"Radiology's being remodeled, remember, Bev? X rays'll take forever. Why don't you do an MRI? Scan total body, you have it all."
"Order it," Tsosie said.
Nancy Hood turned to leave. "Oh, and surprise, surprise. Jimmy is here, from the police."
Dan Baker was restless. Just as he predicted, they'd had to spend hours sitting around the waiting room of McKinley Hospital. After they got lunch - burritos in red chile sauce - they had come back to see a policeman in the parking lot, looking over their car, running his hand along the side door panel. Just seeing him gave Baker a chill. He thought of going over to the cop but decided not to. Instead, they returned to the waiting room. He called his daughter and said they'd be late; in fact, they might not even get to Phoenix until tomorrow.
And they waited. Finally, around four o'clock, when Baker went to the desk to inquire about the old man, the woman said, "Are you a relative?"
"No, but-"
"Then please wait over there. Doctor will be with you shortly."
He went back and sat down, sighing. He got up again, walked over to the window, and looked at his car. The cop had gone, but now there was a fluttering tag under the windshield wiper. Baker drummed his fingers on the windowsill. These little towns, you get in trouble, anything could happen. And the longer he waited, the more his mind spun scenarios. The old guy was in a coma; they couldn't leave town until he woke up. The old guy died; they were charged with manslaughter. They weren't charged, but they had to appear at the inquest, in four days.
When somebody finally came to talk to them, it wasn't the petite doctor, it was the cop. He was a young policeman in his twenties, in a neatly pressed uniform. He had long hair, and his nametag said JAMES WAUNEKA. Baker wondered what kind of a name that was. Hopi or Navajo, probably.
"Mr. and Mrs. Baker?" Wauneka was very polite, introduced himself. "I've just been with the doctor. She's finished her examination, and the MRI results are back. There's absolutely no evidence he was struck by a car. And I looked at your car myself. No sign of any impact. I think you may have hit a pothole and just thought you hit him. Road's pretty bad out there."
Baker glared at his wife, who refused to meet his eye. Liz said, "Is he going to be all right?"
"Looks like it, yes."
"Then we can go?" Baker said.
"Honey," Liz said, "don't you want to give him that thing you found?"
"Oh, yes." Baker brought out the little ceramic square. "I found this, near where he was."
The cop turned the ceramic over in his hands. "ITC," he said, reading the stamp on the side. "Where exactly did you find this?"
"About thirty yards from the road. I thought he might have been in a car that went off the road, so I checked. But there was no car."
"Anything else?"
"No. That's all."
"Well, thanks," Wauneka said, slipping the ceramic in his pocket. And then he paused. "Oh, I almost forgot." He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it carefully. "We found this in his clothing. I wondered if you had ever seen it."
Baker glanced at the paper: a bunch of dots arranged in grids. "No," he said. "I've never seen it before."
"You didn't give it to him?"
"No."
"Any idea what it might be?"
"No," Baker said. "No idea at all."
"Well, I think I do," his wife said.
"You do?" the cop said.
"Yes," she said. "Do you mind if I, uh" And she took the paper from the policeman.
Baker sighed. Now Liz was being the architect, squinting at the paper judiciously, turning it this way and that, looking at the dots upside down and sideways. Baker knew why. She was trying to distract attention from the fact that she had been wrong, that his car had hit a pothole, after all, and that they had wasted a whole day here. She was trying to justify a waste of time, to somehow give it importance.
"Yes," she said finally, "I know what it is. It's a church."
Baker looked at the dots on the paper. He said, "That's a church?"
"Well, the floor plan for one," she said. "See? Here's the long axis of the cross, the nave.. .. See? It's definitely a church, Dan. And the rest of this image, the squares within squares, all rectilinear, it looks like you know, this might be a monastery."
The cop said, "A monastery?"
"I think so," she said. "And what about the label at the bottom: `mon.ste.mere.' Isn't `mon' an abbreviation for monastery? I bet it is. I'm telling you, I think this is a monastery." She handed the picture back to the cop.
Pointedly, Baker looked at his watch. "We really should be going."
"Of course," Wauneka said, taking the hint. He shook hands with them. "Thanks for all your help. Sorry for the delay. Have a pleasant trip."
Baker put his arm firmly around his wife's waist and led her out into the afternoon sunlight. It was cooler now; hot-air balloons were rising to the east. Gallup was a center for hot-air ballooning. He went to the car. The fluttering tag on the windshield was for a sale of turquoise jewelry at a local store. He pulled it from behind the wiper, crumpled it, and got behind the wheel. His wife was sitting with her arms crossed over her chest, staring forward. He started the engine.
She said, "Okay. I'm sorry." Her tone was grumpy, but Baker knew it was all he would get.
He leaned over and kissed her cheek. "No," he said. "You did the right thing. We saved the old guy's life."
His wife smiled.
He drove out of the parking lot, and headed for the highway.
In the hospital, the old man slept, his face partly covered by an oxygen mask. He was calm now; she'd given him a light sedative, and he was relaxed, his breathing easy. Beverly Tsosie stood at the foot of the bed, reviewing the case with Joe Nieto, a Mescalero Apache who was a skilled internist, and a very good diagnostician. "White male, ballpark seventy years old. Comes in confused, obtunded, disoriented times three. Mild congestive heart failure, slightly elevated liver enzymes, otherwise nothing."
"And they didn't hit him with the car?"
"Apparently not. But it's funny. They say they found him wandering around north of Corazn Canyon. There's nothing there for ten miles in any direction."
"So?"
"This guy's got no signs of exposure, Joe. No dehydration dehydration, no ketosis. He isn't even sunburned."
"You think somebody dumped him? Got tired of grandpa grabbing the remote?"
"Yeah. That's my guess."
"And what about his fingers?"
"I don't know," she said. "He has some kind of circulatory problem. His fingertips are cold, turning purple, they could even go gangrenous. Whatever it is, it's gotten worse since he's been in the hospital."
"He diabetic?"
"No."
"Raynaud's?"
"No."
Nieto went over to the bedside, looked at the fingers. "Only the tips are involved. All the damage is distal."
"Right," she said. "If he wasn't found in the desert, I'd call that frostbite."
"You check him for heavy metals, Bev? Because this could be toxic exposure to heavy metals. Cadmium, or arsenic. That would explain the fingers, and also his dementia."
"I drew the samples. But heavy metals go to UNH in Albuquerque. I won't have the report back for seventy-two hours."
"You have any ID, medical history, anything?"
"Nothing. We put a missing persons out on him, and we transmitted his fingerprints to Washington for a database check, but that could take a week."
Nieto nodded. "And when he was agitated, babbling? What'd he say?"
"It was all rhymes, the same things over. Something about Gordon and Stanley. And then he would say, " `Quondam phone makes me roam.' "
"Quondam? Isn't that Latin?"
She shrugged. "It's a long time since I was in church."
"I think quondam is a word in Latin," Nieto said.
And then they heard a voice say, "Excuse me?" It was the bespectacled kid in the bed across the hall, sitting with his mother.