“What did you think?” Estelle prompted gently.
“Freddy was talking about not bothering to finish the year, you know. At school? He’d had a job offer down in Deming and was thinking of just getting it on. Soooooo stupid, Sheriff. I mean, just one year to graduation, and he’s going to drop out? That made me so mad.”
“So you hoped to talk some sense into him?”
“Yes.”
“Freddy drove out to the ranch to pick you up?”
“Yes. In that awful old truck of his. The oil fumes make me sick.”
“And you parked it where?”
“Over on the trail just off the county road. We drove into Bender’s just a little ways and unloaded so we could ride up the canyon road.” Her expression ran the gamut from vexation to sadness. “Way too fast. We rode up to the spot where the fossils were supposed to be, and poked around for a while. Freddy got impatient, which doesn’t take much.”
“So you left that spot and rode here. What prompted stopping and then climbing up the mesa?”
Casey hesitated, the memory obviously painful. Her hands wadded the handkerchief, and she showed no inclination to open the door. “I got mad at him.” She shook her head. “You know, it could be really nice out here, just putting along and enjoying the ride. But Freddy always has to careen along like he’s trying to win a race.”
“So you yelled at him to stop.”
“Sort of. He ran through a bunch of ruts, and I cracked my elbow on that stupid plywood tool box he has strapped to the back of the ATV. He laughed, and I punched him and told him to stop.” She pointed at the juniper. “We pulled up under the tree there.”
Estelle stepped out into the center of the two-track and looked up the steep slope of the mesa. The approach to the rim was a rugged jumble, with no single attractive feature that called out, “Climb me.”
“Where did he go, exactly?” Estelle asked.
“The first thing he wanted to do was run all the way up to the top,” Casey said. “I told him he was crazy…it’d be after dark by the time we got back down. And we had all this food and stuff that he bought at the Handi-way. We’re like really going to lug all that up the mesa? I don’t think so. So he charges up saying that if we climb up just a little ways, we could see the ranch.”
“The ranch,” Estelle said. “Yours, you mean?”
“Sure. And I’m really excited about that,” Casey said dryly. “I mean, duh? I live there. I don’t need to see it from half way up this mesa.” The mesa’s shade was now comfortable, and Estelle beckoned.
“Show me where he went. Will you do that?”
Casey pointed off to the left, where a rim boulder had tumbled for a few feet and then perched, overhanging the slope like a two-story house that had slid off its foundation. “He wanted to see if he could climb that. Maybe up the back.”
“¡Caramba! ” Estelle breathed. “Interesting,” she said. “Boys seem to need to climb things. That’s where he found the skull?”
“If you want to climb up there, I’ll show you.” It didn’t look particularly far, perhaps a hundred yards. But by the time Estelle placed the flat of her hand on the wall of the boulder, feeling its rough warmth, she was breathing hard. “This is where I stopped.” Casey was not the least bit winded. She took another couple of steps and pointed behind the boulder. “Right there. Freddy went around the back there, and he hollered at me that he could feel this gush of cold air coming out of the rocks.”
Estelle followed the girl with caution, seeing altogether too many convenient flat surfaces for reptiles to coil, enjoying the residual warmth from the rocks.
The house-sized boulder could have tumbled from higher on the rim anytime in the past millennium. Stunted trees tried for purchase here and there on the slope behind the wall of rock, shaded both morning and afternoon. Estelle could see the scuff of tracks, and saw the way several rock outcroppings formed a mild overhang. The floor under the overhang was mounded with debris, the efforts of a diligent packrat.
“That’s where the skull was. See, right there?” Casey knelt and pointed up under the overhang. Estelle crouched beside her. From where she crouched to the back of the overhang was perhaps six feet, and the packrat had made the most of it. The undersheriff saw bones here and there, but nothing that she would immediately have identified as a cat. She shifted a bit, edging closer to the packrat’s nest, wary about dark corners.
By the time she’d moved so that her head was just under the upper portion of the overhang, she could feel the flow of cool air from her left. Bending still further, letting the air flow touch her face, she turned and saw the black slit of an opening, a roughly elliptical mouth no more than eighteen inches high at its extreme, tapering at the corners. Rocks had been tumbled to one side, perhaps by Freddy as he explored.
“You’re kidding.” Estelle spoke more to herself than to Casey.
“Oh, he had to explore that. He was all excited about the air coming out. I told him that he was crazy.”
“He couldn’t possibly see a thing.”
“Well, he kept chucking little rocks into it, figuring if there was a snake there, it’d rattle.”
“By then he’d already recovered the skull, though?”
“Yes. It was lying toward the back of the packrat’s nest.”
“You’d have to squirm in on your stomach to explore that hole,” Estelle said.
“Not me.”
“But Freddy did?”
“Of course. ’Cause he’s Freddy.” Casey leaned against the house-rock, eyes closed, tears brimming again.
“How could he see?”
“He had his lighter. He turned it up like a torch. I told him that if he got caught in there somehow, I wasn’t going to be the one to pull him out. He’d just have to stay stuck until I could find help. But he didn’t go very far. He moved a couple of rocks, and then said something about needing a pry bar.”
“Delightful. Is that when you went back to the ATV?”
“No. Freddy crawled in a little ways on his tummy. Not very far. I was kneeling right about where you are now, and I could hear him breathing. Then he said, ‘Whoa!’ real excited. And I said, ‘what?’ and he said there were bats roosting in there. He could see ’em up on the ceiling.”
“Bats,” Estelle grimaced. “Well, why not.”
“And I could imagine him crawling through all kinds of guano, and coming down with hantavirus or whatever. I mean, just the sort of place I’d want to be. I told him that the skull was really neat, and that we needed to take care of it. That’s when he backed out of the cave and ran back down to the four-wheeler to get one of the old towels that he had folded up in the tool box.” She wiped her eyes again. “I mean, it’s an amazing skull. You’ve seen it?”
“I saw it when I talked to Mr. Underwood earlier today. It’s impressive.”
“He told Freddy that it was illegal to keep it-even for the school to keep it without getting a permit for it.”
“All true. So you two had the skull, wrapped in an old towel.”
“Freddy wanted to go home and get one of his dad’s big shop lights-he said it’s one of those big battery-powered floods on one of those little tripods?”
“A simple flashlight wouldn’t do?”
“Well, that’s Freddy,” and she flinched as if the name was a knife twisting in her heart.
“But he didn’t come back right away, then?”
“No. He packed the skull as carefully as he could, and he kept talking about the rest of the skeleton. I told him that he should take the skull in to show Mr. Underwood… I mean, he’s really up on things like that. And then there might be a proper way to collect the rest of the skeleton, instead of just jumbling it all in a big mess. You know, like an archeological dig, or something? Freddy didn’t want to take time to do all that, but I told him that it was too important to ruin.” She shrugged. “I don’t know why. I mean right then we both thought it was just a mountain lion. But even a mounted lion skeleton would be a fun project, don’t you think? I mean, there are lots of those old musty stuffed lions around, but not an articulated skeleton. That’s what Mr. Underwood talked about.”