 Recorded Books Presents A Thief of Time by Tony Hillerman Narrated by me, George Goudel. Author's Note On most of the places in this volume are real. Many ruins' canyon has had its name changed and its location tinkered with to protect its unvandalized cliff ruins. Chapter 1 The moon had risen just above the cliff behind her. Out on the packed sand at the wash-bottom, the shadow of the walker made a strange, elongated shape. Sometimes it suggested a heron, sometimes one of those stick-figure forms of an Anasazi pictograph. An animated pictograph, its arms moving rhythmically as the moon shadow drifted across the sand. Sometimes when the goat trail bent and put the walker's profile against the moon, the shadow became Kokopelli himself. The backpack formed the spirit's grotesque hump, the walking stick Kokopelli's crooked flute. Seen from above, the shadow would have made a Navajo believe that the great yay northern clans called water sprinkler had taken visible form. If an Anasazi had risen from his thousand-year grave in the trash heap under the cliff ruins here, he would have seen the humpback flute player, the rowdy garter fertility of his lost people. But the shadow was only the shape of Dr. Eleanor Friedman Bernal, blocking out the light of an October moon. Dr. Friedman Bernal rested now, sitting on a convenient rock, removing her backpack, rubbing her shoulders, letting the cold, high desert air evaporate the sweat that had soaked her shirt, reconsidering a long day. No one could have seen her. Of course they had seen her driving away from Chaco. The children are up in the grey dawn to catch their school bus, and the children would chat about it to their parents. In that tiny, isolated park-server society of a dozen adults and two children, everyone knew everything about everybody. There was absolutely no possibility of privacy. But she had done everything right. She had made the rounds of the permanent housing and checked with everyone on the digging team. She was driving into Farmington, she said. She had collected the outgoing mail to be dropped off at the Blanco Trading Post. She had jotted down the list of supplies people needed. She had told Maxie she had the Chaco fever needed to get away, see a movie, have a restaurant dinner, smell exhaust fumes, hear a different set of voices, make phone calls back to civilization on a telephone that would actually work. She would spend a night where she could hear the sounds of civilization, something besides the endless Chaco silence. Maxie was sympathetic. If Maxie suspected anything, she suspected Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Vernal was meeting Lehmann. That would have been fine with Eleanor Friedman-Vernal. The handle of the folding shovel she had strapped to her pack was pressing against her back. She stopped, shifted the weight, and adjusted the pack straps. Somewhere in the darkness up the canyon, she could hear the odd screeching call of a saw-wet owl, hunting nocturnal rodents. She glanced at her watch ten-eleven, changing to ten-twelve as she watched. Time enough. No one had seen her in bluff. She was sure of that. She had called from Shiprock, just to make doubly sure that no one was using Bo Arnold's old house out on the highway. No one had answered. The house was dark when she'd arrived, and she'd left it that way, finding the key under the flower-box where Bo always left it. She'd done her borrowing carefully, disturbing nothing. When she put it back, Bo would never guess it had been missing. Not that it would matter. Bo was a biologist, scraping out a living as a part-timer with the Bureau of Land Management, while he finished his dissertation on desert lichens or whatever it was he was studying. He hadn't given a damn about anything else when she'd known him at Madison, and he didn't know. She yawned, stretched. Each with her backpack, decided to rest a moment longer. She'd been up about nineteen hours. She had maybe two more to go before she reached the site. Then she'd roll out the sleeping bag, and not get out of it until she was rested. No hurry now. She thought about layman. Big. Ugly. Smart. Great. Sexy. Layman was coming. She'd whine him and dine him, and show him what she had. And he would have to be impressed. He'd have to agree she'd proved her case. That wasn't necessary for publication, his approval, but for some reason it was necessary to hear. Sample complete. Ready to continue?