The Vanishing Point

by Judith Van GIeson

  “Jennie’s a better writer, but after Out of the Blue didn’t sell, she couldn’t find a publisher for her next book. I had a reputation, so she borrowed my name and my life for A Blue-Eyed Boy. She never should have told you she’d written a novel.”

  Probably not, Claire thought, but ego will out. “It’s not human nature to publish a book and tell no one about it.”

  “Is it human nature to want to be a legend even if you know you don’t deserve it?”

  “That’s difficult to say,” Claire replied. “Few people ever have the opportunity.”

  The eyes that remained restless no matter what color they were settled briefly on Claire before darting away. “My life was either shaped by events I couldn’t control or by opportunity. Take your pick. When the army sent me Lou’s stuff after he died, it gave me a ready-made identity. I wasn’t doing a very good job of being Jonathan Vail. Taking too many drugs. Not happy with my writing. My family was on my case. The relationship with Jennie was trouble. I knew I didn’t want to go to Vietnam.

  “I carried Lou’s duffel bag into the canyons and hid it in the cave in Sin Nombre, along with my journal. I held a little ceremony in the cave, dropped some acid, turned myself into Lou. The writer became the fan. I caused a rock slide, thinking my identity and thoughts would stay buried until I was ready to dig them up. I never told Jennie about the duffel bag. She knew I was going to Mexico, but I didn’t tell her for years that I had assumed Lou’s name. No one could make her reveal it if she didn’t know it.

  “Time passed. I liked my expatriate life in San Miguel de Allende. When I told you Lou couldn’t write anymore, that was the truth. I stopped writing and made a living repairing cars. After I injured my leg, I couldn’t do that kind of work anymore, so I began crafting folk art sculptures out of spare parts. I have a reputation as a metal sculptor in Mexico.

  “When I left the States I was known only as a regional writer. Who would have dreamed that while I was gone A Blue-Eyed Boy would become a bestseller and Jonathan Vail would turn into a legend? Jennie wouldn’t have let me go on being the hero if I’d come back, so when amnesty was granted I stayed where I was. I return every year to renew my vehicle registrations. I visit Jennie, see how the legend is doing, come to Angel Fire to pay my respects to Lou. I avoid my family. I had my life. Jennie collected the royalties. It was an arrangement that worked for both of us until your graduate student found Jonathan’s journal.”

  He stopped talking, and Claire began listening for some sign that the ceremony had ended—people talking outside, footsteps on the path, some indication that she and Jonathan weren’t alone in the dank chapel—but all she heard was wind and Janis Joplin cackling as the tape continued to spin.

  “I can explain about your student.” Jonathan placed the palm of his hand against the wall near Claire’s head and leaned close. She felt he had invaded her space, but she feared that stepping away might anger him. The headband and the vivid blue eyes were making him appear wilder and more dangerous.

  “There’s no need to explain anything to me,” she said, pressing against the wall. She knew that while confession might be good for the confessor, it could be dangerous for the one who hears it. The duffel bag in the van was evidence. There were hundreds of miles between here and Mexico. Lots of time for federal investigators to find Jonathan if he drove away. At this point she would be more than happy to turn the investigation over to them.

  “You’re my archivist. You want to know all about me, don’t you?” he asked in a voice that had the pleading tone of a person who has kept his secrets for too long.

  “I’m the keeper of the legend, not the keeper of the truth. If you have a confession to make, you should make it to the rangers.”

  Jonathan acted as if he hadn’t heard her. His eyes went to the light beaming through the slit behind the altar. “It wasn’t Jonathan’s fault,” he began. “Like being given Lou’s identity in the first place. It just happened.”

  Given his identify change, it wasn’t surprising that he would talk about himself in the third person, but Claire found the dissociation disturbing. The chapel began to feel claustrophobic. She wanted to be in her truck, cradling her cell phone in her hand, but she felt pinned in place by the strength of his arms.

  “Jonathan was—still is—a person that things happen to. He hiked across the mesa to Sin Nombre. It took him a while to find it after all those years. He spent the night in the cave and in the morning was looking through the duffel bag, remembering, wondering if he should have gone to Vietnam, the defining event of his time, wondering if he had wasted his life. If he’d had the courage to look death in the face then it might have changed him for the worse or it might have changed him for the better. A young man came through the dust looking a lot like Jonathan did in ’66. He had the ponytail, the anger, the confidence. He claimed the bag belonged to him, and he tried to grab it. The men fought. The student stumbled and fell off the cliff. Jonathan walked out across the mesa with the bag. He put it in a locker, keeping it hidden from Jennie until he came up here. Jennie never knew—still doesn’t know—that there was a duffel bag.”

  “The autopsy showed no sign that anyone had injured Tim,” Claire said in a voice that tried to be soothing. “You should tell the Park Service what happened. Ellen Frank will listen.”

  “But will she believe?” Jonathan asked.

  “If the evidence supports what you say.”

  “If she doesn’t believe me, it would mean the end of my freedom, the end of my creative life. The death of a legend.”

  “What is it you want from me?” Claire asked. “Forgiveness?”

  “Silence. I want you to promise silence.”

  It would only take one day’s silence, Claire knew, to get him back to Mexico where the chances of extraditing him were remote.

  He moved in close and she smelled fear. Coming from him? From her? From both? They each had reason to fear the other. He could harm her or kill her. She could expose him and cause his imprisonment.

  “Your job depends on preserving the legend, doesn’t it?” he asked.

  It didn’t. Claire knew there were other jobs for her at the center if the legend of Jonathan Vail crumbled. The music played on while she worried that her thoughts were written on her face. She was unpracticed at the art of deception and incapable of letting him escape for even one day. Suppose he came to believe that the only way to silence her was to kill her? If he attacked before the ceremony ended, he could easily get away with it. There was a long moment, one more opportunity for Jonathan Vail to discover what he was capable of while Claire considered what she was capable of. Tai chi advised to yield when the opponent mounted an aggressive attack, but it was hard to yield with her back against the wall. There was the small animal defense of dropping to the ground and curling into a tight little ball. But Claire felt that was too weak to be effective. To fight back would arouse and provoke an attacker who happened to be strong enough to overpower her. Her one option was to stand tall, be still, be firm, do nothing to cause alarm.

  “I…you…he,” Jonathan hesitated. Both of his hands were against the wall now, on either side of Claire’s head. He leaned over her, and she felt she was about to be crushed by a predator’s dark wings.

  “Don’t, Jonathan,” she cried.

  The door swung open, light entered the chapel, and voices spoke.

  “What did you think of the ceremony?” a woman asked.

  “I liked it,” a man replied. Jonathan dropped his hands and stepped back. He turned, flipped up the collar of his jacket, said, “The legend is in your hands now,” and walked out the door.

  Claire slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor.

  “Are you all right?” the woman asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Can I get you a glass of water or something?”

  “I just need to sit still for a moment,” Claire said.

  When she felt she could negotiate again, she walked uphill
to the parking lot. From here she could see most of the Moreno Valley: the lake, the highway, the slate-colored mountains, the stormy clouds, the wispy clouds. She watched the white van head downhill, wondering whether it would turn left or right when it reached the highway. Either route would get it to Mexico eventually. Jonathan turned right on Route 38. For several minutes the van was the only vehicle on the highway. Claire watched it head toward Angel Fire and become no larger than a snowflake, then she unlocked her truck, picked up her cell phone, dialed information, and asked for the number of the ranger station at Grand Gulch. It was a federal holiday, but she hoped Ellen Frank would be at work. When she came to the phone, it was a relief to hear her calm voice.

  “I found the white van,” Claire said.

  “Where?”

  “At the Vietnam Memorial in Angel Fire.”

  “Are you sure it’s the right van?” It was Ellen’s duty to be skeptical.

  “There’s a duffel bag inside imprinted with the name and serial number of Lou Bastiann.”

  “The guy mentioned in the journal?”

  “Right.”

  “Is he driving the van?”

  “No. It’s on record at the memorial that Lou Bastiann was killed in Vietnam in 1966. Jonathan Vail is driving the van.”

  “Our blue-eyed boy?”

  “Yes. He’s been disguising himself as Lou Bastiann all these years.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a long story, but it has to do with perpetuating his legend. He confessed to me that when he went back to Sin Nombre to get the duffel bag, he ran into Tim Sansevera. They struggled, he said, and Tim fell off the cliff.”

  “Did you get the license number of the van?”

  “Yes.” Claire gave her the number. “I believe he’s on his way to Mexico.”

  “I’ll get the state police on it. Are we going to find anything incriminating if we catch him? Any proof that that’s the bag that was in the cave?”

  “I hope so,” Claire said. “If nothing else, it will be layered with Utah dust.”

  “Are you in any danger there?”

  “No.” Now that the ceremony was over, the parking lot was filling with veterans.

  ******

  Jonathan made it all the way to Carrizozo before he was caught, still driving the van, still carrying the duffel bag. Ellen Frank called in the FBI. Forensics found specks of Tim’s blood and a set of his fingerprints on a shirt in the van. Jonathan claimed that Tim’s death was accidental, but he was charged with murder and held over until trial as a flight risk. The original manuscript of A Blue-Eyed Boy with Jennie’s handwritten notes was also in the duffel bag. Jonathan admitted that he hid it there, without telling her, before he sealed the cave and escaped from Sin Nombre Canyon.

  After he was arrested, Jennie claimed authorship of A Blue-Eyed Boy, making it possible for her to give up writing the mini books and get a contract for a novel.

  As soon as the truth came out about Jonathan and A Blue-Eyed Boy, questions were raised as to whether he deserved an archive or an archivist, and Harrison was the first person to raise them. He set up a meeting with Claire and Ada Vail in his office. At the appointed hour he sat at his desk and Ada sat in her chair across from him. Neither of them stood when Claire entered the room.

  “Be seated, please,” Harrison said, waving his hand to indicate the chair next to Ada.

  Claire sat down, and Ada turned to say hello. Perhaps it was the overhead light in Harrison’s office, but she seemed older. A few strands of hair had pulled loose from the bun and framed her face. Her skin had the texture of a dry riverbed. Her lipstick bled into the cracks around her mouth. She wore a severe black dress. “Good to see you,” she said in a voice that belied the sentiment.

  “You, too,” Claire replied. “Have you visited Jonathan?”

  “In prison?” Ada asked.

  In prison, thought Claire. He is your son. She didn’t expect her own son ever to turn up in prison, but she knew that if he did she would be there.

  “For more than thirty years Jonathan hid out, dodging the draft, masquerading as someone else, letting me believe he was dead, breaking his father’s heart. I have nothing to say to him.”

  “You might find something, if you went to see him,” Claire replied. “Did you know, for example, that he is a sculptor in Mexico?”

  “No,” Ada replied

  “It would have been better for the center if none of this had come out,” Harrison said, forming a tent with his long white fingers and aiming the tip of it at Claire.

  “There are other issues than what’s good for the center, Harrison,” Claire replied. “The death of Tim Sansevera, for one.”

  “That was unfortunate, to be sure,” Harrison said, although his tone of voice implied he considered it a nuisance more than a tragedy. “The committee and I don’t see the need for maintaining a Jonathan Vail archive any longer. We consider it an unnecessary expenditure of time, energy, and money on a man who has been proven to be a fraud.”

  It was pretty much what Claire had expected. Nevertheless, she replied, “Jonathan wouldn’t be the first fraud to be honored by historians. His papers may no longer have value as a contribution to the literature of the Southwest, but they do have historical interest.”

  “I do not wish to see my son honored in any way,” Ada said. She was fueled by her anger, if not consumed by it. “I want his papers removed from the center.”

  “Everything we have was written by him or about him,” Claire pointed out. “Legally the papers belong to Jonathan.”

  “Then give them back to him,” Ada snapped.

  “Of course,” Harrison said. He opened the safe, took out the elephant hide briefcase, and handed it to Claire with his bare hands. “White gloves, Harrison,” she wanted to say. “It’s still an important document. Show some respect.” But she took the briefcase in silence, walked down the hall to her office, laid it on her desk, and put on her own white gloves. She went to the tower, collected the rest of the archives, brought them back to her office, and began putting them in a box. The last item to enter the package was the elephant hide briefcase.

  Legends rarely yielded to fact. Regardless of the reality of the person, the legend of Jonathan Vail could well continue. Years from now, a historian somewhere might present a paper attempting to establish that the person who was now in prison really had written A Blue-Eyed Boy. Whoever held the notebook at that point would be in possession of an extremely valuable document. Claire hated to relinquish the briefcase, but she knew she had to, so she dropped it in and sealed the box shut. She took off her gloves, noticing as she did that they had accumulated a fine layer of canyon dust. She put them in an envelope, wrote her name on it, the date, and her former position as archivist for Jonathan Vail. She sealed the envelope tight. On her lunch hour, she stopped at her bank and locked it in her safe deposit box.

  THE END

  You can find more of Judith Van Gieson’s mysteries as ebooks:

  The Stolen Blue: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#1)

  Vanishing Point: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#2)

  Confidence Woman: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#3)

  Land of Burning Heat: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#4)

  The Shadow of Venus: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#5)

  North of the Border: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#1)

  Raptor: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#2)

  The Other Side of Death: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#3)

  The Wolf Path: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#4)

  Lies that Bind: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#5)

  Parrot Blues: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#6)

  Hotshots: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#7)

  Ditch Rider: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#8)

 

 

 
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