The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries (10 page)

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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

BOOK: The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries
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E
VENING FELL OVER THE DESERT IN SOFT LAVENDER veils and drained the golden hues from the broken hills. The square-topped buttes turned the color of a mourning dove’s wings. Scatters of yellow fell from the cottonwoods that lined the Animas River. In the distance, cattle lowed.
Sitting atop the rubble overlooking the partially excavated tower kiva, Dusty propped his elbows on his knees and watched as sunset streaked the clouds. He wore mud-encrusted cowboy boots and a battered brown cowboy hat. In his hands he cradled a toothless human skull, the bone stained a light shade of umber after centuries in the earth. The wind had cooled the temperature down into the sixties. He flipped up the collar of his canvas coat.
Beyond the borders of the ruin, his archaeological field crew sat around the nightly campfire. Steve Sanders said something Dusty couldn’t hear, and Sylvia Rhone laughed. Steve’s rich black skin gleamed in the firelight, contrasting sharply with Sylvia’s freckled face. Steve was up from the University of Arizona on the pretext that he was adding to his dissertation research. In reality, he’d caved in to Dale’s abject pleading. He had aced his comps last June and just had his dissertation to finish before being awarded his Ph.D.
They’d set up their four green tents in a semicircle around a central fire pit with Dale’s old Holiday Rambler camp trailer parked to the west. Along with the small grove of juniper trees behind the camp, it created a decent windbreak. Sunset gleamed off the windshields on the crew vehicles parked in a line behind the tents.
The collapsed walls of the ancient pueblo seemed to glow an unearthly blue in the twilight. Two-by-two-meter excavation units created black squares in the tower kiva. When they’d quit work at sunset, they’d covered the units with black plastic and lined the
edges with every heavy object within reach: shovels, picks, screens, rocks. The idea was to keep the bone from drying and splitting.
The bone. God, they had bone everywhere. It covered the kiva bottom in a layer twenty centimeters deep, not a surface scatter like he’d first thought. Their finds today had included the elaborately etched skull in his lap, the skull of a girl, and a handful of what appeared to be ceremonial Mesa Verde black-on-white potsherds.
He looked down at the skull. The delicacy of the brow probably meant it had belonged to a woman, though he couldn’t be certain. He was an archaeologist, not a physical anthropologist. He didn’t see as much in bones as other people did. Artifacts told him a whole lot more about a people’s behavior than skeletons.
He tipped the skull to study the quarter-sized hole that gaped in the middle of the left coronal suture. Someone had drilled seven small holes, etched the spaces between them with a stone tool, then lifted out the circlet of skull. A surgical incision, clean, precise. Four lightning bolts zigzagged out from the hole. In modern-day Puebloan mythology, lightning bolts signified spiritual power.
Metal clanked and Dusty saw Steve empty a can of something into the big stew pot hanging on the tripod at the edge of the flames. When the wind gusted just right, he could smell coffee perking.
For the tenth time, he stared at the address he’d written on the front of the envelope, and his gut squirmed:
Dr. Maureen Cole, Department of Anthropology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Her face drifted through his mind, straight nose, glinting black eyes, full lips, long black hair.
Dusty folded his arms across his chest like a shield.
Sending a letter was the coward’s way out.
Dale stepped out of the camp trailer and walked carefully down the trail that led to the ruin. He wore a tattered gray canvas coat that Dusty had seen on a hundred excavations. It had to be thirty years old. White insulation peeked through the holes in the elbows, and there were numerous rips around the cuffs. Dale picked his way, step by step, over the irregular rock, and paused two paces from Dusty to stare down into the excavation. A thatch of wiry gray hair stuck out beneath the brim of his fedora.
In his seventies, Dale was still fit. He had worked with the best, Neil Judd, Paul S. Martin, Harold Colton, Emil Haury, and the other giants in the discipline. Though a professor emeritus, he just
couldn’t stay away from the field. His love had always been dirt archaeology. Dusty supposed he would eventually die on a site somewhere.
“I’ve just been on the phone to the Wirths. They want some photographs of the kiva bone bed. Apparently, they’re going to start planning their subdivision.”
Dusty looked up. “Oh, great. What do you think of all this? An archaeology subdivision?”
It sounded like Dusty’s worst nightmare. He could just see the owners out with their shovels, destroying every subtle bit of data the site contained to get to the best artifacts—which they would probably sell on the open market to people who could care less who the Anasazi were or what had happened to them.
Dale tipped his fedora back on his head. “To tell you the truth, William, if it saves one archaeological site from destruction, more power to them.”
“You think this will
save
sites? And Sylvia calls me an optimist.”
Dale paused. “William, the political entanglements of archaeology in this country today are forcing more and more landowners to bulldoze sites. Perhaps subdivisions like this will help to educate people. I think it’s worth a try.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” Dusty answered. “But what about us? I mean, if it comes down to a choice between professional ethics and the Wirths’ financial interest, what do we do?”
“We do what’s right for the archaeology, William.” Dale’s bushy eyebrows arched. “But I think the Wirths are genuinely interested in making archaeology an integral part of their subdivision here.”
“Right.” Dusty looked down at the skull in his hands. He tried to imagine the old woman’s response to the knowledge that people in the future were going to try and make money off the ruins of her culture. Could she even have conceived such desecration?
“What have you got there?” Dale indicated the skull.
“I think she’s an old woman.”
“And that?” He pointed to the hole. “Trephination?”
“Maybe. I can’t tell if it was done when she was alive, or after she died.”
Dale glanced from the skull to Dusty. “I know someone who could tell.” He paused, trying to read Dusty’s expression. “You could call her, William.”
Dusty gut tightened. “She’s in the middle of her semester, Dale. She has classes, students, all that academic bull that lab rats insist on. But I thought maybe I’d write her.”
“She’s tenured,” Dale said mildly. “You can bet that if Maureen Cole, one of the world’s foremost physical anthropologists, walks into the dean’s office and says she needs to leave for a couple of weeks to conduct research, he’ll grant it.”
“Just like that?”
“He’s no fool. Maureen could have a position at any university in North America.”
“So, why does she stay at McMaster? There are bigger, more prestigious places.”
Dale sighed and kicked halfheartedly at a square piece of sandstone. “Firstly, McMaster is an excellent school; but more important, her house is there. John is there … if only in her memories and dreams.”
Dusty looked out at the river, dusky now, the yellowing leaves white in the growing darkness. “Must have been quite a guy.”
“John was brilliant. As the old saying goes, they broke the mold when they made him. You would have liked him. He was different from you, quieter, reserved, but he had a special quality that made him stand out in a crowd.” Dale handed him a cell phone from his back pocket. “I’d imagine she’s home about now. I used my Sharpie pen to write her number on the top of the phone.”
Dusty stared at it. “What should I tell her?”
“Tell her about the skeletal material in the kiva, William. Tell her what you think happened here. Just dial and press the send button.”
Dusty shied away from the phone. “It would be a lot more effective if the legendary Dale Emerson Robertson called. You have pull. I’m just a lowly field archaeologist.”
Dale’s brows lowered, and Dusty wished he could take the words back. They’d sounded cowardly, and Dale’s expression let him know it.
“As I’ve told you before, William, not every woman anthropologist is your mother. You
can
trust a few of them.” Dale jammed the phone into Dusty’s hand before he walked off for camp.
“And as I’ve told you before,” Dusty called after him, “my mother has nothing to do with this!”
Dusty’s mother, the great Dr. Ruth Ann Sullivan was a cultural
anthropologist at Harvard. She’d abandoned the family when Dusty was six years old. His father, Samuel Stewart, had fallen to pieces. He’d tried to commit suicide three times that first year, and Dusty had been there watching each time, screaming and crying, trying to jerk the gun, or knife, or bottle of pills, from his father’s hand.
Dale had been the one to take action. It had broken Dale’s heart, but he’d committed his best friend to an asylum. Dale went through all the family he could find, but no one wanted Dusty, so he’d raised Dusty himself. Thank God. Dusty had spent most of his life in archaeological field camps, digging during the day, and at night listening to the best archaeologists in the world argue about ancient cultures. He’d been a very lucky kid, despite a tough start in life.
Dusty slipped the phone into his coat pocket and lifted the skull to gaze into the woman’s empty eye sockets. The bone gleamed softly. “Well, one thing for sure, Maureen would be able to look at you and tell exactly who you were and probably even why someone drilled that hole in your head.”
Sylvia stepped away from the campfire and cupped a hand to her mouth.
“Hey, Dusty! Dinner’s hot!”
He waved to let her know he’d heard.
“Be honest,” he whispered to himself. “You need her here, you know you do.”
More interesting, perhaps, was that he actually wanted her here.
Which scared the holy hell out of him. Every time he got close to a woman, he turned into a man he didn’t know. He said and did outrageous things he didn’t mean and generally made an ass of himself. A normal man liked it when a woman looked up at him with unabashed adoration. Those looks opened frightening doors in Dusty’s mind. As the spooks drifted up to stare him in the eyes, Jack the Ripper’s story started sounding sympathetic.
Dusty angrily clutched the skull to his chest and walked down the hill. The spindly arms of sagebrush and greasewood scraped against his faded blue jeans.
He walked into the orange halo of the firelight and said,
“Hola, amigos.”
His bearded face tingled from the sudden warmth.
Sylvia looked up with bright green eyes. The wind had worked brown strands loose from beneath her gray wool cap, and fluttered them around her freckled face. The cuffs of her faded denim coat
had frayed. She gestured to the skull. “What did Yoric reveal to you about his life?”
“I think he’s a she.”
“Okay, what did Yoricelle tell you about her life?”
“She told me she’s hungry. What’s for dinner?”
Sylvia looked at him from one narrowed eye. She always evaluated his moods before she laid things on him, probably because they shared similar wounds; they’d both suffered through difficult childhoods, though Sylvia’s had been much worse than Dusty’s.
Sylvia said, “I wagered you’d eat crow and invite Maureen to come. Steve said you’d rather starve to death. I’ve got ten bucks bet. Spit it out. Which is it?”
Dusty gently placed the skull into the wooden box on the examination table beside Dale’s trailer, picked up the lawn chair, and set it in front of the fire. A loaf of rye bread nestled on the hearthstones, warming. He leaned over the pot and sniffed.
“Good God, not Dinty Moore’s beef stew again. Doesn’t anybody in this camp know how to make burritos?”
“Sure,” Sylvia said, “but me and Steve have to work in the same pit tomorrow. We decided to spare each other the consequences.”
Dusty swiveled around in his chair, opened the white lid on the red ice chest, and searched around until he found a cold bottle of Guinness stout. The opener hung from the chest by a string. Dusty flipped off the cap and clamped his mouth over the top of the bottle. Rich brown foam bubbled up. It tasted heavenly.
“Thank God for the Irish.”
Sylvia turned to Steve and gave him a knowing look. “He’s stalling.”
Steve sipped from his steaming coffee cup. His ebony face gleamed. “I noticed.” He looked like a young Denzel Washington, his black hair closely clipped, his eyes the color of antique mahogany. He’d buttoned the collar of his tan coat around his throat. “It’s not going to get any easier,” Steve reminded. “If I were you, I’d just make the decision and leave the rest to the gods.”
“The gods?” Dusty answered incredulously. “You can’t trust them.”
Dusty took a long drink of his Guinness and fixed Sylvia with a curious look. “She wrote you a couple of weeks ago, didn’t she? What did she say?”

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