by Sandi Ault
“Well, maybe she’s not…maybe she wasn’t driving the car.”
“That is still a possibility, but the odds aren’t good at this point, given that we have no other leads to her whereabouts. But we’ll know soon. We reported the wrecked vehicle to the local authorities, which in this case was the county sheriff’s office. They’re the ones who will investigate the crash scene and perform the recovery if there were any victims. In the meantime, you and I should proceed with whatever lines of inquiry we were pursuing until we have more news about the car and if there were any occupants.”
I struggled not to feel hopeless after this update. As the past few days had unfolded without so much as one glimmer of good news, I had grown increasingly less able to ignore the nagging feeling in the back of my mind that we would not find Abasolo alive. But I hadn’t faced it squarely until now. The woman for whom we were searching could well be dead at the bottom of a ravine in her smashed-up car, and there would be no good news for The Bartender.
I continued searching my pockets and finally found the private detective’s card. It contained just three words: Zeke Mitchell, Investigator, and then a telephone number. I dialed that number.
“Hello, Miss Wild,” Mitchell’s voice said.
“How did you know it was me?”
“Caller ID says US Government, and it’s a Taos area code. You’re the only fed I know from Taos.”
“I want to ask you something.”
“I already told you, I don’t share.”
“Well, I’d like to change that.”
“I’m listening.”
“I would be willing to share some information I have recently learned, under the right circumstances, and if it is mutual, of course.”
“I’m still listening.”
Once again, I stuck my head around the corner of the divider and panned my eyes across the station office. Gomez had gone to the back in the direction of the restrooms before I began the call and had not returned to the front desk. Vicky was opening boxes of brochures in the entry area and positioning the leaflets in the information rack as fastidiously as a florist arranging blooms in a bridal bouquet. “First, tell me this. Abasolo had a neighbor who came to take writing lessons from her on Mondays. Her name was Susan Lacy. Do you know anything about her?”
“I might. And if I do?”
“If you do, I have some information on Abasolo that I could share.”
“Like what?”
“Like…” I thought a moment about my instructions to keep my mission undercover but time was running out to find Adoria Abasolo alive—and perhaps had already passed. “Like about an alias, another name she used.”
“You mean Lola Zorate?”
“Lola Zorate? Who is Lola Zorate?”
Mitchell went quiet for a few seconds. “I think I might be out ahead of you on this thing.”
My mind was spinning. Who was Lola Zorate? “I had a different name in mind.”
“A name that is neither Zorate nor Abasolo?”
I didn’t respond.
“Okay. Then perhaps I could be persuaded to share a few notes.”
I had been pursuing a weak hunch about Susan Lacy, but now the new name that Mitchell had thrown into the mix tipped me off-balance. “I can’t really talk where I am right now. Is it possible we could meet and have a chat about some of this?”
“Sure. Where?”
“The closest good place for me might be the Bear’s Paw in Peñasco. Can I buy you a cup of coffee in exchange for a few minutes of your time?”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes.” He hung up.
36: Where There’s A Will
Mountain had been snoozing on the carpet with his nose under the office chair, so I scooted carefully to one side to avoid running over him with the wheels. I reached down for the backpack and returned Buzz to the front pocket. Suddenly the phone I’d just been using, the replacement for the Screech Owl, sounded. This newer model with its sleek display and big glass screen had a much kinder voice than the old phone—a double chime—and I thought in a flash that it didn’t deserve the same moniker as its predecessor. I answered: “Wild, Resource Protection.”
It was Carla from the library. “Since you’re in such a hurry, I reduced everything I had before down to a rough outline. Check your email.”
“Wow, that was fast!”
“Like I said, I already looked up a lot of this stuff. If you want more, I can keep digging.”
The document Carla sent contained two paragraphs, a short timeline, and two bullet-point lists. Although some of the information here had been touched on in the Outside Magazine article I had read at Abasolo’s house, there was enough new data in this small amount of text to render me incredulous. The two paragraphs and the timeline were an overview of how Quintana went from being an unknown undergraduate sociology student at UCLA to a bestselling author, self-proclaimed sorcerer, cult mystic cum psychedelic guru, and patriarch of a polygamous clan that included at least three wives and a number of children, none of whom bore Quintana’s name. The bullet points illuminated one or two significant details on each of the key figures in the family (or coven), with the caveat that each of these people in Quintana’s bizarre circle had “erased their personal history” and so in many cases, their real names and backgrounds were unverifiable. One of these names practically flew off the page at me: Lola Zorate.
After scrolling through the document, I sent the file to the same printer I’d used previously, then stepped over Mountain and got up to go stand beside the output tray it and grab the pages as they emerged. The wolf woke up, stood and stretched, and watched me. As I walked back to him, I folded the newly printed pages and stuffed them in the back pocket of my jeans. “Come on, Mountain,” I said, giving him a rub on the back of his neck. “We’re going to see that guy we caught in our trap last night when we were driving home from Tecolote’s.” As I said the bruja’s name, I felt a stir of concern. I had to find some time somewhere in this day to check on her and see how she was feeling.
It was just after ten in the morning when I got to the Bear’s Paw. Mitchell’s Humvee was already parked outside. Since the early-morning breakfast crowd had already come and gone, the tables inside were now empty except for the one where the P.I. sat sipping from a cup. I ordered a coffee at the counter and gestured to him to see if he needed a warmup, but he waved it off and went back to studying a page in the leather document folder that was open in front of him.
I took a chair and pulled the two printed sheets out of the back pocket of my jeans. I left them folded but set them down next to my cup. “Good morning.”
“Same to you,” he said. “What have you got there?”
“A little research stuff,” I said. “I was hoping we could talk about Susan Lacy as an opener. Have you spoken with her? Do you know where she’s staying?”
He jutted his jaw forward as if he were deciding what to say. “I have not spoken with her. I do know where she is staying. Now, you tell me: what’s this about a third name for Abasolo?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know whether it’s a third name. I didn’t even know anything about the other name you said until we spoke earlier, the Lola name.”
“Lola Zorate. I kind of gathered that. Is that what your research here is about?” He flipped a hand toward my folded pages.
“No. Well, maybe partly. I want to talk about that, too, in a minute. But first: can we just team up on this thing? Abasolo’s been missing more than a week. If we don’t find her soon, we may not…”
“I’m a private investigator,” he said. “I don’t get involved at that level.”
Hearing this, I felt deflated. “Okay, well how about you just help me with anything you can because I am involved at that level?”
“I don’t know where she is. You probably know as much about what happened to her as I do. But it sounds like I know something about her past that you didn’t.”
“Yes. What’s this Lola Zorate thing?�
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“First tell me the alias you had for her. Then I’ll tell you what I know about the Zorate name.”
“Inés Otero. That’s her real name. She wasn’t born in Brazil, she was born in Bogotá, Columbia two and half years earlier than her fake Brazilian birth certificate says she was.”
“You have this document? The real birth certificate?”
“I don’t have it. But someone on my team does. Believe me, if he says it’s real, it’s real.”
He twisted his lower lip between his fingers as he considered this new revelation. “I thought her real name was Lola Zorate. In fact, the way I first located Adoria Abasolo was when a couple of people saw a photo of her from when she was younger—when she was speaking at her graduation as the valedictorian of Stephens Women’s College. The picture was in The L.A. Times after she was named U.S. Poet Laureate last fall, and they said right in the feature that they didn’t have any current photos of her, so they pulled out a few from the past, and that was one of them. Some people recognized her as Lola Zorate from Los Angeles, and they hired me to verify this. That’s how I got started on this case.
“And did you verify it? I mean, do you have a document that shows she’s really Lola Zorate?”
“I think what I have already could make the case. That’s why I’m still here, tying up the loose ends, but I think I could do it with what I have now if I had to.”
“Make a case? Are you working for an attorney? Is there some kind of a case involving Abasolo? Did she change her name because of a crime?”
“We can talk some more about this when I see what else you have. But let me just say something about people who change their names: if you’re a celebrity who wants one of those crazy one-word names, or you’re trying to Americanize your name so you can succeed more easily, you go to court and you legally change your name. If you don’t do that, it’s a tell for a guy like me. I see that and I presume you’re probably hiding something, and that’s usually something that could jeopardize you legally or criminally. Abasolo was hiding something.”
“Hiding what?”
“I believe it’s your turn to share.”
“Well, all I know is that Adoria Abasolo was born Inés Otero. And I’d like to get more information on the Lola Zorate part, too, but I’m really more concerned about finding her than I am about figuring out her past at the moment. I’m concerned that she’s been missing for more than a week, and no one has seen or heard from her in that time. I feel like if we don’t find her very soon, we may not find her alive. To be honest, it may already be too late. This woman Susan Lacy is somehow tied to Abasolo. She was taking writing lessons from her. She’s not from around here, and Abasolo’s basically a hermit, and yet this Lacy person gets the poet to give her private writing lessons. It’s just too odd; it’s been bothering me from the very beginning. I can’t help but wonder what that’s about. And I’m glad you know where she lives. Nobody else seems to know. I ran into her once at Abasolo’s house and I haven’t been able to find her since.”
“I followed her home on that bike of hers. She’s staying in a rented casita, a good way north of Abasolo’s—almost to Ojito—then off on a dirt road that is barely wider than a hiking trail and up a steep dirt drive that hasn’t been graded in years, a real mess. I did a little checking on the place; they had a listing on Air B&B, rent was really cheap by the month, probably because of the terrible road and how far it is from anything. Anyway, that listing must be how Lacy found it. She’s been staying there for a couple months. She’s from L.A.”
“Hmm. From L.A. That’s certainly a repeating theme here, isn’t it? So have you tried to talk to Lacy?”
“I just followed her at first, to find out where she lived. I had my secretary do a background check on her. I wanted that before I talked to her so I could ask the right questions.”
“Did you come up with anything?”
“She’s 37, never married, no children. She has a doctorate in literature from Stanford. She taught at UCLA until last May, when she took a sabbatical. She has published two books, both of them used as textbooks—both feminist approaches to interpreting literature. That’s all I have so far. I can’t see another tie she might have to Abasolo except for the poetry thing. So I wasn’t thinking she was a person of any real consequence, like you seem to.”
“Hmmm,” I said, taking a long drink of my coffee. “Do you know anything about Lacy’s parents?”
“I haven’t gotten that deep into the weeds on her yet. There’s a lot of moving parts in this case.”
I reached down and unfolded the two pages and spread them side by side on the table. “I just got this right before I came here, so I’m playing catch up. Since you think Abasolo used the name Lola Zorate, I think I need to get up to speed on that part of this mystery.”
He tipped his chin up. “What do you have there?”
“It’s a bare bones sketch of the Videl Quintana ‘family.’ The name Lola Zorate is one of five women listed here as ‘witches’ in his coven. The whole thing is unreal. Do you believe that Abasolo was the same person who called herself Lola Zorate, one of Quintana’s witches?”
“I do. And that’s precisely why I’m here. Because if Abasolo is, in fact, Lola Zorate, then she’s Quintana’s one and only legal wife. And that means she would be the primary heir to Quintana’s fortune.”
My mouth fell open. “What?”
He leafed through his document folder and opened it to a photo, then spun the notebook around to show me. “This is a picture of Lola Zorate with three of the other women in Quintana’s harem. That one there is Zorate.” He pointed to a beautiful, dark-haired, olive-skinned young woman in a faded color photograph, then twisted the notebook around and pulled out another page, placed it beside the first one, and spun the folder back to face me. He pointed at the photo on the second page. “And that is Adoria Abasolo four years later speaking at her graduation from Stephens College.” The two images looked almost identical. “I have looked everywhere for evidence that Adoria Abasolo existed before she went to Stephens College. The first time she appears in any public record is when she did her college entrance exams in Columbia, Missouri, at the university’s testing center, as part of her application process, and her score was the highest overall in the state that year. That’s why such an exclusive private college offered her a full scholarship. Her application papers for entrance show that while in high school, she took some advanced courses at the university in São Paulo, but I don’t know if they are real—or if they are not, where she got them. I haven’t been able to track that yet. But at the same time Abasolo was supposedly taking those advanced high school and pre-college classes in Brazil, Lola Zorate was studying at UCLA as Lola Zarate while married to Quintana. And now you’re telling me that she wasn’t even born in Brazil. I’m thinking those Brazilian transcripts were as phony as that birth certificate she gave them.” He sat back from hovering over the documents and threw up his hands. “What do you make of all this?”
“I don’t know. I’m baffled.”
“Look, I gotta ask: is this exchange going to be fair? Do you have anything for me there?” He gestured toward the two folded sheets in front of me.
I pushed the papers toward him. “This is stuff that you’ve already figured out, however, I do have something else that might be a big deal. But before I get even more confused, can you just fill me in on this Quintana connection? Then, I’ll take my turn.”
“Okay, might as well. I think it’s all going to come to light pretty soon anyway. First, there’s this: Videl Quintana also did that ‘erasing your personal history’ thing he wanted everybody associated with him to do. He was born Xavier Benítez in Uruguay, four years before he claimed he was born in Argentina as Videl Quintana.” He tapped his finger on the table for emphasis. “So do you see why, when you said you had another name for Abasolo, I didn’t even question it?”
“What a mess! This blows my mind! Tell me about Quintana’s will.”
“It’s just as complicated as the man was,” he said, and he pulled his notebook back in front of his chest and thumbed to a page in it, then twisted it around for me to see. “First of all, these are the so-called witches.” He showed me a printed list with details after each name.
“Witches of Quintana Coven”:
· Lola Zarate (Adoria Abasolo) Became disciple to Quintana at age 16. Legally married to Videl Quintana 06/28/1968 in Las Vegas and never divorced. Disappeared from Quintana coven at age 18 in August, 1971 and changed identity.
· Rachelle Helena (a/k/a The Nonbeing) Quintana’s second (not legal) wife (married with L.A. County license 07/16/1981) Bears a daughter (Nona Dodd — see offspring below) to Quintana. Kicked out of the coven by Qual but then welcomed back after a few years. Presumed deceased in suicide pact.
· Qual (a/k/a The Wingless Bird—has had at least four different names, none of which are real) Adopted by Quintana 08/31/1981 as an adult (age 19). Sexual partner to Quintana; married him in unlicensed ceremony after/while he was married to Rachelle Helena. Presumed deceased in suicide pact.
· Salma Esteban (not her real name) One of the witches in Quintana’s coven; also the leader of the Sorcery School and appeared in public classes, workshops, retreats, etc., on behalf of the foundation and the Sorcery School. Presumed deceased in suicide pact.
· Yini (not her real name) One of the witches in Quintana’s coven who published a book on learning to become a sorcerer. Presumed deceased in suicide pact.
Offspring of Videl Quintana:
▪ Nona Dodd Born 07/28/1981 daughter of Quintana and Rachelle Helena; raised by maternal grandparents in Iowa. Never associated with coven or Quintana after Helena left, even after Helena returned to the coven.
