I said, “Do you always jump into strange people’s cars and tell them to drive? How do you know we’re not murderous psychopaths?”
Her gaze settled on me, briefly. “I know a murderous psychopath when I see one.”
“A murderous psychopath like Miriam?”
“Yes.”
“Miriam was a skinwalker,” Ben said.
“Yee naaldlooshii. Yes.”
“What else can you tell us?”
“Not here. Someplace safe. We’ll talk someplace safe.”
“We’re in a car driving forty miles an hour,” I said, annoyed. “What could possibly get at us?”
She gave me a look that clearly pitied my ignorance. “You never know what could be listening. Waiting.”
I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t. I said, “If we’re not safe driving, where do you want to go?”
“There’s a place close by. I’ll tell you where to go. Turn right on the highway.”
Her directions steered us farther away from Shiprock, then off the highway. I feared for the car’s suspension. Many miles out, a dirt track led down a slope to a ravine— gullies and dry riverbeds like this cut across the desert. I never would have found this cleft in the hills if I hadn’t been guided here. It was very well hidden.
Ahead of us, toward the end of the ravine, was a hut made of logs sealed with mud. It was octagonal—almost round—ancient-looking, with a low-sloping roof.
We all climbed out of the car, and Louise hurried ahead of us.
She said, “This hogan belonged to my family years ago, in the old days. Everyone’s forgotten about it. But I found it again. It’ll keep us safe.”
“Safe from what?” It seemed like the obvious question.
She gave me a look over her shoulder.
Ben was the one who said, “If you have to ask, you haven’t been paying attention.”
“Just trying to make conversation.”
He took my hand and squeezed it quickly before letting it go and walking on. A brief touch of comfort.
The scene we were walking into was from another world, something out of a tour book, or maybe an anthropology textbook: the desert, the cold wind, the round hut that might have been sitting there for decades. I looked up, expecting to see vultures. I only saw crisp blue sky.
Louise pushed aside a faded blanket that hung over the door and invited us in with her intent stare.
The hogan was dark, windowless, except for a hole in the ceiling, through which a shaft of sunlight came through. My lycanthropic sight adjusted quickly. The single room was almost bare. Toward the back, to the right, a blanket lay spread on the floor. A couple of wooden trunks sat by the wall nearby, along with a pile of firewood. Clearly, this wasn’t a room for living in. It was a sanctuary. I could feel it, the way the walls curled around me, the way that I was sure that even though only a blanket hung over the doorway, nothing could get in. No curses, no hate. I felt a great sense of calm.
Even Louise seemed calm now, confident in the hogan’s security. She knelt in the center of the room and struck a match to light the fire that was already built there. The kindling lit, glowed orange, and flames started tickling the firewood. The air smelled of soot and ash, of many previous fires that had burned themselves out. The smoke of this one rose up through the hole in the roof.
She showed us where to sit, on the ground to the right of the blanket.
She sat on the blanket. Before her, spread on the ground, was a sandpainting.
The pattern showed a complex and highly stylized scene. The colors were earth tones—brown, yellow, white, red, and black—yet vivid. In the firelight, the figures seemed to move.
Four birds, wings outstretched, marked the four quarters of the picture. Their clawed feet pointed inward, toward a circle at the center of the painting. In the middle of the circle stood a figure, a woman: black hair streamed from her square head, and she held arrows in both hands. Crooked white lines—lightning, maybe—rose up from her feet. Her eyes and mouth were tiny lines, hyphens, making the figure seem expressionless. Sleeping. The whole picture was bounded on three sides by rainbow stripes ending in bunches of what must have been feathers. The fourth, unbounded side faced the door. All of it was symbolic, but the symbols eluded me, except for one: the dark-haired woman at the center of great power, armed for battle.
Louise picked up a plastic dish, an old margarine tub. She took a pinch of something out of it: a white, powdery sand, or some other finely ground substance, which she sprinkled onto the image. I didn’t know how she got the lines so straight. Her movements added bolts of lightning radiating out from the circle, between the soaring eagles.
“Tell me how Miriam died,” she said.
Ben looked at me. I was the talker. But I didn’t feel much like telling the story. “She attacked me. Our friend shot her.”
“Friend. The same man who shot John.”
“That’s your brother. The werewolf.”
She said, “John and Miriam were twins. They were destined to be killed by the same man. It all happened so quickly. I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly.”
“What happened, Louise? How did this all start?”
She continued adding to the painting as she spoke. “John went to work in Phoenix. When he came back—he was different. That must have been when it happened. When he became the monster. He wouldn’t talk to anyone but Miriam. They’d go off together, for days at a time. Then Joan died. Then John. Then Miriam.” Her voice never cracked, her expression never slipped. She’d lived this over and over in her mind for weeks now. “I knew,” she said. “Somehow I knew what had happened, that Miriam took Joan. This magic, this evil has lived in the land since the beginning of the world. My family has been part of it, on both sides. I’ve learned what I can, but I’ve had no one to teach me the right way. The way of harmony. The old ways are gone.
“My father believed that because John brought a new evil from outside, an outsider should stop it. He knew someone who knew of a wolf hunter—your friend. The wolf hunter came and did his work. But it didn’t stop the evil. It only made it stronger.”
The flickering light from the fire made the figures in the painting waver and move. I blinked, flinching back, bidden by an animal instinct to escape. My eyes watered, and I shifted so my arm touched Ben’s. He felt shaky, nervous.
Like me. Louise caught the movement, understood the way Ben and I stared at the picture on the ground.
“This is for Joan. She didn’t die; she was killed. There’s no one to help her find her way to the next world. No one else cares. I don’t know how, but I have to try to help her with what I know.”
It came from the heart, Alice had said. That had to count for something.
“She’s still here. She hasn’t traveled on. Maybe she’ll talk to you. Maybe she’ll tell you what happened.”
“How will we know?” I said. “How will we know if she’s talking to us?”
Ben muttered, “If she can’t testify or sign a statement, what’s the point?”
I elbowed him in the side.
“Joan?” Louise sat at the head of her painting, hands on her knees, gazing unfocused at the painting, or the light, or phantoms of her own imagination. She had the voice of a little girl calling in the dark. “I’m here.”
Then she spoke a phrase in another language—Navajo, each sound punctuated, melodic.
The fire dimmed suddenly to embers.
Ben tensed; I felt for his hand, gripped it. He squeezed back. I expected the sudden spike of fear to rouse the Wolf. Any sense of danger always woke her, sparked her instinct, made her want to fight. I expected that instinct to kick in, but it didn’t. This space, this weird timeless feeling, soothed her somehow. She slept, even though my brain was firing. It gave me a strange, disembodied feeling, like I wasn’t really here. Like I couldn’t feel the ground under me anymore.
After a long silence, Louise said, “She is telling me the story to tell to you. I can tell you like s
he’s telling me.”
An aura of blue light glowed around Louise, like some kind of static charge danced around her. No—she was backlit. The light was coming from behind her. I wanted very much to move around her, to see what was behind her. I stayed put.
“I was outside, mending one of the fences after a wind knocked it down. Miriam came to me. She called my name. I looked, and she stood right behind me. She held a powder in her hand and blew it into my face. I knew what it was, anyone would know what it was: corpse powder. She cursed me. She killed me, but no one would ever know. I grew sick. The doctors had a name for it, called it a disease, tried to heal me—but they couldn’t, because it was witchcraft. Miriam stood by my bed at night—my last night—and told me what she would do: she would cut my heart out, take the blood, and put it on the wolf’s skin. Take my soul and use its power for herself. I could see it, see her cutting out my heart, holding up the dripping fist of muscle, and I thought, This is my heart, why can I see it? It should be hidden. My heart should be hidden, safe, but she has taken it from me.”
I choked on a gasp, feeling my own heart suddenly. It wasn’t me, it was her. I told myself it was only a story.
Louise shook her head, and when she spoke next, her voice was hers again. “Joan died of pneumonia, that’s what the doctors said. But Miriam killed her. Miriam took her heart. I found her spirit crying in the desert, searching for her heart. But I’ll help her find it. I’ll help you, Joan.”
She reached out, like she would clasp someone’s hand, but there was no one in front of her. The glow faded, and she was left holding a point of light in her hand. She closed her fist around it before I could see more. As it was, it might have been my imagination.
In fact, a second of dizziness and a slip of time changed the look of the whole room: the fire burned again, as it always had. Louise held her hand over the painting, as if she’d just finished dropping the last grain of color into place.
None of it had happened. I was sure that none of it had happened. Except Ben still held my hand in a death grip. His hand was cold, his face pale. He swallowed.
Louise looked at us, her dark eyes shining. “I’ll sign your statement. She wants me to sign your statement, to tell you what I know. To tell her story.”
She swiped her hand through the painting, smearing the image, blurring the colors, stirring the ground until it showed a galaxy swirl of dark sand, and nothing more. Odd grains of quartz sparkled in the light like stars.
She sat back, closed her eyes, and sighed. “Let’s go.”
We scooped sand over the fire to put it out. Louise put her things—matches, the little containers of colored sand—into the trunk against the back wall. She drew something out as well, but tucked it into her fist so I couldn’t see.
Pulling back the blanket over the door, she ushered us out of the hogan. She paused, looking back to scan the interior, as if searching for something. Or waiting for something. Then she slipped out, letting the blanket fall back into place behind her.
Walking back into the sun was like being in another world, a too-bright sunlit world where birds chirped and a fresh breeze smelled of dust and sage. Surely a world where nobody killed anybody.
Ben said, “I’ll put together that statement.”
Louise nodded. Ben gave a thin smile in acknowledgment, then went to the car. His hands were buried deep in his pockets, his shoulders bent against a cold wind that wasn’t blowing. I was shivering as well. I hugged myself against the cold that came from inside rather than outside.
Louise and I waited, standing halfway between hogan and car. Her tangled hair made her look tired, older than when we’d started out. She looked up and around, studying sky, ground, distant trees, eyes squinting against the sun. For a moment she reminded me of a wolf taking in the scents.
I finally said, “Did you know what would happen in there? Has she ever talked to you before?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t know if it would work with outsiders watching. Most people, if I said that Joan talks to me, they’d laugh. Or they’d feel sorry for me. They wouldn’t think it was real. But you believe. I think that’s why she came.”
“I’ve had my own conversations with the dead.”
“Some people aren’t ready to go when they die.”
I choked on a lump in my throat. “Yeah.”
“I’m afraid—I’m afraid Miriam might come back. She was angry all the time. I’m afraid that might hold her to this world.”
That damned cabin was going to be haunted forever. I didn’t want to go back there to find out if Miriam’s ghost was hanging around or not. Let someone else deal with it.
I said, “When she died, a man was there, a curandero. He was afraid of the same thing. He did something—I don’t know exactly what. I think it was to keep her from coming back.”
“Then maybe it’ll be okay.” She gave a smile that seemed brave and hopeless all at once.
Ben called us over to the car. He used the hood as a desk and transcribed while Louise told a straightforward version of the story. She signed it where Ben indicated. It seemed like such a slim thing to pin any hopes on. We were grasping at straws. After she’d signed, Ben packed away his briefcase.
“Can we give you a ride back?” I said.
“No thanks. I’m not in too much of a hurry to get back. The walk’ll do me good.”
The walk was something like fifteen miles, but I didn’t argue. I understood the urge to walk yourself to exhaustion.
She drew something out of her pocket, holding it in a tight fist. She kept her face lowered. “I have something for you. The questions about Miriam, the thing she was and what you’re looking for—it’s dangerous. You should leave, you should go back and forget about it all. But I know you won’t, so you need these.”
She opened her hand to show two arrowheads tied to leather cords lying on her palm.
I took them from her. They were warm from her clutching them tightly. She must have sensed my hesitation, because she pulled at a length of leather around her own neck. An arrowhead amulet had been hiding under the collar of her shirt.
“Why do you think that I, out of all my sisters and my brother, am still alive?”
She had a point there.
“Thank you,” I said.
She smiled and seemed calmer. Less fearful. Sometimes rituals weren’t about magic. They were about helping people deal with events. Deal with life. She walked away from the road, heading into the scrubland between here and the town. Didn’t look back.
I gave one of the amulets to Ben. Back in the car, I opened the glove box and pulled out two items: the leather pouch Tony had given me, and Alice’s crystal charm. I lined them up on the dashboard above the steering wheel, added Louise’s arrowhead to the collection, and regarded them, mystified.
Ben looked at me looking at the amulets. “Does this make you super-protected? The safest person in the world?”
I frowned. “I’m thinking they might all cancel each other out. Like red, green, blue light making white.”
“Which do you pick?”
“Local color. I’ll bet Louise knows what she’s talking about.” I took the arrowhead, slipped the cord over my head, and put the others back in the glove box. Ben put on his arrowhead. There we were—protected.
We left. Ben sat with his briefcase on his lap, his head propped on his hand, looking frustrated.
“Will her statement help?” I said.
He made a vague shrug. “Maybe the court will believe it, maybe not. When you get right down to it, there’s an official death certificate saying Joan Wilson died of pneumonia. Louise is the only one saying Miriam killed her. Hearsay and ghost stories. I don’t know, I’ll take whatever I can get at this point.” We trundled along in silence for a few minutes, when he added, “As dysfunctional goes, this family’s really got something going.”
I snorted a laugh. “No joke. Where to next?”
“The grandfather. Lawrence Wilson. See what
he has to say about Miriam, since he was the only one who cared to look for her.”
“After the rest of the family, I’m afraid to see what he’s like.”
“Tell me about it.”
The sun had dipped to the far west, and a cold wind bit from the desert. We were nearing the turn to the highway. We’d have to pick one direction or another. I had a thought.
“You want to wait to see him until tomorrow?”
“If small-town gossip works here the way it works everywhere else, he’s probably gotten word that someone’s wanting to talk to him. It’ll give him a chance to go to ground.”
“Yeah, okay. But it’s almost sunset. Call me chicken, but I don’t really want to be out after dark. Not around here.”
He thought, lips pursed, watching the desert landscape slide by. “Then back to the hotel it is.”
I turned east, back to Farmington.
chapter 15
No, Mom. I’m in New Mexico now.”
I’d returned to the motel room to find a message from Mom on my phone. As usual, the timing was not the best.
“What are you doing in New Mexico?”
Trying to track a dead killer without any evidence or witnesses? “I’m looking for some information. We’ll only be here for a couple of days.”
“We?”
Crap. I wasn’t going to be able to talk my way out of this. “Yeah. I’m with a friend.”
“Oh. Anyone I know?” She spoke brightly. Trying to draw me out.
I thought of the white lies and half-truths I could tell her. Then I remembered the phone call to Ariel last night. Be straight. Tell the truth. “By reputation. It’s Ben O’Farrell. I’m helping him with a case.” This was going to worry her. This was going to make her pry further. No information was better than too little information. I shouldn’t have told her anything.
“Well, be careful, okay?” She just let it go. Like she actually trusted me to take care of myself.
“I will.”
The rest of the conversation went pretty much as usual. Except for the part where Ben was sitting there smirking at me.