The Blue Corn Murders by Nancy Pickard

Author:Nancy Pickard [Pickard, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80716-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

In hogan two Martina Alvarez lay on her bunk in agony.

The middle of her spine was aflame with pain; she could think of almost nothing but the torture of it. She hardly knew how she had managed to drive to the slickrock site with Naomi, then walk those hideous broiling hard yards across it. Somehow she had endured the cruel wait for those fools, and then the drive home with that idiot of a woman, her other roommate, Madeline. The one who ought to be hanged. Despoiling a site!

On top of all of that, once they arrived at the hogan, she had been forced to wait while the idiot woman and Lillian had changed clothes, taking their moronic time about it. Only after they had both left the hogan could she allow herself the excruciating luxury of shedding her own attire, bit by painful bit. She wouldn’t have dreamed of asking for help from her roommates; the idea of anyone seeing her in her vulnerability was repellant beyond imagining.

She had once heard it said that nothing repelled God; that having granted human beings free choice, the Godhead could not very well then condemn them for using it. If that were the case, Martina had decided at the time, then she and God had nothing to say to each other. She was repelled by many things; at the moment by her own weakness most of all. Nor would she care to know a God who felt sympathy for her rather than disgust at her capitulation to the pain.

It had taken her an infinitely long time to remove her brace and then to lower herself onto the bunk bed. But then the medication for pain, which she rarely allowed herself, had begun to reduce the flames down to mere small, aching embers of suffering. She was used to that; that, she could bear. If only she could sleep through the dinner hour, she felt she might regain enough strength of will to get up out of her torture rack and attend the advisory meeting this evening.

It was an important part of her reason for coming.

Indians, Martina believed strongly, were their own worst enemies. If they would only leave the scientists alone, their sacred sites might be preserved for all time. Granted, they would not themselves then be able to use them for their ceremonies, but Martina had no more patience for shamans and medicine men than she had for priests, rabbis, or ministers. It was the churches that deserved preserving, not the foolish humans who frequented them, wearing them out with their foolish theologies. It was architecture, whether natural or man-made, that Martina loved, not the architects or the patrons of that architecture. She loved only the buildings, and the pure science that designed them, analyzed them, and saved them for future historians and investigators. (She had admired the neutron bomb from the first moment she read of it and could not fathom the sentimental objections to the fact that it killed people but left buildings intact.

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