Tommy put down the bat as the woman at third base began to come in. He jogged out into the field with only a slight hitch in his leg.
"What does bilagaana mean?" Cree called back to Lynn Pierce.
"White person."
"So what was that Tommy said to them?"
Lynn was looking after him with a proprietary pride. "He said something like, 'Yeah, I'm too young and you're too ugly.' And then a pun that doesn't translate perfectly-it's better in Navajo. Ben was making an indirect pass at you and Tommy was telling him to mind his manners." She turned to Cree with a prim, apologetic smile. "Make any progress, Doctor? I was… kind of listening."
"I don't know," Cree told her. "I really don't know."
15
"Cree!" She was walking back toward the infirmary, determined to lie down, when the voice startled her out of her thoughts. She looked back to see Julieta, striding toward her from the administration building. She walked quickly and wore a frown full of the angry determination of a prize-fighter coming out of his corner. "How's your head?"
Cree put her hand to her bandaged forehead. "I'm fine. Going to be headachy for a few days, that's all. What's going on?"
"I know who the ghost is."
Cree's jaw dropped: This was quite a shift for a woman who'd expressed so many reservations not so long ago. "Urn, that's terrific. Who?"
Julieta hesitated, making some decision as she looked at Cree through narrowed eyes. "Are you up for riding? I'll show you."
Cree assessed her weariness, measured the gas in the tank and found maybe just enough. "Sure," she said.
They saddled the two mares. Cree found she remembered most of the ritual of blanket and saddle, bridle and bit and stirrups; Julieta checked her work and needed only to draw Breeze's belly cinch tighter. The black gelding looked on curiously as they led the mares out the rear corral gate and mounted.
Astride her horse, Julieta looked ravishing. Her black hair floated around her head and over her shoulders as she sat straight and proud. Once they were on their way, she pulled back the thick mane and put on a cowboy hat that held it behind her, then slipped on a pair of sunglasses. In the shades and hat, leather jacket and snug jeans, she looked gorgeous and dangerous, a woman warrior.
Julieta said nothing as she led them straight north at a trot. Cree posted adequately, rediscovering more of her rusty riding skills by the minute. It helped that Breeze was a gentle horse and seemed to want to go today. The rhythm of the trot echoed in Cree's sore head, but the pain was manageable. Especially with her curiosity piqued. She wished Julieta would slow down and explain what this was all about.
And the land was beautiful. Here was the big gesture she'd hungered for since coming to this place, a way of taking in the landscape. Sky. Earth. Rocks. Distance. The wordless company of the willing animal between her knees. Cree savored the air, clean but faintly spiced with a perfume that the grocery truck driver had told her was pinon-wood smoke. The only sound was the drum of hoofs, the creak of leather, the whuff of Breeze's breathing.
They put a couple of miles behind them before Julieta slowed and allowed Cree to fall into a walk beside her.
The iridescent green sunglasses turned toward her. Beneath the glistening ovals, Julieta's mouth was a thin, straight line. "It's Garrett McCarty. My ex. He was always a complete and total bastard and I guess he still is." The sunglasses turned back to the north without waiting for a response.
Cree felt a sudden trepidation. Old animosities could cloud a witness's perspective on a haunting, and she had learned to be wary of making assumptions based on them. Especially if it involved an ex-husband or — wife or — lover. Yes, there was always a lot left unresolved between people who had once been deeply intimate and then had broken away, and of course a revenant often did prove to be an ex, driven to settle the accounts of love or hate. But just as often the kind of dead-certain identification she saw in Julieta now was merely the product of lingering hostility and paranoia in the living person.
"Why do you say that?"
"Because he died not far from here. I told you about that, didn't I?"
"Lip at the mine area?"
Julieta nodded.
"That's, what, fifteen miles or so from the school?"
"As the crow flies, more like ten. Why? Is that too far for a ghost to come?
A memory flashed in front of Cree's eyes, real enough to touch: Mike, standing there in downtown Philadelphia at the moment of his death in Los Angeles. "No," she said sadly. "Not necessarily. But why-"
"Why would Garrett come back? To hurt me."
" But-"
"He hated me because I divorced him and because I came out better in the settlement terms and because I won a couple of fights with McCarty Energy over the years. Maybe because I had the gall to have a couple of relationships over the years, didn't live like a nun after divorcing the great man. I think he also suspected I had a lover while we were still married, or at least before the divorce was final."
"Did you?"
Julieta's jaw dropped at Cree's presumption and she appeared to catch herself on the edge of an indignant denial. She took a deep breath and then her shoulders slumped. "Yes," she said quietly. But then the resistance flared again: "Yes! I had a lover, okay? I was twenty-four and I was married to an old man who I never saw and who was screwing every secretary in his employ and every female social climber in New Mexico! I had a lover. But Garrett never knew about it. I made damn sure he never knew, because I wasn't going to let him use it against me in the divorce. It was perfectly all right for him to chase tail, but for me to actually love somebody for the first and only time in my life, that would have been unforgivable!"
It was so clearly a defensive outpouring, and for Cree a little piece of the puzzle fell into place: Julieta's hard side, this angry warrior woman and the efficient administrator who explained her every action so logically and dispassionately- it was just the armor over the vulnerable person who lived inside. The woman who had invited her to go for a ride within moments of Cree's arriving yesterday and then concealed the gesture by explaining that the horses needed exercise. The woman who'd so badly needed Joseph Tsosie's brief touch last night.
Julieta clucked to Madie, slapped the reins, and began to canter ahead as if fleeing her own words. Cree touched her heels to Breeze's flanks, urging her to follow, and soon they were pummeling full tilt over the rolling land. The canter was less jolting than the trot, the air seemed to flow through Cree's head and wash away the pain. The bare ground and low sagebrush rolled away beneath the lunging horse, unchanging.
When Julieta finally slowed again, Cree caught up and they walked again as the horses blew. So many questions, Cree was thinking. Where to even start?
"But, Julieta-why would he come into one of your students as a way to punish you?"
"Because it's a great way to bring the school down. He knew it was the one thing I loved, the one thing I believed in doing on my own. Trust me, Garrett was very smart, very insightful when it came to figuring out somebody's weaknesses. He built an empire on knowing the best way to hurt somebody."
Cree wanted to point out that ghosts were seldom so intentional and devious. Usually their motives, if you could call so elemental an urge a motive, were more like compulsions, just reflexes of their psyches. But there were more pressing issues to get out of the way.
"Why would it settle in Tommy Keeday? Instead any of the other kids?"