'That's pretty vague too,' Janet Pete said. 'She called one day and made an appointment. And when she came by, she mostly just asked a lot of questions.' She paused while her glass was refilled and then stirred sugar into her tea—two teaspoons.
How did she keep so slim? Chee wondered. Nervous, he guessed. Runs it off. Mary was like that. Always moving.
'I don't think she trusted me. Asked a lot of questions about our relationship at DNA with the tribal bureaucracy and the BIA and all that. When we got that out of the way, she had a lot of questions about what I could find out for her. Financial records, things like that. What was public. What wasn't. How to get documents. I asked her what she was working on, and she said she would tell me later. That maybe it wasn't much of anything and then she wouldn't bother me. Otherwise, she would call me back.'
'Did she?'
'Somebody shot her,' Janet Pete said. 'About ten days later.'
'Did you report talking to her?'
'Probably no connection, but finally I did. I checked to find out who was handling the case and then called him and told him—Streib I think it was.' She shrugged. 'The fed at Gallup.'
'Dilly Streib,' Chee said. 'What did he say?'
She made a wry face. 'You know the FBI,' she said. 'Nothing.'
'How about you? Any idea what she was after?'
'Not really.' She sipped the tea, slim fingers around the tall glass.
A Navajo complexion, Chee thought. Perfect skin. Smooth, glossy. Janet Pete would never have a freckle. Janet Pete wouldn't have a wrinkle until she was old.
'But she said something that I remembered. It made me curious. Let's see if I can remember just how she put it.' She raised a slim hand to her cheek, thinking. 'I asked what she would want to look for and she said maybe some answers to some questions, and I said what questions and she said… she said how people can look so healthy after they're dead. And then I asked her what that meant. Didn't really ask her exactly, you know. Just looked puzzled, raised my eyebrows or something like that. And she just laughed.'
'How people can look healthy after they're dead?'
'That's it,' she said. 'Maybe not the exact words, but that was the sense of it. Mean anything to you?'
'Absolutely nothing,' Chee said, thinking about it so hard that he forgot the refill, and gulped scalding coffee, and spilled it on his uniform shirt—which was not at all what Jim Chee wanted to do in front of Janet Pete.
Chapter 17
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the first thing Joe Leaphorn noticed when he rolled Emma's old Chevy sedan to a halt in the yard of the Short Mountain Trading Post was that McGinnis had repainted his Sale sign. The sign had been there the first time Leaphorn had seen the place, coming on some long-forgotten assignment when he was a green new patrolman working in the Tuba City subagency. He sat assessing the pain in his forearm. And remembering. Even then the sign had been weather-beaten. Then, as now, it proclaimed in large block letters:
THIS ESTABLISHMENT
FOR SALE
INQUIRE WITHIN
Around Short Mountain, they said that the store on the rim of Short Mountain Wash had been established sometime before the First World War by a Mormon who, it was said, noticed the lack of competition without noticing the lack of customers. It was also said that he had been convinced that the oil prosperity he saw far to the north around Aneth and Montezuma Creek would spread inexorably and inevitably south and west—that the Just Creator must have blessed this area somehow with something. And since the surface itself offered nothing but scanty grass, scarce wood, and a wilderness of erosion, there surely must be a bountiful treasure of oil below those sterile rocks. But his optimism had finally faltered with the Aneth field, and when his church ruled against multiple wives, he'd opted to join the polygamist faction in its trek to tolerant Mexico. Everyone around Short Mountain Wash seemed to remember the legend. No one remembered the man himself, but those who knew McGinnis marveled at the Mormon's salesmanship.
McGinnis now appeared in his doorway, talking to a departing customer, a tall Navajo woman with a sack of cornmeal draped over her shoulder. While he talked he stared at Emma's Chevy. A strange car out here usually meant a stranger was driving it. Among the scattered people who occupied the emptiness of Short Mountain country, strangers provoked intense curiosity. In Old Man McGinnis, almost anything provoked intense curiosity. Which was one reason Leaphorn wanted to talk to Old Man McGinnis, and had been talking to him for more than twenty years, and had become in some odd way his friend. The other reason was more complicated. It had something to do with the fact that McGinnis, alone, without wife, friend, or family, endured. Leaphorn appreciated those who endured.
But Leaphorn was in no hurry. First he would give his arm a chance to quit throbbing. 'Don't move it,' the doctor had told him. 'If you move it, it's going to hurt.' Which made sense, and was why Leaphorn had decided to drive Emma's sedan—which had automatic transmission. Emma had been delighted to see him when he'd come home from the hospital. She had fussed over him and scolded and seemed the genuine Emma. But then her face had frozen into that baffled look Leaphorn had come to dread. She said something meaningless, something that had nothing at all to do with the conversation, and turned her head in that odd way she'd developed—looking down and to her right. When she'd looked back, Leaphorn was sure she no longer recognized him. The next few moments formed another of those all too familiar, agonizing episodes of confusion. He and Agnes had taken her into the bedroom, Emma talking in a muddled attempt to communicate something, and then lying on the coverlet, looking lost and helpless. 'I can't remember,' she'd said suddenly and clearly, and then she'd fallen instantly asleep. Tomorrow they would keep their appointment with the specialist at the Gallup hospital. Then they would know. 'Alzheimer's,' the doctor would say, and then the doctor would explain Alzheimer's, all that information Leaphorn had already read and reread in 'The Facts About Alzheimer's Disease' sent him by the Alzheimer's Association. Cure unknown. Cause unknown. Possibly a virus. Possibly an imbalance in blood metals. Whatever the cause, the effect was disruption of the cells on the outer surface of the brain, destroying the reasoning process, eroding the memory until only the moment of existence remains, until—in merciful finality—there is no longer a signal to keep the lungs breathing, no longer the impulse to keep the heart beating. Cure unknown. For Emma, he had watched
