Slickrock Paradox
Page 11
Silas listened to the man’s rant. “Why would she tell her sister that you and she were lovers?”
“She was young, impressionable, and infatuated. I represented a figure of some influence in her life; maybe she simply had a crush and wanted to appear worldlier than her sister.”
“In the Hopi tradition—”
“Yes, yes, don’t try to school me on the Hopi traditions, Mr. Pearson. I know that in their tradition having this sort of relationship would be taboo. Where would it not, at least in modern culture, outside of France? And for the Hopi the implication is nothing short of witchcraft. For this young woman to disappear as she has—and to be murdered and left in Courthouse Wash, no less—would be considered the work of a witch. I assure you, Mr. Pearson, I’m no witch.”
Anton’s arms were folded defensively across his chest as he leaned back on the stacks of drawers. “Tell me about the work you did with Kayah.”
“Does this mean you believe me?”
“It doesn’t matter if I do or not, Dr. Anton.”
“It does to me,” Anton said. His voice was calm.
“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, I do. I don’t know what the FBI will say.”
“The FBI is involved with this?”
“Of course they are. Kayah’s body was found in a national park. The FBI field office in Monticello has joint jurisdiction.”
“Do they . . . do they know about me?”
“I don’t know. I think I’m about a day or two ahead of them in their investigation. I just happened to ask the right questions. It’s only a matter of time, but if things are like you say—”
“Of course they’re like I say!” Anton banged his fist against the cabinet. Silas felt uneasy. Anton drew a deep breath and seemed to calm down. “You know how things are. The FBI comes to my home in Cortez, or here, and I’m through. I’m done.”
“Not if you have nothing to hide.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it. People talk. My wife will hear people whispering at her bridge game on Wednesday night. It won’t matter what the truth is.”
“What if I told you the FBI won’t hear it from me?”
“What do you want?”
“Just the truth.”
“I’ve told you the truth.”
“I want to know where you were working before Kayah was murdered.” Silas used the word deliberately, to drive his point home.
“Have you got a map?”
Have I got a map, thought Silas. “Yes, in my car.”
They walked out to the parking lot of the museum. Silas opened the back of his Outback and found the large-scale map of San Juan County and rolled it out on the hood of the car. Silas put on his sunglasses, and Anton squinted as the sun reflected off the map.
“Okay,” said Anton, after a moment. “This is where we worked together. Right in here.”
“Hatch Wash.”
“That’s right, and up here.” He moved his finger north to Kane Springs. “And Behind the Rocks,” said Anton.
“What were you looking for?”
Anton regarded him a moment. “You know, if the people at Dead Horse find out, I’ll never work for them again.”
“I was under the impression that you no longer worked for them anyway,” said Silas.
“I don’t know who told you that. I’m still involved, from time to time. I suppose not like I was before. Maybe that’s what you mean. It’s a little extra money. June and I, we take a trip or two a year on the money that comes in from these projects.”
“You might have to stay home next year. But I won’t be the one to tell them. What were you working on?”
Anton looked around. The parking lot was crowded with visitors. He seemed to be making rapid calculations in his head. “For as long as I can remember, Canyon Rims and Behind the Rocks have been hot spots for the debate over wilderness and development in this whole region,” Anton said, circling the region on the map with his finger. “I don’t know all the details; I try not to get involved with politics. I know that there have been some very public disputes between folks who want to protect these places and keep them wild and those who want more access to them.”
“Access for what?”
“Off-highway vehicles like jeeps, motorcycles, quads, as well as oil and gas development. I guess there’s a lot of interest in these lands for exploratory drilling, too, and some big companies are showing interest in making substantial investments in this area. There’s a ton of money to be made if they can hit a sweet spot. And then, about five, maybe six years ago, a Moab developer . . .”
“Jacob Isaiah.”
“Yes, Mr. Isaiah.” Anton drew a deep breath. “He wanted to explore the idea of a year-round recreation village outside of Moab. I guess most of the good real estate in Moab had been bought up, so he started looking twenty, thirty, forty miles outside of town for something really spectacular. He looked all over the place; up in the Castle Valley, down toward Potash, on the Colorado, and around the Abajo Mountains. He started to zero in on this area.” Anton poked at the map.
“The main reason was the water. Hatch Wash runs year round. It’s BLM land, without much in the way of protection. They call it a ‘recreation area,’ but you can do just about anything you want there. It was at about that time that Dead Horse was brought on board, just to do some preliminary assessment of the values that we were dealing with. What plants and animals were there? What was the hydrology? What pre-historic sites were in the region?
“We didn’t find anything at first. The Hatch region has been known to have some pictographs, but not much else. I was the team leader doing the inventory. Kayah was working with me as a field tech. We spent two, maybe three weeks working in the field and didn’t find anything.
“Then, just about the time we were going to write a favorable report to Isaiah, telling him there wasn’t much to be found, we stumbled on something. We—well, it was actually Kayah who found the cliff houses, granaries, you name it. They were totally protected—from the elements, and from view. She found them in a little pocket canyon off the main stream of Hatch, just a few miles from Kane Creek.” Anton looked steadily at Silas, whose heart was racing. This was big news.
“It was significant. Nothing like here,” said Anton, motioning to Mesa Verde. “But it was pretty impressive. Completely untouched. In the main kiva, there were still thousands of artifacts, hundreds of pieces of pottery, dozens of ceremonial artifacts. It was a gold mine for pot hunters.”
Silas could hardly believe what he was hearing. “What did you do?”
“Nothing, at first. We didn’t even tell Dead Horse. Not right away. We delayed our report and said that we still had field work to do. We spent a week there. It was like being Cortez himself, the earth felt so new. We camped down along the wash, and every day climbed up and did an inventory.”
“Was it just the two of you?”
“No. I hired another guy, a young guy, from the NAU program too, to help.”
“What was his name?”
“Kelly something. Williams, or Wilson. It was three years ago, and my memory . . . Anyway, we did the inventory and cataloged the site, then made a verbal report to Dead Horse.”
“Who at Dead Horse?”
“Jared Strom. He’s the head of—”
“I’ve met him.”
“We did a verbal and told him that development in that area wasn’t going to fly. No way. When the BLM found out, they would have to order a full environmental assessment. For that client, that would mean paying tens of thousands of dollars. Given the significance, the Park Service would likely argue that the whole Canyon Rims area should be added to Canyonlands. They would contend that it was on par with the Grand Gulch Primitive Area, or the Horseshoe Canyon, which got tacked onto Canyonlands. That’s what the enviros have been saying for a decade or more.”
Silas looked at the map. “Can you give me the coordinates?”
“I don’t see how that would help.”
Anton pulled a Blackberry out of his pocket and looked up the coordinates. Silas found his GPS unit in his pack and recorded them. “Thank you. What happened after you made your report to your boss?”
“Nothing. My guess is that Strom made a report to Isaiah and that was the end of it.”
“That doesn’t sound like Jacob Isaiah to me.”
“I don’t really know the man. Like I said, I do pots, not politics. Given the amount of money they had invested in the project already, I was a little surprised that they just dropped it, but who knows. Maybe Strom made his point. He’s pretty persuasive when it comes to preserving finds like this.”
“What exactly did they want to build?”
“An all-season resort. They would put an airfield up on Flat Iron Mesa, or maybe Hatch Point. They were planning as many as a thousand rooms in several sites, on Hatch, and on the Behind the Rocks Plateau, with a golf course, water pumped up from the creek, guided ORV trails, fine dining, a glass-bottomed sky walk off Hatch Point looking down a thousand feet into the wash. The whole deal. It would look a little like the worst parts of Grand Canyon Village, Aspen, and West Yellowstone, all thrown into one. They were talking about a five-hundred-million-dollar project over ten years. It would have been huge.”
“Did word of this get out?”
“You mean to the greenies?” asked Anton. “I don’t know. I think there were rumors, but because Isaiah was smart enough not to put anything on paper at the time, there was no smoking gun. You’d have to ask the enviros, though.”
Silas nodded, knowing that something of this scale would have sent Penelope right off the chart. “What about this Kelly Wilson guy? Where is he?”
“I think it was Williams. I haven’t worked with him since, but he’s likely still in the Southwest. Remember, archaeologists get around a lot. He was young and keen, so I bet he’s still in the community.”
Silas straightened up. “Dr. Anton, my suggestion is that you go to the FBI and tell them what you know about Kayah. They’re going to learn that you worked with her. They might not hear the rumors about a relationship, but they will want to talk with you about what you know. Better to call them.”
“You’re likely, right, Mr. Pearson.”
“Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. This has been helpful.”
“So you believe me?”
“About what? The ruins?”
“No, about Kayah.”
“Of course I do,” said Silas, though he didn’t.
HE DROVE BACK THROUGH CORTEZ and on to Monticello. He waited until he passed through the town and then pulled out his phone and dialed Katie Rain.
“Rain,” she said.
“Is that a greeting, or an invocation?”
“Ah, Dr. Pearson. What’s up?”
“I told you I’d keep you in the loop.”
“Yes, you did, and what have you learned?” He told her about his meeting with Peter Anton, and what Anton had told him about his relationship with Kayah Wisechild. He told her about the work they had been doing, but left out any details about where the work had been conducted.
“You think he’s being straight up?” asked Rain.
“I don’t think so. I think something happened between Anton and the Wisechild girl. I can’t swear to it, but there was more going on with those ruins than he’s letting on. I just don’t know what.”
“You’re going to check it out, aren’t you?”
“How did you know that?”
“I deal with bones, Dr. Pearson, but I’m a human being. You’re easy to read.”
“Yes, I’m going to go and have a look.”
“Would you like to tell me where you’re going? Just in case you pull a disappearing act?”
“If worst comes to worst, you can look for my car. With my ankle the way it is, I’ll be within a day of it.”
“That’s not very helpful,” said Rain.
“I’m trying my best,” he said, smiling.
“Call when you get out. Your mother worries.”
“Deal,” he said, and hung up.
He drove past the entrance to the Needles section of Canyonlands National Park and turned onto the track that led off toward Hatch Wash. A plume of red dust followed his Outback, and he had to focus on navigating the rough, winding tracks. He had a recreation map open on the passenger seat, where he marked his turns. The country across which he drove was part of a vast tableland, on top of which a thin veneer of desert life existed, appearing amid swells of iron-red, blowing sand and in the lee of washes and arroyos. For more than an hour he coaxed the Outback over crests of sandstone and across tire-sucking, blowing sand. It was hard driving, working the clutch constantly, and his ankle pulsed. When he finally came to a point where he could drive no farther, he was glad to stop. He parked the Outback in the lee of a giant, twisted juniper, then found a flat rock to sit on, letting the desert’s silence ring in his ears.
Silas looked at this watch: it was nearly five in the afternoon. Though there was enough daylight to descend the canyon, there wasn’t enough to climb back out. And while he didn’t mind hoisting a pack with a stove, food, and a sleeping bag, he felt that his ankle might not bear the additional weight.
He camped where he parked. Sometime shortly after he finished his dinner he heard the whine of a motor. Another vehicle was crawling across the tableland, but it stopped, and he forgot about it. As he curled up in his sleeping bag, his final thoughts were of his wife, and of the witch that Leon Wisechild invoked to lead Silas back to her.
In the morning, the going was much rougher than he expected, and he was glad he had taken his cane. The first half mile was a straightforward, gentle descent of the arroyo leading to Hatch Wash. But within half an hour he was forced to use his hands to down climb steep sections of sandstone, his legs spanning narrow fissures, his body pressed against the side of the perpendicular canyon. He zigzagged his way to the bottom of the side canyon, descending five hundred feet, according to his GPS, in little under a mile.
In another forty minutes he’d walked the length of the branch canyon, descended another five hundred feet, and arrived at the juncture with the main stem of Hatch Wash. A trickle of water ran over the slick sandstone exposed where the two arms of the canyon came together. He bent and soaked his hat in the cool water. He cupped a little to his lips and splashed his face. When he stood up, he regarded the land circling around him. He was a thousand feet below the rim, half of which was the sheer formation known as the Wingate Sandstone, the other half a jumble of sloping terraces and smaller cliffs, dotted with boulder fields and junipers. According to Peter Anton’s coordinates, he was less than a mile from the ruins, so he walked very slowly down the central canyon, using his cane for support, and scanning the walls.
Other tracks, both human and animal, had left impressions on the canyon floor. His own distinctive three-legged trail joined the indentations of mule deers’ cloven hooves, the frantic tracks of lizards, the impression made by heavy hiking boots.
He continued on. It was still just mid morning, so the light wasn’t as harsh as it would be later in the day, the shadows not so deep. But he still walked right past the pocket canyon before he realized he’d missed it. Silas backtracked, his face now to the sun, shielding his eyes from the intense glare. In a few minutes he found the unremarkable side canyon, a jumble of fallen rock and a tangle of tamarisk appearing to cut it off from the main wash. He started in.
The narrow defile was covered in deep shadow and the temperature dropped. In places the side canyon was only twenty feet wide and deeply undercut, so that he could walk with one hand trailing along the wall, the canyon arched out above him like a tunnel. In places the canyon floor was a hodgepodge of boulders and Silas had to climb gingerly over car-sized rocks to avoid slipping on the slick s
tone. He was concentrating on one such effort when he looked up and was confronted by what Kayah had found. He stopped, stunned.
Laid out in three terraces along a nearly perpendicular section of the side canyon was a series of dwellings and granaries, and what appeared to be a central kiva or temple. He looked around, mystified that such a find could go undiscovered for so long. The upper structures were typical cliff dwellings, cemented into a soft recess of sandstone and protected from the elements by the overhang of cliff above them. Several of them boasted two stories, and all had windows and doorways opening onto a thirty- to forty-foot sheer drop to the canyon floor. The lower structures were laid out in a half moon along the terminus of the pocket canyon, and had intact log-supported roofs and several windows opening into the courtyard where the kiva lay.
Silas sat down on a boulder in disbelief.
He had been to ancient Pueblo ruins over the course of the last three and a half years. He had even found a couple that nobody had marked on a map or noted in a guidebook. He had seen large complexes of ruins, the evidence of a sophisticated civilization that had existed in the canyon country until seven hundred years ago, and then mysteriously vanished.
Sitting on this boulder in the shade of this box canyon, he felt as if he’d never seen a thing up until this moment. There was something about the design of this enclave that was in complete aesthetic harmony.
Hatch Wash was by no means remote. Peter Anton and his team had spent several weeks cataloging what they had found. Nevertheless, the ruins before him felt newly discovered, and in the backcountry of south-eastern Utah, that counted for a great deal.