Yellow Lies by Susan Slater

Author:Susan Slater
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: amateur sleuth, psychological thriller, indian artifacts, small town mystery, native american fiction, indian pueblo, southwest mystery, new mexico setting, american indian mysteries
Publisher: Columbine Publishing Group, LLC

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Gallup wouldn’t have been her choice of destination on a hundred degree day but the rental’s air conditioning worked, thank God! She’d be glad of that when she was out of the mountains and in the lower elevation of the plains in the hot, dry heat that radiated off the pavement. But, Julie didn’t mind helping Sal. For whatever reason, he felt he couldn’t ask Hannah to do it—or a relative, and that struck her as odd now that she thought about it. Hannah could have easily gone. She went into Gallup for supplies once a week. But maybe he didn’t want anyone local to know he was hiding a family artifact. Maybe he was breaking some kind of taboo.

But why didn’t he trust Hannah? Unless he knew that someone had been in his trailer while he was in jail, had taken the twelve thousand dollars, and he wanted to play it safe but not arouse suspicion. Maybe, he did suspect Hannah. No, that didn’t make sense. He seemed to genuinely like her. He always stood up for her, anyway.

Julie drove the length of Gallup’s main street, one of those Out West kind of main drags that divided commerce into two sides of the street that could be called a “downtown.” Malls had appeared later sometime in the fifties. And it was across from one of these strips of green concrete buildings that housed an insurance company, Furr’s supermarket, Bible bookstore, Goodwill, and pawn shop that she saw the depot.

Out here, if you didn’t have a car, a bus could make the difference between getting to places like Joseph City or Winona, Arizona and staying home. There were no planes. The largest airport of any size would be in Albuquerque. The Santa Fe Railroad had only two trains a day—the eastbound Amtrak and the westbound. No, Greyhound was alive and well in Gallup, New Mexico with good reason.

Julie parked to the side of the building. There were four buses under a covered area connected to the terminal. Two were charters promising the South Rim of the Grand Canyon with stops in the Painted Desert and Flagstaff. One looked to be full of elderly tourists. Another bus was still loading; its luggage compartment filled quickly with boxes, grocery sacks and plastic-sided luggage. The message strip in the bus’s front window read: Window Rock, Ft. Defiance, Chinle, Lukachukai.

Navajo women in long tiered dark skirts and velvet blouses waited to board. The strings of turquoise around their necks gleamed softly beside large round silver pins of small, polished, individually set stones. Most wore moccasins. Young Indian women in jeans and T-shirts balanced round-faced, diapered but naked, chubby babies on hips and supervised the baggage. They wore very little jewelry and seemed to favor Nikes or Adidas. Good examples of the contrast one could find on any present-day reservation, Julie thought.

The heat from the idling buses was intense. The overhead trapped the fumes and held them shimmering under the steel corrugated roof. Julie walked a little faster toward the lounge.

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