Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 120, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 733 & 734, September/October 2002

The Path of Bones by Mary Freeman

When she’s wearing her mystery writer’s hat, the author of “The Path of Bones” goes by the name Mary Freeman. That byline appears on an ongoing mystery series for Putnam Berkley, and with the publication of Garden View, in May of 2002, the books in that series numbered four. As Mary Rosenblum, the author has written several science fiction novels as well as many science fiction short stories. Her new story for us is her first short mystery.

“What if there is no water?” Panting, Teo scrambled up the boulder behind him, his brown skin slick with sweat. “What if there is nothing?”

Jeremiah Apple paused at the crest of the stone, aware of the lightness of his water bottle and the fear in Teo’s voice. The desert breathed on his neck, its touch light and dry. “There’ll be water.” He stroked his hand across the sensuous curve of the stone. “Water shaped this,” he told the boy. “The guy who mapped this hole put the contents at five thousand gallons or more. There’ll be something. And if there isn’t,” he went on, holding out a hand to the skinny Teo, “I left a cache about a half-day’s walk from here. We’ll be all right.”

“Okay.” Teo scrambled up beside him, politely ignoring the offer of assistance.

His fear wasn’t simply suppressed, it had vanished, like drops of water spilled on the burning rocks of this desert land. That was why he had let the boy join him on what would be a week-long hike into the desert to check water holes for Fish and Game. Normally, he hiked the deserts alone. He scrambled up the next cascade of boulders.

“Ah.” The syllable escaped him involuntarily, and he paused, hands on a hot curve of the sandstone that had been rounded and shaped by millenia of flowing water. The tinaja lay before him, round as an earthenware jug, twenty feet across, its lip a soft curve as if carved by human hands, filled with a silvery treasure of water. Above would be another. And another, funnels and traps for the occasional rains that walked this parched land.

“Wow, look at that!” Shoving up beside him, Teo said a rapid Hail Mary in Spanish, then sneaked an embarrassed glance at Jeremiah. “All that water, and man, it’s burning all round.” His voice was hushed, as if he were in church.

A bee bounced off Jermiah’s cheek, reoriented, then dived to the edge of the water to pause and sip. Slowly, Jeremiah slipped his cupped hands beneath the silver skin and raised a dripping handful. Tiny motes danced in the water, fairy shrimp or clam shrimp, ostracods, a few Triops even. He closed his eyes and bent his head to it, letting it flow over his lips, rich with the taste of life.

“Hey, there’s stuff in the water.” Teo had filled his water bottle, was regarding the shimmering dance of creatures with a jaundiced eye. “You drink that?”

“They’re clean,” Jeremiah said, and Teo shrugged. And drank.

They stripped and soaked in the hole, faces turned to the narrow lane of endless sky above, heat on the face, cool water a blessing and an amazement. After, they got out and scrambled naked up to the next tinaja and the next, Jeremiah keeping mental books in his head.

Three thousand gallons maybe, he figured. After the fourth pool, they found sand floors and crusted scums of dried algae as testament to vanished water. Global warming? Maybe. Or just a dry year. Rain walked a random path out here. Jeremiah made his notes and recorded the GPS coordinates. That last man to record these watering spots for Fish and Game had had a compass only. He had not done a half-bad job.

In the afternoon heat they scrambled down the tumble of water-smoothed boulders that guarded the water and descended once more to the smooth floor of the bajada.

“Hey, I bet Ramon knows this hole,” Teo said. “He knows all the water around.”

“I bet he does.” Jeremiah laughed, because he had met Teo’s uncle, Ramon Montoya, at another hole not too far from here. “So how come your uncle went to Los Angeles?”

“He went to see my aunt. She is a teacher, and he will ask her for money.” Teo gave him a considering look. “He told me not to tell my grandmother, but he would not mind, I think, if I tell you. It is for my college. He found a treasure, and he needs the money to get it.” Teo’s eyes glittered with conspiracy. “But it is a secret. You understand?”

Jeremiah said nothing at first, although he felt a moment of alarm that the quiet, hardworking Ramon might have been tricked by some Anglo with a treasure map and a glib story. It didn’t fit his perception of Ramon. “I won’t tell anyone,” Jeremiah said.

They didn’t speak of Ramon again, moving without conversation in the rhythms of hiking in desert heat. The sun leaned on you and thoughts dwindled to simple observation. Bone. Rock. Scat. Some of the bones had belonged to small creatures. Some might be human. People had lived in this land for millennia. Swallows of warm water kept the tongue moist, but didn’t allay thirst. Thirst was a sensation in the bones out here. It inhabited you, drawing you into the moist core of your being.

The sun was setting as they reached the level stretch of ground where Jeremiah had intended to sleep. He had cached food here a week ago, and more water in plastic jugs. A huge ocotillo raised octopus arms above the site, and the containers of food were intact in their rock shelter. A scorpion retreated, sting at the ready, as he gingerly fished them out. Teo was already spreading out the camping pad and old flannel sheet that served as his bed.

“Look.” Jeremiah pointed out across the flat plain of the bajada. “You can see them best at dusk. Or in the moonlight.”

Teo rose, squinting, caught his breath. “Paths. Who made them out here?”

“People going to water.” The trails glimmered, faintly paler than the surrounding rock and sand, beaten hard by thousands of years of feet making their way to those pools of water in the stone. They converged like veins, scattered with the bits of old bones of the ones who had not made their way to the end. Dust rose in the distance and Jeremiah squinted against the fading gleam of sunset, reaching for his compact binoculars. Pickup. It was following a shallow wash, heading in the direction of the distant town. Light glittered on the windshield and Jeremiah made out the Sheriff’s Department logo as the truck followed the twisting wash. As it drew parallel to them, the truck slowed, halted. Jeremiah walked over to it, bending down some to look through the open window.

“I hoped it was you.” Deputy Hardy Jamison peered across the seat, his freckled face red from failed sunscreen. “Glad it’s not another one of those damn college kids out for a hike.”

“You lose a college kid?” Jeremiah asked.

“Nah. A couple of them found another one of those godforsaken wetbacks out there, dried out like jerky. How do they think they’re gonna walk five days through this heat with a single gallon of water?” He turned his head and spat through the open window. “Least I scared the kids out of here. Told ’em a few stories.”

Jeremiah now noticed the body bag in the bed of the pickup. It happened often. You found the trails of castoff clothes, shoes, sometimes even a water jug with water still in it, as the sun sapped sanity and sent the unfortunate border-crossers stumbling into the washes to die. Still they came, to pick watermelons, to clean houses. And still, they died.

“What is it?” Teo trotted up, his face alive with curiosity. “A dead one?” Then his face froze, turning in an instant to a carved mask, the color of the tinaja they had visited. With a cry, he scrambled over the bed of the truck, grabbing at a dusty daypack propped against the side of the bed.

“Hey!” Jamison burst from the cab. “Get your hands off, kid!”

But Teo ignored him, babbling incoherently in Spanish, now fumbling with the zipper of the bag. Jeremiah grabbed him, swung him kicking and struggling out of the truck, grappling with the boy’s wiry strength. “Knock it off, Teo! What’s wrong with you?”

“Ramon. It is his. His pack.” Teo finally managed to get the words out in English.

“I thought he was in L.A.” Jeremiah kept his grip on Teo. “Maybe it just looks like his.” He looked at Jamison. “Any ID or anything?”

“Nothing but a few clothes.” Jamison shrugged, his expression faintly curious. “Who did you think this belonged to, kid?”

“His uncle.” Jeremiah answered for Teo. “He left for Los Angeles five days ago.” He looked at Teo, then at Jamison. “Maybe we better look.”

Jamison hesitated, shrugged, then reached for the zipper, giving them both one last doubtful glance.

Better to see a man dead from thirst than to imagine Ramon in that bag. Besides, Jeremiah had heard the story of Teo’s arrival in this country. He nodded at the deputy, who shrugged and pulled the zipper down.

Teo cried out — a raw, wordless sound. “Close it,” Jeremiah snapped. He turned Teo’s rigid body to face him. Teo resisted for a moment, then stood slack in Jeremiah’s hands, staring down at the ground.

“This isn’t an illegal.” Jeremiah met the deputy’s sceptical gaze above the boy’s head. “Ramon Montoya is a citizen. He’s the foreman at Robeson’s ranch.”

“Oh, him.” The deputy shoved his hat back on his head and scratched his scalp, looking faintly uncomfortable. “He must have taken a wrong turn this time. Everyone knows he’s a coyote...”

“No!” Eyes blazing, Teo leaned against Jeremiah’s grip. “He finds people out here, he shows them where to go, to find water. He does not take money. He does not...”

“Teo. Enough.” Jeremiah kept his arm around the boy as he strained against it, his fists clenched, face mottled with unshed tears. “He wouldn’t get lost and die out here. Not Ramon,” Jeremiah said. “He knows where the water is. This is something else.”

The deputy shrugged again and sighed. “I only know what I see.” He looked from Teo to Jeremiah. “You want to ride back?”

Jeremiah nodded. “We’ll get our gear.” He went back for their packs, followed by the silent Teo. The boy gathered his sleeping pad, his eyes black holes into an unreadable void. Jeremiah put the food and water jugs back into their cache at the ocotillo’s foot. He left the water jugs visible. He always did. He had many caches. If the water here was gone next trip, the person who had taken it had more need of it than he.

The sun had vanished, and night seemed to flow up from the rocks and crevices in the ground. The sky blazed with stars, their fires undimmed by moisture or clouds. Squeezed between them in the pickup’s cab, Teo stared out into the yellow splash of light across the rocks, his body swaying to the jolting progress of the pickup.

“When Ramon left, did he say anything about meeting anyone?” Jeremiah asked as they reached the faint jeep track that wound east, toward the town of Sweetwater. Teo shook his head, said nothing. “There’s my truck,” Jeremiah said. He spoke to the deputy, pointing to where he’d parked it in a small stand of juniper. He’d left water there, too, in the bed, where anyone who found it would not need to break a window to take it. The jugs were there, still blood-warm to the touch, still full. “I’ll take Teo home, and tell Ramon’s mother.”

“Sure.” Jamison sounded relieved. “I appreciate it, thanks.” The pickup with its dark burden disappeared down the track, its tail-lights glowing like embers through the haze of dust, dwindling quickly.

The deputy did not want this to be a murder.

Jeremiah tossed their packs into the truck bed and started the engine as the still-silent Teo scrambled into the front seat. Jeremiah put his hand on the shift lever, but didn’t put the truck into gear. “He wouldn’t have died of thirst there,” he said. He was less than a day’s walk from water. “They’ll do an autopsy, find out how he died.”

Teo gave no sign that he had heard a single word.

“Who would want to kill Ramon, Teo?”

The boy’s body flinched, as if Jeremiah had jabbed him with a stick. “No sé,” he whispered.

Jeremiah reached over and put a hand on his shoulder, gripped hard. Ramon had told him how Teo’s parents had died in a coyote’s locked and abandoned van with six other illegals. Only the infant Teo had survived. A miracle, Ramon had told him. Jeremiah put the truck into gear and bumped back up to the jeep track, turning eastward, toward town. They skirted the main street and small scatter of residential homes, turning off to the north, following another jeep track through scrubby rangeland to the piece of land that Ramon was buying from his boss, Wallace Robeson. An antelope crossed in front of them, eyes reflecting greenly as the headlights froze it, then vanishing into the darkness with a flash of brown and white. The driveway to Ramon’s house was marked by a battered mailbox on a cottonwood post anchored in a heap of rock. The house itself was small, some homesteader’s hand-built effort. Sun had silvered the warped boards and rusty sheet metal roofed it.

Before they had even reached the house, a dark shape moved on the rickety porch that shaded the south-facing door. Teo’s grandmother, Ramon’s mother. His mouth suddenly drier than the desert could make it, Jeremiah killed the engine. Teo was already climbing out, moving slowly, as if something might break if he hurried. He walked over to the small, straight woman in the faded dress, speaking softly, his voice trembling. The old woman raised her head, her eyes unreadable in her weathered face, veiled in shadows. Then she covered her face with hands curved like claws, and the sound of grief she made raised the hairs on Jeremiah’s neck.

Teo took her arm, and with an ageless maturity led her back into the dark house. Neither of them turned to look at Jeremiah.

Jeremiah turned the truck around and retraced his path toward town. He had rented a room by the month at the grimy little motel in the center of town, but the thought of sleeping indoors tonight in the stuffy room that smelled of cigarettes and old sex nauseated him. He turned onto the main street and pulled around the bulk of the tiny City Hall to park outside the sheet-metal and brick entrance with the fading sign: Sheriff’s Department. Light seeped through the grimy glass and bars of the single window. Someone peered through the peephole when he knocked on the door. Jeremiah waited, and it finally swung open.

“I figured I was gonna hear from you.” Deputy Jamison stood aside as Jeremiah entered. An inner door, handleless, formed a sort of air lock into the three rooms that formed the sheriff’s office and jail. The two barred cells were empty, the metal bunks bare. A mouse skittered across the concrete floor and vanished behind one of the seatless johns in the cells. Concrete-block walls sweated musty humidity, and the air was thick and stale.

“Coffee?” Jamison hefted a pot, a mug in his other hand.

Jeremiah nodded, accepted the chipped dimestore mug with the permanent stain around its inner rim.

“We’ll send the body to the M.E. in the morning.” Jamison tilted back in his chair, his eyes on a faded rodeo calendar on the wall. “He sure looks like somebody who died of thirst to me. I seen enough of ’em. How many days did the kid say he’d been gone?”

“Five.” Jeremiah sat down in the single straight chair opposite the desk, eyes on the wisps of steam curling from the mug.

“M.E.’s gonna find out he died of thirst. Bet you ten.” Jamison’s voice was lazy, but his eyes flicked sideways toward Jeremiah, quick as a lizard scuttling across a hot rock.

Jeremiah nodded and picked up his mug. “He might. You know, if you hadn’t run into Teo and me, what would’ve happened? Just another poor sucker trying to cross.”

“You’re sayin’ something kind of ugly here.”

“I guess.” Jeremiah smelled the burned bitterness of the coffee, set it back on the desk untouched. “Who doesn’t like Ramon?”

“Good question.” Jamison shrugged, frowning, his eyes thoughtful. “I called Robeson, his boss. According to him, he’s a real gem of a foreman. Hell, he told me he sold some land to him.”

It wasn’t land Wallace Robeson cared much about, Jeremiah guessed, rocky and poor range. But Ramon had known there was water there and Robeson didn’t.

“His mother was housekeeper for Robeson’s dad. She took care of the old man after he had his stroke, up until he died.” Jamison pulled a crumpled pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket, shook one out. “Ramon didn’t come out here until she took in the baby. He was in California. Maybe this has got to do with California.”

“Seen any strangers around lately?” Jeremiah drawled. “That was a long time ago.”

“Some things last a long time.” Jamison exhaled a drifting cloud. “I can’t believe those damn college kids out there. Jeeze, don’t they grow brains anymore? Maybe they figure because it’s a wildlife refuge it’s like a big park. With running water and campsites. Idiots.” He dragged on his cigarette, scowling. “If they don’t die of thirst, some crosser will knife ’em for their hundred-dollar hiking boots.”

Unlikely, Jeremiah thought. The time somebody broke a window in his truck, all they had taken was the water jug. They’d left the expensive digital camera on the floor of the cab, undisturbed. He hoped they had made it through. Tired clear to his bones suddenly, Jeremiah got to his feet. “Thanks for the coffee.” He carried the cup to the small grimy sink, dumped it out, and rinsed it.

“I’ll let you know what I find out,” Jamison said, propping both boot heels on the desk in front of him.

Jeremiah let himself out. The lights were off in the motel down the street. He fingered his room key, then got into his truck and drove down Main Street and away from town. When he was far enough out, he left the truck near a lone saguaro and hiked out onto the bajada with his bedroll and pack. The moon gleamed like a silvery sickle, razor-edged, and the ancient paths worn in the sand converged in the distance, leading to water, to life.

He drove back up the road to Teo’s home in the bright glare of morning, the air blowing in through the window already hard with heat. Nothing stirred when he pulled up in front of the gray, slab-sided house. A lizard skittered from the brief shade of the porch and insects churred. His footsteps grated on the gravelly soil as he walked up the path to the front door. It stood ajar. “Teo?” Jeremiah tilted his head to listen, but no stir answered his call. He stepped onto the warped boards of the porch, the planks sinking slightly beneath his weight, groaning softly to themselves as he knocked. “Teo?”

A rickety table and chair stood in the center of the room. A propane burner with a black iron pot on it stood on a scabby bureau drawer at the side of the room. Wood ticked in the increasing heat. Jeremiah left the empty house and drove into town. The Fish and Game contract nudged at him. He should take a shower, get some breakfast, and, if he couldn’t find Teo, head back out into the refuge again. But as he turned down Main, he spied Jamison on the sidewalk, in front of City Hall. He waved, and Jeremiah pulled over to the curb.

“You want to come along?” Jamison flicked his cigarette butt into the street. “I’m heading out to where I found Montoya.” He looked up and down the street, empty in the wash of heat and light except for a scrawny yellow dog lounging beneath a parked pickup. “Medical examiner called this morning. He died of thirst, about a day and a half ago. Heat. Exposure — the usual. Had a bruise on his head, took a pretty good clip.” He looked down thoughtfully at the smoldering butt on the softening asphalt. “M.E. said he’d been tied up. For a long time. Gagged, too.” He stepped off the curb and ground the butt out with his boot heel. “Hell of a thing,” he said, and spat.

They drove out into the bajada in the Sheriff’s Department truck, the four-wheel-drive rig slithering through soft sands and jolting across hard rocky shoals. Bunch grass, saguaro, prickly pear, and ocotillo patched the dun land with stubborn life. When rain chose to walk here, flowers would bloom in what seemed to be hours, yellow spiny daisy, purple aster, and broom snakeweed. Jeremiah stared at the landscape as it wheeled slowly by, not really seeing it. “Teo — Ramon’s nephew — he said something about a treasure,” he said at last.

Jamison gave him a sharp look, then went back to wrestling the rig through soft sand that threatened to bog them down.

“Ramon was going to L.A. to borrow money to find it. I don’t think he meant some kind of treasure-map scam.”

Jamison grunted, but didn’t say anything until they’d cleared the sand and climbed a low ridge of rocky ground. “Haven’t heard of any treasure around here. Story like that would get around fast.” He turned off the engine and the truck filled instantly with the sibilant rasp of the wind. “Right there,” he said, getting out. “By that pile of rock.”

Jeremiah followed the deputy as he walked over to the rocks carrying a roll of yellow crime-scene tape, careful to stay in Jamison’s tracks. The deputy hadn’t been careful on his last trip out here. Neither had the college kids who had found Ramon. Footprints scuffed the oddly smooth and sandy ground around a faint impression that might have once been occupied by a stretched-out body. Ramon had died on one of the ancient paths. Jeremiah lifted his head, staring into the shimmering heat in the direction the body had faced. “He was heading to that canyon.” He nodded. “There’s water there, way back in a crack in the rock.”

Jamison cursed once under his breath and began to string the tape around the impression. The neon-yellow strip fluttered in the wind, obscenely bright, out of place in this tan and ochre land. Jeremiah took his eyes away from that so-close water and began to scan the ground where Ramon had lain. He had crawled, or rather dragged his body along for a while. Jeremiah walked slowly along the tortured track, all thought condensed to a knot of rage in his chest. Thirty yards. Fifty. He must have been at the brink of death when he’d been dumped out here. Jeremiah halted, then retraced his steps to look at the tracks behind Jamison’s truck. “This is the truck you were driving yesterday, right?” he called back to the deputy.

“Just got the one.”

“Looks like maybe somebody dumped him out in that wash, over there.” Jeremiah pointed.

Jamison followed the blurred trail of terrible effort, then squatted to stare at the parallel marks of tires in the sand. He sucked his cheeks in thoughtfully. “Pickup, looks like. Why don’t you just stay put for a minute, okay?”

Jeremiah leaned against the shaded side of the pickup, watching Jamison as the deputy began to comb the area. All softness of manner left him, as if he’d tossed aside a shirt before beginning to work. Bent over the ground, his face taut with concentration, he walked a slow spiral across the ground where Ramon had struggled and died, placing his feet lightly and carefully. Jeremiah was impressed in spite of himself.

“Three-quarter ton, I think.” Jamison straightened. “Drove in and dumped him out, turned around and left. Before dawn, I bet. Figured he wouldn’t make it through the day. Bring the truck.” Without waiting for an answer, he began to walk back along the line of tire tracks, his pace leisurely, as if out for a stroll, eyes sweeping the ground ahead, his expression intent.

Jeremiah slid behind the wheel and started the truck, creeping along to the side in first gear as the deputy searched. After a half mile, the deputy reclaimed his truck and drove along beside the track, paralleling its twisting trail until, a little after noon, they crossed a jeep track and lost it.

“Bet you ten bucks he’s heading straight back to town.” Jamison’s face was grim as they accelerated along the beaten track. “He sure doesn’t act like he’s worried about anyone following his tracks.”

“Why should he be?” Jeremiah shrugged. “If those kids hadn’t stumbled over Ramon, who would have found him?” There were plenty of human bones out there. Some were very old. Many were not. If he was found, months or weeks from now, who would guess that he wasn’t just another unfortunate crosser who hadn’t made it? Ramon had gone to L.A. If he vanished, it was there. Not here. “Who knew he was leaving town?” Jeremiah said out loud.

“Good question.” Jamison fumbled a fresh cigarette from his pack, lit it with the dashboard lighter. “You want to ask Mama?” He shot Jeremiah a sideways look. “She doesn’t like me much right now. I wouldn’t give her her son’s body.”

“They weren’t home.” That bothered Jeremiah all of a sudden. Bothered him a lot. “Maybe we ought to go out there.”

“You probably passed ’em. They were in the office most of the night,” Jamison said shortly. “They wouldn’t go home until I could give Maria a time to pick up the body.”

Maybe so, but unease still nagged at Jeremiah as he parted with Jamison in town and headed back out to the house. A car was parked in the front yard this time, a battered green Galaxy that had seen many better years. Duct tape patched the front seat and rock chips starred the dusty windshield. A twisted skein of beads and tiny carved wooden figures hung from the rearview, along with a cluster of dyed-pink feathers and beadwork on a silver key-chain, like you saw for sale at rodeos. Teo stood in the front yard, throwing rocks at a clump of yucca with pinpoint accuracy and a lot of energy. He dropped the last rock onto the ground and came over to greet Jeremiah as he climbed out of his truck.

The change in Teo shocked him. He moved with an adult’s measured cadence, aware of the present, seeing consequences in each action as moment passed to moment. He was no longer a kid.

Jeremiah felt a pang of sorrow.

“I thought you had gone out to map the water holes,” Teo said, and his face told Jeremiah that he accepted that, that he expected nothing else.

“The deputy and I went out to where your uncle died.” Jeremiah cleared his throat, not knowing how to speak to this boy who was no longer a child. “Someone killed him.”

Teo regarded him without speaking, then turned his head slowly toward the house. Jeremiah could hear voices from within, women’s voices, murmuring low and steady like doves in the evening. “The curandera came to say that the spirits here are angry at us.” He frowned toward the house. “We should leave, she says. Or they will take me next. Ramon did not believe in the spirits.” He fell silent, child and man struggling for a moment to occupy the same face. The man won, and he turned back to Jeremiah with a shrug. “We will go stay with my aunt,” he said. “In Los Angeles.”

“Teo, can we take a walk?” Jeremiah looked out at the broken land baking in the sun. “I need to talk to you.”

They walked up from the house, angling into a wash, climbing over a tumble of boulders deposited by some long-ago flood. The entire desert had been shaped by water. Jeremiah turned to look back down the slope toward the bajada, seeing its history in the washes that cut like veins through the sunburned land. Every formation, every fold, had been created and shaped to carry water to where it wanted to go. “This is a land of water,” he said aloud.

Teo looked at him, a spark of understanding in his dark eyes. Then he turned aside, climbing like one of the mountain sheep across tumbled rock, into a narrow crevice that led back into the rising flank of the hills. The seep was there, invisible in the heat of the day. Ramon had showed Jeremiah once. Because he was searching for water, and Ramon understood that search. Or maybe it was because Jeremiah left the water jugs where they could be seen in his caches. He had never been sure why Ramon seemed to regard him as someone to trust.

They had squatted as the sun set, watching the narrow crack of blackness in the rock. Slowly, the sand in front of it had darkened as the night cooled. When Jeremiah put his palm against it, he felt moisture. Then, he had heard the tiny chuckle of water freeing itself from the soil. As the moon rose, the light had sparkled on a thread of water winding through the sandy bottom of the miniature canyon. The slim silvery shapes of fish had darted through the crystal water, ghostlike in the pale illumination of moon and stars.

This time of day, there was nothing but dry sand and a crevice at the rock, swarming with bees. Jeremiah slid his hand into the gap in the stones, reaching. Bees clambered in his hair, sipping at the sweat on his forehead, confused by this obstacle to their flight. Shoulder pressed to the sun-hot stone, he strained and felt his fingertips brush water. The cool liquid sent a ripple of excitement down his spine, just as the tinaja had done yesterday.

“This is the treasure.” Teo’s tone was flat. “This is why he went to borrow the money. It is for water. This is why he was killed.”

Jeremiah withdrew from the crack, his fingers relinquishing that link with water reluctantly. He shook his head, scattering bees who circled then dived into the crack. “Maybe.” But it didn’t feel right. And who would kill him for it? Robeson, the rancher, had enough water, pumped from a lucky hit on a good-sized aquifer. “Did he say anything else about treasure? Did he say anything about meeting someone?”

“No.” Teo deposited a confused bee on the lip of the crevice. “There was no one.”

They walked back down together, and as they drew closer to the sagging house, Teo hesitated briefly. Jeremiah followed his gaze, saw the big maroon pickup with the stock rack parked beside his truck.

“Señor Robeson,” Teo said.

The rancher, in work-worn jeans and a faded plaid shirt, was just leaving the house as Jeremiah and Teo approached. Graying hair cut short and a weathered face testified to a life spent in the desert. He nodded and put his hat on, holding out a hand to Teo. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Your uncle was a good man, and I’ll miss him.”

Teo shook his hand solemnly, man to man.

He turned to Jeremiah, skin crinkling around eyes and mouth as he smiled. “You must be the geologist fellow. I’m Wallace Robeson. I was just telling your grandmother,” he spoke again to Teo, “that I’m returning all the money your uncle put down on this place. No sense in my keeping it, since you’re not going to buy this after all. I wouldn’t have charged him rent to live here, Maria. The money belongs to you.”

“Gracias, señor,” Teo’s grandmother murmured, weeping, from the doorway. She had pulled a black shawl over her head and her arms curved over her slack breasts, as if she held an infant there. A woman stood beside her, younger, maybe thirty, with a rich, sturdy figure and an oval face full of presence and power. She had one hand on the older woman’s arm, and to Jeremiah it seemed that the gesture spoke not so much of comfort as possession.

She must be the curandera, he guessed, purveyor of fortunes, advice, charms, and medicines. Her youth surprised him, not to mention her beauty. She looked like the portrait of some landowner’s daughter from old Spain. She acknowledged his scrutiny with a single lift of an eyebrow that suggested she read minds. Jeremiah felt himself blush as he looked away.

“If there’s anything you need, Maria, you just tell me.” Robeson was getting into his pickup now. “Nice to meet you, son,” he said to Jeremiah. “Drop by for dinner sometime. I’d like to hear what you do out there in the desert.”

“Señor Robeson.” Teo spoke with the grave voice of his newly acquired adulthood.

The rancher paused, his hand on the open pickup door. “Yes?” He was mildly impatient now, eager to be on his way.

“I will pay for the land.” He regarded the older man steadily. “That is what my uncle wished.”

Robeson looked incredulous, then as if he wanted to laugh. Instead, he cleared his throat, his eyes sliding toward Teo’s grandmother, who was murmuring with the curandera. “Why don’t you talk to your grandmother,” he said politely. “We can discuss the contract later. Ramon was paying me two hundred and fifty dollars a month, you know. On the first of every month.” He smiled at Teo, his impatience on hold, his expression kindly. “If you want to do it, that’s fine. But I can’t give the land away. You understand?”

“I understand.” Teo’s expression didn’t falter. “I will have the payment for you.”

The rancher shot a brief curious glance in Jeremiah’s direction, then moved his shoulders in a tiny shrug and closed the pickup door. As he backed the pickup around and departed, the young woman spoke softly and rapidly to Teo’s grandmother, tossing her head and shooting a brief angry glance at Teo. Her words disturbed the old woman, but she merely shook her head, her expression suddenly stubborn. The curandera shrugged and walked across the yard with her head high, giving Teo a brief pitying look as she passed. Without another word, she got into her car and drove away.

“I’m not going back out into the desert for a couple of days.” Jeremiah looked down into Teo’s unreadable eyes. “I’ll be down in the motel. If you need anything, come get me.”

“Gracias,” Teo said with gravity.

He would not ask. There was nothing to ask for. Except for the two hundred and fifty dollars that would be due in two weeks’ time and for many months after that. Feeling defeated, Jeremiah drove back into town, parking in the motel lot, but walking over to the sheriff’s office. Jamison was there, and he wondered briefly if the deputy lived there.

Jamison looked up from the grimy keyboard of an out-of-date computer. “Robeson dropped by. He says he’s gonna give Ramon’s payments back to the family. He also said that this guy who used to work at the ranch owed Ramon a bunch of money. Ramon fired him a couple of weeks ago.” He sounded relieved. “I’m checking it out. I heard he got a job on a ranch near Sells. I called the deputy out there. He’s going to go talk to the guy.”

“I guess that’s a nice simple answer,” Jeremiah said.

Jamison flushed, his eyes fixed on the wall above Jeremiah’s head. “I want to tell you something. I got a call from the sheriff. He was real anxious to get this case closed. You want anything else?”

“I guess not.” Jeremiah left the office, longing for the clean heat of the desert. He should probably get on with his contract. Let Jamison go find his ranch hand. Teo and his grandmother would go out to L.A. to live with Teo’s aunt. Not his business.

He let himself into his motel room, greeted by hot, still air, thick with the smell of old cigarette smoke and stale sheets. Pulling open the ochre drapes, he sneezed, then cranked the single window open. The yellow chenille bedspread didn’t quite mask the faint sag in the center of the bed. He went into the bathroom meaning to take a shower, but instead he washed his face and hands with tepid water that smelled faintly of chlorine and metal pipes, pulled on a clean shirt, and left the motel once more. Hesitating on the sidewalk in front of the motel, he turned left, toward the Main Street Cafe and Lounge sign halfway down the block. At night, blue buzzing neon spelled out the name and the lounge was full of men with jeans and boots and women with upswept country-western hair, playing pool and drinking, laughing loudly in a drifting haze of cigarette smoke.

This afternoon, the lunch rush was over and the varnished wooden tables were empty except for a couple of old men drowsing over the paper and a cup of coffee by the front window. A weathered woman with aggressively auburn hair, dressed in the cafe’s uniform of dark green slacks, pale green ruffled apron, and ivory blouse, was filling plastic salt and pepper shakers on the service counter. “Sit anywhere,” she called, efficiently tipping salt from a quart pitcher.

Jeremiah sat, enduring the brief but thorough examination by the window coffee-drinkers. A swamp cooler tinged the relative cool with a faint hint of old puddle and he looked up as the auburn-haired waitress appeared with the laminated menu and an order pad. He took it, looking at it without really seeing it. “Can I get bacon and eggs this late?” he asked.

“Why not?” She tossed her head, pretty in a quiet way, and just too old to be called young. “Barney’ll gripe, but he doesn’t have anything else to do back there except read his comic books. Coffee?”

“Thank you.” He handed her the menu. “Black is fine.”

She retreated to the pass-through, exchanging a few quick words with the invisible cook, ending with another head toss. In a moment she was back with a glass carafe of coffee. “You’re lucky. I just made a fresh pot for the help.” She plunked down a thick white mug and splashed the dark liquid into it. “You’re the guy out mapping the desert or whatever.”

“That’s me.” He looked up at her, raised his mug in a small salute. “Mapping water holes, actually.”

“Montoya’s kid has been hanging around with you. Our deputy says somebody killed his uncle. He didn’t say how.” She pulled a second mug from her apron pocket, filled it from the pot, then slid uninvited into the seat across from him. “I’m taking a break, Barney,” she hollered in the direction of the kitchen. “Hit the bell when the order’s up.”

An inarticulate grumble answered her along with the clash of pots and pans.

“Did somebody really kill him?” Her eyes were on his face.

“Yes.” They were hazel, Jeremiah noted, with flecks of green.

“Bastards.” She turned away, her lips thinning. “Teo’s a nice kid. What the hell’s he going to do now?”

“He told me that he and his grandmother are going to live in L.A.,” Jeremiah said carefully.

“What kind of life is he going to have in L.A.?” The waitress turned back to him, her eyes angry. “He’ll grow up with the barrio gangs, maybe get himself shot or end up on drugs. His uncle was going to send him to college. He dropped in here when he was in town and he talked about the kid. He wanted Teo to make something of himself, and he could, too.” Another head toss. “He worked for me, Teo, scrubbing floors and windows, hauling garbage and stuff. Good kid. So what’s going to happen to him?”

Jeremiah drew back at the accusation in her voice. “I don’t know.” He hesitated, taken by surprise by the turmoil of his own feelings. “I’m going to stay in touch with him,” he said slowly, realizing that he’d decided this sometime in the past twenty-four hours. “I’ll make sure things work out somehow.” The promise scared him, coming out of nowhere. Too late to withdraw it now.

The waitress stared at the table, her shoulders suddenly bowed, her teeth denting her lower lip. When she raised her head, a shadow had darkened her eyes, dimming the green. “You need to go talk to Tom Burns,” she said. “Across the street, just east of City Hall. He’s a lawyer.” The bell dinged from the pass-through and she got up quickly. Without saying anything more, she whisked onto the table an oval stoneware platter mounded with a pile of crispy hashbrowns nestling two perfect fried eggs and two strips of crisp bacon. A stack of toast on a separate plate and a steel-lidded jar of strawberry jam followed the platter. The waitress refilled his coffee, totaled his check, and laid it on the table beside his cup. “Tell him I sent you,” she said. “April.” And she vanished into the kitchen.

The eggs really were perfect, with creamy yolks and a crisp brown lace at the edges. The hashbrowns hadn’t come from a box. But Jeremiah barely tasted the food, his mind on Teo, his head spinning with the promise he had just made. Not to a waitress, but to himself. To Teo. It scared hell out of him.

Leaving a generous tip with the price of his meal, he made his way past the drowsing old men and out into the pounding heat of afternoon. He found the office across the street: Tom Burns, Attorney at Law had been lettered neatly on the weathered door whose russet paint was beginning to blister in the sun. Climbing a narrow flight of dusty wooden stairs, he found himself in a wooden vestibule, facing a glass-paned door. This one said: Come in. Bienvenido. When he pushed the door open, he found a stocky man in shirt-sleeves laying out poker hands on a tan legal file amidst a desktop sea of files, paper-clipped stacks of papers, and brightly colored Post-it Notes.

“April wins.” He scooped up the cards, tapped them neatly into a box, then ran a hand through thinning brown hair. “She said you were on your way over. I bet her five bucks you wouldn’t show.”

“This town really is a fishbowl, isn’t it?”

“Sweetwater?” He shrugged, got to his feet, and offered a hand. “Yeah. It is. Tom Bums. You’re the naturalist.”

“Geologist.” Jeremiah looked at him warily. “Jeremiah Apple. So what did April want you to tell me?”

“That Ramon Montoya made a will, probably” Bums said cheerfully. “Which I can’t really discuss with you, of course. He’s got a sister in Los Angeles, and there’s his mother. But he was really set on that nephew of his going to college. So if I didn’t know any better, I’d say he’d have left anything of value — like maybe land — to Teo.” Bums threaded his way between gray file cabinets stacked with dusty cardboard files to a water dispenser in the corner. “Funny. He decided just a week ago to make that will. Left me a few things to keep for him, too. Water?” He waved a paper cup in Jeremiah’s direction.

“Thanks.” Jeremiah drank the cool, tasteless water, eyeing the smiling lawyer, suppressing a strong desire to punch him. “Have you talked to Jamison about this?”

“Not yet.” The lawyer’s smile didn’t change, but his eyes narrowed. “Little towns like this, they got their own power structure. You got the big dog. Everybody else knows their place. You want to live here, you stick to your place.” He glanced at his watch. “I gotta go down and see if the mail’s here yet.” He reached over to his desk, flipped open the file he’d been playing cards on. “I’ll be right back.”

Jeremiah listened to the lawyer’s footsteps clattering down the stairs. Slowly he crossed to the desk, glanced down at the folder. The typed and notarized land contract lay on top, signed by Ramon and Robeson. A paper-clipped stack of receipts for the payments lay beneath it. Besides the contract, the folder contained a life-insurance policy issued a year ago. It wasn’t a big policy. Jeremiah picked up the printed certificate. It would pay off the land contract with a little left over. The beneficiary was Teo. A grimy square of white notebook paper lay beneath the policy. A phone number had been written in meticulous black strokes on the blue-lined paper. It included an extension number. Jeremiah found a pen and wrote the number on the inside of his wrist. Burns’s heavy tread clumped up the stairs, and he slipped the papers quickly back into the folder.

“No mail,” the round-faced little lawyer announced cheerfully. “Must be late. Was there anything else you wanted?”

“Who’s the big dog here, Mr. Burns?”

“I wouldn’t know.” The lawyer’s eyes slid away from his. “You have a nice day now, you hear?”

“Sure thing, Mr. Burns,” Jeremiah said through gritted teeth. “I’ll leave you to your work, now.” He closed the door gently, glancing at the polished and well-used mail slot in its center, then clattering down the narrow stairs. Outside, distant thunderheads churned up into the western sky, gray and ominous as mushroom clouds. Rain fell somewhere out there, recharging the tinajas, drowning any creatures unlucky enough to be downstream in a wash when the roaring wall of rocks, silt, sand, and water scoured new channels for itself.

He went back to his stuffy motel room and took his shower, standing under the cool, chlorinated water for a long time. When he got out, he dialed an outside line on the pink princess phone beside the bed, sweat filming his skin as the water from the shower evaporated.

You have reached Aurora Mining, a woman’s voice announced. If you know your party’s extension, please enter it now.

The hairs on his neck prickling, Jeremiah touched the numbers of the extension.

“Ron Smith here.” The voice was gruff, middle-aged.

“Hello, I’m calling about Ramon Montoya, and your interest in his land here in Sweetwater, Arizona.”

A long silence hummed through the line. “What did you say your name was?” The voice had gone wary.

“Jeremiah Apple. I’m a friend of his family.”

“Mr. Apple, you have to understand that I can’t discuss business matters with a stranger who just happens to call my office.”

“Montoya was murdered, Mr. Smith. Did you know that?”

Another silence. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re talking about.” The voice had gone cold now, flat with decision. “I’m sorry you wasted your time.” With a click, the line went dead.

Jeremiah set the receiver gently back on the cradle. He put on clean clothes, then went back out into the searing afternoon heat. It bothered him more in town than it did in the open desert. He wondered briefly why that was as he started down the block. Across the street, a woman emerged from the small drugstore, a list in her hand, her expression preoccupied. The curandera. She walked quickly up the street, then climbed into a dusty red pickup. Flying J Ranch was stenciled on the side in black letters, barely readable beneath a coat of ochre dust. Sacks of feed and three salt blocks filled the bed.

The Flying J Ranch was Robeson’s.

He knew who the big dog was. Jeremiah turned around and walked back to the sheriff’s office. The door was ajar, but the office was empty. Jeremiah looked around, knowing he should wait, thinking it might be important not to wait. He found a pen on the cluttered desk, pulled a torn envelope from the overflowing wastebasket.

Talk to Ron Smith, he wrote on the envelope’s back. Time to choose sides. He added the number and extension from his wrist, dropped the note onto the only clear spot on the desk, and left the office, forcing himself to walk across the street to the motel. He wanted to run. He opened the door to the oven of his pickup cab and hesitated. A folded piece of paper lay on the seat. This was a day for leaving notes. Jeremiah unfolded it, the hairs prickling on the back of his neck again.

Señor Sherimia, I am afraid. I am at Sheep Rock. I will wait.

Sherimia. That was how Teo pronounced his name. The letters were printed in the carefully formed hand of a student, the i’s neatly dotted. Jeremiah stared at it, his gut churning. A miniature dust devil twisted briefly across the corner of the parking lot, momentarily lofting a confetti flurry of cigarette butts and candy wrappers. Jeremiah shoved the note into his pocket and waited only long enough to fill the water jugs and toss his desert pack into the truck bed.

Sheep Rock was an outthrust of rock due west of where Ramon had been found. It was where he had been heading as he died. Jeremiah drove west through town, past the empty sheriff’s office, heading out into the bajada. A few thunderheads towered far to the north, dumping their precious water into the network of canyons and washes that penetrated the mountains there. Because of those distant rains, he didn’t dare take the wash that would lead him straight to Sheep Rock. The risk of a flood on its way from that rain was too great. Instead, Jeremiah turned off the jeep track he was on, bumping across the parched land, circling southward and watching for dangerous pockets of soft sand.

It took him a long time to pick his way cautiously to the hump of Sheep Rock. Shadows streaked the sand from the tangled skeletons of ocotillo and a lone sentinel saguaro. Jeremiah parked the truck at the edge of the tumbled boulders that centuries of water had levered from the face of the cliff. “Teo?” He cupped his hands around his mouth, but the emptiness swallowed his voice.

Cautiously, Jeremiah picked a way through the rock. He scrambled up one boulder, but there was nothing to see except his truck, baking in the sun. To the north, the wash was visible as a sharp-edged gash in the dun soil. He slid down to the ground and called Teo again. Ears straining, he rounded the spill of an old slide and stopped short. Teo lay sprawled in the shadows cast by the descending sun, his face slack, eyes closed. A bright trickle of crimson decorated his forehead.

Throat tight, Jeremiah sprang to his side, fingers searching for a pulse at the angle of Teo’s jaw, relief surging into his throat as the shallow rise and fall of the boy’s chest registered.

“Stand up.”

The command banished that relief, replaced it with gut-deep cold. Jeremiah froze, his hands on Teo’s limp body, searching the shadows between the boulders.

“Now, Mr. Apple.” Robeson emerged from a crack of deeper shadow between two boulders, a squat automatic in his hand.

“The big dog.” Jeremiah straightened slowly, fear crawling in to replace the cold.

“Pick up the boy. Take him back to your truck.” The small mouth of the pistol looked wide as a train tunnel. Jeremiah had a hard time dragging his eyes away from it. Robeson made a small impatient movement with his lanky body and Jeremiah squatted, taking Teo by an arm and rolling the boy’s limp weight onto his shoulders. Teo’s muscles quivered and he moaned faintly.

“Easy, kid,” Jeremiah murmured. Staggering beneath the boy’s weight, the skin of his back crawling with the unseen pressure of that pointing gun barrel, Jeremiah made his way slowly back to his truck, skirting the boulders he’d clambered over.

“So what is your game here?” He stumbled and paused to catch his breath, feeling Teo come awake on his shoulders, the slack muscles tightening. “Easy, easy,” he breathed, too low for Robeson to hear him. “You killed Ramon,” he said aloud. “If two more bodies turn up, you think people are just going to shrug? Jamison already suspects you.” Maybe. He threw it in for effect, anyway.

“Move.” Robeson chuckled grimly as Jeremiah trudged forward again. “No one is going to find your bodies. Too bad those stupid kids were out stumbling around. A few more days and it wouldn’t have mattered. Just another stupid crosser.”

Jeremiah felt Teo twitch and tightened his grip wamingly.

“You took the kid out into the desert again and the two of you got lost. We’ll all look for you. Who knows? The sheriff might even decide that you killed Ramon, too. He’s a reasonable man. We don’t know anything about you, after all. You might have had drug dealings with Montoya in California. Maybe you came here for revenge.”

“You must give some pretty good political donations around here.” The truck was just ahead. What did Robeson plan to do? Shoot them there, where he wouldn’t have to carry them? Or take them somewhere else first? Death was certainly written on Robeson’s face. “Get ready to run,” he breathed, his head drooping, close to Teo’s ear. “Up into the rocks.” Teo’s muscles tightened briefly, although his head still hung slack and his eyes were closed. He had heard.

“Come on.” Robeson’s voice prodded. “You’re almost there.”

Jeremiah stumbled again and went down, not needing to fake the grunt of pain as his knee cracked onto rock. He slumped, dumping Teo’s body facedown onto the sand. “Run!” He came up in a spinning turn, pain stabbing through his injured knee, flinging fistfuls of gritty sand into Robeson’s surprised face. Robeson howled and his gun roared as Jeremiah scrambled into a limping run. He pitched forward into the sand, scrambled to his feet again, staggering now, heading for the spill of rock broken from the cliffs. The gun roared again. A fleeting shadow ahead was Teo, sprinting like a jackrabbit, bent double. He had come here with Ramon. He would know how to find a way back to the tinajas. There were hiding places there, and water.

The ground looked funny, too far away and wavery, as if he were seeing it through a layer of clear water. As if in a dream, he seemed to be running in slow motion and the air didn’t want to fill his lungs. Jeremiah looked down, feeling only a faint surprise at the bright red blood soaking his shirt. No pain. Just blood. His foot missed the distant ground completely and he fell forward, into space, still moving in slow motion. Thunder rumbled, a distant growl. Rain, Jeremiah thought vaguely. Good thing he’d stayed out of the wash. Didn’t want to drown. The sky darkened suddenly, but when he squinted, trying to see the clouds, he found a face floating over him.

Jamison.

“You could have come down the wash,” the deputy said. “Storm was in the wrong place to flood it. Good thing you dropped that note, so I knew where you were headed.” He pulled Jeremiah’s shirt open.

“Teo?” The word emerged as a whisper. He couldn’t speak any louder than that. It required too much effort.

“He’s getting my first-aid kit out of my truck.” Jamison’s lips tightened. “He’s fine. I was on the floor of your damn cab, baking. I heard it all.”

The storm had arrived after all. The sky was getting dark in earnest. Jeremiah heard running footsteps approaching. “Robeson?” He tried to sit up, had forgotten the rancher and his gun, which was a stupid thing to do.

“He’s dead. This is going to get me into a hell of a lot of trouble.” Jamison pushed him back down. “Thanks, Teo,” he said, turning to reach for something.

The storm clouds opened up, and the first drops of rain stung his face, bringing darkness.

He woke up in a hospital in Tucson, with tubes running into his chest and beneath the sheets. A harried-looking doctor came in and told him he was lucky: The bullet had narrowly missed his liver and several major blood vessels. The Fish and Game department sent a businesslike woman with short blond hair, a linen suit, and a cell phone who told him that he could take his time completing his contract. They were waiving the deadline. Jeremiah had a feeling that she mostly wanted to make it clear that Fish and Game had nothing to do with this mess.

Fine by him.

Jamison showed up later to take a statement, carrying a paper sack with clean clothes from Jeremiah’s motel room. To his surprise, Teo edged into the room behind him, wide-eyed and determined in this place of illness, blinking machines, and white sheets. His face lit up when he saw Jeremiah, and he came around the machines beside the bed to take his hand, careful of the IV tubing taped to the back.

“There’s insurance money,” Jeremiah told him. “To pay for Ramon’s land. And I think some mining people want to buy it. That was the treasure Ramon meant.” Not the water. Uranium, or copper, or gold. Something. College for Teo.

“I talked to Señor Burns,” Teo said. “He is taking care of things.”

“Ron Smith from Aurora Mining called the office right after you spoke with him.” Jamison dropped into the chair beside the bed, fished his crumpled pack of Marlboros from his pocket, regarded them with a sigh, then put them away. “He was pretty upset. Seems Robeson called him a few days ago and told him that Montoya had defaulted on the land contract and that he’d be the seller after all. So I went off to have a word with Bums.” He gave Jeremiah a sharp stare. “I don’t pick sides.”

“I’m sorry,” Jeremiah said slowly. “I was getting paranoid.”

Jamison grunted. “I guess Robeson had gotten pretty used to thinking he could have his own way, whatever that was. I guess he didn’t have much reason to think different, most of the time.” The deputy gave him a sharp look. “I’m glad you dropped that note in your motel room. You were on your way out of town by the time I got back there. I took the wash and found Robeson’s pickup parked there.” He shrugged. “I went looking for you two and found your pickup just about the time you were coming back. So I ducked into the cab. If you hadn’t acted like a fool hero, you wouldn’t be here,” the deputy said drily.

“If you’d told me you were there, I wouldn’t have had to act like a fool.”

“Next time, I’ll let you know. We found the shed where Robeson kept Ramon. The housekeeper showed us. She’s under arrest as an accessory.” Jamison got to his feet and gripped Teo’s shoulder briefly. “I’ll wait for you outside,” he said. “Then we’d better head back. It’s a long drive.”

“I am sorry.” Teo stood and took Jeremiah’s hand once more. “I wrote the note for you. Señor Robeson, he... said he would hurt...”

“It’s all right.” Jeremiah gripped his hand. “It’s okay.”

Teo looked down, frowning, then raised his head. “I walked out into the bajada last night,” he said. “The moon was big, and I saw the paths. The ones you showed me — the ones the long-ago people made to water. I saw my uncle,” he said, his dark eyes shining like windows into the desert night. “He waved to me.”

Jeremiah nodded. He had glimpsed them sometimes — a suggestion of movement, a ripple in the night. People moving endlessly toward water. “He can be easy now,” he told Teo. “He wanted you to go to college, and now you can go.”

“Oh yes,” said Teo. “I will.” He started for the door, stopped, and looked back at Jeremiah. “When you are well, when you go back out into the desert, may I come?” he asked shyly. “I would like to learn more of what you do. I would like to do it, too.”

“Sure you can come,” Jeremiah said, meaning it. “There’s always room for another geologist.”

“See you,” Teo said, and waved, and left.

Yes, Jeremiah thought, drifting toward sleep. A promise is a promise, and he would indeed see Teo.