The Stolen Blue

by Judith Van GIeson

  “That’s right,” Burke said.

  “No, it’s not right. Black Sun was published in May, 1971, not in March.”

  “How could you possibly remember that?” Burke’s eyes got a hard glaze when he tried to intimidate. “That book was published over twenty years ago.”

  “My son was born in May, and I reviewed the book for Book Talk after we got home from the. hospital.”

  Age and illness had shortened Burke’s fuse. “If I put March on that list, then that’s what the inscription says.” he snapped.

  Claire didn’t doubt it, but Edward Abbey had been known to sign books long after publication. If he signed a copy of Black Sun years later, he might not have remembered what month it came out. It wouldn’t take away from the value of the book any. It might even increase it. Book collectors valued idiosyncrasies and errors.

  “I haven’t lost my marbles yet,” Burke barked, reminding Claire that the voice is the first weapon of the young and the last of the old. There were times when Burke’s tone grated, but today she was relieved it hadn’t lost its edge. “Although there’s no telling how long that will continue.” His voice slowed and drifted toward the sad no-man’s-land Claire’s father had inhabited in the latter stages of his illness when his mind began erasing its tracks. “I want to get my affairs in order while I am still able.”

  “You seem pretty able to me,” Claire replied.

  “Well, that won’t last forever. After I completed the inventory, I decided to draw up a will. If I left my affairs to my children, that would be a sorry mess.” He opened the folder that lay in his lap. “I’ve made you my personal representative. I need someone I can trust to carry out my wishes. My offspring,” he sighed, “would never get it right.” A log in the woodstove crackled and snapped. The dog lay its head on its paws and stared at the fire.

  “All right,” Claire said.

  “As soon as this is witnessed, it will be valid; I used a program to prepare it on the computer. I see no point in wasting my money on a Catron County lawyer. I’m leaving the ranch to Mariah with the provision that Corinne can live here for the rest of her life. Corinne’s gotten agoraphobic. She can hardly leave the house.”

  “She needs to eat something,” Claire said, a mother’s response.

  “Corinne eats what she wants to eat. When it comes to stubbornness, she takes after me.”

  “What happens to Corinne if Mariah sells the property?”

  “She can’t. She has a life estate. As long as she or her heirs are willing to run it as a nature preserve, the ranch is theirs. If her heirs should decide to sell the place, it goes to the Nature Conservancy. We’ve stopped grazing cattle here to make room for the elk, and when the wolves come back I hope to see them here, too. Nothing gives me more pleasure these days than watching the wildlife, and that’s a pleasure Mariah shares with me. I’ve given my grazing allotment back to the BLM. For as long as she lives, Mariah will run the ranch as a nature preserve. If I left it to my children, they’d either graze the hell out of it or sell it to developers.”

  “Your neighbors won’t be happy about the nature preserve.”

  “The hell with my neighbors.” Burke leaned forward, opened the door to the woodstove, and threw a log on the fire. “They like to wrap themselves in the flag and brag about how American they are, but their view of America doesn’t allow for dissent. Mariah can handle them. What do they have to complain about anyway? All I’m doing is letting the property revert to the way it used to be.”

  “What about your other children?” Burke had a son, James, in Phoenix and a daughter, Samantha, in Santa Fe.

  “They’ll all get what I got when my father died—two hundred thousand each. I’d like to see if they can do as well with it as I did.”

  “They won’t be happy with that, Burke. The ranch is worth a million or more.”

  “Since the ranch isn’t going to be sold, the value is not an issue. It’s too late now to change things with my children. When I look in their eyes, I see blame; when I look in Mariah’s, I see a future. I’ve left the remainder of my liquid assets—two hundred thousand—to her. If there’s a lawsuit, she’ll have some cash to pay the legal fees and to negotiate with. As for the rest of them, I trust you’ll keep the terms of the will quiet until the time comes.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “It is.” Burke rang the bell on the end table. “We need to get this thing witnessed. After that I’m taking a nap. It was a pleasure accumulating all this property, but deciding what to do with it wears me out.” He sank back in his chair and breathed in some oxygen.

  Kassandra came to the door. “Would you bring Jed in?” Burke asked.

  “He’s my ranch hand,” he told Claire. While they waited for the witnesses, they worked their way through the inventory.

  Kassandra returned with Jed, a wiry, dark-haired man in his forties who—to Claire—had the look of someone who’d spent too much time alone. He kept his eyes averted and seemed to be wrapped in a blanket of space.

  When Burke asked him to witness the will, Jed said, “Sure, boss,” and signed without giving the document a glance, although Kass dawdled as if she wanted to understand what she was signing. When they were done, Burke said, “Now, you all agree that I am of sound mind?”

  They did. Burke put one copy of the will in his folder and handed the other to Claire. He stuck the folder under his arm and asked Kass to help him to his room. He walked slowly, leaning on Kass’s arm and pulling the oxygen tank behind him. Roamer followed, scratching the wooden floor with his claws. “We’ll see you at dinner,” Burke said.

  Claire spent the rest of the afternoon contentedly packing books and listening to the fire snap and hiss. As she took each book from the shelf, she balanced it carefully in her hands, giving it the attention something rare and valuable deserved. Many of Burke’s books were in collector’s condition, meaning both the book and dust jacket were flawless. Burke’s books did not have price-clipped corners, library stamps, or the owner’s name written on the endpapers. Some of the books had never been opened. Claire checked each book against the inventory and placed it in a box cushioned with bubble wrap. After she filled a box, she taped it shut with clear sealing tape, numbered it, and labeled it. A book she thought particularly interesting or valuable went into a separate box to show her colleagues, since the remainder of the collection was likely to sit in backlog until it could be cataloged.

  She began with the Abbeys, making a mental note to check the inscription in Black Sun against a bibliography she had in the library. She put that book and The Brave Cowboy, Abbey’s scarcest title, in a special box. The other Abbeys went into a box labeled A. One problem with finding Abbeys in good condition was that his readers were likely to throw them in a backpack and read them around a campfire before passing them along to their friends. Burke’s copy of The Brave Cowboy was the only one Claire had ever seen in a fine dust jacket. She thought of it as the twenty-five hundred dollar dust jacket because the book was worth thirty-two hundred dollars with it, seven hundred dollars without. Inscribing a book to someone could decrease its value, but this book had a dream inscription because Abbey had inscribed it to Burke, who in some circles was as renowned as Abbey was.

  Burke also collected ephemera and had a hard-to-find copy of The Thunderbird, the student newspaper Abbey edited when he was at UNM, in which he had attributed a quote from Voltaire to Louisa May Alcott. That quote—”Man shall not be free until the last general is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”—cost Abbey his position as editor.

  Claire continued working her way through the alphabet to the accompaniment of the crackling fire. She set aside an unnumbered binder’s copy of Taos Pueblo with text by Mary Austin and photographs by Ansel Adams. The photos had the exquisite, luminescent quality of Adams’s black-and-white work. It was the gem of Burke’s collection. Not long ago Sotheby’s had sold one for thirty thousand dollars. Very few of them existed outside of museu
ms.

  Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima also went into the special box and Richard Bradford’s Red Sky At Morning. The Bradford had never become very valuable, but it was a book that Claire admired. From the C’s she added a signed and numbered limited edition of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. Periodically Claire looked out the window and noticed the lengthening afternoon shadows. Just before dark she saw a bull elk standing and studying the light from across the field in a posture of total alertness.

  When Corinne called her to dinner, she made a quick estimate of how much wrapping and boxing lay ahead and saw several hours. They sat down in the dining room at a long table under a chandelier made of elk antlers. Jed joined them, but Kass had gone home. Burke poured them each a shot of Jack Daniel’s. The only time Claire got drunk during her divorce proceedings had been on Jack Daniel’s. She considered it a poisonous, seductive drink, and she sipped warily. Corinne had prepared beef stew and a chocolate cake for dessert. Claire thought the stew was subtly spiced and delicious, but Burke doused his with salt and layered it with grated pepper. Throughout the meal, he passed pieces of meat to the dog lying under the table. Corinne picked at her food, and when she served the chocolate cake, she didn’t cut a piece for herself. It takes a rare person, Claire thought, to bake a chocolate cake and not eat any.

  Burke appeared tired during dinner and said little. Claire tried to make conversation with Mariah by telling her about her son, who was in the computer business in Silicon Valley, and her daughter, who was teaching in Boston. Claire was struck by the contrast between her own children who had been so eager to leave Arizona and get out into the world and Mariah who seemed content to have retreated into the Blue. Eric was well behaved during dinner, which Claire considered a sign of good parenting.

  After dinner Mariah took Burke back to his bedroom, and Claire returned to the library, where she stoked the fire and boxed books. Around eleven she realized how stiff and sore she was getting. She stood up, stretched, and went to bed in the downstairs guest room. Burke’s door was open, and she noticed that his TV was turned to the weather channel. He appeared to have fallen asleep. She thought about turning the TV off, but didn’t want to wake him.

  Someone—probably Burke—had taken the trouble to assemble the head of a jackalope—a jack rabbit with antlers—and hang it on the wall of the guest room. Claire was too tired to appreciate the humor. She fell asleep immediately, but was awakened later by something she could only describe as deep silence. She sensed a change in atmosphere, got up, and went to the window. Three inches of snow had fallen, giving the cactus cone-shaped hats. The snow on the ground was a smooth white blanket as far as she could see. She went back to the warm bed and pulled up the covers.

  When she woke again at dawn, Corinne was standing in the doorway. “My father is gone,” she said in a tight voice.

  Claire sat up. “He must be in the bathroom. Where else could he go with his oxygen tank?”

  “I already checked the bathroom, and he didn’t take his oxygen tank. It’s still in his bedroom.”

  “Oh, God,” Claire said. She got up, stepped into her shoes, wrapped her robe tight, and followed Corinne through the first floor of the house. Corinne turned the lights on in each room they entered, and left them burning after they’d completed their search. She wore a robe with loose sleeves that fell away as she flipped the switches. Claire noticed that her arms were scratched as if she’d just walked through a berry patch. There was no sign of Burke on the first floor. Claire thought of Alzheimer’s patients who became confused and wandered away, but Burke’s mind had seemed too sharp for that. They came to the foot of the stairs, and Corinne started to climb.

  “Would Burke have been able to get up the stairs?” Claire asked.

  “My father can be very determined,” Corinne said.

  Claire followed her to the second floor. There were several identical bedrooms with twin beds covered by Pendleton Indian blankets and a nightstand between them holding a lamp with a rawhide shade and a wrought-iron base. The first few rooms they entered were empty.

  “Where does Jed sleep?” Claire asked.

  “He has a trailer.”

  They came to the door of Mariah’s room, and Corinne knocked. When there was no answer, she pushed open the door and switched on the light. Eric was sleeping in a crib. The sheets on Mariah’s bed were turned down, the blanket was gone, the bed was empty. Roamer, who had been tagging along behind them, started to howl, and they heard the front door at the foot of the stairs open. They hurried to the stairwell and saw Mariah standing in front of the open door wrapped in a blanket wet with snow, and holding another blanket in her arms.

  “What’s happened to my father?” Corinne cried.

  Mariah waited for them to descend the stairs, then said in a voice that was unnaturally calm, “He’s dead.” Her eyes under the hood of the blanket had a dark glow.

  “How did he die? Where is he?” Corinne demanded.

  “He’s under the cottonwood tree by the river. It was how he wanted to die outside in the snow.”

  “He didn’t…” Claire wasn’t able to finish the sentence, but Mariah knew what she meant. The way men in the West who kept guns usually killed themselves was with a bullet through the head.

  “No,” Mariah answered. She dropped the blankets to the floor and shook the snow from her hair. Claire circled behind her, closed the door, picked up the blankets, and put them on a chair. “He died of exposure,” Mariah continued. “He wanted to do it on the coldest night so it would be quick, and he liked the idea of doing it in the snow. He told me that last night was a good night to die.” She turned toward Claire. “He said to tell you he’s sorry it had to happen when you were here.”

  “You helped my father to die?” Corinne asked.

  “It was what he wanted, Corinne. He hated the thought of losing his mind and turning into a vegetable in a nursing home. He was ready. It was better for him to go this way.”

  “How did he get to the cottonwood?”

  “I helped him.”

  “And then you just left him there?”

  “He took some Valium and curled up in the snow. He asked me to remove the blanket once he went to sleep and then to leave him alone. I waited near the river so I could hear if he woke up or cried out, but he never did.”

  Claire wouldn’t deny that this was a death Burke might have chosen, but it took a cold person to be as matter-of-fact about it as Mariah was. She must be in shock, Claire thought. She was seeing signs of it in herself, a detached sensation as if she were floating above the room and watching from the ceiling.

  Corinne demanded to be taken to the body. Claire had to remind her to put on boots and a jacket. She got dressed, Mariah threw her blanket back on, and they stepped outside. The fields were getting light, although the woods were still in deep shadow. The snow had stopped falling. One set of tracks was visible in the smooth white surface—Mariah’s hiking boots leading to the house. They followed the tracks back to the cottonwood, a magnificent tree ten feet thick with a textured trunk and enveloping arms. Burke’s body, in a pair of thin cotton pajamas, lay under it. His lips were blue, and his skin was as white as marble. He was obviously dead, but Claire knelt down and felt for the carotid artery to be sure. There was no pulse, and his skin had the texture of packed snow.

  “He didn’t suffer,” Mariah said.

  “You should put a blanket over him,” said Corinne.

  What difference does it make now? Claire thought. He’s dead.

  She believed they should leave him exactly as he was and call the sheriff, but Mariah took her blanket off and laid it over Burke. The blanket lent him some dignity and calmed Corinne, but Mariah, who was wearing a cotton nightgown, began to shiver without it. Claire took her back to the house while Corinne stayed under the tree, keeping a vigil beside the body of her father.

  Jed, who was waiting when they got back to the porch, swore softly when Claire told him about Burke. “A
nything I can do?” he asked.

  “Keep an eye on Corinne while I call the family and the sheriff,” Claire replied.

  “Sure,” he said.

  He headed for the cottonwood tree, Mariah went upstairs to her room, and Claire went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee before she made her calls. She found the numbers she needed in an address book beside the phone. The sheriff said he’d get there as soon as he could, but the roads were slick this morning. Next she called Burke’s children. Samantha’s answering machine said to leave the date and time of the message. Claire was relieved to get the machine; she found Samantha difficult in the best of times. James was stunned and said he would come over right away. Claire knew it was a five-hour drive from Phoenix, which would make it mid-afternoon before James reached the Blue. She hoped the sun would come out and clear the roads by then. She called out the door to Corinne and Jed that coffee was ready, but they didn’t answer. She poured a cup for herself, took it to the library with Roamer tagging along behind her, sank into a deep armchair, and stared out the window, overwhelmed with sadness, numbed by the enormity of her loss.

  Chapter Two

  WHEN SHE HEARD A VEHICLE PULL INTO THE DRIVEWAY forty-five minutes later, Claire went to the front door, expecting the sheriff, but finding the nurse Kassandra Wells letting herself in. “You’re here early.” Claire said, thinking how irrelevant the comment was even as she said it. A part of her brain sought refuge in the trivial and the normal.

  “Same time as I always get here,” Kass replied taking her jacket off and hooking it over the coatrack. Her hair was windblown, and her cheeks were burning from the cold.

  “Where do you live?” Claire asked, postponing the inevitable.

  “Reserve.”

  “That’s a long drive to make every day.”

  Kass shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

  “How were the roads?”

  “Not too bad.” She finger-combed her hair into place and prepared to go to work. “How’s Burke this morning?”