Kitty Takes a Holiday

Chapter 14

We set off in the morning. We had five days until the hearing, when Cormac had to enter a plea. Ben had to find evidence on Cormac's behalf that would get the case thrown out.

The weather was on our side; it felt like a small advan­tage. I hadn't had to work very hard to talk Ben into let­ting me go with him. I didn't know how much help I'd be in hunting down the information he needed to shore up Cormac's defense, but that wasn't the argument I'd made.

I had to be there to keep Ben sane.

"Wolf Creek Pass," he said when we passed the high­way marker over the mountain. We had a couple more hours until we reached New Mexico. "Am I the only one who thinks that's funny?"

"Yes," I said, not taking my eyes off the road ahead. Too many signs advertising local motels and gift shops had featured pictures of fuzzy, howling wolves. The Wolf Creek ski area was doing a booming business.

I let him drive the stretch that took us over the pass. Just over the mountain, cruising into the next valley and toward the junction that turned onto the highway that led to New Mexico, a zippy little sports car with skis in a rack on the back roared up behind us, gunned its engine, swerved around us, and nearly cut us off as it pulled back into the right line, obviously expressing great displeasure at our insistence at driving only five miles an hour over the speed limit.

Ben clenched the steering wheel with rigid fingers and bared his teeth in a silent growl. Something animal crawled into his eyes for a moment.

"Ben?" I spoke softly, not wanting to startle him. Not wanting to startle the wolf that adrenaline had brought to the surface for a moment.

"I'm okay," he said. His breaths were rough, and his body was still more tense than the stress of driving moun­tain roads warranted. "How many days?"

"How many days?"

"Full moon," he said.

"Sixteen," I said. Keeping track had become second nature.

"I thought it was sooner. It feels sooner."

I knew the feeling. The wolf wanted to break free, and it let you know. "It's better if you don't think about it."

"How do you not think about it?" His voice cracked.

"Do you want to pull over and let me drive?"

He shook his head quickly. "Driving gives me some­thing else to think about."

"Just don't let the jerks get to you, okay?"

He pushed himself back in the seat, stretching his arms, making an effort to relax. After another ten miles or so he said, "I started smoking in law school. It was a crutch, a way to get through it. You feel like you're going crazy, so you step outside for a cigarette. Everything stops for a couple of minutes, and you can go back to it feel­ing a little bit calmer. Quitting, though—that's the bitch. 'Cause as much as you tell yourself you don't need the crutch anymore, your body isn't convinced. Took me two years to wean myself off them. That's what this feels like," he said. "I want to turn wolf like I wanted a ciga­rette. That doesn't make any sense."

"Like any of this makes sense," I muttered. "You don't have to wait until the full moon to Change. The wolf part knows that. It's always trying to get out."

Watching him, I could almost see the analytical part of him trying to figure it out—the lawyer part of him on the case. His eyes narrowed, his face puckered up with thought.

He said, harshly, "Where does the part about that side of it being a strength come in?"

I could have said something cutting, but our nerves were frayed as it was. He needed a serious answer. "Being decisive. Sometimes it helps seeing the world as black and white, where everyone's either a predator or prey. You don't let details muddy up your thinking."

"That's cynical."

"I know. That's what I hate about it."

"You know what the trouble is? We all see this case—what they're doing to Cormac—as black and white. But we're looking at white as white and Espinoza's looking at white as black. Does that make any sense?"

"When maybe if we all saw it as gray we'd be able to come to some sort of compromise."

"Yeah." He tapped the steering wheel as he lost himself in thought.

It started snowing as we left the mountains.

Northern New Mexico was bleak, windswept, and touched with scattered bits of blowing snow from the storm. Stands of cottonwoods by the river were gray and leafless. All the colors seemed washed out of the landscape, which was barren desert hemmed in by eroded cliffs and mesas.

We didn't have much to go on. The woman's name, the missing person report. We arrived in Shiprock in time to stop at the police department—Tribal law enforcement. Shiprock was on the Navajo Reservation. The town's namesake, a jagged volcanic monolith rising almost two thousand feet above the desert, was visible to the south, a kind of signpost.

Ben spoke to the sergeant on duty at the front desk, while I lurked in the back, peering at them with interest.

"I'm looking for information about Miriam Wilson." He showed them a picture from the coroner's office. A terrible, gruesome picture because half her face was pulped, but the other half still showed recognizable fea­tures. Her cheeks were round, her large eyes closed. "A missing person report was filed on her about three months ago. I don't know if the Huerfano County sheriff's depart­ment sent you the news that she was killed in Colorado."

"Yeah, we got word," said the man behind the counter, a Sergeant Tsosie according to his nameplate. He had short black hair, brown skin, dark eyes, and an angled profile.

"You don't seem concerned."

"She won't be missed."

Ben asked, "Has her family been notified? The Coroner up there hasn't received any instructions about what to do with her body."

"He's not likely to, either. She's not going to have any­one asking about her. Trust me."

"Then who filed the missing person report on her in the first place? Families who don't want to find out where their kids went don't normally do that."

"This isn't a normal family," Tsosie said, almost smiling.

"What if I went to talk to them?"

"Good luck with that. The Wilsons are impossible to deal with."

The officer looked nervous. He kept glancing around—over his shoulder, toward the door, like he expected some­one to come reprimand him. "You want some advice? Stop asking about her. She was bad news. That whole family's bad news. You keep going on about this, you won't like what you find, I guarantee it."

"Bad news," Ben said. "Would you be willing to testify to that in court?"

The officer shook his head quickly—fearfully, I might have said. "I won't have anything to do with it."

Ben leaned forward and almost snarled. "I'm the defense attorney for the man who shot her. I need to show that it was justifiable, and you need to help me do that."

Tsosie's lips pressed together for a moment while he hesitated. Then he made a decision. I could see it settle on his features. "Hold on a minute."

He went to a filing cabinet off to the side of the room. He opened the top drawer and flipped through a few fold­ers, drew one out, and studied the top sheet for a moment. Then he brought the whole folder over and lay it open in front of Ben. "Take it," he said. "Take all of it. And your client? You thank him for us."

“Yeah. I'll do that," Ben said, a little breathlessly. "Thanks. Look, it would really help him out if I could get a statement. Just a signed statement."

"I'm not sure a judge would look twice at anything I could say about her."

"Anything'll help."

He got the statement. One paragraph, vague, but it was on the department letterhead and had a signature. It was a start.

Tsosie watched us leave, an unsettling intensity in his eyes.

"What was that all about?" I said as we returned to the car. I drove this time, while Ben studied the folder's contents.

"We just witnessed what happens when a police force wants a person put away, either behind bars or with a bullet, but they don't have any right to do it themselves. Miriam pissed somebody here off real good, but for what­ever reason—no evidence, no real crime committed—they couldn't touch her. Tsosie here has expressed his gratitude that somebody was able to do it."

"Then why won't he testify on Cormac's behalf?"

"If they don't have any evidence against her, then he's just a bitter cop bitching about some local nobody liked."

"What did she do?"

"That's the million-dollar question." He turned a page over, studied it. "Looks like she's got an arrest record. Drunk and disorderly, disturbing the peace, vandalism. Typical juvenile delinquent-type stuff. A bad kid head­ing for trouble. Nothing unusual. But here's something." He shuffled a couple of pages aside and studied a typed report. "A little family history. Her older sister Joan died about three months ago."

"How?"

"Pneumonia. Natural causes. She was only twenty-three."

"Then what's it doing in a police file?"

"Someone thought it was important. It happened right before the missing person report was filed. Maybe there's a connection. Maybe that's what caused her to snap. And here's her brother John's death certificate. Two gunshot wounds. No investigation conducted."

"Does that seem weird to you?"

"It seems like no one was too sorry to see him dead, either. They must have made quite a pair. Here it is: Law­rence Wilson, her grandfather. He's the one who filed the missing person report."

"Just her grandfather. What about her parents? What would they say?"

He studied the file for a moment. "There's an address. It might be worth dropping in on them. We can do that tomorrow. Let's find out if my car got towed."

Ben had left his car in the parking lot of the motel in Farmington, some thirty miles away from Shiprock, where he and Cormac had stayed during their ill-fated hunting expedition. After two weeks, the sedan still lurked in the parking lot, unnoticed. It was the kind of place that might slowly sink into the ground without anyone thinking to panic. The motel was part of a national chain, but that couldn't remove the veneer of age and fatigue that tested over it. Over this entire region.

"Now let's see if the windows are broken and the radio's gone," he said, wearing a thin smile.

They weren't. He'd locked his laptop and other belong­ings in the trunk. But the tires were slashed. All four wheels sat on their rims.

He stared at them for a long minute. "I'm not going to complain. I am absolutely not going to complain. This is fixable."

I had to agree. When something was fixable, you didn't complain.

He retrieved his belongings, then went to get us a room.

The walls of the building couldn't keep out the weird taint in the air. It was like I could hear howling, but it was in my head. No actual sound traveled through the air.

Ben stayed up late refamiliarizing himself with the con­tents of his briefcase and laptop. More online searches, more note-taking. I wanted him to come to bed. I wanted to be held.

Then I remembered it was Saturday, and I turned on the clock radio by the bed.

"You're listening to Ariel, Priestess of the Night."

Like I needed to make myself even more depressed. I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Ben scowled at me.

"Do you have to listen to that?"

"Yes," I said bluntly. He didn't argue.

Ariel droned on. "Let's move on to the next call. I have Trish on the line. She's trying to decide whether or not to tell her mother that she was infected with lycanthropy and became a werewolf two years ago. The kicker: her mother has terminal cancer. Trish, hello."

Strangely, I suddenly understood the attraction of a show like this, and why people listened to my show. There was always somebody out there who had bigger problems. You could forget about your own for a while. Or secretly gloat, At least it's not me.

"Hi, Ariel." Trish had been crying. Her voice had a strained, worn-out quality.

"Let's talk about this, Trish. Tell me why you think you shouldn't tell your mother what happened."

"What's the point? It'll upset her. I don't want to upset her. If it's true—if she doesn't have much time left—I don't want her to spend that time being angry with me. Or being scared of me. And once she's gone… it won't mat­ter. It doesn't matter."

"Now, why do you think you should tell her?"

Trish took a shaky breath. "She's my mother. I think… sometimes I think she already knows that something's wrong. That something happened to me. And what if it does matter? What if when she's gone, there is something after? Then she'll know. She'll die and her soul will be out there and know everything, and she'll be disappointed that I didn't tell her. That I kept it secret."

"Even if you know it'll upset her now."

"I can't win, either way."

"Is there anyone else in your family you can talk to? Someone who might be able to help you decide what's best for her?"

"No, no. There's not anyone. No siblings. My parents are divorced, she hasn't spoken to my father in years. I'm the only one taking care of her. I've never felt this alone." She was on the breaking point. I was amazed she could even speak coherently.

"What's your first impulse? Before you started second-guessing yourself, what were you going to do?"

"I was going to tell her. I'm thinking—it's like every­one talks about how you should work things out before it's too late. But she's so sick, Ariel. Telling her something like this wouldn't be working anything out, it would be torturing her. It's easier to keep quiet. I want to try to make this time as comfortable and happy for her as I can. My problems, my feelings—they're not important."

"But they are, or you wouldn't be calling me."

"I suppose. Yeah."

Ariel said, "It's commendable, your wanting to put your feelings aside for your mother's sake. But you're not convinced it's the right thing to do, are you?"

"No. No, I've always talked to Mom about these things. And I'm not going to have her anymore. I don't want to face that." Finally her voice broke. My heart went out to her. I was almost crying myself.

Ariel spoke gently, but firmly. "Trish, if you're looking for me to tell you what to do, or to give you permission to do one thing and not another, I'm not going to do that. This is a terrible situation. All I can tell you is, listen to your heart. You know your mom better than anyone. You should think about what she would want."

I hadn't intended to do it this time. I was too tired to be snarky. But I found myself digging out my cell phone.

Ben noticed. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Shh," I hissed at him.

I fought through the busy signal and got to the gate­keeper. I explained my reason for calling—that I could speak to Trish's situation. Then I found myself telling him my name. "Kitty."

The guy didn't say anything. Why should he? I wasn't the only person in the world named Kitty. He didn't have any reason to think that Ariel's radio rival would call in to her show.

I wasn't angry this time. I wasn't frustrated and lashing out. I really had something to say.

Ben watched me, kind of like he might watch a train wreck on TV. I had turned down the radio, but he'd moved it over by him and was listening with it up to his ear. I paced the room along the foot of the bed and ignored him.

The call with Trish had drawn to a close. Then Ariel spoke to me. "Hello. Why have you joined me this evening?"

"Hi. I just wanted to tell Trish that she should tell her mother."

"Why do you say that?"

I wished I were in charge here. I wished Trish had called into my show so I could have told her directly. So I knew she was listening. For the first time in weeks, I really wished I were doing my show.

I said, "Because I told my mother that I'm a werewolf, and it was the right thing to do. I didn't mean to. It just kind of slipped out. But once I did, she wanted to know why I hadn't told her sooner. And she was right, I should have. I didn't give her enough credit for being able to handle it. She was upset, sure. But she's still my mom. She still wants to be there for me, and the only way she can do that is if she knows what's going on in my life. In the long run it meant I could stop making stupid excuses about where I was on full moon nights."

"How long ago did you tell her?"

I had to think a minute. "It's been a year or so."

"And you have a good relationship with your mother?"

"Yeah, I think I do. We talk at least once a week, usu­ally." In fact, I should probably give her a call. I should probably tell her what was really going on in my life. "This is going to sound trite, but if Trish doesn't tell her mom, she'll always regret it. If she tells her now they still have a chance to talk it out. If she waits, she'll be telling it to her mother's grave for the rest of her life, hoping for an answer that isn't going to come."

An uncharacteristically long pause followed. Radio people were trained to shun silence, to fill the silence at all costs. Yet Ariel let maybe five seconds of silence tick by.

Then she said, without her usual sultry, sugary tone, "Wait a minute. You said your name is Kitty. Is that right?"

Damn. Caught. Now would be the time to hang up. "Uh, yeah," I said instead.

"And you're a werewolf."

"Yes. Yes I am."

"That's not a coincidence, is it? There couldn't pos­sibly be two werewolves named Kitty. That would be… ridiculous."

"Yes. Yes it would."

"You're Kitty Norville. What are you doing calling in to my show?"

"Oh, you know. Stuck at home on a Saturday night, feeling kind of bored—"

"But you listen to my show. That's so cool."

Huh? "It is?"

"Are you kidding? You're such an inspiration."

"I am?"

"Yeah! You're so down to earth, you make it so easy to talk about things. You've changed the way everyone talks about the supernatural. You inspired me to try to build on that. Why do you think I started this show?"

"Uh… to cut in on my market share?"

She said, horrified, "Oh, no! I want to expand what you've done. Add another voice, make it harder for the critics to gang up on us. And now you're calling me. I hardly know what to say."

Neither did I. To think, I'd wanted to sue her, and here she was sounding like one of my biggest fans. I could have cried. "Thanks, I guess."

"So why are you sitting at home bored and not doing The Midnight Hour?"

"Let's just say I've had a rough couple of months."

Again, she hesitated, just a moment this time. She came back, almost shy. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Did I? On the air? But I had to admit, she was good. She knew the trick of making the caller feel like it was just the two of you having a chat over a cup of tea. Maybe I could talk a little.

I glanced at Ben, still listening to the radio turned way low. He kind of looked like he was suppressing a grin.

"A friend of mine was attacked and infected with lycanthropy a couple weeks ago. I've been taking care of him, and it's been tough. Another friend just got arrested for something he did to save my life. He's being charged with a felony. It's complicated. It also feels like the last straw. No matter how much you try to do the right thing, you get screwed over. Makes it easy to just drop out. To give up."

"But not really. Life gets hard, but you don't just run away."

"Except there's this thing inside me, the wolf side of me, and all she wants to do is run away. I'm really having to fight that."

"But you've always won that fight. I listen to your show. That's one of the great things about it, how you always tell people to be strong, and they listen to you. You understand."

"I'm flying by the seat of my pants most of the time."

"And that's gotten you this far, hasn't it?"

Was sultry Ariel giving me a pep talk? Was it working? I was a bit taken aback, that here was this person I didn't know, out on the airwaves, rooting for me.

Maybe I'd forgotten that anyone was rooting for me.

I smiled in spite of myself. "So what you're saying is I just have to keep going."

"Isn't that what you always tell people?"

"Yeah," I murmured. Nothing like having that mirror held up to you, or your words thrown back at you. "I think you're right. I just have to keep going. I never thought I'd say this, Ariel. But thanks. Thanks for talking to me."

"I'm not sure I really said anything."

"Maybe I just needed someone to listen." Someone who wasn't depending on me to keep it together. "I'll let you go back to your show now."

Ariel said, "Kitty, I'm really worried about you."

"How about I give you a call in a couple of weeks and let you know how it's going? Or you could give me a call."

"It's a date. Take care, Kitty."

I shut off the phone and sat on the edge of the bed.

I felt Ben staring at me, but I didn't want to look back. Didn't want to face him and whatever snide thing he was about to say. But the room was too small for us to avoid each other for long. I looked at him.

He said, "You really need to get back to doing your show. The sooner the better. You're too good at it not to."

I wanted to cry. What I couldn't say—not to Ariel, not to him, not to anyone—was that I was too scared to go back. Scared that I couldn't keep it going anymore. I felt like I'd rather quit than fail.

Slowly, I walked over to him, putting a slink in my step and a heat in my gaze. I needed distracting. I sat on his lap, straddling him, pinning him to the chair, and kissed him. Kissed him long and slow, until he put his arms around me and held me tight. Until his grip anchored me.

"Come to bed, Ben," I breathed, and he nodded, kiss­ing me again.

We went to visit the Wilsons in the morning.

The family lived west of Shiprock, on a flat expanse of desert scrub and sagebrush. The police report left direc­tions. We turned off the highway onto a dusty track mas­querading as a road. A couple of miles along, we found the house. Some run-down rail and post fencing marked corrals, but nothing lived in them. The house was one story, plank board, small and crouching. It didn't seem big enough to serve as a garage, much less house a family. A couple of ancient, rusting pickup trucks sat nearby.

We parked on the dirt road and walked the path—a track lined roughly with stones—to the front door.

"If it were anyone but Cormac I wouldn't be doing this. I'd write the whole case off," Ben said. "I have to go in there and ask these people to help me defend the man who killed their daughter. This kind of thing didn't used to bother me but now all I want to do is growl and rip something apart."

I started to say something vague and soothing, but I couldn't, because I felt the same way. Every hair on my body was standing on end. "There's something really weird about this place."

We'd reached the door, a flimsy-seeming thing made of wood. Ben stared at it. Finally, I knocked. Ben took a deep breath and closed his eyes, opening them as the door opened.

A young woman, maybe eighteen, looked back at us. "Who are you?" The question and her stance—the door was only open a few inches—spoke of suspicion. Maybe even paranoia.

"My name's Ben O'Farrell. I'm trying to find informa­tion about Miriam Wilson. Are you her sister?"

Of course the girl was. I'd only ever seen Miriam dying and dead, but they had the same round face, large eyes, and straight black hair.

The girl stole a look over her shoulder, into the house, then said, "She's gone. Been gone a long time. I don't have anything to say about it."

Ben and I glanced at each other. Did she know her sis­ter was dead? Surely someone had come to tell her, when the police here found out.

"What's your name?" I said.

She shook her head. "I don't want to tell you my name."

Names had power, yadda yadda. Okay, then. We'd do this the blunt way.

"Miriam's dead," I said, "She was killed near Walsenburg, Colorado. We're trying to learn as much as we can about her so we can explain what happened."

Some expression passed over her. Not what I expected, which was grief or sadness, or resignation at learning the truth after months of uncertainty. No, the girl closed her eyes and the release of tension softened her features. It was like she was relieved.

She said, "You're better off letting it go. You're better off forgetting about it. Let it end here." That was the same thing Tony had said. And Tsosie.

"We can't do that," I said. "It's not over. Don't you want to know what happened?"

"No." She started to close the door.

"Is there anyone else who'd be willing to talk to us about her? Are your parents here?"

"They don't speak much English," she said. A conve­nient shield.

Ben spoke up. "Would you be willing to translate for us?"

"They won't talk. My sister—my oldest sister died before Miriam disappeared, my brother died a couple of weeks ago. We've had a hard time of it, and we're trying to move on. I have to go now."

Ben put his hand out to stop the door from closing. "How much of that did they bring on themselves? They hired my client to kill your brother. He did it, then Miriam came after him. He's in jail now, and you know as well as I do he doesn't deserve to be there. Where did this whole thing get started?"

She was lost, cornered, staring at us with a panicked expression, unable to close the door on us and unable to speak.

"Please," I said, "talk to us."

The words seemed to war inside her, like she both did and didn't want to speak. Finally, the words won. "Joan was murdered. No matter what anyone else says, she was murdered. But the more we talk of these things, the more likely we are to bring more curses upon ourselves."

You got to a point where one more curse wasn't going to make a difference.

"Louise, who are you talking to?" a male voice shouted from within. The father who didn't speak much English, I bet.

"Nobody!" she called over her shoulder.

The door opened wide, revealing a short man with desert-burnished skin aiming a rifle at us.

I wondered if he knew that he'd need the bullets to be silver.

"My daughter's right," he said in perfectly decent English. "We've had enough. Get out, now, before you bring more evil with you."

It seemed to me that we weren't the ones carrying evil around with us. We just kept finding it. I had the good sense not to say anything. Funny how a loaded gun can shut you up.

"Well. Thanks for your time," I said. I took Ben's arm and pulled him away from the door. Slowly, we backed along the path, until the door to the house slammed shut.

Ben's muscles were so tense they were almost rigid, like he wanted to pounce. "Keep it together, Ben," I whispered.

"What a pack of liars."

"Does this surprise you? This is the family that produced John and Miriam Wilson. Both confirmed monsters."

"Okay, but you're living proof—in fact you've based your whole career on the belief—that being a monster doesn't make someone a… a…"

"A monster," I finished, grinning wryly. "A fucked-up family's a fucked-up family, whether or not werewolves are involved."

"You think I'd have figured that out by now," he said.

"You know, I'm sick and tired of people pointing rifles at me."

"That was a shotgun, not a rifle."

For some reason, that didn't make a hell of a lot of dif­ference to me.

We got back in the car and pulled out on the dirt track. We didn't speak. Another door had closed, figuratively speaking. One less chance to boost Cormac's defense.

"Kitty, wait, look." Ben pointed to a figure running toward us, from the Wilson house. Small against the landscape, it looked like it fled something terrible. It was Louise, her black hair tangling in the desert breeze.

I hit the brakes and waited for her to catch up. I didn't see anything chasing her, but I wondered.

I'd started to unbuckle and climb out, but Ben said, "Wait. We may have to drive out in a hurry."

He was probably right. I left the car running while Ben got out and waited for her. She reached us more quickly than I expected—she was fast, and we hadn't gone far. The house was still visible. I wondered if her father would show up in a minute with his shotgun.

Sliding to a stop, she leaned on the car's trunk. Her dark eyes were wide, wild. She seemed too flustered to speak, but she said in a rush, "Let me in. I'll talk to you, but we have to go."

Ben put the seat down so she could climb in the back, then he returned to the front.

"Go, now, hurry," Louise commanded. I was already driving, before Ben even closed the door.

I glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She perched at the edge of the seat, her hands pulling at the fabric of her jeans. Her gaze never rested. She looked around, out both side windows, over her shoulder to the back window, duck­ing to see out the front. Like she was worried something might follow us. She had the look of someone who was always afraid that something was following her.

I said, "Do you always jump into strange people's cars and tell them to drive? How do you know we're not mur­derous psychopaths?"

Her gaze settled on me, briefly. "I know a murderous psychopath when I see one."

"A murderous psychopath like Miriam?"

"Yes."

"Miriam was a skinwalker," Ben said.

"Yee naaldlooshii. Yes."

"What else can you tell us?"

"Not here. Someplace safe. We'll talk someplace safe."

"We're in a car driving forty miles an hour," I said, annoyed. "What could possibly get at us?"

She gave me a look that clearly pitied my ignorance. "You never know what could be listening. Waiting."

I wanted to laugh, but I couldn't. I said, "If we're not safe driving, where do you want to go?"

"There's a place close by. I'll tell you where to go. Turn right on the highway."

Her directions steered us farther away from Shiprock, then off the highway. I feared for the car's suspension. Many miles out, a dirt track led down a slope to a ravine—gullies and dry riverbeds like this cut across the desert. I never would have found this cleft in the hills if I hadn't been guided here. It was very well hidden.

Ahead of us, toward the end of the ravine, was a hut made of logs sealed with mud. It was octagonal—almost round—ancient-looking, with a low-sloping roof.

We all climbed out of the car, and Louise hurried ahead of us.

She said, "This hogan belonged to my family years ago, in the old days. Everyone's forgotten about it. But I found it again. It'll keep us safe."

"Safe from what?" It seemed like the obvious question.

She gave me a look over her shoulder.

Ben was the one who said, "If you have to ask, you haven't been paying attention."

"Just trying to make conversation."

He took my hand and squeezed it quickly before let­ting it go and walking on. A brief touch of comfort.

The scene we were walking into was from another world, something out of a tour book, or maybe an anthro­pology textbook: the desert, the cold wind, the round hut that might have been sitting there for decades. I looked up, expecting to see vultures. I only saw crisp blue sky.

Louise pushed aside a faded blanket that hung over the door and invited us in with her intent stare.

The hogan was dark, windowless, except for a hole in the ceiling, through which a shaft of sunlight came through. My lycanthropic sight adjusted quickly. The sin­gle room was almost bare. Toward the back, to the right, a blanket lay spread on the floor. A couple of wooden trunks sat by the wall nearby, along with a pile of firewood. Clearly, this wasn't a room for living in. It was a sanctu­ary. I could feel it, the way the walls curled around me, the way that I was sure that even though only a blanket hung over the doorway, nothing could get in. No curses, no hate. I felt a great sense of calm.

Even Louise seemed calm now, confident in the hogan's security. She knelt in the center of the room and struck a match to light the fire that was already built there. The kindling lit, glowed orange, and flames started tickling the firewood. The air smelled of soot and ash, of many previous fires that had burned themselves out. The smoke of this one rose up through the hole in the roof.

She showed us where to sit, on the ground to the right of the blanket.

She sat on the blanket. Before her, spread on the ground, was a sandpainting.

The pattern showed a complex and highly stylized scene. The colors were earth tones—brown, yellow, white, red, and black—yet vivid. In the firelight, the figures seemed to move.

Four birds, wings outstretched, marked the four quar­ters of the picture. Their clawed feet pointed inward, toward a circle at the center of the painting. In the middle of the circle stood a figure, a woman: black hair streamed from her square head, and she held arrows in both hands. Crooked white lines—lightning, maybe—rose up from her feet. Her eyes and mouth were tiny lines, hyphens, making the figure seem expressionless. Sleeping. The whole picture was bounded on three sides by rainbow stripes ending in bunches of what must have been feath­ers. The fourth, unbounded side faced the door. All of it was symbolic, but the symbols eluded me, except for one: the dark-haired woman at the center of great power, armed for battle.

Louise picked up a plastic dish, an old margarine tub. She took a pinch of something out of it: a white, powdery sand, or some other finely ground substance, which she sprinkled onto the image. I didn't know how she got the lines so straight. Her movements added bolts of lightning radiating out from the circle, between the soaring eagles.

"Tell me how Miriam died," she said.

Ben looked at me. I was the talker. But I didn't feel much like telling the story. "She attacked me. Our friend shot her."

"Friend. The same man who shot John."

"That's your brother. The werewolf."

She said, "John and Miriam were twins. They were destined to be killed by the same man. It all happened so quickly. I didn't expect it to happen so quickly."

"What happened, Louise? How did this all start?"

She continued adding to the painting as she spoke. "John went to work in Phoenix. When he came back—he was different. That must have been when it happened. When he became the monster. He wouldn't talk to anyone but Miriam. They'd go off together, for days at a time. Then Joan died. Then John. Then Miriam." Her voice never cracked, her expression never slipped. She'd lived this over and over in her mind for weeks now. "I knew," she said. "Somehow I knew what had happened, that Mir­iam took Joan. This magic, this evil has lived in the land since the beginning of the world. My family has been part of it, on both sides. I've learned what I can, but I've had no one to teach me the right way. The way of harmony. The old ways are gone.

"My father believed that because John brought a new evil from outside, an outsider should stop it. He knew someone who knew of a wolf hunter—your friend. The wolf hunter came and did his work. But it didn't stop the evil. It only made it stronger."

The flickering light from the fire made the figures in the painting waver and move. I blinked, flinching back, bid­den by an animal instinct to escape. My eyes watered, and I shifted so my arm touched Ben's. He felt shaky, nervous. Like me. Louise caught the movement, understood the way Ben and I stared at the picture on the ground.

"This is for Joan. She didn't die; she was killed. There's no one to help her find her way to the next world. No one else cares. I don't know how, but I have to try to help her with what I know."

It came from the heart, Alice had said. That had to count for something.

"She's still here. She hasn't traveled on. Maybe she'll talk to you. Maybe she'll tell you what happened."

"How will we know?" I said. "How will we know if she's talking to us?"

Ben muttered, "If she can't testify or sign a statement, what's the point?"

I elbowed him in the side.

"Joan?" Louise sat at the head of her painting, hands on her knees, gazing unfocused at the painting, or the light, or phantoms of her own imagination. She had the voice of a little girl calling in the dark. "I'm here."

Then she spoke a phrase in another language—Navajo, each sound punctuated, melodic.

The fire dimmed suddenly to embers.

Ben tensed; I felt for his hand, gripped it. He squeezed back. I expected the sudden spike of fear to rouse the Wolf. Any sense of danger always woke her, sparked her instinct, made her want to fight. I expected that instinct to kick in, but it didn't. This space, this weird timeless feeling, soothed her somehow. She slept, even though my brain was firing. It gave me a strange, disembodied feeling, like I wasn't really here. Like I couldn't feel the ground under me anymore.

After a long silence, Louise said, "She is telling me the story to tell to you. I can tell you like she's telling me."

An aura of blue light glowed around Louise, like some kind of static charge danced around her. No—she was backlit. The light was coming from behind her. I wanted very much to move around her, to see what was behind her. I stayed put.

"I was outside, mending one of the fences after a wind knocked it down. Miriam came to me. She called my name. I looked, and she stood right behind me. She held a powder in her hand and blew it into my face. I knew what it was, anyone would know what it was: corpse powder. She cursed me. She killed me, but no one would ever know. I grew sick. The doctors had a name for it, called it a disease, tried to heal me—but they couldn't, because it was witchcraft. Mir­iam stood by my bed at night—my last night—and told me what she would do: she would cut my heart out, take the blood, and put it on the wolf's skin. Take my soul and use its power for herself. I could see it, see her cutting out my heart, holding up the dripping fist of muscle, and I thought, This is my heart, why can I see it? It should be hidden. My heart should be hidden, safe, but she has taken it from me."

I choked on a gasp, feeling my own heart suddenly. It wasn't me, it was her. I told myself it was only a story.

Louise shook her head, and when she spoke next, her voice was hers again. "Joan died of pneumonia, that's what the doctors said. But Miriam killed her. Miriam took her heart. I found her spirit crying in the desert, searching for her heart. But I'll help her find it. I'll help you, Joan."

She reached out, like she would clasp someone's hand, but there was no one in front of her. The glow faded, and she was left holding a point of light in her hand. She closed her fist around it before I could see more. As it was, it might have been my imagination.

In fact, a second of dizziness and a slip of time changed the look of the whole room: the fire burned again, as it always had. Louise held her hand over the painting, as if she'd just finished dropping the last grain of color into place.

None of it had happened. I was sure that none of it had happened. Except Ben still held my hand in a death grip. His hand was cold, his face pale. He swallowed.

Louise looked at us, her dark eyes shining. "I'll sign your statement. She wants me to sign your statement, to tell you what I know. To tell her story."

She swiped her hand through the painting, smearing the image, blurring the colors, stirring the ground until it showed a galaxy swirl of dark sand, and nothing more. Odd grains of quartz sparkled in the light like stars.

She sat back, closed her eyes, and sighed. "Let's go."

We scooped sand over the fire to put it out. Louise put her things—matches, the little containers of colored sand—into the trunk against the back wall. She drew something out as well, but tucked it into her fist so I couldn't see.

Pulling back the blanket over the door, she ushered us out of the hogan. She paused, looking back to scan the interior, as if searching for something. Or waiting for something. Then she slipped out, letting the blanket fall back into place behind her.

Walking back into the sun was like being in another world, a too-bright sunlit world where birds chirped and a fresh breeze smelled of dust and sage. Surely a world where nobody killed anybody.

Ben said, "I'll put together that statement."

Louise nodded. Ben gave a thin smile in acknowledg­ment, then went to the car. His hands were buried deep in his pockets, his shoulders bent against a cold wind that wasn't blowing. I was shivering as well. I hugged myself against the cold that came from inside rather than outside.

Louise and I waited, standing halfway between hogan and car. Her tangled hair made her look tired, older than when we'd started out. She looked up and around, study­ing sky, ground, distant trees, eyes squinting against the sun. For a moment she reminded me of a wolf taking in the scents.

I finally said, "Did you know what would happen in there? Has she ever talked to you before?"

She shook her head. "I didn't know if it would work with outsiders watching. Most people, if I said that Joan talks to me, they'd laugh. Or they'd feel sorry for me. They wouldn't think it was real. But you believe. I think that's why she came."

"I've had my own conversations with the dead."

"Some people aren't ready to go when they die."

I choked on a lump in my throat. "Yeah."

"I'm afraid—I'm afraid Miriam might come back. She was angry all the time. I'm afraid that might hold her to this world."

That damned cabin was going to be haunted forever. I didn't want to go back there to find out if Miriam's ghost was hanging around or not. Let someone else deal with it.

I said, "When she died, a man was there, a Curandero. He was afraid of the same thing. He did something—I don't know exactly what. I think it was to keep her from coming back."

"Then maybe it'll be okay." She gave a smile that seemed brave and hopeless all at once.

Ben called us over to the car. He used the hood as a desk and transcribed while Louise told a straightforward version of the story. She signed it where Ben indicated. It seemed like such a slim thing to pin any hopes on. We were grasping at straws. After she'd signed, Ben packed away his briefcase.

"Can we give you a ride back?" I said.

"No thanks. I'm not in too much of a hurry to get back. The walk'll do me good."

The walk was something like fifteen miles, but I didn't argue. I understood the urge to walk yourself to exhaustion.

She drew something out of her pocket, holding it in a tight fist. She kept her face lowered. "I have something for you. The questions about Miriam, the thing she was and what you're looking for—it's dangerous. You should leave, you should go back and forget about it all. But I know you won't, so you need these."

She opened her hand to show two arrowheads tied to leather cords lying on her palm.

I took them from her. They were warm from her clutching them tightly. She must have sensed my hesita­tion, because she pulled at a length of leather around her own neck. An arrowhead amulet had been hiding under the collar of her shirt.

"Why do you think that I, out of all my sisters and my brother, am still alive?"

She had a point there.

"Thank you," I said.

She smiled and seemed calmer. Less fearful. Some­times rituals weren't about magic. They were about help­ing people deal with events. Deal with life. She walked away from the road, heading into the scrubland between here and the town. Didn't look back.

I gave one of the amulets to Ben. Back in the car, I opened the glove box and pulled out two items: the leather pouch Tony had given me, and Alice's crystal charm. I lined them up on the dashboard above the steering wheel, added Louise's arrowhead to the collection, and regarded them, mystified.

Ben looked at me looking at the amulets. "Does this make you super-protected? The safest person in the world?"

I frowned. "I'm thinking they might all cancel each other out. Like red, green, blue light making white."

"Which do you pick?"

"Local color. I'll bet Louise knows what she's talking about." I took the arrowhead, slipped the cord over my head, and put the others back in the glove box. Ben put on his arrowhead. There we were—protected.

We left. Ben sat with his briefcase on his lap, his head propped on his hand, looking frustrated.

"Will her statement help?" I said.

He made a vague shrug. "Maybe the court will believe it, maybe not. When you get right down to it, there's an official death certificate saying Joan Wilson died of pneu­monia. Louise is the only one saying Miriam killed her. Hearsay and ghost stories. I don't know, I'll take whatever I can get at this point." We trundled along in silence for a few minutes, when he added, "As dysfunctional goes, this family's really got something going."

I snorted a laugh. "No joke. Where to next?"

"The grandfather. Lawrence Wilson. See what he has to say about Miriam, since he was the only one who cared to look for her."

"After the rest of the family, I'm afraid to see what he's like."

"Tell me about it."

The sun had dipped to the far west, and a cold wind bit from the desert. We were nearing the turn to the high­way. We'd have to pick one direction or another. I had a thought.

"You want to wait to see him until tomorrow?"

"If small-town gossip works here the way it works everywhere else, he's probably gotten word that some­one's wanting to talk to him. It'll give him a chance to go to ground."

"Yeah, okay. But it's almost sunset. Call me chicken, but I don't really want to be out after dark. Not around here."

He thought, lips pursed, watching the desert landscape slide by. "Then back to the hotel it is."

I turned east, back to Farmington.