The Ghostway by Tony Hillerman

Author:Tony Hillerman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Police - Southwestern States, Police Procedural, Police, Leaphorn, Mystery & Detective, Navajo Indians, Fiction, Indian reservation police, Chee, Mystery fiction, Joe, Southwestern States, General, Cultural Heritage, Jim (Fictitious character), Lt. (Fictitious character)
ISBN: 9780061967788
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-05-25T06:27:54+00:00

>17<

CHEE FOUND 13271 JACARANDA STREET just as the setting sun was converting the yellow-gray smog along the western horizon into oddly beautiful layers, pink-gray alternated with pale rose, making a milder, more pastel display than the garish sunsets of the high desert country. He had enjoyed the hunt. The scenery was different: desert, but low-altitude desert, and without the bitter winters of the Big Reservation it produced a different kind of vegetation. He had decided fairly early that he wouldn’t find the Jacaranda address, that it was simply a number Gorman had pulled from the air to satisfy Mrs. Day’s requirement. Tomorrow morning he would get up early, drive back to Shiprock, and put out feelers at St. Catherine and Two Gray Hills and here and there, to make sure he’d know if and when Margaret Sosi returned to home country. And he’d drive over to Crownpoint and talk to Mary Landon. And, having time to think about it, Mary Landon would have decided that raising their children Dinee and among the Dinee was, after all, what she really wanted to do. Or maybe not. Probably not. Almost certainly not. And what then? What would he do?

Meanwhile Chee drove. The junction of Jacaranda Drive was marked by a huge billboard that rose from a fieldstone base and was topped by the legend j c r nd est tes in raised wooden letters, once red. Even expecting it, it took Chee a moment to recognize jacaranda estates with the a’s stolen. And to wonder who had such a specialized need for letters. Below the defaced name the billboard featured a map. A great green blob in the middle was labeled Golf Course, and a dim blue oblong near the center of the green was marked Trout Lake. Other landmarks included Shopping Center, Post Office, School, and Country Club. Nothing on the map seemed to bear any relationship to the reality of lonely desert foothills around him, but Chee studied the network of streets it displayed. Jacaranda meandered east-southeast, a main artery. He felt encouraged.

The encouragement was brief. Jacaranda’s asphalt surface, already cracked and weedy, gave way to gravel within a quarter mile, and the gravel that replaced it was soon replaced in turn by graded dirt, replaced by a rutted track from which streets led, streets which were nothing more than a few passes made by a bulldozer years ago. Chee passed street signs (Jelso, Jane, Jenkins, Jardin, Jellico), warped plywood boards mounted on two-by-fours with their paint weathered almost beyond the point of legibility. Jane Street had offered a half dozen dilapidated mobile homes clustered near a rusty water tank. On Jenkins he passed a concrete foundation, on Jellico an abandoned frame house from which doors and window frames had been looted. But mostly there was only emptiness. Judy, July, Jerri, and Jennifer streets offered nothing but creosote brush, sandstone, and cacti. Beyond Jennifer, the erosion of an arroyo had erased Jacaranda.

Chee detoured, and detoured again, and rediscovered Jacaranda—worse than ever.

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