Death Comes

by Sue Hallgarth

  “Yes?”

  “From the federal Bureau of Investigation. Albuquerque office.”

  “Bill Santistivan.” The sheriff stood as tall as he could but watched his hand disappear into Dan’s. “Haven’t met anybody from the Bureau of Investigation before.”

  “We’re fairly new, especially out here.” Dan moved around to the chair reserved for visitors in front of the sheriff’s desk. “My office called.”

  “Sí,” Emilio burst through the door, then stopped short. His mouth open without sound, he stared up at Dan. “I mean, yes.” He turned to the sheriff. “I wrote you a note.”

  The sheriff nodded and sank into his own comfortable chair.

  “I’m here about the women.” Dan folded himself onto the visitor’s chair. “The three you found dead. Two without heads?”

  “What about them?” The sheriff’s eyes narrowed.

  “We think they may have been killed by members of an international human trafficking ring. Something we’re looking into.”

  “You are.”

  “Yes.”

  The sheriff picked up his pen and made a note on the small piece of paper Emilio had placed on top of the stack on his desk. Emilio continued to stand next to the sheriff’s desk, hands slack.

  “You may go back to your duties,” the sheriff said without glancing up. Emilio half-bowed toward the special agent, backed to the door and closed it behind him.

  Samuel Dan crossed his legs.

  The sheriff leaned back in his chair and placed his fingers together as if he were about to pray. Samuel Dan was simply the biggest man the sheriff had ever seen. And he was wearing a suit with a white shirt and tie. No one in Taos wore a suit unless he was the doctor or maybe that odd English fellow, the skinny writer Tony’s wife kept around for a while and then moved to a ranch near San Cristobal. Lawrence, that was his name.

  After a moment, the sheriff offered, “Is there a way I can be of help?”

  Samuel Dan cleared his throat. “Tell me what you know.”

  IV

  “LADIES, LADIES. YOU must be tired. Thirsty. Hungry. You go to the big house, get burritos, no? It is late. I take care of the caballos.”

  Old José, refusing their objections, sent Willa and Edith away from the corral where he would see that Jesse and Jasper were thoroughly cooled down and brushed before turning them loose again to graze.

  Edith expected as much. José did the same thing the previous summer no matter what time she rode, how many were in the party, or how long they were gone. Always, “Go to the big house, get burritos, no?” Like a refrain. But this time José was right. They were tired, thirsty, hot, dusty, and hungry. Except for a brief pause when a cloud of fast-moving dust came to a sudden halt directly in front of them and Tony’s car appeared in its midst, it had been a long lope home.

  When Tony, John Collier, and Spud got out of the car to greet them, Willa joked, “What is this, a search party, a posse, or are the three of you just out for a spin in soft sand?” Willa and Edith had many more questions for the men than they had for the two of them. Tony assured them that they had been travelling in the right direction but must have turned off to the northeast too soon. He knew nothing about a hunting camp in the pines but reminded them that anything beyond the stream would not be on pueblo land. He would have no reason to know about the camp unless its hunters poached deer or elk on pueblo land. And he had not heard of any poaching in that area. Tomorrow afternoon, he promised, he would drive them in his car to locate the makeshift graves. Right now, he told them, he was on his way with John and Spud to see what more they could learn from the sheriff.

  “If there is anything more to learn,” Spud frowned and they left.

  Edith knew her smile had been grim in response, but Jesse didn’t seem to notice any change in her rider and was anxious to start moving again. They waited until the car turned around and took its dust cloud with it. By the time they were ready to leave, Jesse had pawed a hole in the road deep enough to hold a small boulder, but Jesse and Jasper settled quickly into a comfortable lope and didn’t slow until they reached their home corral. They, too, were thirsty and hungry and dripping with sweat. Women are supposed to glisten, Edith smiled to herself, but horses can go right ahead and sweat and then roll in the dirt to dry off. The thought amused her.

  “Let’s get cleaned up and find those burritos,” Willa strode on ahead, fanning her face with her hat. Edith did the same while Charlie, Mabel’s favorite among the household dogs, fell into step with Edith. Pueblo dogs all look alike, Edith paused for a moment to pet Charlie. His features seemed more heeler than the others and he panted as though he, too, had been with them on the long ride home. Their wide-brimmed hats and the constant breeze across the sage had kept them only relatively cool. They had expected to be done with their ride while it was still morning, but it was well after one o’clock when they reached the pink adobe. Just in time for a burrito in the kitchen of the main house and, Edith guessed, a relaxing siesta in the cool of their little house where they would talk over their morning’s adventure and then, perhaps, read.

  They usually did read in the afternoon, especially when Willa had manuscript pages or galleys to review. Then sometimes silently, sometimes out loud, they would read to each other and make notes of corrections or changes. That’s how they had spent most of their time at Alcalde the summer before, working on the galleys of The Professor’s House.

  Now they were rereading Prescott’s history of Mexico to be sure of dates and other particulars about the historical figures and places Willa thought she might include in what they were calling “the story of her priests.” Edith made notes in her line-a-day journal, the same journal Willa sometimes used to sketch out a scene or two, though she would hold off doing more serious, sustained writing until she had a quiet month alone, as planned — after Edith left for New York and before Willa was to join her family in Denver — and even longer writing periods in their cottage on Grand Manan or in New Hampshire where Willa often spent the month of October at her favorite inn.

  Not many places were peaceful enough to give Willa the kind of imaginative space she needed to write, and now that construction for a new subway meant that they would have to give up their quiet apartment in Greenwich Village, Willa was increasingly desperate to find such places. The previous summer they had been hopeful about Santa Fe and Alcalde, but neither provided quite the magic Willa needed for writing. Santa Fe fairly bustled with tourists, and the fact that they met interesting people and had friends in both places meant that Willa could never fully focus on her priests.

  Taos proved perfect for both of them. Old friends of Edith’s from Washington Square days, Ernst Blumenshein and Bert Phillips, were among the artists who settled in Taos years before Mabel. Edith was excited about how they had created community, a colony of artists, to publicize their work for an art market in New York that was unaware of the beauty of the Southwest. Serious artists, they were also serious about the business of art. And while they gave each other encouragement, they also gave each other space and welcomed the newcomers Mabel imported, like Andrew Dasburg and Nicolai Fechin. Nothing could have pleased Edith more or provided better working conditions for Willa. Here was a chance for Edith to sketch and paint with some of the most innovative and interesting artists in the country while Willa could focus entirely on her priests.

  And the story of Willa’s priests required her full attention. Willa determined from the outset this novel would be serene and simple on the surface. Below the surface, however, would stir a quiet but constant activity, an elemental journey through opposition — multiple levels of opposition in times, places, beliefs, cultures, natural elements, peoples, the forces of good and evil — a quiet turbulence that resolves itself not by overcoming or conquest but by yielding and accepting, by interfusing one into all.

  Edith glanced at Willa, comfortable on the day bed next to the fireplace, a blanket tucked around her legs, a book lying open on her lap. The mor
ning’s ride had been long and the burrito filling. It would be only a minute before Willa slipped into sleep. Edith yawned.

  They had eaten their burritos at a small table in the kitchen of the main house, enjoying savory odors from slow-cooked chili and beans and the quiet voices of Amelia and her young assistant cook as they moved about preparing for the next meal. The room was comforting and cool with doors and windows open to let in a breeze. The ride had tired them and so had the tension they felt at the hunter’s camp.

  “That place is somehow evil, don’t you think?”

  “Frightened me. Jesse, too,” Edith responded without thinking.

  “Almost elemental, that fear.” Willa rose to refill her glass from a pitcher of fresh water on the counter. “I felt the same sort of stirrings when we were in the ceremonial cave Tony took us to last summer, though there were no outward signs of violence there.”

  “I did too,” Edith watched Willa turn back toward the table with the glass of fresh water, but her mind was filled with their first sight of the cave, water spilling over ledges from above, hiding its dark recesses. A beautiful woodland scene as she remembered it, a deep ravine with a waterfall creating a blue pool that opened into a stream lined with cottonwoods and small pines, the sound of its water lively and inviting.

  Once inside the cave, however, the light had dimmed and it took them a few minutes to see where they were. The cave was big but not huge, its sides, mostly dirt with a couple outcroppings of boulders, held small recesses that led nowhere in particular. The floor was firm, its dirt presumably hardened by feet following rhythms from ceremonial drums. Scattered ashes lined a fire pit. Nothing dramatic, really, but they both had shivered. The joyous music of the waterfall seemed to come from a great distance, their whispers were muffled, and they felt rather than heard distant stirrings, a subdued rattle, and then silence.

  “Elemental fear, yes. I felt it, too.” Edith rose to fill her own glass with fresh water. It was important to stay hydrated at this altitude. “That cave chilled me to the bone.”

  When Edith sat down again, Willa’s mood had lifted. She chuckled. “That fear stayed with me until Tony’s car fell into the ditch.”

  “What heroic effort that took!” Edith giggled in response. “A long walk to lord-knows-where and then four men and a horse to dislodge the car from the ditch.”

  “See,” Willa said, still grinning as she pushed back from the table, “this morning’s find was nothing by comparison. Nothing at all.”

  That conversation had eased their minds and now Willa was on the little daybed in their pink adobe, sighing in her sleep. Edith smiled at the open book rising and falling on Willa’s lap. She closed the volume of Prescott she had been trying to read and reached down to cover her legs, resting now on the hassock, with a light throw they had found in the blanket chest. It had repeated zigzags and squares in multiple colors of earthen-dyed wool. She traced its pattern with the tips of her fingers. Its weave was nubby and soft. She particularly loved the browns and reds that lined and filled its squares.

  Edith was tired but not yet sleepy. Good time to think through the topic they had discussed over breakfast early that morning. It was not their first discussion on the subject. More like the umpteenth. For the last year or so, they had been thinking aloud together about how Willa could structure her new narrative like a saint’s legend, informed not by phallic ideals but by the archetypal Feminine Principle.

  Willa wanted her priests to reflect universal mankind in a kind of updated and warmly human Pilgrim’s Progress. Edith’s college roommate, Achsah Brewster, well known in Europe for her religious murals, had achieved something very like that on canvas and masonry. But for Willa the question was which symbols, whose journeys, what archetypes, and which historical events she might draw from. There were so many. Willa had to be careful in the choosing.

  One of the difficulties, they knew, was that readers had been inundated for so long with sensationalized tales of heroic action they would be slow to catch references to classical goddesses or serpent legends or the concept of compassion as an act of heroism. Zane Grey, that’s what they expected in a novel about the West. Or anywhere, Willa had laughed. Not a couple of priests on a pair of white mules wandering around the desert. What readers knew beforehand about archetypes or the Feminine Principle might deepen their response to Willa’s narrative, Edith knew, but the challenge Willa had set for herself was how to create meaning through a kind of elemental emotion. How to help readers grasp meaning without knowing what they understood. It would be a kind of felt knowledge.

  Willa and Edith had talked evening after evening the year before with Mabel and the others around her table. Mabel, who had been in analysis for years, relied heavily on Freud but found Jung’s theories intriguing, especially his interest in Indian traditions and archetypal patterns. Mabel knew a great deal about Jung even before he visited New Mexico and interviewed people at the Taos Pueblo the winter before Willa and Edith first stayed in the pink adobe.

  And Mary Foote, the young painter who had been at Los Gallos the previous July and ridden with Edith almost every morning while Willa worked, was so interested in Jung’s ideas she planned to travel to Switzerland in order to become his student and translate the concepts in his seminars for an American audience. By the time their daily rides ended each morning, Edith was eager to discuss Jung’s concepts with Willa. It was fascinating, they thought, that Jung’s ideas about archetypes were reflected in work Willa had already done. Clearly he was on to something. Or Willa was.

  A bolt of lightning jerked Adam upright. He must have dozed off. His sketch pad slid to the floor with a thunk. Thunder followed almost instantaneously and the sound of wind thrashing nearby trees. The storm must be directly overhead.

  “Maria!” he shouted. Adam had never called out her name before. He had always spoken it softly, gently, so as not to frighten her. But now with rain battering the roof and sliding down the windowpane facing her cabin, he sensed a sudden danger. A fear, not of her but for her. She had gone off alone, he remembered, to pick raspberries, had motioned with her empty bucket toward the bushes a hundred yards or so below the porch. How long ago? He didn’t know. Minutes maybe. He had dozed off, he didn’t know for how long, but he had seen no sign of rain when she left. Of course, monsoons could blow in quickly. The cabin faced southeast. Storms here usually blew in from the southwest. Adam had never known a place with such unpredictable weather. He had been surprised more than once by clouds scudding from nowhere to hide the sun.

  “Maria!” He shoved open the porch door and shouted again. “Maria!”

  The wind was so fierce, he had to brace the door open with his shoulder. He felt certain his shouts were ineffective, like whistling in the wind. With the roar of rain on the roof, Maria wouldn’t hear him even if she were safely back in her own cabin. But he couldn’t stop. He stepped onto the porch. “Maria!” he tried again. A huge bolt of lightning answered, the streak and sound coming together. Deafening.

  “Damn!” A gust of wind knocked him against the porch door. Cold rain soaked through his pants below the knee. “Maria!” he shouted again. Where had she gone? Trees whipsawed against the side of the cabin, slashing back and forth, back and forth. Such violence. Trees could draw lightning or crack and come down. Maria wouldn’t know what hit her. She had just meant to gather a few berries. “Maria!”

  No answer. And then nothing. Nothing. No wind, no rain, no sound. The storm had blown itself out as suddenly as it had blown in. It was over. A rivulet of drips from the roof padded quietly against the grass below.

  “Maria!” Adam renewed his efforts.

  “Sí, Señor Adam. Aqui estoy.”

  Maria’s words reached Adam before he could see her, soaked to the skin, where she burst out from the woods below. She ran swiftly toward him, the bucket in her right hand heaped with berries. And then she was there on the porch and he was taking the bucket from her and telling her to go to her cabin and get dry. It
was over, the crisis.

  But it was no crisis after all. Maria had known to crouch away from her bucket and the flailing trees, to make herself small and safe from lightning. A survivor, Adam nodded to nothing in particular. He set the bucket on the kitchen table and prepared to heat water for tea while he changed into dry trousers. He could use something hot. And he expected Maria could, too.

  If only she knew English or he knew more Spanish, Adam found himself wishing as he had how many times now? At least she had grown to trust him enough to speak a few words, the sort of words he knew, like sí and aqui. Mostly they communicated by gesturing or pointing, an awkward but effective kind of sign language. He often heard her hum and occasionally she sang quietly to herself. Happy-sounding songs from what he could tell. In fact, she seemed happy now. How quickly she had come back to life.

  Were all women so capable of self-preservation, Adam wondered. He guessed not. Some seemed to crumple at the smallest slight. But those, he imagined, had experienced only small slights, handed out by men — and women — who thought of women as lesser beings. Misogynists some called them, the sort who for so long had refused women in America the right to vote. Perhaps they were misogynists, but they did not actively hate women, Adam thought, they simply held on to ignorant and old-fashioned views that demeaned and distrusted women.

  Maria was different. Adam guessed few women had ever been treated as badly as she. She had run into a deep-seated hatred by a man who treated her as if she were chattel, something not human, something he could beat and barter like the lowest form of life. Adam could not imagine what Maria had been through. He still knew nothing about her, her past, her present, what she had been doing with that horror of a man who called himself Blade, or what she had survived before Adam happened along to free her.