by Hy Conrad
“All in all, yes. But if you take it a step at a time, why not?”
“Wouldn’t it be easier just to say that I’m psychic?”
“You’re not psychic.”
“No. According to you, I just saw the same corpse twice.”
“It’s the truth. The first time, she’d been dead only a short time. The condors must have just gotten there. Be honest, Mother. You exaggerated about all the condor pecking.”
“It makes for a better Trippy.”
“So you agree? That’s how it must have happened?”
Fanny reluctantly agreed. Amy’s theory did answer all the impossible questions. “So what was his mistake?” she asked, her natural optimism bubbling up. “Every killer makes a mistake. How do we nail Jorge O’Bannion?”
Amy didn’t share her optimism. “I can’t think of a single mistake. We have no way of finding his mysterious friend. And everything else is buttoned up.”
“What about Oscar?” Fanny asked. “If he’s getting money from Jorge, he must know something.”
Amy thought about this. “From their behavior in the chopper, maybe Oscar noticed the tire tracks from Jorge’s motorcycle going off to the river. I don’t know if he pieced together the same thing I did, but he knows something’s wrong. Our Jorge doesn’t have much of a poker face.”
Fanny was pleased. “So we should talk to Oscar. Juanita can translate.”
“You want her to translate about how her father is blackmailing Jorge? Mother!”
“Come on!” Over the decades, Fanny had perfected this, the art of looking offended. “I can be subtle. Give me some credit.”
It was a testament to their abject desperation that Amy didn’t argue harder and longer than she did.
* * *
That night, after a simple dinner of trout, a present from Kevin’s visit, Amy and Fanny complimented the chef and warmly thanked Jorge for his continued hospitality. Then they walked out of the empty dining room and went for a stroll. After circling back up toward the orchard, the Abels sneaked down to the service area and found a set of keys just where they expected to, in the ignition of the Land Rover parked farthest from the estancia.
Amy had a good memory for directions. She drove, lights off for the first minute, then lights on. Fanny took care of opening and closing the three sets of barbed-wire gates. The gaucho home was easier to find in the darkness, a constellation of incandescent lights nestled in the prairie.
All three of the Joneses came out to greet the guests. Juanita was still as excited as she’d been a few hours earlier. “Miss Abel, it is an honor to have you visit our home again. Mrs. Abel, welcome.”
Oscar stepped off the porch and shook their hands. He also seemed to welcome them—although that was soon to change. They apologized for the late hour and their unexpected arrival. Oscar’s wife, Maria, remained on the porch, near the door, observing.
“Can you tell your father we need to speak to him?” asked Amy. “And maybe you could translate for us.”
“Translate? I will do my best.” Juanita seemed to understand that it was a big responsibility.
Her mother understood enough to retreat back inside, while Oscar and his daughter sat themselves on the porch steps. Amy and Fanny said that they would prefer to stand. Oscar offered them some tea or maté. He would be happy to heat up the water and share a gourd. Fanny refused—“Please don’t go to the trouble”—which signaled to everyone that this was not to be a friendly, neighborly visit.
“Please tell your father . . .” Amy had agonized over how best to say this. “We know what he and Senor O’Bannion were talking about this afternoon.”
When Oscar heard the translation, he stiffened. “Do you understand Spanish?” Juanita asked on his behalf.
“No. But we saw what you saw from the helicopter.” The Spanish word was close enough so that Juanita understood. Helicóptero.
“Jorge O’Bannion is a bad man.” Fanny said this directly to Oscar. “You need to tell the police what you know.”
Juanita did her part. Then she asked her father a question of her own. He answered. She asked another and received a sterner, more forceful reply. “My father says he doesn’t know what you are talking about. But I think he is lying to you.”
“I think he is lying, too,” Fanny said. “No, don’t translate that, dear.”
She didn’t. But the three-part conversation deteriorated from that moment. Rather quickly. Oscar was angry with them for presuming to lecture him on right and wrong, for coming to his home only to insult him and, most of all, for involving his daughter. Juanita, as Amy had feared, was caught in the middle, trying to please her new American friends and trying not to antagonize her father.
“Did my father do something bad? Is he going to be arrested?”
“No,” said Amy. “Your father’s a good man.”
“Is his job in danger?” she asked next. When Amy wasn’t quick to reassure her, the teenager grew anxious and upset. “This is Mr. O’Bannion’s land. Are we going to have to move? Where will we get work after this? What about my school?”
Amy and Fanny didn’t have any answers. They tried their best to be vague with her and direct with her father, but they didn’t stand a chance of succeeding at either. Juanita was sent inside the house, and Oscar Jones began shouting obscenities, what they assumed were obscenities, as he ushered them back, nearly pushed them back, to the Land Rover and pointed to the barbed-wire gate. This last portion of his tirade did not require any translation.
Inside the truck, a guilt-infused silence prevailed. It was only after Fanny had returned from dealing with the third gate that anyone spoke.
“What were we thinking?” Amy asked softly.
“We’re trying to catch a killer,” Fanny said, settling back in and fastening her seat belt.
Amy bit her lip. “What is wrong with us? Why didn’t I think this through? How could we be so arrogant?”
Fanny shrugged. “From Oscar’s behavior just now, I’d say your theory is right on the money. For what it’s worth.”
“It’s not worth much.” Even on high, the headlights barely illuminated the dark, dusty trail. “People out here live on the edge. If Oscar tells the truth and Jorge isn’t convicted, Juanita loses her education. Oscar loses his job, and the lives of three good people are ruined. If he is convicted, the New Patagonian Express will be over. Who would own the estates? Would they throw Oscar and his family out? And all this upheaval and damage for what? To get justice for a woman we never knew? For a woman who was probably mean and selfish to begin with?” Amy stepped heavy on the gas.
“The law doesn’t care if a victim was bad or good. Even in Chile.”
“Well, we did our part,” Amy said. “More than our part. We have our answers, and it’s over. We’ll be home, safe in New York. With any luck, we won’t have ruined Juanita’s life. And you can invent some Trippy story that makes sense, even if it involves a maté vision.”
“I think you’re going a little overboard.”
“I don’t know where I’m going. It’s been a long day.”
“You don’t know where you’re going?” Fanny looked concerned.
“I know where I’m going.” Amy made a sharp left turn with the last of the road. “The parking lot’s right up here. The lodge is around the ridge.”
The Land Rover pulled into the same spot it had evacuated less than an hour before. Amy cut the lights, throwing the lot into darkness. “We should have brought a flashlight,” she grumbled. And just like that, it happened. A flashlight snapped on, its beam shining into the Land Rover’s windshield.
Before they even saw his face, they knew it was O’Bannion. He turned the beam away from their eyes, and they could see in the spill of light the two-way radio in his other hand. His voice was even deeper than usual. “I am going to have to ask you to leave tomorrow.”
“Really?” Fanny feigned the innocence of a newborn puppy. “I thought we had one more day.”
; “After what you did? After what I know you’ve been doing all along?”
“What have we been doing?” Fanny asked. “You mean taking the truck for a little joyride? I’m sorry. But we brought it back. No scratches. You can check.”
“Oscar called me.”
“Oscar called?” Amy asked. Of course he’d called. He was protecting his family.
“That’s where we went for our little ride.” Fanny laughed. “You should have been there. We don’t communicate well, Oscar and I. He got upset about something.... Some misunderstanding.”
“Enough.” They could see Jorge struggling with his anger, wanting to say more, to accuse them of betrayal, of spying on him, but not daring even to bring up the subject. “In the morning I will have a man drive you into Puerto Natales. You can arrange your transportation from there.”
And with that, Jorge turned and marched away, through the parking area and around the bend toward the lodge. In a matter of half a minute, the beam of his light flickered and disappeared.
“Hello?” Fanny shouted into the darkness. “Hello! You could have left the flashlight!”
CHAPTER 29
The next morning Amy woke up slowly. Through the cobwebs, she could sense that her mother was already up—not up and trying to be politely quiet, but up and trying with every movement to lure her out of bed. This went on for some time. The rustling of pages, the dropping of a shoe, the closing of a door, all designed to make her show some sign of human life. But Fanny’s efforts had the opposite effect, like on those mornings at home, when Amy would be lying half awake and the alarm clock would go off. Whatever energy she might have had right before the alarm sounded would be sapped away by the sound of the alarm.
“What time is it?” She mumbled the words reproachfully, head still under the covers.
“Around five forty-five,” answered Fanny. “Good morning, sunshine.”
“Five forty-five a.m.? How long have you been up?”
“An hour maybe. I couldn’t sleep.”
“I can tell.”
“I kept thinking about all the footage I took, all of it lost. So I decided to read the instruction manual, just for fun.”
“Instruction manual?” She oozed her head out of her cocoon to see her mother, fully dressed, sitting at their imitation Chippendale desk, studying a black credit card–sized device and the contents of two open pamphlets. “Are you talking about the camera?” Amy asked, then produced her first big yawn of the day.
“It’s the VITA Pro Action Camera,” Fanny announced without looking up. “You know your Uncle Joe, always pushing me to buy the latest crap. Like this little doohickey that came with it.” She fingered the thick black credit card. “It’s a remote. They say you can turn on the VITA Pro from a distance of six hundred feet.”
“Interesting.”
“I guess it makes sense if you’re a nature photographer or you’re sending up the camera in a hot air balloon, or whatever else people do with them.”
“Very interesting.”
Fanny grinned. “That’s what I thought. And then I was checking the camera’s battery life. You know, to see if it might still be working out there in the middle of nowhere.”
Amy was listening now, the cobwebs magically dispersing. “Very, very interesting.”
“After half an hour the VITA Pro Action has an automatic shutoff, unless you change the settings, which I didn’t.” Fanny flipped to the next page. “When you turn it back on with this doohickey, the camera lights up and beeps. Oh, and the best part. Once it’s on, it sends a signal, unless again you change the settings, which again I didn’t. You can track it on a little map on your phone. I just spent half an hour downloading the app.”
“And the camera’s battery life?”
“A maximum of four hours.” Fanny finally looked over at the newly hatched creature. “And to spare you the great exertion of asking, yes, I charged the battery right before I lost it. My estimate is that we have at least an hour—between the time we remotely turn on the camera and the time its battery dies and it stops sending the signal.”
“Are you suggesting we wander around where you were on your horse, pressing the remote?”
“Uh-huh. Apparently, people lose and re-find these cameras all the time.”
Amy was impressed. “I’d completely forgotten about that.”
“Pretty smart of your old mother.”
“So, all we have to do is get within six hundred feet.” Amy was already out of bed, sniffing through the bedside drawer for a clean pair of underwear. “It’s a long shot.”
“What’s six hundred feet? A couple football fields? Not a bad long shot.” Fanny had gone to the closet, looking for a pair of comfortable shoes. “Think of what’s on that video. Lola’s body, time-stamped, days before she died. How is Jorge going to explain that?”
“Are you sure you caught her face?”
“Ten seconds, at least. I made myself do it for Trippy.”
Amy was at the same closet now, grabbing a pair of jeans and thinking through the logistics. “Should we contact Kevin and his helicopter? He’d be glad to help, although it would be expensive.”
Fanny gave her that look. “What do you mean, contact him? Did you ask that cute boy for his number? What would Marcus say?”
“I didn’t ask for his number. He gave me his e-mail, and I haven’t thrown it out.”
“Well, Kevin’s busy. Two days of trout fishing, remember? It’s just you and me, sweetie. Well?”
Normally, it took Amy five minutes to pick out a top. Now she grabbed the first thing she saw on a hanger, Marcus’s oversize plaid shirt. “Okay. Let’s do it.” For Amy, the mental jolt was better than five alarm clocks and ten cups of coffee. They had gone to bed defeated and had gotten up within reach of success. She didn’t even need a hot shower. The earlier they got out, the less chance they would have of being seen.
Within ten minutes they were in the same Land Rover, this time with Fanny behind the wheel, her Peruvian Batman hat pulled snugly over her hair, the pompom flapping in the breeze of an open window.
In the passenger seat, Amy checked her phone. Kevin had been nice enough to point out the spot on the map where Jorge had gotten so nervous, and she’d been smart enough to take photos of the map. Mother and daughter had each grabbed an apple from the bowl in the great room and hoped it would last until they either succeeded or gave up.
According to this section of the map, now expanded on the phone until the lines and swirls went blurry, the route out of the Glendaval valley was fairly clear. “We’re basically heading for the Rio Grey.” Even with her seat belt on, Amy’s head bounced up against the dome light, and she regretted leaving her mother in charge of the driving. “Can you slow down and maybe not aim for the ruts?”
“No. The ruts are aiming for me.” But she did slow down enough to keep Amy’s head dome free.
“We need to head more toward that butte,” Amy advised, pointing to a small, sandy mesa in the distance. “Take a right.” There wasn’t much of a right to take, just a path with fewer scrubby bushes than the non-paths. Fanny did as she was told, and Amy was satisfied that they were drawing closer to the site of Fanny’s vision and the river just beyond.
The terrain was changing into familiar foothills, but now there were even more ruts aiming themselves under the Land Rover. After one particularly nasty bump, the rear tires got stuck in a waterless gully, bringing the vehicle to an abrupt, shuddering stop. The seat belts saved them both from the dashboard.
When the dust cleared, Amy got out to push. And when the tires and undercarriage were finally free, she took over behind the wheel. Fewer ruts wound up attacking them after that, but not a lot fewer.
They were driving parallel to the sandy butte now. “I remember riding along here,” Fanny said.
“Before or after your vision?”
“After, I think. Do you want to try the remote?”
“Sure,” said Amy. “We’ll give it a shot.�
�� She had no idea if being in a vehicle in motion would affect the remote’s ability to function. Deciding to err on the side of being outside and stationary, she stepped off the pedal and waited until they rolled to a stop.
On getting out of the Land Rover, they wordlessly agreed to make a production of it. Fanny opened the app, while Amy aimed the thick black credit card everywhere and nowhere in particular. Pressing the button resulted in a tiny beep. But there was no answering beep from anywhere, not within earshot. They hovered over the phone together and watched the little dotted circle on the app revolve until the appearance of the words no signal signaled their failure.
Amy hadn’t really expected it to work on their first try. She would have been amazed. But still there was a feeling of disappointment, and the nagging suspicion that it wouldn’t work at all, even if they accidentally parked themselves right on top of the camera.
Neither Abel spoke. They got back into their four-wheel drive and continued down the path along the bottom of the butte.
“I definitely remember coming by here,” Fanny said. Amy appreciated the deception, if it was a deception, which she had no way of knowing. But she appreciated it.
When they were half a kilometer farther along, around the next bend, Amy eased off the gas and they tried again. She was prepared this time for failure. Maybe in an hour, a signal might miraculously hit the phone. Maybe after a few more turns, she hoped, after they’d made their way around and down to the Rio Grey. Maybe on their way back it would happen, she hoped, when all seemed lost. It would be a process. They wouldn’t give up. And either it would work or it wouldn’t.
Again, they got out. Again, they went through the procedure, with the remote aimed into the heavens and the dotted circle on the phone spinning and spinning. Again, the words no signal replaced the dotted circle. Fanny sighed and was in the process of fingering the OFF button when the dotted circle reappeared. This was enough encouragement to make her hold the phone aloft and wave it slowly back and forth, like a lighter at an eighties rock concert.