The Blue Corn Murders Page 3

  God. Even those flat-looking mountains here in Colorado—those mesas that looked like you could safely walk all around the top of them without falling off unless you got too close to the edge—even those were deceptive. Yesterday they’d gone in vans up to Mesa Verde, and the road to the ruins was so terrifying, so twisty and turny, with sharp curves and deep plunges down the sides of cliffs, that he’d thought he’d die before they got there. He’d stuck his earphones in, turned up his portable CD player as loud as he could take it, squeezed his eyes shut, and held on to the bottom of the seat. He hadn’t even cared who saw him do it, and a lot of the other kids were squealing ’cause they were scared, too, so nobody gave him much of a hard time.

  When he grew up, he was never going to leave Texas.

  The boy lay back on his bunk and stared at the ceiling, willing the time to pass so that the other boys in the dormer would wake up and they could all go down to breakfast. He felt safer inside the big group of them. Lying there awake, the only one awake as far as he could tell, he felt very nervous. Too nervous to go back to sleep. Were there grizzly bears in those mountains? he wondered. He knew there were grizzlies in Alaska and in Yellowstone Park, and he was pretty sure they ripped into tourists occasionally. What was to keep them from wandering down here? It wasn’t like there was a fence around Yellowstone Park. Where does a fifteen-hundred-pound grizzly bear go? the joke went. Anywhere it wants. Under a sheet, blanket, and bedspread, he shivered. It was cold here, too. Not like in Farmer’s Branch, Texas, where he lived. He had seen snow on these mountains—in September, for crying out loud! Snow was supposed to be something rare in his life, like a C on a report card.

  They were all honor students, the six boys snoring around him and the nine girls in the dormer across the hall. All from his prep school in Dallas. Sometimes being smart was dangerous, it seemed to him. First of all, it got you into kindergarten when you were way smaller and younger than everybody else, and then it shoved you into middle school too soon, and by the time you got to high school, you were the class shrimp. You got patted on the head a lot by girls who were older and taller than you and treated you like a mascot or something. Their puppy. And you got picked up and tossed around by guys who were your friends but who acted like you were their personal beanbag. Jumping ahead in school like that meant you weren’t bored, but that was mostly because you were too nervous to be bored, because you were always chasing to keep up. Your parents and your teachers all thought you were smart enough to do it, but you knew you were only almost smart enough. And being smart—even just almost smart enough—allowed you to do stuff like experiment with dangerous chemicals in chemistry class, and it encouraged you to think about revolutionary ideas in political science class, and it got you sent—like live bait—to Colorado, where there were mountains and avalanches and bears.

  He was scared but too proud to tell anybody; homesick but too old to go home. At fourteen, he felt too old to cry, but man, he wanted to. The only thing that stopped him was the horror of the other guys waking up and calling him a baby.

  * * *

  Genia, knowing nothing yet of a frightened Texas boy in Colorado, spent a peaceful night at a Holiday Inn in Gallup, New Mexico. She capped off her wearying drive with a tasty restaurant dinner of tamales and enchiladas. (“Someday,” she promised herself, “I’m going to learn to make a good mole sauce.”) Since her sweet dream cookies were long gone, she allowed herself a single cool Mexican beer, to encourage a deep night’s sleep.

  Four

  On Sunday morning, Naomi O’Neal, the executive director of Medicine Wheel, felt exhausted and wished she could manage to get one good night’s sleep. Instead she was up and dressed and slouched over her desk at six A.M., feeling lonely and miserable. She could hear the music and clatter of Bingo Chakmakjian and her kitchen staff starting to work. The tourists were served breakfast between seven and nine, not one second earlier or later. It usually took them only one day to find out that Bingo ran a tight ship and you either heaved to or went hungry.

  Naomi smelled coffee and bacon.

  Her stomach roiled at the thought of food.

  She was rapidly losing weight from her five-nine, formerly 175-pound frame, but anxiety was a hell of a way to diet, she thought. Naomi O’Neal—fifty-four years old, divorced, the mother of four grown children, and the director of Medicine Wheel for the last three years—wished she could mysteriously vanish into the literally thin air. She longed to walk away and abandon everything, just as the Ancient Ones appeared to have done eight hundred years ago.

  Where’s your fightin’ spirit? she wearily asked herself.

  It was hard to fight when she didn’t know what she was battling or even who her enemy was, although she knew a good many people would say it was none other than herself. An optimistic and active person by nature—with hardly a suspicious or paranoid bone in her body—Naomi had a hard time even focusing on such an unlikely word as enemies. It was as hard for her to do as meditation had always been. She could never sit still and think of one thing at a time, even a neutral mantra like om, much less such a threatening, unlikely one as enemy.

  Outside the window of her office, the ancient sun was staging an unusually beautiful rising, outlining Mesa Verde in a wide band of pale gold, as if the gods had taken a gigantic felt-tipped pen and were drawing a bright highlighting line around the geological formation. This is an important place, they seemed to be saying. Pay attention, and remember it later for the test. Naomi stared blindly at her desk, paying no attention to whatever it was that history might tell her.

  Nobody knew for sure why the Ancient Ones had left their splendid buildings in Chaco Canyon, Aztec, Mesa Verde, and other sites. But Naomi knew exactly why she wanted to leave the Wheel, and the answer was written on the reservation cards for the Women’s Hike into History that started tonight. She stared at the two most recent cards and felt like bursting into tears.

  “Dear god,” Naomi O’Neal murmured. “Not this, too.”

  As of Friday night when she’d left work, only five women had been signed up for the hike, but now she’d come in and discovered two new cards that her assistant director had left on top of her desk for her to see first thing. It was a wonder Jon hadn’t called her at home to tell her personally, she thought, but he was probably being merciful, trying to give her a couple of days of happy ignorance. The first card reserved a place for someone by the name of Eugenia Potter from someplace Naomi had never heard of in Arizona. Land of the ancient Hohokam, she automatically thought, the people of ball courts, irrigation canals, red and buff pottery, and beautiful seashells etched with cactus acid. No problem with the Potter reservation, as far as Naomi knew. But the second card reserved a place for someone who was a member of Medicine Wheel’s board of trustees. To that card, Jon Warren had attached a succinct personal note for her, a note that said it all: “Uh-oh.”

  “Oh, shit,” would have been more like it, Naomi thought, feeling hopeless.

  She felt desolate and frightened at the sight of the trustee’s name: Martina Alvarez. Why was a board member signing up at the last minute? And why, in God’s name, this particular trustee, at this specific time, for this very tour?

  A haunting idea occurred to Naomi.

  This, she thought, must be what it feels like to be stranded and lost in the mountains, when nobody knows you’re gone.

  She wondered if she should convene a Talking Circle. Should she call the staff together to find out what was on everybody’s mind?

  “God, no,” she said out loud, appalled at the very idea.

  Naomi thought she knew perfectly well what was on their minds: she herself; and the possibility that the Wheel might roll more smoothly without her. No, the last thing she needed right now was a Talking Circle, where the people who worked for her might actually be tempted to say what they really thought of her.

  She sighed deeply, thinking about her staff and her tourists.

  In private letters she sometimes described
the Wheel as “home to sun-crazed archaeologists and Indian-crazed tourists.” She explained to her friends and relatives that “the scientists come here to sift through red dust—and red tape!—to uncover the secrets of the most ancient of native Americans. The tourists come to peer over the shoulders of the scientists.”

  In describing her own job, she often wrote, “As director, I’m neither archaeologist nor tourist, neither fish nor fowl, so I don’t really belong to either group, but I need both of them and they need each other. Sometimes they all drive me crazy. Ideally, the tourists bring money and the passionate involvement of amateurs, which is urgently required at all times to keep us rolling. The archaeologists spend the money and find the treasures that keep the tourists coming back.”

  Many of the tourists were regulars who came back year after year to spend their vacations or retirements digging in the dirt like delighted overgrown children. Naomi counted several of them among her best friends. It was true that tourists could be unbelievable pains, but Naomi was charmed by most of them, by their wide-eyed pleasure in digging into the past, by their enthusiasms, by their touching generosities, and by their sweet and earnest attempts to follow the rules and to protect the digs.

  In a way she loved them, just as she had once loved her job.

  Not so many years before, the Camp had actually been a camp, complete with archaeologists working and living out in the field in tents, cooking on campstoves, and eking out stipends that, to the proud scientists, felt more like charity than salaries. In fact, that’s how rugged and primitive it had appeared to Naomi when she had first accompanied her archaeologist husband to his new post. Sure, the Camp already had buildings by then, but it was only in the past decade—coinciding with Naomi’s employment in one capacity or another—that the paying tourists were invited to come. With their introduction, the camp blossomed from a prickly little cactus of an outpost into a major institution. All because of tourists, Naomi claimed. All because of Naomi, other people said, whether in praise or blame. But it was true that the new growth had sprouted during the years of her fund-raising and stewardship.

  Naomi recalled an elderly Zuni woman who occasionally accompanied groups on tours. She liked to lecture the white tourists about how nature dictates that all things under the sun have their seasons of fullness and decline. Wisdom, the old woman claimed, lay in walking a straight, unperturbed line through good times and bad, impressed neither by a rise nor a fall in one’s fortunes.

  Lately, Naomi had a terrifying sense that the Wheel was heading down a precipitous decline, long before it had had a chance to enjoy the fullness of complete success. She suspected others agreed with her. Maybe Jon, her assistant. Maybe even Bingo, the chef and her best friend. She wasn’t sure about the archaeologists, like Susan Van Sant. Unfortunately, she was sure about a number of her board of trustees, especially those—like Martina Alvarez—who despised the tourists and who wanted to reserve the Camp for scientists only.

  And who was there for them to blame but her?

  Executive directors don’t cry, she reminded herself, as tears began to leak from the corners of her eyes.

  At just about the same time that the director of a multimillion-dollar not-for-profit institution was feeling sorry for herself, and a teenage boy was shivering from cold and nervousness, Eugenia Potter was getting up from her bed at the Holiday Inn in Gallup.

  After a light breakfast, and with no more sweet dream cookies to carry her north, she felt rather like a member of the Donner party facing that fateful pass. Fortunately, like some of them, she wouldn’t starve. She knew of a café in Shiprock where she could stop for lunch. She looked forward to eating a cheeseburger and gazing at the famous desert monolith that gave the town on the Navajo Reservation its name.

  When she did reach the café, she bought her hot sandwich and took it back outside to her car, so that she could sit there and stare at the landmark and think about the Tony Hillerman mystery she had just read. It was set all around the great rock. As she pondered it, recalling scenes from the book, she was glad she could leave it to authors like him to find and solve the murderous mysteries of the great Southwest. She’d had her own brushes with homicidal individuals in the past. That was enough—more than enough for a woman who desired only to be a doting grandmother, a good friend, a competent rancher, a bit of a needlepoint whiz, and a plain country cook. Now a few simple pot shards and a bit of shell were quite a sufficient mystery for her, and there certainly wasn’t anything murderous about them.

  She tossed her trash into a wastebin on the way out.

  Five

  Martina Alvarez, banker by inheritance, trust attorney by education, and Medicine Wheel trustee by election, was spending the weekend on the telephone in her office at the profitable little bank in Colorado Springs that her family had owned and run since the state first had banks. She was eighty; the bank was older. She was tall, straight, thin, and expensively attired in one of the closetful of identical black wool trouser suits she owned and a white silk blouse. The bank had a similar appearance: tall, thin, and elegant with its nineteenth-century trimmings, which, like her suits, had not changed through the years.

  “Have you seen the figures for the last few months’ expenses up there?”

  She was asking that question of every Medicine Wheel trustee she could reach by phone. Most of them—well meaning but not as fiscally observant by nature or training as she—had to say, embarrassed, that no, they hadn’t seen the figures. They’d meant to study the reports, but they were so busy—

  “It’s criminal,” she informed them, choosing her words with care. They counted on her to know, to peruse, to analyze, and then to tell them how to vote when it came to matters of money at the Wheel. “Expenses are rising every month for no good reason. The number of tourists—” She nearly spat the word into the receiver. One or two trustees smiled at the sound of it; they knew Martina’s opinions on that subject. The majority did not accede to her dictates on that issue, only on money, which was the subject on which she was truly the expert among them. “The number of tourists has not increased, nor the number of scientists.” That last word was said tenderly, by contrast, producing one or two more private unseen smiles. “The culprit is sheer mismanagement and overspending, as far as I can see.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Naomi,” a few of the other trustees ventured to say in defense of their remarkably successful director.

  “Naomi,” came the sharp retort, “would give goose-down comforters to her precious tourists if we would allow her such an extravagance. Naomi would take the shovels out of the hands of our archaeologists to pay for gold-plated faucets for her precious tourists, if we let her.”

  The stronger-minded trustees attempted to defend the sterling economic record of their director, but they didn’t persevere for long in the face of Martina’s implacable antipathy. To say anything more on Naomi O’Neal’s behalf only left them feeling guilty, as if Naomi were a dead horse they kept offering to Martina to flog. Eventually even Naomi’s biggest fans among them gave up, and such was the force of Martina’s criticism that they even found themselves wondering if there might actually be a flaw in Naomi’s character that they had previously failed to detect. She was a little flamboyant, they had to admit, what with her trademark serapes and long skirts, her big lush body and her great warmth of personality. Was it possible they had allowed themselves to be flimflammed by her considerable charm? they asked themselves. What if Martina—the upright, the elder, the impeccable trustee—was right? Martina was certainly never fooled by charm; more than a few of them knew from personal experience that Martina responded to charm the way a rattlesnake reacts to a mouse. First came the scornful pulling back of her head, then the warning rattle of the bracelets on her wrists, and then the dart of her poisonous response, leaving a wounded and paralyzed victim behind her as she moved on to fresher prey. What if Martina was seeing real failure, while the rest of them were blinded because they liked Naomi and admired
her for making their favorite charity so successful? Martina could do that—she could weaken the stoutest faith simply by the onslaught of her always well-informed self-confidence.

  “What are you going to do?” they asked her, naturally hoping she wasn’t going to demand any extra time or effort out of them. They honestly were busy people, and she was a retired banker, after all. The Wheel was their hobby but her passion. Let her go looking for trouble there. They did hope, most of them, that this trouble—whatever it was—would not necessitate an unpleasant showdown over Naomi. They’d hate that. Fire Naomi? It didn’t bear contemplating, for most of them. And it would mean an extra trip—perhaps more than one—to Cortez, plus innumerable impassioned and peremptory messages (like this one) from Martina, and then all the bother of finding and hiring a new director. Collectively, the other trustees shuddered at the idea. But still they asked helplessly, “What are you going to do, Martina?”

  “I’ve registered for one of Naomi’s ridiculous hiking tours,” she informed them. “A group of silly women with nothing better to do, no doubt. But I will go so that I may observe Naomi’s operation closer than I might otherwise be able to do. I’ll find out why we have all this waste, and where all our money is going!”

  The other trustees thought, collectively, well, that sounded all right. They did pity the other hikers, however, to say nothing of poor Naomi, if it was still allowed of them to feel sorry for her.

  It took Martina late into Sunday night to reach all of them. Finally she was satisfied—she had their approval. They could never say she hadn’t warned them. But she was exhausted, and her back hurt terribly. Democracy, in her view, left a lot to be desired. Dictatorship, monarchy, even oligarchy were, in her opinion, so much more efficient. The price she paid for consensus was pain.