by Hy Conrad
That left Amy and the Spanish-speaking Furies to join Nicolas in the Land Rover. Amy sat shotgun and volunteered to get out every now and then to open the barbed-wire gates and close them again. For a place with such wide-open spaces, there seemed to be a lot of fences and gates.
The ride was perhaps fifteen minutes long, interrupted by three gates and an equal number of radio conversations. Each time there’d be a choice between two rocky trails, Nicolas would press his intercom button, fire off a question, and wind up driving down the rockier, less hospitable trail. “Sorry,” he mumbled in English. “My first time here.”
“You’re doing wonderfully,” Amy assured him. “We’re lucky you were free on such short notice. Did you have to drive all night from Buenos Aires?”
“I’m Chilean,” said Nicolas, keeping his eyes glued to the dusty road. “I applied for the job originally, but Senor O’Bannion chose someone else. My references, I guess, are not so many. I decided to do a holiday instead. I was in Bariloche. Do you know Bariloche? Lake district. Very like Switzerland they say. Good skiing in winter.”
“I’ve never been.” Amy was always embarrassed by the number of places she’d never been.
“I don’t think I was the first guide he called. Lucky for me, Bariloche is not far. Four hours by car to the border crossing.” He pointed through the now-grimy windshield. “Time for your help again.”
The final barbed-wire gate led them to the final fork in the road. But this time Nicolas didn’t need his radio. The homestead was in sight, just off to the right.
Amy had been expecting something a little more charming and rustic. But the gaucho home was a patchwork of small prefabricated sections, with a sliding glass door at the back and a roof of corrugated metal. An equally small barn was made from the same material and stood at the far end of a whitewashed corral, along with a lean-to and two outbuildings. What it lacked in charm, it made up for in neatness. Everything was tidy and clean, right up to the corrugated roof.
Three figures were waiting in front of the cheerfully painted blue door, two women—one older, one younger—flanking a familiar male figure. It was Oscar, of course. Who else would have a typical Patagonian homestead open for view by the owner of the Glendaval estancia? Oscar wore pretty much what he had worn yesterday, except for the hat, which was not the Buster Keaton flat hat but a more casual beret. The women, apparently his wife and daughter, were dressed in more folksy costumes: long red pleated skirts, white stockings, white blouses, and a strange type of plaid bib, like a Scottish version of a lobster bib.
Nicolas and the four women descended from the Land Rover. The Furies were quick to approach the family and introduced themselves in their usual furious way. Nicolas stood by Amy’s side, ready with a translation, as needed.
“Is this a native costume?” she asked.
Nicolas in turn asked Oscar, who seemed not to be holding any grudge from yesterday’s adventure. “It’s traditional, yes,” reported Nicolas. “From Wales. But not what they wear every day.”
Amy didn’t quite understand. “Do you mean whales, like the animal?”
“Like the country,” said Nicolas. “Oscar’s last name is Jones. You find many groups in Patagonia. German, Portuguese, Croatian. In the eighteen hundreds, people all over Europe dreamed of a better life. The corrupt schemers took advantage and sold them property in this paradise of South America. Whole towns would come over to farm and build new settlements. It was a big shock for them to arrive here.”
Amy glanced around at the rugged, isolated beauty of the plains. “I can imagine.”
“Most of them did stay,” Nicolas explained. “They were isolated and made their own governments, far from the kings and the unfair laws. And they kept their ways. Some places in Patagonia are still like Europe. They teach the languages and have the holidays. There are towns here more Welsh than any place in Wales.”
“So Oscar speaks Welsh?”
“His parents did. Here he doesn’t get much chance to speak it.”
Oscar Jones and his family invited Nicolas and the tourists inside. And suddenly Amy found herself in the rustic atmosphere she’d been expecting. The main room, a combination living room and kitchen, was paneled in dark, rough, overlapping wood slats. The chairs looked old and homemade, with small sheepskin rugs as their only upholstery. A black iron woodstove stood against an exterior wall and seemed to fulfill the double purpose of heating and cooking. Amy didn’t know if it was lit or not, but the whole house had a warm, almost peat-like aroma. The floor was a brown tile, rich and deep in hue, the kind that a New York designer might want for a Manhattan country-style pantry.
The Jones stood in a formal row. Oscar introduced his wife, Maria, then turned to his daughter with obvious pride, a hand on her shoulder, and made a longer, more impassioned introduction. The girl turned her face away and blushed.
“Her name is Juanita,” Nicolas said, translating, “and Oscar is very proud of how smart and hardworking she is.”
Amy shook hands with each of the Joneses, revealed her own name, and accepted Maria’s offer of a maté gourd. She knew from experience that refusing whatever you were offered upon entering a home anywhere in the world was the same as refusing their hospitality. She stirred and sipped and smiled and set it aside.
“Would you like to see how they spin wool?” Nicolas asked, speaking for Senora Jones. The woman was shy but welcoming, with graying brown hair parted down the middle, thick features, and a sturdy bearing. A wilderness beauty, Amy thought, who might have once known better things.
Everyone, Amy and the Furies, expressed their excitement, and Senora Jones led them outside to a corrugated tin lean-to, protected from the prevailing winds. For the moment, Nicolas stayed inside, drinking maté with Oscar.
Amy had seen enough spinning demonstrations in her life, so she didn’t mind when the other women jockeyed their way to the front, each with a dozen questions about the wool and the carding process and the spinning wheel and whatever else they were pointing at. She took a step back, physically and mentally, and began to wonder how she was going to do it. She’d promised her mother. But how in the world could she start asking about a theoretically missing woman? She didn’t even speak their language.
“Are you norteamericana? USA?” The voice was soft, only slightly louder than a thought.
Amy turned. A few feet behind her was the daughter, still wearing her plaid bib. She was a younger version of the mother, late teens perhaps, still holding on to the hope of youth.
“I am. New York City.”
“Oh.” Juanita Jones looked impressed. “I have a cousin who went to New York City. He says it is very busy all the time.”
“It’s not quite that bad.”
“I don’t mean bad.” She smiled and showed off white and perfect teeth. “Do you mind if I practice my English? People at the estancia help me. Someday I will work at a hotel in Santiago. Not like a maid. My father wants more for me. My mother says it is all the same, just making money. But my father says I can do more.”
Amy was impressed. Not every father, gaucho or not, would be so supportive of his daughter. “It is good to have big goals, Juanita.”
“He says I can work at a front desk, speaking English to norteamericanos. How do you call yourselves? North . . .”
“We call ourselves Americans. It’s wrong, I know, but simpler.” Amy was practically beaming. “And to answer your other question, yes, I would love to help you practice your English.”
The spinning wheel was spinning now. Senora Jones and the Furies were huddled, fully engaged with the making of thread, allowing Amy and Juanita to slip around the side of the lean-to, then away to the edge of the corral.
Juanita climbed up on a railing and settled back against a fence post. “People say I’m smart. I work hard. I want to do things. Do you know how you are lucky this way, to be born who you are and where you were born?”
It was a sobering thought, plainly and beautifully put. �
��I’m very lucky,” said Amy. “I don’t think about that enough. And I’m lucky to meet you, too.”
Juanita nodded gravely, removed her touristy Welsh bib, and folded it into her pocket. “So let us talk English.”
Over the next ten minutes or so, their practice session was intense and targeted. Amy introduced words into the conversation like disappeared and missing. Also the words woman, local, and friend.
At first, Juanita treated it as a vocabulary challenge, like a quiz in a language primer. “Do you know any girls who are missing?” “Yes, I know many girls who are missing. One has brown hair. One has red hair.” But then Amy made it clear that these were real questions, ones that needed honest, thoughtful answers. Juanita nodded and played along. “No, I don’t know any girls who are missing.”
Things got interesting for Amy only when she introduced words like anything unusual and stranger into the session. Also the word auto.
“Isn’t ‘auto’ the same word in both languages?” asked Juanita.
“Yes,” her English professor agreed. “But most North Americans say ‘car.’ Now what about this car that you saw?”
CHAPTER 12
When Amy returned to the lodge at a little after six, the sun was still high in the sky. Fanny was not in their room but had left a note on Glendaval stationery, inviting her daughter to change into her bathing suit and join her in the wood-burning hot tub. Amy felt self-conscious traipsing into the great room in a hotel bathrobe and slippers. But the maid who was dusting the mounted head of a puma understood English enough to point her in the right direction. Amy found the hot tub out on a stone terrace, nestled in a crook off the main level, out of sight of the driveway and everything else except the sheep meadow and the mountains.
“You’ve never been in a hot tub in your life.”
“You say that like it’s an excuse not to try.” Fanny was up to her neck in steaming water, barely able to keep her head afloat, but smiling and determined to enjoy herself. “Alejandro the waiter says they can’t always fire up the tub, because of the wind, but that today was good. By the way, Alejandro says the staff is all present and accounted for. My first day of investigating, and it’s a dead end.”
“Hey, if solving mysteries was easy, everyone would do it.”
Their hot tub was made of cedar, circular like a barrel cut in half, with seating for six and two platforms for getting in and out. The side away from the view held a twenty-foot-high smokestack and a spigot in the tub for adding cold water and controlling the temperature. Amy could smell the burning logs and assumed that somewhere just below them was a roaring fire, along with all the appropriate safety precautions.
“We’re like lobsters in a pot,” joked Fanny. “Come on in.”
Amy did as she was told, making a point of finding a seat away from the smokestack. Her glasses immediately steamed, and she had to choose between a foggy view and a fuzzy view. She chose fuzzy and placed her Ellis frames on a platform, beside the two glasses of chilled white wine. The tub’s temperature was surprisingly uneven, with a pocket of chilly water under her feet. She sat down and moved her legs around to even it out. “Nice.”
“So tell me about gaucho arts and crafts. Did you make a cute little lanyard, maybe with bolos on the end?”
“No lanyard. But I had a conversation with the gaucho daughter. A remarkable girl.”
Fanny handed her a glass of wine, and they toasted. “Tell me.”
“Mmm.” The first sip reminded Amy just how much she liked Chilean wines.
The English lesson had at first produced no results. Juanita had grown up with few friends. Sad but not unexpected. She was homeschooled, pretty much self-schooled from books. Once a year her father drove her more than two hours into town for the national exams, and they would stay overnight. That was the highlight of her existence, the promise of a life that Oscar wanted for his little girl. Now that the estancia had been restored, things were improving. She was starting to make friends with the Glendaval staff. Maybe one of them would teach her how to use a computer.
Then yesterday Juanita took her horse to the estancia just for a ride. She didn’t talk to anyone, but on the way back home in the late morning, she noticed an unfamiliar auto—sorry, car—on the main road. It was a regular black car, not a Jeep or a truck. And it had Chilean plates. But Juanita was riding across a field, and she lost sight of it.
“The bottom line,” said Amy, “is that someone drove in on the morning we arrived.” She paused to enjoy her second sip of the white. “Well before you found your body.”
“Did the car drive out again?” asked Fanny.
“Juanita doesn’t know. But we should ask the staff about visitors. Also, I can go online and check towns within driving distance. If there are any car rental places, they’ll have a record.”
“A record of someone renting a black car somewhere in Chile? There must be dozens.”
“Maybe this car was never returned. It could be sitting in the wilderness or wrecked in a gully the police haven’t looked at. In that case they’d have a record, and we’d get a name. We can also talk to the car services. Ask if they dropped off a customer in the vicinity. If this was a woman on a trip by herself, she might not be reported missing for a while.”
“I suppose that’s something,” said Fanny.
Amy was annoyed by her mother’s lukewarm reaction. “It’s the only something we can expect. The body itself is gone. What else is there?”
“There’s my camera,” said Fanny, brightening at the thought. “We can borrow the horses and try to find it. I had some great footage. It’ll prove I’m telling the truth.”
“We are not doing that. Remember the last time you went horseback riding?”
“It was an expensive camera.”
“The police have already been over that ground. What we need to find is the person in that car.”
“I suppose. Do you think we’re getting any warmer?” asked Fanny.
“No, I don’t.” Then Amy realized what she meant. “Oh, the hot tub. Yes.” It was indeed starting to get uncomfortably warm, even around her feet. “Can we turn down the fire? How do we do that?”
“They explained, but I didn’t understand. Let’s try turning on the cold water.” And she twisted the spigot by the smokestack. A torrent of water flowed in.
“No. No more.” Amy turned it right off. “If the level gets any higher, you’ll drown.”
Fanny turned it back on. “Then we’ll start bailing with our wineglasses.”
“Or we could just get out.”
“Ahhhhhh.” Fanny’s groan would have been more dramatic, but that would have entailed opening her mouth all the way and taking in a lungful. ”I don’t know why I take you on vacations. You’re no fun at all.” Then she downed the rest of her wine and began to bail.
* * *
Their second night at the Glendaval estancia was scheduled to be their last. Amy spent the hour or so before dinner looking at a map and trying to contact car companies in Puerto Cisnes, Puerto Aysén, Chile Chico, all the way down to the larger town of Puerto Natales. Two of the towns didn’t have rental cars at all, one had a car service, but no one there spoke English or French or Italian or cared to make sense of Amy’s garbled attempt at Spanish. Puerto Natales did have a combination of car service and car rental agency. The manager there spoke English. He assured her that all their cars and drivers were accounted for and that they had had no recent trips to the Glendaval region.
Fanny didn’t fare any better. She spoke again to Alejandro and to the bartender. She even enlisted Nicolas to translate her inquiries to a respectable-looking maid who had been there for a week before their arrival, cleaning and polishing. Other than delivery trucks, no one had come up the drive to the lodge. There had been no outsiders that they knew of. No one was missing, and no one new had arrived.
In the morning there was one last excursion, a short drive in the Land Rovers to a cave at the foot of a rare Patagonian waterfall.
Breakfast was cooked on an open fire under an opening toward the rear of the cave—eggs, ham, fruit, pastries, and coffee—and laid out for them on a table-sized rock facing the sheet of water as it cascaded into the lagoon. After breakfast, they exited the cave on the dry side and walked around to where two men in skiffs were waiting to row them around the waterfall’s lagoon. The rowers pointed out a family of guanacos, a camel-like cousin to the llama, that had come to drink from the shallows.
By noon they were back at Glendaval station, the lonely stone whistle-stop, standing on the platform, drinking tea and coffee and maté as the porters loaded their luggage back into their compartments. A hose from the station’s tower had just finished feeding water into the borrowed silver engine.
Amy stood at her mother’s side. They hadn’t spoken seriously all morning, just the usual exchanges about how cute and unafraid the guanacos were and how lucky they’d been with the weather and “Did you remember the toothbrushes?” But waiting here, barely tasting their coffee and maté, Amy could tell that Fanny was thinking the same thing she was. How could they leave? They certainly couldn’t stay. That wasn’t a possibility. But given their situation, with Todd Drucker lurking twenty feet down the platform, with TrippyGirl’s credibility on the line, with a dead woman unaccounted for in the Patagonian wilds, how could they possibly leave the scene, crime scene or not, never to return?
“I’m sorry,” Amy said, barely aware that she’d said it.
Fanny made a face. “I always said you should’ve studied Spanish in high school. But no, you were too artsy. It had to be French.”
“What?” Amy blinked, for a moment unsure if she’d heard correctly. “That is so not fair. It wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“I know.”
“Even if I could have talked to every car place in Patagonia in perfect Spanish, I don’t think it would have helped.”
“I know. I just said it so you’d feel as bad as I do.”
“Aw, thanks, Mom.”
