The Same River Twice

by Stephen Legault

  Robbie stood and extended his hand. “Folks call me Robbie. Thanks for handling things so well back there at the sheriff’s office. I appreciate it.”

  Katie smiled and took his hand. “It’s part of the job. I get paid to look at bones, but it’s the people who actually count. Your father tells me you’re a criminologist.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I just finished my undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver.”

  “What are you specializing in?”

  “I haven’t yet. I’m thinking cyber crime is the way to go. It’s a huge field, and evolving very quickly.”

  “Well, let me know if you’d like an introduction to someone at the FBI. We’ve got the best cyber crime unit in the world.”

  “Thanks, I might take you up on that.”

  “How you holding up, Silas?”

  Silas motioned for Katie to sit on a stool by the desk. She did. “I’m swinging back and forth between anger and relief. And every time I feel relief I feel guilt, which makes me angry.”

  “Sounds perfectly normal to me.”

  “Does it? I don’t have any idea what normal is anymore.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Bury my wife. Or more than likely have her cremated and scatter her ashes somewhere. You know, she didn’t even have a will. No burial instructions. I’m just guessing that she would have wanted to be scattered over the canyon country somewhere. I know a good place.”

  SILAS STOOD WITH his hands at his sides, his face a mask of detachment. Before him on his living room wall were the floor-to-ceiling topographic sheets that had become the focus of his world for the last five years. He studied them. Nearly all of the maps before him had been cross-hatched, indicating that he had searched an area once, and then colored in, denoting a second search. He had hiked a distance equal to a walk from San Diego, California, to Bangor, Maine, and back again, and then kept on going out into the Pacific Ocean. He had logged tens of thousands of feet in elevation gain, enough that he could have climbed a set of stairs halfway to the International Space Station orbiting the earth. He was exhausted and feeling every bit his fifty-eight years. Robbie looked into the living room. He took something off the stove, then came in and handed his father a bottle of beer. He had one of his own.

  “You should write a book. A hiking guide or something.”

  Silas smiled wryly. “What would I call it? A Guide to Finding Dead People in the Desert?”

  “I doubt there are many folks around here who know this place as well as you do.”

  “They can have it. I’m done.” He reached for the map, about to tear it from the wall.

  “Wait! Don’t do it!”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Give it a few days. Give it some time.”

  “What am I giving it time for? She’s dead. Gone. Murdered. What the hell is there left to do?”

  “There’s a pattern.” Robbie pointed to the yellow sticky notes that Silas had left on the Indian Country map that spanned the Four Corner states indicating where Darcy McFarland’s, Kiel Pearce’s, and now Penelope’s bodies had been found.

  “Of course. I see it.”

  “SO WHAT DOES it mean?” Silas and Robbie had just finished supper and were sitting at the picnic table watching the last of the day’s light evaporate.

  “I don’t know. The locations are significant, though. They aren’t accidental. You told me the FBI have worked up a profile and determined that it’s likely that Darcy McFarland and Kiel Pearce were killed by the same person.”

  “It was because of the intimacy of each crime. The close contact. Darcy had her skull cracked and then was drowned; Kiel had been strangled and stabbed.”

  “Both of those suggest a level of anger, even hatred, and a close personal relationship. They knew their killer,” said Robbie. “He, or she, knew them and hated them. It might not have been the kind of hatred that comes from being jilted or scorned; it could be the result of bad business.”

  “Kiel Pearce’s death was made to look like a suicide. He had been strangled and stabbed in the gut to attract carrion feeders,” said Silas. “He’d been hung in a place where the killer knew that vultures would get to him quick, long before he was found.”

  “That’s right. And Penelope was shot at close range. Dad, the angle of the bullet that the FBI describes suggests that she was on her knees.”

  “I know, Robbie.”

  “You told me that Kiel had traces of chloroform in his system.”

  “Darcy’s body had been in the potash solution a long time, but Dr. Rain says that the saline solution preserved traces of chloroform. Penny was …”

  “Chloroform might not have been used on Penelope. Her murder was years before both Darcy and Kiel’s. He started with her, and only later added the other two. The addition of chloroform may have allowed him to manage his victims better. We’re looking for one guy. One man. Someone strong enough to carry a body down the Hole in the Rock. Someone strong enough to smash someone on the head and then submerge them in potash solution. And someone intimate enough with each of these people that they went for a hike with him before they were murdered.”

  7

  “THE EARTH, LIKE THE SUN, belongs to everyone, and to no one. Penelope loved that quote. And she loved this one: I want to weep, not for sorrow, not for joy, but for the incomprehensible wonder of our brief lives beneath the oceanic sky.” Silas Pearson’s hand trembled as he held a few notes, his weather-cracked fingers clutching the pages as a breeze tugged at them.

  He stood on a jetty of naked stone, a few tangled bushes glowing orange in the late afternoon sun. Behind him the earth disappeared into a vacuous space. Fifteen hundred feet below it seemed to reemerge where the White Rim Plateau, twisted and cut by dry arroyos, bordered the Green River.

  A handful of friends stood on the ledge of sandstone near the Green River Overlook on the Island in the Sky. Katie Rain was there, as were Robbie and Stan Baton. Trish Hollyoak wiped tears away, both for Silas’s loss, and her own raw anguish at the loss of her own husband just a few months earlier. Mary Avery from Back of Beyond Books held a few volumes of Edward Abbey’s prose and Roger Goodwin, the archaeologist who lived on the Hopi Reservation, bowed his head in silence. Sarah Jamison, who also taught at UNA, stood beside Roger. Behind them, his ball cap clutched in his hands, Dallas Vaughn stood, holding onto his two girls. Jamie Pearson stood nearby, his eyes cast down.

  “It’s been five years since Penelope disappeared. I wasn’t a very good husband to Penny. I was never unfaithful, but I was distracted and distant and never paid much attention to the things that mattered to her. This mattered to her.” Silas gestured toward the open space. “This mattered.” He stamped his feet. “And this mattered.” He held up his notes, referring to Abbey’s words scribbled on them. “And as hard as it is for me to accept, I mattered to Penny, and it was only after she vanished that I came to see it. I wish I could stand up here and tell you that Penny is at rest now, that her heart is free, and that I’m going to carry on with what she started, carry on her crusade to protect the American Southwest. I can’t tell you that. I don’t know what to do next. What I do know is that Penelope loved the wind, the rock, the sun, the sky, and all that wild country that surrounds us now, and she would have wanted to be remembered as someone who lived life to the fullest—never compromising, never backing down, and never surrendering when something was as important as this is.”

  Silas let his head fall forward. When he had composed himself, he unfolded the paper clutched in his hand and read, “‘The bird that flies from the night into the lighted banquet hall circles twice around the blazing candles and then flies out.’ That’s how Edward Abbey described life. So brief, and so bright. Those lights blazed for Penelope de Silva.”

  “I’M GOING TO go into Moab before I head back to the Castle Valley,” Silas told his sons.

  “You want us to come with you?” asked Robbie.


  “No, head home. I’ve just got to get a few things and I’ll be there shortly.”

  Silas drove into Moab and proceeded to the grocery store. In all of his time in the Spanish Valley he had rarely ventured out of the frozen food aisle. Now he picked up a few things to cook his boys a real meal: steaks for the grill, potatoes, and corn on the cob. He paid for his groceries and was loading the bags into the back of his dusty Outback when he heard a voice behind him.

  “Looks like you’re fixing to have a little party there, Silas.”

  Silas turned to see Jacob Isaiah behind him. “Hello, Jacob.” The old man’s face was sun-bronzed, his white hair thin and pasted to his boney head.

  “I’m real sorry to hear about your loss.”

  “That’s nice of you to say.”

  “She was something else, your Penny was.”

  “I’ve got my boys out at the place, Jacob. I should be getting along.”

  “Don’t let me stop you. I just was wondering how it came to pass that she was out in the middle of nowhere, that’s all.”

  “I should get going.”

  “Of course, of course. Funny thing about the Escalante country: a lot of mystics go there to disappear.”

  Silas finished with his groceries and closed the hatch. He tried to step past Isaiah but the old man blocked his way. Silas looked him in the eye and didn’t like what he saw there. Silas narrowed his own eyes, trying to get a read on the broad smile Jacob wore.

  “You’ve got something on your mind, Jacob?”

  “No, nothing in particular. But I think you do. I think you got something on your mind and that it’s best you just forget about it.”

  “Listen—”

  “No, you listen, Silas. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead. That ain’t what I’m getting at here, but I know you, I know what you’re thinking.”

  “You have no idea what I’m thinking.”

  “I do. You’re thinking that you ought to find out what your Penelope was up to when she got herself killed. You’re thinking that maybe you and your boys might do a little Dick Tracy work. Well, I suggest that you leave well enough alone.”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “Everything that happens in these parts is my business, Silas. Every goddamned thing. That was something that your Penelope couldn’t seem to get through her head.” Jacob poked his own creased brow right between the eyes. “She couldn’t get that through her thick skull.” He poked himself a second time. “Look what it got her. I think it’s best that you just leave things alone.”

  “Do you know something about my wife’s murder, Jacob?”

  The old man laughed. He sounded scornful. “I only know what I read in the newspapers, but I do know a great deal about your wife’s life, and she spent it poking her nose into everybody else’s business. And like I said, everything that goes on in these parts is my business. Now, you go and enjoy your little—what do you call it? Celebration of life?—with them boys of yours. But I strongly suggest that you put all of this behind you now.” The old man’s smile seemed to have been stitched onto his face. His teeth gleamed in the late afternoon sun.

  “For the longest time I thought you were involved in my wife’s disappearance, Jacob, but after the business with Hatch Wash was settled, I gave up that notion. Listening to you right now makes me start to wonder all over again.”

  “Maybe I overestimated you, Dr. Pearson. Maybe you’re more like that wife of yours than I gave you credit for.”

  SILAS DIALED HIS cell phone on his way out of town. Katie answered the phone on the fourth ring. “I just got back to Salt Lake City. I’m still in the airport. Is everything alright?”

  “Listen Katie, I need to know something. When you were telling Robbie and me about the gunshot wound, you explained that Penny was shot in the frontal lobe. Can you be more specific?”

  “Oh Silas, do you really want to be talking about this? What’s going on?”

  “I need to know. It’s important.”

  There was a long silence. Silas heard a departure announcement in the background over the phone. “She was shot lower down on the frontal lobe, just above the nasal bridge.”

  “Between the eyes?”

  “I guess you could say that. She was shot along the ridge of bone between the eyebrows. So yes, between the eyes. Silas, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll let you know when I figure it out.”

  8

  THEY STOOD IN THE EMPTINESS together, a sky shot with lightning and ripped with thunder above them. A bald laccolithic dome sat blue on the horizon; around them the tableland of sandstone was knifed with canyons the color of blood. Wind blew her hair in tatters. She held his hand, and when she spoke, her voice was like a whisper leaking through the storm. “You walked into the radiance of death through passageways of stillness, stone, and light.”

  “YOU LOOK TIRED, Dad.”

  “Thanks, Jamie. It’s always good to be reminded of that when you’re my age.”

  “You know what I mean. Didn’t you sleep? Did Rob and I keep you up?”

  “I slept. It just wasn’t very restful. Can you stay for the weekend? We could all go hiking together somewhere. Or maybe head across the border to Colorado Springs and find a decent pub that serves real beer. What do you say?”

  “I’ve got to get home, Dad.”

  “You just got here.” Silas realized his voice sounded pleading.

  “I know, but I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “Stay here. You can work at the bookstore. I’ll pay you. You can run it. Be manager.”

  Jamie stood with his arms folded across his chest watching the sun rise through the floor-to-ceiling windows in Silas’s living room. He shook his head. “Thanks for the offer. I’ve got a job.”

  “Crewing on a rich man’s boat?”

  “It’s a world-class racing yacht. I’m sailing it to New Zealand.”

  Silas nodded. “Alright, well, thanks for coming. I appreciate it. You know, I realize that you didn’t get on well with Penny—”

  Jamie turned around. “It’s not that I didn’t get on well with her, Dad. I got on fine with her. I just resented the fact that I only got to see you twice a year. You were my father. I was nine. You left.”

  “Not for her, Jamie. I left because … for the university. Penny came later.”

  “Well, you left.”

  “I never meant to hurt you.”

  “You may not have meant to, but you did.”

  “I’ll make it up to you.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “I could come to New Zealand.”

  “That sounds great. You and me on a boat for six months.” A smile crossed Jamie’s face when he said it. “Come to Vancouver when I get back. That would be a start.”

  “Deal.”

  “HE’LL GET OVER it. He’s already starting. I should know: I did.”

  “But Jamie isn’t you, Rob. He’s … I don’t know. He’s got a harder head.”

  “Are you saying I’m a softie?”

  “No, it’s not that …”

  “Don’t worry about it. Look, I’ll drive him out to the municipal airport. He’s got a flight out of Salt Lake tonight. I’ll come back and we’ll start clearing up some of this stuff if you want. What? What is it?”

  “Well, I don’t think we should take the maps down quite yet.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get back. I think I need to go to the Escalante.”

  EVERETT RUESS WAS twenty years old when he vanished in the Escalante Canyons region of Utah’s red rock desert. For several years the young man had made the west’s great wilderness his home, traveling on horseback or with a burro, living like a nomad. He ranged from the Navajo Reservation to Yosemite and all points between. He was an artist of exceptional insight and his block prints captured the stark beauty of the American Southwest. In 1934, at the age of twenty, Ruess set out with two pack
animals to explore the vast wilderness of the Escalante region. After the Mormons and Major John Wesley Powell, he was one of the first white people to do so. His last camp was near Davis Gulch, not far from the terminus of the Hole in the Rock Road where Penelope’s body was found. He was never heard from again.

  Ruess’s body was never found. In 2009 a grave was discovered near Comb Ridge, close to the place where Silas Pearson himself had nearly met his untimely end the year before, but DNA tests concluded that the body discovered there was not Everett’s. The mystery grew deeper.

  Silas sat in his bookstore, the lights out, the door latched. The hooded reading lamp on his desk cast a warm light over the book: Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty. Written by W.L. Rusho with an introduction by John Nichols; Edward Abbey wrote the afterword. Silas had several copies of this slender tome in his personal library, now on the shelves of the Red Rock Canyon Bookstore. He was flipping through one now. He read the afterword again:

  You knew the crazy lust to probe the heart

  Of that which has no heart that we could know.

  Toward the source, deep in the core, the maze

  The secret center where there are no bounds.

  Abbey wasn’t much of a poet, Silas thought, but he guessed that the crazy lust to probe the heart of what no heart could know was what propelled Penelope too.

  She too had disappeared in the Escalante. That was where the answers would be.

  9

  “NOW YOU UNDERSTAND WHY WE left your Tempo at home?” Silas asked as he played the wheel of the Outback to maneuver around foot-deep ruts in the road. The landscape stretched out as far as the eye could see in a tableland dotted with buttes and bordered to the south by the Kaiparowits Plateau. The sky was dark, the underbelly of cumulus clouds pressed down so that the summit of the great upland reef was obscured.

  “What happens when it rains out here?” Robbie wanted to know.

  “This road will get pretty bad.”

  Robbie grinned. “That ought to be interesting.”

  “We just passed Davis Gulch,” said Silas.