The Visitant: Book I of the Anasazi Mysteries (25 page)

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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

BOOK: The Visitant: Book I of the Anasazi Mysteries
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Flame Carrier affectionately said, “I do not know what I would do without you, child. You are my only true friend.”
Redcrop beamed up at her, her eyes filled with love. “And you are mine.” She squeezed Flame Carrier’s arm. “Did you see that Jackrabbit carried Silk Moth home?”
“No, I didn’t, but I’m glad of it. She has endured enough for tonight.”
Redcrop maneuvered Flame Carrier around a heap of cracked plaster, and toward the ladder. “Silk Moth will not be able to prepare her husband will she?”
“No. She will not. I will do it.”
“I will help you.”
Flame Carrier looked at the wide-eyed girl. “I have another job for you. One that is more difficult.”
“Yes?” Redcrop looked up.
“Someone must clean Hophorn’s chamber. It will not be pleasant. From what I have heard—”
“I can do it, grandmother. I’ll start after I take you home.”
“I can go by myself, child, but thank you.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes.” Flame Carrier stood at the base of the ladder, and gently stroked Redcrop’s cheek with the back of her hand. “When I get back, I’ll place your blankets by the coals. They will stay warm until your return.”
Redcrop smiled. “Thank you, grandmother. I will see you soon.”
“Very good, girl.”
Flame Carrier took hold of the ladder, and lifted her feet onto the rungs. As she climbed, she heard the fear in people’s voices. It rang across the plaza like the lingering notes of an echo. By dawn, the terror would have reached gigantic proportions. It would grip them all by the throats. No one would be able to breathe without pain.
Flame Carrier stepped off the ladder onto the roof and looked out across the canyon. Frost glimmered and twinkled in the starlight, outlining every ledge and sheathing the fallen boulders and juniper trees. Straight Path Wash cut a jagged swath of darkness through the shining white blanket.
She turned back to Talon Town. The enormous semicircular structure gleamed, hiding the dark, twisting passageways within. A killer who understood the maze could hide there forever.
Flame Carrier’s stomach knotted as she stepped onto the ladder that led down to the road. Her sandals slipped repeatedly on ice, but she held tight with her hands and managed to make it to the ground without incident.
Several people moved in the shadows cast by the mounds. Flame Carrier saw Wading Bird huddled with his family. His bald head glowed. His gnarled hands clenched at his sides.
“Is there more we can do tonight?” he asked as Flame Carrier neared. The lump in his long nose shone in the silver light.
“No.” She lifted her voice so that everyone could hear her. “Go home! We are all safer in our chambers than standing out here in the open. The murderer is still loose! He may be watching us right now.”
Frightened murmuring erupted, and people began to disperse, slowly heading back toward Hillside Village.
To Wading Bird, Flame Carrier whispered, “The murderer wore the mask of the Wolf Katsina.”
He stared, his eyes jerking wide. “Like the mask—”
“Possibly.”
“Hallowed Ancestors.”
Flame Carrier touched Wading Bird’s shoulder as she passed and continued up the road.
Her legs ached in cold weather, especially her ankles. Every step hurt. By the time she reached the ladder that leaned against the side of Hillside Village, she was favoring her right leg. Flame Carrier panted as she climbed to the roof.
The rich sweet scent of baking squash rose. She savored the smell as she walked, passing three roof entries before she came to her own. Darkness filled the chamber. Without her there to add an occasional twig, the warming bowl had dimmed.
Flame Carrier grasped the top of the ladder, and stood just for a moment, squinting down, before she stepped onto the first rung. A sudden chill shivered her backbone.
She could imagine how Whiproot must have felt, being hit by something heavy, knocked to the ground, slammed in the head before he could rise … then stabbed as he tried to get to his feet. And poor Hophorn, forced to hear the cries, the shuffling feet, to see the men stumble into her chamber in a fight to the death.
What had she seen? What had she
said
? Flame Carrier had forgotten to ask Browser. Well, there would be time enough tomorrow.
A curious scent met her nose as she descended into the darkness. Sage smoke. But her coals came from juniper wood.
The blackness exploded into light as someone tossed a twig onto her coals, momentarily blinding Flame Carrier.
“Who’s there?” she called, and squinted.
Below her, in the corner to her left, a dark figure coalesced from the shimmering darkness.
Flame Carrier’s legs went weak. She clung to the ladder as if it were a life raft in a raging river.
A brittle old voice said, “He is here, you know. Close by, watching us. You must stop walking alone, Matron.”
D
USTY LEANED BACK IN HIS LAWN CHAIR AND TIPPED his chin to the breeze that buffeted the tents. Early that morning, they’d pulled the green rain flies from the tents and attached them to posts to create four ramadas around the central fire pit. It felt much cooler beneath them. Blond hair fluttered around his deeply tanned face. His tie-dyed black-and-white shirt, and Army green shorts, clung to his body like wet snakeskin. The noon temperature sat at an ungodly 108 degrees Fahrenheit. He’d just called an end to work and told the crew to take their two-hour midday break. People had immediately headed for the shade.
Hail Walking Hawk napped in her red tent.
Maureen and Maggie sat to Dusty’s left, hunched over a foldout table that Maggie had brought them from the Park Service headquarters. The wood-veneer top was strewn with the bones of two females. One appeared to be an adolescent girl—Maureen said she was probably eleven or twelve—and the other was the woman Sylvia had excavated, about twenty-two years of age. A magnifying glass, microscope, calipers for measuring the width and breadth of skeletal materials, and a bottle of Lipton’s unsweetened iced tea sat in front of Maureen. She’d braided her long hair and clipped it up in back, but damp black wisps fringed her forehead. At dawn, she’d appeared wearing a white T-shirt and tan shorts. Now, her shirt matched her shorts.
Maggie quietly watched Maureen pick up the magnifying glass and study the length of a femur, the large leg bone. As Maggie leaned forward, short black hair framed her round face, accenting her rich brown eyes. She wore Levi’s cutoffs, black tennis shoes with white socks, and a cream-colored T-shirt.
Dusty gazed across the fire pit, between two tents, and down
the length of the canyon to the west. The cliffs wavered like golden phantoms. Not a single cloud adorned the pale blue sky, which meant there was no relief in sight. Without an afternoon thundershower, the heat would remain high well into the evening.
Sylvia rummaged around in the ice chest to Dusty’s right. “God. This heat is almost too much even for me.”
Locks of soaked brown hair straggled from beneath the brim of her straw hat and glued themselves to her freckled cheeks. She looked like a skinny drowned rat. Her soaked khaki shorts, and brown tank top, had a spiderweb of muddy folds where her perspiration had mixed with the tan dirt. She dragged two cans of Coke from the chest, and grabbed a plastic bag of snacks. As she handed one of the Cokes to Dusty, she said, “I feel like the Wicked Witch of the West:
I’m melting, melting.
”
“Let’s not talk about witches, hmm?”
He glanced at the open tailgate of his Bronco. He’d carefully packed the
basilisco
out of sight, buried beneath neatly labeled brown paper sacks, soil specimen bags, and Ziplocs. Maggie and Mrs. Walking Hawk, of course, did not know he’d mapped and collected it—as he would have any other artifact.
Dusty popped the top and took a long drink of the cold sweet liquid. It went down like the nectar of the gods. “We’ll see how the temperature is later this afternoon. If it hasn’t dropped to below one hundred by three, we might just take the rest of the day off.”
“Hallelujah,” Sylvia said.
“Don’t hallelujah yet. If we take the afternoon off, we’ll go over to the headquarters, take showers, and refill the water jugs. After that, I want field notes updated and an inventory done on the collections to make sure the artifact bags match the field specimen log.”
“Ugh,” Sylvia said, and walked over to the ramada in front of her tent. She dropped into her lawn chair and set her bag on the ground. For several seconds, she held the cold Coke can to her forehead, then rubbed it over her sweaty neck, before finally opening it, and swallowing half the can in four gulps. “If I pass out, just leave me until dark.”
“Well, if you feel it coming on, throw me the rest of your Coke. We’re running low.”
Sylvia clutched the can to her chest. “Dale is supposed to bring supplies tonight. Do you think we ought to call and tell him to bring two more cases of Coke and another six cases of beer?”
Maureen looked up, shook her head in disgust, and went back to rearranging her bones.
Dusty said, “Might not be a bad idea.”
Sylvia tipped her can up, and finished her soda, then reached for the snacks. She dragged out her favorite meal: a package of flour tortillas, a bag of those awful little cheese-flavored fishes, and two strips of teriyaki jerky. She laid out a tortilla, filled it with cheezy fishes, rolled it up, and took a bite. In between crunches, she ripped off hunks of jerky and chewed.
Dusty made a face. “I can feel the rigor mortis settling into your blood vessels.”
Around a crunchy mouthful, Sylvia said, “Don’t you ever look at those ‘food group’ charts they plaster on the college dormitory walls? A perfectly balanced diet is white, yellow, and brown.”
“You’re supposed to
read
the posters, Sylvia, not scan the colors as you pass. Those white, yellow, and brown things are cheese, bread, and meat. Not polysorbate substitutes.”
Sylvia took another bite. “You should talk. Your favorite meal is sour-cream-and-onion potato chips, washed down with brown bog scum.”
“At least I get my vegetables.”
A broad smile spread across Sylvia’s face. She said, “God bless America.”
Maureen scowled at the two of them. “Nero fiddling.”
“Fiddling with what?” Sylvia asked with genuine interest. “Wasn’t he like a king or something?”
Maureen went mute. She lifted a brow, and something akin to puzzled dismay crossed her face. “The American school system is certainly going to bring about the Second Coming. I’m sure God wants your history to end as much as everybody else does.”
Dusty reached for the paper bag of snacks by Sylvia’s chair, and pulled out a big package of jalapeño crackers. “Hey,” he said. “I didn’t know you’d bought these.”
“Yeah, I thought we needed more fiber in our diets.”
“I love these.” Dusty opened the bag and ate one of the green
jalapeño-shaped crackers. “Umm-umm.” He pulled out another one, and held it up for Maureen to see. “What sort of god could destroy a people with this kind of cultural legacy?”
Maureen studied the cracker through slitted eyes. “The sort who realizes Canadians should inherit the earth.”
Sylvia tore off another hunk of jerky. “You and cockroaches. You’d better start stocking up on Raid.”
Dusty lowered an eyebrow. “If Canada’s so great, how come Quebec wants to succeed? Not enough Tim Horton’s?”
“I believe you mean
secede
, you moron. As in secession, to leave a political body.” Maureen gave him a disgusted look.
“Yeah, well, if you ask me, those guys in Quebec just want to join the United States so they can unthaw.”
“Unthaw?” Maureen lifted a pair of stainless steel calipers. “How does one ‘unthaw?’ Either you thaw, or you freeze. Or is this another example of the way Americans are exterminating the English language?”
Dusty dug out a handful of the spicy crackers and shoved them into his mouth. He washed them down with the last of his Coke, stood, and went to sift through the ice chest. Around the collection of half-melted cubes and bottles, soggy pieces of labels swam. He grabbed a naked bottle of what looked like root beer, and went to sit down again. As he unscrewed the lid, he gestured to the skeletal remains. “So, tell me how those bones disprove my war and slavery theory?”
“I need to see the other skulls, first, Stewart. The ones that are partially exposed, and currently covered with black plastic, as well as the ones that are still under rocks.”
He had been going very slowly with the Haze child burial, making sure that every curiously shaped pebble was documented, just in case it turned out to be an artifact under the microscope. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll have the Haze child, and his mother, pulled. Sylvia can finish burial number three, too, I think.”
“Yeah, boss,” Sylvia said with a nod.
Maureen held up the chunk of bone she’d been studying, and turned it over in her hands. “I can already tell you, though, that this was a very sick group of people.”
Sylvia took a big bite of white and yellow, and slurred, “How do you know?”
Maureen placed two malformed pieces of bone together. “You may not recognize them, but you’re looking at the eleventh and twelfth thoracic vertebrae. They’ve been eaten away by infection. For it to have so severely eroded the anterior bodies of these vertebrae, this poor girl must have had a huge paravertebral abscess. I’ll bet the abscess cavity contained ten cubic centimeters of pus, enough to … What’s the matter?”
Maureen squinted at Sylvia who had an enormous half-chewed mass of food in her cheeks. She looked like a wide-eyed, but well-fed, chipmunk.
Dusty leaned forward. “Okay, so she was filled up with pus. What caused it?”
“For a twelfth thoracic lesion? Rampant tuberculosis. This girl must have been in constant pain. Her back muscles would not have relaxed in any position. She would have suffered incapacitating spasms, and probably had difficulty standing, let alone walking. I’d even wager she had to support her upper body with her arms while sitting, or the pain of the collapsed vertebrae would have been unbearable. Just the pressure of the gigantic pus sack on the nerves—”
Sylvia made a disgusting deep-throated sound.
Dusty said, “I thought tuberculosis was a lung disease?” “Pulmonary tuberculosis is. What we’re seeing here is a case of advanced extrapulmonary tuberculosis, the type that affects the body outside of the lungs. Extrapulmonary tuberculosis infects the joints, eyes, lymph nodes, kidneys, intestines, even the larynx, and skin. When the tuberculosis bacteria enters the brain, it causes meningitis, meaning it attacks the meninges—the three membranes that cover the brain. As the membranes swell, the pressure inside the skull changes, producing violent headaches, often accompanied by vomiting and disorientation. When I was in Iran several years ago, I dissected the brain of a tubercular victim with so many abscesses, it literally oozed in my hands.”
Maureen propped her elbows on the card table and extended her fingers, as if Dusty could see them dripping.
Sylvia choked down her lunch and flopped back in her chair with a sour expression on her freckled face. “God,” she said. “No more yellow in my diet.”
“Who’s going to finish all your Coors?” Maggie asked.
“Not me. I don’t drink anything that smells like a fire hydrant. I’d rather die,” Dusty vowed and unscrewed the lid on his root beer.
Sylvia said, “I can’t wait to see what Maureen finds when she dissects you. Or worse, doesn’t find.”
Dusty’s blond brows lowered. “Don’t you dare bring up Cortez again.”
Sylvia grinned, but Maggie and Maureen gazed at him as if they hadn’t the slightest idea what he was referring to.
When Maureen’s right brow arched, Dusty rushed to say, “Let’s get back to the bones. All right, tell me how this tuberculosis bacteria works? It’s passed through sneezing and coughing, right?”
Maureen nodded. “Primarily, yes, though it can also be passed by contact with items touched by an infected person or even by drinking unpasteurized milk from a cow with tuberculosis.”
“How long is a person contagious?”
“An untreated person can be contagious, off and on, for his entire life. I’ve seen cases of long-latent tuberculosis suddenly flare up, particularly in older people, and cause epidemics in third world countries.”
Dusty crossed his legs and propped his root beer on his knee, wondering how the Anasazi would have interpreted the disease. He remembered hearing an elderly Zuni woman talk about an illness that had carried away a number of her people during the 1940s:
“Their blood turned to water, and came out their mouths mixed with white spots. Some of them took a long time to die. We could do nothing for them. Witches caused it. They buried bad medicine bundles around the village. Whenever anybody stepped on one of these bundles, they got the sickness and died.”
Maureen said, “The tubercular lesions aren’t the only interesting thing about these bones though.” She picked up the battered skull of the young woman. Dusty could count at least three cranial depression fractures, dents, on the right side of her head. “Did southwestern peoples practice cannibalism?”
Dusty glanced up sharply. The issue was hotly debated in the
southwest. “Tim White, Christy Turner, and I say ‘yes,’ but there are a lot of people who want to slit our throats for that. Why do you ask?”
Maureen picked up her magnifying glass and studied the top of the skull. “There are unusual cut marks on this skull, and several of the long bones.”
Sylvia wiped her hands on her dirty shorts, and reached for the bag of jalapeño crackers. “Are you sure they aren’t marks left by animal teeth? Mice? Wolves?”
“I’m sure. These are long, straight cuts. Rodents make parallel marks from the incisors that look like gouges under the microscope. The canines and carnasials … uh, wolf fangs, leave irregular shallow grooves. These cuts look like deep
v
’s, as though someone carved through the muscles, to the bone, and sliced the meat off in long strips. Only sharpened stone tools make this kind of incision.”

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