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 thenâŚ' 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?'
'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.'