“George Shaw went out to the Maryboy place the other day and got permission for a climb,” Leaphorn said. “Next day or two. Any idea what he thinks might be found up there?”
“George is going to climb it?” Demott’s tone was incredulous and his expression shocked. “Where’d you hear that?”
“All I know is that he told me he paid Maryboy a hundred dollars for trespass rights. Maybe he’ll get somebody to climb it but I think he meant he was going up himself.”
“What the hell for?”
Leaphorn didn’t answer that. He gave Demott some time to answer it himself.
“Oh,” Demott said. “The son of a bitch.”
“I would imagine he thinks maybe somebody gave Hal a little push.”
“Yeah,” Demott said. “Either he thinks I did it, and I left something behind that would prove it—and he could use that to void Elisa’s inheritance—or he did it himself and he remembers that he left something up there that would nail him and he wants to go get it.”
Leaphorn shrugged. “As good a guess as any.”
Demott put down his tools.
“When Elisa came back from having the bones cremated she told me none of them had been broken,” he said. “Some of them were disconnected, you know. That could have been done in a fall, or maybe the turkey vultures pulled ’em apart. They’re strong enough to do that, I guess. Anyway, I hope it was a fall, and he didn’t just get hung up there to starve to death for water. He could have been a damn good man.”
“I never knew him,” Leaphorn said. “To me he was just somebody to hunt for and never find.”
“Well, he was a good, kind boy,” Demott said. “Big-hearted.” He picked up his tools again. “You know, when the cop came up to show Elisa Hal’s stuff I saw that folder he had with him. He had it labeled ‘Fallen Man.’ I thought, Yes, that described Hal. The old man gave him paradise and it wasn’t enough for him.”
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TheFallenMan
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/Local%20Settings/Te...
LUCY SAM HAD SEEMED GLAD TO SEE CHEE.
“I think they’re going to be climbing up Tse´ Bitáíágain,” she told Chee. “I saw a big car drive down the road toward Hosteen Maryboy’s place two days ago, and it stayed a long time, and when I saw it coming back from there, I drove over there to see how he was doing and he told me about it.”
“I heard about it, too,” Chee said, thinking how hard it was to keep secrets in empty country.
“The man paid Hosteen Maryboy a hundred dollars,” she said, and shook her head. “I don’t think we should let them climb up there, even for a thousand dollars.”
“I don’t think so either,” Chee said. “They have plenty of their own mountains to play around on.”
“The one who lived here before,” Lucy Sam said, using the Navajo circumlocution to avoid saying the name of the dead, “he’d say that it would be like us Navajos climbing all over that big church in Rome, or getting up on top of the Wailing Wall, or crawling all over that place where the Islamic prophet went up to heaven.”
“It’s disrespectful,” Chee agreed, and with that subject out of the way he shifted the conversation to cattle theft.
Had Hosteen Maryboy mentioned to her that he’d lost some more cattle? He had, and he was angry about it. There would have been enough money in those cows to make the last payments on his pickup truck.
Had Ms. Sam seen anything suspicious since the last time he’d been here? She didn’t think so.
Could he look at the ledger where she kept her notes? Certainly. She would get it for him.
Lucy Sam extracted the book from its desk drawer and handed it to Chee.
“I kept it just the same way,” she said, tapping the page. “I put down the date and the time right here at the edge and then I write down what I see.”
As he leafed backward through the ledger, Chee saw that Lucy Sam wrote down a lot more than that. She made a sort of daily journal out of it, much as her father had done. And she had not just copied her father’s system, she also followed his Franciscan padres’ writing style—small, neat lettering in small, neat lines—which had become sort of a trademark of generations of those Navajos educated at St. Michael’s School west of Window Rock. It was easily legible and wasted neither paper nor ink. But readable or not, Chee found nothing in it very helpful.
He skipped back to the date when he and Officer Manuelito had visited the site of the loose fence posts. They had rated an entry, right after Lucy Sam’s notation that, “Yazzie came. Said he would bring some firewood” and just before, “Turkey buzzards are back.” Between those Lucy had written, “Police car stuck on road under Tse´ Bitáí´. Truck driver helps.” Then, down the page a bit: “Tow truck gets police car.” The last entry before the tow truck note reported, “That camper truck stopped. Driver looked around.”
That camper truck? Chee felt his face flush with remembered embarrassment. That would have been Finch checking to see how thoroughly they had sprung his Zorro trap. He worked his way forward through the pages, learning more about kestrels, migrating grosbeaks, a local family of coyotes, and other Colorado Plateau fauna than he wanted to know. He also gained some insights into Lucy Sam’s loneliness, but nothing that he could see would be useful to Acting Lieutenant Chee in his role as rustler hunter. If Zorro had come back to collect a load of Maryboy’s cows from the place he’d left the hay, he’d done it when Lucy Sam wasn’t looking.
But she was looking quite a lot. There was a mention of a “very muddy” white pickup towing a horse trailer on the dirt road that skirted Ship Rock, but no mention of it stopping. Chee made a mental note to check on that. About a dozen other vehicles had come in view of Lucy Sam’s spotting scope, none of them potential rustlers. They included a Federal Express delivery truck, which must have been lost, another mention of Finch’s camper truck, and three pickups that she had identified with the names of local-area owners.
So what was useful about that? It told him that if Manuelito’s network of watchers would pay off at all, it would require patience, and probably years, to establish suspicious-looking patterns. And it told him that Mr. Finch looked upon him as a competitor in his hunt for the so-called Zorro. Finch wanted him to write off Maryboy’s loose-fence-posts location, but Finch hadn’t written it off himself. He was keeping his eye on the spot. That produced another thought. Maryboy had been losing cattle before. Had either Lucy Sam or her father noticed anything interesting in the past? Specifically, had they ever previously noticed that white truck pulling its horse trailer? He would page back through the book and check on that when he had time. And he would also look through the back pages for school buses. He’d noticed a Lucy Sam mention of a school bus stuck on that same dirt road, and the road wasn’t on a bus route. She had also mentioned “that camper truck” being parked almost all day at the base of the mountain the year before.
Her note said “Climbing our mountain?”
Chee put down the ledger. Lucy Sam had gone out to feed her chickens and he could see her now in her sheep pen inspecting a young goat that had managed to entangle itself in her fence. He found himself imagining Janet Pete in that role and himself in old man Sam’s wheelchair. It didn’t scan. The white Porsche roared in and rescued her. But that wasn’t fair. He was being racist. He had been thinking like a racist ever since he’d met Janet and fallen in love with her. He had been thinking that because her name was 55 of 102
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TheFallenMan
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/Local%20Settings/Te...
Pete, because her father was Navajo, her blood somehow would have taught her the ways of the Dine? and made her one of them.