The Vanishing Point

by Judith Van GIeson

  “And you’re positive it was Jonathan?”

  “If it wasn’t him, then it was a deserter, but what the hell would a deserter be doing in southeastern Utah? Where would he have deserted from?”

  “What makes you think he was a deserter?”

  “He was wearin’ dog tags and a fatigue jacket.”

  “You didn’t tell me that before.”

  “Didn’t I? Well, I told Curt Devereux, and he made nothin’ of it. Just some old hippie, he thought. It couldn’t have been Jonathan ’cause he wasn’t reported missing till two days later.”

  “Why are you so convinced he was headed for Mexico?”

  “Where else would a deserter or a draft dodger go from here? It’s a whole lot closer than Canada. With a little bit of money to pave the way, a guy could live out his life comfortably in Mexico. They’ve got no objection to criminals or draft dodgers as long as they’ve got the money.”

  Nelson brought breakfast, and that ended the conversation. Claire wondered whether Sam had any more information to give her, but as soon as breakfast was over, he remarked that much as he enjoyed visiting with her, he had to be on his way.

  His departure left her wondering what to do with the rest of the day. It was still early. If she left now, she’d be home by early afternoon with no plans for the weekend. She considered stopping at the ranger station to see Ellen Frank, but how could she visit Ellen without admitting she’d been conducting her own investigation? Claire decided to drive back to Slickrock Canyon the long way through Blanding to avoid the tortuous climb up the Moki Dugway.

  It took an hour to get to Mile Marker 23. When she stopped at the gate to let herself in, Claire noticed that fresh tire tracks in the dust had obliterated animal tracks left over from the night. She drove down the bumpy road to the fork. Today there was a Subaru station wagon parked under the cedars where the van had been. An SUV was parked in the right fork. A couple of backpackers were standing next to it, adjusting their loads and preparing to hike into the canyon.

  Claire said hello, walked along the rim, and sat down at a place beside the stone cist where she could look out through an opening framed by a weathered gray beam. She never went hiking without her day pack containing trail mix and water, and now she took the pack off and drank from her water bottle. The cist could be a thousand years old, but, as far as she knew, it had never been established whether the structures on the canyon rims were used for storage or for lookouts. Food could be stored anywhere, but this was a spot from which the Anasazi could see their enemies approach. Lookout made more sense to Claire than storage. Glad to be alone in the silence of this place, she stared into the canyon, hoping to bring the mystery of the writer, the hero, and the student into focus.

  A bird rode an updraft above the far rim. It had the white underbelly and wide wings of a redtailed hawk. It tipped its wings as it circled, flapped once, and flew away. Claire remembered seeing a redtail drop out of the sky and pick up a snake in its talons. She knew a hawk could spot a snake beneath a tree at a distance from which a human could see only the tree.

  She imagined she was circling the sky herself, eliminating suspects, narrowing options, looking for a very particular prey, a prey who knew the duffel bag had reappeared in Sin Nombre Canyon and had a reason to covet its contents, a prey with access to a white van. There was one place left to look for the van, but Claire preferred to do it under cover of darkness, which gave her hours to fill. She passed the time by walking along the rim to the point where the sentinel rocks stood. She didn’t see anyone else on her hike. She knew it was possible to spend days here without seeing another person. Remote and isolated as the canyons were now, they had been even more so in 1966. Whatever had happened here between Jonathan and Jennie was known only to them or to whoever else they had confided in.

  Claire stayed on the rim thinking and observing, nibbling on her trail mix. When the shadows lengthened and the color of the sandstone deepened, she walked back to her truck. Both the vehicles she’d seen parked earlier were still in place, and there were no new hikers. Slickrock Canyon was hard to find. It took hours to hike in and out. The people who came here were likely to stay all day or camp deep in the canyon. The pattern was to arrive early and leave late. Yet when Ellen had flown over in the helicopter in mid-afternoon, the van was gone.

  Claire left Slickrock, drove to Blanding, and had dinner at a restaurant decorated with wagon wheels. By the time she finished eating, it was dark. She drove back through Shiprock and Farmington, picking up a nearly full moon in Cuba that lit her way east. She reached I-25 at Bernalillo. This was where she ordinarily turned south to Albuquerque, but tonight she headed north. The clock on her dashboard read eleven-thirty. The timing was right, since she hoped to arrive at her destination near midnight. It had been a long day. She had accomplished a great deal and put several hundred miles on her car. She ought to be tired by now, but she wasn’t. She should be nervous, but she didn’t feel anxiety, either. All she felt was anticipation and a keen sense of awareness that brightened the moonlight and deepened the shadows.

  When she reached the exit to Madrid, she turned south on Route 14, passing the New Mexico state pen, which was lit up like a landing pad. After the penitentiary, Claire didn’t see another car. The road climbed into the Ortiz Mountains, shimmering like a river of silver. As she approached Madrid, the sculptures on the edge of town danced in the moonlight. The baseball diamond was ghostly white. The slag heaps were lumps of dark shadow. The town was fast asleep. The tourists were gone, and there were parking places for the taking.

  Claire drove to the far side of town and parked beside a dirt road. She took a flashlight from her glove compartment, closed and locked her truck, and began walking toward Jennie Dell’s, hoping all the dogs in town wouldn’t hear her. Madrid was likely to be full of dogs, and it only took one sounding the alarm to set all of them howling. The brightness of the moon added substance to the shadows. The rustle of the wind gave them life. The backside of a cholla became a snakepit; a piñon, a bear; a low-lying juniper crept along like a coyote on the prowl. Potholes turned into sinkholes. Rocks became boulders. Claire was casting a long-legged shadow herself. She hoped no one was awake to notice and mistake her for a spirit or a thief.

  The first few houses she passed were quiet and dark. When she reached the converted schoolhouse, she heard a dog give a low growl. She stopped and stood perfectly still, wishing she could call in her shadow and squash it beneath her feet. The combination of her shadow and her body made her far too long and visible. The dog stood on the embankment next to the schoolhouse, looking large and mean. She had come from the wilderness to a place where domesticated dogs ruled the night. Stay calm, Claire said to herself. The dog stared at her for a long minute, then yawned and lay down on the ground. Claire started walking again.

  The dog barked and she turned to stone. She knew it was better not to turn her back on an alarmed dog, better to walk toward it with her arm extended, palm open in a gesture of offering and appeasement—an empty gesture at the moment, since she had nothing to offer. She wished she’d filled her pockets with kibble somewhere on her journey. Another option was to pick up a rock and pretend to throw it at the dog, an action that would intimidate a coward but aggravate a bully. Claire decided to try another quiet step forward. The dog barked again, sounding a warning to all its kin. A bark answered from the far side of town. Claire stopped. The dog stood still. It was possible that dogs in Madrid barked so often and so loud that no one even woke up, but she didn’t want to risk it. She bent over, fluffed out her hair, unzipped her windbreaker and filled it with air. Then she leapt up, flapping the windbreaker, shaking her hair, hissing low in her throat, pretending to be a creature from another universe—a skinwalker, a demon, an alien. The dog stared, jumped back, then put its tail between its legs and ran away.

  Claire continued down the road, turning wary as she approached Jennie Dell’s house. If Jennie happened to look out the window, she would see C
laire, but would she recognize her? The midnight prowl was so out of character, Claire wasn’t sure she would recognize herself. She came around a bend in the road and stopped in front of Jennie’s. The house that had appeared so bright and sunny during the day hid dark secrets at this time of night. Moonlight bleached the color out of the clapboards. The windows facing the street were blank.

  Jennie’s Honda was parked in the driveway, with a motorcycle parked right behind it. Claire walked up close and found what she’d expected to find—the bike had Missouri plates. She wondered whether the owner shared Jennie’s bed as well as her driveway. She’d seen tension between them, but that didn’t necessarily keep people from sharing a bond or a bed. Peering through the windows was dangerous, and she had come here on another mission—to discover what was in the shed. The doors to the shed, wide enough to admit a vehicle, opened from the sides and joined in the middle. They were locked shut with a padlock. Claire walked up and shook the lock gently, but it held. She circled the shed, hoping to find another way to see inside. The wall away from the house had weathered siding, and so did the rear. Neither had a window or a door. After she’d examined the far side and the rear, Claire braced herself against the wall and peered cautiously around the corner of the wall that faced Jennie’s house. The lip of a windowsill protruded from the far end of the wall near the shed door, but it faced a window in Jennie’s house. Claire reviewed the layout of the house, trying to remember what room was on this side. The kitchen, she thought, which was unlikely to be in use at this time of night. She took a cautious step toward the shed window.

  A spotlight mounted on the side of the house snapped on, activated by motion or a suspicious resident. The light widened and formed a pool where it landed on the ground beside the house. It didn’t reach as far as Claire. In fact, it made the place where she stood darker in contrast, but if the light woke someone in the house and that person came outside or looked beyond the beam of the spotlight, Claire was clearly visible. She thought about running, but knew that movement made a prey easier to see. She pressed herself against the wall of the shed, trying to be invisible. She wondered if she could have activated the motion detector from this distance, but then she saw what had set it off. Butterscotch stepped onto the front stoop, extended his front legs, stretched, and curled his tail.

  If the light could be turned on this easily, Claire didn’t think Jennie would pay much attention to it. Madrid was a place where pets became active at night. Still, Claire wanted the light off before she proceeded any further. The only way to do that was to put Butterscotch to sleep or lure him away from the stoop. Claire was relieved that the animal was a cat and not a dog; she knew cats better. She had a highpitched whistle that she used to call Nemesis. To her it sounded more like an insect or a bird than a human. Now she whistled to Butterscotch, who sat down, licked his paws, and ignored the summons. Claire didn’t dare use her speaking voice, which could be heard and recognized. She whistled again. The cat looked her way but didn’t deign to get off the step. Claire knew cats well enough to understand that to allow her safety to depend on getting one to obey a command was suicidal. It would be wiser to entrust her life to a coyote.

  She picked up a stone and tossed it into a clump of hollyhock leaves beside the shed. As she had hoped, the stone rustled the dry leaves and aroused the cat’s curiosity and hunting instincts. It leapt off the stoop, out of the range of the motion detector, and the light went off. Claire closed her eyes for a minute to let them readjust to the moon’s lesser light. When she opened them again, Butterscotch was sniffing at the hollyhocks. She slid along the side of the shed, bent over, and picked up the cat, fearing it might scratch or howl, but it snuggled and purred in her arms.

  “Good boy,” she whispered, transferring the cat to her left arm, so the right was free for the flashlight. She was beside the window now, and she quickly beamed the flashlight in. Light landed on a white wall, the side of a van. Claire guided it around the rear of the vehicle until it came to the license plate. NEW MEXICO, USA, the letters said. A hot-air balloon floated behind the numbers.

  Claire snapped the flashlight off and put the cat down. “Thanks, Butterscotch,” she whispered.

  She walked along the far side of the driveway, concealing herself as well as she could behind the Honda and the motorcycle. She believed that one of the people inside the house was the owner of the white van and that neither of them was a person she wanted to encounter unarmed at night. After she passed Jennie’s house, Claire turned around to give it a last look.

  The motorcycle and Honda were still in place in the driveway. The windows were dark, but suddenly a light in an upstairs room that might have been the bathroom came on, silhouetting the shape of a man. She recognized the combination of soft stomach and hard arms that was Lou Bastiann. He stood still for a minute, looking at himself in the mirror, perhaps, while his shadow seemed to reach across the yard to end at her feet. She knew the interior light would make the exterior appear so dark he wouldn’t be able to see her, but then he turned the light off, which put darkness on his side and moonlight on hers.

  Standing still turned her into a suspect. Running would make her easy prey. Claire sensed that her best option was to turn her back and slowly and deliberately walk away, hoping she wouldn’t be recognized if she was noticed. Her feet crunched the stones in the road. She didn’t hear anyone behind her, but she didn’t know for sure whether she had been followed until she reached her truck and turned around. The road was empty. If Lou had seen her, he had done nothing about it.

  Claire got in her truck and drove home through El Corazón del Ortiz Ranch, thinking about what she had discovered and the connection between Jennie and Lou. Either of them, or both of them, might have driven the van to Slickrock Canyon and gone looking for the duffel bag. Veterans Day was this week. Lou had said he would be at the memorial in Angel Fire and Jennie had confirmed it. Claire preferred to question him without Jennie around, and she hoped she could do it at the service. As for Jennie, Claire thought the truth about her was less likely to be found in conversation than between the pages of a book.

  Chapter Sixteen

  IT WAS TWO O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING WHEN CLAIRE GOT HOME. She picked up her cat, gave him a hug, and checked her messages. There was only one, and it was from John Harlan. “I found your book,” he said. “It’s the Out of the Blue that was published in 1963.” “Yeah!” Claire said to herself. She was too excited to go to sleep right away, so she took a hot bath scented with lavender oil. She lay in the tub and calculated how old Jennie Dell would have been in 1963. The fullness of her face, which tended to plump out fine lines, and the retro clothes and hairdo made her age hard to guesstimate. Jonathan was twenty-three when he disappeared in 1966. Claire figured Jennie’s age to be within five years of Jonathan’s. If she were five years younger, she would have been fifteen in 1963. Five years older would have made her twenty-five. Young to have published a novel, in any case. Sitting in the steaming water and doing mental arithmetic put Claire to sleep, which was where she wanted to be, but she would rather have awakened in a warm bed than a tub full of cold water. She dried herself off and went to bed, but had trouble falling asleep again. She was so close to solving the mystery that, unless the solution came to her in a dream state, time spent sleeping seemed a waste, yet she needed sleep so she would be alert when she read Jennie’s book. She dropped off around four and woke up again at eight. For Claire, her fifties had become an adventure in sleeplessness. She knew exactly how many hours it took to get by. Eight was an unobtainable fantasy. She could function on six. Five was marginal. Four was pushing her limits. Less than that became dangerous. She hated to drive or think on less than four hours’ sleep.

  When she woke up, she looked out the window and saw that it was another beautiful fall day. She let Nemesis out, did her more militant tai chi exercises—felling the tree, repulsing the monkey, and embracing the tiger. Then she made a cup of coffee and called John Harlan. It was nine o’c
lock on Sunday morning, but he was already at the store.

  “I’ve been wonderin’ when you would call,” he said.

  “I got home at two this morning. I expected you to be asleep at that hour.”

  “What were you doing coming home at two in the morning?”

  “It’s a long story. Are you sure the book is Jennie’s? As I recall, the Out of the Blue from 1963 was written by someone named Jess Moran.” With that name Claire had no idea whether the author was male or female.

  “The author’s name is Jess Moran, but the photo on the back flap is of a young, blond hippie. It fits all the descriptions I’ve ever seen of Jennie Dell.”

  “Did you read it?”

  “Yup. It’s a coming-of-age novel set in southern California and Yosemite in the late fifties and early sixties.”

  “Was it any good?”

  “Let’s talk about it after you’ve had a chance to read it.”

  “How did you find it?”

  “A dealer in California had a copy. I think the reason you and I never heard about it was that it was set mostly in Southern California. It was hard to consider Southern California as the Southwest even in 1963.”

  “Southern California is Southern California.”

  “Right,” John agreed. “Shall I bring the book over?”

  “I’ll pick it up,” Claire said, although she didn’t feel like driving.

  “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we meet halfway, at Marie’s for coffee?”

  “It’s a deal,” Claire said.

  Before she left, she dressed in jeans, combed her hair, and put on some makeup. There were dark half circles, the flip side of crescent moons, beneath her eyes. Her neck had a crepey texture, making her think the effort Jennie put into looking young could be worth it.

  John was sitting at a table at Marie’s when Claire arrived. He stood up, kissed her cheek, and handed her the Out of the Blue by Jess Moran, which Claire immediately opened to the author’s picture on the back flap. It was Jennie. The young Jennie. A thin Jennie whose face was defined not by the fullness of time but by its bone structure and expression. Her eyes were bold, and her expression was daring. Jennie’s thick blond hair was parted in the middle, the same way she wore it today. She had a choker around her neck and wore long beaded earrings.