Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [24]
“That Fat Crack guy isn’t really a relative of yours,” Leah said. “If he’s diabetic and too stubborn to take his medicine, what are you going to do about it? Sit there and watch him die?”
“Yes,” Lani said. “If that’s what’s needed, it’s exactly what I’ll do—sit and watch him die.” And that was all she said, because even with Leah—even with her very best friend—Lani Walker couldn’t explain it all, couldn’t tell the whole story.
Six
Lani Walker stepped out of the steamy shower and toweled herself dry. As always, she couldn’t ignore the ugly scar Mitch Johnson’s superheated kitchen tongs had seared into her breast six years earlier. Even when the damage was hidden beneath her clothing, for Lani it was always there, just like the broken white marks Andrew Carlisle’s teeth had left on her mother’s breast years earlier.
In a way Lani couldn’t explain—the same way she couldn’t explain what she sometimes saw in the sacred crystals stored in her medicine basket—she knew that the similar scars she and her adoptive mother wore on their bodies made her Diana Ladd’s daughter in a way far more profound than adoption papers from any tribal court. It was also why she kept the scar a secret from her mother as well as from everyone else, including her best friend. It would hurt Diana too much to know about it, and to tell Leah would require too much explanation.
She hadn’t told Fat Crack about it, either, but she was sure he knew. He had come to her every day, bringing her a soothing salve as well as the salt-free evening meal called for during the required sixteen-day fast and purification ceremony—her e lihmhun—after Lani had killed Mitch Johnson. She and Fat Crack had talked about many things during that time. She had used the salve, but they hadn’t talked about it.
On the last night, Fat Crack had brought not only the food for that night’s evening meal, but also his huashomi—the fringed buckskin medicine pouch he had been given years earlier by an old blind medicine man named S’ab Neid Pi Has—Looks at Nothing. After the two of them had eaten together, Fat Crack had taken a stick and drawn a circle around both Lani and himself. Once they were both inside it, he opened the pouch, took out some wiw—wild tobacco—and rolled it into a crude cigarette, which he lit with Looks at Nothing’s old Zippo lighter. Sitting on the mountain with a beloved family friend who was not only the tribal chairman and a respected medicine man but also her godfather, Lani smoked the traditional peace smoke for the first time.
The powerful smoke had left her light-headed, so some of what they said that night had drifted away from her conscious memory in the same way the silvery smoke had dissipated in the cold night air. Other parts of it she remembered clearly.
“What’s the point of the e lihmhun?” she had asked. “Why did I have to stay out here by myself all this time?”
“What have you been doing while you’ve been alone?” Fat Crack asked in return.
“I made a medicine basket,” she said. “I gave Nana Dahd’s medicine basket to Davy because I knew he wanted it. I made a new one of my own.”
“Good,” Fat Crack said. “What else?”
“I kept thinking about the evil Ohb,” she said, “the one who came after me, not the one who came after my mother. And about Oks Gagda—Betraying Woman, the woman who betrayed the Desert People to the Apache and whose spirit stayed in the cave along with her unbroken pottery.”
“What did you decide about Oks Gagda?” Fat Crack asked.
Lani closed her eyes. “When Nana Dahd first told me the story, I thought it was just a ha’icha ahgidathag—a legend—like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.”
“And now?” Fat Crack inquired patiently.
“I know she was a real person once,” Lani replied. “As real as you and me. When I broke her pottery, I freed her spirit and let her go.”
Fat Crack nodded. “That’s true, too. So you’ve put this time to good use.”
“But I still don’t understand why.”
“Because you took a human life,” Fat Crack explained. “Even though it was self-defense and justified, it’s still a terrible thing for