“Well, herons won’t stop here so far above water.”
As good a non sequitur as any. She laughed and sat down to the board.
“That’s how I met your friend McCord,” the doctor recalled, waiting for white’s first move. “He heard that I’m an authority, hereabouts, on birds. He stopped by for a visit, asked me if I knew anything about herons, if they nest around here.”
“Herons?” She had the oddest feeling that he was holding his breath for her response. “Why herons?”
Luna shrugged, smiled; if she hadn’t imagined the tension, it faded to self-deprecating charm. “I wrote a book about the migrations of wading birds, once, back when I was young and foolish enough to think I had time for hobbies.”
But why would McCord want to know?
“Your move, señorita.”
He was too sharp for her to throw him the game discreetly, Raine told herself a half hour later as she sat, her knight poised in midair, considering. Jump it there, and she’d checkmate him in four moves. Land it beside his bishop, and she could prolong the game, perhaps sparing his ego.
“That reminds me.” The doctor stood abruptly, lurched across the room to open a cabinet and pulled out her shoulder bag.
“Why, there it is! I figured McCord couldn’t find it—that it’d fallen out of my Jeep. Or he’d kept it.” And since you had it all along, why wait till now to hand it over?
“And the professor left this note for you, along with a request that I show you this.” The doctor limped over to another shelf, chose a small carving from among several. He handed her a blue lizard, shaped from wood, painted in patches that looked like stylized scales.
“It’s charming.” Puzzled, she turned it in her hands, then opened the folded note.
Hey, sleepyhead!
I stuck around as long as I could, then gave up and went on errands. Back tomorrow or the next, then my wheels are yours to command. Meantime, I looked for your mug and found a heap of shards in a bandanna. But here’s a thought: check out the doc’s carving of a cielito lizard. Five’ll get you ten that’s the critter on your mug. Till you see me, kick back and stay put, okay? The canyons are no place to snoop around without a guide.
Yours,
McCord.
PS. Don’t play chess with the doc if you like to win.
Second man in two days—no, blast it, make that three—who wanted to be her guide. Raine turned the lizard till it faced her head-on, tipped her head and frowned. Could this be what the potter had been thinking of when he’d glazed her mug? “No neck-frill,” she murmured.
“Your pardon?” The doctor had returned to the chessboard and sat, contemplating his fate.
“Oh, just thinking. It’s a lovely lizard. Now, where were we?”
“Your move.”
“Yes.” Might as well put him out of his misery, so she could straggle off to bed. Raine lifted her knight again—and blinked. That pawn there, last time she’d looked, had been sitting on the f4 square.
Yet now it rested demurely on g5, blocking her attack. She glanced up through her lashes to find the doctor smiling benevolently into the distance, his hands crossed on his rounded vest.
Well, that changed everything.
Chapter 6
T hough the view from this overlook was no more spectacular than the previous ten they’d passed this morning, something about it grabbed the burro. Pausing on an outcrop above a sheer two-hundred foot drop to the green river, the jenny braced her stubby legs, lowered her grizzled neck and let loose with a truly astonishing, “Haw, hee-hawng, hee-hawng.”
As the echoes bounced, then died, Raine took her fingers from her ears. “Well, if they didn’t know we were coming before, they know it now.” She set off, tugging on the burro’s lead. “You wouldn’t consider going any faster, would you?”
Apparently not. This was a beast that believed in mañana, if not next week. They’d covered perhaps twenty miles yesterday, Raine estimated, after leaving the Casa de los Picaflores in the early afternoon. She’d waited for McCord to return, but finally she’d lost patience.
She’d asked the doctor for directions to the ranchito of Lagarto, home of the potter who’d made her mug. When he couldn’t persuade her to wait another day, he’d insisted she take his spare burro, Poquita, to carry her backpack.
She’d have made much better time without her. But while the vegetation changed from temperate to near tropical as they switchbacked deeper and deeper into the canyons, the temperature climbed to the low eighties. And somewhere in the next twenty miles or so, the doctor had advised that she’d come to a point where nothing on four legs could handle the trail. Might as well spare her own back, while she could.
The doctor had assured her that she’d recognize this point when she came to it. Then Raine should remove Poquita’s lead so she wouldn’t trip on it, turn her around and shoo her on her way. “I’ll send a boy to meet her and hurry her home, but in truth, it is not necessary. She knows where to find her oats.”
Without stopping, Raine reached high up the wall of rock on her left, to pick a clump of dry grass. She offered the burro one blade to munch, tucked the rest of the bribe in the hip pocket of her khaki pants, where it wagged enticingly. That gained them maybe a tenth of a mile per hour. At this rate they hadn’t a prayer of reaching Lagarto by nightfall, and the doctor had warned that she should not attempt the trails in the dark.
“Besides the danger of falling, there are rattlesnakes and…” He’d paused, then added in a regretful whisper, “worse things!”
“Bats, scorpions, what are we talking here?” she’d teased.
He’d shrugged good-naturedly. “That depends on who you ask. The Raramuri have legends of werewolves and ghosts and witches.”
She’d met none of that crew last night, when she and Poquita had camped in a lush little meadow. In fact, she’d felt more comfortable alone out under the stars than she had at the Casa de los Picaflores. The doctor was a sweetie, but still, there was something about him. She had an odd sense of unplumbed depths…Something moving below that playful surface. Anyway, she was glad to be on her own again. At least, till she met up with McCord.
If they met up again.
“If McCord goes sniffing after la rubia, instead of searching for the treasure, this is no good! Time flows like water through our fingers. I say she should fall from a high place. It could be easily done.”
“A man should trample flowers only when he finds no stones to run upon.” The doctor chose an apple from the basket beside his chair on the veranda, then drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket. While he polished the fruit, he gazed dreamily across the canyon. “No, do nothing till I have considered this.”
“But, my uncle—”
“Ssszt! You begin to argue like a gringo. And speak your own language, lest you forget it.”
“If I do,” Antonio growled in Raramuri, “it’s because you sent me to live with a gringo. To wash his pots and pans! To carry his pickax and shovels like a pack mule!”
“To be my eyes and my ears, Antonio. To be the raven that perches in the pine and sees all.”
“And does nothing!”
“When the time comes, then may you swoop.” The doctor crunched through the apple’s rosy skin. “While we speak of doing, what have you done since the night you came here to tell me of the mug you saw at Magdalena’s—only to find I had its blond owner already in my hands?”
“I’ve done no