He recalled their last conversation, before she went in for the surgery that was supposed to restore her brain but instead took her life.
He sat with her in the surgical waiting room, just the two of them. She squeezed his hand and said, “Ayóó anííníshní,” and then again, “I love you.” He remembered the tone of her voice, fear and hope intermixed.
He said, “I’ll see you in the recovery room.”
But she didn’t recover. And despite his focus on work, despite colleagues who reached out to him, and the support that came from Emma’s family, he hadn’t recovered either. After so many years, the gaping wound had scarred over, still raw underneath.
The week after Emma died, he found a pile of cards for the boys in her dresser. He stamped and mailed the cards she’d sealed and addressed. Then he put five dollars in the others, signed them with her name, and mailed them, too, one a week for as long as they lasted.
He’d kept working full-time after that for a while and then switched to contract work. Louisa, a college professor studying comparative spiritual beliefs among the Native people of the Southwest, had come into his life and befriended him. Her companionship helped keep loneliness at bay. At least most days.
Immediately after Emma’s death he’d taken on the case of a missing woman archaeologist because he knew Emma would have wanted him to do that. Now, for her sake, he would find out why a boy she had loved and cared about had grown up to be the first person in the history of Shiprock killed with a car bomb.
He thought more about Horseman. Leaphorn kept the little notebooks he used to jot down facts and questions about his cases as an officer and a detective. When he cleared out his desk at the station, he thought about tossing them, an old man’s memories of his better days. But something made him save them, and often in his consulting work he was glad he had. Perhaps he had made some entries about the boy’s family, or his situation, something he might have forgotten now that would help him help Bernie.
He opened the lower drawer of his desk, reached toward the back, and felt the stacks of old notebooks sandwiched together with a thick rubber band. He pulled them out. He had bundled groups of five years together and written the beginning and ending dates on a slip of paper with each pile. He had at least one notebook for every year. Some years, if crime was rampant or the cases he investigated especially complex, he’d started a second book.
He found the notebooks that should bracket the years he guessed he might have encountered the boy and slipped off the rubber band. He’d seen the child on a warm day, so he started by reading his entries from June, then moved to July. His notes sparked the memory that it had been a refreshingly slow period for crime, before meth made its debut in Navajo country. He scanned entries about cattle rustling, illegal liquor sales, and runaways. He reviewed calls about husbands and boyfriends beating up on wives and girlfriends. The journal recalled lost tourists, stolen vehicles that relatives had allegedly borrowed, dogs killing livestock, UFO and shape-shifter reports. But he saw nothing about a scared boy walking down the road for help.
He thought back to the scene again and remembered the way the light had fallen. It didn’t seem like the August sun, so he went to his notes for May, year by year. If he came up empty, then he’d look through September. But there on the twenty-seventh of May, eighteen years ago, he found the reference. Mostly, it was as he recalled it.
Noticed a child along the shoulder of the road. Pulled up next to him. He was limping because he only had one shoe. He was crying, sobbing. He had on an oversized wristwatch with a green dial.
He had forgotten about the watch. His notes indicated that the situation at the house was worse than he’d recollected. He had recorded the name and age of the woman who lived there, Naomi Horseman, 23, and the boyfriend who lived there, too, but, she said, was away working. Leaphorn had also made a note of the children in the house: Richard Horseman, 4, and Harris Horseman, 1.
The woman had old bruises on her face and neck and a freshly swollen eye. She wouldn’t say what happened, but when I asked if her boyfriend had hurt her, she didn’t deny it.
He heard Louisa’s steps approaching and stopped reading.
She spoke from the doorway to his office. “The news will be on in a few minutes.”
He nodded. They watched the national and then the local news on television together every night before dinner.
She put her hand lightly on his shoulder. “You’re awfully quiet and busy today.”
“Fine.”
He waited for her to leave before he read the rest of the entry. It seemed like an invasion of the family’s privacy to review his notes with another person in the room.
The woman said her mother often kept the children. The grandmother, Mrs. Nez, had no phone, so after the ambulance left, I took Richard to her place and she agreed to care for him and asked about the baby’s condition. She told me she was angry with her daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend for neglecting the boys.
He skimmed his description of the neat house and ramada, the sheep pen, the hogan.
He had written: “Case referred to Social Services.” This is where Butterfly’s notes would help him understand what happened next.
He heard the familiar theme song of the evening news, closed the notebook, grabbed his cane, and went in to be with Louisa.
The most interesting thing on the news was the report on protesters at the Grand Canyon meeting. The announcer talked about them with footage of an elderly white man in Tuba City using a protest sign to beat on the hood of a big black car until fellow protesters strong-armed him away. He saw Jim Chee in the background. Chee, he recalled, had a knack for being in the exact spot where trouble might be lurking.
Louisa said, “I wonder if those people had anything to do with the explosion? What do you think?”
He shrugged. He was pleased that nothing happened in Tuba City that would embarrass the Navajo Nation. Or, if something like that had happened, television hadn’t captured it.
The reporter said that one of the Tuba City protest groups had been linked to ecoterrorism in the past. They showed the footage of the destroyed car in the Shiprock gym parking lot and noted the ongoing FBI investigation. The reporter said the feds had identified the dead man as Richard Horseman, 22.
Leaphorn’s cell phone rang twice during dinner. He itched to answer it, but he and Louisa had an agreement: no calls during the news or at meals. She had baked meat loaf with mashed potatoes and gravy, one of his favorite dinners, but he wasn’t hungry. His mind kept replaying the scene with the boy. He was missing something, but what? How could those two random events be connected?
“You usually like my meat loaf. Is something bothering you, Joe?”
“Thinking.”
“So you’re working on a case?”