Slickrock Paradox

by Stephen Legault

  “I’d say late in the fall, over three and a half years ago, then again early the next spring.”

  “You had already moved here?”

  “You have that in your files.”

  “Would you answer the question?”

  “I had just moved from Flag to the Castle Valley when I visited Courthouse Wash the second time. I had bought my place there, had set up my search. The local S&R folks and the Park Service gave me a grid of where they had looked. Courthouse was on that sheet, but I went back to look for myself.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “I wouldn’t be sitting here if I did, would I?”

  “That’s a no?”

  “No, I didn’t find anything. The first or the second time around.”

  “What made you look again two days ago? Why go back if you’d searched it twice already?”

  Silas looked down at his cup of coffee. “I had a hunch.”

  “A hunch?” said Taylor.

  “Yes, slang for an intuitive feeling . . .”

  “I’m familiar with the word, Doctor, but what I don’t get is how a hunch led you into this location at this time. I mean, the middle of August seems like a hell of a time to go setting off into a canyon in the middle of Arches.”

  “When you have nothing else to go on, Agent Taylor, you use what you have. I follow my intuition.”

  “And your intuition led you to Sleepy Hollow?”

  “It did.”

  “The young people who found you, they said you kept saying that you had found her.”

  “That’s right. I thought I had found Penelope.”

  “You said her but all there was visible of the skeleton were the bones of the arm. How did you know it was a woman?”

  Silas looked from Taylor to the sheriff and back. “Are you serious?” Neither man said a thing. “I just told you I believed I’d found my dead wife. I thought the . . . my hunch had been right. I was looking for my wife: a woman. What kind of asinine question is that?”

  Agent Taylor ignored Silas’s protest. “You said there was a flash flood, that you got caught in it. Has this ever happened to you before?”

  “Yes, once. In Dark Horse Canyon, but it was minor, a foot or two of water. Nothing like this.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “You’re making me feel otherwise.”

  “What the agent is getting at, Silas, is that surviving that big a flood is, well, rare,” said Willis. Silas felt anything but lucky, but he didn’t say anything.

  “You say you blacked out?” asked the FBI man.

  “I did black out. I got hit on the head. I have the lump to prove it,” said Silas, pulling aside some of his wiry hair.

  “When you came to, you were next to the cottonwood.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you remember it being there when you went up Sleepy Hollow?”

  “I’m pretty sure it was. I remember checking it, but it moved in the flood. It was up against the canyon wall when I went in, and when I came to, it was in the middle of Courthouse Wash. It’s a big log, and there aren’t that many of them just lying around.”

  “Do you think that the remains you found were under the cottonwood?”

  “When I found them they were off to the side. A few feet away.”

  “What about when the cottonwood was along the canyon wall, as you describe it?”

  “I have no way of knowing.”

  “You don’t remember ever having seen anything . . . peculiar there in the past?”

  Silas looked at the FBI agent. “I think this conversation is done.” He pushed himself up.

  “I have a few more questions, Mr. Pearson.”

  “Doctor Pearson, and no, you don’t. You’re trying to tie me to this somehow, and that’s the most insulting thing I think I’ve ever experienced from the FBI. Let me tell you, having dealt with you and other agents for the last three and a half years, that’s saying something.”

  “We’re just trying to eliminate you as a suspect, is all,” said the sheriff. “Why don’t you sit down and we can finish up.”

  “Thanks, Dex, but no, I don’t think I will. I believed I’d found my wife, and now I have to accept that all I found was some random stranger, and someone who got murdered on top of that. My ankle is killing me, my head is pounding and my ears are ringing. I keep feeling as if I’ve been put through the tumble cycle in an old-fashioned washing machine. I’m going home. I’m going to sleep and I’m going to try and forget all about what I found in Courthouse Wash. If you want to interview me again, I’ll bring a lawyer. Otherwise, I’m washing my hands of this. Good luck, Agent Taylor,” Silas said, looking at the man, who was still seated. “I hope you do a better job finding this young lady’s killer than you have done finding my wife.”

  Silas walked to the door and tried to turn the handle but it was locked. He looked at Willis. “Dex, would you open the goddamned door, please?”

  Willis walked over and knocked. One of his deputies opened the door. Silas walked past the maze of cubicles that amounted to the Grand County Sheriff’s Office and into the growing heat of the day.

  SILAS SAT IN THE OUTBACK until the heat became oppressive. He decided to go to his Red Rock Canyon bookstore instead of home. He drove through the stifling streets and soon arrived at the store. Inside, he dumped the mail and the newspapers on the desk and sat down at his computer. He wanted to look at the various news sites for anything on Penelope.

  A story in the Salt Lake Tribune caught his eye: “Body found in Arches NP by hiker.” He’d grown so accustomed to scanning for such a story that his eye was naturally attracted to it. But the bones weren’t Penelope’s and he was the “hiker” noted in the story. He scanned the article and felt a wave of relief that he hadn’t been named. The story noted that the FBI had been called in and that the circumstances surrounding the death were suspicious, but that a murder investigation hadn’t officially begun yet.

  Yet. Silas knew that within a matter of hours, or maybe days, the FBI would announce that the young Native American woman had been murdered. He read the rest of the story and considered for a moment how he would feel if it was Penelope’s body he was reading about. He felt a strange kinship with whoever had lost this young woman only to have her turn up murdered. When the FBI identified the skeletal remains, they would send someone to find this young woman’s husband, or her parents, or maybe her siblings, and inform them of her murder.

  Silas sat at his desk and considered the case for a moment. The body had been hidden—likely buried—under the cottonwood, for a long time, Dr. Rain had said. Any trail leading to a killer would have grown cold in the intervening years.

  Silas shook his head and continued his online search. There were more stories about the corpse in Courthouse Wash, but nothing else that would lead him to his wife. He shut his computer down. The ring of the telephone at his elbow startled him and he waited for a second ring to compose himself.

  “Hello?” he said into the receiver, forgetting to add the name of his shop.

  “Silas, that you? It’s Ken.”

  “Hi Ken.”

  “I’ve been trying to call you all morning!”

  “I think my cell phone is dead. Literally dead. Got a little water and sand in it.”

  “Of course. Did they ID the . . . the remains?”

  “It’s not Penny,” said Silas. “I was wrong.”

  “Who is it?”

  “They don’t know.”

  “Then how do they know it’s not Penny?” Silas explained to Ken what Rain had told him that morning. “What are you going to do?”

  “Go home. Get some sleep.”

  “No, I mean about the remains?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You found it.”

  “Ken, this isn’t a kid’s game. It’s not finders keepers. The FBI will handle it.”

  “Like they handled Penny,” said Ken, echoing Silas’s own doubt-filled sentim
ents.

  “It’s not my problem. I’m going to go home, sleep, rest my ankle, and as soon as I can, I’m going to start looking again.”

  “Silas, don’t you think you found that young woman for a reason?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Your dream.”

  “You said so yourself, Ken: a product of an over-active imagination. Too much sun. Not enough water. Delusions. There’s nothing more to it. So don’t go all Sedona on me. I got enough of that when I was at NAU. I don’t need it from you.”

  “Easy, Silas, easy. I’m just saying that you were all convinced that Penny had led you to her . . . to her body yesterday. You had me convinced—and I think New-Age hippies should be used for cord wood in the winter!” He laughed at his own joke. “But you had me convinced. And now, you’re just going to ignore it.”

  Silas was shaking his head. “Ken, it was a dream. Nothing more. I dreamt about my wife, because—”

  “. . . you miss her, amigo. Listen, do you want to come by the place? We’ll fix you a big dinner tonight. You can drink that Canadian beer you like. There’s nobody in the second cabin. You could stay the night. We’ll sit out and howl at the moon. What do you say?”

  “I’d like to, Ken, but not tonight, some other time. I need to go home and—”

  “And what? Stare at your maps?”

  “Maybe that’s what I need to do. Right now I just want to sleep. I’ll be fine. Kiss Trish for me and tell her some other night.”

  “¡Hasta luego!” said Ken.

  “See you soon,” said Silas as he hung up the phone.

  HE TOOK THE long way home. He wasn’t ready to face the emptiness of his house, but he didn’t want company either. Silas drove his Outback south on Highway 191 and took Spanish Valley Road on his way into the La Sal Mountains. He wove along the dirt roads until he’d left the inferno of the canyon country behind and had passed into the cool sub-alpine area. Here and there the tangled forest opened up and sweeping meadows stretched across the rolling earth like a soft green sheet across a lumpy mattress. Cows dotted the hillsides, grazing their way down to the quick.

  At Miner’s Basin, in a grove of trembling aspen, Silas killed the engine and got out of the car, stretching his back. He took his cane and walked a few yards from the car to stand among the quivering trees.

  The La Sal Mountains were omnipresent in the Canyonlands; one of four great laccolithic mountain ranges that ringed the region. From forty miles distant, in Moab, or from a hundred miles away, from Island in the Sky in Canyonlands National Park, their triangular facades appeared dark and barren. But venture up out of the Spanish Valley and up to eleven thousand feet above sea level and you exchanged the oppressive heat of summer for an eternal spring or perpetual autumn.

  The temperature was a modest eighty degrees as Silas walked slowly along the cattle-worn path through the aspens. A breeze gently ruffled his hair, and Silas wondered why anybody in their right mind—and here he included himself, first and foremost—would spend a single day in the scorched earth of the canyons during the summer. He walked for half a mile, leaning heavily on the cane for support, until his ankle ached. He sat down on the leaf litter at the edge of a clearing below Mount Waas. He leaned back on the stout trunk of an aspen and closed his eyes.

  Penelope had taken him here once, some years ago—five, six? He couldn’t recall now. She had brought along a copy of Desert Solitaire and read to him the chapter called “Tukuhnikivats, The Island in the Desert” about a hiking trip Abbey had taken in the La Sal Mountains to escape the heat of Arches during one of his seasons in the park. At the time Silas had criticized the writing, saying that anybody who talked about pissing, eating, and drinking as much as Abbey could not be taken seriously as a writer. Upon reflection, Silas now thought it was one of Abbey’s finer moments in Solitaire, reminiscent of one of his own favorite bits of prose, The Sound of Mountain Water by Wallace Stegner. He wished Penelope was with him to hear his confession. He drifted off to sleep listening to the wind’s harmony in the branches above.

  When he woke it was late in the afternoon, and he was hungry. Silas rose stiffly, his ankle sore and swollen, and limped back to his car. From the trunk he took a bag of granola bars but when he looked at them he felt he would rather wait. He started the motor and began backing down the narrow lane.

  With a shock he found himself suddenly hitting the brakes, stalling the engine, to avoid a collision with another vehicle. Not five feet from his rear bumper, partially obscured by a tangle of alder along the side of the track, was a gunmetal-blue Jeep Wrangler. He started the Outback again and revved his engine, but the Jeep didn’t move. He turned the ignition off and opened his door.

  “Hey there,” he called. There was no reply. “Hello?” Nothing. Silas walked to the end of his wagon and looked at the Jeep. There was nobody behind the wheel. He went to the driver’s door and looked into the cab. An open can of beer sat in the holder next to the gearstick and there was a six-pack minus two on the passenger-side floor. In the back were several oversized duffle bags and two large water-tight surplus ammo cans, the sort that rafters used to keep their food and belongings dry when running the Colorado River.

  “Help you?” came a voice from behind him. Silas turned, his ankle protesting, and saw a man not twenty feet away, partially concealed by the foliage.

  “This your Jeep?”

  “Yup.”

  “Mind moving it?”

  The man approached. He was short and powerfully built, thick across the shoulders and broad in the arms. He wore a heavy beard and his hair fell in long curls, nearly touching his shoulders in the back. “Don’t mind at all. Just had to take a piss.”

  “What did you do, walk all the way back to Moab to do it?”

  The man laughed, showing a set of bright white teeth. Silas guessed that he was thirty at the oldest. “Just went off in the woods. Got distracted by a bird.”

  “That’s what you call it, eh?”

  “You Canadian?”

  Silas’s speech had betrayed him again. “Yes.”

  “I’m Josh,” said the man, thrusting out a heavy hand. Silas regarded it momentarily and then shook it.

  “Silas Pearson.”

  “Good to meet you. Want a beer?”

  “I’m actually just heading home.”

  “Whatcha doing up here?”

  “Just getting out of the heat.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean, man. Hot as fucking hell down there. Nice to be up in the trees. I got a place up here, just over by Oowah Lake. Don’t tell the fucking rangers on me.”

  “You live up here?”

  “Sometimes. In the summer. Winter I head down into the canyons.”

  “Sounds nice,” Silas said. “I won’t tell. Do you mind?” he said, pointing to the Jeep.

  “Sorry, fuck. Let me move my machine.” Josh jumped behind the wheel. Silas noticed a heavy revolver tucked in the waistband of the man’s khakis. America, he mused, home of the heavily armed. Josh gunned the engine and deftly navigated the trail in reverse. Silas followed at a more cautious pace. When he reached the T-junction a few hundred yards back, Josh had pulled over and cut his engine.

  “Come up for a visit sometime?” he said when Silas leaned out his window.

  “How will I find you?”

  “I’ll find you,” Josh said with a wolfish grin.

  Silas turned around in the narrow track and drove down the trail. He glanced in his rearview mirror and saw the young man leaning on the front of the Jeep. Silas hoped he wouldn’t see him again.

  THERE WAS A message on his machine when he arrived home. He dialed the number to play back the message and stood in the dark by the big picture windows, the last light draining from the Adobe Mesa.

  “Dr. Pearson, this is Kathleen Rain calling. I wonder if you’d be so good as to give me a call. I’m heading back to Salt Lake in the morning and I have a few questions I’d like to clear up before I go. No la
wyer necessary. Okay, give me a call. Here’s my cell . . .”

  Silas thought he detected a hint of a laugh when she made the crack about the lawyer. Obviously the team had debriefed his interview that morning. He jotted the note on a slip of paper by the fridge and took out a frozen dinner and a can of beer. Back in the living room with the food, he picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Rain,” she answered on the third ring.

  “Not much here in the desert,” he said, deadpan.

  “Dr. Pearson?”

  “Returning your call.”

  “Thanks. I hope you don’t mind. I’ve got a few questions I could use your help with.”

  “I don’t mind. That’s why I called back.”

  “I know this might sound foolish, but I’m trying to reconstruct the original grave and I wonder if you could help me with something.”

  “I can try.”

  “How much water do you think came down Sleepy Hollow when you were caught in the flood?”

  He laughed.

  “You may think it’s a stupid question, but I’m trying to estimate how deeply she was buried, and how far the grave site might have moved.”

  “I can’t see why that makes a difference.”

  “It might help us estimate how long ago she was buried.”

  “You mean, if she was buried right after she was killed, or if she was moved there sometime later?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, Sleepy Hollow is about thirty or forty feet wide at the most, so you’ve got to assume a wall of water, what . . . ?” He paused to think.

  “One hundred and fifty, maybe sixty, feet square?”

  “Sure. Of course. But it wasn’t square. It went on for some time. Certainly five or six minutes’ worth of water. Can you do that in your head?”

  “No, I’m an anthropologist, not a hydrologist. I’ll touch base with the USGS. But that helps.”

  “You said you had a couple of questions.”

  “Yes. What time of day did this all take place at? The report doesn’t list the time of the actual flood.”

  “I’d say four in the afternoon.”

  “And you were found at eight or so the next morning?”

  “That’s right. I came to sometime around three or four that morning and started to, you know, crawl out.”