by Sandi Ault
I drew in a long, slow breath, and let it out. “Let’s eat our dinner while it’s hot,” I said. “And then I want you to tell me the whole story. But first, eat some of this good food Mrs. Munoz has left for us.”
We were doing up the dishes when I started questioning Rico again. “You’re from Tanoah Pueblo. That’s a little ways from here. How do you know Adoria Abasolo?”
“She taught some writing workshops last summer in our village, at Tanoah. It was part of an artists in residence thing. We also had a glassblower come and some people who taught dance. We got to choose which workshop we went to every week. I like to write. I really liked Auntie…Mrs. Abasolo. She encouraged me whenever I wrote a poem. I went to every one of her classes.”
“And so you became friends?”
“Yes. Nobody ever told me I could write before. She made me feel like maybe I can do that, you know, when I grow up. For a job. Like she does.”
“So that was last summer. And you kept in touch?”
“Not really. I didn’t see her any more after school started again. The workshops were just for the summer. They were supposed to keep us pueblo kids from getting into trouble. I didn’t see her until we did the Deer Dance a few weeks before Christmas. She was there. My uncle brought her.”
“And who is your uncle?”
“Paul Deherrera. You were just talking with him the other day. And remember, you told him to tell me thank you for saving your wolf?”
How had I missed that? I knew Paul had ties to Tanoah Pueblo, but I hadn’t thought to ask him about Abasolo. “So you saw your teacher at the Deer Dance. What happened then?”
“She came to my mother’s house with Uncle Paul for the feast after the dances. She asked me about my writing and even helped me put wood on the bonfire outside and we talked and kept warm by the fire for a while. After that, she left with my uncle. I heard some people talking in the kitchen after they left. My mother told the other women that Mrs. Abasolo had asked Paul to bring her to the fireplace, and he spoke for her to the elders in the Carry Water Clan. They allowed her to come because he is an important member of the clan and he sponsored her.”
I dried the last dish and put it back in the cupboard. “But how…”
“You’re so impatient! I wasn’t going to stop,” he grinned, giving my shoulder a light shove. “I’m going to tell you.”
I twisted the dishtowel and swatted him on the back with it. “Well, go on then!”
“Maybe we should sit down again. This could take a little while.”
We moved into the living room, where Mrs. Munoz had laid a fire, complete with crumpled paper and kindling. I struck a match and lit the paper.
“There was another feast two days after that at Picuris,” Rico said. “My mother and some other family, we all came up for it together. Uncle Paul was dancing, and I saw Mrs. Abasolo on the plaza while the dances were going on. I went to talk to her, and she told me that she had seen a vision when she went to the fireplace at Tanoah Pueblo, and she needed to see more. She said she was looking for something important and the peyote would help her find it. She asked me if I could get some peyote for her. I told her that they would have another fireplace soon, but she said she couldn’t wait. I didn’t want to do it. I tried to tell her I couldn’t do it, that it was wrong to take the medicine. She said it was urgent, and she gave me some money. I still have it. I didn’t ask her to pay me. I didn’t want to do it, but Auntie Adoria…” He stopped in mid-sentence and looked down into his lap.
“What? Adoria…what?”
“She saved me,” he blurted, and then began to cry.
I waited, lest I interrupt this boy’s delicate confession.
“You know, before, I was hanging around with some guys. They were doing drugs and stealing and doing a lot of bad things. When Auntie Adoria came to Tanoah Pueblo and gave those workshops, she made me see that I don’t want to be like that. She gave me hope....hope of getting out…hope that I could be someone…that there is something good inside of me… I don’t know how to say it. She just saved me. I think I would already be in that juvy jail you talked about if it wasn’t for Auntie Adoria. Or maybe worse.”
“I see.”
“It seemed like she needed the medicine pretty bad. I just couldn’t say no to her when she kept pleading with me. She was crying and practically begging. I just wanted to help her.”
“Did she tell you what she was looking for that she could only see in the vision?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. He wiped his tears from his face and regained his composure. “I just wanted to help her, that’s all. Now, I don’t think I can go on unless I do something to get back home. It’s even worse here at Picuris. There’s no one my age. The place is like a ghost town. I have to get back home. I miss my mom. I want to go back to school. It starts again next week, and I won’t be there. I’ll fall behind if I don’t get back. I just want to go home, but I can’t go back until I make it right again. I thought if I returned the medicine, the tribe would let me come home. I wanted to ask Auntie Adoria to give it back to me, but she is gone. So I decided to find it myself and take it to the clan leaders and ask them to forgive me.”
I fluffed up a pillow and wedged it behind me and put my feet up on the coffee table. Mountain had chosen to lie underneath Rico’s already-propped-up legs and was stretched out on his back, upside down against the edge of the base of the couch with his hind legs spread wide, looking absurdly comical and even slightly obscene. “So where is your uncle now? Does he know you’re out running around like a bandit in the dark of night?”
“Uncle Paul is at kiva doings at Tanoah Pueblo. They only have two clans left at Picuris, so my uncle has to go to Tanoah for his clan rituals. He doesn’t know I’m out, and he won’t be home until daybreak. He’ll be tired then and need to sleep.”
“Okay. Well, no matter, I think you ought to get home—I mean back to your uncle’s house. Get some rest. Don’t get your internal clock all switched around and start becoming a night owl.” I swung my feet off the side of the coffee table and stood up. The wolf twisted and then leapt to his feet as nimbly as a cat.
“You never told me why you are here,” Rico said, standing now, too.
I tussled the Mohawk on the top of his head. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” I smiled.
“Is Auntie Adoria coming back?” He asked as we walked toward the big front door in the entry lobby.
“I don’t know when she will be back,” I said, truthfully. But as I spoke, I also knew that as time passed and I grew no closer to finding her that answer could ultimately be no. I opened the big door wide and saw that a fog had settled in while we were eating and talking, the stars no longer visible. “How did you get here, by the way?”
“I rode my bike,” he said. “It’s around the side of the house. There’s a trail across this open land right here that leads back into the forest.” He pointed toward the land to the south side of the house where I’d parked my Jeep—the land Abasolo had bought from Bota Romero and given to the brothers. “It’s just a game trail, but it goes clear over behind the mission. It cuts through onto Pueblo land along the rim of the canyon and onto an old road that nobody ever uses much. I chase rabbits on that trail sometimes with my bike.”
“Well, you be careful riding that thing in this fog, especially on the canyon rim road. I can barely see the wall around the garden out there, and it’s only a few yards away.”
“I will, Miss Jamaica,” he said, trying for a smile but not completely succeeding. I could tell he was still feeling unsettled about what he had done and how to make it right.
“Listen, keep your chin up. We’ll see what we can do about getting you back home to Tanoah Pueblo.”
He had started to cross the portal when I said that, but he spun around, his eyes wide in the porch light. “Are you going to help me?”
“I know some people,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
32: Visio
n
I pulled Buzz from the backpack, and when I raised the device in my hand, the screen lit up. I found the keypad symbol, enlarged it to fill the screen, and pressed the image marked zero.
“Good evening, Miss Wild,” the woman’s voice said. “How may I assist you?”
“I need to speak with Agent…”
She cut me off. “Certainly. Stand by for your device to sound. Should you need anything further, dial zero. Have a safe and productive day.”
A minute later, Buzz began to rasp and dance in my hand. I pressed the talk icon on the screen. “I need to speak with you,” I said.
“Where are you?”
“I’m at Ab…I’m at the poet’s house.”
“I am unable to get there tonight. Can it wait until morning?”
“I suppose. I have a little info to share. And I wanted to ask a couple things as well.”
“This is a secure line. Go ahead.”
“It’s nothing urgent. I’ll wait to brief you until tomorrow. How thoroughly have you looked through this house?”
“Bare minimum. We were interrupted.”
“Have you gone through her computer files?”
“Affirmative. We copied her hard drive, looked through her desk. That’s about all.”
“Okay. Hey, can I use her computer? Or is that going to screw something up?”
“If necessary, you may search only. Clear your search history when you’re finished. Do not create, modify, or destroy files.”
“Is it okay if I send an email?”
“Negative. That creates a file. You can use the device you’re using now to communicate, to send and receive emails and text messages, and you can also use it to search and print. You can create files to store directly to the device like photographs of physical files or evidence. I would prefer you used it in lieu of the computer at that residence.”
“Okay. I just wanted to send a personal email.”
“That is permitted on the device.”
“But it’s monitored. I mean, there’s no privacy…”
“That is correct,” he said. “It is monitored and reviewed. Anything else?”
“No. I’ll make a list and look to hear from you in the morning.”
“Assume I will find you at some point; do not wait. Just proceed with the business of your day. Good night.”
I held the phone away from my face and frowned at it. “Boy are you a different guy when you’re not breaking in to my house.”
I made a mug of black tea in the kitchen, figuring I’d be up most of the night searching Abasolo’s personal effects for clues. I decided to start in her office, as I had begun to do when I had been interrupted by the neighbor, Susan Lacy. I took my cup and went to the desk and shuffled through the stack of papers on one corner. She had a file drawer, but all the most recent paperwork—going back several months from the look of things—was amassed in a heap in the in-basket or piled up on the two corners of her workspace.
It became apparent after about twenty minutes of sifting and speed-reading that most of this was not creative work but rather receipts and mail. Utility bills. Royalty accountings for her book sales. Statements for repairs and maintenance on her house and keeping her drive cleared of snow. Maintenance and service tickets for her Mercedes from the dealership in Albuquerque. Invitations to speak or appear at events. Even a few pieces of fan mail and several old magazines with post-it notes stuck to the pages marking articles that must have interested her. One of these struck me as curious.
A dog-eared, four-month-old issue of Outside Magazine sported a blank sticky-note in the fold at a feature titled: Mystery Solved: A Witch’s Bones in Canyonlands. After scanning this to get the gist of the story, I was intrigued. The article detailed a true life mystery about a woman who was said to be a witch among several in the coven kept by the now-deceased author Videl Quintana, and the tale went back to a time right after Quintana’s death, years before the article was written. The piece began with the same information I had read previously—that immediately after Quintana died, his coven dispersed and the women disappeared, never to be seen again. And then it focused on an event some years after that occurrence, when a woman’s bones were discovered by hikers at the base of a steep cliff in a narrow slot canyon in Canyonlands. A forensic autopsy of the bones estimated that at the time of discovery the remains had been there for at least four years—and possibly more—before being found, and that perhaps the woman had jumped or fallen off the cliff edge into the canyon far below. I stopped reading there, thinking I had much more looking around to do.
But because I had registered the reference to Quintana, this grisly tale continued to pique my curiosity. I finished a perfunctory sweep of the remaining items on the desk, then picked up my empty mug and the magazine and started for the door to get more tea and a comfier spot to sit and read the article in depth. As I swung around the side of the desk, I noticed again all the books by Quintana on Abasolo’s bookshelf. I bent down to review the titles and detected a slim sheaf of folded papers in between two of the tomes. I pulled at them and extracted a folded stack of about twenty sheets of letter-sized paper. I looked at the first few lines of the poem on one of these pages and decided to take this bunch with me to peruse further.
In the kitchen, I made another cup of tea, then took it and the items from the study into the living room, where the fire I had started earlier while talking to Rico had died down to ash-coated coals. I stirred them up with the poker and threw a couple logs on top, then sat down with the tea and my reading and put my feet up. Mountain curled up in front of the fire, having already slept a fair amount of time nearby me on the floor of the study while I was hunting for clues on Adoria’s desk. My nighttime sleuthing was not interfering much with his beauty sleep.
I began with the story in the magazine, which held my rapt attention. I read every word, then doubled back to study the dates because it contained a complex and somewhat confusing correlation of events that took place in approximately four-to-five-year increments. As the story recounted, the bones of a woman were found more than five years after Quintana died, and the forensic pathologist estimated her death had occurred at least four years prior, or possibly more, which would have been roughly around the same time as Quintana died. The cause of the woman’s death appeared to be a leap or a fall from a cliff edge into a deep slot canyon. Once discovered, the bones were interred in Utah as a Jane Doe.
More than four years after the interment of the bones, an investigator sought to have them exhumed relative to an ongoing case regarding the contesting of Quintana’s will. The significance of the bones in relation to Quintana figured into both the settlement of the will and a cult legend that had yet to be proven as fact.
In laying out background for this legend, the article echoed much of what I had read previously: that Quintana was not only world famous as an author, but also worshipped as a sorcerer and teacher by a cult of followers. That he was known to keep what he referred to as a coven of witches, also known as his sorcerer’s apprentices—anywhere from four to five women at any given time. And it detailed how they lived with Quintana, served in many cases as his sexual companions, taught classes in sorcery and a strange form of exercise called Powerform at his foundation, and managed the vast Quintana compound on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where dozens of people lived and worked, including several children thought to be either Quintana’s or the witches’, or both. The cult followers knew the “witches” by esoteric aliases, identities the women had assumed when they joined forces with their mystic master, Quintana. Because of this, the women could not be traced by their coven names to any real person, living or dead. When Quintana began to rapidly decline in health, the four apprentices in the coven at that time told a handful of friends and cult members outside the compound, and all those within it, that they intended to go with their leader “into the beyond.” After Quintana died, the four witches who had been living with him at the time—known as Rachelle Helena (a
/k/a The Nonbeing), Qual (a/k/a The Wingless Bird), Salma Esteban, and Yini—suddenly and mysteriously disappeared.
The story skipped ahead to the current time, ten years after the death of Quintana and the disappearance of the witches, and back to the Canyonlands bones, now exhumed: DNA tests were run just before the Outside Magazine article was published, and the results showed the bones found in Canyonlands to be those of Ursula Lindstrom, who had abandoned her former identity when she joined the coven, and assumed the name of Qual, also known to Quintana and his cult-like followers as The Wingless Bird. The conclusion the journalist drew was that soon (if not immediately) after Quintana’s death, Qual had leapt from the cliff “into the beyond,” as the witches were said to have pledged to do.
Quintana’s books told of his own leap from a cliff decades before, as he was striving to become a powerful sorcerer through his apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian capable of superhuman feats of witchcraft. The first few of his bestselling books, discounted by scholars and experts as pure fable, detailed Quintana’s schooling in the use of psychedelic drugs to reach altered states of reality at the hands of this teacher who claimed to be a Toltec. Later books in the series told tales of Quintana emerging as a sorcerer in his own right, and eventually becoming so powerful that he, too, became a master who trained apprentices not unlike the women he lived with and referred to as his coven of witches. The magazine article concluded that in the case of the bones, if Qual did try to leap into the beyond like the sorcerer had purportedly taught Quintana to do, she did not take her bones, nor likely her body, with her, notwithstanding her nickname of Wingless Bird.
I wondered if this article and Abasolo’s obvious interest in Quintana as a writer—given that she owned every one of his books—had sparked her quest for hallucinogenic experiences and using peyote. I felt an uncomfortable sense of dread, much like I had felt when Rico had asked me earlier if Abasolo was coming back.
In one sense, I completely related to Abasolo’s interest in Quintana’s work. Like hundreds of thousands of other Americans who had read his bestselling first book, I found his early writings fascinating. I could also relate because of two very strange and powerful characters in my own life story. Both Momma Anna and Tecolote knew things and were capable of doing things that I myself might disbelieve if I hadn’t witnessed their powers. Tecolote had referred to herself as a bruja, which meant that she knew herself to be a witch or sorcerer. And she had also given me a powerful hallucinogenic the very first time I went to see her which gave me a glimpse into an altered state of reality. In contrast, though, I had never learned these skills nor practiced them myself. Momma Anna had years ago agreed to teach me the ways of the traditional Puebloans, and cited her reason for doing so: the youth of the dwindling population of Tanoah Pueblo had shown little interest in maintaining their culture. From her, I had learned to bake bread, to make a few small bits of pottery, to cook and observe a few feast day rituals, but I had also witnessed unexplainable things in her presence and by her hands. Rather than training me in any secret or dark arts, what both of these amazing women had taught me by encouragement and example was to trust my own intuition, to honor my hunches, to look deeper than others and to be present for whatever I observed or sensed. In particular, Momma Anna had taught me to see life in everything, even things I might have previously considered inanimate or without intention—like stones, trees, the wind—and to read the messages coming to me from everything I experienced. She had shown me the sacred in life, something I had never been taught as a child. Tecolote, on the other hand, was an immensely powerful seer and healer, and her cryptic cautions, potions, foods, and teas had often had a potent effect on my thinking and/or my consciousness. It was no accident that, even now in the 21st century, the mountain people surrounding her village still looked to her for healing that they could not otherwise find.
