by Hy Conrad
“You like maté?” he asked, pointing to the earthenware gourd and the matching thermos on the table by Fanny’s chair. “It is unusual for norteamericanos to enjoy it. Do you mind?” And with that, he opened the leather satchel at his feet and brought out his own burl-wood maté gourd with silver rims around its lip and its base.
“I just filled my thermos,” said Fanny and handed it over. “Here.”
“Thank you,” said Ramirez with a courtly nod. Fanny watched as he took a few ounces of yerba maté from a pouch in his jacket, slipped them in the burl-wood bowl, added some steaming water from Fanny’s thermos, then brought out a gold- and silver-striped straw from his pocket.
“I like your straw.”
“It’s called a bombilla,” said Ramirez. “Usually there are rituals with maté—how long to wait, who drinks first, how the gourd is passed from person to person.” He inhaled the steam from his bowl. “It is a very social part of life. But given our situation. . .”
“Your English is very good,” said Fanny.
“My family sent me to the U.S. for my education. I disappointed them by coming home.”
“I’m sure they weren’t disappointed. So, what did you find out?” Fanny asked it matter-of-factly, as if she were the one conducting the interview.
Ramirez didn’t seem to mind. “There had been condors, yes. And foxes. We know something dead was there.”
“What about clothing? You’d think the birds would tear off pieces of her clothing. . . .”
“We found no clothing.”
“How about meat?” asked Fanny. “Sorry to be crude, but they didn’t appear to be delicate eaters.”
The sergeant pressed his herbs with his bombilla and took a first, tentative sip. “The birds and foxes are scavengers—thorough eaters. You saw them, granted. But it may have been an animal they could carry off. Perhaps a hare?”
“What if a whole bunch of them grabbed onto a person and lifted at the same time?”
He shook his head. “That is not how they work.”
Fanny took a moment to sip from her own gourd. “Maybe they changed methods since the last time you checked.”
Sergeant Ramirez smiled, until he realized that Fanny wasn’t joking. “Condors do not change.”
“Then she wasn’t dead, and she just crawled away.”
“Half eaten?”
“Not half eaten. I stretched the truth. A few nibbles. Even I could crawl with a few nibbles gone.”
“Scavengers do not eat live things.”
“Maybe they changed methods.”
Sergeant Ramirez put down his gourd and uttered a sigh, the first of many to come. “My men searched a two-kilometer circle around the location. No one crawled away.”
“Then someone moved her.”
“Moved her? Why?”
“To bury her.”
Ramirez mulled it over. “Possible. But the land is hard, and we found no evidence of burial.”
“Then to hide her. He didn’t want the body to be found.”
“Why?”
“Why, why, why. Any child can ask why over and over.”
“Very well. How? Let’s pretend someone wanted to keep her death a secret. How would he make her disappear? Our vehicles could barely get to that spot. Between the time you say you saw her and the time you returned was how long? Half an hour?”
“Closer to an hour.” Fanny wrinkled her nose. “Forty-five minutes?”
“And in that time, someone came in, took the woman, and carried her away.”
“Exactly.” Fanny took a few moments to sip, more of a slurp than a sip. Sergeant Ramirez did the same. Amy sat off to the side and watched, happy not to have to be a part of this. “How about footprints?” asked Fanny, putting aside her gourd.
“Yes, many footprints. Yours and mine and everyone’s. What did this woman look like?”
“It happened so fast.” Fanny closed her eyes. “Slim, I think. Not young. Walking shoes. She might have been hiking, but I didn’t see any equipment. No backpack. Her top was red, unless that was just the blood. Black pants, not jeans. Light-colored hair, not too long. Has anyone disappeared who fits this description?”
“That is another problem,” said Ramirez. “No one has disappeared. We telephoned the resorts and campsites for two hundred kilometers. All the farms and estancias. Not that there are many.”
“We are a little remote,” Fanny had to admit.
“If someone was missing, then my other questions would not matter so much.”
“I suppose you need a missing person in order to have a corpse.” Fanny’s tone was reluctant.
“Exactly,” said Ramirez. “So how can I ask the Chilean government to keep looking for a body that doesn’t exist except for what you saw? You and no one else.”
That was pretty much the end of the conversation, even though it went on for another few minutes. Sergeant Ramirez did his best to be diplomatic, but there was nothing more he could do. If someone was reported missing in the next few days, he might have cause to reopen the case. Fanny’s reaction was to say that she didn’t accept his decision. But her outrage was lackluster compared to her normal outrage.
And so they sat there, facing each other in the log cabin’s living room, Fanny and the sergeant, quietly drinking maté through their bombillas. Amy had a feeling that neither one would move, not until the thermos was empty. She had said next to nothing during the whole interview, and now, with nothing even to listen to, Amy pushed back her chair, touched her mother on the shoulder, and made her way to the outer office.
Jorge O’Bannion was at his desk near the front window, staring glassily at his computer screen. The businessman looked older now, slumped in his chair, his suit a little crumpled, his wavy dark hair disheveled, as if he’d run his hand through it more than a few times. She could see the bald spot, which must have been artfully, carefully combed over on all their previous encounters.
“How’s it going?” she asked and immediately regretted it.
“Miss TrippyGirl,” he said, sitting up and waving for her to join him. He spoke in a near monotone, his voice sounding tired and resigned. “I never took time to read these before. Fascinating.” He turned the monitor so she could see.
“Oh.” It was a very familiar Web page, for Amy at least. Well designed in comforting blues and greens, with tabs on the right for the blog entries, it had been created by one of the Abel cousins, a graphic artist just out of school. Banner ads along the top and bottom linked up with all the best travel sites. “You never read TrippyGirl before?”
O’Bannion shook his head. “My publicist I hired in New York said you were important. She didn’t say how or why. Apparently, things happen when you two travel.”
Amy felt horrible, as if all this were somehow her fault. On the other hand . . . “I think I tried to tell you at one point.”
“At your house when you mentioned murder? I should have listened.”
“In my defense, it’s not like I ever caused a murder.” Her voice lightened. “And we don’t have one now. Look on the bright side. Great weather. Exciting excursions.”
O’Bannion chuckled. “Exciting, yes. A delay in Buenos Aires, an explosion, two injuries, a woman who sees dead bodies. I don’t want to be rude, but do you believe your mother’s story?”
Amy had been awake half the night mulling over this question. Given the bare facts, it seemed almost comically coincidental. Todd Drucker had ridiculed Fanny’s overheated blog post about the explosion. Fanny herself had mentioned how some excitement, even a murder, might be helpful, just to shut him up. Then she stormed off and decided to invent a body in the wilderness. On the other hand, her mother was not stupid.
“You’re taking a long time to answer.”
Amy nodded slowly. “I believe she saw something. Fanny likes to exaggerate, but she wouldn’t make it up. Even if Drucker did make fun of her.”
“Last night at the bar, Mr. Drucker . . . You should have heard. Drinki
ng my best scotch and railing on about how dangerous you were for the travel business. Delusional. Attracting the wrong kind of attention. Creating chaos from nothing.”
Amy didn’t know what to say. “I am so sorry.”
“Me too. Good scotch is hard to get in Patagonia.”
Well, at least he could laugh about it, she thought. “What will you do if this doesn’t work out?” It was a very personal question. But the mood of the moment seemed to make it okay. “What if their reviews aren’t glowing? Or they don’t spread the word and make all their clients sign up? My reviews will be glowing, of course.”
O’Bannion looked past his computer and focused on the orchard just outside his window, then on the valley sloping below it. His tone was wistful. “My grandfather named this place Glendaval. He had memories of the Glendalough Valley near his family’s home in Ireland. He talked about it always, how much prettier it was. How much better the soil and the weather. But he never went back, even when he had money.” He straightened in his chair. “There’s a wildness here that’s not just about the lack of houses or people. Our air here no one else breathes. Our flowers couldn’t live elsewhere. It would be too easy, and they’d die. The wind is like a brother. Our only civilization here is what we have made. I could be smart and sell to the national parks or some resort chain run by Europeans. I could move to Valparaiso and live like a millionaire forever.”
“But you’re going to stay. Even if you run out of money.”
Jorge turned back from the window. His eyes glanced across the blue and green of the monitor, then settled on something shiny, half hidden by the edge of the printer. It was a pendant looped into a silver chain. A turquoise oval with a tiny sunburst of silver inlaid in the center. Amy saw it, too.
“That’s beautiful,” she said. “Is it old?”
Jorge seemed taken aback, as if her glimpse of this was a glimpse too far into his soul. “I was going through boxes in the old house. It was my mother’s favorite. I thought maybe to make a present to Lola Pisano. My investor.”
Amy thought back to the wealthy, possessive woman with the mole. They’d met for only a few moments in the Iglesia del Tango, but Amy felt she knew enough about the woman to have an opinion. “I think she’ll love it.”
“Me too.”
“Why isn’t she here?”
Jorge treated her to an uncharacteristic roll of the eyes. “I think maybe I’m lucky she’s not. Maybe at the next estancia she will come, and everything will run wonderful and smooth.”
“Maybe,” Amy said hopefully. Jorge smiled back. And then, like a cold wave of reality, the living-room door opened and Fanny emerged with her gourd and empty thermos, followed by Sergeant Ramirez.
“So if I find a missing person, you’ll start taking my story seriously?”
“Yes, Mrs. Abel,” said the sergeant, then exhaled his final sigh of the morning. “That would be a good start.”
CHAPTER 11
“The glaciers off Tierra del Fuego are much more impressive,” Todd Drucker said.
“They’re certainly larger,” agreed Edgar Wolowitz. “But for absolute blueness, nothing beats the Perito Moreno. You’ve been there, of course.”
“Of course,” answered Todd. “Although I would argue that Glacier Bay in Alaska has a deeper blue. We helicoptered into the middle of it last summer. I might still have a photo.” Before Edgar could make the transition to another, better glacier—in Iceland, perhaps, or Tanzania—his opponent was tapping his phone, trying to pull up proof of his superiority.
Amy nursed her post-lunch cup of Earl Grey and eavesdropped from across the great room as the travel writers faced off for the next round of competitive touring. Despite their nitpicking about which of the world’s diminishing number of glaciers was still worth a visit, the consensus from the entire group was that the excursion had been enthralling, an unforgettable, not particularly difficult hike to a lake glacier where they’d been the only humans, perhaps the only humans to visit it all week. Or all month.
Alicia had been most impressed by the picnic lunch waiting for them at the end. “I don’t know how the drivers managed to get there and get everything set up. We were literally in the middle of nowhere, with hot soup and delicious sandwiches and a wine bucket chilled with ice from the glacier.” Then, as if to dispel any criticism . . . “I’m sure they didn’t chop off the glacier itself. That wouldn’t be right.”
Amy had never seen a glacier. It had always been on her must-see list. But there were plenty more of them in Patagonia, she told herself. There was still time. For right now, she would console herself with the chilled salmon salad she’d just had for lunch and with the prospect of this afternoon’s visit to . . . Amy picked up the daily schedule, which had been slipped under their door during the night.
“Whoo,” said Fanny as she plopped herself down on the sofa next to her daughter. “This touring and dealing with murder at the same time . . . My hat’s off to you. It’s harder than it looks.”
“We’re not dealing with murder,” Amy whispered, trying to encourage her mother to use her indoor voice. “No one has said that word. At most we’re dealing with a death.”
“What do you mean, at most? Are you saying you don’t believe me?”
“No.” And then, to avoid any misunderstanding, she added, “I mean, yes, I believe you.”
“Then we’re dealing with a death. A death that no one reported and that someone went to great lengths to cover up. At the least we can call it mysterious, probably criminal.”
“Possibly criminal. Look, Mom. I don’t want to spoil your fun. But I missed a glacier this morning. This afternoon we’re off to visit . . .” She picked up the schedule and found the paragraph. “A local homestead where a gaucho family will give you an unforgettable glimpse into a way of life unchanged for a hundred years.”
“Sounds charming, dear.”
“You’ve never dealt with this before. I have. My approach is to ignore it as long as possible. If this turns into a real crime, we’ll find out soon enough.”
“Interesting. But let me put this another way.” Fanny lost her smile. She scooched a little closer and finally lowered her voice. “This is not a lark, sweetie. We, you and I, are the brand known as TrippyGirl, and we are trying to save ourselves from the impending doom known as Toad Drucker. I’ve given this a lot of thought. Maté’s good for your thinking.”
“I’m not sure you should be making decisions when you’re jacked up on maté.”
Fanny ignored her. “If I’d known the body was going to disappear, I never would have made such a fuss. But I did. And it disappeared. And Toad Drucker was suspicious from even before any of this. So what do you think he’s going to do if we never find it?”
“If you never mention it again, maybe it’ll go away.”
“And if it doesn’t? He’s a toad with a magazine and a Web site and an evil personality. If he ridicules us, then everyone who thought it was cool to follow a half-real, half-fictional adventurer is going to lose interest.”
“Not necessarily.”
Fanny snorted at her naïveté. “Our book editor is a perfect example. What’s her name? Little Rumplestiltskin.”
“Sabrina.”
“The girl practically fainted when she realized I was Trippy. I never really read our contract, but I’ll bet she can find a way to cancel the book.”
“Can she really?”
“Let’s say she can. The result will be bad publicity and no book. Then our advertising falls off, et cetera, et cetera. Before you know it, we’re homeless. But, hey, go ahead and visit your gaucho family. They’ll probably have some tips about building trash can fires and living off of street rats. Tips we’ll be able to use.”
“Okay, okay.” Her mother did seem to have a point. “We’ll investigate a little. But you can’t blog about any of this.”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t want to dig your hole any deeper. Plus, if there is a crime, then th
e bad guys can read your blog and know what we’re up to.”
Fanny seemed flattered. “You think the bad guys read my blog?”
“Yes. It’s number one in San Quentin. So no blogging. You promise?”
“Okay, I promise.” Fanny held up her hand in a pledge.
Amy checked her other hand for crossed fingers. “Good. So where do we start?”
“The sergeant gave me an idea. We start by identifying our victim. This ranch is the closest place to where I found her. There are employees here. Maids, cooks, bartenders. Also maintenance people. If one of them is missing, we can find out.”
“We should do that this afternoon,” agreed Amy. “How about other people in the area? I can talk to them.”
“Good idea.” Fanny was pleasantly surprised that her daughter had gotten on board so quickly. “What other people?”
“Well, there’s a gaucho family living nearby. They may have a wife or a daughter who was out tending the sheep yesterday and didn’t come home.” Amy repressed a smile, taking off her blond tortoiseshells and wiping them with the napkin from her tea service. “I should go visit them and ask.”
Fanny cocked her head quizzically. “You think some Little Bo Peep might be our victim?”
“It’s a legitimate line of inquiry. The gauchos must live as close to the scavenger site as we are here.”
“Amy Josephine Abel.” She was using her mother voice. “If you’re not going to treat this seriously . . .”
“I am treating it seriously. It won’t take two of us to make sure all the maids are accounted for. Meanwhile, I can check on the neighbors.”
“Fine,” Fanny said, drawing out the word into three syllables. “I’ll stay here. You go learn how to make lariats and weave blankets and shine the spurs on your boots.”
“I will do that.”
* * *
The excursion met at 4:00 p.m. out in front of the lodge. Amy was surprised to find herself the only English speaker there except for Nicolas.
“Ms. Lindborn is resting until dinner,” the young guide explained when she asked. “And the gentlemen are trying to get the Wi-Fi to connect them to their offices at home.”