Stormwalker (14 page)

The McGuires still owned this house; they had not wanted to rent it out or sell it after Amy vanished. All her stuff was still in it, locked away, waiting for her return. I’d investigated the house during my first week in Magellan, even spending the night to listen to it, but it had told me nothing.

Amy had planted flowers to either side of the driveway, but they’d long since died and no one had bothered to pull them out. They lay like dried straw in the unwatered beds, food for the birds.

As I walked up the driveway, a large crow flapped toward me and perched on the chain-link fence. It cocked its head and watched me, as if waiting to see what I’d do. I still had the key to the house Chief McGuire had given me, and I unlocked the door and went inside.

The small house had a short hallway just inside the door, which led to the living room on the right and two bedrooms on the left. Straight ahead was the kitchen, small and functional.

Amy had photos all over her living room—of herself and her parents, of herself in the middle of her blue-robed church choir, of herself with her arm around Nash Jones. The few pictures with her and Nash never showed him smiling. They were candid photos—in them he contemplated a cup of coffee, or was listening to someone else, or looking at something beyond Amy. None of them showed him looking at her, smiling at her, paying any attention to her.

I took out the smudge stick I’d bought from Heather Hansen, propped it in a coffee cup, lit the stick, and let the sage smoke fill the room. I closed my eyes, breathing in the scent, letting my mind and body become attuned to the house and the faint noises inside and out. I heard the crow hopping along the fence, and I knew without opening my eyes that it had moved so it could watch me through the living room window.

The aura of the house wrapped around my senses. It was clean and soft, a little lonely, but patient, waiting. I sensed no violence, no despair, no struggle. Just Amy living day after day through her routines, her choir practice, the preparations for her coming wedding.

I sighed and opened my eyes. I hadn’t really expected the house to tell me anything more than it already had. I let the sage stick continue to burn while I stepped out into the yard. I felt nothing there either, just the inky aura of the crow as she stared at me. I don’t know how I knew that the crow was female—I just did.

“Do you know what happened?” I asked it.

The crow regarded me silently, black eye shining.

“I know.” I sighed. “It’s something I have to work out for myself. But if supernatural beings are going to hang around me, they could at least help.”

The crow sidestepped in its ungainly way, then it took off, soaring on outstretched wings into the very blue sky. Its hoarse caw drifted back to me, sounding for all the world like an admonishment.

If my mother had anything to do with Amy’s death—for example, if Amy had died because my mother had possessed her in order to have form in this world—I’d expect to find more signs of darkness in Amy’s house and in the nearby desert. Her body might have been found after all this time, as dried out and spent as Sherry Beaumont’s walled up in my basement. I had grave suspicions that my mother had possessed Sherry Beaumont, and Sherry had died of it, though how the woman had ended up in my basement I still had no clue.

I let myself out of Amy’s back gate, trudged over the railroad bed, and set off across the desert, angling north and east toward the place we’d battled the skinwalkers.

Under the bright light of day, with a few white clouds hanging far to the south, the land was starkly beautiful, the miasma of last night’s fear gone. A few hikers wandered in the distance or on the railroad bed, likely following maps to the vortexes they’d picked up at Paradox.

The trail I took and the vortex I found wasn’t on any map. A mile or so from Amy’s house, I stood at the top of the little rise where I’d heard my mother last night and looked down to the narrow wash between gentle slopes. Sunshine burned the earth orange red, the grasses green. It was mid-May, and wildflowers were out in a profusion of red, blue, yellow, purple.

A nonmagical person walking here would see a pretty scene, nothing more. A vortex didn’t actually
look
like anything to the mundane eye; it was more a feeling, a prickling sensation, a warmth that didn’t come from the blazing sun.

The sensations pounded me like a dozen shovels on the top of my head. I walked down the hill to the heart of the vortex, where I’d been afraid to go last night, and put my hands on a boulder that jutted out of the ground.

The vibrations from it nearly jarred me off my feet. This was an entrance, all right. Closed and sealed, but if it opened . . . Well, I had no idea
exactly
what would happen, but I imagined it wouldn’t be good.

A click of rocks above me announced a presence, but I didn’t turn around. I knew who it was even before he stopped behind me like menace manifest.

“Why were you and your boyfriend starting fires out here last night?” he demanded.

I took my hands from the rock, rubbed them on my pants, and walked past him up the hill. Nash Jones fell into step behind me, for once not in his sheriff’s togs but in shorts, T-shirt, and hiking boots. He had well-muscled legs, strong and tanned, and his sunglasses were firmly in place.

“Day off?” I asked him when we reached the top of the hill. “I didn’t know you took them.”

“The fire department came out to investigate,” he said, ignoring my question. “And called me. Why do you keep giving me excuses to arrest you?”

“I didn’t start any fires, Sheriff. Besides, they were out before the fire department arrived.”

The flat black of his sunglasses was unnerving. I hated not being able to see a person’s eyes. “I asked what were you doing out here,” he said.

“What are you doing out here now? Hiking is a popular pastime in Magellan.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“It’s pretty under the stars.”

“Don’t mess with me, Begay.”

“Don’t mess with
me
, Jones. You are so out of your league I can’t believe it.”

The scar pulled at his upper lip. “It’s my fiancée who’s missing. I don’t need an outsider telling me I’m out of my league.”

“Why do you think she’s dead?”

“What?”

“You told me when you interrogated me in your jail that you thought Amy was dead. The case file said you had a PTSD blackout that day.” I hesitated, but I needed to ask. “Are you afraid you killed her?”

I doubt I would have asked so bluntly if Nash had been carrying his gun. I figured, in his civvies, maybe he couldn’t hurt me as much. Maybe.

“That’s none of your damned business.”

“So, are you?”

Nash opened his mouth to roar at me. Then he stopped and flinched, as though some pain twisted his gut. “I don’t know.”

“For the record, I don’t think you did.”

My statement, if anything, made him even madder. “What the hell do you know about it?”

“Because I don’t think Amy’s dead. I was just at her place, reading it again. There’s no sign of a struggle, no blood, nothing. And no ghosts.”

“There aren’t any effing ghosts.”

“Houses have an aura just like people do,” I said patiently. “They retain an imprint of those who live there, of the emotions the house witnesses. Violence and death leave a vivid mark. A friend of mine, a Navajo, once toured Auschwitz. He said the aura there was so black and sticky that it was like walking through tar. He couldn’t stand it and had to leave. And he has only a little bit of shaman magic.”

“Your point?”

“Amy’s place has no aura of violence, death, or fear. I felt nothing there but her quiet life, day in, day out. Which could mean she left on her own, her choice.”

“Her car never left her house, and no one came to pick her up,” Nash said in a tight voice, repeating what I had read in the files.

“That anyone saw,” I said. “She could have gone when no one was looking out their windows. Even the nosiest neighbor has to go to the bathroom sometime.”

“Then she must have walked somewhere,” Nash said.

“No one walking the railroad bed that day saw her. Plus, I’ve hiked through the desert out here several times and sensed no trace of her, psychic or physical.”

“Then how do you account for this?” Nash pulled out his wallet and extracted a photo. “I found this in this very spot a year ago. In a place you were compelled to come to last night and again today.”

He held the photo in front of my face. It was Amy, wearing a dark blue strapless gown, her hair pulled up and styled in golden ringlets. She smiled, eyes sparkling, lips red and smooth. The photo was stained and creased, one fold across Amy’s face like a knife cut. It had also been savagely torn in half, obliterating the man who’d had his arm around Amy’s waist.

He shook his head. “We weren’t together then. It’s from a formal dance when she was down at U of A.”

Amy’s escort had been effectively erased from the photo. Had Amy done that? Or Nash in a fit of jealousy? Or my deranged mother?

“Who was the guy?”

“My brother, Kurt.”

I looked at Nash in surprise. “Your brother?”

“Kurt dated Amy in high school and college. They broke up, and he got married and moved to North Carolina. Three years ago now.”

Kurt Jones hadn’t figured in any of the reports McGuire had let me read. Maybe because the brother had already married and gone, and therefore was not a suspect? “What did he have to say about Amy’s disappearance?”

Nash snatched the picture back. “Kurt hadn’t left home in months; he hadn’t seen her. He had nothing to do with it.”

“And he was fine with you getting engaged to her?”

“Why the hell wouldn’t he be? He fell in love with someone else and is happily married. His wife has a daughter on the way. Kurt and Amy both moved on.”

“Kind of an odd match, you and Amy.”

Nash stuffed the picture back into his wallet. “She was good to me.”

But were you good to her?
Had Amy started dating one brother because she was still hung up on the other? Or had it been a clean break as Nash so emphatically stated? And who had torn Kurt out of the photograph?

I didn’t voice my questions, because this was the most Nash had opened up to me about Amy, and I didn’t want to ruin it. Maybe being out of uniform softened him a little. I looked at the grim set to his mouth. Only a little.

“Why didn’t you give the picture to McGuire?” I asked him. “It might be evidence.”

“I know. That’s why I kept it.”

“You’re a confusing man, Sheriff. Why shouldn’t the chief of police have the evidence?”

“Because McGuire is too upset to run a proper investigation. He always has been. He confirmed it by asking you to come here. I don’t care if this is Magellan, it’s not good procedure to bring in a psychic.”

“Police departments do it all the time,” I countered. “Especially on missing-persons cases.”

“The last resort of the desperate. Investigators should find answers based on logic, facts, and a knowledge of human nature.”

I wondered how much Nash understood human nature. He didn’t seem understanding of any point of view but his own.

“Are you saying
you
aren’t too upset to investigate? You were going to marry her.”

“McGuire and I both conceded conflict of interest. We asked for it to be investigated under state jurisdiction.”

“Then why are you still investigating on your own?”

“Because no one else has turned up a damn thing,” he said. “I’m not too upset to do my job.”

“A building fell on you out in Iraq. That could mess up anyone.”

“It’s what happens in war.” Nash spoke with his jaw so tight, I thought it might snap.

I had a sudden vision of Nash’s face under an army helmet paling as explosions ripped around him. I saw plaster rain down, his arms coming up to stave off the falling beams. I smelled the dust, the smoke, heard noise so loud it drowned out his shouting and the screams of the others.

I shuddered, and the vision vanished. I found myself back in the desert, the sun beating down on me, the wildflowers pungent. I knew the vision had been a real one. Psychic distress didn’t cling only to buildings; it clung to people too.

As I turned away, trying to catch my breath, my foot struck something tangled in the weeds at the base of a rock. I leaned down and parted the grasses.

Nash was right behind me. “What is it?”

“Bones.” I looked down at the stained brown remains. “Animal. Rabbit, I think.”

“Yes, I can see that. What about it?”

“More over here.”

I moved dirt on the slope down to the vortex to reveal three more carcasses—birds. I heard a flap of wings and looked up to see the big crow land on a nearby scrubby piñon pine. She looked down at the bones in disapproval.

“What the hell is this?” Nash stood with hands on his hips. “Some kind of freak Native American ritual?”

“I didn’t do this. These bones have been here for a long time. Some of them for years.”

“It’s an ecosystem. Birds and rabbits are eaten by coyotes, owls, and snakes.”

I stepped away from the vortex, feeling cold. The animals had simply died here; I knew that, caught in the evil energy of the place.

“Don’t come out here again,” I said. “Not alone, and definitely not at night. Never, in fact.”

“Funny, I was going to say the same thing to you.”

I rubbed the back of my neck where the tingling was worst. “Can you feel that? I barely have any power right now, and it’s driving me crazy.”

“No.”

“Is that true, or are you just determined to be an Unbeliever?”

“I don’t feel a damn thing, and you don’t either.”

“The fact that you don’t believe in magic doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, Jones.”

“Cut the crap. I get it all day long from losers who claim that magic put the stolen TV in their car or the meth in their pocket.”

I put my hands on my hips. “You know, you and Maya should get together. When she talks, she sounds just like you.”

Nash went crimson from neck to forehead. He opened his mouth like he wanted to swear at me, then he closed it again.

Had I struck a nerve? I thought of the deep anger in Maya’s voice when she’d talked about Nash and Amy after she’d discovered the body in the basement, the flattening of her lips when she spoke Nash’s name. I studied Nash with new interest.

He glared back at me. “Mind your own damned business, Begay,” was the best he could come up with.