Land of Echoes

23

"Lynn! Good Jesus, you startled me!" Cree felt a flood of relief at the sight of the nurse, standing twenty feet away in the dim green light with arm outstretched, hand against the wall. She looked like a person who had been startled while listening or waiting for something. Cree wondered how long she'd been there.

"As you did me. Oh, my!" Lynn blew out a breath and fluttered a hand against her chest. Then she came toward Cree, trailing her fingers against the corridor wall. "I thought you might be here, but I got a little worried when I found the door open. And no lights on."

Cree backed into the dorm room. "I couldn't sleep. So I figured I'd come and look at Tommy's drawings and things. Before the other kids got back."

Lynn Pierce came through the door and switched on the overhead lights. The tubes flickered and hummed and then came on garishly bright. She took in the room before locking her disconcerting eyes on Cree's. "In the dark?" she asked expressionlessly.

"I borrowed your flashlight."

"I know. I heard you go into the office." A clever expression fled quickly across her face and was banished. "So you still hope to be working with him?"

"It'll probably come down to getting his grandparents' permission. If there's any chance I can, I figured I should make use of the time. Get to know him better."

Lynn looked at the open notebook on Tommy's desk, the bureau drawer Cree had neglected to close. "Finding anything interesting?"

"I think so."

" Like-?"

Cree went to the desk, flipped the notebook pages to one of the drawings of faces. "This, for example. Do you know if it's from life-a real place? Or is it a made-up place?"

Lynn Pierce came to her shoulder to consider the drawing. "It looks like the walls of the mesa. Oh, sure-it's that spot about, oh, maybe a mile north of here. It's the deepest gully on this side, the rock formations are pretty distinctive. Picturesque, I guess you'd say. The art teachers often take classes there before the cold weather sets in. What-the faces?"

"Do they mean anything to you?"

Lynn shrugged and shook her silver head once. "A teenage boy with an active imagination."

Unaccountably ill at ease with Lynn so close to her shoulder, Cree left the desk and went to sit on the end of Tommy's bed. "Did you want to talk to me? Is that why you followed me here?"

Smiling minutely, Lynn turned to face Cree and half sat against the edge of the desk. "Mind if I smoke? Strictly speaking, it's not allowed, but with the kids gone… " She rummaged in her pocket and brought out a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and a little foil ashtray folded into a half circle. She opened the ashtray and smoothed out its creases before setting it on the desk. She lit a cigarette and drew on it hungrily. When she exhaled, she carefully blew the smoke away from Cree, toward the hall door.

"My one vice," she apologized. "Down to five a day. And never in the infirmary, God forbid." Another deep suck that made the ember spark, and then her gaze wandered cautiously from the floor to meet Cree's. "I was wondering what kind of psychologist you are."

"I got my Ph. D. in clinical psychology from Duke."

"But you specialize…"

"Didn't Julieta tell you my focus?"

"She's the boss. She tells me only what she thinks I need to hear. I guess I didn't need to hear the details this time."

"It's hard to explain, Lynn. There's really no name for my field of specialty."

"Not 'parapsychologist'? On the Internet, that's the term that seems to come up." Lynn blew another gout of smoke toward the door and with an air of apology swished at it with one hand. "I did a search on you this evening."

"Does that bother you?"

"I can't decide. The strictly orthodox professional in me disapproves. But Tommy… it's baffling. I can't imagine what's going on with him."

"Any thoughts you want to share?"

She startled Cree with a direct bolt of her blue-bronze gaze, then tapped ash into the foil tray before answering. "Did you know I was married to a Navajo? Sixteen years. My Vern died fifteen years ago." She hesitated, clearly stumbling over that obstinate fact without meaning to.

"I'm sorry, Lynn."

"Yeah. Well," the nurse said reflexively.

"I know that 'yeah, well.'" Cree smiled. "I lost my husband, too."

The look Lynn returned had a surprised, grateful quality to it. But it lasted only an instant before she half shook her head, refusing the sympathy or resisting the impulse to remember. A drag on her cigarette seemed to help her find her train of thought again. "It took a few years for his family to accept me, a white Midwestern girl, but eventually I got to know them pretty well. The older people told stories about this kind of thing… Once we went to a Way sung for one of his nephews. The boy had started having what a mainstream doctor would've diagnosed as grand mal seizures. The Hand-Trembler said he had a ghost in him. That he had offended an ancestor. The family hired a Singer to do the Evil Way."

"Do you believe it? About the ghost?"

"It's completely at odds with my medical training…"

" But-" Cree prompted.

Lynn smiled crookedly. "But after the Way, his symptoms were much less extreme."

Cree smiled with her. Despite her unease, she found herself intrigued by this odd, tense, smart, apologetic woman whose aura glinted with the sharp silver flashes of well-concealed anger.

"I guess I'm credulous enough to be curious what a parapsychologist would do about Tommy," Lynn continued. "I was also very impressed with the way you handled him when we were playing cards-responsive but not condescendingly sympathetic. I admire that. Refreshingly unlike our beloved but distinctly overindulgent principal. He respects you now, you could tell by the way he opened up to you during softball. That'll help." She took a last, long drag on her cigarette, blew out a blue-gray plume, stabbed out the butt. Obviously a practiced clandestine smoker, she folded the ashtray like a clam around the remains and returned it to her pocket. "That is, if the doctors at Ketteridge or his grandparents let you work with him."

Despite Lynn's efforts to disperse the smoke, the acrid stink rasped in Cree's lungs. She got up to look again at the drawings over the bed. In the brighter light, the skill of the rendering was more apparent: The old man looked alive.

"You've worked here for, what, two years?"

"Three."

"So you must know her pretty well. Julieta." The old man seemed to be looking over Cree's shoulder, as if watching Lynn on the other side of the room.

"In some ways, maybe."

"She's a remarkable person, isn't she?"

A hesitation. "She certainly is."

"I mean, she's dynamic, she's intelligent, she's beautiful enough to turn any woman green, she's passionate-"

"She is all that and much more."

Cree gave it a beat, and then suggested casually, " But-?"

"But nothing. And I'm not that easy, Dr. Black. Please don't be sly with me."

Cree felt caught out. Her head was hurting again, putting her off her stride, and the hovering layer of cigarette smoke was a distracting irritant.

"Your tone seemed to qualify your praise, that's all. I was wondering why."

"She's great. She's my boss. No qualification."

Cree let it go, pretending to give the next drawing a close inspection. "So, okay, ghosts of ancestors can cause things like this. What else can? What's the story on Skinwalkers? Are there really such things-evil Navajo magicians, people capable of changing into animals? Do people still believe any of that?"

"Around white people, Vern always said it was nonsense. Superstition."

"And what did he say when he wasn't around white people? What did the old people say?" Cree half turned and jumped to find that Lynn had come silently up close to her again, standing just behind her shoulder. She moved a step away.

"Sideways comments," the nurse said quietly. "Warnings with their eyes not to talk about it. Once Vern bought a wolfskin from a pawnshop in Gallup-kind of a joke, just to show how above it he was, something we'd put in front of our woodstove. But there'd been some Navajos from our town at the pawnshop, and they recognized him. The next day, that's how fast gossip travels on the rez, three of Vern's uncles came to our house. A delegation from the family. Said he should burn it. Said people were talking about him, they'd get the wrong idea. Of course it was crap-a real Navajo Wolf wouldn't buy his skin at a Gallup pawnshop!"

"Did he burn it?" Claustrophobic, Cree sidled another step away.

"Yes, as a matter of fact." Standing where Cree had just been, the nurse pretended to look over Tommy's drawings. "Why? What does a modern parapsychologist think of old superstitions?"

"This one thinks there's usually some wisdom there."

"You're thinking there's a… spirit inhabiting Tommy, aren't you? That he's possessed. Is that what you are? An exorcist?"

Cree would have preferred not to discuss it with Lynn, not yet. But there was no denying the obvious. "No, I'm not an exorcist. I don't believe the popular idea of possession, Lynn. I'm skeptical of the idea of purely evil beings. In my experience, paranormal entities are neither more nor less wicked than living humans. I wouldn't assume this thing has malevolent intentions. It may be just lost or scared or desperate. Or lonely."

Lynn Pierce cocked her head, puzzled. "Am I being obtuse in some way? Because you saw him attack Julieta. And he stabbed himself repeatedly tonight." She winced as she rubbed her forearm and went on. "In fact, I have a confession to make. Something I didn't tell anyone, but I'll tell you." She unbuttoned the cuff of her jacket, tugged back the sleeve, then rolled the sleeve of her blouse. Cree gasped at the sight of the half circles of scabs and the surrounding penumbra of marbled green bruising. "From last week. I didn't tell Julieta because she's so… invested in Tommy. I didn't want her to worry." Lynn held up the arm and rotated it, looking at the wounds with satisfaction, as if admiring a suntan.

"Do you have any idea why she might be so 'invested' in him? Him particularly?"

Again, Lynn cocked her head. "Why do I keep getting the feeling you're trying to tempt me into indiscretions? Or maybe I'm just being paranoid. That must be it. But." She raised the wounded arm again and pinned Cree with her gaze. "You didn't answer me. Still convinced it's harmless?"

The bites were upsetting, and Cree needed a moment to think about what they implied. She moved farther away from Lynn, around Tommy's bed to one of the windows, where she leaned her pounding forehead gingerly against the pane and cupped her hands around her eyes to look outside. All she could see was the rectangle of bare earth lit by the ceiling fluorescents, stark as a patch of moon landscape, with her own humped shadow cut into it. Beyond the light, dead black. The wind whimpered faintly as if it wanted to get inside. The glass was icy against her skin. The nurse was complex and strange, and seemed to be fencing- to be asking or offering something. But Cree couldn't think well enough to respond in the right way. All she knew was that if Lynn came too far into her physical space one more time, she'd confront her on it.

"The entity is not harmless," Cree said at last. "It's hurting Tommy terribly. We just don't know that it's intentionally doing so. There's an important difference."

"Good point. Excellent point. Of course." The admiration in Lynn's voice seemed genuine. "You're very smart, Dr. Black. I can't tell you what a pleasure it is talking with you. Such a refreshing change from

… well, from my usual diet of conversation."

This time Cree heard her moving, and she spun around quickly.

But Lynn had gone to the door and stood half turned as if about to leave.

"You've been very kind, Cree Black. Thank you. I know I'm strange. Hard to get used to. My Vern used to say I was an acquired taste." Her downcast eyes darted around the floor as if searching for something; then, as if she'd found it, she brightened a bit and looked at Cree. "What you said about paranormal entities-you apply the same principle to living humans, too, don't you? I like that very much. You won't assume someone has malevolent intentions. They may be just lost or scared or desperate. Or lonely, huh?" She offered a shy, apologetic smile that quickly failed, and with a tired wave left the room.