The Vanishing Point

by Judith Van GIeson

  “It looks like Vail’s writing, except for the places where it gets large and sloppy.”

  “He might have been under stress.”

  “He could also have been on drugs. He was a known user.”

  “It could explain the reference to La Sagrada Família.”

  “The sacred family. I thought that was an ironic reference to his own family.”

  “Possibly. It’s also an unfinished church in Barcelona. The masonry walls seem to be sliding off the frame, which is the way some people perceive things when they’re on LSD.” Claire had taken LSD while traveling through Europe with her lover, Pietro, in 1967 and 1968. At the time she thought it explained the artistic vision of some artists, including Vincent van Gogh and Antoni Gaudí.

  Curt didn’t question her about LSD, which was all right with Claire. She had no desire to be discussing thirty-year-old acid trips in her office. On the other hand, Curt showed a remarkable lack of curiosity for an investigator.

  “The style of the journal also seems to be Vail’s,” he said.

  “I’d say so, but it’s not up to the standard set by A Blue-Eyed Boy,” Claire replied.

  “I’ll let you be the judge of that. I was reading more for content myself. This is the first I’ve heard of Lou. Do you know who he is?”

  “No,” Claire admitted. “I was rather surprised that Jennie Dell was never mentioned, since she was with Jonathan in the canyon.”

  “She claims she got there on the tenth. She signed in at the ranger station that day. I never found anything to contradict her story. There were only a few entries after she got to Slickrock.”

  “She was his girlfriend. You’d think he’d have had some thoughts about her.”

  “Vail was a self-centered individual. He was concerned about getting his draft notice and angry at his folks for not getting him a deferment.”

  “Would they really have been able to?”

  “It wasn’t unheard of for prominent businessmen to get deferments for their employees. The Vails sold their products to the army. They were major contributors to the Republican Party. They had influence.” Curt leaned forward in his chair, resting his bear-paw hands on his knees. “I never thought the family gave Jennie her due. She was always very cooperative with the investigation.”

  The light in Curt’s eyes when he talked about Jennie set off an alarm in Claire. A middle-aged man investing power in a younger woman, she thought. Of course, Curt hadn’t been middle-aged when he’d known Jennie Dell. He had probably been the same age as she, but he was a ranger and Jennie was a footloose hippie.

  “She was a good-looking woman,” Curt said, “with long blond hair down to her waist. Jonathan Vail didn’t appreciate what he had. Did you make me a copy of the journal?”

  “Yes.” Claire handed it over.

  “I’ll reread it, but I hope I’ll find more in the cave than I did in the journal. I’ll need to contact Tim Sansevera.”

  Claire supplied his address and phone number.

  “I want to see exactly where he found the briefcase, and I’ll need to examine the duffel bag and to see if there is any other evidence in the cave. You know as much about Vail as anyone. Would you be interested in going to Sin Nombre with Sansevera and me?”

  Claire wondered whether this was proper procedure, but she was delighted to be asked. “I’d love to,” she said.

  “How is your schedule?”

  “No problem. I could go anytime this week or over the weekend.”

  “I’ll set it up for Saturday.” Curt stood up and gave Claire’s hand a firm shake. “It will be a pleasure to work with you.”

  “I’m looking forward to it,” said Claire.

  ******

  When Tim came by the next morning to pick up his photocopy, he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, possibly even the same jeans and T-shirt he’d had on when Claire had seen him a few days ago. But today his clothes were clean, and he wasn’t covered with a layer of dust, although his running shoes seemed to be tinted permanently pink.

  “Did Curt Devereux get in touch with you?” Claire asked him.

  “He came to my place.” Claire had deduced from Tim’s address that he lived in the student ghetto. “We’re meeting at the trailhead to Slickrock Canyon.”

  “I’m going, too,” Claire said.

  “Are you?” Tim replied, with an expression in his green eyes that Claire couldn’t read. “What did you think of the guy?”

  Claire, who hadn’t made up her mind yet, chose her words carefully. “He seemed agreeable.”

  “Agreeable!” Tim’s lips started to form an expletive, but then he remembered that he was a graduate student and Claire was an assistant professor. “He’s a potato head.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know the kid’s toy where you stick plastic face parts onto a real potato? Devereux puts on the right expression for every occasion, but basically the guy’s a blank.”

  “He’s preparing to retire from the federal government. Most likely he’s spent most of his working life concealing his thoughts.”

  “If he ever had any to conceal. I don’t have a lot of confidence in him. I’d never trust a man who wears his pants around his armpits.”

  When a man has a stomach, his pants have to go somewhere, Claire thought.

  “If someone discovers what happened to Jonathan Vail, it won’t be Curt Devereux. Did you find any clues in the journal?”

  “Let’s talk about that after you read it,” Claire said. “I think it’s better to approach the journal without preconceptions.” She suspected, however, that Tim’s interest was too proprietary to allow him to approach anything related to Jonathan Vail without preconceptions. “Ada Vail gave me permission to give you a photocopy, but she is restricting access to people who work at the center. Please don’t show this to anyone.” She gave the photocopy to Tim and watched while he put it into his backpack.

  “I won’t,” he said. “Did you mention publication to Ada Vail?”

  “Yes. There are things in the journal she wants to suppress.”

  “She can’t suppress a word,” Tim cried. Once again Claire had the sensation that he was radiating canyon heat. “The journal has to be published exactly as it is.”

  Claire wondered if this was the moment to tell him that it wasn’t his decision to make—but she decided against it. She was meeting with an editor at UNM Press that afternoon, but there were many issues to be resolved before publication could even be considered.

  “I’ll see you in Slickrock Canyon,” she said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Me, too,” Tim said, hoisting his backpack.

  ******

  Other than getting around the UNM campus, people seldom walked in Albuquerque, or in Tucson either, where Claire had lived and worked before coming to the center. By the time the sun rose, it was too hot to walk in Tucson, but people didn’t have that excuse in Albuquerque, where the nights and mornings were always cool. Claire had been too rushed to do her tai chi this morning and needed some exercise, so she walked to the UNM Press office, where she had an appointment with an editor named Avery Dunstan. She passed through the exhibition room and went out the front door of the center. The bicycle rack had a sign that had once read, LEAVE YOUR BICYCLES AND E-Z GO CARTS OUTSIDE but had been vandalized to read, LEAVE YOUR TESTICLES AND EGOS OUTSIDE. Advice that was seldom followed in a university.

  She walked around the west side of the building, stopping for a minute beside the duck pond and noticing the way the tower reflected across the surface. The center’s massive walls made it seem solid and grounded, but its tower reached for the sky. It was the university’s signature building—a good place to store rare manuscripts.

  Claire walked west to University and north to Lomas, where UNM Press was located in a undistinguished strip-mall building. Whenever she came to this office, she was glad she worked at the beautiful center, although she suspected there might be more camaraderie among the editors at t
he press than there was among the librarians. She gave her name to the receptionist and waited for Avery.

  “Claire,” he called as he came rushing down the hall, reminding her of a long-legged bird that, no matter how much it flapped its wings, never got off the ground. Avery was in his mid-thirties, Claire guessed, six feet tall and thin as a reed. His brown hair was tousled, and he wore khaki pants and a white shirt. One eye was slightly crossed, which gave him a permanently puzzled expression.

  “Excellent to see you,” he said, giving Claire a hug.

  “Good to see you, Avery,” she replied.

  “I am so incredibly excited about Jonathan Vail’s journal! Let’s go back to my office where we can discuss it.”

  Claire felt there was no privacy to be had in the press’s office cubicles, so you might as well talk in the hallway as anywhere else, but she followed Avery to his office, passing a cubicle that appeared to be a graveyard for dead computers. A screen saver was doing loops on Avery’s computer monitor, and pictures of a solemn-faced woman were taped to his walls. The woman was Avery’s wife, Heather, whom Claire had met at the press’s annual Christmas party. Avery’s flamboyant manner contrasted with Heather’s steady, quiet presence.

  Avery picked up his copy of Jonathan’s journal and hugged it to his chest before putting it back on his desk. “This is the find of a lifetime. A lifetime! We will be ever so lucky if it doesn’t go to a New York publisher.”

  “What do you think of the writing?” Claire asked him.

  “Honestly? Between you and me?” he said in a stage whisper, glancing surreptitiously around his cubicle.

  And anyone else who happens to be listening, Claire thought. “Honestly,” she replied.

  “Leaden. Flat. But he was out there in the wilderness scribbling by a campfire, right? It’s not great literature, but it is Jonathan Vail, so who cares?”

  “Now you sound like a New York publisher.”

  “We consider this to be a book with historical significance that we definitely want to publish, but first we will have to get permission from whoever holds the rights.”

  “Presumably that’s the parents, and they could be difficult. The father has been incapacitated by a stroke, and there’s no telling what he thinks. The mother is already talking about cutting out passages she doesn’t like.”

  “She can’t!” Avery cried, throwing up his hands in exasperation. “The journal is a historical document that needs to be published exactly as it is. Personally I would not change one single word. Can you talk to her?”

  “I tried. I didn’t get very far.”

  “I’ll talk to her, then,” said Avery.

  Claire didn’t think that Ada would be receptive to the flamboyant Avery. “She is very conservative,” she replied.

  “There’s always the rumor that Jonathan left behind a child. If there is such a child and anyone can find him or her, there’s an heir. I know for a fact that royalties for A Blue-Eyed Boy are paid to Jennie Dell.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I talked to the editor in New York once about doing a limited edition of that book, and she told me. Jonathan had some arrangement with Jennie. Maybe he left her the rights to the journal, too. I’m counting on you, Claire, to get the matter settled. If we publish, we want you to write the foreword and to annotate our edition.”

  It was a considerable honor. “I’d love to,” Claire said.

  “You deserve to,” Avery replied. “You’re his archivist. Having your name on Jonathan Vail’s journal will add enormous prestige to your career. It will be a ten without a doubt.” Archivists and librarians were graded each year for librarianship, research and publication, and university community service, ten points in each category. Claire needed some publication points this year. “And I know that with your name on it you’ll want to get permission to publish the manuscript intact.”

  “Tim Sansevera, the grad student who found the manuscript, wants to see his name on it.”

  “A grad student?” Avery’s errant eye did a loop around the ceiling and settled on his nose. Grad students didn’t get their name on a book if a professor was involved, no matter how much they contributed—which had more to do with ego than merit or effort. Claire didn’t actually teach, but she was still considered a member of the faculty and held the title of assistant professor. “Mention him in the acknowledgments,” Avery said. It was the standard method of dealing with grad students.

  “He won’t be content with that.”

  “Does he have a choice? Finding a manuscript in a cave doesn’t constitute ownership. Talk to him. Work it out. You can do it.”

  Claire wasn’t so sure. Her mood was reflected in her posture as she left Avery’s office and walked across the campus. Hunched over like Kokopelli, the Anasazi flute player, she felt as though she was toting a backpack that was filled with stones.

  Chapter Four

  WHEN CLAIRE ANSWERED HER PHONE LATER THAT AFTERNOON the voice on the line sounded hesitant and husky. “I’d like to speak to Claire Reynier?” the caller whispered, putting a question mark where there should have been a period.

  “I’m Claire Reynier.”

  “This is Jennie Dell.” The image that came to Claire’s mind was of the hippie with long blond hair beating a tambourine on a stage. She was too startled to respond immediately. Jennie hesitated, too, then said, “Curt Devereux gave me a copy of Jonathan’s journal.”

  “He did?” Claire asked, adding a question mark of her own. It was a lame response, but she needed time to think. She didn’t believe Curt should be showing the journal to a woman who had once been a suspect.

  “It was a shock to see it after all this time.”

  “I’m sure it was.”

  “Curt said that UNM is considering publication?”

  “It’s under consideration, but there are a lot of issues that need to be resolved—rights, for one thing.”

  “Ada Vail can be difficult.”

  Claire had nothing to add to that. There was another lengthy pause in the conversation. “Where are you calling from?” she finally asked, to fill the vacuum.

  “Madrid. I live here now.”

  Claire knew by the emphasis on the first syllable that Jennie was talking about the former mining town southwest of Santa Fe, not the city in Spain.

  “Curt told me you’re meeting him in Slickrock Canyon on Saturday?”

  Claire resisted the impulse to say, “He did?” again. She was bothered by Curt’s lack of discretion and confidentiality. The fact that this was an old investigation didn’t make it insignificant in her mind. To her what happened to Jonathan Vail was very significant. As an archivist, she knew that a rumor that gets repeated often enough becomes accepted as fact. She had heard all the rumors about Curt’s incompetence, but she needed facts to believe them. So far he seemed to be doing his best to live up to his reputation. “Did he invite you to come along, too?” she asked, hoping that he hadn’t.

  “No, he didn’t, but I wouldn’t have gone even if he had. I have no desire to return to that place ever again. Besides…” She laughed. “I’ve become a house cat. I was wondering if you could stop by here on your way? I’d like to talk to you about the notebook and what would be in Jonathan’s best interests. I’m not hard to find—it’s the yellow house with turquoise trim on the west side of town. Follow the dirt road next to the glassblowers.”

  Claire agreed. She was intrigued by the thought of meeting the woman who had existed for so long as a character on a page, a character considered duplicitous by some, honorable by others. Curt Devereux had come out of the Vail investigation with a tarnished reputation, but Jennie’s remained ambiguous.

  ******

  Claire left the center Friday afternoon prepared for hiking in Grand Gulch. She had good boots. She brought along a hat, sunscreen, a day pack, lots of water, and trail mix. She worried about keeping up with Curt and Tim, who spent a lot more time in the wilderness than she did. Tai chi, which had
taught her how to keep an opponent off balance by embracing the opposite, was good preparation for her job at the center, but she didn’t know if it could prepare her for the wilderness, or for Jennie Dell either.

  She took the back road to Madrid, passing through Tijeras Canyon on the section of I-40 where trucks picked up speed for the long haul to Amarillo. She got off at Cedar Crest and turned north onto Highway 14, the old Turquoise Trail. From an Albuquerque resident’s point of view this was the back side of the Sandia Mountains. The west side was high desert. The east side was green with piñon, juniper, and cedar. It had rained recently. The sky was heavy with clouds, and there were places where gravel had washed across the highway.

  Development moved relentlessly north on Route 14. The farther north Claire drove, the larger the houses and building lots became. She took a deep breath and exhaled when she passed San Pedro Creek, the last development, and entered the place that was described in a Spanglish road sign as El Corazón del Ortiz Ranch. KEEP OUT was painted on tires attached periodically to a fence. It was a beautiful and valuable property located midway between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. From here on, the road passed through ranch country and ghost towns.

  Claire drove through Golden admiring the rounded lines of the whitewashed adobe church. Adobe always gave her the impression that it was rising out of the earth at the same time that it was sinking back in. Ten miles later she rounded a curve and came upon the slag heap that marked the entrance to the former mining town of Madrid. It was one of the rare towns in New Mexico that had little natural beauty. Claire couldn’t remember when Madrid was an active mining town, but she remembered when, in the seventies, artists and craftspeople who could no longer afford to live in Santa Fe began fixing up the abandoned board-and-batten miners’ shacks and moving in. Some had been painted, some were weathered stony gray, some were too far gone to ever be restored, reduced to skeletons. Madrid had once been a very lonely place, but now the main street bustled with restaurants and shops, and finding a parking space could be a challenge. Claire followed Jennie’s directions and turned onto a dirt road that was pockmarked with potholes and ruts. The recent rain had left puddles in the holes. Going five miles an hour and dodging the puddles, Claire came to the yellow house with turquoise trim that belonged to Jennie. Next to it a weathered shed functioned as a garage. The door was open, and Claire could see a compact car inside that matched the turquoise trim. She parked in the driveway and walked to the front door. The doorbell was a wind chime, a series of graduated metal pipes. Claire struck it, and the sound reverberated along the pipes.