The Blue Corn Murders Read online

  And that insolent chef!

  Martina reviewed with a sort of pleasure the litany of complaints, large and small, that she had sought out and attended to since she had arrived last night.

  It was unconscionable. It was malfeasance or worse.

  Something had to be done.

  The tourism must cease immediately.

  Naomi must go.

  Martina’s eyes closed as the medicine worked its soft fingers into her brain, easing away the worst of the pain. She disciplined herself, as always, to go to sleep at once. There wouldn’t be much of it; she needed what little she could obtain.

  Her last thought before sleep was that by this time tomorrow, there would be changes.

  “Chef! Chef!”

  The teasing, flattering cry rang out from the table in the dining hall that evening, where five members of the Women’s Hike into History sat together. They applauded, whistled, and shouted irrepressibly, and all of the other tables quickly caught on and joined the ruckus.

  A tiny, dark-haired woman finally came out of the kitchen, wearing tennis shoes, blue jeans, a T-shirt, a white apron, and a grin.

  “You like Uncle Dick’s Chicken?” she asked, prompting hollers of “Great!” and “Yes!” and even more wild clapping. Bingo picked up the ends of her apron skirt, lifted them, and neatly curtsied. Then she flapped the apron at her audience, as if dismissing them, and disappeared back into her domain, leaving even more laughter and bonhomie in her wake.

  “I swear to God, this is the best chicken I ever ate.” Judith Belove looked blissful as she stabbed another tender piece of chicken awash in creamy juice. “What do you think she puts in it?”

  “Milk,” Lillian Kleberg said.

  Judith, Genia, Teri, and Madeline looked at her expectantly, waiting for more. When Lillian noticed, she smiled, and said, “Salt and pepper.”

  “And?” Madeline prodded her.

  “That’s all. I swear. Chicken. Milk. Salt. Pepper. Oh, and a little oil to brown the chicken in.”

  “That can’t be all,” Teri protested. “She may be a culinary genius, but nothing this good can be that simple.”

  Judith laughed at her. “How can you say that, you science teacher, you? Have you forgotten H2O, for instance? Lots of the best things are the simplest.” But then she turned a doubting face to Lillian, too. “Really? That’s all?”

  “Really.” Lillian put down her own fork—reluctantly—and raised her right hand, palm out. “That’s what she claims. I watched her make it one time, and I didn’t see her slip in any secret ingredients.”

  “Yes,” Judith said darkly, “but would you tell us if she did?”

  “It’s all in the wrist.”

  They looked at her inquisitively.

  “When she stirs it.”

  Genia cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “No doubt.”

  “Salt and pepper,” Judith murmured, her eyes glazing over as she chewed. “Amazing.”

  After Madeline and Lillian had departed from the table with their dishes, which looked so clean no one could have told they’d ever held food, Genia asked her remaining tablemates a question.

  “That shampoo bottle you were searching for. What does it look like?”

  Judith looked startled to be reminded of it. “It’s just a little thing, one of those freebies you get when you stay in a hotel. This one says Sheraton, I think.”

  “Holiday Inn,” Teri corrected.

  Her friend looked doubtful. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, ’cause don’t you remember where we got—it?”

  Genia wondered at the sudden guarded expression that crossed Teri’s face between the words got and it.

  “Oh. Right.” Judith nodded seriously at Genia. “Holiday Inn. If you see it anywhere—”

  “I’ll hand it right over.” She couldn’t help but smile when she said it.

  Judith’s expression turned a little sickly, Genia thought, while Teri jumped right in to say, “You probably think we’re making an awful fuss over a bottle of shampoo, but it’s—”

  “A souvenir,” Judith said quickly.

  “Uh-huh. Of our first protest march.”

  “Oh?” Genia said agreeably. “What were you protesting?”

  “French atomic testing in Polynesia,” said Judith. “Japanese whale slaughter in the Pacific,” Teri said.

  Genia nodded, keeping her facial expression carefully neutral. “Both good causes, I’m sure.” It was a struggle not to laugh, so transparent was their prevarication. “And so geographically proximate, latitudinally speaking.” She bit down hard on her lower lip.

  “Well,” Teri said, sounding defensive, while Judith’s face turned a bright sunburn red, “there were two marches on the same weekend.”

  “Educational,” Genia said smoothly, as she pushed back her chair and picked up her dinner tray. “I’m sure.”

  After dinner she went onto the veranda where she joined Madeline and Lillian gazing idly toward the moon rising over Mesa Verde, and soon Teri and Judith joined them, too. Although Madeline now and then had made cutting remarks about Gabriella, who had not come up for dinner, the incident in the canyon seemed to have released some of the natural tension in her. Strangely, at least in Genia’s view, Madeline seemed more relaxed and easier to get along with now, and not quite so quick with her usual, rather off-putting sarcasm. It almost seemed as if she were trying harder to be part of the group.

  Various vehicles were pulling into the gravel driveway.

  Genia was fascinated to see that almost every person who got out of the cars and trucks was obviously of Native American descent. And they were all heading up the stairs, onto the veranda, and into the dining hall. One of them, a short, swarthy middle-aged man wearing a business suit, cowboy boots, and a ponytail, glanced their way, and then smiled.

  “Lillian?” he called out. “Is that you?”

  “Hello there, Robert. How are you?” She stepped forward, holding out her right hand, and he came toward them to shake it. “What’s going on? Some kind of tribal confab?”

  He grinned. “Anytime you get more than one Indian together, it’s a tribal confab. No, this is just the regular monthly meeting of the Medicine Wheel Native American Advisory Council. They tell us what they’re up to out at their digs and what they think they want to do next. We tell them what we think about it.”

  “They’re actually asking your opinions?”

  He shook his head. “I know. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Robert, let me introduce you—”

  There were names, smiles, and handshakes all around. Genia thought Madeline looked defensive, as if the touch of Robert’s hand reminded her of the ancient prints she had touched. It turned out that Lillian had met Robert several times over the many years of her attendance at the Wheel, and that he had long served as an unofficial liaison between the scientists and certain contemporary Pueblos.

  “Now I’m official, I guess,” he said with a slight smile.

  “What’s on the agenda for tonight’s meeting, Robert?”

  “The council itself.” Suddenly his broad, dark-eyed face turned serious. “It may disband.”

  “Why, Robert?” Lillian looked appalled. “After you finally get some influence, why would it disband?”

  “Not everybody likes our connection to this place, Lillian,” he said. “Some of my people.” His smile was unapologetic. “Some of yours.”

  “Don’t call them mine,” she snapped. “Do you mean Martina?”

  He grinned and shrugged, but Genia thought she saw many strong emotions in the dark eyes. “You know Martina, she’s of the old school, Lillian. She thinks the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” When he saw the shocked reaction on Teri’s dark face, he hastened to explain, “I don’t mean she wants to exterminate us, I just mean she’s really only interested in ancient Indians, not living ones. We get in the way of archaeology, don’t we, Lillian? We’re a nuisance, from Martina’s point of view. She liked it bett
er when nobody ever asked us for our opinion about anything.” He sighed. “And frankly some of our people liked it better that way, too, because this way feels to them like compromising something sacred.”

  The parking lot was quieter now, because most of the visitors had gone inside. Robert noticed. “I’d better get in there.” He tipped his head to the other women. “Nice meeting you.”

  They reconvened their study of the rising moon.

  * * *

  In hogan two the trustee carefully raised herself from the bunk bed and reached for her back brace. She was still in great pain, and furious about it. This, too, was all Naomi’s fault! And the fault of the Indians. Because of them, she had to rise and attend a meeting that should have been unnecessary, for an advisory committee that should not even exist. There would be people who would pay for her pain tonight; she looked forward to seeing her own agony mirrored on their faces!

  Nineteen

  When Gabby opened her plastic toiletry kit in the shower, while almost everyone else was at dinner, she discovered an unfamiliar bottle of shampoo.

  Holiday Inn, it advertised, in green letters.

  “Where’d this come from?” she said, and the noise of the running water drowned out her whispery voice.

  She saw that it was one of those free little samples, but she couldn’t remember ever staying in a Holiday Inn, much less packing this bottle in her kit.

  “Oh, well,” she said, knowing life is full of mysteries.

  She unscrewed the top and turned the bottle upside down, but no shampoo trickled out into her palm. Puzzled, she turned it right side up, and peered in. When she saw there was paper inside, she quickly turned off the water. Ignoring the instant chilling she felt, she reached toward the door of the shower stall to dry off her fingers on a towel she’d hung there, and then she retrieved her tweezers from her toiletry kit. Delicately she lifted the paper from inside the bottle and held it up to get a good look at it.

  She saw two little rectangles, each with a cartoon of an owl printed on it.

  “Oh, my God,” Gabby whispered.

  Her fingers now trembling, she put the tiny owl rectangles back into their safe dry cave in the bottle, and then rescrewed the lid on tight. As she put the bottle back into her kit. Gabby felt overwhelmingly excited, even grateful. She’d viewed photographs of such things before, but as a person who didn’t use intoxicants, she’d never actually seen any real ones before this.

  “It’s a gift from the spirit world,” she told herself as she stood shivering. “It’s a sign that I must do a vision quest.” She experienced the cold as her conscious sacrifice, offered in appreciation for this astoundingly unexpected gift of two tabs of LSD.

  She changed into fresh clothing in the empty hogan.

  It was too late for her to get dinner, but she wasn’t hungry anyway, at least not for food. She had originally planned to work this evening on certain story ideas she was developing. It made her laugh to think how much information she could gather by quietly moving around the campus in her moccasins, which some people laughed at her for wearing. And she had the last laugh as well, because of the many things she had overheard just by keeping quiet while all of the other women were talking to each other. She’d caught the two teachers whispering about using drugs, for instance. If they could only see her now! Gabby giggled at the irony of it. But all of the story ideas she had gathered in those secret ways could wait now.

  Eager with anticipation, she grabbed the precious little shampoo bottle and ran out of the hogan toward the woods on the far edge of the meadow below the main lodge.

  In a little circle of aspen trees, she bowed first to the four winds, and then she sprinkled corn pollen on the ground from the soft deerskin pouch she kept hanging around her neck, always close to her heart. She didn’t know exactly what to do by way of ceremony, so she tossed in bits and pieces of ritual she’d heard about from various sources. A snatch of Navajo here, a snippet of Hopi there, a bit of Zuni and even Cherokee. Only when she felt the spirits were satisfied with her seriousness of purpose did she allow herself to unscrew the top to the bottle.

  Carefully she used her tweezers to pull out the contents.

  Gabby would have preferred peyote for its sacred history, but she suspected that the gods prescribed only culturally appropriate drugs. Since she was a young white woman, they must have settled on LSD as the logical hallucinogen of choice.

  She placed the first owl on her tongue.

  “What is she doing?”

  Teri and Judith were still sitting on the veranda railing, facing each other but staring down into the meadow where their group had met for its first Wisdom Circle. It was dark by now; the almost-full moon seemed to turn even the most ordinary objects, like trees and cars, into strange, almost unrecognizable things.

  Genia followed their gaze.

  She saw Gabriella Russell running back and forth from one end of the meadow to the other. Her arms were stretched high, so the fringe on her jacket flew out behind her, and her head was thrown back at an unnatural-looking angle, so her long straight hair trailed down her back like a pale yellow wedding veil. As she ran, she lifted her knees high. It looked comic, absurd. Genia thought it also looked awfully uncomfortable. It made her feel nervous just to see it, because she sensed in it something abnormal and dangerous.

  “Oh, Genia,” Lillian Kleberg said quietly, beside her. “What’s she doing now?”

  “Is it a dance?” Teri asked of no one in particular.

  “Maybe it’s an Indian ritual,” Madeline guessed, and laughed. “Better not be a rain dance.”

  Teri snickered and gave her a kick.

  Beside Genia, Lillian made a small unhappy sound.

  Genia immediately decided the direct approach was the best one.

  “Come on, Lillian. Let’s go down there and ask her.”

  Judith jumped to her feet. “This ought to be good. We’ll go, too.”

  But Lillian stepped out in front of Genia and said forcefully, “No, you won’t, Judy, not if you’re going to make fun of her. If that’s all you have in mind, you stay here.”

  Judith sat back down hard, as if she’d been pushed, looking surprised and abashed. Genia felt a little sorry for her; it was understandable that a person might be tempted to laugh at the herky-jerky scarecrow in the meadow. It looked like a joke, an exaggerated mime act for the entertainment of the observers. But Gabby was probably dead serious about whatever it was she thought she was doing down there. And Judith really ought to have sensed that. Genia started down the stairs with Lillian, but before they managed to traverse half the distance, the strange, bobbing figure ran off into the woods.

  “Gabby!” shouted Lillian, breaking into a slow trot over the hazardous gravel in the driveway in front of the lodge. “Gabby! Wait!”

  “Lillian, slow down! You’ll fall on these rocks!”

  Neither of them fell, but by the time they reached the edge of the woods, they were out of breath. They stepped a few yards into the deeper darkness under the trees where Gabby had vanished. There was no sight, no sound of the girl. Giving up, the two women trudged back through the meadow toward the veranda where the others waited. But at the edge of the driveway, Lillian pulled at Genia’s sleeve, stopping her.

  “I have to tell you something, Genia.”

  Her voice was spent, hollow.

  It was something about Gabby, Genia supposed, but she was wrong.

  “I … lost my daughter last year.”

  The awful sentence ran straight down from Genia’s ears into her heart, where it instantly touched the spot where a mother’s terrors live. She fought a natural urge to recoil in fear and instead reached out, wordlessly, to touch Lillian’s arm. At last the awful news was out and spoken between them. Genia had waited for Lillian to speak of it, only if she wanted to, and now, here it was.

  “Tonya was thirty-six, which is just the same age I was when I had her,” Lillian said, in a voice so full of pain that Genia’s th
roat began to ache and her eyes felt wet with sympathetic tears. “It was cancer, something odd and rare and awful, and there wasn’t anything we could do to—save her. She died exactly one year ago this week. I thought if I came on this trip, I could get away and just think about her. I was afraid that my friends would call to console me on the one-year anniversary. I knew I’d fall apart and be miserable. Can you understand? I hoped I could come out here and feel closer to Tonya somehow.”

  “Oh, Lillian. I—”

  “I know, please don’t say it.”

  Genia nodded, and then thought of the one thing that had helped her the most when her own dear Lew had died. “I’d love to hear about her, if you’d like to tell me—”

  “Oh!” Lillian’s sad face seemed to light from within at Genia’s suggestion. “Would you? Really? May I show you pictures of her, too? I’ve just been bursting to talk about her, but I haven’t wanted to inflict my troubles on—”

  “Lillian, I’d really love to hear all about her.”

  They ended up walking arm in arm to Lillian’s hogan, instead of returning to their curious audience on the veranda.

  “My goodness,” Madeline Rose said in a dry tone of voice, while Teri and Judith looked on. “Everybody’s leaving us. Do you think it was something I said?”

  It was more than her daughter’s death that troubled Lillian, Genia learned. Lillian had helped her to die—secretly, against every doctor’s orders, in a manner she wouldn’t confide to Genia, who didn’t ask, anyway.

  “It was my final obligation to Tonya, as her mother. I would do it again, too, for anyone I loved, and especially for one of my children. She was suffering, she only had a little while longer to live, and nobody would let her die, which is all she wanted to do toward the end. She couldn’t do it herself. I had to help her.”

  Genia simply listened and held Lillian’s hands. The photographs of Tonya showed a beautiful young woman with a vibrant smile and long blond hair like Gabby’s. Later pictures showed her gaunt and bald, the smile fading, and a pleading look in the wide expressive blue eyes. After viewing the pictures and hearing the story, it became even easier for Genia to comprehend Lillian’s attachment to and concern for Gabriella Russell.