The Blue Corn Murders

by Nancy Pickard

  So she contented herself with admiring the scenery while listening with half an ear to Madeline’s tales of the effect of hordes of Californians moving to Colorado. She gathered it was good news for realtors.

  On the other side of Madeline, Gabby had entered one of her quiet, pouty spells—Genia was able to recognize them now—when she seemed entirely self-absorbed and oblivious to the people around her. She came out of it only long enough to interrupt Madeline by saying once, “The Indians know that private property will not endure,” and then later, “The earth cannot be bought or sold.”

  To the first comment, Madeline laughed. “It only has to last until I cash the check for the commission,” she said. And to the second comment, she said, “Try telling that to somebody from L.A.” Otherwise, she ignored the girl to her right and talked only to Genia.

  At some point in the drive, an air of companionability descended firmly among the occupants. It was then that Genia and the others learned that Teri and Judith were both married to much younger men. “It’s the first thing we had in common”—Teri laughed—“namely, what to say to people who think we’re their mothers!”

  “That happens?” Madeline looked horrified.

  “Well”—Teri cast a sly glance at Judy—“it happens a lot less since we left them.”

  Lillian laughed at that, but Madeline still seemed appalled at the notion of being mistaken for your husband’s mother. “Well, that’s the best argument for divorce I ever heard,” she said. “God. I’d die.” She shook her head. “Or find a very good plastic surgeon.”

  The two teacher-friends took it good-naturedly, even when Madeline fixed them with a stare and demanded to know, “Did you leave them for each other?”

  “No, no.” Judy laughed out loud. “We’re not that experimental. Heck, we haven’t either of us even had enough experience with men in our lives.”

  Teri sighed. “And probably never will.”

  “It’s never too late,” Genia heard herself blurting out and then, to her embarrassment, found them all turning toward her with interest. Lamely, she added, “So they say.”

  Madeline arched an eyebrow. “Do tell, Genia.”

  Lillian turned around in the right front passenger seat and grinned at her.

  Here she was again, Genia thought, at a crossroads similar to the one she’d experienced at the Talking Circle. A lifetime of the habit of personal reserve made her want to hold her tongue, but a few halting words worked their way to the surface anyway. “I thought I was finished with romance, too, and I’m much older than you two. Then a few months ago, my very first real love walked back into my life again.”

  She stopped; it was hard to reveal herself. Why did she want to? she wondered. She never had before, except sparingly and only to friends she had known for a long, long time.

  “And?” Madeline prodded her.

  “And it’s never too late.”

  No more than that could they get out of her, not Jed White’s name, or that he was divorced, or that he lived in Boston and that he never complained about his longdistance telephone bills to Arizona. Genia, having gone as far toward self-revelation as she was willing to go for the moment, became aware of Teri Fox gazing at her with an unreadable expression. Genia cocked her head at Teri, as if to ask her, “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing.” The younger woman smiled and shook her head. Her expression was … soft, that was the word for it, Genia thought. “I’m just paying attention, that’s all, to you and Lillian, so I’ll know how to be when I’m your age.”

  Touched and surprised by that, Genia felt rewarded for speaking up so personally and for giving them more of herself than she normally might have. Maybe, just maybe, extreme personal reticence was not always the virtue she had long believed it to be.

  “I keep learning,” she said thoughtfully to Teri.

  “See?” Teri responded. “That’s what I mean.”

  Then, in the sort of instant, humbling moment that often made the universe seem so comical to Genia, she observed that Madeline Rose was staring at her with an expression of anything but admiration. Madeline seemed to be taking in Genia and Lillian’s “natural” look and thinking, No way, not me, not ever!

  “So you divorced them?” Madeline asked Teri and Judy, turning the conversation back onto its previous track.

  “No, we’re just kind of running away from home,” Judy said, “like so many women did back in the seventies.” To which she hastened to add, “Our kids are all grown—it’s not like we left infants in cribs.”

  “We’re still a bit scandalous though,” Teri said, as if she didn’t want their “escape” to be taken too lightly. “At our churches and in our neighborhoods. People just don’t know anymore when we’ll show up, or where—”

  “Or with whom,” Judith chimed in.

  “We wish,” Teri added sarcastically.

  “You look so average,” Madeline said rather insultingly.

  “I know.” Teri didn’t look insulted. “We hate it.”

  “What do your children say?” Lillian asked from the front seat.

  “Children,” Judith said, with the air of making a pronouncement, “do not need to know everything about their mothers.”

  “Amen,” blurted Genia, and then laughed as hard as the others did.

  They had been talking for some time, and only Susan and Gabby had said nothing. Susan concentrated on the driving, and Gabby stared out a window, appearing to ignore them entirely.

  Finally the archaeologist turned the van off the paved road and onto a rutted dirt lane, where they continued to bounce along for another twenty minutes, driving deep into the forest. When the van came to a stop, the women alighted in a sunny glade ringed by white-trunked aspen and slop-armed spruce trees. On the ground wild yellow sunflowers poked through the green and golden grass.

  Sixteen

  It was warm, and swarming gnats were visible.

  The air was scented with the fragrance from a thick layer of pine needles that carpeted the shady forest surrounding the little meadow. Genia got out of the van, stretched, breathed deeply, looked around, and felt enormously glad she had come to Medicine Wheel to spend almost a week with these women.

  “Is anyone starving?”

  It was Susan asking the question.

  A chorus of “I am” rose up.

  “Well, we won’t set up lunch for another hour, but merciful Saint Bingo does provide for the in-between times.”

  Susan opened the back doors of the van, then reached in and hauled out a large orange plastic beverage jug that held iced tea. Next came paper cups. After that she surfaced with a big opaque plastic bowl with a blue lid on it. She gestured for the women to gather around her, and then she smiled and held the bowl high in the air with both hands, as though it were a votive offering.

  “This is one of Bingo’s sacred snacks.”

  Removing the blue lid and passing the bowl to the woman nearest her, Susan instructed, “Take one and pass it around, but don’t eat yours until everybody has theirs.”

  When the plastic bowl came by Genia, she carefully lifted out of it a perfect, puffy, yellow stick of cornbread.

  “This isn’t merely cornbread,” Susan avowed as they all held on to theirs, as directed. “According to our Bingo, it’s a taste of history. She likes us to pause before we go tromping through other people’s ancient houses, and to try to commune with them by partaking of something we still have in common with them.”

  She raised her delicate stick of cornbread, as if in a toast.

  “Corn has been around for at least five thousand years, starting out in this hemisphere, and as cobs no bigger than your thumbnail, if you can believe that. So here’s to us and to the ancient ancestors as well. Whoever they were, we are now linked through the millennia, by the simple and familiar taste of corn.”

  “I’m allergic to corn products,” Madeline Rose objected. She tossed hers onto the ground for the squirrels to eat. Genia thought it was a
remarkably selfish and insensitive thing to do, especially when she got a look at the expression of horror on Gabby’s face. The girl looked as if Madeline had spit into holy water. If Madeline didn’t want to participate, she could have given her share to someone else or tactfully held on to the corn stick without actually eating any, like a nondrinker joining a toast.

  All of the other women bit into the cornbread and seemed to appreciate the touch of ritual and solemnity that the chef had provided for them. Genia made up her mind that Bingo Chakmakjian—was that the unusual name she’d heard the trustee use?—must be quite a remarkable woman.

  “Hey!” Teri looked pleasantly surprised. “I hate cornbread, but this is good. What’s Bingo done that’s different?”

  “It’s not dry,” Judith observed, her theatrical voice making the simple pronouncement sound like solemn oratory.

  “Cream cheese,” Susan informed them. “Bingo’s secret ingredient is cream cheese. If you like these, just wait until you see her cornbread cake.”

  “Why?” Judith asked. “What about it?”

  “You just wait,” Susan teased them. “Here, there’s more.”

  There was enough for two sticks for everybody, and a third for Gabby, who took the one Madeline didn’t want. And two were leftover—the two intended for Martina Alvarez, Genia surmised, as she accepted Lillian’s suggestion that they divide the remainder among them.

  Gabby was the last to finish eating.

  At first, Genia was under the impression that Gabby wasn’t going to eat the third stick. For several moments the girl cradled it in her hands, closing her eyes and murmuring something over it as if she were a priest, it was the host, and their little ceremony had been a Holy Communion. Finally, she brought it slowly to her mouth and ate it prayerfully, as if it were indeed sacred.

  Genia happened to look over at Madeline Rose.

  The realtor shook her head, and then Genia saw Teri Fox and Judith Belove give each other an eyerolling glance. Genia felt another stirring of concern for this odd, impressionable child who wanted to be known as Gabbling Brook. Was this normal behavior, she wondered, and merely the expression of a sincere devotion to a cause? Or was there some danger that Gabby might be going off the deep end?

  A quiet voice spoke near her left ear. “Is she all right, do you think?” It was Lillian Kleberg, staring over Genia’s shoulder at Gabby. “Is this normal behavior?”

  Genia turned her back to Gabby, so there was no chance she would be overheard. “I was just asking myself the exact same thing, Lillian. You know her a little, don’t you? You’ve been here at programs with her before this one?”

  Lillian nodded, looking grave. “Yes. She was a little strange then, always spouting off about the Indians, but she didn’t seem so—obsessed. I’m worried about her.” She looked into Genia’s eyes. “If you don’t count Martina, I’m the great-grandma of the group, so I guess that makes you the grandmother, Genia. And she’s the baby. Let’s keep an eye on her together, all right?”

  “Yes, let’s.”

  Lillian let out a sigh. “Thanks,” she said, as if Genia had just done a personal favor for her. It seemed natural to Genia that Lillian, who had recently lost a daughter, would transfer some of her motherly concern to this possibly troubled young woman.

  When the van was locked up again, Susan advised them to split into two bands, so that half of the group could visit the tower while the other half went to the settlement.

  “Then reverse directions.”

  Hearing that, it seemed to Genia that there could not possibly be a nicer way to spend a day. When Lillian Kleberg came over to her again and suggested, “Come on, I’ll show you the way to the tower,” Genia happily followed along behind.

  As they set out, she knew she wouldn’t have to worry about whether her boots would fit or her socks would rub. Everything she had brought for this adventure was well loved for being well worn. Her sturdy old brown ankle-high boots were well broken in. Her down vest and jacket were fluffy and familiar. Her shirts, trousers, even undergarments, all were soft and easy to get in and out of. It was a good thing to be free of the worry and pain of blisters, stiff fabrics, and unforgiving zippers. She felt at home in her clothes. As for her body, this was a slimmer, definitely tougher version moving along the trail.

  In a word, she thought, I’m prepared.

  So much of a successful life was preparation, she had come to believe. Preparation made spontaneity, even impulsiveness, possible. It made her life feel like previously tilled earth into which she could plant any new flower on the spur of the moment.

  And so here she was, and grateful for it.

  She turned to look for Gabby, to invite her to come along with them, only to discover the girl was already right at her heels. So Gabby—who seemed to be sticking closely to her, as if the girl felt comfortable only with Genia—tagged along, and the archaeologist made up their fourth, after pointing Teri, Judith, and Madeline in the right direction for the other destination.

  It was only when they heard tramping footsteps behind them that they realized somebody had ignored Susan’s instructions.

  “It’s me,” called out Madeline, as she approached their single-file march through the woods. When she caught up, she said, ironically, “I don’t do old houses. Just new, expensive ones. But I figure, where there’s a tower, there’s a view.”

  The tower, what was left of it, stood three times as high as Gabby, who was the tallest woman in the group. The base—its mortared stone walls a good two feet thick and with a diameter of about fifteen feet—was still intact for the first three feet or so. But above the base the front of it was gone, its stones having long ago tumbled down the thousand feet to the valley below. Only the long, gracefully curving back climbed skyward, until it ended in a jagged row of stones and broken mortar.

  It looked almost Gothic, Genia thought.

  On a cloudy day it would have looked quite sinister.

  It was perched about as close to the edge of the dangerous cliff as could be, a gray skeletal finger pointing up, and it was surely visible for miles. You couldn’t look at it, Genia thought, without marveling at the courage and skill of the ancient builders who must have had to balance so precariously to complete it.

  “What was it for?” Madeline asked Susan, as the five of them cautiously poked around the talus pile at the bottom. “Defense?”

  Susan shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “A lookout,” Gabby said in an authoritative voice, as if she were privy to insider knowledge. She ventured so close to the cliff’s edge that Genia felt nervous.

  “Could be,” Susan agreed.

  “A landmark?” Genia suggested, still keeping an eye on Gabby. “For travelers?”

  “Possibly.”

  Gabby stepped back, and Genia breathed more easily.

  Madeline laughed and said to Susan, “I thought you were supposed to be the expert archaeologist who has all the answers.”

  “I wish I did. I do have an excuse in this case, because this tower has never been officially investigated. It’s not a dig, it’s just a place that somebody built a long, long time ago. There are literally thousands of anonymous sites like this all over the Southwest. Not all of them are towers, of course. Some of them are cliff dwellings, some are caves, and Some are mysterious stone walls that don’t appear to have any good reason to exist. Most of them just look like big mounds covered with rabbitbrush, but if anybody ever dug into them, they’d find rock walls, or earthen berms, or kivas, or middens, or any number of things.”

  “Well, do you know anything about it?”

  “I can guess that it’s probably from the early Pueblo period of Anasazi development—before the multiple cliff dwellings on Mesa Verde, to give you a context. Although I’m not even sure of that, because what most people don’t realize is that there were people living in pit houses on Mesa Verde even before the construction of the great houses. It’s difficult, for many reasons, to place this tower exactly in time
.”

  “Food storage?” Genia wondered aloud, her curiosity well aroused, like everyone else’s, even Madeline’s. “Like a silo.”

  Susan nodded. “It could have been a storage tower.”

  “Not for food, though,” Gabby stated.

  “Possibly not,” said the scientist, “although the so-called Fremont people used towers for storage in Utah and northern Colorado. You should make a trip to see one someday. The towers have little bitty doors in them, so for a long time people thought they had been built by a race of tiny people!”

  “It’s a lookout,” Gabby repeated, speaking much more authoritatively than the official archaeologist of the group. “So when the people were traveling to the great gambling houses in the south, the Gambler would know they were coming.”

  Susan turned to stare at her. “Is that what you’re going to put in your article, Gabby?”

  “Definitely. And I’ll write about the religious significance of gambling, too.”

  Susan’s lips appeared pale, as if she were feeling ill again. “You can’t prove any of this, can you?”

  “I don’t have to,” the writer said dismissively. “The Navajo say it’s so, and that’s all I need to know. I couldn’t care less what you archaeologists can ‘prove.’ ”

  “It’s not a new idea, you know,” Susan said weakly.

  “Well, of course it isn’t, not if the Navajo have been saying it for centuries!”

  “No, I mean quite a few archaeologists and anthropologists have tossed it around for decades, too.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe it’s not news, that’s all, as you think it is.”

  Gabby looked angry, defensive. “What do you care? Besides, nobody but the Navajo have ever really believed it, so trust me, it’s still news to white people.”

  She didn’t get an argument to that, because Susan turned and walked away from her.

  Genia, who had been listening with interest, now saw that Lillian Kleberg had paused in her “investigations” to sit down on a rock and appreciate the view. Genia went to stand beside her. Plains, riverbeds, mesas, mountains, all measure of geological wonders met her gaze. Sensing the presence of the archaeologist, she asked, “Where are we, exactly, Susan?”