Coming over the pass that led down to the valley, they had a panoramic view of the village, which from a distance seemed to have none of the chaos and poverty that Hunt had pretty much been expecting. Instead, the town appeared quaint, traditional, and altogether lovely. Tamara, although she’d spent a month after college in Greece and Italy, was far less well traveled than Hunt, and she passed the time on the drive regaling him with details and personal observations about the place: that it was no wonder it was so beautiful—the Nahuatl name Teotitlán meant “land of the gods”; its elevation was nearly fifty-five hundred feet; its population topped out at around forty-five hundred, with another thousand in the immediate outlying communities; the main language was not Spanish, but Zapotec; the native people had been weaving here, paying tribute to the Aztecs in these goods, since about five hundred years before Christ.
“El Picacho,” Tamara said, pointing to one of the peaks across from them, “is evidently sacred. The other big one is Cerro Gie Bets, which means ‘stone brother’ in Zapotec.”
“Good to know.” Hunt looked across at her. “Pop quiz to follow?”
“Of course.”
“You could be a tour guide down here if this whole private investigator thing doesn’t work out,” Hunt said.
“I would want you to come with me.”
“That could be negotiated. If you go, I’m going with you.”
Earlier that morning, Hunt, his body suddenly and completely coming awake at around dawn, had extricated himself from the covers, kissed the shoulder of the sleeping Tamara, and gone into the bathroom to shower and shave. Nowhere nearly caught up on the sleep he had lost, he could not keep his mind from returning to the real reason they were down here, and this realization brought with it a familiar catch in his breathing, a tightening band of tension across his shoulders, a few popping points of light at the periphery of his vision.
He had taken his pounding heart back into the bed and lain there with his eyes closed until she had stirred and turned to face him, then coming all the way awake, she had rolled herself on top of him, and over most of the next hour, the two of them succeeded in driving his demons off and keeping them at bay.
Now as they drove on unpaved streets into the picturesque little village, she put her hand on his thigh. “You sure you’re okay with this?”
His jaw set, Wyatt nodded. “This has got to happen.”
“That’s not what I asked.” She hesitated. “I could go find him and talk to him. You don’t have to go.”
“Yes, I do.”
Hunt found a place to park on the edge of a square in front of a massive cathedral, close to the hotel in the center of the village at which they had a reservation in case they wound up needing a place to spend another night or two. He and Tamara got out of the car into cool, bright sunshine. It wasn’t yet 10:30, several hours too early for them to check in.
Down the street a ways, several tables out in front of a restaurant named El Descanso beckoned, and holding hands, they walked over and took one of the few remaining. They were not by any stretch the only visitors to the town. In fact, although Hunt had never in his life heard the name of the village before a couple of days ago, and although it was not large at all and certainly relatively remote, Teotitlán was apparently a tourist destination, especially for Americans. All around them as they sipped their strong and delicious coffee with chocolate, people were speaking English, showing off brightly colored shawls and ponchos and rugs and other woven materials, talking about hiking and mountain biking and archeology.
They had their local map spread out on the table. Their destination looked to be about eight blocks to the west. Hunt had marked the spot with a black felt-tip X and now he finished his drink and sat back, blinking.
“You ready?” Tamara asked.
Hunt stared off around the plaza for a few seconds and then blinked again several more times. “These damn lights. The last three or four days.” Shaking his head, he closed his eyes for a long count, then opened them and looked across at her. “I’m all right,” he said. “Let’s go do this.”
More than a hundred and fifty families made their living doing something with weaving in the village, and Wyatt and Tamara passed thirty-five or forty businesses before they got to the address where Hunt had made his X.
The place was like all the others, a stucco structure that might sometimes double as a house, but with an open front, and with brightly colored serapes and rugs and other woven goods hanging out facing the street. In most of these establishments, the weaver did his work in the back half, and visitors were sometimes welcome but more often brought along as part of an organized tour and buying opportunity.
Wyatt put his hand out to stop Tamara and together they stood across the street in glaring sunlight. The little shop was clearly open for business and although no apparent customers were inside, there was movement in the back, in dark shadow.
Hunt couldn’t will himself to move. He brought his hand to his forehead, the pain of the migraine coming on in a sudden rush into what had been the field of the aura.
Now someone called out what sounded like a command in a tongue Wyatt didn’t recognize—Zapotec?—and two young boys exploded out the front of the shop into the street, laughing and running, racing one another, until they disappeared around a corner.
Tamara squeezed Wyatt’s hand, and as though at that signal, he nodded to himself and crossed the five steps out of the bright sunlight and into the shadowed front of the store. His pulse exploded beat by beat in his ear. Wyatt tried to let his eyes adjust to the dimness, but the exploding balls of fire wouldn’t allow him to keep them open for more than a few seconds.
To keep his balance because the force of the headache was bringing on a wave of nausea and panic, he stood holding the side of a wooden rack upon which the proprietor had draped a bunch of gaudy ponchos.
He became aware of a slow, repetitive sound, like wooden sticks slapping one another. Raising his head and opening his eyes, he saw that it was a loom—a telar according to Tam’s lesson—behind which stood a tall, angular figure with long gray hair tied in a pony-tail. He wore a green and yellow serape and was looking down through a pair of rimless glasses, concentrating, humming almost inaudibly to himself.
Hunt took a step. His breath seemed to have stopped, and he was aware that Tamara had stepped in next to him and had taken his arm. The pain in his head was suddenly, and quite literally, blinding, and he had to stop and lean into her for support.
Wyatt opened his eyes and the man looked up adjusting his spectacles and Tamara cleared her throat and said, “Excuse me, we’re looking for Kevin Carson.”
The man’s expression grew quizzical, then guarded as he straightened all the way up and stopped moving his hands over his work. “I’m Kevin Carson,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
TAMARA FELT THE TENSION in Hunt’s arm as though it were an electric current.
On the walk out from the plaza, Wyatt was all grim determination. By the time they reached the Carson shop and stopped to wait across the street, it was clear that his emotions and the psychological impact of finally confronting his biological father were taking their toll on his body and mind.
When he had finally summoned the fortitude to step into the shadowed confines of the space, she could tell by the expression on his face—his brow drawn in furrows, his jaw set, the line of his mouth taut—that it was all he could do to force himself forward.
Kevin Carson was perhaps an inch shorter than Wyatt, but his face had the same clean bone structure, the same clear forehead under the same hairline, the same blue-green eyes. The merest glance eliminated any doubt that the two men were related by blood. She knew that Wyatt could not help but see the resemblance as well—there was no way to miss it.
His bicep twitched again under Tamara’s grip. She looked at his face and saw that he was not so much really blinking as consciously closing, then opening his eyes, she guessed against what last night he’d been
calling his light show. His left hand still rested for balance on the rack that held the ponchos, but he moved a step or two closer so that no more than six feet separated him from the loom.
Scrunching his eyes down one last time, Hunt opened them, then took a quick breath and released all of it in a rush, his cheeks pushing out with the force of it. He leveled his gaze at the weaver. “I’m Wyatt,” he said. “Your son.”
The older man had already stopped his robotic working of the loom, and now in what Tamara saw as an eerie duplication of his son’s behavior, he closed his eyes and raised his face to the ceiling. Taking his own long breath, when he released it his shoulders fell under the poncho. When he opened his eyes again, he had the same startling focus that Tamara had seen in Wyatt a hundred times. “You come here to kill me?” he asked. “I wouldn’t blame you.”
“No.”
A gray-haired, heavyset woman of obvious native extraction—a little more than half Carson’s height—suddenly appeared from the back of the structure and moved up next to him, saying something in Zapotec. He answered her with a few words, then came back to Wyatt. “My wife, Maria.” He spoke to her again, a few more words in Zapotec, but they must have conveyed a sense of the moment, because she gave a quick, startled glance at Wyatt, then her hand went to her mouth before she crossed herself.
For a long moment, the two couples faced one another without a sound. Wyatt’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. His father cast his eyes to the ground, over to his wife, then settled back on Wyatt. Both men seemed to gather into themselves somehow against the onslaught of God knew what emotions.
At last, shrugging against whatever reservations he might be feeling, Carson said, “We can sit in the back if you want to come around.” He gave what sounded like an order to Maria, who circumvented the loom, then stopped in front of Wyatt. Reaching out, she touched his hand and bowed from the waist in front of him, a greeting. Going around both of them, she pulled the large wooden doors to the street closed behind them, leaving them all now in the dim ambient light allowed by the small panes of glass in the doors and the windows high on the wall to Tamara’s right.
Tamara and Wyatt followed them back into the small open rooms of the house—there was no hallway, just two rooms, one behind the other—through what looked to be a kitchen—a half-size refrigerator, a sink and counter. Here Maria peeled off to the side, and Kevin led them out to a small enclosed stucco patio with a red-tiled floor, an ornately carved wooden gate, the whole area covered by a trellis to which clung a riot of bougainvillea. A simple wooden table, surrounded on three sides by chairs, sat against a bench on the side wall. More flowers grew from sconces set into the stucco.
Tamara found the place beautiful and serene, which is what everybody seemed to need.
Wyatt’s father pulled out two chairs as he passed the table and turned the third one around to straddle it backward. Wyatt took the chair closest to the house, across the table from him, with Tamara in the middle.
Under Carson’s poncho, a blue work shirt peeked out, below which he wore jeans and leather sandals, no socks. Beneath his glasses, deep lines creased the skin around his eyes. He moved his mouth, pursing his lips, taking Wyatt in as he settled himself at the table. “I guess it’d be stupid to ask how you’ve been,” he said.
Wyatt’s shoulders heaved at the absurdity of that.
“If it’s any consolation, if I had it to do over again, I’d have done it different.”
Wyatt unclasped his hands on the table, opened his palms. “It worked out okay.”
“I see that.” Carson kept his voice flat. “I didn’t know I’d ever have a life where I could raise a kid. Never really believed I would get one. I couldn’t have told you I’d have picked this place, that I’d wind up here, in a million years. And I thought, no matter what I did, you would be better off without me. And then, by the time I got finished with the trials, you were gone. Adopted out in a new life. I couldn’t have found you if I wanted to.”
“I get it,” Hunt said. “It’s water under the bridge.”
“Not exactly. It was a terrible mistake. The worst mistake of my life. You should know that.”
Tamara saw Wyatt’s Adam’s apple rise and fall.
“You know about the trials, I presume.”
“Sure.”
“I didn’t kill your mother.”
“I know that.”
Kevin’s nod seemed distilled relief.
“I got the letter you left with Father Bernard,” Wyatt said. “What about Texas?”
“Texas?”
“Your job there. That’s where you said you were going.”
Kevin shook his head. “It wasn’t far enough. I wasn’t sure this would be far enough, either. If I hadn’t met Maria, who saved my life, and her family, who taught me how to do this work—I probably would have kept going all the way to Brazil.” He paused. “So, let me ask, how’d you find me? I thought I’d managed to disappear.”
“And you did, pretty much.”
“Except?”
Wyatt shook his head as though it weighed a hundred pounds. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “You’re here. I’m here.”
“He’s a private investigator. He finds people,” Tamara put in, then added. “I’m Tamara. I work with him.”
Kevin turned his head and fixed his gaze on her. “So you’re here on a job?”
Wyatt nodded and again brought his hands to his temples. “My mother.” He closed his eyes for two or three seconds before opening them again, squinting to focus. “We’re trying to find out who killed her.”
Tamara saw him struggling and reached out to touch his arm. “Wyatt?”
Putting his hand over hers, he said, “I’m all right.” Then, back to his father, he repeated himself. “We’re trying to find who killed Margie. Do you have any ideas?”
Carson shook his head no. “If I had any ideas,” he said, “I would have told them to the police back then when it might have done some good.”
“And you haven’t had any since?”
“No. There was no reason for anyone to have killed her. She was just a young mom, staying at home, taking care of you.”
“Did you know about Jim Jones?”
The question straightened Carson up in his chair. “That was a long time before, like years. Him and her, I mean. It wasn’t any part of either of the trials. How did you find out about that?”
“That doesn’t matter, either. But we know it’s true. That’s the point.”
“Well, of course it’s true. But nobody knew back then what a monster he was going to turn out to be.”
“Really?”
“Really. Honestly.”
“You don’t think Margie had some inkling? Having seen what he’d done to her? How he could be?”
“Well, yes. That. But . . .”
Wyatt came forward in his chair, his hands supplicating on the table. “But what if she told Evie Spencer?”
“Evie? How’s she involved in any of this?”
“Listen. What if she told Evie she was going to tell anybody who’d listen about what Jones had done to her, and about how old she’d been when it had all happened? Did she ever tell you if she thought about doing something like that?”
Tamara’s eyes went to Carson, who was frowning in concentration. “She couldn’t believe it when Evie started getting involved with the People’s Temple, I know that. They were relocating down in San Francisco from wherever the hell Margie had been with them up north. And Margie tried to warn Evie not to get involved, that Jones was trouble. That’s why Evie wasn’t around for any part of the trials. She and Margie had had this huge fight about Jones, and she hadn’t even been around the apartment for a month or more, which was fine with me. That woman was a whack job of the first order, and I was glad to see her gone out of our lives.”
“Did you know Evie’s husband, Lionel?”
“Sure. We went out with them a lot—the kids, you know, playing together.”
>
“What’d you think of him?”
Carson shrugged. “Not much, to tell you the truth. He was a nice enough guy, but a bit of a wimp. And how he could stand being with her I don’t know.”
“What would you say,” Hunt pressed, “if I told you that the police in San Francisco now think he killed Margie, along with one of my associates and a random cab driver, before he killed himself?”
“Lionel killed himself?”
Hunt nodded. “Apparently. Last week. Does any of this surprise you?”
“All of it surprises me. That just doesn’t sound like Lionel. I mean, killing people? Killing Margie? I can’t imagine . . .” He picked at the paint on the back of his chair. “You know,” he said, “Lionel’s the guy who offered me the job in Texas.”
Wyatt threw a look at Tamara, then came back to his father. “Say that again.”
Carson inclined his head. “He looked me up after the second trial and said if I wanted to get away from the city, he had some friends and maybe a job at an airfield down in Texas. He could spring for a ticket . . .”
“Why would he do that?”
“He was still with Evie and she was in the temple by then and Jones had a lot of money. They were coining money with all the social security and savings accounts they were taking in. Lionel told me they’d all followed the trials and knew I was innocent. They thought I’d been railroaded and it would be an act of Christian kindness to help get me started somewhere else, away from the heat. I could either take some travel money or he could fly me down there next time he went himself.”
“Wait a minute. You’re saying Lionel was a pilot?”
“Yeah, he and his brother. They’d both been in the air force in Vietnam. The rumor was that Jones was buying them their own airplane, or had already bought it. Or maybe just the use of it.”
Maria came out from the house bearing a tray with a glass pitcher of some tropical-looking juice and three glasses. Placing it on the table in the middle of them, she said a few words to her husband before touching him on the shoulder and disappearing back inside the house.
The Hunter Page 26
