'You may be right about that,' Leaphorn said. 'But still, that would make it a lot more interesting than knocking a golf ball around. Why don't we find Chee and see what he thinks.'
They spent the rest of the drive to Tuba City with Louisa plowing through Catherine Pollard's hodgepodge of papers.
Leaphorn had already gone through them once, quickly. Pollard wrote fast, producing a tiny, erratic script in which all vowels looked about the same, and an
Now Louisa read and he listened, amazed. 'How can you decipher that woman's handwriting?' he said. 'Or are you just guessing at it?'
'Schoolteacher skill,' Louisa said. 'Most students give you computer printouts for the long papers these days, but in olden times you got a lot of practice plowing through bad penmanship. Repetition develops skill.' She went slowly through the papers, translating.
The first fatal case this spring had been a middle-aged woman named Nellie Hale, who lived north of the Kaibito chapter house and who had died in the hospital at Farmington the morning of May 19, ten days after being admitted. Pollard's notes were mostly information collected from family and friends about where Nellie Hale had been during the first weeks of May and the last few days of April. They reported checks made around the Hale hogan, the examination of a prairie dog town near Navajo National Monument where the victim had visited her mother (the dogs had fleas but neither fleas nor dogs had the plague), and the discovery of a deserted colony at the edge of the Hale grazing permit. Fleas collected from the burrows were carrying the plague. The burrows were dusted with poison and the case of Nellie Hale put on the back burner.
That brought them to Anderson Nez. Pollard's notes showed the date he died as June 30 in the hospital at Flagstaff, with 'date of admission?' followed by 'find out!' She had filled the rest of the page with data accumulated from quizzing family and friends about where his prior travels had taken him. This showed he left home on May 24 en route to Encino, California, to visit his brother. He had returned on June 22. Here Louisa paused.
'I can't make this out,' she said, pointing.
He looked at the page. 'It's 'i g h,'' he said. 'I think I'd figure out that's short for 'in good health.' Notice she underlined it. I wonder why?'
'Double underlines,' Louisa said, and resumed reading. Anderson Nez had left the next afternoon for the Goldtooth area and 'job with Woody,' according to Pollard's notes. 'Did you notice he was working for Dr. Woody?' Louisa asked. Then she looked embarrassed. 'Of course you did.'
'Sort of ironic, isn't it?'
'Very,' Louisa said. 'Did you notice those dates? She was looking for sources of infection starting back three weeks or so before the dates of the deaths. Is that how long it takes for the bacteria to kill you?'
'I think that's the usual time range that's been established, and I guess that explains why she underlined the 'i g h.' In good health on the twenty-second. Dead on the thirtieth,' Leaphorn said. 'Anything more about Nez?'
'Not on this page,' she said. 'And I haven't found any mention of that third case you mentioned.'
'That was a boy over in New Mexico,' Leaphorn said. 'They wouldn't handle that here.'
They rolled past the Hopi outpost village of Moenkopi and into Tuba City and parked on the packed-dirt lot of the Navajo Tribal Police station. There Leaphorn found Sergeant Dick Roanhorse and Trixie Dodge, old friends from his days in the department, but not Jim Chee. Roanhorse told him Chee had headed out early for the Kinsman homicide crime scene and hadn't called in. He took Leaphorn into the radio room and asked the young man in the dispatcher's chair to try to get Chee on the radio. Then it was nostalgia time.
'You remember when old Captain Largo was out here, and the trouble he had with you?' Trixie asked.
'I'm trying to forget that,' Leaphorn said. 'I hope none of you people are giving Lieutenant Chee that kind of headache.'
'Not that kind. But he's got one,' Roanhorse said, and winked.
'Well, now,' Trixie said. 'If you mean Bernie Manuelito, I wouldn't call that trouble.'
'You would if you were her supervisor,' Roanhorse said, and noticed Leaphorn's uncomprehending look. 'Bernie has what we used to call a crush on the lieutenant, and I guess he's more or less engaged to this woman lawyer, and everybody around here knows it. So he has to walk on eggs all the time.'
'Yeah,' Leaphorn said. 'I'd call that a problem.' He remembered now that when the word came on the grapevine at Window Rock that Chee was transferred from Shiprock to Tuba, people thought that was ironic. When he asked why, the answer was that when Officer Manuelito heard Chee was going to marry Janet Pete, she'd gotten herself transferred to Tuba to get away from him.
The dispatcher came to the door. 'Lieutenant Chee said he'd be waiting for you,' the young man said. 'You take U.S. 264 seven miles south from the 160 junction, then turn right on the dirt road that connects there, and then about twenty miles down the dirt. There's a track that connects there leading back toward Black Mesa. Lieutenant Chee said he'll be parked there.'
'Okay,' Leaphorn said, thinking that would be the old road across the Moenkopi Plateau to Goldtooth where nobody lived anymore, and on into the empty northwestern edge of the Hopi reservation to Dinnebito Wash and Garces Mesa. It was a drive you didn't start without a full tank of gasoline and air in your spare tire. Maybe it was better now. 'Thank you.'
'You think you can find it?'
Sergeant Roanhorse laughed and whacked Leaphorn on the back. 'How soon they forget you,' he said.
But Trixie hadn't exhausted the unrequited romance business as yet. 'Bernie's been worried all week about whether she should invite him to a
'Is that why she's been so hard to get along with the last day or two?' Roanhorse asked.
