“When the headaches began,” Stone Ghost asked, “did you check her to see where she had been struck? What part of the head?”
Marsh Hawk answered, “The right side, Elder. Always on the right side. I did not understand it. If she were being tormented by another child, surely he would strike her wherever he could. And the blows grew more fierce over time. At first she complained of mild headaches, then she stayed in bed for three days, and finally she began coming home bloody-headed and vomiting.”
Stone Ghost stared unblinking at Marsh Hawk, but thoughts churned behind his luminous eyes. “The right side,” he said in a low voice. “Of course.”
“Why?” Little Bow asked.
Wind Baby gusted through the village, and the old man leaned over to watch the grains in the bowl blow about. Tiny curls of sand whipped across the surface. “How long ago did your daughter disappear?”
“Nine moons, Elder.”
Stone Ghost watched the sand, but he had a look in his eyes
that eluded Little Bow—not fear, not anguish, more like a man suddenly confronted with a horror too bizarre, too abominable to believe.
Little Bow said, “What is it, Elder? What do you see?”
The old man’s bushy brows drew together. He hesitated, his mouth open.
Then, in a mink-soft voice, he said, “The strange agonizing grief that turns a human being into a monster.”
MAUREEN SQUINTED IN THE SCORCHING SUNLIGHT THAT fell across the canyon. The distant cliffs wavered like heat-spawned illusions. Though she’d dressed in tan shorts, a white T-shirt, and hiking boots, the extreme heat made it almost impossible to breathe. She pulled her white canvas hat low over her dark eyes, and shifted to sit cross-legged on the edge of the excavation unit. Three feet below, Sylvia worked, carefully brushing away the centuries of sand that had accumulated over the young woman’s bones. They’d begun work at six-thirty, rested between the hours of noon and two, and been working for two hours since then. It stunned Maureen that at four P.M. the heat could still be this suffocating.
Thirty paces away, outside the perimeter of lath stakes, Stewart excavated the site where Mrs. Walking Hawk claimed the Haze child rested. Maggie and her aunt sat in lawn chairs a few feet from the edge of the pit, watching. Both wore straw cowboy hats. Maggie kept patting her aunt’s arm affectionately. They spoke in voices too low for Maureen to hear, but she could see Mrs. Walking Hawk smiling.
Maureen shifted uneasily. From the instant she had met Hail Walking Hawk, she’d sensed something amiss, as though the kindly old woman had reached inside her and scattered the pieces of Maureen’s carefully ordered world. The man that Mrs. Walking Hawk claimed to have seen standing behind Maureen fit John’s description. And that was a problem. Her own gut feelings lent weight to the vision. She often felt John nearby, talking just below her ability to hear, touching her with hands she could almost feel. Sometimes, when she missed him desperately, she sat down, closed her eyes, and tried with all her strength to summon him, to
see him standing before her with that loving smile on his face—and she almost could. Perhaps that’s what Mrs. Walking Hawk had seen. A longing so intense it had form.
“What are you thinking?” Sylvia asked. “You have a weird look on your face.”
“I was thinking that people who would work in this kind of heat have to have rocks in their heads, eh?”
Sylvia grinned. She’d tucked her brown hair beneath her broad-brimmed straw hat, but sweaty locks glued themselves to her freckled forehead. Dirt streaked her face and ringed her green eyes. Her brown shorts, hiking boots, and the pale green long-sleeved cotton shirt and tank top bore a thick coating of dust. In a poor German accent, she replied, “Ve archaeologists must get used to all climates, Doctor, from ze Sahara to ze arctic.” She turned to the notebook that lay to her right and jotted down a few notes. “You ought to give yourself a few days to get used to this. Why don’t you go rest in the shade of the tents? I’ll yell when I’ve bagged the skull.”
“I’d rather fry. Two minutes in the shade and ‘Cool Hand Luke’ over there would never let me live it down. He’d start calling me a ‘lab rat’ to my face.”
“There are a lot worse things you could call him back. If you need suggestions, let me know.” Sylvia ran her shirt sleeve over her sweating chin.
Grasshoppers leaped at her movements, buzzing as they flew away, then rattling through the dry grasses. As the sun descended in the western sky, the slanting rays of light turned the sand into a sparkling golden blanket.
“Tell me the truth, Sylvia. Did Stewart really dance with Muffet?”
Sylvia stood up and stretched her back muscles. “Not even I could make up something that gross. And the worst part came afterward. Dusty was, like, devastated. He wouldn’t date for weeks. He kept telling women that he’d taken divine vows, which they naturally translated as VD.”
“Sounds more like he didn’t have any
v
at all.”
“Yeah, I told him he should have claimed he was venereally challenged. Women take pity on men like that. You know? War wounds?”
Maureen swiped at a fly that dive-bombed her nose, missed, and said, “I don’t know. I suspect the women might have reacted to Stewart’s wounds like those killer bees in Texas. Did you read about that? The males were sterilized by a blast of radiation then released into the wild.”
“No. What happened to them?”
“The females bred once, and died.”
Sylvia brushed sweaty brown hair from her freckled cheeks. “Wow. That really gives the name ‘killer bee’ a new twist.”
“I’ll say.”
“Fortunately dancing with Muffet is about as close as Dusty gets to women, so I guess it’s irrelevant.”
“He really has problems, eh?” Maureen frowned at him where he stood in the pit across the site. His tanned face had an unearthly sheen. “Hard to believe. He has the looks of a blond god.”
“Yeah. And the nightmares of Frankenstein.”
Maureen looked down into Sylvia’s green eyes. She seemed to be appraising Maureen, gauging her reaction. “He has nightmares?”
Sylvia nodded. “Every time he starts getting close to a woman he has really scary ones about being locked in darkness. He wakes up and can’t breathe.” She took a deep breath of the hot air. “I don’t know all of it, but I think it goes back to his mother.”
Wind blasted the site, flapped the green tents, and threatened to tug off Maureen’s white canvas hat. She grabbed it just before it went and held onto the brim until the gust passed by and continued on down the canyon.
Sylvia wiped her trowel off on her brown shorts and knelt again. “So. Let’s talk about you. Are you a lab rat? Is that what you really do?”
A puff of cloud passed overhead and the cool shadow briefly touched Maureen’s face. It felt heavenly, soothing. Maureen breathed in the coolness, then the shadow drifted westward, and the heat beat down upon her again. She sighed and gazed at Sylvia.
“Pretty much. I enjoy that a good deal more than the classroom.”
“God, where do you get the strength? I could never work in a lab day in and day out.” Sylvia blew dust from the smashed cranium of the dead woman. It puffed around her face and settled on
the brim of her straw hat. “I have to be outside or my soul grows snake eyes. I start looking at human beings like I’m the queen mother on LV426.”
Maureen tried to place the reference. “Is that the planet in
Aliens
?”
Sylvia nodded. “Yeah. Remember that scene in the nursery where the queen hisses, and drops her jaw? That’s just how I feel after a few days of being locked in a building with other people.”
“You are definitely not a big city girl. Were you born in New Mexico?”
Sylvia squinted against the blazing sun. “I don’t really know. I spent the first eight years of my life in foster homes in Idaho, being traded around, shoved from one pair of ‘loving’ arms to another.”
The way she’d said “loving” shriveled Maureen’s heart. “Sounds like a tough way to grow up.”
“I didn’t know any different. Not at first. I thought all kids traded parents four times a year. Then I turned six, and started school. That was rough. I’d make friends, then the angels at Social Services would move me to a new family halfway across Boise. I—”
“Were your foster parents that bad? I didn’t think the state moved a child unless it had a reason to.”
Sylvia’s mouth quirked. She twisted her trowel in her dusty hands. “Well. Some of them were bad. I remember this one old man. God, I hated him. He used to come into my room late at night. I think I was about four at the time. I swear all I remember is the feel of his mouth over mine, sucking the air out of my lungs, and his rank smell—like gin mixed with stinking saltwater. The social worker told me the other foster kids in the house claimed it had gone on for months, but it’s like my mind just blocked it out.”
Maureen stayed silent. Sylvia’s matter-of-fact voice was as haunting as the picture it painted of a lonely, frightened little girl, trying to figure out what was happening to her, why the people supposedly taking care of her were, instead, hurting her—a child so traumatized by the pain that her mind simply severed the neural pathways to the memories.
No wonder she and Stewart were friends. They’d both lived through difficult childhoods. Perhaps that’s what he’d meant when he’d said,
“Sometimes I think she knows me better than I know
myself …”
Sharing that kind of past must create a bond that outsiders couldn’t really understand.
In a soft voice, Maureen said, “I’ve heard that the mind does that to protect people.”
“I guess,” Sylvia said. “Too bad it doesn’t work better. I still wake up on occasion swinging my fists.” She gave Maureen a sheepish smile. “By the way, don’t ever walk into my tent unannounced.”
“You want me to use a shotgun to get your attention first?”
“That’ll work.” Sylvia tipped her straw hat back on her head.
“One time Dusty decided he’d play a joke on me. This was before he knew about the problems I’d had as a kid. He reached into my tent, grabbed the bottom of my sleeping bag, and started to drag me out. Ha, ha. What fun, you know? Thank God he has a distinctive scream. Woke me up before I had a chance to finish the job the Coors bottles started. I was just about to smash his nonexistent
v
to smithereens with my baseball bat.”
“You sleep with a baseball bat?”
“Yeah.” She used a paintbrush to whisk dirt away from the occipital bone that made up the base of the skull. “I’m not the sort of person who should own a pistol.”
Maureen just stared.
“I still don’t know how you got to New Mexico, Sylvia.”
“When I turned eight, I was adopted by these great people in Idaho Falls. We moved to Albuquerque when I was ten.”
“You’ve been in New Mexico since then?”
“Except for a few trips to nearby states. I’m pretty happy here. The archaeology is fabulous. The Mexican food is out of this world. That’s all I need in life. Give me lots of sunshine, some broken rocks, a bushel of jalapeños, and I’m yours. What about you? Have you always been into anthropology?”
“My family did it to me. We used to travel to archaeological and historical sites for summer vacations. I guess I never got over that sense of wonder.”
“Yeah, but that’s field stuff. How did you wind up buried in a laboratory?”
A little defensive, she said, “The lab is where the real science begins, Sylvia.”
“But it’s cold and sterile. Where’s the thrill of discovery?”
Maureen chuckled. “It’s there every moment, Sylvia.”
She thought about the bones that lay arranged on her lab table. Many tribes in North America believed that humans possessed two or even three souls, and that one of those souls stayed with the body forever. In a strange way, she believed it. When she first touched a bone it always seemed as though a long-dead person reached back to her across an infinite gulf of time, grateful for the sudden companionship.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Maureen said, “but working on human remains is different from a potsherd or a stone tool. Bones
talk
to you.”
Sylvia blew dirt from the hole in the dead woman’s skull and answered, “I’ve heard something like that before.”
“Really? Where?”
“Dusty invited a Hopi woman into one of our classes last year. She was a museum curator, and lectured about the museum’s treatment of kachina masks. Talk about spook city. She said that each mask had a soul, and that she had to feed them blue corn, and rub them with sunflower oil to keep them happy, or they’d get pissed and wipe out the museum.”
“She was serious?”
“Dead serious.” Sylvia wiped her dirty palms on her shorts. “One of the other students in the class was Cheyenne. She added that her people believed that medicine bundles had souls, and she thought it was cruel to keep them locked in a museum, because they’d be lonely.”
Sylvia stood, slapped the sand from her pants, and reached for the olive-drab ammunition box on the lip of the pit. She withdrew a thirty-five millimeter camera and a scaled “north arrow.” She placed the arrow parallel with the pit wall, focused on the exposed burial, and snapped two quick shots before replacing the camera and the arrow. As she wrote the shots down in the photo log, she said, “So, like, do you believe stuff like that?”