Thunderhead

16

THE NEXT MORNING, NORA AWAKENED TO A marvelous smell. She stretched luxuriously, still wrapped within a wonderful, receding dream. Then, hearing the clatter of tins and the murmur of conversation, she opened her eyes and jumped out of her bedroll. It was six-thirty, and the camp had already gathered around a pot of coffee hanging over an open fire. Only Swire and Black were missing. Bonarotti was busy at the grill, the delicious aroma wafting from his sizzling fry pan.

She quickly stowed her gear and washed up, embarrassed at oversleeping on the first morning. Up the canyon she caught a glimpse of Swire, brushing down the horses and checking their feet.

“Madame Chairman!” Smithback called out good-humoredly. “Come on over and have a sip of this ebony nectar. I swear it’s even better than the espresso at Café Reggio.”

Nora joined the group and gratefully accepted a tin cup from Holroyd. As she sipped, Black emerged from a tent, looking frowsy and bedraggled. Wordlessly, he stumbled over and helped himself to coffee, then squatted on a nearby rock, hunched over his tin.

“It’s cold,” he muttered. “I barely slept a wink. Normally, on the digs I investigate, they at least have a couple of RVs parked nearby.” He looked around at the surrounding cliffs.

“Oh, you slept fine,” Smithback said. “I’ve never heard such a cacophony of snores.” He turned to Nora. “How about if we institute co-op camping for the rest of the trip? I’ve heard all about the ‘tent-creeping’ that goes on around expeditions like this.” He cackled salaciously. “Remember, happiness is a double mummy bag.”

“If you want to sleep with the opposite sex, I’ll have Swire put you out with the mares,” Nora replied.

Black barked a laugh.

“Very funny.” Coffee in hand, Smithback settled on a fallen log, next to Black. “Aragon tells me that you’re an expert on artifact dating. But what did he mean when he said you were a Dumpster diver?”

“Oh, he said that, did he?” Black gave the older man an angry glare.

Aragon waved his hand. “It’s a technical term.”

“I’m a stratigrapher,” Black said. “Often, midden heaps provide the best information at a site.”

“Midden heaps?”

“Trash piles,” said Black, his lips compressing. “Ancient garbage dumps. Usually the most interesting part of a ruin.”

“Coprolite expert, too,” said Aragon, nodding toward Black.

“Coprolite?” Smithback thought for a moment. “Isn’t that fossilized shit, or something?”

“Yes, yes,” Black said with irritation. “But we work with anything to do with dating. Human hair, pollen, charcoal, bone, seeds, you name it. Feces just happens to be especially informative. It shows what people were eating, what kind of parasites they had—”

“Feces,” said Smithback. “I’m getting the picture.”

“Dr. Black is the country’s leading geochronologist,” Nora said quickly.

But Smithback was shaking his head. “And what a business to be in,” he chortled. “Coprolites. Oh, God. There must be a lot of openings in your field.”

Before Black could answer, Bonarotti announced breakfast was ready. He was dressed, as the day before, in a neatly ironed jacket and pressed khaki trousers. Nora, grateful for the interruption, wondered how he could have kept so prim while everyone else was already verging into grubbiness. The wonderful aroma stanched further curiosity, and she quickly fell in line behind the rest. Bonarotti slid a generous slice of perfectly cooked omelette onto her plate. She took a seat and dug in hungrily. Perhaps it was the desert air, but she’d never tasted eggs half as delicious.

“Heaven,” Smithback mumbled, mouth full.

“It has a slightly unusual flavor, almost musky,” Holroyd said, looking at the forkful in front of him. “I’ve never tasted anything like it before.”

“Jimson weed?” Swire asked, only half jokingly.

“I don’t taste anything,” Black said.

“No, I know what you mean,” Smithback said. “It’s vaguely familiar.” He took another bite, then set his fork down with a clatter. “I know. At Il Mondo Vecchio on Fifty-third Street. I had a veal dish with this same flavor.” He looked up. “Black truffles?”

Bonarotti’s normally impassive eyes lit up at this, and he stared at Smithback with new respect. “Not quite,” he replied. The cook turned to his curio box, opened one of the countless drawers, and pulled out a dusky-colored lump, about the size of a tennis ball. It was flat along one side where it had been scraped by a knife.

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” Smithback breathed. “A white truffle. In the middle of the desert.”

“Tuber magantum pico,” Bonarotti said, placing it carefully back in the drawer.

Smithback shook his head slowly. “You’re looking at about a thousand dollars worth of fungus right there. If we don’t find that huge stash of Indian gold, we can always raid the Cabinet of Doctor Bonarotti.”

“You are welcome to try, my friend,” Bonarotti said impassively, pulling open his jacket and patting a monstrous revolver snugged into a holster around his waist.

There was a nervous laugh all around.

As Nora returned to her breakfast, she thought she heard a noise: distant but growing louder. Looking around, she noticed the others heard it, too. The sound echoed around the canyon walls and she realized it was a plane. As she searched the empty blue sky, the noise increased dramatically and a float plane cleared the sandstone canyon rim, early morning sun glinting off its aluminum skin and bulbous pontoons. From upcanyon, the horses eyed it nervously.

“That guy’s awfully low,” said Holroyd, staring upward.

“He ain’t just low,” Swire said. “He’s landing.”

They watched as the plane dipped, its wings waggling an aviational hello. It straightened its line, then touched down, sending up two fins of water in a flurry of spray. The engines revved as the plane coasted toward the tangle of logs. Nora nodded to Holroyd to take the raft out to meet them. Inside the cockpit, she could see the pilot and copilot, checking gauges, making notes on a hanging clipboard. At last the pilot climbed out, waved, and swung down onto one of the pontoons.

Nora heard Smithback whistle softly beside her as the pilot took off a pair of goggles and a leather helmet, giving her short, straight black hair beneath a shake. “Fly me,” he said.

“Stow it,” she snapped.

The pilot was Sloane Goddard.

Holroyd had reached the side of the plane by now, and Goddard began swinging duffels into the raft from the cargo area behind the plane’s seats. Then she slammed the hatch shut, slid down into the raft, and gave the copilot a sign. As Holroyd rowed back through the tangle of debris, the plane turned and began to taxi down the canyon, where it revved its engines and began its takeoff. Nora’s eyes moved from the vanishing plane back to the rapidly approaching figure.

Sloane Goddard was sitting in the rear of the raft, talking to Holroyd. She wore a long aviator’s leather jacket, jeans, and narrow boots. Her hair was done in a classic short pageboy, almost decadent in its anachronism, that reminded Nora of a Fitzgerald-era flapper from a 1920s fashion magazine. The almond-shaped, brilliant amber eyes and sensuous mouth with its faint, sardonic curve lent an exotic touch to her features. She looked almost Nora’s age, perhaps in her mid- to late twenties. Nora realized, quite consciously, that she was looking at one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen.

As the raft ground to a halt on the shore, Sloane leaped nimbly out and came walking briskly into camp. This wasn’t the skinny sorority girl Nora had imagined. The woman approaching her had a voluptuous figure, yet whose movements hinted at quick, lithe strength. Her skin was tan and glowed with health, and she brushed back her hair with a gesture that was both innocent and seductive.

Still grinning, the woman walked over to Nora, slipped off her glove, and extended her hand. The skin was soft, the grip was cool and strong.

“Nora Kelly, I presume?” she said, eyes twinkling.

“Yes,” Nora exhaled. “And you must be Sloane Goddard. The belated Sloane Goddard.”

The grin widened. “Sorry about the drama. I’ll tell you about it later. Right now, I’d like to meet the rest of your team.”

Nora’s alarm at this easy tone of command abated at the words your team. “Sure thing,” she said. “You’ve met Peter Holroyd.” She indicated the image specialist, who was now bringing up the last of the woman’s gear, then turned toward Aragon. “And this is—”

“I’m Aaron Black,” Black said out of turn, approaching the woman with an extended hand, his belly sucked in, his back straight.

Sloane’s grin widened. “Of course you are. The famous geochronologist. Famous and feared. I remember your paper demolishing the Chingadera Cave dating at the last SAA meeting. I felt sorry for that poor archaeologist, Leblanc. I don’t think he’s been able to hold his head up since.”

At this reference to the destruction of another scientist’s reputation, Black swelled with visible pleasure.

Sloane turned. “And you must be Enrique Aragon.”

Aragon nodded, face still inscrutable.

“I’ve heard my father speak very highly of your work. Think we’ll find many human remains in the city?”

“Unknown,” came the reply. “The burial grounds for Chaco Canyon have never been found, despite a century of searching. On the other hand, Mummy Cave yielded hundreds of burials. Either way, I will be analyzing the faunal remains.”

“Excellent,” Goddard nodded.

Nora looked around, intending to complete the introductions and get underway as quickly as possible. To her surprise, Roscoe Swire had abruptly shuffled off and was busying himself with the horses.

“Roscoe Swire, right?” Sloane called out, following Nora’s eyes. “My father’s told me all about you, but I don’t think we’ve ever met.”

“No reason we should have,” came the gruff answer. “I’m just a cowboy trying to keep a bunch of greenhorns from breaking their necks out here in slickrock country.”

Sloane let out a husky laugh. “Well, I heard that you’ve never fallen off a horse.”

“Any cowboy tells you that is a liar,” said Swire. “My butt and the ground are tolerably well acquainted, thank you.”

Sloane’s eyes twinkled. “Actually, my father said he could tell you were a real cowboy, because when you showed up for the interview you had real horseshit on your boots.”

Swire finally grinned, fishing a gingersnap out of his shirt. “Well, now,” he said, “I’ll accept that compliment.”

Nora waved toward the writer. “And this is Bill Smithback.”

Smithback swept an exaggerated bow, cowlick jiggling frantically atop the brown mop of hair.

“The journalist,” said Sloane, and Nora thought she heard a brief note of disapproval in Sloane’s voice before the dazzling smile returned full-proof. “My father mentioned he’d be contacting you.” Before Smithback could reply, Sloane had turned toward Bonarotti. “And thank God you’re along, Luigi.”

The cook nodded in return, saying nothing.

“How about breakfast?” she asked.

He turned to the grill.

“I’m ravenous,” Sloane added, accepting a steaming plate.

“You’ve met Luigi before?” Nora asked, sitting down beside Sloane.

“Yes, last year, when I was climbing the Cassin Ridge on Denali. He was operating the base camp kitchen for our group. While everybody else on the mountain was eating gorp and logan bread, we dined on duck and venison. I told my father he had to get Luigi for this expedition. He’s very, very good.”

“I’m very, very expensive,” Bonarotti replied.

Sloane tucked into the omelette with gusto. The others had instinctively drawn round again, and Nora wasn’t surprised: the younger Goddard was not only beautiful but—sitting there in the wilderness in her leather jacket and faded jeans—she radiated charisma, ironic good humor, and the kind of easy self-confidence that came with money and good breeding. Nora felt a mixture of relief and envy. She wondered what kind of impact this new development would have on her position as leader. Best to get things established right away, she thought.

“So,” she began. “Care to explain the dramatic entrance?”

Sloane looked at her with her lazy smile. “Sorry about that,” she said, putting aside the empty plate and leaning back, coat thrown open to expose a checked cotton shirt. “I was delayed back at Princeton by a failing student. I’ve never failed anybody, and I didn’t want to start now. I worked with him until it became too late to mess with commercial airlines.”

“You had us worried back there at the marina.”

Sloane sat up. “You didn’t get my message?”

“No.”

“I left it with somebody named Briggs. Said he’d pass it along.”

“Must have slipped his mind,” said Nora.

Sloane’s grin widened. “It’s a busy place. Well, you did the right thing, leaving without me.”

Swire brought the horses back down the canyon from their grazing ground, and Nora went over to help with the saddling. To her surprise, Sloane followed behind and joined in, deftly saddling two horses to Swire’s three. They tied the horses to some brush as Swire started on the pack animals, throwing on the pads and sawbuck packsaddles, hooking on the panniers, carefully balancing the more awkward equipment, throwing a manty over each load and tying it down. As soon as each horse was packed they passed it to Sloane, who brought it upcanyon. Bonarotti was packing the last of the cooking gear, while Smithback was stretched out comfortably nearby, debating with the cook whether béarnaise or bordelaise was the more noble sauce for medallions of beef.

At last, Nora stood back from the final horse, breathing hard, and looked at her watch. It was just past eleven: still enough time for a decent ride, but short enough to help break in the greenhorns. She glanced at Swire. “Want to give them their first lesson?”

“Now’s as good a time as any,” he said, hitching up his pants and looking at the group. “Who here knows anything about riding?”

Black began to raise his hand.

“I do,” said Smithback instantly.

Swire ranged his eyes across Smithback, his mustache drooping skeptically. “That right?” he said, spitting a stream of tobacco.

“Well, I did, anyway,” the writer returned. “It’s like riding a bike; it’ll come back fast.”

Nora thought she saw Swire grin beneath his droopy mustache. “Now the first thing is the introductions.”

There was a puzzled moment while Swire gazed around the group. “These two horses are mine, the buckskin and the sorrel. Mestizo and Sweetgrass. Since Mr. Smithback here’s an experienced rider, I’m gonna give him Hurricane Deck to ride and Beetlebum to pack.”

There was a sudden guffaw from Black, with an uncomfortable silence from Smithback.

“Any special significance to the names?” Smithback asked with exaggerated nonchalance.

“Nothing in particular,” said Swire. “Just a few habits they have, is all. You got a problem with those two fine horses?”

“Oh, no, no way,” said Smithback a little weakly, eyeing the big shaggy gray horse and its strawberry roan companion.

“They’ve only killed a few greenhorns, and they were all New Yorkers. We don’t have any New Yorkers here, do we?”

“Certainly not,” Smithback said, pulling on the brim of his hat.

“Now for Dr. Black here, I’ve got Locoweed and Hoosegow. For Nora, I’ve got my best mare, Fiddlehead. Crow Bait will be your pack horse. Don’t let the name fool you: he may be an ugly, coon-footed, ewe-necked, mule-hipped cayuse, but he’ll pack two hundred pounds from here to the gates of hell, no problem.”

“Let’s hope he doesn’t have to go that far,” Nora replied.

Swire parceled out the horses according to ability and temperament, and soon everyone was holding a pair of horses by the halters and reins. Nora lofted herself into the saddle, Goddard and Aragon following her example. Nora could see from Sloane’s lightly balanced seat that she was an expert horsewoman. The rest stood around, looking nervous.

Swire turned to the group. “Well,” he said, “what’s taking you? Git on up!”

There was some grunting and nervous hopping, but soon everyone was sitting in the saddle, some slouched, some ramrod straight. Aragon was moving his horse around, backing him up, turning him on the forehand, another clearly experienced rider.

“Just don’t make me unlearn any bad habits,” Smithback said, sitting on Hurricane Deck. “I like to steer with the saddlehorn.”

Swire ignored this. “Lesson number one. Hold the reins in your left hand, and the pack-horse lead rope in your right. It’s simple.”

“Yeah,” said Smithback, “like driving two cars at once.”

Holroyd, sitting awkwardly on his horse, let out a nervous bray of laughter, then fell silent abruptly, glancing at Nora.

“How are you doing, Peter?” Nora asked him.

“I prefer motorcycles,” he said, shifting uncomfortably.

Swire walked over first to Holroyd, then Black, correcting their postures and grips. “Don’t let the lead rope get wedged under your horse’s tail,” he said to Black, who was letting his rope droop dangerously. “Or you might find your horse with a sudden bellyful of bedsprings.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Black said, hastily drawing in the slack.

“Nora plans to ride point,” Swire said. “That’s up front, for you dudes. I’ll ride drag. And Dr. Goddard over there, she’ll ride swing.” He leaned over and looked at Sloane. “Where’d you learn to ride?”

“Here and there,” Sloane smiled.

“Well, I guess you’ve done a bit of here-ing and thereing.”

“Remind me how to steer,” Black said, clutching the reins.

“First, give your horse some slack. Now move your reins back and forth, like this. The horse gets his cue when he feels one rein or the other touch his neck.” He looked around. “Any questions?”

There were none. The air had grown sullen in the late morning heat, smelling of sego lilies and cedar.

“Well, then, let’s jingle our spurs.”

Nora put heels to her horse and rode forward, Holroyd and the rest falling into place behind her.

“You’ve taken a reading?” she asked Holroyd.

He nodded and smiled at her, patting the laptop computer that peeped, wildly out of place, from one of his weathered saddlebags. Nora took a final look at her map. Then she nudged her horse forward and they headed into the sandstone wilderness.

17

THEY MOVED UP SERPENTINE CANYON SINGLE file, crossing and recrossing the little creek that flowed in its bottom. On both sides of the canyon, windblown sand had piled up against the stone cliffs in drifts, covered with a scattering of grass and desert flowers. Here and there they passed juniper trees, stunted and coiled into fantastic shapes. Elsewhere, blocks of sandstone had come loose from the canyon walls and spilled across its bottom, creating piles of rubble the horses had to pick through with care. Canyon wrens flitted about in the shadows, and swallows darted out from beneath overhanging lips of sandstone, their mud nests like warts on the underside of the rock. A few white clouds drifted past the canyon rims, a quarter mile above their heads. The group followed silently behind Nora, lost in this strange new world.

Nora inhaled deeply. The gentle rocking motion of Fiddlehead felt familiar and comforting. She glanced at the animal. She was a twelve-year-old sorrel, clearly an experienced dude horse, wise and melancholy. As they proceeded, she proved herself sure-footed in the rocks, putting her nose down and picking her way with the utmost attention to self-preservation. While she was far from handsome, she was strong and sensible. Except for Hurricane Deck, Sloane’s horse Compañero, and Swire’s own two mounts, the horses were similar to Nora’s: not very pretty, but solid ranch stock. She approved of Swire’s judgment; her experience growing up had given her a low opinion of expensive, overbred horses who looked great in the show ring but couldn’t wait to kill themselves in the mountains. She remembered her father buying and selling horses with his usual flair and bluster, turning away pampered animals, saying We don’t want any of those country-club horses around here, do we, Nora?

She twisted in the saddle to look back at the other riders trailing behind her, pack horses in tow. While some of the riders, notably Black and Holroyd, looked lumpy and unbalanced, the rest looked competent, particularly Sloane Goddard, who moved up and down the line with ease, checking cinches and giving suggestions.

And Smithback was a surprise. Hurricane Deck was clearly a spirited horse, and there were a few tense moments at first while Smithback’s oaths and imprecations filled the air. But Smithback knew enough to show the horse who was boss, and he was now riding confidently. He may be full of himself, she thought, but he looks pretty good on a horse.

“Where’d you learn to ride?” she called back.

“I spent a couple of years at a prep school in Arizona,” the writer answered. “I was a sickly, whining brat of a kid, and my parents thought it would make a man of me. I arrived late the first term, and all the horses were taken except this one big old guy named Turpin. He’d chewed on barbed wire at some point and torn his tongue, and it was always hanging out, this long pink disgusting thing. So nobody wanted him. But Turpin was the fastest horse at the school. We’d race down the dry creekbeds or bush-bend through the desert, and Turpin always won.” He shook his head at the memory, chuckling.

Suddenly, the smile on his face was replaced with a look of shock. “What the hell?” He spun around. Following his gaze, Nora saw Smithback’s pack horse, Beetlebum, dart back. A rope of saliva was dripping off Smithback’s leg.

“That damn horse just tried to bite me!” Smithback roared, full of indignation. The pack horse looked back, his face a picture of surprised innocence.

“That old Beetlebum,” said Swire, shaking his head affectionately. “He’s sure got a sense of humor.”

Smithback wiped his leg. “So I see.”

After another half hour of uneventful riding Nora brought the group to a halt. From an aluminum tube tied to her saddle, she removed the U.S.G.S. topo onto which Holroyd had superimposed the radar data. She examined it for a moment, then motioned him over.

“Time for a GPS reading,” she said. She knew that six miles up Serpentine Canyon they had to branch off into a smaller canyon, marked HARD TWIST on the map. The trick would be identifying which of the endless parade of side canyons they were passing was Hard Twist. Down on the canyon bottom, every bend looked the same.

Holroyd dug into his saddlebag and pulled out the GPS unit, a laptop into which he had downloaded all the navigation and waypoint data. While Nora waited, he booted the computer, then began to tap at the keyboard. After a few minutes he grimaced, then shook his head.

“I was afraid of that,” he said.

Nora frowned. “Don’t tell me it isn’t powerful enough.”

Holroyd laughed crookedly. “Powerful? It uses a twenty-four-channel GPS reader with an infrared remote. It can plot positions, geocode locations automatically, leave breadcrumb trails, everything.”

“Then what’s the problem? Broken already?”

“Not broken, just unable to get a fix. It has to locate at least three geostationary satellites simultaneously to get a reading. With these high canyon walls, it can’t even pick up one. See?”

He turned the laptop toward Nora, and she nudged her horse closer. A high-resolution overhead map of the Kaiparowits canyon system filled the screen. Atop lay smaller windows containing magnified charts of Lake Powell, real-time compasses, and data. In one window, she could see a series of messages:

NMEA MODE ENABLED

ACQUIRING SATELLITES . . .

SATELLITES ACQUIRED SO FAR: 0

3-D FIX UNAVAILABLE

LAT/LONG: N/A

ELEVATION: N/A

EPHEMERIS DATA UNAVAILABLE

RELOCATE UNIT AND REINITIALIZE

“See this?” Holroyd pointed to a small window on the screen in which various red dots orbited in circular tracks. “Those are the available satellites. Green means good reception, yellow means poor reception, and red means no reception. They’re all red.”

“Are we lost already?” called Black from behind, a note somewhere between apprehension and satisfaction in his voice. Nora ignored him.

“If you want a reading,” Holroyd said to Nora, “you’ll have to go up top.”

Nora glanced at the soaring red walls, streaked with desert varnish, and looked back at Holroyd. “You first.”

Holroyd grinned, powered-down the laptop, and returned it to his saddlebag. “This is a great unit when it works. But I guess way out here, even technology has its limits.”

“Want me to climb up and take the reading?” Sloane asked, riding forward with an easy smile.

Nora looked at her curiously.

“I brought some gear,” Sloane said, lifting the top of a saddlebag and displaying a gear sling loaded with carabiners, friends, nuts, and pitons. She gave the rock walls a calculating look. “I could make it in three pitches, maybe two. Doesn’t look too bad, I could probably free climb my way up.”

“Let’s save that for when we really need it,” Nora said. “I’d rather not take the time right now. Let’s do things the old-fashioned way instead. Dead reckoning.”

“It’s your gig,” Sloane said good-humoredly.

“Dead reckoning,” Smithback murmured. “Never did like the sound of that.”

“We may not have satellites,” Nora said. “But we’ve got maps.” Spreading Holroyd’s map across her saddlehorn, she stared at it closely, estimating their approximate speed and travel time. She marked a dot at their probable position, the date and time beside it.

“Done a lot of this before?” Holroyd asked at her side.

Nora nodded. “All archaeologists have to be good at reading maps. It’s hell finding some of the remoter ruins. And what makes it harder is this.” She pointed to a note in the corner of the map that read WARNING: DATA NOT FIELD-CHECKED. “Most of these maps are created from stereogrammatic images taken from the air. Sometimes what you see from a plane is a lot different from what you see on foot. As you can see, your radar image—which is absolutely accurate—doesn’t always correspond to what’s printed on the map.”

“Reassuring,” she heard Black mutter.

Replacing the map, Nora nudged her horse forward and they continued up the canyon. The walls broadened and the stream diminished, in some places even disappearing for a while, leaving only a damp stretch of sand to mark its underground course. Each time they passed a narrow side canyon, Nora would stop and mark it on the map. Sloane rode up beside her, and for a while they rode together.

“Airplane pilot,” Nora said, “expert horsewoman, archaeologist, rock climber—is there anything you don’t do?”

Sloane shifted slightly in her seat. “I don’t do windows,” she said with a laugh. Then her face became more serious. “I guess the credit—or the blame—goes to my father. He’s a man with exacting standards.”

“He’s quite a remarkable man,” Nora replied, hearing a slightly acerbic tone creeping into Sloane’s voice.

Sloane glanced back at her. “Yes.”

They rounded another bend and the canyon suddenly widened. A cluster of cottonwoods grew against the reddish walls, late afternoon sunlight slanting through their leaves. Nora glanced at her watch: just after four. She noted with satisfaction a broad sandy bench where they could camp, high enough to be beyond the reach of any unexpected flash flood. And along the banks of the creek were abundant new grass for the horses. True to its name, Hard Twist canyon veered off to the left, making such a sharp turn that it gave the illusion of dead-ending in a wall of stone. It looked ugly—choked with rocks, dry and hot. So far the trip had been an easy ride, but Nora knew that could not last.

She turned her horse and waited while the others straggled up. “We’ll camp here,” she called out.

The group gave a ragged cheer. Swire helped Black off his horse, and the scientist limped around a bit, shaking out his legs and complaining. Holroyd dismounted by himself, only to fall immediately to the ground. Nora helped him to a tree he could lean against until he got his legs back.

“I don’t like the look of that canyon,” Sloane said, coming over to Nora. “What if I scout up a ways?”

Nora looked at the younger Goddard. Her dark pageboy had been tousled by the wind, but the disarray only enhanced her beauty, and the golden desert light made her amber eyes as pale as a cat’s. During the day Nora had noticed several of the company, particularly Black, clandestinely admiring Sloane, whose tight cotton shirt, unbuttoned at the top and slightly damp with perspiration, left little to the imagination.

Nora nodded. “Good idea. I’ll take care of things here in the meantime.”

After assigning the camp chores, Nora helped Swire unpack and unsaddle the horses. They lined up the panniers, saddles, and gear on the sand, taking care to keep the high-tech equipment, in its waterproof drysacks, separate from the rest. Out of the corner of her eye, Nora noticed Bonarotti, armed with brush hook, digging trowel, buck knife, and his oversized pistol, marching off upcanyon on some mysterious errand, khakis still miraculously pressed and clean.

As soon as the horses were unpacked, Swire remounted Mestizo. During the ride, he had talked and sung to the horses constantly, making up verses to fit the small events of the day, and he sang another as Nora watched him drive the sweaty remuda toward the creek:

O my poor young gelding

Do you see yonder mare?

Such a lovely young filly

One cannot compare.

Too bad your equipment

Is in disrepair.

Once in the grass, he hobbled several of the lead horses and tied cowbells around their necks, then unsaddled Mestizo and staked him on a thirty-foot rope. At last, he placed himself on top of a rock, rolled a smoke, pulled out a greasy little notebook, and watched the horses settle down to their evening graze.

Nora turned back, surveying the camp with satisfaction. The heat of the day had abated, and a cool breeze rose up from the purling stream. Doves called back and forth across the canyon, and the faint smell of juniper smoke drifted past. Crickets trilled in the gathering twilight. Nora sat down on a tumbled rock, knowing that she should be using the last of the light to write in her journal, but savoring the moment instead. Black sat by the juniperwood fire, massaging his knees, while the others, the work of setting up camp done, were gathering around, waiting for a pot of coffee to boil.

There was the sound of footsteps crunching on sand and Bonarotti came swinging back down the canyon, a sack thrown over his back. He dropped the sack on the cook tarp spread out by the fire. He slapped a grill on the fire, oiled a large skillet, tossed in some minced garlic from his cabinet, and followed this with rice in a separate pot of water. Out of the sack tumbled some hideous, unidentifiable roots and bulbs, bundles of herbs, and several ears of prickly pear cactus. As he worked, Sloane came back into camp from her reconnaissance, clearly tired but still smiling, and sidled over to watch the final preparations. Working the knives with terrifying swiftness, Bonarotti diced up the roots and threw them into the pot, along with the bulb and a bundle of plants. Then he singed the cactus ears on the grill, skinned and julienned them, and threw them into the sizzling garlic. He gave the concoction a final stir, combined it with the rice, and removed it from the fire.

“Risotto with prickly pear, sego lily, wild potato, bolitas, and romano cheese,” he announced impassively.

There was a silence.

“What are you waiting for?” Sloane cried. “Line up and mangia bene!”

They jumped up, grabbing plates from the kitchen tarp. The cook loaded down each plate, sprinkling chopped herbs on top. They settled back on logs by the fire.

“Is this safe to eat?” Black asked, only half jokingly.

Sloane laughed. “It may be more dangerous for you, Doctor, if you do not eat it.” And she rolled her eyes melodramatically toward Bonarotti’s revolver.

Black gave a nervous laugh and tasted it. Then he took a second bite. “Why, this is quite good,” he said, filling his mouth.

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” intoned Smithback.

“Damn tasty chuck,” mumbled Swire.

Nora took a bite, and found her mouth filled with the creamy taste of arborio rice mingled with the delicate flavors of mushroom, cheese, savory herbs, and some indefinable tangy flavor that could only be the prickly pear.

Bonarotti accepted the praise with his usual lack of emotion. The canyon fell into silence while the serious business of eating began.

* * *

Later, as the expedition made ready for bed, Nora walked off to check on the horses. She found Swire in his usual position, notebook open.

“How is everything?” she asked.

“Mighty fine” came the answer, and then she heard a rustle as Swire removed a gingersnap from his breast pocket and inserted it into his face. There was a crunching sound. “Want one?”

Nora shook her head and sat down beside him. “What kind of a notebook are you keeping?” she asked.

Swire flicked some crumbs off his mustache. “Just some poems, is all. Cowboy doggerel. It’s a sideline of mine.”

“Really? May I see?”

Swire hesitated. “Well,” he said, “they’re supposed to be spoken, not read. But here, help yourself.”

Nora thumbed through the battered journal, peering closely in the mixture of firelight and starlight. There were bits and snatches of poems, usually no more than ten or twelve lines, with titles like “Workin up a Quit,” “Ford F-350,” “Durango Saturday Night.” Then, toward the back of the journal, she found poems of a completely different nature: longer, more serious. There was even a poem that appeared to be in Latin. She turned back to one called “Hurricane Deck.”

“Is this about Smithback’s horse?”

Swire nodded. “We go way back, that horse and me.”

He came tearing down the draw one stormy winter’s night,

A brush-tailed mustang, full of piss and fight.

I saddled up a chaser and laid a rope around his neck,

Corralled him and christened him Hurricane Deck.

Hurricane Deck, Hurricane Deck, hard on the eye and the saddle,

You whomper-jawed, hay-bellied, cold-backed old spraddle,

Only a blind mare could love your snip-nosed face,

Oh, but I tell you, Hurricane Deck could race.

I trained him for heeling, took him on the road,

At Amarillo and Santa Fe we won a load,

He served me well, from Salinas to Solitude,

But Hurricane’s been retired to loading up dudes.

“I need to work on the last stanza,” said Swire. “It don’t sound right. Ends kind of sudden.”

“Did you really catch him wild?” Nora asked.

“Sure did. One summer when I was running a pack string at the T-Cross up in Dubois, Wyoming, I heard talk about this buckskin mustang that nobody could catch. He was an outlaw, never branded, always broke for the mountains when he saw riders. Then that night I saw him. Lightning spooked him, sent him right past the bunkhouse. I chased that son of a bitch for three days.”

“Three days?”

“I kept cutting him off from the mountains, circling him back around past the ranch. Each time I picked up a fresh mount. I wore out six horses afore I got a rope on him. He’s some horse. The son of a bitch can jump a barbwire fence and I’ve seen him walk, just as nice as you please, across a cattle guard.”

Nora handed back the journal. “I think these are excellent.”

“Aw, horsehocky,” Swire said, but he looked pleased.

“Where’d you learn the Latin?”

“From my father,” came the answer. “He was a minister, always after me to read this and study that. Got it into his head that if I knew Latin, I wouldn’t raise so much hell. It was the Third Satire of Horace that finally made me light out of there.”

He fell silent, stroking his mustache, looking down toward the cook. “He’s a damn fine beanmaster, but he’s an odd son of a bitch, ain’t he?”

Nora followed his gaze to the tall, heavyset figure of Bonarotti. Postprandial ablutions completed, the cook was now preparing himself for bed. Nora watched as, with finicky care, Bonarotti inflated an air mattress, applied nocturnal facial creams, and readied what appeared to be a hairnet and a facial mask.

“What’s he doing now?” Swire muttered, as Bonarotti began working his fingers into his ears.

“The croaking of the frogs disturbs his rest,” Sloane Goddard said, emerging from the darkness and taking a seat beside them. She laughed her low, husky laugh, eyes reflecting the distant firelight. “So he brought along earplugs. And he’s got a little silk pillow that would turn my great aunt green with envy.”

“Odd son of a bitch,” Swire repeated.

“Maybe,” Sloane said, turning toward the wrangler and eyeing him up and down, one eyebrow raised. “But he’s no wimp. I’ve seen him on Denali in a blizzard with the temperature at sixty below. Nothing fazes him. It’s as if he has no feelings at all.”

Nora watched the cook slip gingerly into his tent and snug down the zipper. Then she turned back to Sloane. “So tell me about your recon. How is it upcanyon?”

“Not so good. A lot of dense willow and salt cedar brush, with plenty of loose rock.”

“How far did you go?”

“A mile and a half, maybe.”

“Can the horses make it?” Swire asked.

“Yes. But we’re going to need brush hooks and axes. And there isn’t much water.” Sloane glanced down at the remnants of the group, lounging around the fire drinking coffee. “Some of them are going to be unpleasantly surprised.”

“How much water?”

“A pothole here and there. Less as you go up. And that’s not all.” Sloane reached into a pocket and pulled out a map and a penlight. “I’ve been studying the topo. Your father found Quivira somewhere upcanyon, right?”

Nora frowned, unaware that Sloane had brought along maps of her own. “That’s about right.”

“And we’re here.” Sloane moved the penlight. “Look what’s between us and Quivira.”

She moved the penlight to a spot on the map where the elevation lines came together in an angry black mass: a ridge, high, difficult, and dangerous.

“I know all about that ridge,” Nora said, aware of how defensive she must sound. “My father called it the Devil’s Backbone. But I don’t see any reason to get everyone worried prematurely.”

Sloane snapped off the light and refolded the map. “What makes you think our horses can make it?”

“My father found a way to get his horses over that ridge. If he could do it, we can.”

Sloane looked back at her in the starlight; a long, penetrating look, the amused expression never leaving her face. Then she simply nodded.

18

THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER A BREAKFAST ONLY a little less miraculous than its predecessor, Nora assembled the group beside the packed horses.

“It’s going to be a tough day,” she said. “We’re probably going to be doing a lot of walking.”

“Walking sounds good to me,” Holroyd said. “I’m sore in places I didn’t know I had.” There was an assenting murmur.

“Can I have a different pack horse?” Smithback asked, leaning against a rock.

Swire ejected a stream of tobacco juice. “Got a problem?”

“Yeah. A horse-sized problem. Beetlebum over there keeps trying to bite me.”

The horse tossed its head in a mighty nod, then nickered evilly.

“Likes the taste of ham, I guess,” said Swire.

“That’s Mr. Prosciutto to you, pal.”

“He’s just kidding around. If he really wanted to bite, you’d know it. Like I said, he’s got a sense of humor, just like you.” Swire glanced at Nora.

Despite herself, Nora found the writer’s discomfiture covertly satisfying. “Roscoe’s right, I’d rather not make any changes unless we have to. Let’s give it another day.” She climbed into the saddle, then gave the signal to mount up. “Sloane and I will go first and pick out a trail. Roscoe will bring up the rear.”

They moved forward into the dry streambed, the horses pushing through the dense brush. Hard Twist Canyon was hot and close, with none of the charm of the previous day’s ride. One side of the canyon lay in deep purple shadow, while the other was etched in sunlight, a contrast almost painful to the eyes. Salt cedars and willows arched over their heads, creating a hot tunnel in which ugly, oversized horseflies droned.

The brush grew thicker, and Nora and Sloane dismounted to hack a path. It was hot, miserable work. Making things worse, they found only a few stagnant potholes of water that did not keep up with the horses’ thirst. The riders seemed to bear up well enough, except for Black’s sarcastic protest when told they would have to ration water for a while. Nora wondered how Black would react when they reached the Devil’s Backbone, somewhere in the wasteland ahead of them. His personality was beginning to seem a high price to pay for his expertise.

At last they came across a large muddy pool, hidden on the far side of a rockslide. The horses crowded forward. In the excitement, Holroyd dropped the lead rope of Charlie Taylor, his pack horse, who eagerly bounded forward into the muddy pool.

Swire turned at the sound. “Wait!” he called, but it was too late.

There was a sudden, terrifying pause as the horse realized it was bogging down in quicksand. Then, in an explosion of flexing muscle, the animal tried to back out, legs churning, spraying thick mud, whinnying in shrill fear. After a few moments it flopped back into the muck, sides shuddering in panic.

Without hesitating, Swire jumped down into the muck beside the horse, drew his knife, and with two deft strokes cut through the diamond hitch. As Nora watched, two hundred pounds worth of provisions slid off the horse’s back into the mud. Swire grabbed the lead rope and pulled the horse’s head to the side, simultaneously quirting him on the rump. With a great sucking noise the horse struggled free. Swire labored out of the mud himself, dragging the pack behind him. Resheathing his knife, he collected the shaking animal’s lead rope and wordlessly handed it to Holroyd.

“Sorry,” said the young man sheepishly, throwing a deeply embarrassed glance at Nora.

Swire stuffed a plug of tobacco into his already full cheek. “No problem. Coulda happened to anyone.”

Both Swire and the pack were liberally covered in vile-smelling muck. “Maybe this is a good time to stop for lunch,” Nora said.

After a quick meal, with the horses watered and the canteens full of purified water, they set out again. The growing heat had baked the canyon into a kind of oppressive somnolence, and all was quiet save for the clatter of horses’ hooves and the occasional muttered imprecations from Smithback to his pack horse.

“Goddammit, Elmer,” he finally cried, “get your hairy lips off me!”

“He likes you,” Swire said. “And his name’s Beetlebum.”

“Soon as we get back to civilization, it’s going to be Elmer,” Smithback said. “I’m going to personally escort this nag to the nearest glue factory.”

“Now don’t go hurtin’ his feelings,” Swire drawled, punctuating the sentence with a spit of tobacco juice.

Their route branched again into an unnamed canyon. Here, the walls were narrower and well scoured by flash floods, but there was less brush and the riding grew a little easier. At one broad bend, where the canyon temporarily widened, Nora reined in her horse and waited for Sloane to catch up. Looking around idly, she suddenly tensed, pointing toward a cutbank on the inside of the bend where flash floods had sliced through the old streambed.

“See that?” she asked, indicating a long thin swale of stained soil beside what looked like a linear arrangement of stones.

“Charcoal,” Sloane nodded as she rode up.

They dismounted and examined the layer. Her breath coming fast with excitement, Nora picked up some tiny fragments of charcoal with a pair of tweezers and placed them in a test tube. “Just like the Great North Road to Chaco,” she murmured.

Then she straightened up and looked at Sloane. “I think we’ve finally found it. The road my father was following.”

Sloane smiled. “Never doubted it.”

They moved on. Now, wherever the canyon took a sharp bend and the old floor was exposed as a bench high above the stream, they could see charcoal-stained ground and, infrequently, lines of stones. Time and again, Nora found herself picturing her father: riding along this same trail, seeing these same sights. It gave her a feeling of connection she hadn’t felt since he died.

Around three o’clock they stopped to rest the horses, taking refuge under an overhang.

“Hey, look,” Holroyd said, pointing to a large green plant growing out of the sand, covered with huge, funnel-shaped white flowers. “Datura meteloides. Its roots are saturated with atropine—the same poison in belladonna.”

“Don’t let Bonarotti see it,” Smithback said.

“Some Indian tribes eat the roots to induce visions,” said Nora.

“Along with permanent brain damage,” replied Holroyd.

As they sat with their backs to the rock, eating handfuls of dried fruits and nuts, Sloane retrieved her binoculars and began scanning a series of alcoves in a blind canyon opposite them.

After a minute she turned to Nora. “I thought so. There’s a small cliff dwelling up there. First one I’ve seen since we started out.”

Taking the binoculars, Nora peered at the small ruin, perched high on the cliff face. It was set into a shallow alcove, oriented to the south in the Anasazi way, ensuring shade in the summer and warmth in the winter. She could see a low retaining wall along the bottom of the alcove, with what looked like several rooms built in the rear and a circular granary to one side.

“Let me see,” Holroyd said. He gazed at the ruin, motionless. “Incredible,” he breathed at last.

“There’s thousands of little ruins like that in the Utah canyon country,” Nora said.

“How did they live?” Holroyd asked, still peering up with the binoculars.

“They probably farmed the canyon bottom—corn, squash, and beans. They hunted and gathered plants. I’d guess it housed a single extended family.”

“I can’t believe they raised kids up there,” Holroyd said. “You have to be pretty brave to live in a cliff face like that.”

“Or nervous,” said Nora. “There’s a lot of controversy over why the Anasazi suddenly abandoned their pueblos on the flats and retreated into those inaccessible cliff dwellings. Some say it was for defense.”

“Looks like a no-brainer to me,” Smithback said, grabbing the binoculars from Holroyd. “Who’d live up there if they didn’t have to? No elevators, and Pizza Hut sure as hell doesn’t deliver.”

Nora looked at him. “What makes it strange is that there’s no overt evidence of warfare or invasion. All we really know is that the Anasazi suddenly retreated to these cliff sites, stayed there for a while, and then abandoned the Four Corners area entirely. Some archaeologists think it was caused by a total social breakdown.”

Sloane had been scanning the cliffs with a shaded hand. Now she took the binoculars from Smithback and examined the rock more carefully. “I think I can see a way up,” she said. “If you climb that talus slope, there’s a hand-and-toe trail pecked up the slickrock which goes all the way to the ledge. From there you can edge over.” She lowered the binoculars and looked at Nora, amber eyes lit up with mild excitement. “Do we have time to try it?”

Nora glanced at her watch. They were already hopelessly behind schedule—one more hour wouldn’t matter, and they did have an obligation to survey as many ruins as they could. Besides, it might revive some flagging spirits. She gazed up at the little ruin, feeling her own curiosity aroused. There was always the chance her father had explored this ruin, maybe even left his scrawled initials on a rockface to record his presence. “All right,” she said, reaching for her camera. “It doesn’t look technical.”

“I’d like to go, too,” said Holroyd excitedly. “I did some rock climbing in college.”

Nora looked at the flushed, eager face. Why not?

“I’m sure Mr. Swire would be happy to give the horses an extra rest.” Nora looked at the group. “Anybody else want to come?”

Black gave a short laugh. “No thanks,” he said. “I value my life.”

Aragon glanced up from his notebook and shook his head. Bonarotti had gone off to gather mushrooms. Smithback pushed away from the rock wall and stretched luxuriously. “Guess I’d better tag along with you, Madame Chairman,” he said. “It wouldn’t do to have you find an Anasazi Rosetta stone while I was loafing around down here.”

They crossed the stream, scrambled over boulders and up the talus slope, loose rocks clattering behind them. The sandstone ahead sloped upward at a forty-five-degree angle, notched with a series of eroded dimples set into the rock.

“That’s the hand-and-toe trail.” Nora pointed. “The Anasazi pounded them out with quartzite hammerstones.”

“I’ll go first,” said Sloane. To Nora’s surprise she shot nimbly upward, limbs tawny in the sunlight, hands and feet finding the holds with the instinctive assurance of a veteran rock climber. “Come on up!” she said a minute later, kneeling on the ledge above their heads. Holroyd followed. Then Nora watched Smithback creep cautiously up the slickrock face, gangly limbs clutching at the narrow holds, his face covered with sweat. Something about him made her smile. She waited until he had safely completed the climb, then brought up the rear herself.

In a few moments they were all sitting on the ledge, catching their breath. Nora looked at the camp spread out below their feet, the horses grazing along an apron of sand, the humans looking like splotches of color resting against the red cliffs.

Sloane rose. “Ready?”

“Go for it,” said Nora.

They crept along the narrow ledge. It was about two feet wide, but the bottom was canted slightly and scattered with fragments of sandstone, which rattled off into space as they inched along. After a short distance the ledge broadened out, curved around a corner, and the ruin came into view.

Nora made a quick visual inspection. The alcove was perhaps fifty feet long, ten feet high at its highest point, and about fifteen feet deep. A low masonry retaining wall had been built at the lip of the alcove and filled with rubble, leveling the surface. Behind were four small roomblocks of flat stones mortared with mud; one with a keyhole door, the rest with tiny windows. The builders had used the natural sandstone roof of the alcove as their ceiling.

Nora turned to Holroyd and Smithback. “I think Sloane and I should make an initial survey. You wouldn’t mind waiting here for a few minutes?”

“Only if you promise not to find anything,” Smithback replied.

Nora unbuckled the hood of her camera and walked gingerly along the facade, photographing the exterior of the dwelling. Although Sloane’s expertise with the large 4x5 Graflex made her the expedition’s official photographer, Nora liked to keep her own record of all the sites she studied.

She stopped to peer more closely at the plastered wall. Here, she could see the actual handprints of the person who had smeared the adobe. Raising her camera again, she took a careful closeup, then another when she noticed a clear set of fingerprints. It was not unusual to find prints preserved in Anasazi plaster and corrugated pottery, but she always liked to document them when she could. They helped serve as a reminder that archaeology was the study, ultimately, of people, not artifacts—something she felt many of her colleagues seemed to forget.

There was the usual littering of potsherds on the ground—mostly Pueblo III Mesa Verde whiteware and some late Tusayan-style corrugated grayware. A.D. 1240, Nora thought without surprise.

Sloane, who had been sketching a quick plan of the ruin, now removed a pair of tweezers and some Ziploc bags from her rucksack. Labeling the bags with a marker, she moved carefully forward, picking up a sampling of potsherds and some scattered corncobs with the tweezers. She placed them in the bags, then marked their positions in her sketchbook. She worked quickly and deftly, and Nora watched with growing surprise. Sloane seemed to know exactly what to do. In fact, she worked as if she had been on many professional surveys before.

Reaching into her bag again, Sloane pulled out a small, battery-powered chrome instrument and moved to a viga that projected from one of the roomblocks. There was a small whining sound, and Nora realized she was taking a core from the roofbeam for tree-ring dating. By studying the growth pattern of the rings, a specialist in dendrochronology such as Black could tell the exact year the tree was cut. As the whining ended abruptly and silence returned, Nora felt a sudden annoyance at this mechanized disturbance of the site—or, perhaps, with the fact that Sloane had done it so blithely, without her permission. She instinctively moved forward.

Looking over, Sloane read her face in an instant. “This all right?” she asked, raising her dark eyebrows inquiringly.

“Next time, let’s discuss something like this first.”

“Sorry,” Sloane said, in a tone even more annoying for its apparent lack of sincerity. “I just thought it might be useful—”

“It will be useful,” Nora said, trying to moderate her voice. “That’s not the point.”

Sloane glanced at her more closely, a cool, appraising glance that bordered on insolence. Then the lazy grin returned. “I promise,” she said.

Nora turned and moved to the doorway. She realized her irritation was partly based on a vague, irrational threat she felt to her leadership. She hadn’t realized Sloane was so experienced in fieldwork, spoiling Nora’s earlier assumption that she would be leading Goddard’s daughter through the basics. She immediately felt sorry for showing her feelings; she had to admit that the pencil-thin core probably contained the most useful piece of information they would take from the ancient ruin.

She shined a penlight inside the first roomblock and found the interior relatively well preserved. The walls were plastered, still showing traces of painted decoration. She angled the beam toward the floor, covered with sand and dust that had blown in over the centuries. In one corner she could see the edge of a metate—a grinding stone—protruding from the dirt, beside a broken mano.

Opening her flash, she took another sequence of pictures in the room and the one beyond, which was exceptionally dusty and—very unusually—seemed at one time to have been painted with thick, heavy black paint. Or perhaps it was from cooking. Moving through a low doorway, she advanced into the third room. It, too, was empty, save for a hearth with several firedogs still propping up a comal, or polished cooking stone. The sandstone ceiling was blackened with crusted smoke, and she could still smell the faint odor of charcoal. A series of holes in the plaster wall might have been the anchor for a loom.

Moving back through the rooms, Nora leaned out into the sudden warmth of the sun and beckoned the waiting Holroyd and Smithback. They followed her into the roomblock, stooping through the low doorways.

“This is incredible,” Holroyd said in a reverential whisper. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I still can’t believe people lived up here.”

“Neither can I,” said Smithback. “No cable.”

“There’s nothing like the feeling of one of these ancient ruins,” Nora replied. “Even an unremarkable one like this.”

“Unremarkable to you, maybe,” Holroyd said.

Nora looked at him. “You’ve never been in an Anasazi ruin before?”

Holroyd shook his head as they stepped into the second room. “Only Mesa Verde, as a kid. But I’ve read all the books. Wetherill, Bandelier, you name it. As an adult, I never had the time or money to travel.”

“We’ll call it Pete’s Ruin, then.”

Holroyd flushed deeply. “Really?”

“Sure,” said Nora, with a grin. “We’re the Institute: we can name it anything we want.”

Holroyd looked at her a long moment, eyes gleaming. Then he took her hand and pressed it briefly between his. Nora smiled and gently withdrew her hand. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea, she thought.

Sloane came from the back of the ruin, shouldering her rucksack.

“Find anything?” Nora asked, taking a swig from her canteen and offering it around. She knew that most rock art was found behind cliff dwellings.

Sloane nodded. “A dozen or so pictographs. Including three reversed spirals.”

Nora looked up in surprise to meet the woman’s glance.

Holroyd caught the look. “What?” he asked.

Nora sighed. “It’s just that, in Anasazi iconography, the counterclockwise direction is usually associated with negative supernatural forces. Clockwise or ‘sunwise’ was considered to be the direction of travel of the sun across the sky. Counterclockwise was therefore considered a perversion of nature, a reversal of the normal balance.”

“A perversion of nature?” Smithback asked with sudden interest.

“Yes. In some Indian cultures today, the reversed spiral is still associated with witchcraft and sorcery.”

“And I found this,” Sloane said, lifting one hand. In it she held a small, broken, human skull.

Nora turned, uncomprehending at first, and Sloane’s grin widened lazily.

“Where did you find that?” Nora asked sharply.

Sloane’s smile did not falter. “Back there, next to the granary.”

“And you just picked it up?”

“Why not?” Sloane asked, her eyes narrowing. The slight movement reminded Nora of a cat when threatened.

“For one thing,” Nora snapped, “we don’t disturb human remains unless it’s absolutely critical for our research. And you’ve touched it, which means we can’t do bone collagen DNA on it. Worst of all, you didn’t even photograph it in situ.”

“All I did was pick it up,” Sloane said, her voice suddenly low.

“I thought I made it clear we were to discuss these things first.”

There was a tense silence. Then Nora heard a scratching sound behind her and she glanced at Smithback. “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded. The journalist had his notebook out and was scribbling away.

“Taking notes,” he said defensively, pulling the notebook toward his chest.

“You’re writing down our discussion?” Nora cried.

“Hey, why not?” Smithback said. “I mean, the human drama’s as much a part of this expedition as—”

Holroyd advanced and snatched the notebook away. “This was a private conversation,” he said, ripping out the page and handing the notebook back.

“That’s censorship,” Smithback protested.

Suddenly Nora heard a low, throaty purr that swelled into a mellifluous laugh. She turned to see Sloane still holding up the skull, looking at the three of them, amusement glittering in her amber eyes.

Nora took a breath and ignored the laugh. Don’t lose your cool. “Now that it’s been disturbed,” she said in a quiet voice, “we’ll bring it back for Aragon to analyze. Being a ZST type, he may object, but the deed’s been done. Sloane, I don’t want you ever doing any invasive procedures without my express permission. Is that understood?”

“Understood,” said Sloane, looking suddenly contrite as she handed the skull to Nora. “I wasn’t thinking. The excitement of the moment, I guess.”

Nora slipped the skull into a sample bag and tucked it in her pack. It seemed to her there had been something challenging in the way Sloane had come forward holding the skull, and Nora momentarily wondered if it hadn’t been a deliberate provocation. After all, it was clear that Sloane was well versed in the protocol of fieldwork. But then she told herself she was being paranoid. Nora remembered infelicitously seizing a gorgeous Folsom point she once uncovered at a dig, pulling it out of the stratum, and then seeing the horrified looks of everyone around her.

“What’s a ZST?” the unrepentant Smithback asked. “Some kind of birth control?”

Nora shook her head. “It stands for Zero Site Trauma. The idea that an archaeological site should never be physically disturbed. People like Aragon believe any intrusion, no matter how careful or subtle, destroys it for future archaeologists who might come along with more sophisticated tools. They tend to work with artifacts that have already been excavated by others.”

“ZST groupies consider traditional archaeologists to be artifact whores, digging for relics instead of reconstructing cultures,” Sloane added.

“If Aragon feels that way, why did he come along?” Holroyd asked.

“He’s not a total purist. I suppose that on a project as potentially important as this, he’s willing to put his personal feelings aside to some extent. I think he feels that if anyone is going to touch Quivira, it should be him.” Nora looked around. “What do you make of these walls?” she asked Sloane. “It’s not soot, it’s some kind of thick dried substance, like paint. But I’ve never seen an Anasazi room painted black before.”

“Beats me,” Sloane replied. She removed a small glass tube and a dentist’s pick from her pack. Then she glanced with a quick smile at Nora. “May I take a sample?” she paused. “Madame Chairman?”

It’s not funny when Smithback calls me that, Nora thought. And it’s even less funny coming from you. But she nodded wordlessly, watching as Sloane expertly flaked a few pieces into the glass test tube and stoppered it.

The sun was now low in the sky, painting long contrasting stripes along the ancient walls. “Let’s get back,” Nora said. As they turned to walk out on the ledge, Nora glanced back at the reverse spirals on the wall behind the ruin. She shivered briefly in spite of the heat.

19

THEY WERE FORCED TO MAKE A DRY CAMP that night. The horses were thirsty and off their feed, and by sundown the expedition had made serious inroads into their own supplies of water. Aragon received the skull with the wordless disapproval that Nora had expected. They turned in early, saddle sore and weary, and slept hard.

Shortly after starting out the following morning, they arrived at a triple intersection of narrow canyons. Despite careful examination, Nora and Sloane could find no more traces of the ancient road here; it was either buried or had washed away. The GPS laptop was still not functioning, and Holroyd’s map was of little help: at this point of the journey, the underlying topographical elevations on the map were ludicrously off. The radar data became a confusing maze of color.

Nor could Nora find any sign that her father had ever come this way. In the tradition of Frank Wetherill and the other early explorers, Nora knew her father sometimes marked his trail by scratching his initials and a date into the rock. Yet, to her mounting anxiety, she had yet to see any graffiti by him or anyone else, save the occasional petroglyphs of the long-vanished Anasazi.

For the rest of the day, the group toiled up through a warren of fractured canyons, moving deeper into a surreal world that seemed more a landscape of dream than anything of the earth. The mute stone halls spoke of eons of fury: uplift and erosion, floods, earthquakes, and the endless scouring of the wind. At every turn, Nora realized her dead reckoning grew more difficult and prone to error. Each fall of the horses’ hooves took them farther from civilization, from the comfortable and the known, deeper into an alien landscape of mystery. Cliff dwellings became more numerous, tucked slyly into the canyon walls, remote and inaccessible. Nora had the irrational feeling, as she stopped for the tenth time to pore over the map, that they were intruding onto forbidden ground.

By evening they were so exhausted that dinner was a cold, silent, impromptu affair. The lack of water had compelled Nora to institute severe rationing. Bonarotti, forced to cook with no water and dirty dishes, grew sullen.

After dinner, the group gravitated apathetically toward the campfire. Swire joined them after giving the horses a final check.

He sat down beside Nora and spat. “Come morning, these horses won’t have had decent water for thirty-six hours. Don’t know how much longer they can last.”

“Frankly, I couldn’t give a damn about the horses,” Black said from across the fire. “I’m wondering when we’re going to die of thirst.”

Swire turned to him, his face flickering in the light. “Maybe you don’t realize it, but if the horses die, we die. It ain’t any more complicated than that.”

Nora glanced in Black’s direction. In the firelight his face was haggard, a look of incipient panic in his eyes.

“Is everything all right, Aaron?” she asked.

“You said we were going to reach Quivira tomorrow,” he said huskily.

“That was only an estimate. It’s taking longer than I anticipated.”

“Bullshit.” Black sniffed. “I’ve been watching you all afternoon, struggling with those maps and trying to get that useless GPS unit to work. I think we’re lost.”

“No,” Nora replied. “I don’t believe we’re lost.”

Black leaned back, his voice growing louder. “Is that supposed to be encouraging? And where’s this road? We saw it yesterday. Maybe. But now it’s vanished.”

Nora had seen this kind of reaction to the wilderness before. It was never pleasant. “All I can say is we’ll get there, probably tomorrow, certainly by the next day.”

“Probably!” he repeated derisively, slapping his hands on his knees. “Probably!”

In the flickering light, Nora looked around at the rest of the group. Everyone was filthy from the lack of water and badly scratched from heavy brush. Only Sloane, sifting sand thoughtfully through her fingers, and Aragon, wearing his usual distant expression, appeared unconcerned. Holroyd was staring into the campfire, for once without a book at his side. Smithback’s hair was wilder than ever, his bony knees covered with dirt. Earlier in the afternoon he had complained, eloquently and at great length, about how if God had meant man to ride a horse he would have put a Barcalounger on the animal’s back. Even the fact that the apathetic Beetlebum had stopped trying to bite him had been little comfort.

It was a desperate-looking group, and it was hard to believe that the change had taken place in less than forty-eight hours of difficult travel. Jesus, Nora thought, if they look like that, what must I look like?

“I understand how concerned you all are,” she said slowly. “I’m doing the best I can. If any of you have any constructive ideas, I’d like to hear them.”

“The answer is to keep going,” said Aragon with a quiet vehemence. “And to stop complaining. Twentieth-century humans are unused to any real physical challenge. The people who lived in these canyons dealt with this kind of thirst and heat every day, without complaint.” He cast his dark, sardonic eyes around the group.

“Oh, now I feel better,” said Black. “And here I thought I was suffering from thirst.”

Aragon turned his dark eyes on Black. “You are suffering more from an undifferentiated personality disorder than from thirst, Dr. Black.”

Black turned to look at him, speechless with rage. Then he stood up on trembling limbs and made his way silently toward his tent.

Nora watched him walk away. What was happening here? What seemed so simple on paper—the Anasazi road, the descriptions in her father’s letter—had grown hopelessly complicated on the ground. It would only get worse: tomorrow afternoon, if her navigation was correct, they would hit the Devil’s Backbone, the massive hogback ridge that separated their canyon system from the even more remote and isolated system in which Quivira was hidden. On the map, it looked impassable. Yet her father had ridden over it. He must have. Why didn’t he leave any signs behind? But as she asked the question, she realized the answer: he wanted to keep the location of Quivira a secret known only to himself. For the first time, she understood the vagueness in his letter had been deliberate.

The group began to break up, leaving Smithback restlessly dozing and Aragon gazing thoughtfully into the fire. Nora felt movement nearby, then Sloane sat down beside her.

“This campsite isn’t all bad,” she said. “Look what I just uncovered.”

Nora glanced down in the direction Sloane indicated. There, lying half-buried in sand, was a perfect arrowhead, pressure-flaked out of a snow-white agate flecked with pinpoints of red.

Nora picked it up with great care, examining it closely in the light of the fire. “Amazing, isn’t it, how much they loved beauty? They always chose the loveliest materials for their stone tools. That’s Lobo Mesa agate, from an outcrop in New Mexico about three hundred miles southeast of here. Think of how far they were willing to trade to get the really nice stuff.”

She handed it to Sloane, who was looking at her curiously. “That’s quite a nice piece of identification,” she said with real admiration. She took the point and carefully laid it back in the dust. “Maybe it should lie here, after all.”

Aragon smiled. “It is always more fulfilling,” he said, “to leave something in its natural place than to lock it in a museum basement.” All three fell silent, staring into the dying flames.

“I’m glad you spoke up like that,” Nora said at last to Aragon.

“Perhaps I should have done it long before.” There was a pause. “What do you plan to do about him?”

“Black?” Nora thought. “Nothing, for the moment.”

Aragon nodded. “I’ve known him for a long while, and he’s always been full of himself. With good reason—there’s no better geochronologist in the country. But this is a side I hadn’t seen before. I think it’s fear. Some people fall apart psychologically when removed from civilization, from telephones, hospitals, cars, electric power.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Nora said. “If that’s the case, once we’ve made camp and set up communications with the outside world, he’ll calm down.”

“I think so. But then again, he might not.”

There was another silence.

“So?” Sloane prompted at last.

“So what?”

“Are we lost?” she asked gently.

Nora sighed. “I don’t know. Guess we’ll find out tomorrow.”

Aragon grunted. “If this is indeed an Anasazi road, it’s unlike any other I’ve encountered. It’s as if the Anasazi wanted to eradicate any trace of its existence.” He shook his head. “I sense a darkness, a malignancy, about this road.”

Nora looked at him. “Why do you say that?”

Silently, the Mexican reached into the pack and removed the test tube containing the flakes of black paint, cradling it in his palm. “I performed a PBT with luminol on one of these samples,” he said quietly. “It came up positive.”

“I’ve never heard of that test,” Nora said.

“It’s a simple test used by forensic anthropologists. And police. It identifies the presence of human blood.” He gazed at her, his dark eyes in shadow. “That wasn’t paint you saw. It was human blood. But not just blood: layers upon layers upon layers of crusted, dried blood.”

“My God,” Nora said. The passage from the Coronado report came back to her unbidden: “Quivira in their language means ‘The House of the Bloody Cliff.’” Perhaps “bloody cliff” was not merely symbolic, after all . . .

Aragon removed a small padded bag and carefully pulled out the small skull they had discovered at Pete’s Ruin. He handed it to Nora. “After I discovered that, I decided to take a closer look at the skull you found. I reassembled the pieces in my tent last night. It belongs to a young girl, maybe nine or ten years old. Definitely Anasazi: you can see how the back of the skull was flattened by a hard cradleboard when the child was a baby.” He turned it over carefully in his hands. “At first, I thought she had died an accidental death, perhaps hit by a falling stone. But when I looked more closely, I noticed these.” He pointed to a series of grooves on the back of the skull, near the center. “These were made with a flint knife.”

“No,” Sloane whispered.

“Oh, yes. This little girl was scalped.”

20

SKIP KELLY SAUNTERED DOWN A SHADED WALKWAY of the Institute’s manicured campus, rubbing bleary eyes. It was a breathtaking summer morning, warm and dry and full of promise. The sun threw a silken illumination over building and lawn, and a warbler was sitting in a lilac bush, pouring out its heart in rapturous song.

“Shut the hell up,” Skip growled. The bird complied.

Ahead of him lay a long, low Pueblo Revival structure, clothed in the same subdued earth tones as the rest of the Institute’s campus. A small wooden sign was set into the ground before it, ARTIFACTUAL ASSEMBLAGES spelled out in sans serif bronze letters. Skip opened the door and walked inside.

The door closed behind him with a squeal of metal, and he winced. Christ, what a headache. His mouth was parched and tasted of mildew and old socks, and he dug a piece of chewing gum out of his pocket. Oh, man. Better switch to beer. It was the same thing he thought every morning.

He looked around, grateful for the dim illumination. He was in a small antechamber, bare of furnishings save for two display cases and an uncomfortable-looking wooden bench. Doors led off in all directions, most of them unmarked.

Another squeal of metal on frame, and one of the far doors opened. A woman stepped out and approached him. Skip looked at her without interest. Mid-thirties, tall, short dark hair, round oversized glasses, and a corduroy skirt.

The woman extended her hand. “You must be Skip Kelly. I’m Sonya Rowling, senior lab technician.”

“Nice outfit,” he replied, shaking the proffered hand. Dressed up for the Brady Bunch reunion, he thought. Nora, I’ll get you for this.

If the woman heard the compliment, she gave no sign. “We expected you an hour ago.”

“Sorry about that,” Skip mumbled in reply. “Overslept.”

“Follow me.” The woman turned on her heel and walked back through the doorway. Skip followed her down a passage and around a corner into a large room. Unlike the antechamber, the space was filled with equipment: long metal tables, covered with tools, plastic trays, and printouts; desks piled high with books and three-ring binders. The walls were hidden by row upon row of metal drawers, all closed. In the corner nearest the door, a young man was standing in front of a keyboard, talking animatedly on the phone.

“As you can see, this is where the real work gets done,” the woman said. She waved at a relatively empty desk. “Have a seat and we’ll get you started.”

Gingerly, Skip eased himself down beside Sonya Rowling. “God, am I hung,” he muttered.

Rowling turned her owlish eyes toward his. “I beg your pardon?”

“Hung. Hung over, I mean,” Skip added hastily.

“I see. Perhaps that explains your lateness. I’m sure it won’t happen again.” Something in Rowling’s gaze made Skip sit up a little straighter.

“Your sister says you have a natural talent for labwork. That’s what I intend to find out in the next couple of weeks. We’ll start you off slowly, see what you can do. Have you had much field experience?”

“Nothing formal.”

“Good. Then you won’t have any bad habits to unlearn.” When Skip raised his eyebrows, she explained. “The public thinks fieldwork is the be-all and end-all of archaeology. But the truth is for every hour spent at the field, five are spent in the lab. And that’s where most of the important discoveries are made.”

She reached over and pulled a long metal tray with a hinged top toward them. Lifting the lid, Rowling reached inside and carefully removed four oversized Baggies. Each had the words PONDEROSA DRAW scribbled hastily across the top in black marker. Skip could see that many more sealed Baggies lay in the dim recesses of the tray.

“What’s all this?” Skip asked.

“Ponderosa Draw was a remarkable site in northeastern Arizona,” Rowling replied. “Note I say was, not is. For reasons we don’t fully understand, potsherds of many different styles were found there, scattered in apparent confusion. Perhaps the place was some kind of trading center. In any case, the owner of the land was an amateur archaeologist with more enthusiasm than sense. Over three summers in the early twenties he dug the whole site and collected every last sherd he could find. Scoured the site clean, above and below the surface.” She gestured at the bags. “Only problem was, he tossed all his finds together in a single pile, paying no attention to location, strata, anything. The entire provenance of the site was lost. The sherds were eventually given to the Museum of Indian Antiquities, but were never examined. We inherited them when we acquired the museum’s collection three years ago.”

Skip stared at the bags, frowning. “I thought I was going to work on Nora’s Rio Puerco stuff.”

Rowling pursed her lips. “The Rio Puerco dig was a model of archaeological discipline. Material was carefully gathered and recorded with a minimum of on-site intrusion. We stand to learn a great deal from your sister’s finds. Whereas this . . .” She gestured at the bags, letting the sentence drop.

“I get the picture,” Skip said, his scowl deepening. “This site is broken already. There’s nothing I can do to make it worse. And you’re going to make me cut my teeth on it.”

Rowling’s pursed lips curved into what might have been the shadow of a smile. “You catch on fast, Mr. Kelly.”

Skip stared at the bags for a long moment. “So I guess these are just the tip of the iceberg.”

“Another good guess. There are twenty-five more bags in storage.”

Shit. “And what do I have to do, exactly?”

“It’s very straightforward. Since we know nothing at all about where these potsherds were found, or their position relative to each other, all we can do is sort them by style and type and do a statistical analysis on the results.”

Skip licked his lips. This was going to be worse than he ever imagined. “Could I get a cup of coffee before we start?”

“Nope. No food or drink allowed in the lab. Tomorrow, come early and help yourself to coffee in the staff lounge. And that reminds me.” She pointed a thumb at the nearest wastebasket.

“What?”

“Your gum. In there, please.”

“Can’t I just stick it under the desk?”

Rowling shook her head, unamused. Skip leaned over and spat out his gum.

Rowling passed over a box of disposable gloves. “Now put these on.” She tugged on a pair herself, then placed one of the artifact bags between them and unsealed it carefully. Skip peered inside, curious despite himself. The sherds came in a variety of patterns and colors. Some were badly weathered, others still quite fresh. A few were corrugated and blackened with cooking smoke. Many were too small to clearly determine what kind of designs had been painted on them, but some were large enough to make out motifs: wavy lines, series of diamonds, parallel zig-zags. Skip remembered collecting similar sherds with his father. Back when he was a kid, it had been okay to do that. Not anymore.

The lab technician removed a sherd from the bag. “This is Cortez black-on-white.” She laid it gingerly on the table and her fingers moved back into the bag and withdrew another sherd. “And this is Kayenta black-on-white. Take a careful note of the differences.”

She put the sherds into two clear plastic containers, then drew another sherd from the bag. “What’s this?”

Skip scrutinized it. “It looks like the first one you drew out. Cortez.”

“Correct.” Rowling put the sherd into the first plastic bin, then drew out another sherd. “And this one?”

“It’s the other. Kayenta.”

“Very good.” Rowling placed the sherd into the other bin, then drew out a fifth sample from the bag. “And how about this?” There was a slightly sardonic expression on Rowling’s face, a faint challenge. It looked almost like the second sherd, but not quite. Skip opened his mouth to say Kayenta, then closed it again. He stared, reaching deep into his memory.

“Chuska Wide Banded?” he asked.

There was a sudden pause, and for a moment Rowling’s face lost its assurance. “How in the world—?”

“My father liked potsherds,” said Skip, a little diffidently.

“That’s going to help us a lot,” she said, her voice warming. “Maybe Nora was right. Anyway, you’ll find all sorts of good things in here: Cibola ware, St. John’s Polychrome, Mogollon Brownware, McElmo. But see for yourself.” She reached across the table and pulled over a laminated sheet. “This shows you samples of the two dozen or so styles you’re likely to find from the Ponderosa Draw site. Separate them by style, and put any questionable sherds to one side. I’ll come back and check on your progress in an hour or so.”

Skip watched her leave, then sighed deeply and turned his attention to the overstuffed Baggie. At first, the work seemed both boring and confusing, and the heap of questionable sherds began to pile up. But then, almost imperceptibly, he grew more sure in his identification: it was instinctive, almost, the way the shape, condition, even composition of the sherds could speak as loudly as the design itself. Memories of long afternoons spent with his father, pacing over some ruin in the middle of nowhere, came back with a bittersweet tang. And then, back at the house, poring over monographs, sorting and gluing the sherds onto pieces of cardboard. He wondered what had become of all their painstaking collections.

The lab was quiet except for the occasional keytaps of the young technician in the far corner. Skip started when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“So?” Rowling asked him. “How’s it going?”

“Has it been an hour?” Skip asked. He sat up and looked at his watch. The headache was gone.

“Just about.” She peered into the bins. “Good heavens, you’ve worked your way through two bags already.”

“Does that make me teacher’s pet?” Skip asked, massaging his neck. In the distance, he heard a rap at the laboratory door.

“Let me look over your work first, see how many mistakes you’ve made,” Rowling replied.

Abruptly, a high, tremulous voice rang out on the far side of the room: “Skip Kelly? Is there a Skip Kelly here?”

Skip glanced up. It was the young technician, looking very nervous. And easing past him, Skip could see the source of his nervousness: a large man in a blue uniform. The man walked partway toward Skip, the gun, baton, and handcuffs on his belt clinking slightly, then stopped. He hooked his hands in his belt with a slight smile. The room had fallen silent.

“Skip Kelly?” he asked in a low, calm baritone.

“Yes,” said Skip, going cold, his mind racing through a dozen possibilities, all of them unpleasant. That asshole neighbor must have complained. Or maybe it’s that woman with the dachshund. Christ, I only ran over its back leg, and—

“Could I speak with you outside, please?”

In the solemn darkness of the anteroom, the man flipped open an ID wallet and aimed it in Skip’s direction. “I’m Lieutenant Detective Al Martinez, Santa Fe Police Department.”

Skip nodded.

“You’re a hard man to reach,” Martinez said in a voice that managed to be both friendly and neutral at the same time. “I wonder if I could have a bit of your time.”

“My time?” Skip managed to say. “Why?”

“We’ll get to that at the station, Mr. Kelly, if you don’t mind.”

“The station,” Skip repeated. “When?”

“Let’s see,” said Martinez, glancing first at the floor, then at the ceiling, then back at Skip. “Right about now would be nice.”

Skip swallowed. Then he nodded toward the open laboratory door. “I’m at work right now. Can’t it wait until later?”

There was a brief pause. “No, Mr. Kelly,” the policeman replied. “Come to think of it, I don’t believe it can.”

21

SKIP FOLLOWED THE POLICEMAN OUT OF THE building to a waiting car. The detective was enormous, with a neck like a redwood stump; yet his movements were light, even gentle. Martinez stopped at the passenger side and, to Skip’s surprise, held the door open for him. As the car pulled away, Skip glanced in the rearview mirror. He could see a pair of white faces framed by the open door of the Artifactual Assemblages building, watching motionlessly, dwindling at last to invisibility.

“My first day on the job,” Skip said. “Great impression.”

They pulled through the gates of the compound and began to accelerate. Martinez slipped a stick of gum out of his breast pocket and offered it to Skip.

“No thanks.”

The detective folded the stick into his own mouth and began to chew, muscles in his jaw and neck working slowly. The irregular form of the La Fonda Hotel loomed on his right. Then they passed the plaza and the Palace of the Governors, Indians selling jewelry under the portal, the sunlight glinting off the polished silver and turquoise.

“Am I going to need a lawyer?” Skip asked.

Martinez chewed his gum diligently. “I don’t think so,” he said, “’Course, you’re welcome to one if you want.”

The car moved past the library and pulled around behind the old police building. Several Dumpsters sat in front, filled with broken pieces of drywall.

“Renovating,” Martinez explained as they entered a lobby draped in plastic. The lieutenant stopped at a desk and took a folder offered by a uniformed woman. He led Skip along a hallway smelling of paint, down a flight of stairs. Opening a scratched door, he ushered Skip in. Beyond lay a bare room, devoid of furniture except for three wooden chairs, a desk, and a dark mirror.

Skip had never been in such a place before, but he’d seen enough television to instantly recognize its purpose. “This looks like some kind of interrogation room,” he said.

“It is.” Martinez took a seat with a protest of wood. He laid the folder on the table and offered Skip a chair. Then he pointed to the ceiling. Skip glanced up to see a lens, pointed almost insolently at him. “We’re going to videotape you. Okay?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Yes. If you say no, the interview will be over, and you’ll be free to go.”

“Great,” said Skip, starting to get up.

“Of course, then we’d have to subpoena you, and you’d spend money on that lawyer. Right now, you’re not a suspect. So why don’t you just relax and answer a few questions? If at any time you want a lawyer or want to terminate the interview, you can. How does that sound?”

“Did you say suspect?” Skip asked.

“Yes.” Martinez looked at him with uninformative black eyes. Skip realized the man was waiting for an answer.

“Okay,” he said, sighing mightily. “Roll ’em.”

Martinez nodded to someone behind the one-way glass, then turned back to Skip. “Please state your name, address, and birthdate.” They rapidly went through the preliminaries. Then Martinez asked:

“Are you the owner of an abandoned ranch house beyond Fox Run, address Rural Route Sixteen, Box Twelve, Santa Fe, New Mexico?”

“Yes. My sister and I own it together.”

“And your sister is Nora Waterford Kelly?”

“That’s right.”

“And what are the whereabouts of your sister at the moment?”

“She’s on an archaeological expedition to Utah.”

Martinez nodded. “When did she leave?”

“Three days ago. She won’t be back for a couple of weeks, at least.” Once again, Skip began to stand. “Does this have to do with her?”

Martinez make a suppressing motion with one palm. “Your parents are both deceased, correct?”

Skip nodded.

“And you are currently employed at the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute.”

“I was until you showed up.”

Martinez smiled. “And how long have you been employed by the Institute?”

“I told you in the car. This was my first day.”

Martinez nodded again, more slowly this time. “And prior to today, where were you employed?”

“I’ve been job hunting.”

“I see. And when were you last employed?”

“Never. Not since I graduated from college last year, anyway.”

“Do you know a Teresa Gonzales?”

Skip licked his lips. “Yeah. I know Teresa. She was our neighbor out at the ranch.”

“When did you last see Teresa?”

“God, I don’t know. Ten months ago, maybe eleven. Shortly after I graduated.”

“How about your sister? When did she last see Ms. Gonzales?”

Skip shifted in his chair. “Let’s see. A couple of days ago, I think. She helped Nora out at the ranch.”

“You mean Nora, your sister?” Martinez asked. “Helped her how?”

Skip hesitated. “She was attacked,” he said slowly.

Martinez’s neck muscles stopped working for a moment. “Care to tell me about it?”

“Teresa used to call my sister when she heard noises at the old place. Vandals, kids, that kind of stuff. Lately there’s been a lot of messing around over there; she’s called my sister several times. Nora went over about a week ago. Said she was attacked. Teresa heard the racket, came over with a shotgun, scared them off.”

“Did she say anything more? A description of the attackers?”

“Nora said . . .” Skip thought for a moment. “Nora said it was two people. Two people, dressed up as animals.” He decided not to mention the letter. Whatever was going on here didn’t need any more complications.

“Why didn’t she come to us?” Martinez asked at last.

“Can’t say for sure. Going to the police really isn’t her style. She always wants to do everything for herself. I think she was concerned it might delay her expedition.”

Martinez seemed to ponder something. “Mr. Kelly,” he began again. “Can you account for your whereabouts over the last forty-eight hours?”

Skip stopped short. Then he sat back, took a deep breath. “Except for showing up at the Institute this morning, I was at my apartment all weekend.”

Martinez consulted a piece of paper. “2113 Calle de Sebastian, number two-B?”

“Yes.”

“And did you see anybody during that time?”

Skip swallowed. “Larry, at Eldorado Liquors, saw me Saturday afternoon. My sister phoned me late Saturday night.”

“Anybody else?”

“Well, my neighbor called me three or four times.”

“Your neighbor?”

“Yeah. Reg Freiburg, in the apartment next door. Doesn’t like loud music.”

Martinez sat back, running his fingers through his close-cropped black hair. He stayed silent for what seemed like a long time. At last he sat forward. “Mr. Kelly, Teresa Gonzales was found dead last night at your ranch house.”

Suddenly, Skip’s body felt strangely heavy. “Teresa?”

Martinez nodded. “Every Sunday afternoon, she gets a delivery of feed for the farm animals. Last Sunday, she didn’t answer the door. The man noticed the animals hadn’t been fed, and that her dog was locked in the house. When she still didn’t answer the next morning, he got worried and called us.”

“Oh, my God.” Skip shook his head. “Teresa. I can’t believe it.”

The lieutenant shifted in his chair, eyes on Skip. “When we went out there, we found her bed unmade, clothes set out. The dog was terrified. It looked like something had gotten her up in the middle of the night. But there was no sign of her on the property, so we decided to visit the neighboring ranches. Your place was our first stop.” He took a slow breath. “We saw movement inside. Turned out to be dogs, fighting over something.” He stopped, pursed his lips.

But Skip barely heard this. He was thinking of Teresa, trying to remember the last time he’d seen her. He and Nora had gone out to the house to pick up a few things to decorate her apartment. Teresa had been outside in her yard, seen them, and waved her enthusiastic wave. He could see her still, jogging down the path to their house, brown careless hair flapping and dancing in the breeze.

Then his eyes fell upon the single folder lying in the center of the desk. GONZALES, T. was written along one side. The glossy edge of a black-and-white picture peeked from beneath one corner of the folder. Automatically, he reached out for it.

“I wouldn’t,” Martinez said. But he made no move to stop him. Skip lifted the edge, exposing the photograph; then froze in horror.

Teresa was lying on her back, one leg across the other, left hand thrown up as if to catch an errant football. At least, Skip thought it was Teresa, because he recognized the room as their old kitchen: his mother’s ancient stove stood in the top right-hand corner of the picture.

Teresa herself was less recognizable. Her mouth was open, but the cheeks were missing. Through gaps in the ruined flesh, teeth fillings gleamed hollowly in the light of the camera’s flash. Even in the black-and-white photograph, Skip saw that the skin was an unnatural mottled shade. Several parts of Teresa were missing: fingers, a breast, the meaty part of a thigh. Small black marks and ragged lines dotted her body: evidence of unhurried sampling by animals approaching satiation. Where Teresa’s throat had once been was now just emptiness, a ruined cage of bone and gristle, surrounded by ragged flesh. Congealed blood ran away in a horrific river toward a long hole in the scarred floorboards. Pattering away from the river of blood were countless small marks Skip realized were paw prints.

“Dogs,” Martinez said, gently removing Skip’s hand and closing the folder.

Skip’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. “I’m sorry?” he croaked.

“Stray dogs had been working on her body for a day or so.”

“Was she killed by dogs?”

“We thought so at first. Her throat had been torn out with a large bite and there were claw and bite marks over the body. But the coroner’s initial examination found definitive evidence that it was a homicide.”

Skip looked at him. “What kind of evidence?”

Martinez rose with an easy affability that seemed incongruous with his words. “An unusual kind of mutilation to the fingers and toes, among other things. We’ll know a lot more when the autopsy is completed this afternoon. Meantime, please do three things for me. Keep this to yourself. Don’t go near the farmhouse. And most important of all: stay where we can find you.”

He ushered Skip out of the room and down the hall without another word.

22

AT BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, THE expedition was uncharacteristically silent. Nora felt a mood of doubt. All too clearly, Black’s comments from the night before had made their mark.

They proceeded northwest, up a harsh, brutal canyon destitute of vegetation. Even at the early hour, heat was rising from the split rocks, making them look airy and insubstantial. The unwatered horses were irritable and difficult to control.

As they continued, the canyon system grew increasingly complex, branching and rebranching into a twisted maze. It continued to be impossible to get a GPS reading from the canyon floor, and the cliffs were so sheer that Sloane could not have climbed to the top to take a reading without putting herself in danger. Nora found she was spending as much time consulting the map as traveling. Several times they were forced to backtrack out of a blind canyon; other times, the expedition had to wait while Nora and Sloane scouted ahead to find a route. Black was uncharacteristically silent, his face sick with a combination of fear and anger.

Nora struggled with her own doubts. Had her father really gone this far? Had they taken a wrong turn somewhere? A few swales and scatterings of charcoal were visible here and there, but so faint and infrequent as to be background noise; they could easily be the result of wildfires. There was a new thought now she barely dared to consider: what if her father had been delirious when he wrote the letter? It seemed impossible for anyone to have successfully navigated this labyrinth.

At other times, she thought about the broken skull and dried blood, and what it could possibly mean. In her mind, Pete’s Ruin had changed from an unremarkable set of roomblocks to a dark, unnerving little mystery.

By midmorning, the canyon had ended in a sudden puzzle of hoodoo rocks. They squeezed through an opening and topped out in a broken valley, peppered with scrub junipers. As she went over the rise, Nora glanced to the right. She could see the Kaiparowits Plateau as a high, dark line against the horizon.

Then she faced forward, and the vista she saw both horrified and elated her.

On the far side of the valley, raked by the morning sun, rose what could only be the Devil’s Backbone: the hogback ridge she had been anticipating and dreading since they first set out. It was a giant, irregular fin of sandstone at least a thousand feet high and many miles long, pocked with vesicles and windblown holes, riven with vertical fractures and slots. The top was notched like a dinosaur’s back. It was hideous in its beauty.

Nora led the group over to the shade of a large rock, where they dismounted. She stepped aside with Swire.

“Let’s see if we can scout a trail up it first,” Nora said. “It looks pretty tough.”

For a moment, Swire didn’t answer. “From here, I wouldn’t exactly call it tough,” he said. “I’d call it impossible.”

“My father made it over with his two horses.”

“So you said.” Swire spat a thin stream of tobacco juice. “Then again, this ain’t the only ridge around here.”

“It’s a fault-block cuesta,” said Black, who had been listening. “It outcrops for at least a hundred miles. Your father’s so-called ridge could be anywhere along there.”

“This is the right one,” Nora said a little more slowly, trying to keep the tone of doubt out of her voice.

Swire shook his head and began to roll a smoke. “I’ll tell you one thing. I want to see the trail with my own eyes before I take any horses up it.”

“Fair enough,” Nora replied. “Let’s go find it. Sloane, keep an eye on things until we get back.”

“Sure thing,” came the contralto drawl.

The two hiked north along the base of the ridge, looking for a notch or break in the smooth rock that might signal the beginnings of a trail. After half a mile, they came across some shallow caves. Nora noticed that several had ancient smudges of black smoke on their ceilings.

“Anasazi lived here,” she said.

“Pretty miserable little caves.”

“These were probably temporary dwellings,” Nora replied. “Perhaps they farmed these canyon bottoms.”

“Must’ve been farming cholla,” Swire muttered laconically.

As they continued northward, the dry creek split into several tributaries, separated by jumbled piles of stone and small outcrops. It was a weird landscape, unfinished, as if God had simply given up trying to impose order on the unruly rocks.

Suddenly, Nora parted some salt cedars and stopped dead. Swire came up, breathing hard.

“Look at this,” she breathed.

A series of petroglyphs had been pecked through the desert varnish that streaked the cliff face, exposing lighter rock underneath. Nora knelt, examining the drawings more closely. They were complex and beautiful: a mountain lion; a curious pattern of dots with a small foot; a star inside the moon inside the sun; and a detailed image of Kokopelli, the humpbacked flute player, believed to be the god of fertility. As usual, Kokopelli sported an enormous erection. The panel ended with another complicated grid of dots overlain by a huge spiral, which Nora noted was also reversed, like the ones Sloane had seen at Pete’s Ruin.

Swire grunted. “Wish I had his problem,” he said, nodding at Kokopelli.

“No you don’t,” Nora replied. “One Pueblo Indian story claims it was fifty feet long.”

They pushed a little farther through the cedars and stumbled on a well-hidden ravine: a crevasse filled with loose rock that slanted diagonally across the sandstone monolith. It was steep and narrow, and it rose up the dizzying face and disappeared. The trail had a raised lip of rock along its outer edge that had the uncanny effect of causing most of it to disappear into the smooth sandstone from only several paces off.

“I’ve never seen anything so well hidden,” Nora said. “This has to be our trail.”

“Hope not.”

She started up the narrow crevasse, Swire behind her, scrambling over the rocks that filled its bottom. About halfway up it ended in a badly eroded path cut diagonally into the naked sandstone. It was less than three feet wide, one side a sheer face of rock, the other dropping off into terrifying blue space. As Nora stepped near the edge, some pebbles dislodged by her foot rolled down the rock and off the edge, sailing down; Nora listened but could not hear their eventual landing. She knelt. “This is definitely an ancient trail,” she said, as she examined eroded cut marks made by prehistoric quartzite tools.

“It sure wasn’t built for horses,” Swire said.

“The Anasazi didn’t have horses.”

“We do,” came the curt reply.

They moved carefully forward. In places, the cut path had peeled away from the sloping cliff face, forcing them to take a harrowing step across vacant space. At one of these places Nora glanced down and saw a tumble of rocks more than five hundred feet beneath her. She felt a surge of vertigo and hastily stepped across.

The grade gradually lessened, and in twenty minutes they were at the top. A dead juniper, its branches scorched by lightning, marked the point where the trail topped the ridge. The ridge itself was narrow, perhaps twenty feet across, and in another moment Nora had walked to the far edge.

She looked down the other side into a deep, lush riddle of canyons and washes that merged into an open valley. The trail, much gentler here, switchbacked down into the gloom below them.

For a moment, she could not speak. Slowly, the sun was invading the hidden recesses as it rose toward noon, penetrating the deep holes, chasing the darkness from the purple rocks.

“It’s so green,” she finally said. “All those cottonwoods, and grass for the horses. Look, there’s a stream!” At this, she felt the muscles in her throat constrict voluntarily. She’d almost forgotten her thirst in the excitement.

Swire didn’t reply.

From their vantage point, Nora took in the lay of the landscape ahead. The Devil’s Backbone ran diagonally to the northeast, disappearing around the Kaiparowits Plateau. A vast complex of canyons started on the flanks of the Kaiparowits wilderness and spread out through the slickrock country, eventually coalescing into the valley that swept down in front of them. A peaceful stream flowed down its center, belying the great scarred plain to either side that told of innumerable flash floods. Scattered across the floodplain were boulders, some as large as houses, which had clearly been swept down from the higher reaches of the watershed. Beyond, the valley stepped up through several benchlands, eventually ending in sheer redrock cliffs, pinnacles, and towers. It looked to Nora as if the valley concentrated the entire watershed of the Kaiparowits Plateau in one hideous floodplain.

At the far end of the green valley, at the point where it joined the sheer cliffs, the stream passed through a canebreak, then disappeared into a narrow canyon, riven through a sandstone plateau. Such narrow canyons—known as slot canyons—were common among these southwestern wastes but practically unheard of elsewhere. They were thin alleys, sometimes only a few feet across, caused by the action of water against sandstone over countless years. Despite their narrowness, they were often several hundred feet deep, and could go on for miles before widening into more conventional canyons.

Nora peered at the entrance to this one: a dark slit, slicing into the far end of the great plateau. It was perhaps ten feet wide at the entrance. That, Nora thought with a rising feeling of excitement, must be the slot canyon my father mentioned. She pulled out her binoculars and looked slowly around. She could make out many south-facing alcoves among the cliffs across the valley, ideal for Anasazi dwellings, but as she scanned them with the glasses she could see nothing. They were all empty. She examined the sheer cliffs leading up to the top of the plateau, but if there was a way over and into the hidden canyon beyond, it was well hidden.

Dropping the binoculars, she turned and looked around the windswept top of the ridge. An overlook like this was a perfect place for her father to have carved his initials and a date: the calling card of remote travelers since time immemorial. Yet there was nothing. Still, from the top of the ridge it seemed likely that Holroyd would finally get his GPS reading.

Swire had settled his back against the rock and was rolling a smoke. He placed it in his mouth, struck a match.

“I ain’t bringing my horses up that trail,” he said.

Nora looked at him quickly. “But it’s the only way up.”

“I know it,” Swire said, drawing smoke into his lungs.

“So what are you suggesting? That we turn around? Give up?”

Swire nodded. “Yep,” he said. There was a brief pause. “And it ain’t a suggestion.”

In an instant, Nora’s elation fell away. She took a deep breath. “Roscoe, this isn’t an impossible trail. We’ll unload and carry everything up by hand. Then we’ll guide the horses, unroped, giving them their heads. It might take the rest of the day, but it can be done.”

Roscoe shook his head. “We’ll kill horses on that trail, no matter what we do.”

Nora knelt beside him. “You’ve got to do this, Roscoe. Everything depends on it. The Institute will replace any horse that gets hurt.”

From the expression on his face, she saw she had said the wrong thing. “You know enough about horses to know you’re talking through your hat,” he replied. “I ain’t saying they can’t do it. I’m saying the risk is too high.” A truculent note had crept into his voice. “No man in his right mind would bring horses up that trail. And if you want my opinion, I don’t think we’re on any damn trail, Anasazi or otherwise. Neither does anyone else.”

Nora looked at him. “So you all think I’m lost?”

Swire nodded, pulled on his cigarette. “All except Holroyd. But that boy would follow you into a live volcano.”

Nora felt her face flush. “Think what you want,” she said, pointing toward the sandstone plateau. “But that slot canyon out there is the one my father found. It has to be. And there’s no other way in. That means he brought two horses up this trail.”

“I doubt it.”

Nora rounded on him. “When you signed on to this trip, you knew the danger. You can’t back out now. It can be done, and we’re going to do it, with you or without you.”

“Nope,” he said again.

“Then you’re a coward,” Nora cried angrily.

Swire’s eyes widened quickly, then narrowed. He stared at Nora for a long, silent moment. “I ain’t likely to forget you said that,” he said at last in a low, even tone.

The breeze blew across the fin of rock, and a pair of ravens rode up the air currents, then dipped back down into space. Nora slumped against the rock, resting her forehead in her hands. She didn’t know what to do in the face of Swire’s flat refusal. They couldn’t go on without him, and the horses were technically his. She closed her eyes against a growing sense of failure, terrible and final. And then she realized something.

“If you want to turn around,” she said quietly, glancing over at Swire, “you’d better get going. The last water I remember was a two-day ride back.”

Swire’s face showed a sudden, curious blankness. Then he swore softly, as he realized the water the horses so desperately needed was in the green valley that lay ahead, below their feet.

He shook his head slowly, and spat. Finally, he eyed Nora. “Looks like you get your wish,” he said. And something in the way he looked at her made Nora shrink back.

By the time they returned to camp, it was noon. A palpable air of anxiety hung over the group, and the thirsty horses, tied in the shade, were prancing and slinging their heads.

“You didn’t happen to pass a Starbucks, did you?” Smithback asked with forced joviality. “I could really use an iced latte.”

Swire brushed his way past them and stalked off to where the horses were hobbled.

“What’s with him?” Smithback asked.

“We’ve got a tough stretch of trail ahead,” Nora said.

“How tough?” Black blurted out. Once again, Nora could see naked fear on his face.

“Very tough.” She looked around at the dirty faces. The fact that several of them were looking to her for guidance and reassurance gave her another twinge of self-doubt. She took a deep breath.

“The good news is, there’s water on the far side of the ridge. The bad news is that we’re going to have to carry the gear up by hand. Then Roscoe and I will bring the horses.”

Black groaned.

“Take no more than thirty pounds at a time,” Nora went on. “Don’t try to rush things. It’s a rough trail, even on foot. We’re going to have to make a couple of trips each.”

Black looked like he was about to say something, then stopped. Sloane stood abruptly, walked over to the line of gear, and hefted a pannier onto her shoulder. Holroyd followed, walking a little unsteadily, then Aragon and Smithback. At last, Black raised himself from the rocks, passed a shaky hand over his eyes, and followed them.

* * *

Almost three hours later, Nora stood at the top of the Devil’s Backbone with the others, breathing heavily and sharing the last of the water. The gear had been brought up over the course of three arduous trips, and was now neatly lined up to one side. Black was a wreck: sitting on a rock, soaked with sweat, his hands shaking; the rest were almost as exhausted. The sun had moved westward and was now shining directly into the long grove of cottonwoods far below them, turning the stream into a twisted thread of silver. The sight seemed inexpressibly lush and beautiful after the barren wastes behind them. Nora ached with thirst.

She turned to look back down the hogback ridge up which they had come. The hard part, bringing the horses up, was still before her. My God, she thought. Sixteen of them . . . The ache in her limbs fell away, replaced by a small sickness that began to grow in the pit of her stomach.

“Let me help with the horses,” Sloane said.

Nora opened her mouth to answer, but Swire interrupted. “No!” he barked. “The fewer there are of us on that ridge, the fewer are gonna get hurt.”

Leaving Sloane in charge, Nora hiked back down the trail. Swire, his face dark, brought the animals around, bare except for their halters. Only his own horse, which would lead, had a rope clipped to the halter.

“We’re gonna drive them up the trail, single file,” he said harshly. “I’ll guide Mestizo, you bring up the rear with Fiddlehead. Keep your head up. If a horse falls, get the hell out of the way.”

Nora nodded.

“Once we get to the upper trail, you can’t stop. Not for anything. Give a horse time to think on that ridge, and he’ll panic and try to turn around. So keep them moving, no matter what. Got that?”

“Loud and clear,” she said.

They started up the trail, careful to keep the horses well apart. At one point the animals hesitated, as if by general consensus; but with some prodding Swire got Mestizo moving again and the rest instinctively followed, noses down, picking their way among the rocks. The air was punctuated with the clatter of hooves, the occasional scrabble among the rocks as an animal missed its footing. As they began to gain altitude, the horses grew more fearful; they lathered up and started blowing hard, showing the whites of their eyes.

Halfway up the ridge, the rubble-filled crevasse ended and the much more dangerous slickrock trail began. Nora craned her neck upward. The worst part of the journey stretched ahead, just a cut in the sloping sandstone, eroded by time into the merest whisper of a path. In the places where it had peeled away, the horses would have to step over blue space. She stared at the series of wicked switchbacks, trying to suppress the anxiety that welled up deep within her.

Swire paused and looked back at her, his eyes cold. We can turn back now, his expression seemed to say. Beyond this point, we won’t have that option.

Nora gazed back at the bandy-legged wrangler, his shoulders barely higher than the horse’s withers. He looked as frightened as she felt.

The moment passed. Without a word, Swire turned and began leading Mestizo forward. The animal took a few hesitant steps and balked. The wrangler coaxed a few more steps, then the horse balked again, whinnying in fear. His shoe skidded slightly, then bit once again into the sandstone.

Speaking in low tones and flicking the end of his lasso well behind the horse, Swire got Mestizo moving again. The others followed, their trail experience and strong herd attachment keeping them going. They worked their way upward at a painful pace, the only sounds now the thump and scrape of iron-shod toes digging into canted slickrock, the occasional blow of fear. Swire began singing a low, mournful, soothing song, words indistinct, his voice quavering slightly.

They arrived at the first switchback. Slowly, Swire guided Mestizo around the curve, then continued up the rockface and past a deep crack until he was directly above Nora’s head. Once, Sweetgrass skidded on the slickrock and scrabbled at the edge, and for a moment Nora thought she would go over. Then she recovered, eyes wide, flanks trembling.

After agonizing minutes they arrived at the second switchback: a wickedly sharp turn over a narrow section of trail. Reaching the far side, Mestizo suddenly balked once again. The second horse, Beetlebum, stopped as well, then began to back up. Watching from below, Nora saw the animal place one hind foot over the edge of the trail and out into space.

She froze. The horse’s hindquarters dropped and the foot kicked out twice, looking for a purchase that wasn’t there. As she watched, the horse’s balance shifted inexorably backward; the animal dropped over the edge, rolled once, and then hurtled down toward her, letting out a strange, high-pitched scream. Nora watched, paralyzed. Time seemed to slow as the horse tumbled, limbs kicking in a terrifying ballet. She felt its shadow cross her face, and then it struck Fiddlehead, directly in front of her, with a massive smack. Fiddlehead vanished as both animals hurtled off the edge of the ridge into the void. There was a moment of horrible, listening silence, followed by double muffled thumps and the sharp crackle of falling rocks far below. The sounds seemed to echo forever in the dry valley, reverberating from ever more distant walls.

“Close up and keep moving!” came the harsh, strained command from above. Forcing herself into action, Nora urged the new rearward horse forward—Smithback’s horse, Hurricane Deck. But he wouldn’t move; a clonus of horror trembled along the animal’s flanks. Then, in a galvanic instant, he reared up, whirling around toward her. Nora instinctively grabbed his halter. With a frenzied clawing of steel on rock, Hurricane scrabbled at the edge of the trail, wide eyes staring at her. Realizing her mistake, she released the halter, but her timing was slow and already the falling horse had pulled her off balance. She had a brief glimpse of yawning blue space. Then she landed on her side, her legs rolling over the edge of the cliff, hands scrabbling to grip the smooth sandstone. She heard, as if from a great distance, Swire shouting, and then from below the soggy, bursting sound of a wet bag as Hurricane Deck hit bottom.

She clawed at the rock, fingernails fighting for purchase as she dangled in the abyss. She could feel the updrafts of wind tickling her legs. In desperation, she clutched the stone tighter, her nails tearing and splitting as she continued to slide backward down the tipped surface of stone. Then her right hand brushed against a projecting rill; no more than a quarter inch high, but enough to get a handhold. She strained, feeling her strength draining away. Now or never, she thought, and she gave a great heave, swinging herself up sideways. It was just enough to get one foot back onto the trail. With a second heave she managed to roll her body up and over. She lay on her back, heart hammering a frantic cadence. Ahead and above came a whinny of fear, and the clatter of hooves on stone.

“Get the hell up! Keep moving!” she heard faintly from above. She rose shakily to her feet and started forward, as if in a dream, driving the remnant of the remuda up the trail.

She did not remember the rest of the journey. The next clear memory was of lying facedown, hugging the warm, dusty rock of the ridge summit; then a pair of hands were gently turning her over; and Aragon’s calm, steady face stared down into her own. Beside him were Smithback and Holroyd, gazing at her with intense concern. Holroyd’s face in particular was a mask of agonizing worry.

Aragon helped Nora to a nearby rock. “The horses—” Nora began.

“There was no other way,” Aragon interrupted quietly, taking her hands. “You’re hurt.”

Nora looked down. Her hands were covered with blood from her ruined fingernails. Aragon opened his medical kit. “When you swung out over that cliff,” he said, “I thought you were done for.” He dabbed at the fingertips, removing a few pieces of grit and fingernail with tweezers. He worked swiftly, expertly, smearing on topical antibiotic and placing butterfly bandages over the ends of her fingertips. “Wear your gloves for a few days,” he said. “You’ll be uncomfortable for a while, but the injuries are superficial.”

Nora glanced at the group. They were looking back at her, motionless, shocked to silence by what had happened. “Where’s Roscoe?” she managed to ask.

“Back down the trail,” Sloane replied.

Nora dropped her head into her hands. And then, as if in answer, three well-spaced gunshots sounded below, echoing crazily among the canyons before dying away into distant thunder.

“God,” Nora groaned. Fiddlehead, her own horse. Beetlebum, Smithback’s nemesis. Hurricane Deck. Gone. She could still see the wide pleading eyes of Hurricane; the teeth, so strangely long and narrow, exposed in a final grin of terror.

Ten minutes later Swire appeared, breathing heavily. He passed Nora and went toward the horses, redividing and repacking the loads in silence. Holroyd came over to her and gently took her hand. “I got a decent reading,” he whispered.

Nora glanced up at him, hardly caring.

“We’re right smack on the trail,” he said, smiling.

Nora could only shake her head.

* * *

Compared to the nightmarish ascent, the trail down into the valley beyond the hogback ridge offered few difficulties. The horses, smelling water, charged ahead. Tired as they were, the group began to jog, and Nora found the events of the last hours temporarily receding in her devouring thirst. They splashed into the water upstream from the horses and Nora fell to her stomach, burying her face in the water. It was the most exquisite sensation she had ever felt, and she drank deeply, pausing only to gasp for air, until a sudden spasm of nausea contracted her stomach. She backed away, retiring to a spot beneath the rustling cottonwoods, breathing hard and feeling the sting of evaporation on her wet clothes. Gradually the waves of nausea passed. She saw Black bent double in the trees, vomiting up water, joined shortly by Holroyd. Smithback was kneeling in the stream, oblivious, bathing his head with cupped hands. Sloane staggered over, sopping wet, and knelt beside Nora.

“Swire needs our help with the horses,” she said.

They went downstream and helped Swire drag the horses out of the water, to prevent any possibility of fatal overdrinking. As they worked, Swire refused to meet Nora’s eyes.

After a rest, the group remounted and continued downstream into the new world of the valley. The water ran over a cobbled bed, filling the air with tranquil noise. The sounds of life rose about them: trilling cicadas, humming dragonflies, even the occasional eructation of a frog. As Nora’s thirst abated, the sickening horror of the accident returned with fresh force. She was riding a new horse now, Arbuckles, and every jarring movement seemed a reproachful memory of Fiddlehead. She thought of Swire’s poem to Hurricane Deck, almost a love ballad to the horse. She wondered how she was ever going to work things out with him.

They traveled down the valley, which narrowed as it approached the broad sandstone plateau, rising in front of them now less than a mile away. Nora glanced up at the cliffs as they passed, noting again the odd lack of ruins. This was an ideal valley for prehistoric settlement, and yet there was nothing. If, after all that had happened, this turned to be the wrong canyon system—she shut the thought from her mind.

The stream made another bend. The naked plateau loomed ever closer, the stream at last disappearing into the narrow slot canyon carved into its side. According to the radar map, the canyon should open, about a mile farther along, into the small valley that—she hoped—contained Quivira. But the slot canyon itself that lay between them and the inner valley was clearly too narrow for horses.

As they rode up to the massive sandstone wall, Nora noticed a large rock beside the stream with some markings on its flanks. As she dismounted and came nearer, she could see a small panel of petroglyphs, similar to those they had found at the base of the ridge: a series of dots and a small foot, along with another star and a sun. She couldn’t help but notice that there was a large reversed spiral carved on top of the other images.

The rest came up beside her. She noticed Aragon gazing at the glyphs, an intent expression on his face.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I’ve seen other examples of dot patterns like these along the ancient approaches to Hopi,” he said at last. “I believe they give distance and direction information.”

“Sure,” Black scoffed. “And the freeway interchanges and the location of the nearest Howard Johnson’s, I’ll bet. Everyone knows Anasazi petroglyphs are indecipherable.”

Aragon ignored this. “The footlike glyph indicates walking, and the dots indicate distance. Based on other sites I’ve seen, each dot represents a walking distance of about sixteen minutes, or three quarters of a mile.”

“And the antelope?” Nora asked. “What does that symbolize?”

Aragon glanced at her. “An antelope,” he said.

“So this isn’t a kind of writing?”

Aragon looked back at the rock. “Not in the sense we’re used to. It’s not phonetic, syllabic, or ideographic. My own view is that it’s an entirely different way of using symbols. But that doesn’t mean it’s not writing.”

“On the other side of the ridge,” Nora said, “I saw a star inside the moon, inside the sun. I’d never seen anything like it before.”

“Yes. The sun is the symbol for the supreme deity, the moon the symbol for the future, and the star a symbol of truth. I took the whole thing to be an indicator that an oracle, a kind of Anasazi Delphi, lay ahead.”

“You mean Quivira?” Nora asked.

Aragon nodded.

“And what does this spiral mean?” asked Holroyd.

Aragon hesitated a moment. “That spiral was added later. It’s reversed, of course.” His voice trailed off. “In the context of the other things we’ve seen, I’d call it a warning, or omen, laid on top of these earlier symbols. A notice to travelers not to proceed, an indication of evil.”

There was a sudden silence.

“Lions and tigers and bears, oh my,” murmured Smithback.

“Obviously, there’s still a lot we don’t know,” Aragon said, the slightest trace of defensiveness in his voice. “Perhaps you, Mr. Smithback, with your no doubt profound knowledge of Anasazi witches and their modern-day descendants, the skinwalkers, can enlighten us further.”

The writer rolled his tongue around his cheek and raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

As they moved away, Holroyd gave a shout. He had walked around to the side of the rock nearest the entrance to the slot canyon. Now he pointed to a much fresher inscription, scraped into the rock with a penknife. As Nora stared at it, she felt her cheeks begin to burn. Still staring, she knelt beside the stone, fingers slowly tracing the narrow grooves that spelled out P.K. 1983.

23

AS NORA TOUCHED HER FATHER’S INITIALS on the rock, something inside her seemed to give way. A knot of tension, tightened over the harrowing days, loosened abruptly, and she leaned against the smooth surface of the rock, feeling an intense, overwhelming flood of relief. Her father had been here. They had been following his trail all along. She realized dimly that the group was crowding around, congratulating her.

Slowly she rose to her feet. She gathered the expedition under a small grove of gambel oaks, near the point where the stream plunged into the slot canyon. Everyone seemed to be in high spirits except Swire, who silently moved off with the horses to a nearby patch of grass. Bonarotti was busy cleaning the dirty cookware in the stream

“We’re almost there,” she said. “According to our maps, this is the slot canyon we’ve been searching for. We should find the hidden canyon of Quivira at the far end.”

“Is it safe?” Black asked. “Looks pretty narrow to me.”

“I’ve kept my eyes on the canyon walls,” Sloane said. “There haven’t been any obvious trails that would lead up and over to the next valley. If we’re going on, this is the only way through.”

“It’s getting late,” Nora said. “The real question is, shall we unpack the horses and carry everything in now? Or shall we camp now and go in tomorrow?”

Black answered first. “I’d prefer not to carry any more equipment today, thank you, especially through that.” He gestured past the canebrake toward the narrow slot, which looked more like a fissure in the rock than a canyon.

Smithback sat back, fanning himself with a branch of oak leaves. “As long as you’re asking, I’d just as soon sit here with my feet in the stream and see what victuals Signore Bonarotti brings out of his magic box.”

The rest seemed to agree. Then Nora turned toward Sloane. In the woman’s eyes, she immediately saw the same eagerness that was kindling within her.

Sloane grinned her slow grin and nodded. “Feel up to it?” she asked.

Nora looked at the entrance to the slot canyon—barely more than a dark seam in the rock—and nodded. Then she turned once again toward the group.

“Sloane and I are going to reconnoiter,” she said, glancing at her watch. “We might not be able to get in and back before darkness, so it may turn out to be an overnight trip. Any objections?”

There were none. While the camp settled down to its routine, Nora loaded a sleeping bag and water pump into a backpack. Sloane did the same, adding a length of rope and some climbing equipment to hers. Bonarotti wordlessly pressed small, heavy packets of food into each of their hands.

Shouldering their packs, they waved goodbye and hiked down the stream. Past the grove of oaks, the rivulet burbled across a pebbled bed and entered the canebrake outside the mouth of the slot canyon. Much of the cane had been torn and shredded into a dense tangle, and there were several battered tree trunks and boulders lying about.

They pushed ahead into the cane, which rustled and crackled at their passage. Deerflies and no-see-ums danced and droned in the thick air. Nora led, waving them away with an impatient hand.

“Nora,” she heard Sloane say softly behind her, “look carefully to your right. Look, but don’t move.”

Nora followed Sloane’s glance toward a piece of cane perhaps eighteen inches away. A small gray rattlesnake was coiled tightly around it at about shoulder height.

“I hate to tell you, Nora, but you just elbowed this poor snake aside.” It was meant to sound lighthearted, but Sloane’s voice carried a small tremor.

Nora stared in horrified fascination. She could see the cane still swaying slightly from her passage. “Christ,” she whispered, her throat dry and constricted.

“Probably the only reason he didn’t strike was because it would have caused him to fall,” added Sloane. “Sistrurus toxidius, the pigmy gray rattler. Second most poisonous rattlesnake in North America.”

Nora continued to stare at the snake, almost perfectly camouflaged by its surroundings. “I feel a little sick,” she said.

“Let me walk first.”

In no mood to argue, Nora stood by while Sloane went on ahead, gingerly picking her way through the broken cane, pausing every few steps to scrutinize her path.

She stopped suddenly. “There’s another one,” she pointed. The snake, disturbed, was swiftly gliding down a stalk ahead of them. It gave a sudden, chilling buzz before it disappeared into a tangle of brush.

“Too bad Bonarotti isn’t here,” said Sloane, moving ahead carefully. “He’d probably make a cassoulet out of them.” As she spoke, there was another buzz directly beneath her feet. She leapt backward with a shout, then gave the snake a wide berth.

A few more harrowing moments brought them to the far side of the canebrake. Here the mouth of the canyon opened before them, two scooped and polished stone walls about ten feet apart, with a bottom of smooth sand barely covered by slowly moving water.

“Jesus,” Nora said. “I’ve never seen so many rattlers in one place in my life.”

“Probably washed down by a flood,” said Sloane. “Now they’re wet, cold, and pissed.”

They continued down the creek into the slot canyon, splashing in the shallow water. The narrow walls quickly pressed in around them, leaving Nora with the uncomfortable feeling that she was along the bottom of a long, slender container. Eons of floods had sculpted the walls of the canyon into glossy hollows, ribs, pockets, and tubes. There were only occasional glimpses of sky, and they proceeded in a reddish half-light that filtered down from far above. With the high narrow walls of the slot canyon crowding out the sun, the air at its base felt surprisingly chilly. In places where water had scooped out a larger hollow, they encountered pools of loose quicksand. The best way to get past them, Nora found, was to start crawling through on her hands and knees and, when the quicksand at last gave way, to lie on her stomach and breaststroke, keeping her legs rigid and unmoving behind her. The pack, oddly enough, buoyed her, acting as a kind of float on her back.

“It’s going to be a wet night,” Sloane said, emerging from one of the pools.

As the canyon descended, the light grew dimmer. At one point, a huge cottonwood trunk, horribly scarred and mauled, had somehow become jammed in the canyon walls about twenty feet above their heads. Nearby, there was a narrow hollow in the rockface, above a small, stepped ledge.

“Must’ve been some storm that put that tree up there,” Sloane murmured, glancing upward at the trunk. “I’d sure hate to be caught in a flash flood in one of these canyons.”

“I’ve heard the first thing you feel is a rising wind,” Nora replied. “Then you hear a sound, echoing and distorted. Someone once told me it sounded almost like distant voices or applause. At that point, you get your butt out as fast as possible. If you’re still in the canyon by the time you hear the roar of water, it’s too late. You’re dead meat.”

Sloane broke out into her low, sultry laugh. “Thanks a lot,” she said. “Now you’ll have me climbing the walls every time I feel a breeze.”

As they walked on, the canyon narrowed still further and sloped downward in a series of pools, each filled with chocolate-colored water. Sometimes the water was only an inch deep, covering shivery quicksand; other times, it was over their heads. Each pool was connected to the next by a pitched slot so narrow they had to squeeze through it sideways, holding their packs. Above their heads, large boulders had jammed between the canyon walls, creating an eerie brown twilight.

After half an hour’s struggle, they came to a pourover above an especially long, narrow pool. Beyond, Nora could make out a faint glow. Taking the lead, she eased down into the pool and swam across toward a small boulder, wedged between the walls about six feet above the ground. A thick curtain of weeds and roots trailed from it, through which came a sheen of sunlight.

Nora crawled under the boulder and paused at the shaggy curtain, wringing the water from her wet hair. “It’s like the entrance to something magical,” Sloane said as she approached. “But what?”

Nora glanced at her for a moment. Then, placing her arms together, she pushed through the dense tangle.

Although not strong, the light of the late afternoon sun beyond seemed dazzling after their journey through the cramped, twisting canyon. As her eyes adjusted, Nora could see a small valley open up below them. The stream tumbled down a defile and spread out into a sandy creek along the valley floor. There was a narrow floodplain, covered with pounded boulders, repeatedly raked by flash floods. Cottonwoods lined the banks of the floodplain, their massive trunks scarred and hung with old flood debris. The creek had cut down through a layer of rock in the center of the valley, creating benchlands on either side that were also dotted with cottonwoods, scrub oak, rabbitbrush, and wildflowers.

The valley had an intimate feeling: it was only about four hundred yards long by two hundred yards wide, a jeweled pocket in the red sandstone. The mellow sunlight fell upon a riot of color: blooming Apache plumes, Indian paintbrush, scarlet gilia. Puffy cumulus clouds, tinged with the afternoon light, drifted across the narrow patch of sky above the clifftops.

After the long dark crawl through the slot canyon, arriving at this beautiful valley was like stumbling upon a lost world. Everything about it—its intimate size, its high surrounding walls, its incredible remoteness, the tremendous difficulties involved in attaining it—filled Nora with the sensation of discovering a hidden paradise. As she looked around, enraptured, a breeze began to come up. As the trees rustled, cotton fell from their catkins and drifted in the lazy air like brilliant motes of trapped light.

After a moment Nora glanced over at Sloane. The woman had a look of intense, suppressed excitement on her face; the amber eyes seemed to blaze as they darted about, scanning first the canyon floor, then its walls.

Light as a cat, Sloane moved silently down the shallow stream to the canyon floor. Nora lagged behind for a moment. Mingled with her awe of the beauty was a fresh certainty: this was the valley her father had discovered. And with this certainty came another thought, awful in its suddenness. Was the place terrible as well as beautiful? Would she find her father’s remains somewhere down there on the canyon floor, or hidden among the ledges above?

But as quickly as it had come, the feeling dissipated. Somebody had found and mailed his letter. That in itself was a mystery, which gnawed at her constantly. But at least it meant that, wherever her father’s bones lay, they probably lay somewhere else, closer to civilization. Still, it was several moments before she followed Sloane to the flat sandy benchland, girded with rocks, well above the flash flood zone. A small grove of cottonwoods provided shade.

“How’s this for a campsite?” Sloane asked, dropping her pack.

“Couldn’t be more perfect,” Nora replied. She unshouldered her own pack, pulled out her soggy sleeping bag, shook it out, and draped it over a bush.

Then her eyes turned ineluctably back toward the towering cliffs that surrounded them on four sides. Pulling the waterproof binoculars from her pack, she began scanning the rock faces. The sandstone cliffs rose in steplike fashion from the canyon floor: sheer pitches, interrupted by benchlands of softer strata that had eroded back to form flat areas. Near the far end of the valley, a large rockfall had dropped a pitched tangle of house-sized boulders that lay in a precarious jumble against the cliff face. But the rockfall led up to nothing; and there was no sign in the valley of a trail, a ruin, anything.

She shook off the sudden cold feeling in her gut, reminding herself that if the ruined city was obvious, it would have been found. Any caves or alcoves formed in those benches above could not be seen from below. It was precisely the kind of spot favored by the Anasazi.

Her father, however, had seen a clear hand-and-toe trail. Her eyes again swept the lower rock faces, searching for the telltale signs of a trail. She saw nothing but smooth faces of red sandstone.

Nora glanced around for Sloane. The woman had already abandoned her scrutiny of the walls and was walking along the base of the cliffs, peering intently at the ground. Looking for potsherds or flint chips, Nora thought approvingly: always a good way to locate a hidden ruin above. Every fifty feet, Sloane would stop and squint up the cliff faces at an oblique angle, looking for the telltale shallow notches that would signify a trail.

Nora shoved her binoculars into her damp jeans and walked along the cutbanks and rock shelves above the stream, examining the soil profile for any cultural evidence. She knew they should be using the last of the light to build a fire and prepare dinner. But, like Sloane, she felt compelled to keep searching.

It was the work of ten minutes to reach the opposite side of the valley. Here, the stream disappeared into another slot canyon, much narrower even than the one they had crawled through. Narrow stone benches crawled up the red walls on either side, and from the gorge below came the sound of falling water. Carefully, she crept up to its edge. Water fell from the valley in a long stream. A plume of mist rose from where it struck the rocks below, filling the end of the canyon with a watery veil she could barely see through. A small microclimate had developed, and the rocks were thickly covered with moss and ferns. She knew from the maps, though, that the stream ran on through a series of descending waterfalls and pools, each separated by twenty or thirty feet of overhanging rock. It would be impossible to descend without a highly technical climb, and in any case at its bottom the slot seemed too narrow to admit a human being. But there would be no point even in trying: as the maps indicated, the stream ran in this impassable fashion for sixteen miles, until it spilled off the North Rim of Marble Gorge and dropped a thousand feet to the Colorado River. Anyone caught in a flash flood and pushed into this canyon would emerge at the Colorado just so much ground beef.

She moved on, pausing at the large rockfall. It was cool in the shadow of the cliffs, and she shivered slightly. The rockfall, with its dark holes and hidden spaces between the huge boulders, looked like a lair of ghosts. It appeared too unstable to climb. And, in any case, the cliff face behind it was sheer and unmarked by toeholds.

She worked her way back up the other side of the creek and encountered Sloane, who had finished her own survey. The almond eyes had lost some of their brilliance.

“Any luck?” Nora asked.

Sloane shook her head. “I’m having trouble believing there was a city here. I haven’t found anything.”

For once, the trademark smile was missing, and she seemed agitated, almost angry. This city is as important to her as it is to me, Nora thought.

“The Anasazi never built a road to nowhere,” Nora replied. “There’s got to be something here.”

“Perhaps,” Sloane said slowly, peering again at the cliff faces surrounding them. “But if I hadn’t seen those radar images and the hogback ridge, I’d have a hard time believing we’ve been following any sort of road at all the last two days.”

The sun had now dipped low enough to bring creeping shadows across the valley floor. “Look, Sloane,” Nora said. “We haven’t even begun to examine this valley. We’ll spend tomorrow morning making a careful survey. And if we still don’t find anything, we’ll bring the proton magnetometer in and scan for structures beneath the sand.”

Sloane was still looking intently up at the cliffs, as if demanding they give up their secrets. Then she looked at Nora, and gave a slow smile. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Let’s get a fire going and see if we can dry out these bags.”

After she had scooped out a shallow firepit and built a ring of stones, Nora sat by the fire and changed the damp bandages on her fingers. The sleeping bags began to steam slightly in the heat.

“What do you suppose Bonarotti put in those care packages?” Sloane asked as she piled more logs on the fire.

“Let’s find out.” Nora retrieved a pot from her daypack, then grabbed the small packet Bonarotti had thrust into her hand. She unwrapped it curiously. Inside were two Ziploc bags, still dry, one containing what looked like tiny pasta and the other a mix of herbs. ADD TO BOILING WATER AND COOK SEVEN MINUTES was written on the first bag in black Magic Marker; REMOVE FROM HEAT, DRAIN, ADD THIS MIXTURE was written on the second.

Ten minutes later, they pulled the simmering mixture from the fire, drained off the water, and added the second packet. Instantly, a wonderful aroma rose from the pot.

“Couscous with savory herbs,” Sloane whispered. “Isn’t Bonarotti a prince?”

From the couscous, they moved on to Sloane’s dish—lentils with sun-dried vegetables in a curried beef broth—then cleared away the dishes. Nora shook her bag out and laid it in the soft sand, close to the fire. Then, stripping off most of her wet clothes, she climbed in and lay back, breathing the clean air of the canyon, gazing at the dome of stars overhead. Despite the words of encouragement she’d given Sloane—despite the remarkable meal—Nora couldn’t entirely escape a private fear of her own.

“So what’ll we find tomorrow, Nora?” Sloane’s husky voice, surprisingly close in the near darkness, echoed her own thoughts.

Nora sat up on one shoulder and glanced over. Sloane was sitting cross-legged on her sleeping bag, combing her hair. Her jeans were drying on a nearby limb, and an oversized shirt spilled across her bare knees. The flickering light threw her wide cheekbones into sharp relief, giving her beautiful face a mysterious, exotic look.

“I don’t know,” Nora replied. “What do you think we’ll find?”

“Quivira,” came the reply, almost whispered.

“You didn’t seem so sure an hour ago.”

Sloane shrugged. “Oh, it’ll be here,” she said. “My father is never wrong.”

The woman’s face wore its trademark lazy smile, but something in her voice told Nora it wasn’t entirely a joke.

“So tell me about your father,” Sloane went on.

Nora took a long breath. “Well, the truth is, from the outside he was a traditional Irish screwup. He drank too much. He always had schemes and plans. He hated real work. But you know what?” She looked up at Sloane. “He was the best father anyone could have had. He loved us. He told us he loved us ten times a day. It was the first thing he said to us in the morning and the last thing at night. He was the kindest person I ever knew. He took us on almost all of his adventures. We went everywhere with him, looking for lost ruins, digging for treasure, scouring old battlegrounds with metal detectors. Nowadays, the archaeologist in me is horrified at what we used to do. We packed horses into the Superstition Mountains trying to find the Lost Dutchman Mine, we spent a summer in the Gila Wilderness looking for the Adams diggings—that sort of thing. I’m amazed we survived. My mother couldn’t stand it, and she eventually took steps to divorce him. As a way to win her back, he went off to discover Quivira. And we never heard from him again—until this old letter arrived. But he’s the reason I became an archaeologist.”

“You think he could still be alive?”

“No,” said Nora. “That’s out of the question. He would never have abandoned us like that.”

She breathed the fragrant night air as silence settled into the canyon. “You have a pretty remarkable father yourself,” she went on at last.

A thin trace of light suddenly lanced across the dark sky. “Shooting star,” Sloane said. She was silent for a moment. “You said the same thing, back on the trail. I suppose it’s true. He is a remarkable father. And he expects me to be an even more remarkable daughter.”

“How so?”

Sloane continued to stare at the sky. “I guess you could say he’s one of those fathers who holds his child to an almost impossible standard. I was always made to perform, to measure up. I was only allowed to bring home friends who could carry on an intellectual discussion at the dinner table. But nothing I did was ever good enough, and even now he doesn’t trust me to succeed.”

She shook her head. “I still remember when I was in seventh grade, my piano teacher made all us students attend a recital. I’d worked up this really difficult Bach three-part invention, and I was very proud of myself. But the teacher had this other student, Ursula Rein, who was a true prodigy. She’s teaching at Juilliard now. Anyway, she played right before me, and did this Chopin waltz at about twice normal speed.” Her face hardened. “When my father heard that, he made me get up and leave with him. I was so angry, so embarrassed. I’d practiced for so long, and I thought he’d be proud of me. . . . Oh, he made up some excuse, said his stomach was bothering him or something. But I knew the real reason was he couldn’t stand for me to come in second.” She laughed. “I’m still amazed he wanted me on this expedition.”

Nora could hear the bitter undertone in the laugh. “It doesn’t seem to have hurt you,” she replied.

“Because I don’t let it hurt me,” she said, looking at Nora with a defiant flip of her hair.

Nora realized Sloane might have taken the comment the wrong way. “No, that’s not what I meant. I meant, you’re—”

“And you know what?” Sloane interrupted, as if she hadn’t heard. “I don’t ever remember my father telling me he loved me.”

She looked away. Nora, unsure how to answer, decided to change the subject. “I’ve been curious. You’ve got the money, looks, and talent to be anything. So why are you an archaeologist?”

Sloane turned back to her, the grin returning. “Why? Are archaeologists supposed to be poor, ugly, and dumb?”

“Of course not.”

Sloane gave a low laugh. “It’s the family business, isn’t it? The Rothschilds are bankers, the Kennedys are politicians, the Goddards are archaeologists. I’m his only child. He raised me to be an archaeologist and I wasn’t strong enough to deny him.”

The father again, Nora thought. She looked into Sloane’s face. “Don’t you like archaeology?”

“I love it,” came the reply, a brief note of passion sounding in the rich contralto. “I never stop thinking about the precious things and the secrets that lie hidden beneath the soil. They’re waiting to teach us something, if only we’re smart enough to find them. But I’ll never be a good enough archaeologist to satisfy him.” She paused a moment, then spoke more briskly. “It’s funny, Nora, but if I find Quivira, you know who’s going to be remembered? You know who’s going to go down in the history books like Wetherill and Earl Morris? Not me. Him.” She punctuated this with a short, harsh laugh. “Isn’t that ironic?”

Nora could not find an answer to this.

Sloane uncrossed her legs and lay down atop her sleeping bag. She sighed, teased her hair back with one finger. “Seeing anyone?”

Nora paused to consider this abrupt change of subject. “Not really,” she replied. “And you? Are you dating someone?”

“Not anybody I wouldn’t drop in a second if the right person came along.” Sloane was silent for a moment, as if thinking about something. “So what do you think of the men in this group of ours? You know, as men.”

Nora hesitated again, not feeling entirely comfortable talking like this about people she was leading. But the steamy warmth of the sleeping bag, and the brightness of the stars, somehow conspiratorial in their proximity, relaxed her defenses. “I hadn’t really thought about them as, you know, potential dating material.”

Sloane gave a low laugh. “Well, I have. I’d pegged you for Smithback.”

Nora sat up. “Smithback?” she cried. “He’s insufferable.”

“He’s in a position to do a lot for your career if this all works out. Funny, too, if you like your humor dry as a martini. He’s led a pretty interesting life these last couple of years. Did you ever read that book of his, about the New York museum murders?”

“He gave me a copy. I haven’t really looked at it.”

“It’s a hell of a read. And the guy’s not bad looking, either, in a citified sort of way.”

Nora shook her head. “He’s about as full of himself as they come.”

“Maybe. But I think part of that is just facade. The guy can take it as well as dish it out.” She paused. “And something about that mouth tells me he’s a great kisser.”

“If you find out, let me know.” Nora glanced at Sloane. “Got your eyes on anybody?”

By way of answering, Sloane fanned herself absently. “Black,” she said at last.

It took a moment for Nora to digest this. “What?” she asked.

“If I had to choose somebody, I’d choose Black.”

Nora shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

“Oh, I know he can be obnoxious. He’s terrified of being away from civilization. But you wait. When we find Quivira, he’ll come into his own. It’s easy to forget out here in the middle of nowhere that he’s one of the most prominent archaeologists in the country. With good reason. Talk about someone who could do a lot for a career.” She laughed. “And look at that big-boned frame of his. I’ll bet he’s hung like a fire hydrant.”

And with that she stood up, letting the shirt slide off her arms and fall away to the ground. “Now look what you’ve done,” she said. “I’m going down to the stream to cool off.”

Nora leaned back. As if at a distance, she heard Sloane down at the stream, splashing softly. In a few moments she returned, her sleek body glistening in the moonlight. She slid noiselessly into her sleeping bag. “Sweet dreams, Nora Kelly,” she murmured.

Then she turned away, and within moments, Nora could hear her breathing, regular and serene. But Nora lay still, eyes open to the stars, for a long time.

24

NORA AWOKE WITH A START. SHE HAD slept so deeply, so heavily, that for a moment she did not know where she was. She sat up in panic. Dawn light was just bloodying the rimrock above her head. A throbbing at the ends of her bandaged fingers quickly brought back the memories of the previous day: the terrible struggle on the hogback ridge; the discovery of the slot canyon and this hidden valley beyond; the lack of any signs of a ruin. She looked around. The sleeping bag beside her was empty.

She rose, sore muscles protesting, and stirred the ashes of the fire. Cutting some dry grass and folding it into a packet, she shoved it in the coals. A thread of smoke came up, then the grass burst into flame. She quickly added sticks. Rummaging in her pack, she filled a tiny two-cup espresso pot with grounds and water, put it on the fire, then went down to the creek to wash. When she returned, the pot was hissing. She poured herself a cup just as Sloane walked up. The perpetual smile was gone.

“Have some coffee,” Nora said.

Sloane took the proffered cup and sat down beside her. They sipped in silence as the sun crept down the canyon walls.

“There’s nothing here, Nora,” Sloane said at last. “I just spent the last hour going over this place inch by inch. Your pal Holroyd can scan this ground with the magnetometer, but I’ve never seen a ruin under the sand or in a cliff that didn’t leave some trace on the surface. I haven’t found one potsherd or flint chip.”

Nora set down her coffee. “I don’t believe it.”

Sloane shrugged. “Take a look for yourself.”

“I will.”

Nora walked to the base of the cliffs and began making a clockwise circuit of the valley. She could see the welter of footprints where Sloane had scoured the ground for artifacts. Nora, instead, took out her binoculars and systematically searched the cliffs, setbacks, and rimrock above her. Every twenty steps she stopped and searched again. The morning invasion of light into the valley continued, each minute creating fresh angles and shadows on the rock. At each pause she forced her eyes across the same rock faces, from different angles, straining to recognize something—a toehold, a shaped building block, a faded petroglyph, anything that indicated human occupation. After completing the circuit, she then crossed the valley from north to south and from east to west, heedlessly wading through the stream again and again, peering up at the walls, trying to get every possible view of the towering cliffs above.

Ninety minutes later she came back into camp, wet and tired. She sat down beside Sloane, saying nothing. Sloane was also silent, her head bowed, staring into the sand, idly tracing a circle with a stick.

She thought about her father, and all the terrible things her mother had said about him over the years. Was it possible that she could have been right all this time? Was he untrustworthy and unreliable—just a fantasist, after all?

They remained beside the dying fire, wordlessly, for perhaps ten minutes, perhaps twenty, as the full weight of the colossal defeat settled upon them.

“What are we going to tell the others?” Nora said at last.

Sloane tossed her short hair back with a shake of her head. “We’ll do it by the book,” she said. “We can’t turn around now without going through the formalities. Like you said last night, we’ll bring in the equipment, do an archaeological survey of the valley. And then we’ll go home. You to your office. And me . . .” She paused. “To my father.”

Nora glanced over at Sloane. A haunted look came into her amber eyes as she spoke. The woman looked back at Nora. As she did so, her expression softened.

“But here I am, moping like a selfish schoolgirl,” she said, the old smile returning. “When you’re the one who really needs consoling. I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Nora. You know how much we all believed in your dream.”

Nora looked up at the dark encircling cliffs, the smooth sandstone faces that showed no trace of a trail. There had been no other ruins in the entire canyon system, and this was no exception. “I just can’t believe it,” she said. “I can’t believe I dragged you all out here, wasted your father’s money, risked lives, killed horses, for nothing.”

Sloane took one of Nora’s hands and gave it a reassuring squeeze. Then she stood up.

“Come on,” she said. “The others are waiting for us.”

Nora stowed the cooking gear and sleeping bag into her pack, then shouldered it wearily. Her mouth felt painfully dry. The thought of the days to come—going through the motions, working without hope—was almost too much to bear. She looked up yet again at the rock, picking out the same landmarks she had seen yesterday. The morning light was coming in at a different angle, raking along the lower cliffs. Her eyes instinctively scoured the rock face, but it remained clear and barren. She raised her eyes higher.

And then she saw something: a single, shallow notch in the rock, forty feet above the ground. The light now lay at a perfect raking angle. It could be natural; in fact, it probably was natural. But she found herself digging into her pack anyway for her binoculars. She focused and looked again. There it was: a tiny depression, seemingly floating in space a foot or so below a narrow ledge. Magnified, it looked a little less natural. But where was the rest of the trail?

Angling her binoculars down, she saw the answer: below the lone notch, a section of the cliff face had recently peeled off: the desert varnish—that layer of oxidation built up on sandstone over centuries—was a lighter, fresher color. At the base of the cliffs was the proof—a small heap of broken rubble. Her heart began to pound. She turned and found Sloane staring at her curiously.

She handed over the binoculars. “Look at that.”

Sloane examined the indicated spot. Suddenly, her body tensed.

“It’s a moqui step,” she said breathlessly. “The top of a trail. The rest must have fallen away. Jesus, look at that pile of rubble at the bottom. How could I be so stupid? There I was, so busy looking for sherds that I never thought . . .”

“That little landslide must have happened since my father saw the trail,” Nora said. But Sloane was already digging into her pack, pulling out a rope shot through with black fibers.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“No problem,” came the response. “It’s a friction climb.”

“You’re going up there?”

“Damn right I’m going up there.” She worked frantically, pulling out her equipment, kicking off her hiking boots and tugging on climbing shoes.

“What about me?” Nora asked.

Sloane glanced up at her. “You?”

“There’s no way in hell you’re going up there without me.”

Sloane stood up, began coiling the rope. “Done any climbing?”

“Some. Mostly one-pitch scrambles and boulder problems.”

“What about your hands?”

“They’re fine,” Nora insisted. “I’ll wear my gloves.”

Sloane hesitated for a moment. “I didn’t bring a lot of gear along, so you’re going to have to belay me without a harness.”

“No problem.”

“Then let’s do it,” said Sloane, with a sudden radiant grin.

In a moment they were at the base of the cliff. Sloane tied on with a figure eight, then helped Nora set up the ground stance and showed her how to use the belay device. Nora braced the rope around her body as Sloane dusted her hands, then turned to address the sheer face. “Climbing,” she called out in a clear voice.

As Nora watched, Sloane moved up the rock with care and precision, instinctively finding tiny holds in the cliff face. As she climbed, her small loop of friends, cams, and carabiners dangled in the still air. Nora played out the rope sparingly. Fifteen feet up, Sloane paused to select a nut, insert it into a crack, and pull down sharply, testing for tightness. Satisfied, she attached a quickdraw to the wire and clipped the climbing rope into it. She continued up the face, placing a nut here, a friend there. At one point she called out “Rock!” and Nora dodged a shower of chips. Another minute and Sloane had reached the single toe hold, then gained the ledge above it. She set up the anchor and tied in, yelling “Off belay!” Then, leaning out onto her anchors, she called down to Nora, “On belay!”

There was a brief silence. Then she cried out again. “I can see a route!” The sound echoed crazily around the valley. “It goes up another two hundred feet and disappears over the edge of the first bench. Nora, the city must be recessed in an alcove just above!”

“I’m coming up!” Nora shouted.

“Take it slow,” came the voice from above. “Follow my chalk marks for the best holds. Don’t jam straight in, use the insides of your feet. The handholds are small.”

“Got it,” Nora said, freeing the rope from the belay device. “Off belay!”

She began working her way up the cliff face, painfully aware that her climb had none of the grace or assurance of Sloane’s. Within minutes, the muscles of her arms and calves were twitching spasmodically from the strain of clinging to the thin holds. Despite the gloves, the ends of her fingers were exquisitely painful. She was aware that Sloane was keeping the rope tighter than normal, but she was grateful for the added lift.

As she approached the single ancient step, she felt her right foot lose its purchase on the rock. Her bandaged hands could not compensate, and she began to slip. “Watch me!” she cried. Immediately, the rope tightened. “Lean away from the rock!” she heard Sloane call. “I’ll haul you up!”

Taking short, choppy breaths, Nora half climbed and was half pulled the last few feet onto the ledge. She climbed shakily to her feet, massaging her fingers. From this vantage point she could see that the canyon wall sloped back at a terrifying angle. But at least it wasn’t vertical, and as it continued the angle lessened. Sloane was right: though invisible from the ground, from up here the trail was unmistakable.

“You okay?” Sloane asked. Nora nodded, and her companion began a second pitch up the rock, rope trailing from her harness. With the hand-and-toe trail still in place it was a simple pitch. After another fifty feet, she anchored herself and in a few minutes Nora was beside her, breathless from the exertion. The recessed benchland above them loomed closer, its hidden secrets now a single pitch away.

Another ten minutes of climbing, and the trail leveled off considerably. “Let’s solo the rest,” Sloane said, the excitement clear in her voice.

Nora knew that, technically, they should keep to the safety of the ropes. But she was as eager to reach the bench as Sloane was. On an unspoken signal, they untied from the ropes and began moving quickly up the trail. It was the work of a minute to climb the last remaining stretch of rock.

The bench was about fifteen feet wide, sloping gently, covered with grass and prickly pear cactus. They stood motionless, staring ahead.

There was nothing: no city, no alcove, just the naked shelf of rock that ended in another cliff face twenty feet away, which rose vertically for at least five hundred feet.

“Oh, shit,” Sloane groaned. Her shoulders slumped.

In disbelief, Nora scanned the entire bench again. There was nothing. Her eyes began to sting, and she turned away.

And then she glanced across the canyon for the first time.

There, on the opposite cliff face, a huge alcove arched across the length of the canyon, poised halfway between ground and sky. The morning sun shone in at a perfect angle, shooting a wedge of pale light into the recesses below the huge arch. Tucked inside was a ruined city. Four great towers rose from the corners of the city, and between them lay a complicated arrangement of roomblocks and circular kivas, dotted with black windows and doorways. The morning sun gilded the walls and towers into a dream-city: insubstantial, airy, ready to evaporate into the desert air.

It was the most perfect Anasazi city Nora had ever seen; more beautiful than Cliff Palace, as large as Pueblo Bonito.

Sloane looked at Nora. And then she, too, slowly turned to look across the canyon. Her face went deathly pale.

Nora closed her eyes, squeezed them shut, then opened them again. The city was still there. She gazed slowly across the vista, drinking it in. Wedged into the middle of the city, she could make out the circular outline of a Great Kiva: the largest she had ever seen, still roofed. An intact Great Kiva . . . nothing like it had ever been found.

She could see how the alcove itself was set back from the bench, making it invisible from below. The great sandstone cliff above billowed out in a huge convex curve that leaned at least fifty feet beyond the bottom of the alcove. It was this fortuitous artifact of geology and erosion that allowed the city to be hidden, not only from above and below, but also from the opposite canyon rim. She had a fleeting, desperate thought: I hope my father saw this.

Suddenly her knees grew weak and she dropped slowly to the ground. Seated, she continued to stare across the valley. There was a rustling sound, and Sloane knelt down beside her.

“Nora,” came the voice, the slightest trace of irony leavening the reverence, “I think we’ve found Quivira.”