The Salt Maiden

by Colleen Thompson

  She noted the grim set of his jaw, the sweat gleaming at his temple. In his eyes she saw what he was thinking, what she was trying so hard not to let herself understand.

  “If she’s inside,” he started, “she can’t possibly be living. It’s been two months since she vanished, Dana. Two months without water, food…”

  She held his gaze and resisted the urge to blink back moisture. “I ran away from what I had to face in Houston. I’m not running from this, too.”

  Yet she did a moment later, when the first gunshots rang out.

  Chapter Twelve

  Police responded Saturday to an incident at the AMC 16 at the Valley View Center, where witnesses claim a patron assaulted a man of Arabic descent as he carried a snack tray into a movie theater. The victim was transported to a minor emergency center with a head laceration but declined to press charges. The alleged assailant, recently separated from military service overseas, was escorted to Dallas VA Medical Center, where he agreed to undergo voluntary psychiatric evaluation.

  —Police blotter item,

  Dallas Morning News

  Behind and between them, rock exploded with a crack that instantly took Jay back to a Baghdad hotspot his unit had been defending.

  “What was tha—” Dana started before a second report echoed from everywhere at once.

  Jay was already reaching for her when she leaped out of range, instinct and adrenaline pushing her to bolt. Which would take her out into the open, straight into harm’s way.

  He’d seen it before in his men, so he was ready, propelling himself after her, hooking his left arm around her waist and dragging her to the closest cover—the black maw of the cave.

  He bent low to hurry them inside, pulling her past a row of rocks that jutted upward like a crone’s teeth. Dana lost a sandal, but he couldn’t stop to grab it.

  “Quiet,” he barked before she had the chance to cry out. He hauled her farther back, picking his way by feel amid the stony rubble.

  He didn’t dare turn on his flashlight, couldn’t give the sniper any greater advantage than he had already. Leaving her behind him, Jay growled, “Don’t move; don’t speak,” and belly-crawled behind a large rock to peer outside.

  The pistol in his hand felt all wrong. What he needed was his AK-47 and enough battle rattle to encase his head and body like a beetle’s. He felt naked out here with the hajji firing on their position, with the terrorists who’d streamed in like a swarm of stinging ants on a fresh carcass—

  That’s not right, Jay realized. He wasn’t in that desert, wasn’t even someplace it was okay to call them hajjis, much less tackle a man wearing a turban as he walked into a matinee.

  Horror body-slammed him, the same shame that had hit after he’d realized the man wasn’t some bomb-strapped radical but an adjunct professor from a local college who’d been taking popcorn to his twelve-year-old son.

  “What…what’s happening?” Dana whispered from the spot where she crouched, breathing hard.

  He glanced back at her, looking for confirmation that the shots he’d heard had been real. That she wasn’t cowering because she’d been dragged in here by an insane man.

  “Can you see him? Is he coming?” Her expression was barely visible, but she was clearly tense. Yet he saw trust in her eyes, enough to reassure him that he hadn’t just assaulted her over a mirage.

  “Can’t see anyone,” he said. “Did you, before I pulled you in here?”

  His words reverberated in what sounded like a good-size space. Bigger than any of the wormhole caves he’d seen around here. Maybe they’d found Angie’s cavern, after all, or at least its antechamber.

  “No, I just…I heard the shots, and I remembered the man with the gun last night. After that all I could think of was running back to the Suburban, where I left my purse and phone. If you hadn’t pulled me in here…”

  So what he’d heard had been real. Jay would have been relieved—except a live sniper wasn’t a reality worth celebrating.

  “You might’ve made it,” he said. “It’s tough to hit a running target. But we’re better off here, behind cover—except the bastard can keep us pinned down for a while. At least till Wallace comes looking for us.”

  “Will he?”

  Jay nodded. “If I don’t check in within the next hour he’ll start to wonder. We don’t carry handheld radios—they don’t work around here well enough to bother, and it’s a dead zone for my cell phone, too. But when I don’t answer my truck radio, he’ll worry something’s happened and drive out here.”

  Wallace might not be his number-one fan, but he knew as well as Jay did that they had to watch each other’s backs. In a place this desolate, every mother’s son—and daughter—respected the necessity of mutual assistance. Especially in the hot months, when the “inconvenience” of a dead battery or flat tire could prove fatal.

  Jay tried to think of some way to warn his deputy. If the shooter lingered, he could easily take Wallace by surprise.

  “But what if he climbs up here first—the man who fired at us?” Dana asked him. “What if he—”

  “He’ll have to leave cover to get to a spot where he can sight us. For a decent angle he’ll have to come in close, too. And if he does that, I’ll drop him.” Just another enemy target, he thought. Not an old friend or a neighbor. He couldn’t afford to hesitate, couldn’t afford to let the shooter squeeze off another round.

  “Chances are he won’t risk it,” Jay added. “After all, he’s already blown his best chance, when he had both time and surprise on his side. That tells me he’s nervous, just like he got nervous last night when Max started barking. If he ran then, he’ll run now. More than likely.”

  “More than likely,” Dana echoed with prayerlike fervor.

  They remained in place a long time, but no matter how hard Jay stared he saw no movement except that caused by the renewed stirring of the wind, heard no sound but its haunted voice whispering across the cave’s face.

  “I can’t take this anymore,” said Dana. “It…it stinks in here. Like death. G-give me the flashlight.”

  He had smelled it, too, and had been hoping that she hadn’t: a pungent background odor mingled with the moldy, barnyard reek of guano. “No, Dana.”

  “He’s gone by now; he has to be. But I’ll point the beam away from the opening in case he’s watching.”

  “There’re other things to think of, too. Bats have been here. They’ll be deeper than the swallows’ nests, but they could be close enough, covering the ceiling. You disturb them and they’ll swarm out, maybe by the thousands. And it only takes one with rabies. Besides that, snakes hole up where there’s shade, and—”

  “Ugh—does this place have any nondisgusting fauna?” she asked sharply. Without waiting for an answer she said, “I’ll keep my voice down and my beam low. So come on, Jay. Let me look.”

  Still he hesitated, until she said, “I’ve been to vet school. I’ve done necropsies on dead dogs. I’ve put down sick and injured animals while their owners stood there bawling. I’ll handle this the same way. Because I have to.”

  Even if it’s Angie? He couldn’t ask her that, though, couldn’t give voice to the suspicion. Because he’d smelled the odor that hovered in this cave before, a peculiar strain that had him thinking, Human.

  “It’s not my sister,” she said nonetheless. “Do you really think Angie would’ve stopped on her way to her own death to decorate the tomb?”

  When he’d patrolled the streets of Dallas, Jay had been first responder to a lot of strange stuff. Suicides, in particular, had a tendency to ritualize their own deaths, maybe in some last-ditch quest for meaning. Considering what he’d read of her journal, “Angelina Morningstar” would have been the type.

  Again he scanned the slope below them. This time he spotted movement, but it was only the agitated darting of the swallows and a trio of scaled quails pecking among the scraggly brown weeds. He could have cited the pretty little birds as examples of the land’s “nondis
gusting” creatures, but he didn’t have the heart.

  Instead he passed the flashlight back toward Dana. When she grasped its end, he did not immediately let go.

  “First you have to promise me,” he told her, “you won’t move from where you’re sitting. No matter what you see, you stay put. There could be holes and passages and side chambers, and I’m not running after you again. You hear that?”

  There could also be a crime scene, one that needed to be preserved.

  “I hear you,” she said grudgingly. “And I promise I’ll stay right here.”

  With a nod, he let go of the light, and then looked back out on the desert. Though he was nearly convinced they were alone here, he’d seen men and women die when they took things for granted.

  A split second later Dana’s gasp turned him around. A circle of light skimmed along the guano-stained floor and rocky walls that glittered white with sparkling crystals.

  “This has to be it,” she said, her voice bouncing off of salted walls.

  The space was smaller than he’d imagined, smaller than his RV. But as her beam shifted, he saw a darker spot off to the right, a second opening that led downward, deeper inside the hill.

  It might have been his imagination, but the smell of death seemed to come from that direction. From the blackness of that hole.

  “I’ll bet an animal wandered in here.” Thin and eerily childlike, Dana’s voice floated in the darkness. “It got confused and lost, and when Angie found its body later she built the tribute outside. Because this spot was sacred to her.”

  Turning from the cave’s mouth, Jay holstered his pistol and then crept over rock to reach her. He laid a hand on her bare leg where she crouched.

  “Let me take the flashlight,” he said softly. “Let me have a look.”

  Nodding, she relinquished it and waited, her tension a more palpable presence than the unseen sea of living fur above. After taking one last glance back toward daylight, he stood up awkwardly and made his way toward the cavern’s throat.

  The smell strengthened with his progress, a stench he had smelled far too often overseas. Though he hoped—prayed—he was wrong and that he would discover a mule deer or a bobcat, the closer he came to the opening the more convinced he was he’d find a human, a body already partly mummified within the chamber’s arid confines.

  He reached the nearly round portal and, using one hand, braced himself within its rock frame. Then, leaning in, he shone the flashlight downward—down into a grotto whose sole inhabitant lay curled and naked as a fetus on its floor.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Navajo call her Usheenasun, salt spirit.

  The Zuni know her as the Salt Mother.

  But to the Cochiti and so many others, she is simply Salt Woman.

  To the people Salt Woman’s flesh is sacred.

  They use it to preserve food, to give simple stews their savor.

  Often it’s important in religious ceremonies.

  When gathering her flesh, they are instructed to move with quiet dignity, keeping her realm pure.

  But often, in the stories, she is disrespected by those who should revere her.

  Refused food and lodging, polluted, her gifts squandered without thought.

  So she leaves the people she loves.

  She turns her back and walks deep into the desert.

  Can I do any less?

  —Final entry (undated)

  Angie’s sobriety journal

  Dana stared straight through the grimy windshield without registering the rocky slope before her.

  Once they’d heard the slam of a truck door, Jay had ventured outside the cavern and then called down the hill to Wallace. Afterward he’d taken Dana down to sit inside the Suburban with its engine idling while she waited out Those Things That Must Be Done.

  He hadn’t let her see the body, though he had promised that he would once it was recovered. First, though, would come the photographs, the measurements, the collection of whatever trace evidence remained.

  Jay had used his radio to contact someone, perhaps Estelle Hooks, at the courthouse. He had asked the woman’s husband, the county judge, to collect and bring out the supplies they would need. Dana couldn’t recall what he had wanted, other than a stretcher and a body bag, and perhaps a camera.

  She was horrified to realize that other men would see the corpse the way Jay had described it: curve-spined, withered, and entirely unclothed. The thought of Angie so heartbreakingly helpless and exposed in death seized Dana with a desire to protect her sister’s dignity—to race back and demand that they turn away their prying gazes.

  Yet she sat shivering in the AC vents’ arctic blast. When Abe Hooks pulled up and climbed out of his old pickup, he glanced curiously in her direction, but she couldn’t meet his eyes. Couldn’t do a damned thing except stare numbly while her brain spun desperately through possible explanations for the presence of a blond female corpse inside the remote cavern Angie’s journal had described.

  Even so, when her satellite phone rang perhaps fifteen minutes later, Dana answered without thinking.

  “Hello.” The word was listless and mechanical, more a reflex than a greeting.

  “I just called to say I’m so, so sorry.”

  Dana jerked to awareness at her mother’s words. How could she know? Who on earth would have told her before the body was officially identified?

  “Sorry?” she asked cautiously.

  “Yes, about that stupid Regina—who is no longer any friend of mine. Jerome says I should have my head examined for crying on her shoulder, that the only reason she listened in the first place was to come up with some angle to turn to her own advantage. Now it seems he was right, and you know how I hate that.”

  “Regina called and pestered me in El Paso. I told her not to come,” Dana said flatly, while inside she screamed and wept and wondered, What the hell does any of it matter now?

  “That’s just it. Regina said that when it comes to the news, she doesn’t need anyone’s permission.”

  “Regina Lawler’s not the news. She’s just some flipped-out has-been.” Dana knew it was a harsh assessment, but she had no energy for tact now, not while she was bleeding inside and helpless to tell her mother what was happening at that very moment beneath the desert’s blank face.

  As she thought about the withered corpse there, hot tears hazed her vision.

  “She’s on her way,” said Isabel. “That’s what I called to warn you about. She’s found a freelance cameraman, and they’re coming out to get the story. That’s all this is—a story to her. My daughter, my granddaughter—everything you’re doing. She’s already shown up at the hospital and gotten footage of Nikki’s birthday party from the doorway. She turned seven the other day, and there was cake and ice cream with her parents and the nurses. They didn’t want the extra visitors, but Nikki got so excited when she saw the microphone and TV camera, they didn’t have it in their hearts to tell her no.”

  Say something. Just say it, Dana thought. Don’t let her sit there thinking that anything we do or don’t do will make one damned bit of difference. Not for Angie, not for Nikki, not for any of us in the end.

  Because she couldn’t force out those words, Dana settled for a stammered, “For-forget about Regina. I-I’ll handle her when she gets here.”

  “Is something wrong?” Isabel asked. “You sound terrible. Is your nose clogged? I knew you’d catch something in that horrible place. Did you remember your antihistamines?”

  “I’m fine. It’s just…let me call you later.”

  “What’s going on? Dana? Is there anything you need?”

  A mother who could stand to hug me. A mother who was willing to accept Angie as she was. But her anger was only a thin shroud draped over a monolith of sadness.

  “Just to say I love you,” Dana managed. And I’ll be home sooner than I thought.

  Once the call was over she shut off the Suburban and stuck Jay’s keys in her pockets. Rubbing her arms for w
armth, she stepped out into the already oppressive heat and started up the hill.

  How far have you gone this time, Angie?

  The answer came back to Dana on a moan of wind across the cavern’s mouth: Far enough to finally break your heart…

  “She’s lighter than I would’ve thought,” said Wallace Hooks as he and the sheriff carefully maneuvered the stiffened figure inside the body bag.

  The deputy was mouth-breathing and trying not to look down. Jay suspected he’d appear green when they stepped out into the daylight. No surprise there. The odor, while not as harrowing as wet-rotted putrefaction, was plenty strong in the enclosed space. And besides that, Wallace had already told him this was only his second corpse, after the charred remains of the sheriff with whom he had worked for more than three years.

  Wallace’s father, who held the flashlight where he stood at the portal, looked unhappy but resigned to the morbid tasks at hand. He had clearly left his grill in a hurry, for his thick white hair stood up in clumps, probably from where he’d hurriedly pulled off his apron. “That’s what happens when they dry out. Henry Schlitz and I went out with the last sheriff, when a couple of illegals got found by Weevil Jenkins’s stock tank. Guess they didn’t make it to the water soon enough, ’cause they were light like this, too. Or I should say what was left was. After the coyotes.”

  “Gently,” Jay instructed Wallace. “We’ll need the body intact for the medical examination, and she’s…fragile.”

  “This is going to cost the county a damned fortune,” Abe complained.

  Both Jay and Wallace looked up sharply, though Jay knew Abe was right, since Rimrock County was far too small to have its own MEand so contracted with the county of El Paso.

  “Listen, I’m sorry the girl’s gone and killed herself,” the older Hooks grumbled. “I’m just being practical, that’s all.”