The Shadow Read online

  “Sounds like a good way to live,” she said.

  “It is, and reconnecting to it was the right thing for me. So I had an Enemy Way done, remained home and began to work for the tribe.”

  “An Enemy Way?”

  “It’s a ceremony that allows a returning soldier to restore harmony within himself. Once that was done, everything else fell into place.”

  So much about Jonas drew her, but she knew that he was a free spirit who needed the freedom his lifestyle gave him. Accepting what she couldn’t change, she tore her thoughts away from him and looked at the path ahead.

  They were just making the turn onto the highway that ran parallel to the bluffs, and led to her home, when his phone rang. Jonas pulled over to the shoulder and stopped to answer. He spoke softly in Navajo, then ended the call. “The coordinates have been checked, and they match points on your land.”

  “Did your contact have any idea why my father targeted those particular locations?”

  “All we’ve been able to determine is that there are old coal mine shafts in that general area.”

  She nodded. “The mines date back to the eighteen hundreds, I’ve been told. Maybe Dad flagged those shafts so he’d know exactly where they were. Let’s go take a look around.” Her own choice of words made her pause and think. The day would come when she’d have to learn another way of getting around in a sighted world.

  “Why don’t I go track down those places on my own? I’ve noticed that your eyes are giving you problems from time to time. If those shafts run along the cliffs, you’re going to need to be very sure-footed.”

  Emily’s first instinct was to deny that she had a problem, but then decided against it. “It’s true that my eyesight’s bad in low light, but I’m just fine when the sun’s up,” she answered.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, what exactly is the problem with your vision?”

  She didn’t answer right away, taking time to gather her thoughts. “You told me recently that Navajos are careful about what they say out loud. It’s like that for me, too, though my reasons are different. I don’t talk about my eyesight because people tend to sympathize and pity too easily. Or, if they care, they’ll try to overprotect, and eventually smother. I can’t allow myself to accept any of that, because it’s a sure road to defeat.”

  Jonas nodded slowly. “I agree with you about that, but I also know that you’re not the kind who can accept defeat, not without one heck of a fight.”

  His belief in her bolstered her confidence and strengthened her. “Thank you for saying that.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Now you also understand why I have to take an active role in finding answers, and can’t just hand things over to you or anyone else. Some of it is pride, yes,” she admitted, “but there’s more to it than that. My future’s at stake, and it’s my responsibility to see things through.”

  “Just don’t try to shoulder everything by yourself. No one ever stands alone.”

  “Is that part of the Navajo belief? That we’re all connected?”

  Jonas nodded, then gave her a devilish grin. “And some of us are more connected than others.”

  To her credit, Emily didn’t choke, but his deep voice and the memory he’d evoked jolted her to the core.

  “Do you ever think of that night?” she asked after several long moments, her voice almost a whisper.

  “More than you realize. That memory saw me through some very bad times,” he said. “I can still see you stumbling around in the blizzard, hypothermia about to set in, your jacket and pants sopping wet. You couldn’t stop shivering by the time we made it to my shelter. I got you out of those wet clothes, then crawled into the sleeping bag with you. I knew my own body heat was needed to keep you alive.” Then, in a smoldering voice that came from the depths of him, he added, “The rest…what happened hours later…was nature and fate.”

  “I remember every detail of that weekend,” Emily whispered. His body against hers…At first she’d felt nothing but numbness. Then cold, then heat—the blazing kind that was all consuming. He’d been the first and only man she’d ever made love to. After that night, no one else had mattered.

  He brushed his knuckles against the side of her face, then forced his eyes back on the road. “We’re both different people now, Em. So much has happened to us since that night.”

  “Your work…it’s everything to you.”

  He could have argued the point, but there was too much truth in what she’d said. “Yes. I’m good at what I do, and my work’s needed.”

  “And you’re the best among the best,” she murmured, thinking of the Brotherhood.

  Her words caught his attention. Yet as he studied her expression, he could read nothing on her face. “So where to next?” he asked, weaving more than one meaning into his words.

  “Drop me off at my trailer. I need to put on a pair of hiking boots, then we’ll set out.”

  “Boots are a good idea. This time of day rocks provide shelter for snakes, and there’s no telling when you’ll run into one.”

  As they drove through her open gate, they saw three workmen’s trucks parked nearby. The sound of hammers and pry bars came from inside the main house. Today, built-ins and woodwork she wanted to keep, such as the big stone pass-through, were being removed. They’d be stored, and then at the right time brought back to be used in the new structures.

  Ken, the tall, slender construction foreman, stepped out onto the porch as they drove by, and gave them a thumbs-up.

  Jonas took Emily directly to the trailer, and five minutes later, they set out on foot, wearing small day packs containing water, flashlights, gloves, binoculars and climbing rope.

  He was armed with his pistol, not for snakes, but for protection against possible intruders. After the previous two incidents, it didn’t made sense to take chances. The next attack, if there was one, might involve something lethal—knives or firearms.

  They decided to hike to the closest location first—southeast, and close to Woods’s property line.

  Emily matched Jonas’s pace. It had been years since she’d hiked this far from the house. Her parents had left the natural vegetation intact, so they were quickly within the upper limits of the bosque—the cottonwood forest that lined the river bottom and upper banks.

  On most of the other properties along the populated valley, the bosque had been cleared for fallow and cultivated fields. Here on her land there were thickets of tamarisk, Russian olives and willows, and, closer to the river, flats of salt grass, sandbars and dunes.

  Emily knew this valley well, as did most New Mexicans who lived in rural farming communities. It was no accident that the city just to the north had been named Farmington.

  The land sloped gently uphill, becoming drier and rockier as they approached the towering bluffs. Here, sagebrush and grama grass were more common, and a few low, fragrant junipers dotted the land.

  They’d been hiking for close to thirty minutes, and the side of the valley was getting steeper, when she stopped, needing time to catch her breath. “How much farther?” she asked, looking back toward the house, but not able to see it anymore because of the trees.

  “Maybe another ten minutes, according to the GPS reading,” he said, reaching into his backpack and taking out a bottle of water. Although he’d made it a point to search for any signs of Dinétsoh as they’d covered ground, he’d yet to find any indication that the man had come this way.

  “It’s a nice day for this kind of hike, with the weather in the sixties.”

  Before he could reply, they both heard a rustling in the brush to their right. Jonas reached for the pistol, tucked into a holster at his belt, hidden beneath his jacket.

  A second later a coyote appeared in full view. The animal stopped, watched them for a second, then trotted quickly to the north, keeping his distance as he headed toward the river. Ducks and other waterfowl had been returning from their winter migration for a few weeks now, and the food supply
for hunters and scavengers was on the increase.

  “I know that to a lot of people, coyotes are just a nuisance, but I’ve always liked having them around,” Emily said. “Of course, I imagine it’s totally different for a sheep herder. Do Navajos hate them?”

  “No, not ‘hate.’ That’s too strong a word. Coyote has his place. In our creation stories, the gods who stood for good always stayed on the south side of all the gatherings. The evil ones took their place on the north. Coyote, being neither good nor evil, took his post near the doorway. That way he could choose either side, depending on his mood. Many call him the Trickster. It’s his unreliability that made warriors turn and head in the opposite direction whenever they saw a coyote on the trail.”

  “And now that we have, would you like to take a detour? We could go the long way around.”

  “He didn’t really cross our path,” he said with a trace of a smile.

  As they looked back downhill in the direction the animal had gone, something whined overhead. Almost simultaneously, the crack of a gunshot came from behind them.

  Jonas pushed her to the ground beside a low, wide bush, then urged her over another two feet, behind the protection of a sandstone boulder. After looking her over quickly to make sure she was okay, he gestured for her to remain where she was.

  Jonas slipped off his backpack, then crawled away, low to the ground, dragging the pack along by the strap.

  Memories of other battles filled his mind, but with effort, he focused solely on the present. The shot had come from roughly the same direction where the coyote had been. Maybe a hunter had been on its trail.

  Nearly invisible now behind some thick brush, he reached into the backpack and removed the binoculars. Before he could focus the lenses, he heard someone approaching.

  The shooter was noisy, making little effort to hide his presence. Jonas drew out his pistol, thumbing off the safety.

  Soon an Anglo man carrying a rifle at quarter arms appeared from behind a juniper, then stepped right into Jonas’s field of fire.

  Gun in hand, Jonas rose to a crouch, and verifying with his peripheral vision that no one else was coming along behind the shooter, stood. “Stop, and don’t make another move. If you swing that rifle around, I’ll drop you.”

  The man froze, his head turning as he spotted Jonas. “I didn’t know anyone else was around. I was after that darned coyote. It must have passed by close to here. Didn’t you see it?”

  Jonas took the rifle away from the man, removing the clip and ejecting a .22 Long Rifle round from the chamber. “Who are you?”

  “Who are you? Some kind of bosque cop?”

  “I’m the one with the pistol. Answer the question.”

  “Sam Carpenter’s the name. I’m Grant Woods’s handyman,” he said. “I’m fixing up an old cabin of his just below the bluffs about two miles over.” He turned to point.

  “I said don’t move,” Jonas growled, laying the rifle across the top of a bush, then placing his pistol back in the holster.

  “Relax!” the man answered.

  Emily came out from behind cover then and walked up to them. “The Woods property line is at least five hundred yards east of here. What are you doing, hunting on my land?”

  “Your land? You’re Emily Atkins.” He shrugged helplessly. “Sorry, there aren’t any fences this close to the bluffs, and I was after that coyote. I must have lost track of where I was.”

  “Nobody hunts any creature on my land,” she repeated.

  “And shooting without a clear target can get somebody killed,” Jonas snapped. “Your bullet flew right over us.”

  “I never even saw you or the lady. I wasn’t expecting anyone to be out here.” He glanced down at the rifle. “I’m going to need the .22 back. It belongs to Grant—Mr. Woods.”

  Jonas handed him the clip. “Don’t load it again until you’re off Atkins property. And if any other bullets come our way, accidental or not, I’m going to come hunting for you,” he said, his voice dropping an octave and vibrating with a lethal edge.

  “Yeah, okay,” Carpenter mumbled, reaching down and gingerly picking up the rifle. He backed away a few steps, then turned and moved east at a fast pace.

  “The shot he fired…it really came close to us, didn’t it?” Emily looked down at the cartridge Jonas had ejected from the rifle, picked it up and handed it to him.

  He looked at the round, then put it in his pocket. “Carpenter’s either an excellent shot or a miserable one. If he really was trying to hit the coyote, he was firing blind, and aiming at movement—which turned out to be ours. But if what he really intended was to shake us up with a near miss, he was right on the mark.”

  “I never want to hear a bullet whistle overhead like that again,” she said with a shudder.

  “Would you like to turn back?”

  “No.” She sighed. “We’ve come too far to waste all that time and effort. He’s gone, so let’s complete what we started,” she said, her voice stronger now.

  “All right. But let’s stick close to cover, and avoid long, open stretches from now on.”

  “You know, maybe there’s something to the stories about Coyote,” Emily commented, coming up beside him.

  Jonas didn’t answer. His gaze remained focused on the land around them. “If you hear anything strange, be ready to react in a hurry.”

  After another five minutes he checked his GPS and confirmed that they were close to the spot. He knew that this particular area had been searched with thermal imagining. Brotherhood warriors had also followed up with a ground search for Dinétsoh. He could see fresh prints here and there, probably left by his brother warriors who, when tracking, wore untraceable footware.

  Jonas remained alert for subtler signs. Dinétsoh was said to have been wearing ordinary street shoes at the time. Yet, despite that, any trail left by his mentor would be defined by infinitesimally small clues—ones most others would overlook.

  As they hiked, he kept an eye out for things such as a manmade scratch on a boulder, or one rock stacked on another. Even two sticks crossed. But all he found was the distinctive trail of a cottontail—long hind legs and short front paws.

  As they came into a rocky passageway, something immediately caught his eye.

  Emily came up behind him almost at the same time. “It’s broken—snapped in half—at eye level,” she said, pointing to a juniper branch. “That brings back memories.”

  “Of what?”

  “When I was a kid, Dinétsoh taught me about tracking, and how to leave trails someone else could follow in case I ever got lost. A branch broken at eye level like that was one of his favorite techniques.”

  Chapter Seven

  It took Jonas a beat to gather his wits. “That’s a good call. A marker like that is meant for someone who’s watching for a sign. It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to overlook or dismiss.”

  Jonas studied the branch. The break was relatively fresh—at least fresh enough to fit the important time frame. He was sure now that Dinétsoh had come this way and, more important, had wanted someone to know about it.

  “Do you think this was left by the Navajo man who was with my father? I mean, why resort to leaving a trail like this unless you don’t have any other option?” She looked at the ground. “At least Carpenter didn’t come this way. I noticed that he left very distinctive work-boot prints.”

  Jonas was thinking of Dinétsoh, wounded, on the run from an assailant and trying to find his way to safety. There wasn’t enough ground cover here to hide anyone in daylight—not for long—and certainly not from an overhead thermal search at night. So the question of where he’d gone remained. Above, on the bluffs but still almost a quarter mile away, were the old mines. Some had undoubtedly collapsed after decades of weathering and erosion. If that was the shelter he’d chosen, only more danger awaited him there.

  “Be careful stepping on or around the rocks that have tumbled down from the heights. You could break an ankle—or worse,” he
said as they continued on.

  “You’re also thinking about rattlesnakes,” she said quietly, fully aware of the danger. “Don’t worry. I’ve done lots of hiking.”

  After they’d walked another fifty feet, Emily stopped. “You just reminded me of something. One time when I was playing with Dinétsoh, he left a fetish by a rock for me as a clue that he’d been there. I remember him specifically saying that it was a clue most would miss, since the rocks posed their own danger.”

  Jonas nodded slowly. Although she didn’t know that Dinétsoh was the missing man, Emily’s tracking skills were worthy of the teacher who’d taught them to her.

  “It would be better if you look around while I keep an eye on the general area,” he said.

  The bluffs were still too far away to offer any threat except from a high-powered rifle in the hands of an expert sniper. He and Emily were also high enough up the valley to have a good view of the terrain to the north. The east and western flanks offered cover, but he wasn’t going to be taken off guard again.

  “I’ve got something,” she called out. “Look in the recess of that large rock just off the little trail. The fetish is in partial shadow right now, but in the morning hours it would show up as clear as anything.”

  Jonas stepped past her and retrieved the small wood carving. “It’s an ant fetish. Ants are all about patience,” he said, remembering. “They can be aggressive when need be, and are known for having the energy to complete whatever task is before them.”

  “That was Dinétsoh’s spiritual brother,” she said with surprise.

  “Don’t jump to conclusions,” he cautioned, wondering how long he’d be able to keep the truth from her. “There are many others who carry fetishes, and Ant isn’t uncommon. It could have been left by a hiker. There are outdoor clubs who leave messages and artifacts for others to uncover.”

  “Letterboxing,” she said with a nod. “It’s getting popular now. People combine hiking with sleuthing as they try to find messages others left behind. But I doubt this is something like that. Maybe your missing man…” She didn’t complete the thought, hoping he’d fill in the rest.