The Shape Shifter by Tony Hillerman

Excellent. He sipped again. “At least it tells me that this isn’t the rug destroyed in that fire.” But as he said it, he was thinking he hadn’t phrased that well. He should have said it proved that the tale-teller rug hadn’t been burned. But actually, it hadn’t really proved anything.
    “Try that fruitcake,” Delos said. “Tommy’s a damn fine cook, and that cake is his pride and joy. Everything’s in it. Apricots, apple, cherries, six kinds of nuts, just the right spices, all measured out just right. World’s best fruitcake.”
    “It sure looks good,” Leaphorn said. “Trouble is, I never did learn to like fruitcake.” He dipped into the nut dish. “I’ll eat more than my share of those walnuts and pecans instead.”
    Delos shrugged. “Well, I’ll guarantee you that you’d THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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    like Tommy’s version of it. I’ll have him make you a little snack package to take with you. If you don’t like it, toss it out for the birds. Now, let’s go see what you think of this famous rug.”
    The rug was displayed on the wall in a little sitting room adjoining the office, mounted on a hardwood frame.
    Leaphorn stared at it, trying to remember the time before the fatal fire when he examined it in Totter’s little gallery. It looked the same. He found the brilliant red spots formed by the liquid taken from the spider’s egg sacs, the little white spots formed by the dove’s feathers, other feathers from birds of different colors, and places where fibers from cactus, snakeweed, and other flora of eastern New Mexico grew. He found the sign of the trickster coyote, and of witchcraft, of the silver dollar, and of other assorted symbols of greed, the ultimate evil in the Dineh value system. And, sickening to Leaphorn, all of that evidence of sorrow and disharmony was surrounded by the enfolding symbol of Rainbow Man, the guardian spirit of Dineh harmony. That made it all an ultimate irony. The weaving, as his grandmother had always told them, was the work of an artist. But it was easy to understand why the shamans who saw it condemned it and put their curse on it.
    Delos was staring at it, too.
    “I always thought it was an interesting work,” he said. “After that picture got published in the magazine, a lawyer I know told me old man Totter had put in an insurance claim on it for forty thousand dollars. Said he finally settled for twelve thousand on the rug. About half of what he got for all the other stuff that he claimed was destroyed in that fire.”

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    TONY HILLERMAN
    “You think this could be a copy of the original?” Leaphorn asked.
    Delos weighed that, staring at the rug. He shook his head. “I have no idea. No way for me to judge.”
    “Well, if my opinion was recognized as expert, I’d tell the insurance company that here it is, the original, right off old man Totter’s wall, that they were swindled. But the statute of limitations on that’s run out long ago, I guess.
    And anyway, old man Totter’s dead.”
    Delos’s eyebrows rose. “Dead?”
    “His obituary was published in the Gallup Independent,” Leaphorn said.
    “Really?” Delos said. “When did that happen?”
    “I don’t know exactly,” Leaphorn said. “I heard they had an obituary item in the paper some years ago.”
    “I never met the man,” Delos said. “But I guess he’d make another case for that rug bringing bad luck with it.”
    “Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “Why don’t you get rid of it?”
    “You know,” Delos said, looking thoughtful, “I hadn’t heard about Totter dying. I think I’ll see what I can get for it.”
    “I would,” Leaphorn said. “I’m not really what you’d call superstitious, but I wouldn’t want it hanging on my wall.”
    Delos laughed, a wry sound. “Think I’ll advertise it in the antique collectors’ journals. List all those semigeno-cidal horrors that inspired those women to weave it, and all the bad luck that has gone with it. That kind of legendary stuff