The Kachina Doll Mystery Page 3

  “I don’t see how a few childish pranks could cause so much trouble,” Nancy said, her mind on the shy smile and almond eyes of the boy who’d ridden in on the pinto. He’d seemed younger than twelve and quite defenseless.

  “That filly is worth a great deal of money,” Mr. Henry told her. “And there have been a number of other things. We’ve been lucky with the fires so far, but he could light up a barn or a house next, and that wouldn’t be so easy for us to ignore.”

  Heather gasped and Nancy could see her paling at the man’s accusing tone, but before she could say anything, Chuck came into the hall. A moment later, the rancher excused himself to talk to Chuck about some ranch business.

  Heather turned back to the wall paintings with a sigh. “They really are beautiful, aren’t they?” she said. “Someone suggested that we might be able to get rid of the ghost by painting over them, but I couldn’t do that.”

  “Of course not,” Bess agreed. “They are real art treasures.”

  “Which Kachinas are they?” Nancy asked. “I mean, what do they represent?”

  Heather smiled and pointed out the feather-headdressed, red, white, and yellow Cloud Kachina; the feather-winged Eagle Kachina; the white-furred Bear Kachina; and finally a blue-masked, white-bodied creature known as the Prickly Pear Cactus Kachina. “The other three we haven’t identified yet,” she finished. “Maria says she thinks the one on the end is a Mud-head, but the other two even she doesn’t recognize.”

  “They certainly are exotic,” Nancy observed, standing in front of one of the unidentified figures, which sported a feathery topknot and a very carefully patterned body. “Your guests are going to love them.”

  “I hope so,” Heather said with a smile. “Especially you three, since your rooms are right along this hall.” She paused, then added, “I hope you and George don’t mind sharing a room, Bess. We don’t have all our furniture yet.”

  “Just being here is wonderful,” Bess and George assured Heather as she pointed to the two doors that opened just beyond the bend in the hall.

  “The front of the house is devoted to the lobby area and the resort office,” Heather explained, “so all the bedrooms open off this hall. Grandfather, Chuck, and I have rooms at the other end at the moment, though we hope eventually to move upstairs and convert all the rooms down here for our guests. ”

  “What about the Tomiches?” Nancy asked. “Do they live at the resort?

  “Yes, on the second floor, as a matter of fact. Ward and Chuck have been working on the modernization up there in the evenings. They have one end fixed, but that’s all.”

  “Where did your grandfather see the Kachina spirit?” Nancy inquired, her mind returning to the reason for her visit.

  Heather frowned. “Well, he said he came out of his room and started along the hall, but he’d only taken a few steps when he saw this thing in the moonlight. He thought it was an intruder, so he went down the hall in a hurry, then he caught his foot and ... well, he said that the figure just seemed to fade into the wall about there.” She indicated the Kachina that had attracted Nancy’s eye.

  Nancy stared at the painting for a moment, wishing that the masked face could give her some kind of clue. But the old paint was uninformative, and, after another moment, she shrugged and allowed herself to be directed to her room.

  “I suppose if we’re going to unpack before dinner, we’d better get started,” she murmured as she stepped through the door which bore a freshly painted number on it.

  “Don’t feel rushed,” Heather told them all. “We’re just family, so Maria can hold dinner if you want to nap or something. ”

  “Oh, no,” Bess said quickly, “don’t have her do that, not the way everything smelled in the kitchen. It must be nearly ready.”

  Nancy laughed as she closed her door and turned her attention to her suitcases, which Chuck had placed on the bench at the foot of her double bed. She got her keys out and started to open the large one first, anxious to hang her clothes in the closet so the wrinkles would come out. However, when she tried to unlock the bag, she found that it was already unlocked.

  Could she have forgotten to lock it? Nancy asked herself as she opened the case. They had been rushed, but still.... Frowning, she began taking things out, trying hard to remember everything she’d packed and the exact order it had been put in.

  Everything seemed all right, but when she reached for her new, blue knit shirt, the wrinkle in it moved and she jerked her hand back quickly. Nothing happened, so she carefully picked up one of the clothes hangers from the bed and lightly touched the “wrinkle.” It moved suddenly, and to her horror, a brownish scorpion nearly two-and-a-half inches long scuttled out of her shirt, its deadly tail moving angrily!

  5

  A Scary Apparition

  Nancy shrieked when she saw the ugly scorpion, but managed to control her nerves enough to use one of her unpacked riding boots to kill the creature before it could find a new hiding place. Only then did she catch her breath and really look at it.

  “How did you get in that suitcase?” she asked the dead scorpion. “You didn’t come with me from River Heights, that’s for sure.”

  She picked up the vicious creature, with its poisonous stinger, and disposed of it in the corner wastebasket. Nancy looked around, sighing. It was possible that her unlocked case could have come open in the luggage area of the airport, or even here, but somehow she didn’t think so. She had a disturbing feeling that someone had used the scorpion in another attempt to get rid of her. Was it the driver of the car that had forced them off the road when they arrived? The person who sent her the threatening note in River Heights?

  In any case, her enemy obviously knew she had been invited by Heather and Chuck before she left home, and was desperately trying to keep her from solving the mystery. But who could it be? And what was his or her motive?

  Nancy sighed. “This is getting stranger every minute,” she said to herself. “And certainly more dangerous!”

  Chuck and Heather seemed unsurprised when she casually mentioned the scorpion as they sat in the rear parlor after dinner.

  “We don’t see as many of them now as we did when we first moved in,” Heather said, “but they are still around. It’s wise to empty your shoes before you put them on in the morning, just to be sure.”

  “Ugh,” Bess said with a shudder. “How could you do anything but scream, Nancy? I’d be scared to death if I found one.”

  “Then it’s a good thing that we’re sharing a room,” George told Bess. “While you are screaming, the scorpion would just find a new place to hide.”

  “I don’t think you’ll need to worry, Bess,” Chuck said with a smile. “We had the exterminator out last week, so that little devil probably came from outside the house.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Nancy said, then showed them the letter she’d received the day before.

  Chuck looked grave after he finished reading it. “Now I’m beginning to think that scorpion was planted,” he said. “And you probably are convinced that the car accident yesterday was deliberate, too.”

  Nancy shrugged. “I honestly don’t know what to think,” she admitted.

  After a few moments of silence, the talk turned to other subjects, and soon the long day’s excitement began to catch up with the three girls. Nancy was glad when Heather suggested that they make it an early evening. “I’ve invited some of our friends over for a barbecue tomorrow night,” she explained. “I thought you might enjoy having a campfire in the desert.”

  “That sounds like fun,” George and Nancy chorused.

  “Without scorpions,” Chuck told Bess, and they all laughed as the pretty blonde added her voice enthusiastically to theirs.

  In spite of her weariness, Nancy found sleep difficult as she watched the moonlight tracing the delicate limbs of a palo verde tree which grew just beyond the single window of her room. She’d seen no more of Ngyun Little Feather, since he and the Tomiches ate in the kitchen rather tha
n the dining room, but she found it hard to believe that the boy was a troublemaker. However, she could see no reason for anyone to falsely accuse Ngyun of starting fires or stealing the Appaloosa filly.

  The Kachina paintings troubled her, too. They were beautiful and strangely fascinating, with their alien colors and forms. They were perfect for the resort, and as she’d stood in front of them, she’d felt no sensation of haunting or menace, only a kind of sadness.

  Though she wasn’t aware of drifting into sleep, Nancy knew as soon as she opened her eyes that a great deal of time had passed, for the moonlight no longer played brightly through her deep window. For a moment, she just lay still, then the sound came again and she sat up. Someone was out in the hall!

  She slipped her feet into her shoes, trying not to think of scorpions, then pulled on her robe as she moved to the door, opening it as quietly as she could. The hall, which stretched in both directions, was dimly lit by the moonlight that came in the windows at each end, but shadows lay heavy along the inner walls and in the doorways that opened off it.

  Suddenly, something moved out of the shadows at the near end of the hall and seemed to be coming toward Nancy. Sure that it was an intruder, Nancy stepped back into her room, closing the door to a crack, then peeping out. Only when the apparition reached her did she realize that it was no human form.

  The Kachina drifted by, moving in and out of the shadows, seeming unaware of Nancy’s eyes. Fearfully, she eased her door open and stepped out into the hall, determined to follow the creature and perhaps learn if it was real or part of a nightmare. Just then, the apparition reached the turn in the hall, and Nancy had to hurry to keep it in sight.

  Her feet made soft sounds on the bare floor, but she wasn’t really conscious of anything except following the Kachina. Then, suddenly, someone was coming down the stairs and a switch clicked, flooding the hall with light. The Kachina whirled for a moment, then disappeared into the wall.

  “Miss Drew?” Maria Tomiche came up to her. “I thought I heard someone down here. I hope I didn’t frighten you. ”

  “Call me Nancy, please,” Nancy told her, forcing a smile though her heart was still pounding with excitement from following the Kachina.

  “Were you looking for something?” the Indian woman asked.

  Nancy peered around, suddenly aware that there were people sleeping behind the doors along the hall. “Could we go to the kitchen and talk?” she whispered. “I don’t want to wake the others.”

  “Of course. Would you like some tea? I mix my own herbal blend and came down to have a cup myself. I often do when I can’t sleep. ”

  “I definitely could use a cup of tea,” Nancy assured her, shivering now in reaction to her spooky vision. “I think I’ve just seen the Kachina ghost.”

  Maria nodded, seeming unsurprised as she stepped through the door that led into the kitchen. She busied herself making two cups of steaming, fragrant tea, added a small plate of pecan-rich cookies, then settled herself at the kitchen table with Nancy.

  “You’ve seen the Kachina yourself, haven’t you?” Nancy asked.

  Maria nodded. “Its spirit has lived here for years, but it mostly appears when the moon is full, as it was last night and is tonight.”

  “You’re not afraid of it?”

  Maria shook her head. “The Kachinas are sacred to my people, so why should I be afraid? Besides, it has done no harm here. Mr. McGuire fell because he caught his foot in one of the small rugs, that’s all. ”

  “Do you know why the Kachinas haunt this house?” Nancy asked, suddenly sure that this quiet woman could offer her some valuable clues to the mystery she’d come to unravel.

  Maria sipped her tea for a moment, then sighed. “I think it has to do with the man who built this house and the way he died,” she replied.

  “Do you know the story?”

  “I know all the stories that were told,” Maria answered evasively.

  “But you don’t believe them?”

  Maria shrugged. “Big Jake Harris built this house and painted all the Kachinas. He was a friend of the Indians and he honored our ways. There was no reason for his death to be blamed on the old tribal chiefs. They wouldn’t have scared him to death.”

  “What do you mean?” Nancy asked, intrigued by the woman’s words. “Who said that’s what happened?”

  Maria looked at her suspiciously, then seemed to decide that Nancy was honestly interested. “The story is that Big Jake took something valuable from the Hopi, a treasure of some sort, and hid it in this house. When they came to reclaim it, he refused to give it up, so they threatened to burn him out or maybe they attacked the house or something. Anyway, he was a frail, old man and the fear was too much for him. He was found dead in the hall near that strange middle Kachina. ”

  Nancy nodded, realizing that Maria must mean the spot where her apparition had disappeared. “But you don’t believe that’s what happened, do you?” she asked.

  “My great-grandfather was among the chiefs blamed for Jake Harris’s death. They were driven out of the area and died in exile in Mexico. My great-grandmother mourned him for years. She always swore that he and Jake Harris were old friends, that Jake would never have taken their treasure, so there was no reason for them to have frightened him to death.”

  “Do you think that’s why the Kachina spirit still haunts this house?”

  Maria nodded. “My great-grandfather and several of the other chiefs died shamed and alone for something they didn’t do.”

  “Why do other people say the spirit appears?” Nancy asked, wanting to get the whole story.

  “They say that the chiefs put a curse on this house because Jake Harris had hidden their treasure and they couldn’t find it even after he was dead,” Maria explained emotionlessly.

  Nancy stared at Maria in surprise. “You mean that the treasure is still here?”

  6

  First Clue

  Maria shrugged. “That’s the story most people believe.”

  “But you don’t?”

  “People used to search this house and the surrounding area. I’ve heard stories about it ever since I was a little girl. No one ever found any treasure.” Maria got to her feet briskly. “Would you like more tea?”

  Nancy drained her cup, then shook her head. “It’s delicious, but I think I should be getting back to bed. Thank you for telling me about the house and the Kachina spirit. You have given me plenty to think about. ”

  “I just hope it helps you solve the mystery here so the McGuires can go on with the resort.” Maria’s expression softened. “And thank you for saying that you’d try to help Ngyun. He’s really a very good boy, Miss Drew—Nancy. I just can’t believe he’d do anything that would get him sent away from here. He wants so much to be like his father.”

  “I’ll do my best on both,” Nancy assured her, then made her way back through the now empty and quiet hall to her own peaceful room.

  After her disturbing night, Nancy slept later than was her habit. When she’d washed and dressed in jeans and a bright, plaid Western shirt, she went outside to find Bess, George, and Heather still sitting around a table in the back garden. All three were sipping some of Maria’s herb tea, their breakfast dishes empty on the table before them.

  “We got too hungry to wait,” Bess told her. “Anyway, we wanted you to sleep late. Maria told us that you had some excitement last night, so you would be tired.”

  “Did she tell you what happened?” Nancy asked, feeling rather strange about confessing to what she’d seen in the shadowy hall. It had been believable in the light of the full moon, but now that the bright Arizona sun was shining and the bees were buzzing around the citrus blossoms, it seemed more like a dream.

  “She just said you’d seen something in the hall and had tea with her before going back to bed,” George answered, her eyes full of curiosity.

  “Was it the Kachina ghost?” Heather asked as Maria came out with an omelet and a large glass of fresh-squeezed o
range juice for Nancy.

  Nancy recounted her night’s adventures carefully, starting with the sound she’d heard in the hall. “At the time, I thought it must be an intruder,” she said, “but now I realize that it was more like distant voices singing or chanting.”

  “An Indian chant?” George asked.

  “It could have been,” Nancy admitted.

  “I wouldn’t have followed it out into the hall,” Bess murmured, shivering. “That’s so spooky.”

  “What do you think it means?” Heather asked.

  Nancy repeated the two stories that Maria had told her about the haunting of Kachina House.

  Heather nodded. “I’ve heard both theories,” she admitted. “But what does it help? Either way, we still have a ghost and we can’t open our doors to guests till we get rid of it.” Her voice was filled with despair. “I guess we should have sold the place to Mr. Henry when he offered to buy it last fall.”

  “Someone wanted it?” George asked. “You didn’t tell us that.”

  “Oh, he wasn’t interested in the old house, just the land. He has cattle, and he was going to expand his herd. We’d already done quite a bit of work on the house, though, so we didn’t want to give up the resort idea.”

  “You sound as though you might change your mind now,” Nancy observed, feeling sorry for the girl.

  Heather’s green eyes filled with tears. “I love it here, ghost and all, but if we can’t open the resort, we’ll have to sell. Grandfather invested everything we have in it. But we won’t be able to maintain it, unless we make money, and we’ll have to sell at a loss.”

  “Nancy won’t let that happen,” George assured her. “She’ll find a way to stop the ghost.”

  The young detective ate her delicately spiced omelet without speaking, hoping fervently that she could justify her old friend’s confidence. If the ghost had been simply someone’s trickery, she would have felt surer of her next move. But last night’s apparition was something she’d never encountered before, and she wasn’t exactly sure what to do next.