The Shape Shifter (13 page)

Few days before Totter fire, Totter apparently stole pinyon sap from Grandma Peshlakai’s work shed.

Why? As fire accelerant? To get fire hot enough to destroy Shewnack’s body beyond identification?

Why would he do that? The burned man was apparently not a local. Nobody seemed to come forward to ask about him. Garcia guessed he was a tran-sient coming through who had noticed Totter’s HELP

WANTED sign. But coming through from where?

He looked at that, produced a wry smile, and added:

“Or for waterproofing some of his own baskets for sale to tourists?”

He started to scratch that out. Stopped. Shook his head. Instead wrote: Joe Leaphorn LOSING IT!!

Skipped some space on the page. Wrote:

“
An’n ti’
.” Frowned. Lined that out and wrote “
an’ t I’
.” Studied that sort of generic Navajo word for witchcraft in general, said it aloud, approved it, underlined it. Then he wrote
an’t’zi
, the Navajo word for the specie of witchcraft employing corpse powder poisons to cause fatal illnesses.

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Under that he wrote “
ye-na-L o si
,” underlined it, thought a moment and slashed an X over the entire list. The
ye-na-L o si
expression described what the
belagaana
schol-ars preferred to call skinwalkers, relating them to their European witchcraft stories of werewolves.

At the bottom of the page, he underlined Leaphorn LOSING IT!! And added: SEEMS LIKE I HAVE ALREADY

LOST IT.

He wadded the paper. Tossed it into the fire. Leaphorn didn’t believe in witchcraft. He believed in evil, firmly believed in it, saw it practiced all around him in its various forms—greed, ambition, malice—and a variety of others.

But he didn’t believe in supernatural witches. Or did he?

And he was dead tired and, to hell with it all, he was going to bed to get some sleep.

Easier said than done. He found himself thinking of Emma, missing her, yearning for her. Telling her about the carpet, about Delos, about Totter’s fire, about Shewnack, about the Handy case, about people who didn’t seem to have beginnings anywhere and who faded away into ashes and odd mailed-in obituary notices. And Emma smiling at him, understanding him all too well, telling him that she guessed he already had this all figured out and his problem was he just didn’t like his solution because he didn’t like the idea of “shape shifters,” of his suspects turning into owls and flying away. Which seemed painfully close to true.

He drifted from that into wishing that he could have been in the hogan all those winters when his elderly maternal relatives were telling their winter stories—

explaining the reasons behind the curing ceremonials, the basis for Dineh values. He’d missed too much of that.

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Emma hadn’t. Neither had Jim Chee. Chee, for example, had once passed along to him how Hosteen Adowe Claw, one of Chee’s shaman kinsmen, had clarified the meaning of the incident in the story of the Dineh emergence from the flooded third world into this glittering world, in which First Man realizes he had left his medicine bundle behind, with all of humanity’s greed, malice, and assorted other evils. And then sent a heron back into the flood waters of that world destroyed by God because of those evils and told that diving bird to find the bundle and bring it to him.

And tell the heron not to tell anyone that it contained evil, to just tell them it was “the way to make money.”

14

It proved to be another uneasy sleep, broken by troublesome dreams, by long thoughts about whether the dead man found in the car was Mel Bork, and if not him, who, and what then had happened to Bork? When Leaphorn finally came fully awake, it was because he thought he had heard a door opening. He sat up, totally alert, tensed, listening. Now came the sound of the door closing. It would have been the garage/kitchen door. Now the sound of footsteps. Light footsteps. Someone trying not to disturb him. Probably Louisa, he thought. Probably she had cut off her southern Ute research a little early. Some of the tension went away. But not much. He slid across over the bed toward the nightstand, pulled open the drawer, feeling for the little .32-caliber pistol he kept there, finding it, clutching it, remembering that once, when someone with children was visiting, Louisa had persuaded him to leave it unloaded.

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The sound of another door opening. At Louisa’s adjoining bedroom just down the hall. More steps. Sounds of bathroom water running. Sounds of the shower. Then assorted sounds that Leaphorn identified as connected with unpacking a suitcase, hanging things in the closet, putting things in drawers. Then the sneaky sound of slipper-clad feet. The sound of his doorknob turning, of the door to his bedroom opening just a little. Light from the hall streaming in.

He could see the outline of Louisa’s head, peering in at him.

“Joe,” Louisa’s said, very softly, “you asleep?” Leaphorn exhaled a huge breath.

“I was,” he said.

“Sorry I woke you,” Louisa said.

“Don’t be,” Leaphorn said. “I am delighted it’s you.” She laughed. “Just who were you expecting?” Leaphorn didn’t know how to answer that. He said,

“Did you find any good Southern Ute sources?”

“I did! A really great old lady. Full of stories about all their troubles with the Comanches when they were being pushed west into Utah. But go back to sleep. I’ll give you a complete report at breakfast. And how about you? All quiet on the home front?”

“Relatively,” Leaphorn said. “But if you just drove in, you must be tired. It can wait. Get some sleep.” Leaphorn’s next awakening was much less stress-ful. He was lured out of his sleep by the sound of perking coffee and the aroma of bacon in the frying pan. Louisa was at the kitchen table, reading something in her notebook, sipping coffee. Leaphorn poured himself a cup and joined her. She told him about what her very, very elderly THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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Ute source had told her of the clever tactics her tribesmen had used to confuse the Comanches, about horses stolen and enemies tricked. She was heading back to her office at Northern Arizona University after breakfast, but first she needed an account of what Leaphorn had been doing, and his copy of last month’s utility bills so she could pay her share. While she served the bacon and eggs, Leaphorn dug out the paperwork and decided what, and how much, he wanted to tell her. He wouldn’t tell her that he was afraid that Mel Bork was dead, not until that was confirmed. And even if it was, he didn’t think he’d report his suspicions about Tommy Vang’s fruitcake. That all seemed sort of silly to him, even though he’d been offered the stuff himself. He was pretty sure it would sound even sillier to the professor.

He started his account with the letter from Mel Bork.

He skipped through all that happened next rapidly, skipping a lot of it, and being stopped several times by her questions about the rug. By the time he’d finished his recitation, he found himself forced back to his conclusion of the previous night—that he had wasted a lot of time and accomplished nothing useful.

But Louisa’s interest, naturally, was in the culturally significant rug. The history of that weaving fit pre-cisely into her professional preoccupation with tribal cultures. What did Leaphorn think had happened to it? That led up and down the list of questions that Leaphorn had been asking himself, and he couldn’t answer a single one of them with anything better than guesses. Louisa’s curiosity eventually, over the second cup of coffee, settled on Jason Delos. One of her graduate students at NAU had done some landscape work at
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his place, had become an acquaintance of Tommy Vang, and had regaled one of her graduate student sessions with Vang’s stories of life among his fellow tribesmen in the mountains along the Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos borders.

“It all seemed totally authentic,” she said, “and interesting. But what we were hearing, of course, was second-hand. So I sent Mr. Vang an invitation to come in and talk to our little seminar. But he didn’t come.”

“Did he say why?” Leaphorn asked. “I’d love to know how he got connected with Mr. Delos.”

“He just said he couldn’t do it,” Louisa said. “Our landscaping grad student said he had the impression that Tommy’s family had been some of the tribesmen who worked with the CIA in the latter phases of the Vietnam War, about the time we were poking into Cambodia. This student of mine was sort of edgy about it. He told me, more or less privately, that he thought Tommy’s family had been sort of wiped out during all that back-and-forth fighting, that Delos had been with the CIA and had sort of rescued him as a boy and brought him back to the States.”

“Well, now,” Leaphorn said.

“Does that sound sensible? Based on what you know?”

“It sounds as sensible as anything else I know about Delos. Which is damned near nothing,” Leaphorn said.

“About all I know for almost certain is that he is a dedicated big-game hunter, likes to collect antiques; and if you’d like to have that old tale-teller rug, he says he’s thinking about getting rid of it.”

“I’ve heard he’s fairly new to Flagstaff,” Louisa said.

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“Certainly not old family. And I gather he doesn’t mix much socially.”

Leaphorn nodded. “That fits,” he said.

Louisa had been studying him during this conversation.

“Joe,” she said, “you seem sort of down. Depressed.

Tired. Is this business of being retired getting to you?

From what you said, this rug affair sort of ties in with one of your old cases. So it doesn’t sound like being retired has stopped you from acting like a detective.” Leaphorn laughed. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out the utility bills, and handed them to her.

“Perfect time for this. Here what it’s costing you for this unorthodox, possibly even un-American arrangement we’ve been having. But I’ll let you do the figuring of the percentages.”

She took the slips, glanced at them.

“I was just going to remind you about that,” she said, smiling at him. “I will turn them over to my accountant at the university to make sure you’re not cheating. I will also remind you that I am behind on our room rental deal.

Remember, I stayed up here about three times during the summer.”

During all this Leaphorn had been studying her, remembering Emma.

“You know, Louisa, we could save this paperwork, this sort of thing, if you would just go ahead and marry me.” She smiled at him. “You have probably just established a
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
record for the most un-romantic proposal ever made.”

“It wasn’t intended to be romantic,” Leaphorn said.

“It was intended to be just downright practical.”
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She looked down at her coffee cup, picked it up, held it, replaced it in the saucer, smiled at him ruefully.

“Do you remember what I said the first time you came up with this idea? Let’s see. About nineteen—”

“Several years ago,” Leaphorn said, interrupting her.

“I remember exactly every word of it. You said. ‘Joe, I tried being married once. I didn’t care for it.’ ”

“Yep,” she said, looking at him fondly. “That’s exactly the way I put it.”

“Have you since changed your mind? Found me more attractive?”

That brought a thoughtful silence. A sigh. Another picking up and putting down of the coffee cup. Then:

“Joe, I’ll bet you remember that adage—I’m sure you do because I think you are the very first person I heard using it. It’s about how hard it is for old dogs to learn new tricks. Or something like that. Anyway, how do I say it? I guess I’ll use something an old lady once told me in one of my oral history interviews. She said, ‘Don’t marry a really good friend ’cause they’re a lot better than a husband.’ ”

Leaphorn let that hang there. He was noticing that his reaction to her reaction was a sort of relief.

She was watching him, looking sort of penitent. “Or maybe I got that wrong. Maybe she said it would spoil the friendship.”

“However she worded it,” Leaphorn said, “I damn sure don’t want that to happen to us.”

“Nor me either,” Louisa said, and got up and carried her plate, cup, saucer, and cutlery to the sink. “And just to make sure you don’t think I might be willing to revert to full-time housekeeper, I will leave this in the sink for you THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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to wash, while I collect my stuff and head south toward my great stack of midterm papers waiting to be graded.” She started to add his plate to her load, but stopped. Instead, she smiled at him.

“Good friends are too hard to collect,” she said.