The Wailing Wind

And we heard a scream. Or sort of like a scream from a long ways off. So we stopped and tried to listen. And we heard it again. Plainer this time. More like wailing.' He glanced at Gracella. 'Right?'

She nodded.

'So we stopped and just stood there awhile,' she said. 'We heard it some more. And we decided to turn around and go back and report it to the police. While we were talking about that, the wailing stopped. And then after a while we heard the piano music. Tomas thought that proved it was just Lloyd Yazzie trying to scare people. Playing a recording, you know?'

'Why Lloyd Yazzie?'

'He was a guy in the band,' she said. 'And the music sounded like a piece we practiced. A real jerk.'

After that, nothing. The wind had risen. They walked back to McGaffey and got the teacher to call the sheriff.

'What do you think was causing it?' Leaphorn asked.

They looked at each other. 'Well,' Gracella said. 'Nobody has proved there aren't any ghosts.'

Garcia laughed, which irritated Gracella.

'Okay,' she said. 'You can laugh. But remember that one deputy didn't laugh. He thought it was serious, and he came back to talk to us later.'

Garcia's expression dismissed that. 'That was old Lorenzo Perez,' he said. 'That was after Mr. Denton was in jail and started running those advertisements asking his wife to come home. Lorenzo thought Mr. Denton had got jealous and killed her, and he was running those advertisements to make himself look innocent.'

'I don't care,' Gracella said. 'Anyway, he didn't act like he thought it was just a joke.'

The last name on Leaphorn's list seemed to have vanished with time—apparently part of the nomadic movement of belagaana families who follow jobs around the country. He spent the rest of the afternoon taking a look at part of the 130 square miles that make up what was, when Leaphorn was a lot younger, the Fort Wingate Army Ordnance Depot, finding the approximate place where the Garcias had their fright, and trying to imagine what might have been happening to cause it. When Leaphorn had driven past this place on U.S. 66 as a very young man, it had been busy. Its bunkers, built for World War II, had been full of the shells and gunpowder of the Vietnam War.

With the end of the Cold War it had been 'decommissioned' and had slipped into a sort of semi-ghost town identity. The Navajo Nation stored records in a couple of bunkers; the army used a bit of it on the edge of the Zuni Mountains to launch target missiles to be shot at by the Star Wars scientists at White Sands Proving Grounds; other agencies used a bunker here or there for their purposes, and TPL, Inc., had machinery set up in others converting the rocket fuel still stored there to a plastic explosive useful in mining.

What made the old fort interesting to those who persisted in hunting the several legendary gold mines of the adjoining territory was its checkered history. The so-called 'fort' had originated about 1850 when the Americans were replacing the Mexicans as landlords of the territory. It was called Ojo del Oso then, after the spring where travelers had stopped and bears came down out of the Zuni Mountains to get a drink. Next it was called Fort Fauntleroy, honoring a colonel who had served bravely in the Mexican war. But said colonel went south in 1860 to serve bravely in the Confederate Army, causing the name to be changed to Wingate, after an officer free of secessionist loyalties. During the efforts of Carlton to round up the Navajos into the concentration camp at Bosque Redondo and clear the Four Corners mountains for prospectors hunting the gold he coveted, it had been used as a sort of holding pen for Dineh families being herded eastward into captivity. It played the same role in reverse when President Grant let the tribe go home to their 'Dine' Bike'yah,' their land between the sacred mountains, in 1868.

The gold prospectors of the time had come often to the fort. They found a little gold here and there, but the huge bonanza discoveries always seemed to be 'lost' before they could be exploited. They produced more legends than wealth. As Leaphorn recalled its history, the fort had been expanded from 100 square miles to 130 square miles in 1881 for reasons no one seemed to understand. It had been used as a sort of internment camp for Mexicans fleeing Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution, as a center for sheep research, as a vocational school for Indians, etc.; but its major role came as the place where the military could store immense amounts of high explosives that, as Leaphorn's uncle had explained it to him, 'wouldn't kill nobody important if they blew away this whole part of the world.'

There had been times when the fort was busy, with trains rolling in and out on the network of spur tracks from the main lines and hundreds of employees kept busy with the loading. But on this afternoon, as Leaphorn drove under the rusty iron arch over the main entrance, all was quiet. Two pickups were parked down a side street in front of a warehouse, and a car sat in front of the modest old headquarters building. Leaphorn parked beside it, went up the steps into the office, and looked around. He hadn't been here in years—since the first year he had been called in from Crownpoint and assigned to run the special investigations office in Window Rock. But nothing seemed to have changed.

A gray-haired woman arose from behind the counter, where apparently she had been filing something. She hadn't changed much either—had already been wrinkled and gray last time he'd seen her close up. Teresa Hano was her name. He was amazed that he remembered it.

'Good to see you again, Lieutenant,' she said. 'You law enforcement people seem to be taking a lot of interest in us all of a sudden. What brings you out here? And in plain clothes, too.'

And now he was surprised she remembered him. He laughed, patted his denim jacket, said: 'This is what I'm wearing all the time now. No more policeman.'

'No?' she said. 'I was guessing you're interested in the killing of the Doherty boy. If you were, I couldn't tell you anything much. Nothing I didn't already tell the fbi men.'

'Actually I'm more interested in an old Halloween prank—if that's what it was.'

Teresa Hano said, 'Oh?' and looked puzzled.

'It was the night Mr. Wiley Denton shot that swindler at his house over near Gallup. That same night some kids from McGaffey were cutting across the fort and heard—'

'Yes, Yes,' Mrs. Hano said. 'And called the sheriff. Lot of excitement over that.' The memory produced a happy smile. Excitement must be as rare at a closed-down army base as it was for a retired policeman.

'That wasn't a criminal case, of course,' he said. 'But I always wondered about it. Four teenagers hearing that