this process of unlearning begin. Where had she left her keys? Walking home from the grocery with the car left parked in the grocery lot. Being brought home by a neighbor after she'd forgotten how to find the house they'd lived in for years. Forgetting how to finish a sentence. Who you are. Who your husband is. The literature had warned him what would be coming next. Fairly early, all speech would go. How to talk. How to walk. How to dress. Who is this man who says he is my husband? Alzheimer's, the doctor would say. And then Leaphorn would put aside pretense and prepare Emma, and himself, for whatever would be left of life.
Leaphorn shook his head. Now he would think of something else. Of business. Of whatever it was that was killing the people he was paid to protect.
He had the cast propped against the steering wheel, letting the pain drain away, sorting what he hoped to learn from this visit to Old Man McGinnis. Witchcraft, he guessed. Much as he hated to admit it, he was probably involved again in the sick and unreal business of the skinwalker superstition. The bits of bone seemed to link Jim Chee, and Roosevelt Bistie, and Dugai Endocheeney. Dilly Streib's call had confirmed that.
'Jim Chee's gossip had it right,' Streib had said. 'They found a little bead down in one of the knife wounds. Thread, little dirt, and a bead. I've got it. I'll have it checked to see if it matches the first one.' And then Streib had asked Leaphorn what it meant, beyond the obvious connection it made between the Endocheeney and Bistie killings and the attempt on Chee. Leaphorn had said he really didn't know.
And he didn't. He knew what it might mean. It might mean that the killer thought Endocheeney was a witch. He might have thought that Endocheeney, the skinwalker, had given him corpse sickness by shooting the prescribed bit of bone into him. Then, instead of relying on an Enemy Way ritual to reverse the witchcraft, he had reversed it himself by putting the lethal bone back into the witch. Or it might mean that the killer in some crazy way thought himself to be a witch and was witching Endocheeney, putting the bone into him at the very moment he killed him with the knife. That seemed farfetched, but then everything about Navajo witchcraft seemed farfetched to Leaphorn. Or it might mean that the killer inserted the notion of witchcraft into this peculiar crime simply to cause confusion. If that had been the goal, the project had succeeded. Leaphorn was thoroughly confused. If only Chee had wormed it out of Bistie. If only Bistie had told them why he was carrying the bone bead in his wallet, what he planned to do with it, why he wanted to kill Endocheeney.
The pain in his arm had subsided. He climbed out of the Chevy, and walked across the hard-packed earth toward the sign that proclaimed the willingness of McGinnis to leave Short Mountain Wash for a better world, and stepped through McGinnis's doorway—out of the glare and heat and into the cool darkness.
'Well, now,' the voice of McGinnis said from somewhere. 'I wondered who it was parked out there. Who sold you that car?'
McGinnis was sitting on a wooden kitchen chair, its back tilted against the counter beside his old black-and- chrome cash register. He was wearing the only uniform Leaphorn had ever seen him wear, a pair of blue-and- white-striped overalls faded by years of washings, and under them a blue work shirt like those that convicts wear.
'It's Emma's car,' Leaphorn said.
''Cause it's got automatic shift and you got your arm hurt,' McGinnis said, looking at Leap horn's cast. 'Old John Manymules was in here with his boys a little while ago and said a cop had got shot over in the Chuskas, but I didn't know it was you.'
'Unfortunately it was,' Leaphorn said.
'The way Manymules was telling it, old fella got killed up there at his hogan and when the police came to see about it, one of the policemen got shot right in the middle.'
'Just the arm.' Leaphorn was no longer surprised by the dazzling speed with which McGinnis accumulated information, but he was still impressed.
'What brings you out here to the wrong side of the reservation?' McGinnis said. 'Broke arm and all.'
'Just visiting,' Leaphorn said.
McGinnis eyed him through his wire-rimmed bifocals, expression skeptical. He rubbed his hand across the gray stubble on his chin. Leaphorn remembered him as a smallish man, short but with a barrel-chested strength. Now he seemed smaller, shrunken into his overalls, the sturdiness missing. The face, too, had lost the remembered roundness, and in the dimness of the trading post, his blue eyes seemed faded.
'Well, now,' McGinnis said. 'That's nice. I guess I ought to offer you a drink. Be hospitable. That is, if my customers can spare me.'
There were no customers. The tall woman was gone and the only vehicle in the yard was Emma's Chevy. McGinnis walked to the door, limping a little and more stooped than Leaphorn remembered. He closed it, slipped the bolt lock. 'Got to lock her up, then,' he said, half to Leaphorn. 'Goddam Navajos they'll steal the panes outta the windows if they need it.' He limped toward the doorway into his living quarters, motioning Leaphorn to follow. 'But only if they need it. White man, now, he'll steal just for the hell of it. I've known 'em to steal something and then just throw it away. You Navajos, now, if you steal a sack of my meal I know somebody's hungry. Screwdriver's missing, I know somebody lost his screwdriver and has a screw that needs driving. I think it was your granddaddy that first explained that to me, when I was new out here.'
'Yeah,' Leaphorn said. 'I think you told me that.'
'Get so I repeat myself,' McGinnis said, with no sound of repentance in his voice. 'Hosteen Klee, they called him before he died. Your mother's father. I knew him when they was still calling him Horse Kicker.' McGinnis had opened the door of a huge old refrigerator. 'I ain't offering you a drink because you don't drink whiskey, or at least you never did, and whiskey's all I got,' he said into the refrigerator. 'Unless you want a drink of water.'
'No, thanks,' Leaphorn said.
McGinnis emerged, holding a bourbon bottle and a Coca Cola glass. He carried these to a rocking chair, sat, poured bourbon into the glass, examined it, then, with the glass close to his eyes, dripped in more until the level reached the bottom of the trademark. That done, he set the bottle on the floor and motioned Leaphorn to sit. The only place open was a sofa upholstered with some sort of green plastic. Leaphorn sat. The stiff plastic crackled under his weight and a puff of dust arose around him.
'You're here on business,' McGinnis declared.
Leaphorn nodded.
McGinnis sipped. 'You're here because you think old McGinnis knows something about Wilson Sam. He'll tell you, and you'll put it with what you already know and figure out who killed him.'
