A Thief of Time jlajc-8

by Tony Hillerman

  'Who knows?' Leaphorn said. 'Maybe so. You have any more specific idea where she took your kayak?'

  'Nothing more than I said. She borrowed it

  before and went down into the canyons. Just poking around in the ruins looking at the potsherds. I'd guess she did it again.'

  'Any idea how far down?'

  'She'd ask me to pick her up the next evening at the landing upstream from the bridge at Mexican Hat. Only place to get off the river for miles. So it would have to be between Sand Island and Hat.'

  Her car too could be found between Sand Island and Mexican Hat, Leaphorn was sure. She would have to have hauled the kayak within dragging distance of the river. But there was no reason now to look for the car.

  'That narrows it down quite a bit,' Leaphorn said, thinking Ellie's trips were into the area Etcitty had described in his falsified documentation, the area Amos Whistler had pointed to in his talk with Chee. He would find a boat and go looking for Arnold's kayak. Maybe, when he found it, he would find Eleanor Friedman, and what Harrison Houk meant in that unfinished note. '… shes still alive up.' But first he wanted a look at that barn.

  Irene Musket came to the door at Harrison Houk's old house. She recognized him instantly and let him in. She was a handsome woman, as Leaphorn remembered, but today she looked years older, and tired. She told him about finding the note, about finding the body. She confirmed that she had found absolutely nothing missing from the house. She told him nothing he didn't already know. Then she walked with him up the long slope toward the barn.

  'It happened right in here,' she said. 'Right in that horse stall there. The third one.'

  Leaphorn looked back. From the barn you could see the driveway, and the old gate with its warning bell. Only the front porch was obscured. Houk might well have seen his killer coming for him.

  Irene Musket stood at the barn door. Kept out, perhaps, by her fear of the chindi Harrison Houk had left behind him and the ghost sickness it would cause her. Or perhaps by the sorrow that looking at the spot where Houk had died would bring to her.

  Leaphorn's career had made him immune to the chindi of the dead, immune through indifference to all but one of them. He walked out of the wind and into the dimness.

  The floor of the third horse stall had been swept clean of the old alfalfa and prairie-hay straw that littered the rest of the place. That debris now formed a pile in one corner, where the Utah crime lab crew had dumped it after sorting through it. Leaphorn stood on the dirt packed by a hundred years of hooves and wondered what he had expected to find. He walked across the barn floor, inspected the piles of alfalfa bales. It did, indeed, seem that Houk might have been rearranging them to form a hiding place. That touched him oddly, but taught him nothing. Nothing except that Houk, the hard man, the scoundrel, had set aside a chance to hide to make time to leave him a message. 'Tell Leaphorn shes still alive up' -- up the canyon? That seemed likely. Up which canyon? But why would Houk have put his own life at greater risk to help a woman who must have been nothing more than one of his many customers? It seemed out of character. Not the Houk he knew about. That Houk's only weakness seemed to have been a schizophrenic son, now long dead.

  Outside the barn the wind shifted direction slightly and howled through the cracks, raising a small flurry of straw and dust on the packed floor and bringing autumn smells to compete with the ancient urine. He was wasting his time. He walked back toward where Irene Musket was standing, checking the stalls as he passed. In the last one, a black nylon kayak was leaning against the wall.

  Bo Arnold's kayak. Leaphorn stared at it. How could it have gotten here? And why? It was inflated, standing on one pointed end in the stall corner. He walked in for a closer look. Of course it wasn't Arnold's kayak. He had described his as dark brown, with what he called 'white racing stripes.'

  Leaphorn knelt beside it, inspecting it. It seemed remarkably clean for this dusty barn. He felt inside, between the rubber-coated nylon of its bottom and the inflated tubes that formed its walls, hoping to find something telltale left behind. His fingers encountered paper. He pulled it out. The crumpled, water-stained wrapper from a Mr. Goodbar. He ran his fingers down toward the bow.

  Water.

  Leaphorn pulled out his hand and examined his wet fingers. Whatever water had been left in the kayak had drained down into this crevice. How long could it have been there? How long would evaporation take in this no-humidity climate?

  He walked to the door.

  'The inflated kayak in there. You know when it was used?'

  'I think four days ago,' Irene Musket said.

  'By Mr. Houk?'

  She nodded.

  'His arthritis didn't bother him?'

  'His arthritis hurt all the time,' she said. 'It

  didn't keep him from that boat.' She sounded as if this represented an argument lost, an old hurt.

  'Where did he go? Do you know?'

  She made a vague gesture. 'Just down the river.'

  'Do you know how far?'

  'Not very far. He would have me pick him up down there near Mexican Hat.'

  'He did this a lot?'

  'Every full moon.'

  'He went down at night? Late?'

  'Sometimes he would watch the ten o'clock news and then we would go down to Sand Island. We'd make sure nobody was there. Then we'd put it in.' The wind whipped dust around Mrs. Musket's ankles and blew up her long skirt. She held it down, pressed back against the barn door. 'We would put it in, and then the next morning, I would drive the pickup down to that landing place upstream from Mexican Hat and I'd wait for him there. And then…' She paused, swallowed. Stood a moment, silently. Leaphorn noticed her eyes were wet, and looked away. Hard as he was, Harrison Houk had left someone to grieve for him.

  'Then we would drive back to the house together,' she concluded.

  Leaphorn waited awhile. When he had given her enough time, he asked: 'Did he tell you what he did when he went down the river?'

  The silence lasted so long that Leaphorn wondered if his question had been lost in the wind. He glanced at her.

  'He didn't tell me,' she said.

  Leaphorn thought about the answer.

  'But you know,' he said.

  'I think so,' she said. 'One time he told me not to guess. And he said, `If you guess anyway, then don't ever tell anybody!' '

  'Do you know who killed him?'

  'I don't,' she said. 'I wish they would have killed me, instead.'

  'I think we will find the one who did it,' Leaphorn said. 'I really do.'

  'He was a good man. People talked about how mean he was. He was good to good people and just mean to the mean ones. I guess they killed him for that.'

  Leaphorn touched her arm. 'Would you help me put the kayak in? And then tomorrow, drive my truck down to Mexican Hat and pick me up?'

  'All right,' Irene Musket said.

  'First I have to make a telephone call. Can I use your telephone?'

  He called Jim Chee from Houk's house. It was after six. Chee had gone home for the day. No telephone, of course. Typical of Chee. He left Houk's number for a call back.

  They slid the kayak into the back of his truck, with its double-bladed paddle and Houk's worn orange jacket, tied it down, and drove south to Sand Island launch site. Bureau of Land Management signs there warned that the river was closed for the season, that a license was required, that the San Juan catfish was on the extinction list and taking it was prohibited.

  With the kayak in the water, Leaphorn stood beside it, feet in the cold water, doing a last-minute inventory of possibilities. He wrote Jim Chee's name and the Shiprock police station number on one of his cards and gave it to her.

  'If I don't meet you by noon tomorrow down at Mexican Hat, I hope you will call this man for me. Tell him what you told me about Mr. Houk and this kayak. And that I took it down the river.'

  She took it.

  He climbed into the kayak.

  'You know how to run that thing?'r />
  'Years ago I did. I think I'll remember.'

  'Well, put on the life jacket and buckle it. It's easy to turn over.'

  'Right,' Leaphorn said. He did it.

  'And here,' she said. She handed him a heavy canteen with a carrying strap and a plastic bread sack. 'I got something for you to eat out of the kitchen,' she said.

  'Well, thanks,' Leaphorn said, touched.

  'Be careful.'

  'I can swim.'

  'I didn't mean the river,' Mrs. Musket said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ť ^ ť

  TRAILERS ARE POOR PLACES to sleep on those nights when seasons are changing on the Colorado Plateau. All night Jim Chee's narrow bed quivered as the gusts shook the thin walls of his home. He slept poorly, wrestling with the problem of Elliot's application while he was awake, dreaming of jawbones when he dozed. He rose early, made coffee, and found four Twinkies abandoned in his otherwise empty bread box to round out his breakfast. It was his day off, and time to buy groceries, do the laundry, check three overdue books back into the Farmington library. He'd refilled his water reservoir, but his butane supply was low. And he needed to pick up a tire he'd had repaired. And, come to think of it, drop by the bank and see about the $18.50 difference between his checkbook balance and their records. Instead he looked in his notebook and found the number Dr. Pedwell had given him for the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe. 'That would have an MLA number,' Pedwell had told him when he'd asked if Elliot had also applied to excavate the site where Etcitty and Nails had been killed. 'It's in New Mexico, and apparently on public land. If it's on a Navajo section, we record it. If it's not, Laboratory of Anthropology handles it.'

  'Sounds confusing,' Chee had said.

  'Oh, it is,' Pedwell had agreed. 'It's even more confusing than that.' And he'd started explaining other facets of the numbering system, the Chaco numbers, the Mesa Verde, until Chee had changed the subject. Now he realized he should have asked for a name at Santa Fe.

  He made the call from the station, drawing a surprised look from the desk clerk, who knew he was off. And it took three transfers before he connected with the woman who had access to the information he needed. She had a sweet, distinct middle-aged voice.

  'It's easier if you know the MLA number,' she said. 'Otherwise I have to check through the applicant files.'

  And so he waited.

  'Dr. Elliot has eleven applications on file. You want all of them?'

  'I guess so,' Chee said, not knowing exactly what to expect.

  'MLA 14,751. MLA 19,311. MLA--'

  'Just a moment,' Chee said. 'Do they have site locations? What county they're in. Like that?'

  'On our map, yes.'

  'The one I'm interested in would be in San Juan County, New Mexico.'

  'Just a minute,' she said. The minute passed. 'Two of them. MLA 19,311 and MLA 19,327.'

  'Could you pin the location down any more?'

  'I can give you the legal description. Range, township, and section.' She read them off.

  'Was he issued the permits?'

  'Turned down,' she said. 'They're saving those sites to be dug sometime in the future when they have better technology. It's hard to get permission to dig them now.'

  'Thanks a lot,' Chee said. 'It's exactly what I need.'

  And it was. When he checked the legal description on the U.S. Geological Survey map in Captain Largo's office, MLA 19,327 proved to share range, township, and section with the oil well pump beyond which he'd found the U-Haul truck.

  He had less luck trying to call Chaco Canyon. The phone was suffering some sort of satellite relay problem that produced both fade-out and echo. Randall Elliot was out of reach at one of the down-canyon ruins. Maxie Davis was somewhere. Luna was doing something, unintelligible to Chee, at Pueblo Bonito.

  Chee glanced at his watch. He calculated the distance to Chaco. About a hundred miles. He remembered the condition of that last twenty-five miles of dirt. He groaned. Why was he doing this on his day off? But he knew why. Much as Leaphorn irritated him, he wanted the man to pat him on the head. To say, 'Good job, kid.' Might as well admit it. Also he might as well admit another fact. He was excited now. That grotesque line of lower jaws suddenly seemed to mean something. Perhaps something important.

  The strange weather slowed him a little, rocking his truck when he stretched the limit on the fast pavement of N.M. 44 across the sagebrush flats of Blanco Plateau. End of autumn, he thought. Winter coming out of the west. Behind him over Colorado's La Plata range, the sky was dark, and when he left the pavement at Blanco Trading Post, he had a direct side wind to deal with--and the tiring business of steering against it as he fought chugholes and ruts. And tumbleweeds and blowing sand chased him across the parking lot at the Chaco visitors' center.

  The woman he'd talked to was at the desk, looking trim in her park ranger uniform and glad to have Chee break the boredom of a day, and a season, that brought few visitors. She showed him on the Chaco map how to get to Kin Kletso, the site where Randall Elliot would be working today, 'if he can work in this wind.' Where Maxie Davis was seemed a mystery, 'but maybe she'll be working with Randall.' Luna had driven into Gallup and wouldn't be back until tonight.

  Chee went back to his truck, leaning into the wind, squinching his eyes against the dust. At Kin Kletso, he found a Park Service truck parked and an employee sitting in the shelter of one of the walls.

  'Looking for Dr. Randall Elliot,' Chee said. 'Did I miss him?'

  'A mile,' the man said. 'He didn't show up today.'

  'You know where…'

  The man waved a dismissive wave. 'No idea,' he said. 'He's independent as a hog on ice.'

  Maybe he was home. Chee drove to the temporary housing. Nothing in the parking area. He knocked at the door marked Elliot. Knocked again. Walked around the building to the back. Randall Elliot hadn't pulled the drapes across his sliding-glass patio door. Chee peered into what must be the living room. Elliot seemed to have converted it into a work area. Sawhorses supported planks on which cardboard cartons were lined. Those that Chee could see into seemed to contain bones. Skulls, ribs, jawbones. Chee pressed his forehead against the cool glass, shading his eyes with both hands, straining to see. Against the wall, boxes were lined. Books on shelves against the kitchen partition. No sign of Elliot.

  Chee glanced down at the lock that held the door. Simple enough. He looked around him. No one visible. He dug out his penknife, opened the proper blade, slipped the catch.

  Once inside he closed the drapes and turned on the light. He hurried through a quick search of the bedroom, kitchen, and bath, touching hardly anything and using his handkerchief to avoid leaving prints. This made him nervous. Worse, it made him feel dirty and ashamed.

  But back in the living room he lingered over the boxes of bones. They seemed to be arranged in groups, tagged by site. Chee checked the tags, looking for either N.R. 723 or MLA 19,327. On the makeshift table by the kitchen door he found the N.R. number.

  The tag was tied through the eye socket of a skull, number on one side, notes on the other. They seemed to be in some sort of personal shorthand, with numbers in millimeters. Bone thickness, Chee guessed, but the rest of it meant nothing to him.

  The N.R. 723 box contained four lower jaws, one apparently from a child, one broken. He examined them. Each contained an extra molar, or a trace of one, on the right side. Each had two of the small holes low in the bones through which Elliot's petition had stated nerves and blood vessels grow.

  Chee put the jaws back in the box exactly as he had found them, wiped his fingers on his pants legs, and sat down to sort out the significance of this. It seemed clear enough. Elliot's genetic tracking had led him to the same site as had Eleanor Friedman-Bernal's pottery chase. No. That didn't state it accurately. In their mutual fishing expeditions, both had struck pay dirt in the same ruins. Perhaps, Chee thought, one of the jawbones belonged to the potter.

  He thought about site MLA 19,327, the li
ned jawbones, the missing plastic sack from the box of thirty. Thinking about that, he made another search of the apartment. He found a black plastic sack in the bottom of a wastebasket in the kitchen. He carefully set aside the table scraps and wadded papers that had buried it and put it on the counter beside the sink. The top was tied in a knot. Chee untied it and examined the plastic. SUPERTUFF was printed around the top. The missing sack.

  Inside it were seven human mandibles, two of them child-sized, two broken. Chee counted teeth. Each had seventeen--one more than standard--and in each the superfluous molar was second from the back and out of line.

  He put the sack back in the wastebasket, recovered it with waste, and picked up the telephone.

  No, the woman at the visitors' center said, Elliot hadn't reported in. Nor had Luna or Maxie Davis.

  'Can you get me Mrs. Luna?'

  'Now that's easy,' she said.

  Mrs. Luna answered on the third ring and remembered Chee instantly. How was he? How was Mr. Leaphorn? 'But this isn't what you called about.'

  'No,' Chee said. 'I came out to talk to Randall Elliot but he's away somewhere. I remembered you said he went to Washington last month. You said his travel agent called and you took the message. Do you remember the name of the agency?'

  'Bolack's,' Mrs. Luna said. 'I think just about everybody out here uses Bolack's.'

  Chee called Bolack Travel in Farmington.

  'Navajo Tribal Police,' he told the man who answered. 'We need to confirm the dates of an airline ticket. Don't know the airline, but the tickets were issued by your agency to Randall Elliot, address at Chaco Canyon.'

  'You know about when? This year? This month? Yesterday?'

  'Probably late last month,' Chee said.

  'Randall Elliot,' the man said. 'Randall Elliot. Let's see.' Chee heard the clacking sound of a computer keyboard. Silence. More clacking. More silence.

  'That's funny,' the man said. 'We issued them, but he didn't pick them up. It was an October eleven departure, with an October sixteen return. Mesa from Farmington to Albuquerque, American from Albuquerque to Washington. You just need the dates?'