Land of Echoes

15

"Cree!" She was walking back toward the infirmary, determined to lie down, when the voice startled her out of her thoughts. She looked back to see Julieta, striding toward her from the administration building. She walked quickly and wore a frown full of the angry determination of a prize-fighter coming out of his corner. "How's your head?"

Cree put her hand to her bandaged forehead. "I'm fine. Going to be headachy for a few days, that's all. What's going on?"

"I know who the ghost is."

Cree's jaw dropped: This was quite a shift for a woman who'd expressed so many reservations not so long ago. "Urn, that's terrific. Who?"

Julieta hesitated, making some decision as she looked at Cree through narrowed eyes. "Are you up for riding? I'll show you."

Cree assessed her weariness, measured the gas in the tank and found maybe just enough. "Sure," she said.

They saddled the two mares. Cree found she remembered most of the ritual of blanket and saddle, bridle and bit and stirrups; Julieta checked her work and needed only to draw Breeze's belly cinch tighter. The black gelding looked on curiously as they led the mares out the rear corral gate and mounted.

Astride her horse, Julieta looked ravishing. Her black hair floated around her head and over her shoulders as she sat straight and proud. Once they were on their way, she pulled back the thick mane and put on a cowboy hat that held it behind her, then slipped on a pair of sunglasses. In the shades and hat, leather jacket and snug jeans, she looked gorgeous and dangerous, a woman warrior.

Julieta said nothing as she led them straight north at a trot. Cree posted adequately, rediscovering more of her rusty riding skills by the minute. It helped that Breeze was a gentle horse and seemed to want to go today. The rhythm of the trot echoed in Cree's sore head, but the pain was manageable. Especially with her curiosity piqued. She wished Julieta would slow down and explain what this was all about.

And the land was beautiful. Here was the big gesture she'd hungered for since coming to this place, a way of taking in the landscape. Sky. Earth. Rocks. Distance. The wordless company of the willing animal between her knees. Cree savored the air, clean but faintly spiced with a perfume that the grocery truck driver had told her was pinon-wood smoke. The only sound was the drum of hoofs, the creak of leather, the whuff of Breeze's breathing.

They put a couple of miles behind them before Julieta slowed and allowed Cree to fall into a walk beside her.

The iridescent green sunglasses turned toward her. Beneath the glistening ovals, Julieta's mouth was a thin, straight line. "It's Garrett McCarty. My ex. He was always a complete and total bastard and I guess he still is." The sunglasses turned back to the north without waiting for a response.

Cree felt a sudden trepidation. Old animosities could cloud a witness's perspective on a haunting, and she had learned to be wary of making assumptions based on them. Especially if it involved an ex-husband or — wife or — lover. Yes, there was always a lot left unresolved between people who had once been deeply intimate and then had broken away, and of course a revenant often did prove to be an ex, driven to settle the accounts of love or hate. But just as often the kind of dead-certain identification she saw in Julieta now was merely the product of lingering hostility and paranoia in the living person.

"Why do you say that?"

"Because he died not far from here. I told you about that, didn't I?"

"Lip at the mine area?"

Julieta nodded.

"That's, what, fifteen miles or so from the school?"

"As the crow flies, more like ten. Why? Is that too far for a ghost to come?

A memory flashed in front of Cree's eyes, real enough to touch: Mike, standing there in downtown Philadelphia at the moment of his death in Los Angeles. "No," she said sadly. "Not necessarily. But why-"

"Why would Garrett come back? To hurt me."

" But-"

"He hated me because I divorced him and because I came out better in the settlement terms and because I won a couple of fights with McCarty Energy over the years. Maybe because I had the gall to have a couple of relationships over the years, didn't live like a nun after divorcing the great man. I think he also suspected I had a lover while we were still married, or at least before the divorce was final."

"Did you?"

Julieta's jaw dropped at Cree's presumption and she appeared to catch herself on the edge of an indignant denial. She took a deep breath and then her shoulders slumped. "Yes," she said quietly. But then the resistance flared again: "Yes! I had a lover, okay? I was twenty-four and I was married to an old man who I never saw and who was screwing every secretary in his employ and every female social climber in New Mexico! I had a lover. But Garrett never knew about it. I made damn sure he never knew, because I wasn't going to let him use it against me in the divorce. It was perfectly all right for him to chase tail, but for me to actually love somebody for the first and only time in my life, that would have been unforgivable!"

It was so clearly a defensive outpouring, and for Cree a little piece of the puzzle fell into place: Julieta's hard side, this angry warrior woman and the efficient administrator who explained her every action so logically and dispassionately- it was just the armor over the vulnerable person who lived inside. The woman who had invited her to go for a ride within moments of Cree's arriving yesterday and then concealed the gesture by explaining that the horses needed exercise. The woman who'd so badly needed Joseph Tsosie's brief touch last night.

Julieta clucked to Madie, slapped the reins, and began to canter ahead as if fleeing her own words. Cree touched her heels to Breeze's flanks, urging her to follow, and soon they were pummeling full tilt over the rolling land. The canter was less jolting than the trot, the air seemed to flow through Cree's head and wash away the pain. The bare ground and low sagebrush rolled away beneath the lunging horse, unchanging.

When Julieta finally slowed again, Cree caught up and they walked again as the horses blew. So many questions, Cree was thinking. Where to even start?

"But, Julieta-why would he come into one of your students as a way to punish you?"

"Because it's a great way to bring the school down. He knew it was the one thing I loved, the one thing I believed in doing on my own. Trust me, Garrett was very smart, very insightful when it came to figuring out somebody's weaknesses. He built an empire on knowing the best way to hurt somebody."

Cree wanted to point out that ghosts were seldom so intentional and devious. Usually their motives, if you could call so elemental an urge a motive, were more like compulsions, just reflexes of their psyches. But there were more pressing issues to get out of the way.

"Why would it settle in Tommy Keeday? Instead any of the other kids?"

"I don't know!" Even behind the camouflage of the sunglasses, Julieta's face looked agonized. "How could I possibly know?"

"Does Tommy have any characteristics that would make him particularly vulnerable? Joseph describes him as a boy with a lot of internal conflicts-"

"Look, before all this, I'd spent maybe four hours with him. Once for his admission interview. A couple of chance encounters around school. He was in the drawing class I teach, along with six other kids, but we had only two classes before all this came up! Beyond that, I don't know anything about him but what I've read in his records."

"Then why do you care so deeply about him?"

"I care about all of my students! Every one of them! He's a very sick and troubled boy! I'd be the same with-"

"Why didn't you ever have children? You want children."

"Why didn't you?" Julieta shot back. "We're about the same age."

Cree bobbed her head: Clearly, Julieta would demand reciprocation for eveiything she revealed. "My husband died unexpectedly before we had kids. We were going to. I'd like to, but I've never… I've never found the right man. Sometimes it makes me feel very sad, very incomplete. No-it just about kills me, Julieta. I'm thirty-nine and probably I'll never have a child. But I'm lucky to have two beautiful nieces who I'm very close to. Kind of their half-mom."

"So I'm half mom to my students." Julieta tipped her hat brim lower over her face.

The horses huffed and shied. As they craned their heads, Cree saw the object of their concern: a dead coyote, fifty feet ahead, stretched along the ground as if it had died running. Its gray fur was matted, and something had been nibbling it, leaving the eye sockets round black pits on its narrow skull. The belly had been eaten away, too, leaving a dark cavity and baring a length of dirty white spine. She caught the smell as they let the horses find a wide route around it. The sight struck Cree as sorrowful, a dark omen.

She waited until they were well past before continuing what increasingly felt like an interrogation: "Is that why you started the school? To be near children-to be half mom?"

Julieta had found her armor in the interim. "What does my past have to do with Tommy? Look, I came to you with my best guess as to who this 'entity' is. I've come a long way, haven't I? Aren't I doing a good job of embracing your worldview? Why don't you go do whatever it is you do to find out if it's the rotten awful ghost of Garrett and then… exorcise it or kill it or whatever's supposed to happen?"

"If it is Garrett's ghost, I need you to help me figure Garrett out. Tell me why his compulsion to hurt you would be so strong. That it would manifest as an urge to vengeance so enduring it would continue even in the absence of his body, so deliberate it could do anything as complex and devious as this."

Julieta's face was set as if indicating that she'd said as much as she'd intended to.

Frustrated, Cree briefly let go the reins, threw her shoulders back, and brushed her hair away from her face with both hands. The bandage above her brow pinched.

They rode on at a walk for another ten minutes in silence. Julieta showed no indication she was going to say any more.

"Whatever it is," Cree said at last, "if it's the ghost of Garrett or someone else, I don't kill it. I wouldn't know how to do that."

"Then what do you do?" Julieta said numbly.

"I figure out a way for it to come to terms with why it's there. And if you have any role in why it's there, I can only do that if you do the same-come to terms with why it's there. If you're part of its world or play a role in its compulsions, you're the one who has to let it free."

"If it's Garrett, I'd rather kill it."

Cree shook her head. "Can't. It's already dead. You've got to integrate it in some constructive way. Release it by somehow dealing with its impulse."

Julieta brought Madie's head up and angled her path toward the left, up a low rise. Ahead, Cree saw the tip of a huge derrick like the one she'd seen from the highway.

"I'd rather kill it," Julieta repeated quietly to herself.