by Sandi Ault
His partner squeezed his arm and then patted him, clearly trying to calm him down.
“I work for the BLM, and I’m the liaison to Tanoah Pueblo.” I pointed to the patch on my jacket sleeve. “You can call me Agent Wild.” I took out my badge and showed them the brass shield. “I’m a federal agent.”
At this, they glanced quickly at one another. “Well, we didn’t mean any harm,” the woman said.
“I’m sure of that,” I said. “It is unusual for the pueblo to be on Quiet Time right now. The new War Council came into power on the 1st of the month, and normally the Kings Day dances celebrate and symbolically give power to them from the tribe. There must be some important reason why they’ve cancelled the dances and closed the pueblo. Are you two visiting this area on vacation?”
The man answered, “Yes. We’re here for the first time, just trying to see all the sights.”
“Did you go to the dances over at Taos Pueblo today?”
This time the woman spoke. “No, we missed them. I guess we prefer things a little more off-the-beaten-path.”
“Well, Taos Pueblo is a much larger tribe, and their dances are all the more magnificent because of their numbers. Next time around, try them first, and try during daylight. Dances usually start in the early morning hours.”
“We came in daylight,” the man grumbled. “It just got dark earlier than we expected.”
“What are your names?” I asked.
They both hesitated. The female spoke. “I’m Uma. And this is Kyle.”
“Hey, you two, your car is ready over here now,” Officer Rainwater called from a few yards down the road where he and the driver stood next to the big truck that had towed the Subaru.
“We better get going,” Uma said with a pinched smile, and the two promptly made for their car.
When I opened the door to my Jeep to get back in, a stench rose from the back of it that would have rivaled any cesspool. I waved my arms and screwed up my face. “Aw, Mountain! That rabbit is coming back to haunt us both!”
When I got to Momma Anna’s place, her house was dark. I approached the door and knocked softly just in case, but I already guessed she wasn’t home. There was no smoke puffing out of the woodstove and no tracks in the soft white powder that coated her walk. She’d been gone since before the snow began falling.
When I got back to the highway I called Roy while I had cellular coverage. “You told me to call before I headed home,” I said.
“I wish to hell you had phone service out there,” Roy said. “I got a bad feeling about this deal with Talgren. I don’t think the man’s going to let it go.”
“I know what you mean. He’s disturbed.”
“You got that right.”
“Well, I’ll keep my sidearm with me, and I sleep with a shotgun by the bed,” I said.
24: Outfoxed
When I opened the hatch on the Jeep, Mountain scrambled out and fled into the darkness behind the cabin, so urgent was his need to relieve himself from the rabbit’s revenge. But even as he bolted, he hesitated for just an instant to sniff at several small white mounds on the ground near the propane tank. I went to see what he had discovered and found the bodies of the mother fox and her two kits frozen and coated with snow next to the bowl I’d asked Coronel to set there the night before. I knelt and touched the stiffened body of the mama fox and saw that her lips were curled back and a frozen glob of gel extended from the corner of her mouth. “Oh no!” I gasped. Someone had put poison in the water. I stood and looked around, the message clear, the threat of it overwhelming the sadness I felt for the fox family.
I worked quickly to get in enough firewood to last the night. Coronel had only barely repaired the lock on my door by screwing the receiver for the slide bolt back into the same holes he’d busted it out of when he first arrived. As soon as I got a fire going, I pulled the screw gun out from under the sink and removed the slide bolt altogether so I could place it elsewhere on a new section of wood. But the battery on the drill went dead before I could reattach it. I plugged the battery into its charger and went outside with a flashlight to the shed. The power often went out on nights like this when sudden cold came and there was heavy moisture in the air, and I couldn’t know for sure if the electricity would stay on long enough for the battery to charge. After rummaging around among the fence-building materials I had left from when we built an enclosure for Mountain, I found a two-by-four long enough to span the door, and I thought that if I had to, I could nail it across the jamb before I went to bed and pry it back off in the morning. A hammer didn’t need a battery, but nailing a board across the door would not just keep an intruder from coming through it, it would also block me and Mountain in, which carried its own risks. I stopped by the Jeep and retrieved my handgun from the glove box. With Mountain and me back inside, I decided to wait for the battery to charge until bedtime, and hoped I didn’t have to resort to the two-by-four.
I had no appetite after discovering the poor little foxes, and Mountain’s bunny binge had pre-empted his evening meal, so once the fire was going well, I spread the things I’d picked up from the library across my kitchen table. I needed to distract myself from the tightness in my chest and the anxiety that came from the knowledge that I could be attacked at any moment. I was certain the foxes were the victims of Lor Talgren’s rage, and I didn’t know how far his desire for revenge over the loss of his dog would take the man. He could have poisoned the water thinking it was for Mountain and gone home satisfied that the matter was finished. Or he could be outside my cabin now, waiting for the right moment to come after me. It was an unfortunate fact that a considerable number of dogs were killed by poisoning every year in Taos County. But the people who poisoned their neighbors’ dogs were generally among the less-educated population living in the small rural villages where folks had been handling their own affairs for centuries. And their actions were usually done subversively—with no announcement or threat—as a means to settle a score, without public ado. Lor Talgren, on the other hand, had pronounced his intention loudly and publicly, and seemed to care little that it was now a matter of record. Because he went looking for me at the BLM’s offices, it seemed to me that Talgren had declared his own war and was not likely to consider putting some poison in a bowl enough to match all that noise and bravado. He meant to cause some suffering.
I flashed a look at my shotgun, still in the corner next to my bed. I pulled my Sig Sauer P229 out of its holster and laid it on the table beside me and took my seat in the chair facing the door. Mountain stretched out on the lambskin in front of the woodstove, his head on the knot of his tug like it was a pillow, his tummy making intermittent squeaks and snarls. I started sifting through the papers Carla had given me at the library. I glanced at a few of the articles and began separating them into three stacks as I went. One stack contained information about the American Indian Church. Another was the more generalized information about peyote. And finally, there were the things Carla thought I might be interested in regarding the notorious author, Videl Quintana.
I took a pen and a legal pad and began to scribble. I wrote: Peyote, and underlined it twice. I drew an arrow pointing downward and wrote: Fireplaces at Tanoah Pueblo, another arrow down from it, where I wrote: Carries Water Clan? Boy stole peyote
Beneath this, without a connecting arrow, I jotted two notes: Quintana and Abasolo’s recent poetry.
On a fresh page, I scribbled the word Monastery and underlined it. Beneath this, I wrote: Brewing beer, Beneficiary of Abasolo’s prize-winnings? When did they last see Abasolo? Owns Abasolo’s house/land. Next to the note about Abasolo’s land, I drew two lines leading to two other ideas: Grazing land Ibanez wanted to use? And: When did Abasolo move into her house? Did monastery own it then?
Finally, on a third page, I listed all the people I had encountered who might have anything to do with Adoria Abasolo: Neighbor—Susan Lacy, Landlord—Father Anthony, Housekeeper, Eddiejoe Ibanez…After that, I drew a blank.
> I looked across the table and saw the information Carla had printed for me about Quintana. I made a wild leap and scribbled his name on the People list, too.
Shuffling through the pages Carla had provided, I noticed a reprinted article from the front page of The Los Angeles Times from November, 1998, carrying a big, bold headline: Videl Quintana’s Secret Death Leaves More Mysteries. The article revealed that the author had died of liver cancer a few months before, but that the matter had been kept from the public. The journalist who discovered this had also learned that Quintana left an enormous estate, and a will that was being contested at the time of the story’s publication. In fact, claims filed in contest of the will were how Quintana’s death eventually came to light.
In recapping the author’s life, the paper had few proven facts. Quintana professed to have been born in 1935 in Argentina, but the newspaper was unable to find records to substantiate this. In fact, most of what would normally be cited as life statistics in an obituary were questioned in the article. What the newspaper could verify was that Quintana and a woman named Rachelle Helena were married in 1981, and that Helena bore a daughter less than two weeks later. The couple named her Nona Dodd. But The Times said that Quintana also kept what the author and his cult of followers referred to as “a coven of witches,” and Helena was but one of them. Only a month after daughter Nona Dodd was born, Quintana legally adopted an adult woman as his daughter, which was allowable under California law; and this newly-adopted adult woman was said to also be one of the “witches” in the coven. The paper went on to say that all four of the women who were reputed to be members of Quintana’s coven disappeared soon after Quintana died. The reporter promised that the story would be continued as investigations into the whereabouts of the “witches” proceeded. Since Quintana was not merely an author of books that were questioned as to whether they were fact or fiction, but was also the leader of a cult and of this so-called coven of witches, the speculation among his followers was that the witches had “gone into the beyond” with Quintana when he passed.
I shook my head. What craziness! None of this had anything to do with Adoria Abasolo’s disappearance. I drew a line through Quintana’s name on my list of people. What was I thinking? She has his books on her bookshelf—so what? He writes about peyote—so what? I hesitated. I went back to the page titled: Peyote and saw Quintana’s name on that list, too.
I got up and fished the blue cardboard file that President-elect Vargas had given me out of my backpack and brought it back to the table. I read through the stats on Abasolo’s life: born 11/30/1954 in São Paulo, Brazil, took advanced classes at the University of São Palo while still attending high school in her home city, then just shy of the age of eighteen became Maria Vargas’ roommate at Stephens Women’s College in Columbia, Missouri, via a scholarship in literature. So while Quintana—who was perhaps thirty years older than Abasolo and already published—was marrying, fathering, adopting, and maintaining women in a coven as witches, Abasolo was studying literature, earning an undergraduate and two advanced degrees, publishing her own books of poetry, and earning the Pulitzer Prize. There was nothing there.
I stretched my arms above my head and yawned. I began gathering the three stacks of papers into one when Mountain suddenly awakened and sat upright. I listened, and then I heard it, too: the sound of a car engine. Someone was coming up my long drive.
I raced to the switch by the door and shut off the light, then grabbed the heavy government-issue flashlight that could easily double as a club. I crouched behind the table and slid the handgun off the top and grasped it, ready to fire. I didn’t need to rack the slide to chamber a round. After the events of the prior winter, when a greedy local landowner had sent goons to trap, beat and try to rape me and had later left me out on the mesa tied to a post as food for a family of mountain lions, I had begun carrying my sidearm with a round in the chamber, ready to go.
The sound of the car grew closer and then stopped, just off the side of the porch. I heard a car door open and then shut softly. One guy, I thought. At least it’s only one guy. I strategized how I could fire the first shot and then hurdle across the bed and into the corner behind it and use the shotgun if I needed to do more. Mountain had risen to all fours but had not moved from in front of the woodstove. He sensed the danger, and at least at this moment, he acknowledged my leadership in our small pack.
Footsteps crossed the wood plank porch, and there was a soft knock on the door, which promptly sprung open because of the missing slide bolt. With my left hand, I turned on the flashlight, aimed it directly at the intruder’s face and raised my right hand with the Sig Sauer pointed in the same direction. I yelled: “Stop right there or I’ll blow a hole right through your head!”
“Dammit, Wild!” Agent Coronel’s hands flew up into the air over his head and he dropped something heavy, which hit the porch with a dull thud. “What the hell is the matter with you? Why do you pull a gun on me every time I come to see you?”
I raised up from my crouch and set the flashlight on the table, shouting back at him, “Why do you always come sneaking around my cabin after dark?”
“I wasn’t sneaking around!” His voice thundered, bouncing off the corners of the cabin walls. “I drove right up the drive this time, didn’t park down at the intersection, I knocked on the door, the damn thing just swung open when I knocked, I didn’t do anything to make that happen.”
By then, I had hurried to the doorway and flipped the switch beside the frame, allowing light to fill the room. My heart felt like a speeding train in my chest. “I was going to put the slide bolt on in a different place.” I noticed I was practically screaming this, as if there were a contest to see which of us could be louder. I reined my voice in but it was still uncontrolled as I added, “The wood is splintered where it came off the other night when you broke in.”
Coronel lowered his hands. He bent and picked up the bag he had dropped. “I can help with that,” he said, and he pushed the fingers of one hand through his hair as if to unruffle his feathers. “I brought you a new locking doorknob and a heavy-duty slide bolt.” He looked at me, and I noticed that his face was red—either from the cold or from adrenalin.
“That’s kind of you,” I said, feeling a little foolish. “But my drill battery went dead when I tried to fix the lock before. I don’t know if it’s charged up again yet.” I looked at the receiver on the kitchen counter, hoping to see the green light that indicated the battery’s energy was restored. But it wasn’t even blinking amber, as it usually did when it was charging. “Shit,” I said. “It looks like the whole thing has died.”
Coronel went to take a look. “Could be your charger was the problem all along. Let me see if I have anything in the car.” He went out the door and I heard his footsteps cross the porch toward the drive.
I looked at Mountain. He was still peering out the door to see what was going to happen next. I took a few deep breaths, trying to calm my nerves. I slid my handgun back into the holster and pushed the stack of papers on the table to one side.
When Coronel came back through the door with his tool kit, he said, “We gotta stop meeting like this.”
Later, I was getting up to refresh my cup, but I noticed he’d only drunk a sip or two of his. “You don’t like tea much, do you Harold? May I call you Harold?”
“Call me Hank,” he said. “And, no, I don’t much like tea. It tastes like boiled twigs and grass clippings or something close to that.”
I laughed. “Well, don’t hold back! Tell me how you really feel about it!”
He laughed, too. Then he sobered and pressed his chin forward, thinking for a moment. “So basically, all you have is some questions about who owns what land. Did Abasolo give the land she lives on to the monastery, or did she rent from them? And did she buy the land that guy—what’s his name—wanted to graze his cattle on just to prevent that from happening, or was she going to build on it or whatever? And you want me to try to find out if the monas
tery is one of the charities she gave her prize winnings to. Am I right?”
“I also think there could be something to the peyote thing,” I said.
“You don’t have anything there, from what you told me.”
“I know, but I think I should follow it.”
“We don’t have time. We need something solid. Now.”
“I know,” I said, “but things don’t move fast in this part of the world.”
He got up from the table and pressed his fists into the small of his back, arching his abdomen forward and stretching. “I haven’t got much to share either, but there are a couple of things I’m looking into. Abasolo had a cell phone and made frequent calls to one number in the past few weeks. We’re trying to track that number down. And I have a friend looking into something peculiar I noticed on her birth certificate.”
“Her birth certificate? What about it?”
“I’m not sure. I will get back to you when I have something real, but I thought it looked phony. Of course, I don’t look at a lot of birth certificates from Brazil. I have a guy checking it for me.”
“Why would she have a phony birth certificate? I mean, isn’t she already vetted since she’s doing the inaugural poem? Wouldn’t she have to be who she says she is to get the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature in poetry? Even to get the scholarships she did to go to all those high-dollar schools?”
“It could be nothing,” Coronel admitted. “But we have to turn over every stone, and we don’t have much else besides our instincts to follow at this point.” He put his hand on top of the jacket he’d hung over the back of the chair. “You think you can relax and get some rest with the door like it is?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Sure. That slide bolt you put on will hold for now, I think. Thank you.”
“I’ll bring a screw gun and put the new doorknob on tomorrow. Sorry I didn’t have what I needed for that.”