ready for sleep yet. Too much tension. Too much uneasiness.
Standing here beside the sleeping bag, out of the moonlight, more stars were visible. She checked the autumn constellations, found the polestar, got her directions exactly right. Then she stared across the wash into the darkness that hid what she and Eddie had called Chicken Condo. In the narrow stone alcove, Anasazi families had built a two-story dwelling probably big enough for thirty people. Above it, in another alcove so hidden that they wouldn't have noticed it had Eddie not wondered where an evening bat flight was coming from, the Anasazi had built a little stone fort reachable only by a precarious set of hand- and footholds. It was around the lower dwelling that Eleanor Friedman-Bernal first had found the peculiar potsherds. If her memory didn't fool her. It was there, when it was light enough tomorrow, that she would dig. In violation of Navajo law, of federal law, and of professional ethics. If her memory only had not fooled her. And now she had more evidence than just her memory.
She couldn't wait until daylight. Not now. Not this near. Her flashlight would be enough to check.
Her memory had been excellent. It took her unerringly and without a misstep on an easy climb up the talus slope and along the natural pathway to the rim. There she paused and turned her light onto the cliff. The petroglyphs were exactly as she had stored them in her mind. The spiral that might represent the sipapu from which humans had emerged from the womb of Mother Earth, the line of dots that might represent the clan's migrations, the wide-shouldered forms that the ethnographers believed represented kachina spirits. There, too, cut through the dark desert varnish into the face of the cliff, was the shape Eddie had called Big Chief looking out from behind a red-stained shield, and a figure that seemed to have a man's body but the feet and head of a heron. It was one of her two favorites, because it seemed so totally unexplainable even by the cultural anthropologists--who could explain anything. The other was another version of Kokopelli.
Wherever you found him--and you found him everywhere these vanished people carved, and painted, their spirits into the cliffs of the Southwest--Kokopelli looked about the same. His humpbacked figure was supported by stick legs. Stick arms held a straight line to his tiny round head, making him seem to be playing a clarinet. The flute might be pointed down, or ahead. Otherwise there was little variation in how he was depicted. Except here. Here Kokopelli was lying on his back, flute pointed skyward. 'At last,' Eddie had said. 'You have found Kokopelli's home. This is where he sleeps.'
But Eleanor Friedman-Bernal hardly glanced at Kokopelli now. The Chicken Condo was just around the corner. That was what had drawn her.
The first things her eyes picked up when the beam of her flash lit the total darkness of the alcove were flecks of white where nothing white should be. She let the flash roam over the broken walls, reflect from the black surface of the seep-fed pool below them. Then she moved the beam back to that incongruous reflection. It was exactly what she had feared. Bones. Bones scattered everywhere. 'Oh, shit!' said Eleanor Friedman-Bernal, who almost never used expletives. 'Shit! Shit! Shit!'
Someone had been digging. Someone had been looting. A pot hunter. A Thief of Time. Someone had gotten here first.
She focused on the nearest white. A human shoulder bone. A child's. It lay atop a pile of loose earth just outside a place where the wall had fallen. The excavation was in the hump of earth that had been this community's trash heap. The common place for burials, and the first place experienced pot hunters dug. But the hole here was small. She felt better. Perhaps not much damage had been done. The digging looked fresh. Perhaps what she was hunting would still be here. She explored with the flash, looking for other signs of digging. She found none.
Nor was there any sign of looting elsewhere. She shined the light into the single hole dug in the midden pile. It reflected off stones, a scattering of potsherds mixed with earth and what seemed to be more human bones -- part of a foot, she thought, and a vertebra. Beside the pit, on a slab of sandstone, four lower jaws had been placed in a neat row -- three adult, one not much beyond infancy. She frowned at the arrangement, raised her eyebrows. Considered. Looked around her again. It hadn't rained -- at least no rain had blown into this sheltered place -- since this dig had been done. But then when had it rained? Not for weeks at Chaco. But Chaco was almost two hundred miles east and south.
The night was still. Behind her, she heard the odd piping of the little frogs that seemed to thrive in this canyon wherever water collected. Leopard frogs, Eddie had called them. And she heard the whistle again. The night bird. Closer now. A half-dozen notes. She frowned. A bird? What else could it be? She had seen at least three kinds of lizards on her way from the river -- a whiptail, and a big collared lizard, and another she couldn't identify. They were nocturnal. Did they make some sort of mating whistle?
At the pool, her flashlight reflected scores of tiny points of light -- the eyes of frogs. She stood watching them as they hopped, panicked by her huge presence, toward the safety of the black water. Then she frowned. Something was strange.
Not six feet from where she stood, one of them had fallen back in midhop. Then she noticed another one, a half-dozen others. She squatted on her heels beside the frog, inspecting it. And then another, and another, and another.
They were tethered. A whitish thread--perhaps a yucca fiber--had been tied around a back leg of each of these tiny black-green frogs and then to a twig stuck into the damp earth.
Eleanor Friedman-Bernal leaped to her feet, flashed the light frantically around the pool. Now she could see the scores of panicked frogs making those odd leaps that ended when a tether jerked them back to earth. For seconds her mind struggled to process this crazy, unnatural, irrational information. Who woulda?S ? It would have to be a human act. It could have no sane purpose. When? How long could these frogs live just out of reach of the saving water? It was insane.
Just then she heard the whistle again. Just behind her. Not a night bird. No sort of reptile. It was a melody the Beatles had made popular. 'Hey, Jude,' the words began. But Eleanor didn't recognize it. She was too terrified by the humped shape that was coming out of the moonlight into this pool of darkness.
Chapter Two
T ^ t
'ELEANOR FRIEDMAN HYPHEN BERNAL.' Thatcher spaced the words, pronouncing them evenly. 'I'm uneasy about women who hyphenate their names.'
Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn didn't respond. Had he ever met a hyphenated woman? Not that he could remember. But the custom seemed sensible to him. Not as odd as Thatcher's discomfort with it. Leaphorn's mother, Leaphorn's aunts, all of the women he could think of among his maternal Red Forehead clan, would have resisted the idea of submerging their name or family identity in that of a husband. Leaphorn considered mentioning that, and didn't feel up to it. He'd been tired when Thatcher had picked him up at Navajo Tribal Police headquarters. Now he had added approximately 120 miles of driving to that fatigue. From Window Rock through Yah-Ta-Hey, to Crownpoint, to those final twenty jarring dirt miles to the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Leaphorn's inclination had been to turn down the invitation to come along. But Thatcher had asked him as a favor.
'First job as a cop since they trained me,' Thatcher had said. 'May need some advice.' It wasn't that, of course.
