The Blue Corn Murders

by Nancy Pickard

  “We’re more or less equidistant from Utah—over there—and Arizona, over there—and New Mexico, down there. Hovenweep National Monument is due west, and Shiprock is down that way on the Navajo Reservation. There are a couple of Ute reservations over there, and way over east of them is an Apache reservation.” Indicating a mountain shaped like a recumbent human form, she identified it as Sleeping Ute Mountain. “The Dolores River is off yonder, and the La Plata Mountains are way back there, behind us.” Susan smiled at Genia, who was charmed by hearing so many words of the American vernacular spoken in a British accent. “That’s about as ‘exactly’ as I can do for you. Do you feel oriented now?”

  Genia smiled back at her. “Yes, I do. Thanks.”

  “It’s against the law to divulge the location of ruins on government land,” Susan said with mock severity. “We had to get permission to bring you up here. Promise you won’t tell anybody, Genia?”

  “Susan, if someone had to find this place based on my directions, it would remain protected until the end of time.”

  The other two women laughed quietly.

  All three of them simply stared at the landscape for several moments. Then Genia murmured, “So beautiful.”

  The archaeologist said softly, “Maybe that’s the reason.”

  But Madeline had overheard them, for she spoke up loudly, saying, “Location, location, location. Of course! I should have guessed that, right off the bat.”

  Susan allowed them to prowl around the tower for a while longer, before shooing them off in the other direction Midway the two bands of women passed each other, with comments of “You’ll love it” and “Wait till you see.” The group following Susan had already come upon the first indications of Two Spruce Settlement before they noticed that Madeline wasn’t with them any longer.

  “She wanted to return to the van,” Susan told the ethers. “I gave her the keys.”

  Sure enough, when they returned from their expedition, they found Madeline seated in the van with the engine on, the windows closed, and the air conditioning running. She was already eating a plateful of sandwich meat, bread, potato salad, and pie. She had a cup of iced tea, and her bare feet were propped on the dashboard.

  “So much for fresh air,” Susan said with resignation.

  “I could learn to dislike that woman,” Lillian remarked to Genia.

  “What’s to learn?” asked Judith, walking past them. “It just comes naturally. Do you suppose she left any food for us?”

  Seventeen

  A surprise waited for them after lunch, when they traveled to the location of their afternoon hike. There both the executive director and the trustee joined them.

  As Susan Van Sant pulled the van off the blacktop highway, Naomi O’Neal and Martina Alvarez got out of a blindingly clean four-wheel-drive vehicle with a Colorado license plate. Martina had driven, and now she stood beside her car, regally erect, her hands in the pockets of her black jacket, looking—thought Genia—like a queen waiting for all of the peasants to approach her.

  Naomi, dressed in a bright yellow peasant blouse, loose blue trousers, and hiking boots, left Martina and trudged over to the window of the van and leaned in to greet the seven women.

  “Hi. How’d it go this morning? Any chance I could enlist you guys in helping me to push an elderly trustee off a high cliff?”

  An explosion of tactless laughter greeted that remark.

  In the front seat of the van, Lillian Kleberg said, sounding astonished, “Martina’s actually going to hike, Naomi?”

  Susan’s question was a sardonic one: “Did you tell her to take a hike, Naomi?”

  Naomi snickered but then shushed them, with a terrorized look over her shoulder back toward where the object of their spite was waiting. “Just shut up and get out of the van, Dr. Van Sant. Take the other ladies up the hill, will you? I have to go back to meet my doom.”

  Susan smartly saluted her.

  “It’s been nice knowing you, Naomi.”

  The director trudged back to the car where the trustee waited.

  They had been brought to a location which took Genia’s breath away, and not only because it was another thousand feet higher in altitude. Right in front of them lay a vast expanse of slickrock—a hard, unforgiving, monstrous slab of red rock laid down like the floor of the world. Genia thought it was spectacularly beautiful but unnerving. It appeared to her as the Creation must have looked before God said, “Let the waters pour forth.”

  At one o’clock the slickrock was hot beneath the soles of their boots.

  As they moved forward behind Susan, small lizards scurried into sight and out again. Dozens of long, hot yards away, a sheer red cliff rose to a flat top. They were headed, Susan told them, even beyond that monolith, into the rugged, rocky canyons, where there would be amazing hideaways, petroglyphs, and pictographs.

  After only a few yards, Genia wasn’t sure it was worth it.

  She felt sweaty, awkward, and uncomfortable.

  No one talked much, not even Gabby, who had been on one of her periodic talking jags back in the van. Now, halfway to the canyons, a large dark bird flew in toward them and circled overhead. Madeline pointed up and said, “Buzzard.”

  “Hawk,” Susan corrected her. “After lizards, probably.”

  “I feel like a lizard,” Teri said, her words sounding sluggish and forced, which was also the way Genia’s legs felt, moving over the flat expanse. “I feel just like a tiny inconsequential creature crawling along the ground, where giants could step on me. An ant. I am nothing but a tiny black ant.”

  “Termite,” said Judith. “If you’re an ant, I’m a pasty white termite.”

  “Mosquito,” said Teri.

  “A spot of grease on the rock,” said Genia.

  “I am wind!” sang Gabby. “I am the hot, hot wind!”

  “I guess that would make you a Santa Ana then,” Madeline said nastily. “The kind that makes everybody so irritable, they want to kill you.”

  Somebody chuckled. Nobody else had the energy to respond.

  Far behind, Naomi walked with the trustee, who appeared to be having no problem in finding the energy or motivation to talk. The other women couldn’t hear what was being said, but Genia looked back at the way Naomi’s head and shoulders were slumped and the manner in which Martina held her own head upright, and she guessed the words were not friendly. The queen appeared to be reprimanding her prime minister.

  Their moods lifted ten minutes later, when they reached trees and a path where rocky overhangs provided periodic shade along their way. They paused to drink from their water bottles—and some of them slipped behind the trees to answer the call of nature—and then they continued single file, except for Martina.

  “I have overestimated my ability,” she announced. “And my stamina. I will sit here in the shade and wait for you.”

  When Naomi, looking resigned, started to move with her toward some rocks in the shade, the trustee stopped her. “No, Naomi,” she said in a martyred tone, “you go on with the others. I’ll wait here alone.”

  When they were safely out of the trustee’s earshot, Genia overheard Naomi whisper furiously to Susan, “Why did she bother to come at all? She should have known she couldn’t do this! Look how she’s dressed—in black wool, for God’s sake! She’s eighty years old, and her bones are as fragile as dinosaur eggs. And she makes it sound as if I twisted her arm and forced her to come.”

  “The only dinosaur eggs I ever saw were petrified. Watch where you’re stepping, Naomi!”

  “Oh! Thanks. I would hate to please her by tripping and knocking my head on a rock. How am I going to push her off a cliff, Susan, if she can’t climb up where it’s high enough?”

  Genia heard the two staff members giggle together at that.

  The director’s mood seemed to lift the higher they climbed and the farther they hiked away from the woman in black. Eventually Genia found that she and Lillian were outpacing everyone except, surprisingly, Naomi, w
ho was stepping right along, nimbly, up the incline and over the rocks.

  “Thanks a lot, Naomi,” Lillian said wryly, as she spoke to the director’s back, “for giving me Martina as a roommate. I thought you liked me.”

  Naomi looked over her shoulder briefly, with an apologetic smile. “Do you want to kill me? It’s okay. I don’t blame you. I had to put her in somebody’s hogan, Lil. Genia, Teri, and Judy are newcomers. Martina might scare them off, and they’d never come back again. And can you even imagine her rooming with Gabby?”

  Lillian made an appalled sound in her throat.

  “No, you can’t. Neither could I. Gabby would be shredded meat by the end of the week. So that left only you and Madeline Rose. Madeline is a tough cookie, and I know Martina respects you at least as much as she respects anyone. So that’s my excuse. Forgive me?”

  “All right,” Lillian granted her. “We’ll manage. But if she gives me any lip, I’m going to tell her you let tourists camp overnight in the ruins.”

  “Lillian!” came the protesting cry from the director. “I never! You wouldn’t!”

  “Hah!” The woman behind her laughed. “Just sharing the pain, my dear.”

  “Oh,” Naomi moaned lingeringly as she trudged ahead. “Don’t even say such a thing as a joke to that woman. She’d have my job and my head, probably on an ancient woven Indian platter!”

  Soon the drop-off to their left became precipitous. Genia didn’t really feel afraid, but she started to pay more than casual attention to where she placed her feet.

  The awful moment occurred an hour and a half into their excursion. All of the women were gathered around Susan as she lectured about prehistoric art. They’d already had their sacred snack for the afternoon—a moist, tangy zucchini bread, “to remind you of the importance of squash in the diet of prehistoric people.”

  Madeline, Naomi, and Gabby stood closest to the pictographs they were all studying. Genia sat on a fallen oak limb, Lillian squatted on some rocks, and Teri and Judith had their backs propped against a wall of the tiny pocket canyon where Susan had led them.

  “The Hopis don’t call this art,” Susan was saying. Behind her on the flat rock wall, a dozen figures had been painted onto the stone or pecked out of the black patina: three pairs of handprints, a goat, two human figures with lines of dots rising from their heads; the skin of an animal, flattened as if viewed from above. “They say it’s writing, that these are historical documents written by their ancestors to mark their migrations. They say a wall like this tells who the people were—which clan—who passed by or stayed here, and where they came from and even what important spiritual events happened here.” She shifted her feet on the canyon floor. “So when something like this is vandalized, to the Hopis it is a desecration of an important historical document—and a one-of-a-kind document, at that. It’s as if someone scribbled on the Magna Carta or cut a piece out of the original copy of the Declaration of Independence.”

  Just then, Madeline, who was closest to the handprints, held up her left hand and splayed out her fingers in just the way the fingers on the wall were spread. Before anyone grasped what she intended to do, she leaned in and placed her hand against one of the painted prints.

  Like a tiger, Gabriella sprang on her, screaming, “No!” With a full swing of her right arm, she knocked Madeline’s hand away from the wall, which knocked the other woman off balance and sent her sprawling face forward onto the sharp rocks at their feet. “Don’t you touch that! It’s sacred! It’s a bridge to the spirit world! You’ve contaminated it!”

  Madeline cried out in pain and shock.

  The others reacted first with gasps, and then there was an instant of stunned, disbelieving paralysis.

  Gabby faced them all, her back to the wall as if she intended to guard it with her life. The expression on her face was thunderous, her eyes looked wild with fury and intention.

  Naomi was the first among them to spring to Madeline’s aid, followed quickly by Genia, and then Teri and Judith.

  Lillian, meanwhile, went up to Gabby and gently took one of her hands and pulled her away, assuring her that no one would go near the wall again. Wisely, Genia thought, she led the girl away from the others, out of the pocket canyon, and back along the path they’d come.

  Madeline was sitting up by then and cursing, as she checked herself for torn clothing or bloody scrapes.

  “Lunatic!” she said with venom.

  It was difficult to feel entirely sympathetic toward Madeline, Genia thought, even as she helped to dust her off, because the woman was so very wrong to have touched the vulnerable treasure. They’d been warned not to; they all knew better.

  And yet what stuck in Genia’s mind afterward was not Madeline’s arrogant, self-centered gesture of curiosity but the extreme violence of Gabby’s reaction. She had the uneasy feeling that a border had been breached, and that it was one of the invisible, important borders that kept civilized people safely on their own proper side of the line.

  “She’d better not touch me again.” Madeline’s lips tightened in pain as she allowed Naomi and Teri to help her to her feet. One side of her face was raw from the force with which she had landed on the rocks, but amazingly, there wasn’t any blood. “She gets near me again, I’ll sue her ass.”

  Genia nearly laughed with relief.

  A lawsuit! What a day and age we live in, she thought, although she supposed it was an improvement over the age when revenge meant more violence. The word sue nearly managed to transform the event from melodrama to mundane.

  Their afternoon hike aborted, the women retraced their steps back to where Martina still waited for them. Her response, upon hearing of the contretemps, was a single, sneering word: “Tourists!”

  They returned in uneasy peace to the main campus. For the sake of that peace, Madeline rode back with Naomi and Martina in the trustee’s car.

  In the van Lillian kept firm hold of one of Gabby’s hands, which lay limply in her own. Genia, Teri, and Judith talked quietly of other things—teaching, ranching, normal life.

  A wind had picked up, seemingly out of nowhere. It buffeted them about on the blacktop and heavily dusted the van with red dirt. Genia noticed that Susan’s hands on the wheel looked white, as if she were holding on tight to keep them all safely on the road.

  Eighteen

  In hogan two Martina Alvarez lay on her bunk in agony.

  The middle of her spine was aflame with pain; she could think of almost nothing but the torture of it. She hardly knew how she had managed to drive to the slickrock site with Naomi, then walk those hideous broiling hard yards across it. Somehow she had endured the cruel wait for those fools, and then the drive home with that idiot of a woman, her other roommate, Madeline. The one who ought to be hanged. Despoiling a site!

  On top of all of that, once they arrived at the hogan, she had been forced to wait while the idiot woman and Lillian had changed clothes, taking their moronic time about it. Only after they had both left the hogan could she allow herself the excruciating luxury of shedding her own attire, bit by painful bit. She wouldn’t have dreamed of asking for help from her roommates; the idea of anyone seeing her in her vulnerability was repellant beyond imagining.

  She had once heard it said that nothing repelled God; that having granted human beings free choice, the Godhead could not very well then condemn them for using it. If that were the case, Martina had decided at the time, then she and God had nothing to say to each other. She was repelled by many things; at the moment by her own weakness most of all. Nor would she care to know a God who felt sympathy for her rather than disgust at her capitulation to the pain.

  It had taken her an infinitely long time to remove her brace and then to lower herself onto the bunk bed. But then the medication for pain, which she rarely allowed herself, had begun to reduce the flames down to mere small, aching embers of suffering. She was used to that; that, she could bear. If only she could sleep through the dinner hour, she felt she might regain enough
strength of will to get up out of her torture rack and attend the advisory meeting this evening.

  It was an important part of her reason for coming.

  Indians, Martina believed strongly, were their own worst enemies. If they would only leave the scientists alone, their sacred sites might be preserved for all time. Granted, they would not themselves then be able to use them for their ceremonies, but Martina had no more patience for shamans and medicine men than she had for priests, rabbis, or ministers. It was the churches that deserved preserving, not the foolish humans who frequented them, wearing them out with their foolish theologies. It was architecture, whether natural or man-made, that Martina loved, not the architects or the patrons of that architecture. She loved only the buildings, and the pure science that designed them, analyzed them, and saved them for future historians and investigators. (She had admired the neutron bomb from the first moment she read of it and could not fathom the sentimental objections to the fact that it killed people but left buildings intact.)

  A brief flare of the worst of the pain returned.

  Death would be preferable to this, she thought.

  Black, blank, nonexistence.

  She would have chosen to be anywhere but here on this hard bed, with no privacy for her suffering. But she could not give in now. The Wheel, the scientists, depended on her and only on her. Who else did they have to defend them against Naomi, who was bleeding them dry for the sake of tourism? Of all the superficial reasons to spend a dollar!

  Martina’s only distraction, her only real consolation in her agony, was her fury, which equaled her pain in fire and intensity. She pictured that idiot’s palm pressed against the ancient art. The human sweat eating away at the vulnerable design! She recalled the indignation of the two Texas teachers, and Naomi’s culpability in that mistake. If anything untoward happened to those children now, the blame would be easy to place! Even in her pain, Martina’s lips curved in a secret, satisfied smile at the thought of such a consequence.