Finding Casey (27 page)

“Mostly,” he said. “But it never hurts to try.”

Whatever that meant, the conversation stalled. They listened to the CD and drove for an hour and a half in silence. Just before they arrived in Pojoaque, Juniper turned to Chico. “Want to stop for a minute?”

“What for? We're almost there.”

“To stretch out. Plus, I'd really like to see where your family's from.”

“Okay,” he said. “That's really thoughtful of you.”

“Yeah, I'm pretty great like that,” she said, and laughed when he looked at her so puzzled. She bet he'd never had this long of a conversation with anyone alive. How sad was that?

She exited the freeway. They made a U-turn and pulled off the road. It felt good to get out of the car, and Juniper turned her
neck back and forth until the knotted muscles gave. Chico walked around the car, coming to a stop at the edge of the road. He looked west, then north, and finally stopped, shrugging. “Things have really changed here,” he said. “I don't know where I used to live, but I'm pretty sure it was that way.” He pointed to a trailer park, and suddenly Juniper, remembering her parents' mobile home, liked him a little bit more.

“I know how you feel. The same thing happened where I grew up,” Juniper said, stretching her arms above her head, amazed at how quickly the time had gone by. “Developers cleared out my entire neighborhood to build luxury homes by the lake. Never seemed to get around to building them, though. Man, it's really cold, isn't it?”

Chico returned to the car and got his thermos out of his backpack. He unscrewed the top, poured a cup, and then handed it to her. “Coffee from the Standard. My only luxury. Want some?”

“Thanks, I love their coffee,” she said. “I go there a lot.”

“I know. I've seen you there plenty of times.”

“Seriously? Were you in camouflage or something? I never saw you.”

“You're always with that rich kid who looks like Jakob Dylan.”

She was instantly embarrassed. He must have thought that her not saying hello meant she was being a snob. No wonder he was horrid to her in class. She wanted to tell him that yeah, Topher-Jakob was so rich he still owed her money from the Cactus Lodge, plus twenty dollars this week so he could buy new strings for his guitar. “I'm sorry I didn't see you. If I had, I would've said hi. You could have said hi to me, though. Why didn't you?”

“You guys always look pretty focused on each other. I didn't want to interrupt.”

She thought a moment. “Is this a teacher-student thing? Are you required by university law to keep your distance outside of class?”

“There's no rule about saying hello to students in public places. I used to go drinking with my professors at Yale. I even roomed with a graduate assistant my last semester there. His name was Ahmed and he taught me seven different ways to make Top Ramen, including curried.”

She laughed. “It's the universal food of college students everywhere.”

“You're shivering,” he said. “Let's get back in the car.”

They did. “I usually give the noodles to my roommates and just drink the broth part,” she said. “You know, too many refined carbs and all. I avoid any food that's white.”

“Really? Are you on a diet? You don't look like you need one.”

“It's just a healthier way to eat. You should read
Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution.
I'll lend it to you. Listen,” Juniper said. “So next time you see me, say hi. I can't drink beer with you, though.”

“Because of carbs?”

“I'm not old enough to drink alcohol yet. But I can drink coffee.”

“What about Jakob Dylan?”

She snorted. “Believe me, you wouldn't be interrupting anything all that interesting unless you're obsessed with writing the next timeless folk song.”

“Is that so?”

She was looking straight ahead, studying traffic, but she caught a peripheral glance when he turned to look at her. She saw how his eyes were the color of coffee, and his caterpillar eyebrows actually had a nice arch to them. Maybe he was cuter
than she originally thought, but then he wasn't walking around at the moment like a stork that had dislocated both knees—he was sitting in her car and they were talking about things they were both interested in. “Trust me. I'd way rather discuss coprolites than Eric Clapton's amazing fingering on ‘Layla.'”

He chuckled.

She took her right hand from the wheel, waving it to try to deflect how badly that sentence came out—fingering? He must think I'm sex-obsessed. “I mean, you know, music is great and I do love classic rock. Who doesn't? ‘Layla' is awesome, but Eric Clapton stole George Harrison's wife and then wrote a song about her, which is pretty awful, and really, I'd much rather hear about your classes at Yale. Who did you study with? Were there all kinds of brilliant visiting professors? Do they let you pick an area or do they make you study everything? How many anatomy classes did you take? I loved Anatomy and Physiology. I swear, after I took it, I thought about being a doctor for like ten minutes, but in the end I decided against it.”

“You get to choose a major coursework. Up to three cognates.”

She had no idea what that meant but she'd look it up later. “Sounds great.”

“I've never studied harder than I did there, let me tell you.” He paused a moment, then said, “It's none of my business, but you're way too good for that guy.”

“I am?”

He nodded, and she saw the way he was looking at her. For once it wasn't about how she was too young to be in his class, it was something else entirely and it was making her feel a little faint. She rolled her window down an inch, grateful for the cold air. “Will you stop staring at my tattoo?” she asked.

He smiled. “You're wearing a turtleneck. I didn't know you had one until you mentioned it this morning. Where is it?”

She pulled the neckline of her turtleneck down for a brief flash. “It was a moment of madness. Now you need to forget about it,” she said. “That was great coffee. Just what I needed to perk me up.”

“Then the next time I see you at the Standard, I'll buy you a cup.”

“And I'll bring you some of my dad's menudo so you don't starve to death over Christmas. Speaking of Christmas, do you have any plans?”

“No.”

“You could come to Santa Fe. My dad cooks so much food you wouldn't believe it. Really, think about it, okay?”

“Sure,” he said, but she could tell he didn't mean it.

As soon as they entered Española there were all these old-timey shop fronts on either side of the road. “Look at this place,” Juniper said. “It's as if the town stopped in 1952. I bet if we walked into that shop”—she pointed at a Western-wear shop with a sign in the window advertising Carhartts—“there'd be cowboys in there playing checkers, dusty old miners weighing their gold, and dance-hall girls trying to get them to buy them a drink.”

Chico laughed. “Visual anthropology is becoming a popular field. Does your mind always work that way?”

“I guess. Doesn't yours?”

“Something similar.”

“Does that surprise you?”

“Not at all. What made you want to study anthropology? Family vacations to the Petrified Forest? Did you see dinosaur
bones in a museum, or watch some TV special about Olduvai Gorge?”

“Nothing like that,” she said, and hesitated. If she told Chico about Casey, he might just feel sorry for her. She'd been burned before, and up until this moment, hadn't told anyone in New Mexico. She took a breath. “When I lived in California, this girl went missing. Some years later, a dog uncovered some human bones way out in the middle of nowhere, and for a while, they thought the bones might be hers. It would explain what had happened to her, and her family would have something to bury, you know?”

“Did they?”

“No. They were the bones of a much younger girl. This professor at UC Santa Cruz dated them, and suddenly this local ghost story kids used to scare each other with turned into a true story.” In a way, Juniper almost understood the way anyone she told couldn't keep it a secret. The story was so dramatic that they had to tell someone. But that person would look at her differently from then on, and changing her name, all her hard work to become Juniper Vigil, would be for nothing.

“Then what?”

Juniper took a breath and let it out slowly. Just the idea of Casey made her want to stop the car, jump out, and run ten miles. “To be honest, I don't really like talking about it. But my dad used to work in the Albuquerque crime lab, which, by the way, he says is in no way like that TV show. He said they were always scraping the coffers for equipment. Anyway, he knew this professor was a forensic anthropologist. It blew me away how much information the professor was able to tell about the bones, how old they were, what gender, how they fit into history, what
had happened to them. Up until then I thought anthropology was like archeology, some poor guy sitting out in the hot sun all day using a paintbrush to remove specks of dirt from a pottery sherd while courting melanoma. As soon as I saw those bones, it was like something inside me came to life. I didn't care if it meant I had to go to school for a thousand years, I knew that I wanted to be that guy, who can look at bones and tell their story.”

When he didn't say anything, she thought, great, I sound like the geek of all time. Like my idea of perfume is formaldehyde! Like I grew up believing Indiana Jones movies were documentaries.

Chico looked at his watch. “We should probably talk about the interview.”

“You're right,” Juniper said, her face bright red from embarrassment. Her stupid mouth did not know when to shut, but she couldn't think of anything educational to say. “There's the turnoff,” she said, and put on her blinker.

It was only a short way over the Rio Grande and down a couple streets before they arrived at the Ohkay Owingeh Cultural Center. They knocked, but no one was there and the doors were locked. “What the heck?”

“Did you call to confirm?” Chico asked.

“Of course I did, yesterday, as a matter of fact,” Juniper said. She peered in the window and knocked on the glass. Nothing. Nobody was in there.

“Some Pueblos operate on Indian time,” Chico said. “Let's leave a note and head out to the pottery studio.”

“But we're an hour early.”

“So? What's the worst-case scenario? She's not there, and we
leave her a note, drive back into 1952-land, and find a coffee shop. If you want to do forensics, you have to learn to be patient.”

“You sound just like my dad. I don't get it.” She thought of Casey, that endless wait. “I'm probably the most patient person on earth, actually.”

Chico laughed.

“What's so funny?”

“Forget it,” he said. “There it is.”

Juniper pulled over at the white mobile home with the sign PUEBLO POTTERY. Its roof was weighted down with tires, and the trailer coach could've used a coat of paint. Behind the mobile home there was a rickety corral and a small barn. The unfinished wooden steps creaked as they went up them, and she thought of Dolores, how their ghost had taught her to pay attention to sound. No one answered this door, either.

“Great,” she said. “This day is just going from bad to worse. Maybe Anna knew something, not showing up. Or I should've had my tarot cards read or thrown the I-Ching or something. Are you going to fail me because my appointments didn't show?”

“Did you even hear what I said about patience? Let's sit in the car for a while and talk about the interview. Maybe Louella Cata is out riding her horse. Besides, we're going to be here for three days.”

“How do you know for sure she has a horse? And if she does, why would she go riding in weather this cold? That doesn't make sense. Maybe she got called into work or something. Although there is a pickup truck next to the barn, but it doesn't have a trailer hitch.”

“Juniper, just get into the car already.”

“I will when you promise not to fail me.”

Chico held up a gloved hand. “I solemnly swear I won't fail you for this course. Now will you get in the car? I'm freezing.”

They got back into the car and Juniper turned on the heater, hoping it wouldn't run her battery down. She fetched her sleeping bag and unzipped it, pulling it over them like a blanket. “You have to admit you agree with me that she wouldn't be out riding a horse. What's the temperature? Twenty? Who rides a horse in the snow? How do you know she even has a horse?”

Chico pointed. “What do you see around the corner of the barn?”

“The same thing you do, a falling-down corral devoid of horses.”

“Currently devoid. Do you need glasses?”

“No. Why?”

“Because if you look at the far edge of the corral, there're some green hay bits on the snow.”

“Where? I don't see them.”

Chico put his arm around her shoulder and leaned her forward and sideways and it freaked her out, him touching her. “Behold, open corral gate. Note pile of manure that looks like horse droppings. Either I have more skilled powers of observation, or I'm the reincarnation of Saint Anthony of Padua. Which do you think?”

“I think you have this unfortunately mistaken belief that you're funny, like Patton Oswalt,” she said. “Trust me, you're not.” WTH did I say that for, she thought. Her grade-point average was never going to recover.

When I came out of the bathroom down the hall marked FAMILY RESTROOM (though there was no place to rest), the doctor posse was there again, standing outside Aspen's room, talking in low voices. I started to run. “What happened?” I said before I even got to them.

“Mrs. Smith,” the oldest doctor said, the one who was always snotty to me.