She continued adding to the painting as she spoke. “John went to work in Phoenix. When he came back—he was different. That must have been when it happened. When he became the monster. He wouldn’t talk to anyone but Miriam. They’d go off together, for days at a time. Then Joan died. Then John. Then Miriam.” Her voice never cracked, her expression never slipped. She’d lived this over and over in her mind for weeks now. “I knew,” she said. “Somehow I knew what had happened, that Miriam took Joan. This magic, this evil has lived in the land since the beginning of the world. My family has been part of it, on both sides. I’ve learned what I can, but I’ve had no one to teach me the right way. The way of harmony. The old ways are gone.
“My father believed that because John brought a new evil from outside, an outsider should stop it. He knew someone who knew of a wolf hunter—your friend. The wolf hunter came and did his work. But it didn’t stop the evil. It only made it stronger.”
The flickering light from the fire made the figures in the painting waver and move. I blinked, flinching back, bidden by an animal instinct to escape. My eyes watered, and I shifted so my arm touched Ben’s. He felt shaky, nervous.
Like me. Louise caught the movement, understood the way Ben and I stared at the picture on the ground.
“This is for Joan. She didn’t die; she was killed. There’s no one to help her find her way to the next world. No one else cares. I don’t know how, but I have to try to help her with what I know.”
It came from the heart, Alice had said. That had to count for something.
“She’s still here. She hasn’t traveled on. Maybe she’ll talk to you. Maybe she’ll tell you what happened.”
“How will we know?” I said. “How will we know if she’s talking to us?”
Ben muttered, “If she can’t testify or sign a statement, what’s the point?”
I elbowed him in the side.
“Joan?” Louise sat at the head of her painting, hands on her knees, gazing unfocused at the painting, or the light, or phantoms of her own imagination. She had the voice of a little girl calling in the dark. “I’m here.”
Then she spoke a phrase in another language—Navajo, each sound punctuated, melodic.
The fire dimmed suddenly to embers.
Ben tensed; I felt for his hand, gripped it. He squeezed back. I expected the sudden spike of fear to rouse the Wolf. Any sense of danger always woke her, sparked her instinct, made her want to fight. I expected that instinct to kick in, but it didn’t. This space, this weird timeless feeling, soothed her somehow. She slept, even though my brain was firing. It gave me a strange, disembodied feeling, like I wasn’t really here. Like I couldn’t feel the ground under me anymore.
After a long silence, Louise said, “She is telling me the story to tell to you. I can tell you like s
he’s telling me.”
An aura of blue light glowed around Louise, like some kind of static charge danced around her. No—she was backlit. The light was coming from behind her. I wanted very much to move around her, to see what was behind her. I stayed put.
“I was outside, mending one of the fences after a wind knocked it down. Miriam came to me. She called my name. I looked, and she stood right behind me. She held a powder in her hand and blew it into my face. I knew what it was, anyone would know what it was: corpse powder. She cursed me. She killed me, but no one would ever know. I grew sick. The doctors had a name for it, called it a disease, tried to heal me—but they couldn’t, because it was witchcraft. Miriam stood by my bed at night—my last night—and told me what she would do: she would cut my heart out, take the blood, and put it on the wolf’s skin. Take my soul and use its power for herself. I could see it, see her cutting out my heart, holding up the dripping fist of muscle, and I thought, This is my heart, why can I see it? It should be hidden. My heart should be hidden, safe, but she has taken it from me.”
I choked on a gasp, feeling my own heart suddenly. It wasn’t me, it was her. I told myself it was only a story.
Louise shook her head, and when she spoke next, her voice was hers again. “Joan died of pneumonia, that’s what the doctors said. But Miriam killed her. Miriam took her heart. I found her spirit crying in the desert, searching for her heart. But I’ll help her find it. I’ll help you, Joan.”
She reached out, like she would clasp someone’s hand, but there was no one in front of her. The glow faded, and she was left holding a point of light in her hand. She closed her fist around it before I could see more. As it was, it might have been my imagination.
In fact, a second of dizziness and a slip of time changed the look of the whole room: the fire burned again, as it always had. Louise held her hand over the painting, as if she’d just finished dropping the last grain of color into place.
None of it had happened. I was sure that none of it had happened. Except Ben still held my hand in a death grip. His hand was cold, his face pale. He swallowed.
Louise looked at us, her dark eyes shining. “I’ll sign your statement. She wants me to sign your statement, to tell you what I know. To tell her story.”
She swiped her hand through the painting, smearing the image, blurring the colors, stirring the ground until it showed a galaxy swirl of dark sand, and nothing more. Odd grains of quartz sparkled in the light like stars.
She sat back, closed her eyes, and sighed. “Let’s go.”
We scooped sand over the fire to put it out. Louise put her things—matches, the little containers of colored sand—into the trunk against the back wall. She drew something out as well, but tucked it into her fist so I couldn’t see.
Pulling back the blanket over the door, she ushered us out of the hogan. She paused, looking back to scan the interior, as if searching for something. Or waiting for something. Then she slipped out, letting the blanket fall back into place behind her.
Walking back into the sun was like being in another world, a too-bright sunlit world where birds chirped and a fresh breeze smelled of dust and sage. Surely a world where nobody killed anybody.
Ben said, “I’ll put together that statement.”