The Blue Corn Murders

by Nancy Pickard

  “This is the first time,” he said with grave humor, “that potential suspects have so thoughtfully provided lists of everything at a crime scene. And what about you, Mrs. Potter? How did you get along with the two dead women?”

  She wondered how Madeline Rose might have answered that question. Better than when they were alive, officer.

  “Fine,” Genia told him mildly, and then she also told him what Susan Van Sant had confided to her about the Anasazi pot and pictographs.

  He inquired, as if he were only making casual conversation, “She didn’t tell you where to find this alleged proof? It would be worth quite a bit of money, I would think.”

  “Millions, do you think?” Genia asked him.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” He smiled at her in his rather starchy fashion. Genia could see why Bingo had advised waiting for this one officer: He appeared quite intelligent and efficient, but also thoughtful, as if he would not jump to wrong conclusions. Nevertheless, he raised an eyebrow and asked her, “Would you be surprised to learn it was worth that much?”

  Do you think I killed her for it? Genia thought wearily. But she merely repeated, “No, I wouldn’t. But she didn’t tell me.”

  When he dismissed her, he directed her to a phone that was being kept free. She made a quick call to each of her children and also to a certain phone number in the Boston area, to let everyone who loved her know she was fine. After all, if the news from Medicine Wheel was going out to London, Tokyo, and Cape Town, it might well be going out to her children and to Jed White, he of the massive long-distance phone bills. After answering their worried questions as well as she could, she assured them there was no reason for them to worry about her. Of course, not one of them believed her, and one or two of them threatened to hop on a plane to come out there to be with her. “There’s no place to stay,” she warned them, “from here to Colorado Springs.” She told them the truth, that the police didn’t want any member of the women’s group to depart the area yet, and that she didn’t want to go until she knew the fate of the children.

  She returned to hogan one, where she fastened the windows with their weak latches, then struggled to shove a chest of drawers against the door. After that, she lay down and tried to sleep.

  A boy sat alone on a flat rock at the tip-top of a mountain. He was thinking, not of the home for which he longed and that he worried he might never see again, or of the parents who he believed had too much faith in his ability to cope in any circumstances. He missed them; he would like to see them again at least one more time. Was he being melodramatic? “How would I know?” he asked himself in his practical fashion. “I’m too young to know things like that about myself.”

  There were many immediate concerns he could have been thinking about, but what he was actually thinking about—who he was thinking about—was Frank Lloyd Wright, odd as it seemed even to him. The great architect. One thousand building designs in a seventy-year career. Five hundred of them actually built, as far as the boy knew. An incredible record for one person. A monumental achievement of beautiful, singular architecture that stood out like buildings from another planet in the landscape of masses of city skyscrapers and suburban tract homes.

  The boy had a theory. If he ever got home alive, he’d tell his mom about it, and his dad, too, if his dad would ever stop talking about how he ought to be a builder instead of an architect. And he might tell that nice Mrs. Potter, too.

  He reached for the silver circle and rubbed it.

  It had become his talisman.

  The boy’s theory was that the Hisatsenom had had their own version of Frank Lloyd Wright. An ancient architect of singular vision, towering ego, and magical charisma. That was why those buildings went up in the space of one man’s lifetime and why they were all of a similar, astonishingly original design, like nothing that had ever come before or ever came again. And that was also why they stopped being built, all of a sudden, bang.

  He laughed, sitting on his rock. It was also why they had to be abandoned. Frank Lloyd Wright’s roofs leaked, too. Like the great American architect, the great Anasazi architect was stronger on artistry than on mechanics! And when he was gone, dead, nobody else could carry it on or do it quite right. Just like Frank Lloyd Wright.

  It was a good theory, the boy decided, and he sure hoped he got a chance to tell somebody about it sometime.

  Late that afternoon the parents were allowed to sort through the bedrolls and other objects left at Red Palace Ruins to pick out what belonged to their children.

  But none of the items did.

  These were not their children’s belongings, the parents said. Everything was brand new, never used. Nobody knew to whom the things belonged. If they weren’t the property of the young people, whose were they? Where had they come from, and who had left them there, and to what purpose? Had the teenagers even been to Red Palace Ruins?

  Thirty-five

  Genia awoke that evening with one clear thought: I can’t stay here.

  With trepidation, she crept around shrubs and trees and people’s backs to the kitchen door. She stood there until somebody inside noticed her and pointed her out to the busy chef.

  Bingo came to the screen door.

  “You look like a woebegone puppy somebody left outside. What’s the matter, Genia? Apart from death and disaster, I mean.”

  “I need to find somewhere else to stay, Bingo. Could you suggest something for me?”

  The little chef opened the door.

  “Come in here while I think about this. If you’re a good girl, and you stay out of our way, I’ll get a plate fixed up for you, so you can eat supper in here with us.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  An hour and many happy and full stomachs later, Bingo came over to the corner where Genia sat on a stool, her back to a wall, slopping up a delicious spaghetti sauce with the remnants of the five pieces of garlic toast she had devoured. She had obediently and gratefully bothered no one. The chef came over, wiping her wet hands on a dish towel.

  “Stay with me,” she said.

  “Bingo, I couldn’t—”

  “Please.” That uncharacteristic word alerted Genia to examine the other woman’s face carefully for a hint of what lay behind the unexpected invitation. But the deadpan expression gave no clues. “I have room. You need a room. It’s free. Best food in town. What a deal. Say yes. Please.”

  “Yes,” said Genia humbly.

  “Come,” said Bingo to the “woebegone puppy,” and the puppy went, feeling for all the world that if she had a tail, it would be dragging disconsolately on the ground behind her.

  Bingo’s home in Cortez was no romantic, charming old Victorian like Susan’s. The chef ushered Genia and her belongings into a plain and practical new ranch-style house set amid neat labeled gardens of herbs and vegetables.

  None of that particularly surprised Genia.

  What did take her utterly by surprise was the presence of the two women sitting, over coffee and pie, at Bingo’s kitchen table: Naomi O’Neal and Lillian Kleberg.

  Naomi smiled warmly. “Surprise. Welcome to our little sorority, Genia.”

  And Lillian said tartly to Bingo, “Is this a new pledge?”

  “There is a pledge, actually,” Naomi said, standing up to pull out chairs for the newcomers. “A pledge of secrecy. Will you take it, Genia?”

  Thinking it was that or be turned out to sleep in her car, she naturally said she would. In fact, so grateful was she for lodging away from the campus that she very nearly asked for a Bible and raised her right hand to swear to it! “Give me a piece of that cherry pie,” she bargained, as she sat down between Lillian and Bingo, “and I’ll keep any secret you’ve got! Hello, Lillian, Naomi. I’m awfully glad to see you. I’ve been worried about both of you.”

  As well she might be, she soon learned from them.

  Before Genia even raised a fork to slice into pie, Lillian growled at her, “Rat fink.”

  Genia smiled down at the flaky crus
t and runny cherries on her plate. “Gabby’s list of story ideas? They told you? You know I had to tell the police. You would have, too, Lillian.”

  “Yes, I would” was the reply, “but you’re still a rat fink. I had a terrible time with that starched cop—you know the one I mean. Did he interrogate you, too?”

  “Interrogate? I talked to him, yes.”

  “I’ll bet you didn’t make the mistake of bursting into tears.”

  “Well, no.”

  “I did,” Lillian said, while Naomi looked sympathetic and Bingo swiped at the table with a clean wet rag. “All the man had to do was say Gabby’s and Susan’s names, and I blubbered like a fool.”

  “Lillian, that’s understandable.”

  “He certainly thought so,” she agreed, but her tone was biting. “He sure decided he understood me. ‘Tell me, Mrs. Kleberg, did you think Ms. Russell was suffering from mental illness? Did you think she should be put out of her misery?’ ”

  “Oh, Lillian! No!”

  “Yes! And then he said, ‘And what about Ms. Van Sant? Did you condemn her pregnancy out of wedlock? Did you try to solve her problems the way you helped solve your own daughter’s?’ ”

  “Oh, no! Lillian, I didn’t tell him that much. I didn’t say a word about—”

  The older woman relented. “I know you didn’t, Genia.”

  “Then, who—?”

  “Guess.”

  “I don’t know who else you told. Madeline?”

  “Bingo.”

  For a moment, Genia was confused. Was Lillian telling her that Bingo Chakmakjian had “ratted” on her? But the confusion cleared up when Bingo herself said indignantly, “Hey! Now don’t be taking my name in vain like that.”

  “I didn’t know Madeline knew,” Genia said.

  “I told her,” Lillian admitted, “in a moment of weakness. I’ve been having a lot of those lately.” She didn’t look weak at the moment, Genia thought; she looked like a strong-minded and determined woman. “But no more. Tonya would disown me to see me blubbering all over perfect strangers. Besides, I may have to get tough in order to save my own skin—or yours, or yours, or yours. What’s your motive supposed to be, Genia?”

  “I don’t think I have one for the death of poor Gabriella. But they do think that Susan may have passed on valuable information to me, which I suppose somebody could want to kill for.” Doubtfully, she added, “I suppose. Although it’s not very good information.…” She trailed off to find three faces staring at her curiously. “More than that, I can’t say.”

  Luckily, they seemed to take that to mean she didn’t have anything more to add. Before they had time to think about their mistaken interpretation, she said, “Naomi and Bingo, are you supposed to have motives?”

  “Not me,” said Bingo, raising her hands defensively in the air. “I’m just the chief cook and bottle washer ’round here. Like to keep it that way, too, but I won’t if Naomi leaves.”

  “If I leave?” Naomi’s smile was crooked. “Hasn’t anybody noticed that I’m already gone? It will take a miracle to get my job back. The consensus seems to be that I’ve gone completely off my rocker—that I’m running the Wheel into bankruptcy. It isn’t true, by the way, in case you wondered; we’re just slightly over one year’s budget, for heaven’s sake. But I’m supposed to have lost my grip on the Wheel and somehow then lost a whole group of people and also probably killed Gabby and”—her eyes filled—“Susan. My employee. My friend.” She shook her head sorrowfully. “Maybe I am losing my grip on reality. How did it all get so bad? So fast? It’ll take a miracle.”

  Lillian patted her hand consolingly. “That’s what we’re here for, dear.” She looked across at Genia. “Got any ideas?”

  “I know just what we need,” Genia responded. She got up and left the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a ballpoint pen and a yellow legal pad that she had packed at the bottom of her suitcase. She never went anywhere without one. Slapping it down on the table, which Bingo had already cleared of dirty dishes, she told them, “I can’t think without my yellow legal pad. Now, where shall we begin?”

  * * *

  They started with the three main questions:

  Where are the children?

  Who killed Gabriella Russell?

  Did somebody kill Susan Van Sant? Who?

  And then they started brainstorming wildly, tossing out every “fact” or fantasy they could think of, filling the empty yellow pages with their ideas, their fears, their theories.

  Naomi said, a glimmer of hope appearing in her eyes, “We’re four smart women. We ought to be able to figure something out!”

  Soon the “facts” began to organize themselves under the three main headings. And then there were pages headed with particular names, and long observations about those specific people, their activities, their lives. And then there were lists of “things to do,” with assignments for each of the women to take on. They worked long into the night, comforted and inspired by one another’s presence, fortified by Bingo’s nonstop supply of wonderful food, and congratulating each other on having observed this or overheard that or gotten a glimpse of something else that might be helpful or even incriminating.

  Hours later, they stopped for a review.

  “I don’t know what any of this means,” said Lillian.

  “It’s hopeless,” moaned Naomi.

  “I’ve got to get up in four hours,” complained Bingo.

  “Let’s sleep on it,” Genia suggested. “Maybe it will come clear in the morning.”

  It didn’t.

  * * *

  Their breakthrough didn’t come until Friday night.

  The children had been gone since Monday; if they were all right, they would have been expected back on Saturday.

  The women had been idly talking about Martina Alvarez, how difficult she could be, and the changes she might put into place at the Wheel. Lillian was in the middle of telling them a grimly humorous story about how Madeline Rose never took any guff from Martina, when she suddenly looked up with a puzzled expression.

  “Naomi,” she said, “when you put Martina in hogan two with Madeline and me, how did you know Madeline could survive it?”

  “What, Lillian?”

  “You said, ‘Madeline’s a tough cookie.’ Didn’t she say that, Genia? We were climbing the trail to Last Man Standing, just before Madeline got in that tussle with poor Gabby. Remember, Genia?”

  She nodded. She did, in fact, remember that very well.

  “So,” Lillian continued, “how did you know, ahead of time, when you were making our hogan assignments, that Madeline would be such a ‘tough cookie’?”

  “Oh.” The director appeared nonplussed. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Naomi!” It was a vehement, demanding chorus.

  “Oh, all right. I guess we all need to know everything, even if it’s not important. Madeline Rose is Jon’s wife.”

  She gazed into three faces all registering shock.

  “What?” Naomi asked them. “Should I have said he’s her husband? Is that better? I know you’re probably surprised—”

  “Probably?” Bingo screeched at her.

  “—but you knew he was married to somebody.”

  “How do you know this,” Bingo yelled at her, “and we don’t?”

  “Good grief, Bingo. I found out when I ran the background check on him before I hired him. But even then, Jon said they weren’t really married—not really—and they just hadn’t gotten around to filing for divorce, and they preferred to keep quiet about it. He said, very nicely, that this was intensely private information about him and would I please not reveal it to anybody, ever.”

  “But he told everybody he was married,” Bingo objected.

  “Oh, that was just to keep the horny tourists away.” Naomi laughed. “He is a cutie, you have to admit. It was protective coloration. But if he did get involved with a woman—like he did with Susan—he didn’t want his wife to be embarrassed b
y it, so he wanted her name kept out of it. Very chivalrous, you might say, in his own unique way.”

  She noticed they were still staring at her in the same shocked manner. “What? You don’t think so? Why are you all still looking at me as if I’ve grown horns?”

  “You weren’t there, were you?” Lillian spoke slowly. “When Susan told us she was pregnant—that Jon was going to divorce his wife … and marry Susan.”

  “What?” Now it was Naomi’s turn to look stunned. “No, I wasn’t. She heard that, Madeline did? But wait a minute, why would she care, if they were married in name only? And not even in name, really, since she kept her maiden one.”

  “That’s Jon’s version,” Bingo pointed out. “We don’t know how his wife—Madeline—felt about it. Anyway, jealousy’s a weird thing, don’t you think? It can pop up real violently just when you think you’ve got it all tamped down.”

  “Violently?” Naomi echoed.

  “What was Madeline doing in this women’s group?” Bingo demanded. “What did you think, Naomi, when you took her reservation?”

  “Oh, I didn’t. Jon did. You know he takes care of all the reservations—that’s entirely his job. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even recognize her name when I did see it. But when Jon disappeared and I looked up his next of kin, there she was.”

  “My God, what’d she say?” Bingo asked.

  “Nothing. And since she didn’t, I figured I’d better keep quiet, too, since nobody was supposed to know. I really don’t know if she knows that I know, if you can follow that.”

  “I think,” Genia said slowly, speaking up for the first time, “you’d better hope she doesn’t.” When they asked her what she meant, she just shook her head, unwilling to go any further than that for the moment. Instead, she said, “We didn’t have a clue about Madeline and Jon, Naomi. She didn’t say anything, didn’t give us a hint that it was her husband who was missing.”