The Butterflies of Grand Canyon

by Margaret Erhart

  “I’ve never cared for tea.”

  “Ah. I’ll make it for myself then.” She fills the kettle and sets it to boil, while he walks around the kitchen with small hurried steps. She’s met him only once, at dinner at the Schellbachs’, but tonight he looks like an entirely different man. His face that night was hopeful. His bones were well defined. Now there’s a droop, a sag to his features. His mouth is somewhat collapsed.

  “You’ve heard the rumors,” he says.

  “Many rumors, Mr. Hedquist. Was there a particular—”

  “Oliver,” he says sharply.

  “Of course. Oliver.” She hesitates. “Tell me something. What does this skeleton have to do with you?”

  He draws a breath and turns to face her. “I’m in an awkward position. I’ve never told anyone, and I’ve struggled with whether or not to tell you.”

  “You needn’t say a word, but my understanding is that’s why you’ve asked me to come.”

  He drops his gaze. “There was a fellow by the name of Lowell Dunhill. A ranger here. He worked in the backcountry most of the time. I didn’t know him well, but he was well thought of, especially after his death, thirteen years ago. His body washed up at Phantom Ranch and was found by a gentleman named Amadeo, who was and still is a wrangler here. He came across Dunhill and brought him out, and I happened to be there, and for reasons I don’t need to go into, Louie Schellbach wanted the body at his house. While we were managing that, Louie alluded to the fact that the poor man had died of love.”

  “And exactly how did this person do that, according to Mr. Schellbach?”

  “By throwing himself off a cliff, into the river. But for me the point was not the method of suicide, but the cause of it. For some time I had felt something from my wife, Dotty—a coolness toward me, a change of heart, but I hadn’t gotten as far as putting a name or face to it. And still it took a while to put two and two together. She withdrew after his death. Her body seemed to shrink. Finally I understood she had lost her lover. And partly because he was no longer there to challenge me, I felt tender toward her, and she seemed to respond to this and came back to me. Briefly,” he adds. “The kettle, Dr. Clover.”

  “Please,” she says. “Call me Elzada.” She moves to the stove and prepares her tea.

  “During this time,” he continues, “a strange thing happened. After it arrived in Schellbach’s house, Dunhill’s body was stolen and never seen again. A few months after that I noticed a change in Dotty. All of a sudden she perked up. She got over her tears. I was happy for her, of course, until I began to feel the old familiar distance, a wandering of her attentions. I tried to think nothing of it, but when it didn’t go away, I became curious as to who had captured her imagination this time. I poked around and found myself quite suited to detective work. It satisfies my inquiring mind, and apparently I give off an air of being perpetually muddled, so no one guessed I was closely following my wife’s affairs. There was the telephone, of course, which brought its own piece to the table. Mr. Dunhill called our house infrequently but called just the same. A bold move, I’d say. I certainly felt I had every right to listen in.”

  “I’ve been told you hate the telephone.”

  “Now you understand why.” He moves to the sink and fills a glass with water. “It pained me, of course, that it was my wife, but a scientist learns to distance himself from the project at hand in order not to influence the data. I’ll admit I was cold. I was terribly calm and cold. Quite serendipitously I enlisted the help of the little wrangler, Amadeo, and quickly learned that he was acting not only as my informant but Dotty’s. She wanted him to keep an eye on Emery Kolb.”

  “For what reason?”

  “I’ll get to that. Meanwhile the situation worked well for me but poorly for Dotty, because of course she never suspected my suspicion, and Deo, for his part, encouraged by a small sum of money, never revealed it. Soon enough he told me the following story: Dunhill, or the man we called Dunhill, didn’t die of drowning but of a bullet to the back of the head.”

  “I see,” says Elzada, bringing her tea to the kitchen table.

  “Yet he came back to life.”

  “My dear wife was led to believe that Emery Kolb attempted to kill Lowell Dunhill but botched the job.”

  “But how could that be? It sounds like a third-rate mystery novel!”

  Oliver ignores this. “At first she believed Mr. Dunhill dead, as we all did. Her grief was not fabricated. If it had been, I would have known it in a minute. She’s a poor liar, and I’m not ashamed to say I take comfort in that.” He looks away, out the window. “I think it was two or three months after the death that she received her first telephone call from Mr. Dunhill. It must have shocked her. Keep in mind, she never saw the body nor knew of the striking resemblance, so at least she wasn’t puzzled by that, as I am. Anyway, the reason he gave for his continued stay on earth was this. He told her he and Emery Kolb came to blows over a camera. Then Kolb sent someone to kill him, but they got the wrong man, and he, Mr. Dunhill, thought it best to flee for his life before Kolb became aware of the mix-up and came after him again. Why Emery would trouble himself to murder Lowell Dunhill is beyond me, but Dotty wasn’t of a mind to question. He’d returned from the dead, and that was undoubtedly foremost in her thoughts. But she took it upon herself to keep an eye on Emery after that, through the eyes and ears of Deo. It was important to her for Mr. Dunhill’s sake but also for her own. Naturally, she didn’t want her liaison with Dunhill to be known, but especially as it would expose him to Kolb, and her to Kolb, and me to Kolb as well. She became wilier, more intentional, more aware of the perils of setting out in a whaleboat across open waters.”

  “Whaleboat?” asks Elzada. “I wasn’t aware there was a whaleboat involved.”

  “Never mind,” says Oliver. “The point is, she tried to protect me.”

  “From a danger that didn’t exist.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her tea is cool enough to drink. She sips it twice. “I suspect you’ve asked me here because you have your doubts, Oliver. We detectives depend on doubts, don’t we? On intuitions. The stories told to us always hold an element of truth, but we sense the flaws and our curiosity compels us to deepen our search. You’re not sure why an argument over a camera would lead one man to murder another, and you’re right to question it. It’s a flimsy motive. A fabricated one, by the way. It was fiction, and the author of this fiction, your wife’s . . . paramour, was well acquainted with her gullibility. He counted on it.” She looks down into her cup. “There’s a great deal I could tell you. I don’t know what you’d like to hear. Perhaps you’re curious as to why the body you saw bore such a striking resemblance to Dunhill, if it wasn’t Dunhill. The story is long. Another night, when it’s not so late and we have time to—”

  “No,” he says firmly. “Dotty comes home in the morning.”

  “And you’d like to tell her?”

  “She’d like to hear it from me.”

  “Well, then,” says Elzada, “where shall we begin? Why not with our friend the wrangler? It was July, 1938, and I was staying at the El Tovar Hotel, where the Nevills expedition had come to rest for a few days. The attraction of clean sheets and hot water should not be underestimated after a month on the river and a long climb out of the canyon on the back of an or nery mule. We had heard of Mr. Dunhill’s misfortune but were eager to get back to our field work and the outdoor life. That night, for reasons I will never understand, Amadeo took me into his confidence. He showed me the bullet hole you describe, and when we returned to the river the next day, I gave this information to Lois Jotter—Mrs. Cutter—and Emery Kolb, who joined our party. For me, until recently, that was the end of it. There was nothing I could or cared to do, and my life was quickly absorbed with collecting and teaching. But up on the rim, quite a drama was unfolding. The body was removed, as you mentioned. But before that, our wrangler, being an Italian, sensed the possibility of foul play—there was already the
fact that a murder had been committed, rather than a suicide—and he made it his job to guard the body. I have it from him that he was there outside Schellbach’s house that night when a man arrived on foot, dressed in dark clothes, with a hat shadowing his face, and entered Louie’s study by means of the side door, which was inexplicably unlocked.”

  “My dear woman,” says Oliver, coming to sit at the table, “there’s no such thing as a lock here in the village. Except at Babbitt’s, where they’re only locking in the thieves.”

  “Yes, well the man entered. There are some gaps in Deo’s narrative here, which indicate to me that he fell asleep.”

  “Asleep! At a time like that?”

  “A whiskey sleep. And when he came to, a woman was making her way toward the same door. She hadn’t attempted to disguise herself, a fact that clears her of premeditation, and it was easy enough to see it was the postmistress, Edith Chase.”

  “Oh?” says Oliver. “She’s always struck me as being on the shifty side. I’m not surprised.”

  “Perhaps you aren’t, but he was, and he crept up to the door. Inside, there was an angry exchange going on between the fellow and Miss Chase, who apparently came to see the body. The whole business was hushed up on the one hand, but rumors were flying on the other—just the kind of thing she enjoys. She arrived quite by accident at the right place at the wrong time, and her curiosity might have been the end of her if she hadn’t done some fast talking. They struck an agreement, she and the fellow. She would help him remove the body and keep his secret—”

  “What secret?”

  “Patience. You’ll see. If he would allow her to hide it in Emery Kolb’s garage. She never liked Emery, for some reason. I suppose as a woman one couldn’t like Emery and Ellsworth both. And Deo, who has a feeling for these things, assured me that as much as Miss Chase disliked Mr. Kolb, she was forever sweet on the fellow with whom she bargained. The intruder. Mr. Dunhill.”

  Oliver looks at her blankly. “I’m confused.”

  She moves to the window and looks out. At the edge of the garden a small green pumpkin shines. She turns to him and says, “The man you saw, the face of the dead fellow brought up from the river, that wasn’t Lowell Dunhill, as you’ve guessed, though it looked exactly like him. It was his brother, Owen. His twin, though no one here knew he had a twin. I suspect even your wife doesn’t know. Nor does she know that Owen is dead and Lowell killed him.”

  “Killed him!” cries Oliver. “What do you mean?”

  “Killed him. Right here in Grand Canyon. Out in the backcountry. Shot him with his Park Service pistol and disposed of the body in the river—hopefully never to be seen again. Though he knew, as any ranger knows, that as often as drowned men disappear, they just as regularly surface and take up shop in an eddy, or wash ashore. He couldn’t neglect that possibility, and it occurred to him if that were the case, he would exchange places with the dead man. He would let you think he killed himself, a suicide.”

  “He warned Schellbach of such a possibility.”

  “He would leave Grand Canyon—he intended to anyway.”

  “I think it was Dotty who held him in place.”

  “For a time, yes. But someday he knew he would tiptoe away, as it were, and go to his brother’s wife. It was she over whom they quarreled—fatally, for Owen. But that’s another story altogether. I don’t think he intended to kill his twin. I don’t believe he was a bad man, Oliver. Is. Is a bad man. His brother, on the other hand, was contemptible.”

  “Lowell Dunhill a murderer!” cries Oliver in anguish. “I would never have let Dotty go to him!”

  “I think he was caught by surprise, and certainly something terrible was said between the brothers. We’ll never know. But it was not the first time. They had a history of disagreements. I imagine Lowell invited him here to smooth out their differences, which seemed to him possible in the outdoors.”

  Oliver sits quietly for a moment. He flattens his hands on the table and strokes the red and white checkered cloth. When he concentrates, his features become softer, as if trying to enfold this new idea, this new information. The news might harden him, but it hasn’t yet. He seems puzzled, yet not surprised. He looks up. “How do you know all this?”

  “Do you sew, Oliver?”

  “Sew?”

  She sits down and crosses her arms on the table. “Knowing is like sewing. Like sewing a quilt. Many people know a small part of the story I’ve told you, but I’ve been the one to sew it all together. It lay in pieces—one from Gavia Immer, one from Amadeo, and several, especially concerning the brother’s wife, from Ethyl Schellbach, the Canyon Songbird.” She laughs. “The sweet voice hides a hungry ear—and, to be fair, a generous heart. Lowell confided in her as everyone does. I’ve been busy sewing. Not an elegant tapestry but a serviceable quilt.”

  She stands up suddenly, and Oliver asks, “Where are you going?”

  “Home to bed, Mr. Hedquist. You may be in the bloom of youth, but I am not.”

  “But the rest of the story!”

  “The rest of the story,” she repeats. “What more is there?”

  “Why did Mr. Dunhill come back to remove his brother’s body?”

  “Ah, of course. He realized that despite the poor condition of the flesh, after its journey through some frightful rapids, the bullet hole might be discovered, and he didn’t want that. Making the body disappear, once it was acknowledged to be his, seemed the best solution. And unbeknownst to anyone until just the other day, Owen Dunhill was in possession of one remarkable feature that distinguished him from his twin brother—that is, a withered arm. Originally Dunhill must have thought that if the body surfaced, it would be in significant disarray and the arm might go unnoticed. On seeing the body that night, he changed his mind.”

  “So the brother went to Mr. Kolb’s garage?”

  “Where he lies still.”

  “The postmistress certainly had her fun.”

  “Her revenge,” says Elzada.

  “Love is the cause of so many misfortunes.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I think we often blame things on love, when in fact the source of our spite and unhappiness lies elsewhere. Love is not something we understand. Science can’t quantify it, and therefore it remains a mystery. We can shape it any way we wish. We give it life and definition as it suits us, and who’s to contradict our version of a story that’s essentially unknowable?”

  “I’ve come to know it,” says Oliver quietly. “A small parcel of it.”

  Elzada nods. “Yes, I believe you have.”

  Off Broadway

  Dotty has tried not to think about the unpleasant events of the past week, though her mind wanders to her suitcase every now and then. She imagines the Aztec lugging it from the porch to the street, where it awaits the garbage truck. She sees Lowell watching silently from the front window, making no move to stem his wife’s anger or salvage his mistress’s belongings.

  Meanwhile she is content to carry her life in a single shopping bag. It is freedom indeed. She thinks of Jane arriving from St. Louis, on this same train perhaps, though headed west not east, arriving with only the clothes on her back. She remembers the fun they had shopping, their moments of closeness while fitting her sister-in-law for a brand-new life. It makes her smile. Of course she herself doesn’t need a brand-new life. She has Oliver, her old friend Oliver, and much of the time that’s enough.

  She gazes out the window of the train, savoring the journey before her. She feels damp, slightly rotten, from her week of sightseeing along California’s coastal highway. She has seen enough sea otters to satisfy her for the rest of her life. And redwoods—frightening edifices hardly in the category of tree. And Hearst’s castle, and beaches with pounding surf, the ocean gray and cold, or blue and cold, and a fascinating park north of San Francisco where white deer sniffed the bumper of her rent-a-car while she was sleeping in it, for heaven’s sake! It was her chan
ce to ramble and roam, and she took it. Not in the way she imagined, with Lowell by her side. But it did not occur to her to feel sorry for herself. She was shocked and surprised and would soon feel unpleasant things, but in the time before the unpleasant things, she wanted only to feel free. And alive. She had given her heart to a dead man. She understood that now, and she intended to take it back. A man who hid his life was as good as dead, and all the blood and flesh and excuses in the world didn’t make him alive again.

  She can feel the hot breath of the desert coming closer, the cool wet tongue of the coast receding as the evening settles to the ground like a soft gray dew. She has no seatmate and stretches sideways. She pries off her shoes and drops them with a satisfying clump clump to the floor. In the morning she will see Oliver. They’ll have breakfast at the Howard Johnson’s, visit the hardware store, do their food shopping, and go home. Life will be ordinary again. She’ll tell him about the sea otters lolling on their backs like human babies, and the young men riding the waves on boards the size of kitchen counters, and the wine served with every meal, and the abundance of green vegetables, and the large beetles attracted to her headlights at night. And perhaps someday, though she can’t imagine it, she’ll tell him the other story, for it occurs to her that until she does, she’s a woman who is hiding her life, a woman as good as dead to him.

  She rests her head against the window and decides not to think. She’s gone through all her magazines, and it’s too early to sleep, and the movement of the train is jarring. She feels like an infant in a cradle rocked by an angry nurse. She never had a nurse or a cradle. She slept in a dresser drawer. Her clothes were hand-me-downs and her dolls were made of sticks and rags, and her ambition was to sing and dance on Broadway, in New York City, where people dressed up just to go out and buy a bottle of milk. But instead she married Oliver. All these years it was Oliver who kept her from the stage. Oliver, with his plodding good nature, his scatterbrained charm, his need to be fed and tidied up after—he’s the reason she wakes up in the morning and slops around in her housecoat and slippers and heads off to town with hardly a thought to her appearance. No makeup, no hairdo, no fashionable clothes. Why, it’s terrible the way she’s let herself go! Surely, in New York City she would make the effort. She might even have a little dog with a diamond-studded leash and its own outfits. She would carry it in her arms to the beauty parlor and dry cleaners, and she would wear stockings every day and felt hats with feathers and perhaps a boa. She would have men. Men would fall in love with her and woo her with flowers and chocolates and expensive meals in first-class restaurants. She would take taxis everywhere and learn how to tip, and her talent would be recognized and sought after, and she would refuse to appear anywhere without her male bodyguard, who was also her chauffeur and houseboy, and in the evening he cleaned the pool. But are there pools in New York City? Maybe she would move to Los Angeles. Yes, thinks Dotty, Hollywood. Beverly Hills. A large mansion with a gardener and servants, and perhaps Oliver might come on the weekends and drive her around in a convertible that would muss up her hair. But she wouldn’t care. They’d laugh and travel north along the coastal highway and take in the beauty of the cliffs and the sea. They’d eat in an attractive inn on the water and watch the sunset and order coffee, then retire to their room and act young again, act young all night, and watch the sunrise and eat breakfast in bed: coffee and rolls and bacon. She looks at her watch. In a short while he will meet her at the station in Flagstaff. He will welcome her home. He will ask where she would like to have breakfast and she will say, “Oh, I can’t think of any place I’d rather eat than Howard Johnson’s.” And because he has so hoped for this his face will light up, his old familiar face, and she will see his dearness and breathe the air and take in the early light on the mountain and know why she never had a life on Broadway. Why she’s here with him instead, about to have a cup of bitter coffee and a plate of overcooked eggs and undercooked bacon, and why it makes no difference in the world what a person eats for breakfast as long as they’re comfortable sitting in a booth with the one they’ve sworn themselves to. Not by the gold band on the fourth finger, but sworn through years of waking up and going to sleep, like two old dogs on the porch. It would not be right for one to wander off alone and never come back.