Dance of the Bones

Off to the left, Lani could see the charco, the water hole, that in her mind still belonged to the long--abandoned village of Rattlesnake Skull. Now, as often happened when she was upset, the almost invisible pin--sized flaws on Lani’s face—-ones she covered each morning with deftly applied makeup—-began to prickle and itch. She knew what was causing the old ant bites to burn—-Rattlesnake Skull charco was where all this had started so many years ago. The water hole was where the authorities had found the body of Gina Antone, a teenage Tohono O’odham girl who had been tortured and murdered by an evil ohb--like Anglo named Andrew Carlisle. Garrison Ladd, Lani’s mother’s first husband, had been a suspect in that case right along with Carlisle.

In the course of the homicide investigation, Diana and the dead girl’s grandmother, Rita Antone, had been thrown together. To everyone’s amazement and to the dismay of the -people on the reservation, the two women—-the Indian and the Anglo, the old Tohono O’odham widow and the young Milgahn one—-had become fast friends.

On the reservation, Rita Antone, originally from Topawa, had long been known as Hejel Wi i’thag, Left Alone. At the time, Diana, a teacher on the reservation, had been living in a teachers’ compound mobile home in the same village. United in their mutual loss and grief, the two women had left the reservation behind and moved to Tucson, where they had worked together to rehab a ramshackle river-rock house in the Tucson Mountains. When Diana’s son, Davy, was born, Rita looked after him and became the boy’s beloved Nana Dahd, his godmother. Years later, when Lani was adopted into the Ladd/Walker household, Rita Antone became Lani’s godmother, too.

Lani was eleven years younger than Davy. Even though Rita was elderly by the time Lani showed up, it was Rita who had schooled both children in the sacred traditions and legends of the Tohono O’odham. She was the one who had taught them the endangered ancient art of basketmaking and had pointed out and given names to the various herbs, plants, and fruits that were at home in the Arizona desert. Rita had carefully described how some of the plants were useful in the healing arts while others were used in religious ceremonies. She also made sure they could easily recognize and avoid the ones that were poisonous and even deadly.

And it was through Rita that Lani had come to the attention of Brandon Walker and Diana Ladd.

Lani had begun life on the Tohono O’odham as the neglected child of a jailed father and a runaway mother. Abandoned while still a toddler, Clemencia Escalante, as Lani was known back then, had been left in the care of an impoverished, aged, and exceedingly deaf grandmother in the village of Nolic, which means The Bend. During the summer months, the older children in Nolic had helped look after Clemencia, but once school started, the baby, little more than a year old, had been the only child left in the village.

On a warm September afternoon with her caretaker sound asleep, Clemencia had somehow made her way outside—-probably through a door left open to allow a bit of breeze into the rough adobe house. Outside and unsupervised, the child had wandered away from the house. Eventually she had become trapped in a nest of Maricopa harvester ants, whose venom is legendary. There was little doubt that she had screamed as the ants bit into her because she was still screaming an hour or so later when the school bus dropped off the other children. The children were the ones who found her, not the grandmother. Lack of hearing was the reason the grandmother hadn’t heard the child screaming, but for the authorities, an even greater concern was that she had failed to notice that the little girl had gone missing.

Close to death from the poison of literally hundreds of bites, Clemencia had been transported first to the Sells Indian Hospital. When her condition worsened, she was taken to the ER at Tucson Medical Center. At the time, Wanda Ortiz, Fat Crack’s wife and Gabe’s grandmother, had been the social worker in charge of Clemencia’s case.

Clemencia was still hospitalized in Tucson when, on a trip back to Sells from seeing her, Wanda and Fat Crack had stopped by the house to see Rita Antone, Fat Crack’s auntie. In the course of the conversation, Wanda had mentioned the situation with the little ant--bit girl. By now the grandmother had been deemed an unsuitable guardian. Even though some of Clemencia’s other relatives still lived in Nolic, none of them was willing to take the child in once she was released from the hospital.