Nora looked at her solid figure, her rattled but capable face. She knew the woman didn’t believe her, but she didn’t have the energy to argue. “Next time I will,” she said.
“I hope there won’t be a next time,” said Teresa gently. “You need to either tear this place down, or sell it and let someone else tear it down for you. It’s becoming a problem, and not just for you.”
“I know it’s an eyesore. But I just hate to think of letting it go. I’m sorry it’s caused trouble for you.”
“I would’ve thought this might change your mind. Want to come in for a bite of something?”
“No thanks, Teresa,” Nora said as firmly as she could. “I’m all right.”
“Maybe,” came the reply. “But you better get a rabies shot anyway.”
Nora watched as her neighbor turned onto the narrow trail that headed back up the hill. Then she eased into the driver’s seat of her truck and locked all the doors with a shaking hand. She sat quietly, feeling the air move in and out of her lungs, watching Teresa’s dim form merge slowly with the dark bulk of the hillside. When at last she felt in full control of her limbs, she reached for the ignition, wincing at a sudden stab of pain in her neck.
She turned over the engine, unsuccessfully, and cursed. She needed a new vehicle, along with a new everything else in her life.
She tried it again, and after a sputtering protest the engine coughed into life. She punched off the headlights to conserve the battery and, slouching back against the seat, gently pumped the accelerator, waiting for the engine to clear.
To one side, a flash of silver winked briefly. She turned to see a huge shape, black and furred, bounding toward her against the last twilight in the western sky.
Nora slammed the old truck into gear, punched on the headlights, and gunned the engine. It roared in response and she went fishtailing out of the yard. As she careened through the inside gate, she saw with consummate horror that the thing was racing alongside her.
She jammed the accelerator to the floor as the truck slewed across the ranch road, spraying mad patterns of dirt, whacking a cholla. And then, the thing was gone. But she continued to accelerate down the road to the outer gate, wheels pounding the washboard. After an unbearably long moment, her headlights finally picked up the outer cattle guard looming from the darkness ahead, the row of old mailboxes nailed to a long horizontal board beside it. Too late, Nora jammed on the brakes; the truck struck the cattle guard and was airborne. She landed heavily and skidded in the sand, striking the old board. There was the crunch of splintering wood and the boxes were flung to the ground.
She sat in the truck, breathing hard, dust smoking up around her lights. She dropped into reverse and gunned the engine, feeling panic as the wheels dug into the deep sand. She rocked twice before the truck stalled.
In the glow of the headlights, she could see the damage. The row of ranch mailboxes had been a rickety affair to begin with, and they had recently been supplanted by a shiny new set of post office boxes that stood nearby. But she could not back up: there was no choice but to go forward.
She jumped out and, glancing around for any sign of the figure, moved around to the front of the truck, picked up the rotten, abandoned mailboxes, and dragged them aside into the brush. An envelope lay in the dirt, and she grabbed it. As she turned to step back into the truck, the headlights caught the front of the envelope. Nora froze for a moment, gasping in surprise.
Then she shoved it in her shirt pocket, jumped into the truck, and peeled back onto the road, careening toward the distant, welcoming lights of town.
2
THE SANTA FE ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE stood on a low mesa between the Sangre de Cristo foothills and the town of Santa Fe itself. No affiliated museum opened its doors to the public, and classes were limited to invitation-only graduate seminars and faculty colloquiums. Visiting scholars and resident professors outnumbered students. The campus sprawled across thirty acres, its low adobe buildings almost invisible among the walled gardens, apricot trees, tulip beds, and rows of ancient, blossom-heavy lilacs.
The Institute was devoted almost exclusively to research, excavation, and preservation, and it housed one of the finest prehistoric southwestern Indian collections in the world. Wealthy, reserved, and much wedded to its traditions, it was looked on with both awe and envy by professional archaeologists across the country.
Nora watched the last of her students leave the low-ceilinged adobe classroom, then gathered her notes and slotted them into an oversized leather portfolio. It was the final class of her seminar, “The Chaco Abandonment: Causes and Conditions.” Once again, she was struck by the unusual attitude of students at the Institute: quiet, respectful, as if unable to believe their good fortune in being granted a ten-week resident scholarship.
Stepping out of the cool darkness into the sunlight, she walked slowly along the graveled path. The Pueblo Revival buildings of the campus, with their organic sloping walls and projecting vigas, were painted a warm rust color by the morning light. A thunderhead was developing over the mountains, dark beneath but topped with a spreading crown of brilliant white. As she glanced up to look at it, a sharp pain lanced one side of her bruised neck. She reached to massage it as a dark shadow seemed to come across the sun.
Passing the parking lot, she traced a circuitous route toward the rear of the campus, turning at last down a flagstone walk columned with lombardy poplars and old Chinese elms. The walkway ended at a nondescript building whose small wooden sign read simply RECORDS.
Nora showed her badge to the guard, signed in, and went down the hall to a low doorway, stopping at the cement steps that led down into the gloom. Down to the Map Vault.
She tensed for a moment, the darkness of the stairs bringing back another unwanted memory of the evening before. Again, she felt the broken glass stabbing into her skin, the tightening claws, the sickly sweet smell . . .
She shook the memory away and started down the narrow steps.
The Institute’s collections contained innumerable priceless artifacts. Yet nothing on campus, or in its extensive collections, was as valuable, or as guarded, as the contents of the Map Vault. Although the vault contained no treasure, it housed something far more valuable: the location of every known archaeological site in the Southwest. There were more than three hundred thousand such sites, from the most insignificant lithic scatter to huge ruins containing hundreds of rooms, all carefully marked on the Institute’s U.S.G.S. topographical map collection. Nora knew that only the tiniest fraction of these sites had ever been excavated; the rest lay slumbering under the sand or hidden in caves. Each site number corresponded to an entry in the Institute’s secure database, containing everything from detailed inventories to surveys to digitized sketches and letters—electronic treasure maps leading to millions of dollars worth of prehistoric artifacts.
How strange, Nora had always thought, that such a place would be guarded by Owen Smalls. Resplendent in beat-up leathers, heavily muscled, Smalls always looked like he had just returned from a harrowing expedition to the farthest corners of the earth. Very few who met the man realized he was an Eastern boy from a wealthy family, a summa cum laude graduate of Brown University, who if placed out in the desert would be dead or lost—or both—within the hour.
The steps ended at a metal door with a small casement window, a red light glowing above it. Nora dug into her bag, extracted her security card, and inserted it into the slot. When the light turned green, she heaved the door open and stepped inside.
Smalls occupied a fanatically neat little office outside the vault itself, overlooking the reading area. He rose as he saw her enter, placing a book carefully on his desk.
“Dr. Kelly,” he said. “Nora, right?”
“Morning,” Nora said as casually as possible.
“Haven’t seen you around for a while,” Smalls replied. “Too bad. Hey, what’d you do to your arm?”
Nora glanced briefly at the bandage. “Just a scratch. Owen, I need to look at a couple of maps.”
Smalls squinted back. “Yeah?”
“In the C-3 and C-4 quadrants of Utah. Kaiparowits Plateau.”
Smalls continued scrutinizing her, shifting his weight, sending a creak of leather echoing through the room. “Project number?”
“We don’t have a project number yet. It’s just a preliminary survey.”
Smalls placed two giant, hairy hands on the desk and leaned over them, looking at her more intently. “Sorry, Dr. Kelly. You need an approved project number to look at anything.”
“But it’s just a preliminary survey.”
“You know the rules,” Smalls replied, with a disparaging grin.
Nora thought fast. There was no way that Blakewood, the Institute’s president and her boss, would assign a project number based on the meager information she could give him. But she remembered working on a project in a different part of Utah, two years before. The project was still current, if a bit moribund—she had a bad habit of not finishing things up. What was the damn project number?
“It’s J-40012,” she said.
Small’s bushy eyebrows raised.
“Sorry, I forgot it was just assigned. Look, if you don’t believe me, call Professor Blakewood.” She knew her boss was at a conference in Window Rock.
Smalls turned to the computer on his desk and rapped at the keys. After a moment, he looked up at Nora. “Seems to be approved. C-3 and C-4, you said?” He resumed his typing, the keys ludicrously small in his hands. Then he cleared the screen and stepped away from the desk.
Nora followed as he stepped up to the vault and swung the door open. “Wait here,” he said.
“I know the routine.” Nora watched as he stepped into the vault. Inside, bathed in pitiless fluorescent light, lay two rows of metal safes, locked doors across their tops. Smalls approached one, punched in a code, and lifted its door. Hanging within the safe were countless maps, sandwiched in layers of protective plastic.
“There are sixteen maps in those quadrants,” Smalls called out. “Which ones do you want to see?”
“All of them, please.”
Smalls paused. “All sixteen? That’s eight hundred eighty square miles.”
“As I said, it’s a survey. You can always call Professor—”
“Okay, okay.” Holding the maps by the edges of their metal rails, Smalls stepped out of the vault, nodding Nora toward the reading area. He waited until she sat down, then gently placed the maps on the scarred surface of the Formica table. “Use those,” he said, indicating a box of disposable cotton gloves. “You’ve got two hours to complete your study. When you’re done, let me know and I’ll replace the maps and let you out.” He waited while she donned a pair of gloves, then grinned and returned to the vault.
Nora sat at the table as he shut first the safe, then the vault, and returned to his office. You’ll know when I’m done, she thought to herself. The “reading area” consisted of a large table with a single chair, placed in clear view of Smalls’s glass-windowed office. It was a cramped, exposed space. Not at all suitable for what she had in mind.
She took a deep breath, flexed her white-gloved fingers. Then, carefully, she spread the maps out on the table, the plastic crackling as she aligned them along their edges. The sequence of 7.5-minute maps—the most detailed U.S. Geological Survey maps made—covered an exceedingly remote area of southern Utah, framed by Lake Powell to the south and east and Bryce Canyon to the west. It was almost entirely Bureau of Land Management country: federal land that, in effect, nobody had any use for. Nora had a good idea of what the area was like: slickrock sandstone country, bisected by a diagonal—trending maze of deep canyons and escarpments, sheer walls, and barren scabland.
It was into this desolate triangle, sixteen years before, that her father had disappeared.
She remembered with painful vividness how, as a twelve-year-old, she had pleaded to go along with the searchers. But her mother had given a brusque, dry-eyed refusal. And so she spent two tormented weeks, listening for news on the radio and poring over topographical maps. Maps just like this one. But no trace was ever found. Then her mother instituted proceedings to have him declared legally dead. And Nora had never looked at a map of the area since.
Another deep breath. This would be the hard part. Making sure her back was to Owen Smalls, Nora slid two fingers into her jacket and removed the letter—the letter she had never allowed from her person since she found it, just nightmarish hours before.
The envelope was discolored and brittle, addressed faintly in pencil. And there, as she had in the glow of the headlights the previous night, she read the name of her mother, dead six months, and the address of the ranch that had been abandoned for five years. Slowly, almost unwillingly, she moved her gaze to the return address. PADRAIC KELLY, it confirmed in the generous, loopy hand she remembered so well. Somewhere west of the Kaiparowits.
A letter from her dead father to her dead mother, written and stamped sixteen years ago.
Slowly and carefully, in the fluorescent silence of the Map Vault, she removed the three sheets of yellowed paper from the envelope and smoothed them beside the maps, shielding them from Small’s view with her body. Again, she glanced at the strangest things of alclass="underline" the fresh postmark and POSTAGE DUE stamp, showing the letter had been mailed from Escalante, Utah, only five weeks before.
She brushed her fingers along the soiled paper, over the red POSTAGE DUE notice and the badly faded ten-cent stamp. The envelope looked as if it had been wet, and then dried. Perhaps it had been found floating in Lake Powell, swept down the canyons in one of the flash floods the area was famous for.
For perhaps the hundredth time since she first read the letter the night before, she found herself forced to squash a surge of hope. There was no way her father could still be alive. Obviously, somebody had found the letter and mailed it.
But who? And why?
And, more frighteningly: was this the letter the creatures in the abandoned ranch house were after?
She swallowed, throat painfully dry. It had to be; there was no other answer.
A loud squeak shattered the silence as Smalls shifted in his chair. Nora started, then slipped the envelope beneath the nearest map. She turned to the letter.
Thursday, August 2 (I think), 1983