The Vanishing Point

by Judith Van GIeson

  Claire climbed out of her truck, and the rancher extended his hand. “Howdy,” he said. “I’m Sam Ogelthorpe.” He’d been ranching here thirty years ago, so he wasn’t a young man, but it was hard to pinpoint his age. He could have been anywhere from fifty-five to seventy-five. Although his hair was white, he didn’t have the slow movements of an old man. His face was weathered, but out here that could happen at a young age. Claire knew that if ranchers didn’t get killed by accidents, they tended to live a long time. In some ways it was a very healthy life.

  “Good to meet you,” she said. “My name is Claire Reynier. I’m the archivist for the Jonathan Vail papers at the University of New Mexico.”

  “Well, damn,” said Sam. “I was wondering if you people would ever show up.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You ought to put my name in your archives right along with Vail’s. I may not be the last person to see him in Utah, but I’m the last person who’s willing to admit it.”

  Everyone liked to have their place in history, Claire thought, however small. “Of course, you’re in our archives,” she reassured him. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time. If you ever get to the university, I’d be glad to show you the archives.”

  Harrison soothed the wealthy donors, and Claire got the cowboys, which was all right with her; cowboys were less predictable than rich people. The stroking was deliberate, and it appeared to work. Sam’s crustiness fell away like mud dropping off a dried-up boot.

  “I may just do that,” he replied.

  “I hope you will,” said Claire.

  “What brings you to Comb Ranch?”

  “A student discovered Jonathan Vail’s missing journal in a cave in Sin Nombre Canyon last week. I went back with Curt Devereux to see if there might be anything else in the cave, and we found the student dead.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “It looks like he fell off a ledge. Ellen Frank is investigating.”

  “Easy enough to fall in the canyons,” Sam replied. “Ellen’s smart. She’ll find out what happened—unlike Curt Devereux, who couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag. Vail was on my property in 1966. Devereux came over and looked at the spot, but that’s all he ever did. I can show you exactly where I saw Vail if you’re interested. It’d be somethin’ to tell your students about.”

  “I’d like that,” Claire replied.

  “My truck’s out back.”

  “Let’s take mine,” Claire said. “The keys are in the ignition.” She hoped that would keep Sam from bringing the dogs, who were a scruffy mixture of hound and mutt, saliva and fleas, dander and dirt. People drove around with dogs in the back of their pickups all the time, but she wasn’t comfortable doing it. If you braked too hard, the dog became an unguided missile.

  Sam ordered the dogs to stay put, got in her truck, and directed her down a ranch road that was even worse than his access road. It was basically two ruts, and it took all her concentration to keep the Chevy’s wheels in the track.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” Sam asked.

  Claire did mind, but they were on his property, so she said, “No” and rolled down her window. Sam did the same, resting his right arm on the open window between puffs. It felt like they’d gone as far north as Slickrock Canyon, but it was actually only a few miles before Sam told her to stop.

  They got out of the truck, and Claire followed him across the mesa, noticing his worn boots and rolling cowboy walk. It soon became clear how hard it could be to find one’s way among the piñon, cedar, and juniper. They were all approximately the same size, color, and shape, making it nearly impossible to distinguish one tree from another. The land was flat and dry, so there were no changes in elevation or water channels for guidance. It didn’t take long for the trees to close in behind them, concealing Claire’s truck. There were no landmarks to indicate where they were going or where they had been. Even Comb Ridge was not reliable. The peaks were so identical, Claire could look away for a second and not be able to tell which ridge she had previously focused on. You were left to navigate by the stars, the sun, or a compass, if you had one. The dogs would have been a help; dogs can always find their way back.

  Sam walked ahead, squinting at the ground. He wasn’t wearing glasses, and Claire wondered how well he could see. He was old enough for corrective lenses. Why wasn’t he wearing them? Stubbornness seemed a more likely cause than vanity. There was no visible trail, and she looked down at the ground wondering what guided him. Every now and then she saw an unfiltered cigarette butt, and she began to feel they were Hansel and Gretel following paper crumbs through the forest.

  Sam stopped, dropped the cigarette he’d been smoking and crushed it out with the heel of his cowboy boot. “That’s where I saw Vail, by that cedar over there,” he said. “Kneeling over the cow he’d killed. He didn’t think there was anybody around to notice, I guess.”

  “What time of day was it?”

  “Afternoon, but to him it was dinnertime.”

  “I understand it was raining that day.”

  “It was what the Navajos call a female rain, slow and gentle and steady. I could see him all right.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I yelled and he ran away. The guy was a draft dodger and a coward. I was on foot and more interested in protecting my cattle than in chasing him.”

  “What did he look like?” Claire asked, wondering if Curt had asked the very same questions. Sam seemed more than happy to answer.

  “Like a hippie. He was dirty. He had long hair.”

  “A lot of people looked like that in 1966,” Claire reminded him.

  “Not on Cedar Mesa they didn’t.”

  “How do you think he got here?”

  “He hiked. It’s twenty miles from Slickrock as the crow flies. He could have done it in a day. There are no major canyons between here and there. Any jackass with a compass could have found his way to my cattle.”

  “You didn’t have any cattle between here and there?”

  “Not then I didn’t.”

  “He wasn’t reported missing until two days after you saw him.”

  Sam watched Claire from under the shadow of his black hat. “The girlfriend didn’t know he was missing, or else she was giving him time to get away. After I interrupted his feast, Vail walked out to the highway and got a ride to Mexico.”

  “If he was a draft dodger, wouldn’t he have come back when amnesty was granted?”

  “If he was alive, he would have, but anything could have happened to him down there.”

  “Were you in Vietnam?” Claire asked. If he were at the younger end of her age guesstimate, he could have served in the war.

  “They wouldn’t take me,” Sam replied. “I was too old, but I would have enlisted if I could have. It was a chance to participate in a historical event.”

  “Do you come out here often?”

  “Not nearly as often as I used to. Interest in Vail has faded. Sometimes nowadays I just come out by myself.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “To keep the trail fresh and the memory alive,” Sam said. “Seen enough?”

  “Yes,” Claire replied.

  While they walked back to the truck in silence, Claire wondered why the sighting of someone thirty years ago had remained so important to him. Did he like the attention and the feeling that he had a place in history? Or could it be something more sinister? A persistent rumor among Vail scholars was that after Jonathan killed the cow, Sam shot him and concealed the body. A rancher would know how to use a rifle. Sam might have vision problems now, but that didn’t mean he’d had them thirty years ago. Today if a rancher found an animal he didn’t like on his property, the expression “shoot, shovel, and shut up” was used to describe the outcome. It was a phrase Claire hadn’t heard in 1966, but the impulse was probably the same. She rather liked Sam and didn’t want to think he was capable of murder, but thirty years ago he was another person. He might not have known it was a
human that was killing his cattle at a distance in the rain. But if he had killed Jonathan Vail or anyone else at that tree, why bring people out to look at the spot? The tree could be a decoy, Claire thought. The victim might have been killed and buried somewhere else on the ranch. It was a place a body could easily be buried and never be found until Sam wanted it to be, which wasn’t likely, unless he arranged for it to happen after his death. Anyone with an eye on the past knows that a villain’s place in history is assured.

  They reached the truck and drove back to the ranch house with Sam smoking and resting his arm on the open window and Claire feeling guilty about the thoughts she’d had. Even so, when they got back to the house and the dogs ran out to greet him, she asked him if they were hunting dogs.

  “They’re good for nothin’ now,” Sam replied, “but I used to hunt with ’em.”

  “What did you hunt?” she asked.

  “Cougar.”

  Mountain lions were hunted with dogs, which pursued them until they climbed a tree, then the hunters shot them down, a pastime Claire didn’t consider particularly sporting.

  “What does it say about me in your archives?” Sam asked, squinting as if Claire had gotten between him and the sun.

  “That you claimed you saw Jonathan Vail kill one of your cows two days before his disappearance was reported to the authorities.”

  “That’s the way it happened,” Sam replied. “Sorry to hear about your student. Next time you get out this way, you come back and see me.”

  “I’d like that,” Claire replied.

  ******

  She left Sam with his memories and his dogs and drove south on Route 261 through the Moki Dugway, where the road dropped fifteen hundred feet by curving down the cliff like a coiled snake. There were no guardrails, and the dropoffs were precipitous. Negotiating the curves took all of Claire’s attention, but right before she began the descent she looked out over the Valley of the Gods. The red rock spires of Monument Valley shimmered twenty miles away. The patterns of the cliffs in the near distance resembled a Navajo rug. Behind them, patches of river were visible in the gooseneck section of the San Juan. It was a landscape that inspired awe and doubt.

  Once she reached the bottom of the Dugway and a flat stretch of road, Claire inserted her brother’s apocalyptic sixties tape. She had often felt like a bystander in those days. She was a student at the University of Arizona and opposed to the war, but unlike Jonathan and Jennie, she had never participated in a demonstration. At the height of the conflict she’d spent six months in Europe, five of them traveling with her Italian boyfriend. She had been separated from the war more by reserve than distance, but she had always wondered if the demonstrators had experienced life more intensely than she did. There was no doubt the soldiers had. She knew men who had never recovered from the war, but she also knew men who had served in Vietnam, come back, and carried on normal lives as scholars, engineers, computer programmers. They might well have killed people, but she never heard them talk about it. It was impossible to tell from her brief encounter with Sam Ogelthorpe whether he was capable of murder. Her instinct said he wasn’t, but that was also what she wanted to believe. If Sam was guilty of anything, it could be the same things she herself felt guilty of—an overactive imagination, a desire to get close to defining events, a bystander’s regret.

  When Claire got to Bluff, she didn’t stop but kept on driving until the tape played out. By then she was in Farmington. She stopped and got a Lota Burger with green chile and seasoned fries, sat outside at a little table under a red umbrella, and thought about “The Eve of Destruction,” “Riders on the Storm,” and all the other turbulent music she had just heard. It was the music of close places, chaos, crowds, danger. Remote from the wide-open spaces of this area, but like them in the threat of danger. Jonathan Vail had chosen to retreat to a dangerous place. Tim Sansevera had followed. Curt Devereux and Ellen Frank were from different eras and, at the moment, in charge of different investigations. If there was a link between the two deaths, Claire wondered who would be the one to find it.

  Chapter Seven

  CLAIRE ALWAYS FOUND IT HARD TO RETURN FROM THE WILDERNESS to the city, from solitude to traffic congestion, from oceans of space to a tiny office, but the beauty of Zimmerman Library made the transition easier. The thick walls kept her feeling connected to the earth. The vigas and corbels in the high ceilings of the reading rooms seemed to stretch to infinity. When she opened the door to the center Monday morning, she felt glad to be back, although she wasn’t looking forward to the job that lay ahead of her. She had returned from afar with a message of death, and the messenger is always subject to blame. When she got to her office, Claire checked her voice mail and heard Avery Dunstan ask her to call him ASAP. With Avery everything was ASAP, so she set the message aside and made a list of people she had to call, trying to limit it to those who absolutely needed to know about Tim’s death, eliminating those she merely wanted to commiserate with. Ada Vail should be told. Jennie Dell had an interest and should also be notified. Tim’s mother, Vivian Sansevera, already knew, of course, but Claire wanted to express her sympathy. She thought about calling Vivian, but decided to write a note instead. Harrison, who was last on her list, was the person who would need to be notified first. Claire walked down the hallway to his office.

  He had just arrived and was hanging his hat and scarf on a rack as she knocked on the door. When he turned around to answer her summons, she noticed he hadn’t put his library face on yet. He looked disheveled and windblown. His features didn’t have their usual locked-jaw severity, reminding Claire that he had a life outside of the center—a wife, whom she had never met, and children—although he always gave the impression that he lived alone. He had trouble finding his voice, as if this were the first time he had spoken this morning.

  “Claire,” he said, clearing his throat. “How was Utah?” Someone else might have smiled at this point, but Harrison’s face settled into its typically remote expression.

  “I have bad news,” Claire said.

  “Oh?” Harrison scowled, remembering perhaps the last time Claire had returned to the center with bad news.

  “Tim Sansevera died in Sin Nombre Canyon.”

  “Good grief! How did that happen?”

  “It appears he fell from a ledge.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “Apparently. He spent the night in the canyon. When he didn’t show up to meet Curt and me, we hiked in and found the body near his campsite.”

  “Were you able to recover any of Jonathan Vail’s effects?”

  “No. We had directions to the cave, but when we got there, it was empty.”

  “How disappointing,” Harrison said.

  Considering that a promising graduate student had lost his life, “disappointing” struck Claire as the wrong choice of words.

  “So now all we have to verify Tim’s story is the journal?”

  “True.”

  “It’s still possible the journal is a hoax.”

  “Ada Vail believed the writing was authentic,” Claire reminded him, “and so did I.”

  “I’ll give Ada a call about this.”

  Claire made a mental note to cross that name off her list.

  “I think it’s past time to have the manuscript authenticated. I’ll call August Stevenson.” He was a handwriting expert who had retired to Santa Fe.

  “All right.”

  Harrison sat down at his desk. He collected folk art, and there was a papier-mâché skeleton of death pulling a cart on the shelf behind his head. Claire had the sensation that death was grinning at her over Harrison’s shoulder. He waved a long white hand and dismissed her.

  Claire turned to leave, noticing that the windows up near the ceiling of Harrison’s office were deep blue rectangles, as if the walls were framing the sky in a series of abstractions. In Utah she felt she could reach out and touch the sky. In Harrison’s office it seemed impossibly remote.

  ******

&
nbsp; When she got back to her own office, she crossed Ada Vail off her list. She was looking for Jennie Dell’s number when she sensed someone at her window and looked up to see Avery Dunstan standing there, although even when standing still he appeared to be in motion. He waved at Claire, then opened her door and let himself in.

  “Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner,” Claire said. “I just returned from Utah and I had to talk to Harrison.”

  Avery was so intent on what he had to say that her comments made no impression. He stood in front of her desk, cocked his head, and looked down at his nose.

  “I had to come over here to look something up. I wanted to tell you about a strange meeting I had with Tim Sansevera.”

  “When?”

  “Late Thursday, just before I went home.”

  “Avery, there’s something I . . .”

  Claire hesitated just long enough for Avery to catch his breath and rush on. “He was very insistent that we publish the journal word for word, and furious at Ada Vail for intervening. He wants his name on the book. Why is he so intense about this? Since we don’t even have a contract to publish the journal, it strikes me as premature to be discussing how we are going to edit it and whose name goes where.”

  It seemed insignificant to Claire as she explained to Avery what had happened.

  “That’s awful!” Avery shivered. “How old was he?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Obviously the journal was something he cared about very much, far beyond the usual graduate student obsession. You don’t suppose there is any possibility that…?”

  Claire, who was expecting Avery to suggest forgery, was startled when he said, “Tim is Jonathan Vail’s son.”

  Actually the idea had occurred to Claire. She saw a resemblance between them in appearance and in temperament, but she had dismissed the father/son connection as too far-fetched. “I have no reason to believe that,” she said.

  “He’s the right age, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anglo looks, Spanish surname. Could be his mother was Indian or Hispanic. He took the mother’s name, but his father was Vail. You’ve heard all the rumors, I’m sure.”