A Man Without a Haven Read online

  A Man Without a Haven

  Beverly Bird

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 1

  It was the kind of day her Navajo ancestors had died trying to keep for their own. Shadow Bedonie tilted her head back to breathe in the sun, understanding why.

  The sky was an unbroken bowl of varying shades of blue. It was silver gold near the horizon where the desert wind teased up distant clouds of dust. Overhead, where it met the blazing orb of the sun, it was nearly white. And in between there were a thousand shades of azure and robin’s egg, without a single cloud to mar them.

  Shadow guided her horse along the top of an arroyo, looking down at a narrow stream that trickled through there. Within another few weeks it would be gone along with the last of the rainy season—if these summer months in New Mexico’s high country could be called rainy. The parched land drank water thirstily, leaving scarce evidence of the rare storms. The air was dry and very hot, thin and hard to breathe.

  It was hard country, rugged and stark and unforgiving. Shadow loved it with all of her soul.

  She nudged the horse homeward with her heels, thinking about the time after college when she had left this reservation. She had ached for it, had felt so lost and misplaced without it that she had left the man who had taken her from it and had come back home. She had realized this morning that that had been seven years ago. She wondered if Kevin was still alone and doubted it.

  She shook her head, unconsciously tensing. Her horse felt it and picked up into a rough, weary trot. Shadow let her go, as though they could somehow outrun the truth. But time was like that on this Navajo Res, wandering by almost unnoticed, until one day you sighed and realized the seasons had changed, until you looked in the mirror and saw little sun lines at the corners of your eyes and realized you were thirty years old.

  That had happened today. It was her birthday.

  Thirty. Shadow didn’t want to think about it. It made her feel strangely wild inside, as though she wanted to protest, to fight back, but had no idea what to swing her fist at.

  She rode up onto another rise of land and saw her hogan in the distance, sitting back a little way from a rutted dirt road. Her sheep grazed not far behind it and the rickety old gate of the corral swung back and forth, clattering in the breeze. She decided she would fix it this afternoon. The chore was long overdue and she had nothing better to do, birthday or not.

  Only one thing about the place was not as she had left it—an old Land Rover was parked beside her four-wheel-drive truck. The Rover belonged to her brother, and Jericho had not been venturing very far from his house up on the mountain these past couple of weeks. His wife, Catherine, was very, very pregnant.

  So what was he doing here? Had the baby come or was something wrong?

  Shadow forced her horse into a tired, ground-eating lope and swung breathlessly to the ground when she reached the Rover. Jericho pushed open the door to meet her.

  “Hey,” he greeted her.

  She looked at him closely. His face was a bit haggard but he didn’t seem particularly distraught. “Everything okay?”

  “Right as rain,” he answered, “unless you consider that Paddy and Uncle Ernie have moved in.”

  Shadow’s jaw dropped. Paddy was Catherine’s father, a blustering Irishman who never meddled—he simply barged in. Uncle Ernie was their Towering Rock Clan grandfather, a shaman so old no one truly knew how many years he had seen. Uncle Ernie didn’t meddle either. He just slid in like smoke.

  “Both of them?” she asked, startled.

  “They’re waiting for Catherine to do something.”

  “I don’t think it’s up to her,” she answered dryly.

  “Guess not. The baby was supposed to have been here two weeks ago.”

  Shadow waved him inside the hogan and put a coffeepot on the wood-burning stove that sat in the center of the single room. It was easily a hundred degrees outside, but the interior of the dwelling was cool enough. A breeze puffed sporadically through the open doorway and the heat from the stove rose straight up through a smoke hole in the ceiling. In the winter she could close the hole a little more to contain the heat and warm the place. The hogan was small, but it had everything she needed.

  Everything but someone to tell her happy birthday, to explain to her how seven years had somehow passed without her being aware of it, with absolutely nothing changing in her life.

  Thirty. She shook her head, still amazed by it.

  “Catherine’s mother died having her kid sister,” Jericho was explaining. “Paddy won’t go home to Boston until he’s sure both she and the baby are fine. And you know how Uncle Ernie gets when he likes somebody. He’s taken a shine to Cat, I guess.” He rubbed a tired hand over his eyes. “Anyway, one’s following her around nagging and the other one’s following her around chanting medicine songs, and I needed a break.”

  Shadow looked at him curiously. “How’s Catherine taking it?” His wife was Anglo, a resident with the Indian Health Service. She had adapted to reservation life well enough; in fact she seemed to thrive on it. But Shadow had to wonder how she was handling Uncle Ernie on a live-in basis. Even those who loved him considered him to be mildly eccentric.

  Jericho shrugged, reading her mind. “Cat was acting a few cards short of a deck even before Ernie came.”

  “Hormones.”

  “Yeah?” He took the coffee she offered. “Nasty little buggers.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Her voice was too tight. Shadow flinched. Suddenly she wondered how many times in the past seven years she had even worn a dress. How many times had a man looked at her with anything other than brotherly camaraderie, or, in rare cases like Diamond Eddie, with lascivious greed? Given that it took a man’s help to make a baby, it was doubtful if she would ever know about hormones, Shadow realized. She was surprised to feel her throat close painfully.

  “You okay?” Jericho asked, giving her a hard look.

  “Fine. What are the nasty little buggers doing to her?”

  “I brought her flowers last week and she cried for four days.”

  “That would do it.” Shadow sipped her own coffee, watching him. “But you wouldn’t come down here to tell me Catherine’s gone loopy with estrogen, not even if Uncle Ernie and Paddy were camped right in your bedroom.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, I might. If I had an excuse.”

  “Such as?”

  “Heard something I thought you might like to know. ‘Course, I heard it from Lance, so its validity is open to some discussion.” Lance was a clan relative who had taken to drinking when his children had moved off the Res. Anything he repeated had to be taken with a grain of salt because he was drunk more often than not.

  “I think somebody’s digging up the ruins over in Kokopelli’s Canyon,” Jericho went on. “Lance went hunting out that way last week, up in the Chuska Mountains. Said he saw the chindi ghost of old Kokopelli himself. Probably what he actually saw was a pot hunter.”

  “Oh, hell,” Shadow muttered.

  It had been only a matter of time before someone dared the canyon again, she thought, but she’d put money on the intruder being anything but Navajo. The People had a healthy fear of chindis—Navajo ghosts—and the dead. Th
e canyon was about as haunted and filled with bones as a hole in the ground could get. But chindis wouldn’t stop a determined pot hunter from digging illegally on the Res, not when mere fragments of Anasazi pottery sold for thousands of dollars. The pieces were almost older than time itself. Centuries before the Navajo had come to this red-rock desert, the Anasazi people had dwelled here—and, then, inexplicably, they had disappeared again. The Navajo had arrived to find only traces of the Anasazi’s brief sojourn and they had named them for the Navajo word meaning “old ones,” their predecessors, the ones who came before.

  Most of the Old Ones’ ruins were too remote to be found easily, but there were at least four relatively accessible and renowned sites in the canyon that was named after the Anasazi’s roaming fertility god.

  The only thing that kept most of the hordes of archaeologists and thieves away from the place was the legend of the canyon itself. Those who went in were said never to return. Not all of the bones hidden in the ancient, crumbling ruins were hundreds of years old. Or so they said, Shadow thought dryly. She had been in and out of there once as an anthropology student, and she was still warm to the touch.

  “I’ll drive out there and see what’s going on,” she decided.

  Jericho’s face took on a wary cast. “When?”

  Shadow looked at her watch. “Today. It’s still early enough that I can get in and out before dark.” She didn’t actually believe in the legends—much—but she wasn’t keen on being trapped in the canyon when the moon rose. Still, it was something to do. It was better than mending corral gates.

  Jericho was still scowling. “Don’t you have to work?”

  “Diamond Eddie isn’t expecting me until tomorrow.” She was assistant curator for the Navajo Nation Museum in Shiprock. The place was only open four days a week.

  But her brother knew that. She narrowed her eyes at him. “You don’t even like Eddie.”

  “I don’t trust any man who wears three diamond earrings.”

  “So now you’re worried about him firing me? You’ve told me a hundred times that I should find another job instead of putting up with him.”

  Jericho didn’t answer. Shadow waited. Conversational silences weren’t uncomfortable for anyone raised Navajo—even if they had spent a chunk of their lives in the cities, as she and Jericho had done. Their parents had insisted they go to school in Gallup rather than on the Res.

  “There’s too much death in the canyon,” he muttered finally.

  “So you can do a sing for me when I get back.” Jericho was a shaman himself, and the Navajo had rites to combat exposure to chindi ghosts.

  “Hell, it’s not your responsibility,” Jericho argued. “Notify the tribal police. Let them flush him out.”

  “When? On Navajo time? If you didn’t want me to go out there, Jericho, then you shouldn’t have told me.”

  “If I didn’t tell you and you found out that I knew about it, I’d never hear the end of it,” he snapped.

  Shadow gave a brief nod. She would have grinned if she hadn’t been so preoccupied. She began moving around the hogan, collecting what she would need for the long drive—most notably water. She had broken down once in the desert in the summer months and she wouldn’t be unprepared again. She filled a canteen and looked at Jericho.

  “Besides, you know how it goes with the authorities here,” she went on. “One day of real time equals five days of Res time. The pot hunter will be gone with his loot before an officer can be convinced to brave the chindis and the legend and go in there after him.”

  “So you’re going to go after him yourself like some kind of fearless pit bull?”

  Shadow shrugged. “Why not? Somebody has to.” On impulse she added a flashlight to her duffel bag, although she really intended to be out of there by dark.

  “And one of these days you’re going to get yourself in trouble,” Jericho said tightly. “Those guys can be dangerous.”

  She held up a small revolver for his inspection, then she belted it neatly around her waist. “Jericho, it doesn’t matter if it’s my responsibility. It doesn’t matter if I get paid for it or even thanked for it. It’s the principle of the thing. It’s illegal to dig on the Res. It’s immoral and wrong to disturb the Old Ones’ bones. It’s some kind of heinous thievery to take their pots from their graves and sell them to the highest bidder.” And I can’t stay here today. But she kept that last excuse to herself, not sure if she could explain it even if she wanted to.

  “You and your damned causes,” he complained.

  “They’re all I have.”

  “What about Catherine?” he demanded.

  Ah, Shadow thought, therein lies the rub. “She’s going to have a baby,” she answered quietly. “Women have been doing it for centuries.”

  “What if we can’t get into Albuquerque or Gallup in time?”

  “Then you and Cat will deliver your baby yourselves.”

  Jericho blanched.

  “She’s a doctor!”

  “Things go wrong.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t need me this time. What could I possibly do? Offer moral support?”

  “Well, at least you’ve delivered babies before. You could help in an emergency.”

  “So could Catherine.”

  Suddenly, for one brief, uncharacteristic moment, she wished fervently for a different kind of life, one where nobody needed her ever. Jericho always said she had an unnatural penchant for saving what he called broken doves—the weak, the wounded, the needy. Maybe she did. From her earliest childhood she had been prone to bring home lame, abandoned ponies and Anglo friends whose parents didn’t share the People’s devout love of children. She had established a precedent early on, she realized grimly.

  By now—by thirty—it seemed everyone came to her for every favor they needed. She was always burying pieces of herself to take care of someone else. And somehow, in the meantime, too much of her own life slid right by without notice.

  Thirty years old?

  She realized she was almost desperate to get in her truck and drive away from it all. She slung her duffel bag over her shoulder and started for the door.

  After a moment, Jericho followed her outside. “Be careful.”

  “I always am. These pot hunters are sneak thieves, Jericho. At the first sign they’ve been caught, they turn tail and run.”

  “Then they come back at night.”

  “Not always, and I’ll be gone by then anyway.”

  She climbed into the cab of her truck. By the time she had backed it up to the horse trailer beneath the brush arbor, Jericho had given up the fight and his Rover was headed back down the road.

  Shadow leaned her head against the steering wheel for one rare, vulnerable moment. The fact of the matter was, a “Happy Birthday” would have been nice.

  She straightened and rubbed a hand over her eyes. Her brother wasn’t cold. He cared deeply about those closest to him. Any day now Catherine would have their baby and his head would clear. He would realize that he had forgotten, and he would be appalled.

  In the meantime, there was the shameful truth that she really didn’t want to be anywhere around when his baby was born. The biggest part of her would gaze down upon the child, hold it close to her breast, and her heart would swell for this new life born into their family. But another small, nasty part would whisper, thirty years old.

  Almost too old to be having babies of her own—especially since the next seven years showed every indication of passing the way the previous seven had done.

  She was definitely having an age crisis, she decided. She got out of the truck again to hook up the trailer, unsaddling her horse and shoving the tack into the storage compartment. She brushed down the mare quickly and loaded her on, glancing at her watch only when she was finished.

  It was nine o’clock. Later than she would have liked, but she could still make it. It was about three hours to the Chuska Mountains, then two hours up to Kokopelli’s Canyon, hidden in their p
eaks. The mare would make the last leg of the trip less arduous, she thought. Even if there were complications, she should be there absolutely no later than three o’clock if she rode. That would still leave her a couple hours of daylight to get back down to her truck again.

  No problem. She climbed up into the cab, slamming the door hard.

  * * *

  Mac Tshongely bit back a curse as he carefully maneuvered a potsherd out from beneath several still-connected pieces of vertebrae. The Old Ones tended to bury their dead in their trash middens. They had also been fond of disposing their pottery right along with their corpses. Both habits made digging for shards a messy, spooky business, especially if a man happened to be possessed of any superstitious Navajo blood.

  But his Navajo blood was something Mac rarely chose to think about. As far as he was concerned, bones were just bones. And at the moment they were in the way of the pot he wanted.

  He finally got the shard free and reached a hand behind him without looking, skimming the rocky sand for the brush he had laid there. But he already knew that the piece wasn’t one of the ones he was looking for. For one thing, it was the wrong color and it bore several wavering lines. As his fingers closed around the brush handle, a drop of perspiration freed itself from his brow and landed wetly on the shard.

  His hands moved fast now, drying it, dusting it, before the salt could do any damage. Then he swore again. He doubted if there was a hotter place on earth than this Navajo reservation. Unless it was hell. But it seemed to Mac that the ancient Greeks had attested to a river around that place—presumably a man could dive in and cool off once in a while.

  Not so in Kokopelli’s Canyon.

  He laid the shard carefully on a pallet—he would take it anyway and hand it over to men who dealt with that sort of thing. Finally he straightened, stretching. His thighs felt cramped and achy from squatting so long. Another day gone and he still hadn’t found what he knew was here...somewhere.

  He looked down the canyon from where he stood at its easternmost edge. The walls were bloodred in the dying light, sweeping starkly upward, pockmarked with crevices and treacherous caves. Stunted junipers grew out from the rock, twisting up toward the sun, defying logic. The floor was a maze, angling first north, then south, then turning back on itself entirely. And in places where the cliff walls faced the winter sun, where mountain water had carved chasms in its downward path, were all that remained here of the vanished, ancient Anasazi.