"So am I," Louisa said. "About when you're going to tell me about how this old Hispanic legend of the tragedy of a lost lady got involved in this gold mine swindle."
"I heard about that Halloween evening call, got the name of the caller, and went out to see her. She's a teacher out at McGaffey School. Said these kids showed up at her house that Halloween night—students of hers. They told her about cutting across the corner of the fort to get out to the road and catch a ride into Gallup, and they heard these awful terrifying moans and crying sounds. She said they seemed genuinely frightened. She'd called the sheriff."
"And his deputy found absolutely nothing?"
Leaphorn chuckled. "Nothing. But she told me it turned out to have a healthy benefit because two of the kids were Hispanics, who connected the sounds with the Wailing Woman ghost story, and one was a Zuñi. She thought they were hearing a skinwalker, or another of the Navajo version of witches, or maybe that Zuñi spirit who punishes evildoers, and the white girl thought it might be an ogre, or vampire, or one of their things. So the word spread around McGaffey School, and it put an end to the student body's practice of taking that forbidden shortcut."
"Did you talk to any of the kids?"
"Somebody from the sheriff's office did."
"You didn't."
"Not yet," Leaphorn said. He picked up the old notebook, flipped through it.
"I still have the names. You want to go with me?"
"Golly," she said. "I wish I could. I've got to meet with an old man named Beno out at Nakaibito. He's supposed to know a story about his great-grandmother being captured by the Mexicans when she was a child. His daughter is bringing him into the trading post there to talk to me. Could it wait?"
"It could," Leaphorn said. "But it's already waited a long, longtime."
Chapter Seven
« ^ »
The first name on Leaphorn's old list was a Zuñi girl whose father worked at Fort Wingate and who was now a student at the University of New Mexico and out of reach. The second was Tomas Garcia, now a husband and father. Leaphorn found him at his job with a Gallup lumber company.
Garcia threw the last bundle of asphalt shingles on the customer's flatbed truck, turned up his shirt collar against the dusty wind, and grinned at Leaphorn. "Sure, I remember it," he said. "It was a big deal, getting interviewed by a deputy sheriff when you're in high school. But I don't think it ever amounted to anything. At least not that any of us ever heard about."
"You mind going over it again? They didn't put much in his report."
"There wasn't much to put," Garcia said. "I guess you know the layout at Wingate. Miles and miles of those huge old bunkers with dirt roads running down the rows. It's easy to get through that fence the army put up in the olden days when it was storing ammunition out there, and we'd cut through there to get to the highway when we wanted to go into Gallup. That evening one of the kids was having a sort of Halloween party in town. So we were going to that. Catch a ride in, you know. Cutting across through the bunkers, we started hearing this wailing sound."
Garcia paused, recalling it, bracing himself against the west wind that was blowing dust around their ankles. "I guess it was just the Halloween idea in our heads. Kids, you know. But it was spooky. Just getting real dark, and a cold wind blowing. At first I thought it was the wind, whistling around those bunkers. But it wasn't that."
"What do you think it was?"
He shook his head. "Why don't we talk about this where it's warm," he said. "Get Gracella in on it, too. She might remember it better than I do."
"Is that Gracella deBaca?" If it was, Leaphorn had found the fourth person on his list.
"Gracella Garcia now," Garcia said, looking proud of that.
Leaphorn followed Garcia's pickup home and got a free lunch of excellent posole generously seasoned with pork. Gracella was on maternity leave from her job at the McKinley County hospital, and to Leaphorn's unpracticed eye she seemed extremely close to motherhood. Her account of that twilight Halloween was much like her husband's—as Leaphorn had expected. They would have relived the affair and more or less agreed on the memory.
"It was very, very scary," Gracella said, as she dished Leaphorn another dipper of posole. "Tomas pretends he thinks it was just some sort of a practical joke for Halloween. That's what the cops told us." She gave her husband a stern look. "But he knows better," she said. "He's just macho. Doesn't want to admit he believes in La Llorona."
Garcia let that pass. They'd been over this before.
"I'm not saying it wasn't Gracella's mythical lost mother, but how about the music?"
"We always get to that," Gracella said. "I'm not even sure I heard the music. Maybe you talked me into that."
"What sort of music?"
"Not my kind," Garcia said. "I'm into hard rock, or heavy metal. This sounded like classical stuff."
"You could barely hear it," Gracella said. "The wind was blowing. Sometimes you thought you heard like a piano playing. Sometimes not."
"The wailing and the music came together?" Leaphorn asked.
"I better explain," Garcia said. "We were hurrying along, cutting across where the rows of bunkers are lined up. And we heard a scream. Or sort of like a scream from a long ways off. So we stopped and tried to listen. And we heard it again. Plainer this time. More like wailing." He glanced at Gracella. "Right?"
She nodded.
"So we stopped and just stood there awhile," she said. "We heard it some more. And we decided to turn around and go back and report it to the police. While we were talking about that, the wailing stopped. And then after a while we heard the piano music. Tomas thought that proved it was just Lloyd Yazzie trying to scare people. Playing a recording, you know?"
"Why Lloyd Yazzie?"
"He was a guy in the band," she said. "And the music sounded like a piece we practiced. A real jerk."
After that, nothing. The wind had risen. They walked back to McGaffey and got the teacher to call the sheriff.
"What do you think was causing it?" Leaphorn asked.
They looked at each other. "Well," Gracella said. "Nobody has proved there aren't any ghosts."
Garcia laughed, which irritated Gracella.
"Okay," she said. "You can laugh. But remember that one deputy didn't laugh. He thought it was serious, and he came back to talk to us later."
Garcia's expression dismissed that. "That was old Lorenzo Perez," he said. "That was after Mr. Denton was in jail and started running those advertisements asking his wife to come home. Lorenzo thought Mr. Denton had got jealous and killed her, and he was running those advertisements to make himself look innocent."
"I don't care," Gracella said. "Anyway, he didn't act like he thought it was just a joke."
The last name on Leaphorn's list seemed to have vanished with time—apparently part of the nomadic movement of belagaana families who follow jobs around the country. He spent the rest of the afternoon taking a look at part of the 130 square miles that make up what was, when Leaphorn was a lot younger, the Fort Wingate Army Ordnance Depot, finding the approximate place where the Garcias had their fright, and trying to imagine what might have been happening to cause it. When Leaphorn had driven past this place on U.S. 66 as a very young man, it had been busy. Its bunkers, built for World War II, had been full of the shells and gunpowder of the Vietnam War.
With the end of the Cold War it had been "decommissioned" and had slipped into a sort of semi-ghost town identity. The Navajo Nation stored records in a couple of bunkers; the army used a bit of it on the edge of the Zuñi Mountains to launch target missiles to be shot at by the Star Wars scientists at White Sands Proving Grounds; other agencies used a bunker here or there for their purposes, and TPL, Inc., had machinery set up in others converting the rocket fuel still stored there to a plastic explosive useful in mining.