Bob Luna's wife, a handsome woman with a friendly, intelligent face, was full of questions about Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. After polite feelers established that questions were not out of order, she asked them. The Luna son, Allen, a blond, profusely freckled boy who looked like a small copy of his blond and freckled mother, put down his fork and listened. His sister listened without interrupting her supper.
'We haven't learned much,' Leaphorn said. 'Maybe the county has done better. It is their jurisdiction. But I doubt it. No sheriff ever has enough officers. In San Juan County it's worse than normal. You're worried to death with everything from vandalism of summer cabins up on Navajo Lake to people tapping distillate out of the gas pipelines, or stealing oil field equipment, things like that. Too much territory. Too few people. So missing persons don't get worked on.' He stopped, surprised at hearing himself deliver this defense of the San Juan County Sheriffs Office. Usually he was complaining about it. 'Anyway,' he added, lamely, 'we haven't learned anything very useful.'
'Where could she have gone?' Mrs. Luna said. Obviously it was something she had often thought about. 'So early in the morning. She told us she was going to Farmington, and got the mail we had going out, and our shopping lists, and then just vanished.' She glanced from Chee to Leaphorn and back. 'I'm afraid it isn't going to have a happy ending. I'm afraid Ellie got in over her head with a man we don't know about.' She attempted a smile. 'I guess that sounds odd--to say that about a woman her age--but at this place, it's so small--so few of us live here, I mean--that everybody tells everybody everything. It's the only thing we have to be interested in. One another.'
Luna laughed. 'It's pretty hard to have secrets here,' he said. 'You have experienced our telephone. You don't get any secret calls. And you don't get any secret mail--unless it happens to show up at Blanco the day you happen to pick it up.' He laughed again. 'And it would be pretty hard to have any secret visitors.'
But not impossible, Leaphorn thought. No more impossible than driving out to make your calls away from here, or setting up a post office box in Farmington.
'You just get to know everything by accident even if people don't mention it,' Mrs. Luna said. 'For example, going places. I hadn't thought to tell anybody when I was going to Phoenix over the Fourth to visit my mother. But everybody knew because I got a postcard that mentioned it, and Maxie or somebody picked up the mail that day.' If Mrs. Luna resented Maxie or somebody reading her postcard, it didn't show. Her expression was totally pleasant-- someone explaining a peculiar, but perfectly natural, situation. 'And when Ellie made that trip to New York, and when Elliot went to Washington. Even if they don't mention it, you just get to know.' Mrs. Luna paused to sip her coffee. 'But usually they tell you,' she added. 'Something new to talk about.' At that she looked slightly abashed. She laughed. 'That's about all we have to do, you know. Speculate about one another. TV reception is so bad out here we have to be our own soap operas.'
'When was the trip to New York?' Leaphorn asked.
'Last month,' Mrs. Luna said. 'Ellie's travel agent in Farmington called and said the flight schedule had been changed. Somebody takes the message, so everybody knows about it.'
'Does anyone know why she went?' Leaphorn asked.
Mrs. Luna made a wry face. 'You win,' she said. 'I guess there are some secrets.'
'How about why Elliot went to Washington?' Leaphorn added. 'When was that?'
'No secret there,' Luna said. 'It was last month. A couple of days before Ellie left. He got a call from Washington, from his project director I think it was. Left a message. There was a meeting of people working on archaic migration patterns. He was supposed to attend.'
'Do you know if Ellie's going to New York had anything to do with her pots? Is that logical?'
'Just about everything she did had something to do with her pots,' Luna said. 'She was sort of obsessive about it.'
Mrs. Luna's expression turned defensive. 'Well now,' she said, 'Ellie was about ready to make a really important report. As least she thought so. And so do I. She pretty well had the proof that would connect a lot of those St. John Polychromes from the Chetro Ketl site with Wijiji and Kin Nahasbas. And more important
than all that, she was finding that this woman must have moved away from Chaco and was making pots somewhere else.'
'This woman?' Luna said, eyebrows raised. 'She tell you her potter was a woman?'
'Who else would do all that work?' Mrs. Luna got up, got the coffeepot, and offered all hands, including the children, a refill.
'She was excited, then?' Leaphorn asked. 'About something she'd found recently? Did she talk to you about it?'
'She was excited,' Mrs. Luna said. She looked at Luna with an expression Leaphorn read as reproach. 'I really do believe that she'd found something important. To everybody else those people are just a name. Anasazi. Not even their real name, of course. Just a Navajo word that meansa?S' She glanced at Chee. 'Old Ones. Ancestors of our enemies. Something like that?'
'Close enough,' Chee said.
'But Ellie has identified a single human being in what has always just been statistics. An artist. Did you know that she'd arranged her pots chronologicallya?S showing how her technique developed?'
The question was aimed at Luna. He shook his head.
'And it's very logical. You can see it. Even if you don't know much about pots, or glazing, or inscribing, or any of those decorative techniques.'
Luna seemed to have decided about then that his self-interest dictated a change in posture on this issue.
'She's done some really original work, Ellie has,' he said. 'Pretty well pinned down where this potter worked, up Chaco Wash at a little ruins we call Kin Nahasbas. She did that by establishing that a lot of pots made with this potter's technique had been broken there before they were fully baked in the kiln fire. Then she tied a bunch of pots dug up at Chetro Ketl and Wijiji to the identical personal techniques. Trade pots, you know. One kind swapped to people at Chetro Ketl and another sort to Wijiji. Both with this man's--this potter's peculiar decorating strokes. Hasn't been published yet, but I think she has it pinned.'
It gave Leaphorn a sense of deja vu, as if he remembered a graduate student over some supper in a dormitory at Tempe saying exactly these same words. The human animal's urge to know. To leave no mysteries. Here, to look through the dirt of a thousand years into the buried privacy of an Anasazi woman. 'To understand the human
