Gallagher walked past him into the ruin. He glanced at the blueprints, then into the next room at the cot, the bedroll. Raglan walked out on the mesa. There was a confusion of tracks, blurred, nothing definite. Somebody had been here. He said as much.
“You could have made those tracks,” Gallagher said, “just gathering wood. Or Hokart could have. There hasn’t been any rain or high winds to wipe them out. They might have been there for weeks.”
“There’d be dust sifted over them.” Raglan walked away several steps. “Gallagher? Take a look at this. Do you think I have feet like that?”
“This” was a large, distinct print of a bare foot, a very large foot.
Gallagher looked at it and was silent. Suddenly he squatted down on his haunches. “I’ll be damned!” he whispered. Then he pointed. “Will you look at that?”
At the end of each toe—and they were well-defined— there was the mark of a claw. Or of a long untrimmed toenail. But sharper, like a claw.
Gallagher stood up and looked around. For a long moment he looked all about and then he said, “She’s gone. Do you reckon those things got her?”
Mike Raglan had been shying away from the idea. “No,” he said, “I don’t know how they could have gotten her without a struggle. She was deathly afraid of them and would never have gone into the dark where they were, and they would have had to go over me to get her.”
“Then where is she?”
Reluctantly, he said. “I think she went away, after they had gone. I think she went because she wanted to, or had to, but of her own volition.”
Gallagher looked at him. “Went where? I told you I was on the road, and I saw nobody. She wouldn’t just wander off into the desert and fall into a canyon, would she?”
“Maybe she went back where she came from. To the Other Side.”
Gallagher stuck his thumbs in his belt. “You on that kick again? I’ve been thinking about that. It’s nonsense. Pure unadulterated nonsense! I don’t buy it.” He paused. “You’re in trouble, Raglan. Maybe what you should do is get on the wire and get yourself a good lawyer. We’ve got two disappearances here, one of them a wealthy man, another a beautiful girl. The only connecting link is you.”
“And the kiva.”
“There’s a lot of kivas.” He glanced around, then said, “Let’s have a look.”
Erik had staked out his rooms, indicating the projected floor plan of the house. Two of the rooms—the large living room and the study—were to have walls of native rock which needed only a little smoothing and shaping. The floor as well would be of natural rock.
Gallagher paused, studying the strings and stakes that marked the layout of the rooms. “Quite a place. You say he was going to build this himself?”
“That was the idea. I suspect he might have called somebody in to do the plumbing and the wiring.”
“Away out here,” Gallagher commented, “he wasn’t going to have many visitors.”
“He didn’t want them. Erik had an apartment in New York, beautiful place, but he wasn’t social. He had a few friends, mostly people he met in a business way. He wanted time to think, to be away from the telephone.”
Gallagher looked around again. “Everywhere he looked,” he said, “he’d have a view. It would be something to wake up to, I’ll give him that.” He paused again. “He have any family? Any heirs?”
“Nobody I know of, but there must have been somebody. He wasn’t a talkative person. Not about personal affairs.”
“Where was he from?”
“I’ve no idea. He was an American, I am sure of that, and I believe his ancestry was Swiss, but I can’t be sure. Like I said, he didn’t talk.”
“A kind of a mystery man?”
“I never thought of him that way. He never seemed to be mysterious—just a quiet sort who minded his own affairs and made a mint of money doing it.”
Gallagher glanced toward where the kiva lay but made no move toward it. “Odd,” he said, “you being the one he sent for when he was in trouble, yet you know nothing about him.”
Raglan shrugged, disturbed in spite of himself. “He thought he was calling an expert. When your plumbing goes haywire you call a plumber. If you aren’t feeling well, you call a doctor. Something strange was happening, so he called me.”
“Makes sense,” Gallagher agreed. “This place here”—he waved a hand—”beautiful place, all right, but what about water?”
“What?”
“Where was he going to get water for the house? Of course, if money was no object …”
“It wasn’t.”
“Look,” Gallagher said, “you’ve told me quite a story, you and the missing girl, but all I’ve got is a burned-out cafe that seems to have been arson. I’ve got a Jeep, and you, and I can’t connect you to the cafe. Not yet, at least.”
“Me? Why would I burn it?”
“That I ask myself. But I am asking myself a lot of questions and none of the answers make sense. If the folks around here even guessed at some of what I’ve been thinking they’d run me out of office.
“Hokart is missing. Now the girl is missing, too. Two missing people and a fire.” He paused. “How do we know this isn’t aimed at you?”
Astonished, Raglan stared at Gallagher. “At me? How? And for what reason?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know anything and I’m reaching. Hokart have any reason to want to get rid of you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“He invited you out here. Asked for your help, you say. Then he doesn’t show up and there’s some cock-an’-bull story about other dimensions, parallel worlds, and all that. There’s a building burned and Hokart disappears, leaving nothing behind but a Jeep and what you see here. Then that Kawasi disappears when you are alone with her. Something about this smells to high heaven.”
He walked back to the ruin and stopped in front of the blueprints. “I’m fishing,” he said irritably. “I just don’t have anything that makes sense. For all I know, you could have murdered both of them.”
“I’d no reason to kill Erik and nothing to gain by it, and if I was going to start killing, it wouldn’t be a beautiful woman. There’s never enough of them around.”
“I grant you that.” Gallagher was studying the circle where the kiva would have been added to the house Erik had planned. “Fits, all right. Suppose he could have dreamed it? I’ve heard stories of men going to sleep and waking up with answers. Maybe this was like that.”
“He didn’t know the kiva was there—nobody did.”
“Any other ruins around?”
“In the canyon over there. He told me there were a couple of rock shelters for storing grain. And, of course, back up the canyon there are two or three ruins, one of them near a spring.”
“I know about them. Been there a time or two.” Gallagher walked out and looked down the mesa. “Odd. It does look like it had been cultivated at one time.”
“The Anasazi planted crops on the mesas but I’ve never seen one like this. It’s different, somehow.”
Gallagher took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ve got to look at this every which way,” he said, almost as if thinking aloud. “I’m going to run a check on Hokart. I want to know who he was and where he came from.” He stared at Raglan. “That goes for you, too.”
“Fine with me. As for Hokart, I doubt if you will find much.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Can’t leave anything to chance. Everything a man does is rooted in his past somehow. If we check him out, something may turn up.”
“Let’s take a look at the kiva.”
Gallagher shook his head. “Wait. I want to think this out before I start going any further. First, I’d like to find that girl. I need to question her. Should have done it before but you snowed me with all that talk about other dimensions or whatever it was.”
“I think she went back to the Other Side.”
“You implied that. What about your dog? Could he find her?”
“He could, I expect, but they don’t like dogs over there. They don’t understand them. But what about the cliffs? She could have fallen over. It must be five hundred feet down to the river.”
“No tracks I noticed.” He glanced at Raglan. “It was the first thing I thought of, and the tracks would have been plain enough, leading toward the edge.”
He ran his fingers through his hair again. “All right, let’s look at the kiva.”
XIII
Mike Raglan did not move. “Gallagher? You said the Paiutes had a sheet-metal garage? How large?”
Gallagher turned squarely around. “Big. Big enough for four cars, but they have sort of a workshop in one corner.”