Shan struggled to understand, not what she was saying but what she was not saying. He replayed her words in his mind several times, then abruptly understood the question he had to ask. “Climbers come to the village sometimes, to talk with Kypo, mostly the expedition leaders. You give them blessings.”
“Do I look like a monk?”
“Forgive me. You provide them with propitious dates and words to say at the top. I’ve seen the climbers carry charms in little yellow bags sewn shut with red thread.”
When she did not reply Shan pressed on. “Did Megan Ross first come to you last year or was it earlier?”
The astrologer went very still.
“I read she was working with Tibetans and sherpas to spread the word that the mountain was sacred,” Shan explained. “She was working with someone to learn the old ways of going up mountains.”
Ama Apte began to stroke the back of the goat.
“Did she learn to drink your buttered tea?” he tried, hoping to get her to admit she at least knew the American.
“She carried a little bottle of mint extract,” Ama Apte said in a strained voice. “With a few drops of that Megan said she could swallow the strongest Tibetan tea.”
“Surely she couldn’t speak Tibetan.”
“She spoke some Chinese.”
“Why would she go see the minister? She could never have expected to persuade Wu to stop the climbing tours.”
“You will have to ask her yourself.”
Shan watched the woman carefully as he spoke. “Megan Ross is dead.”
Ama Apte cocked her head at Shan. There was no grief in her eyes, no surprise. “She plays tricks, that American girl. She goes places the government doesn’t want her to, so she lets stories be spread to divert their interest. She may seem dead to you. She would pretend to be dead if it helped preserve one of her secrets.”
“She isn’t on one of her secret climbs. I found her, Ama Apte. Shot twice, lying beside the murdered minister. She died in my arms.”
It was not grief that came now but anger. “No,” Ama Apte said in a simmering voice.
“I was a good friend of your uncle’s,” he ventured. “You and I said prayers for him. When speaking of the dead the truth must be spoken.”
“She is not dead,” Ama Apte insisted. “I would know it.”
“Are you saying that as her friend,” Shan said, “or as her fortuneteller?”
The Tibetan woman turned back to the goat. “She is on some high peak, laughing into the wind. And Tenzin will not be found until he is ready. The dead of the mountain will keep coming back if they have unfinished business,” she declared to the animal. “That has always been the way of the mountain.”
Reality is nothing but a shared perception, a lama had once told him. It didn’t seem to matter that Shan had been stained with the blood of the dead woman, for the reality that everyone perceived was that she had not died. Shan had never encountered a murder where the dead kept moving, where the dead were still players in events even after they stopped breathing.
“Tell me how you met her,” he said softly.
“It was up high,” she said after a long silence. “Two years ago. There are secret places, little shrines only my people know about, shrines where words must be spoken every spring. I was hiding because some climbers were passing close by. I waited a long time before I emerged, but there she was, waiting for me at the shrine. She asked me why I was afraid of climbers.”
“Afraid?”
“I told her I wasn’t afraid of who they were, but of what they did. I told her that if the shrines were ignored, more and more climbers would die. I said dead foreigners were accumulating all over the upper slopes, with no one to pray for them, no one to help them make the passage to the next life. She helped me clean up the shrine, and when she saw that the prayer flags were old and tattered she said she would give me money for some new ones. I explained it wasn’t money that made flags valuable, that these scraps of cloth were holy for having sent out a million prayers, one with each flutter. It was only when she helped me tighten the line and straighten the flags that she really understood. Half the line was empty.”
“Because foreigners had been taking the flags for souvenirs.”
Ama Apte nodded. “She asked Kypo about me, not knowing then that I was his mother, and she found me here the next week, to tell me she arranged for the climbing groups to delete that particular trail from their route maps. That’s when she began asking me how Tibetans went up the mountains in the old days.”
“Did you know she was trying to meet with the minister?”
“She comes every week or two during the climbing season. Last time she told me she was going to attend the conference at that new hotel. She said they needed what she called a dose of reality, as if she would give it to them like a pill.”
“You mean she was going to stop the minister from doing something?”
The fortuneteller decided to change the subject. “Have you found the answer for my mule?” she asked abruptly. “If he is not settled, things could go badly,” she added, as if she were now telling the fortunes of ghosts.
“To find your uncle’s killer,” Shan explained, “I need to know more about your way to the mother goddess. When I needed to carry bodies, Kypo always met me with the mule below Rongphu gompa, on the trail that parallels the road from the base camp. The mule knew the trail instinctively.”
“He walked it for over eighty years, in both his lives.”
“But that is a trail that winds down toward the highway. The way from the village to that trail is cut off by the steepness of Tumkot mountain and the glacier on top of the mountain. But Kypo and the mule seemed to know a way across.”
“Ridiculous. We go around, on a trail that circuits the base of the high ridge.”
“To go around to the road means walking at least fifteen miles. To go over the top would be no more than five.”
“Fifteen miles is a morning stroll for one of us.”
“But suppose there was a secret trail,” Shan suggested. “Your mule would know it as the way home, would lead anyone to it who cared to follow, because he would make fresh tracks that would highlight the trail. If the murderer also used such a secret trail to do his work he would want the mule dead.”
“There were many cars and trucks going up and down the road that day after the killing. So many army trucks they had no room for an ambulance,” she said in a pointed tone.
“But there was an injured man,” Shan observed. “That bus driver.”
Ama Apte cast him a disappointed glance. Shan thought again of the photo of the young Dalai Lama with soldiers. It hadn’t been ripped from a book or newspaper. It had been an original photograph. Every time he peeled one layer of the woman’s secrets he found one more.
“I thought you were going to tell me how that Chinese colonel killed my uncle, like the minister.”
“I came to find out the truth.”
“It’s a strange way you have with the truth.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You act as though someone from Tumkot was the killer.”
“Your uncle was shot less than a mile from here. Maybe he was scared away by the bullets, and was coming home.”
“My uncle knew bullets. He would have told me, and told Tenzin.”
“Tenzin?” he asked with rising foreboding. “Tenzin was dead.”
“I thought you would better understand the dead here,” she said in a tone that sent chills down Shan’s spine.
“Is that why I am the corpse carrier? Dakpo saw what I did with a dog and the two of you assumed I knew the dead?”
Ama Apte fixed him with a sober stare. “Dakpo spoke with me, yes. But I had to meet you first. Right away, I saw it in your eyes. You are one of those the dead speak through. The threads of your life become entwined with the dead you touch.”