“She’s my mother’s sister, which makes her my ‘little mother,’ ” Chee said. “A real tiger.”

“You’re not playing the game,” Mary Landon said. “I told you about me. You’re just telling me about your family.”

The statement surprised Chee. One defined himself by his family. How else? And then it occurred to him that white people didn’t. They identified themselves by what they had done as individuals. He added sugar to his coffee, thinking about it.

“That’s the way we play the game. If I was introducing you to Navajos, I wouldn’t say, ‘This is Mary Landon, who teaches at Crownpoint,’ and so forth. I’d say, “This woman is a member of…’ – your mother’s family, and your father’s family – and I’d tell about your uncles and aunts, so everyone would know just exactly where you fit in with the people around you.”

“This woman’?” Mary Landon asked. “You wouldn’t tell them my name?”

“That would be rude. Now more people have English names, but among traditional Navajos it’s very impolite to say someone’s name in their presence. Names are just reference words, when the person’s not there.”

Mary Landon looked incredulous. “I think that’s…” She stopped.

“Silly?” Chee asked. “You have to understand the system. Our real names are secret. We call them war names. Somebody very close to you in the family names you when you’re little. Something that fits your personality, if possible. Not more than a half-dozen people are even going to know it. It’s used for ceremonial purposes: if a girl is having her kinaalda – her puberty ceremony – or if you’re having a sing done for you. Then, as you grow, people give you nicknames to refer to you. Like ‘Cry Baby,’ and ‘Hard Runner,’ or maybe ‘Long Hands’ or ‘Ugly.’ ” Chee laughed. “I’ve got an uncle on my father’s side everybody calls ‘Liar.’ ”

“How about Jim Chee? Isn’t that your real name?”

“Along came the trading posts,” Chee said. “Along came the white man. He had to have a name to write down when one of us pawned our jewelry to him, or got credit for groceries. The traders started formalizing the nicknames, and before long we had to have names on birth certificates, so you got family names, like mine. I’ve had nicknames, too. Two or three. And I’m sure you do, too.”

“Me?” Mary Landon looked surprised.

“How long you been at Crownpoint? Three months? Sure. The people have a name for you by now.”

“Like what?”

“Something that fits. Maybe ‘Pretty Teacher.’ Or ‘Stubborn Girl.’ ” Chee shrugged. “’Blue Eyes.’ ‘Blond Woman.’ ‘Fast Talker.’ Do you want me to find out for you?”

“Sure,” she said. Then, “No, wait. Maybe just forget it. How about you? What do they call you?”

“Here? I don’t know. When I was at Rough Rock they used to call me…” He paused, and then said the word carefully in Navajo. “It means ‘One Who Studies to Be a Singer.’ ”

“Oh,” Mary Landon said. “Are you?”

“I was,” Chee said. “I guess I still am, in a way. It depends.”

“On what?”

“I applied for admission to the FBI. More or less to see how I’d do. Took the tests. Got interviewed by the screening panel at Albuquerque. Last week I got a letter telling me I’d been accepted. I’m supposed to report to the academy in Virginia. December tenth.”

She looked at him curiously. “So you’re going to be an FBI agent.”

“I don’t know,” Chee said.

“You haven’t decided?”

“What’s the rush? We work on Navajo time.” Even as he said it, the flippancy sounded false. December 10 wasn’t Navajo time. It was four weeks away. A specific, ironclad, unbendable deadline.

“But you can’t be both a Navajo medicine man and an FBI agent?”

“Not really,” Chee said. He wanted to change the subject, wanted not to talk about it. As a matter of fact, you couldn’t be both a Navajo and an FBI agent. You couldn’t be a Navajo away from the People. “By the way,” he said, “thanks for helping with Tomas Charley. I learned what I needed to know. If he told me the truth, that is.”

Mary Landon studied him. Chee remembered, belatedly, what he had told her about why he wanted to find Charley.

“Do people lie a lot in your business?”

The question sounded innocent. And if it was, the answer was yes, a lot of people lie to a policeman. But Chee sensed the barb. And the answer was different.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I did tell his nephew I’d pass on the message about the car. But I also wanted to see him about police business.”

“And you couldn’t tell me that.” It was more a statement than a question, and the proper answer, of course, was “No, I couldn’t.” But Chee sensed the hostility again (or perhaps it could now better be described as a mixture of caution and suspicion), and he was not in the mood to give the proper answer.

“I could tell you, but only if you don’t mind complicated accounts of things that don’t amount to much,” Chee said. “Do you want to hear about it?”

She did. Chee told her about Vines, and Mrs. Vines, and the stolen keepsake box, and Sheriff Gordo Sena, and about the People of Dankness and the disappearing body, and finally about where Tomas Charley had left the box.

“And when you look at it all with a detached view,” Chee said, “you see a Navajo cop simply exercising his curiosity. A crime of no particular importance. A total lack of jurisdiction.”

“But it is curious,” she said. “What do you think happened to Mr. Charley’s father? And what are you going to do next?”

“I don’t know about the body. Probably lost by the bureaucracy somehow and nobody cared enough to find it. As for me, next I’ll go out in the malpais when I have some time and get the box and take a look at those rocks, and then I’ll get the box back to Vines. He says he doesn’t want his box back. But he must want those medals.”

“What will you tell Vines?”

“I won’t. I’ll call the sheriff’s office at Grants and tell them I got an anonymous tip on where the box had been left, and went out and found it, and for them to tell the Vineses to come and get it if they want it back.”

Mary Landon raised her eyebrows and sipped her coffee.

“Okay,” Chee said. “It’s a lie. But how else does Vines get his box back without Charley getting in jail?”

“I can’t think of a way,” she said. “Something else puzzles me. How did Charley know he could trust you?”

Chee shrugged. “Because I look trustworthy?” he asked.

She laughed. “As a matter of fact, you don’t,” she said. “Could I go along when you go hunting the box?”

“Sure,” Chee said. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

The apartments the Crownpoint school district provided for its teachers were a quarter mile beyond the school. The school was dark now, and the parking lot empty except for a single pickup truck. The pickup was a blue Ford 150. Charley’s. Chee slowed his carryall, staring at it.

“Not here,” Mary Landon said. “It’s those apartments up ahead.”

“I know,” Chee said. “I’ll get you home in just a minute.”

He pulled into the parking lot, beside the pickup. “This is Charley’s truck,” he said. “Why would he leave it?”

The truck was locked. Frost was turning the windshield opaque. Chee walked around it, shone his flashlight into the cab, looking for anything that would answer that question. He didn’t find it.