Eagle's Last Stand (7 page)

Chapter Eight

Rick looked up at the pine trees dotting the top of the mesa. They glowed in the sunlight that had yet to penetrate to the desert floor. The cliffs were layered top to bottom in a kaleidoscope of color, from yellow-orange to a pale cranberry-red that turned purple above the shadow line. It was more beautiful here than he remembered.

This was his turf, but he still didn’t feel at home. Maybe he just needed to reconnect. He jammed his hands inside his leather jacket and continued walking.

Every day at this time Hosteen Silver would leave the ranch house to go offer his prayers to Dawn at a spot high atop the sandstone bedrock. His voice, filled with power and conviction, would echo in the walls of the narrow canyon.

Without charting a course, Rick moved farther up slope, deep into Copper Canyon.

It was here that he’d heard his foster father cry to the morning sky,
“Hozhone nas clee, hozhone nas clee,”
which translated meant “Now all is well, now all is well.” Then he’d scatter pollen from his medicine bag as an offering to Dawn, so he could continue to walk in beauty.

Memories crowded Rick’s mind as he stared into the brightening cliff wall to his left. That’s when he remembered the other reason he’d come this way as a boy. Hearing the spring-fed creek that ran the length of the canyon year round, he smiled.

As his brothers before him, he’d staked out his own special place, one too private to share. Although his brothers’ spots were soon known to the rest of the family, no one had ever discovered his.

He smiled, wondering if his sole treasure still lay nestled in that hole carved into the rock face, hidden by the thick spread of junipers that scented the air year-round. There was a gap in the cliffs here, one cleverly hidden from the curious by nature herself.

Rick stepped around the tall rock that seemingly blocked further passage. Pressing his way sideways between the plants that formed a natural barrier, he walked up a rabbit trail that was almost obscured by permanent shadows.

He never would have found this place as a boy, as a matter of fact, if he hadn’t seen a cottontail disappear into the cliff side. About twenty steps into the narrow opening, which closed off completely just around the curve, he stopped and searched for the familiar crevice created by the splitting of a sandstone layer centuries ago.

He’d just reached in when he heard footsteps—not animal. He spun in a crouch instantly, gun in hand.

“Whoa! It’s me,” Kim said, hands up in the air.

“You followed me?” he asked, surprised. No one had ever been able to do that before. But then, he’d been on a walk, not trying to evade the enemy.

“Yes, I’m supposed to be your backup. That’s part of my training, too. What if you ran into danger?”

“If I had, what could you have done? You’re not armed.”

“I can fight. I was deployed in Afghanistan as a cargo specialist,” she said. “And I’m armed, not with a gun, but with this,” she said, holding up a can of Mace.

He smiled. “What they sell as Mace these days is usually just pepper spray. Anyone who’s drugged up or has any training won’t be deterred by that.”

“I wasn’t thinking that you’d run into humans. I was thinking more of wild animals.”

“I’m armed,” he said, putting his pistol away.

“What if you’d fallen off a cliff or stepped on a rattler?”

He decided not to argue the point. Her motives had been right on target, but he was curious how she’d pulled it off. “I know you didn’t follow me from the house, not visually. I’d have seen you.”

“Tracks,” she said, pointing to the sandy earth. “I learned it at Boy Scouts. Actually, I had a friend who was a Boy Scout and he’d teach me what he was learning. It was far more interesting that what my Girl Scout troop was doing.”

He laughed. “Yeah, that fits you.”

“So why are you out here?” she said, changing the subject.

He grew serious. “I was trying to reconnect with the place I called home for so many years. This was my special spot. When I first arrived at Copper Canyon, after Hosteen Silver convinced family services that I wasn’t beyond hope and took me in—as he had before with my foster brothers—I went hiking a lot. One day I found an arrowhead. It wasn’t particularly valuable, but I chose to see it as something this place had meant for me to find. It fit the image I had of myself back then—a survivor and a fighter.”

“You still are,” she said softly.

“Yes, I’m that—and more,” he said. Parting some branches, he reached into the shallow crevice in the sandstone wall. “Let’s see if my arrowhead is still...” He paused for a moment. “There’s something else back here.”

He pulled out a pocket-size, metal breath-mint box containing the arrowhead and, along with it, a small, spiral notebook enclosed in a plastic freezer bag.

Curious, Rick put the box that held the arrowhead back for a moment, then opened the plastic bag and took out the notebook. Inside, on each page, were ink drawings. “The Plant People.”

“Who are they?” she said, trying to get a closer look at the drawings.

“A Traditionalist Navajo believes our native plants are people who go where they will, and can harm or bless, depending on how you appeal to them,” he said. “These particular ones are the plants Hosteen Silver used for his ceremonies...but look at the top of the page. That’s some kind of code.”

“Do you recognize it?”

“No, but he obviously left this here for me, so he thought I’d be able to decipher and read it.” He studied it for a moment longer.

“This was your special hiding place, but you shared the location with Hosteen Silver?”

“No, but it doesn’t surprise me that he knew,” Rick said. He held the notebook and leafed through its pages again. “I think there’s a good chance that he left this here for me the same day he went for his final walk into the desert. The numbers that make up the code are shaky, like the handwriting in his note to me.”

“I don’t understand,” Kim admitted. “Why would your father just walk off like that to die? Why not pass away in his house or call 9-1-1 and get help?”

“That’s not the way of a Traditionalist Navajo,” he said, his voice heavy. “Had he passed away at home, many would have believed that the ranch house would have drawn his
chindi
and become cursed.”

“You mean by his ghost?”

“No, the
chindi
is not a man’s spirit. It’s only the evil side of him that has to remain earthbound because it can’t unite with universal harmony.”

“Do you and your brothers believe in the
chindi?
”

“No, not really, we’re all Modernists. But like most Navajos, we still respect the old ways,” he said. “The things I’ve seen on the Rez, and what I’ve learned from our Traditionalists, have taught me that there’s a lot more to life that what we see and can easily explain.”

“Listen. I hear a voice,” Kim said.

It was Kyle, yelling for Rick.

Rick yelled back. “We’re okay.” He glanced at Kim. “It’s time to head back, but there’s something I need to do first.”

He took the arrowhead out of the mint box and placed it in his pocket. Then, using his cell phone, he photographed each page of the notebook, enclosed it in the plastic bag and placed it back in the crevice.

“Why are you leaving it here?” she asked.

“My foster father hadn’t been suffering from any obvious terminal disease. It’s impossible that my brothers, and the people who lived in the area and saw him often, would have missed something that important. Whatever caused him to walk off and die like that came on very suddenly.

“Over the past several months we’ve all begun to think it’s possible that he was murdered—maybe by some toxic substance, or more likely, a plant-derived poison that wasn’t detected until too late. That would explain why he left this documentation of the Plant People. The notebook may be the single most important clue we have. If I take it with me, and people come after us, I risk losing or damaging it,” Rick said. “The notebook has remained safe here all this time. For now, this is where it should stay.”

“Will you tell your brothers?” Kim asked.

“Yeah, and as soon as I can I’ll send Daniel and Paul the pages. Both of them are good at breaking codes.”

“We’re heading back to Hartley this morning, then?”

“Yes, but on the way back to the ranch house we need to rub out our tracks. I trust my brothers, of course, and you, but I want to make sure no one else who comes into the canyon can track us here,” he said.

Rick broke off a juniper branch and showed her how to erase obvious marks in the sand left by their shoes. “Carefully scoop up handfuls of sand, smooth over those scoop marks, then scatter the sand lightly over the trail the branch leaves as I run it over the ground. Just don’t pour the sand onto any leaves if you can help it.”

It took them several minutes to finish the job around the cliff exterior, but the rest was easy. They were back at the ranch house a half hour later.

Kyle met them at the door and Rick told him what they’d found.

“The fact that he didn’t leave the notebook here makes me think his enemy was familiar with our home and where things were kept,” Kyle noted.

“That doesn’t narrow the list very much,” Rick responded.

“Yeah, I hear you. Let’s see if Paul and Daniel can break the code, but I have to tell you, Hosteen Silver meant for
you
to find it, so it stands to reason you hold the key,” Kyle said. “You two had a special connection.”

“That’s because I could read people, just like Hosteen Silver did.”

“I understand you kept in touch with him even when you were undercover, south of the border.”

“It was only a sporadic note that would appear on a website set up by Daniel. Hosteen Silver would let me know when I had a new niece or nephew, or tell me he’d done a special Sing for my protection. Stuff like that.”

“I suppose the notes were in code?”

“Yeah. He would give it to Daniel to encrypt and I had the software needed on my end to decrypt.”

“Do you think he used a variant of the same system in the notebook?”

“Not likely. He didn’t like computers, but it is possible it’s based on a number-letter substitution with a specific book as the key. If I’m right, finding that particular book is going to require patience and a lot of luck.”

* * *

A
N
HOUR
LATER
, after a quick breakfast with Kyle and Erin, Kim and Rick were in the SUV heading back to Hartley. “I remember when your foster father came to visit Uncle Frank,” Kim said. “All eyes in the tavern would automatically turn to him. His white headband and of course his long silver hair made him stand out even in a crowd.”

“That’s why he was known as Hosteen Silver.
Hosteen
means Mister, I’m sure you know that already, having worked with Angelina. And Silver...well, that was obvious. His hair seemed to glow with a silver sheen that’s impossible to describe.”

“I agree. One time I was stressed out, hurrying to finish cleaning the tables so I could get to class. He came over and told me that I already had my place in the pattern of life. I didn’t have to rush to make it so.”

“That sounds like him.”

“I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but I didn’t have time to ask,” she said. “The next day when I went to work, Uncle Frank said that he’d left a note for me. I read it but it made no sense.”

“What did the note say?”

“It had a tiny hand-drawn figure of a horse, and a note saying that the horse had a lot to teach me.” She held up her hands, palms up and shrugged. “No explanation, nothing. Just that.”

He smiled. “He was telling you that Horse is your spiritual sister.”

“Why a horse? I love them, but I’ve never even ridden one.”

“As far as he was concerned, what Eagle is to me, Horse is to you.”

“Does the horse symbolize strength?” she asked, taking a guess.

“Yes, and cooperation, too. Horse is all about knowing when to exert control and when to yield. It’s a reminder that you get better results when you don’t try to do everything by yourself.”

“I wish he would have just said that.”

Rick laughed. “That wasn’t his way. He liked letting things unfold in your own thinking.”

After a while, her thoughts still on the case, she glanced over at him. “Do you still want to stop by Angelina’s second store? Jeri, the manager, worked at Silver Heritage before her promotion and she might remember the professor’s name.”

“What makes you think she’d remember?”

“She thought he was hot.”

“You didn’t?”

She took a deep breath. “What attracts me to a man isn’t looks. It’s attitude. Like confidence. Integrity is essential, and courage works, too.”

“Are you telling me that you’re never swayed by packaging?” he said, giving her an incredulous grin.

“Hey, I like eye candy as much as the next person, but keeping my interest takes a lot more than that,” she said, laughing. “I’m picky. When I met you for the first time since high school, what got my attention was the way you looked at whoever was speaking to you. That person had your undivided attention. You also took time to savor your food; you didn’t just wolf it down. I knew that you were a man who took his time to do things right.” Realizing the double entendre, she glanced away and felt her cheeks burning.

“I don’t like to rush,” he said, his voice low and deep. “Like wine, women and investigations, some things just need that extra attention.”

The masculine timbre of his voice felt like a warm caress on a cold winter’s night. Realizing the turn her thoughts had taken, Kim forced herself to look directly ahead.

As she peered off into the distance, something on the road caught her attention. “Slow down. There’s some kind of animal in our way.” She squinted, then quickly added, “It’s a snake.”

“Pretty common sight this late in the year. They sometimes sun themselves in the morning just to get warm. Let me see if I can prod it off the road.” He braked and came to a stop.

“Why don’t you just drive around it? If it’s a rattler you’ll be safer keeping your distance.”

“The road isn’t wide enough. And if I try to straddle it, it might just move and get struck. Wait here,” he said, climbing out. “I don’t want to kill it unless I have to.”