I hung the mic back on the dash and shut the door. “No. It must be the rock walls.”
He leaned against one of the support posts and looked down the ancient ruts of Bailey’s main street and then up to the cliffs hanging over us like red waves. The sun was high, there was no discernible shade, and somehow it seemed even hotter out here. “There are a number of footprints, along with yours, up near the cemetery.”
I had canvassed the town while Henry had headed up the rocky outcropping near the union hall. I nodded and hung my Ray-Bans in my uniform pocket to rest the bridge of my nose. “That’s where I found Tuyen, at the cemetery.”
“There are rattlesnakes up there.”
“I figured.” There was a cross rail between two of the supports, so I walked over and sat on the outside, continuing to look up and down the dusty, dry, and empty street. “James said he saw her out by the road.”
“James says his dead mother makes coffee for him in the morning.”
I looked up at him through a squinted eye and immediately regretted taking off my sunglasses. “There’s that. . . . But just in case this mystery girl does exist, he says he saw her out by the road. Now, where else could she be?”
“Making coffee?” I gave him a longer look. “All right; assuming she does exist, we are assuming that she does not wish to be found?”
I looked to the east and then north at the union hall and the scrub pines and scattered cottonwoods along Beaver Creek. It wasn’t hard to imagine Bailey as the bustling little town it must have been before the disaster. You could almost see the horses tied off to the railings, the draft wagons, and the narrow-gauge locomotive chugging and steaming to a stop at the mine tipple at the end of the street. “Yep. Assuming she exists, she ran off after her friend was killed and dumped alongside the highway.”
He came over and sat on the other end of the railing. “She was not killed in town.”
“No, too much of a chance of being spotted.”
“And away from the highway.”
“Yep.”
He nodded, the wooden-nickel-profile looking off toward the cemetery. “Do you think she witnessed the murder?”
“It would go a long way toward explaining why she’s hiding. ” I watched as a red-tailed hawk was chased by two smaller birds, and wondered how Vic, Cady, and Michael were doing.
The Bear turned back and stared at the side of my face as a slight breeze came up, hotter than the still air. “You know, there is something funny about this town. . . .”
“You mean besides the fact that there are no people?” I could be a smart-ass, too.
“Yes, besides that.”
"What?”
“There is no church.” He glanced up and down the street, perhaps expecting one to appear. “If there was one, it would be up near the cemetery, but there is no foundation, nothing.”
I stood, stepped down, and walked into the street, turning to look up at the old mine. “Did you check the union hall while you were up there?”
“No.”
“Why not? ”
Henry flipped his legs up on the railing and leaned back against the post. He pulled his ponytail loose from above the adjustable strap of his hat, which he put over his face. “I told you, there are rattlesnakes up there.”
I stared at the embroidered fish on his hat. “Since when are you afraid of rattlesnakes? ”
“I am not, but they told me that no one had been up there since Tuyen and you.”
“Oh, right.” I put my sunglasses back on. I noticed he wasn’t moving. “What are you doing, taking a nap? ”
“Yes. I assumed it was the only sensible thing to do while you checked the union hall.”
I looked up the street and at the high, razorlike grass leading to the lone building on the hill, past the dark pyramid of the coal tipple—perfect ambush territory for rattlers. “What makes you think I’m gonna go do that? ”
The hat remained over his face, muffling his voice. “I knew you would not believe me about the snakes.”
Rattlesnakes shed in August. Their eyes become cloudy, and they grow uncomfortable, pissed off, and strike out at anything; contrary to popular belief, they do not always rattle before striking.
Part of the trail leading past the cemetery was still visible to the left of the cliffs, with a few rock steps that turned the corners where hard men descended into the ground to bring up soft fuel. I paused at one corner to see if the Cheyenne Nation had moved, and it hadn’t.
Most of the American public had been hoodwinked by the director John Ford in the forties and fifties into believing that the entire West looked exclusively like Monument Valley, where he filmed most of his movies. It was a vista that had become emblematic, and I had to admit that my view of the Hole in the Wall, with its bold crimson palisades and the hazy flux of the horizontal landscape, looked a lot like Monument Valley.
The only tracks were indeed the ones that Tuyen and I had made, but they ended at the cemetery—above that, there were no tracks, no broken grass, nothing to indicate that anyone had been up here in ages. I caught my breath. It was still early, and the heat of the day had yet to push us into triple digits. I didn’t want to be up here in a couple of hours, when the sun reached its zenith and Bailey would feel something like the fifth ring of hell.
The union hall was up and to my right, standing alone like a weathered lighthouse amid the storm toss of the rocks.
I leaned on the iron railing surrounding the cemetery, then immediately regretted it, the dark metal feeling as if it had been just pulled from the smelter. I thought of Saizarbitoria at the jungle gym back in Powder Junction and smiled. Maybe the Basquo was learning fast, or was it that I was learning more slowly?
I found myself reading the tombstones, the names, and the single date on seventeen of them, and thought about the survivors walking the path next to the graveyard. I wondered if they saw those dead miners who had been trapped in the dark tunnels beneath my boots.
I thought about the two bottles of water in my shooting bag, which I had left back at the truck, and turned the corner. I’d taken only a dozen steps into the high weeds when I heard the rattling sound, the one that makes westerners freeze and wonder why they didn’t wear their high-top leggings.
As Lonnie Little Bird would say, he was a big one, um hmm, yes, it is so; twelve buttons at least and only about ten feet away. Again contrary to popular belief, you can’t judge a rattler by his buttons since they shed and accumulate a new pod three or four times a year. It didn’t matter, he was big, and neither of us was in a mood for counting.
He was curling in an "S” and backing away from me, the majority of his body as big as my forearm. He had backed himself up against one of the rises on the stone steps, and there was nowhere else to go. He coiled himself tighter and flicked a dark tongue at me as the vibrating tail shook beside his rectangular-shaped head.
“Howdy.” I figured now was as good a time as any to test Henry’s theory. He didn’t respond and stayed compacted, the dark eyes shining like black beads. “You haven’t seen anybody come by here lately, have you?” His head dropped a little as I began raising my hand very, very slowly. “That’s what I thought.”
I could go for my sidearm, but the thought of what the .45 round might do after hitting the stone step gave me more than a little pause, so I continued raising my hand till I got it to the brim of my hat.
The buzzworm’s head dropped a little again, and I froze.
It was my fault really, disturbing him as he’d peacefully sunned himself after indulging in a brunch of field mouse or sagebrush lizard. I could have introduced myself as the sheriff and told him about the important case I was working on, but he didn’t seem interested and I was more than beginning to doubt Henry’s theories on interspecies communication.