by Sandi Ault
Calling Tecolote to mind now worried me about how tired and weak she had been after the incident with the raven. Until now, I had only thought of her as a force of nature—strong and formidable. She had never complained of anything before in my presence, except being hungry, which she usually rapidly remedied.
I looked at the clock over the fireplace. It was three a.m. I was tired. I determined to scan through the papers I’d found wedged between the books by Quintana and then try to get a little rest before I had to begin another day. I quickly glanced over their contents. One contained a poem that gave me pause, and I read it three times to make sure I wasn’t imagining its meaning:
The Smallest Star
I swallowed the smallest star
In the earliest times,
When we were naked and clean
Against one another,
Radiant,
Filled with fire and dreams with wings.
Within me it grew, luminous,
Round and smoldering,
Churning with shame and promise,
Consuming me,
Until I could no longer contain it.
Walking under dark sweeping trees,
Full of smoke and decay,
One night, I decided to vanish,
Eclipse,
Belly full of my heart’s shadow.
Half past three and foaming,
I felt its slithering escape,
A pain that has never stopped hurting,
Comet!
Wails of sorrow and dark honey followed.
Now, every night, I look for you,
O, smallest star in the wide black heavens,
Do you talk to God, do you dream?
I search the sky
And feel the wound flare again in my heart.
The back of my neck tingled. Had Abasolo lost a baby when she was young? Perhaps a miscarriage, or an abortion? When she spoke in the poem of searching the sky, looking every night for someone, I thought of how she had expressed an urgent need to Rico for more peyote so she could find something she had lost. What could she find in a hallucination that she couldn’t locate by searching in full consciousness on the mundane plane? Could she be trying to have a shamanic vision that would connect her with her lost child?
I pried myself out of the sofa’s soft cushions and stood and stretched. “Come on, buddy,” I said to Mountain. “I’m going in circles with this. I’ve got to get some sleep. Let’s go to bed.”
On the way to the guest bedroom, I stopped at the coat rack and picked up my jacket and my backpack. I put the pack on the floor beside the nightstand and threw the jacket over a nearby chair. As Mountain flopped down at the foot of the bed, I pushed the door closed, then pulled back the bedspread and folded it over the foot of the bed. Unclipping the holster from my belt, I unsnapped the stay so I could quickly draw the pistol from it if needed, and pushed it under the pillow. Next, I grabbed my jacket by the collar and plunged my hand into the pocket, feeling for my keys. I wanted them on the nightstand in easy reach, just in case. I grasped the fob, drew it out, and a bit of fluff followed, dangling from my hand. It was the raven feather from Abasolo’s desk that I had shoved into my pocket when I was interrupted by the neighbor. Pulling the plume by the quill tip, I separated it from the bands of the stainless steel ring, and again felt the smallest flutter vibrate through my fingers as whatever draft or air currents in the room set it in motion. I carefully placed it with the keys on the nightstand beside the bed, stripped down to my undershirt and panties, and crawled under the covers. I looked down at Mountain and saw his nose tucked under his tail. He was curled into a perfect wolf donut. “Good night, buddy,” I said and turned off the lamp.
“Can you see me?” A voice whispered.
“Can you see me?”
I lifted my eyelids and peered into the darkness.
A large black eye appeared, right in front of mine, then withdrew to a few inches away. The raven stood atop me, examining me closely, its face turned to the side so it looked directly at me, the long ebony beak pointed toward the door of the room.
I felt the bird’s weight on my chest. It stepped backward and onto my abdomen, then lifted its wings and settled them down again, all its blackness gathered about it, darker even then the unlit room. “Can you see me now?”
“Yes.”
“See nothing I do not. See only what I see.” The raven lifted its wings again, and I felt my own body lift with it, and then felt the exhilaration of rising…high, higher, higher…up through the field of fog that blanketed the house below. Here, the sky was clear, the stars shimmering.
“Who sees with my eyes?” the bird’s voice whispered. Then a loud cry: “Ka-ka. Ka-ka.”
As the raven called out, I felt the night sky surrounding my body, first caressing, and then enveloping it like a silk cocoon. I looked down and saw the earth passing below me, the clouds of fog clearing, then gathering, then clearing again.
“Who sees with my eyes?” the bird said again.
“I see. But I don’t know who I am.”
A long, flat mesa stretched across the land in the darkness below, and the raven and I suddenly made a swooping dissent to its rim. I felt a strange desire to spread my reach wide. My chest expanded and flattened like a sail, but my arms were so heavy that I could not raise them.
A seed pearl, the tiniest moon, rose over the edge of the landscape and hung suspended, bobbing ever so slightly, as if it were trying, but could not gain any more height. “I promise,” it sang, with a voice like a bell softly rung, “there will be more light to come.”
The illumination from this miniscule orb made just enough difference that I could now make out a group of people by a river below. They were women, naked and blue as sapphires, their bodies young and beautiful, every one of them round in the belly. One woman nursed an infant at her breast. Another of the maids fell to the ground at the edge of the river and opened her legs wide into the current. She gave out a wail and two ice-blue bubbles burst on top of the water, and I heard babies crying. Several of those attending plunged into the river to retrieve the pair of newborns, and when they came out with the babes in their arms, all of the women gathered in a circle and began to sing, rejoicing and then handing the newly birthed twins from one to the other, all of them but one. The woman who had been nursing her child slipped quietly away with her charge, into the trees, and out of sight.
“Spread your wings,” my companion whispered, and I realized we were perched on the edge of a cliff.
My torso trembled as a loft of air whooshed over the edge of the precipice. But, hard as I tried, I could not open my arms.
“Jump.”
A stabbing fear overwhelmed me. The ground dissolved beneath my feet and I violently forced my arms outward, feeling them rip at the web of night fibers that had been holding them down. I flailed at the sky, to no avail. I felt myself falling, faster and faster.
“You may think of looking back,” the raven called, “but there will be nothing there. You must fly.”
I woke gasping for air, my heart pounding in my chest. I sat up, and for a moment I could not register where I was or why. Slowly, I began to gain wakefulness, and with it, a raging thirst and a blinding headache. From the scant promise of dim light at the edges of the window blinds, I figured it to be almost dawn. I reached to the nightstand and switched on the lamp. The fledgling raven feather fluttered up ever so slightly from where I had left it and then floated back down and settled again next to my keys.
33: Mistaken Identity
With my head pounding, I went to the kitchen to make some coffee. I knew that the housekeeper would come and provide breakfast, but I was already up, and it would be another two hours before she would arrive. I started a pot brewing and went back to the guest room to take a shower. Mountain seemed as worn out as me, and hadn’t moved to get up even when I had gone to the kitchen. Once I was dressed and ready, I knelt down on the bedroom floor beside him and rubbed his tummy. He
was so warm and cuddly that I curled up on the rug behind him, spooning him against my chest, wishing I could just snuggle up and fall asleep, this time without dreaming. Finally, I made myself get up. “Come on, buddy,” I said. “I know it’s early, but we need to get going.” I took him to the front door and opened it to go outside with him.
The fog that had begun to develop when I sent Rico home had metastasized overnight. In the dim light of early morning, the almost-viscous mass spread itself across the ground and clung there. The wolf disappeared from view as soon as he moved a few yards away from me and I had to rely on my ears to track him. He did his business, and then scurried back to my side, as if he, too, felt wary about this obscuring vapor.
I pushed the door shut and thought about stoking a fire in the lobby woodstove but decided against it. I had too much to do and needed to get going. But first, I needed some coffee, and I would give the wolf the rest of that ground meat. Mountain and I went to the kitchen and I pulled the half-full packet of hamburger out of the fridge and broke the remaining contents from it into bite-size lumps for the wolf’s breakfast. I set Mountain’s bowl down and was about to get myself a cup of java when I heard footsteps crossing the Saltillo tiles of the lobby floor. I tiptoed as lightly as I could to the edge of the pantry, reached into the holster on my right hip, and drew out the SigSauer pistol.
A man’s head and upper torso leaned around the door frame and peered into the cocina. “Holy shit!” Coronel threw his hands up. “What is it with you drawing down on me all the time?”
“Damn, Coronel,” I said in exasperation as I lowered the gun. “Don’t you ever knock?”
Mountain, who had come up right behind me, wagged his tail and darted over to greet the agent and sniff his boots.
Coronel distractedly reached a hand down and patted the wolf, but looked directly at me as he said, “Well, I would have knocked, but I didn’t see the point when the door was wide open!”
“I just closed that door. I made sure it was shut because it’s cold in here.”
“Take a look.” He opened his palm and swept it in front of his body. “It was just like that when I got here.”
I stepped through the kitchen archway and looked toward the entry, my gun still in my hand but down at my side. The front door yawned wide, nearly back against the wall behind it. Mountain trotted over to peer out into the fog.
Coronel said, “I wasn’t about to close that until I figured out what was going on. The noise might have…”
“You know, I had that same thing happen to me the first time I came here. I had closed the door and was looking around in the house when I heard a sound. I went back in the lobby and it was like it is now. Freaked me out.”
“Okay, then, we have three things that we need to do something about. One, we’ve established the door has a tendency to come open by itself, so we’ll double-check that it’s closed tightly from now on. Two, I’d really like to see you stop pulling your gun on me, I really would.” He paused and rubbed his forehead.
“I’m sorry. I’ll try not to do it again.” I holstered my pistol. “And, three?”
“Three, like I said before, why don’t you call me Hank? I figure I’ve survived you looking down a barrel at me—what is it, three or four times now? So we can probably do away with the Agent Coronel stuff and get on a first-name basis.”
“You brought a gun to my door, too, you know, Hank.” I said his name with emphasis.
“Well, like I said, let’s try to end that tradition, too, what do you say? Now, is that coffee I smell?”
“I just made a pot. Come on in and join me.” I went back to the counter and got a second mug out of the cupboard.
“I’ll just close the front door first. Come on, Mountain. You don’t want to go out in that pea soup, you’d lose your way. Stay in here with us.” He went back to the lobby and I heard the big door slam and both paws and boots coming back across the floor toward the kitchen. “That should do it.”
Sitting at the table and sipping from our cups, Coronel and I began exchanging notes while Mountain slipped off to the edge of the living room where he could lie on the rug. I started off by telling about the incident with Zeke Mitchell and that he was an investigator who was looking for Abasolo, too, but wouldn’t reveal why. I was reluctant to share my hunch about Abasolo having lost a baby because all I had to go on was the poem, which could have been taken as metaphorical. And I wasn’t about to go into the whole crazy story about Quintana, his coven, and the bones, because I didn’t even know what that had to do with Abasolo. Maybe something to do with her using peyote, but I didn’t know that for sure. Instead, I went over what little I had learned from Father Anthony about why Abasolo had bought the property next door and deeded it to the Mission. I was about to tell him about Rico stealing the peyote for her when Hank’s phone rang.
The agent stepped out of the kitchen to take the call, but I could hear his end of it. “Okay, and when will that be? It’s foggy as hell here, which isn’t going to help at all. Well, I appreciate this. I owe you one. Call me after the pass and let me know if you got anything, okay?”
When he came back to the table, he turned his chair around, sitting in it backwards, with his arms folded over the top of the backrest. “Sorry to interrupt your briefing. In short, you’ve got nothing earthshaking, right?”
I shook my head.
“Well, I only have a little time here this morning, so let me tell you something. Adoria Abasolo is not Adoria Abasolo.” He let that sink in, then went on: “Remember when I told you I thought something looked ‘off’ about her birth certificate? It turns out I was right. It was a fake.”
“Well, if she’s not Adoria Abasolo, then who is she?”
“Her real name is Inés Otero. And not only is she not who she said she was, she’s not even Brazilian. She was born in Bogotá, Columbia about two-and-a-half years before the date on that phony birth certificate.”
“That’s just crazy.” I tried for a few seconds to make sense of this. Everything I learned about the poet ranged from confusing to incredible. “Why did she change her identity?”
“We don’t know that yet. But we’re working on a couple ideas.”
“But, how could she even pull that off? I mean, she went to three different universities. She had scholarships and grants. She won a Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize, for goodness’ sake!”
“Like I said, we’re pulling on the loose threads. I think we’ll know more before the day is out. But one more thing I wanted to tell you is that we finally got her cellular records. Not the phone itself, it hasn’t been active for several days; we tried pinging it for location and got nothing. But the number Abasolo…Otero was calling so frequently before she died? It’s the direct line to one of the offices of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Do you have any idea why she might have been phoning them several times a week for the past couple months?”
“No.” I shook my head and sighed. “But I can think of a couple of people who might be able to help me find out.”
“It’s getting late. By that, I mean that it’s getting harder every minute to hold out hope that we will find her alive. You see that, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“I know you’re doing everything you can, but I just want you to be prepared for that possibility.” Harold Coronel got up from his chair and scooted it back under the table. “I gotta go. I just have one more thing for you,” he said, pulling a folded piece of paper from his back pocket. “I know your phone was destroyed in the car fire. We’ve been monitoring your number, and you’ve had several attempted calls from the same origin. You got a text message from that number last night.” He put the paper down on the table and slid it toward me.
I stood up. “You’ve been monitoring my phone?”
He grimaced. “I’m sorry. It’s protocol.”
“At least you could have shown me the courtesy of telling me that,” I said.
He winced. “It kind of defeats the purpos
e to do that, in most cases,” he said. “Really, I am sorry; it’s not like I don’t see you as being one of the team.”