TRAFFIC HAD BEEN desultory on the drive down I-25 from Santa Fe. The casino signs occupied Maureen’s attention as she watched the countryside flash past the Bronco’s window. To the east, the Sandia Mountains stood in silhouetted humps that shadowed the valley from the morning sun. The lingering taste of
huevos rancheros
titillated her taste buds. Something about the combination of eggs over-easy, hot corn tortillas fresh from the oven,
refritos,
cheddar, and chopped green chilis, with a rich seasoning of cumin, created ecstasy. She smiled; it was even better than the chocolate doughnuts and the rich black coffee in her favorite Tim Horton’s off the QEW outside of Hamilton.
As they drove into the slanting morning sunlight, Dusty pulled his battered brown cowboy hat low and drove with one hand. He wore a thick denim coat and mirrored sunglasses.
“Why would Dale leave his truck sitting out there overnight and not tell anyone?” Dusty whispered, more to himself than to her. “It’s just not like him.”
She studied him as they passed the clutter of truck stops, industrial warehouses, and motels that introduced the southbound traveler to Albuquerque. “I
thought you were the one who said not to worry about it.”
Dusty let off the gas as he entered the speed zone, and the Bronco growled under compression. “I don’t know. I mean, first the murder victims at the 10K3 site, then burned children in the kiva at Pueblo Animas. Too many peculiar things are happening.” He shook his head.
“You’re not thinking of
el basilisco,
are you?”
He glanced at her, then returned his attention to the road. “No.”
Uh-huh, she thought, remembering the beautiful little coiled jet snake with the red coral eye that they’d dug up from a murdered woman’s grave at the 10K3 site in Chaco Canyon. Dusty seemed to be plagued by Ariasazi witchcraft.
“You think I’m crazy, Doctor?”
“I suspected that the moment I met you on that Proto-Iroquois site in New York, Stewart. All I can say is that after months of close exposure to your warm fuzzy personality, I’m convinced.”
His mouth twisted. “Did I ever tell you what a charming person you are to be around? Always seeing the bright side, cheering a fellow up.”
“That’s my mission …
watch out!”
She threw a hand against the dash as Dusty jammed on the brakes to avoid rear-ending a little blue Toyota that swerved into their lane.
“Asshole!” Dusty yelled.
“Ouch!” She looked down at the big black revolver that slid out from under the seat and clunked into the back of her heel. “Stewart, I wish to God you’d get a seat belt for the passenger’s seat!”
“Me? Why don’t you wish some of these ostrich-headed idiots would drive like human beings? If it wasn’t for lunatics like that, people wouldn’t need seat belts!”
She grimaced down at the revolver. “There’s a gun between my feet.”
“Sounds Freudian.”
Annoyed, she replied, “Of course, it does. You’re a man.”
“Maureen, it’s just a pistol. Reach down and slide it back under the seat.”
“Is it loaded?”
“You bet.”
She stared at the gun. It seemed to ooze evil. “You know, you’d be in jail in Canada, and most of the civilized world.”
“Yeah, yeah, Canada and Communist China have banned all the guns. Well, this is the United States of America. We’re still mostly free to protect ourselves from bad guys. Just push the revolver back under the seat. It won’t bite.”
The sensation was like riding with a coiled rattlesnake between her boots. She used her heel to kick it back, glaring at him the whole time.
He wheeled them through the traffic to the exit onto 1-40 eastbound. The Bronco thump-thumped over the cement overpass and merged into the line of shining autos that crept along at the post-rush-hour crawl.
Dusty took the exit onto Louisiana and hedged his way into the left lane. Maureen raised an eyebrow when they passed the Winrock Mall and its trendy stores. At the light on Independence, he waited for the arrow, passed the Marriott, and wound around to a small industrial building hidden behind the hotel and the glass and brick restaurants.
The white building sported a sign stating: ROBERTSON & STEWART, CULTURAL RESOURCES CONSULTANTS.
“So, this is it?” Maureen opened the door and stepped out onto the small asphalt parking lot. It held four spaces that apparently didn’t get a lot of use. The paint defining the spaces still looked fresh.
“Home away from home,” Dusty told her as he walked around, opened the passenger door, and jammed some empty bottles between the seat bottom and the floorboard to keep the revolver in place.
Maureen shook her head.
Dusty unlocked the office’s aluminum-framed glass door, then reached down to retrieve a weathered metate, an ancient grinding stone. He used the artifact to prop open the door.
“We rent this by the year. It serves for an office, lab, and place to keep the paperwork. Sometimes when we have extra field crew in town, we crash them in the back room.”
He led her into a spartan but functional front office. The light wood veneer walls gleamed under the fluorescent lights. The metal desk sported a telephone, typewriter, and pencil cup. On a stand to the right stood a copy machine with a case of paper visible behind the open cabinet door. The calendar on the wall had been turned to September; never mind that this was the first day of November. The opposite wall had been covered with contiguous 1-to-500,000-scale maps of Arizona, New Mexico, southern Utah, and Colorado. Pins were stuck here and there in the maps, some with tags that denoted sites and others marking project areas. The big wooden case blocking the plate-glass window held stacks of USGS quadrangles.
Dusty pushed the button on the combination phone/ answering machine/fax that promptly told him he had four messages. The first ran.
A man with an English accent said,
“Dale, you son of a bitch! I didn’t think that even you could sink this low! I will not allow you to pour salt into old wounds. Keep this up, and you’ll think my last rebuttal to your article was a joke. I’ll be your worst nightmare
.”
Dusty frowned as the next message played.
“Dale? It’s Maggie. We found your truck this morning. If you get this, please call and let us know you’re all right.”
Two more Maggie messages followed, each slightly more concerned than the last.
Dusty picked up the phone and punched the speed dial. He listened for a moment, meeting Maureen’s concerned stare. Finally he said, “Dale? Dusty. Hey, we’re getting a little worried about you. If you get to your place before I do, I don’t want to play tag with you all day long. Just stay put. We’ll be there as soon as we get the Pueblo Animas artifacts unloaded. And call Maggie to let her know you’re okay.”
He hung up and stared at the phone for several moments.
“Who was the Englishman?” Maureen asked. He didn’t sound very friendly.
“I don’t know. I didn’t recognize his voice. Maybe that’s what this is all about. Dale’s engaged, once again, in an academic squabble.”
Maureen folded her arms. “What rebuttal was he talking about?”
Dusty shrugged. “I don’t know. Dale’s last published article, however, was about the evidence for cannibalism in the Southwest. The Englishman was probably upset that his alabaster Anasazi turned out to be human beings.”
He walked over, opened the wooden door in the back wall, and flipped a light switch. Maureen followed him into a spacious lab. Cinder-block walls were lined with wooden shelving made of two-by-fours and plywood. From floor to ceiling they were packed with cardboard boxes full of brown paper artifact bags, soil sample bags, portions of broken pottery, collections of animal bone, and thick slabs of ground stone. A stack of shovels cluttered the corner behind the door. Wooden screens stood in the back of the room, all propped up like an angular line of soldiers.
Maureen ran a finger along one of the dusty lab tables. It, like the three others that ran lengthwise down the center of the room, had been constructed of two-by-fours
and covered with plywood. Each table was littered with microscopes, calipers, light tables, maps, and stacks of reference books on southwestern ceramics, geology, archaeology, botany, and a host of other subjects. Shoe boxes held stacks of three-by-five index cards in clear sandwich bags that identified individual artifacts for curation.
Through the open door to her left, she could see a small bathroom with sink, toilet, and shower. To her right, more shelves lined the wall, bursting with reference books, field reports, and the other exotica of report production.
“Dale?” Dusty called. “You here?”
Maureen leaned over to examine the mouse dung on the file cabinets and boxes. “Nobody here but us mice.”
“Yeah, I need to bait the traps again.”
Dusty stepped to the closest table and rolled up the maps there. Scrounging a rubber band, he secured them and used a whisk broom to bat a cloud of dust from the tabletop. “That should be enough room for the Pueblo Animas stuff, right there.” He pointed.
Maureen spent the next half hour packing in boxes of human bone, pottery sherds, soil samples, and other cultural material from their dig at Pueblo Animas. This, as in her specialty in physical anthropology, was where the real work started. Contrary to popular opinion and the image created by
National Geographic,
most archaeology was done in the lab, perched on uncomfortable chairs, peering down at bits of human trash that opened dim windows into long-vanished worlds.
As he set down the last of the boxes, Dusty said, “Okay, there it is. That’s the last of the field records.” He thumped the cardboard box full of forms. “Sylvia took the photos into the processor, so that’s taken care of.”
“Right. Let’s go see if Dale’s home,” Maureen said, and headed for the front door. “He and I are going to
have a little talk about this employee complex he’s developed.”
“You’re going to beard Dale in his own house?”
“Yep.”
“This I gotta see.”
Magpie propped her hands on her hips. She stood just above the gaping circumference of the Casa Rinconada great kiva. A cold wind tugged at her green Park Service jacket, and teased the ends of her shoulder-length hair where it escaped her silver clasp. Looking to the east, she could see her vehicle parked beside Dale’s gleaming red truck. It was supposed to be her lunch hour. She checked her watch. In fifteen minutes she had to be back at the Visitors Center, on guard at the main desk to accommodate the few tourists who passed through this late in the season.
Maggie couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible had happened to Dale.
She sighed and looked around. Maybe it was just the stress she’d been under lately. Her elderly aunt Sage was dying of cancer. She lived alone just off the road north of Grants. Despite Magpie taking every chance to drive down to see her, the old woman refused to leave her old trailer house. She wanted to die in her house, not among strangers at a hospice in Albuquerque or at the hospital in Gallup.
Her eyes fixed on his red truck, as though it could send her a message, some subtle clue as to where Dale might be.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Rupert Brown, the park superintendent, had told her when she’d reported the vehicle. “This is Dale we’re talking about. I’ve known him since before you were born. He does things like this. I think I’ll write him a citation personally, just to
see the expression on his face when he roars in here to protest.”
But Maggie’s encounter with the vanishing owl, the faint hazy vision of Dale walking right up this path toward Casa Rinconada, had been eating at her all day. She’d had to return for a second look.
Turning, she looked off to the west, up the low gray ridge that humped out from the side of Rincon Canyon’s buff-colored sandstone. The grasses and brush, stroked by the wings of the wind, might have been beckoning her. Why? She knew that ridgetop. Nothing was up there except an unexcavated ruin.
The flash of white caught her eye. Maggie frowned, shading her vision as she studied it. It looked like a piece of paper. Trash. People were such pigs. Reggie, who had been hired to do minor repairs as well as collect the park trash, spent most of his time picking up trash.
The sound of a vehicle caused her to look to the north. From here she could see straight across the canyon to the Pueblo Bonito ruins almost due north. Slightly to the east stood the once proud walls of Chetro Ketl. To the west she could see Pueblo del Arroyo, the location of the only tri-wall structure in the canyon.
The vehicle was Rupert’s shiny Dodge pickup, the newest and nicest of the Park Service units. Being boss had perks.
Rupert’s truck thumped over the Chaco Wash bridge and made the turn into the Rinconada parking lot. He pulled up beside Magpie’s truck and killed the engine. She walked partway down the trail to meet him.
Sunlight drenched his tall body. He had a handsome brown face and powerful eyes. Something about him had always affected her, as if the man broadcast on a frequency that she could detect but not really hear. She never knew what to do with that sense of power that surrounded him. Was it just something that spoke to her subconscious?
“Hey, Magpie, I thought you’d be headed back to the front desk.” He smiled. He wore sunglasses and a black cowboy hat. His green Park Service winter coat sported the official patch on the shoulder. His long legs were encased in slim brown slacks.
“I just thought I’d come back and check. You know, about Dale. Something’s not right about his truck being out here.” She shook her head. “He would have at least checked in.”
Rupert stuffed his long fingers into his back pockets as he turned, looking back at the parking lot. Maggie watched him as he carefully searched the surrounding canyon bottom. “Well, you can never tell with Dale. Rules and regulations have never had much of an impact on his behavior.”
Maggie checked her watch again. “Rupert, I have to get back.” She pointed at the bit of white paper up on the ridge. “You might want Reggie to drop by with his trash truck. That looks like something that blew out of someone’s car.”
“I sent him into town on a ‘gofer’ run. If you wouldn’t mind trotting up and getting that, I’d appreciate it.” He made a face. “I need to look around here a little bit.”
Maggie gave him a cautious look.
Rupert read her expression and laughed. “Probably just a nut call. You know, we get them. Yesterday was Halloween. Some woman just called, asked for the superintendent, then told me that a white guy had fallen through a hole in the past. And that his head was sticking down into the Fourth World where he could see the ancestors.”
A surge of adrenaline tingled Maggie’s veins. “What did she mean?”
“I don’t know.” Rupert squinted up at the sun. “I’ll look around here and see you back at the barn.”
“Right.” Maggie walked back up the trail and spilt off, climbing up to the bit of white paper that the wind
had wedged under a saltbush branch. She crumpled it in her hand and straightened, only to see another twenty paces beyond. Climbing to it, she picked it up. On a whim she plodded to the ridgetop and looked around. Chaco Canyon unfolded before her. Rupert was walking the last of the trail loop through the small houses on the way back to his vehicle. The ruins under the far northern wall gleamed. To the south the rim of Chacra Mesa shone in the midday sun. She could see the ancient Anasazi stairway that led to Tsin Kletsin on the mesa top. At first the oddity didn’t register as she lowered her eyes to the crumbled stone piled on the ridgetop. It was the color rather than the shape that caught her eye. Dark red, wine color rather than buff. Like two juniper stumps, except … then her stumbling mind put it together.
Two bloody feet atop legs stuck out of the dirt.
She screamed,
“Rupert!”