Spider Woman's Daughter Read online

  Why did the Holy People lead the Diné to a world with so much sorrow? Big sorrows, like a good man catching a bullet in the brain. Like her mother abandoning the loom she loved because arthritis crippled her hands. Like her sister Darleen, on the road to becoming a lost young woman.

  A sound startled her, and then she recognized it: a row of ice cubes falling into the freezer box. Get on with it, she thought. Stop wasting time. She noticed the yellow phone on the wall. The missing Louisa must have a cell phone because of all the traveling she did. Bernie stood, scanned the list of numbers attached to the refrigerator with a magnet from the Navajo Times. Several doctors, a dentist, a car repair shop. Nothing identified as Louisa’s cell. The lieutenant must have had her number memorized or programmed into his phone. He complained about how you couldn’t get a reliable signal on the reservation and how cell phones interrupted the quiet, but he’d got his, he’d told her and Chee, to keep Louisa happy. He probably had the phone with him when the shooter attacked. But maybe he’d left it here. Worth a look. Find the phone, call Louisa, give her the news. And the logical place for the phone would be connected to a charger.

  Bernie didn’t notice a charger in the kitchen, so she walked down the hall, passing the living room on the right. The lieutenant or Louisa had closed the drapes to keep out the heat, leaving the house in soft, dim light. Prowling made her edgy, unsettled.

  She noticed an open door on the left, a bathroom. Neat, almost sterile. Just the essential towels, hand soap, and a box of tissues; not a toothbrush or a vitamin bottle in sight. It reminded her of a motel, except for the cat box near the bathtub. The electrical outlets were empty; no charger.

  The room across the hall held a double bed with a masculine gray spread draped over it and a colorful Teec Nos Pos blanket on top of that. She ran her hand over the weaving. Smooth, fine work. She’d ask the lieutenant to tell her about this rug, who gave it to him and why. The round-topped alarm clock on the dresser reminded Bernie of the clock her grandfather had owned. On the simple wooden table next to it sat a book with a pair of black-framed reading glasses on top of it, and a gooseneck lamp. No phone, cell or otherwise.

  She found Leaphorn’s office at the next doorway. Another large rug, this one woven to include deep aniline red yarn and the terraced diamond designs that marked the Ganado style, occupied part of the wooden floor. Among the books on his shelves, the lieutenant had intermixed brown-glazed Navajo pots, a small polychrome Hopi seed jar shaped like a flying saucer, an alabaster eagle, and an assembly of Zuni fetishes. A stuffed chair sat in the corner with a nearby table and a floor lamp. On the table, Bernie noticed a wedding basket and two framed photographs. She leaned down for a closer look at the smaller picture, a black-and-white shot of a Navajo woman holding the same basket, a young Leaphorn standing beside her, both of them smiling. She guessed the woman was his late wife, Emma. Next to it, the lieutenant had parked the color picture of Chee and Bernie on the white beach in Hawaii the week after their wedding, the vast deep ocean blue behind them. No photos of Louisa, his housemate, friend, and maybe something more than that for the past five years. No photos of anyone else, including those who might be relatives.

  The room’s focal point was the lieutenant’s rolltop desk. She sat behind it, feeling like an intruder. He had piled a stack of books next to the computer monitor. She opened the top one, From This Earth: The Ancient Art of Pueblo Pottery, to a page Leaphorn had marked with a slip of paper and found a spread of photos of pots and potshards with geometric designs. She glanced at the other titles: Anasazi Pottery; Ten Centuries of Prehistoric Ceramic Art; Pueblo Potters of the Four Corners Country; Ceramic Treasures of Chaco Canyon. All from the Navajo Nation library. A research project, she guessed, for a client somewhere.

  A dog barked, and then she heard a woman’s voice and an end to the barking. She wouldn’t like living so close to neighbors. She and Jim didn’t have a fancy place, but she loved the silence of their spot along the San Juan River.

  She scanned the lieutenant’s desktop for the phone. Not there. She pulled her shirttail free and used it to open the top drawer. A neat pile of pens in one compartment. Pencils, all sharpened, in the other, along with an organized arrangement of letter-size envelopes, paper clips, and business cards wrapped in a rubber band.

  She opened the large lower drawer next. She saw neatly labeled folders with old-fashioned paper tabs for alphabetizing, scores of files arranged behind pastel dividers. Nothing marked “death threats.”

  She heard a vehicle approach on the gravel road and pull up into the driveway. Louisa coming home, she thought. As she pushed the drawer closed, her gaze drifted to the floor. She noticed a wastebasket with some torn paper worth investigating and a white cardboard filing box on the floor next to it. On top sat the phone charger. Empty. Darn it.

  She hurried out of the office into the living room. She pushed back the drape before opening the front door and saw Chee walking toward the porch.

  “Hello, beautiful,” he said. “Louisa here?”

  “No. Not yet. I was hoping she’d show up so I could talk to her before you got here.”

  “Come outside and take a look at this.”

  She followed him, feeling the intensity of the sun through her uniform shirt. He stopped at the edge of Leaphorn’s driveway and pointed at the dirt with the toe of his boot. “What do you think?”

  “Wheel tracks. A dolly? Maybe the lieutenant or Louisa was moving something.”

  “Maybe one of those rolling suitcases,” Chee said. “Maybe that’s why we can’t find Louisa.”

  “She’ll turn up,” Bernie said. “Hey, thanks for picking me up. I saw lots of files in the lieutenant’s desk drawer. The current stuff might be relevant to the shooting. And we ought to check the information on his computer.”

  Chee laughed as they went inside. “I’ll get right on it. Just point me in the right direction. Anything else?”

  Bernie ignored him, leading the way down the hall to the office.

  “Look at that.” Chee examined the maze of wires dangling behind Leaphorn’s desk. “That computer must be twenty years old. I remember him talking about how slow it was and about how he was going to get a new one.” He shook his head. “It was one of the few things I ever heard him complain about. He didn’t complain much. Except about me.”

  “He appreciates you, so he expects a lot from you,” Bernie said. “He just didn’t know how to show it. I mean, doesn’t know how to show it.”

  “Tough as an old boot,” Chee said.

  Bernie noticed that she hadn’t closed the large drawer completely. “The files are in there.”

  Chee extracted latex gloves from his pants pocket and nudged the drawer fully open. He scrutinized the folders, then pulled one out.

  “Leaphorn and I collaborated on this case. It fascinated me to see how his mind worked. We discovered a crazed scientist experimenting with bubonic plague. An old lady tending her goats helped us solve the thing.”

  “Sounds like an adventure.”

  “It started when a rich grandmother hired the lieutenant to find her granddaughter. The girl had a job as a college intern, working on a public health project on the reservation near Yells Back Butte. Leaphorn’s investigation overlapped a case I was on, a situation where it looked like a young Hopi had killed a Navajo cop.”

  “Did the lieutenant find the granddaughter?”

  “Her body. We found the guy who killed her, and it turned out he’d killed the officer, too. The Hopi guy was innocent, except for eagle poaching.” Chee added, “The lieutenant told me, ‘Good job.’ ”

  She heard the catch in his voice. Although he’d never say it, few things pleased Chee more than the approval of the crusty old lieutenant. “So, how’s he doing?”

  “We just got word that Leaphorn made it into Gallup.”

  She heard something in his voice that made he
r ask, “What else?”

  Silence. Then Chee said, “He’s too badly injured for treatment there. They called in a helicopter to take him to Albuquerque to the big hospital with the fancy trauma unit.”

  “When he comes out of this, let’s help him get a new computer. A laptop he could take with him on cases, type his notes right into it. That would save him a lot of time.”

  “You think he’d give up his little leather notebook? No way.” Chee turned back to the file drawer. “I’ll thumb through these quickly, see if anything jumps out at me. Then I need to get back to the office. Bigman is on his way. He can box these up for us and deal with the computer.”

  “And will you look for Leaphorn’s phone?” she asked. “I’m going to check the rest of the house, see if there’s anything out of the ordinary. Maybe his cell will turn up, and I can call Louisa’s cell.”

  She left Chee fanning through the folders. She noticed again how quiet the house was, how different from her cubicle at the station or the constant noise of her unit when she was on the road. The semiretired life might be nice, she thought, but kind of lonely.

  She found Louisa’s bedroom at the end of the hall. Unlike Leaphorn’s room, it looked ransacked. Clothes tossed everywhere, drawers hanging open, shoes on the dresser top. She looked in the closet for a suitcase and saw empty hangers.

  Chee’s voice startled her. “Some of these folders might be worth following up on, but they’re old. Bigman can look at the computer files, see what’s more recent. You ready?”

  “I’m coming.” She told him what she’d found, and what she hadn’t found.

  “Maybe Louisa keeps her suitcase in the garage or in another closet. Maybe she’s just naturally messy. Like your little sister.”

  Bernie said, “I don’t think she’s messy. Look how neat the rest of this house is. I think she left in a hurry. Let’s go. You’ve got a lot to do.”

  On the way out, she pulled a business card from her pocket and wrote “Louisa, call ASAP” on the back. She left it in the center of the kitchen table, along with Leaphorn’s truck keys.

  Bernie slid into the passenger seat of Chee’s police unit, feeling the heat from the upholstery and a film of sweat on her upper lip. Chee maneuvered in behind the wheel and had just started the engine when Largo’s voice bellowed through on the scanner.

  “Chee, is Bernie with you?”

  “Yes, sir. We’re heading back to the Navajo Inn for her car.”

  “Not yet,” Largo said. “We found a vehicle that could be the shooter’s. Bernie needs to give us an ID.”

  3

  “We’ve got the car,” Largo said again. “At least, we think so. At Bashas’. Bernie needs to verify that before it gets hauled in.” An officer at the scene in the parking lot was keeping an eye on the sedan until the tow truck came to deliver it to the impoundment yard, where the Arizona police investigators could go over it for evidence.

  “We’ll be there in ten minutes,” Chee said. “By the way, Louisa may be missing.”

  Largo said, “I’ll put the word out.”

  Bashas’ grocery, on the main drag near the Navajo Nation fairgrounds, was always busy. Merchandise reflected the needs of customers, most of them Diné and many of them rural. Folks could buy basic items in bulk you might not see at a neighborhood grocery outside the reservation: animal feed, Blue Bird flour, granulated sugar in twenty-five-pound bags, gallon tubs of lard. The store stocked canned food in monster sizes, fresh meat, vegetables, and fruit. The sprawling bakery department made sheet cakes for all occasions. On any given day, a dozen women with children or grandchildren in tow populated the aisles.

  The modern, well-stocked market was one of the best things about Window Rock, Bernie thought. She loved to stand in the produce section when the sound of thunder came over the speakers, followed by the mist that sprayed the lettuce and parsley. She could pick up a loaf of bread and a bottle of aspirin for her mother and get a sandwich for those long days when she knew she’d be close to nowhere at lunchtime.

  They spotted the Navajo Police car near the back of the lot. Next to it Officer Brandon Wheeler stood in the hot sun, looking at a dark blue sedan. Bernie and Chee climbed out and headed toward him into a gust of fiercely blowing June wind. Grains of sand bounced off their pant legs and swirled in the hot dry air. Air-propelled plastic bags plastered the wire fence that surrounded the lot and hung like flags from the piñon trees. Bernie didn’t like the wind. It made her uneasy.

  She walked around to the sedan’s right rear fender. It was dented, just as she remembered, and had picked up a coating of silver paint. She noticed a red bumper sticker, “UNM Lobos.” The University of New Mexico, her alma mater, a three-hour, 170-mile drive away in Albuquerque.

  “This is the car,” she said to Chee. “I’m sure of it.”

  “I saw it as I was driving in to help with the search,” Wheeler said. “No one near it. I’ve been keeping an eye on it. No one has touched it since I got here.”

  Considering how old the car was—Bernie guessed the early 1980s—it was in remarkably good shape except for the dent. She looked in through the open window, noticed the wear on the driver’s seat and a patch of duct tape over the upholstery on the passenger side. The backseat was empty, the floors clear. Whoever owned this car took care of it. Except for some sand on the mat beneath the gas and brake pedals, it was clean.

  Chee looked at Bernie, then turned toward Bashas’. “I’m going into the store, ask some questions. I’ll have the manager close it. You follow up on the Arizona plate check. When you’re done on the radio, watch the car so Wheeler can come help with the interviews.”

  Chee had every right to tell her and Wheeler what to do, thanks to Largo putting him in charge of the investigation. Still, she bristled at taking orders from him. She climbed into his unit car, fuming but silent. She lowered the windows and tried to calm down before starting her assignment.

  Wheeler said, “Let Bernie do the interviews. She’s better with people. I can follow up with the radio and watch the car.”

  “Largo took her off the case,” Chee said. “She’s just here for the ID.”

  Chee sprinted toward the building, nearly colliding with a rotund Navajo woman rolling her grocery cart toward them.

  The woman with the cart advanced. She said, “You’re blocking my car.”

  “You own this car?” Wheeler asked.

  The woman glared at him, the look one might give a small, ornery child. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with her hand.

  “Yes. That’s why I’m gonna put in my groceries and head for home once you get out of the way.”

  Wheeler said, “This car matches the description of a vehicle involved in a shooting this morning. We need to impound it and check it for evidence. The tow truck is on the way.”

  The woman’s dark eyes widened. “Is this one of those TV shows where they play tricks on people?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  The woman said, “Not my car.”

  “This is not your car?”

  “This is my car. But my car was not involved in any funny business.” She rummaged in a red purse and held out her hand with a set of keys. The wind stirred her short, cropped hair. “Look, see here?” She switched to Navajo and said, “I need to get on home now.”

  She pushed her grocery cart toward the car’s trunk. Bernie watched from inside Chee’s unit as Wheeler moved to block her.

  “Because this car was involved in a serious crime, we have to check it for evidence,” Wheeler said in English. “Please step away from it, ma’am.”

  “Lots of cars look like this. Do you think I’m a criminal?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m asking you to cooperate with us, ma’am. Please show me your driver’s license.”

  The woman stiffened and stared up at his name tag. “Officer W
heeler, my Fudgsicles are melting. I didn’t have anything to do with anything bad, but I am not happy with you. This is what they call police harassment. If you keep talking like that, they might think you are crazy.”

  Bernie picked up the tone of Shopping Cart Woman’s voice, sensed trouble in the making. Luckily, the license plate check was nearly done; the officer assured Bernie she would be able to retrieve the name of the car’s owner in another sixty seconds.

  “Ma’am, I need to see your driver’s license,” Wheeler repeated.

  The woman said nothing, but her defiant posture spoke volumes.

  Two police cars, uniformed officers, and an angry woman began to draw a crowd. Chee had succeeded in keeping anyone from entering the market, so the would-be shoppers with time on their hands walked over to investigate the commotion. Several bystanders knew Shopping Cart Woman, nodded to her.

  “He wants to arrest me for buying Fudgsicles,” the woman said. “That man has handcuffs. I can see his gun. He’s going to take me to jail for shopping at Bashas’.”

  Bernie heard a low rumble of disapproval from the crowd about the same time as the name on the car registration came back. She hurried to the woman, greeting her in Navajo, introducing herself the traditional way, using maternal and paternal clans. The woman, Gloria Benally, did the same. Gloria Benally, the same name the DOT record search had given her as the car’s registered owner.

  Bernie turned to the dozen people who had gathered to watch. “A good man was shot this morning, and we are searching for a person involved in a shooting. We will open the store when we can. If you can buy your groceries later, I’d recommend that. ”