relief. 'I don't mind telling you, with the full moon coming up, I've been kind of nervous about sleeping.'
A cleansing was one of the easiest ceremonies to perform. There was just one precaution she was going to have to take. She took a quick glance into the hallway, made certain that the nurse was still deep in her paperwork, and closed the door. Then she climbed up on a chair, and stuffed facial tissue into all the openings of the smoke detector.
Ten minutes later, the ventilator in the bathroom was clearing out the last of the tobacco-redbud-and-cedar smoke, and the nurse was none the wiser. Larry Bushyhead looked much happier, and Jennifer was back in her chair, her implements neatly stowed back in her purse. Just as if she hadn't been chanting and wafting smoke around with a redtail feather a few minutes ago.
'If it makes any difference, I didn't feel as if They had tagged you,' she told him. 'But if I were in your shoes, I'd have wanted someone to do the same. I-I don't suppose you got any kind of a look at what was dug up, did you? Enough to really, honestly, recognize whose ancestors you were messing with?'
He hesitated, frowning. 'I'm not an expert,' he said, after a long moment. 'And you know how much swapping around there was between the nations, even a long time before the white guys took over.'
'A guess,' she urged.
'Well-it wasn't Cherokee, or Seminole, and it wasn't Cado. If I was guessing-I'd guess it was our people. Osage. That's what I thought at the time.' He licked his lips, as if they'd gone dry. 'But that's just a guess. Could'a' been Sac and Fox. Could'a'been Creek, or Potawatami.'
'Do you have any idea what happened to those relics?' she asked. 'Because no one has mentioned them-and you'd think with cops crawling all over the site, somebody would have.'
'I got two guesses,' he told her. 'The stuff we first dug up was either blown to bits or buried again. And the stuff that didn't get blown to bits, Calligan probably snuck in and got rid of. If he hasn't yet, I'm betting he will. All he needs to do is bring in a bunch of white guys who don't give a shit, as soon as the cops clear out.'
She nodded, thoughtfully, and looked at her watch. 'Oh hell, visiting hours for us nonfamily types are up-' And right on cue, the nurse showed up at the door, to remind her of that fact.
She stood up, swinging her purse over her shoulder, and gave him her best smile. 'Thanks, Larry-you were a really big help.'
He grinned. 'So were you, Jennifer.'
She made her way out of the hospital and down to the parking lot, only half aware of her surroundings. A burial ground-well, that certainly explained the 'trouble' Sleighbow had mentioned, and why she had the feeling that there had been something there. The problem was, there wasn't supposed to be one there.
That may not mean anything. We haven't charted all the old burial sites yet, not by a long shot. The Arkansas wandered around a lot before the flood-control and irrigation programs settled it in one bed with all the dredging and dams. But-right on the riverbank is an awfully odd place to put a burial site. Especially an old one. And there should have been cairns, not underground burials; the Old Ones hated underground burials. Shoot, they wouldn't even build the cairns until months after the wind and weather had their way with the dearly departed.
The ancestors had tried not to put burial grounds anywhere near the Arkansas or any other river for just that reason-there was no telling when it would change its course and wash out the site.
Still, if it's really old, like when the Osage got forced down here from the north, and they didn't know the Arkansas tended to wander-and if it got buried by some accident or other-
Without actually seeing any of the artifacts, she had no way of telling how old it was, and if that was a possibility.
With a start, she realized that she had reached her truck; she opened the door and got in, reflexively locking her door again. But she didn't move; she was still thinking things through.
Really old grounds that had been 'lost' were being rediscovered all the time in the course of development. Some were even uncovered by digging deeper under a building that had just been demolished-that was how they'd found that bat statue in Mexico not long ago. Since there hadn't been anything built on that site before, maybe it wasn't surprising that no one knew anything about it-
But that felt wrong, somehow. It matched the few facts as she knew them, but not the feel of the place.
It felt as if there had been some very powerful, very old relics there-but the feeling was-transitory, I guess. As if they hadn't been there long.
But that wasn't consistent with the idea of it being a burial ground.
One thing it did explain, though, was the definite scent of Bad Medicine about Rod Calligan. If he'd violated sacred ground and then destroyed bones and relics, he had definitely incurred the anger of the Little People.
But an Osage burial site-there-it just didn't add up. .
Maybe if someone ripped the stuff off from another site and cached it there?
But who, and why would they have chosen that place to leave the loot? And why didn't they come back for it?
Could there be more caches around the site? Again, if she found anything, she would know right away if it was a cache or a grave-and that would at least put one question to rest.
Maybe I'd better go run a quick check on the construction area again. And maybe I'd better go check some of the old burial grounds too, the ones out in the boonies.
One thing was for sure; that feeling she got with just her brief glance at Rod Calligan meant that the Little People were after his hide-and given how vindictive they could be, the hides of everyone else connected -with him.
She shivered at the thought. That was not a position that she would want even her worst enemy to be in.
_CHAPTER SEVEN
it was a good thing that the traffic was light, because she had most of her attention on the possibilities of the mi-ah-luschka being involved in all of this. The prospect was not one she would have guessed when she took this job.
Mi-ah-luschka. The Little People-different from the other kind of 'Little People,' the Little Mysteries that stole breath and made people sick-were not something she wanted to get involved with, particularly not if they were very old and very powerful Little People. And if this burial ground was old enough that her people had even forgotten it existed-
Jeez, I can't even talk about this to anyone but Grandfather without them thinking I've been drinking too much Irish whiskey. Little People. I don't even know what other nations call them; I'd sound like a refugee from a St. Patrick's Day parade.
'Little People' was a poor translation of mi-ah-luschka, when all was said and done. They were spirits; some of them were the spirits of those who had not been recognized by Wah-K'on-Tah, who had died without paint, or been buried in such a way that Wah-K'on-Tah could not see them-or worst of all, had perished in a way that kept their spirits earthbound. Executed, murdered, died in cowardice, buried without the proper rites, without paint. . . not happy spirits.
She had seen them. Once. On Claremore Mound. Grandfather had sent her there specifically to see them; it was part of the trials of becoming a shaman, to recognize spirits on sight, to face down spirits and learn to deal with them. That time, they had been mannerly; but then she was a woman, and it was mostly men who had trouble with the mi-ah-luschka of Claremore Mound, who had perished quite horribly at the hands of a band of renegade scum. Even though they had met her gravely, and had not even played any relatively harmless tricks on her, she had sensed the power and the possible menace in them, and had been glad to accept the token that would tell Grandfather she had passed this trial so that she could get back to safer territory.
According to Grandfather, there were other kinds of mi-ah-luschka too, that had never been human, but she had never seen any of that kind. Sometimes mi-ah-luschka were only lonely-sometimes they were just interested in making trouble, of a harmless kind.
But only sometimes.
Real Jekyll-and-Hyde types. She knew far too many stories about the Little People for her own comfort; especially the ones that ended up with someone dead or driven mad.
