of seeing a big well come in up in the Texas Panhandle when I was flat broke. All that sort of stuff. She was going to school part-time then at the University of New Mexico branch here, and having trouble with a geology course. I helped her with that, and before long it dawned on me. Crazy as it was, I was in love with her.'
Denton paused and repeated that. 'Crazy as it was. Me old enough to be her daddy, and I was in love with her. And I never got over it and I never will.' He turned to look at Leaphorn. 'Can you understand that?'
'Perfectly,' Leaphorn said. He had never gotten over being in love with Emma—not with her being dead all these years. And he never would.
'Then I'll tell you something that's even harder to understand. It turned out it was mutual. She loved me, too. Can you believe that?'
'How did you know?'
'All sorts of little things,' Denton said. He thought about it, nodded, and decided to explain.
'You might think I'm pretty easy to fool, letting this McKay thing go as far as I did. But that wasn't normal. It was because I want that Golden Calf so damn bad, and I was getting so frustrated with hunting it, I just quit thinking. But you don't make money in the mineral lease racket without being skeptical, and if you ain't to start with, you get that way damn quick. You leave your trust at home in the closet. Your basic idea is that everybody is out to skin you, and so you're always looking and listening for a sign of it. You ever gamble?'
'All Navajos gamble,' Leaphorn said. 'But I've never done much of it.'
'Gamblers call it 'looking for tells.' Little things that another gambler might do that tip you off. Well…' Denton waved at their surroundings. 'You can see by this I was good at reading tells. And when the money started coming in, and people could see it was, then I got to practice on another bunch. People who wanted to get to me and get some of it.'
'And you thought Linda was one of those.'
'Of course I did. Wouldn't you if you looked like me? So I was watching everything she said or did. And finally…' He stopped. Threw up his hands. 'What can I tell you to make you believe it? I couldn't believe it myself, but I finally had to admit it. Crazy, but she loved me. So I asked her why. Me being way too old and ugly. And she said…' Denton looked away from Leaphorn, embarrassed by this. 'She said it was because of what I'd done. How I'd lived. What I'd gone through. She said she thought I was a real strong man and the men she'd been around before were really just boys. Can you understand that kind of thinking?'
'Sure,' Leaphorn said. 'But do you want me to believe that, after what happened with McKay, after she dropped out of sight, you didn't have your doubts?'
'Never. Not a single—' And then he stopped, closed his eyes. 'Of course I did,' he said. 'Sitting in the jail there that night after they arrested me. And she didn't call. And hadn't come home. And my lawyer couldn't locate her. If I could have thought of a way to do it, I would have killed myself.'
'How about now? How about running those ads, having me try to find her? Do you think she was working with McKay?'
Denton shrugged. 'Hell, I don't know. I wore myself out trying to figure it out—month after month after month. Never did decide. After a while I just didn't give a damn. Maybe she did. Just a girl, you know. Didn't know anything about how the world works. All tied up with music and daydreams. I don't care what she did. I still love her.'
Denton started to add something to that, but didn't. He stood a moment, staring at Leaphorn, waiting for a reaction. And then he said: 'Does any of that make sense to you?'
'It does,' Leaphorn said. 'And it made sense to William Shakespeare.'
'Shakespeare.'
'He wrote plays a couple of hundred years ago.'
'Oh, yeah. Sure.'
'I had to do a paper about one of his dramas about forty years ago when I was in college.
But Denton was interested. 'Said what?'
'Said, ah: 'She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her because she pitied them.' That's about how it went.'
'Pretty well fits Linda and me, I guess,' Denton said. 'How's that story end?'
'It's not very happy,' Leaphorn said.
Chapter Fourteen
« ^ »
Officer bernadette manuelito had spent some of her not-suspended-but-out-of-favor time off sorting through her income tax records, responding to an irs objection to her April 15 return. Perhaps that explained her negative attitude as she surveyed the swarm of tax-paid people now congregated at the Coyote Canyon Chapter House. Sergeant Chee had overheard something she muttered and had assumed his role of mentor, which didn't improve her mood either.
'It's a political law. Like physics,' Chee said. 'When a federal agency gets into something, the number of tax- paid people at work multiplies itself by five, the number of hours taken to get it done multiplies by ten, and the chances of a successful conclusion must be divided by three.'
Bernie responded to than with an ambiguous shrug. It had been a long day—more tiring than usual for her because she was working to establish a correct attitude toward Sergeant Chee. At first that had shifted all the way from friend to potential boyfriend to arrogant boss. During the day it had modified itself to something like fairly nice boss. This improvement in Chee's rating had been helped along by how well he'd accepted his own secondary role, with her in the primary position, as source of information for Agent-in-Charge Osborne. It got another big boost when Osborne had wondered aloud how Doherty had happened upon this place, and Chee had explained that Doherty had been the post-burn clean-up man assigned here after the fire had swept through the canyon. How could Chee have learned that? Only if he zeroed in on this canyon himself. But if he had, he had said not a word about it. He'd left all the credit to her.
