Wild Penance (18 page)

“You ask Old One,” Momma Anna said.

I thought for a moment about this. Then, suddenly, I had another idea. “Momma Anna, if I have done anything to hurt or offend you, I ask your forgiveness.”

The elder smiled at me, and light from the window twinkled on the surface of one of her eyes. “I forgive you,” she said. “Maybe you need forgive you.”

I was so tired when I got to my cabin that I wedged a chair under the doorknob of my front door and hurried to change into sweats. I went directly to bed for a nap, placing my pistol under my pillow once more and the shotgun on the floor—just under the edge of the bed where I could reach it. It had been a long week full of strange events, odd hours, and little sleep. I held the Old One up between my fingers to look at it while I lay on my pillow. “What are you trying to teach me?” I said aloud, turning it this way and that, as if the answer might be on the stone itself. I tucked it in the pocket of my sweatpants and closed my eyes.

I must have dozed off instantly. When I woke, I felt groggy and hungover, and I had drooled on my pillow. I propped myself up against the aspen log headboard, still drowsy and unable to prod myself fully awake. The sun was low outside and my cabin was in the shadow of the mountain now—I could see the fading sky out the window near my bed. The gray semidarkness inside the house made everything seem fuzzy and out of focus. Within seconds, just as if a trapdoor had opened beneath me, I dropped deep into a memory—one that had held itself in perfect waiting for a time like this, when I let down my guard:

“Jamaica! Jamaica! Jamaica, are you all right?” Roy’s voice called from the other side of the door, his fist thumping demandingly on the thick wood slab. I hoisted myself out of bed feeling like I weighed a thousand pounds. I staggered to the door, removed the chair, and swung the door open.

“Jamaica! For Christ’s sake, I’ve been banging on this door and yelling for you for five minutes! I thought we were going to have to get a medic out here. Boy, you look like you’ve been drug through a knothole. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, give me a minute. I took a nap and . . . I guess I wasn’t quite awake. I got up too fast. I need to sit down.” I turned and walked back to my big chair and carefully lowered myself into it. I laid my head back and looked up at the ceiling, waiting for the room to stop spinning.

The Boss stood in the doorway. I knew he probably didn’t want to come into my cabin, but I couldn’t have stood at the door any longer, and I wasn’t sure I could get up and move now even if there was free land involved.

“Well, your being sick kind of changes things, but I don’t really know how to sort it out yet. Jerry Padilla called me at home and said he wanted to talk with you. He couldn’t find a phone number for you, and wanted to know how to find you, said he needs to question you. I told him you didn’t have a phone, but I would have you meet him at the BLM at seventeen hundred hours. He won’t tell me what it’s about. Do you want me to tell him you’re sick and can’t come?”

I sat up straight in the chair. “No, Boss, I’ll be fine. I’m not sick, just tired. I’ll get changed in just a second, and I’ll come.”

When I got to the BLM, Deputy Sheriff Jerry Padilla was waiting in the lobby. I asked him to come to the employee break room with me and I started a pot of coffee.

“Man, you look worn out. You getting any sleep?” he asked.

“No, I haven’t had much sleep this week.”

“Well, drinking coffee this late in the day isn’t going to help.”

“You’re probably right. My timing stinks. I’m trying to wake up so I can talk to you, but I need to go home right after this and go to bed. I guess I won’t have any coffee after all. Do you want some?”

“Sure, I’ll have a cup. Listen, there’s a new twist. We have a positive I.D. on the body that went over the bridge on the cross on Wednesday. Hey, you probably ought to sit down, Jamaica; you don’t look so good.”

I took a chair.

“It’s a priest, guy we think you might know, name is Father Ignacio Medina.”

“Father Ignacio? But—no! How can he . . .”

Jerry sat quietly and didn’t speak, watching me.

I grabbed the front of my shirt and wadded up a fistful of the cloth. “I can’t believe . . .” I felt short of air. “My book . . .”

“This the priest that was helping you with your book?”

I nodded my head. I felt like I should cry, anything, but I was going numb inside instead.

Jerry continued to watch me. After a minute or so, he reached in his pocket and took out his notebook. He opened it on the table and thumbed to a page filled with writing in black ink. Then he looked up at me again. “The reason I wanted to talk to you is to find out why you were trying to reach him at the Indian school in Santa Fe on Thursday afternoon.”

I didn’t speak.

Jerry’s eyes studied my face, but now he looked down at the notebook. “Woman at the school says, let’s see . . .” He consulted his notes. “ . . . Says you called at about one o’clock that afternoon.”

My skin was tingling, as if my whole body had physically gone to sleep, every muscle full of pins and needles and totally unresponsive. I remembered Father Ignacio’s vigilance at our meeting, his warning:
There is something going on right now. I cannot speak about it. It is not safe . . . You must be very careful . . .
I swallowed hard. I wanted to feel something, but I couldn’t. Instead, I spoke, almost mechanically. “I called to get a name from him. A name that he had given me before, but I had forgotten. The name was written in my book.”

“The book that got stolen?”

“Yes.” I went on, “It was a Spanish name—it was unusual. I’d never heard it before. I couldn’t remember it.”

“So this priest, he’s the one you mentioned Saturday night?”

“Yes. He’s the one who knew about my book, what was in it. In fact, he was the only one who had ever actually seen what I was sketching and writing. He hadn’t really read the whole thing, just a few things I sent him. And he looked at the maps and the drawings in the book, just scanned it, really.”

“And, let’s see, what was his angle?”

“You mean, why was I consulting him?”

“Yeah. Was he some kind of expert or something?”

“Yes. He had written a book about the Penitentes. I read it and looked him up. He hadn’t wanted to see me, but I persuaded him. I only met him the one time. The Catholic Church evidently did not look kindly on his research.”

“Oh? Who told you that?”

“He did. And another priest that I met in Agua Azuela just this morning.”

“This priest in Agua Azuela, is he working on the same stuff?”

“On the same stuff? Oh, no. No, he just held mass there. No, he said—well, actually, he told me that Father Ignacio was . . . that the Church did not approve of the work he was doing regarding the Penitentes. And then he said he thought my book was ill-advised.”

“Well, that makes two of us. So, this priest—what’s his name?”

“Father Ximon Rivera.”

“Father Rivera. So, he knows about your book, too?”

“No. Well, he didn’t. I mean he didn’t until Regan announced that I was writing it.”

“Regan?”

“Regan Daniels. She’s a friend of mine.”

“Regan Daniels,” he said, as he wrote the name in his notebook. “So, let’s see, she’s the woman from Agua Azuela you mentioned, and the priest from Santa Fe—that’d be the late Father Medina—they were the only ones who knew what the book was about.”

“Right.”

“So you don’t think she could have had anything to do with your book getting taken?”

“No. No, absolutely not. First of all, she is a friend of mine. And she’s the only local elder who has given me direct, firsthand accounts of Penitente rituals she has observed. She’s been a valuable resource. She’s told me dozens of stories.”

“Do you know if she knew Father Medina?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know, really. I’m just seeing if there’s a string that ties all this stuff together, but if there is, I can’t see it. So you called Father Medina to try to arrange to see him again, right?”

“Right.”

“But the receptionist told you he wasn’t there?”

“Yes. No. Actually what she said was that he wasn’t available right then. That’s what she always said when I called. The only difference . . .” I closed my eyes and replayed the conversation in my mind.

“The only difference?”

“Well, she hesitated before she said it. For more than a few seconds. And then when I told her I didn’t have a phone and couldn’t leave a number, but I really needed to talk with him, she covered the phone up and talked to someone else.”

Jerry was taking notes on his notepad. After a few seconds, he looked up. “And then what happened?”

“She just said she would leave a note that I called, and she hung up on me.”

Padilla looked up at the ceiling and he tapped his pen on his notepad repeatedly, beating out the rhythm of his thoughts. Finally he stopped tapping and said, “Okay.”

“Father Ignacio, when I met with him, he said something was going on with the Penitentes. He said someone was . . . let me think, how did he say it? He said someone was trying to ‘steal their power.’ And I think he was . . . I don’t know, expecting something to happen. He kept watching the door. He told me it wasn’t safe. He said no one trusts anyone, and no one would trust me.”

“He did, huh?”

“Yes. He kept checking the door, like he was afraid he was being followed. When I asked if he was expecting somebody, he just said, ‘Perhaps.’”

Padilla bit the end of his pen. “Is that right?”

“He said the Penitentes had been betrayed by traitors.”

The deputy’s eyes had thinned to two narrow cracks, his nose wrinkled almost in distaste. He didn’t speak.

“Jerry, what do you know about this crucifixion thing and Father Ignacio?”

“Nothing.” He shook his head. “I don’t know nothing. Like I said, talk to Christine Salazar. I don’t even want to know as much about this case as I do now. Whole idea, a priest—well, the whole thing gives me the creeps.”