Slickrock Paradox

by Stephen Legault

  “It’s too early to tell, Mr. Pearson. We have a forensic anthropology team on site now. They’ve been on the ground for maybe . . .” Taylor checked his watch. “Two hours now.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s 7:00 PM.”

  “Have you exhumed the skeleton?”

  “Our team is in the process of doing that right now.”

  “Is it all in one piece?”

  “We’re not able to say.”

  Silas swallowed and felt the bitter coarseness in this throat. He opened his eyes and looked around for a glass of water. There was a pitcher on the small wheeled bedside stand and he reached for it, but his right arm had an intravenous tube connected to it. Taylor stepped forward and handed him a cup. Silas drank from the articulated straw. The water tasted better than anything he had ever tasted in his life. When Silas was done Taylor put the cup back on the table.

  “What do you mean, you’re not able to say?” Silas asked when he had swallowed again.

  “Let’s go over a few of the details of how you found this body, Mr. Pearson,” said Taylor.

  “I told you everything when we were in Courthouse Wash,” Silas said, the annoyance in his voice obvious.

  “Let’s go over it again.”

  Silas exhaled loudly. “There’s nothing more to tell. I was looking for Penny. I wanted to search the upper part of Sleepy Hollow. I hadn’t been there in three years. I wasn’t paying attention to the weather. There was a storm over the Windows section of the park and I got caught in the flash flood. I must have hit my head, maybe on that big cottonwood log.” Silas reached up and felt the bandage that was coiled like a white snake around his head.

  “When you came to, what did you see?”

  “I’ve told you all this. I saw what I thought was a branch of a cottonwood sticking out of the mud. But it wasn’t. It was bones. Looked like an arm to me.”

  “Did you disturb it?”

  “I didn’t touch it.”

  “How was it that you happened to be in Courthouse Wash when a flash flood uncovered these remains, Mr. Pearson?”

  Silas looked from Taylor to Nielsen. He was dumbfounded. “You think I could predict a flash flood, Agent Taylor?”

  “It seems very . . . interesting that you would happen to be in that location when the remains were unearthed.”

  Silas shook his head. It ached. He reached up and touched the bandages again, his eyes pressed shut. “Mr. Taylor, I don’t know what they teach you in Quantico, but maybe your colleague could educate you on the random nature of flash floods in the canyon country in the summer.”

  “How long have you been looking for your wife, Mr. Pearson?”

  “Since she went missing. Three years, five months, six days . . .”

  “Since five days after she went missing,” interrupted Taylor.

  “She was backpacking. It wasn’t unusual for Penelope to spend a few extra days on the trail,” said Silas. His voice betrayed the defensiveness that haunted him.

  “Mr. Pearson,” said Taylor, “why was your wife backpacking alone?”

  “We’ve been through this a hundred times,” Silas replied wearily.

  “Let’s do it again.”

  “She was a very experienced backpacker. She didn’t always go alone, but she liked being in the desert and the canyons that way. She sort of scorned other people when she was in the backcountry.”

  “You never went with her?”

  “Once or twice. But it wasn’t my thing.”

  “But now it is?”

  “Now it’s different. I’m not out to appreciate nature. I’ve been trying to find my wife.”

  “You’ve told us you think she was looking for something when she was hiking. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

  “I have no idea, Agent Taylor. I’ve told you before. Penelope often went hiking in places that were threatened with some kind of development: mining, logging, a hydro development. She would document what she found and use it to fight whatever threat there was.”

  “But you don’t know what your wife was looking for when she went missing?” Silas shook his head. Taylor continued, “So here we are, the middle of August, and you just happen to be hiking in a canyon where a body has been buried and somehow, miraculously, there is a flood that churns up enough of the canyon floor to expose it?”

  Silas looked from one agent to the next. “Agent Taylor, am I a suspect in some sort of crime?”

  “So far there is no evidence of a crime.”

  “You won’t tell me if these . . . remains . . . are those of my wife?”

  “Not won’t : can’t. We won’t know ourselves until our team recovers the body and has time to examine it in detail.”

  “You know.” Silas pushed himself up onto an elbow so he could see Agent Taylor better. “When Penelope disappeared I had to beg local law enforcement to get involved in finding her. People said . . . they said that Penelope had likely just left me. Would turn up in Maine. In France. When you got involved—the FBI—the first thing you did was investigate me. At some point in all of this, I’d like somebody to take the disappearance of my wife seriously without accusing me of being involved.”

  Taylor pushed his hands further into his pockets. “When a person is murdered by an intimate, a husband, a boyfriend, a brother, and that person is buried, there is sometimes a deep psychological need for the killer to lead authorities to the body. It brings them closure, even satisfaction.”

  “They teach you that at bullshit at Quantico?” asked Silas, laying back down and closing his eyes.

  “You want us to help you find your wife. For most of the four years I’ve been in Monticello this file has been open on my desk. Every time you and I talk, Mr. Pearson, I come away feeling that while you say you want us to help you find Ms. de Silva, all you do is throw up roadblocks. Every lead we chase down brings us to a dead-end. Every interview we conduct circles back to where we started from. Every theory of the crime we construct that doesn’t sound like something from a movie leaves us with only one conclusion.”

  “And what is that?”

  “One third of all women murdered in the United States are killed by their husbands.” A long moment passed and then Taylor spoke again. “Like I said, we don’t have an ID on the body in Courthouse Wash.”

  The nurse came back at that moment and checked Silas’s vitals. “Let’s let him get some rest,” she said.

  “Get some sleep,” said Taylor, pulling his hands from his pockets and turning to leave.

  “It’s Penelope,” said Silas, his eyes pressed shut, tears forming at their edges. “I don’t know why she was there, or what happened to her. She was my wife. I loved her. Maybe I didn’t give her everything she needed . . . but I would never have . . .” Silas’s voice trailed off.

  Taylor suppressed the urge to say “That’s what they all say.” Instead he said, “We’ll call you when we know the ID of the remains.” He walked out of the room, Agent Nielsen close behind him. The nurse finished her work, touched Silas’s arm gently and left as well, leaving him in the darkness of the private room.

  SILAS WAS RELEASED FROM MOAB Regional Hospital the following day at noon. The doctor told him that he was in remarkably good shape for a man who had gone through what he had. He stood up from the wheelchair at the door to the hospital, facing the glare of the midday sun with his eyes closed. The temperature hovered around 100 degrees. Using the cane he’d rented from the hospital dispensary, he took a few tentative steps on his sprained ankle, then set off toward 5th Street West.

  He guessed the walk would take him twenty minutes, but with his ankle in a tensor bandage and his head still aching from his concussion, it took him nearly an hour to walk to Kane Creek Boulevard and the small two-cabin bed and breakfast that backed up against the sudden cliffs of the Moab Rim. It was where his wife often stayed on her many trips to Moab. He slipped through the gate of the residence and hobbled down the path that led to the rear of the ma
in house.

  The central adobe structure was two stories tall with thick roof beams supporting an elegant, traditional design. The exterior was painted a rosy pink, blending at sunrise and sunset with the hue of the salmon-colored cliffs. The neat, rectangular windows were framed with heavy wood, and baskets of flowers hung from the trusses that supported the veranda. The garden path was lined with Parry’s agave, fragrant verbena and lush thickets of purple autumn sage. He felt his legs weakening as he made his way down the perfumed walkway.

  Behind the main building were two small adobe replicas that served as the guest houses. He reached the door of the first one and bent to retrieve the key he knew was hidden under the stone next to the entrance. He unlocked the door.

  It hadn’t occurred to him that the room might be rented, and when he saw a suitcase on the bench at the foot of the four poster bed and several sundresses in the open closet, he hesitated. But the space soon compelled him inside, the memory of Penelope drawing him forward like a moth to the flame.

  “Hello?” he called out.

  There was no reply. The room was empty. He stepped in and closed the door behind him. It was like stepping into a dream.

  “WHY DON’T YOU come here more often?” Penelope asked. She was lying on the four-poster bed. The windows were open and a breeze blew through the room, ruffling the gauzy canopy so that it looked like undulating waves on the ocean.

  He was lying next to her. He rolled over and put an arm behind his head. “I don’t know. It’s a long way?”

  She laughed. She had the sort of laugh that song birds envied. “It’s not that far. Seven hours. Six, the way you drive . . .” She rolled over and put her hand on his naked chest. Her fingers played with the patch of graying hair.

  “The university, it’s busy. There’s this push on for publications . . .” She kissed his face and he stopped.

  “I know how busy you are, Silas. I know. Your work is important.”

  “It’s really important that I focus on publishing now.”

  “I know. All I’m saying is . . . I love it here. And I wish you could come here more often. That’s all.”

  “I’ll try,” he said, smiling sadly.

  HE PRESSED HIS back against the door behind him. That had been more than a year before she vanished. It was the last time he’d been with her in Moab.

  Silas went to the bed and sat down, his thoughts far beyond the violation he was committing. The room had been made up that morning and the elegant, patterned bedspread was pulled taught. He fell backwards onto the spread and closed his eyes. It was as if she had just been here. He reached up and pressed his knuckles into his eyes. They still burned from the scouring they had received two days ago in Sleepy Hollow. Dresses hung in the closet and there was lipstick on the counter by the sink; in the miasma of his daydream it felt as if Penelope would walk through the door any moment. The night before she left on that final hike, she had stayed in this very room—as she had so many nights while visiting Moab. And now, after so long, she had led him to her corpse. He felt tears again; the warmth of relief. He lay down on the bed and fell asleep.

  He jolted upright at a knock on the door, his head feeling as if it had been struck. He tried to speak. “Who’s in there?” barked a rough voice at the door.

  He opened his mouth to reply, but the door flew open and a man with a pistol stood there, backlit by the searing afternoon sun.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” the man said, lowering the pistol. “What the fuck are you doing here, Silas?” It was Kenneth James Hollyoak, Silas’s only true friend in Grand County.

  THEY SAT UNDER a pergola adorned with honeysuckle that scented the air. Silas rested his hand on his cane and with his other, reached for a glass of ice tea. The ice clinked as he raised the glass to his lips. He drank half of it. As he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he looked at Ken sitting across from him. His friend was dressed in light cotton pants and a matching shirt that hung open, exposing his bulbous belly and the scar that traced the length of his sternum.

  “Trish is in the house, fixing you something to eat,” said Ken. Silas silently reached for the glass again. Ken did the same. “We were heading to the hospital, but they said that you had been discharged. We were going to drive you home. What the hell are you doing walking a mile on that goddamned cane, and in this heat?”

  “They found her, you know.”

  “You don’t know that, Silas. Jesus Christ. Listen, it’s all over the news. I heard it on KZMU this morning. It’s even in the Salt Lake papers but you don’t know that it’s Penny. It could be anybody—”

  “It’s her. I know it.”

  “How do you know it?”

  Silas regarded the man a moment. “Ken, you’re going to think I’m—”

  “You’re what?” Ken interrupted. “What? Crazy? Jesus Christ, Silas, I know you’re crazy. You gave up a tenured position at Northern Arizona University so you could open a bookstore four blocks off the beaten path in Moab. That’s crazy. You’ve been walking around in the desert, staring into the sun, willing Penny to materialize from behind a juniper, for how long?”

  “Three—”

  “Three and a half years.” Ken scratched the scar on his chest. “I don’t think you’re crazy, Silas. I know you are.”

  “I had a dream.”

  “You and Martin Luther King, Silas.”

  “No, I had a dream, Ken. She was in it.”

  Trish emerged from the house. She was twenty years Ken’s junior, in her early fifties and beautiful in an understated, eloquent way. She carried a plate of sandwiches and a jug of ice tea on a silver tray that she placed on the table between her husband and Silas. “Would you like anything else, Si?” she asked. Besides Penelope, she was the only person who ever called him that.

  “No thanks, Trish, this is fine.”

  “Sit down, darling,” said Ken. “Silas was just about to recite Martin Luther King.” She sat down and smiled at him.

  “I had a dream,” Silas began, reaching for the jug to pour them all ice tea. As he began to speak, his hands started to shake and he stopped pouring. Looking down at the tea, he described the dream.

  Trish reached out and put a hand on Silas’s. She took the glass from him and put it on the table. “Sleepy Hollow . . . ?”

  “Is in Arches. Courthouse Wash. That’s why you went there,” said Ken.

  “Yes. I’d been there twice before. You know my pattern. Every place gets two passes. It was one of the first places I looked.”

  “Because of Abbey,” said Ken.

  “Yes, because of Abbey. Every place he wrote about I go out and search. I have no idea what Penny was up to when she went for that hike, so searching Edward Abbey’s haunts is the best I can do. She was obsessed with him. I went back to Sleepy Hollow. I thought she was telling me something. Leading me to her. It turns out she was right.”

  “It was a goddamned dream, Silas. Unconscious mind intruding on the conscious world. Nothing more. Your wife was not trying to lead you to her body—”

  “But I found her!” he said, pressing his fists into his legs.

  “You found something, a body for sure. And nearly got your fool self killed in the process.”

  “Ken,” said Trish, touching Silas’s hand again.

  “What did the sheriff say?” asked Ken.

  “I haven’t talked much to him. Taylor showed up from the FBI. They and the sheriff are sharing proprietary jurisdiction, but the feds are playing the state line card.”

  “Have they told you anything?”

  “No. They said that they would contact me when they have an ID on the . . . on the remains.”

  “Could very well be a hiker gone missing. Could have been from fifty years ago by what the news says.”

  “Could be. So why the dream?”

  “Because you are crazy,” said Ken, laughing.

  “Ken,” said Trish, scowling at him.

  “He is!” said Ken, and Trish slapped him
on the arm playfully.

  “If she wasn’t leading me to her own grave, then why lead me there? Why there, and the flood, and the body? It’s too much to just be a coincidence.”

  Trish picked up the tray of sandwiches and passed it to Silas, who took one and passed the tray to Ken. “So,” Silas said after a bite, “who’s staying in the room?”

  “Nobody you know,” said Ken, “and you are damned lucky the young lady wasn’t in her birthday suit when you let yourself in. I’m going to have to find a better hiding place for that goddammed key, I guess,” he said. Crumbs fell onto his bare chest as he bit into his sandwich.

  “She’s a nice young woman from Boston,” said Trish. “You should stay for dinner. I think she’ll be back.”

  “Thanks, Trish, but I don’t think so. Not today.” Silas took two more bites of his sandwich and made an appreciative sound. He asked, “Did Penny ever have a man here with her?”

  “Jesus, Silas, not this again.”

  “Did she?”

  “No. For God’s sake, no. Penny never had a man here.”

  “It’s just that, you know, people talk.”

  “Who, Jacob Isaiah?”

  “Him and others.”

  “Jacob Isaiah is a snake. He’s the king of snakes. I should take a goddamned shovel and cut off his fucking head,” said Ken.

  “Ken, darling . . .”

  “I know I know,” he said, tapping the scar on his chest. “But it just makes me so goddamned angry, people talking like that about Penny, and getting poor Silas here all worked up.”

  “She loved you, Si,” Trish said. “She loved you. And she loved the canyons. And she’s gone. You’re going to have to let go.”

  “Not yet,” said Silas.

  Ken laughed and sat up in his chair, “You didn’t think it would be as easy as that, did you darling?”

  “What do you need, Si?” asked Trish.

  “I need a ride. I need to get my car. I want to go home.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  “YOU WANT ME to come over and stay the night?” asked Ken as they passed the entrance to Arches. “We could have a bachelor party. I might even be convinced to drink one of those Canadian beers you keep in the fridge.”