Thatcher had said something else. He had been looking at him, expecting some response, when he should have been watching the ruts.
Leaphorn had nodded.
'You weren't listening. I asked you why you decided to quit.'
Leaphorn had said nothing for a while. 'Just tired.'
Thatcher had shaken his head. 'You're going to miss it.'
'No, you get older. Or wiser. You realize it doesn't really make any difference.'
'Emma was a wonderful woman,' Thatcher had told him. 'This won't bring her back.'
'No, it won't.'
'She were alive, she'd say: Joe, don't quit.' She'd say, 'You can't quit living. I've heard her say things just like that.'
'Probably,' Leaphorn had said. 'But I just don't want to do it anymore.'
'Okay,' Thatcher drove awhile. 'Change the subject. I think women who have hyphenated names like that are going to be rich. Old-money rich. Hard to work with. Stereotyping, but it's the way my mind works.'
Then Leaphorn had been saved from thinking of something to say to that by an unusually jarring chughole. Now he was saved from thinking about it again. A medium-sized man wearing a neatly pressed U.S. Park Service uniform emerged from the doorway marked PERSONNEL ONLY. He walked into the field of slanting autumn sunlight streaming through the windows of the visitors' center. He looked at them curiously.
'I'm Bob Luna,' he said. 'This is about Ellie?'
Thatcher extracted a leather folder from his jacket and showed Luna a Bureau of Land Management law enforcement badge. 'L. D. Thatcher,' he said. 'And this is Lieutenant Leaphorn. Navajo Tribal Police. Need to talk to Ms. Friedman-Bernal.' He pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket. 'Have a search warrant here to take a look at her place.'
Luna's expression was puzzled. At first glance he had looked surprisingly young to Leaphorn to be superintendent of such an important park--his round, good-humored face would be perpetually boyish. Now, in the sunlight, the networks of lines around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth were visible. The sun and aridity of the Colorado Plateau acts quickly on the skin of whites, but it takes time to deepen the furrows. Luna was older than he looked.
'Talk to her?' Luna said. 'You mean she's here? She's come back?'
Now it was Thatcher's turn to be surprised. 'Doesn't she work here?'
'But she's missing,' Luna said. 'Isn't that what you're here about? We reported it a week ago. More like two weeks.'
'Missing?' Thatcher said. 'Whadaya mean missing?'
Luna's face had become slightly flushed. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Inhaled. Young as he looked, Luna was superintendent of this park, which meant he had a lot of experience being patient with people.
'Week ago last Wednesday--That would be twelve days ago, we called in and reported Ellie missing. She was supposed to be back the previous Monday. She hadn't showed up. Hadn't called. She'd gone into Farmington for the weekend. She had an appointment Monday evening, back out here, and hadn't showed up for that. Had another appointment Wednesday. Hadn't been here for that, either. Totally out of character. Something must have happened to her and that's what we reported.'
'She's not here?' Thatcher said. He tapped the envelope with the search warrant in it against the palm of his hand.
'Who'd you call?' Leaphorn asked, surprised at himself even as he heard himself asking the question. This was none of his business. It was nothing he cared about. He was here only because Thatcher had wanted him to come. Had wheedled until it was easier, if you didn't care anyway, to come than not to come. He hadn't intended to butt in. But this floundering around was irritating.
'The sheriff,' Luna said.
'Which one?' Leaphorn asked. Part of the park was in McKinley County, part in San Juan.
'San Juan County,' Luna said. 'At Farmington. Anyway, nobody came out. So we called again last Friday. When you showed up, I thought you'd come out to start looking into it.'
'I guess we are now,' Leaphorn said. 'More or less.'
'We have a complaint about her,' Thatcher said. 'Or rather an allegation. But very detailed, very specific. About violations of the Antiquities Preservation Protection Act.'
'Dr. Friedman?' Luna said. 'Dr. Friedman a pot hunter?' He grinned. The grin almost became a chuckle, but Luna suppressed it. 'I think we better go see Maxie Davis,' he said.
Luna did the talking as he drove them up the road along Chaco Wash. Thatcher sat beside him, apparently listening. Leaphorn looked out the window, at the late afternoon light on the broken sandstone surface of the Chaco cliffs, at the gray-silver tufts of grama grass on the talus slope, at the long shadow of Fajada Butte stretching across the valley. What will I do tonight, when I am back in Window Rock?
What will I do tomorrow? What will I do when this winter has come? And when it has gone? What will I ever do again?
Maxie is Eleanor Friedman's neighbor, Luna was saying. Next apartment in the housing units for temporary personnel. And both were part of the contract archaeology team. Helping decide which of the more than a thousand Anasazi sites in Luna's jurisdiction were significant, dating them roughly, completing an inventory, deciding which should be preserved for exploration in the distant future when scientists had new methods to see through time.
'And they're friends,' Luna said, 'They go way back. Went to school together. Work together now. All that. It was Maxie who called the sheriff.' Today Maxie Davis was working at BC129, which was the cataloging number assigned to an unexcavated Anasazi site. Unfortunately, Luna said, BC129 was on the wrong side of Chaco Mesa -- over by Escavada Wash at the end of a very rocky road.
'BC129?' Thatcher asked.
'BC129,' Luna repeated. 'Just a tag to keep track of it. Too many places out here to dream up names for them.'
BC129 was near the rim of the mesa, a low mound that overlooked the Chaco Valley. A woman, her short dark hair tucked under a cap stood waist-deep in a trench watching. Luna parked his van beside an old green pickup. Even at this distance Leaphorn could see the woman was beautiful. It was not just the beauty of youth and health, it was something unique and remarkable. Leaphorn had seen such beauty in Emma, nineteen then, and walking across the campus at Arizona State University. It was rare and valuable. A young Navajo man, his face shaded by the broad brim of a black felt hat, was sitting on the remains of a wall behind the trench, a shovel across his lap. Thatcher and Luna climbed out of the front seat.
'I'll wait,' Leaphorn said.
This was his new trouble. Lack of interest. It had been his trouble since his mind had reluctantly processed the information from Emma's doctor.
'There's no good way to tell this, Mr. Leaphorn,' the voice had said. 'We lost her. Just now. It was a blood clot. Too much infection. Too much strain. But if it's any consolation, it must have been almost instantaneous.'
He could see the man's face--pink-white skin, bushy blond eyebrows, blue eyes reflecting the cold light of the surgical waiting room through the lenses of horn-rimmed glasses, the small, prim mouth speaking to him. He could still hear the words, loud over the hum of the hospital air conditioner. It was like a remembered nightmare. Vivid. But he could not remember getting into his car in the parking lot, or driving through Gallup to Shiprock, or any of the rest of that day. He could remember only reviving his thoughts of the days before the operation. Emma's tumor would be removed. His joy that she was not being destroyed, as he had dreaded for so long, by the terrible, incurable, inevitable Alzheimer's disease. It was just a tumor. Probably not malignant. Easily curable. Emma would soon be herself again, memory restored. Happy. Healthy. Beautiful.
'The chances?' the surgeon had said. 'Very good. Better than ninety percent complete recovery. Unless something goes wrong, an excellent prognosis.'