- Hard Fall (18 page)
Authors: James Buchanan
He laughed all quiet. "Look, time to run, just wanted to let you know I'm okay. If you talk to Sandy or T, tell 'em I'm fine. I'll call 'em later and check in. I love you, tell Dad I miss him, okay." A heavy sigh punctuated the soft beep of the disconnect.
I waited for a while, waited for him to shut the window and go back in. Boy made no sign of moving. Great, now he was going to sit there mooning in the window and I couldn't stay out here all night. Oh, heck, time to come clean. I whispered.
"Hey, Kabe."
"Joe?" I could see him sit up and look back. Probably thought I'd gone and snuck up on him.
"Down here," I sat up and hooked my arms over my knees, "outside on the roof."
He leaned out the window. The moon's light went all warm where it touched him, and turned his skin into melted chocolate. "What the fuck are you doing up on the roof?"
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I shrugged. "Eavesdropping, I guess." Clambering to my feet, I steadied myself on the rough-hewn wall. The few steps up the pitch got me to where I could lean on the windowsill.
Kabe moved a bit so that I had one corner and he the other.
"Didn't mean to." I apologized. "Was going to tell you I was up here, but you'd already started jawing."
Kabe just stared at me a bit. Then he snorted and asked,
"So you heard everything?"
"Yeah."
Running his hand through that mop of black hair, he snorted again. "Fuck." Then he barked out a laugh. "Good."
"Good?"
"Yeah, then I don't have to make any stupid confessions to your face." Kabe dropped his head on the arm still canted out the window. "Me, the closet romantic." His words got kinda muffled.
I leaned in, trying not to slip, and put my mouth near his ear. "I'm falling too, it's likely to kill me."
As he rolled his head to look at me, the stars shone in his eyes. For a moment my heart stopped beating. "It's not the fall you know." His breath was all warm on my cheek. "It's that sudden stop at the end that does it."
Just before I kissed him, I whispered, "I hope it doesn't hurt much."
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Panguitch Library smelled like new paint and musty carpets. Mrs. Massey led us through the dark building toward periodicals. Every so often she'd flip a light switch, long enough for us to pass through a section. Then she'd turn it off on the other side. Normally, the library didn't open until afternoon, but she'd come in first thing because I'd asked.
Looked like we'd reached the right place when Mrs. Massey didn't switch off the light. Instead she settled onto an office chair that'd seen better days and smoothed out her floral print skirt over her lap. "Old newspapers are over there," she pointed toward a shelf where large blond books hid under several blue-spined volumes along the bottom row. Above, stacks of papers occupied the rest of the case. "Oldest are in the bound books. Careful with those, they're brittle."
"Aren't they on microfiche?" Kabe flipped through back issues of Boy's Life, Highlights and Mormon Life on the magazine display. Heck, I ain't sure if they'd got anything more hard-core than Newsweek shelved in Panguitch.
"Honey, we ain't got the budget to manage that." She rolled her eyes and sighed. "Least not for anything local. We get the big names already done for us." A little more primping and she asked. "What are you boys looking for?"
When she smiled, it made me think of my grandma, Lord rest her soul, and I smiled back. Problem was I didn't quite know what we were looking for. "Not rightly sure." I really did not want to spend the rest of my day flipping through piles of 161
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newsprint. "We were talking with Old Man Jennings over at Ruby's." Funny how every guy over fifty becomes an
Old Man
and anyone under thirty gets called
Boy
. "He reminded me of a guy, maybe ten years back, whose wife fell off the trail in Zions."
"Oh, I remember ... my granddaughter, Jamie, the one who died in that car accident. It happened right about the time she went over to Salt Lake for her Temple Endowment."
She stood and fussed with her skirt again. "Here, let me look it up."
"The newspaper account?" Kabe sounded confused.
'Course I was too, a bit. Mrs. Massey had started off back the way we'd come.
"No son," she laughed one of those librarian laughs, all quiet, restrained and a little like she was embarrassed by the noise. "The temple records. I've been called the past six years as the church secretary. I've set it up so I can access the computer, births, deaths, endowments and marriages from here. Not a lot happens at the library here. I have it all at my fingertips." She disappeared into the stacks. I guessed she was headed for the library office up front.
Kabe snorted and wandered to one of the reading tables.
"Okay, the newspapers are rotting away in books, but all those records are on her computer." Then he plunked himself down in a molded plastic chair, the same type that just about every school I'd ever been in used, and shook his head.
"Endowments ... they keep track of the money huh?"
"No, that's tithing." I settled in across from him. Yep, chairs were just as uncomfortable as I remembered. "Ten 162
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percent. Endowment is when you become a full member of the church, for guys it's just before your mission." I could tell by the look on his face, Kabe didn't really get it. "Look, you go to one of the big temples. You get undressed in front of all these old men and bathed and then you put on this robe and they bless parts of your body. Then you put on all white clothes and an apron and watch a really badly done movie.
And if I tell you more I'd have to kill you."
His eyes went wide. "Seriously?"
"No," I started to laugh, but choked it back. Don't know why, the library was empty. "Not the killing part, the rest of it, yep, serious. You now know, though, more than I did going into my Endowment." Lord, I'd been scared then, knees knocking like saplings in a breeze. I think I'd done thrown up near a dozen times on that morning from the fear of just not knowing what came next. I rested my chin on my fist as I leaned over the table. We ain't supposed to talk about it to people outside the church. I figured, maybe, Kabe would get a kick out of what happened. "Here I am ... nineteen ...
naked with all these old farts touching me," still kept my voice low so Mrs. Massey wouldn't hear up front, "and I'm thinking the first one that lays a hand on my pecker, I'm kicking someone in the nuts, running and I don't care if God strikes me down in the parking lot."
Didn't quite have the effect I'd planned. Instead of a smile or laughter or even just a chuckle, Kabe looked at me slack jawed and slightly horrified. He hissed out, "Dude, that's freaky, weird. Seriously fucked up shit."
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That reaction, that's why we don't talk about things outside the church. I rocked back in my chair, crossed my arms over my chest, and stared at the clock on the wall. It was darn uncomfortable for the five minutes it took before Mrs. Massey came back. All the time, Kabe stared at me. Felt like the Kodiak Bear in his concrete pen over at the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake. All those people ogling him like he's all strange and them feeling real sad for him and real glad for themselves that they ain't in there with him.
"Alright boys," she beamed as she rounded the stacks with a piece of scrap paper in her hand. "Jamie had her Endowment a month before she got married. So that would have put it in June ten years ago." Breezing past us she headed for the shelf of blue binders and yellow books. "Let's look a few months to either side of that."
It took digging, but not a lot. The Garfield County rag was a weekly, not a daily, and we figured to start there. Tended to keep to local news: who'd been called to what mission, things happening in Bryce Valley and flyers for the big chain market.
A fall in Zion would likely make the local news.
The searching through brought back a lot of memories.
Ten years ago, I'd have been twenty-two or twenty-three and living in St. George with my older sister. Every day spent trying to get jobs that weren't there. Tried my hand at college and just couldn't get the swing of it. I'd spent late nights up on her computer on this one bulletin board, wishing and talking about things I'd never told anyone up to then.
Three things happened that year for me. I met Vern, one of the guys with a gay Mormon support group, online, and 164
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we'd talked a lot about what I was feeling. Realized I wasn't alone, I wasn't crazy, and I hadn't somehow sold my soul to the Devil. I'd met another guy, Mike, online and then later, in Vegas, and he showed me the ropes, so to speak. And I'd applied for the Utah Department of Corrections, never thinking I'd have a chance. All of it turned out to be some of the best things that I ever could have done for myself.
Kabe's, "Found it!" yanked me from my memories. The three of us clustered around a dusty blue binder open to May ten years back. There it was. A tiny blurb about one Frieda Warner who fell to her death while hiking in Zion, and how the Ward had prayed for her. Now we knew the when of it.
The library didn't carry the big papers that far back and even a lot of those, according to Mrs. Massey, didn't keep online archives more than a few years.
Still, sweet and patient, she fired up the computer. I stood over one shoulder and Kabe the other. Mrs. Massey didn't complain about being hemmed in like that or us doing the backseat driver routine with a computer search. The Moab papers didn't help. The Zypher went back to '98 but only abstracts that far, and the Spectrum had larger articles but nothing prior to '04. Our best bet was one of the Salt Lake rags.
Hit it with the Tribune. Way back, one little three hundred word article in the archives. That gave us the details though.
Enough that when Mrs. Massey expanded the search to the rest of the web, we found it. A picture, only one blurry scanned copy of a news article lodged in some climbing magazine archive. There was my man, Gunter Warner. Only 165
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he'd gone by Alban ... Alban G. Warner. Bit heftier then, not the rail-thin man we'd met, and wearing a beard. You could tell it was him though. Enough facial features matched. He and his then-wife Frieda stood on some canyon outcrop hugging.
Nothing said Frieda's death had been anything but an accident—somehow I figured different. They always claim murderers returned to the scenes of their crimes. Lot of police buy into that ... mostly 'cause it's human nature to want to relive the bad and the good. Man had to be pretty darn smug to come back out here and do it again. 'Course, maybe he'd gotten away with it once before. Good many folk see backcountry law as a bunch of uneducated hicks. From what I'd seen of Gunter, he fit the profile.
As Mrs. Massey printed out the article, my cell phone rang.
I dug it off my hip and flipped it open, "Joe's Pizza." Kabe raised an eyebrow and shook his head. The only jokes I know are lame ones.
"'Scuse me?" Nadia sounded a wee bit confused. I suspected it was Nadia since I didn't have many women with southern drawls phoning me. "I'm looking for Joe Peterson."
"That's me." I chuckled. "Is this one lady Ranger of my acquaintance?"
"Sure 'nuf." Kabe snagged the paper off the printer as Nadia talked. "What you doin' for lunch?"
I jammed the phone between my ear and my shoulder as Kabe walked over and handed me the paper. "If'n you're asking then I suspect I'm having lunch with you."
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"I've got some pictures for you. You'll want to see 'em as soon as possible." God loved me today and I loved Ranger Slokum. "So I thought it might be easier to meet me at that diner halfway between here and there."
"At Bryce Junction, sure." The junction was a little seasonal place where Highway 89 met Route 12. Didn't want to put her out though, not after she'd come through with my pictures. "I could come up to you."
"No, Sugar," I could hear the smile over the connection,
"they're hooking up my computer today. Got to eat and might as well get out for a bit. Half an hour sound good?"
"See you then." I looked over to where Kabe'd wandered.
He'd picked up one of the magazines from earlier and thumbed through it. Mrs. Massey was busy shutting down the computer. "Kabe's tagging along with me, so get a table for three."
After a pause, Nadia groaned, "And they said it couldn't be love."
"Teasing is not appreciated."
"Don't worry, Sugar." Now she sounded motherly. "Ain't nobody around me 'cept ground squirrels." Somehow I got the sense she'd mother like a cougar. Pretty hands off unless somebody got her sideways. Then it'd take all hell to back her down. "I take it you boys had a little teddy bear snuggle?"
Ignoring the tease wrapped in a question, I growled out,
"I'll see you in thirty."
"See," her voice went all girly, "you ain't denying it."
"Later, Ranger Slokum." I didn't say goodbye, just clicked the phone shut. I figured she'd see it as another excuse to 167
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claim she'd hit my button. She had. Strangely, I was okay with that, at least with her. I thumped Kabe's shoulder as I walked past. "Thank you for the help, Mrs. Massey. I got a meeting with a park ranger." I smiled as she started to stand.
"We can find our own way out."
"Alright then boys," she grinned back, "take care of yourselves."
I had a good hunch what Nadia likely had for me. Probably pushed the speed limits a little too much on my drive. We made better time than I'd planned on.
Bryce Junction wasn't much more than a couple hotels, a gas station and a few tourist shops hawking Hopi pots and Navajo silver. I pulled the truck into a dirt parking area next to an NPS car. The lot fronted a log cabin style building overhung with a green metal roof. Big red letters proclaimed
Restaurant
. Just to the side of the door a small white sign said
cabins available.
We walked in and found Nadia already at a table with a plate of ham and eggs. "Hey, sugars." She waved us and the waitress over. Off to the side, where it was safe from coffee and food spills, Anya's battered camera in the plastic evidence bag sat on top of a manila folder. "What you boys want to eat?"