The Blue Corn Murders

by Nancy Pickard

  “Remember, breakfast is from seven to nine. You’ll leave on your first hike after breakfast, with Susan. I’ll join you whenever I can. Don’t forget sunblock, even if it’s cloudy.

  “You’ll find your luggage has already been mysteriously placed in the proper hogans. And there’s really nothing more to say, except to tell you that Gabby, Teri, Judy, and Genia are sharing hogan one, and Lillian, Madeline, and our missing member”—she gestured to the empty chair next to Jon—“will share hogan two. If you’re having a good time, tell Lillian and Madeline’s roommate, because she’s a member of our board of trustees. If you have any complaints, tell—Jon.”

  Amid general laughter, she added, “Hang around the fire as long as you want, but if you feel like carrying a chair up to the lodge, Jon would be grateful. Company! Dismissed!”

  It was only then, as everybody was stirring and stretching and getting up, that Genia realized that Jon Warren was not the only person in the Talking Circle who had failed to reveal himself. Naomi O’Neal had not even taken her turn to speak. In the confusion over Lillian’s tears, had she forgotten? Genia wondered. Or was it deliberate? And did it have anything to do with the director’s own suppressed tears earlier on?

  A Talking Circle, she decided, was powerful medicine, as the Indians might say!

  Eight

  “I just love Native Americans, don’t you, Genia?”

  “I don’t actually know any,” she replied tactfully.

  She and her youngest roommate, Gabriella Russell, were walking together down the dirt and gravel path toward hogan one, after delivering their folding chairs to the dining hall. In front of them their other two roommates walked in single file, Teri holding a flashlight that adequately lighted the path for all of them, with the help of the great orange moon overhead. The lights ablaze in the first hogan helped to illuminate their way, as well.

  Genia’s new roommate blinked her lovely blue eyes, as if she didn’t quite grasp the advisability of actually becoming acquainted before vowing one’s affection for people.

  “But I’d like to,” Genia added quickly, honestly.

  That seemed to satisfy the girl, because she smiled and nodded. Then she said, in the intense near-whisper that seemed to be her usual tone of voice, “It’s too bad they didn’t kill all of our ancestors, instead of the other way around.”

  A now-familiar cynical voice spoke up behind them.

  “Well, that would make it a little awkward for us now.” The woman named Madeline Rose laughed. Genia glanced back and saw amused dark eyes set just a fraction too close together over a small straight nose and lipstick so dark, it looked nearly black. “Don’t you think?”

  Gabriella blinked again. It gave her the appearance, in Genia’s eyes, of someone not quite bright, a girl who didn’t—in the vernacular of Genia’s own grandchildren—“get it.” Genia wasn’t sure that perception was accurate, but she nevertheless found herself feeling protective, just as she used to feel toward the more socially awkward of her children’s friends. That’s what Gabbling Brook seemed to Genia to be, really: an overage, overgrown, naive, earnest little girl playing Indian in beads and fringes and moccasins.

  Genia and Gabriella followed Teri and Judith into hogan one.

  Madeline Rose sauntered, with her hands in her pants pockets, on down the path to the next hogan. She was not exactly the sympathetic roommate one might have wished for Lillian after her tears. Watching the retreating back of the thin stylish woman, Genia thought irresistibly of … Custer. General George Custer. That didn’t make any sense to her, because he was the one, after all, who was outfoxed by the Indians and not the other way around. So why in the world did the fashionable, sardonic Ms. Madeline Rose make her think of Custer? Genia couldn’t imagine a single good reason why, and she was suddenly much too exhausted to care. She only hoped Madeline had a few kind fibers in her body, for her roommate’s sake.

  * * *

  “Naomi?” Jon ran to catch up to her in the parking lot, before she could leave for home.

  She turned, smiling. “Just call me Ancient One.”

  He laughed. “If you insist. Sorry. Hope you didn’t mind. I thought we needed some levity after Lillian went to pieces.” Quickly he added, “Poor thing. Naomi, are we still going ahead with our experiment? Even with Mrs. A. coming?”

  “Yes, dammit.”

  He raised his hands in the air. “Just asking!”

  Naomi sighed. “I know, Jon. I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at her for being such a rigid, unimaginative person that we can’t ever plan anything new without worrying that she’ll throw a hissy fit over it.”

  “She’s going to hate it, you know that.”

  “That, dear Jon, is a given, an absolute, a verity, and not one of the variables of our experiment.”

  “Tell her that.” His grin showed through his beard. They were alone in the dark parking lot. “She’d like that. Tell her she’s our control group in a scientific experiment. Tell her everybody else is a variable. She’ll see it as science, then. Probably give you a grant to repeat it next year.”

  “Oh, Jon.” Laughing, Naomi grasped one of his wrists and shook it as if he were a rag doll. “What would I do without you to loosen me up?” She released his hand with a sigh, and her laughter died. “If only that would do the trick with her.”

  “So it’s all systems still go?”

  “Yes, dammit!”

  “No more changes?”

  “Jon,” she said warningly, her energy and her patience suddenly depleted at exactly the same time. “No. It’s set in concrete, I swear. Just do it exactly as I planned it.”

  She turned away to open her car door, missing the inscrutable look on his face.

  After lights out, Genia overheard Teri Fox whisper to Gabriella, “Do you know that older lady, what’s her name, Lillian? You’ve both been here before, right? Do you know why she was crying?”

  “I know why,” the girl whispered back. “I heard that her oldest daughter died last year. Some horrible fast kind of cancer. She was only about forty, I heard.”

  “Wow, that’s awful. No wonder. I don’t think I’d ever stop crying.”

  “Really? It’s been a whole year, though, since it happened.”

  There was a brief silence, during which the naive and callous statement hung in the air of the dark hogan like an unpleasant smell. Finally Teri whispered, “That’s what you say now. Wait until you’re a parent though.”

  Yes, Genia thought, that was exactly right. Her own heart hurt for the lively, funny woman with the silver hair. To lose a child? A year was nothing, nothing. She added Lillian Kleberg to her silent prayers. And then she added the roommate, Teri, for being kind to the girl. And then Gabriella, who might well need some extra prayers to help her mature into greater sensitivity to other people’s suffering. Odd how she was acutely attuned to some suffering—the Native Americans’, the earth’s—and yet she couldn’t relate to so simple and immediate a pain as a mother’s loss.

  If the whispering continued, Genia didn’t hear it.

  If the aspen leaves applauded the dropping of the night’s curtain on the day, she didn’t know it. In the nearby hills, something wild screamed.

  Genia, completely worn out by her long day, slept on.

  In the bedroom of Susan Van Sant’s rented house in Cortez, she reached across the bed, grabbed a book out of Jon Warren’s hands, and snapped it shut. It was Legends of the Little People, subtitled, Tales of the Fremont.

  “Hey!” He protested in mock alarm. “I’m studying!”

  She snuggled closer to him under the covers. “You’re worse than I am, Warren. Forget the damn Ancient People for once and pay attention to this Modern Person.”

  They smiled at each other.

  “What an attitude,” Jon teased her, “for an archaeologist.”

  “Did you find out if we’re still going ahead with it?”

  “Naomi says all systems go.”

  “Even though Ma
rtina—”

  “Even though. Despite, in spite of, possibly to spite her.”

  “She’s not going to like it. I’m still not entirely comfortable with it myself.”

  “Jesus, it’s a little late now, Suze. What don’t you like? I thought we had it all worked out to please you.”

  “Jon! Don’t make it sound as if I’m a prima donna. I’m protective of the sites, that’s all. It’s my job.”

  “And you do it well.”

  “Was that sarcasm?”

  “No, Dopey. That was sarcasm.” He smiled fondly at her and kissed her forehead where a straggle of blond hair bisected it. “What’s still bothering you about it?”

  “I’m still afraid you’ll disturb things at the site. I mean, kids—”

  “They’ll be careful, Suze. I’ll threaten them with a twenty-mile hike with their backpacks on if they’re not.”

  She visibly relaxed a little. “Okay, then, I guess.”

  After a moment she repeated, “Martina’s going to hate it. If anything goes wrong, it’ll be all our jobs.”

  He threw up his hands in mock exasperation. “Suze! That site has survived for almost eight hundred years. It can tolerate a half hour with a bunch of modern teenagers.”

  They looked at each other, even his face registering doubt at his last words. When she saw the misgivings written there, she poked a finger into the middle of his bare chest. “See! See? You’re not sure either!”

  He pulled her face around until it was nose to nose with his and pronounced very slowly and clearly, “Stop worrying.” A kiss naturally ensued, but when he tried to sneak his book back from her grasp, she wouldn’t let him have it.

  “Jon, is Naomi falling apart on us?”

  He frowned and sighed, considering the question. “It sure looked like she was going to, didn’t it? I don’t know, Suze. She keeps holding it together all right.”

  “How bad are things really?”

  “Don’t ask me, I’m only the second banana around here. Why do you want to know all of a sudden? What are you hearing?”

  “Everybody’s complaining. You know, don’t you? Or don’t they tell you? Not enough supplies. Or the wrong ones. Or too many. Conflicting directions. Mistakes. And she seems … confused … instead of commanding.”

  “You’d like it if Naomi left, wouldn’t you, Suze?”

  “Jon! What a thing to say!”

  “Yeah, but if somebody else took over, you could do more work in the field and get stuck less with the tourists.”

  “I like the teaching.”

  “Sure you do. But you’re a field archaeologist with big ideas to prove.” He let the implication hang in the air between them. And then he grinned. “You want me to show you commanding?”

  Susan giggled as he pulled her closer. The giggle was a fake. Characteristically, he had avoided answering a tough question. And if he thinks questions about Naomi are hard, wait until he hears what else I have to ask him, Susan thought, closing her eyes for his kiss. Her response to that was faked, too, in spite of her hunger for him. It was impossible to feel aroused when all she really felt these days was panic.

  She could talk to him about almost anything except what was most important to her. She tried to talk to him about her thrilling discovery and the theory it might prove—and make her famous—but at those times, he always seemed more interested in sex than history. Everything was so lighthearted to Jon, everything had to stay so cheerful and easy. He kidded her that she took life too seriously. “But I’m a scientist. That’s what we do, Jon,” she’d told him. “We have to take things seriously, otherwise what’s the point?”

  “You mean I’m not enough?” he’d said, and then laughed at his own outrageous conceit.

  Now, even as his beard brushed her face, she was thinking, Why can’t I ask you the hard questions? When am I going to get up the courage to ask you what I really need to know—like, can I have you more often than now and then? Will you divorce your wife for me? You don’t love her, do you? How could you, since you don’t even live with her? You never talk about her, you won’t even say her name. Who is she, where is she, what kind of marriage could it possibly be? Do you love me, instead of her? Will you marry me? What would you say if you knew I’m pregnant?

  She felt a cavernous loneliness and a desperate longing, even as she held him in her arms.

  The book about the prehistoric Fremont people slid unnoticed to the floor.

  In the morning, when a pair of male and female cardinals showed up at the feeder outside her bedroom, Susan blurted, “Jon, will you marry me?”

  “Sure,” he said, and then yawned. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Completely astonished by his response, she decided to take what she could get for the moment and save the news about the pregnancy for later.

  “What about your wife, Jon?”

  He groaned in mock dismay and slapped the side of his face as if he’d forgotten that detail. “Damn. She’ll be a bitch to divorce. I guess we’ll have to kill her.”

  This time Susan’s giggle was real, as authentic as the overwhelming relief that flooded through her body, releasing the desire she felt for him.

  Nine

  At the approach of seven o’clock on Monday morning, the kitchen staff at the Wheel tried desperately to stay safely out of their chef’s way. They knew the signs when Bingo Chakmakjian was in one of her moods. Their boss might be tiny and only twenty-nine years old, but she was ferocious when roused by inefficiency or insincerity. The entire kitchen staff had witnessed an infuriating example of both of those dreaded sins this morning.

  Not that anyone blamed Bingo for being upset about it.

  Nobody was in a good mood, as a consequence.

  And it was all due to the fact that Naomi had done it to them again: laying down certain food service instructions, and then reversing them at the last minute, all the while pretending she had never changed her plastic mind! Sometimes it was just a matter of “Hamburgers? No, Bingo, I said hot dogs.” But today it was more serious, because they already had way too much work to do, without also having to save their director’s butt—again—because she couldn’t seem to remember her own instructions.

  Behind Bingo’s back, her staff agreed that if she and Naomi O’Neal weren’t such good friends, Naomi probably would have had a pan of scrambled eggs dumped on her head when she stuck it in the kitchen this morning. It wouldn’t have been the first time that Bingo had flung eggs—or a pot roast—at somebody who angered her. Unfortunately, instead of yelling at Naomi—who deserved it—Bingo had taken out her frustrations on her crew.

  They were fiercely loyal to their chef, because Bingo fought like a bantamweight samurai against anybody who got in her staff’s way or criticized them. So they tended to forgive her outbursts.

  But the incident hadn’t made Naomi any more popular.

  Today the pink morning memo—which anybody could read, right up there on the kitchen bulletin board—had told them to cook for forty people for dinner tonight, and so Bingo had shopped and planned for just that number. But then Naomi had waltzed into the kitchen not half an hour ago and said in front of everybody, “With seventy-five people tonight, maybe we’d better set up the extra tables, Bingo.”

  Seventy-five?

  While they held their collective breath, Naomi had stood there with her hands on her fat hips, looking as if clarified butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Bingo had merely stared, and nodded, like she was Naomi’s puppet. And yet they all knew—at least, they were pretty damn sure—that Bingo was nobody’s marionette.

  Bingo had exploded, all right, but only after Naomi left the kitchen. Then a knife had been slammed into a cutting board, a cast-iron skillet had gotten kicked across the floor by Bingo’s hiking boots, and soprano curses had reverberated from the ovens to the freezers.

  A couple of the kitchen workers were pretty annoyed about that. Why hadn’t Bingo stood up to Naomi?

  They’d all seen the
morning memo with Naomi’s own scrawl: “Forty for dinner.” And they’d all seen her act as if she’d never even written that note and didn’t have a clue what sort of chaos she was causing in the kitchen just by changing her mind at the last minute.

  After Bingo finished coming apart at the seams, she had announced that she would drive to Cortez as soon as the markets opened, to buy enough poultry and milk to fix Uncle Dick’s Chicken, the world’s easiest entrée, requiring only those two ingredients plus oil, salt, and pepper. That was vintage Bingo, trying to make life easier for them, even when it was rough on her.

  So now they all were even hotter and sweatier than usual and tiptoed around their chef, who was chopping tomatoes as if each one were a substitute for Naomi O’Neal’s head:

  Whack. Whack. Whack.

  All this, and they hadn’t even started loading up the food van that was going to transport a week’s worth of meals for a camping tour for sixteen teenagers from Texas! Or the portable lunch for the women on the hiking tour. Or the usual preparations for the lunch crowd in the dining hall.

  Bingo was, as usual, doing several things at one time: chopping the tomatoes for the breakfast scramble, keeping an eye on the boiling water for the cheese grits, and making sure nobody let the cinnamon rolls overcrisp in the oven.

  Above all the labor and clatter rose the music of one of Bingo’s damn classical records by that Armenian cousin of hers. It was a symphony this time, with violins and kettledrums sounding all moody and ominous. One of her staff’s few gripes against her was that she rarely allowed them to switch to rock and roll or anything anybody else wanted to hear; as long as she was in the kitchen, it had to be that boring classical stuff.

  What Bingo needed, they agreed among themselves, was some time away from the kitchen, maybe to go hiking with Dr. Van Sant and that group of women who had arrived yesterday. Because if she didn’t get away—soon—they were going to need some time off from her.