A Thief of Time by Tony Hillerman Page B

Nation Road Department number painted on its side. Then he flashed the light into the cab.
    A man was sitting there, slumped sideways against the opposite door, his open eyes reflecting white in Chee’s flash. The left side of his face was black with what must be blood. But Chee could see his mustache and enough of his face to know that he had found Joe Nails.

SIX
    L EAPHORN CAME HOME to Window Rock long after midnight. He hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights. He drank from his cupped palms in the bathroom and folded his clothing over the bedside chair (where Emma had so often sat to read or knit, to do the thousand small things that Emma did). He had turned the bed ninety degrees so that his eyes would open in the morning to the shock of a different view. That broke his lifelong habit, the automatic waking thought of “Where’s Emma?” and what then followed. He had moved from his side of the bed to Emma’s—which had eliminated that once-happy habit of reaching out to touch her when he drifted into sleep.
    Now he lay flat on his back, feeling tired muscles relax, thinking about the food in Eleanor Friedman-Bernal’s refrigerator, drifting from that to her arrangement with Nakai to inspect contributed pots and from that to the notebook Nakai had described. He hadn’t noticed a pocket-sized leather notebook in her apartment—but then it might be almost anywhere in the room. Thatcher had made no real search. On the long drive homeward across the Checkerboard from Huerfano Mesa, he had thought of why Elliot hadn’t mentioned being sent by Friedman to see Nakai and collect a pot. It must have seemed odd to Elliot, this abortive mission. Why not mention it? Before Leaphorn could come to any conclusion, he drifted off to sleep, and it was morning.
    He showered, inspected his face, decided he could go another few days without a shave, made himself a breakfast of sausage and fried eggs—violating his diet with the same guilty feelings he always had when Emma was away visiting her family. He read the mail that Saturday had brought him, and the Gallup Independent. He snapped on the television, snapped it off again, stood at the window looking out on the autumn morning. Windless. Cloudless. Silent except for a truck rolling down Navajo Route 3. The little town of Window Rock was taking Sunday off. Leaphorn noticed the glass was dusty—a condition Emma had never tolerated. He got a handkerchief from his drawer and polished the pane.
    He polished other windows. Abruptly he walked to the telephone and called Chaco Canyon.
    Until recently telephone calls between the world outside and Chaco had traveled via a Navajo Communications Company telephone line. From Crownpoint northeast, the wire wandered across the rolling grassland, attached mostly to fence posts and relying on its own poles only when no fence was available going in the right direction. This system made telephone service subject to the same hazards as the ranch fence on which it piggybacked. Drifts of tumbleweeds, winter blizzards, dry rot, errant cattle, broke down both fences and communications. When it was operating, voices sometimes tended to fade in and out with the wind velocity. But recently this system had been modernized. Calls were now routed two hundred miles east to Santa Fe, then beamed to a satellite and rebroadcast to a receiving dish at Chaco. The space age system, like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration which made it possible, was frequently out of operation. When it operated at all, voices tended to fade in and out with the wind velocity. Today was no exception.
    A woman’s voice answered, strong at first, then drifting away into space. No, Bob Luna wasn’t in. No use ringing his number because she’d seen him driving away and she hadn’t seen him return.
    How about Maxie Davis?
    Just a minute. She might not be up yet. It was, after all, early Sunday morning.
    Maxie Davis was