A Thief of Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

Thatcher said, sorting through one of the boxes. “Just jot down some idea of what we have here, which we both know is absolutely nothing that is going to be of any use to us.”
    Leaphorn sat in the swivel chair and looked at the 365-day calendar on the desk. It was turned to October 11. “What day was it they said Dr. Hyphenated left here? Wasn’t it the thirteenth?”
    â€œYeah,” Thatcher said.
    Leaphorn flipped over a page to October 13. “Do it!” was written under the date. He turned the next page. Across this was written: “Away.” The next page held two notes: “Be ready for Lehman. See H. Houk.”
    H. Houk. Would it be Harrison Houk? Maybe. An unusual name, and the man fit the circumstances. Houk would be into everything and the Houk ranch—outside of Bluff and just over the San Juan River from the north side of the reservation—was in the heart of Anasazi ruins country.
    The next page was October 16. It was blank. So was the next page. That took him to Wednesday. Across this was written: “Lehman!!! about 4 P.M . dinner. sauerbraten, etc.”
    Leaphorn thumbed through the pages up to the present. So far Dr. Friedman-Bernal had missed two other appointments. She would miss another one next week. Unless she came home.
    He put down the calendar, walked into the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator, remembering how Emma liked to make sauerbraten. “It’s way too much work,” he would say, which was better than telling her that he really didn’t like it very well. And Emma would say: “No more work than Navajo tacos, and less cholesterol.”
    The smell of soured milk and stale food filled his nostrils. The worse smell came from a transparent ovenware container on the top shelf. It held a Ziploc bag containing what seemed to be a large piece of meat soaking in a reddish brown liquid. Sauerbraten. Leaphorn grimaced, shut the door, and walked back into the room where Thatcher was completing his inventory.
    The sun was on the horizon now, blazing through the window and casting Thatcher’s shadow black against the wallpaper. Leaphorn imagined Eleanor Friedman-Bernal hurrying through the sauerbraten process, getting all those things now shriveled and spoiled lined up on the refrigerator shelves so that fixing dinner for Lehman could be quickly done. But she hadn’t come back to fix that dinner. Why not? Had she gone to see Harrison Houk about a pot? Leaphorn found himself remembering the first, and only, time he’d encountered the man. Years ago. He’d been what? Officer Leaphorn working out of the Kayenta substation, obliquely involved in helping the FBI with the manhunt across San Juan.
    The Houk killings, they had called them. Leaphorn, who forgot little, remembered the names. Della Houk, the mother. Elmore Houk, the brother. Dessie Houk, the sister. Brigham Houk, the killer. Harrison Houk, the father. Harrison Houk had been the survivor. The mourner. Leaphorn remembered him standing on the porch of a stone house, listening intently while the sheriff talked, remembered him climbing up from the river, staggering with fatigue, when it was no longer light enough to search along the bank for Brigham Houk. Or, almost certainly even then, Brigham Houk’s drowned body.
    Would it be this same H. Houk now whom Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had noted on her calendar? Was Harrison Houk some part of the reason for the uneaten banquet spoiling in the refrigerator? To his surprise Joe Leaphorn found his curiosity had returned. What had prevented Eleanor Friedman-Bernal from coming home for her party with a guest whose name deserved three exclamation points? What caused her to miss a dinner she’d worked so hard to prepare?
    Leaphorn walked back into the closet and recovered the album. He flipped through it. Which one was Eleanor Friedman-Bernal? He found a page of what must have been wedding pictures—bride and groom with another