Donald studied the ground at his feet, causing Chuck to wonder what his friend might have added to his off-duty routine over the last two years—not that he was going to ask. How many evenings had the two of them hung out together in Donald’s park-service duplex while, night after night, Donald sipped himself into whisky-fueled oblivion? And never once had Chuck said a word. He wasn’t about to start now, having run into Donald for the first time in more than two years, and with the full body bag waiting fifty yards beyond Donald’s shoulder.
The rangers on the promontory were lining up on either side of the litter. “Looks like they could use your help,” Chuck said.
Donald glanced back. “Right-o.” He reached inside the patrol car and shut off the engine, then stepped to the sidewalk. “Gimme a call in the morning, I’ll see what I can do. Where you staying?”
“Mather.”
“Still the cheap bastard, huh? A hotel room’s too nice for the new missus?”
“It’s her idea. She wants to try camping.”
“Sure she does,” Donald said with a roll of his eyes. “By the way, this guy’s girlfriend—” he gestured at the body bag behind him “—she’s staying at Mather, too.” He paused. “And Rachel’s assigned to keep tabs on her.”
“I’m taken, Donald.”
“Never stopped you before.”
“I’m married.”
“Never stopped you either, near as I can remember.” Donald turned and headed for the point. “Call me,” he said cheerily over his shoulder.
Chuck looked past Donald to the park staffers bent double at the sides of the litter, readying their lift—all but one, that is. Robert Begay stood unmoving, his dark eyes fixed on Chuck.
Chuck gave the chief ranger a tentative wave. Robert did not lift his hand in return. Though Chuck didn’t know Robert well, their few interactions over the course of Chuck’s work at the Hermit Creek latrine site had been amicable. Now, however, Robert’s coal-black eyes burned with deep and unyielding suspicion.
FOUR
1 p.m.
Chuck held his position, his hand arrested in midair. When Robert neither moved nor broke his gaze, Chuck dropped his hand, spun on his heel, and headed away from the promontory, wholly unnerved.
Chuck made his living drawing the line between archaeological finds that were significant and those that weren’t. In the field, truth was revealed through the gradual accumulation of many pieces of evidence, clues in the form of pressure flakes and hunting points, potsherds and bone fragments. Each discovered artifact, collapsed wall, or uncovered fire ring might disclose something critical to understanding the truths of the ancients. Or it might mean nothing at all. It was his responsibility to know the difference, and over the years he’d proven himself good at it.
When it came to the death of the guy on Maricopa Point, however, Chuck was left not with an accumulation of evidence, but only with Robert Begay’s menacing gaze on the promontory.
Upon retreating from the point, Chuck caught up with Janelle, Carmelita, and Rosie at Hermit’s Rest. Janelle greeted him with gritty silence. Carmelita glowered at Chuck, following her mother’s lead.
They took refuge on a covered bench at the shuttle-bus stop, the glare of the midday sun assaulting their patch of shade from all sides. No one spoke. Rosie swung her legs beneath the bench and shot surreptitious glances at Chuck while she nibbled on her sandwich. Chuck knew he could draw her into conversation with a single comment. He knew just as well what Janelle’s reaction would be if he did that. He stayed quiet.
When they returned to the village, they walked straight to the South Rim Museum. The girls turned slow circles on the varnished flagstone floor in the air-conditioned coolness of the museum’s grand entry hall while Chuck worked through the questions arising from Robert’s menacing look on Maricopa Point.
If the chief ranger suspected something, why hadn’t he spoken with Chuck at the promontory? Why the silent stare-down? Perhaps, Chuck reasoned, it was actually good news Robert hadn’t said anything to him. Maybe he was reading more into the chief ranger’s look than was deserved.
Chuck led Janelle and the girls to a humidity-controlled glass case containing one of his discoveries selected for display in the museum’s grand entry hall. He’d unearthed this one, a wide-bodied olla basket woven of long ponderosa needles, prior to construction of the new road connecting Grand Canyon Village to the South Entrance Road. A card next to the basket referred to its origin as Ancestral Puebloan, a new term gaining favor in the Southwest archaeological community—though Chuck still used the term Anasazi; most of the Navajos he’d worked with disliked the fact that the word Puebloan derived from the language of the Spaniards who’d invaded their lands five centuries ago.
Chuck aimed Janelle and the girls toward the glass case containing the second of his displayed Grand Canyon finds. Before they reached it, however, a bespectacled man in baggy khakis and a long-sleeved white shirt, head bent over a sheath of papers held in both hands, nearly ran Rosie over as he scurried through the hall. The man, and a gray-haired woman whispering into his ear as she hurried alongside him, had entered the hall from a side passage that connected the museum’s display area with its administrative wing.
The man grabbed Rosie around her shoulders, as much to keep himself upright as to assure she didn’t topple over. Papers cascaded to the floor. He brushed a thinning shock of white hair back over the top of his head before squatting to pick up the scattered documents. The woman crouched to help. Like the man, she was close to sixty, her face sun-browned and wrinkled. She wore a beige polyester pantsuit at least two decades out of date. Her graying hair was cropped close at the back of her neck and the top of her ears.
“Jonathan? Elise?” Chuck asked.
The couple looked up and broke into crinkly grins. “Chuck,” they exclaimed in unison, rising with the collected papers. Jonathan embraced Chuck, and Elise patted Chuck’s shoulder with a handful of paper.
Jonathan’s bushy white eyebrows worked up and down at the sight of Chuck. “We heard you were here. So nice to have you in the park again.”
Elise bent forward to the girls and confided in them, her face inches from theirs, “We call him our magician. Did you know that?” The girls stepped back, unsettled, but Elise merely leaned closer and warbled, “He digs up something amazing every time he sticks a shovel in the ground.”
She straightened and focused her bright blue eyes on Chuck, who said, “Hours in, results out. That’s all it is, Elise. You know that as well as I do.”
“Actually,” Elise said to the girls, “I don’t know that. I just know that someday he’s going to discover the ultimate of all discoveries for us, and our careers will be complete.”
“Where are our manners?” Jonathan said. “Pray tell, Chuck. Who are these three lovely young ladies?”
At Chuck’s introduction, Jonathan transferred the papers he’d gathered to one hand and bent to shake Carmelita’s hesitantly proffered hand, then Rosie’s outthrust one. Chuck explained to the girls, “Jonathan Marbury, Dr. Marbury, is chief curator for Grand Canyon National Park. And his wife Elise here, also Dr. Marbury, is chief curator for the museum.”
“The two chiefs,” Jonathan crowed. “Actually,” he told the girls, “we’re the only curators in the whole park. They just call us chiefs to make us feel good.” He winked.
Chuck tipped his head toward Janelle. “This is Jan, the girls’ mother.”
“Ah, of course, Jan,” Jonathan said with a wide smile.
In response to Janelle’s puzzled look, Elise said, “He’s never heard of you before.” She looked Janelle over. “But you certainly are lovely, I’ll grant him that. Almost the equal of your girls.”
Jonathan turned to Chuck. “Showing off your finds to your lovelies?”
“Of course he is, Jonny,” Elise said. She raised her eyebrows at Carmelita and Rosie. “He’s showing you his magic, isn’t he?” She checked her watch. “And we should leave him to it.” She directed an en
ergetic shrug at Chuck. “Work, work, work, work, work, you know.”
Jonathan turned to Janelle, Carmelita, and Rosie. “Enchanté,” he breathed to the three of them.
“Shush, you,” Elise said to her husband. She smiled at Janelle and the girls. “A pleasure.” She leaned toward Chuck. “You’re a lucky man, my friend.” She herded Jonathan ahead of her down the museum’s main corridor, waving the papers in her hands like semaphore flags to guide him in the direction of their side-by-side offices facing the display-preparation room at the back of the museum.
Chuck turned to Janelle with an amused shrug. “They’ve been here forever.”
“Funny,” she replied, “they don’t look anything like what I thought ancient Indians would look like.”
“That pantsuit of hers? The height of fashion back in Anasazi times.”
Chuck led Janelle and the girls to the case containing the second of his displayed artifacts, this one an impressive double-ported urn he’d discovered a few hundred yards from the site of the new solar latrine. The urn’s slender form was similar to that of the famous two-ported vases commonly used in modern Navajo wedding ceremonies—so similar, in fact, that Marvin Begay and other young Navajos insisted the tribe’s renowned vases had to be derived from the work of the Anasazi potter who had crafted the sensuous urn now on display.
They moved on to the third and last of Chuck’s discoveries displayed in the entry hall, an ornately decorated Anasazi turkey-feather burial shroud he’d found a decade ago at the bottom of a late-1800s mining-debris pile where the national park’s Backcountry Information Center now stood at the south edge of the village.
“I like the feather thing best,” Rosie proclaimed, turning heads in the quiet museum. “It’s pretty.”
“You’ve got a good eye,” Chuck praised her.
The skill of the Anasazi in the medium of clay was well known, while the shroud featured heretofore-unseen Anasazi mastery with needle and thread. As such, the shroud was the most impressive of Chuck’s displayed artifacts, providing an even greater understanding of the Anasazi than did the double-ported urn.
“It’s the most famous of my finds,” Chuck told Rosie as he stood next to her in front of the glass case. “It led to all the work I’ve gotten with the Navajo tribe over the last few years.”
“Wow.” Rosie pressed her nose to the front of the case so that her breath fogged the glass. “Did they put you on TV?”
Chuck smiled. “Not yet. But quite a few papers and articles have mentioned it.”
“That’s how Chuck makes his living, m’hijas,” Janelle explained to the girls as she bent over Rosie, peering into the case. “Your stepfather digs up these sorts of things so people can study and learn from them.”
“He’s a magician,” Rosie whispered.
But Carmelita stiffened. “We already know what he does,” she huffed. “Duh. That’s why you made us come here.” She folded her arms across her skinny chest and stalked away from the display case.
Janelle shot Chuck an apologetic look. She called after her oldest daughter, “You’re right, bonita. Perdoname, por favor.” She put her hand on Rosie’s shoulder. “The Grand Canyon,” she murmured. “We’re really here.”
“The biggest hole in the Earth this side of the Mariana Trench,” Chuck put in.
Rosie turned from the case. “There’s a bigger hole than the Grand Canyon?”
“If you count what’s underneath the ocean.”
“Well, I don’t.”
Janelle gave Rosie’s shoulder a squeeze. “Neither do I.”
Rosie skipped out of the entry hall, trailing Carmelita beneath the exposed beams of the museum’s main passageway. Janelle watched them go. She slipped her hand into Chuck’s and looked up at him, her face alight with happiness. He lost himself in her gaze, just as he had countless times since they’d first met a few months ago. He wasn’t sure what it was about her dancing eyes that had made him fall so quickly and completely in love with her, but he liked it all the same. Jonathan and Elise Marbury were right: Janelle was lovely.
For a few luxurious seconds, he basked in the delicious, schoolboy-like infatuation he felt for Janelle, until the growing pit in his stomach reminded him of the frighteningly hasty commitment he’d made to her and the girls. He turned his head away lest she see the anxiety in his eyes. What could she possibly see in him? he asked himself for the thousandth time.
All his adult life, Chuck had found peace in being alone—so much so, in fact, that before Janelle had come along he’d regularly gone days at a time without speaking to anyone. He’d enjoyed his solitary life right up to the evening when, upon meeting Janelle at her parents’ house, the calm in his head had been replaced by the combustive mix of ardor and trepidation that, at this point, was on the verge of driving him crazy.
He had no idea what he’d done to deserve this beguiling young woman who had materialized in his life, nor did he know how Janelle had come to trust him enough to allow him to join her in raising her two girls. He worried about missteps he might take that would result in his newfound joy vanishing, and wondered how, having experienced the thrill of his new life with Janelle and the girls, he could go back to his old life if that were to happen.
Deep down, he was convinced he risked scaring Janelle away if she ever realized how much he loved her. How could she not be frightened off when the love he felt for her was threatening to scare him away, to send him running from the museum this very instant?
Janelle tugged at his hand, and he forced a smile. “We’re here all right,” he said, his words guarded. He cursed to himself, knowing his uncertainty was visible in his eyes. “The Grand Canyon.”
Janelle’s eyes narrowed. Without a word, she let go of his hand and set off down the hallway after the girls.
Chuck gathered himself and followed. He would catch up with her and take her in his arms, tell her how fortunate he knew he was, how much he loved and cared for her. But he was still trailing her when she spun to face him in the middle of the corridor, causing other museum-goers to alter course as they passed. He avoided her eyes as he approached.
“Look at me,” Janelle said.
He stopped in front of her and offered her an uneasy glance before looking past her at Carmelita and Rosie, still making their way down the passageway.
“Look . . . at . . . me,” Janelle repeated.
He did as told. Seconds ago, her mouth had been relaxed, her eyes warm and inviting. Now, every muscle in her face was tight, her eyes burning into him.
“I love what we’ve got going between us. You have to believe that,” she said. “But I have to be sure you’re with me on this. I already placed my trust in someone by mistake. You know that. I can’t let it happen again. I won’t let it happen again. Not to me, and not to Carm and Rosie.”
Chuck opened his mouth, then closed it.
“Maybe I should have figured this out earlier—like, before we got married,” Janelle went on, her voice softening. “But I’m doing the best I can here. And what I’m saying is, you have to be all the way in on this with me. No halfway about it. You don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve it.” Her lower lip trembled. “And the girls . . . the girls . . . they don’t deserve it either.” Her voice shook. “I don’t need a pretend husband, Chuck. I need the real thing. I can’t stand by and let the girls grow close to you just to risk having you walk away from them.”
“I—” Chuck began, but Janelle wasn’t finished.
“There’s a time limit on this thing,” she said, her voice steadying. “I don’t know how long, exactly. But there has to be, for the girls, for me. You have to come around for the three of us. All the way around. And you have to do it soon.”
With that, she turned and headed down the corridor after her daughters.
FIVE
2 p.m.
Chuck shuffled down the passageway behind Janelle.
A time limit, she’d said.
She was headstrong, impetuous. S
he’d probably just been blowing off steam. Still, her comment filled him with dread because he knew she was right. Did he have it in him to do what she needed, what he himself knew he had to do, if their brand-new marriage was to last?
Rosie came charging back up the corridor. She darted around her mother, took hold of Chuck’s wrist with both hands, and dragged him past Janelle toward a darkened doorway off to one side.
“You gotta see, you gotta see,” she exclaimed gleefully, tugging him through the entry into a windowless, cave-like room lit only by black lights directed at luminescent specimens of hackmanite collected from Meteor Crater, a fifty-thousand-year-old, five-hundred-foot-deep asteroid-impact depression in the high desert east of Flagstaff.
Rosie pranced around the dark room, giggling at the way the cream-colored piping on her blouse glowed beneath the black lights. “Look at me!” she cried out.
Carmelita entered the room behind Chuck and Rosie. As she took in the spectacle of her sister dancing and spinning across the floor between the specimen cases, she smiled, her teeth shining as brightly as the luminescent rocks on display. “This is so cool,” she said to Rosie. Catching sight of Chuck looking on, she clamped her mouth shut. Even from across the room, her disdain for him was evident. She turned her back on him and left.
This didn’t surprise Chuck. Where Rosie had taken instantly to him, Carmelita consistently turned a cold shoulder his way—perhaps wisely so, he chastised himself, given what Janelle had said to him in the museum corridor. Carmelita shared Janelle’s striking beauty, same dark hair, heart-shaped face, and smooth olive skin. It was in her eyes that she differed most from her mother; where Janelle’s were warm and inviting, Carmelita’s tended toward cool and appraising, taking in the world without offering much in return.
Rosie took Chuck by the hand and bunny-hopped alongside him out of the black-lit room behind her sister.
After the museum visit, Chuck, Janelle, and the girls wandered with the crowds along Rim Trail, the strip of pavement that separated the village from the canyon. They escaped the blazing midafternoon sun by ducking into each of the several hotel gift shops that faced the trail and the gaping canyon beyond.
Canyon Sacrifice Page 3