"Any word on the vehicle she was driving?"
"Not to me," Krause said. "And to tell the truth, I'm getting a little bit concerned myself. At first I was just sore at her. Cathy is a tough gal to work with. She's very into doing her own thing her own way, if you know what I'm saying. I just thought she'd seen something that needed doing worse than what I'd told her to do. Sort of reassigned herself, you know."
"I know," Leaphorn said, thinking back to when Jim Chee had been his assistant. Still, as much trouble as Chee had been, it had been a pleasure to see him yesterday. He was a good man and unusually bright.
"You still think that might be a possibility? That Pollard might be off working on some project of her own and just not bothering to tell anyone about it?"
"Maybe," Krause said. "It wouldn't bother her to let me stew awhile, but not this long." He'd be happy to tell Leaphorn what he knew about Pollard and her work, but not today. Today he was tied up, absolutely snowed under. With Pollard away, he was doing both their jobs. But tomorrow morning he could make some time—and the earlier the better.
Which left Leaphorn with nothing to do but wait for Chee's promised call. But Chee would be driving back to Tuba City from Flag this morning, and then he wouldn't get into his files until he dealt with whatever problems had piled up in his absence. If Chee found something interesting in the files, he'd probably call after noon. Most likely there'd be no reason to call.
Leaphorn had never been good at waiting for the telephone to ring, or for anything else. He toasted two slices of bread, applied margarine and grape jelly, and sat in his kitchen, eating and staring at the Indian Country map mounted on the wall above the table.
The map was freckled with the heads of pins—red, white, blue, black, yellow, and green, plus a variety of shapes he'd reverted to when the colors available in pin-, heads had been exhausted. It had been accumulating pins on his office wall since early in his career. When he retired, the fellow who took over his office suggested he might want to keep it, and he'd said he couldn't imagine why. But keep It he had, and almost every pin in it revived a memory.
The first ones (plain steel-headed seamstress pins) he'd stuck in to keep track of places and dates where people had reported seeing a missing aircraft, the problem that then had been occupying his thoughts. The red ones had been next, establishing the delivery pattern of a gasoline tanker truck that was also hauling narcotics to customers on the Checkerboard Reservation. The most common ones were black, representing witchcraft reports. Personally, Leaphorn had lost all faith in the existence of these skinwalkers in his freshman year at Arizona State, but never in the reality of the problem that belief in them causes.
He'd come home for the semester break, full of new-won college sophistication and cynicism. He'd talked Jack Greyeyes into joining him to check out a reputed home base of skinwalkers and thus prove themselves liberated from tradition. They drove south from Shiprock past Rol-Hay Rock and Table Mesa to the volcanic outcrop of ugly black basalt where, according to the whispers in their age group, skinwalkers met in an underground room to perform the hideous initiation that turned recruits into witches. It was a rainy winter night, which cut the risk that someone would see them and accuse them of being witches themselves. Now, more than four decades later, winter rains still produced memorial shivers along Leaphorn's spine.
That night remained one of Leaphorn's most vivid memories. The darkness, the cold rain soaking through his jacket, the beginnings of fear. Greyeyes had decided when they'd reached the outcrop's base that this was a crazy idea.
"I'll tell you what," Greyeyes had said. "Let's not do it, and say we did."
So Leaphorn had taken custody of the flashlight, watched Greyeyes fade into the darkness, and waited for his courage to return. It didn't. He had stood there looking up at the great jumbled hump of rock. Suddenly he had been confronted with both nerve-racking fear and the sure knowledge that what he did now would determine the kind of man he would be. He'd torn his pant leg and bruised his knee on the way up. He'd found the gaping hole the whispers had described, shone his flash into it without locating a bottom, and then climbed down far enough to see where it led. The rumors had described a carpeted room littered with the fragments of corpses. He had found a drifted collection of blown sand and last summer's tumbleweeds.
That had confirmed his skepticism about skin-walker mythology, just as his career in the Navajo Tribal Police had confirmed his belief in what the evil skin-walkers symbolized. He'd lost any lingering doubts about that in his rookie year. He had laughed off a warning that a Navajo oil-field pumper believed two neighbors had witched his daughter, thus causing her fatal illness.
As soon as the four-day mourning period tradition decrees had ended, the pumper had killed the witches with his shotgun.
He thought about that now as he chewed his toast. Eight black pins formed a cluster in the general vicinity of that north-reaching outcrop of Black Mesa that included Yells Back Butte. Why so many there? Probably because that area had twice been the source of bubonic plague cases and once of the deadly hantavirus. Witches offer an easy explanation for unexplained illnesses. To the north, Short Mountain and the Short Mountain Wash country had attracted another cluster of black pins. Leaphorn was pretty sure that was due to John McGinnis, operator of the Short Mountain Trading Post. Not that the pins meant more witch problems around Short Mountain. They represented McGinnis's remarkable talent as a collector and broadcaster of gossip. The old man had a special love for skinwalker tales, and his Navajo customers, knowing his weakness, brought him all the skinwalker sightings and witching reports they could collect. But any sort of gossip was good enough for the old man. Thinking that, Leaphorn reached for his new edition of the Navajo Communications Company telephone directory.
The Short Mountain Trading Post number was not listed. He dialed the Short Mountain Chapter House. Was the trading post still operating? The woman lad picked up the telephone chuckled. "Well," she said, "I'd guess you'd say more or less."
"Is John McGinnis still there? Still alive?"
The chuckle became a laugh. "Oh, yes indeed," she said. "He's still going strong. Don't the bilagaana have a saying that only the good die young?"
Joe Leaphorn finished his toast, put a message on his ring machine for Chee in case he did call, and drove his pickup out of Shiprock heading northwest across the Navaho Nation. He was feeling much more cheerful.
The years that had passed since he'd visited Short Mountain hadn't changed it much—certainly not for the better. The parking area in front was still hard-packed clay, too dry and dense to encourage weeds. The old GMC truck he'd parked next to years ago still rested wheelless on blocks, slowly rusting away. The 1968 Chevy parked in the shade of a juniper at the corner of the sheep pens looked like the one McGinnis had always driven, and a faded sign nailed to the hay barn still proclaimed THIS STORE FOR SALE, INQUIRE WITHIN. But today the benches on the shady porch were empty, with drifts of trash under them. The windows looked even dustier than Leaphorn remembered. In fact, the trading post looked deserted, and the gusty breeze chasing tumbleweeds and dust past the porch added to the sense of desolation. Leaphorn had an uneasy feeling, tinged with sadness, that the woman at the chapter house was wrong. That even tough old John McGinnis had proved vulnerable to too much time and too many disappointments.
The breeze was the product of a cloud Leaphorn had been watching build up over Black Mesa for the last twenty miles. It was too early in the summer to make a serious rain likely but—as bad as the road back to the highway was—even a shower could present a problem down in Short Mountain Wash. Leaphorn climbed out of his pickup to the rumble of thunder and hurried toward the store.