'This man who was coming out to see her the week after she disappeared, do you know who he was?'
'Lehman,' Davis said. 'He came.' She smiled ruefully. 'Plenty sore about it. He came on a Wednesday and it had rained Tuesday night and you know how that road gets.'
'And he'sa?S' Leaphorn began to ask.
'He's the hotshot in Ellie's field,' Elliot said. 'I think he was chairman of her dissertation committee when she got her doctorate at Madison. Now he's a professor at University of New Mexico. Two or three books on Mimbres, and Hohokam, and Anasazi pottery evolution. Top guru in the ceramics field.'
'Ellie's equivalent of our Devanti,' Davis said. 'She pretty well had to persuade Lehman she knew what she was talking about. Like in migrations, Elliot and I have to deal with our top honcho.'
'Doctor Delbert Devanti,' Elliot said. 'Arkansas's answer to Einstein.' The tone was sardonic.
'He's proved some things,' Maxie Davis said, her voice flat. 'Even if he didn't go to Phillips Exeter Academy, or Princeton.'
There was silence. Elliot's long, handsome face had become stiff and blank. Maxie glanced at him. In the glance Leaphorn reada?S what? Was it anger? Malice? She turned to Leaphorn. 'Please note the blue blood's lofty contempt for the plebeians. Devanti is definitely a plebe. He sounds like corn pone.'
'And is often wrong,' Elliot said.
Davis laughed. 'There is that,' she said.
'But you give people the right to be wrong if they came out of the cotton patch,' Elliot said. His voice sounded normal, or almost normal, but Leaphorn could see the tension in the line of his jaw.
'More of an excuse for it,' Maxie said, mildly. 'Maybe he overlooked something while he was working nights to feed his family. No tutors to do his digging in the library.'
To that, Randall Elliot said nothing. Leaphorn watched. Where would this tension lead? Nowhere, apparently. Maxie had nothing more to say.
'You two work as a team,' Leaphorn said. 'That right?'
'More or less,' Davis said. 'We have common interests in the Anasazi.'
'Like how?' Leaphorn asked.
'It's complicated. Actually it involves food economics, nutrition tolerances, population sizes, things like that, and you spend a lot more time working on programming statistical projections in the computer than you do digging in the field. Really dull stuff, unless you're weird enough to be into it.' She smiled at Leaphorn. A smile of such dazzling charm that once it would have destroyed him.
'And Randall here,' she added, 'is doing something much more dramatic.' She poked him with her elbow--a gesture that almost made what she was saying mere teasing. 'He is revolutionizing physical anthropology. He is finding a way to solve the mystery, once and for all, of what happened to these people.'
'Population studies,' Elliot said in a low voice. 'Involves migrations and genetics.'
'Rewrites all the books if it works,' Maxie Davis said, smiling at Leaphorn. 'Elliots do not spend their time on small things. In the navy they are admirals. In universities they are presidents. In politics they are senators. When you start at the top you have to aim high. Or everybody is disappointed.'
Leaphorn was uncomfortable. 'It would be a problem,' he said.
'But not one I had,' Maxie Davis said. 'I'm white trash.'
'Maxie never tires of reminding me of the silver spoon in my crib,' Elliot said, managing a grin. 'It doesn't have much to do with finding Ellie, though.'
'But you have a point,' Leaphorn said. 'Dr. Friedman wouldn't have missed that appointment with Lehman without a good reason.'
'Hell, no,' Maxie said. 'That's what I told that idiot at the sheriff's office.'
'Do you know why he was coming? Specifically.'
'She was going to bring him up-to-date,' Elliot said.
'She was going to hit him with a bombshell,' Maxie said. 'That's what I think. I think she finally had it put together.'
There was something in Elliot's expression. Maybe skepticism. Or disapproval. But Davis was enthusiastic.
'What did she tell you?'
'Nothing much, really. But I could just sense it. That things were working out. But she wouldn't say much.'
'It's not traditional,' Elliot said. 'Not among us scientists.'
Leaphorn found himself as interested in what was going on with Elliot as in the thrust of the conversation. Elliot's tone now was faintly mocking. Davis had caught it, too. She looked at Elliot and then back at Leaphorn, speaking directly to him.
'That's true,' she said. 'Before one boasts, one must have done something to boast about.'
She said it in the mildest of voices, without looking at Elliot, but Elliot's face flushed.
'You think she had found something important,' Leaphorn said. 'She didn't tell you anything, but something caused you to think that. Something specific. Can you think what it was?'
Davis leaned back on the couch. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. She laid her hand, in a gesture that looked casual, on Elliot's thigh. She thought.
'Ellie was excited,' she said. 'Happy, too. For a week, maybe a little longer, before she left.' She got up from the
