She didn't add and I should know, but she might just as well have. Both the authoritative tone of her voice and the fact that she mentioned it could be done at all confirmed his hunch that she had somehow messed with the phone system when he had tried to call her to chew her out.
And a little cold chill ran up his spine for a, moment or two. A Medicine Woman powerful enough to mess with the phone system-what did that take, anyway? Was there anything she couldn't do? Or-
He caught himself up sharply. Dammit! She did it to me again!
"So what do you think is happening?" he asked.
"My best guess is that someone might just be sending ringers over to Calligan to keep him from filling those slots." She gave him a sharp look. "That 'someone' wouldn't be you, would it?"
He brought his head up indignantly. "Me? Why the hell would I do something like that?"
"To keep Calligan from filling those slots," she said, logically. "Those are jobs theoretically being taken away from Indians. It would be a good way to preserve them until our guys came off the sick list."
"Oh." Damn, he wished he had thought of that one! "No, it isn't me."
"Then maybe I ought to find out if there really is a plot, because I don't think the Little People are behind this one."
"Neither do I," he told her-and actually, that did agree with the feeling he'd gotten when Billy told him this morning. He was beginning to get a feel for which incidents were caused by the mi-ah-luschka and which by purely human hands.
Not that the "feeling" made him any more comfortable. He would really rather not have anything to do with Medicine at all, except admire the showmanship from afar...
Are you a shaman, or are you a showman? one of his friends used to ask the people he suspected of fakery, or of catering to the supermarket psychic crowd. Up until last night he would have said that anyone who claimed to be the former was really the latter.
Until now. . . .
"How sure are you about this 'false trail' stuff?" he asked, unwilling to make the concession, but also unwilling to let her get away with putting on a show rather than giving him real facts.
She snorted, delicately. "Sure enough to bet my life on not following it," she said. "But if you want more-"
Before he had a chance to protest that no, he really didn't want any more, thank you, she had reached into a drawer in her desk, and had taken out a little bag of something. As she dusted it over her desk-blotter and the cassette that lay there, chanting under her breath, he recognized it as corn pollen.
The pollen just lay there for a moment, a frosting of yellow specks over the dark brown blotter-but then, as the hair on the back of his neck began to crawl, he saw very clearly that it was moving. It crept across the blotter as if each bit of pollen was a tiny insect, but an insect moving in a purposeful way.
It formed into symbols even he could read. And last time he had looked, there was no scientific power on earth that would make corn pollen crawl into readable patterns.
A ragged circle around the tape cassette, with an uneven slash across it. A rough arrow pointing away, to the west.
Nothing vague or requiring interpretation. If she was calling on Medicine Spirits for advice, she had made certain it was advice he could read as well as she. Once again, his skepticism had been shattered. He looked up from his frozen contemplation of the pollen on the blotter, to see her watching him sardonically.
"I hope that's enough for you," she said, without inflection. "I asked for something you could understand and see for yourself. Anything more than this, you'd better ask from Grandfather."
He swallowed, with a little difficulty.
"I-ah-think that will do," he replied. Suddenly the idea of legwork had a lot more appeal.
Over the next several days, he had a few more occasions to have his skepticism shattered. Mostly, though, she didn't do it on purpose-but there were plenty of times he saw things-half-seen people and animals-around the house, appearing and disappearing without warning. Once, he heard her talking and heard something else answering, but when he opened the door to her office, there was no one else there. It was unnerving, to say the least, and he kept feeling as if he were off-balance and that everything he had always thought was true had suddenly come into question.
Finally it all became unnerving enough that he couldn't take it anymore. Something was going to have to break, one way or another. Either he was going to have to leave Tulsa, give up on this problem, and go back to his friends in North Dakota, or-
Or else he was going to have to take a good look at himself and his world and rethink everything he had accepted as true.
He didn't make a conscious decision; the morning was clear and cool, the sky cloudless-and instead of driving to Jennie's office, he found himself taking the opposite direction. Before long, he found himself on a dirt road, halfway between Catoosa and Claremore, out in the middle of nowhere.
Without thinking about it, he slowed as he came to an area without planted fields or fences. It seemed the right place to stop, and he pulled over onto the narrow shoulder, then left the car where he parked it. A narrow drainage ditch lined with young cottonwood trees separated the open field from the road; he jumped across it, hiked into a quiet spot, and sat down on a rock in the sun, to think. There was a slight breeze, and birds called off in the distance, but otherwise he might have been completely alone, ringed in with tall, nodding grasses that towered above his head as he sat there, cutting off his sight of anything but their tips and the cloudless blue sky. This might be the tallgrass prairie of the days of the buffalo herds.
No distractions. It was a good place to do some thinking.
Hard thinking, in fact.
He lost all track of time, as he stared at the sky and the grass tips, and thought over everything that had brought him here. Everything, right back to the very day he had left this area in the first place. And he came to some hard conclusions.
He didn't usually act like such an idiot. Oh, maybe he had back when he was still in school, but he'd had some sense knocked into him since then. There just seemed to be something about this entire situation that had been bringing out the worst in him. Maybe it was being back home. Maybe it was being around Jennie, bringing up old baggage and old habits of behavior. Maybe it was just Jennie herself that both irritated him and made him want to strut and bugle like a young buck in rut. A bad combination, for sure . . . especially given Jennie's opinions of young bucks strutting and acting like fools.
There was very little doubt in his mind that Jennie was getting a certain amount of enjoyment out of putting him down-but on the other hand, every time she did so, it was because he was trying to pretend he knew more than she did about either P.I. work or Medicine. When he had an opinion on law, politics, or the Movement, he honestly had to admit that she listened and acted on his advice. When he told her what Calligan's ex-employees had told him, she listened and paid attention to what he told her. In fact, any time he voiced a fact or an opinion in an arena where he did have some real knowledge, she listened and used it.
He didn't deserve the snide way she enjoyed putting him in his place-
-well, maybe he did, a little-
-but she only did it when he was making a fool of himself, when it came right down to it.
She'd changed, like he'd thought, but not in the way that he'd thought; she'd grown up a lot since college, and she had sure learned a lot that you couldn't find in classrooms. And man, it was sure hard to tell that he'd done the same, with the way he'd been acting around her.
He sat in the sun for a long time, just letting it soak into him, trying to rearrange his thoughts when it came to Jennie, to put everything he thought he knew about her on the back burner and try to look at the past few days and weeks as if she were a total stranger.