by Susan Slater
The Pumpkin Seed Massacre
Ben Pecos Mysteries, Book 1
Susan Slater
The Pumpkin Seed Massacre
Published by Secret Staircase Books, an imprint of
Columbine Publishing Group
PO Box 416, Angel Fire, NM 87710
Copyright © 1999 Susan Slater
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy and completeness of information contained in this book we assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or any inconsistency herein. Any slights of people, places or organizations are unintentional.
Book layout and design by Secret Staircase Books
First trade paperback edition: January 2018
First e-book edition: January 2018
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Slater, Susan
The Pumpkin Seed Massacre / by Susan Slater
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1945422379 paperback
ISBN 978-1945422386 e-book
1. Pecos, Ben (Fictitious character)--Fiction. 2. Pueblo Indians--Fiction. 3. New Mexico--Fiction. 4. Hantavirus--Fiction. 5. Indian casinos—Fiction. I. Title
Ben Pecos Mystery Series : Book 1
Slater, Susan, Ben Pecos mysteries.
BISAC : FICTION / Mystery & Detective.
813/.54
To:
—Joan, for “seeing”
—Beth, Laura and Susan who supported the struggle from the beginning
—Don, for his insight, ideas and laughing out loud
—All my friends in the Jemez Pueblo who have enriched my life
and
—The countless students who have made me a better writer
THANK YOU!
* * *
Get another Susan Slater book FREE—click here to find out how!
Prologue
The owl winged noiselessly across the moon’s path and settled on a pine bough above his head. He didn’t look up. He knew the owl was there and knew its meaning. Death. His sweat evaporated in the dry, high-altitude crispness of the New Mexico night. Atop the mesa, a fire kept him from chilling. He stared at the bright flames and didn’t try to keep his mind from straying to what was wrong.
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. He couldn’t sleep and, like tonight, would take long walks calling upon the spirits to give him guidance. But they had deserted him. No longer did he feel their presence, their support. Yet, the answer was clear. He knew what he had to do. Much rested on his shoulders—responsibility, duty—but weren’t they the same? Wasn’t the future of the Tewa village in his hands? Someone who could assure all of a better life?
He put another cedar log on the fire; the orange warmth made his skin glow bronze. Then he untied the laces of his new Adidas, and pushed off first one shoe and then the other and rubbed his aching arches. Stripped to the waist, he wore designer jeans pleated below his black leather belt studded with buffalo nickels. But tonight he couldn’t take pleasure in his clothes.
He sat back against a granite outcropping and let the fire warm the soles of his feet. He was beat. From his vantage point, he looked out over the Indian Pueblo. Wisps of wood smoke stood straight up in barely waving columns above the roofs. On this windless night, they acted as sentinels guarding each dwelling—the adobe houses huddled in an extended web of families and values, dating back hundreds of years. He felt a surge of pride. These were his people. His to lead. His to protect. His to make rich.
He could make out the plaza ringed by houses flanked on the right by the Squash kiva and at the opposite end by the Turquoise kiva. The underground ceremonial chambers were privy to the secrets of centuries. Shadowy dancers floated over the hard-packed clay, putting one foot and then the other down in half-steps to a drum beat. The long line of imaginary men and women shook pine boughs and turned in rhythm to the chanting of a circle of old men.
He would soon dance in celebration of summer. He couldn’t remember ever missing a feast day. But he felt empty. He took little pleasure in performing the rituals of his ancestors.
Barking dogs brought his attention back to the houses below. Lights blinked on to his right. A group of young men had organized a hunt. A black bear had been seen in the foothills foraging for berries along the river, a male cub old enough to be abandoned by its mother. A black bear was powerful medicine. Would the taking of a yearling cub bring prosperity? Was this the sign he needed?
Someone hurried along the road leading to the Mission Church. As he watched, the door to the rectory was thrown open, and he could just make out the long robes of Father Emerson before both figures were lost in the shadows of the path that led back to the center of the village. Attending those in need—a worthy profession—just not something he could do.
He couldn’t check an involuntary shudder. He had to take action. Why hadn’t he called? Told them for sure that he’d do it? He had been summoned to Santa Fe. Tomorrow he would meet with the investors. He had been dreading their accusations. They would think he was weak. But he wasn’t.
A breeze suddenly tickled his nose. He sneezed. Startled, the owl rose mime-like and climbed high in the moon-bright sky. He watched death soar above him, blackly outlined, until the bird disappeared into the inky ceiling.
He felt a flutter of relief. It was the sign—death’s visiting him this evening. He must act. He knew that now. No one could interfere with the way things were supposed to happen. Tomorrow, he would accept the packet of tainted seeds—lethal, untraceable, meant to kill the one man who stood in the way of progress. He pulled on the now-warm running shoes. Leaving the laces loose, he stood and jubilantly breathed in the cool night air.
He felt light-headed, calmed, but strangely excited. He would walk home along the river and take pleasure in how the giant cottonwoods shimmered silver above the water. The song of the rapids breaking gently over low rocks would keep him company. He bent down and scooped handfuls of dirt to smother the fire.
ONE
The morning was hot. Parched weeds grew on the roofs of the pueblo houses. Lorenzo Loretto awakened at dawn to feel the stifling closeness of a day promising rain. He got up from his bed, a mattress on a sheet of plywood supported at the four corners by chunks of firewood. He would bathe in the river, but first, he had to pee.
He pulled the three pound coffee can from under the bed and watched as his stream of urine sometimes hit and sometimes missed the can. He would empty it in the alleyway behind the house and wait for his granddaughter to yell at him to rinse the can. She was up baking bread in the great horno in the courtyard to the side of the house. Already she was removing big crusty round loaves from the blackened opening of the adobe oven, each loaf secure in the center of a long wooden paddle squared at the end. From the covered basket beside her, she lifted a mound of dough. Patting it with her hands, she shaped it into a ball and placed it in the center of the paddle. Then, she thrust the paddle back into the oven, gently sliding the dough off to rest on a shelf to bake. The aroma of fresh bread filled the air.
Behind the house, the clothesline sagged with flapping shirts, and jeans, and underwear. Washday. If he didn’t hurry, she’d come get the clothes he was wearing. Lorenzo put the coffee can
down by the corner of the house. Luckily, he had his cane with him so he could continue down the narrow path between the houses and out of sight of his granddaughter.
Two thousand people lived in his village with one thousand trucks or cars. He waved his cane in the air as Marcus Toledo roared past in a new Jeep Cherokee. He hated automobiles. Always had. He never rode in one unless he needed to go a long distance. Lorenzo continued down the road by the pueblo church shaking his cane at Sally Fragua’s dogs, who threatened to follow him.
He thought of himself as the eyes of his village. At ninety-six, he kept watch over the births and deaths. At least, he thought he was ninety-six. He tried to verify his age for the clinic records last spring, but the mice ate the only paper that proved when he was born. Not that he could read English. He couldn’t. But the paper had been issued by the tribe to his mother in 1952. When she died, he put the paper and the Bible from his first communion in a hole in the adobe wall behind his bed. Last winter had been cold and mice moved into the single adobe room attached to his granddaughter’s house. They nested in the cardboard box of underwear under his bed and in the box of kindling, and in the hidey hole. His granddaughter hated mice. She chased them around the room when she came to clean, screaming that he’d die in such filth. He only sat in his rocker and looked straight ahead not hearing.
Tito Tsosie, the rowdy rival from his youth and dead some fifty years, came up from the underworld slithering across the doorstep, his unmistakable beady eyes and wedge-shaped nose fastened to the body of a bull snake. Tito stayed with him until every mouse was gone. Eaten. At night he slept in the kindling box by the fire. Then, he left. Was Tito making amends? Lorenzo thought so. He liked Tito better in death than in life.
Lorenzo was less afraid of those from the dark side as he got closer to leaving this earth. Many of his friends from the other world visited him daily now. They walked with him by the river or sat with him in the darkened sanctuary of the Mission chapel. He talked with them, but speech was difficult. He heard little around him but his eyes were like the hawk’s. He looked everywhere and saw everything.
The rectangular pueblo church loomed in the distance. Its smooth tan adobe sides stretched upwards two stories with twin bell towers perched on the front corners above double hand-carved, fist-thick doors. The bells, now seldom used, were gifts from the Spaniards, cast bronze bigger than wastebaskets and securely tethered to a crossbar embedded in the adobe bricks. The church had been restored twice, the first time over two hundred years ago. His mother had been married there; Lorenzo had been baptized there.
He stood for a moment at the churchyard cemetery. In the old days, the dead were buried in the yard in front of the village church or for someone important—maybe a priest—under the wooden plank flooring of the sanctuary itself. This old cemetery was full; there were no spaces left. The elders had consecrated a new burial ground outside the village some years back.
But as Lorenzo watched, a man with a shovel and a man with a posthole digger leaned on their equipment while a third man unloaded the pointed slats of wood from his truck that would extend the picket boundary. They were enlarging the churchyard.
The tribe’s fiscal officer, as the member of the Governor’s Council in charge of village maintenance, ordered the quarter-acre enclosure around the graves to be expanded, the fence straightened, painted, made inviting to the hundreds of tourists who visited each summer. Teens policed the grounds for pop cans and candy wrappers and pulled upright the fallen grave markers. The sparse grass that sprouted hit-and-miss across the mounds was clipped close to the ground.
The new fence hugged the road and angled to the left. This created a dozen new burial spaces. Didn’t the man know that he was begging death to visit the village by expanding the old cemetery, making room for more places of rest? Lorenzo watched as the men pounded the stakes in a straight line each leading farther to the north along the irrigation ditch. Lorenzo couldn’t believe such foolishness. He knew that many didn’t believe the way he did, but they would see. Death would come and he would fill his house before the dying stopped. It would be a time of anguish for Lorenzo’s people. He sighed. There was no way to undo what had been set in motion.
TWO
The first death occurred on Monday, the second on Tuesday. Both would have gone unnoticed except for the fact that they kept Twila Runningfox, physician’s assistant at the Tewa Pueblo, from attending an Indian Health Service meeting on Wednesday. As Twila reported, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the deaths of a sixty-three year old man and a seventy-one year old woman from flu symptoms—especially since both had a history of upper-respiratory problems and Dr. Sanford Black, clinical director of the Albuquerque service unit, was the first to agree.
In fact, Sandy barely acknowledged Twila’s excuse, thanked her for calling but dismissed her rather quickly. She was competent. There was no reason to dwell on routine deaths. He had a decision to make on adding a student intern and was already running behind schedule. He shuffled and reshuffled the applications and shifted his concentration from lower back pain to the stack of paperwork in front of him. Too much sitting in one position leaning over a desk—this was the part he least liked about his job—the bouts of forced inactivity.
He stared at the applications of five would-be interns. They were even beginning to sound alike—all well qualified, good undergraduate, strong masters studies in psychology, counseling, social work. So, what was he looking for? What did IHS need the most?
The counseling position in the Tewa Pueblo probably took priority. It might be wise to choose someone from that community. But Benson Pecos didn’t exactly fit into that category. He hadn’t spent much time there and he wasn’t claiming Indian preference, either. He had a B.S. in biology and an M.A. in psychology.
Sandy sighed and leaned back in his chair. Sunlight pushed through the tangle of grape ivy above his desk and zapped him in the right eye. He twisted his chair a half turn to the left. This wasn’t getting him anywhere. He should ask his secretary. Gloria was from Tewa. He grabbed Ben’s application and walked across the hall.
“Gloria, what do you know about a Ben Pecos?”
“He’s really good looking.”
“I was thinking of something a little more academic.”
“Well, his mother was a famous Tewa artist and his father was Anglo, someone she met at school. When his mother died, a couple from Utah adopted him. He was five. He hasn’t spent too much time in the Pueblo, mostly just summers with his grandmother.”
“Is he well liked?”
“I like him.”
“Gloria, if I consider him for the internship, I need a little broader application.” He watched Gloria shrug. When she didn’t seem to want to add anything else, he continued. “I like what I see on paper. If you can, check a couple of his references this afternoon. I think I’ll invite him to the meeting in Tewa tomorrow morning. Maybe I’ll give this kid a try.”
“You won’t be sorry,” Gloria said.
“How do you know?”
“I know.” Gloria turned back to the word processor in front of her.
+ + +
Ben’s grandmother didn’t have a phone, not many of the Tewa village elders did. One of the kids who hung out at the civic center down by the highway brought the message late in the afternoon, an invitation from Dr. Black to attend a meeting at the Tewa Pueblo clinic in the morning.
It must mean that they were interested in him—he just wished that he could return the enthusiasm. He’d applied, hadn’t he? Then he’d had about a thousand second thoughts. But he called back and accepted, confirmed that he would be there and thanked Dr. Black for his consideration.
But now, this morning, Ben wasn’t feeling any more certain. He wiped a spot of toothpaste off the mirror. He still had an hour before the meeting. He inspected his face. Ben Pecos, the anomaly. That wasn’t original. Someone had called him that. His second year psychology professor at Stanford. A German woman who tri
ed to make him fit some kind of mold for Native Americanism. She had a knack for making it sound like a national movement, something one aspired to, wasn’t born into without a choice.
“No tepees? No feathers on the head?” She’d roll over in bed and, propped on an elbow, run a finger over his prominent cheekbones.
“I’m a Pueblo Indian. Mud houses. Farming. The Spanish Conquistadors brought us the Catholic religion.”
“Not even the horses to ride like the wind? Arrows? Spears to run through the enemy?” She would tease but sound vaguely disappointed with his answer. Usually his hormones would end any further conversation. Her curiosity was real, her understanding limited. He always thought he’d see her get off a tourist bus in the pueblo someday ‘oohing and ahhing’ about primitivism—pointing to the adobe ovens beside the squat houses, watching a dance, buying some trinkets marked ‘Hand-made by Indians’—and then go back to California thinking she’d had a real experience.
Cynicism. Could you become a cynic at twenty-six? Probably. And if he was lucky it would edge out any idealism he might have. While there was still a chance, he should chuck the idea of returning to his place of birth, of helping a people who only half-heartedly claimed him, still looked at him with suspicion because he didn’t know their language or ceremonies ... and, do what?
His grandmother wasn’t surprised when he told her he might come back. She nodded and said that his mother followed the Navajo tradition and buried his umbilical cord between the river and the mesa. He would always call this place home. He couldn’t help it
