“Oh? She’s difficult to talk to, is she?”
“Well, she’s sort of—scarce.”
Jury laughed. “ ‘Scarce’? What’s that mean?”
Dolly sat back and twisted the cup on the saucer. “Just that, one, she goes off by herself a lot; and, two, you can talk to her, or think you’re talking to her, and she’s all the while tuned you out. She works at the pharmacy off and on. You know, just being there for when people come in to pick up medicine. Or at the soda fountain. But only occasionally, when Billy—that’s my delivery boy—and I are gone at the same time. But she’s very smart, I’ll give her that.” Dolly sighed. “Doesn’t like me much, though. She senses how I felt about Angela. And she and Angela got on really well—Mary’s passionately loyal—in spite of their ages and in spite of their being so different.” She looked at her watch and quickly started gathering up her coat, her purse. “I have to get back; Billy’s not all that reliable.”
As she half-rose, Jury put a restraining hand on her arm. “Dolly, can you think of anyone at all who might have wanted Angela dead?”
Surprised again at the thought her cousin might have been murdered, she sat back down. “She died of a coronary, or something like that, didn’t she?”
“A policeman in Devon thinks she could have been poisoned. You probably know, it’s a little difficult to determine unless you know what you’re looking for.”
“But she didn’t know anybody in England.”
But she did, Jury thought: she knew Frances Hamilton and Helen Hawes. That was the problem. He said, “No. Here. Enough to follow her to the U.K.?”
She stared at him. “Like me, do you mean? Do you want to see my passport?”
“I wasn’t thinking of you, Dolly. I wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular. That’s why I asked you the question.”
Relaxing a bit against the back of the booth, she seemed to be thinking this over. She shook her head. “I can’t imagine. It’d be easier to imagine somebody doing away with Mary.” She smiled.
Jury didn’t. “Why?”
“Look, I’m only kidding. It’s just that Mary’s a lot more difficult to get along with than Angela. Angela was kind of . . . vague. Well, that’s not the right word. Mary’s anything but vague. I get the feeling she’s looking straight through me sometimes. She’s a lot closer to the ground than Angela.”
“The same thing Dr. Anders said.” Her discomfort at the mention of that name was evident. “He was a good friend of Angela, was he?”
Dolly looked away. “Most people liked Angela,” she said, evasively.
“Somebody didn’t.” Jury tossed some bills on the table and got up.
TWENTY-NINE
The desk clerk at the La Fonda approached Jury as he was contemplating the menu posted out-side the hotel’s restaurant. He was trying to decide between the huevos rancheros (given he’d skipped breakfast that morning) and the Old Santa Fe Trail Platter, comprised of enchiladas, beans, posole, and red and green chile sauce, when the young man handed him a message.
“The caller said it was important, that I should give it to you as soon as you came in.” He was as impressed by Jury’s being a British cop as he would have been had Jury been a casting director.
Jury thanked him; still, he hovered. The lobby was crowded, the dining room was packed. Jury had seen another one of those film “shoots” as he passed by the plaza, taped off like a crime scene, a lot of Santa Feans or tourists surrounding it, stopping to gawk.
He asked the desk clerk if there was any place at all, any restaurant he could go to that wasn’t jammed.
“No,” said the clerk. But he smiled as he delivered this unembellished response and still gazed at Jury as if Jury might land him a part in Priestly of the Yard or The Whitechapel Horrors, whatever Scotland Yard’s latest venture might be. Finally, he sailed off to tend to the incoming guests.
Jury read the short message from Jack Oñate, telling him to call immediately, that it was important. He looked around for a bank of public telephones, looked through the people flowing in and out of La Fonda’s entrance—rich people, pretty people, California-tanned people—and finally located a phone around the corner near the elevator and slotted in a quarter.
• • •
“YOU FEEL LIKE going to Colorado?” was Jack Oñate’s enigmatic question when he took the call.
“No. I feel like having the Old Santa Fe Trail Platter. But now you mention it, I might have to go to Colorado just to get some lunch. Where did all of these people come from in February? What’s in Colorado?”
“Aspen, Telluride—to mention two things. You should see Colorado before you leave.”
Jury sighed. It was clear that Jack was going to spin his nugget of information out as long as could. “What’s so important, Jack?”
“Are you gonna be surprised.”
“Great. Surprise me.” Jury studied the Mexican tiles encrusting the wall in front of him.
Sound of cellophane or other substance crinkling and rattling and when Jack’s voice came back over the line, he was eating. “Okay. Coh-wada Stah Cup—”
“Jack. Swallow, will you?” It was like trying to talk to Wiggins when he was shooting up nose drops. Jury ran his finger over the intaglio design of the tile and reminded himself he hadn’t sent Wiggins any flowers. Well, he’d be back in a couple of days.
“Sorry. There was a Colorado state cop in here this morning and he and a couple of other guys in here were jawing about Mesa Verde.” Jack must have taken another bite of whatever—pizza, sandwich—for Jury heard sounds of chewing again. “Well, he was talking about the ruins—the big ones, like Spruce Tree House and so on, and then the smaller ones, the ones that are known only by numbers. And guess what?”
Jury sighed. “I can’t. You’re going to surprise me, remember?”
“Well, sometimes they assign names to these lesser ones. Just for the fun of it, I guess.”
A silence lengthened during which there was more rattling of paper and Jury prompted him. “And—?”
“Yeah. One of them’s named Coyote Village. If you’re going, fly from our airport and rent a car there. Otherwise, it’ll take you maybe six hours.”
THIRTY
The guard at the gate to the park handed him a map of Mesa Verde and told him that he wouldn’t have more than an hour, since they closed the park at sundown. As his hired car crept along the winding road the sun blazed on the windscreen as if it hadn’t heard the guard’s prediction. Right now, it was a cold, blue day of high-piled clouds and air like glass. By the roadside, delicate white flowers he couldn’t put a name to were interwoven in tufts of silvery grass.
He knew exactly how to get to the ruin whimsically christened Coyote Village. About fifteen miles, and another two past the visitors’ center; why he had undertaken this short trip was somewhat more obscure. Perhaps he’d find something; more likely, he wouldn’t.
He must have missed the wooden sign, supposed to be on the left, for he found himself near one of the principal attractions, Cliff Palace, pulled the car into the car park and got out. From the mesa top, Jury looked down into the canyon that wound under the cliff. Built under the edge of a cliff in a space like an amphitheatre was the pueblo. It was a cavernous three-and-four-tier living complex built like steps, its roofs becoming porches. The Anasazi had built this literally from sticks and stones. It was enormous; Jury guessed there must have been over two hundred rooms. He stood looking for some moments, hunching into his coat. What had happened to them, the Anasazi? Where had they gone? Why had they gone? What were they running from that would make them leave everything they’d built? It was, Jury realized, a dangerous line of thought, for it only led him back to Jenny’s disappearance. Surely, “disappearance” was overstating it. Yet, when he looked at that cliffside and thought of a whole vanished civilization, he was not comforted. The cold breeze stirred, blew clumps of tumbleweed over to the rim where he stood. Finally, he got back in his car, the only one in the ca
r park. He headed back, keeping a closer lookout for Coyote Village.
• • •
HE STOOD beside the car, listening. He could hear nothing but some dim, distant birdcall, so faint that he thought he might be imagining it.
Music.
It wasn’t birdsong that he was hearing, but a flute playing. When he came out on the clearing, he stopped dead. A young woman was playing a flute, a slow, sad piece, in a private ceremony of her own.
She was of less than average height, and thin, boyish-looking. Her hair was dark brown, and like mahogany, long and straight, tinted red by the dying sun. She was dressed entirely in black. Relentlessly in black: black leather, black wool, black cord jeans. Milky light, but strong, poured through the trees. Light that pearled the flute also shimmered on the material of a shirt with a high collar buttoned right up to under the chin. The jeans were stuffed into black boots. Only her face and her hands were uncovered and, by contrast, illumined against the dark clothes and hair. She stopped playing and gripped the flute before her in her two hands, stared at the site for a moment, and then turned her head to stare at Jury.
And he saw she was (he thought, with a smile) rather glowingly made up. Glossy lipstick, heavy purplish eye shadow, black eyeliner. All of this was in strange contrast to the somber gear she was wearing and in contrast to her actual age, which he had clearly mistaken. She was a girl—a child, nearly—not a young woman. What he had taken for boyish thinness was actually an undeveloped figure.
Jury stood there in a moment of confusion as they regarded one another, and he wouldn’t have guessed, had not the dog emerged from the undergrowth and into the clearing. It certainly looked like pictures he’d seen of coyotes—the long, thin legs and long, foxlike muzzle; the lips were black as pitch and bordered by white hair; the silvery coat the color of sagebrush or the tufts of grass he’d passed back there. And the eyes that looked transparent, colorless. The dog loped over to stand at a point between the two of them, ears set forward, ice-water eyes wide and boring into Jury.
Jury coughed lightly and (he hoped) in a friendly-seeming way. “What’s your dog doing?”
“Nothing. Just saying ‘Hello.’ ”
“I’ve never seen police dogs say ‘Hello’ that way.”
Reasonably she said, “Well, he’s not a police dog, is he?” Then her eyes, the exact same color of the dog’s, bore into him too. “Are you another policeman?”
“I don’t know about ‘another,’ but, yes, I’m a policeman.”
Her shoulders slumped. He heard her breathe, “Oh, goddamn.”
Jury kept his eyes on the so-called dog, judging its greater or lesser display of tension. Judging, actually, the distance between the dog and himself. “Are you Mary Hope?”
Her frown deepened. Then she pursed her mouth and chewed at her lip. In an unconsciously female-coy gesture, she flipped her long hair back over her shoulder. “Mary Dark Hope.” She sighed and pointed off toward the carpark. “The car’s out there.”
“The car?” He took a step forward and, alerted, the dog moved. It was like some American Mob movie with the wiseguy’s bodyguard going for his gun. Jury took a few defensive steps backward. “What’s he doing?”
She sighed. “He’s just being friendly.” She paused and Jury could all but see the wheels go round in her head. “That’s why I call him Sunny.” She added, “That’s the way German shepherds are. You’re not a state trooper? You didn’t come about the car?”
“I’m not.” The dog seemed to relax at this announcement, so Jury added, “I’m from Scotland Yard.”
Her head tilted slightly, regarding him. It was a tiny movement, one of the few she’d made since she saw him. She stood motionless, still gripping the flute. Mary Dark Hope and coyote made a good twosome.
“Then I guess you’re not going to arrest me.”
Jury considered his reply. Soberly, he said, “Not yet.”
It was clear she liked that answer. “But I guess you want to talk to me.”
Jury smiled broadly. “I certainly do.”
• • •
THE REASON for all “the goo” (she told him as they walked the path back to the cars) was that she had to look older, old enough to drive. Old enough to get through the park gate. All the way here from home she’d been afraid of being picked up by a state trooper.
They were standing by the car she’d driven, a dusty old Ford. Jury was peering through the driver’s side window. “Telephone books?”
“I had to make myself taller.”
“You drove nearly three hundred miles sitting on telephone books?”
As that was what she’d just told him, she didn’t bother answering, but leaned against the Ford and kept her eyes riveted on the far mountains. The eyes were so pale they were almost colorless, clear as ice. Jury had never equated beauty with colorlessness before—but then, there were diamonds, weren’t there? There was brook water, there were iridescent raindrops—
There was vodka, there was gin, he heard the voice of Diane Demorney chime in to his inventory. He laughed.
“What’s funny?” Mary Dark Hope blushed slightly; surely, he must be laughing at her.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. I’m sorry; a friend just came to mind.” He paused. “It must’ve been important to you to get here.”
Still, she didn’t answer. Why should she? He might just laugh again.
“Could we go someplace and talk? Get something to eat, perhaps?”
This suggestion enlivened her a bit. “There’s a coffee shop in Durango where we always went—” Her eyes turned quickly forward again, looking out over the mesa where the setting sun blazed for a moment, before finally sinking.
Jury did not ask her to amplify as to the “we.” “I’ll drive,” he said dryly, opening the door. “Do you think I’ll need the telephone books?”
She ignored this, looked at his Dodge Dynasty. “What about your car? Is it just going to sit?”
“It’s a rental; maybe the park police will help out getting it back to Cortez. If I explain,” he added, ominously.
“I’ll drive, then,” she said, starting to get into her car.
“Out,” said Jury, stacking the telephone books on the floor.
She opened the passenger door and ushered her dog into the front seat.
“No,” said Jury, “the dog goes in back.”
She shrugged her indifference at this arbitrary law, but got out and opened the rear door. “Have it your way, but you’ll be sorry.” She slammed Sunny’s door, got back in front, slammed her own. “Sunny’s an awful backseat driver.”
Not nearly so bad as Mary Dark Hope, he discovered ten miles along the curving mountain road, as the fading red glow of the sun reflected on high-built clouds and turned the cloud bank deep pink, spread across mesa and sagebrush. Jury thought it was magnificent.
“Painter’s sun,” she said, and went back to negotiating every turn for him, announced every lay-by and every precipitous drop well in advance, every advancing car and every car following, and generally criticized every single move Jury made.
All Sunny did was punch Jury’s shoulder occasionally with his forepaw.
Mary Dark Hope wondered aloud how in heaven’s sakes Jury had ever made it all the way here by himself.
Jury wondered how he was going to make it all the way back.
• • •
THEY STOPPED in Durango for coffee.
All three of them.
Durango, Colorado, sat in a bowllike declivity, shaped by the surrounding mountains. The air was so clear and pure it was like breathing at an impossible altitude. Jury took great gulps of it as they walked through the door of Mary Dark Hope’s favorite coffee house (no wonder, since it permitted animals).
Mary was still talking about Jury’s driving, saying that it was probably because he was English, and that they drove on the wrong side of the road, on lanelike roads, and in toy cars.
“Look, will you cut it out about my driving?�
�
She was peering at the pastry display, moving along the counter and looking at the pedestaled plates. “I was only giving reasons for it, that’s all. I’ll have two jelly doughnuts and a cheese danish. And a chocolate éclair.” Raising her eyebrows at him, as if he might try to refuse this repast, she explained, “The other doughnut’s for Sunny.”
“Do you want something to drink? Hot chocolate? A soft drink?”
“No, I want cappuccino.” Her tone was slightly condescending. They were, after all, in an espresso bar.
He refused to get three of them, however. “The dog can drink water,” he said. “It might have to drive.”
That little witticism was about to misfire, her expression told him.
“Don’t say it.” Jury carried the two cups and she followed with a plate of pastries. The doughnut went under the table where Sunny had been lying, peacefully watching the proceedings.
They sipped, they munched. His driving momentarily forgotten—or set aside—she told him about Durango. “It’s a real old-fashioned cowboy town, you can tell. It’s got wide streets and a lot of saloons.”
Jury looked around the espresso-cappuccino-coffee bar at the beautifully booted women, the soft leather clothing and silk scarves, the tiny cups and tiers of croissants and tried to imagine it packed with cowboys. Underneath the table, Sunny gnawed at the doughnut as if it were as tough as a steak bone.
Mary sat, calmly eating her pastry. He watched her blow on her cappuccino, making designs in the froth with her breath. Her eyes were cast down, lashes long and thick. A knockout, thought Jury. That’s what she’s going to be—a knockout. And he was disturbed by this thought; she was, after all, only thirteen. Yet, there was about her a distressingly ambiguous sexuality, as if the woman were laying claim to the little girl. He had at first mistaken her for a young woman, and realized now that it was not wholly owing to the heavy makeup. He wondered how men reacted to her, what feelings she aroused in them.
There had been no further reference to Angela’s death since the implied one: I guess you want to talk to me. And Mary certainly didn’t seem inclined to bring it up. So Jury simply took a direct approach. “I’d like to talk to you about your sister.”
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