The Anomaly(19)

“Seriously?”

“I kid you not.”

“Huh. Okay, well, neither are indigenous to the American southwest, can we agree on that?”

“Or were they?” she intoned mysteriously. “Perhaps the authorities are covering up the existence of roving flocks of pandas in American prehistory, the better to keep us woefully ignorant of—”

“Shut up. Because what’s most striking is…hang on.”

I got out my phone and kicked up the Evernote app. It bleated at me about not being able to contact the server. Gemma moved around the fire to see what was on the screen, coming close enough that I was suddenly aware that she was not just someone to be convinced but a woman who possessed physical form.

“Good luck with that,” she said when she saw what I was doing, raising her hands to indicate a dark and signal-less sky.

“I don’t need data. I’ve got thousands of pages of research cached on the phone. And what I need is…this.”

I angled the phone so she could see the picture of Newspaper Rock, then expanded a section. Near the top of the explosion of designs are two figures close together, another a couple of feet above. “Ignore the higher one for now,” I said. “It’s close to pieces of modern graffiti, so it’s possibly not authentic.”

“Goodness,” she said. “You have a dispassionate scientist side, too. You’re full of surprises.”

“Do be quiet. Check out the other two.”

Both drawings showed powerful figures, almost rectangular in the body, with stubby, widely spread legs and arms that were hunched up at the shoulders with big hands pointed down, in classic I’m coming to get you! style.

“Spooky,” she said. “A bear symbol?”

“Maybe,” I allowed. “Except bears don’t have horns. And there aren’t any bears around here. Though maybe they got eaten by the marauding packs of prehistoric pandas.”

She laughed, genuinely—the first time I’d heard her do so. “But wait,” she said. She moved her face closer to the screen, frowning with concentration. “One has curved horns. The other’s are straight, like stylized antlers. And one’s got four fingers on each hand, the other has three.”

“Exactly. They clearly depict the same thing and yet every detail is stylistically different. Not like some we-always-do-it-this-way clan icon, but as if two different guys were trying to draw something as accurately as they were able.”

“Huh,” she said. “But relevant how?”

“Where were all these young Hopi dudes headed, on this sacred pilgrimage, for century after century? A place they called ‘Ongtupqa.’ Now known as…the Grand Canyon.”

“You know a bunch of weird shit, I’ll give you that.”

“It’s a curse. Do you think I enjoy having attractive women thinking I’m a nut?”

She arched an eyebrow. “Are you hitting on me, sir?”

“No,” I said. “If that comes to pass then I’ll make it very obvious, so you may reject me in the proper manner.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “My spider-sense tells me you are no stranger to waking hungover in a tangle of motel sheets and thinking, ‘So who the hell is this chick?’”

“Your spider-sense is misinformed.”

“Seriously?”

“I was married.”

“I know that. But faithful?”

“Yes.”

“Good for you. Since?”

“I went through a phase of wanting to prove I wasn’t dead yet. Sure. But soon realized that wasn’t the way to do it. Not that this is any of your business.”

“It speaks to character.”

“I don’t have any. I seem to remember that being your point yesterday morning.”

“I never said that.”

“It’s what you meant.”

She looked away. “Yes,” she said. “But I have been known to change my mind. Grown-ups do. You’ll learn that one day.”

“Jesus. Was it the chance to be openly hostile to everyone that first drew you to journalism?”

She laughed. “No. That’s just a bonus.”

“Then what?”

“Trying to put the world right.”

“Ah, how noble.”

She made a face. “Yeah, okay, I know how that sounds. Deep background, and long story short. I was late getting ready for school one day. I was fourteen. My dad lost his temper. So I took my own sweet time and picked a pointless fight and I still don’t even have any idea why.”

“You were fourteen. That’s all you need.”

“I guess. Anyway, eventually we leave the house and it’s silence the whole way. Normally Dad would do a reset and ask some question and we’d end up chatting. That morning he didn’t. We got to school. As I’m opening the car door he looks at me.

“‘Know why I wanted to get to school on time today?’ he said. ‘I mean, more than usual?’

“I shook my head, not caring even a tiny bit. ‘I’ve got a meeting,’ he said. ‘Kind of a big deal. I was hoping I could get downtown in time to have a coffee first, take a minute, get myself set. That’s not going to happen now.’