you were a quick study.”
They pulled into the campground, and Chee switched to parking lights. They passed domed tents next to picnic tables and grills on stands, camping trailers and the boxy shapes of RVs. It took a few minutes to find the first empty spot. They pulled the tarps and sleeping bags from the trunk, trying to be quiet, and spread them out on sandy earth still warm from the June day.
They moved their sleeping bags close together and started to take off their shoes.
“What’s that noise?” Chee kept his voice low.
“Sounds like a cross between a gurgle and sandpaper. I bet it’s frogs or toads or something.”
“I thought they needed water.”
“There must have been some rain here,” Bernie said. The desert was wonderful, she thought, packed full of life waiting quietly under the earth’s surface. Waiting for a drop of moisture to inspire it to spring forth. “I bet we’ll see wildflowers in bloom tomorrow.”
Chee walked to the truck. He returned with their water bottles and handed her hers. “You made me thirsty.”
They climbed into the sleeping bags, and he pulled her close. They watched the moon move across the endless New Mexico night sky until they fell asleep.
Bernie awoke to pearly predawn light. She looked at Chee, his dark eyes open to the sky. “Come run with me,” she whispered. They pulled on their shoes and went to welcome the day. They ran through the campground, where blue, gray, and green nylon tents sprouted like mushrooms, jogging toward the main road beneath the weathered sandstone cliffs. The cool air reverberated with bird calls.
They ran until the sun rose, then circled back and found the campground coming to life. They heard muffled conversations and smelled bacon and coffee. A slot over from where they camped, a woman in a plaid shirt tended a fire beneath a grill. “Good morning, neighbors,” she said as she saw them approach. She picked up the coffeepot by its handle, using a towel as a hot pad. “I’ve got some extra. Join me?”
“Sounds great,” Bernie said. “How kind of you.”
The woman gave Bernie a cup that matched the blue camping pot and poured Chee’s into a red mug and offered them milk and sugar.
“I don’t care where I am,” she said. “I can’t start the day without a hit of this.”
Bernie tried a sip. It was tea, not the coffee she expected. She should have known from the smell. At least it was hot.
“Enjoying the ruins?” Chee asked.
“I come every few years,” the woman said. “My husband used to come with me, always complaining about how far it was from Denver. Now he’s with his new wife, complaining about something else, no doubt.” She chuckled, refilled her own cup. “I’m Karen.”
“I’m Jim. This is Bernie.”
Bernie noticed a pad of paper open to sketches.
“You an artist?”
“Sort of. I make drawings of places I like, a visual journal. Chaco is still my favorite. I did the major ruins a few years ago with Mr. Complainer. Now I’m exploring sites farther out.”
“Are you hiking by yourself?” Chee asked.
Karen nodded.
“Be careful,” he said.
“I was.” She sipped her tea. “I’d offer you breakfast, but I’m not cooking this morning. Packing up and heading for home.”
Bernie said, “We’re off to see the ruins, then we have to get this guy to work.”
“So you live around here? I’m jealous. What do you do?” Karen asked.
“I’m a cop,” Chee said. He turned his head toward Bernie. “She is, too. We’re based in Shiprock.”
“Well, you might find this interesting,” Karen said. “Earlier this week, I was sketching on the trail out at Pueblo Alto. When I parked, there was one other car there. I hiked up, went off to find a place with a view of Pueblo del Arroyo—that’s the ruin closest to the parking lot. I walked up a dry wa
sh and set up in the shade at a great vista point. I lose track of time when I work, so I’m not sure how long I’d been there, but I heard a commotion. It sounded like people arguing. I noticed a couple of hikers on the rim trail. A woman in a long-sleeved shirt, you know, one of those expensive ones to keep out the UV rays? The other one had one of those khaki hats that tie on with a string. The dorky-looking ones that old people wear?”
Chee nodded. Karen continued. “The dorky-hat person was twisting the other person’s arm, kind of pulling her. The woman was resisting, but Dorky Hat seemed to overpower her. Or she just gave in. They moved out of sight, but I could hear them arguing for a while longer. I didn’t think much more about it. I went back to sketching. The light was just right, you know? Well, I stopped to get out my water bottle, and I noticed Dorky Hat down below, running. I thought at the time it was too hot to be running. I finished, packed up, ambled down to my car. The other car—I assume it was theirs—was gone.”
Karen put her mug down. “I figured the woman must have hiked out earlier or later or something, and I’d missed seeing her. But it stuck with me.”
“Did you mention it at the park headquarters?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t want the rangers to think I was a deranged artist. I decided I’d go in this morning and report it, but the office isn’t open yet and I have to get on the road.”
“We’ll tell them about it,” Bernie said. “We’re heading down there in a few minutes anyway. Anything else about that incident you think we ought to mention?”
Karen said, “I heard a loud noise while I was working. I thought it was a car backfiring, or someone setting off a firecracker out here. But now that I’m thinking about it and talking to you guys, it could have been a gunshot.”
Bernie and Chee drove to the visitor center and went to the information desk. They identified themselves to the gray-haired ranger, Andrew Stephen, as police officers with the Navajo Nation. “Is Joe Wakara here today?”
“No. I’m in charge today. Can I help you with something?”
“So even that old geezer gets a day off,” Chee said.
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