I listened, trying to block the sound of the wind in my ears. The air stilled and swirled, a hint of human voice drifting on it. I crawled around the side of the sagebrush, feeling exposed in the lunar glare atop this hill, and peered again into the shadowy valley. A glint of blue moonlight now caught the corner of a pool of stagnant water near the parked cars. It worked as a mirror, brightening the rest of the scene. The two cars were unfamiliar. I squinted, scanning the forest that began past them, looking for light, for movement, for Elaine.
My legs began to ache as I squatted on my haunches. I put one bare knee, still in shorts from our charade jog across campus, down in the dirt. My hand went down for balance. As it did I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye. The dark and light stripes, long and slender, the S shape.
Rattlesnake! I lost my balance and fell backward on my butt as it slithered out of sight. I jumped up, hopping three or four paces away across the crest of the hill before remembering I was trying to hide. Bending over, I took a few more steps, caught my breath, and ducked behind a boulder. I closed my eyes, my heart thumping hard in my chest.
The rock was solid, warm, and reassuring. After I was sufficiently calm I peeked over it, down into the valley again. This time a light, a spark of campfire, shone through the trees at the bottom of the tall rock cliff, about a mile away.
How had I not seen it before? The angle had improved. The view through the spaces between trees lined up now. Thanks to the rattler. Just like they told us in Lutheran Sunday school about the Garden of Eden. A snake pushing humans into doing something they were not entirely ready for.
I picked my way down the hill, keeping in shadow. Watching each foot placement, pausing to look up and get my bearings, keeping an eye out for snakes and the approach of Elaine, the going was tortuously slow. She must have taken the wrong road in, the second instead of the third. She could be lost. She could be right behind me.
The trees at last: Douglas firs, lodgepole pines, a smattering of aspens. I sank against one, feeling its rough, corky bark, releasing a pent-up breath in the cool blackness of the forest floor. The fire I had seen from the hill was little more than a dim glow through the thick growth; had I not known it was there I'd never have noticed it. My hand
grazed a damp carpet of moss and paused to sink into its cushioned depth, cradled and safe for an instant. I drew my wet hand across my forehead: The anxiety made me break out in a sweat.
Then a sound. Breaking of twigs downhill. I flattened myself against the tree. Another branch broke, then a whizzing sound followed by a whipping slap: "Ow! Son of a bitch!" It was Elaine, making her way to the campfire and none too pleased about it.
She cried out again. "The hell with it," she muttered and a flashlight beam turned on ten or twelve feet away from me, lighting a small spot on the ground. "That's better."
The density of the underbrush was going to be a problem for me too, even with Elaine's beam to follow. I couldn't turn on my own light. But I would probably alert them with either the sounds of twigs underfoot or my own cursing. I had to smile, thinking of Elaine in her purple sweat suit and little blond curls traipsing angrily through the
forest, spewing epithets.
I waited until her footsteps were barely audible, then moved out of the forest again where the moonlight helped light the way. By staying on the edge of the trees, in the shadow of their branches, I could see where I was going yet stay out of sight. It veered me away from the campfire, up the rocky hillside. Soon I reached the bottom of the ridge, a field of granite boulders and pebbles that ran to a small grassy strip, then to the trees.
A chill wind fell from the stone ridge. I hugged my arms against my sides, struggling to get my breathing back to normal. With the wind a sound, faint and momentary, drifted over to me. A pecking sound, two rocks being hit together? A hard, unnatural sound.
The rocks leading up to the ridge looked ready to roll down on me. They were massive and old. Intruder, they whispered. I looked back at the chunks of rock and occasional juniper spread out on the hillside where I'd come. To my right the ridge continued with more rock debris. To my left the wall of rock jutted out and the land below disappeared into the night.
I crept along the granite face of the wall and peered around the abutment. A grassy meadow, nearly flat, sat around the corner, at the bottom of an immense slide of rock. I stepped over a boulder and jumped down into the grass.
Click, clack. There it was. Louder, continuous, rhythmic. No breeze was carrying it here. But I knew the rocks echoed sound perfectly. The direction of this telegraph signal was unclear. Small outcroppings of rocks, miniature versions of the immense wall around the abutment, rose from the slope. Vegetation grew in clumps and hollows. The meadow where I stood was a handkerchief lawn, apparently a favorite of the high mountain animals, its grasses clipped close to the ground.
The moon had risen over the tops of the trees downhill from the huge rock face. I stepped across the meadow, into the rocky hillside, listening for the sound. I backtracked into the grass again, covering my uphill ear. Click, clack. It came again. From downhill. I turned. Yes, below.
The forest loomed down the hill, dense and dark, scattered with boulders. Back into it, I listened, then as I tiptoed around a huge rock a light, its source hidden, flickered against the midnight sky. Edging my way along the backside of the boulder, I moved toward the light. It appeared to be around another rock, but as I got closer I saw there was a cave nestled into the hillside. The light, a campfire--and the noises--came from the cave.
My pulse raced. I moved back toward the high rock face I had come from. Once I lost my balance and caught a yearling tree, bending it nearly to the ground as I fell. I picked myself up and continued until my back flattened against the rock face. I inched along sideways, the sharp crystals of the granite like needles against my fingertips.
The cave faced away from my approach. All I could see was theglow of the fire and a sliver of one side of the entrance. I clung to the rock, cool and gritty. The light became brighter, dancing with an orange glow on the opposite wall of the entrance. I stopped ten or twelve feet from the entrance. What now, hotshot? Did I stick my head around the corner and yell howdy? The smoke from the fire poured past me. I looked down the hill. This was crazy.
I inched back away from the cave, picking my way in a wide arc to the safety of a lichen-covered boulder across from the cave entrance. The sounds from the cave had changed now to a low chanting. I scrambled up the big rock, finding a place where I could lie on my stomach and see into the cave.
Around the campfire sat three figures. From the distance, some twenty or thirty yards, the campfire light danced on their faces, their features distorted with harsh shadows. I blinked. Why did their faces look so blurry? I squinted. Not blurry. Blackened. Covered with soot.
The figures were all slight, and, I guessed, all women. They wore dark garments, nondescript. I tried to isolate each one, to recognize them. Elaine was easy; her blond curls sparkled in the campfire's yellow light. The smoke from the campfire blew over me. My eyes stung.
The women were chanting, a slow rhythmical chant that seemed to put them half to sleep. Their eyes were closed, hands still on the knees. Then out of the shadows came another figure, a man, dancing wildly, prancing, bringing his knees high. His face was blackened as well, and his chest. He wore only a strip of fabric from his waist, covering the groin. His bare feet shone as he swung them high enough to let the firelight bounce off his pink soles.
As he moved out of the darkness the rest of the cave flickered, brightening. On the rock wall facing the mouth of the cave a painted figure was dimly visible. 1 couldn't make out the shape of it through the smoke but the color was unmistakable. A bright, jaybird blue.
I sucked in my breath. Would that maniac get out of the way so I could see it better? Could this be the bluejay pictograph? But it was big, three or four feet high. And if painted on a slab of rock, impossible to transport by hand. And hard to hide.
lf I couldn't recognize the women, there was no doubt in my mind about the man. Marcus Tilden, the one the students called Mad Dog, pranced around the campfire, doing the Bluejay Dance. It was just like in the monograph. The chanting of the participants kept the dancer moving. The clacking I heard earlier must have been the deer hoof rattles the author had described.
Eventually the bluejay shaman would reach a fever pitch, and the others would suddenly douse the fire. In the darkness he would run into the woods and perch in a tree. The others would persuade him to come down. lf they couldn't find him, or persuade him to return, he would lose his mind.
Witnessing it all at last elated me. I couldn't wait to see Tilden flip out and climb a tree. I smiled despite the clammy, cold stone. I watched the hot fire longingly as the women put on more sticks from the pile stacked against the cave wall. Mad Dog Tilden danced around them, sometimes changing directions or dancing in place. At some invisible signal they picked up the rattles and began the clacking sound, giving their voices a rest.
And so it continued. Not a word was said between Mad Dog and the women. If the boulder had not been so uncomfortable I would have fallen asleep from the rhythmical sounds. I wondered if the women--or Mad Dog--were in some trancelike state. They continued so long, so still, I decided they must be.
I turned my watch to the moonlight. 3:00 A.M. My bones ached on the cold, hard bed of rock. I shivered in my shorts. How long would they keep this up? Tilden must be tiring. I could see his dancing wa less inspired, more economical. Then suddenly he tapped one woman on the head and the chanting stopped.
The woman rose. Not Elaine. Another woman. The others hung their heads like they had fallen into a deep sleep. Tilden turned toward the dark recesses of the cave, the woman following. I waited. The women passed over by Mad Dog waited, motionless.
I slipped down from the boulder onto a soft mound of earth. The ceremony (or whatever it was) must be over. I had to get out before Elaine did. Peering around the boulder one last time I saw that the two women remained in the same position, chins on their chests.
As I straightened to go, one lifted her face out into the night, toward the moon. My heart leapt; I knew her. As I methodically retraced my steps to the car I went over and over the night's events. The break-in at the office. The old monographs. The descriptions of the dance and then the real thing.
For a split second I felt a twinge of victory. Yes, he was as whacked out as I had thought. Even more so. Did that mean he had killed two women though? Had they been in this bluejay cult?
Questions, questions. As I reached the Saab one stuck in my mind. Why, on a clear summer night in a cave deep in the Bitterroot Mountains, with blackened face, did Zena Glenn sit chanting?
22
SMITH, ALBERT, SMITH, ZACHARY. Hundreds of Smiths.
They were packed in tighter than sardines in the old wooden card catalog drawer. Files of articles, recorded by an overzealous library science major for a thesis project in the fifties: names of all the authors of articles in journals then owned by the University library.
The research librarian, an officious woman in her sixties with a friendly smile and thick glasses, had shown me the card catalog in aback room. She remembered me and seemed eager to get to the bottom of the mystery of the missing journals and microfilm. I didn't tell her about Tilden's stash. Not yet.
"Graphite," the pencil behind her ear said. I pulled the heavy thin drawer from the cabinet and set it with a thud on a round table. It smelled of dust. The cards stuck together as if the ink hadn't quite dried when our library student had filed them, lo these many years ago.
Seymour. Smith, Seymour S. I jammed my fingers into the cards. There he was, between Sidney and Russell Smith. Seymour had sixteen cards, dating from 1923 to 1932. He started out in a local journal about an Indian dig in Minnesota, according to the notes on the card written in a fancy old-fashioned script. Who was this library science major? What a task this person had set up for herself. What an accomplishment. Yet here it languished, unused and forgotten. These were the days of computers and speed•of•light.
Smith's journal articles continued, on topics as narrow as hunting arrows of the Kootenai and as broad as intertribal rivalries of the Indians of Montana. He bounced around a lot those first few years until about 1928 when he wrote his first article on Salish medicine men. From then on he wrote about the Salish. Mostly about their spiritual ceremonies. Sweathouses. Games. The bluejay shaman.
That was the last article, dated May 1932. The one Tilden had copied off, the one Melina and I had lifted. After that, Seymour disappeared from the files.
Out in the main library Miss Graphite helped me search the old Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature issues and a few other suc catalogs of journals and magazines. I read some old monographs about Shining Shirt and his vision for good measure but learned nothing new. The name Seymour S. Smith, common but odd enough, never appeared again after 1932.
What had happened to Seymour? He had been such a prolific publisher of anthropological articles for ten years. Then nothing. Had he died? Taken a leave of absence? Gone insane? He was hot on the trail of the bluejay shaman. Had one thrown a feather of bad medicine into Seymour? I wondered if he was like Wade, making friends with the Indians, joining in their rituals. One of Wade's ancestors in away.
Ancestor.
I ran down the library steps into the morning sunshine. The wall of heat greeted me, sucking at my cool insides as I made my way across campus. I was just getting used to it when the doors of the administration building opened and slapped my cheeks with air-conditioned coolness.
"A present for my mother," I explained to the records supervisor. "It will mean so much to her to have the complete family history."
The supervisor was another officious woman, younger by a hair (dyed no doubt) than the librarian. She was meticulously attired in a red polka dot dress with every red plastic accessory known to woman. Even her red lipstick matched the crimson of her dress. But her eyes were soft as she regarded me, weighing my story of the family history of the descendants of Seymour S. Smith.
"Those old faculty files are boxed in the basement," she said, scratching her scalp with red-painted nails. "I just don't have the time to look for it."
"Could I look for Grandfather's file myself? I don't mind. I really need every scrap of information." I pleaded. I begged. "You see, he didn't marry Grandmother until after he left the university. So she never knew much about his career here." I smiled. "She always told me how proud he was that he had taught here at the University of Montana."
Shameless, that's me.
Polka•Dot pursed her lips. She knew I was wheedling. But her blue eyes squinted and in a moment the keys rattled from her hand as we descended the dimly lit stairs to the basement. The long linoleum corridor at the bottom was quiet, smelling of the battling odors of mildew and Pine Sol. She unlocked a door to a huge storeroom, rivers of
paper in cardboard boxes and manila envelopes, oceans of messy files, stacked on rough wood shelves and sleek, chrome wire racks.
I followed the tick of her red heels down the side aisle. We passed row after row, going back farther and farther. 1957-1962. 1948-1953. At last we came to the thirties. She stopped, her bangles clattering against the keys, in front of a row labeled in faded ink lettering, 1927-1932.
"It should be filed by the last year he was affiliated with the university." Polka-Dot pursed her lips again. "But you never know back here." I looked down the row of shelving, my smile fading.
"Thanks."
"If you want to copy something, you can bring it up to myoffice. But I have to charge you ten cents a copy. And you must put it back in the right place." She turned on her heel, then glanced back. "You have an hour until my lunch break."
The row of shelving was forty feet long and stretched to the ten-foot ceiling. Heavy boxes of files sat covered with black grime. I rubbed the side of one and sneezed. Then I sat down on the floor in front of
the very last box on the bottom shelf and said a little prayer for luck.
Forty-five minutes later luck roosted on my shoulder, gazing down on a musty file. I copied down the information in my notebook furiously, then stuffed the file back in the dusty box. Touching Polka-Dot's cool arm upstairs, I thanked her before I flew out the door.
Freddy's Feed and Read sat like a dowdy hen in an old neighborhood storefront three or four blocks from the campus. The exterior was unpretentious, painted brown with a yellow sign lettered with flourishes. As I stepped into the grocery side I caught a glimpse of Freddy heading toward a back room in his signature Hawaiian shin.
I poured myself some gourmet coffee into a large Earth friendly paper cup, leaning against a wall by the cash register to sip it and watch for Zena. She worked afternoons, she said. I choked on my coffee when a man with a waist-length neon-green Mohawk haircut turned to show me his surprisingly handsome face.
The lunch crowd thinned. A sprout-and-cream-cheese sandwich called to me from the refrigerator case. I had devoured it with a natural fruit juice that tasted like sweetened sewer water when Zena's black hair flashed by the doorway to the bookstore.
"I don't have time for this." Her words were whispered but hard. I stopped on the last step down to the bookstore as the footsteps of her pursuer approached.
"Please, Zena. I need to talk to--" Elaine stopped in front of the doorway. Her frightened eyes stared at me, then switched to the direction Zena had gone.
"Hello, Elaine." Bingo: two for one. 1 stepped down the last stair to the bookstore level. The small room was filled with books, neatly stacked on handcrafted wooden shelves. The summer sun streamed through the huge old plate glass window, making me squint. "I need to talk, too."
Guiding her by the arm, I pulled Elaine toward the back of th store where Zena had disappeared. She didn't resist. The door at the back revealed a small, dark storeroom with a cement floor, cardboard boxes against one wall, a metal table with two chairs, a sink and toilet. Bent over in front of the sink, washing her face, was Zena.
The Bluejay Shaman (Alix Thorssen Mystery Series) Page 16
