Leah couldn’t sleep, so an hour after she’d lain down she was back outside, sitting on a low stone wall behind the motel watching the sun rise. She found herself wishing she’d brought her phone out, but she didn’t want to miss a moment by going back inside to get it. A camera never captured this sort of thing properly anyway, or at least not in her experience. So she stayed where she was, listening to the morning bird chorus as the sky slowly lightened in a blush over the Hierro Maderas Mountains. She could actually see the shadows of the mountains receding, the higher the sun rose.
When Marisa came around the side of the motel to join her, a half-dozen quail went bobbing into the underbrush, startled by the sound of her footsteps crunching in the dirt. A ground squirrel scolded her before it too scurried from sight. Marisa sat down on the wall beside her.
“You’re up early,” she said.
“I couldn’t fall asleep,” Leah told her without turning from the view. “I guess I got enough on the drive down.”
Marisa nodded. She looked at the sunrise. Lifting her hand, she covered up a yawn.
“Pretty,” she said.
Leah nodded. She could think of a hundred glorious descriptions for that sky, but “pretty” worked just fine. When the sun finally popped up above the mountains she felt like applauding.
“I need coffee,” Marisa said.
“This guy told me there’s a good diner just down the road.”
“What guy?”
“I met him last night when I was sitting at the little table out in front of our room.”
Marisa turned to look at her. “In the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, you meet a guy?”
“It’s not like that. He was just coming back from work or whatever, and stopped to chat for a few minutes.”
“Cute?”
Leah laughed. “More like grizzled. He looked like a real desert rat. But he was nice.”
“Let me get this straight. Do you make a habit of chatting up strangers you meet in the middle of the night?”
“He had kind eyes.”
Marisa shook her head. “I need coffee,” she repeated.
Jerry’s Roadhouse was pretty much what Ernie had promised. It was a long building, part adobe and part wood frame, with a tiled roof and a dirt parking lot. Like the motel, it had seen better days. But the coffee was strong, with a bottomless cup, and the breakfast special was a generous helping of eggs any style, sausages, biscuits and gravy, with freshly squeezed orange juice and a couple of pancakes on the side.
The main difference from back home was that the waitress brought them each sides of salsa and green chilies. Her name tag read “Janis” and she seemed genuinely happy to see them, unlike the hipster servers and baristas back in Newford, who often seemed slightly put-upon when they actually had to take an order. Janis’s face lit up when Leah told her that Ernie had recommended the place to them.
“So where did you meet Ernie?” she asked.
“We’re staying at the Silver Spur,” Leah told her, “and I was sitting outside our room last night when he came in from work or wherever.”
Janis smiled. “Did he tell you he was working?”
“No, I just assumed it was work. He didn’t look like a partying kind of guy.”
“You can say that again. Ernie’s one of the last of the old desert rats. He spends pretty much every night out in the mountains. I think he can see better than a coyote in the dark.”
“So what does he do?” Marisa asked.
Janis shrugged and refilled their coffee mugs. “Who knows? Stares at the stars? Makes friends with the javelinas? I expect that mostly, he just wanders around.”
“What about the migrants who get lost out there?” Leah asked. “He must run into some of them.”
A wall suddenly went up behind Janis’s eyes. “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” she said and started to move away from the table.
“It’s just he was talking to me about them,” Leah said. “I’m a writer—a journalist. He told me I should be telling their stories.”
The waitress paused. “He said that?”
Leah nodded.
Janis looked around the restaurant before returning her attention to them. The warmth was back in her eyes. “That’s something that doesn’t get talked a lot about round here,” she said. “It’s like politics or religion. People have their own ideas about the issue and there’s no shifting them. Get on the wrong side of that argument, you could find yourself finishing it from the inside of a jail cell.”
Leah and Marisa exchanged surprised looks.
“For real?” Marisa said.
Somebody at the long counter called for a refill.
“Hold your horses, Fred,” Janis called to the man. “Be right there.” She turned back to their table. “Ask Ernie if you want to know more about it,” she said in a quiet voice. “It’s not my story to tell.”
“Well, that wasn’t weird,” Marisa said as the waitress walked away.
Leah nodded. “Except we live in a whole different world, so we shouldn’t judge.”
Marisa studied her for a moment. “You’ve got a look in your eye.”
“It’s just…I’ve been thinking about it ever since I talked to Ernie last night. What am I doing chasing around after the ghost of Jackson Cole when there are real, important stories to tell? Maybe I should be writing something that has more meaning than trying to get inside the head of some spoiled rock star.”
Marisa laughed.
“Okay,” Leah said. “So I don’t think Cole was ever exactly that, and if he is still alive and living around here, he’s certainly not that now. But what are the chances he’s actually alive? And if he is, would the world be a better place because I tracked him down and exposed his secret hideaway?”
“Probably not,” Marisa said. “But really, I can’t answer that and neither can you. It might mean a lot to his fans.”
“But if he’s alive, he walked away. Who are we to drag him back into the limelight?”
Marisa shrugged. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Let’s see what this Abigail White Horse has to tell us. It might not be a decision we ever need to make.”
Leah looked at the old Coke clock behind the lunch counter.
“It’s pretty early to drop in on her,” she said.
“Probably. But we can do a drive by, make sure we can actually find the place. If it looks like nobody’s up, we’ll just kick our heels for a while.”
“I suppose it’s a plan,” Leah said.
She finished her coffee and they took their check to the cash.
“So what are you girls up to today?” Janis asked as she rang them in.
“We’re driving up to the rez,” Leah told her. “We’re hoping to interview an artist named Abigail White Horse.”
Janis nodded. “She’s a nice lady. Her paintings give me the creeps, but her, I like.”
“You know her?”
“Not really. But Ernie takes me to the powwow every summer and I’ve met her there. Too bad you girls didn’t come a few months earlier. The Kikimi know how to throw a party. Even Ernie cuts loose a little.”
“We’ll try to make it back sometime,” Marisa said. She paid the bill over Leah’s protest and asked for a receipt. “It’s a business expense,” she told Leah.
“You have fun today,” Janis said as she made change and printed out a receipt. “And make sure you bring water.”
“We’re only going to the rez. It doesn’t look that far on the map.”
“It’s not. But like Ernie says, the first rule of going into the desert—doesn’t matter for how long—is to bring plenty of water.”
“We will,” Leah said.
After leaving Jerry’s Roadhouse, they backtracked a few blocks into town until they found a gas station where they could top up the gas tank and buy some bottled water. Leah entered Abigail White Horse’s address into the GPS on her phone while she waited for Marisa to come back to the car with the water.
“Ready to navigate?” Marisa asked as she slipped into the driver’s seat.
Leah nodded. “Left out of here, then take your first right on Jacinto. It’ll eventually take us all the way to the rez.”
“Sweet.”
“Looks like it might get a bit tricky after that.”
Marisa smiled. “Which is why I have you.”
Once they got out of town, Leah drank in the austere landscape, appreciating every subtlety of faded colour. She loved how the shape of the land wasn’t hidden by swaths of trees the way it was in the hills back home. Instead, she could see every nuance as the spartan panorama spread away from the highway, rolling into the distance like the dry waves of a dusty sea.
When she said as much, Marisa shot her a quick glance before returning her attention to the highway. “You’re not serious, are you?” she said.
“What do you mean?” Leah asked.
“They call these ‘badlands’ for a reason. There’s nothing but sand and cacti. I don’t know how anybody can live out here.”
“I think it’s beautiful.”
Marisa laughed. “And you also think there hasn’t been any good music since the Diesel Rats packed it in.”
“That’s not true.”
Marisa laughed again. “Kidding.”
They passed a sign announcing that they were entering the Kikimi Painted Lands, quickly followed by a place called the Little Tree Trading Post. The dirt parking lot was empty, but it was still early in the morning, so it was probably closed. Leah hoped they’d get a chance to stop in on the way back. She checked her phone.
“We make a left in another mile or so,” she said.
They missed the turn, but since they were the only car on the road, Marisa just backed up. The GPS led them through reddish hills dotted with mesquite, cacti and dried brush until they topped a rise to see a rutted lane that led down to a pair of adobe buildings, one obviously the main house, with a smaller structure up on the side of the hill behind it.
“That’s it,” Leah said. She peered through the windshield. “Although how are we supposed to figure out if anybody’s up?”
Marisa pointed to a figure sitting on the porch at the front of the main house. “Somebody’s up,” she said.
She steered the rental down the lane, stopping where it opened into a yard between the two buildings. A half-dozen dogs came running and barking to meet them and Leah shrank back in the car seat. They looked like a mix of German Shepherd, coyote and pit bull, their fur the same dusty colours of the landscape—muted reds, yellows and tans—and all she could think of was the time a neighbour’s two dogs had chased Aimee and her across a park when they were kids. She’d been nervous around dogs ever since.
The figure on the porch proved to be an old Native woman. She watched their approach, but made no move to rise and meet them.
Leah caught Marisa’s arm as she started to open her door. “You’re not going out there, are you?”
“Kind of hard to have a conversation with that woman if we stay in the car.”
“But the dogs—”
“I’m not scared of dogs,” Marisa told her as she opened her door.
The pack crowded around her as she got out, but she ignored them until she’d closed the door and was able to step away from the car. Then she stood still with her hands open on either side of her thighs to let the dogs take in her scent.
Leah looked up to where the woman had been sitting to find that she’d stood up and was coming to meet them. Swallowing her fear, Leah got out and braced herself as the dogs left off pushing their muzzles against Marisa’s legs to take a turn at crowding around her instead.
“Ohla,” the woman said. “Are you lost?”
“I’m Marisa and this is Leah,” Marisa replied, “and I guess that depends on whether you’re Abigail White Horse.”
“I am, though most people just call me Aggie.” She glanced at Leah and added, “Just push them away if they’re bothering you.”
To Leah’s surprise, the dogs were far more gentle than she’d expected. One in particular, a female with a red coat, looked up at her with big brown eyes, her tongue lolling from the corner of her mouth with what seemed to be pure goofy amusement.
“No, I’m fine,” Leah said. She reached down to give the red dog a tentative pat and the animal leaned into her, pressing against her leg.
“I don’t get many visitors,” Aggie said, by which Leah assumed she meant she didn’t often have a pair of white girls drive up to her house. “How can I help you?”
“We were interested in your art,” Marisa said.
Aggie smiled. “You’re welcome to have a look—especially considering that you drove all the way out here—but you should know in advance that none of it’s for sale.”
“We know that,” Marisa said.
“I hope we haven’t come by too early,” Leah added.
“I’m usually up early, if not this early,” Aggie told them. “But today I just got back from a memorial service for a friend of mine. We had a dawn ceremony for him back in the canyons.”
“Oh, we’re so sorry for your loss,” Marisa said.
Leah nodded. “We can stop by some other time.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Aggie said. “That’s not how it works around here. Our brother’s dead but that doesn’t mean he’s gone. He’s just got himself a new place on the wheel. It’s not as if we won’t see him again.”
Leah and Marisa exchanged glances.
Aggie smiled. “That only sounds woo-woo if you don’t already live a spiritual life. Round here, the borders between this world and the otherworld aren’t as solid as you might be familiar with. Come on. I’ll show you my studio.”
Leah blinked at the sudden switch in subject. She and Marisa exchanged another look, then hurried after Aggie, who had already set off up the hill to the smaller building. The dogs trailed along on either side of them.
“I mostly do portraiture,” Aggie said when they joined her on the porch of the studio. She ushered them inside. “Right now I’m working on one of my friend Hector, but I think I’ll stop and see if I can capture a good memory of Derek while the ceremony’s still fresh in my mind. I haven’t done a painting of one of the Bighorn Clan for a while, and I can already feel the sweep of those horns as they take shape under my brush.”
The dogs sprawled on the porch while Leah and Marisa stopped just inside the doorway to look around. The smell of turps was pungent, and skylights let the sun splash light into every corner. Standing on a large easel was Aggie’s current work in progress—a striking profile of a hawk’s head on the shoulders of a man. The bird had a band of leather around his head. Strips of leather festooned with shells, beads and feathers trailed from the band down his back.
Leah looked from it to the other paintings. They were all similar to the one on the easel or those Alan had found in his Google search back at the Art’s Court in Newford—curious combinations of humans mixed with animals, birds or reptiles.
“So…portraits?” Marisa said.
Aggie nodded. “I’m no good at making things up.”
“I mean, are you saying these aren’t…symbolic?”
“Heaven’s no. I can only paint what I see.”
“But…”
“I think I already mentioned that the borders between the worlds are awfully thin around here.”
Marisa looked around, eyes wide, then walked over to an old battered sofa under the window. She moved some books to the floor and sat down where they’d been.
Leah drifted deeper into the studio, studying the paintings on the walls, others in stacks leaning against the walls. She had the same feeling looking at them as she’d gotten sitting outside the motel room last night and driving through the hills to get to Aggie’s place. That everything was different, but familiar as well. That she was a stranger, but she had come home.
She could have stood there and soaked it all in for hours, except she suddenly realized that no one had spoken for some time. She turned to see Marisa still on the sofa looking a little shell-shocked, while Aggie leaned against a long table crammed with paint tubes and glass jars with the handles of paint brushes sticking up out of them.
Leah cleared her throat. “These are beautiful,” she said. “Thank you so much for letting us see them.”
“But that’s not why you’re here.”
Leah shook her head. “No, but just getting to see your art would be more than enough reason for the whole trip.”
“Hmm,” Aggie said. She pushed away from the long table. “I think this calls for some tea.”
She gestured for Leah to sit by Marisa, then fetched three clay handleless mugs from a stack on the table behind her. She put them and a thermos on the crate in front of where Leah and Marisa were sitting. Pulling a chair over for herself, she poured them each a mug from the thermos and sat down across from her two visitors.
“Usually,” she said, “people I don’t know come here for one of two reasons: they either think I have some special knowledge that will set them on a spiritual path, or they want to buy one of my paintings. More rarely, they hope to study under me or have come to invite me to speak at some conference or workshop. But what’s interesting here is that I always know they’re coming.”
“I’m sorry,” Leah said. “We should have called ahead.”
“That’s not what I mean. When I say I know they’re coming, the local gossips tell me. Crows. Hawks. Sparrows. Sometimes it’s one of the javelina boys, or perhaps one of Cody’s younger cousins—Cody being the original Coyote.”
Marisa looked at the old woman over the rim of her mug. “When you say these names, do you mean tribes or—”
“No,” Aggie cut in. “I’m being quite literal.”
“You can talk to birds,” Leah said. “And wild boars and coyotes.”
Aggie shook her head. “I talk to spirits. I’m one of the tribal elders, but where most of us consult with human members to help them deal with the world of the spirits, my time is spent with spirits helping them adjust to the world of the five-fingered beings.”
“The, uh…?” Leah began.
Aggie held up a hand and wiggled her fingers. “It’s what the ma’inawo—the spirits—call men and women because they only have the one, five-fingered shape.”
“Ma’in…” Leah tried.
“Ma’inawo. It’s what they call themselves, at least they do so here in the Painted Lands. It means ‘cousin.’”
“So you help spirits who look like animals.”
“No, they are animals, but they can wear human shapes as well. They’ve been here since the long ago, when Raven pulled the world out of that old pot of his and set the wheels of our lives in motion.”
“This is…weird,” Leah said. “You know it’s weird, right?”
Aggie regarded her steadily with no change in her expression, so Leah turned to Marisa for backup, but Marisa only shrugged.
“This last day or so seems full of portents,” Aggie went on. “There was a child whose parents threw her away. A friend of mine who finally learned to actually see the world in which he lives. Another friend shot by a hunter. The appearance of Night Woman at the dawn ceremony. And now you two showing up on my doorstep without the gossip of even one cousin preceding your arrival.”
Leah didn’t know what to say.
On the sofa beside her Marisa stirred. “Why are you telling us this?” she asked Aggie.
The old woman shrugged. “Sometimes when you speak riddles aloud they begin to make sense.”
“But not today,” Marisa said.
“Not today,” Aggie agreed.
Leah looked from one woman to the other, then settled her gaze on Marisa. While her friend had seemed taken aback when they first came into the studio, she now appeared to be completely at ease. “You don’t seem too freaked out by any of this,” Leah said to her.
“I suppose I’m not,” Marisa said.
Leah didn’t consider that any real answer at all. But before she could ask Marisa to elaborate, Marisa turned to Aggie.
“Have you ever heard of numena?” she asked.
Aggie shook her head.
“Maybe you have another name for it,” Marisa said. “It’s when an artist paints a picture that speaks so clearly to…” She looked lost for a moment. “To its spirit in the otherworld, I guess. The painting speaks so clearly that the spirit crosses over and becomes real. No matter how outlandish the subject’s appearance, they show up exactly as depicted in the painting.”
She glanced at Leah, then returned her attention to Aggie before going on. “It’s only special artists that can do it. Make this pathway, I mean.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Aggie said.
“So you didn’t call the spirits to you through your paintings? And the reason you won’t sell any isn’t because their lives are tied to the physical safety of their paintings?”
“No, they’re simply portraits of beings who already exist.”
“Marisa—” Leah said. “You’ve seen this before?”
Marisa nodded. “You know Isabelle’s daughter Izzy? And her girlfriend Kathy? Izzy’s not Isabelle’s daughter. She’s Isabelle when she was twenty-something and her best friend was Kathryn Mully—the writer who killed herself. Both these girls are numena that Isabelle painted into existence. So’s John Sweetwater and about half the people living on Wren Island.”
“What?” Leah said. “You’re saying they’re all…all…”
“Numena. But now that they’ve crossed over, they’re just people. Well, except for some of the faerie creatures she paints.”
Leah bent over with her face in her hands. “I’m going crazy,” she muttered.
“I’d like to meet your friend Isabelle,” Aggie said. “And perhaps some of her friends, too.”
“Isabelle doesn’t travel much,” Marisa said. “Maybe I can put the two of you together on Skype.”
“I don’t know how—”
Marisa didn’t let her finish. “Don’t worry. I can set you up. But the point of all of this is, I thought you were like Isabelle.”
“You came here to have me bring someone across through a painting? But why? Couldn’t your friend Isabelle do it for you?”
“No, no. I thought you’d already done it with someone. Leah, show her the picture.”
Leah pulled out a printed copy of the image that had been emailed to her, and passed it over to Aggie.
“That’s one of your paintings, isn’t it?” she said.
Aggie nodded. “Where did you get this?”
“Somebody emailed it to me yesterday.” She paused before adding, “It wasn’t you?”
Aggie shook her head.
“Because the thing is,” Marisa said, “the man in that painting looks just like a musician named Jackson Cole, who’s been presumed dead. He disappeared after a plane crash around forty years ago. Or rather, the painting looks like Cole might if he’d been alive all these years.”
“I don’t know anyone named Jackson Cole.”
“Used to play in the Diesel Rats?” Marisa tried. “They were huge back then.”
“I don’t really follow popular music—never have.”
“But it is your painting?”
Aggie glanced at the picture again and nodded.
“Then, if you didn’t send it to Leah, who did?”
Aggie lifted her gaze. She looked past them, out the window to her house.
“I think I have an idea,” she said.