Part 11 (1/2)

”It probably wasn't that way,” Chee said. ”Different people, probably. Some friend called you, not knowing that this madman was coming along.”

”I'm getting to be a jinx,” Janet Pete said. ”Typhoid Mary. A sort of curse.”

Chee waited for the explanation. Janet Pete offered none. She sat, her square shoulders slumped a little, and looked sadly at her hands.

”Why jinx?” Chee said.

”This is the second time this happened,” Janet Pete said, without looking at Chee. ”Last time it was Irma. Irma Onesalt.”

”The woman who got killed over by ... You knew her?”

”Not very well,” Janet said. She produced a humorless laugh. ”A client.”

”I want to hear about it,” Chee said. Leaphorn seemed to think there might be some connection between the Onesalt killing and the Sam and Endocheeney cases. The lieutenant had been very interested when Chee had told him about the letter Endocheeney received from Onesalt's office. It didn't seem likely, but maybe there was some sort of link.

”That's how I heard about Officer Jim Chee,” Janet Pete said, studying him. ”Irma Onesalt said you did her a favor, but she didn't like you.”

”I don't understand,” Chee said. And he didn't. He felt foolish. The only time he'd met Onesalt, the only time he could remember, had been that business about picking up the patient at the clinic-the wrong Begay business.

”She told me you were supposed to deliver a witness to a chapter meeting and you showed up with the wrong man and screwed everything all up. But she said she owed you something. That you'd done her a favor.”

”What?”

”She didn't say. I think it must have been some sort of accident. I remember she said you helped her out and you didn't even know it.”

”I sure didn't,” Chee said. ”And don't.” He waved at the man behind the counter, signaling a need for refills. ”How was she your client?”

”That's pretty vague too,” Janet Pete said. ”She called one day and made an appointment. And when she came by, she mostly just asked a lot of questions.” She paused while her gla.s.s was refilled and then stirred sugar into her tea-two teaspoons.

How did she keep so slim? Chee wondered. Nervous, he guessed. Runs it off. Mary was like that. Always moving.

”I don't think she trusted me. Asked a lot of questions about our relations.h.i.+p at DNA with the tribal bureaucracy and the BIA and all that. When we got that out of the way, she had a lot of questions about what I could find out for her. Financial records, things like that. What was public. What wasn't. How to get doc.u.ments. I asked her what she was working on, and she said she would tell me later. That maybe it wasn't much of anything and then she wouldn't bother me. Otherwise, she would call me back.”

”Did she?”

”Somebody shot her,” Janet Pete said. ”About ten days later.”

”Did you report talking to her?”

”Probably no connection, but finally I did. I checked to find out who was handling the case and then called him and told him-Streib I think it was.” She shrugged. ”The fed at Gallup.”

”Dilly Streib,” Chee said. ”What did he say?”

She made a wry face. ”You know the FBI,” she said. ”Nothing.”

”How about you? Any idea what she was after?”

”Not really.” She sipped the tea, slim fingers around the tall gla.s.s.

A Navajo complexion, Chee thought. Perfect skin. Smooth, glossy. Janet Pete would never have a freckle. Janet Pete wouldn't have a wrinkle until she was old.

”But she said something that I remembered. It made me curious. Let's see if I can remember just how she put it.” She raised a slim hand to her cheek, thinking. ”I asked what she would want to look for and she said maybe some answers to some questions, and I said what questions and she said ... she said how people can look so healthy after they're dead. And then I asked her what that meant. Didn't really ask her exactly, you know. Just looked puzzled, raised my eyebrows or something like that. And she just laughed.”

”How people can look healthy after they're dead?”

”That's it,” she said. ”Maybe not the exact words, but that was the sense of it. Mean anything to you?”

”Absolutely nothing,” Chee said, thinking about it so hard that he forgot the refill, and gulped scalding coffee, and spilled it on his uniform s.h.i.+rt-which was not at all what Jim Chee wanted to do in front of Janet Pete.

> 17 <>

THE FIRST THING Joe Leaphorn noticed when he rolled Emma's old Chevy sedan to a halt in the yard of the Short Mountain Trading Post was that McGinnis had repainted his Sale sign. The sign had been there the first time Leaphorn had seen the place, coming on some long-forgotten a.s.signment when he was a green new patrolman working in the Tuba City subagency. He sat a.s.sessing the pain in his forearm. And remembering. Even then the sign had been weather-beaten. Then, as now, it proclaimed in large block letters: Joe Leaphorn noticed when he rolled Emma's old Chevy sedan to a halt in the yard of the Short Mountain Trading Post was that McGinnis had repainted his Sale sign. The sign had been there the first time Leaphorn had seen the place, coming on some long-forgotten a.s.signment when he was a green new patrolman working in the Tuba City subagency. He sat a.s.sessing the pain in his forearm. And remembering. Even then the sign had been weather-beaten. Then, as now, it proclaimed in large block letters: THIS E ESTABLISHMENT.

FOR S SALE.

INQUIRE W WITHIN.

Around Short Mountain, they said that the store on the rim of Short Mountain Wash had been established sometime before the First World War by a Mormon who, it was said, noticed the lack of compet.i.tion without noticing the lack of customers. It was also said that he had been convinced that the oil prosperity he saw far to the north around Aneth and Montezuma Creek would spread inexorably and inevitably south and west-that the Just Creator must have blessed this area somehow with something. And since the surface itself offered nothing but scanty gra.s.s, scarce wood, and a wilderness of erosion, there surely must be a bountiful treasure of oil below those sterile rocks. But his optimism had finally faltered with the Aneth field, and when his church ruled against multiple wives, he'd opted to join the polygamist faction in its trek to tolerant Mexico. Everyone around Short Mountain Wash seemed to remember the legend. No one remembered the man himself, but those who knew McGinnis marveled at the Mormon's salesmans.h.i.+p.

McGinnis now appeared in his doorway, talking to a departing customer, a tall Navajo woman with a sack of cornmeal draped over her shoulder. While he talked he stared at Emma's Chevy. A strange car out here usually meant a stranger was driving it. Among the scattered people who occupied the emptiness of Short Mountain country, strangers provoked intense curiosity. In Old Man McGinnis, almost anything provoked intense curiosity. Which was one reason Leaphorn wanted to talk to Old Man McGinnis, and had been talking to him for more than twenty years, and had become in some odd way his friend. The other reason was more complicated. It had something to do with the fact that McGinnis, alone, without wife, friend, or family, endured. Leaphorn appreciated those who endured.

But Leaphorn was in no hurry. First he would give his arm a chance to quit throbbing. ”Don't move it,” the doctor had told him. ”If you move it, it's going to hurt.” Which made sense, and was why Leaphorn had decided to drive Emma's sedan-which had automatic transmission. Emma had been delighted to see him when he'd come home from the hospital. She had fussed over him and scolded and seemed the genuine Emma. But then her face had frozen into that baffled look Leaphorn had come to dread. She said something meaningless, something that had nothing at all to do with the conversation, and turned her head in that odd way she'd developed-looking down and to her right. When she'd looked back, Leaphorn was sure she no longer recognized him. The next few moments formed another of those all too familiar, agonizing episodes of confusion. He and Agnes had taken her into the bedroom, Emma talking in a muddled attempt to communicate something, and then lying on the coverlet, looking lost and helpless. ”I can't remember,” she'd said suddenly and clearly, and then she'd fallen instantly asleep. Tomorrow they would keep their appointment with the specialist at the Gallup hospital. Then they would know. ”Alzheimer's,” the doctor would say, and then the doctor would explain Alzheimer's, all that information Leaphorn had already read and reread in ”The Facts About Alzheimer's Disease” sent him by the Alzheimer's a.s.sociation. Cure unknown. Cause unknown. Possibly a virus. Possibly an imbalance in blood metals. Whatever the cause, the effect was disruption of the cells on the outer surface of the brain, destroying the reasoning process, eroding the memory until only the moment of existence remains, until-in merciful finality-there is no longer a signal to keep the lungs breathing, no longer the impulse to keep the heart beating. Cure unknown. For Emma, he had watched this process of unlearning begin. Where had she left her keys? Walking home from the grocery with the car left parked in the grocery lot. Being brought home by a neighbor after she'd forgotten how to find the house they'd lived in for years. Forgetting how to finish a sentence. Who you are. Who your husband is. The literature had warned him what would be coming next. Fairly early, all speech would go. How to talk. How to walk. How to dress. Who is this man who says he is my husband? Alzheimer's, the doctor would say. And then Leaphorn would put aside pretense and prepare Emma, and himself, for whatever would be left of life.

Leaphorn shook his head. Now he would think of something else. Of business. Of whatever it was that was killing the people he was paid to protect.

He had the cast propped against the steering wheel, letting the pain drain away, sorting what he hoped to learn from this visit to Old Man McGinnis. Witchcraft, he guessed. Much as he hated to admit it, he was probably involved again in the sick and unreal business of the skinwalker superst.i.tion. The bits of bone seemed to link Jim Chee, and Roosevelt Bistie, and Dugai Endocheeney. Dilly Streib's call had confirmed that.

”Jim Chee's gossip had it right,” Streib had said. ”They found a little bead down in one of the knife wounds. Thread, little dirt, and a bead. I've got it. I'll have it checked to see if it matches the first one.” And then Streib had asked Leaphorn what it meant, beyond the obvious connection it made between the Endocheeney and Bistie killings and the attempt on Chee. Leaphorn had said he really didn't know.

And he didn't. He knew what it might mean. It might mean that the killer thought Endocheeney was a witch. He might have thought that Endocheeney, the skinwalker, had given him corpse sickness by shooting the prescribed bit of bone into him. Then, instead of relying on an Enemy Way ritual to reverse the witchcraft, he had reversed it himself by putting the lethal bone back into the witch. Or it might mean that the killer in some crazy way thought himself to be a witch and was witching Endocheeney, putting the bone into him at the very moment he killed him with the knife. That seemed farfetched, but then everything about Navajo witchcraft seemed farfetched to Leaphorn. Or it might mean that the killer inserted the notion of witchcraft into this peculiar crime simply to cause confusion. If that had been the goal, the project had succeeded. Leaphorn was thoroughly confused. If only Chee had wormed it out of Bistie. If only Bistie had told them why he was carrying the bone bead in his wallet, what he planned to do with it, why he wanted to kill Endocheeney.

The pain in his arm had subsided. He climbed out of the Chevy, and walked across the hard-packed earth toward the sign that proclaimed the willingness of McGinnis to leave Short Mountain Wash for a better world, and stepped through McGinnis's doorway-out of the glare and heat and into the cool darkness.

”Well, now,” the voice of McGinnis said from somewhere. ”I wondered who it was parked out there. Who sold you that car?”

McGinnis was sitting on a wooden kitchen chair, its back tilted against the counter beside his old black-and-chrome cash register. He was wearing the only uniform Leaphorn had ever seen him wear, a pair of blue-and-white-striped overalls faded by years of was.h.i.+ngs, and under them a blue work s.h.i.+rt like those that convicts wear.

”It's Emma's car,” Leaphorn said.

” 'Cause it's got automatic s.h.i.+ft and you got your arm hurt,” McGinnis said, looking at Leaphorn's cast. ”Old John Manymules was in here with his boys a little while ago and said a cop had got shot over in the Chuskas, but I didn't know it was you.”

”Unfortunately it was,” Leaphorn said.

”The way Manymules was telling it, old fella got killed up there at his hogan and when the police came to see about it, one of the policemen got shot right in the middle.”

”Just the arm.” Leaphorn was no longer surprised by the dazzling speed with which McGinnis acc.u.mulated information, but he was still impressed.

”What brings you out here to the wrong side of the reservation?” McGinnis said. ”Broke arm and all.”