The Blue Corn Murders Page 20

  “Will you come back for breakfast?” Teri asked, and everybody laughed, because she sounded so pitiful when she said it. Bingo assured her she would.

  An independent little soul, Genia thought of the chef.

  When Madeline and Lillian complained about the trick that Susan had pulled on them to get them here, the little chef’s reaction was only to laugh at them. “Hah. Maybe you accidentally uncovered the secret of the Anasazi,” she said, grinning. Susan and Genia exchanged startled glances. “Maybe their leader told all the poor suckers they were only going to take a little hike over to the next mesa. Only when they got there and turned around to go back, he said, ‘Not so fast! I say we’re heading south, and guess who’s holding the water?’ ”

  Then she seemed to hear what she’d just said; her face fell into an expression of disgust. “What am I saying? Maybe they really were poor suckers, like my people. Maybe the Anasazi got forced out of their homeland, too, by murdering thugs who made them all march for hundreds of miles. That’s what happened to the Armenians in 1915. Right at the beginning of World War I. The Turks tried to deport our whole population. Almost two million people. They sent them to Syria and Mesopotamia, and about six hundred thousand died on the way, starved or murdered. My father’s parents. My mother’s mother. Everybody else in our family, just about. People forget about us.”

  Bingo took a stick and began to stir the fire until sparks flew dangerously about. “Not me. I don’t forget. I figure it’s my job to remember, it’s the least I can do.”

  She looked up, saw the effect she’d had on the others. With a shrug, she laid the stick back down. “Sorry, I’m not really trying to set anybody on fire. What I mean is, so maybe something like that happened to the Anasazi, too, you know?”

  There was a respectful silence for a bit, but Genia was not at all surprised when Madeline broke it.

  “Great steak,” she observed.

  “Tell me,” Bingo replied acidly, “something I don’t know.”

  “Bingo?” Susan’s tone was straightforward. “There’s not much evidence of that, of what you just suggested. No sign, really, of a forced march, or bodies strewn along the way.”

  But the chef had the last word. “After another eight hundred years, there may not be much sign of any of us, Susan.”

  The Talking Circle looked as if it were going to be an utter failure, from Susan’s point of view. She’d even brought along the ear of blue corn and the music to get things going. But her question—“What do you remember about the scene of Gabby’s death?”—was too blunt and direct, Genia thought, and her participants too mulishly resentful of her coercion. The whole effort offended the spirit of the thing. They all tried, or gave some semblance of appearing to try, except for Madeline, who didn’t even pretend. But nothing came out of them except the obvious things that everyone who had been there could corroborate. Genia suspected that Talking Circles weren’t meant for police interrogations; they were meant for meandering gently into profound layers of consciousness. When the circle so obviously failed in Susan’s intent for it, the group fell into conversation around the campfire.

  “Well, that was a waste of time,” Madeline complained. “I thought you wanted to find Jon. What does Gabby’s death have to do with him?”

  “They could be connected,” Susan declared. “It’s just a pretty strange coincidence if they aren’t. I mean, Gabby shows up dead at the very place where they’re supposed to come, but they don’t. Don’t all of you think they must be connected somehow?”

  They were all so tired, Genia thought, it was no wonder that none of them took up the conversational baton. Instead, they all just sat and stared into the fire, seeming to be lost in their individual thoughts. Susan looked frustrated and angry. Later, Genia would never be able to say where the impulse came from, but suddenly she felt herself taking the blue corn from Susan and saying out loud in a strong voice that compelled their attention:

  “What do the Ancient Ones know that we don’t know? What can they tell us tonight?”

  Something uncanny happened then that made no sense to her when she pondered it later; in fact, it rather frightened her because it felt so powerful, so compelling. A trance seemed to fall upon the women; something deepened and softened and seemed to pull them together, when only moments before they had been lost inside themselves. Genia quietly passed the corn back to Susan Van Sant.

  The archaeologist said, as if hypnotized, “The Ancient Ones know … they want to tell us …”

  She never finished the sentence.

  Instead, she exclaimed, “Oh!” in a loud voice and scrambled to her feet, looking excited. “Oh, my God, I know—I know!” Susan broke out of the circle and walked off into the darkness beyond it, seemingly still caught in the trance that had held them. Genia worried she might trip and fall.

  “What do you know, and aren’t you going to tell us?” Madeline shouted in a voice that held a twist of whining in it. When that got no response, she snarled, “Well, I hope she’s happy now.”

  They picked themselves up, put out the fire, and lumbered off to their bedrolls.

  “This,” said Lillian, “is certainly the strangest time I’ve ever had at Medicine Wheel or anywhere.”

  “So where is Jon?” asked Judith, flinging her arms out dramatically to the wide, starlit sky above them.

  “Oh, who cares?” snapped Teri. “She must think he’s safe, or she wouldn’t look so happy. Now I want to feel safe, too. And clean. And I want my bed at home. And my refrigerator. And my own car that I can drive, not your car full of junk, Judith. And I want a telephone to call my kids, and—”

  “We still don’t know what happened to Gabby,” Genia said, half to herself.

  “Killjoy,” muttered Madeline.

  “Oh, who are we kidding,” Teri sighed, sounding exhausted and ready to cry again. “We still don’t know anything, and I don’t believe that Susan does, either.”

  Bingo, who had spent the time cleaning up while they were in the Talking Circle, could be heard driving off in her “bug.” Genia thought she could hardly blame the chef for wanting to put some distance between herself and them.

  * * *

  Genia had had a long time going up the trail that day to consider the disturbing and painful bombshell that Susan had dropped on them: Gabby was murdered. Someone had struck that child’s head hard enough to kill her, or to leave her to die horribly in the teeth and claws of a beast. And which was the real beast? Genia had thought as she labored uphill. The mountain lion or the human?

  Instantly, back on the trail, she had connected the unthinkable with what had already been thought and even written down: Gabby’s notebook. Was there a motive for murder on that list she had seen? She felt she couldn’t know that, because she didn’t really know the women well enough yet, not even after the intimacy of sharing shocking events. What she could know to some degree, however, was who among them had had the opportunity to travel to Red Palace Ruins—probably taking poor Gabby along with them—and then return, undetected by the others.

  Unaccustomed to sleeping on the ground, uncomfortable, and alternately either too hot or too cold in her sleeping bag, Genia pondered the question of “opportunity” for a long time. The specific time period she was considering was the second night on campus, the night before they had discovered Gabby’s body.

  Lillian claimed she took sleeping pills. Was that true?

  Judith and Teri said they’d been partying at the main lodge with a lot of other people, but there had been much coming and going. Had they gone and then come back again?

  Madeline was, according to them, part of the festivities, but surely she could have “come and gone” as easily as anyone else.

  Susan’s name had also been on the list, and Genia had no idea where she had been, or with whom, or what she had been doing that night. Nor did she know about Naomi.

  I only know I didn’t do it, she thought at last.

  She heard rustlings in the night
, an owl, distant coyotes, and she thought unhappily of Gabby’s body and of mountain lions. At various times in the night, movements alerted her to women getting up to go to the bathroom. She heard long-drawn-out whispering and assumed it was the teachers talking to each other late into the night as they lay in their sleeping bags. She heard a rattling of rocks that caused her eyes to fly open and her heart to pound, because of the immediate fear that one of them had walked the wrong way and slipped off the cliff. She nearly called out to see if all were safe.

  Then she heard soft footsteps from the direction of the rattling and knew someone had returned safely to a bedroll.

  After a time her heartbeat slowed, her breath relaxed, her thoughts stopped beating against her skull like moths against a screen door, and she fell into a sleep of sheer exhaustion. Her last realization before dreaming was that they had all probably had an opportunity to leave the campus and return to it unnoticed on the night that was Gabby’s last on earth.

  She awoke to the sounds of Bingo preparing breakfast and calling out, “Everybody up! Has anybody seen Susan? Where’d she go?”

  When Genia walked to the edge of the cliff to look at the breathtaking sunrise, she found Susan Van Sant. The young archaeologist’s body lay sprawled lifelessly on the viciously hard and unforgiving boulders at the very bottom of the canyon. After the first shock of it, Genia remembered stones rattling in the night, and soft footsteps returning to a bedroll. And she remembered how Judith Belove had said early on that if she were staging Shakespeare among the ruins, she would have Ophelia fling herself off for love of Hamlet. Now a young, passionate lover lay dead, almost as Judith had described, but there had been no one to catch her.

  Again, Judith and Teri waited with the body, despite Madeline’s merciless observation, “What’s the point? She’s not going anywhere.”

  Thirty-two

  Of all the things Genia might have learned when she returned to the campus with the other women, practically the last she might have expected was that Hiroshi Hansen’s parents had been looking everywhere for her.

  But even before she heard that surprising news, she heard amazing things. There were rumors of “sightings.” Gold-colored vans were being reported from Provo to Paris. A forty-two-car pileup near San Bernardino, California, was rumored to include the kids, until the fog cleared. Stories both impossible and plausible surfaced every minute, it seemed, and the call-in talk shows were electric with guesswork and argument. The country, maybe even the world, was getting a history lesson it hadn’t counted on, and even the angry young Native American men had come down from their ceremony in the mountains to be interviewed by journalists who wanted to talk to anybody who looked anything like an Indian, an archaeologist, or a parent.

  Genia would have been amused, if only she knew the kids were okay, if only Gabby and Susan weren’t gone.…

  As for the campus, itself, Bingo had been too right, Genia discovered: It was a chaotic scene that appeared to have been taken over by scores of journalists. A tent city had popped up in the meadow; the perimeter of the campus was infested with trailers and campers, most bearing commercial slogans of one sort or another having to do with news gathering, generally along the lines of “the first with the biggest.” There hadn’t been much of an attempt to control it as yet, leading Genia to guess that most available police power was devoted to searching for the missing children. She had a feeling Gabby’s death had been forgotten in the melee.

  Martina Alvarez herself took Genia to meet the Hansens, picking her way over thick black electrical cords and leveling with a forbidding stare those who dared attempt to stop them. “Who’s she?” Genia heard someone say, and knew the question was directed at her back. “One of those women hikers,” somebody responded. And then, “They lost another one, did you hear? Very careless, I must say.” Martina ignored them all, even physically batting away some hands that dared touch her or tug on Genia. She took Genia into the main lodge, through the noisy dining hall, and past a police officer who was maintaining the inner offices as islands of calm. After tersely introducing Genia to the parents, Martina then left the three alone together in a tiny office.

  Genia took one of the three available chairs, feeling breathless as she sat down. The Hansens, introduced to her in Martina’s formal fashion merely as Mr. and Mrs., without first names, sat across from her, but the room was so small, the three pairs of knees nearly touched.

  At once she saw the racial mixture that had produced the handsome boy: his mother’s small stature, straight black hair, and gently slanted eyes; his father’s broad American shoulders, and a quality to the mouth and nose that he shared with his son. Genia recalled Hiroshi very well; she had stared at him as he had looked out the lone window toward Mesa Verde, struggling with his fear. She couldn’t imagine how they’d known she had any contact with their son.

  “Hiroshi called us,” Mr. Hansen said. Genia’s heart leaped, thinking perhaps that the child had called recently. His next words dashed that hope. “Just before they all left from here for that damn camping trip, he called home and talked to his mother. He had some crazy idea that something had happened to his mother or me.”

  Genia glanced at Mrs. Hansen, saw her eyes fill.

  “Of course,” his father continued, “she told him everything was fine with us.” Mr. Hansen was struggling with his words, as Genia watched and listened helplessly, but he managed to get out, “He told us about you. A potter, my wife thought he said. It was Mrs. Alvarez who helped us figure out he must have meant Mrs. Potter.” He stopped talking, clearly unable to go on; his eyes were pleading, as were Mrs. Hansen’s.

  Genia did what little she could to relieve a bit of their suffering for an instant. “Yes,” she said gently. “We met on a bench. I liked Hiroshi immediately. He’s so smart, isn’t he? And such a handsome fellow—”

  Genia’s lips trembled. Feeling the deepest pity for them and very near to weeping herself, she plunged on, trying to make the boy come alive—be alive—in the telling of her all-too-short memory of him.

  “He’s so easy to talk to,” she exclaimed, making sure to use the present tense. “Right away, he told me how the kids were supposed to go off by themselves and to think like ancient Americans. He developed a theory that they may not have been so different from modern teenagers.”

  His mother whispered, “What else did he say?”

  Genia understood they wanted—needed—to hear every word, every syllable she could remember, that Hiroshi had uttered before he vanished. “Well, he figured out that they must have had to think about food most of the time, in order to survive, and then he smiled, and I remember he said, ‘How’s that so different from me?’ ”

  A laugh bubbled up out of his mother, but then her face crumpled and she closed her eyes and gripped the edge of the table with both of her small hands as if to keep herself from flying into many pieces. “He’s very intelligent,” she whispered haltingly, with her eyes squeezed shut and tears leaking from them. “That sounds just like him.”

  “He told his mother,” Mr. Hansen said, “that he was scared—”

  Mrs. Hansen covered her face with her hands and quietly sobbed into them. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she whispered through her sobs.

  Genia felt agony for them, and terrible helplessness. She felt as if she herself were being asked to endure terrible things—Gabby, Hiroshi, now Susan—but nothing compared with what they must be feeling. “Please,” she said to Hiroshi’s mother, “don’t apologize. I have children and grandchildren. I understand so well. This is a dreadful time for you. I have the strongest hope that they are safe somewhere. I want to think there’s been some confusion, a mistake of some sort, and they’ll be back when they’re supposed to be, and everything will be all right.”

  She was instantly furious at herself for sounding stupidly optimistic. What if she were only building their hopes for a reunion that might never happen, except in tragedy?

  “I know,” Mr. Hansen surprised he
r by saying. He was dry-eyed now, and his voice grew stronger as he spoke. “That’s how I feel, some of the time—I have a lot of hope. I know my boy. I like to think I would know it if anything really bad had happened to him.”

  “We shouldn’t have let him come.” His wife seemed to derive a bit of strength from his conviction and Genia’s hope. She raised her face again and wiped her eyes by lifting a corner of her jacket to them. “He’s too young. Younger than the others. He told us he was scared to camp out. He told us.” She cast an accusing look at her husband, who frowned at the tabletop. “He’s scared of heights, and—”

  Her husband interrupted, as if this were an old argument rehashed many times. “It’s one of the reasons we let him come here, Tomasi—to encourage him to conquer his fears.”

  Genia said, “He’s a wonderful boy, isn’t he? You must be so proud of Hiroshi.”

  That helped to divert the argument, and Genia was glad to sit for half an hour and listen to them tell her all about their son, his drum lessons, the telescope he set up in the backyard and how he made his dad chop down a small tree so he could get a better view of the northern sky. She heard about his nice friends; the two teachers he loved this year and the others he hated; how he was too short for the basketball he loved and not interested in the tennis at which he excelled; how he seemed to have a precocious interest in architecture, even though his dad kept telling him that, practically speaking, he’d be better off as a builder, like his dad, than as one of those tomfool designers who couldn’t pound a nail if you put a hammer in his hands.…

  When they parted company, Genia felt she knew the Hansens and their eldest child very well. She felt like an aunt, deeply concerned for the welfare of the family. As they got up from the table, Mrs. Hansen whispered to Genia, “I cannot bear to think of my son being frightened, Mrs. Potter.”

  Genia said softly back to her, “I think the truth is that he is very brave, Mrs. Hansen. It takes real courage—don’t you agree?—to act in spite of fear. He struck me as a brave young man rather than a fearful one.” And that was true, Genia realized as she said it; it is the fearful, after all, who are most likely to be experts in courage.