A Thief of Time

'Ellie kept her purse in the dresser,' Maxie Davis said. She opened a bottom drawer. 'In here. And I remember seeing her drop that notebook in it when she came in from work.'

Davis extracted a purse and handed it to Leaphorn. It was beige leather. It looked new and it looked expensive. Leaphorn unsnapped it, checked through lipstick, small bottles, package of sugarless gum, Tums, small scissors, odds and ends. No small leather notebook. Emma had three purses--a very small one, a very good one, and a worn one used in the workaday world of shopping.

'She had another purse?' Leaphorn said, making it half a question.

Davis nodded. 'This was her good one.' She checked into the drawer. 'Not here.'

Leaphorn's mild disappointment at not finding the notebook was offset by mild surprise. The wrong purse was missing. Friedman-Bernal had not taken her social purse with her for the weekend. She had taken her working purse.

'I want to take a sort of rough inventory,' Leaphorn said. 'I'm going to rely on your memory. See if we can determine what she took with her.'

There were the disclaimers he expected, from both Maxie Davis and Elliot, that they really didn't know much about Ellie's wardrobe or Ellie's possessions. But within an hour, they had a rough list on the back of an envelope. Ellie had taken no suitcase. She had taken a small canvas gym bag. She'd probably taken no makeup or cosmetics. No skirt was missing. No dress. She had taken only jeans and a long-sleeved cotton shirt.

Maxie Davis sat on the bed, examining her jottings, looking thoughtful. 'No way of knowing about socks or underwear or things like that. But I don't think she took any pajamas.' She motioned toward the chest of drawers. 'There's an old blue pair in there I've seen her wear, and a sort of worn-out checked set, and a fancy new pair. Silk.' Davis looked at him, checking the level of Leaphorn's understanding of such things. 'For company,' she explained. 'I doubt if she would have a fourth set, or bring it out here anyway.'

'Okay,' Leaphorn said. 'Did she have a sleeping bag?'

'Yeah,' Davis said. 'Of course.' She sorted through the things on the closet shelf. 'That's gone too,' she said.

'So she was camping out,' Leaphorn said. 'Sleeping out. Probably nothing social. Probably working. Who did she work with?'

'Nobody, really,' Elliot said. 'It was a one-woman project. She worked by herself.'

'Let's settle down somewhere and talk about that,' Leaphorn said.

They settled in the living room. Leaphorn perched on the edge of a sofa that looked and felt as if it would fold outward into a bed, Davis and Elliot on the Park Service Purchasing Office low-bid overstuffed couch. Much of what Leaphorn heard he already knew from his own studies a lifetime ago at Arizona State. He had considered telling the two about his master's degree and decided against it. The time that might have saved had no value to Leaphorn now. And sometimes something might be gained by seeming to know less than you did. And so Leaphorn listened patiently to basic stuff, mostly from Davis, about how the Anasazi culture had risen on the Colorado Plateau, almost certainly a progression from the small, scattered families of hunters and seed collectors who lived in pit houses, and somehow learned to make baskets, and then the rudiments of agriculture, and then how to irrigate their crops by controlling runoff from rain, and -- probably in the process of caulking baskets with fire-dried mud to make them waterproof -- how to make pottery.

'Important cultural breakthrough,' Elliot inserted. 'Improved storage possibilities. Opened a door to art.' He laughed. 'Also gave anthropology something a lot more durable than baskets to hunt, and measure, and study, and all that. But you already know a lot about this, don't you?'

'Why do you say that?' Leaphorn never allowed a subject to shift him from the role of interrogator unless Leaphorn wanted to be shifted.

'Because you don't ask any questions,' Elliot said. 'Maxie isn't always perfectly clear. Either you're not interested in this background, or you already know it.'

'I know something about it,' Leaphorn said. 'You've said Friedman's interest was in pottery. Apparently she was interested mostly in one kind of pot. Pots which have a kind of corrugated finish. Probably some other revealing details. Right?'

'Ellie thought she had identified one specific potter,' Elliot said. 'A distinctive individual touch.'

Leaphorn said nothing. That sounded mildly interesting. But--even given the intense interest of anthropologists in the Anasazi culture and its mysterious fate--it didn't seem very important. His expression told Elliot what he was thinking.

'One potter. Dead probably seven hundred and fifty years.' Elliot put his boots on the battered coffee table. 'So what's the big deal? The big deal is, Ellie knows where he lived. Out there at BC57, across the wash from Pueblo Bonito, because she found a lot of his pots there broken in the process of being made. Must have been where he worked…'

'She,' Maxie Davis said. 'Where she worked.'

'Okay, she.' Elliot shook his head, regaining his chain of thought, showing no sign of irritation. It was part of a game they played, Leaphorn thought. Elliot's boots were dusty, scarred, flat-heeled, practical. A soft brown leather, perfectly fitted, extremely expensive.

Davis was leaning forward, wanting Leaphorn to understand this. 'Nobody before had ever found a way to link the pot with the person who made it--not before Ellie began noticing this peculiar technique repeated in a lot of those BC57 pots. She had already noticed it in a couple of others from other places--and now she had found the source. Where they came from. And she was lucky in another way. Not only was this potter prolific, she was good. Her pots traded around. Ellie tracked one back to the Salmon Ruins over on the San Juan, and she thinks one came out of a burial near the White House Ruin in Canyon de Chelly, and…'

If Elliot had any objection to Maxie Davis's commandeering his story, his face hadn't showed it. But now he said: 'Get to the important point.'

Maxie looked at him. 'Well, she's not sure about that,' she said.

'Maybe not, but this BC57 site was one of the last ones built--just before everybody disappeared. They dated a roof beam to 1292, and some of the charcoal in what might have been a kiln fire to 1298. So she was working just about the time they turned out the lights here and walked away. And Ellie is beginning to think she might be able to pin down where she went.'

'That's the really big deal out here.' Davis waved her arms. 'Where'd the Anasazi go? The big huge mystery that all the magazine writers write about.'

'Among a couple of other big questions,' Elliot said. 'Like why they built roads when they didn't have wheels, or pack animals, and why they left, and why they lived in this place in the first place with so damn little wood, or water, or good land, and…' Elliot shrugged. 'The more we learn, the more we wonder.'

'This man who was coming out to see her the week after she disappeared, do you know who he was?'

'Lehman,' Davis said. 'He came.' She smiled ruefully. 'Plenty sore about it. He came on a Wednesday and it had rained Tuesday night and you know how that road gets.'

'And he's…' Leaphorn began to ask.

'He's the hotshot in Ellie's field,' Elliot said. 'I think he was chairman of her dissertation committee when she got her doctorate at Madison. Now he's a professor at University of New Mexico. Two or three books on Mimbres, and Hohokam, and Anasazi pottery evolution. Top guru in the ceramics field.'

'Ellie's equivalent of our Devanti,' Davis said. 'She pretty well had to persuade Lehman she knew what she was talking about. Like in migrations, Elliot and I have to deal with our top honcho.'

'Doctor Delbert Devanti,' Elliot said. 'Arkansas's answer to Einstein.' The tone was sardonic.

'He's proved some things,' Maxie Davis said, her voice flat. 'Even if he didn't go to Phillips Exeter Academy, or Princeton.'