“Oh, fantastic. Can you fill out our online form?”
“Is Jim Gardner still here?”
“No, Jim’s retired.”
“Oh, I hadn’t heard. Maybe I could leave my name and number.” Dalton took out a pen and looked for a slip of paper.
“The web form is really easy, though.”
“But I don’t like web forms,” Dalton said.
“But then you’ll know the information we have on you is right,” she said.
Dalton stared at her and she stared back.
“I guess you’ll want me to do that from home.” Dalton put the pen back.
“Or you could do it on your phone,” she said.
Dalton walked out of the office without saying goodbye and drove to the Beehive House, where social services had temporarily relocated Raylene Cluff. It was an assisted care facility in a pioneer home with a large brick addition attached to the back. A hand-painted sign out front featured a logo with a blue beehive surrounded by a few simple bees. Dalton’s mother had lived here until his sister moved her to Salt Lake to have her close at hand. Bruce and Raylene had no children, so this is where she landed, too.
Dalton wanted to talk to Raylene about the missing items and the break-in. He hoped she might be able to shed some light.
The orderly at the front desk greeted him.
“I’m here to check on Raylene Cluff, ask her a couple of questions. She ready for something like that?”
“I’ll have to get permission,” he said and excused himself.
Dalton took in the surroundings. They hadn’t changed much in five years. It was cramped, full of oddly matched donated furniture that had come from several different decades. The orderly returned with a harried woman wearing a Kane County Fun Run T-shirt over her blouse and blue half-moon reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She had a wild arrangement of white hair tied back with a flowered scarf. Her name was Catherine Mowbley.
“What do you need to see Raylene for?” she asked.
“I’m trying to clear up some things for the report on her husband.”
“You know she’s not lucid,” she said. “The stress of the situation isn’t settling well with her. We’ve had her on sedatives since she came in.”
“Catherine, this is one of the big pieces of the puzzle.”
She looked at him. “You might not get much out of her. She hasn’t said more than a couple of words. They also just gave Raylene her meds. She’ll be out of it pretty quick.”
“Can I give it a shot?” Dalton said.
The orderly sent them through to a common room, and in a few minutes, Catherine appeared with Raylene in a wheelchair. Dalton noticed she was strapped at the wrists, a blanket tucked around her legs.
Dalton took a chair from one of the tables and brought it closer to Raylene. An orderly locked the wheels on the chair and stepped back. Raylene looked ashen and exhausted. Her silver hair was unkempt. Her thin arms pulled at the restraints.
“Sheriff,” Raylene said. “These assholes think I’m going to run off and join the circus.”
Dalton was surprised by her cursing. He’d known her for a long time. She worked as a librarian, and she’d dress down rowdy teenagers for 10 percent of the language he’d just heard. When Catherine saw his face, she told him this kind of language was a new development for Raylene but not uncommon for people in her situation.
He nodded, then said, “All this could just be a safety concern, Raylene.”
“They’ve got me locked up so they can steal from me and Bruce. While I’m here, they’re off ransacking my house. You talk to anyone. They’ll tell you.”
“Raylene, you’ve known me and my parents for a long time.”
“You’re the one married to Olma. I didn’t know you were a cop.”
“Olma’s my mother,” Dalton said, looking at Catherine, who had her hands on her hips. “I’m Patrick, Henry Dalton’s boy.”
Raylene blinked and turned her head a few degrees.
“Yesterday there was a break-in at your house—”
“I told you they were trying to rob me.”
“Now, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t any of these people. It was in the middle of the day, and I’ll bet they were all working. It seems like the people who broke in were after some of Bruce’s things. I found a couple of spots where it looks like things used to be, but now they’re gone. A lot of artifacts Bruce used to have in his study, it looks like they’re gone, too. I mean, all the pots are gone, Raylene. I have some photographs. Could you take a look and—”
She waved him off with a dismissive hand. “You should just ask Bruce. He’s got all of that stuff cataloged.”
“I’d like to ask Bruce, but he’s—”
“Sheriff,” Catherine interrupted. “Let’s talk, over here.”
“Bruce is what? He’s supposed to be coming to pick me up.”
As Dalton and Catherine stepped away, the orderly tried to make Raylene comfortable. “She doesn’t know what happened. We thought maybe it was the shock. Maybe she was in denial about what happened, but I think we might be looking at the onset of dementia.”
“You mean, like Alzheimer’s or something?”
“I’m not a doctor, but yeah. I think that’s what we’re looking at. If you drop anything about Bruce taking his own life, she might withdraw again.”
“I’ve got to ask about the break-in. Is she going to have trouble remembering that?”
“Why was there a break-in if Bruce killed himself?” Catherine asked.
“Well, that’s a good question, isn’t it?”
“A lot of times people with dementia have trouble with new memories. Older stuff, well, there’s more connections in the brain. It’s better encoded. She might forget today altogether. She doesn’t know why she’s here. Last in, first out,” she said.
“Then I better get cracking.” Dalton took out his phone and went to the photos app. “Am I okay to show her these pictures?” He thumbed through to pictures of the empty spots he’d found in the dust.
“Sometimes old memories are fine. Sometimes they’re not. Give it your best shot.”
Dalton went back to Raylene and sat in his chair. “Can I show you a couple of pictures? I’m wondering if you could tell me what is supposed to be in these spaces.”
“What’s wrong with Bruce?” Raylene asked, her eyes soft and unblinking. “I’m not stupid.”
“He’s had an accident,” Dalton said.
“Well, I want to see him.”
Dalton looked to Catherine for guidance. She shrugged and touched Raylene softly on the shoulder, which didn’t soothe her.
“He wants to see you, too,” Dalton said.
Dalton showed her the first photo of a small disk left in the dust.
“That’s where the Swallow Valley bowl goes, the one with a monster inside. It’s one of Bruce’s favorites. It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but what a surprise when you look into it.”
“Was it valuable?”
“Oh, yes. But he’d never sell it. Those things mean so much to him. He’s had a hard time letting that one go. He’s saving it for last.”
Dalton wrote himself a note that said: Saving it for what?
“Okay. How about this one?” Dalton showed her the next photo with the square space in the dust. On one side was a large agate bookend, and on the other was a potted cactus.
“That’s where his inventory goes. It’s his whole book of everything. The list of all the things. Everything with a catalog card and everything on one of his maps is in that book.”
“Could you tell me what it looks like?”
“It’s a blue thing with a stiff back, like we used to use in chemistry.”
“It sounds important.”
“It used to be.”
“Tell me what that means.”
“A while ago Bruce started taking everything back.”
“Is that what you meant when you said Bruce is having a hard time
letting things go?”
“That’s right.”
“So, what’s going back?”
“All of it. His whole collection. A few years ago, he had a change of heart. He said he thought that when he died all his things would lose their meaning. They’d just be something for somebody to sell. That’s why he’s doing it. He’s old, though, and he’s been getting help.”
“Do you know who that helper would be?” Dalton asked.
“Oh, some young man. He’s not from around here.”
Raylene’s eyes drooped, and Dalton could see that her meds were starting to set in. Dalton reached over and put his hand on hers. He noticed an ornate turquoise ring. There was a second ring on the other hand. “Are these in that blue book?” he asked, gesturing to the jewelry.
“Bruce found the turquoise for this one in a burial pit,” she said, extending her left hand. “Ever since he was a teenager, he found things nobody else could. He had a nose for it. He said he found these stones folded together in a piece of hide and stuck in a mummy’s fist. It was covered in blue feathers, and there was a crown of yellow feathers all around the head. He said it looked like a leather sun. The whole thing was lying in a little room full of sand and stones. Imagine that. A human head like a tiny little star in there. He brought the stones home and turned them out on the kitchen table. He had a Navajo he knew in Chinle make this one for me, then he gave it to me for my twenty-fifth birthday.” She wiggled the fingers on her other hand. “This one was made in Mexico. I don’t remember the story for it.”
Dalton thanked her and said, “It helps to hear your perspective, Raylene.” Then he stood and returned the chair to the table, thinking about someone far in the future finding Raylene’s rings loose in the loam of her remains, no story, no body, just the stones and silver. What would she think of that person slipping the ring on their own finger, trying to imagine her?
“When are they going to let me go?” Raylene asked.
“Once they know you’re not going to run off and party with your girlfriends,” Dalton said.
“When Bruce comes home—he’s going to come get me, right?”
“He will,” Dalton said.
The orderly took Raylene away, and Catherine showed Dalton out of the room. “I shouldn’t have let you in here.”
“I’m glad you did, though. I have to ask you not to talk about it, though. Especially not to Stan Forsythe.”
“I don’t talk to that man unless I have to,” Catherine said.
Dalton knocked on the door, and he was buzzed out. “Hey, Sheriff,” Catherine called after him. “If Bruce didn’t kill himself, then what the heck is going on?”
Dalton shrugged. “I’d sure like to find out.”
___
The way from their climb to the white sandstone domes led them through thick, luminescent chollas, bristling with light. Where there had been no trail before, a subtle path emerged from the random placement of stone and vegetation, and they followed it for the ease of the passage. They moved into shadow, and the sunlight became a white corona behind the stone ramparts. They hiked for another hour through this rough architecture, climbing upward until they stepped at last into the cool space of a sandstone amphitheater at the center of which was a series of small connected brick structures nestled under a thick natural overhang. Off to the side was a miraculous pool of standing water, fed by an invisible spring.
Sophia gasped. Paul turned around, beaming. She dropped her pack and began digging around for her camera.
“No pictures, okay?” Paul asked.
“Why not? The grant gives me clearance,” Sophia said.
“This trip is not quite on the books.” Paul made a face that was neither smile nor grimace. “Actually, it’s one hundred percent off the books. You can’t tell anyone we came here.”
“Are you kidding me? This isn’t on any of the maps. It’s like the discovery of a lifetime.”
“It’s really just a rediscovery,” Paul said.
She looked at the silent cliff dwellings with their thin black windows and narrow slotted doors. “This site could help me establish a baseline for my research. I’d have a pre-tourism basis for comparison.”
“Maybe,” Paul said. “Maybe. But if you write about it, people will come. And if people come, then we’ll have to file a management plan, and once we do that, it’s probably over for this place. I can take you to sites that have essentially the same features, and—”
“But if this is really Swallow Valley, we’d be able to make important connections that are just educated guesses right now.”
“The Paiutes don’t need us to interpret this place for them, and tourists don’t need an explanation for something they aren’t going to see.” Sophia noticed a look of uncertainty flash across Paul’s face. “It would be a huge favor to me if you just soaked this place in, without recording it. The USGS is pulling sites like these from their maps because they feel like they are aiding and abetting the looters. Some people think we should redact everything from the maps and write in ‘here be dragons’ like in the good old days.”
Sophia stopped digging through her bag. “You know I agree with you about the trouble with tourism, but being able to gather data on this site would change everything for me when I get back to Princeton.”
“And it would change everything for this place. Tourism here would be catastrophic. That’s what you’re researching, right? Can you imagine a ladder bolted into that cliff? With everything that’s going on in D.C. right now, climate denial, all the push to let energy companies in here, anonymity is the most efficient way to save this place.”
“Efficient?” Sophia said with no attempt to mask her anger. “There are a lot of efficiencies in this world that make it a worse place to live. And there’s a world of difference between studying a place and posting it on Instagram.”
“Okay, ‘efficient’ was the wrong word. But it’s just me and a million acres out here. I can only be in one place at a time. They cut our budgets every chance they get. We’re being led by bureaucrats who hate the idea of public land. This is a no-win situation. If I can redefine even a couple of the parameters—reduce the number of people, keep it hard to access a site, make sure the legislature doesn’t even know what’s out here, and quit painting a target on every amazing thing—if I can do that, then maybe I’ll stand a chance.” Paul was going to say something else but he stopped and took out a blue hardback lab notebook from his pack. “Let me show you something. The guy I talked about who’d been up here fifty years ago, he cataloged it, drew pictures of what he found. He came back twenty or thirty times over the course of a decade. Never told anyone about this place, except for his wife.”
“And you.”
“That’s right. He took things out of here, said he was rescuing them.” He handed her the notebook. “This will give you a sense of what he was up to. Take a look.”
She opened the book, which was filled with studious notes and sketches of artifacts. Each entry featured a drawing with careful crosshatching that gave the images a heft; around these flowed physical descriptions written in an impeccable hand, all of it done with thin black and red lines. The meticulous descriptions told the dimensions of each object and the conditions in which it was found. For some entries there was a second sketch showing the proximity to other artifacts in the inventory, the orientation within a room, chamber, or kiva, or there was a rendering from the side showing the depth of the object in the ground. Sophia stopped at a page featuring a detailed sketch of a clay jar with a corrugated outer surface. The notes said: White slip clay body, quartz sand temper with beautiful tool-dented corrugated surface design. Moenkopi style. Each entry gave a date of discovery, some going as far back as the 1970s. Many of the entries had a second date written in the margins in pencil, and there were initials, too: KT and PT. The pencil dates were all in the last five years.
“The level of detail here is amazing.”
“He was self-taught.”
&
nbsp; “What are these dates in pencil?” Sophia asked.
“He’s been reviewing his collection. That’s where I’ve been helping.”
Sophia closed the book. It was old but in good condition, meant to last. She noticed a fine stippling of brown across the back cover. “Helping how?” she asked.
Paul retrieved the notebook and put it away. “Let’s look around,” he said. Paul led the way across the amphitheater down near the pueblo structures. The wind bent the grasses lightly, and as they drew closer the sun moved through a notch in the cliffs, illuminating the rock with a warm golden light while the buildings remained in shadow.
As they crossed, Sophia noticed the shallow depressions of irrigation ditches that had been almost completely refilled with rock and soil. If she hadn’t known what she was looking at, she wouldn’t have noticed anything, but as they walked on, they skirted the midden and she spotted potsherds and lithic fragments among the vegetation. She knew there would be more if she had the time to work through the area, but Paul pushed toward the circular pits ahead.
Their roofs had collapsed, and a quick look inside showed the stone pilasters against the walls that marked them as kivas and the whole site as late Pueblo II, maybe early Pueblo III. Her arms and hands filled with electricity. In the rubble at the bottom, she could easily make out the hearth ring and the remnants of a ladder. Again she wanted to linger, but the tangible lure of the cliff dwellings drew them on. The plaza was filled with sage and rabbit brush. What she had seen so often depicted as an abstract delineation on a flat diagram was now a real space with wind and sound and the scent of pinyon and juniper in the air.
The first row of freestanding ruins transformed from shapes to textures as they approached. The adobe had flaked off, and the precise angular stone masonry beneath it showed its intricate patterns. They stopped and allowed their eyes to float up beyond these broken structures to the horizon, where this frozen curve of striated sandstone blended seamlessly into these stacked linear rooms. At the center of the structure was a tower with three doors facing outward. These buildings spoke with their stillness, vibrating like the soundboard of an ancient instrument. She wanted to explore everything at once but she knew she had to measure out her excitement. To take it all in at once would be to take in nothing at all.
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