A Thief of Time

There was silence. Elliot's long, handsome face had become stiff and blank. Maxie glanced at him. In the glance Leaphorn read… what? Was it anger? Malice? She turned to Leaphorn. 'Please note the blue blood's lofty contempt for the plebeians. Devanti is definitely a plebe. He sounds like corn pone.'

'And is often wrong,' Elliot said.

Davis laughed. 'There is that,' she said.

'But you give people the right to be wrong if they came out of the cotton patch,' Elliot said. His voice sounded normal, or almost normal, but Leaphorn could see the tension in the line of his jaw.

'More of an excuse for it,' Maxie said, mildly. 'Maybe he overlooked something while he was working nights to feed his family. No tutors to do his digging in the library.'

To that, Randall Elliot said nothing. Leaphorn watched. Where would this tension lead? Nowhere, apparently. Maxie had nothing more to say.

'You two work as a team,' Leaphorn said. 'That right?'

'More or less,' Davis said. 'We have common interests in the Anasazi.'

'Like how?' Leaphorn asked.

'It's complicated. Actually it involves food economics, nutrition tolerances, population sizes, things like that, and you spend a lot more time working on programming statistical projections in the computer than you do digging in the field. Really dull stuff, unless you're weird enough to be into it.' She smiled at Leaphorn. A smile of such dazzling charm that once it would have destroyed him.

'And Randall here,' she added, 'is doing something much more dramatic.' She poked him with her elbow--a gesture that almost made what she was saying mere teasing. 'He is revolutionizing physical anthropology. He is finding a way to solve the mystery, once and for all, of what happened to these people.'

'Population studies,' Elliot said in a low voice. 'Involves migrations and genetics.'

'Rewrites all the books if it works,' Maxie Davis said, smiling at Leaphorn. 'Elliots do not spend their time on small things. In the navy they are admirals. In universities they are presidents. In politics they are senators. When you start at the top you have to aim high. Or everybody is disappointed.'

Leaphorn was uncomfortable. 'It would be a problem,' he said.

'But not one I had,' Maxie Davis said. 'I'm white trash.'

'Maxie never tires of reminding me of the silver spoon in my crib,' Elliot said, managing a grin. 'It doesn't have much to do with finding Ellie, though.'

'But you have a point,' Leaphorn said. 'Dr. Friedman wouldn't have missed that appointment with Lehman without a good reason.'

'Hell, no,' Maxie said. 'That's what I told that idiot at the sheriff's office.'

'Do you know why he was coming? Specifically.'

'She was going to bring him up-to-date,' Elliot said.

'She was going to hit him with a bombshell,' Maxie said. 'That's what I think. I think she finally had it put together.'

There was something in Elliot's expression. Maybe skepticism. Or disapproval. But Davis was enthusiastic.

'What did she tell you?'

'Nothing much, really. But I could just sense it. That things were working out. But she wouldn't say much.'

'It's not traditional,' Elliot said. 'Not among us scientists.'

Leaphorn found himself as interested in what was going on with Elliot as in the thrust of the conversation. Elliot's tone now was faintly mocking. Davis had caught it, too. She looked at Elliot and then back at Leaphorn, speaking directly to him.

'That's true,' she said. 'Before one boasts, one must have done something to boast about.'

She said it in the mildest of voices, without looking at Elliot, but Elliot's face flushed.

'You think she had found something important,' Leaphorn said. 'She didn't tell you anything, but something caused you to think that. Something specific. Can you think what it was?'

Davis leaned back on the couch. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. She laid her hand, in a gesture that looked casual, on Elliot's thigh. She thought.

'Ellie was excited,' she said. 'Happy, too. For a week, maybe a little longer, before she left.' She got up from the couch and walked past Leaphorn into the bedroom. Infinite grace, Leaphorn thought.

'She'd been over in Utah. I remember that. To Bluff, and Mexican Hat and--' Her voice from the bedroom was indistinct.

'Montezuma Creek?' Leaphorn asked.

'Yes, all that area along the southern edge of Utah. And when she came back'--Davis emerged from the bedroom carrying a Folgers Coffee carton--'she had all these potsherds.' She put the box on the coffee table. 'Same ones, I think. At least, I remember it was this box.'

The box held what seemed to Leaphorn to be as many as fifty fragments of pots, some large, some no more than an inch across.

Leaphorn sorted through them, looking for nothing in particular but noticing that all were reddish brown, and all bore a corrugated pattern.

'Done by her potter, I guess,' Leaphorn said. 'Did she say where she got them?'

'From a Thief of Time,' Elliot said. 'From a pot hunter.'

'She didn't say that,' Davis said.

'She went to Bluff to look for pot hunters. To see what they were finding. She told you that.'

'Did she say which one?' Leaphorn asked. Here might be an explanation of how she had vanished. If she had been dealing directly with a pot hunter, he might have had second thoughts. Might have thought he had sold her evidence that would put him in prison. Might have killed her when she came back for more.

'She didn't mention any names,' Davis said.

'Hardly necessary,' Elliot said. 'Looking for pot hunters around Bluff, you'd go see Old Man Houk. Or one of his friends. Or hired hands.'

Bluff, Leaphorn thought. Maybe he would go there and talk to Houk. It must be the same Houk. The surviving father of the drowned murderer. The memories flooded back. Such tragedy burns deep into the brain.

'Something else you might need to know,' Davis said. 'Ellie had a pistol.'

Leaphorn waited.

'She kept it in the same drawer with that purse.'

'It wasn't there,' Leaphorn said.

'No. It wasn't,' Davis said. 'I guess she took it with her.'

Yes, Leaphorn thought. He would go to Bluff and talk to Houk. As Leaphorn remembered him, he was a most unusual man.

Chapter Seven

Ť ^ ť

JIM CHEE SAT on the edge of his bunk, rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, cleared his throat, and considered the uneasiness that had troubled his sleep. Too much death. The disturbed earth littered with too many bones. He put that thought aside. Was there enough water left in the tank of his little aluminum trailer to afford a shower? The answer was perhaps. But it wasn't a new problem. Chee long ago had developed a method for minimizing its effects. He filled his coffeepot ready for perking. He filled a drinking glass as a tooth-brushing reserve and a mustard jar for the sweat bath he was determined to take.

Chee climbed down the riverbank carrying the jar, a paper cup, and a tarpaulin. At his sweat bath in the willows beside the San Juan, he collected enough driftwood to heat his rocks, filled the cup with clean, dry sand, started his fire, and sat, legs crossed, waiting and thinking. No profit in thinking of Janet Pete--that encounter represented a humiliation that could be neither avoided nor minimized. Any way he figured it, the cost would be $900, plus Janet Pete's disdain. He thought instead of last night, of the two bodies being photographed, being loaded into the police van by the San Juan County deputies. He thought of the pots, carefully wrapped in newspapers inside the garbage bags.

When the rocks were hot enough and the fire had burned itself down to coals, he covered the sweat bath frame with the tarp, slid under it. He squatted, singing the sweat bath songs that the Holy People had taught the first clans, the songs to force contamination and sickness from the body. He savored the dry heat, conscious of muscles relaxing, perspiration seeping from his skin, trickling behind his ears, down his back, wet against his flanks. He poured a palmful of water from the jar into his hand and sprinkled it onto the rocks, engulfing himself in an explosion of steam. He inhaled this hot fog deeply, felt his body slick with moisture. He was dizzy now, free. Concern for bones and Buicks vanished in the hot darkness. Chee was conscious instead of his lungs at work, of open pores, supple muscles, of his own vigorous health. Here was his hozro--his harmony with what surrounded him.