The Vanishing Point (10 page)

“By now someone else could have come across it and taken it. It should have been reported to us, but there's no guarantee it would be. We might have gone looking for it ourselves, except that Curt asked to do it and he did it on his own time. People still come to me with theories about what happened to Jonathan Vail. There's an amazing amount of interest in someone who disappeared in 1966. I've always wondered why.”

It was Claire's job to keep the memory of Jonathan Vail alive, and his enduring legend was a subject to which she had given considerable thought. “He wrote a book that influenced a lot of people, he disappeared at a young age, and the mystery of his disappearance has never been solved. It's a puzzle that keeps people interested.”

“I hear the same theories over and over again. Vail is still alive, there's a child somewhere, he's hiding out and dodging the draft on the Navajo reservation. I know that one isn't true. If Jonathan were on the reservation, someone would have reported it by now. Besides, draft dodgers got amnesty years ago. Sam Ogelthorpe, who owns the Comb Ranch, talks to me about it occasionally. He claims he saw
Jonathan
killing a cow on his ranch two days before he was reported missing. But it was raining, Sam hated hippies. Who knows what he saw? Maybe it was an apparition, maybe it was a mountain lion, maybe it was another hungry hippie. Whatever it was left a dead cow, but any footprints washed away in the rain.”

“Is Sam still alive?”

“Oh, yeah. Still ranching, still grazing on BLM land. Even though Sam has nothing but contempt for Jonathan Vail, I guess the connection makes him feel important, like he's a part of history somehow. Is that what it's all about?”

“That's part of it.” Claire was reluctant to bring up the next subject, but Ellen had given her an opening. “There is also the theory that Curt didn't conduct a thorough investigation, that he was blinded by his attraction to Jennie Dell.”

Ellen smiled with precision. “I've heard that one, too,” she said. Her smile disappeared, and her face went bureaucratically blank, almost as blank as Curt's, although she'd had less experience in cultivating the expression. “To be fair to Curt, this area was very primitive in the sixties, and he had limited resources. It's quite possible that Jonathan Vail and Tim Sansevera both died by falling off a ledge. Maybe even, by a strange coincidence, the same ledge. We were lucky enough to find Tim. Jonathan's bones could have washed into the San Juan, or they could remain in Sin Nombre Canyon. They might still be found. Every time we get a hard rain the boulders shift and the configuration of the canyon changes. One day one of those changes may expose Vail's bones. Bones are a good witness. They don't lie, and they never forget.”

“It's possible for the cave to have closed and opened up again?”

“Absolutely.”

“Could Curt and I have gone into the wrong cave?”

“That's also possible. We'll look into the others while we're conducting our investigation. If we find any artifacts of Jonathan Vail, they'll get passed on to Curt. Are you going home today?”

“Yes,” Claire said.

Ellen stood up and gave Claire a firm handshake. “Have a good trip. I appreciate your help.”

******

Claire drove south on Highway 261, planning to drive down the Moki Dugway and stop in Bluff for lunch. Route 261 paralleled Comb Ridge, which looked more like cresting waves to her now than dunes. She thought of grief as an ocean that came at the grieving person in waves—submerging, receding, submerging again. She could imagine that Tim's mother would feel she was drowning in grief.

She came to a dirt road with a rusty sign that read
COMB RANCH
. On a whim, Claire turned in. It
was
a long drive across the mesa, on a road so rough it made her truck sound like a bucket of bolts and buck like an ornery horse. It was a test of the effectiveness of her shock absorbers, and they seemed to be failing. The road was so bad there were points at which she considered turning around, but Sam Ogelthorpe was another character in the Jonathan Vail mystery, someone she had wondered about for years, and she couldn't pass up the opportunity to meet him.

Eventually the road ended at a ramshackle ranch house and outbuildings. This was a hardscrabble, working ranch, not the hobby of a wealthy absentee owner. A pack of dogs snoozed in the yard and on the porch. They raised their heads as Claire parked her pickup, but didn't bother to bark. When a man came out the front door and walked over to her, the dogs stood up and followed. He wore jeans, boots, and a black cowboy hat with a dip in the brim that hid the upper portion of his face. The lower part wore a shaggy white mustache.

Claire climbed out of her truck, and the rancher extended his hand. “Howdy,” he said. “I'm Sam Ogelthorpe.” He'd been ranching here thirty years ago, so he wasn't a young man, but it was hard to pinpoint his age. He could have been anywhere from fifty-five to seventy-five. Although his hair was white, he didn't have the slow movements of an old man. His face was weathered, but out here that could happen at a young age. Claire knew that if ranchers didn't get killed by accidents, they tended to live a long time. In some ways it was a very healthy life.

“Good to meet you,” she said. “My name is Claire Reynier. I'm the archivist for the Jonathan Vail papers at the University of New Mexico.”

“Well, damn,” said Sam. “I was wondering if you people would ever show up.”

“Excuse me?”

“You ought to put my name in your archives right along with Vail's. I may not be the last person to see him in Utah, but I'm the last person who's willing to admit it.”

Everyone liked to have their place in history, Claire thought, however small. “Of course, you're in our archives,” she reassured him. “I've been wanting to meet you for a long time. If you ever get to the university, I'd be glad to show you the archives.”

Harrison soothed the wealthy donors, and Claire got the cowboys, which was all right with her; cowboys were less predictable than rich people. The stroking was deliberate, and it appeared to work. Sam's crustiness fell away like mud dropping off a dried-up boot.

“I may just do that,” he replied.

“I hope you will,” said Claire.

“What brings you to Comb Ranch?”

“A student discovered Jonathan Vail's missing journal in a cave in Sin Nombre Canyon last week. I went back with Curt Devereux to see if there might be anything else in the cave, and we found the
student
dead.”

“How'd that happen?”

“It looks like he fell off a ledge. Ellen Frank is investigating.”

“Easy enough to fall in the canyons,” Sam replied. “Ellen's smart. She'll find out what happened—unlike Curt Devereux, who couldn't find his way out of a paper bag. Vail was on my property in 1966. Devereux came over and looked at the spot, but that's all he ever did. I can show you exactly where I saw Vail if you're interested. It'd be somethin' to tell your students about.”

“I'd like that,” Claire replied.

“My truck's out back.”

“Let's take mine,” Claire said. “The keys are in the ignition.” She hoped that would keep Sam from bringing the dogs, who were a scruffy mixture of hound and mutt, saliva and fleas, dander and dirt. People drove around with dogs in the back of their pickups all the time, but she wasn't comfortable doing it. If you braked too hard, the dog became an unguided missile.

Sam ordered the dogs to stay put, got in her truck, and directed her down a ranch road that was even worse than his access road. It was basically two ruts, and it took all her concentration to keep the Chevy's wheels in the track.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” Sam asked.

Claire did mind, but they were on his property, so she said, “No” and rolled down her window. Sam did the same, resting his right arm on the open window between puffs. It felt like they'd gone as far north as Slickrock Canyon, but it was actually only a few miles before Sam told her to stop.

They got out of the truck, and Claire followed him across the mesa, noticing his worn boots and rolling cowboy walk. It soon became clear how hard it could be to find one's way among the piñon, cedar, and juniper. They were all approximately the same size, color, and shape, making it nearly impossible to distinguish one tree from another. The land was flat and dry, so there were no changes in elevation or water channels for guidance. It didn't take long for the trees to close in behind them, concealing Claire's truck. There were no landmarks to indicate where they were going or where they had been. Even Comb Ridge was not reliable. The peaks were so identical, Claire could look away for a second and not be able to tell which ridge she had previously focused on. You were left to navigate by the stars, the sun, or a compass, if you had one. The dogs would have been a help; dogs can always find their way back.

Sam walked ahead, squinting at the ground. He wasn't wearing glasses, and Claire wondered how well he could see. He was old enough for corrective lenses. Why wasn't he wearing them? Stubbornness seemed a more likely cause than vanity. There was no visible trail, and she looked down at the ground wondering what guided him. Every now and then she saw an unfiltered cigarette butt, and she began to
feel
they were Hansel and Gretel following paper crumbs through the forest.

Sam stopped, dropped the cigarette he'd been smoking and crushed it out with the heel of his cowboy boot. “That's where I saw Vail, by that cedar over there,” he said. “Kneeling over the cow he'd killed. He didn't think there was anybody around to notice, I guess.”

“What time of day was it?”

“Afternoon, but to him it was dinnertime.”

“I understand it was raining that day.”

“It was what the Navajos call a female rain, slow and gentle and steady. I could see him all right.”

“What did you do?”

“I yelled and he ran away. The guy was a draft dodger and a coward. I was on foot and more interested in protecting my cattle than in chasing him.”

“What did he look like?” Claire asked, wondering if Curt had asked the very same questions. Sam seemed more than happy to answer.

“Like a hippie. He was dirty. He had long hair.”

“A lot of people looked like that in 1966,” Claire reminded him.

“Not on Cedar Mesa they didn't.”

“How do you think he got here?”

“He hiked. It's twenty miles from Slickrock as the crow flies. He could have done it in a day. There are no major canyons between here and there. Any jackass with a compass could have found his way to my cattle.”

“You didn't have any cattle between here and there?”

“Not then I didn't.”

“He wasn't reported missing until two days after you saw him.”

Sam watched Claire from under the shadow of his black hat. “The girlfriend didn't know he was missing, or else she was giving him time to get away. After I interrupted his feast, Vail walked out to the highway and got a ride to Mexico.”

“If he was a draft dodger, wouldn't he have come back when amnesty was granted?”

“If he was alive, he would have, but anything could have happened to him down there.”

“Were you in Vietnam?” Claire asked. If he were at the younger end of her age guesstimate, he could have served in the war.

“They wouldn't take me,” Sam replied. “I was too old, but I would have enlisted if I could have. It was a chance to participate in a historical event.”

“Do you come out here often?”

“Not nearly as often as I used to. Interest in Vail has faded. Sometimes nowadays I just come out
by
myself.”

“Why?” she asked.

“To keep the trail fresh and the memory alive,” Sam said. “Seen enough?”

“Yes,” Claire replied.

While they walked back to the truck in silence, Claire wondered why the sighting of someone thirty years ago had remained so important to him. Did he like the attention and the feeling that he had a place in history? Or could it be something more sinister? A persistent rumor among Vail scholars was that after Jonathan killed the cow, Sam shot him and concealed the body. A rancher would know how to use a rifle. Sam might have vision problems now, but that didn't mean he'd had them thirty years ago. Today if a rancher found an animal he didn't like on his property, the expression “shoot, shovel, and shut up” was used to describe the outcome. It was a phrase Claire hadn't heard in 1966, but the impulse was probably the same. She rather liked Sam and didn't want to think he was capable of murder, but thirty years ago he was another person. He might not have known it was a human that was killing his cattle at a distance in the rain. But if he had killed Jonathan Vail or anyone else at that tree, why bring people out to look at the spot? The tree could be a decoy, Claire thought. The victim might have been killed and buried somewhere else on the ranch. It was a place a body could easily be buried and never be found until Sam wanted it to be, which wasn't likely, unless he arranged for it to happen after his death. Anyone with an eye on the past knows that a villain's place in history is assured.

They reached the truck and drove back to the ranch house with Sam smoking and resting his arm on the open window and Claire feeling guilty about the thoughts she'd had. Even so, when they got back to the house and the dogs ran out to greet him, she asked him if they were hunting dogs.

“They're good for nothin' now,” Sam replied, “but I used to hunt with 'em.”

“What did you hunt?” she asked.

“Cougar.”

Mountain lions were hunted with dogs, which pursued them until they climbed a tree, then the hunters shot them down, a pastime Claire didn't consider particularly sporting.

“What does it say about me in your archives?” Sam asked, squinting as if Claire had gotten between him and the sun.