The Shadow of Venus

by Judith Van GIeson

  “It could be difficult,” Claire said, “if not impossible.”

  “The impossible—now that takes a little longer.” He smiled.

  Claire, who felt he’d dodged the ball she’d tossed out, wondered if it was photographs of the dead he wanted to avoid or meeting with the police. She moved on to the next subject.

  “Would you be able to put together a list of the library’s most valuable illustrated books in the field of archeoastronomy for me? I could narrow my search for missing illustrations by starting with those books.” Claire was capable of compiling such a list herself but knew Lawton Davis could do it better and faster.

  “Now, that’s an area in which I can help,” he said. “Consider it done. In its own way Spiral Rocks is quite an interesting site. Very few people have seen it, but that should change soon. Have you ever been there?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the rare archeoastronomical site that’s on private land. It was owned by a rancher in Colorado until the celestial artist Edward Girard talked him into selling it. Girard has a passion for his work that can make him a very convincing salesman. The sky is his canvas. What makes Spiral Rocks unique from an archeoastronomer’s point of view is that it frames the Maximum Moon.”

  “What’s that?” Claire asked.

  “The Hopi considered the moon to be a foolish man who wanders around without a home. I’m sure you’ve noticed from watching the full moon rise over the Sandias that it moves north in the winter and south in the summer. Every year it reaches its southernmost point at the summer solstice and its northernmost point at the winter solstice, but those aren’t fixed points. Within those extremes the moon actually has an eighteen-and-a-half-year cycle. It moves north for nine and a quarter years, then it turns south. Its northernmost and southernmost points are called the Maximum and Minimum Extremes. The Anasazi were keen observers of the night sky and they had the advantage of a sky free of ambient light. They were aware of the Maximum and Minimum Extremes. In fact, some of the buildings at Chaco are oriented toward them. The spiral on Fajada Butte has nine and a quarter turns and the Maximum and Minimum Moons cast shadows on it. In an amazing natural occurrence, the Maximum Moon rises right between Spiral Rocks every eighteen and a half years. The ancient peoples observed this and celebrated it, and so does Edward Girard. This year is a Maximum Moon year, and it will take place later this month. It’s the second time that has happened since Girard bought the property. The last time he threw a large party to celebrate. He may be doing it again. He has much more to celebrate, now that he is further along in developing his observatory.

  “Girard believes that isolating elements of the sky alters the viewers’ perceptions. For example, we see the sky as a bowl, but if you isolate and frame a portion of it, it appears flat. The planet Venus is the third brightest light in the sky, bright enough to cast a shadow. Girard is building a chamber to isolate its light. His observatory may never be finished. He has a knack for taking on enormous projects but never completing them. Even in an incomplete stage, his observatory is an amazing achievement, one that will inspire people throughout the ages in much the same way that Chaco Canyon has. Excuse me for running on at the mouth.” He laughed. “Obviously this is a project for which I have enormous enthusiasm.”

  “Will there be a chamber for observing Venus in the daytime?” Claire asked.

  “I don’t know. Offhand I would say that’s not possible, but I didn’t consider many of the things Edward Girard has accomplished to be possible.”

  “Do you know him well?”

  “Not really. He’s a loner and totally devoted to his work, although he can be charming when he wants to be.”

  “Can you tell me how I could get in touch with him? It’s possible there is a connection between his observatory at Spiral Rocks and Maia. If she admired Girard’s work, maybe she was planning on attending the celebration.”

  “Artistic men like Edward Girard have groupies and fans even when they totally ignore them,” Lawton sighed. “Unlike us scholarly types.”

  Scholarly types had groupies, too, in Claire’s experience, but Lawton Davis might be too self-effacing to be aware of that. The light in his eyes when he talked about Edward Girard’s work bordered on hero worship. It was the artist’s role to act out and express everything more buttoned-up types couldn’t, the artist’s role to be damned for his self-expression as well as to be praised for it.

  “Let me see if I can find a phone number or an E-mail address,” Lawton said. “Maybe I can get you an invitation to the Maximum Moon celebration.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Claire said. She stood up. “Your photographs are beautiful. Thank you for showing them to me.”

  Lawton had a glow on the verge of turning into a blush, but he dimmed the light by saying, “It’s nothing, really. Just a hobby. Wait until you see Edward Girard’s work. Now, there’s an artist.”

  ******

  The next morning Lawton Davis brought his list of valuable illustrated archeoastronomy books to Claire’s office. He also brought along Edward Girard’s phone number and E-mail address.

  “I e-mailed him about your interest,” Lawton said, “but I haven’t received a reply yet.”

  Later that afternoon Claire took the list to the Anderson Reading Room and began searching the books he’d recommended. In one sense it wasn’t a difficult job; the books were works of art. To spend the afternoon sitting in a beautiful room looking at illustrations of ancient observatories, of stars, moons, planets, and constellations could hardly be considered unpleasant work. But every time she checked an index and turned to a page, Claire had the gnawing sensation she would find it missing. As she worked her way through the books, finding every illustration exactly where it was supposed to be, her ansia abated. Turning page after page and looking at the sky had a tranquilizing effect. By the time she’d finished Lawton’s list she knew Maia hadn’t been systematically looting archeoastronomy books, which made her choice of the Spiral Rocks illustration even more intriguing.

  She went back to her office, called Lawton, and gave him the news.

  “Excellent,” he said.

  Next she dialed Detective Owen’s number. “Professor Lawton Davis from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences gave me a list of valuable archeoastronomy books,” she said. “I went through all of them and found nothing else missing.”

  “Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, although it’s possible she had already looted books in another field and was just getting started on archeoastronomy. Or it could be that Spiral Rocks had some special meaning to Maia. Lawton Davis told me an artist named Edward Girard is turning it into an observatory and is having a celebration there in a few weeks.”

  “Oh?” asked Owen.

  “Oh,” Claire replied.

  “We talked to Seth Malcolm. He admits to talking to Maia but not to giving her his code or letting her into the basement or the Anderson Reading Room.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Not necessarily, although he was right about the Hope Central Shelter. We talked to Christopher Hyde, the director, who identified Maia from our photo. He said she stayed at the shelter a few years ago but started using and had to leave. She stopped using and came back last winter. She left in the spring, possibly because she had started using again. Maia kept to herself, Hyde said. She claimed she hated to be shut up indoors, but he thought she was claustrophobic. The only personal information he ever got from her was that her name was Maia and she’d used drugs.”

  “Have you found out who sold her the China White? Have there been any more deaths from it?”

  “To both of those questions the answer is not yet. We’re still investigating, but the only crimes we’ve found so far are the sale of the heroin and the damage to your book. No missing person’s report has been filed on anyone who resembles Maia. Unfortunately heroin gets bought and sold all the time. Do books get damaged all the time?”

&
nbsp; “I wouldn’t say all the time, but more often than I’d like,” Claire said. “If there are other damaged books in the library I need to know. It would help if I could further narrow my search.”

  “Have you thought about other expedition books? Expeditions that didn’t involve archeoastronomy?”

  Claire had thought about it. It meant making a list and going through another stack of books page by page, another day shut up in the Anderson Reading Room. But she agreed to start looking through the expedition books. Damaged books were the only legitimate involvement she had in Maia’s death.

  “Good luck,” Detective Owen said.

  Claire hung up the phone and stared at her books-with-wings screen saver. Books were her passion and her business. She was a librarian and rare-book expert. It wasn’t up to her to find out who Maia was and notify the next of kin; that job belonged to the APD. To them she was just another unidentified homeless person who had OD’d, but she was the only homeless person or addict Claire had ever known. Everyone else she had encountered had a name, a history, an identity, was more than a few snippets of conversation. But it had been years since anyone had called her beautiful. Was it that compliment that connected her to Maia and drove her to find out who she was? Was it because Maia was about the same age as her own daughter and she couldn’t stand the thought of Robin disappearing and dying alone in a storage room with no one to bury her or to mourn her passing? Or was it because she suspected Maia was a sister, another girl who’d longed to escape to the sky?

  The books with wings flew across her computer screen—red books, green books, leather-bound books, classic books, forgotten books, boring books, illuminating books. Claire turned off the computer. She had agreed to examine the other expedition books, but she hadn’t agreed to do it today. There were times when even Claire tired of books.

  She called Edward Girard and got voice mail in a recorded man’s voice that might, or might not, have been Edward’s. She left a message saying she was interested in attending the Maximum Moon celebration and asking him to call her back as soon as possible.

  Chapter Eight

  CLAIRE LEFT WORK, BUT INSTEAD OF HEADING FOR HOME in the foothills she turned her truck toward the Valley. She drove west on Central, passed the cluster of movie theater, lights, restaurants, and the NYPD (the New York Pizza and Deli) that made downtown Albuquerque look almost upscale. She turned south on Third and in a few blocks she was in derelict city, the area she thought of as Mission Row, where the homeless went seeking shelter. Except for isolated pockets around Central there wasn’t much street life in Albuquerque, so little that Claire sometimes questioned why the city even had sidewalks. It was a sprawling Western city where trucks and SUVs ruled. Every year people’s driving-around-town vehicles got larger. In tired moments Claire thought of them as tanks that fortified and protected the drivers while giving them a sense of power that turned them belligerent. When her pickup truck was new it had seemed substantial, but now it felt like a little red wagon surrounded by a column of tanks.

  Those who could protected themselves; those who couldn’t walked the streets. There were people on the sidewalk in this part of town, clusters of ragtag warriors, some wearing football shirts, some wearing miniskirts, some in camouflage. Many of the men on the street were veterans. One result of war and aggression was that even the victors ended up with no place to live. Claire passed the churches and missions that administered to the homeless and stopped at Hope Central, which displayed no cross or religious symbol. Claire had met Christopher Hyde and knew that was a deliberate choice on his part. Hope Central was a humanist shelter. The homeless came from many different walks of life and followed many different paths. Christopher’s goal was to help them get back on their feet, not to convert them. The lack of a church connection made it even harder for him to raise money. Periodically he put together a book of writings and artwork created by people who had spent time at the shelter. The arts were taught at Hope Central by a loyal group of volunteers. Christopher raised money by selling this book. Claire always bought several copies for the library, but book sales rarely supported individuals, much less institutions, and Hope Central was always strapped for cash.

  She parked in front of the building, which was shabby even for south Third Street. Claire had last seen Christopher Hyde at a signing the University Bookstore held for the latest edition of his book. She remembered him as a small, vibrant man with a fringe of reddish hair. Would he remember her?

  Claire glanced at her watch. It was four thirty, still afternoon in her opinion. If she were at the library she would have hours of work left. But at Hope Central the day was ending. Homeless drifted toward the door like bees returning to the hive. Most of their clothes were drab and shabby. The pale, neat Maia would have stood out here. Claire negotiated her way through the swarm of people at the door, went inside, and asked a volunteer if she could speak to Christopher Hyde.

  The woman gave her a quick glance, recognized that she didn’t need a place for the night, and asked, “Does he know you?”

  “We’ve met. My name is Claire Reynier. I’m a librarian at UNM.”

  The woman buzzed Christopher on the intercom. “Hey, Chris,” she yelled, “there’s a woman named Claire somethin’ or other from UNM who wants to talk to you.” She went back to gathering information from people at the door. “Excuse me,” she said. “Dinner time.”

  The living room at Hope Central reminded Claire of the lobby of a seedy hotel furnished with sagging, broken-springed sofas. The room was filling with hungry people, including crying babies, squirming children, defeated and tired men with empty eyes. As the noise level escalated, she could see how the confusion and lack of privacy might have driven Maia to the sanctuary of the library.

  While she waited for Christopher, Claire was drawn to the artwork on the walls of the living room, portraits of the homeless. In one way they mirrored the people in the room. Their faces showed the ravages of street life, yet their expressions were vibrant and hopeful. Many were shown as performers in an imaginary circus—clowns, tightrope walkers, animal trainers. The colors were bright as circus posters but never garish.

  Christopher Hyde crossed the room, stopping several times to take a hand and smile at someone he recognized. Claire had the thought that if she were painting him, she would have painted him as a clown. His fringe of orange hair resembled a clown’s ruff. His pants were baggy. He wore a yellow shirt.

  Christopher took her hand. His eyes were puzzled and his forehead wrinkled in confusion. “I know we’ve met. I just can’t remember where or when.”

  “I work at the Center for Southwest Research at UNM. I go to your signings at the University Bookstore. I always buy several copies of your book for the library.”

  “Well, that’s good to know.” He patted her hand and Claire saw that the back of his was ruddy and freckled. “We always need the money. Do you like our paintings?”

  “They’re wonderful,” Claire said. “I love the colors, the optimism, the expressions on the subjects’ faces.”

  “These are all people who stayed at the shelter at one time or another,” Christopher said. “It’s empowering for them to see themselves represented in a work of art. We sell the paintings to raise money for the shelter.” He laughed. “We’re shameless. We sell anything we can, except, of course, sex and drugs. Any drugs we confiscate are destroyed.”

  “Who is the artist?”

  “A woman named Lisa Teague, who teaches here. It would be hard for us to survive without the help of Lisa. I can’t walk around with my hand out all the time.”

  Claire intended to make a contribution to the shelter but she hadn’t decided what to give yet. “If you have some time, I’d like to talk to you about Maia, the woman who died in the basement of Zimmerman.”

  “The police told me she stole an illustration from the library.”

  “I’m hoping she only stole one. Could we talk? I should have called first. I didn’t realize this would be s
uch a busy time for you.”

  “No problem. We have a half hour yet before dinner.”

  He led Claire through the living room to a minuscule office in the back of the building. The solitary window had a battered air conditioner filling the lower panes. The upper panes faced a brick wall on the far side of an alley. A bookshelf was filled with copies of Christopher’s book.

  “Maia was interested in art,” Christopher said. “She participated in Lisa’s workshops. Lisa probably knew her as well as anyone. You might want to talk to her.”

  “I would,” Claire said.

  Christopher took Lisa’s card from his desk and handed it to Claire. “After all my years in this business very little shocks me, but I am surprised that Maia would steal from the library. She loved art.”

  “I don’t know for sure that she stole it,” Claire said. “I only know that an illustration was cut out of the book Ancient Sites and it was found in the room with Maia. It’s possible she took other artwork and sold or traded it for drugs. We have so many valuable illustrated books in the library. It’s difficult and time consuming to look through every one/’

  “La jeringa and the damage done,” Christopher said. “Maia had a heroin addiction. I had to ask her to leave when she started using. For a while she kicked it, but she must have started up again. It’s a powerful addiction, almost as powerful as cigarettes, so they say. Street life is also intoxicating. Everyone gets to be a heroine or a hero on the street. They rescue their fellow addicts by bringing them drugs or finding them a place to stay. Lisa catches some of that element of heroism-on-the-edge in her paintings, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Claire agreed.

  “Life on the street is dangerous but it has a purpose. Addicts know what they have to do next to get high. That can be addicting, too. Most people kick it by going into a treatment center. Maia claimed she did it by being locked up alone in a house.”

  “Really?” Claire asked.