helicopter again from the front of the house, and he jerked the door open.
The Acoma woman stood there. She looked startled, but she made no sound.
Chee put a finger to his lips, signaling silence. “Where is everyone?” he whispered in English.
The Acoma woman stared at his pistol. It was pointed at her stomach. Chee lowered it.
“A blond man came here,” Chee said. “Is he here?”
She seemed not to understand. She appeared to be stunned. “Where is everyone?” Chee repeated.
The woman released another gasp of breath. “
“The witch is dead.” Did she mean the blond man? Did she mean Vines? Not Mrs. Vines. She had used the masculine noun. The dead witch was male.
Chee found him in Vines’ study. He sat behind the great desk, still upright because the swivel chair had been tilted slightly backward, and the impact of the bullet had pushed his head against the leather cushion. The light from the sunny snow outside streamed through the shutters and lit his face and showed a spot low on the forehead just above the bridge of his nose. It hadn’t bled much, but a trickle had run down across his cheek and into his white beard. B. J. Vines’ eyes were still open, but the witch was forever dead.
Where was the blond man? Chee stood just inside the door, back to the wall, listening. He heard nothing. The copter had gone now. Had it landed? Vines’ dead face wore a look of shocked surprise. He had seen death coming. A tigress looked over his shoulder, her glittering glass eyes staring at Chee. Where was the blond man? Chee found himself thinking instead of B. J. Vines’ head mounted among those of the other predators, the blue eyes glittering. The blond man might have left. He would hardly stay after he had accomplished his purpose. Chee moved quickly around the desk. He put his finger against Vines’ throat. The skin was still soft and warm. He touched the bloody streak that ran down the side of the nose. Not even sticky yet. Vines had been dead only minutes. No more than five or ten. The blond man was close. Then where was Rosemary Vines? Perhaps she was away from home.
Chee stood beside the desk, watching the door, listening. What would the blond man do? The copter thudded close again, hovering in front of the house. Mary trying to help. He remembered the blond man’s rifle. Stay away, Mary. Stay out of range. She was a woman among women. She made him happy. She was a friend. She made him feel like singing. She deserved nothing but beauty all around her. But now, stay away. The blond man must be in the house. Close. Doing what? Looking for servants? Making sure he’d leave no one alive to report this visit? Chee’s eyes rested on the telephone. The line would be cut. He picked up the receiver, expecting deadness. Instead he heard the buzzing dial tone. He dialed 0. It rang, and a woman’s voice said, “Operator. Can I help you?”
“Sorry,” Chee whispered. He hung up. Why had the blond man left the telephone intact? He hadn’t got to it yet. Then he heard the sound. Someone coughed. And coughed again.
The blond man was sitting on the floor of the entrance foyer, his shoulder against the massive door. Blood was everywhere. It splashed across the polished wood, it soaked the blond man’s trousers, it spread in a still- growing stain across the patterned ceramic tiles of the floor. A pistol lay in the blood, black, with the long cylinder of a silencer on its barrel. The blond man coughed again. He glanced at Chee, then focused his eyes on him. He moved his lips, tentatively. Then he said:
“It’s cold.”
Chee could see what had happened. The shot had hit the blond man as he reached the door. One of Vines’ hunting rifles, probably. Something big. The slug had torn through him from the back, splashing the door with blood. It had broken the blond man as a stick is broken.
“Is there someplace warm?” the blond man asked.
“Maybe the fireplace,” Chee said. He put his pistol in its holster, walked through the blood, and squatted beside the blond man. He put an arm under his legs and an arm behind his shoulders and lifted him – carefully because the blood was slippery under his socks, carefully because the man was dying.
In the big room, a log fire had burned itself down to flickering coals in the fireplace. Chee knelt in front of it and put the blond man on the skin of the polar bear. The man’s back was broken somewhere between the shoulder blades. The blond man’s head rolled toward the fire. His voice was small.
“There’s this detective agency,” he said. “Webster. In Encino. He’s going to find my mother. She’ll know about the cemetery. She’ll come and get me.”
“All right,” Chee said. “Don’t worry.”
“I thought I killed him,” Rosemary Vines said. She was standing in the doorway, holding a long-barreled rifle. It was pointed roughly in Chee’s direction.
“You did,” Chee said. “It takes a few minutes.”
Mrs. Vines’ face was bloodless. The lipstick she wore made a grotesque contrast against chalky skin.
“Did you know who your husband was?” Chee asked.
Rosemary Vines stared past him, her eyes on the blond man. She’s in shock, Chee thought. She didn’t even hear me.
“I knew he’d had another life somewhere,” she said slowly. “I suspected that even before we were married. He loved to talk about himself, but not back before a certain time. Earlier than that – when he was a boy, when he was in college, any of that time before he’d come out here and found his mine – any time before that it was all very vague. So he had to be hiding something. And finally he admitted he had his secrets. But he’d never tell me what. I told him it had to be criminal or he wouldn’t be ashamed of it. But he’d just laugh.”
On the pelt of the dead polar bear, the blond man was now quite motionless. Rosemary Vines still stared at his body, the rifle still ready.
“I knew it was in his safe. In his box. It had to be. That’s the way BJ. was. Everything he did, he had to keep the evidence. Heads. Pelts. Photographs. He was compulsive about it. Like he had to have proof it had happened. He wouldn’t take twenty-five years of his life and just throw it away. If I could get the box before he got back, there’d be things in there to tell me who B.J. had been when he was young. And there’d be something to tell me what it was he was so ashamed of.”
The thought brought something like animation to her face – a look of triumph anticipated. It was a sort of smile. “Ashamed of, or afraid of,” Mrs. Vines said, still smiling.
Jim Chee looked away from her, away-from the body, and the white fur stained with red. Through the great soaring expanse of glass that lit the room he could see only sky and snow. Blue and white purity. Such beauty should have aroused in Jim Chee an exultation. Now he felt nothing. Only numb fatigue and a kind of sickness.
But he knew the cause, and the cure. Changing Woman had taught them about it when she formed the first clans of the Dinee from her own skin. The strange ways of strange people hurt the spirit, turned the Navajo away from beauty. Returning to beauty required a cure. He would go tomorrow to Hosteen Nakai and ask him to arrange an Enemy Way, to gather family, the interlinked relatives of the Slow Talking Dinee and the Red Forehead Dinee – the brothers and sisters of his blood, his friends, his supporters. Then there would be another eight days for the songs and the poetry and the sand paintings to recreate the past and restore the spirit.
He would persuade Hosteen Nakai that Mary, too, should undergo the blessing even though she was not born Dinee. The arrangements would take weeks – picking the site, spreading the word, getting the proper singer, arranging the food. But when it was over, he would go again with beauty all around him.
About the Author
TONY HILLERMAN is past president of the Mystery Writers of America and has received its Edgar and Grand Master Awards. His other honors include the Center for the American Indian’s Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for the best novel set in the West, and the Navajo Tribe’s Special Friend Award. He lives with his wife, Marie, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
