Wild Mystic by Sandi Ault

Author:Sandi Ault [Ault, Sandi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781733509916
Publisher: HandInPaw Publishing
Published: 2018-12-19T06:00:00+00:00

28: The Key to the Place

As I drove back down the long road from the monastery, I mulled over the few details I knew that might help me to find Adoria Abasolo. Unfortunately, I couldn’t name many people who knew her. She wasn’t a regular at Tanoah Pueblo or Momma Anna or Yohe would have known who she was. The abbot and at least a few of the monks at the monastery knew her, but given that many of them were under vows of silence, there wasn’t much more to be gleaned there than I had just learned from Father Anthony. The woman at the Bear’s Paw knew who she was, but since Adoria had been ostracized by the locals after buying Bata Romero’s land, she didn’t trade with the few area businesses. Peñasco was a small, tight-knit community of folks, many of whom traced a common heritage back to the settling of New Mexico by the Spanish conquistadores; no surprise the villagers had sided with Eddiejoe in his dispute with Abasolo. Had she known any of the Picuris? Was that how she had learned about the peyote ceremony at Tanoah Pueblo? I tapped my chin, wondering how to proceed. I decided I would try to encounter Mrs. Munoz when I stayed at Abasolo’s house and see if I could get any further than I did the first time I tried to talk with her. Beyond her, the only person left who seemed to see Abasolo with any regularity was the neighbor, her writing student Susan Lacy.

There was something about Lacy. In a place that was so often sharply divided along ethnic lines, I couldn’t tell which group she belonged to. With her coloring, she might have been Hispanic, or partly so. Her facial features were delicate, unlike those of the local Indians. I supposed that she could have been Anglo, but her complexion was swarthy enough that she might not be entirely so. She had no discernible accent—if I had to guess, she was probably raised somewhere in the west, but not New Mexico. And that bike of hers! Definitely not from around here.

When I reached the end of the Monastery’s road, I decided to return to the ranger station to use one of their computers. As soon as I turned south onto State Road 75, a black Humvee sped past me going the other direction, almost certainly the same car that had been tailing me. With its tinted black windows, I couldn’t make out the driver. I looked for a place to make a U-turn so I could get behind it to see the plates, but there was not even a wide place in the road that was safe enough to try it for well more than two miles. The Hummer was long gone by that time. I struck the steering wheel with my palm and swore aloud. “Damn!”

Mountain raised his head from his nap in the back.

“It’s okay, Buddy,” I said. “I’m not upset with you.”

At the ranger station, I let Mountain out to run in the pasture with the horses.

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