At Ease with the Dead (28 page)

Sergeant Mendez had not been delighted to see me. He had not found my story either believable or particularly entertaining. He wanted to know where I'd gotten it, and he was displeased with my evasions, no matter how winningly I presented them.

Since both Lowery and Halbert were dead, I saw no point in producing Grober's tapes. They implicated me, after all, in two deaths—even if, according to Daniel Begay, the deaths had never occurred.

For a day or two Mendez considered providing me with municipal accommodations. They probably wouldn't have been any less stimulating than my motel room, where I spent my time recuperating. I called Rita and told her what had happened. She didn't find my story any more entertaining than Mendez had. I called Lisa Wright once. She was better, but still distant, and she said she was going away for a while, to visit a friend in California. I wished her a good trip. More time passed.

And then the cops found the remains of Ganado.

They were in a metal steamer trunk buried in Lowery's cellar. With them was the detailed statement that Martin Halbert had mentioned, signed by Emmett Lowery's father, Jordan.

According to Sergeant Mendez, the house in which the trunk was found had originally belonged to Jordan Lowery. There was evidence, Mendez said, that the trunk had been there at least since the late fifties. But no one could say, with any certainty, whether it had been there since the murder of Dennis Lessing.

If it had, I don't understand why. It seems to me that both the Lowerys would've wanted it someplace farther away, where neither of the Halberts could get to it. Maybe the Lowerys had simply claimed that it had been. Maybe one or the other of them had moved it. Maybe the Halberts had never seriously bothered to look.

I don't understand, either, the relationship between Emmett and his father. At some point Emmett had found out, or his father had told him, about the arrangement with Martin Halbert's father. Rita thinks his father told him. In any event, Emmett had, without a qualm, embraced murder and blackmail as his birthright.

Finally, I suppose, I don't really understand Emmett.

But the piece of evidence that connected the trunk to the late 1950s was something I found suggestive. Lying amid the disarray of bones and beside the brittle folded confession of his father, the police found a single Calla lily. Tied to it with black ribbon was an announcement of the memorial service for Jordan Lowery. The service had been held in September of 1959. Emmett had been eighteen then.

Mendez showed me the lily. It was in a Ziploc evidence bag. Just a thin, bent, shriveled stalk and some gray dessicated petal fragments turning to powder. The sergeant let me open up the bag.

It smelled exactly like dust. Only in a dream could anyone believe that it smelled like a flower.

I heard a distant car behind me. I turned and saw Daniel Begay's Ford pickup winding over the barren, gently rolling hills. I hadn't seen him since last night in Chinle, when I brought him the remains. Sergeant Mendez had given them to me in a cheap cardboard suitcase. I'd handed the suitcase in as baggage at the El Paso airport, flown to Flagstaff, then driven to the Reservation with the case on the back seat of the Subaru.

Last night, Daniel Begay had told me how Pablo and Ramon had reached Peter Yazzie's cabin without being detected. They had come from the east, from the Wide Ruins road. Gary Chee's brother, the man who was supposed to be watching that approach, had been asleep in his car.

Now, Daniel's truck pulled in behind my station wagon and stopped. Daniel opened the door, got out, closed the door, and limped slowly over to me. He held out his hand and I took it. He said, very formally, “I thank you again.”

“You should thank Sergeant Mendez, down in El Paso. He could've kept the body as evidence.”

He nodded. “I'll call him.” He rested his hands on the top of his cane and looked out over the canyon.

Neither of us spoke for a while. The sky was clear, the day was bright but breezy. The wind made a faint low whistle as it gusted over the canyon rim.

Daniel Begay said, “You did a good thing, Joshua.”

I frowned. “A lot of people died.”

The flat black brim of his hat dipped as he nodded. “But you did what you could.”

“Wasn't enough, was it?”

He shook his head. “You got to make peace with it. You got to remember that things balance out.”

The wind tugged at my hair. Somewhere in the canyon, it moaned around the rocks. “At ease with the dead,” I said.

He looked at me, eyebrows raised slightly.

“Something Alice Wright told her granddaughter,” I said. “About herself. She said she was at ease with the dead.”

Daniel Begay's hat brim dipped again. “That's what you got to do. Get to the place where you're at ease with the dead.”

“It's going to take a while, Daniel.”

“Sure,” he said. “It always does.”

After I left Daniel Begay and Canyon de Chelly and the bones of Ganado, I drove to the Ardmore Trading Post. It was sixty miles in the wrong direction, but sixty miles, after what I'd already driven, didn't seem like much. And I wanted to see the place where Dennis Lessing and Elena Ardmore had known each other.

And maybe someone there—maybe Elena's nephew, John—would be able to answer the questions I still hadn't answered myself. Why had Dennis Lessing's wife been having self-destructive relationships with Lessing's students? Had she been involved with Jordan Lowery as well? Had Jordan been, as I suspected, the one who told her about Lessing's affair with Elena? And if so, how had he known?

I noticed the three new telephone poles as I drove up to the squat wooden building. The old poles, neatly sawed at the base, lay in the brown caliche beside the road.

Inside, the trading post looked like an extremely ambitious 7-Eleven that had fallen on hard times. There were candy racks and soda coolers and rows of canned goods, but there were also bags of flour and rice and corn on the shelves, and bolts of cloth, and yellow and red boxes of ammunition. Everything seemed dusty and disused.

A man sat behind the counter on a stool, reading
Soldier of Fortune
magazine. He was in his thirties, too young to be Elena and Carl Ardmore's nephew. I asked if John Ardmore was around.

He looked up. He was small and wiry and suspicious. The small veins of his cheeks and nose were bright red. “You selling?”

I shook my head. “A friend asked me to look him up.”

“What friend?”

“Vasco da Gama.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He'll be disappointed. You know where John is?”

He shrugged and looked down at the magazine. “Out back. Working on the car.”

I thanked him and he ignored it and I ignored that and went out the front door and around the side of the building.

An old Jeep was parked behind the store, its hood up, and a man was bent over the engine, his back to me.

“Mr. Ardmore?” I said.

Ducking out from under the hood, the man straightened up and turned around. He was in his sixties, slim and erect, wearing boots and jeans and a zippered denim jacket. His hair was swept back from his forehead in a thick white mane, and the face beneath it was a weathered version of the face I'd seen staring out from the UTEP yearbook in El Paso. No elaborate handlebar mustache, but the same dark deep-set eyes, the same strong cheekbones, the same wide sensual mouth.

He frowned slightly and said, “Help you?” and I realized that I hadn't spoken.

“Yeah,” I said. I smiled. “Sorry. You reminded me of someone.”

His grin came quickly and easily. “I hear tell everyone's got himself a double. Guess you seen mine someplace.” He plucked a stained handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his knuckles, then offered the hand. “John Ardmore.”

I shook the hand. “Joshua Croft.”

“Pleasure. What can I do for ya?” He leaned back against the Jeep, hands along the fender.

“A man in El Paso asked me to stop by here if I was ever in the area. He used to know your aunt and uncle.”

Ardmore nodded. “This fella got a name?”

“Dennis Lessing.”

He looked at me blankly for a moment, then shook his head. “Know some folks in El Paso. Don't recollect no Lessing, though.” If he was lying, he deserved an Oscar.

“It was a long while ago,” I said. “Before your time.”

He grinned again. “Not much went on before my time. I been here since the Flood. Me and Noah used to shoot pool.”

“This was in the twenties. 'Twenty-four, 'twenty-five.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “Well now, that does go back some. He knew Elena and Carl?”

“Yeah. He was pretty impressed by both of them.”

He nodded. “Good people. The best. Raised me like their own. Better, maybe. Everybody liked 'em. I get folks come through ever' summer, lookin' to say hello to 'em, and they been gone now for years. Carl went in 'fifty-seven. Elena in ‘sixty-three.”

I took a breath, let it out. “Well, if I see him again, I'll tell him.”

“In the twenties, huh? He can't be no spring chicken himself, this frienda yours.”

“Nope.”

“You tell 'im, he's ever up in this neck of the woods, come on by and say hello. We'll get us some coffee and shoot the shit a while. Can't offer no beer. Not allowed on the Res.”

“I'll tell him,” I said.

“Which way you headed?”

“East. Santa Fe.”

“Got time for some coffee yourself?”

“Thanks, but I'm running late.”

“You come back through here, you make sure you stop in and spend some time.”

“I'll do that.”

We shook hands again and I left.

Some questions can't be answered, and some questions shouldn't be asked.

That was almost five months ago. It's spring again. The buds are sprouting on the trees, the tourists are sprouting on the Plaza.

Daniel Begay has been through town a couple of times. Rita told me she's seen him, but she's never said what they talked about and I've never asked. He and I had lunch once, and he insisted on paying. In June I'm meeting him at Asayi and we're going to do some serious fishing. I still don't really know who he is, what he is, but I've got an idea or two.

In February I bumped into Lisa Wright on San Francisco Street, downtown. She's showing her work in a gallery here now. She looks a little older, a little more wary around the eyes, but still very beautiful. She told me she was getting married in the summer. It was cold, and we were both in a hurry, and we exchanged numbers and promised to call, but neither of us ever did.

It seemed to me that she had become, at least partially; at ease with the dead in her life.

I haven't, not really. Now and then Alice Wright wanders through my unguarded moments. Now and then I see Peter Yazzie and his cousin. Now and then I wonder about Emmett Lowery. And sometimes, less often now, I can hear that terrible small sad sigh of Pablo's.

But, as Daniel Begay said, things balance out. Rita called me at my house two nights ago. At first I thought she was crying. Soon I realized she was laughing so hard she couldn't talk.

“
Joshua
” she said for the third time, and then she laughed some more.

I started laughing myself, laughing at her laughter, and feeling ridiculous for it, and laughing at that. “What
is
it, Rita?”

She caught her breath. “Listen. Listen to this.”

I listened and I heard nothing. “Rita? Rita, you there?”

“Did you hear it?”

“Hear what? What am I supposed to hear?”

“My toes.” More laughter.

“What?”

“My stupid
toes.
My
toes
, Joshua. They're
moving.
” She laughed again.

“Rita—”

“I can move my
toes
, Joshua. Don't you understand?”

And then I did. “I'll be right over,” I told her.

Acknowledgments

T
hanks to Richard Brenner, Bettsy Byrne of Computer Bazaar, Cathleen Jordan, Tasha Macklin of Murder Unlimited, Priscilla Ridgway of MWA, and Janwillem Van de Wetering. Thanks again to Jeanne W. Satterthwait and Jonathan Richards and Claudia Jessup. Special thanks to B.E. Kitsman, without whose help this would have been nothing.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.