It was as dry as always at Acoma Pueblo that afternoon as Caridad and Esmeralda made their way up to Sky City, the oldest city in all of the Americas that has had constant habitation. They were allowed to drive up because Esmeralda’s grandmother lived there. Esmeralda’s baby sister would one day inherit the little adobe which her grandmother had helped rebuild as only a thousand-year-old house would need to be, and which Esmeralda’s baby sister also was having to mud-plaster those days.

Although the baby sister was not there that day when the two women arrived, her little son was, playing outside with a bike that had no foot pedals. After being introduced to the grandmother, Caridad waited for Esmeralda outside the door, to gave Esmeralda some privacy to talk, as she figured that was what she went to do.

Caridad, meanwhile, had been aware of Francisco’s truck behind them—it had become like a constant companion to her own for months—as they drove up to Acoma. He could not come up the mesa in his truck like they had in theirs, however, because outsiders were not allowed to drive up uninvited.

She looked around. It wasn’t easy to hide up there. As far as she could see there was only one puny tree under which an old station wagon was parked—the only vehicle that would probably not get baked by the sun that day. The Sky City tour bus was pulled up in front of the big church. There was a little tour group being led by a young woman. Caridad squinted to see if Francisco was among them, but didn’t spot him, shadow that he was and more elusive than a strand of hair.

There were just some things even a clairvoyant couldn’t see, couldn’t put her ultra-perceptive finger on, so to speak. Caridad had prayed for clarity. She stared for hours into a clear jar as doña Felicia had instructed her to do when she was having such difficulties. She went into trances with sweetgrass, and still there was something opaque when it came to Francisco.

She had even consulted with a famous channeler who was living in Santa Fe, an Anglo woman from New York who claimed to speak to a two-thousand-year-old spirit, but neither the New Yorker nor the two-thousand-year-old spirit had ever heard of Francisco el Penitente. In fact, neither of them even knew what a penitente was. “Where did you say you were from?” Caridad asked the channeler.

“Which one of us?” the channeler asked.

“Either one,” Caridad said.

“Long Island and Egypt, respectively,” the woman answered in a kind of strange stereophonic-sounding voice. Caridad winced. She didn’t know very much about either of those two places, but she was pretty much convinced then and there that she had just wasted seventy-five hard-earned dollars and went back home to consult with her own inner voices.