Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02 Read Free Page A

me, Lynn? I would have—"
    "Joseph told me I should let you rest. Unless it was a crisis. Yazzie and I were able to keep him from hurting himself. By
     the time I could get free to call you, he'd stabilized."
    "Is there any point in my going in with him?" All Julieta could think of was to hold him.
    "No. Wait until Joseph gets here."
    The thought of Joseph's earnest face and skilled, strong hands soothed Julieta a little. It helped that he knew how much this
     meant to her. That there was someone who knew it all. Surely he'd have some solution, he'd think of the next step.
    "Have you talked to his teachers?" Julieta asked.
    "I sent out my usual absence notice. I didn't go into details, just said he wasn't feeling well."
    "Who else has seen him? Is anybody talking about it yet?"
    Lynn would know this was the school administrator turning to damage control, the need to contain superstitious gossip. The
     nurse was one of the few non-Navajo staff at the school, a solidly built woman in her midfifties with silver hair pulled back
     into a thick braid that hung down to her waist. She had dazzling blue eyes made more startling by an iridescent bronze fleck
     in her left iris that was distracting and sometimes made her expression hard to read. She had come to the rez as a VISTA volunteer
     in the 1970s and had married a Navajo man from the Nakaibito area. Childless, her husband now dead, she seemed to have taken
     the stream of student patients here as her family. Somehow Julieta hadn't really gotten close to Lynn in her three years here,
     but right now she took comfort in the fact that the nurse shared her concern and distress.
    "Nobody's called me for details," Lynn said, "so if Sam doesn't talk, it'll probably be all right for a few days. Sam says
     the other boys don't remember anything, but I wouldn't count on that—I don't know what kind of gossip they might be spreading.
     The teachers will inquire if he doesn't show up in class soon, and his grandparents will need to be informed . . . " Lynn
     finished with a gesture: And soon everyone will know.
    Julieta shut the examining room door and leaned against it. "Lynn," she whispered. "What is this? Be honest with me. Have you ever encountered anything like this?"
    Lynn toyed with the snapped pencil, her fingers drawn again and again to the jagged break. "The brain is a wilderness, the
     strangest things can happen. All I can guess is that this is a profound neurological aberration. But I can't square that with
     what Sam says—the way it affected the other boys."
    They thought about it for a moment, listening to the deceptively serene noise of breathing coming through the monitor.
    "What're we going to do?" Julieta whispered at last. "Where do we go from here?"
    Lynn shook her head, and she looked at Julieta with her lopsided, startling gaze, her eyes now moist, nested in wrinkles of
     worry, and very guarded. "I have no idea."

2
    CREE GLANCED up to see that a shape had materialized at the rear of the auditorium. Backlit by the ceiling lights near the
     entry, at this distance, it was no more than a dark silhouette: no face or features, just the outline of heavy shoulders and
     a large head so low above the body that it seemed the being had no neck. It loomed low behind the last row of seats like someone
     crouching or stooping, both menacing and disturbingly familiar.
    In the instant it took to place the profile, Cree lost her train of thought. The last echoes of her words rang out over the
     speakers, and she wished she could somehow retrieve them and discern what she had said only an instant before.
    Mason Ambrose. Here in Albuquerque. It had to be.
    Sure enough, as she hesitated, another figure took up a post above the man in the wheelchair: Lupe. The ceiling spot haloed
     her gray hair and gave exaggerated dimension to the sockets of her eyes, her gaunt cheekbones, her thorn of a nose. Lupe,
     thin as a bone and as hard, not so much Ambrose's eternal personal assistant as