by Sue Henry
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Dedication
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
“Fans will want to hitch a ride with Maxie and Stretch
as they find the Land of Enchantment enchanting but
dangerous.”—Midwest Book Review
More Praise for the Novels of Sue Henry
“Devotees of Henry’s Alaska mysteries will be delighted to see sixty-three-year-old Maxie McNabb, the Winnebago-driving, free-spirited widow introduced in Dead North, starring in this gentle whodunit. . . . Cozy crime fans . . . will love to live vicariously through Maxie and Stretch in what promises to be a long and popular run of adventures.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Another winner ... a fine series debut.” —Booklist
“Twice as vivid as Michener’s natural Alaska, at about a thousandth the length.” —The Washington Post Book World “The twists and turns keep you turning the pages . . . a thoroughly good read.” —The Denver Post “Henry revels in the wilderness of Alaskan scenery and keeps the tension mounting . . . a fine adventure.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“This fast-paced page-turner will make the miles fly during any trip.” —Boston Herald
“[Henry’s] descriptions of Alaska’s wilderness make you want to take the next flight out, buy heavy sweaters, or at least curl up with an afghan, a cup of steaming hot chocolate, and the book.” —The Phoenix Gazette
“[Her] grasp of tense storytelling and strong characterization matches her with Sue Grafton. Give her a try—she’ll challenge your powers of perception and deduction.”
—The Colorado Springs Gazette
“Sue Henry is an agile writer . . . hard to put down.”
—The Charleston Post and Courier (SC)
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Published by Onyx, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a New American Library edition.
First Onyx Printing, April 2007
eISBN : 978-0-451-41237-9
Copyright © Sue Henry, Inc., 2006
Map copyright © Eric Henry, Art Forge Unlimited, 2006
Excerpt from The Refuge copyright © Sue Henry, Inc., 2007
All rights reserved
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful thanks to:
Kris Illenberger, Regional Manager, Western National Parks Association, for assistance and information concerning Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado—including that handful of sand in the mail.
Pat Dozier, Mary Ann Baron, Kelly Rosenboom, Bettye Sullivan, Alex George Sullivan, and everyone at Weaving Southwest, Taos, New Mexico, who patiently provided a wealth of friendship, information, and hospitality during my visits to this artistic and friendly “town” and allowed me to use Weaving Southwest as a base for the setting of this tale.
Jackie and Al Gamauf, of the Taos Valley RV Park, who provided space to park, information, and permission to wander freely through the grounds, and graciously answered all my questions.
Vickie Jensen and Becky Lundqvist, for their friendship, great senses of humor, patience, and pleasant company on research trips to New Mexico.
And, as always, to my son, Eric, of Art Forge Unlimited, for the maps and photographs.
For Vickie Jensen,
talented writer and photographer,
great friend and fellow traveler.
Hugs, Vickie.
Where next?
ONE
On an otherwise empty westward-tending dirt road, the small cloud of dust raised by a slow-moving thirty-foot Winnebago motor home was gently carried aside by the whisper of a breeze that wandered from a broad meadow between the road and a long, high ridge to the north, an arm of the Cimarron Range of the New Mexican Sangre de Cristo Mountains. In mid-May, the meadow grass was a soft yellow green, in contrast to the dark bluish hues of piñon pine and juniper that began at the foot of the mountains. High overhead a hawk that had nested in the rocky cliffs of the ridge was drawing slow circles against the bright blue of the sky, watching for some small mammal, a squirrel or perhaps a jackrabbit incautious enough to reveal itself.
At a spot wide enough to allow a turnaround, the driver of the motor home pulled over and stopped beside the road. After a brief pause, the door to the coach swung open, steps extended, and a woman stepped out with a camera in one hand, the end of a leash in the other. Encouraging a russet-colored mini-dachshund to follow her, she closed the door, turned, and stood facing the hills, recognizing what she had come out of her way to find and until then had seen only in pictures—a pale arrowhead-shaped peak that rose commandingly midway along the ridge.
Medium slim of build and of average height, she was an attractive woman, though pretty was not a word that would apply. Handsome suited her better—and, perhaps, interesting—for there was a sharp intelligence in her hazel eyes and a thoughtful alertness about her that would offer the observant the impression that she would probably notice more than the obvious of whatever, or whomever, she encountered. The lines of her face hinted at an approach to life that was more positive than negative, leavened with a well-established sense of humor.
Reaching up, she removed a clip that held her silvering dark hair in a twist, allowing it to fall to her shoulders, and ran a hand through its crown to push it away from her face, still gazing upward at the sharp peak.
“The Tooth of Time,” she said softly as if to name it aloud made it more real, thinking that it was different than she had imagined it. But in an odd way it seemed to sum up a lot of what she had experienced in the preceding weeks. “I hadn’t expected that.”
At the sound of her low voice, more cello than violin in tone, the dog at her feet cocked his head to give her an inquisitive look.
“Yes, lovie,” she said, turning her attention to him. “Your walk comes now. Then, since we have the rest of the afternoon, I think I’ll do a little journal keeping. Maybe I can make more sense of it all on paper than in my head.”
Half an hour later the two were back inside the motor home with the screen door and windows open to the soft breeze. The woman was seated at the dinette table with a glass of iced tea, her journal, and a favorite pen in front of her, the dog napping on a rug nearby. For a few minutes, as she clipped her hair back into its usual twist, she stared out the window at the peak on the ridge, eyes narrowed in thought. Then she opened the journal and began to write.
Saturday, May 22
Time and age both have teeth—or at least one tooth, if the name of the peak is any indication. Whoever labeled it the Tooth of Time was no spring chicken. It must have been someone on the downhill side of a life, someone who knew what they were talking about and—to totally jumble metaphors—named it with a rueful sense of the shrinking size of their singular piece of the pie . . .
Through the long afternoon she continued to write, periodically getting up to refresh her glass of tea—once to make a small lunch, which she ate sandwich in one hand, pen in the other, brushing a few crumbs from the page as she continued to record her thoughts in the journal.
Things that affect you strongly often creep up almost without your realizing, very like the way time passes. The older you get the faster years go by, and then—quite suddenly—you realize that there are less than half of them left. That recognition has an unexpected bite.
I wonder why many people are so desperately afraid of growing old. Some give up and become immediately what they fear most. Others pretend to be younger, generally deceiving no one but themselves, or, just as foolishly, refuse to admit it makes a difference.
I’m glad that, as a senior citizen, I made up my mind to take what comes along as practically as possible, somewhere in between. One of the best things I’ve ever done was get myself a Minnie Winnie and go off to see parts of the world I had never had a chance to visit, especially doing it on my own, with Stretch for company. But how many people said, “Oh, you can’t do that alone, can you?” as if I were too old, or as if being a woman made it something unimaginable and frightening. Most depressing was that most of the ones who questioned my intentions were women. I have found that I love to be on the road to someplace new, seeing things and meeting all kinds of people as I come to them. If nothing else it keeps me feeling, if not young, then definitely not yet old.
There are women who, left alone by death or divorce, are terrified to live without a man to take care of them. Being a self-sufficient sort, with or without a partner, I have never felt a need to be similarly dependent. I was very lucky, twice, and will always miss the companionship I shared with both my husbands, that infinitely valuable physical and emotional warmth that was a dependable part of our lives. But it does not fill me with any more anxiety to be by myself in my later years than it did almost half a century ago, before I married either of them.
What happened in Taos was totally unnecessary—and sad. Somehow I still feel I should have seen it coming, though I didn’t know the woman and her particular circumstances until it was too late.
To even try to get it in perspective I must think back to where it all began—that, and what happened after I decided to go back to Taos, New Mexico, from the Great Sand Dunes National Monument, after I had spent the better part of two days traveling and trying to convince myself that I had left for good. I’ll start again—first to those two days and making up my mind to go back that stormy day at the dunes, then from the beginning—the day I first arrived in Taos, and what came during and after . . .
TWO
YOU SIMPLY NEVER KNOW WHERE CHANCE WILL TAKE you when you journey as randomly as I sometimes like to do, with no particular destination, or whom you will meet along the way who will change your outlook on—well, all kinds of things, sometimes for better, other times for worse. Considering the usual mix of good and not so good, at least this kind of travel is seldom boring, though it is often not what you expected it to be.
Having spent the greater part of my life as a resident of Homer, Alaska, I’ve found my later years to be passages of discovery that have turned me into an enthusiastic, motor-homing, senior gypsy, always curious to see what I will come across next. What I found on that particular day in May in southern Colorado was the spectacular landscape of the Great Sand Dunes National Monument.
Nothing could have prepared me for the size of the dune field, or the dunes themselves. I was astonished and awed to find that over time the prevailing wind has deposited some fifty square miles of sand at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains—enough to swallow downtown Denver, tall buildings and all. Constantly changing as the wind moves and sculpts them, at more than seven hundred feet above the San Luis Valley floor the Great Sand Dunes are the tallest in North America. I felt as though I had been transported to somewhere in the Sahara and that a caravan of camels would not seem out of place.
It was late in the day. We had walked a long way over the light and shadow of the enormous dunes and, lost in thought, I had neglected to notice that Stretch was beginning to tire of laboring through piles of sand that were both unfamiliar and often less than stable for a low-slung mini-dachshund of short-legged build. Starting down the lee side of a medium-sized dune, I suddenly felt an unexpected tug on the leash and turned to find that he had finally decided enough was enough and was sitting stubbornly down on the steep slope to await my attention. It was abundantly clear that he intended to remind me there were two of us on this walk and I had better keep in mind that he was the smaller and had been extremely patient thus far, but had not set out to walk off the gloomy mood that, to his disadvantage, I was attempting to alleviate with exercise. I couldn’t help smiling, for as he looked at me, head cocked questioningly to one side, both he and the tawny sand on which he rested, exceeding the angle of repose, were slowly sliding toward me and the bottom of the dune.
“Ah, you’re tuckered, aren’t you? I’m sorry,” I told him, feeling contrite. As he slid within reach, I gathered him up under one arm and started back toward the now far-out-of-sight Pinyon Flats Campground, where I had parked my Winnebago motor home before tramping off to experience the dunes. A bundle of energy, Stretch usually disdains to be carried and immediately wriggles to be put down, but on this particular occasion he snuggled against me willingly and tried to tuck his nose under my wrist, then sneezed
, twice.
When I had begun this expedition, for well over a mile I had followed a hiking trail north from the campground, crossed a small creek, and come to a picnic area. From there, fording larger Medano Creek required removing my shoes and, with Stretch under my arm, wading ankle-deep through the cold snowmelt from the surrounding peaks.
I had then headed out across the dunes in a northwesterly direction with a pleasant following breeze at my back. Upon turning, I found that in concentrating on the troubles of the past three weeks I had not noticed that what had been a light wind was now more forcefully blowing toward the Sangre de Cristos. It was strong enough to gather up grains of sand and carry them above the surface of each dune, casting them over the edge of the steep face, almost like spray from an ocean wave. The sharp sting of the airborne grains with which that sly wind was now peppering my face, ankles, and arms was downright irritating, to say the least, enlightening me as to why Stretch was attempting to bury his face beneath my wrist.
Nevertheless, to return to my house on wheels I would have to travel into the wind, so I encouraged him to continue his disappearing act and began to make what speed I could in the direction of Medano Creek, the hiking trail, and, ultimately, the campground. I had assumed that, if necessary, it would be easy to find my way back by following my own footprints in the sand, but now they were rapidly being cleverly erased by the wind, which deposited sand into each vanishing depression. The farther I went, the less distinct they became. This was not a particular problem, for though I could not see it over the crests of the dunes that rolled away into the distance, one after the other, like waves on a sandy sea, I knew approximately where my rig was parked, a bit north of the national monument’s visitor center.
Abandoning the fading line of meandering prints made earlier, I struck out as directly as possible, given the rise and fall of the terrain, toward the campground. It was slow going through the sand, up and over each dune. The wind whined as I walked and the flying grains became even more abrasively annoying. Stretch whimpered. I swore and wished I hadn’t, as opening my mouth allowed in a bit of sand that gritted between my teeth. The sunlight suddenly departed and a shadow swept over us. I looked up to find that more than half the sky was filled with billowing dark clouds heavy with rapidly approaching rain that would undoubtedly begin to fall before I could reach the Winnebago.