hours, heard it in Gorman's lungs, seen it in his eyes. Why hadn't he moved the man outside in the fashion of the People? Why had he allowed this valued homeplace to be eternally infected with ghost sickness?
Sharkey appeared in the hogan doorway and stood staring up toward Chee. Chee stared back, unseen among the boulders. Bales and the other agent were invisible now. What was the man's name? It came to him suddenly: Witry. Another thought suddenly occurred to Chee. Could the body under the rocks be Begay's? Could it be that Gorman had killed the old man? It didn't seem likely. But Chee found that his bleak mood had changed. Suddenly he was interested in this affair.
He stepped out where Sharkey could see him. 'Up here!' he shouted.
Removing the rocks was quick work.
'I left the photographs in the truck,' Sharkey said. 'But he fits Gorman's description.'
The body obviously couldn't be Hosteen Begay. Far too young. Mid-thirties, Chee guessed. It lay on the stone, face up, legs extended, arms by the sides. A plastic bread sack, its top twisted shut, was beside the right hand.
'Here's what killed him,' Bales said. 'Hit him right in the side. Probably tore him all up, and the bleeding wouldn't stop.'
Sharkey was looking at Chee. 'I guess there's no way to get a vehicle in here,' he said. 'I guess we'll have to carry him out to the pickup.'
'We could bring a horse in,' Chee said. 'Haul him out that way.'
Sharkey picked up the sack and opened it.
'Looks like a jar of water. And cornmeal,' he said. 'That make sense?'
'Yes,' Chee said. 'That's customary.'
Sharkey poured the contents of the sack carefully out on the rock, leaving Gorman's persona to make its four- day journey into the underground world of the dead with neither food nor water. 'And here's his billfold. Cigaret lighter. Car keys. Comb. Guess it was the stuff he had in his pockets.' Sharkey fished through the various compartments of the wallet, laying the odds and ends he extracted on the boulder beside Gorman's knee and then sorting through them. The driver's license was first. Sharkey held it in his left hand, tilted Gorman's face toward him with the right, and made the comparison of face to photograph.
'Albert A. Gorman,' Sharkey read. 'The late Albert A. Gorman. Eleven thousand seven hundred thirteen La Monica Street, Hollywood, Cal.' He counted quickly through the money, which seemed to be mostly hundred-dollar bills, and whistled through his teeth. 'Twenty-seven hundred and forty-odd,' he said. 'So crime paid fairly well.'
'Hey,' Witry said. 'His shoes are on the wrong feet.'
Sharkey stopped sorting and looked at Gorman's feet. He was wearing brown low-cut jogging shoes—canvas tops, rubber soles. The shoes had been reversed, right shoe on left foot.
'No,' Chee said. 'That's right.'
Sharkey stared at him quizzically.
'I mean,' said Chee, 'that's the way it's done. In the traditional way, when you prepare a corpse for burial you reverse the moccasins. Switch 'em.' Chee felt his face flushing under Sharkey's gaze. 'So the ghost can't follow the man after death.'
Silence. Sharkey resumed his examination of the artifacts from Gorman's billfold.
Chee looked at Gorman's head. There was dirt on his forehead, and his hair was dusty from the rockfall that had buried it. But it was more than dusty. It was tangled and greasy—the hair of a man who had lain for days dying.
'Lots of money,' Sharkey said. 'visa, Mastercard, California driver's license. California hunting license. Membership card in Olympic Health Club. Mug shots of two women. Coupon to get two Burger Chefs for the price of one. Social Security card. That's it.'
Sharkey felt in the pockets of Gorman's jacket, unbuttoned it and checked his shirt pockets, turned the pockets of his trousers inside out. There was absolutely nothing in Gorman's pockets.
Walking back to the carryall, Chee decided he had a second puzzle to add to the question of why Hosteen Begay had not saved his hogan from the ghost. Another piece of carelessness. Begay had in some ways prepared his relative well. Albert A. Gorman had gone through the dark hole that leads into the underworld with plenty of money he could no longer spend. No ghost could follow his confusing footprints. He had been left with the symbolic food and water for the journey. But he would arrive unpurified. His dirty hair should have been washed clean in yucca suds, combed, and braided. Boiling yucca roots takes time. Had something hurried Hosteen Begay?
Chapter 5
The beginning of winter bulged down out of Canada, dusted the Colorado Plateau with snow, and retreated. Sun burned away the snow. The last late Canada geese appeared along the Sun Juan, lingered a day, and fled south. Winter appeared again, dry cold now. It hung over the Utah mountains and sent outriders of wind fanning across the canyon country. At the Shiprock subagency office of the Navajo Tribal Police the wind shrieked and howled, buffeting the walls and rattling the windows, distracting Jim Chee from what Captain Largo was saying and from his own thoughts about Mary Landon. The Monday morning meeting had lasted longer than usual, but now it was ending. The patrolmen, shift commanders, dispatchers, and jailers had filed out. Chee and Taylor Natonabah had been signaled to stay behind. Chee lounged in his folding chair in the corner of the room. His eyes were on Largo, explaining something to Natonabah, but his mind was remembering the evening he had met Mary Landon: Mary watching him in the crowd at the Crownpoint rug auction, Mary sitting across from him at the Crownpoint Cafe, her blue eyes on his as he told her about his family—his sisters, his mother, his uncle who was teaching him the Mountain Way and the Shooting Way and other curing rituals of the Navajo Way, preparing him to be a
