The Blue Corn Murders Page 18

  It didn’t take very long. They hadn’t known her very well; there wasn’t much for any of them to say, except that they were sorry. Genia thought the group as a whole sounded as if apology were uppermost on their minds. Certainly it was for Teri and Judith. Genia worried that she should have chosen a better question, something more complex and profound. She worried that she hadn’t led them well enough to do justice to their lost maiden.

  But Teri hugged her afterward and in a choked voice said, “Thank you.” And Judith grasped her hands and murmured, “I didn’t know how bad I needed to say that out loud to somebody.”

  Madeline didn’t make any other rude remarks.

  And Lillian seemed a bit soothed by the little ritual.

  So maybe, Genia decided, it had been adequate after all.

  She truly hoped so.

  After the circle, Teri, Judith, Madeline, Lillian, and Genia congregated around each other and agreed that they didn’t know whether to stay at Medicine Wheel or to go home. To continue their tour seemed callous, but to leave seemed abrupt. Nor did they have any idea what Naomi or Susan would want—or have—to do. Naomi had departed the circle quickly, with Martina accompanying her, so they couldn’t ask her.

  “Let’s sleep on it,” Lillian suggested, sounding depressed.

  “No, let’s go up to the lodge and have a drink,” Madeline countered. “And let’s talk about it up there.”

  At everyone’s urging even Lillian joined them.

  They had hot chocolate, all of them, as if they all craved the comfort of something warm and sweet.

  It was just the five of them now, a sad little band huddled together around a table off in a corner, separate from the twenty or so other people in the dining hall. They were aware of glances directed their way; they were the group whose seventh member had died. They were the group who’d discovered a body. They were the group the kids were supposed to meet but hadn’t. Each of the five of them had already been asked questions by other curious tourists all evening long.

  Madeline took charge, as if she were leading a committee meeting and they needed to take a vote.

  “Let’s decide,” she said to them. “Go or stay? We need to figure out what we want, and they’ll have to do it.”

  “They won’t have to,” Teri said.

  “We paid,” Madeline reminded them.

  “Acts of God,” Judith reminded her. It was a way of saying their “contracts” for the trip could be broken—possibly with no recompense—because of Gabby’s death. Genia didn’t really believe that Medicine Wheel would send them packing like that; more likely they’d all be offered another tour, at a better time.

  “Act of God, my eye,” Lillian remarked, sounding like her old tart self. “Did God give her a ride out there?”

  The others stared at her.

  Madeline crudely voiced all of their thoughts. “Huh?”

  “Nobody has explained how Gabriella got out there,” Lillian said. “Seventeen miles from here. She didn’t drive her own car. And how did she know to go there?”

  “What do you mean?” Genia encouraged her to keep talking. “What do you mean, how did Gabby know to go there?”

  “We didn’t know that was our destination! Not until we left this morning! Why did Gabby happen to end up at the very place we were going to be today?”

  Judith shrugged, as if that were easy to answer. “Somebody on the staff must have told her. Naomi. Susan. Anybody who knew our schedule could have let her know.”

  Lillian compressed her lips for a moment, then nodded. Compliantly, she murmured, “All right.”

  But Teri took up the first part of the question. “Yeah, but how did she get out there?”

  They all glanced at one another. Genia asked the pertinent question:

  “Does it matter?”

  They shuffled uneasily in their chairs.

  “She found out from Susan or Naomi,” Madeline said, sounding as if she were stringing separate facts together like beads on a string, making it up as she went along but trying to sound authoritative. “She hitchhiked out. Got down inside the kiva to do some crazy Indian ceremony.” She flushed a little at the reaction of the others. “Sorry. But you know how she was. It’s likely, isn’t it? And a wildcat—or something—got her. She was trapped like a bear in a pit.”

  It was an awful scenario.

  Genia could barely stand to think of it. But it was possible that it happened that way. Madeline might have—in a moment of impatient improvisation—outlined the actual sequence of deadly events.

  “And she was stoned,” Madeline said then, looking around at them, with a small smile hinting at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Her glance paused a fraction longer on Teri and Judith than on Genia and Lillian. “You gotta admit it. She was stoked on something. That weird scene in the grass?” Madeline actually laughed a little. “Maybe she was on grass. Had to be something more, though. I mean, she acted like she was hallucinating or something. Not coke. Not just uppers. LSD, or like that.” Her sharp, attractive features were arranged in a blandly knowing look.

  Judith changed the subject ruthlessly.

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “About?” Madeline inquired, looking perversely mischievous.

  “About … do we stay, or do we leave?”

  It was Lillian who turned the tide toward their collective decision. “You all can do what you want,” she told them, “but I don’t feel ready to leave yet. It would feel like abandoning her somehow. I know that doesn’t make sense—”

  Genia spoke up. “It does, Lillian. I’d like to stay, because I’d like to have time to register the fact that she’s … dead. And I don’t really want to go until we know the children are safe.”

  “It would be wonderful,” Teri said wistfully, “to be able to go out on another hike tomorrow. Where it’s peaceful, where we could think about Gabby and be together in her memory.”

  Genia was touched.

  Lillian reached over and grasped Teri’s hand. Genia felt her own eyes fill.

  “When should we ask Naomi?” Teri said, as if it were already the consensus. “Tonight? Or wait until tomorrow morning?”

  They decided the director had enough on her plate at the moment. They’d wait, sleep on it, and be absolutely sure of their own desires when they approached her in the morning. None of them were aware that it was already too late to get any executive decision out of Naomi O’Neal.

  Twenty-nine

  By the next morning the children still had not been located, but the mountain lion had been found. The big cat, a male, had been tracked to its lair, shot, and killed. Sometime in its life, it had been neutered surgically, and it was wearing around its neck a clear plastic flea collar, which confirmed the suspicions that it was someone’s escaped—or released—pet.

  Those were the first facts Genia heard upon wakening. The children hadn’t arrived at any of their scheduled campsites, she was told. The news of the lion’s death only compounded her mounting sense of loss and sadness.

  The parents had begun to arrive on campus.

  Walking together to breakfast, Genia and Lillian spotted the parents. The mothers and fathers weren’t hard to identify: all appeared of an age to have teenagers, were dressed for Dallas, not for Colorado, and showed haggard faces, as if they had flown all night, in cramped airplane seats. They stood together inside and outside the main lodge in private groups, looking self-contained, as if they wanted only one another’s company and nobody else’s. Several were weeping. Some looked angry, others stunned with anxiety.

  “My heart aches for them,” Lillian murmured as they neared the dining hall. “Do you suppose Gabby’s family is here, too?”

  They didn’t know.

  Genia kept her eyes peeled. It seemed important for her to find Hiroshi’s parents and to tell them she’d met him, talked to him, thought him a delightful boy. There was no need to confide to them his last-minute fears or his premonition of disaster, which migh
t only make them feel worse.

  Parents weren’t the only ones to arrive en masse that morning. Cars—mostly four-wheel-drive vehicles—and vans with law enforcement logos, and others with radio or television station call letters, were crowding the gravel parking lot above the meadow where Genia and Lillian had last seen Gabby alive.

  “Poor Naomi,” Lillian whispered to Genia as they climbed the stairs to breakfast. “Imagine having to handle all this.”

  But Naomi wasn’t having to handle the increasing chaos. That was the next thing the two women found out, when they sat down with their breakfast trays beside Madeline, Teri, and Judith.

  “Naomi’s been relieved,” Teri leaned across the table to whisper.

  “Fired,” said Madeline, looking pleased.

  Judith dropped the other shoe: “Martina is in charge now. The trustees are arriving, and they’re taking over.”

  * * *

  Madeline had exaggerated.

  It was not true that Naomi O’Neal had been outright fired; she had been, as Teri had told them, “relieved.”

  “Suspended, relieved, whatever you want to call it,” Susan Van Sant said to their little group a while later. She looked grim as she predicted, “That’s only to keep her from suing them later. When this is all over, then they’ll fire her.”

  “Where is she, Susan?” Genia asked with concern.

  “Searching the outback” was the grim reply. “Martina ordered her off the campus. She said Naomi would be a lightning rod for the parents’ anger. And for the media. Naomi told me she was going to join the search for the kids, that she wasn’t coming back until she found them.”

  While all around her, her new friends expressed dismay for Naomi’s sake, Genia found herself wondering if that was the only reason for Martina’s actions. What might Martina accomplish at the Wheel if she put herself in charge, even temporarily? Would she disband the Native American Advisory Council? Banish all tourists, as she had now barred the director who attracted them to the Wheel? And then would Martina make sure the next director they hired was more to her liking?

  “No offense to Naomi,” Madeline said in a caustic tone that contradicted her words, “but I mean, really, what would you do if you were the trustees? Naomi screwed up. Directly, indirectly, it hardly matters. All this happened on her watch. She deserved to get her butt fired. And from what I’ve been hearing, maybe it’s long overdue.”

  But none of the others wanted to hear that. Or rather, Genia was curious but decided not to ask, as Teri, Judith, and Lillian all jumped in at once either to defend Naomi or to change the subject.

  Only the young archaeologist remained quiet.

  She still looked pale, ill.

  “Susan?” Genia asked kindly, moving to her side. “Are you all right, dear?”

  The look Susan gave her was almost shockingly vulnerable. Tears filled her eyes. “I’m so worried about Jon.” She could hardly say the words, they came out sounding choked with tears.

  The other women heard her say it, and they stopped their arguing to stare at her.

  “Susan!” Lillian tried to sound hearty and encouraging. “Jon’s a genuine outdoorsman! Daniel Boone! A gold miner! A bear in the woods! If anyone can take care of those kids and keep himself safe in the bargain, you know it’s Jon Warren.”

  Genia wondered if Lillian believed her own sturdy sentiments.

  “It’s not just that,” Susan confided. Her eyes filled again. In a near whisper, she stepped closer to the little circle of women and confessed, “I’m pregnant. And it’s Jon’s baby. He doesn’t know about the baby yet, but he already told me he’s going to divorce his wife and marry me.”

  Genia put her arm around the young woman’s shoulders and gave her a comforting squeeze.

  Later, as she and Lillian walked back toward the rest room together, Lillian was indignant. “So am I supposed to act sympathetically toward a woman who steals another woman’s husband and gets pregnant, to boot? Is that the agenda, do you think, Genia?”

  “I gather that’s the idea,” Genia replied mildly.

  “Well!” A good night’s sleep, with the help of her pills, seemed to have put some starch back into Lillian’s personality. “I’d like to put her out of her misery by informing that young lady that her unhappiness is entirely of her own making!”

  As things turned out, the little band of women didn’t need to go looking for permission to continue their hiking. Permission found them, in the person of Susan Van Sant, who stuck her head into the doorway of hogan one.

  “I can’t stand it around here,” she announced, with the sun and Mesa Verde behind her and her hands on her hips. “I want to escape into the field, but if I do that, I know the other archaeologists and the interns will bombard me with questions.”

  She smiled unhappily at the three remaining roommates, who had looked up at her from their small personal housekeeping chores: making beds, folding clothes, cleaning backpacks. They waited for Susan to finish speaking.

  “You’re the only ones around here who understand … everything,” she said. They glanced at one another, definitely understanding what she meant by that. Gabby. The kids. Susan’s pregnancy. Everything. “You paid for the whole week. I know Martina has completely forgotten about you. And me. We can do what we want. So how about it? Want to keep going? We promised you an overnight. Want to camp out tonight? Want to take a hike with me?”

  The unanimous opinion in hogan one was yes. And in hogan two a few minutes later, yes again. At the last minute Genia put her plastic bag full of artifacts into her backpack, because the way things were going, she couldn’t be sure when she would get another chance to ask Susan about them.

  Teri said it felt as if they’d stolen the van. Judith said they escaped just in time, because she’d seen one of the other tourists point them out to a man holding a camera with a television logo on it. Susan told them they didn’t know the half of it.

  “It isn’t only the media who want to interview you,” she said, picking up speed as she drove out past the front gate. When they asked her what she meant, she glanced in the rearview mirror, meeting Genia’s eyes, and said, “I’m not going to tell you until we’re a long way away from here.”

  She drove, Genia thought in some alarm, as if she thought they were being chased.

  Thirty

  A long way away it was, over the Colorado state line into Utah, where they drove deep into a slot canyon with high sandstone walls rising close on either side of a dry creek bed. It was hiking, indeed, that Susan seemed to have in mind for them, and a lot of it, moving from isolated site to site, walking off their tension until they were ready to drop.

  All the rest of that morning and afternoon they hiked, first at an almost frenetic pace, until Teri pleaded for mercy, speaking for all of them. Susan allowed them to slow down then, but always she pushed them ever-winding upward. They stopped fairly often—for calls of nature, to drink water, for the views, for minilectures from Susan, and for the lunch of sandwiches, chips, and cookies she had secretly scrounged for them with Bingo’s connivance.

  “Bingo wanted to come. She said if Martina fires her before the day is out, she’ll join us at camp tonight. Otherwise she’ll send an intern out with our next meals.”

  Lillian exclaimed, “Fire Bingo? It’ll never happen. Even Martina must know how important she is to the tourist—oh, I forgot, Martina wants to get rid of the tourists. And she knows that Bingo is a staunch supporter of Naomi.”

  “Yes,” Susan said as they climbed. “But look at the bright side, Lillian: Bingo may quit before Martina gets a chance to fire her.”

  “That’s bright.”

  Only when they were halfway up the canyon—following a route that ascended more gradually than the canyon walls suggested—did she finally tell them who else it was that wanted to interview them.

  “The law.” She said it seriously but with a hint of sardonic humor. “Various law enforcement agencies of indeterminate stripe.” The s
light English accent lent a wry crispness to her words. “Bingo warned me—she heard a couple of them talking about it to Martina.” She dropped her voice an octave and posed in macho swagger. “ ‘We’re thinking we’d better have a talk with those women.’ ”

  “Us?” Teri’s dark face looked ashen as burned charcoal. She wailed, “Why us?”

  Susan looked doubtfully at each of them, as if she were afraid they might all bolt back down the mountain. “Because,” she said in a carefully neutral tone of voice, “Bingo said that it may not have been wild animals that killed Gabby.”

  “What?” Teri yelled it, again giving voice to all of them.

  “Bingo heard that she sustained heavy blows to her head.” Susan’s voice took on a sardonic tinge again. “ ‘Sustained.’ I sound just like one of them.”

  “She fell,” Madeline said emphatically, “into that hole, what-do-you-call-it, kiva, and she hit her head.”

  But Susan shook her head and looked meaningfully at them again. “Do any of you remember seeing anything like a rock in that kiva? Did we see anything in there at all except for Gabby’s body?”

  Genia spoke first. “No.”

  “Right,” Susan said.

  Judith appeared bewildered. “But what does that mean, Genia?”

  “It means,” said Madeline, cutting in impatiently, “that somebody hit Gabby on the head and either pushed her into the pit or she fell into it.”

  Teri’s hands flew to her face, and Judith stepped back with a dramatic expression of horror on her face. Lillian looked as if she hadn’t taken it in yet, while Madeline’s face registered disgust. “Why would anybody bother to kill her?” she said. “She was such a gnat in the scheme of things.” Then she embellished, pleased with her first figure of speech. “A flea on the dog of life.”

  Lillian whipped around, looking murderous.

  Genia stepped in firmly. “Stop, Madeline. Enough.”

  “My God, I should think so,” Judith said breathily.