Chapter 11
Finding margaret sosi, Chee thought, would take a lot more time and hard work than finding an aluminum trailer under a cottonwood tree. Maybe she'd gone to Los Angeles. Maybe she hadn't. Chee remembered himself at seventeen. Easy enough to talk about Los Angeles, and to dream about it, but for a child of the reservation it represented a journey into a fearful unknown—a visit to a strange planet. He could never have managed it by himself. He doubted if Margaret Sosi would have taken that long and lonely leap into God-knew-what. More likely she was hunting Old Man Begay on the Big Reservation. Maybe she was tracking down members of their clan who'd moved to the Canoncito. That was exactly what Chee would begin doing. Unfortunately, members of the Turkey Clan seemed to be scarce. But Chee's route back to his office led past the intersection of U.S. 666 and Navajo Route 1. The 7-Eleven store there served as depot for both Greyhound and Continental Trailways. It would only take a minute to check, and Chee took it. A middle-aged Navajo named Ozzie Pete managed both the store and bus ticket sales. No. No tickets had been sold to Los Angeles for weeks. Maybe months. For the past several days he was dead sure he had sold no tickets at all to a skinny teenage girl in a navy pea coat.
From his office, Chee called south to the trading posts at Newcomb and Sheep Springs. Same questions. Same answers. He called Two Gray Hills. The mare was back in the corral, neither better nor worse for its abduction, but no one had seen anyone who looked like Margaret Sosi. So much for that.
Chee tilted his chair back against the wall and crossed his boots on his wastebasket. What now? He had no idea how to start looking for Turkey Clan people. It could only be purely random. Driving around, stopping at trading posts, chapter houses, watering points, every place where people collected, to ask questions and leave word. Sooner or later someone would either be Turkey Clan or know someone who was. And since the Turkey Clan was virtually extinct it would more likely be later rather than sooner before he made connections. Chee did not feel lucky. He dreaded the job. But the only alternative to starting it was to see if he could think of an alternative.
He thought.
What had Margaret done when she slipped away from him at the hogan? Taken the mare back to Two Gray Hills, obviously. Before that she had, perhaps, taken time to take a sweat bath. Hosteen Begay's sweat bath was handy and in plain view from where she'd tied the mare. Perhaps she had made sure Chee was gone, built a fire, heated the stones, poured spring water over them, and cleansed herself in the healing steam to rub away Gorman's ghost. Chee himself had taken a steam bath in his trailer home—putting his frying pan, superheated on the stove, on the floor of his shower and pouring boiling water from his teakettle onto the hot metal to create an explosion of steam. He'd felt limp, very clean, and generally better when he'd finished his rubdown. The same would have been true of Margaret. Say she'd taken the bath, ridden the mare down to U.S. 666 and turned it loose to find its way back to Two Gray Hills, and then caught an early-morning ride back into Shiprock. Then she'd gone to Grayson's trailer looking for Leroy Gorman. How the devil had she found it? Perhaps Hosteen Begay had told her where it was when he wrote her, warning her away from Gorman. More proof that Margaret Sosi didn't scare easily. Not when her grandfather was involved. Chee thought some more. Perhaps this explained what had happened to the Polaroid photograph. Perhaps Hosteen Begay had taken it from the dying Albert Gorman and mailed it to Margaret. Whatever was on that photograph had brought Albert Gorman racing to Los Angeles to find Leroy Gorman. Would Hosteen Begay use it to keep Margaret away? The Margaret Sosi who didn't scare?
Chee sighed, took his feet down, and reached for the telephone. Maybe she
By midafternoon Chee knew everything about bus schedules from Shiprock southward toward Gallup and westward through Teec Nos Pos, including who drove which bus and where they lived. He knew that one Greyhound driver didn't remember having a skinny Navajo girl in a pea coat as a passenger yesterday, and another Greyhound driver was still out on his run and incommunicado. The very first Continental Trailways driver he reached made all this beside the point.
'Yeah,' he said. 'She flagged me down north of the Newcomb Trading Post. She wanted a ticket to Los Angeles, but she didn't have enough money.'
'How much did she have?'
'She had enough to get to Kingman, right there on the California border, and forty cents left over.'
'Describe her to me,' Chee said.
The driver described Margaret Billy Sosi. 'Nice-looking kid,' he concluded, 'but she looked like she needed some fattening up and her face washed. Looked wore out. What are you fellas after her for?'
'Trying to keep her from getting hurt,' Chee said.
Chee called the station at Kingman. The LA-bound bus from points east had arrived on schedule and departed, also on schedule, about fifteen minutes ago. Had anyone noticed a small, thin, tired Navajo girl with black eyes and black hair getting off? She was wearing a navy pea coat and her face needed washing. No one had noticed.
Chee called the Kingman police station, identified himself, and asked for the watch commander. He got a Lieutenant Monroney and described Margaret Sosi for what seemed to be the eleventh time. 'I guess she'd be hitchhiking,' Chee said. 'She's trying to get to Los Angeles.'
'And the bus got in when, quarter hour ago? And she's seventeen?'
'Seventeen but looks fifteen. Small.'
'Pretty girl?'
'I guess so,' Chee said. 'Yeah. Kind of thin but she looks okay. Would have needed to have her face washed, though.'
'We'll look for her,' Monroney said. 'And I'll call the California Highway patrol across the line and give them the word. But don't count on anything. A boy, he'd still be out there thumbing. Girl, pretty girl, that age—she'd be picked up. Long gone. But we'll look. Give me your number. We find her, we'll call. Just want her held for runaway, that it? No crime?'
'No crime,' Chee said. 'But there's a homicide in the background. Just keep her safe.'
But maybe it was already too late for that.
Chapter 12
The 'eleven thousand seven hundred thirteen La Monica Street' address Sharkey had read from Albert Gorman's driver's license translated into a single-story U-shaped building of faded pale-green stucco. Chee parked his pickup behind an aging Chevy Nova with an off-color fender and looked the place over. The building seemed to
