'Turned from what into an owl?'
McGinnis looked surprised by the question. 'Why, from a man. You know how it goes. Hosteen Saltman said the owl kept flopping around as if he wanted to be followed.'
'Yeah,' Leaphorn said. 'And he didn't follow, of course. That's how the story usually goes.'
McGinnis laughed. 'I remember about the first or second time I saw you, I asked if you believed in skin- walkers, and you said you just believed in people who believed in 'em, and all the trouble that caused. Is that still the case?'
'Pretty much,' Leaphorn said.
'Well then, let me tell you one I'll bet you haven't heard before. There's an old woman who comes in here after shearing time every spring to sell me three or four sacks of wool. Sometimes they call her Grandma Charlie, I think it is, but I believe her name is Old Lady Notah. She was in here just yesterday telling me about seeing a skinwalker.'
McGinnis raised his glass in a toast to Leaphorn. 'Now listen to this one. She said she was out looking after a bunch of goats she has over by Black Mesa—right on the edge of the Hopi Reservation—and she notices somebody down the slope messing around with something on the ground. Like hunting for something. Anyway, this fella disappears behind the junipers for a minute or two and then emerges, and now he's different. Now he's bigger, and all white with a big round head, and when he turned her way, his whole face flashed.'
'Flashed?'
'She said like the flash thing on her daughter's little camera.'
'What did the man look like when he quit being a witch?'
'She didn't stick around to see,' McGinnis said. 'But wait a minute. You ain't heard all of it yet. She said when this skinwalker turned around he looked like he had an elephant's trunk coming out of his back. Now how about that?'
'You're right,' Leaphorn said. 'That's a new one.'
'And come to think of it, you can add that one to your Yells Back Butte stories. That's about where Old Lady Notah has her grazing lease.'
'Well, now,' Leaphorn said, 'I think I might want to talk to her about that. I'd like to hear some more details.'
'Me, too,' McGinnis said, and laughed. 'She said the skinwalker looked like a snowman.'
Chapter Seven
THEY'D AGREED TO MEET FOR BREAKFAST, early because Janet had to drive south to Phoenix and Chee had to go about as far north to Tuba City. 'Let's make it seven on the dot, and not by Navajo time,' Janet had said.
There he was, a little before seven, waiting for her at a table in the hotel coffee shop, thinking about the night he'd walked into her apartment in Gallup. He'd been carrying flowers, a videotape of a traditional Navajo wedding and the notion that she could explain away the way she had used him, and—
He didn't want to think about that. Not now and not ever. What could change that she'd gotten information from him and tipped off the law professor, the man she'd told Chee she hated?
Before he'd finally slept, he decided he would simply ask her if they were still engaged. 'Janet,' he would say. 'Do you still want to marry me?' Get right to the point. But this morning, with his head still full of gloomy thoughts, he wasn't so sure. Did he really want her to say yes? He decided she probably would. She had left her high-society inside-the-Beltway life and come back to Indian Country, which said she really loved him. But that would carry with it, in some subtle way, her understanding that he would climb the ladder of success into the social strata where she felt at home.
There was another possibility. She had taken her first reservation job to escape her law professor lover. Did this return simply mean she wanted the man to pursue her again? Chee turned away from that thought and remembered how sweet it had been before she had betrayed him (or, as she saw it, before he had insulted her because of his unreasonable jealousy). He could land a federal job in Washington. Could he be happy there? He thought of himself as a drunk, worthless, dying of a destroyed liver. Was that what had killed Janet's Navajo father? Had he drowned himself in whiskey to escape Janet's ruling-caste mother?
When he'd exhausted all the dark corners that scenario offered, he turned to an alternative. Janet had come back to him. She'd be willing to live on the Big Rez, wife of a cop, living in what her friends would rate as slum housing, where high culture was a second-run movie. In that line of thought, love overcame all. But it wouldn't. She'd yearn for the life she'd given up. He would see it. They'd be miserable.
Finally he thought of Janet as court-appointed defense attorney and of himself as arresting officer. But by the time she walked in, exactly on time, he was back to thinking of her as an Eastern social butterfly, and that thought gave this Flagstaff dining room a worn, grungy look that he'd never noticed before.
He pulled back a chair for her.
'I guess you're used to classier places in Washington,' he said, and instantly wished he hadn't so carelessly touched the nerve of their disagreement.
Janet's smile wavered. She looked at him a moment, somberly, and looked away. 'I'll bet the coffee is better here.'
'It's always fresh anyway,' he said. 'Or almost always.'
A teenage boy delivered two mugs and a bowl filled with single-serving-size containers labeled 'non-dairy creamer.'
Janet looked over her mug at him. 'Jim.'
Chee waited. 'What?'
'Oh, nothing. I guess this is a time to talk business.'
