A Pilgrimage to Death

by J. J. Cagney

  But that afternoon, Anna Carmen had seemed to fade from Cici’s consciousness. Not a gentle easing—more of a great gasp of despair and regret.

  And then, nothing.

  Cici had been with her boyfriend the moment of Anna Carmen’s stabbing, working on the location in Central America they wanted to explore for Cici and Lyndon’s first field work trip together. A recent Harvard graduate, who’d finished his post-doctoral work in archaeology, Lyndon had asked Cici if she’d go with him if he got the funding. She hadn’t been too sure if she should.

  He’d proven to be unrelenting in his arguments, just as he was in most other areas of his life. When Lyndon discussed the forest’s health and how it impacted the natives’ way of life, Cici’s desire to remove herself from his all-consuming focus turned to interest.

  Lyndon knew Cici wanted to study the forests in Peru, assess their health and the balance with the natives living in the high region of the area. Cici’s master’s degree shared a dual focus in divinity and environmental studies. She’d interned as an associate reverend outside Boston, and the church hired her as an associate pastor as soon as she’d graduated. For the last year and a half of her internship, she hadn’t been able to focus on her environmental science degree, but she had met Lyndon at a group on spirituality and environmentalism she moderated the year before, and he’d opened the door for her to focus on both of her passions.

  After many conversations with her sister, she’d accepted the opportunity. Lyndon had been ecstatic, coming up with potential scenarios for their work—and living arrangements. Many of which pushed Cici even further outside her comfort zone.

  But, by then, she’d agreed, and the situation had already snowballed.

  At the time, Cici had been much more excited about an adventure in Peru, even if she had to put up with Lyndon’s intensity, than taking over the church back in her hometown. Though, both her sister and many of her lifelong friends lobbied hard for her to return home.

  But Cici hadn’t wanted to return to the place where her mother lost not just her marriage and dignity, but also her battle with cancer.

  Then, when the connection to her sister had popped, Cici collapsed, passed out still hearing her name cried in a soft, broken voice, her twin’s name leaking past her stiff lips. She’d woken on the small couch in her apartment, shivering, aching, as if she had the flu.

  But it was worse than an illness. A portion of Cici ripped from her soul and she’d never recovered. Never could recover.

  Anna Carmen, Aci . . . Cici slid back into the pet name she’d created for her sister when they were quite young and Cici couldn’t say “Carmen.” Don’t leave me.

  How many times had she said that aloud and deep within her soul? Too many. And her sister never heard or never listened because the place Anna Carmen had always nourished remained black, blank, silent no matter how many times Cici struggled to reconnect.

  In desperation and against Lyndon’s loud objections, Cici had stood, then struggled to right herself, right the world. She left the apartment as fast as she could.

  As her sister’s closest relative, the only one alive to care that she was gone, Cici had received the call before Anna Carmen’s boyfriend had. She’d cried from the moment she’d heard the words, where a ticket agent, also tearing up, managed to find her a seat on the next available flight. She’d wept through the entire flight to Albuquerque, not that it changed the new reality she’d have to live with.

  That she still lived with.

  Thank goodness by the time she’d landed, Evan—Anna Carmen’s boyfriend—and a few other close friends had taken care of the preliminary issues. Sam had met her at the airport and pulled her into a long, tight hug that signaled a shift in their relationship.

  Cici leaned on that shift so heavily right now.

  “I’m sorry, Cici.” Sam’s voice bit through her haze, reconnecting her with the here, the now. Up on top of Aspen Vista Trail, on a sunny late May morning.

  “I know this has to bring it all back up,” he said, his voice mournful.

  Oh, it did. For Sam, too. Sam and her sister had been the best of friends long before Sam and Cici were. In fact, Sam and Cici were friends now by default. That’s what losing the most important person in your life did—it created unbreakable bonds between people who’d never been particularly close before.

  Well . . . not for Cici and her sister’s boyfriend, Evan. But that was a different story, a different relationship.

  A different set of regrets and what-ifs.

  Sam turned her toward his chest, but Cici’s eyes remained on Donald’s body.

  “He was stabbed,” Cici said.

  “Multiple times,” Sam said, his eyes that of a clinician—so cold and detached from what had been a living, breathing person.

  Cici panted. “That one. In the back.”

  Sam’s hand squeezed her fingers tighter, steadying her. “Yeah.”

  “It’s like . . . The placement. It’s like Anna Carmen.”

  “Yeah.”

  Normally, Cici didn’t mind Sam’s minimal use of language, but now—right now—she needed more.

  “Through the kidney,” she said, her voice sharpening.

  “Looks like,” Sam replied as he began to rock her back and forth, back and forth. The soft sway calmed her somewhat.

  Much as she wanted to pound Sam with her fists, she couldn’t look away from Donald’s glazed eyes. An ant crawled over the pale skin of Donald’s nose. She shuddered, still unable to look away even as the ant settled on Donald’s sclera. Cici shuddered, breaking the strange spell.

  She stared up into Sam’s face. “What does that mean?”

  Sam dropped his hands from her back and sighed. He motioned Cici away from the rock where Donald sprawled. When she didn’t move, he nudged her, much like a sheep dog, to herd her away from the body, onto the trail, keeping them away from much of the area surrounding the boulder and Donald.

  Cici wrapped her arms tight around her waist as she struggled to keep her breakfast burrito in her stomach.

  “Good thing you left your dogs home today. They’d mess up the area.”

  Cici stiffened. “I couldn’t take them to the Sanchez’s house—she would have beat me with her broom after she cursed at the dogs for shedding. And you know Rodolfo and Mona are well behaved.”

  “Never said they weren’t. Just that the forensic team is more likely to find something if we don’t disturb the area. And the dogs would’ve been all over this guy, messing with evidence.”

  “Like the ants.”

  Sam grimaced, turning to face her.

  Cici huddled against the rock outcropping where she and Sam leaned, willing her body to ward off the chill of memory. Not even the intensity of May sun at nearly ten thousand feet managed to do so. She shivered and her teeth began to chatter.

  “Sam, what does that stab wound mean?” Cici asked again.

  “I’m not sure,” he said, his voice hesitant.

  “But if you had to guess?”

  “They fought. You can see that in his defensive wounds on his hands.”

  Cici shuddered.

  “I can’t tell you for sure right now Cici,” Sam muttered.

  “The wound in his back. It’s the same as Anna Carmen’s.”

  Sam took off his ball cap and ran his palm over the back of his head, smoothing the wisps of dark hair back into his stubby pony tail just below his crown. The bottom half of his hair was close-cropped. Conservative. Much like his dress slacks and the ties he now wore to work. Those long-sleeve button downs hid his half-sleeve tattoo that slipped in and out of visibility under his sweat-soaked T-shirt.

  He’d become as much of an enigma as she had, hiding too many of his feelings and thoughts deep behind those gunmetal eyes and the unusual hair style.

  Sam drew in a deep breath, his face as ashen as hers must be. In this, they understood each other.

  “I don’t know if that was intentional,” Sam said.
/>   Cici waited, sensing he had more to say.

  “Some murderers have signatures and perhaps this is one. If so . . . if it’s like Anna Carmen’s . . . we could find out more about the killer.”

  Bring him to justice.

  Sam didn’t say it, but both he and Cici thought it.

  “How would you know? If it’s the same.”

  Sam bit into the cuticle on the side of his left thumb—a sure sign of his increasing agitation. She hadn’t seen him do that in a long time. Not since . . . not since he’d driven her to Anna Carmen’s house the night of her murder.

  “Forensic evidence.”

  Cici was sure there was more but Sam clamped his lips tight.

  “You’re sure?” she asked. “I mean, that there’s a possibility to catch her killer?”

  Sam blew out a breath. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up, Cee.”

  Cici clenched her jaw to keep the hysterical laughter from bubbling up and over.

  “A man I know is dead just there.” She pointed. “I don’t think my hopes are going to rise any time soon.”

  “Fine. Based on my preliminary review of the scene.” Sam emphasized the word preliminary. “Yes, I’d say it’s like Anna Carmen’s.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He ran his hands down his cheeks and turned so he couldn’t meet her gaze. “I sometimes look at her file. To remember why I’m here.”

  Somehow, those words triggered the latte Cici had indulged in earlier this morning. She turned, palm flat on the smooth, white bark of the aspen as her breakfast flowed upward. She wiped her lips with the bandana she kept in her back pocket.

  “Shit, Sam.”

  After a brief attempt to regulate her breathing, Cici grabbed her water bottle and slugged back some of the cool liquid. Her stomach gurgled rebelliously. She ignored it just as she ignored the pain squeezing at her heart. She stared at Donald, but she saw her sister’s small body there on those blood-stained stones.

  “I mean . . .” Cici hauled in some air. “Thank you. For caring. But, dammit, give me a chance to prepare for that kind of devotion.”

  She tipped her head back and squinted up through the leaves.

  Sam’s eyes remained dark but his tone turned rueful. “I hear the team coming up the trail. They don’t need to hear your potty mouth, Reverend Gurule.”

  Cici bit her lip as she stepped back, flush against the rock wall. The granite poked into her back even as the stone warmed her. Cici shut her eyes. Still light, tinged golden with the perfect summer sun, filtered through her lids. She squeezed them tighter, trying to block out the images of her dead sister’s eyes.

  No use.

  Anna Carmen’s bright hazel eyes, Cici’s eyes, melded with Donald’s darker ones. Different shape but both seemed to beseech her. Their stories intertwined. Death took them in brutal fashion. Too soon.

  Much too soon.

  Cici’s lids fluttered open, and she peered into the canopy of acid-green leaves rustling in a soft, sweet wave. Splashes of bright blue and wisps of white clouds completed the pattern.

  For the first time in one year, two months and nine days, Cici felt Anna Carmen next to her. Just as Anna Carmen had nestled in close at her funeral, buoying Cici in that time of need, but not the full-throttle Anna Carmen Cici remembered.

  Until now. When her sister lit up her brain and set every cell in Cici’s body on fire.

  “Anna Carmen,” Cici whispered.

  She shifted, turning her head, unsurprised to find her twin standing there next to her.

  The silence lengthened as her sister regarded her, eyes urgent. Cici reached out, needing to touch her twin, but Anna Carmen shook her head, moving backward. She dipped her head toward Donald even as she began to fade.

  Through the soft rustle of the leaves in the trees, Anna Carmen’s voice whispered back, “You need to help Sam. You need to fix what I broke.”

  “What’s wrong, Cee?” Sam asked, crouching next to her, where she’d slid down the rock face.

  “Come back,” Cici murmured, continuing to stare at the location just next to the thick white trunk where her sister had been.

  “Cici?” Sam’s voice became more urgent. “Look at me. Are you in shock?”

  With great effort, she wrenched her gaze from the now-empty spot and met Sam’s concerned eyes.

  “No.”

  “You sure? You look like . . . well, you like you saw a ghost.”

  Cici stood, her legs wobbly but able to hold her weight. She glanced back at the area where her sister had stood.

  “I did,” she murmured. “But that’s not the worst of it.”

  Probably for the best one of the SAR volunteers called Sam’s name before she spoke again. His attention shifted to the lanky fifty-something retiree from Nevada.

  Anna Carmen wanted Cici to find her killer. Donald’s killer, too.

  Because Anna Carmen’s emotions pointed to one clear realization: if Cici failed, more deaths would follow.

  3

  So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt. — Shakespeare

  Death stalks.

  Not a realization anyone should need to make. Death sucked, too. But, now, eighteen hours after finding Donald, Cici had had to talk about finding him, about her sister, and everything related to leaving this mortal coil to pretty much everyone in the Santa Fe Police Department and Search and Rescue—plus a few others who came up the trail just for kicks.

  Cici never wanted to discuss wounds or death or dying again. Kind of a problem for a reverend.

  She laid her head on her paper-strewn wooden desk and closed her gritty eyes. They popped back open immediately as her stomach heaved.

  Thankfully, it settled again before she had to bolt from her small second room at the back of her house into the equally small bathroom off the narrow hall.

  Eyes. Donald’s and Anna Carmen’s.

  Not even Rodolfo’s and Mona’s warm bodies and doggie breaths alleviated the terror and grief of reliving those moments after Cici learned her twin sister was dead.

  Sam had offered to stay with her, but Cici’s casita was definitely ita. As in tiny—and having Sam stay the night to comfort her felt weird. Because she wanted him to. Desperately. So, Cici sent him home.

  Which meant Cici slept little last night. And today, she paid for that decision with a pounding head and raw eyelids.

  She glanced at the clock, relieved she needed to head over to the church. Hopefully, Sam would call her as soon as he had more information about Donald’s death . . . and what it meant for her sister’s murder investigation.

  “You got a minute?” Carole, the church secretary, asked.

  Cici smiled as Carole’s gray head poked into her doorway. The older woman wore green cat-eye glasses. The beaded chain that wrapped around the delicate silver eye pieces jangled.

  Cici had been pleased to hire the older woman, whose daughter, Regina, was a couple of years behind Cici in school. The young woman had died years earlier from breast cancer. She’d been so young—her loss a terrible tragedy for the community. Just months later, Carole’s husband had drowned in a hot tub. The rumors that swirled out to Cici claimed he’d been high at the time of his death.

  Cici never asked, and Carole never discussed her family.

  Cici smiled at her friend and closest work companion. “Of course.”

  Carole closed the door and leaned against the wooden panel. “Susan Johnson is here,” Carole said in a dramatic whisper. “She wants to talk to you.”

  Cici’s eyes widened and something in her expression must have alerted Carole, because the older woman slammed her hands onto the old wooden desk with a vicious whomp and leaned in close.

  “Breathe, Reverend,” she demanded.

  Cici nodded and managed to suck much-needed air through her nose. After two more breaths, the black spots in front of Cici’s eyes dissipated.

  “Does she know I was there yesterday?” Cici
managed to ask. “That I found . . . Donald?”

  Carole cocked her head. Her eyes narrowed. “How could she possibly know that? I didn’t know that.”

  The unsaid words surrounded by Carole’s irritation reverberated around the room: I should have known. That’s because Carole ferreted out information from pretty much everyone, which made her a fantastic church secretary—as well as a few words Cici preferred not to use.

  Cici stood, clenching her teeth as her legs shook. But she needed a moment to walk around her office to clear her head.

  “This is Santa Fe. Everyone talks. And I just told you now.”

  “Susan would have to be asking specific questions to know you found Donald yesterday,” Carole said, her voice stiff. She did not like Cici knowing details before her. “Where did you find him, anyway?”

  Cici shook out her arms and wiggled her head on her neck. “Oh. Aspen Vista Trail. Sam and I were already hiking it when the call came in. And good point. As always. So. You’ll send her in, and we’ll see what she knows.”

  “I’ll bring you a latte, too.”

  “Thanks,” Cici said, trying to control her shaking hands. “I need the caffeine.”

  “Rough night?”

  Cici barely heard the words, instead drawn back into the strange feeling she got—and missed so desperately—when Anna Carmen was close. She sent out a feeler, but Anna Carmen refused to answer. Or maybe Cici was fixated on the idea of her sister’s image appearing to her yesterday, but it never actually happened. Sam had assumed Cici fell into shock. Maybe he’d been right.

  Cici rubbed her palms down her face, wishing for some level of certainty about what happened yesterday. She had none. Not even her daily prayer time this morning eased her riotous emotions.

  Carole made a sound of disapproval as she walked over to the door, opened it, and walked down the short office hallway to the reception area.

  Cici heard her say, “Reverend Gurule is finishing her call. You can head on back.”