“I hope I’m not—” Chee began, but she cut him off.
“No. No,” she said. “I appreciate this. Ramona said you’d found Hal. Or think so. But she didn’t know anything else.”
“Well,” Chee said, and paused. “What we found was merely bones. We thought they might be Mr. Breedlove.” He sat on the edge of the sofa, watching her.
“Bones,” she said. “Just a skeleton? Was that the skeleton they found about Halloween up on Ship Rock?”
“Yes, ma’am. We wanted to ask you to look at the clothing and equipment he was wearing and see if—tell us if it was the right size, and if you thought it was your husband’s stuff.”
“Equipment?” She was standing beside a table, her hand on it. The light slanting through windows on each side of the fireplace illuminated her face. It was a small, narrow face framed by light brown hair, the jaw muscles tight, the expression tense. Middle thirties, Chee guessed. Slender, perfectly built, luminous green eyes, the sort of classic beauty that survived sun, wind, and hard winters and didn’t seem to require the disguise of makeup. But today she looked tired. He thought of a description Finch had applied to a woman they both knew: “Been rode hard and put up wet.”
Mrs. Breedlove was waiting for an answer, her green eyes fixed on his face.
“Mountain climbing equipment,” Chee said. “I understand the skeleton was in a cleft down the face of a cliff. Presumably, the man had fallen.”
Mrs. Breedlove closed her eyes and bent slightly forward with her hips against the table.
Chee rose. “Are you all right?”
“All right,” she said, but she put a hand against the table to support herself.
“Would you like to sit down? A drink of water?”
“Why do you think it’s Hal?” Her eyes were still closed.
“He’s been missing for eleven years. And we’re told he was a mountain climber. Is that correct?”
“He was. He loved the mountains.”
“This man was about five feet nine inches tall,” Chee said. “The coroner estimated he would have weighed about one hundred and fifty pounds. He had perfect teeth. He had rather long fingers and—”
“Hal was about five eight, I’d say. He was slender, muscular. An athlete. I think he weighed about a hundred and sixty. He was worried about gaining weight.” She produced a weak smile. “Around the belt line. Before we went on that trip, I let out his suit pants to give him another inch.”
“He’d had a broken nose,” Chee continued. “Healed. The doctor said it probably happened when he was an adolescent. And a broken wrist. He said that was more recent.”
Mrs. Breedlove sighed. “The nose was from playing fraternity football, or whatever the boys play at Dartmouth. And the wrist when a horse threw him after we were married.”
13 of 102
15/03/2008 19:57
TheFallenMan
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/Local%20Settings/Te...
Chee opened the satchel, extracted the climbing equipment, and stacked it on the coffee table. There wasn’t much: a nylon belt harness, the ragged remains of a nylon jacket, even more fragmentary remains of trousers and shirt, a pair of narrow shoes with soles of soft, smooth rubber, a little rock hammer, three pitons, and a couple of steel gadgets that Chee presumed were used somehow for controlling rope slippage.
When he glanced up, Mrs. Breedlove was staring at them, her face white. She turned away, facing the window but looking at nothing except some memory.
“I thought about Hal when I saw the piece the paper had on the skeleton,” she said. “Eldon and I talked about it at supper that night.
He thought the same thing I did. We decided it couldn’t be Hal.” She attempted a smile. “He was always into derring-do stuff. But he wouldn’t try to climb Ship Rock alone. Nobody would. That would be insane. Two great rock men were killed on it, and they were climbing with teams of experienced experts.”
She paused. Listening. The sound of a car engine came through the window. “That was before the Navajos banned climbing,” she added.
“Are you a climber?”
“When I was younger,” she said. “When Hal used to come out, Eldon started teaching him to climb. Hal and his cousin George.
Sometimes I would go along and they taught me.”
“How about Ship Rock?” Chee asked. “Did you ever climb it?”
She studied him. “The tribe prohibited that a long time ago. Before I was big enough to climb anything.” Chee smiled. “But some people still climbed it. Quite a few, from what I hear. And there’s not actually a tribal ordinance against it.
It’s just that the tribe stopped issuing those ‘back country’ permits. You know, to allow non-Navajos the right to trespass.” Mrs. Breedlove looked thoughtful. Through the window came the sound of a car door slamming.
“To make it perfectly legal, you’d go see one of the local people who had a grazing permit running up to the base and get him to give you permission to be on the land,” Chee added. “But most people even don’t bother to do that.” Mrs. Breedlove considered this. Nodded. “We always got permission. I climbed it once. It was terrifying. With Eldon, Hal, and George. I still have nightmares.”
“About falling?”
She shuddered. “I’m up there looking all around. Looking at Ute Mountain up in Colorado, and seeing the shape of Case del Eco Mesa in Utah, and the Carrizos in Arizona, and Mount Taylor, and I have this dreadful feeling that Ship Rock is getting higher and higher and then I know I can never get down.” She laughed. “Fear of falling, I guess. Or fear of flying away and being lost forever.”
“I guess you’ve heard our name for it,” Chee said. “Tse´ Bitáí´—the Rock with Wings. According to the legend it flew here from the north bringing the first Navajos on its back. Maybe it was flying again in your dream.” A voice from somewhere back in the house shouted: “Hey, Sis! Where are you? What’s that Navajo police car doing parked out there?”
“We’ve got company,” Mrs. Breedlove said, barely raising her voice. “In here.” Chee stood. A man wearing dusty jeans, a faded jean jacket with a torn sleeve, and well-worn boots walked into the room. He held a battered gray felt hat in his right hand.
“Mr. Chee,” said Mrs. Breedlove, “this is my brother Eldon. Eldon Demott.”
“Oh,” Demott said. “Hello.” He shifted his hat to his left hand and offered Chee the right one. His grip was like his sister’s and his expression was a mixture of curiosity, worry, and fatigue.
“They think they’ve found Hal,” Elisa Breedlove said. “You remember talking about that skeleton on Ship Rock. The Navajo police think it must be him.”
Demott was eyeing the little stack of climbing equipment on the table. He sighed, slapped the hat against his leg. “I was wrong then, if it really is Hal,” he said. “That makes him a better climber than I gave him credit for, climbing that sucker by himself and getting that high.” He snorted. “And a hell of a lot crazier, too.”
“Do you recognize any of this?” Chee asked, indicating the equipment.
Demott picked up the nylon belt and examined it. He was a small man. Wiry. A man built of sun-scorched leather, bone, and gristle, with a strong jaw and a receding hairline that made him look older than he probably was.
“It’s pretty faded out but it used to be red,” he said, and tossed it back to the tabletop. He looked at his sister, his face full of concern 14 of 102
15/03/2008 19:57
TheFallenMan
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/Local%20Settings/Te...
and sympathy. “Hal’s was red, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” she said.
“You all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “And how about this jumar? Didn’t you fix one for Hal once?”
“By God,” Demott said, and picked it up. It reminded Chee of an oversized steel pretzel with a sort of ratchet device connected.