A Thief of Time jlajc-8

by Tony Hillerman

  Nor was there any sign of looting elsewhere. She shined the light into the single hole dug in the midden pile. It reflected off stones, a scattering of potsherds mixed with earth and what seemed to be more human bones -- part of a foot, she thought, and a vertebra. Beside the pit, on a slab of sandstone, four lower jaws had been placed in a neat row -- three adult, one not much beyond infancy. She frowned at the arrangement, raised her eyebrows. Considered. Looked around her again. It hadn't rained -- at least no rain had blown into this sheltered place -- since this dig had been done. But then when had it rained? Not for weeks at Chaco. But Chaco was almost two hundred miles east and south.

  The night was still. Behind her, she heard the odd piping of the little frogs that seemed to thrive in this canyon wherever water collected. Leopard frogs, Eddie had called them. And she heard the whistle again. The night bird. Closer now. A half-dozen notes. She frowned. A bird? What else could it be? She had seen at least three kinds of lizards on her way from the river -- a whiptail, and a big collared lizard, and another she couldn't identify. They were nocturnal. Did they make some sort of mating whistle?

  At the pool, her flashlight reflected scores of tiny points of light -- the eyes of frogs. She stood watching them as they hopped, panicked by her huge presence, toward the safety of the black water. Then she frowned. Something was strange.

  Not six feet from where she stood, one of them had fallen back in midhop. Then she noticed another one, a half-dozen others. She squatted on her heels beside the frog, inspecting it. And then another, and another, and another.

  They were tethered. A whitish thread--perhaps a yucca fiber--had been tied around a back leg of each of these tiny black-green frogs and then to a twig stuck into the damp earth.

  Eleanor Friedman-Bernal leaped to her feet, flashed the light frantically around the pool. Now she could see the scores of panicked frogs making those odd leaps that ended when a tether jerked them back to earth. For seconds her mind struggled to process this crazy, unnatural, irrational information. Who would… ? It would have to be a human act. It could have no sane purpose. When? How long could these frogs live just out of reach of the saving water? It was insane.

  Just then she heard the whistle again. Just behind her. Not a night bird. No sort of reptile. It was a melody the Beatles had made popular. 'Hey, Jude,' the words began. But Eleanor didn't recognize it. She was too terrified by the humped shape that was coming out of the moonlight into this pool of darkness.

  Chapter Two

  Ť ^ ť

  'ELEANOR FRIEDMAN HYPHEN BERNAL.' Thatcher spaced the words, pronouncing them evenly. 'I'm uneasy about women who hyphenate their names.'

  Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn didn't respond. Had he ever met a hyphenated woman? Not that he could remember. But the custom seemed sensible to him. Not as odd as Thatcher's discomfort with it. Leaphorn's mother, Leaphorn's aunts, all of the women he could think of among his maternal Red Forehead clan, would have resisted the idea of submerging their name or family identity in that of a husband. Leaphorn considered mentioning that, and didn't feel up to it. He'd been tired when Thatcher had picked him up at Navajo Tribal Police headquarters. Now he had added approximately 120 miles of driving to that fatigue. From Window Rock through Yah-Ta-Hey, to Crownpoint, to those final twenty jarring dirt miles to the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Leaphorn's inclination had been to turn down the invitation to come along. But Thatcher had asked him as a favor.

  'First job as a cop since they trained me,' Thatcher had said. 'May need some advice.' It wasn't that, of course. Thatcher was a confident man and Leaphorn understood why Thatcher had called him. It was the kindness of an old friend who wanted to help. And the alternative to going would be to sit on the bed in the silent room and finish sorting through what was left of Emma's things--deciding what to do with them. 'Sure,' Leaphorn had said. 'Be a nice ride.' Now they were in the Chaco visitors' center, sitting on the hard chairs, waiting for the right person to talk to. From the bulletin board, a face stared out at them through dark sunglasses. A THIEF OF TIME, the legend above it said. POT HUNTERS DESTROY AMERICA'S PAST.

  'Appropriate,' Thatcher said, nodding toward the poster, 'but the picture should be a crowd scene. Cowboys, and county commissioners, and schoolteachers and pipeline workers, and everybody big enough to handle a shovel.' He glanced at Leaphorn, looking for a response, and sighed.

  'That road,' he said. 'I've been driving it thirty years now and it never gets any better.' He glanced at Leaphorn again.

  'Yeah,' Leaphorn said. Thatcher had called them ceramic chugholes. 'Never gets wet enough to soften `em up,' he'd said. 'Rains, the bumps just get greasy.'' Not quite true. Leaphorn remembered a night a lifetime ago when he was young, a patrolman working out of the Crownpoint subagency. Melting snow had made the Chaco chugholes wet enough to soften the ceramic. His patrol car had sunk into the sucking, bottomless caliche mud. He'd radioed Crownpoint but the dispatcher had no help to send him. So he'd walked two hours to the R.D. Ranch headquarters. He'd been a newlywed then, worried that Emma would be worried about him. A hand at the ranch had put chains on a four-wheel-drive pickup and pulled him out. Nothing had changed since then. Except the roads were a lifetime older. Except Emma was dead.

  Thatcher had said something else. He had been looking at him, expecting some response, when he should have been watching the ruts.

  Leaphorn had nodded.

  'You weren't listening. I asked you why you decided to quit.'

  Leaphorn had said nothing for a while. 'Just tired.'

  Thatcher had shaken his head. 'You're going to miss it.'

  'No, you get older. Or wiser. You realize it doesn't really make any difference.'

  'Emma was a wonderful woman,' Thatcher had told him. 'This won't bring her back.'

  'No, it won't.'

  'She were alive, she'd say: Joe, don't quit.' She'd say, 'You can't quit living. I've heard her say things just like that.'

  'Probably,' Leaphorn had said. 'But I just don't want to do it anymore.'

  'Okay,' Thatcher drove awhile. 'Change the subject. I think women who have hyphenated names like that are going to be rich. Old-money rich. Hard to work with. Stereotyping, but it's the way my mind works.'

  Then Leaphorn had been saved from thinking of something to say to that by an unusually jarring chughole. Now he was saved from thinking about it again. A medium-sized man wearing a neatly pressed U.S. Park Service uniform emerged from the doorway marked PERSONNEL ONLY. He walked into the field of slanting autumn sunlight streaming through the windows of the visitors' center. He looked at them curiously.

  'I'm Bob Luna,' he said. 'This is about Ellie?'

  Thatcher extracted a leather folder from his jacket and showed Luna a Bureau of Land Management law enforcement badge. 'L. D. Thatcher,' he said. 'And this is Lieutenant Leaphorn. Navajo Tribal Police. Need to talk to Ms. Friedman-Bernal.' He pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket. 'Have a search warrant here to take a look at her place.'

  Luna's expression was puzzled. At first glance he had looked surprisingly young to Leaphorn to be superintendent of such an important park--his round, good-humored face would be perpetually boyish. Now, in the sunlight, the networks of lines around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth were visible. The sun and aridity of the Colorado Plateau acts quickly on the skin of whites, but it takes time to deepen the furrows. Luna was older than he looked.

  'Talk to her?' Luna said. 'You mean she's here? She's come back?'

  Now it was Thatcher's turn to be surprised. 'Doesn't she work here?'

  'But she's missing,' Luna said. 'Isn't that what you're here about? We reported it a week ago. More like two weeks.'

  'Missing?' Thatcher said. 'Whadaya mean missing?'

  Luna's face had become slightly flushed. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Inhaled. Young as he looked, Luna was superintendent of this park, which meant he had a lot of experience being patient with people.

  'Week ago last Wednesday--That
would be twelve days ago, we called in and reported Ellie missing. She was supposed to be back the previous Monday. She hadn't showed up. Hadn't called. She'd gone into Farmington for the weekend. She had an appointment Monday evening, back out here, and hadn't showed up for that. Had another appointment Wednesday. Hadn't been here for that, either. Totally out of character. Something must have happened to her and that's what we reported.'

  'She's not here?' Thatcher said. He tapped the envelope with the search warrant in it against the palm of his hand.

  'Who'd you call?' Leaphorn asked, surprised at himself even as he heard himself asking the question. This was none of his business. It was nothing he cared about. He was here only because Thatcher had wanted him to come. Had wheedled until it was easier, if you didn't care anyway, to come than not to come. He hadn't intended to butt in. But this floundering around was irritating.

  'The sheriff,' Luna said.

  'Which one?' Leaphorn asked. Part of the park was in McKinley County, part in San Juan.

  'San Juan County,' Luna said. 'At Farmington. Anyway, nobody came out. So we called again last Friday. When you showed up, I thought you'd come out to start looking into it.'

  'I guess we are now,' Leaphorn said. 'More or less.'

  'We have a complaint about her,' Thatcher said. 'Or rather an allegation. But very detailed, very specific. About violations of the Antiquities Preservation Protection Act.'

  'Dr. Friedman?' Luna said. 'Dr. Friedman a pot hunter?' He grinned. The grin almost became a chuckle, but Luna suppressed it. 'I think we better go see Maxie Davis,' he said.

  Luna did the talking as he drove them up the road along Chaco Wash. Thatcher sat beside him, apparently listening. Leaphorn looked out the window, at the late afternoon light on the broken sandstone surface of the Chaco cliffs, at the gray-silver tufts of grama grass on the talus slope, at the long shadow of Fajada Butte stretching across the valley. What will I do tonight, when I am back in Window Rock?

  What will I do tomorrow? What will I do when this winter has come? And when it has gone? What will I ever do again?

  Maxie is Eleanor Friedman's neighbor, Luna was saying. Next apartment in the housing units for temporary personnel. And both were part of the contract archaeology team. Helping decide which of the more than a thousand Anasazi sites in Luna's jurisdiction were significant, dating them roughly, completing an inventory, deciding which should be preserved for exploration in the distant future when scientists had new methods to see through time.

  'And they're friends,' Luna said, 'They go way back. Went to school together. Work together now. All that. It was Maxie who called the sheriff.' Today Maxie Davis was working at BC129, which was the cataloging number assigned to an unexcavated Anasazi site. Unfortunately, Luna said, BC129 was on the wrong side of Chaco Mesa -- over by Escavada Wash at the end of a very rocky road.

  'BC129?' Thatcher asked.

  'BC129,' Luna repeated. 'Just a tag to keep track of it. Too many places out here to dream up names for them.'

  BC129 was near the rim of the mesa, a low mound that overlooked the Chaco Valley. A woman, her short dark hair tucked under a cap stood waist-deep in a trench watching. Luna parked his van beside an old green pickup. Even at this distance Leaphorn could see the woman was beautiful. It was not just the beauty of youth and health, it was something unique and remarkable. Leaphorn had seen such beauty in Emma, nineteen then, and walking across the campus at Arizona State University. It was rare and valuable. A young Navajo man, his face shaded by the broad brim of a black felt hat, was sitting on the remains of a wall behind the trench, a shovel across his lap. Thatcher and Luna climbed out of the front seat.

  'I'll wait,' Leaphorn said.

  This was his new trouble. Lack of interest. It had been his trouble since his mind had reluctantly processed the information from Emma's doctor.

  'There's no good way to tell this, Mr. Leaphorn,' the voice had said. 'We lost her. Just now. It was a blood clot. Too much infection. Too much strain. But if it's any consolation, it must have been almost instantaneous.'

  He could see the man's face--pink-white skin, bushy blond eyebrows, blue eyes reflecting the cold light of the surgical waiting room through the lenses of horn-rimmed glasses, the small, prim mouth speaking to him. He could still hear the words, loud over the hum of the hospital air conditioner. It was like a remembered nightmare. Vivid. But he could not remember getting into his car in the parking lot, or driving through Gallup to Shiprock, or any of the rest of that day. He could remember only reviving his thoughts of the days before the operation. Emma's tumor would be removed. His joy that she was not being destroyed, as he had dreaded for so long, by the terrible, incurable, inevitable Alzheimer's disease. It was just a tumor. Probably not malignant. Easily curable. Emma would soon be herself again, memory restored. Happy. Healthy. Beautiful.

  'The chances?' the surgeon had said. 'Very good. Better than ninety percent complete recovery. Unless something goes wrong, an excellent prognosis.'

  But something had gone wrong. The tumor and its placement were worse than expected. The operation had taken much longer than expected. Then infection, and the fatal clot.

  Since then, nothing had interested him. Someday, he would come alive again. Or perhaps he would. So far he hadn't. He sat sideways, legs stretched, back against the door, watching. Thatcher and Luna talked to the white woman in the trench. Unusual name for a woman. Maxie. Probably short for something Leaphorn couldn't think of. The Navajo was putting on a denim jacket, looking interested in whatever was being said, the expression on his long-jawed face sardonic. Maxie was gesturing, her face animated. She climbed out of the trench, walked toward the pickup truck with the Navajo following, his shovel over his shoulder in a sort of military parody. In the deep shadow of the hat brim Leaphorn saw white teeth. The man was grinning. Beyond him, the slanting light of the autumn afternoon outlined the contours of the Chaco Plateau with lines of darkness. The shadow of Fajada Butte stretched all the way across Chaco Wash now. Outside the shadow, the yellow of the cottonwood along the dry streambed glittered in the sun. They were the only trees in a tan-gray-silver universe of grass. (Where had they found their firewood, Leaphorn wondered, the vanished thousands of Old Ones who built these huge stone apartments? The anthropologists thought they'd carried the roof beams fifty miles on their shoulders from forests on Mount Taylor and the Chuskas--an incredible feat. But how did they boil their corn, roast venison, cure their pottery, and warm themselves in winter? Leaphorn remembered the hard labor each fall--his father and he taking their wagon into the foothills, cutting dead pinon and juniper, making the long haul back to their hogan. But the Anasazi had no horses, no wheels.)

  Thatcher and Luna were back at the van now. Thatcher slammed the door on his coat, said something under his breath, reopened it and closed it again. When Luna started the engine the seat belt warning buzzed. 'Seat belt,' Thatcher said.

  Luna fastened the seat belt. 'Hate these things,' he said.

  The green pickup pulled ahead of them, raising dust.

  'We're going down to look at what's-her-name's stuff,' Thatcher said, raising his voice for Leaphorn. 'This Ms. Davis doesn't think hyphenated could be a pot hunter. Said she collected pots, but it was for her work. Scientific. Legitimate. Said Ms… Ms. Bernal hated pot hunters.'

  'Um,' Leaphorn said. He could see the big reservation hat of the young man through the back window of the pickup ahead. Odd to see a Navajo digging in the ruins. Stirring up Anasazi ghosts. Probably someone on the Jesus Road, or into the Peyote Church. Certainly a traditional man wouldn't be risking ghost sickness -- or even worse, the reputation of being a witch -- by digging among the bones. If you believed in the skinwalker traditions, bones of the dead made the tiny missiles that the witches shot into their victims. Leaphorn was not a believer. Those who were were the bane of his police work.

  'She thinks something happened to Ms. Bernal,' Thatcher said, glancing in the rearview mirror at Leaphorn. 'You ought to
have that seat belt on.'

  'Yeah,' Leaphorn said. He fumbled it around him, thinking that probably nothing had happened to the woman. He thought of the anonymous call that had provoked this trip. There would be a connection, somewhere. One thing somehow would link Dr. What's-Her-Name's departure from Chaco with the motive for the call. The departure had led to the call, or something had happened that provoked both.

  'What do you think?' he would have asked Emma. 'Woman takes off for Farmington and drops off the world. Two days later somebody nasty turns her in for stealing pots. It could be she'd done something to make him sore, and knew he'd find out about it and turn her in. So she took off. Or she went to Farmington, made him sore there, and took off. So what you think?'

  And Emma would have asked him three or four questions, and found out how little he knew about the woman, or about anything else to do with this, and then she would have smiled at him and used one of those dusty aphorisms from her Bitter Water Clan.

  'Only yearling coyotes think there's just one way to catch a rabbit,' she'd say. And then she'd say, 'About next Tuesday the woman will call and tell her friends she ran away and got married, and it won't have anything to do with stealing pots.' Maybe Emma would be right and maybe she'd be wrong, and that didn't really matter. It was a game they had played for years. Emma's astute mind working against his own intelligence, honing his thinking, testing his logic against her common sense. It helped him. She enjoyed it. It was fun.

  Had been fun.

  Leaphorn noticed it immediately -- the cold, stagnant air of abandoned places. He was standing beside Thatcher when Thatcher unlocked the door to the apartment of Dr. Friedman-Bernal and pushed it open. The trapped air flowed outward into Leaphorn's sensitive nostrils. He sensed dust in it, and all that mixture of smells which humans leave behind them when they go away.