Free The Visitant: Book I of the Anasazi Mysteries by W. Michael Gear, Kathleen O’Neal Gear Page A

enormous mounds that bordered the road. Snow covered the tools. She kicked them to knock it lose, and selected a good fire-hardened chokecherry digging stick.
    As she walked back out into the sunlight, the Singing started again.
    The melody rose into the cold air like sad wings.
     
    MAGGIE WALKING HAWK TAYLOR SQUINTED AS THE HEADLIGHTS of her Park Service truck lit the narrow greasewood trail. For a moment, the brush seemed alive, reaching out to her with spindly arms, then it recoiled as the truck rolled by. Out here, the Ancient Ones were not dead. They peered through the veil of time with little effort, examining the curious ways of modern people.
    The first time she had felt them was eight years ago. Fresh out of the university, she’d come to Chaco Canyon as a Park Service summer temporary. She’d walked down to the great kiva at Casa Rinconada and heard flute music. The park closed at sunset. Tourists were prohibited in the ruins after dark. With her ticket book in hand, she’d sneaked silently into the giant subterranean ceremonial chamber, ready to write a citation.
    She had flicked the big black maglight on and seen no one. The place stood empty, the stones bathed in the moonlight.
    She had taken a deep breath, turned the flashlight off, and leaned
against the cool stone, head back, to look up at the moon. She would have sworn she’d heard flute music. Like something Carlos Nakai would play.
    Her soul responded to the chanting before her ears did. Distant, but oh, so close. The harmonic voices rose and fell as if to the metronome of her heart. At the edges of her hearing, the flute lilted.
    A tape player? Something left by a tourist? She had slowly walked around the great kiva.
    In the peaceful moonlight, her grandmother’s words had come back to her: “Only when your soul is still will you hear the Singing.”
    Something electric kindled deep down in her soul. Just beyond the senses she could feel them around her. Ecstasy claimed her, carried her up, as if she were part of the moonlight and the ancient voices that whispered from the time-worn rock.
    How long she stood, caught in that rapture, she did not know.
    But that night had changed her life. For the first time she’d felt whole.
    Maggie guided the truck through a series of dips and thought about her life.
    She’d grown up hard. Her mother died in car wreck when Maggie was eight, killed when she passed out at the wheel after drinking too much whiskey in a Taos bar.
    Her grandmother, Slumber Walking Hawk, and her two aunts, Hail and Sage, had used subtle but effective pressure to raise Maggie traditionally. At the same time, she’d had the radio, television, basketball shoes, and computer game arcades. They had irresistibly drawn her toward the White world, and the University with its challenges and excitements. She’d earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in History, specializing in Native American history.
    She’d met her husband at school. Richard had been tall and dark, with a keen mind and a playful way about him. They’d loved each other for two years, then Maggie had noticed him pulling away, slowly at first. He’d made up excuses to go into town. Later he’d stayed away all night. They’d divorced three years ago, after she discovered he had several other women on the side. She still missed him. She also still longed to kick his ass.
    The lights of her passing truck sparkled on eyes that bounded
away. Deer? Or ghosts? Grandmother Slumber would have told Maggie that the other world had been stirred up by something.
    Maggie smiled. Her “Western” rational side no longer fought with her “Traditional” side. Depending upon the situation, she could play in either court. Her heart and head worked in unison, each knowing when to give way to the other.
    She bounced through a shallow wash and followed the two tracks through a sinuous turn. In her headlights, the reflectors on the archaeologist’s trucks gleamed like little red flames. Then she