Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 3 - Venus Besieged Read online

  "You've summoned him. He will show himself now." I could tell from Callie's voice that she was worried, but I was anxious to get everything out in the open—in particular Luther Drake.

  Almost as soon as we got back to the cabin, the phone rang. It was Ramona Mathers saying she had been unable on such short notice to get permission to exhume a body; she'd even called Cy Blackstone, who had reminded her that many people weren't back from the holidays and it wasn't going to be possible. I thanked her for giving it a shot and hung up.

  "She even asked Cy Blackstone, which was pretty ballsy of her. She's connected, I'll give her that."

  "I think she's been warned off," Callie said. "She was so confident and now, before the government offices are even open, she's declaring defeat."

  "Should we tell Manaba we can't get it done?"

  "She's meeting us late tonight. I knew it would come down to our doing it without anyone's help."

  I wanted to ask when she'd contacted Manaba about digging up the grave, but the air in Sedona seemed to carry messages like whispers in the wind. If a woman could dance in the middle of a fire, she most likely could know things without relying on U.S. Cellular.

  "Wake up." Callie shook me. It was still pitch-black outside as I yanked on my cords, grabbed a sweater and down vest, and pulled on my mountain boots. I crossed in front of the living room door on my way to the bathroom and halted abruptly.

  The figure in the living room only looked up, the face stoic, the outfit the same, Manaba sitting like an invited guest before I'd even heard the front door open.

  "Did you let her in?" I said over my shoulder to Callie.

  "She let herself in. This is her cabin, remember?"

  "Forgot about that. But she might consider knocking when it's rented."

  Entering the living room, I greeted her as I crossed to the kitchen to turn on the coffee but saw it was already made, the pot emptied and put away. Manaba offered me a cup she'd apparently saved for me and I took it, grateful to be able to drink and not talk. The cabin brew, always strong and rich, was more bitter than it had been the last time I drank it, as if it too anticipated the thing to be done: an unearthing, a removal of a body from a grave in the middle of the night, an illegal act on sacred ground. I hoped Manaba had said all the right prayers before we left.

  Excusing myself, I headed back to the bedroom to see how Callie was doing. "How can Manaba stand the idea of digging up a grave that contains her lover? How can she be okay with that?"

  "She's trained to endure many things, some you and I could never even imagine."

  I watched as Callie applied her makeup as if she was going to a premiere instead of an exhumation. She caught me staring at her and cocked a questioning eyebrow.

  "It's dark-thirty outside. No one will see you, and even Sacajawea in there is without makeup and in her only piece of wardrobe. Why take so much time getting ready? Don't get me wrong. Personally, I think you look fabulous."

  "Out of respect." Callie shook her head.

  "For Nizhoni? You said she wasn't in the grave."

  "For myself."

  I realized Callie's principles trickled down into the smallest details of life, and for a moment I saw her as a beautiful warrior applying war paint—preparing to do battle with a form yet unseen.

  "I'm not too excited about doing this," I said.

  "It's her family's burial place. Nizhoni's uncle is going to help."

  "That's even creepier."

  When Callie came out of the bedroom, Manaba made eye contact with her for an instant and then went outside, further annoying me with her constant attempts at unspoken conversation with Callie.

  As we headed for our car, Manaba was gone. Was there a Manaba-mobile? I didn't know. All I knew for sure was she didn't ride with us and I didn't see another vehicle for her. Perhaps she'd mastered the art of disappearing and reappearing. We'd find out when we got to the cemetery.

  "Something's not right," I fretted as Callie navigated, directing me around curves, up hills, and back down the other side. "Manaba's too damned calm." We topped a hill and emerged on a short stretch of two-lane with nothing on either side but sand. "Navajos don't want to see, touch, or talk about the dead because they're afraid the ghosts of the dead will attach to them," I said, turning back toward rockier terrain and thinking that getting lost took on a whole new meaning out here.

  "They're very smart. That can happen."

  "So why would Manaba and the uncle agree to dig up Nizhoni's grave?"

  "I don't care why. I know we have to do it. Could we make it a little warmer in here? You've got the AC so low that snow is coming out of the vents," Callie said and I rolled my eyes at her. "I got you something to take for the hot flashes." Callie pulled a small tin container out of her pocket. "It's all natural." She handed me a capsule and gave me a sip of her Coke to slug it down.

  "Where did you get this?"

  "It's an Indian remedy."

  I noted she didn't answer the question directly, meaning she'd probably gotten it from a local source I wouldn't even visit, much less buy drugs from. "Great," I said, wondering what in hell I'd swallowed.

  As the road inclined again, Callie punched a button on her penknife and shone the light on antiquated-looking hand-drawn directions; I was almost certain Manaba had drawn them.

  "Left," she instructed as we approached an opening in the road that looked like a goat path. I was grateful for four-wheel drive as she continued with her instructions, pointing this time. "Up that hill with the tree and then down over there."

  About two hundred feet in front of the car, a cluster of graves dotted the landscape. Closing the car doors softly, to avoid rattling the spirits, we walked to the dirt graves and knelt down among the modest wooden markers. Beside them, stabbed into the dirt, a few crooked cradle boards that once held babies safely against their mothers' strong backs now marked the end of life, graphically illustrating the phrase "cradle to grave" and creating an even greater sadness about death—that this is what was left.

  Manaba appeared out of nowhere. Beside her walked a man— short, muscular, with a piece of cloth across his forehead at a slant concealing his face. Assuming he was Native American from his build and stance, legs slightly arched at the thighs as if he constantly rode horses, I thought tonight he looked sentrylike, as if he should be brandishing a rifle rather than a shovel. Could this be Nizhoni's uncle, here to break open his niece's grave? If so, he was more peaceful than I.

  "If I am wrong—" Callie's tentative voice was interrupted by Manaba's loud wail that filled the night air and sent goose bumps roaming across my flesh: a chant of forgiveness perhaps. Never had I heard anyone make those kinds of sounds—of sadness, and longing, and love.

  If we’re trying to do this in secret, we’re screwed, I thought. The volume was making me nervous but the sound was hypnotic. It dawned on me that the chant was one of the most ancient sounds on earth, used by mankind for eons to call people to a common purpose—and now we were called to this most unpleasant of tasks. Despite the gravity of the event, I felt powerful, almost proud, anxious to get this done, certain if anyone showed up I could take them down, and I wondered if the coffee or the Indian estrogen contained an upper.

  When Manaba quit chanting, she looked to the sky and offered up what I assumed was a prayer of protection and forgiveness, then signaled the uncle to begin. As I rationalized it would most likely take a lone man with a shovel hours to dig up a grave, the dirt flew and in moments a concave indention formed around the marker. I imagined he was working at triple speed to finish and elude the evil spirits.

  Moments later, deeper still into the digging, his speed increased like a video on fast-forward, his adrenaline obviously pumping as he got closer to the body.

  Dirt piled up off to one side of the deep hole, the shovel clanked against the top of the box that held the woman killed by the totem that was her protector, and I began to dread seeing what might be left of Nizhoni.

  Th
e sides around the grave dug out, an animal howled in the distance, seeming to mourn the dirt's removal, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck. But that cry only foreshadowed the bloodcurdling yell that broke the night's silence—a tortured sound that appeared to emanate from the hollowness of despair and bespoke anger and anguish and raw aggression.

  Flint rattled against the bones of a breastplate, fringe slapped the sides of deerskin leggings, a pair of well-worn moccasins stabbed into the earth, and dirt sprayed over the elaborate beading of the intruder's shoes and into the exhumer's face.

  I panned up to the angle of the intruder's hips, cut from granite; he was bare-chested and muscled against the wind, a tall man with slick black hair angled at his clavicle, a brow that jutted forward like the red cliffs, and eyes as sunken as the caves buried within them. If the devil materialized, he could take lessons from this man who reeked of death and danger.

  Looking first at me, he seemed intentionally to send a ripple of fear across my body, and Callie clutched my arm. He was poised and tense as if ready to kill and appeared to pray for the opportunity. Then as quickly he turned his attention to Manaba.

  She glared at him, her eyes ferocious beyond the telling as he jumped down into the dark hole, landed with a loud thud against the packed earth, took the shovel away from the uncle, and used the tip like a crowbar, swiftly prying open the lid at one end, shining a light inside and revealing a piece of bone.

  The uncle, apparently having barely managed to keep his apprehension in check while hunkered in the dank dirt, mere seconds from seeing his decayed niece, gasped as if fearful of what he had unearthed, or perhaps unleashed. He cast a terror-stricken glance at the moccasined man, then scrambled squirrel-like out of the hole and ran into the night, leaving us to the intruder.

  Staring down into the coffin at the bones, what was left of Nizhoni, the wild-eyed warrior locked eyes with Manaba in an unspoken battle across the grave. They exchanged fierce looks of what appeared to be anger and pain and revenge.

  Suddenly he took the shovel and tossed dirt back on the coffin with an alacrity that far outstripped the uncle's efforts.

  Manaba waited until the last shovel full of dirt was back in place and then chanted again, this time slowly and with great melancholy. He chanted with her and while I felt his song was unwelcome, their harmonious sounds were undeniably beautiful, as if they'd been trained to chant together and were now bound against their will. Suddenly the chant ended, and he let out an unearthly scream and ran from the grave, disappearing into the night. Callie's eyes met Manaba's as the shaman turned her head away and strode from the gravesite.

  Admittedly, I was shook up, and I could see Callie was a little off balance as well. The dead of night, exhumed bodies, bloodcurdling screams from a weird Indian guy—anybody would be looking for a tranquilizer.

  "Was that...Luther Drake?" I whispered, and Callie nodded. "No wonder everybody's afraid of him. Nice technique, squealing like a castrated pig when he enters and exits. The hair on my arms is standing up like a whore at a revival."

  "That sounds like your father," Callie said absently, her mind obviously elsewhere.

  "My father would say someone ought to shoot that fucker and put him out of his misery. So you see I'm an evolutionary step up." I put my arm around her as we walked back to the car.

  "How can I be so wrong about the grave being empty?"

  "You're not wrong."

  "You saw the bone."

  "It takes a corpse awhile to look like that. Depends on temperature, embalming method, body size, humidity, and even geography, but bodies buried in boxes in the earth don't turn into bleached bones in less than three weeks, so that can't be Nizhoni's body."

  "Then whose body is it?" she whispered to herself.

  Chapter Thirteen

  At dawn, Callie was in the cabin at her computer pulling up a current astrological chart. "Look at this. Jupiter in the Twelfth House, complete protection in the present. Right now the Moon is trapped, as Venus was back then, between two heavy planets." I had to prod Callie to finish her thought. "Mars and Uranus, male energy, something will happen quickly, bizarrely in the Eighth House of death. A woman is about to be in grave danger."

  "Speaking of grave—who was in the one we dug up, if it wasn't Nizhoni?"

  But Callie apparently wasn't even aware I was speaking to her or was simply ignoring me.

  "Well, Teague," I said, slightly irritated at the silent treatment, "I don't know who's in the coffin. I'll get back to you on that, right after I finish taking my own planetary pulse—"

  "Are you making fun of me?" she asked, turning her beautifully sculpted face in my direction and making me feel like a brat.

  "I'm just hot and irritable and need to get some fresh air," I said, as my body went nuclear again. As if on cue, Elmo wiggled and jiggled and whined, clearly communicating that the lack of attention I was getting from Callie mirrored the lack of attention he was getting from me.

  Hooking him up to his lead, I took him outside; his bladder relief was only perfunctory, his real purpose for our trip apparently to tell me someone was about to arrive. Being with Callie had made me realize Elmo was psychic when it came to visitors. He could lie around all day, then suddenly for no reason sit by the door and whine, which signaled he was picking up images of visitors arriving. At first, it seemed coincidental, but now I knew that Elmo received images of people long before they showed up, and in addition, he had a built-in dog clock that knew what time they would appear. Usually he saw fit to give me a heads-up about fifteen minutes out.

  So when Elmo parked his soft, furry derriere in the middle of the driveway and watched the road, I knew somebody was coming.

  "Good visitor, bad visitor?" I asked. His deep, short, impatient reply sounded fretful, which I always took to mean he wasn't happy about these particular guests.

  Moments later, a white truck pulled into the driveway and the driver's-side door swung open. A tall, sandy-haired young man with a limp—the kind that started at the hip like a tractor had rolled on it—climbed out of the truck cab and strolled across the rocky road and shook my hand.

  "Ms. Richfield, right?" he asked, and Callie must have heard the car tires because she suddenly appeared on the porch. Upon seeing her, he tipped his hat not unlike Cy Blackstone. "Ms. Rivers."

  "How do you know our names?" I asked.

  "Small town. I'm Dwayne Wayne Mucker."

  My mind could never store a lot of facts, but a few stuck with me because of their bizarre nature, and one of those popped into my head at this very moment. Over eight hundred and eighty-three accused murderers had the middle name Wayne. Obviously, lots of other middle-name-Waynes were perfectly law-abiding citizens; nonetheless a whole bunch of psychos, killers, and general nut cases had middle-name-Wayne, and now it was possible I could be talking to one.

  "Do you all know a lady by the name of..." and he looked down at the small leather book he carried. "I apologize..."

  I glanced over at Callie, somehow feeling this guy was screwing with us.

  "Mathers." He stopped, letting the upcoming bad news hang. "Missing, from what we can tell, taken off by some Injun." He made it sound like she'd left with a Hemi.

  "You a cop or a deputy or what?"

  "Self-appointed," he said, and that's when I knew I was staring at Wayne-the-insane-living-up-to-his-name. Wayne's eyes had the look of someone who was self-medicating, with a large pharmacy at his disposal.

  "And why do you think she's missing?"

  "Neighbor personally told me that around two in the morning another gal..." he checked his notebook again. "...Ms. Silvers left, and that's when the Injun fella must have got her."

  "Who's the neighbor?"

  "Confidential. There's an element up here, ma'am, is why I'm believin' Ms. Mathers is in trouble. Now don't get me wrong. I'm for red people exceptin' a few. But when this Mathers woman went for permission to dig up a grave on Injun land, I knew that'd put her in the crosshai
rs of that element."

  Part of me wanted to write this guy off and believe that Ramona was fine, but why would this nutcase take the time to come to our cabin unless someone had her—maybe even him.

  "How did you know she asked permission to dig up a grave?"

  He gave me a big grin. "This is a little ole one-horse town out in the desert. By the way, permission denied, right?"

  "Sounds to me, Dwayne-Wayne, like the song says, you got friends in low places."

  "You're friends with the shaman lady, ain't ya? You see the news today? Rumor that she was standin' next to the girl before she went off the cliff.. .and the shaman had the killer wolf with her. Right beside her, like it was a trained attack dog or somethin'. Makes you wonder, dudn't it—is she siccin' the wolf on people? Anyway, if Ms. Mathers shows up, do me a favor and leave word for me at Cy Blackstone's office."

  "How do you know Cy Blackstone?" I thought an awful lot of people, including Ramona, claimed a connection with Blackstone.

  "Do some work for his family." He handed Callie a card. "If we find her, might lead us to the Injun." He tipped his hat like a Blackstone wannabe and got in his truck.

  Not waiting for Dwayne-Wayne's tires to clear the driveway, Callie and I headed for Ramona's cabin, dialing Wade Garner from the road.

  "Yeah, he wasn't a cop of any kind, and he was obviously looking for Ramona under the guise of helping to find her. So what do you make of that?" I asked Wade.

  "I'm catching the first flight out. Ramona's helped me out on a couple of occasions and I owe it to her," he said flatly, anger in his voice, devoid now of all horsing around.

  "Stay put. If it looks like there's been trouble I'll let you know. I thought since you talked to her before she came to our place maybe she mentioned going somewhere else."

  "She's always on some Indian's legal case when she's out there—a real bleeding heart. A do-gooder liberal." Wade snorted but I could hear affection for her beneath the derisive sound. Having been a cop alongside Wade, I knew his soft side and, despite who Ramona might take to dinner, to bed, or to court, he'd never mistake her mansion for her morals.