The Blue Corn Murders

by Nancy Pickard

  “Genia? May we talk to you?”

  It was Judith and Teri, standing behind her, looking as grim as she’d ever seen any two women look.

  “It’s our fault,” Judith said.

  Teri added, “That she died.”

  A breeze at Genia’s back ruffled the stray hairs escaping from the bun in which she had captured and pinned her hair. She felt the cool gentle caress, closed her eyes for a second, and thought, I must be asleep in my bed at home, this is a breeze blowing through my bedroom window, and when I open my eyes, that’s where I will be.

  “It’s so stupid,” Judith moaned.

  “We’re so stupid,” Teri snapped. “Look, Genia, here’s what we did. You know how we said at the Talking Circle that we missed the sixties?”

  Genia nodded. “So you participated in protest marches, and attended a rock concert, and now you’re ‘doing’ nature. Yes?”

  “Yeah, and one of the other experiences we thought we had to have was …” Teri took a breath, blew it out through her mouth.

  “Drugs,” Judith intoned. “In particular, LSD.” Her theatrical voice boomed in the natural amphitheater. If there had been anyone else around, Genia thought, they could have heard this little confession miles away. Maybe that was a slight exaggeration, but Judith was now standing, pacing, commanding “center stage.” She seemed to be declaiming this information to the natural world. And to Genia. “We brought some with us, a couple of—what they call tabs—nothing more than little squares of paper soaked in ‘acid.’ You just swallow the paper to take it. We brought one for each of us. We thought we’d be safe, doing it one at a time, with the other one completely sober and keeping watch. We thought we’d do it out alone in the countryside, after this trip was over and all the rest of you had gone home. You know, come back to one of these sites they’re taking us to, take the LSD, and have some visions.”

  It sounded hopelessly naive to Genia, like the ill-advised, idealistic plans of teenagers, not of mature women. But then the state of being a wild and free young person was exactly what these two overgrown adolescents were attempting to capture, she realized.

  Teri, whose head had been down during this explanation and whose arms had been wrapped around her legs, said, from her muffled position, “We put them in an empty Holiday Inn shampoo bottle.”

  Genia had already grasped that surrealistic fact. She grasped the rest of it, too, before they said it, but she sat still and listened to them tell the rest of their tale, with its tragic, guilt-ridden climax.

  Judith said, “Gabby got hold of it. Maybe she stole it, you know, just looking for some shampoo. Maybe it rolled out of Teri’s bag and Gabby picked it up. But when we saw her acting so weird last night, we were pretty sure she had found it and taken it. And …” Judith’s pauses were growing more dramatic, her enunciation more theatrical by the moment. Genia found herself disliking very much the show that Judith was making out of her own and Teri’s negligence. “She came out here, under the influence. God knows what she thought she was doing. Maybe she crawled down in the hole and fell asleep. Maybe she tripped—”

  Her voice rang out across the valley.

  “I’ll never forgive myself! Never!”

  Oh, sit down, Genia wanted to say.

  Judith stood poised at the edge of the cliff, arms spread wide, looking melodramatically distraught. Watching her, Genia revised her opinion of Judith’s theatrical potential; a great voice did not necessarily make a great actress; that was clear. Maybe her forte was directing.

  “Stop it, Judy.”

  Teri’s own furious voice cut through all the bathos like a genuine knife through phony butter. “She’s dead and it’s our fault, and she wouldn’t be dead if we hadn’t brought the acid along and if I hadn’t lost it. And you make me sick, the way you’re turning it into some kind of personal drama. This isn’t about you or me. Who cares if you forgive yourself? We should only care about Gabby. Gabby’s dead. It’s about her. So just sit down and shut up.”

  Her friend looked, in turns, shocked, angry, hurt, and then ashen with shame. The shame looked real, Genia thought, and if it wasn’t, then Judith was a superb actress after all. She stood looking bewildered, like an actor who has forgotten her lines.

  It was Teri who found the words.

  “Genia, Judy wants to go get that bottle and take it out of there, so no one will ever know, except us and—you. We know you saw it. She wants you to agree with that, to save our skins. I don’t want to. I mean, I do want to, but we can’t. We have to tell what we did, don’t you think so?”

  Genia never had to answer that moral question, because at that moment a shuffling sound behind them caused all three of them to turn and look.

  Madeline Rose stood a couple of feet behind and to their left. Her right arm was high in the air, and she was holding some small object in that hand. She cocked the arm back and then forward. The object whipped high, over the lip of the cliff, and far out into the air above the valley. Was it only Genia’s imagination that caused her to think she saw a flash of green and white?

  Madeline said, “It’s a good thing somebody has some common sense around here.” Then she turned and walked away from them, back toward the path leading up.

  Judith ran over to look into the kiva where Gabby’s remains lay. Genia saw her clap her hands over her mouth. She ran back and whispered in a dramatic show of wide-eyed disbelief, “The bottle’s gone! She threw it over the cliff!”

  But Genia thought: Not one of us could swear to that.

  Had Madeline just saved the two teachers from some sort of criminal charges? Had she rescued their reputations and their jobs? Genia looked at Judith and Teri and saw comprehension and relief flood into their faces. Now there was no hard evidence to link them to Gabby’s death. Even if they confessed the truth, there was nothing to connect them to the tragedy.

  She glanced over toward where Madeline was disappearing around a bend in the trail. She was a cynical and hard-bitten woman, and yet she had deliberately acted to save Judith and Teri.

  Genia, feeling altogether disgusted with the two teacher-friends, got up, dusted herself off, and walked off to find Madeline. But before she even reached the trail, a moment arrived when the fact of Gabby’s awful death finally sank fully into her soul. She had stood at the edge of the kiva like an observer, seeing but not accepting, noticing but not allowing herself to feel it all. Now it came in a wave. Genia, suddenly overcome with sorrow and horror, stumbled into a far corner of the desolate ruin. In privacy, hidden by a crumbling stone wall, she cried and prayed for the lost girl.

  In an hour Naomi returned with Martina, and a half hour after that, three law enforcement officials showed up in two cars. But at no time did Jon Warren and the Texas teachers appear with their group of sixteen teenagers.

  As dusk began to drape the ruins in lavender shrouds, the sleeping bags lay as still and neglected as Gabby’s body in the kiva.

  It was Naomi who first asked the question that none of the rest of them, preoccupied with Gabby’s death, had thought to ask.

  “Where are the kids?”

  Twenty-four

  The deputation from the Montezuma county sheriff’s department had more immediate questions.

  “Who was she?”

  Naomi told them what she knew. Gabriella Russell, from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Unmarried. Twenty-four years old. A freelance magazine writer specializing in Indian affairs.

  “What was she doing here?”

  Nobody answered that.

  “How’d she get here?”

  The women—Naomi, Martina, Teri, Judith, and Genia—looked at one another. That was a very good question. How had she gotten here, at least seventeen miles from campus, when her car was still parked on campus? (Naomi attested to that; she’d seen it, she said.) And when there was no other vehicle on top of the mesa, or anywhere near the ruins, that she might have driven there.

  “Did somebody bring her out here?”

  They didn’
t know.

  “Would she have hitchhiked?”

  Nobody could say, but they all supposed she might have.

  The deputy asking the questions pointed out the obvious.

  “Well, she had to get here somehow.”

  “Maybe one of the young braves brought her,” Madeline said, an edge of contempt coloring her tone and her words. The other women cast her hostile glances, but she made a mocking face at them. “Well! She just loved Indians, didn’t she? And Naomi, aren’t you the very one who suggested she might have gone off with one of them last night? One, or more?”

  Of course, then the representative from the sheriff’s department had to hear all about the advisory council meeting of the previous night, and of the young men exiting in anger with the stated intention of heading for the hills, and of Gabby’s infatuation with all things Native, possibly including young men. Madeline also told him about Gabby’s odd behavior in the meadow the night before.

  “She never came back to the hogan,” Judith confirmed, sounding as if the words were being dragged out of her. “To tell you the truth, some of us were worried about her this morning.”

  “She acted as if she were high,” Madeline said, and her smile reached her eyes, although she did not look at anybody except the deputy when she said it.

  “Last night?” Naomi asked them.

  But only a tense silence followed those words.

  Genia waited to see if Madeline would mention the plastic bottle, but she said nothing more. It was she, after all, Genia thought, who threw it away.

  * * *

  The youth group did not return.

  At first, no one from Naomi on down to the cops investigating Gabby’s death seemed to know whether to take it seriously.

  “They’re supposed to be here?” A county sheriff’s deputy inquired of Naomi, within hearing distance of Genia, Teri, Judith, and Martina.

  “They were supposed to be here at least two hours ago,” he was told.

  “So where could they be?”

  “They could be at one of the other sites they were scheduled to visit this afternoon,” she told him. “But they’re way off schedule, if that’s the case, because they were supposed to return here at three, participate in a seminar with us and the ladies—”

  “The ladies?”

  “A hiking group. Seven women. Gabriella was one of them.”

  “Okay, then what?”

  “Then we were supposed to go back to the campus—”

  “We?” He was patient, more than she.

  “Uh, the ladies’ group—our seven women—and Dr. Susan Van Sant, one of our archaeologists. And me. And the kids were supposed to pack up their belongings and move on to another campsite.”

  “You think—car trouble?”

  “I don’t know. They’re in three vans, like the one we came in. Medicine Wheel vans, with our logo on them. I don’t know. I guess that could be it, a flat tire, or something. But—you haven’t heard about any accidents, have you?”

  He shook his head. “No, but I’ll check to see if anything has come in since I’ve been down below.” Down in the ruins, he meant, with Gabby’s body. “You probably got your signals crossed. Maybe they arrived here too early and you arrived too late. Maybe they’re already at their campsite, cooking hot dogs.”

  “Without their sleeping bags?”

  He frowned, seeming for the first time to consider the possibility of a problem of some kind.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “You take your ladies on back. We’ll be here for a while, so we can wait for the kids. How many kids did you say?”

  “Sixteen.” Naomi’s face had paled under her tan. “And three adults. Maybe they called. Maybe there’ll be a message for me at my office.”

  “I’ll bet there will be.” He was kind, encouraging. “I’m sure there will be. I mean, look at it this way, they’re not lost. They know where they are, even if you don’t.”

  “Maybe I’ll drive up to their next campsite, where they’re supposed to be tonight.”

  “Good idea.”

  “If there’s no message.”

  “Right. If there isn’t.”

  He made a movement, as if he was going to walk away, but then he turned back, as if he’d had a mere casual afterthought. “If there isn’t, and if they’re not at their campsite tonight, you call our dispatcher, all right? Just let us know.”

  Genia saw Naomi swallow, saw her chest rise and fall. “Okay.” Her voice sounded weak. She cleared her throat and made it stronger. “Okay.”

  “Any local kids among them?”

  His head was cocked to one side, his expression was calm, pleasant, his voice still casual. Too casual, perhaps, Genia decided.

  “No, no. Texas kids. Honor students. From a prep school in Dallas.” Naomi seemed to hear herself talking too much, because she cut off her own words and turned and hurried over to where the “ladies” were waiting.

  The tall sheriff’s deputy stood and watched them pile into their van, watched them drive off. When Genia glimpsed back at him, he was still standing at the edge of the cliff, watching them.

  Twenty-five

  They endured a long and mostly silent van ride back to the campus. The silence puzzled Genia, although personally she appreciated it, because she was feeling too overwhelmed and sad about Gabby to talk. She simply couldn’t believe anything bad had happened to the teenagers—there would be a calming, logical explanation, she felt sure—but anxiety nagged at her all the same.

  Silence wasn’t what she would have expected from the others, but maybe they were just as exhausted and drained as she was. Some people chatter when they are frightened or upset; other people withdraw into themselves. Genia knew she fell into the latter category, and she suspected Naomi did, too, judging from her actions at the Talking Circle.

  It was Naomi who surprised Genia by being the first one among them to speak, as they sped along the deserted highway toward their “home.” “I’d like,” she said, “to hold a Talking Circle tonight. To honor Gabriella’s memory. Do any of you object to that idea?”

  No answer, but no objections, either. Beside Genia, Teri brought her left hand up and covered her mouth, and then raised it up to cover her eyes. She bowed her head.

  “I’ll take that as consent,” Naomi said.

  When they reached the campus and got out of the van, they discovered themselves to be the object of stares. No one came down to greet them—not that anyone necessarily would have anyway, Genia thought—but they seemed to step out of the vehicle into a bubble of isolation.

  They gathered their backpacks and stayed close together as they started toward their hogans.

  But Naomi stopped Genia before she could leave the vicinity of the parking lot. “Genia? We usually pass around the leadership of the circles. Would you be up to taking it tonight? It would require you to set a time, notify the rest of us, get the chairs set up, and pick a topic. I’ll give you the blue corn, or you can bring a totem of your own choice. I’ll bring the tape with the music. Will you do it?”

  “Yes.” Genia’s response was quick and sure. “I’ll be grateful for something to do.”

  “I know.”

  “And it sounds rather … healing.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Why don’t you suggest the time for me, Naomi.”

  The director breathed deeply, which could have suggested that she felt relieved, or overburdened, or both. She seemed to be thinking of all of the responsibilities awaiting her. “It may depend on when I hear from Jon and the kids—”

  “Of course.”

  “But let’s say nine o’clock.”

  “In the meadow.”

  “Yes. Will you ask for help with the chairs?”

  “I will. And if you’d bring the blue corn?”

  “Yes. Sure.”

  “Naomi, I know this is not the time—but I wondered, at our first circle, you didn’t answer the question you posed to us.”

  That pr
ompted a small wry smile from the director. “You noticed. I thought I got away with it. I didn’t take my turn because you’d already seen one person burst into tears. I thought seeing me do it, too, might be a little much for your first night.”

  She gazed at Genia for a moment, as if deciding something.

  “Things are rough around here. Even before … this. For the first time in my life, I’m not holding myself together very well. I may lose this job. And I’ve loved it. Loved it. That question I asked—‘Why have the Ancient People called you here?’—I thought they called me to set things right for them again.

  “See, unlike some people, like Gabby, I’ve never thought of them as perfect beings, or this existence as idyllic. I think they screwed up. Big time. It looks to me as if they lost everything except their lives. I look at their empty cities, their magnificent empty architecture, all that accomplishment, all that beauty, and I see all of that, but I see failure, too.

  “They built it all up, and then they had to abandon it because they failed for some reason. All that work, Genia! Was all of their work for nothing? Was it just so that almost eight hundred years later, you and I could drop our jaws and say, Wow? And was there any way they could have kept it from happening? I mean, what if you put in years of backbreaking labor on building a community, and you suddenly had to leave it? If I were one of the Ancient Ones, I’d have done anything I could to keep that from happening. What they had—what they made—was so brilliant, so rare. I would do anything to save something like that.

  “I hear them telling me not to make the same mistake: ‘Don’t walk away. Don’t give up. Fight to protect everything I’ve done here.’ But it’s so hard, because—”

  “I wouldn’t fight to save buildings, for God’s sake,” Madeline Rose interrupted. She had come upon them without warning. “I don’t care if they were designed by Leonardo da Vinci. They all fall down, eventually. I say, if you gotta go, go. Don’t make a fuss about it. Just pack up and move on and build something just as good at the next place.” It almost seemed, Genia thought, as if Madeline were speaking directly to Naomi, but surely even she wouldn’t be that presumptuous.