The Vanishing Point

by Judith Van GIeson

  VANISHING POINT

  A CLAIRE REYNIER MYSTERY, #2

  Judith Van Gieson

  VANISHING POINT

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2001 Judith Van Gieson.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by other means, without permission.

  First ebook edition © 2012 by AudioGO.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-472-0

  Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9509-4

  Cover photo © Agaliza/iStock.com

  Vanishing Point is dedicated to my former roommate

  and longtime friend, Danielle Freeman,

  and to the world’s best fans,

  Katia Kirpane and Gerard Kosicki, with thanks

  for sharing the wonder and the journey.

  Hundreds of times I have trusted my life to

  crumbling sandstone and nearly vertical

  angles in the search for water or cliff

  dwellings. . . . One way and another, I have

  been flirting pretty heavily with Death, the

  old clown.

  —Everett Ruess

  VANISHING POINT

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  MORE MYSTERIES BY JUDITH VAN GIESON

  Chapter One

  ARCHIVISTS ARE KNOWN AS THE KEEPERS OF MEMORY. One of Claire Reynier’s jobs at the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico was to preserve the papers, the legend, and the memory of the writer Jonathan Vail. There was little in his own words—a few letters, a novel, and a journal that had remained in print for more than thirty years—but volumes had been written about him. Claire liked to think of Jonathan as the literary West’s phantom limb. In 1966, when he was twenty-three, he vanished on a camping trip in Slickrock Canyon in southeastern Utah. The journal he was keeping at the time was never found. But, as a brain continues to receive signals from a limb it knows has been severed, people who cared about Western writing continued to receive stimuli from Jonathan Vail. For years after he vanished there were sightings all over the West, in Mexico, and in Canada. His initials were found carved in caves and on canyon walls.

  Southeastern Utah is a good place to start a legend: the mesas are vast, the canyons are deep and often invisible until a person stands right on the edge, the rocks are whipped into suggestive shapes by the water and the wind. When Jonathan disappeared, he was young, good-looking, and full of promise, and that was how he remained. Claire knew well enough that while real people show the effects of time, legends don’t. She had once been five years younger than Jonathan, but that was long ago. She had recently turned fifty-one. He would always be twenty-three. Eventually she would die and be remembered only by friends and family, but the legend of Jonathan Vail would last as long as people cared to read about the West.

  Claire had a layperson’s knowledge of Jonathan Vail’s work when she came to the center and was put in charge of his papers. She had been a student at the University of Arizona during the years he dropped in and out of UNM. She knew of him—everyone did—but they had never met. She read his novel, A Blue-Eyed Boy, when she was eighteen and was enthralled by Jonathan’s brand of rebellion and his elegant and passionate prose style.

  The Vail family had donated the original manuscripts of the journal and A Blue-Eyed Boy to the center with the stipulation that they could be read only by scholars. If a scholar wanted to read them, Claire retrieved the manuscripts from their place in the tower and took them to the Anderson Reading Room, where valuable manuscripts were read. Scholars were required to surrender their ID’s and put on the white gloves provided by library staff before they were allowed to touch precious pages. After Claire had read A Blue-Eyed Boy several times and discussed it innumerable times, she’d come to the conclusion that it was a book best read when one was eighteen. The coming-of-age theme would always be of interest, and Vail showed a poet’s flair in his descriptions of the natural world, but attitudes that had once seemed bold and flamboyant now verged on self-indulgence. Nevertheless, Claire didn’t consider it her job to disillusion a student captivated by the book or the legend, and by now the legend had become greater than the book. The possibility still existed that the mystery of Vail’s disappearance would be solved, and Claire listened patiently to all the theories.

  The night Jonathan vanished from Slickrock Canyon, he was with his girlfriend, Jennie Dell. Her story, which had remained constant, was that they went to sleep in a cave during a light rain. When she woke up, she was alone, the rain had become a downpour, and the water level was rising rapidly in the narrow canyon. Jennie claimed that it was hours before the water receded sufficiently for her to go looking for Jonathan. By then any footprints or evidence had washed away.

  Jonathan was reckless enough (possibly even drugged enough) to have wandered off alone. Slickrock got its name because it turned treacherously slippery when wet. He might have slipped, fallen off a cliff, drowned in the flash flood. He could have been struck by lightning or a rattlesnake. The accidental death theory was popular, but it had never satisfied Claire; she thought that sooner or later Jonathan’s bones would have been found. Bones don’t lie, and they take forever to disintegrate. Occasionally human bones were found downstream from Slickrock Canyon, but DNA testing established that they were not Jonathan Vail’s.

  He had received his draft notice shortly before he vanished, and some people believed he killed himself in despair or staged his own disappearance to avoid the Vietnam War. Rumors persisted that Jonathan had fathered a child and that he was alive and well somewhere. None of these theories satisfied Claire either. If there had been a suicide, there should have been a body. When he disappeared, Jonathan was a young, acclaimed writer, full of books yet to be written. Claire believed that a writer of Vail’s reputation would not have killed himself. She was sure he would have returned when amnesty was granted and continued writing. In her experience writers lived to write. If something had happened to Jonathan in exile, word would have come back.

  She thought the most logical explanation for his disappearance was that he had been murdered and the remains buried deep or carted away. Jennie Dell, while never charged with a crime, was still shadowed by suspicion. But the theories Claire heard most often from graduate students had to do with cattle rustlers, drug dealers, Navajo thieves, a rancher who came upon Vail killing his cattle. The fact that the crime was never solved was blamed on the inexperience, incompetence, or indifference of Curt Devereux, the ranger who had conducted the investigation.

  Long before Claire took charge of Vail’s papers the sightings had stopped, and the initials that were still occasionally discovered carved in the walls of remote canyons were attributed to vandals from another era. The number of people who hoped to make their mark by solving the mystery or finding the journal that Jonathan was working on had dwindled to a handful of graduate students at UNM.

  When Tim Sansevera, a doctoral candidate in American Studies, showed up in her office, Claire’s first reaction was skepticism. Tim’s scruffy appearance didn’t help. Claire didn’t expect anyone with a theory about Jonathan Vail to show up in a three-piece suit, but it wouldn’t have hurt Tim’s credibility any to have shower
ed and changed his clothes. Although his surname was Spanish, his appearance was Anglo: fair, sunburned skin, pale green eyes, and long reddish-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. Tim wore a dirty T-shirt, torn jeans, and running shoes that had been tinted pink by dust. The hair on his forehead was matted with sweat.

  He dropped his backpack to the floor and sat down in the chair across from Claire’s desk. “I’ve been in Slickrock Canyon for a week,” he said. Claire was willing to believe him on that score; he had the rank smell of a person who’d spent a week on the trail. She also knew that a discovery was a discovery wherever you found it. In the Southwest, discoveries were more likely to be made in the dust than anywhere else. “I drove straight here. I didn’t even go home first.”

  Claire was feeling a tingle of excitement in spite of herself. “What did you find?”

  “I was in the side canyon they call Sin Nombre, walking along a high ledge just below the mesa. It’s a hard ledge to follow because it’s full of rock slides. I’d been there before, but it seemed like the slides had shifted since the last trip. There might have been a hard rain, maybe even a minor earthquake. Anyway, I was able to climb over the rubble, which I never could before. I saw an opening. I climbed in.” With an actor’s sense of timing, Tim paused to retie his bandanna.

  Claire distrusted his theatricality. What could he have seen? Another set of initials carved in the wall of a cave that might have been opened and closed by rock slides numerous times in the last thirty years?

  “I found this,” he said, bending over and opening his backpack. “I brought it to you because the center is where it belongs.” Tim took his find out of the backpack and handed it to her. It was a briefcase made of a thick gray hide and layered with dust.

  “Did you open it?” Claire asked.

  Tim nodded, focusing his intense green eyes on her.

  “What did you find?”

  “The journal,” he whispered.

  The journal could only be Jonathan Vail’s journal. His last known words. The document that people had been searching the canyonlands for since 1966. The document that just might solve the mystery of his disappearance. Given the remoteness, ruggedness, and dryness of the area in which he had vanished, it was entirely possible that the journal had sat in a cave undiscovered and well preserved for more than thirty years.

  “Did you read it?” Claire asked, trying to resist the temptation to get theatrical herself.

  “I didn’t want to get fingerprints on it or damage it in any way. I read the first and last pages only.”

  That’s what she would have done. Better not to have read the manuscript or even touched it, but for anyone familiar with the Vail legend it would have been hard to resist reading the first page to see if the handwriting was Vail’s and the last page to see if the mystery had been solved.

  “It’s his,” Tim said, radiating excitement like a canyon wall emanates heat. “It’s his writing. It’s his style.”

  Possible, Claire thought, but it wouldn’t be the first elaborate hoax perpetrated in New Mexico. She had no reason to distrust Tim, though. As far as she knew, he was a dedicated student. He’d asked to read the manuscript of A Blue-Eyed Boy several times, but that wasn’t unusual for someone doing a dissertation on the author. Maybe he was radiating too much heat—or was it that the stakes were too high? Claire reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a pair of white gloves. Tim watched as she inserted her hands, smoothing her fingers into place. It was a ritual she enjoyed, a way of showing reverence for something rare and valuable. The contrast between the pristine white gloves and the dusty gray briefcase was extreme.

  She undid the zipper carefully, trying not to dirty the gloves, and slid her hand inside, feeling that there was an empty pocket in the side of the briefcase and that the leather was thick. “What kind of hide is this?” she asked Tim. “Buffalo?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied.

  Claire pulled out a faded blue spiral-bound notebook and carefully turned back the cover. The paper was dry and crinkly, apparently with age. The ink was faded but still legible, the handwriting familiar. It was either Jonathan Vail’s careless script, which Claire knew well, or a skillful forgery. The immensity of the discovery began to overwhelm her, and she closed her eyes. In her world this was comparable to finding a previously unknown Emily Dickinson poem or a sonnet by Shakespeare.

  “Incredible, isn’t it?” Tim asked.

  “Yes.”

  She read the first entry, which was dated June 29, 1966. “Pale blue ribbon cloud sky. A hawk flew over the rim dangling a snake from its talons. A rare day when you get to see a snake and a hawk.” It was Jonathan’s handwriting. Jonathan’s elliptical style.

  Claire turned the pages carefully until she came to the last entry. Here the handwriting was larger, bolder, and even more careless than it had been at the beginning. The last entry was dated July 12, 1966, two days before Jennie Dell reported Jonathan missing. “Canyon slipping and sliding like the walls of La Sagrada Família. Thunder growls in the distance like an angry bear or a drum roll. I hate the fucking war.”

  For an instant the sounds, the smells, the excitement of being young in 1966 came back to Claire. It was a time of living dangerously, and Jonathan Vail could take her back there if anyone could. She was eager to read the rest of the journal, but there was much to be done first.

  “Have you ever been to La Sagrada Família?” she asked Tim.

  “Never. Where is it?”

  “It’s an unfinished church in Barcelona designed by the architect Antoni Gaudí. The walls give the effect of sliding off the frame.” Claire thought she knew as much about Jonathan as anyone, but she had never heard of him visiting Spain.

  “I thought he was referring to the rain and rock slides in the canyon.”

  As Claire recalled, it hadn’t started raining hard until July 13, a detail that was certain to be checked later when the manuscript was examined by scholars. She would have to make one very careful copy, placing each page of the notebook on the Xerox machine’s glass, and then recopy the copy so it could be read by the family and members of the department.

  “Were you alone when you found this?” she asked Tim.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you told anyone else?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Was there anything else in the cave?” she asked. Footprints, tools, bones, murder weapons? she thought.

  “Just a duffel bag.”

  “Did you look inside?”

  “There were clothes on top, but I didn’t go through it. I didn’t want to disturb anything. The bag was heavy and I was carrying too much gear to bring it out.”

  “There are people who will say you should have left the briefcase there, too.”

  In its own way it was an archaeological find, although not ancient enough to be governed by the Antiquities Act. The thinking now was that archaeological finds should be left undisturbed.

  “I know,” Tim sighed, “but I couldn’t. Someone who didn’t value the journal might have found it. Suppose there was another slide? It might have gotten lost forever.”

  “Jonathan’s disappearance is a cold case, but it’s an unsolved case. The federal government could consider the journal evidence and moving it tampering with evidence. You would only have had to leave it alone long enough to get to the ranger station.”

  “I didn’t want to report it to the ranger station. They fucked it up the first time, didn’t they?”

  Claire felt the heat rising as his face flushed. It was beginning to seem fitting to her that Tim had found the journal; he had the same pale eyes and passionate intensity that his hero was known for.

  “Who knows? We weren’t there. We don’t know the obstacles the rangers were facing.”

  “I’d hate to see them pawing all over the journal.”

  “I’m sure they can work with a copy. I do need to notify the rangers in Grand Gulch that you found the journal. They’ll want to get in touch with yo
u.”

  Tim wrote his address down on a slip of paper and handed it to Claire. “Before you call them, put the original in a very safe place.”

  “Of course. I’ll also need to notify the family.”

  “Them? What did they ever do for Jonathan when he was alive?”

  Jonathan’s troubled relationship with authority was well documented in A Blue-Eyed Boy. He was drafted at age twenty-three, a few years from the outer limit of eligibility, by a hard-nosed draft board. It was widely believed that he could have avoided the draft by going to work for the family business, which manufactured felt that the army used, but Jonathan either refused to work for his family or the family refused to hire him. Claire had heard both theories.

  “Legally the journal belongs to the heirs, who presumably are the parents. They have been very generous with the library. I have to ask their permission before we can do anything/’

  “Then what?”

  “Hopefully, they’ll allow us to keep the journal at the center and make it available to scholars, as they have the other papers.”

  “The journal is a major find. It should be published and read by everyone,” Tim said.

  He’d had five hours to think about this while driving down from Utah. Claire had had only a few minutes, and she hadn’t even considered publication yet. “Well, of course, publication would be an option if the family is willing. UNM Press would be the logical choice.”

  “Not them!” Tim cried. “The journal should reach a wider audience.”

  “I don’t know, Tim. It’s been more than thirty years since Jonathan Vail disappeared. The journal is news here, but not everywhere.”

  Tim tugged at his bandanna. “It would be fair if my name appeared on the book, since I was the one who found the manuscript.”

  They were both in a publish-or-perish profession. If Tim intended to be an academic, having his name on such a prestigious publication when he was so young would jump-start his career. It would also be a coup for Claire, who was considered a member of the faculty and, as such, was required to publish. “It is a possibility, but it’s premature to be talking about publication. As I said, there are other things that need to be taken care of first.” Claire stood up. “Thank you so much for bringing this to me, Tim. It will be wonderful for the center.”