The Same River Twice

by Stephen Legault

  There wasn’t a single mention of Penelope.

  Silas returned the file to its place and closed the drawer. There was a final drawer, but Silas had lost hope he would discover anything that would help him link Isaiah to Penelope’s death. He slid the drawer open. The desk was old and in bad shape, and as he pulled the drawer out it slid off its runner and landed with a heavy thud on the floor. Silas stopped; he felt his heart race. He thought, over the sound of piano music below, he heard Lars Gorman pause in his pontificating about local artists.

  He looked down at the contents of the drawer. More files. There were maybe forty files in the drawer, each also with a neatly typed label, but instead of names of projects there were names of people. He found a file for Dexter Willis and another for the mayor of Moab and one for the chair of the local development corporation. There was one for the owner of the Canyon Country Zephyr, the local newspaper, and one for Tim Martin, whom Silas had run across in the Hatch Wash business the year before.

  There was a file for Jane Vaughn, whose murder Silas had helped solve the previous spring, and for Darcy McFarland, whose murder at nearby Potash remained a mystery.

  Senator C. Thorn Smith had a file. Silas quickly scanned it. There were records of donations going back more than two decades, from the time that Smith had run for governor. Smith had been in Jacob Isaiah’s pocket for a long, long time.

  Silas looked but couldn’t find a file on Kiel Pearce, whose murder was also open and unsolved. Nor was there a file on Josh Charleston. There were other names in the files, most of which Silas recognized as belonging to local politicians or bureaucrats with the Forest Service, the BLM, or the Parks Service.

  Penelope’s file was thicker than all the others. Silas pulled it from the drawer. In the glow of his headlamp he opened the dossier.

  Like all the others it contained copies of correspondence. Silas recognized some that Penelope had sent to Jacob, and some that he had sent back. While hers were long and detailed, outlining her concerns with his development projects around the Southwest, Isaiah’s responses were curt, bordering on rude. Silas scanned them. There didn’t appear to be any overt threats, merely a resignation that people like Penelope had to be dealt with in order to do business in Utah.

  After Silas had finished reviewing the correspondence, he found photocopies of newspaper articles where Penelope was quoted criticizing Isaiah’s projects. There were a few from the local paper and several from the Salt Lake Tribune. There was nothing new in these stories, though Silas found it interesting that Isaiah had underlined or circled several comments that Penelope had made about the Escalante project.

  What Silas found next sent a chill up his spine. There was an envelope of photographs at the back of the file. Silas laid them out on the floor next to the drawer. A dozen in total, they were eight-by-ten black-and-white images printed on glossy photo paper. There were several closeup photos of Penelope speaking at a microphone at a hearing or public presentation, maybe even the one in Escalante just a few months before her disappearance. And there were candid photos of her taken with a long lens: Penelope walking toward Ken and Trish Hollyoak’s home in Moab; Penelope standing on the street in front of Back of Beyond Books; Penelope through the window of a Main Street Moab diner. There were several of Penelope with Darcy McFarland taken outside what looked like the BLM visitor center in Escalante.

  Silas’s hands shook as he studied the images. He felt bile rise in his throat. There, in an envelope in this angry man’s drawer, were photos taken of his beautiful wife, several of them just months before she was executed in the desert. He fumbled and put the images back in the envelope, tearing the corner of the manila paper. His hands were sweating and he realized he had forgotten to wear gloves. Using the corner of his shirt, he rubbed the envelope, leaving a greasy smear there. He put the files back into the drawer, quickly scanning to see if he recognized any other names. None of them looked familiar, so he lifted the drawer and slid it back into place.

  Silas reached the door and as he opened it he used the tail of his shirt to smear any fingerprints he might have left behind. He closed it, making no effort to conceal the damage he had done. What could he do? He started down the stairs, turning his headlamp off as he descended. The first few stairs were silent but halfway down he stepped on an old board that groaned under his weight. He hurried down, wiping fingerprints from the ruined outside door as he exited the building.

  The alley was empty and the street was quiet. He drew a deep breath as he walked from the recessed door and made for the sidewalk. He thought he was home free when he heard a voice call after him. “Silas? That you?”

  20

  SILAS CONTEMPLATED BREAKING INTO A run, but stopped, fixed a smile on his face, and turned to see who was calling him. It was Lars Gorman.

  “Silas, what are you doing here?” Lars said, looking around. He was a narrowly built man dressed in tan slacks and a printed shirt. His dark-rimmed glasses were placed atop a full head of black curly hair.

  “Oh, hi Lars. I was just, um, finishing up some business downtown.”

  Lars looked behind him again and nodded. “Business. Alright, I see.”

  “Yes, my son is in town and I’m heading back to my place now.”

  “Silas, was that you upstairs?”

  Silas felt a lump in his throat. He stared at the man, willing himself to continue eye contact, to not look up and to the left. “No, I was just making my way back from the bookstore—”

  “From which bookstore, Silas?”

  “From Back of Beyond.”

  “Silas, you’re not a very good liar.”

  “Look, Lars—”

  “Let me see what’s in your bag.”

  “Lars—”

  “Your bag, Silas.” Lars took a step toward him. Silas towered over him, but something in Gorman’s voice was disarming. Silas slipped his bag from his shoulder. Lars opened it and took out the prybar. Lars looked at him with a silly grin. “Really, Silas? A crowbar? Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “Lars, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Silas, everybody in town knows what’s going on. Well, mostly everybody. But you’ve got to take it easy. You can’t break into Isaiah’s office and not expect him to connect the dots or call Dexter to arrest you.”

  Silas looked down at his feet. When he looked up, Lars was walking toward the back of his gallery where there was a door adjacent to the one that gave access to the second storey. There was a heavy window in it. Lars swung the crowbar at it and smashed it to pieces.

  “Jesus, Lars, what are you doing?”

  Lars laughed and handed Silas back the prybar. “Now when Dexter sends someone to investigate it will look like whoever broke in upstairs was just looking to hit local businesses. Now go find out what happened to your wife, Silas.”

  21

  “I’M GOING TO SLEEP UP in the mountains tonight,” announced Hayduke after the BBQ.

  “You’re alright to drive?”

  “Shit yeah; even with this Canadian beer, it’s no problem. So, tomorrow, you need any help with Isaiah?”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ve got to spend some time at the store, maybe sell a book or two, and do some digging.”

  “Alright, then I’ll see you in a couple of days. We’ll head to the Escalante.”

  Hayduke raced off into the darkness toward the La Sal Mountains. Robbie looked at his father standing in the doorway. “I see what you mean.”

  “Yeah, it’s like he rehearses the lines or something, right out of The Monkey Wrench Gang.”

  “You think he’s … stable?”

  “Are you kidding me? He’s a loon. But he has been helpful. He saved my life on Comb Ridge. He took a bullet on the Arizona Strip.”

  “I just hope he doesn’t get you killed. He seems reckless.”

  “According to Agent Taylor, he’s got a record—assault, I believe. I think it happened after he got back from the Persian Gulf, some sort of PTSD thin
g.”

  “Be careful, Dad.”

  “Listen, I didn’t say anything while Josh was here. I just didn’t want him going off on another tangent. The reason I was late coming back from town is I paid a visit to Jacob Isaiah’s office. He wasn’t there. I sort of broke in.”

  “Dad!”

  Silas told his son what he found. After they had discussed it, Silas sat back on one of the chairs in the living room, looking out into the darkness. “I think we’re beyond careful now.”

  ROBBIE LEFT FOR Salt Lake City the next day. He promised to call Silas on his cell when he got to the state capital. Silas spent part of the afternoon reorganizing and cleaning his gear and getting set for a return trip to the Escalante. Late in the afternoon he drove into Moab, the afternoon light reflecting off the cliffs of Hal Canyon onto the back of the sleepy Colorado River. Silas mused as he drove: it was all about this river, all along. All that time spent scrambling around the plateaus and mesas and canyons, and in the end the answer was just a few miles from his home in the Castle Valley and his store in Moab. The Colorado was what tied Penelope’s death to that of Darcy McFarland and Kiel Pearce. In his quest to understand what happened to his wife, he couldn’t lose the thread that tied all three of these people together. He wouldn’t forget them.

  Silas arrived in town and went to the Moab Diner, hoping that Isaiah would be there, but he wasn’t. He was spoiling for a fight. He thought he just might drive out to the man’s ranch and confront him there, but doing so could very well get him shot.

  Instead, Silas ate supper and then drove to the Red Rock Canyon Bookstore and stepped inside. If he couldn’t confront the man directly, he’d do so electronically. He flicked the window-mounted air conditioner on and sat down in his chair. He took a can of beer from the tiny fridge and started to scan the web for stories about C. Thorn Smith’s relationship with Isaiah, Barry, and Love. He spent an hour hunched over his aging desktop computer, clicking through online archives of environmental organizations, newspapers, and the US Senate.

  Tired, his eyes starting to blur, he sat up and stretched, his shoulders popping. He leaned back in his chair and looked around the store. The muted lighting in the old adobe building cast a soft glow over his books. The rumble of a muffler on the road caught his attention; he looked from the far end of the narrow store to the single front window and scanned his collection as he did. He shook his head. Selling his own books as a pretext for being in Moab seemed absurd now. But the store had given him something to do when he wasn’t searching for Penelope, and gave him an air of credibility in the tourist town.

  He returned to his reading. There were a dozen stories about the senator’s interest in business dealings in the Escalante region. He had supported the opening of the Monument to expanded oil and gas development, including hydraulic fracking. He had championed logging on the Kaiparowits Plateau. He had backed a plan to straighten and pave the winding Hole in the Rock Road to accommodate more tourists on the route. Silas dug back further into the archives of the Salt Lake Tribune. In a story, nearly seven years old, he found what he was looking for: the first mention of Senator Smith and the Glen Canyon Dam. The story had been written during the debate over refilling the reservoir behind the dam. At the time, Smith had been aggressively encouraging Congress to reconsider the Colorado River Compact.

  Smith, it appeared, had been drafting an amendment to the Compact that would allow the upper basin states—Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming—to hold back more water behind the dividing line with the lower basin states. That dividing line was the Glen Canyon Dam. If passed by both Houses of Congress, and signed by the Republican president at the time, the changes would have refilled Glen Canyon Dam, once again drowning the region’s temples, buttes, and grottos under the silt-laden water.

  It would have left the lower basin states of Arizona, Nevada, and California, as well as Mexico, high and dry. It would have been a second death for Glen Canyon, and places like the Grand Canyon, downstream, would have suffered dearly for a lack of water.

  Penelope would have been devastated. She would have fought this with all of her heart and soul. So would Darcy McFarland and Kiel Pearce. So would Hayduke.

  Silas sat back in his chair. His can of beer was empty. He took another from the fridge, opened it, and read the story again. He scanned the Tribune website for follow-up stories. There was one about the bill being introduced into a lame-duck session of Congress, but then nothing. Silas went to the website of the Senate of the United States and tried to find further mention of the legislation, but there was no mention of the bill after its introduction over five years ago. Silas couldn’t find any mention of Barry, Isaiah, or Love in any of these articles.

  For some reason, C. Thorn Smith had let the legislation drop and, when he did, the water in Lake Powell had done the same.

  “SILAS.”

  He was dreaming. His wife was there.

  “Silas. Wake up.”

  He didn’t want to.

  “Silas, the flames spread explosively. Wake up!”

  WHEN SILAS TORE himself from sleep he had his head down on the desk at the back of the Red Rock Canyon Bookstore. The line from Desert Solitaire was etched in his mind. He had just reread them the night before in the chapter on Glen Canyon, now the focal point of his investigation. The flames spread explosively; Abbey had accidently started a brush fire in a side canyon and nearly been burned alive.

  His first thought was Please, not another body. The side canyon that Abbey had described was now under the stagnant waters of Lake Powell.

  Silas heard the sound of the ragged muffler on the road. Blearily he looked toward the front window again. Some neighbor needs a new exhaust system, he thought. There was a crash at the front of the store; the narrow building’s single front window, next to the deeply inset door, shattered and a stone crashed into the center column of books. Silas jumped to his feet, knocking his desk, sending papers and the can of beer careening to the floor. He was halfway to the front of the store in a few long strides; the front window was shattered and the offending stone—a rock the size of a grapefruit—was on the floor. He looked up in time to see a figure on the street, illuminated by flames. The dark shape reared back with one hand and threw a burning Molotov cocktail through the broken window. Silas had to jump back to avoid being hit. The bottle collided with the front bookshelf and exploded, flames quickly engulfing the front of the building.

  Silas tripped over the stone and landed on his back, pushing with his feet to get clear of the flames. His pants had small spots of fire on them where the gasoline from the homemade bomb had splashed on him. He patted them out with his hands. The fire rose up the bookshelves quickly, consuming the front of the store, blocking his only exit. Silas could see the doorway that led to the street through the raging fire but he couldn’t reach it. He scrambled to his feet and ran for the back of the store. His cell phone was in his bag; he took it out and frantically dialed 911. The flames were rising up the walls and crossing the ancient log beams that held the adobe structure in place. Books burst as the fire consumed them.

  Silas yelled over the din of the conflagration his address and that he was trapped. When the heat became too much, he dropped his phone and retreated to where the window-mounted air conditioner still sputtered. He looked back. The fire was halfway down the narrow building, the sound almost deafening. The flames created a wind tunnel, sucking the oxygen out of the room. As he stared at them, the flames seemed like an angry mouth that was consuming his world. He could feel the heat searing his face and his hands; his clothing felt as if they might burst into flames themselves. His eyes felt hot and he closed them for fear that they might melt.

  He was trapped. There was no way out. He couldn’t reach the door and it was the only exit. The air conditioner groaned to a halt as the power supply to the building was cut.

  He pulled the desk to the edge of the window, the computer crashing to the floor. The AC unit was secured to the frame of the small win
dow with heavy bolts. Pushing everything else off the table, he climbed onto it and lay on his back. With all his might, he kicked at the air conditioner. He could feel the flames closing in on him, smell the acrid reek of burning timbers and scorched clay brick. He kicked again and the AC unit budged. The ancient wood that held the screws fast began to split. He kicked and kicked and a voice rose up inside of him, furious and full of rage. He screamed as he kicked, the red hot air searing his throat. The wood frame of the window shattered and the unit was dislodged. He kicked again and it plunged out of the splintered frame and onto the ground. The open window allowed a rush of air to enter the burning building, feeding the flames. Silas pushed himself off the table, throwing it to the side, into the inferno. He dove for the window as the flames engulfed the rear of the building.

  22

  THERE WERE VOICES AND SIRENS all around him. Someone pulled him up off the dirt behind the store and half-carried him onto the street. He turned to watch the cottonwood tree that stretched over his store burst into a candelabra of flame. Branches and clots of dried leaves dripped like tears of fire onto the roofs of the homes and the street, setting both neighboring houses ablaze. He turned to see families rushing from their burning homes to join him. “Is everybody out?” he shouted over the roar of the flames.