The Shape Shifter

General Sherman in 1866 and the survivors started their long walk home, that young woman and her sister brought the beginnings of the rug with them and kept working on it, working in little reminders of their treatment. Little bit of a root woven in here, and rat hair there, and so forth, as reminders of what they were eating to keep from starving.

Anyway, so the story goes, the weaving went on when the families began getting their flocks reestablished for some good wool. And other people heard about it, and more weavers got a hand in it and added another bitter memory of misery and murder and dying children. And then, finally, one of the clan headmen, some say it was either Barboncito or Manuelito, told the weavers it violated the Navajo way to preserve evil. He wanted all the weavers to arrange an Enemy Way sing to cure themselves of all those hateful memories and restore themselves to harmony.”

Tarkington took a sip of water. “What do you think of that?”

“Interesting,” Leaphorn said. “My mother’s mother told us something like that one winter when I was about ten or so. She didn’t approve of what those weavers were doing either. She told us about three of the shamans in her clan getting together and putting a special sort of curse on that rug.”

“I heard something like that, too,” Tarkington said.

“They said it had too many chindi associated with it. Too many ghosts of dead Navajos, starved and frozen and 40

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killed by the soldiers. The rug would make people sick, bring down evil on people involved with it.”

“Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. You keep your bad memories, grudges, hatreds, and all that alive with you, and it makes you sick.” Leaphorn chuckled. “Not bad reasoning for people who never enrolled in introduc- tion to psychology.”

“Christians have that thought in their Lord’s Prayer,” Tarkington said. “You know: ‘Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.’ Too bad a lot of ’em don’t practice what they’re preaching.”

Leaphorn let that pass.

Tarkington stared at him. “I’m thinking about people crying when the judge gives the guy who killed their kid just life in prison instead of the death penalty they were praying for.”

Leaphorn nodded.

Tarkington sighed. “But back to the rug. I’ve heard bad luck stories about people who owned it down through the years.” He shrugged. “You know. Murders, suicides, bad luck.”

“We Dineh don’t believe much in luck,” Leaphorn said. “More in a sort of inevitable chain of causes producing naturally inevitable effects.”

And when he said that, he was thinking of Grace Bork’s fear, and of what sort of cosmic cause-and-effect chain might involve that Woven Sorrow rug, the photo of it, the fire at Totter’s Trading Post, the wanted murderer burned in there, Mel Bork’s being sucked into it, and the death threat taped on his answering machine. Then, suddenly, he was thinking of himself being sucked in as well. By being at Grandma Peshlakai’s THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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hogan and having his hunt for her pinyon sap bandit being interrupted by the fire because it destroyed the FBI’s most wanted murderer. He shook his head, produced a rueful smile. No. That seemed to be stretching the Navajo cosmic natural connection philosophy a little too far.

6

Luxury Living magazine protected the privacy of those who allowed its photographers access to their mansions.

It published neither names nor addresses. Leaphorn had concluded, by studying the view through the window beside the Woven Sorrow rug, that the house was in the high slopes outside Flagstaff— one of the handsome residences built as summer homes for those who enjoyed the long views and the cool mountain air and could afford a second home. After some stalling, Tarkington checked his address file and read all the information off it that he considered pertinent to Leaphorn. But the telephone number? It’s unlisted, Tarkington said. But you’d certainly know it, Leaphorn had insisted. Well, yes, Tarkington had admitted. But don’t let anyone know you got it from me.

And thus Leaphorn left the Tarkington Museum Gallery with nothing much more than he arrived with—

except for an expert’s vague opinion that the rug in the 44

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photo might or might not be a copy of the original Woven Sorrow, and that making such a copy would be very dif-ficult and, besides, who would want to do it? Beyond that, he had enjoyed two cups of excellent coffee, two tasty but not filling sandwiches, and an interesting version of the story of how that rug had come to be woven, and its history of spreading the misery, brutality, and misfortune it was designed to recall. The only thing he’d received that might help him was the telephone number of Jason Delos.

Leaphorn pulled into a Burger King, ordered a burger, found the pay phone, picked up the receiver, then decided not to call Delos. Not yet. First he would call the Coconino Sheriff’s Department and find Sergeant Kelly Garcia.

If Garcia was in, he might know something useful about Mel Bork. And if Grace Bork had played that telephone tape for him as she said she would, maybe Garcia would have some ideas about that. Anyway, it was a reasonable way of postponing the call to Delos. He had a sad feeling that the call would lead him to a dead end.

But if he just called Grace Bork saying he had nothing helpful to tell her, and then made the long drive back to Shiprock, he would be welcomed there by the loneliness of an empty house and the smell of an almost-full half gallon of milk, thoroughly soured by now, which he had forgotten to put back in the fridge.

He dialed the sheriff’s office. Yes, Sergeant Garcia was in.

“This is Garcia,” the next voice said.