couch and walked past Leaphorn into the bedroom. Infinite grace, Leaphorn thought.
'She'd been over in Utah. I remember that. To Bluff, and Mexican Hat and--' Her voice from the bedroom was indistinct.
'Montezuma Creek?' Leaphorn asked.
'Yes, all that area along the southern edge of Utah. And when she came back'--Davis emerged from the bedroom carrying a Folgers Coffee carton--'she had all these potsherds.' She put the box on the coffee table. 'Same ones, I think. At least, I remember it was this box.'
The box held what seemed to Leaphorn to be as many as fifty fragments of pots, some large, some no more than an inch across.
Leaphorn sorted through them, looking for nothing in particular but noticing that all were reddish brown, and all bore a corrugated pattern.
'Done by her potter, I guess,' Leaphorn said. 'Did she say where she got them?'
'From a Thief of Time,' Elliot said. 'From a pot hunter.'
'She didn't say that,' Davis said.
'She went to Bluff to look for pot hunters. To see what they were finding. She told you that.'
'Did she say which one?' Leaphorn asked. Here might be an explanation of how she had vanished. If she had been dealing directly with a pot hunter, he might have had second thoughts. Might have thought he had sold her evidence that would put him in prison. Might have killed her when she came back for more.
'She didn't mention any names,' Davis said.
'Hardly necessary,' Elliot said. 'Looking for pot hunters around Bluff, you'd go see Old Man Houk. Or one of his friends. Or hired hands.'
Bluff, Leaphorn thought. Maybe he would go there and talk to Houk. It must be the same Houk. The surviving father of the drowned murderer. The memories flooded back. Such tragedy burns deep into the brain.
'Something else you might need to know,' Davis said. 'Ellie had a pistol.'
Leaphorn waited.
'She kept it in the same drawer with that purse.'
'It wasn't there,' Leaphorn said.
'No. It wasn't,' Davis said. 'I guess she took it with her.'
Yes, Leaphorn thought. He would go to Bluff and talk to Houk. As Leaphorn remembered him, he was a most unusual man.
Chapter Seven
T ^ t
JIM CHEE SAT on the edge of his bunk, rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, cleared his throat, and considered the uneasiness that had troubled his sleep. Too much death. The disturbed earth littered with too many bones. He put that thought aside. Was there enough water left in the tank of his little aluminum trailer to afford a shower? The answer was perhaps. But it wasn't a new problem. Chee long ago had developed a method for minimizing its effects. He filled his coffeepot ready for perking. He filled a drinking glass as a tooth-brushing reserve and a mustard jar for the sweat bath he was determined to take.
Chee climbed down the riverbank carrying the jar, a paper cup, and a tarpaulin. At his sweat bath in the willows beside the San Juan, he collected enough driftwood to heat his rocks, filled the cup with clean, dry sand, started his fire, and sat, legs crossed, waiting and thinking. No profit in thinking of Janet Pete--that encounter represented a humiliation that could be neither avoided nor minimized. Any way he figured it, the cost would be $900, plus Janet Pete's disdain. He thought instead of last night, of the two bodies being photographed, being loaded into the police van by the San Juan County deputies. He thought of the pots, carefully wrapped in newspapers inside the garbage bags.
When the rocks were hot enough and the fire had burned itself down to coals, he covered the sweat bath frame with the tarp, slid under it. He squatted, singing the sweat bath songs that the Holy People had taught the first clans, the songs to force contamination and sickness from the body. He savored the dry heat, conscious of muscles relaxing, perspiration seeping from his skin, trickling behind his ears, down his back, wet against his flanks. He poured a palmful of water from the jar into his hand and sprinkled it onto the rocks, engulfing himself in an explosion of steam. He inhaled this hot fog deeply, felt his body slick with moisture. He was dizzy now, free. Concern for bones and Buicks vanished in the hot darkness. Chee was conscious instead of his lungs at work, of open pores, supple muscles, of his own vigorous health. Here was his hozro--his harmony with what surrounded him.
When he threw back the tarp and emerged, rosy with body heat and streaming sweat, he felt light of head, light of foot, generally wonderful. He rubbed himself down with the sand he'd collected, climbed back to the trailer, and took his shower. Chee added to the desert dweller's habitual frugality with water the special caution that those who live in trailers re-learn each time they cover themselves with suds and find there's nothing left in the reservoir. He soaped a small area, rinsed it, then soaped another, hurried by the smell of his coffee perking. His Navajo, genes spared him the need to shave again for probably a week, but he shaved anyway. It was a way to delay the inevitable.
That was delayed a bit more by the lack of a telephone in Chee's trailer. He used the pay phone beside the convenience store on the highway. Janet Pete wasn't at her office. Maybe, the receptionist said, she had gone down to the Justice building, to the police station. She had been worried about her new car. Chee dialed the station. Three call-back messages for him, two from Janet Pete of DNA, the tribal legal service, one from Lieutenant Leaphorn. Leaphorn had just called and talked to Captain Largo. The captain then had left the message for Chee to call Leaphorn at his home number in Window Rock after 6:00 P.M. Had Pete left any messages? Yes, with the last call she had said to tell him she wanted to pick up her car.
Chee called Pete's home number. He tapped his fingers nervously as the telephone rang. There was a click.
'Sorry I can't come to the phone now,' Pete's voice said. 'If you will leave a message after the tone sounds, I will call you.'
Chee listened to the tone, and the silence following it. He could think of nothing sensible to say, and hung up. Then he drove over to Tso's garage. Surely the damage hadn't been as bad as he remembered.
