Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [1]
The sun was high in the sky when Benny spotted the cooler. A big blue-and-white Coleman ice chest—a relatively new one, from the looks of it—lay hidden just inside the yawning opening to a culvert that ran under the highway. As soon as he saw it, Benny was sure he knew what had happened. It had probably blown out of the back of a pickup driven by some Anglo returning from a trip to Rocky Point in Old Mexico. There was always a chance that the cooler would be full of once frozen but now rotting fish, but if Benny was lucky—really lucky—maybe there’d be beer in the cooler as well. Warm beer was better than no beer.
Dropping his bag, Benny scrambled down the edge of the wash. Despite his big belly, he moved with surprising speed and agility. He needed to beat Alvin to the prize. If there were two beers, Benny might be willing to share. But if there was only one? Too bad for Alvin.
Panting, Benny grabbed the handle. The cooler was surprisingly heavy. Grunting with effort, Benny pulled it out of the culvert and off to one side so it would be out of Alvin’s line of vision once he reached the far end of the culvert. Only when the ice chest was safely concealed from Alvin’s view did Benny reach down to unfasten the lid. As soon as he did so, a cloud of unbearable stench exploded into the air. Covering his mouth and nose, Benny staggered away from the cooler. In his rush, he stumbled and fell. His hand banged hard against the top of the cooler, knocking the lid wide open. The jarring blow caused the contents of the cooler to shift and something wet and foul slopped onto Benny’s long-sleeved shirt.
The smell alone was enough to stun him. Benny tried to control his gag reflex long enough to push himself away. It was then, as he attempted to regain his feet, that he saw her. A face stared out at him. Strands of long black hair floated on top of a vile-smelling stew.
Groaning in horror, Benny lurched away. He managed only a few steps before he fell once again. He dropped heavily to the ground and vomited uncontrollably into the sand. When the spasms finally left him, Benny lay there, exhausted and unable to move, wondering if he would ever breathe again without the heavy odor of rotting flesh permeating his lungs.
Less than two years after that November afternoon, Benny Gutierrez was dead at age thirty-eight—a victim of cirrhosis of the liver and of acute alcohol poisoning. That was what his medical chart said, and it was true.
But had anyone bothered to consult a medicine man—a siwani, they might have learned something else was wrong. A medicine man could have told them that Benny’s spirit had been infected by a ghost, a kokoi—by the spirit of someone who was dead. And that was true as well. Even as Benny lay dying in a spotlessly clean hospital bed, the awful smell from the murdered girl in the cooler lingered in his wavering senses. Doreen and Robert were there with him, and so was Esther, but the last thing Benny saw, swimming hazily before his eyes as he drifted into unconsciousness for the last time, was that terrible face staring blindly up at him from deep inside a blue-and-white Coleman cooler.
It was only when Benny Gutierrez was dead, too, that he managed to escape the girl in the box. Only then did she finally set him free.
One
They say it happened long ago that I’itoi, Elder Brother, came to a village to see if his Desert People had enough water after the long summer heat.
As he walked along he heard a crowd of Indian children playing. He stopped for a while and watched them, listening to the music of their voices and laughter. About that time Elder Brother saw an old woman carrying a heavy load of wood for her cooking fire. Old Woman was not as happy and carefree as the children. She had no energy to sing or play.
About