Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries (35 page)

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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

BOOK: Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries
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“Does this have a point?”
“Indeed, Dr. Cole. Mambas reminded me a lot of our dear Ruth. Unlike the snakes, however, she strikes at a man’s crotch as well as his face.”
She clutched the keys and said, “Weren’t you the man who wooed her away from her husband and son once upon a time?”
Hawsworth gave her the same condescending smile a tolerant adult would give a child. “That was more than thirty years ago. She was young, beautiful, and only beginning to develop poison sacs.”
“But you were together for two years after she ditched Samuel Stewart.”
“Yes.” His lips thinned again. “Remarkable, isn’t it?”
“What are you doing here? What do you want?”
He pulled himself up, that scholar’s frown deepening in his forehead. “I was hoping to find this William Stewart. I hear that everyone calls him Dusty.”
“That’s right. What did you want with Dusty?”
Carter Hawsworth scowled at her, as if trying to
evaluate her character. “I should probably speak to him.”
“I don’t think he’s anxious to talk to you, Dr. Hawsworth. He associates you with one of the more traumatic moments in his life.”
Hawsworth waved it off. “Oh, you should have seen him. A squalling brat in dirty clothes. Most unruly. He was a little monster. I can understand Ruth wanting to leave him and this shabby trailer behind—though they only came here between the field seasons. Sometimes the housing was a great deal rougher than this.”
Maureen narrowed her eyes. “If you want to talk to him, he’s going to want to know why he should listen instead of breaking your jaw first.”
“I beg your pardon?” he said as though stunned. “I’m here to help him.”
“Dr. Hawsworth, you ran off with his mother. He’s hated you all of his life. Why in the world would you want to help him now?”
Hawsworth blinked, as if he truly didn’t understand. “Dr. Cole, that was
thirty years ago
! What difference would it make today? But that’s all right”—he pushed out with his hands, as if to ward her off—“if he doesn’t want to see me, that’s well and fine.”
She sighed irritably. “Look, that’s his decision. What do you want to tell him? I’ll deliver your message and after that it’s up to him.”
Hawsworth turned, flipped his white ponytail, and stalked to his car. He got in, rolled down the window, and said, “Tell him … tell him I have reason to believe that no one from those days is safe. If he wants to know more he can contact me. Assuming he wants to discuss this matter in a mature and sensible way, we will decide what to do about Kwewur.”
“Right.” Maureen stepped up to the man’s car door. “How does he reach you?”
“I’ll call him. His number, like this address, is in the
book.” Hawsworth twisted the key. The Chevy roared to life.
Maureen was smiling as Hawsworth backed around, shifted the transmission into gear, and accelerated away. The little white tag hanging from his rearview mirror had said: SANTA FE HILTON PARKING. Better yet, the expiration was still three days away.
 
 
BROWSER KNELT IN a collapsed room high in Kettle Town and watched the morning glow change from gray to pink. Jackrabbit and Straighthorn had just returned, and stood behind him, breathing hard, covered with dust.
“We got separated, War Chief,” Jackrabbit said. Sweat streaked the young warrior’s face, cutting dark lines across his pug nose and around his wide mouth. “We were taking our time, moving slowly, checking abandoned houses. We split up to check several old pit houses. I sent Fire Lark and Straighthorn ahead to War Club village. We were supposed to meet there. Carved Splinter was behind me when we left the last pit house. A moment later, when I looked back, he was gone. I didn’t think too much about it since we were all supposed to meet at War Club village anyway.” The young warrior shook his head. “Carved Splinter wouldn’t have just wandered off.” He swallowed hard. “A half-hand of time later, we heard a cry, like someone being hurt. Then came whistles, and I knew that something had gone terribly wrong. We waited for a half-hand of time, just in case there was something we could do …
or in case Carved Splinter showed up. Then the warriors came.”
“What warriors?”
“White Moccasins, War Chief. Straighthorn saw them first. At least ten climbed down the stairway, dressed in long white capes. I made the decision to draw back. We took shelter in a drainage and waited. Just before daylight we withdrew and returned here.”
Browser carefully searched the approaches to Kettle Town, hoping desperately to see Carved Splinter trotting in. He did not wish to tell old White Cone that he had already lost one of the Bow Society’s best warriors.
The plain with its abandoned ditches and cornfields remained empty, but for a slight breeze that whisked a swirl of dust off to the east.
 
 
THE THING ABOUT Santa Fe, Maureen had discovered, was that even in early November, the weather could be incredible. With a bright sunny day, and temperatures bumping up against seventy Fahrenheit, the outdoor dining area at Nellie’s proved the perfect place for lunch.
Dusty had dropped her off that morning while he ran errands to the bank, the hardware shop, and the place that did lube jobs down on Cerrillos. After promising to meet him at Nellie’s at noon—the restaurant attached to the Loretto Hotel—she had drifted in and out of the shops around the plaza.
What was it about the Southwest? She could browse with passionate disinterest through the trendy shops on Queen Street in Toronto and rarely have the craving to do anything extravagant. But in the first fifteen minutes in Santa Fe, she could blow her yearly salary. It wasn’t just that it was Indian artwork. She’d seen that at Sainte
Marie Among the Hurons in northern Ontario. The difference was that here, in the Southwest, Native art had made the transition from being quaint relics to something beautifully relevant to the twenty-first century.
Studying the katchinas in their wealth of styles, she couldn’t help but wonder why her Iroquoian contemporaries at Six Nations couldn’t find a way to share the power and beauty of the Society of Faces. Iroquoian False Face dancers were every bit as delightful as katchinas, and often a great deal more colorful.
She considered that as the midmorning sun warmed the outdoor restaurant. It reflected from the cement and the bright yellow napkins on the table. The historic Loretto chapel stood immediately to the south, guarded by overarching cottonwoods. Behind her a traditional-looking ramada enclosed the server’s stations and fireplace. In front of her, the plastered walls of the Hotel Loretto, with its plastic-shrouded luminarias, glowed in the clear morning.
“Excuse me?”
Maureen started from her reverie. The tall woman standing beside her table wore a gray wool suit with matching waist-length cape, opaque white nylons, and brown pumps. Her perfect silver hair was accented by the red silk scarf knotted at her neck.
“Hello, Dr. Sullivan, fancy meeting you here.” Maureen felt her happy mood evaporate.
“I was sitting over there.” She pointed to the far corner table beside the cement railing. “I thought perhaps you might like company?”
Subduing her first instinct to say no, Maureen moved her bison-hide purse from the other chair. “Be my guest.”
Ruth Ann Sullivan seated herself, looking every inch an East Coast matron. She unhooked her cloak and spread it over the chair back. Back straight, posture perfect, she crossed her arms primly and studied Maureen through hard blue eyes. “You’re not the sort I
would have figured my son would attract.”
“How would you know? You don’t know anything about your son.”
Maureen raised the big yellow coffee cup to signal for a refill. They had marvelous coffee here, rich and black—even better than her favorite Tim Horton’s off the QEW back home.
“Just after I escaped the Gestapo treatment of Agent Nichols, I did some research.” Ruth Ann smiled coldly.
“Gestapo? Like white lights, a wooden chair, black leather gloves, and rubber hoses?” Maureen asked.
“No, him, me, and my lawyer, in the Santa Fe residency.” Ruth Ann arched an eyebrow. “Did you really think I killed Dale?”
“No, but I thought you might know who did.” Maureen leaned back as her cup was refilled, and the waitress, a middle-aged woman, asked if they were ready to order.
“Just coffee for me,” Ruth Ann said.
“I’ll order later, please,” Maureen replied and waited until the waitress had stepped out of earshot. “Whoever killed Dale knew enough to make it look like southwestern witchcraft.”
“Perhaps the killer read too many Tony Hillerman novels.” She loosened the red scarf at her throat. “I wish I had known who you were the other night at the trailer.” Ruth Ann smiled wearily. “I really would not have expected someone of your reputation to be with William.”
“What sort would you have expected?”
“A field bimbo. The rotating sort we used to call teepee creepers. Usually young, out on their own for the first time, bursting with desire to crawl into the crew chief’s bedroll and benefit from his status.” She waved a thin hand. “It’s not just in archaeological field camps, of course. We train our young women to be that way. It’s fascinating. I spent a year at a high school, watching the most popular girls: blond, buxom,
and beautiful, from educated, upper-class households. They just couldn’t wait to pair themselves off with the football heroes, the boys with expensive cars, and the track stars.”
Maureen sipped her coffee and thought about all of the problems Dusty had relating to women. Even the field bimbos would have scared him. “You thought Dusty would be shacked up with a golden girl?”
“I would have imagined. What we think of as silly high school girls is really a microcosm of adult female behavior. We still teach our girls to create their self-identity through their husbands’ status and their husbands’ possessions.”
“Somewhere along the line, I missed that lecture. Must have been because of the poor schools on the Reserve.” Maureen watched Ruth Ann across her coffee cup.
“Then you aren’t as good a physical anthropologist as your vitae would indicate. The same behavior is exhibited in a troop of Gelada baboons. Females want to be bred by alpha males. They gravitate toward them through an attraction as magnetic now as it was in the middle of the Pleistocene.”
“Much the same way you were attracted to Carter Hawsworth some thirty years ago?” Maureen asked.
Ruth Ann tipped her face to the sun. “Exactly the same way. Have you and William been lovers for long? Or is this just a field affair?”
“Dusty and I are professional colleagues and good friends,” she said, “only.”
Ruth Ann’s mouth pinched. “Maybe, but the way you look at him, either you’ve been in his bed, or will be soon.”
“Would that bother you?”
She laughed. “What sort of relationship do you think I have with him? I couldn’t care less who he screws.”
Maureen toyed with her cup. “I’ve been wondering why the killer was so certain he could lure you here
through those faxes. What could have happened back then to make you feel you had to come back here—”
“You’re fishing,” Ruth Ann responded archly.
Maureen sipped her coffee, but her eyes never left Ruth Ann. She said, “Something brought you here. Something as innocent as curiosity or as powerful as guilt. Either way, if you’d cut the ties with the past as cleanly as you would have us believe, you wouldn’t be here.”
Ruth Ann exhaled, then nodded slightly. “Dr. Cole, why don’t you and I just lay our cards on the table? At this stage, I’m not sure where scoring points for being clever will get us.”
“Very well, did you have Dale killed?”
For a long moment Ruth Ann’s hard eyes bored into Maureen’s. Finally she said, “Dale and I hadn’t spoken in years. Why on earth would I suddenly place myself and my career at risk to murder him?”
“You used to be lovers. Maybe you hold a grudge.”
Ruth Ann laughed and slapped the table. “You’re right! There is always a reason to kill an ex-lover. What did Dale tell you about me?”
“Not much. He told me a little about Dusty’s childhood, and about how you treated him and Sam. He told me about you and Hawsworth. That’s all. We didn’t know that you and Dale were lovers until we began reading the journals.”
“I would appreciate the opportunity to look through those journals,” she said stiffly, “especially as they regard me.”
Maureen took another drink and savored the rich flavor for a time before she answered, “So would we. Someone broke into Dale’s house and stole them while we were up at Chaco.”
Ruth Ann leaned back and looked around the airy restaurant while she studied the information. “Rupert?”
“Rupert?” Maureen started. “The park superintendent?”
“Or Carter.”
“Why Rupert?”
“Oh, come on. You don’t think he’s some saintly Indian, do you? He used to pick women up at bars, fuck them, and drop them off at the nearest bus station. That’s how he met his wife, Sandy, for God’s sake.”
“Rupert Brown couldn’t have taken the journals. He was at Chaco with us. It would have been impossible for him to be in two places at once. And believe me, he was still there after we left. He couldn’t have beaten us home.” Maureen leveled a finger, “You, however, have been sight unseen for days, eh?”
“I didn’t even know about Dale’s journals.” The answer sounded lame to Maureen.
“He was a young field archaeologist, living out of his truck. Are you telling me you didn’t know he kept a journal while he was in the field?”
She made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, I might have. That was so long ago, how would I remember?”
Maureen let her have it her way. Instead she said, “Tell me about it. Your side, I mean. Just how deeply are you involved in witchcraft?”
“I’m an anthropologist, dear. You don’t study human culture without running into witchcraft. The first article I published was on southwestern witchcraft. But I am not ‘involved’ in it.”
“But you know what it means when a man’s feet are skinned, his body is buried in a yucca hoop, and a hole is drilled in his head. Someone stuffed another human’s muscle tissue into Dale’s mouth, and he was buried upside down in an archaeological site.”
Sullivan’s face remained expressionless as she listened. “The actual methods of witchery were Carter’s fascination, not mine. If you look up that article, you’ll find he was the senior author. He’s the one who got me involved in witchcraft stories in the first place. Him and his witch.”
Maureen shifted uneasily. “Was that before you ran out on Samuel?”
Sullivan’s mouth hardened. “I wouldn’t try to sound so judgmental, Dr. Cole. You weren’t there.”
“Then inform me, please.”
“I don’t think so. That was in a different millennium, a different life.” She toyed with the tabletop, thoughtfully running her fingers over the surface, then looked up suddenly. Her smile was as sharp as cut glass. “Oh, what the hell. They’re dead … Sam … Dale. I could just wish Carter was. Now there, Dr. Cole, is someone I wouldn’t mind going to jail for murdering. It would damn near be worth it.”
“If Carter was that bad, how could Samuel Stewart have been worse?”
She snorted. “God, Sam was a crusader. It was the sixties. How do I explain the world then? Most of us truly believed that we would die in thermonuclear explosions. Our friends were dying in Vietnam and our government was lying to us. Samuel was one of those free spirits who thought that by knowing people in the past, we could know our future, avoid the mistakes that kill civilizations and maybe build a better world for ourselves and the whole planet.”
“That doesn’t sound like justification for desertion.”
She glared at Maureen from under lowered eyelids. “Have you ever lived with an idealistic fanatic? In the beginning it’s heady stuff, this charging windmills and rewriting the future of man. After a couple of years the endless abrasive enthusiasm begins to wear holes in your soul. After William was born, I was supposed to become some sort of maternal clan-elder earth mother goddess. The pure virgin mother, symbol of fertility, but not sexuality. To hear Samuel tell it in those days, breast milk was to a child as rain was to the Shalako. Motherhood wasn’t biology, it became religion.”

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