A Thief of Time jlajc-8

by Tony Hillerman

  The wind made walking difficult, and the crooked, erratic nature of the canyon bottom made estimating distance -- even for one as experienced as Leaphorn -- little more than guesswork. Double guesswork, he thought. He had to guess how much of this climbing over tumbled boulders and detouring around brush would have added to the five and a half miles Etcitty had estimated. It would be less than that, he was sure, and he'd been looking for the landmarks Etcitty had mentioned since about mile three. Just ahead, where the canyon bottom made a sharp bend, he saw a crevice in the cliff walled in with stones--an Anasazi storeroom. On the cliff below it, half obscured by tall brush, he saw pictographs. He climbed the soft earth to the floor of the bench and pushed his way through the heavy growth of nettles for a closer look.

  The dominant shape was one of those broad-shouldered, pin-headed figures that anthropologists believe represented Anasazi shamans. It looked, as Etcitty had described it, 'like a big baseball umpire holding up a pink chest protector.' Leaphorn recrossed the canyon bottom and climbed the shelf on the other side. He saw what he had come to find.

  Near its beginnings in the Chuska Mountains, Many Ruins Canyon is cut deep and narrow through the Chinle sandstone formation of that plateau. There its cliffs rise sheer and vertical almost a thousand feet above a narrow, sandy bottom. It is much shallower by the time it emerges into Chinle Valley and becomes a mere drainage wash as it meanders northward toward Utah through the Greasewood Flats. But the cut deepens again in its passage through the Nokaito Bench to the San Juan. Here the crazy mishmash geology of the earth's crust had given Many Ruins a different shape. One climbed out of it on a series of steps. First the low, sometimes earthen cliffs that crowded its narrow streambed, then a broken sandstone shelf hundreds of yards wide, then more cliffs, rising to another shelf, and still more cliffs rising to the flat top of Nokaito Mesa.

  In the spring when the snowpack melts a hundred miles away in the Chuska Mountains, Many Ruins carries a steady stream. In the late-summer thunderstorm season it rises and falls between a trickle and booming flash floods, which send boulders tumbling like marbles down its bottom. In late autumn it dries. The life that occupied it finds water then only in spring-fed potholes. From where he stood on the sandstone shelf above such a pothole, Leaphorn could see the second of the ruins Etcitty had described. Two ruins, in fact.

  Part of the wall of one was visible in an alcove in the second level of cliffs above him. Another, reduced to little more than a brushy hump, had been built along the base of the cliff not two hundred yards from the alcove.

  All this day he had fought down his sense of excitement and urgency. He had a long ways to go and he went at a careful walk. Now he trotted across the sandstone bench.

  He stopped when the alcove came in full view. Like those invariably picked as building sites by the Anasazi, it faced the low winter sun, with enough overhang to shade it in the summer. A cluster of brushy vegetation grew under it, telling him it was also the site of seep. He walked toward it, more slowly now. He didn't consider Brigham Houk particularly dangerous. Houk had called him schizophrenic -- unpredictable but not likely to be a threat to a stranger. Still, he had killed once in an insane rage. Leaphorn unsnapped the flap that held his pistol in its holster.

  Eons of water running down the inner face of the alcove had worn a depression several feet into the sandstone below it. Water stains indicated this held a pool about four feet deep in wetter seasons. Now only a foot or two was left -- still fed by a tiny trickle from a mossy crevice in the cliff, and now green with algae. It was also the home of scores of tiny leopard frogs, which hopped away from Leaphorn's feet.

  Only some of them hopped.

  Leaphorn squatted, grunted with surprise. He studied the small scattered frog bodies, some already shriveled, some newly dead, each with a leg secured by a yucca thread to a tiny peg cut from a twig. He stood, trying to make sense of this. The pegs followed a series of faint concentric circles drawn around the pothole, the outside one perhaps four feet from the water. Some sort of game, Leaphorn guessed. He tried to understand the mind that would be amused by it. He failed. Brigham Houk was insane, probably dangerous.

  He considered. Brigham Houk almost certainly would already know he was here.

  Leaphorn made a megaphone of his hands. 'Eleanor,' he shouted. 'Ellie. Ellie.' Then he listened.

  Nothing. Outside the alcove, the wind made whimpering sounds.

  He tried again. Again, nothing.

  The Anasazi had built their structure on a stone shelf above the pool. About a dozen small rooms once, Leaphorn estimated, with part of it at two levels. He skirted around the pool, climbed over the tumbled walls, peered into the still-intact rooms. Nothing. He walked back to the pool, puzzled. Where to look next?

  At the edge of the alcove, a worn set of footholds had been cut into the sandstone--a climb-way leading to the shelf above the alcove. Perhaps that led to another site. He walked out of the alcove around the cliff to the brushy hump. Immediately he saw it had been plundered. A ditch had been dug along the outside wall. Bones were scattered everywhere. The digging had been recent--hardly any rain since the earth was disturbed. Leaphorn inspected it. Was this why Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had slipped away from Chaco, slipped down the San Juan? To search this site for her polychrome pots? So it would seem. And what had happened then? What had interrupted her? He checked in the disturbed earth for shards and collected a handful. They might be the sort that interested her. He couldn't be sure. He looked down in the trench. Jutting from the earth was part of a pot. And another. In the bottom were a half-dozen shards, two of them large. Why had she left them there? Then he noticed an oddity. Among the bones littering the trench he saw no skulls. On the earth outside more than a dozen were scattered. None had jawbones. Natural, probably. The mandible would be attached only by muscle and gristle, which wouldn't survive an eight-hundred-year burial. Then where were the missing mandibles? He saw five of them together beside the trench, as if discarded there. It reminded him of the jawbones lined so neatly at the dig site where Etcitty and Nails had died. But where was the woman who had dug the trench? He went back to the pool and inspected the footholds. Then he started climbing, thinking as he did that he was far too old for this. Fifty feet up the cliff, he was aware of two facts. These Anasazi footholds were in regular current use, and he was a damn fool to have attempted the climb. He clung to the stone, reach-

  ing blindly for the next handhold, wondering how many remained. Finally the slope eased. He looked up. He had done it. His head was almost even with the top. He pulled himself up, his upper body over the edge.

  Standing there, watching him, was a man. He wore a beard cut straight across, a nylon jacket so new it still had the creases of its folds, a pair of tattered jeans, and moccasins that seemed to have been sewn together from deer hide.

  'Mr. Leaphorn,' the man said. 'Papa said you coming.'

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ť ^

  AS HARRISON HOUK'S MESSAGE to him had promised, Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal was still alive. She lay dozing under a gray wool blanket and a covering of sewn-together rabbit skins. She looked very, very ill.

  'Can she talk?' he asked Brigham.

  'A little,' he said. 'Sometimes.'

  It occurred to Leaphorn that Brigham Houk might have been describing himself. He talked very little and sometimes not at all. What you'd expect, Leaphorn thought, after twenty years of no one to talk to except once every full moon.

  'How bad is it? Her injuries I mean?'

  'Knee's hurt,' he said. 'Arm broken. Place in her side. Place in her hip.'

  And probably all infected, Leaphorn thought. Thin as her face was, it was flushed.

  'You found her and brought her here?'

  Brigham nodded. Like his father, he was a small man, tightly built, with short arms and legs and a thick, strong torso.

  'Do you know what happened to her?'

  'The devil came and hurt her,' Brigham said in an odd, flat voi
ce. 'He hit her. She ran away. He chased. She fell down. He pushed her off. She fell into the canyon. Broke everything.'

  Brigham had made a bed for her by digging a coffin-shaped pit in the sand that had drifted into a room of the sheltered ruin. He'd filled it with a two- or three-foot layer of leaves. Open as it was to the air, it had the sickroom smell of urine and decay.

  'Tell me about this,' Leaphorn said.

  Brigham was standing at what had been the entry door to the little room--now a narrow gap into a roofless space. Behind him the sky was dark. The wind, which had fallen during the afternoon, was blowing again now. It blew steadily out of the northwest. Winter, Leaphorn thought. He kept his eyes locked with Brigham's. The young man's eyes were the same odd blue-gray as his father's. Had the same intensity about them. Leaphorn looked into them, searching for insanity. Looking for it, he found it.

  'This devil came,' Brigham said, speaking very slowly. 'He dug up the bones, and sat on the ground there looking at them. One after another he would look at them. He would measure them with a tool he had. He was looking for the souls of people who never had been prayed for. He would suck the souls out of the skulls and then he would throw them away. Or some of them he would take away in his sack. And then one day the last time the moon was full--' He paused and his somber bearded face converted into an expression of delight. 'When the moon is full, that's when Papa comes and talks to me, and brings me what I need.' The smile drifted away. 'A little after that, this woman came.' He nodded at Friedman-Bernal. 'I didn't see her come and I think maybe the angel Moroni brought her because I didn't see her come and I see everything in this place. Moroni left her to fight with that devil. She had come to the old cliff house down below here where I keep my frogs. I didn't know she was there. I was playing my flute and I frightened her and she ran away. But the next day, she came to where the devil was digging up the bones. I saw them talking.' Brigham's mobile face became fierce. His eyes seemed to glitter with the anger. 'He knocked her down, and he was on top of her, fighting with her. He got up and was searching through her pack, and she jumped up and ran over to the edge where the cliff drops down to the streambed and then she fell down. That devil, he went over and pushed her over with his foot.' Brigham stopped, his face wet with tears.

  'He just left her there, where she fell?'

  Brigham nodded.

  'You kept her alive,' Leaphorn said. 'But now I think she is starting to die. We have to get her out of here. To a hospital where doctors can give her medicine.'

  Brigham stared at him. 'Papa said I could trust you.' The statement was reproachful.

  'If we don't get her out, she dies,' Leaphorn said.

  'Papa will bring medicine. The next time the moon is full he will come with it.'

  'Too long,' Leaphorn said. 'Look at her.'

  Brigham looked. 'She's asleep,' he said, softly.

  'She has fever. Feel her face. How hot. She has infections. She has to have help.'

  Brigham touched Eleanor Friedman-Bernal's cheek with the tips of his fingers. He jerked them away, looking frightened. Leaphorn thought of the shriveled bodies of the frogs and tried to square that image with this tenderness. How do you square insanity?

  'We need to make something to carry her on,' Leaphorn said. 'If you can find two poles long enough, we can tie the blanket between them and carry her on that.'

  'No,' Brigham Houk said. 'When I try to move her, to clean her after she does number one or number two, she screams. It hurts too bad.'

  'No choice,' Leaphorn said. 'We have to do it.'

  'It's terrible,' Brigham said. 'She screams. I can't stand that, so I had to leave her dirty.' He looked at Leaphorn for understanding. Houk had apparently given him a haircut and trimmed his beard on the last visit. The old man was no barber. He had simply left the hair about an inch long everywhere, and whacked the beard off a half -inch under Brigham's chin.

  'It was better to leave her dirty,' Leaphorn said. 'You did right. Now, can you find me two poles?'

  Brigham nodded. 'Just a minute. I have poles. It's close.' He disappeared, making no sound at all.

  Here is how it must have been when man lived as predator, Leaphorn thought. He developed the animal skills, and starved with his children when the skill failed him. How had Brigham hunted? Traps, probably, and a bow to kill larger game. Perhaps his father had brought him a gun -- but someone might have heard gunshots. He listened to the sound of Eleanor Friedman's shallow breathing, and over that, the wind sounds. Suddenly he heard a thumping. Steady at first, then louder. He leaped to his feet. A helicopter. But before he could get into the open there was only the wind. He stared into the grayness, frustrated. He had found her. He must get her out of here alive. The risk lay in carrying such a fragile load over such rough terrain. It would be difficult. It might be impossible. A helicopter would save her. Why hadn't Houk done more to get her out? No time, Leaphorn guessed. His son had told him of this injured woman, but perhaps not how near she was to death. Houk would have wanted a way to save the woman without giving up this mad son to life (or perhaps death) in a prison for the criminally insane. Even Houk needed time to solve such a puzzle. He was too crippled to bring her out himself. If he did, she would talk of the man who had nursed her, and Brigham would be found--an insane triple murderer in the eyes of the law. The only solution Leaphorn saw would be to find Brigham another hideaway. That would take time, and the killer had allowed Houk no time.

  The woman stirred, moaned. He and Brigham would have to carry her to the canyon bottom, then five miles down to the river. They could tie the kayaks together, put her litter on one of them, and float her to Mexican Hat. Five or six hours at least, and then an ambulance would come for her. Or the copter would come from Farmington if the weather allowed. It hadn't been too bad for whatever had just flown over.

  He walked out under the dark sky. He smelled ozone. Snow was near. Then he saw Randall Elliot walking toward him.

  Elliot raised his hand. 'I saw you from up there,' he said, pointing past Leaphorn to the rim of the mesa. 'Came down to see if you needed help.'

  'Sure,' Leaphorn said. 'Lots of help.'

  Elliot stopped a few feet away. 'You find her?'

  Leaphorn nodded toward the ruin, remembering Elliot was a copter pilot.

  'How is she?'

  'Not good,' Leaphorn said.

  'But alive at least?'

  'In a coma,' Leaphorn said. 'She can't talk.' He wanted Elliot to know that immediately. 'I doubt if she'll live.'

  'My God,' Elliot said. 'What happened to her?'

  'I think she fell,' Leaphorn said. 'A long ways. That's what it looks like.'

  Elliot was frowning. 'She's in there?' he said. 'How did she get here?'

  'A man lives out here. A hermit. He found her and he's been trying to keep her alive.'

  'I'll be damned,' Elliot said. He moved past Leaphorn. 'In here?'

  Leaphorn followed. They stood, Elliot staring at Friedman-Bernal, Leaphorn watching Elliot. He wanted to handle this just exactly right. Only Elliot could fly the helicopter.

  'A hermit found her?' he said softly, posing the question to himself. He shook his head. 'Where is he?'

  'He went to get a couple of poles. We're going to make a litter. Carry her down to the San Juan. Her kayak's there, and mine. Float her down to Mexican Hat and get help.'

  Elliot was looking at her again, studying her. 'I have a helicopter up on the mesa. We can carry her up there. Much quicker.'

  'Great,' Leaphorn said. 'Lucky you found us.'

  'Really, it was stupid,' Elliot said. 'I should have remembered about this place. She'd told me once she'd found the polychrome pattern she was chasing on potsherds in here. Back when she was helping inventory these sites. I knew she'd planned to come back.' He turned away from the woman. His eyes locked with Leaphorn's.

  'As a matter of fact, she said some things that made me think she had come here earlier. She didn't exactly say it, but I think she did some illegal
digging in here. I think she found what she was looking for, and she came back to get some more.'

  'I think you're right,' Leaphorn said. 'She dug up that ruins on the shelf down below here. Dug up a bunch of graves.'

  'And got careless,' Elliot added, looking at her.

  Leaphorn nodded. Where was Brigham? He'd said just a minute. Leaphorn walked out of the ruin, looking along the talus slope under the cliff. Two poles leaned against the wall not ten feet away. Brigham had returned and seen his devil, and gone away. The poles were fir, apparently, and weathered. Driftwood, Leaphorn guessed, carried down Many Ruins all the way from the mountains by one of its flash floods. On the ground beside them was a loop of rawhide rope. He hurried back into the room with them.

  'A very skittish man,' Leaphorn said. 'He left the poles and disappeared again.'

  'Oh,' Elliot said. He looked skeptical.

  They doubled the blanket, made lacing holes, and tied it securely to the poles.

  'Be very careful,' Leaphorn said. 'Knee probably broken. Broken arm, all sorts of internal injuries.'

  'I used to collect the wounded,' Elliot said, without looking up. 'I'm good at this.'

  And Elliot seemed to be careful. Even so, Eleanor Friedman-Bernal uttered a strangled moan. Then she was unconscious again.

  'I think she fainted,' Elliot said. 'Do you really think she's dying?'

  'I do,' Leaphorn said. 'I'm giving you the heavy end because you're younger and stronger and not so exhausted.'

  'Fair,' Elliot said. He picked up the end of the poles at the woman's head.

  'You know the way back to your copter, so you lead the way.'

  They carried Eleanor Friedman-Bernal carefully down the talus, then toward a long rock slide which sloped down from the rim. Beyond the slide -- probably the cause of it -- was a deep erosion cut which carried runoff water down from the top. Elliot turned toward the cut.

  'Rest a minute,' Leaphorn said. 'Put her down on this slab.'

  He was fairly sure now what Elliot planned. Somewhere between here and the helicopter, wherever that was, something fatal had to happen to Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. Elliot simply could not risk having her arrive at a hospital alive. Ideally, something fatal would also happen to Leaphorn. If Elliot was smart, he would wait until they had climbed a hundred feet or so up the cut. Then he would push the litter backward, tumbling Friedman-Bernal and Leaphorn down the jumble of boulders. Then he would climb back down and do whatever was needed, if anything, to finish them off. A bang of the head on a rock would do it and leave nothing to arouse the suspicion of a medical examiner. Figuring that out had been easy enough. Knowing what to do about it was another matter. He could think of nothing. Shooting Elliot was shooting the copter pilot. Pointing a gun at him to force him to fly them out wasn't practical. Elliot would know Leaphorn wouldn't shoot him once they were airborne. He'd be able to make the helicopter do tricks that Leaphorn couldn't handle. And he probably had the little pistol. And yet, once they started that steep climb, Elliot had simply to drop his end of the litter and Leaphorn would be helpless.