Spider Woman's Daughter Page 8

  “Down the hall on this floor. Follow the signs.”

  Bernie walked past a waiting area, noticing a young blonde in tight jeans pacing back and forth and an elderly couple sitting on a couch.

  The critical care unit was a short hike from the entrance around several angled corridor junctions. The confusing layout had not been designed with consideration for a person already under stress. She checked the overhead signs at each intersection to make sure she stayed on the right path.

  The door to the CCU had a sign with visiting hours posted. Her timing was off, but she walked in.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m Officer Bernadette Manuelito. I need to see Lieutenant Leaphorn.”

  The nurse shook her head.

  “Sorry, but that’s impossible. Doctor—”

  “It’s police business.” She stood taller, steeling herself for an argument. “The lieutenant’s shooting is under investigation.”

  “I didn’t know that,” the nurse said. “I came on duty this morning.”

  Bernie waited.

  The nurse looked up from her computer screen. “Before you interrupted me, I was going to say it’s impossible for anyone to see Mr. Leaphorn right now. Dr. Moxsley, the neurologist, is with him, running some tests.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Hard to say,” the nurse said. “We have a waiting area for the CCU just down the hall. You’re welcome there.”

  “I also need to talk to the doctor.”

  The nurse hesitated. “He’s got a crazy schedule this morning.”

  “He needs to make time for me,” Bernie said.

  “Is this part of the investigation?”

  She paused. “Not exactly. The lieutenant is my—” She used the Navajo word that means one-who-acts-as-leader or one-who-is-respected as a teacher. “He and Mrs. Leaphorn never had any children, and so now I—” She left the sentence unfinished, hoping the nurse would fill in with the assumption that Bernie was the closest thing Leaphorn had to a daughter.

  The nurse gave Bernie a friendlier look. “It must be tough to investigate your relative’s shooting. I’ll ask Dr. Moxsley to find you in the waiting room.” She handed Bernie a pile of papers from a folder on her desk. “While you wait, perhaps you can help us with some of these forms.”

  The CCU waiting space was tiny and crammed with furniture. A girl younger than Darleen with dark hair and a shattered complexion held an infant and walked back and forth, back and forth, in front of the windows. She glanced up when Bernie came in, then looked away. A woman with a plump, lined face and a man with a bushy mustache sat close, talked quietly in Spanish. Everyone wore worry and fatigue like a second skin.

  The best thing about the waiting area was the patio. Bernie took her free cup of aged coffee out where she could see the sky. A chunky man in a black jacket sat at one patio table, a Bible in his lap. She sat at the other.

  Bernie believed in science, but she also believed that human life was more than anybody could keep track of with machines and computers, or put down in equations and reduce to numbers like cholesterol ratings and blood pressure scores.

  The last time she had been in the hospital was in Gallup with Jim’s uncle, Hosteen Nakai. The man had a mind as clear and fast as a mountain spring and a generous heart. She remembered his kindness to her, even before she had decided that Jim Chee would be her husband. He told her, “One day my nephew will be a finer man, a better person than he can see himself being. It will be good for him to have the help of a strong woman. Of one who isn’t afraid of his power or of her own power.”

  In the two years of their marriage, Chee had blossomed into his own gentle power. She saw his fierce sense of brotherhood with his fellow officers and his dedication to the people they all served. Some policemen grew cynical with the exposure to so much evil, but Chee became more determined to make things right. To save the good citizens of the Navajo Nation from those who had lost sight of the Beauty Way. He took the responsibility to help restore the land and its people to harmony seriously. She wished Hosteen Nakai had lived to see the man his nephew had become and was still becoming.

  She remembered Nakai, the great and beloved hataalii, looking tiny and miserable on his hospital bed, filled with cancer. Like an animal in an experiment, not like the valued and beloved elder who knew many songs and sand paintings and had helped his people. She and Chee checked him out of the hospital against his doctor’s recommendation and allowed him to die as he wished in a ramada beneath the stars at home.

  Hospitals made her restless, and she stood and paced. Leaphorn was more vigorous than Nakai. The advances of science, including new knowledge of our human brain and its complexity and resilience, might save his life. But what damage had the bullet done to his mind?

  She watched a cloud shadow move against the building and a pile of thunderheads begin to rise. Rain this afternoon? She went back to the table and studied the paperwork the nurse had given her. Bernie had no answers for its questions: Was the lieutenant taking any medicine? Had he ever had surgery? Did anyone in his family ever have heart disease? Immune system conditions? What was he allergic to? She put the forms down. She opened her backpack and took out a mystery. A few pages later, a man in a white coat with graying brown hair in a ponytail and a laptop walked to her table.

  “Bernadette Manuelito? Grant Moxsley. I’m the one in charge of Mr. Leaphorn’s case.”

  She offered her hand, and he touched it gently and said, “Yá’át’ééh,” with an accent that sounded as though the doctor knew more than a little Navajo. He sat on the chair next to her.

  “I understand you had some questions for me, and I wanted to talk to you before you saw him,” he said. “The injury is very serious. I’ve given the FBI basic information, the type of bullet, stuff like that, as part of their investigation.”

  He paused. “Hospitals all have a lot of rules, and one of the rules is that I should only speak to next of kin. I know from my years with public health in Tuba City that the concept of kinship is different for us than for the Diné.”

  Bernie waited. When Moxsley said nothing more, she said, “I visited his house after the shooting. He had a photo of his late wife. And the wedding picture my husband and I gave him. The lieutenant had no children and he has no sisters or brothers who are still with us.” She glanced toward the hospital ward where the lieutenant lay. “I was the first person to reach him after he was shot. I want to talk to him about what he saw, find out if he knows who did it. So, I would say I’m family and I’m also here on business.”

  Moxsley said, “Would you like me to tell you what I think is happening because of the injury?”

  “Please,” Bernie said.

  He raised the laptop cover and called up images as he explained how the bullet had entered near the temple and progressed through the brain. The good news was that it had not damaged the lieutenant’s spinal cord.

  “There are many things we don’t know about the human brain, but we have a good idea of where to find the control panels for various functions.” Moxsley looked at her with kindness. “The bullet penetrated brain centers crucial for speech, comprehension, memory, vision, and what we commonly call personality.” He showed them to her, tracing the bullet’s journey with his finger.

  “Can he speak? Will he be blind?”

  “I don’t know. For now, your uncle is in an induced coma. His brain swelled with the injury, and we removed part of his skull to reduce the pressure. He looks like he’s asleep, but we think some patients like this hear what’s going on around them. Some respond to touch, some to the sound of a familiar voice. He might respond to you. He might not.”

  “What happens next?”

  “Difficult to predict.” Moxsley closed his laptop. “We’re taking this hour by hour now, for the next few days. I’m sorry I can’t be more optimistic.
We know a lot about the brain, but there’s a whole lot more we don’t know.”

  Bernie said, “The lieutenant is sharper than my husband and me put together. I’ve never seen him give up on a challenge.”

  Moxsley smiled. “That is definitely in his favor.”

  The doctor took his pager out of a pocket, looked at it, pushed a button. “The next forty-eight hours are the most crucial. I’ll be keeping a close eye on him, and he will be continuously monitored by the nursing staff.”

  Monitored, Bernie thought. The word made her think of those electronic bracelets offenders wore on house arrest. In a way, Leaphorn’s condition was the same. He couldn’t make a move, take a breath, without a machine recording it.

  “We are observing him for seizures, for signs of infection, for other complications. When the swelling goes down, we will reattach the bone. In the meantime, his brain mass has room to expand without doing harm to itself. That’s why you’ll see all the bandaging.”

  Bernie nodded.

  “If he survives until the swelling subsides, we will be better able to decide what happens next in terms of treatment.” Moxsley extracted a card from his white smock and gave it to her. “I’ll make sure we list you and your husband as next of kin and that the staff knows you can visit whenever you like. Any other questions?”

  “Do you think he knows where he is or what happened?”

  “No way to tell,” Moxsley said.

  Bernie thought of something else. A long shot.

  “Do you know a Dr. John Collingsworth? I think he has a clinic called AIRC.”

  Moxsley smiled. “Collingsworth isn’t a medical doctor. He’s a PhD, director of the American Indian Resource Center. That’s a great place. They have a fabulous private museum with an amazing collection of Indian art and artifacts, the kind of stuff that people from all over the Southwest come to study. My wife volunteers as a docent there. She gets us in to the museum for free.”

  She’d heard about the center during a course in anthropology at the University of New Mexico, and remembered the story of its origins. A rich couple moved to Santa Fe from Delaware in the 1930s, fell in love with the town and with the Pueblo Indians who lived nearby in villages up and down the Rio Grande. The husband and wife worked to promote Indian rights at a time when Pueblo, Navajo, Apache, and other Indian people couldn’t even vote for president. They also collected beautiful Indian art and used their patronage to keep quality work alive in difficult times. When they died in a car wreck, they left their home, its extensive grounds, and their collection to the AIRC. Bernie had always wanted to see the place.

  “Anything else?”

  She shook her head. “Thank you.”

  “Are you ready to see your uncle now?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Moxsley held the door. Bernie felt cold, nervous, as she walked past the CCU desk and into the medical area. In some rooms a curtain concealed the patient and whoever else was in the tiny cubicle. In others, she could see a prone figure, tubes connecting arms and body parts beneath the sheet to machines. In one room, two people sat in hard-backed chairs by the bed. Medical staff quietly went back and forth.

  They stopped at the fourth room. “Here he is. Good luck finding the creep who did this.”

  Bernie went in alone. Leaphorn lay on his back beneath a white sheet that came to his chin. A tube ran into his left arm from a metal stand; another tube emerged from the sheets into a bag that hung lower on the bed, and another protruded from his mouth. His eyes were closed, his head swathed in bandages. His chest moved up and down shallowly, and the lights on the machines flickered.

  He looked, she thought, like a man whose spirit was deciding if it should stay or if it could go. So very different from the person she had shared breakfast with slightly more than twenty-four hours ago.

  She quietly walked to the bed and put her hand on his arm that didn’t have the tubes. He felt warm. When the time was right, she spoke to him in Navajo. She spoke slowly, softly, but loud enough to be heard over the machines, saying what needed to be said about how she was sorry to have disappointed him, reminding him of her promise. When she was done, she noticed his eyes moving beneath the closed lids. Then the motion stopped.

  Bernie stopped at the nurse’s station to ask about Leaphorn’s notebook.

  “I imagine it’s with the rest of the belongings he arrived with. Check with security.”

  “Where?”

  “Go back down the hall, past the ER. It’s on your left. Watch for the signs.”

  She found a sleepy-looking guard in the office, his feet propped up on the desk.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I need to collect the possessions of one of the patients here.”

  The guard looked up.

  “Are you family?”

  “I’m Officer Bernadette Manuelito, Navajo Department of Public Safety. The person involved is the victim of a shooting we are investigating in conjunction with the FBI.”

  The man came to life, noticed her uniform for the first time.

  “Sure thing.” He moved his feet and brushed dirt off the desktop. He opened a drawer and pulled out a form. Handed it to her with a pen.

  “You’re a long way from home, Officer. What do you think of Santa Fe?”

  “All I’ve seen this trip is the hospital. I’d rather not be here. You know how it is.”

  The guard returned with a clear heavy-duty plastic bag. He gave it to her in exchange for the paperwork.

  Inside, Bernie found the clothes and shoes the lieutenant had worn when he’d been shot. The smaller items in his pockets had been bagged separately. She picked out his notebook and put it in the front pocket of her backpack.

  It was warm outside, but not as hot as in Window Rock. The sun felt good after the chilly hospital rooms. She walked to her car, admiring the view of the Sangre de Cristo range to the east and the blue sprawl of the Jemez Mountains to the west. Whoever built the hospital, she thought, had done visitors a favor by placing the parking lot in this spot. Bernie opened the back hatch, put the lieutenant’s possessions inside. As she put on her seat belt, she noticed the envelope for the AIRC.

  Next stop lunch, then a post office and home.

  She followed directions the security guard had given her to the College Plaza shopping center, passing up fast food restaurants and a couple franchised places in favor of the little café he’d recommended for an inexpensive lunch. It had a cute name, Jambo, and smelled like a rainbow of spices and fresh bread. Bernie sat at a table by the window and opened the menu. She found some things she recognized: lamb stew, lamb burgers, goat stew, and salads. Also, they served dishes she’d heard of but never tasted. And then came the more exotic choices—cinnamon-dusted plantains and a jerk organic tofu sandwich. And “stuffed phyllo,” whatever that was.

  She’d never been an adventurous eater, but aromas from the kitchen tempted her to try something new. If she won the bet with Chee about the FBI checking into Louisa and a murder-for-hire scheme, she’d ask him to take her here. Maybe she’d try that tofu sandwich.

  When the waiter asked for her order, she stuck to what she knew—goat stew and a Coke. Then she took the worn brown notebook out of her backpack.

  7

  Bernie turned the little book over in her hands, feeling the soft leather of its cover. The book had metal rings to hold in the pages, rings that released for refills with pressure on a clasp at the bottom. From the wear on the edges, she guessed Leaphorn had used the book for decades.

  By reading what he’d written here, she would intrude into the lieutenant’s private life again. This seemed more of an invasion than standing in his kitchen or rummaging through his deck. Looking inside the journal felt like snooping in his underwear drawer. Still, she had promised Largo she’d find the lieutenant’s relatives, and the book might hold the key to doing that job.
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  She opened it. The first pages were a printed annual calendar, the year-at-a-glance and then an expansion of each month. The rest of the pages were unlined white paper, some filled with the lieutenant’s precise handwriting. She fanned through, hoping for a heading that read “Contacts” or even “Friends and Relations” and finding nothing like that. Much of what she saw was incomprehensible. He’d filled several pages with doodles—zigzags, half circles with wavy lines beneath, a pattern that resembled stair steps, linked triangles.

  Near the end of the notebook, she came across several lists. One short vertical row of figures:

  5–20 125/85 195

  5–27 140/90 197

  6–5 120/80 194.5

  They reminded her of something she’d seen before, but what? On the next page, the lieutenant had jotted down a column of letters with what might be phone numbers. She scanned the row, found “JC” and two sets of numbers, their home number and Chee’s cell number, next to it.

  She looked up when the waiter brought her Coke. “Would you like some water, too?” He stood with a pitcher in hand.

  “Sure,” she said. “Nobody even asks me back in Shiprock.”

  “Santa Fe has rules about water in restaurants. It’s expensive here, so we try not to waste it.”

  “Good idea.”

  He filled her empty glass. “Your lunch will be here soon.”

  She returned to the little book. More cryptic notes. Numbers that could be case file notations, each with a name—“Hightower,” “Yellowhorse,” “Shelley”—next to it. She copied them down in her own notebook. She’d talk to Chee about all this, see what ideas he could generate.

  On the next pages, more dates and more figures, all without benefit of a heading. Why would he label the pages? He knew what it all meant. She found another set of entries with possible dates. The most recent, about two weeks ago, was followed by “WR/SF 179430–655.” She saw three earlier WR/SF notations with different, lower numbers, but still in the 17 series. WR equaled Window Rock, she thought, and the lieutenant had noted his truck’s odometer readings for his commute to Santa Fe and home again.