She decided to try a different angle. "Do you think you can remember exactly what happened just before all hell broke loose?" It had occurred to her that he might have noticed something that would tell her what kind of hand had been behind this.
"Yeah, I think so." He nodded. "I went over this for the cops, though-"
"I'm not likely to get access to that," she pointed out. "Was there anyone hanging around the site that you noticed?"
"No, and we kind of watch for that," he told her. "We've had some problems with people pilfering stuff. In fact, the guys told me this afternoon that the dynamite inventory doesn't match the stores-"
Bet that's where the explosives came from. "Did anything odd happen that day?" she persisted.
"Uh-I didn't tell the cops this, but, yeah." He was frowning, and she asked why.
"Well, something really bad happened right before the explosion, only it wasn't the kind of thing the cops would consider bad." He hesitated a moment, then gave her a sharp look. "Can I ask you a question first? About your family?"
"Sure," she said, wondering what had caused the look, but getting the feeling in her bones that he was about to tell her something very important. "I don't see why not."
"Is your grandfather the Talldeer that's the Medicine Man?" Despite being fogged by drugs, he was watching her very closely-and the question startled her a little, and increased the feeling of urgency.
"Well, yes, actually." She wondered where he'd heard of her grandfather, and if she should say anything else, but he said it-for her.
"So you're the Medicine Woman, the kid he's been teaching-" He sighed and looked relieved. "Okay, you'll understand, then. You know, if this had happened the day before the dozer suicided, I'd have been sure somebody had planted a bomb because of it-but it couldn't have been more than a few minutes before-"
He was rambling, possibly nerves, possibly the drugs, probably both. But in the ramblings, there were important clues. Suddenly, this wasn't just an insurance job. She suddenly felt like a hunter who has just heard the warning caw of a crow. She stiffened. "So what did happen?" she prompted.
"We-we dug up bones." He swallowed. "Old bones, pots, you know what I mean?"
"You're saying you found a burial ground. I mean, one of our grounds," she said, trying to control the feeling of danger that made her skin crawl. There it was. Out in the open. "Not just some old graveyard from around the Land Rush days."
"Yeah, at least that's what we all think." He shook his head. "It really spooked us, even the white guys. The stuff looked like it might be real old. And you know what digging up sacred ground means. ..."
He was getting more and more agitated the more he thought about it. "Yes," she told him. "I do. Can I help?"
He brightened at that. "Yeah, if you get a chance, would you ask your grandfather to come do a cleansing on me? Not that I'm superstitious but-"
"But you've already had enough trouble; no problem," she replied, mentally hitting a "reset" button and looking at the situation in a whole new light. Now it definitely was no longer just an insurance job. She had a real soul-stake in finding out what had happened, and too bad if the cops didn't like her poking around. "So you-ah-disturbed relics. Then what happened?"
"We backed off pretty quick, you bet-and we told the foreman we weren't gonna dig there. He got hot; called the boss on the cellular. The boss said we by god were gonna dig, and what was more, we were gonna burn the stuff we found or throw it in the river and not say anything about it." He gritted his teeth, and it didn't take a shaman to sense his anger. "He said if we told anybody, there'd be people from the college and everything coming in and stopping work."
She grimaced. "And you were mad-"
"I wasn't the only one!" he said. "We started arguing, and we even got the white guys on our side. I was just about to see if I couldn't sneak off and like, call the college or something, just to delay things, when-" He shrugged.
She sat silent for a moment. "So, what do you think happened to cause that?" she asked cautiously.
"Well-I thought it was just faulty equipment, but the guys said it was sabotage. My brains say somebody probably planted a bomb in the dozer, and god only knows why." He shook his head. "Nut cases, who can tell, with them? But my gut-"
She noticed he was sweating, and she knew why.
"-you know, I am really glad you're the Medicine Woman and all," he said, and he sounded genuinely grateful; "Anybody else would laugh at me for this, but-my gut says it happened because the Little People are after his ass, and they kind of got us because we were involved. You know how they are."
She did, indeed, know how They were. Mi-ah-luschka had a mixed reputation. Vindictive, vicious at times. "You didn't hear any-owls-did you?" she asked. "Just before the explosion?" The mi-ah-luschka, the Little People, often took the form of owls. ...
"Not that I'd noticed, but I wasn't noticing a lot except the fight between the foreman and the other dozer driver." He sighed. "That's why I'd really appreciate it if your grandfather could get on over here, you know?"
"Oh, I know," she assured him. "Uh-wait a minute, let me check on something-"
She dug into her purse, vaguely remembering that trip to Lyon's and the one to Peace Of Mind earlier this afternoon. Some things she always had with her, of course, but others she didn't necessarily take with her all the time. She'd picked up some herbs for herself and Grandfather, as well as the goodies for her father. Had she taken the packages out of her purse yet?
No!
"Would you accept a Medicine Woman instead of a Medicine Man?" she asked him carefully. "I won't be offended if you'd rather it was Grandfather."
"You mean, you've got stuff with you?" Bushyhead looked ready to kiss her, and a little light-headed with relief. "I don't mind telling you, with the full moon coming up, I've been kind of nervous about sleeping."
A cleansing was one of the easiest ceremonies to perform. There was just one precaution she was going to have to take. She took a quick glance into the hallway, made certain that the nurse was still deep in her paperwork, and closed the door. Then she climbed up on a chair, and stuffed facial tissue into all the openings of the smoke detector.
Ten minutes later, the ventilator in the bathroom was clearing out the last of the tobacco-redbud-and-cedar smoke, and the nurse was none the wiser. Larry Bushyhead looked much happier, and Jennifer was back in her chair, her implements neatly stowed back in her purse. Just as if she hadn't been chanting and wafting smoke around with a redtail feather a few minutes ago.
"If it makes any difference, I didn't feel as if They had tagged you," she told him. "But if I were in your shoes, I'd have wanted someone to do the same. I-I don't suppose you got any kind of a look at what was dug up, did you? Enough to really, honestly, recognize whose ancestors you were messing with?"
He hesitated, frowning. "I'm not an expert," he said, after a long moment. "And you know how much swapping around there was between the nations, even a long time before the white guys took over."
"A guess," she urged.
"Well-it wasn't Cherokee, or Seminole, and it wasn't Cado. If I was guessing-I'd guess it was our people. Osage. That's what I thought at the time." He licked his lips, as if they'd gone dry. "But that's just a guess. Could'a' been Sac and Fox. Could'a'been Creek, or Potawatami."
"Do you have any idea what happened to those relics?" she asked. "Because no one has mentioned them-and you'd think with cops crawling all over the site, somebody would have."
"I got two guesses," he told her. "The stuff we first dug up was either blown to bits or buried again. And the stuff that didn't get blown to bits, Calligan probably snuck in and got rid of. If he hasn't yet, I'm betting he will. All he needs to do is bring in a bunch of white guys who don't give a shit, as soon as the cops clear out."
She nodded, thoughtfully, and looked at her watch. "Oh hell, visiting hours for us nonfamily types are up-" And right on cue, the nurse showed up at the door, to remind her of that fact.
She stood up, swinging her purse over her shoulder, and gave him her best smile. "Thanks, Larry-you were a really big help."
He grinned. "So were you, Jennifer."
She made her way out of the hospital and down to the parking lot, only half aware of her surroundings. A burial ground-well, that certainly explained the "trouble" Sleighbow had mentioned, and why she had the feeling that there had been something there. The problem was, there wasn't supposed to be one there.
That may not mean anything. We haven't charted all the old burial sites yet, not by a long shot. The Arkansas wandered around a lot before the flood-control and irrigation programs settled it in one bed with all the dredging and dams. But-right on the riverbank is an awfully odd place to put a burial site. Especially an old one. And there should have been cairns, not underground burials; the Old Ones hated underground burials. Shoot, they wouldn't even build the cairns until months after the wind and weather had their way with the dearly departed.
The ancestors had tried not to put burial grounds anywhere near the Arkansas or any other river for just that reason-there was no telling when it would change its course and wash out the site.
Still, if it's really old, like when the Osage got forced down here from the north, and they didn't know the Arkansas tended to wander-and if it got buried by some accident or other-
Without actually seeing any of the artifacts, she had no way of telling how old it was, and if that was a possibility.
With a start, she realized that she had reached her truck; she opened the door and got in, reflexively locking her door again. But she didn't move; she was still thinking things through.