Read Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 12] for Free Online Page B

us if it was the right size, and if you thought it was your husband’s stuff.”
    “Equipment?” She was standing beside a table, her hand on it. The light slanting through windows on each side of the fireplace illuminated her face. It was a small, narrow face framed by light brown hair, the jaw muscles tight, the expression tense. Middle thirties, Chee guessed. Slender, perfectly built, luminous green eyes, the sort of classic beauty that survived sun, wind, and hard winters and didn’t seem to require the disguise of makeup. But today she looked tired. He thought of a description Finch had applied to a woman they both knew: “Been rode hard and put up wet.”
    Mrs. Breedlove was waiting for an answer, her green eyes fixed on his face.
    “Mountain climbing equipment,” Chee said. “I understand the skeleton was in a cleft down the face of a cliff. Presumably, the man had fallen.”
    Mrs. Breedlove closed her eyes and bent slightly forward with her hips against the table.
    Chee rose. “Are you all right?”
    “All right,” she said, but she put a hand against the table to support herself.
    “Would you like to sit down? A drink of water?”
    “Why do you think it’s Hal?” Her eyes were still closed.
    “He’s been missing for eleven years. And we’re told he was a mountain climber. Is that correct?”
    “He was. He loved the mountains.”
    “This man was about five feet nine inches tall,” Chee said. “The coroner estimated he would have weighed about one hundred and fifty pounds. He had perfect teeth. He had rather long fingers and—”
    “Hal was about five eight, I’d say. He was slender, muscular. An athlete. I think he weighed about a hundred and sixty. He was worried about gaining weight.” She produced a weak smile. “Around the belt line. Before we went on that trip, I let out his suit pants to give him another inch.”
    “He’d had a broken nose,” Chee continued. “Healed. The doctor said it probably happened when he was an adolescent. And a broken wrist. He said that was more recent.”
    Mrs. Breedlove sighed. “The nose was from playing fraternity football, or whatever the boys play at Dartmouth. And the wrist when a horse threw him after we were married.”
    Chee opened the satchel, extracted the climbing equipment, and stacked it on the coffee table. There wasn’t much: a nylon belt harness, the ragged remains of a nylon jacket, even more fragmentary remains of trousers and shirt, a pair of narrow shoes with soles of soft, smooth rubber, a little rock hammer, three pitons, and a couple of steel gadgets that Chee presumed were used somehow for controlling rope slippage.
    When he glanced up, Mrs. Breedlove was staring at them, her face white. She turned away, facing the window but looking at nothing except some memory.
    “I thought about Hal when I saw the piece the paper had on the skeleton,” she said. “Eldon and I talked about it at supper that night. He thought the same thing I did. We decided it couldn’t be Hal.” She attempted a smile. “He was always into derring-do stuff. But he wouldn’t try to climb Ship Rock alone. Nobody would. That would be insane. Two great rock men were killed on it, and they were climbing with teams of experienced experts.”
    She paused. Listening. The sound of a car engine came through the window. “That was before the Navajos banned climbing,” she added.
    “Are you a climber?”
    “When I was younger,” she said. “When Hal used to come out, Eldon started teaching him to climb. Hal and his cousin George. Sometimes I would go along and they taught me.”
    “How about Ship Rock?” Chee asked. “Did you ever climb it?”
    She studied him. “The tribe prohibited that a long time ago. Before I was big enough to climb anything.”
    Chee smiled. “But some people still climbed it. Quite a few, from what I hear. And there’s not actually a tribal ordinance against it. It’s just that the tribe stopped issuing those ‘back country’