by Sue Henry
“You use wood?” he asked.
“Cheaper than the electricity or gas it would take to heat fifty gallons of water,” she told him. “Especially since we have a couple of contractors who know we’ll be glad to come and collect the scrap from their building projects if they give us a call. I seldom have to buy wood. Someone cuts down a tree? I’m very handy with a chain saw.”
Butch was still checking out the vats, but I watched, fascinated, as Bettye stepped into the storage shed, put on a respirator mask and rubber gloves, checked a recipe from a notebook, and carefully measured out powdered red dye from gallon-sized cans into a container on a triple-beam balance scale that measured its weight in grams.
“Must be a job changing the water in those vats,” he said, coming up behind me to see what was going on.
“In desert country we try to conserve as much as possible, so I only change it a few times a year,” she told him. “That’s part of why I measure so carefully. By the time the yarn is the color I want, it will have soaked up every bit of the dye I put into the water and left it clear.”
With a huge paddle, she stirred the dye into the hot water in the vat, then lowered the white yarn into the crimson brew.
“Now it just takes time,” she said. “I’ll come out and move it around with the paddle a little once in a while until it’s done, pull it out, let it drip, and hang it to dry. Come, I’ll show you some I dyed yesterday.”
We left the vats and walked back toward the house, where I noticed that Bettye had hung yarn to dry on long poles balanced between the top of a fence and one high step of a ladder. In the noon sun it all but glowed in bright shades of blue and green. Lovely.
We thanked her for showing us the process and were soon back on the road to Taos and the RV park. There we found Stretch, full of delight in seeing Butch, who took him for a walk while I made a quick lunch for him to take along on his drive back to Santa Fe, since he had decided it was time to hit the road.
As I was filling his thermos with iced tea the pair of them came back, Butch with a thoughtful expression on his face.
“I can’t imagine why anyone would want to put a body in a vat like that,” he said, shaking his head. “It would obviously be found and identified, so they must not have cared about that. It was either intentional or they had no choice. Could it have been done to throw suspicion on the woman who owned the vat? Have you thought any more about connections with the rest that’s been going on?”
I told him I had no ideas, except that it all seemed to have a common thread through weaving, though I couldn’t see how.
“But I don’t know any of these people well,” I said thoughtfully. “And there are some that I don’t know at all that I suppose could be connected peripherally.”
I had—I thought, but didn’t mention—one stone left that I wanted to turn. I had yet to meet or speak with Alan Medina and that was definitely on my afternoon agenda.
“Well,” said Butch, “I’d better get going. I’m going to take the longer, historic High Road this time. Keep meaning to do it and haven’t yet. It’ll take more time, but it’s supposed to be interesting—the road the original settlers took to get here.”
“Will you be back soon?”
“Not next weekend. I’m going to make a run to Phoenix, but I could come up the following weekend. Will you still be here in two weeks?”
“I’m not sure. I may be, but it depends on how my weaving classes go and—oh, I don’t know. Why don’t you give me a call? Wherever I am you can reach me on my cell phone.”
We exchanged numbers and addresses, both pleased that we would be able to keep in touch now that we’d found each other again.
“Give my address and phone to Jessie when you have a chance,” he said, looking up the steps at me as he left. “I’d like to see her again sometime and meet that trooper friend of hers. Give her my best.”
I promised I would.
“And you.” He grinned. “You take good care—kiting around the country seems to get you involved in all kinds of things. Be careful, okay? Someone could take an interest the wrong way, you know?”
“At least it’s never boring—but I will.”
As Stretch and I watched him go, waving as he turned the corner and drove out of sight down the road, I was glad to have met him again and knew I’d miss him. It seemed much quieter than it had been for the last couple of days. As the dust settled behind his pickup, I went inside and sat down with a glass of iced tea of my own to think out some kind of plan for the afternoon.
The huge Class A Fleetwood had left sometime while we were visiting Bettye Sullivan and apart from a pop-up rig and a couple of tent campers the park was now empty. It was warm, dry, and, except for the faraway hum of traffic on Paseo del Pueblo Sur, sleepily silent enough to tempt me toward a nap. Through the open window, I heard the zip of a grasshopper’s wings as it flew somewhere in the nearby brush.
But I wanted to track down Medina and get that off my mental plate, so I finished my drink and got ready for another trip to downtown Taos.
TWENTY
I WORE A BROAD-BRIMMED STRAW HAT AND MY SUNGLASSES, for the sun was bright and warmer than it had been since I arrived. It wouldn’t be long, I thought, until I should think about hitting the road for somewhere that would be cooler. Even Taos, in its high and mountainous location, would have average temperatures in the upper eighties before long. But almost everywhere in the interior of the Lower Forty-eight is warmer in the summer than I am used to on the coast of Alaska, where the average high temperatures from June to August are between sixty and seventy degrees.
Once again leaving Stretch at home, I drove to the Taos Plaza and parked the car. From there I walked east across Paseo del Pueblo and along the left side of Kit Carson Road, where almost immediately I came to the Kit Carson Museum, which I had read contained a part of what had been the Carson residence, purchased by Carson as a wedding present for his bride, Maria Josefa Jaramillo, and was now a museum dedicated to him as one of America’s great frontiersmen.
Later, I thought, passing it by. There would be plenty of time in the next week or two for museum inspections. I had another goal in mind for that afternoon.
Not far up the street, among other galleries and gift shops, I came to the Medina Gallery, a fairly small place with a display of unusual pottery in the front window, which gave me an excuse to go in and ask touristy questions.
At first the place seemed empty of anything but high-end art—mostly sculpture, pottery, and paintings tastefully exhibited. Classical music played quietly in the background. As I stood examining one of the pots I had selected among those in the window, a well-dressed Hispanic woman came out of a room at the back.
“May I help you with something?” she asked with a smile.
“This is interesting.” I showed her the piece I was holding—a small, round pot that could be held in your cupped hands, its sides cut into steps that narrowed as they rose. An attractive pinkish tan in color, its surface glittered with thousands of tiny bits of gold. “Was it made locally? What kind of glaze did the potter use?”
“No glaze at all,” she said. “The finish on micaceous pottery is a natural result of mica in the clay. All the pieces we have were made by a local potter at the pueblo just outside of town.”
“It’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Intending to attempt to contact Alan Medina, I found I had fallen in love with the piece. I buy very little in my travels, having collected a fair amount of Alaskan art over the years, which pretty much fills my house in Homer. But once in a long while I find something I simply can’t resist. This was clearly one of those times, so without even looking at the other pots I handed her my credit card and asked her to pack it for shipping. Besides, it provided me with a legitimate reason to remain in the gallery.
As we walked to the counter in the back I gave myself a mental shake to return my thoughts to my initial objective.
“Does Alan Me
dina work here?” I asked.
She nodded, focused on writing up the sale. “Yes, he does, but not today. He’ll be back on Monday. Was there something . . . ?” She allowed the sentence to trail off unfinished and gave me a questioning look.
“Nothing that won’t wait, I guess.”
I thought quickly, hoping to gain some kind of information. She did look young, but not that young. However, nothing ventured in flattery, nothing gained. “You must be—his sister?”
She gave me a knowing and amused smile as she shook her head and corrected me, as I had known she would. “I’m Dolores Medina—his mother. Was it something I could help you with?”
Another bit of quick thinking required.
“A friend recommended Alan and the gallery to me because I admired a painting she had on her wall. If he’ll be here Monday I could stop in again. But thank you anyway.”
“We offer the work of a number of artists. Do you know the name?”
“Sorry, I don’t.”
“Well, you’re welcome to look around. You may recognize the artist’s style. Let me know if I can help.”
I thanked her and spent a few minutes walking around the gallery. The art on its walls was attractive, carefully selected and displayed—and expensive. On one wall were displayed two handwoven rugs, in traditional colors and patterns that reminded me of the one Butch had bought the evening before. A bronze sculpture of a bird in flight stood on a pedestal next to them. There was more pottery filling one corner, with traditional painted Indian patterns in attractive contrasts of white, black, red, and tan.
Halfway around the room I was stopped cold in surprise. Hanging on the east wall was the colorful abstract acrylic I had seen in Shirley’s apartment. For a moment or two I assumed it was only similar, for how could it be there for sale? But in stepping near to examine it more carefully I knew immediately and without a doubt that it was the same painting. There was another possibility: I had not looked closely at the one in the duplex. Could Shirley’s picture have been a copy? I didn’t think so—and it had been missing from the others she had put in the backseat of the car she had been packing, but—
Turning to Dolores Medina, who was working with something at the counter, I asked, “Do you have prints of any of the pictures?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “We sell only originals and on an exclusive agreement with the artists.”
Well, that answered that. I asked no further questions, thanked the woman who had sold me the pot, which, now carefully packed in a box, I took with me, and started toward the front of the gallery.
As I reached for the handle I heard a door slam in the back of the place and turned to see who had come in. Mrs. Medina was just disappearing behind a curtain that swung between the display area and what was apparently the storage and working part of the gallery. I was just able to hear a quick, low mumble of conversation with one sharply spoken word I couldn’t catch, then the sound of the back door closing again. Whoever had come in had gone back out in a rush. I wondered if it could have been Alan, but we had never met, so why would he have avoided me? He wouldn’t even know who I was or what I looked like, would he? I decided my imagination must be working overtime and went out the door onto the street.
Walking toward the plaza, where I had parked, I came to the corner and glanced left to check for oncoming traffic before stepping off the curb. When I looked right for the same reason, among the people ambling along in the Saturday afternoon sunshine one figure stood out—a man taking long, hurried strides past the Taos Inn. Alan Medina, I was almost sure, though I couldn’t see his face to be certain it was the man I had seen on Thursday following Shirley in the plaza. Stepping back into a handy doorway, I watched him cross the street at a trot, reach Bent Street, and start to make a quick left. As he turned the corner, he glanced back over one shoulder, making me glad I had anticipated the move, for it was surely Medina.
Why would he run from me? It didn’t make sense. I stood staring after him, confused. But it was obvious that I wasn’t going to see or talk with him before Monday, if then. What the heck was going on? Did it have something to do with the reason Shirley’s painting was now in the Medina Gallery, as I believed it must?
Whatever the answer was, I saw no way to solve the puzzle at the moment, so I went back to my car and drove home, where I picked up Stretch and took him along on a drive I had found on a map, the Enchanted Circle. I was up for any enchantment I could get after the past days of confusing and unpleasant events.
Hoping the escape would clear my head, I drove out of town past the Taos Pueblo, where my micaceous pot had been made, into the lush green of the Hondo Valley to the north. I took my time driving the eighty miles, stopping infrequently along the road that circled Wheeler Peak, New Mexico’s highest, at 13,161 feet. Along the way was a variety of interesting things, but as my goal was simply to leave behind the confusion of busy streets and the happenings of the past few days, I passed most of them, including the D. H. Lawrence Memorial, where the author’s ashes had been placed in a chapel built by his wife on the ranch where he had spent time writing in the 1920s. Some say that she mixed his ashes in the concrete used to make the altar inside the small white building I had seen in a brochure.
Beyond a huge scar left by a forest fire on the mountains, and a fish hatchery, we reached the small town of Questa. There I took the time to visit Artesanos de Questa, a cooperative showcase for local woodworkers, tinsmiths, painters, stained-glass artists, and sculptors, but did not add to my personal collections, though their work was appealing and diverse.
After a steep climb to the east with wonderful views of dark spruce and aspen still in its bright spring green on the slopes of the hills around Mount Wheeler, Red River was our next stop. We walked a bit through what was one of the numerous winter skiing resorts, but a pleasant place in any season with an Old West feel to its saloons and shop fronts—even a melodrama theater.
Cruising over Bobcat Pass, past the turnoff to the old gold-mining community of Elizabethtown, the beautiful Vietnam Veterans Memorial on a hill, and two more ski areas, I took us into Taos Canyon, heading west on the last part of the circle.
After a few miles on the road that twisted like a ribbon, we came to a roadside parking area where I pulled over and we found a place to sit in the shade of ponderosa pines and appreciate the spectacular cliffs of the Palisades Sill across the Cimarron River that long before had carved its way down through igneous rock. It was cool and pleasant, with the music of the river for company as it gurgled along on its tumultuous way to join the Rio Grande for the cross-country run to the Gulf of Mexico. It was good to be away from people for the time being and I refused to consider any of the unsettling events of the past week in favor of letting nature soak in.
A crow swept down, hoping for a handout, and landed fairly close to where we sat. Stretch, always ready to defend against intruders, especially when they are even slightly smaller, dashed to the end of his leash and told it to get lost with yaps from as close as he could get. It was clear that the bird had calculated the limit of his mobility exactly, for it stayed just far enough out of reach to frustrate and annoy, cockily walking back and forth, watching his reaction with seeming amusement in its bright, intelligent eyes.
“Come here, you silly galah,” I told him, tugging on the leash. “You can’t win, you know. It’s got your number.”
He came reluctantly back and lay down beside the rock on which I was sitting, looked up at me with resignation in those irresistible brown eyes, and laid his muzzle down on his front paws.
Refusing to be further baited, he didn’t even look around when the crow took off for parts unknown.
I gave him an approving pat. “You’re right. Ignoring it is much the best policy.”
I do so love Daniel’s dog. He is such good company and never, never boring. What would I do without him?
By just after five o’clock we were back in Taos and settled in the Winnebago. I opened all the windows
to let out the warm, stale air, then closed them again before turning on the air conditioner, pouring myself a glass of tea, and waiting for it to grow cooler. It had been so warm that I didn’t want to cook anything and add to the heat, so I decided I would go back to Bravo for dinner in an hour or so.
A note had been waiting for me on the door when I unlocked it:
2:45 p.m. Got your message. Will stop again later today or tomorrow morning.
Herrera
Sorry to have missed him, I had to think for a minute just what it was I had been going to tell him. Oh, yes—that I might have the phone number of Shirley’s ex-husband, Ken Morgan, on the list I had copied from her bulletin board and that he might be able to answer questions about her—at the very least, he should be told she was dead. Also, now, I supposed I should tell Herrera about finding her painting in the Medina Gallery earlier that afternoon.
That started the whole puzzle whirling in my thoughts again, which I stubbornly refused to allow. Retrieving the mystery I had picked up at Moby Dickens, I settled at the dinette table and took myself off to North Carolina with Rituals of the Season. Stretch, after lapping up half a bowl of water, came and curled up beside me for a nap with his head on my knee.
“You’re such a bonzer boy, you are,” I told him with appreciation.
At six thirty I left him and drove to Bravo, where I spent over an hour enjoying a Caesar salad with grilled chicken, prepared by someone else and therefore not heating up my living space.
Satisfied and tired, I headed home, parked the car next to the Winnebago, and walked around to find the coach door standing wide open, screen and all. The single light I had left on for Stretch showed me that there had been no more destruction that another burglary would have caused, but obviously someone had been in my rig again.
Cautiously stepping inside, I immediately spotted a note placed strategically on the dinette table—block letters, all capitals. My heart fell straight into my shoes as I read: