Thatcher was a confident man and Leaphorn understood why Thatcher had called him. It was the kindness of an old friend who wanted to help. And the alternative to going would be to sit on the bed in the silent room and finish sorting through what was left of Emma's things--deciding what to do with them. 'Sure,' Leaphorn had said. 'Be a nice ride.' Now they were in the Chaco visitors' center, sitting on the hard chairs, waiting for the right person to talk to. From the bulletin board, a face stared out at them through dark sunglasses. A THIEF OF TIME, the legend above it said. POT HUNTERS DESTROY AMERICA'S PAST.
'Appropriate,' Thatcher said, nodding toward the poster, 'but the picture should be a crowd scene. Cowboys, and county commissioners, and schoolteachers and pipeline workers, and everybody big enough to handle a shovel.' He glanced at Leaphorn, looking for a response, and sighed.
'That road,' he said. 'I've been driving it thirty years now and it never gets any better.' He glanced at Leaphorn again.
'Yeah,' Leaphorn said. Thatcher had called them ceramic chugholes. 'Never gets wet enough to soften `em up,' he'd said. 'Rains, the bumps just get greasy.'' Not quite true. Leaphorn remembered a night a lifetime ago when he was young, a patrolman working out of the Crownpoint subagency. Melting snow had made the Chaco chugholes wet enough to soften the ceramic. His patrol car had sunk into the sucking, bottomless caliche mud. He'd radioed Crownpoint but the dispatcher had no help to send him. So he'd walked two hours to the R.D. Ranch headquarters. He'd been a newlywed then, worried that Emma would be worried about him. A hand at the ranch had put chains on a four-wheel-drive pickup and pulled him out. Nothing had changed since then. Except the roads were a lifetime older. Except Emma was dead.
Thatcher had said something else. He had been looking at him, expecting some response, when he should have been watching the ruts.
Leaphorn had nodded.
'You weren't listening. I asked you why you decided to quit.'
Leaphorn had said nothing for a while. 'Just tired.'
Thatcher had shaken his head. 'You're going to miss it.'
'No, you get older. Or wiser. You realize it doesn't really make any difference.'
'Emma was a wonderful woman,' Thatcher had told him. 'This won't bring her back.'
'No, it won't.'
'She were alive, she'd say: Joe, don't quit.' She'd say, 'You can't quit living. I've heard her say things just like that.'
'Probably,' Leaphorn had said. 'But I just don't want to do it anymore.'
'Okay,' Thatcher drove awhile. 'Change the subject. I think women who have hyphenated names like that are going to be rich. Old-money rich. Hard to work with. Stereotyping, but it's the way my mind works.'
Then Leaphorn had been saved from thinking of something to say to that by an unusually jarring chughole. Now he was saved from thinking about it again. A medium-sized man wearing a neatly pressed U.S. Park Service uniform emerged from the doorway marked PERSONNEL ONLY. He walked into the field of slanting autumn sunlight streaming through the windows of the visitors' center. He looked at them curiously.
'I'm Bob Luna,' he said. 'This is about Ellie?'
Thatcher extracted a leather folder from his jacket and showed Luna a Bureau of Land Management law enforcement badge. 'L. D. Thatcher,' he said. 'And this is Lieutenant Leaphorn. Navajo Tribal Police. Need to talk to Ms. Friedman-Bernal.' He pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket. 'Have a search warrant here to take a look at her place.'
Luna's expression was puzzled. At first glance he had looked surprisingly young to Leaphorn to be superintendent of such an important park--his round, good-humored face would be perpetually boyish. Now, in the sunlight, the networks of lines around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth were visible. The sun and aridity of the Colorado Plateau acts quickly on the skin of whites, but it takes time to deepen the furrows. Luna was older than he looked.
'Talk to her?' Luna said. 'You mean she's here? She's come back?'
Now it was Thatcher's turn to be surprised. 'Doesn't she work here?'
'But she's missing,' Luna said. 'Isn't that what you're here about? We reported it a week ago. More like two weeks.'
'Missing?' Thatcher said. 'Whadaya mean missing?'
Luna's face had become slightly flushed. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Inhaled. Young as he looked, Luna was superintendent of this park, which meant he had a lot of experience being patient with people.
'Week ago last Wednesday--That would be twelve days ago, we called in and reported Ellie missing. She was supposed to be back the previous Monday. She hadn't showed up. Hadn't called. She'd gone into Farmington for the weekend. She had an appointment Monday evening, back out here, and hadn't showed up for that. Had another appointment Wednesday. Hadn't been here for that, either. Totally out of character. Something must have happened to her and that's what we reported.'
'She's not here?' Thatcher said. He tapped the envelope with the search warrant in it against the palm of his hand.
'Who'd you call?' Leaphorn asked, surprised at himself even as he heard himself asking the question. This was none of his business. It was nothing he cared about. He was here only because Thatcher had wanted him to come. Had wheedled until it was easier, if you didn't care anyway, to come than not to come. He hadn't intended to butt in. But this floundering around was irritating.
'The sheriff,' Luna said.
'Which one?' Leaphorn asked. Part of the park was in McKinley County, part in San Juan.
'San Juan County,' Luna said. 'At Farmington. Anyway, nobody came out. So we called again last Friday. When you showed up, I thought you'd come out to start looking into it.'
