Leaphorn made a megaphone of his hands. 'Eleanor,' he shouted. 'Ellie. Ellie.' Then he listened.
Nothing. Outside the alcove, the wind made whimpering sounds.
He tried again. Again, nothing.
The Anasazi had built their structure on a stone shelf above the pool. About a dozen small rooms once, Leaphorn estimated, with part of it at two levels. He skirted around the pool, climbed over the tumbled walls, peered into the still-intact rooms. Nothing. He walked back to the pool, puzzled. Where to look next?
At the edge of the alcove, a worn set of footholds had been cut into the sandstone--a climb-way leading to the shelf above the alcove. Perhaps that led to another site. He walked out of the alcove around the cliff to the brushy hump. Immediately he saw it had been plundered. A ditch had been dug along the outside wall. Bones were scattered everywhere. The digging had been recent--hardly any rain since the earth was disturbed. Leaphorn inspected it. Was this why Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had slipped away from Chaco, slipped down the San Juan? To search this site for her polychrome pots? So it would seem. And what had happened then? What had interrupted her? He checked in the disturbed earth for shards and collected a handful. They might be the sort that interested her. He couldn't be sure. He looked down in the trench. Jutting from the earth was part of a pot. And another. In the bottom were a half-dozen shards, two of them large. Why had she left them there? Then he noticed an oddity. Among the bones littering the trench he saw no skulls. On the earth outside more than a dozen were scattered. None had jawbones. Natural, probably. The mandible would be attached only by muscle and gristle, which wouldn't survive an eight-hundred-year burial. Then where were the missing mandibles? He saw five of them together beside the trench, as if discarded there. It reminded him of the jawbones lined so neatly at the dig site where Etcitty and Nails had died. But where was the woman who had dug the trench? He went back to the pool and inspected the footholds. Then he started climbing, thinking as he did that he was far too old for this. Fifty feet up the cliff, he was aware of two facts. These Anasazi footholds were in regular current use, and he was a damn fool to have attempted the climb. He clung to the stone, reach-
ing blindly for the next handhold, wondering how many remained. Finally the slope eased. He looked up. He had done it. His head was almost even with the top. He pulled himself up, his upper body over the edge.
Standing there, watching him, was a man. He wore a beard cut straight across, a nylon jacket so new it still had the creases of its folds, a pair of tattered jeans, and moccasins that seemed to have been sewn together from deer hide.
'Mr. Leaphorn,' the man said. 'Papa said you coming.'
Chapter Nineteen
Ť ^
AS HARRISON HOUK'S MESSAGE to him had promised, Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal was still alive. She lay dozing under a gray wool blanket and a covering of sewn-together rabbit skins. She looked very, very ill.
'Can she talk?' he asked Brigham.
'A little,' he said. 'Sometimes.'
It occurred to Leaphorn that Brigham Houk might have been describing himself. He talked very little and sometimes not at all. What you'd expect, Leaphorn thought, after twenty years of no one to talk to except once every full moon.
'How bad is it? Her injuries I mean?'
'Knee's hurt,' he said. 'Arm broken. Place in her side. Place in her hip.'
And probably all infected, Leaphorn thought. Thin as her face was, it was flushed.
'You found her and brought her here?'
Brigham nodded. Like his father, he was a small man, tightly built, with short arms and legs and a thick, strong torso.
'Do you know what happened to her?'
'The devil came and hurt her,' Brigham said in an odd, flat voice. 'He hit her. She ran away. He chased. She fell down. He pushed her off. She fell into the canyon. Broke everything.'
Brigham had made a bed for her by digging a coffin-shaped pit in the sand that had drifted into a room of the sheltered ruin. He'd filled it with a two- or three-foot layer of leaves. Open as it was to the air, it had the sickroom smell of urine and decay.
'Tell me about this,' Leaphorn said.
Brigham was standing at what had been the entry door to the little room--now a narrow gap into a roofless space. Behind him the sky was dark. The wind, which had fallen during the afternoon, was blowing again now. It blew steadily out of the northwest. Winter, Leaphorn thought. He kept his eyes locked with Brigham's. The young man's eyes were the same odd blue-gray as his father's. Had the same intensity about them. Leaphorn looked into them, searching for insanity. Looking for it, he found it.
'This devil came,' Brigham said, speaking very slowly. 'He dug up the bones, and sat on the ground there looking at them. One after another he would look at them. He would measure them with a tool he had. He was looking for the souls of people who never had been prayed for. He would suck the souls out of the skulls and then he would throw them away. Or some of them he would take away in his sack. And then one day the last time the moon was full--' He paused and his somber bearded face converted into an expression of delight. 'When the moon is full, that's when Papa comes and talks to me, and brings me what I need.' The smile drifted away. 'A little after that, this woman came.' He nodded at Friedman-Bernal. 'I didn't see her come and I think maybe the angel Moroni brought her because I didn't see her come and I see everything in this place. Moroni left her to fight with that devil. She had come to the old cliff house down below here where I keep my frogs. I didn't know she was there. I was playing my flute and I frightened her and she ran away. But the next day, she came to where the devil was digging up the bones. I saw them talking.' Brigham's mobile face became fierce. His eyes seemed to glitter with the anger. 'He knocked her down, and he was on top of her, fighting with her. He got up and was searching through her pack, and she jumped up and ran over to the edge where the cliff drops down to the streambed and then she fell down. That devil, he went over and pushed her over with his foot.' Brigham stopped, his face wet with tears.
'He just left her there, where she fell?'
Brigham nodded.
'You kept her alive,' Leaphorn said. 'But now I think she is starting to die. We have to get her out of here. To a hospital where doctors can give her medicine.'
Brigham stared at him. 'Papa said I could trust you.' The statement was reproachful.
'If we don't get her out, she dies,' Leaphorn said.
'Papa will bring medicine. The next time the moon is full he will come with it.'
'Too long,' Leaphorn said. 'Look at her.'
Brigham looked. 'She's asleep,' he said, softly.
'She has fever. Feel her face. How hot. She has infections. She has to have help.'
Brigham touched Eleanor Friedman-Bernal's cheek with the tips of his fingers. He jerked them away, looking frightened. Leaphorn thought of the shriveled bodies of the frogs and tried to square that image with this tenderness. How do you square insanity?
'We need to make something to carry her on,' Leaphorn said. 'If you can find two poles long enough, we can tie the blanket between them and carry her on that.'
'No,' Brigham Houk said. 'When I try to move her, to clean her after she does number one or number two, she screams. It hurts too bad.'
'No choice,' Leaphorn said. 'We have to do it.'
'It's terrible,' Brigham said. 'She screams. I can't stand that, so I had to leave her dirty.' He looked at Leaphorn for understanding. Houk had apparently given him a haircut and trimmed his beard on the last visit. The old man was no barber. He had simply left the hair about an inch long everywhere, and whacked the beard off a half -inch under Brigham's chin.
'It was better to leave her dirty,' Leaphorn said. 'You did right. Now, can you find me two poles?'
Brigham nodded. 'Just a minute. I have poles. It's close.' He disappeared, making no sound at all.