"I always thought there was something funny about that place," she replied, wiping her swollen eyes. "That mall, I mean. Rod was so obsessed with it, when half the people in town told him it was going to be a disaster, because it was on a floodplain." She looked up at Jennie, her expression hardening. "What you've been basically saying, over and over, is that you really do think he brought all this on us. That you're completely certain that it's his fault all this has been happening."
"That's it," Jennie replied, then shrugged. "You have to take my word for it, if you're going to believe in the mi-ah-luschka and Medicine. It's very subjective stuff. I can't prove most of it. I can't even prove the looting. None of this would even be enough to bring charges, much less to convict him in a court. But the mi-ah-luschka know, they've tried and convicted him, and they're carrying out the sentence. The only problem, so far as I am concerned, is that they are also carrying it out on you and your children."
"I have one dead child, and two who had escapes so narrow it was miraculous," Toni Calligan said, the heat of anger creeping into her voice. "I know what's been happening. There is no natural explanation. I can believe it. I saw that Indian myself, twice. And I can believe Rod would rob graves; he'd rob his own parents' graves if he thought there was something good in them. He fooled me for a long time, and for a lot longer, I fooled myself. But I'm not going to delude myself anymore."
That might just be anger and outrage in the wake of the beating speaking, but Jennie didn't think so. This woman knew Rod Calligan as well as anyone could. This was probably experience talking, not anger. The bruised face looked determined; the hands clenched on her tissue spoke volumes about her feelings.
"It's going to take two days before I can get the kids out of here," Toni continued. "Maria says that I should be very cool and very meek, try and stay out of his way as much as possible, and act as if I thought I deserved all this, so he doesn't suspect that we're about to run." Her jaw tightened, and tears started up again. "Anyway, I'm going to be so busy with the-taking care of-I think I can keep myself and the kids out of his way."
"Good," Jennie said, but Toni wasn't through.
"You've done so much to help," she continued. "I don't know much about what Rod's been doing, but maybe I can find out something for you in the next two days."
"Don't do anything that puts you at risk," Jennie warned, a little alarmed. She did not want Toni hurt worse than she already was! "You're going to be at risk enough from Rod, and then there's the mi-ah-luschka. I have no idea what they'll try next, or when!"
"Can't you do something for her?" David asked, his own eyes dark with concern. "You got them to leave me alone."
But she had to shake her head. "You came into their territory, and I was able to bluff them into thinking you were with me."
She turned to Toni. "I wish I could do something. If I could protect you from them, I would, but while you live in this house, under this roof, they will not believe me if I try to tell them that you are not a lawful target. It will have to wait until you have filed divorce papers; that act will resonate into the spirit world, divorcing your spirits as well as your marriage. Then I-or better still, my grandfather- can perform a purification ceremony for you that will take you completely out of Rod Calligan's sphere, so far as the spirits are concerned."
"They've already done so much-maybe they'll be satisfied for a while," Toni replied, voice tight with unshed tears. Jennie's stomach twisted; bad enough that the poor woman had gone through losing her child-the rest of this was torture of the innocent. But the mi-ah-luschka had no hearts. "And maybe they've seen how much Rod thinks of me and the other two kids. Anyway, if I can, I'd like to do something." She frowned for a moment, as if she had suddenly recalled something. "You know, there used to be a couple of cardboard boxes full of some strange things in his office; they used to give me the creeps. ... That was just before all this stuff, the strange accidents, started happening."
"Is the stuff there now?" Jennie asked quickly, hope rising. For that, and the chance that the "strange things" might come from Watches-Over-The-Land's grave, she'd break down the damn office door and to hell with legalities.
But Toni shook her head. "No," she replied, dashing Jennie's hopes again. "No, he took it out right about the time he started locking the door, and I haven't seen it since. I still don't know what was in those boxes. All I know is, they were really dirty, and they weren't the kind of thing I ever thought he'd have around."
"If it was artifacts, he's probably sold them by now," David said, sotto voce. Jennie grimaced, but he was probably right.
"Don't risk your own safety, but when it comes to information on Rod Calligan, we could use the inside help," Jennie told her, after a moment. "Every leg up we can get on this case is something we didn't have before. I'd be interested, and so would the cops. It would be nice to be able to prove he booby-trapped his own land. I'm not sure that he could be charged with manslaughter, but at the least, he could get reckless endangerment, and it would leave things wide open for civil suits by the survivors."
"I'll do what I can," Toni Calligan replied, her chin up, with a look of determination in her eyes that belied the black eye, the bruises, the swollen lip. "I promise."
David took the city bus back to the house to tell Mooncrow what had been happening; at least now they had a good theory that made all the pieces fit. If Rod Calligan were systematically robbing gravesites and caching the artifacts at the mall to be dug up in the course of excavation, it explained just about everything anomalous.
And it explained the anger of the Little People.
She asked David to write everything down and fax it to Sleighbow-with the preface that this was all very speculative, and they had no way of proving any of it. But she wanted Sleighbow to have all the information she did. Minus the Little People, of course.
She was positive that, at the least, Mr. Sleighbow would find it all very interesting. She was rather certain that using insured property for the "storage" of dubiously acquired artifacts was not covered by Calligan's policy.
Jennie thought it all the way through on her way to the offices of the Women's Shelter, following behind Maria, Toni's caseworker. The little Chevette was easy enough to follow, even though the streets were crowded as people got out for lunch. Traffic in Tulsa still was never as bad at its worst as it was in Dallas at its best.
The mall site was a bad one, although on the surface it might seem to be a good place to put a shopping area. Granted, there was no mall or even a decent shopping center that close to the river. This was a high-income area, heavily residential. A high-end shopping mall should have good potential.
But when you looked close, at least according to Jennie's mother, the picture changed. Existing malls still had plenty of vacancies, what with the recession and all. A smaller, high-end shopping complex associated with a hotel was not doing well, and it was very near Calligan's site. Worse yet, there wasn't nearly enough access; the streets were predominantly residential, and a plan to increase Riverside Drive to six lanes was controversial and being fought by the local residents. This site was, after all, on a floodplain, and her mother's tips from the local real estate grapevine said that reason alone had kept people away. He didn't even have a quarter of the shops booked. But he owned the land, free and clear, and David said just before he left that he thought Oklahoma property rights included "treasure-hunter" rights to whatever was found there.
Maria was a cautious driver; that made her easier to follow. She never ran yellow lights, much to the annoyance of those behind her. And although Jennie already knew the way, she was glad to have the excuse to go slowly; it gave her the opportunity to think this through.
David had explained the law as he understood it, cautioning that he had not looked up Oklahoma law yet. If Calligan had "treasure rights," that meant that valuable artifacts that seemed to have been cached there, under Oklahoma law, belonged to Calligan, unless someone could come along with proof of ownership or proof that the objects had been stolen, or both. And if that was the case, it also accounted for the fact that he'd just buried them there rather than making it look like a legitimate burial site; under Oklahoma law, remains had to be reburied in an appropriate place if they were dug up in the course of construction. But something that was obviously a cache site came under the heading of "treasure," even if there were bones cached with it. The bones alone would be reinterred; what was with them became simple property.
Since sacred pipes and fetish-bundles didn't exactly come with I.D. numbers or registration cards, there was no way on earth or heaven that Jennie could prove the artifacts Calligan had came from the looted graves.
So assume that this was what he had done; Calligan would have the right to sell them. Probably for a lot of money; if there had been a Wah-hopeh bundle, for instance . . . well, there weren't many of those in white hands, and none in the hands of private collectors. Selling them on the black market would get him a lot of money, but being able to claim them with the force of the law on his side would allow him to put objects up for bid openly, which would mean a lot more money than if he'd had to sell them privately.
So, he gets his loot and makes obvious caches on his land; now how does that fit in with the bomb? And just as importantly, how does that fit in with the stuff that was bulldozed?
That was the part that puzzled her. Wait a minute. The more public his "discovery," the less likely it will be for someone to think he looted the stuff. So say he makes one cache of relatively worthless pieces of broken pottery and bones, and has his men dig it up. Then he fights the work stoppage so it looks as if he didn't know the stuff was there. When the archeologists say it was a cache rather than a burial site, he orders work shut down, does his own excavations, and "uncovers" more caches, these a lot more valuable than the stuff his crew ruined. He sells it all in legitimate circles, and makes back ten times what he spent on the canceled mall.
It was a beautiful scheme, and the only thing that had ruined it was the bomb. Which still didn't fit in. It was a bright red piece in the middle of the green puzzle, and it stuck out in all directions.
So why the explosion-Well, he probably booby-trapped his caches, like David said, only the mi-ah-luschka moved one of the bombs. Or else the explosion was something not even he knew was going to happen. Maybe a business rival. Whatever, he decided to capitalize on it, and blame it on us.
That way the cops wouldn't be looking for more booby traps.
The explanation for the one that nearly got David was easy enough.
He probably set that one right out in the open to get me as soon as he found out I was working on the case. He'd kill a lot of birds with one stone. He'd get me out of his hair, get another bombing he could blame on the Movement, put up more smoke and mirrors to hide what was really going on.
She nodded to herself as she pulled into the Shelter parking lot. It all made perfect sense, and it certainly explained Calligan's insistence on continuing with a project that was doomed to failure. Calligan was a lot of things, but "stupid" wasn't one of them.
But he didn't plan on the mi-ah-luschka, and he didn't plan on me, she thought grimly, as she got out of her car to join the Shelter caseworker who was waiting for her. Let's just see if between us, we can bring him down.
The office of the Women's Shelter was a madhouse; there were always a hundred kinds of crisis going on, each one worse than the last. Yet somehow, amid all the chaos, things did get done.
It took a long time to get, as Maria (Toni Calligan's caseworker) put it, "all the ducks in a row." Oklahoma was a state riddled with antique laws and outmoded assumptions. It was, for instance, a common-law state; live together with someone for seven months in such a way that everyone knew you were sharing a bed, and you were common-law spouses and liable for each other's debts under the law. For that matter, check into the same motel room and you were automatically common-law spouses, if one of you wasn't already married!
This was not such a good thing, so far as spousal abuse was concerned. In Maria's words, "In Oklahoma, unless you can get witnesses and documentation that the abuse went past simply 'slappin' her around to larn her,' you don't get protection or a divorce." Judges, especially older male judges, were not inclined to take abuse seriously if there was nothing but one woman's word against a man. They were too inclined to believe that "the little woman" was just angry with her hubbie and trying to get a little attention for herself.
So the neighbor's testimony had to be taken, then Jennie's, as well as Maria's and Toni's; Jennie had to swear that the pictures Maria had taken were undoctored and had been taken exactly the way Maria said they were.
David had to come in long enough to make a statement, which was good news as far as Jennie was concerned. She got a chance to tell him her speculations, and to warn him she thought that she was going to be here for a while. He got a chance to tell her that the assumptions he had made about Oklahoma "treasure" law were correct.
Once all the documentation was in order, they still weren't done. A lawyer had to draw up the preliminary papers. A judge had to review them, and the evidence-
And besides all that, the safe house had to be located and room made for Toni and the kids. Maria's guess of forty-eight hours was based not on the fact that she knew they had a place but that it would take that long to locate one for her.
All that took time, and it was well after ten when the last of the "ducks" were properly lined up, and Jennie could go home. She was exhausted, but it didn't stop her mind from working.
Another rather nasty thought had occurred to her, after David had gone back to Mooncrow to make sure he didn't gorge himself on pizza.
All this time they had been assuming that the appearance of the Evil One had nothing to do with Rod Calligan. But what if they were wrong?
What if Rod Calligan had taken the Evil One's spirit-bundle? What if it had been the Evil One who had been behind the looting of Watches-Over-The-Land's grave-goods?
She had put the thought out of her mind while she and Maria worked on the more mundane matter of getting Toni Calligan out of her husband's hands, but it came back to her as she walked out to her truck.