“Long ago as it was, I always felt sorry that I couldn’t stay on that case. I got called away by my boss because the federals wanted help on that fire at the Totter store.” Elandra’s expression made it clear that she remembered. She laughed.
“I’ll tell her you told her ‘ ya eeh teh,’ but telling Grandma to ‘be cool’ isn’t going to do it. She’s still mad at you for running off without finding that pinyon sap.” Then she had another sudden memory. “In fact, long time ago when she was going off to help with Austin’s kids, she 80
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said you had told her you would come back sometime to deal with that stolen sap problem, and she left something for me to give you if you did. Just a minute. I’ll see if I can find it.”
It was closer to five minutes later when Elandra emerged from the bedroom. She was carrying a sheet of notebook paper folded together and clasped with two hairpins. She grinned at Leaphorn and handed it to him.
On it was printed in penciclass="underline" TO THAT BOY POLICEMAN.
“That wasn’t my idea,” Elandra said. “She was mad at you. What she wanted to write was worse than that.”
“I guess I should read it?” Leaphorn said.
Elandra nodded.
Inside was the neatly penciled message: Young policeman.
Get my sap back here before it spoils. If not, get back $10 for each bucketful, and $5 for each bucket. Rather have sap. Otherwise $30.
Garcia had been watching all this, his expression amused.
“What does it say?” he asked. “That is, if it’s not secret.”
Leaphorn read it to him.
Garcia nodded. “You know how much time and labor goes into collecting that damned pinyon sap,” he said.
“Did you ever try to get sticky stuff off of you? I’d say that thirty dollars would be a very fair price.” Leaphorn put the note in his shirt pocket.
Elandra looked slightly abashed. “Grandma is usually very polite. But she thought you were practicing THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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racial discrimination against us Indians. Remember? Or maybe she just wanted somebody to blame.”
“Well, I could see her point.”
“You want to know if we got our pinyon sap back?”
“Anything at all you can tell me about that.” Elandra laughed. “We didn’t recover any sap, but Grandma Peshlakai did get our buckets back. So I guess you should cut ten dollars off that bill.” Garcia’s eyebrows rose. “Got the buckets back? Well, now,” he said.
Leaphorn drew in a breath. “She recovered the buckets?” he said. “Tell me how she managed to do that.”
“Well, after that fire at Totter’s place, Grandma had been asking around everywhere. Right from the start she had the notion that Totter might have gotten that sap.” She laughed. “She thought he was going to start making his own baskets. Compete with us. Anyway, she noticed people were going over there after Mr. Totter moved with what was left of his stuff. And they were picking up things. Walking away with it. Just taking things away.” She paused.
“Like stealing stuff ?” Garcia said.
Elandra nodded. “So Grandma rode over there and looked around, and she came back with our buckets.” Leaphorn leaned forward. “Where were they?”
“I don’t know exactly. She said they were laying out by the porch. Or maybe out by the back door. I don’t really remember.”
“Empty buckets?” Leaphorn said.
Elandra nodded. “And dented up some, too,” she said. “But they still hold water.”
Leaphorn noticed that Garcia was grinning. That turned into a chuckle.
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“I guess we could make a burglary-theft case against Totter now, Joe. If we knew where he moved to when he left here. You want to try?”
Leaphorn was embarrassed. In no mood to be joshed.
“I think it would be a good idea to find out where he went,” he said. “Remember, one of his hired hands burned to death in that fire.”
“Okay, okay,” Garcia said. “I didn’t mean that to sound like I was joking.”
“Well, then—” Leaphorn began, but Elandra violated the “never interrupt” rule of her tribe.
“You don’t know where he is?” she said. She shook her head. “You don’t know about Mr. Totter? You don’t know he’s dead?”
“Dead?” Garcia said.
“How do you know that?” Leaphorn asked.
“It was in the newspaper,” she said. “After Grandma found the buckets, and knew for sure Mr. Totter had stolen our pinyon sap, she had a real angry spell. Really mad about it. So everywhere she went she would tell people about what he’d done and ask about him. And quite a while later somebody in a store where she was buying something told her Totter had died. He told her he’d seen it in the newspaper. That’s how we knew.”
“What newspaper?” Leaphorn asked.
“She was in Gallup, I think. I guess it was the Gallup paper.”
“The Gallup Independent,” Garcia said.
“Was it a news story about his being killed? Shot? Or in an accident?”
“I don’t know,” Elandra said. “But I don’t think so. I THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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think the man said it was one of those little pieces where they tell where you’re going to be buried, and who your relatives are, for sending flowers, all that.”
“An obituary item, I guess,” Garcia said.
“Well, since we know within a year or two when that was printed, I guess we can track that down,” Leaphorn said.
As he said it, he was wishing that Sergeant Jim Chee and Officer Bernadette Manuelito were not off somewhere on their honeymoon. Otherwise, retired or not, he could talk Chee into going down to Gallup and digging through their microfiche files of back copies until he found it. Or maybe Chee could talk Bernie into doing it for him. She’d get it done quicker, and not come back with the wrong obituary.
11
Back in Flagstaff, back in his own car, with farewells said to Sergeant Garcia, an agreement reached that they had pretty well wasted a tiresome day and a lot of the sheriff’s department’s gasoline budget, Leaphorn again pulled into the Burger King parking lot. He sat. Organized his thoughts.
Was he too tired to drive all the way back to Shiprock tonight? Probably. But the alternative was renting a cold and uncomfortable motel room, making futile and frustrating efforts to adjust the air conditioner, and generally feeling disgusted. Then he’d have to awaken in the morning, stiff from a night on a strange mattress, and do the long drive anyway. He went in, got a cup of coffee and a hamburger for dinner. Halfway through that meal, and halfway through the list of things he had to do before he went back and told Mrs. Bork that he had absolutely no good news for her about her missing husband, he got up 86
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and went back out to his pickup. He extracted the cell phone from the glove box, returned with it to his waiting hamburger, and carefully punched in Jim Chee’s home number. Maybe Chee and Bernie would be back from their honeymoon. Maybe not.
They were.
“Hello,” Chee said, sounding sort of grumpy.
“Chee. This is Joe Leaphorn. How busy are you?”
“Ah. Um. Lieutenant Leaphorn? Well, um. Well, we just got back and . . .”
This statement trailed off unfinished, was followed by a moment of silence and then a sigh and the clearing of a throat.