Free Ill Wind by Nevada Barr

it that Anna had never seen before. “Y’all can piss and moan the rest of the night if you want to. I’m going to bed. ’Night Anna.”
    The magnolia blossom apparently had a core of good Southern steel.
    “ ’Night,” Anna returned automatically.
    “Jamie really did see something. She’s got a weird sense like that—you know, ghosts and shit,” Jimmy Russell said somberly.
    The boy was so transparent, if she’d not been tired and cranky, Anna might have found him amusing. Jennifer gone, Russell was trying to re-ingratiate himself with Jamie. Somebody wants to get laid tonight, she thought without charity but with undoubted accuracy.
    Russell fell back on the sofa, his feet splayed out in front of him. Brown cowboy boots. Anna had no trouble picturing him with an implement of destruction. Environmental concerns didn’t seem to be the Kentucky boy’s mainstay but drunken pranks might be. After a six-pack or two Jamie could probably talk him into almost anything.
    Anna began to wonder if all the ghostly theatrics were designed as a cover story for more practical measures taken to protect the Anasazi heritage.
    Jamie interrupted Anna’s train of thought. Stalking to one of the two refrigerators in the kitchen, she took out a Tupperware container and kicked the refrigerator door shut. “Bonegrinder!” As she spat out the word, she jerked open a drawer. In one continuous motion she fished out a serving spoon and popped the plastic lid off the food container.
    “If somebody took one of those huge ditchers and started chewing a trench through Forest Lawn you can bet there’d be an outcry. It just wouldn’t happen.” Ladling a bite of some pasta concoction into her mouth as if to calm her nerves, Jamie went on. “You can’t go around digging up white people’s cemeteries. Oh no. Big sacrilege. They won’t get away with it.” Jamie inhaled another serving-spoonful of pasta. “The whole mesa is sacred ground.”
    Though it had been in vogue at one time, there wasn’t any archaeological evidence to support that theory, but Anna didn’t say anything. She dumped her hat and gun on the dinette table and collapsed in one of the straight-backed chairs.
    “They’re not going to get away with grinding our bones up. Not this time.”
    Anna noted the “our.” She also noted that Jamie’s brown roots were just beginning to show at the base of her part. Raising her eyebrows politely, she invited Jamie to continue ranting.
    “Solstice is coming,” the interpreter said with finality.
    June twenty-first; perhaps that was the proposed date of some planned event. Anna let the idea filter through her mind. Why would Jamie divulge that bit of information in the presence of a law enforcement ranger? Unless, as was often the case in publicity stunts, the law was necessary to provide the drama required to lure out the press. It was illegal for government employees to “tattle” to the press on touchy issues. But bringing down the wrath of the six o’clock news was almost the only way to effect any real change. Like any other entrenched bureaucracy, the Park Service was filled with people passing the buck and covering the hindmost parts of their anatomy.
    “What happens on solstice?” Anna asked.
    “It’s a sacred day to the Old Ones,” Jamie replied, with the air of an insider who only hands out information in pre-approved sound bites.
    “Are they going to hold those Indian dances or something?” Jimmy Russell wanted to know.
    “Not likely. ‘They’ have been dead for seven hundred years,” Anna told him.
    “They might,” Jamie said cryptically.
    “Ah. Chindi.” Anna was suddenly too tired to play along.
    “The spirit veil, ooooo—” Jimmy’s wail ended abruptly at the look on her face.
    “Are you driving, Jimmy?”
    “Yes, ma’am.” He dangled his car keys.
    Anna took them and slipped them into her pocket. If Russell was her chain-swinging eco-terrorist, he was too far gone to do much damage