The Vanishing Point (3 page)

“I'm Ellen Frank,” the woman said. “Curt is in the Gallup office now. I can give you his number there if you like.”

“Please,” said Claire.

Claire
wrote the number down, then said, “I'm an archivist at the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico. Are you familiar with the legend of Jonathan Vail?”

“Somewhat,” Ellen answered. “We sell his novel and his journal at the ranger station. They're popular with backpackers. Not as popular as Abbey, but people still like to read them.”

“A student just brought me a notebook he found in Sin Nombre Canyon that appears to be Vail's missing journal.”

“You're kidding. After all this time? Is it in good shape?”

“Excellent.”

“The student should have brought it to us. It's not an active investigation, but Vail's disappearance is a case that has never been solved.”

“I told the student that. He also found a duffel bag, which he left in the cave. I'm sure it will be of interest to whoever is conducting the investigation. Do you know who that would be?”

“I'm not sure, actually. That case has been inactive for so long. I know whoever it is will want to see the notebook. Can I get back to you?”

“Of course.”

Claire hung up, then dialed the number she had been given for Curt Devereux. She had never met him but was curious about the man who'd been in the eye of the storm that swirled around Jonathan's disappearance. Claire explained who she was and why she was calling. There was a pause. Curt cleared his throat and said, “My God. After all this time. Do you believe the journal is authentic?”

“It appears to be, but we intend to have it authenticated by the family and a handwriting expert.”

“I always wondered if Vail might have ended up in one of the side canyons. I've been all over Sin Nombre, but never found a trace.”

“The student who brought it to me said he thought the cave had been covered by a rock slide and uncovered by another slide.”

“That's possible. What's the student's name?”

“Tim Sansevera. He's a Ph.D. candidate writing his dissertation on Jonathan Vail.”

“It used to be that students visited me, but I haven't spoken to one in years. Sansevera shouldn't have taken the journal out of the cave. It's not old enough to fall under the Antiquities Act, but it is evidence in an investigation that has never been closed.”

“That's what Ellen Frank said. She told me she didn't know who would be in charge of the investigation at this point.”

“I've got less than a year left here. I've been thinking about Jonathan Vail since the sixties. I sure would love to close my career out by finding out what happened to him. Thanks for calling. Someone from here will be in touch.”

Chapter
Two

C
LAIRE LIVED IN THE FOOTHILLS
in an area of high desert vegetation—cholla and prickly pear blending into piñon and juniper as the elevation increased. The only deciduous trees in her neighborhood had been planted by developers and residents. Her rear windows gave her a close-up of the Sandia mountains, which sparkled like an effervescent wine in the sunset's afterglow and turned cold and surreal beneath the light of the moon. The view from the front of her house, across the city and into the dusty vastness of the West Mesa, was almost too large to appreciate, although the sunsets were spectacular. There were times when Claire preferred the walls, the vegetation, and the seclusion of her courtyard to either view.

When she got home that night, she put her copy of Jonathan's journal on the bench by her front door, picked up her cat, Nemesis, and walked through the house. The cat was gray, the carpeting was gray, the walls were off-white with a minimum of artwork and decoration. Her house was subtle and subdued, and Claire liked it that way.

It was late October, and there was enough of a chill in the air to contemplate lighting the first fire of the season. Claire had two choices—the wood fireplace in her living room and the gas stove in her bedroom. She decided on the gas; it was easier and cleaner. She went into the bedroom, clicked the remote, and watched the gas flames lick the ceramic logs. Then she went to the kitchen, where she cooked herself some frozen pasta for dinner, her favorite meal since her divorce. One advantage to being single was that she didn't have to make her husband a salad every single night. By the time she had finished eating, the stove had warmed her bedroom and the cat had warmed her bed.

She took the copy of the journal to bed, thinking she would read it one more time, but it lay on the bedside table while she stared at the fire and thought about Jonathan Vail. She had seen him only once, at an antiwar demonstration she attended while visiting a friend at UNM. It was in the early summer of 1966, right after her freshman year at U of A. Jonathan had finally graduated from UNM by then and had already published two books.
The Journal of Jonathan Vail,
a record of time he'd spent wandering in the canyonlands, was published in 1965. It had some beautiful nature writing and was far more polished than the recent discovery, but he'd had a chance to work on that book with an editor.
A Blue-Eyed Boy
was published in the winter of 1966. It didn't find its audience until after Jonathan disappeared that summer, but Claire read it when it came out. Even then, before she knew she would be an archivist, she read everything she could get her hands on about the Southwest.

A
local band called Las Margaritas had played at the demonstration. They had a few years of notoriety and popularity in the Southwest before breaking up. Claire remembered Jonathan and Jennie Dell sitting on the stage. Jennie got up and danced with the band, swinging her long blond hair and tapping a tambourine. Jonathan remained seated, looking withdrawn and sullen. When he finally spoke, he mumbled. Claire wasn't sure if the slurred speech was an affectation or if he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol. He had been known to show up at book signings inebriated. It was a time when being incoherent was considered appealing, and there was something rebellious and attractive about the slightly built, blue-eyed boy with the thick brown hair falling across his forehead. His manner was intense. He swayed as he gripped the mike. Claire wasn't sitting close enough to see the blue eyes Jonathan was famous for, but she saw the reaction of other women in the audience, the adulation that male writers can provoke in women.

Jonathan was twenty-three then, and in a few more years he would have become ineligible for the draft. Speaking out in public risked attracting the attention of the draft board, but that was how Jonathan Vail had lived, taking every risk, accepting every challenge. There were times when Claire envied his recklessness and his courage.

******

She kept her word to Harrison and didn't mention the journal to anyone when she got to work in the morning. The only way she could do that was to hide in her office and avoid her coworkers. Whenever Harrison entered her office, Claire felt a shadow glide across her desk, an amorphous kind of eastern shadow, not the sharp one cast by the New Mexico sun. She could always feel his presence, but sometimes she hesitated before acknowledging it. He cleared his throat, which was the signal it was past time for her to look away from her computer screen.

“Harrison,” she said. “Hello.”

He liked to give the impression that he was too busy for pleasantries, getting right to the point. “I dropped a copy of the notebook by Ada Vail's house on my way home last night. She was, as you can well imagine, overwhelmed by the discovery.”

“Of course.” Harrison usually maintained that he was too busy to sit down, so Claire had stopped offering him a chair. She could have stood up herself and been on his level, but she didn't do it. Respect was granted or denied by subtle gestures in academia.

Harrison picked up a paperweight from Claire's desk and cradled it in his long white fingers. He had the fingers of a pianist, but Claire, who had been a musician herself, was convinced he had never played. Harrison didn't have a musical soul.

“Ada is an elderly woman,” he said. “Still very active, but in her eighties. I feared the shock
might
be too much for her. After all, this was a message from the grave, from a son who has been gone and presumed dead for more than thirty years. She recovered well, however, thanked me profusely and said she would read the journal overnight.” Harrison put the paperweight down two inches from where he had picked it up. “She called me this morning. There were things she found disturbing in the journal. She wants to talk to you. I made an appointment for you to meet at her house at eleven-thirty.”

Claire glanced at the time on her computer screen. “That's an hour from now, Harrison.”

He placed his fingertips together, forming a tent, and pointed the tip of it at Claire. “Ada has been most generous to the center.”

“I'm aware of that.”

“We need the notebook to complete the Vail collection. I'm counting on you to keep Ada Vail happy.”

“I'll do my best,” Claire said, but she felt she would have been able to do a better job if she'd had time to prepare herself. Harrison had barely given her time to comb her hair before driving across town to the Vails'. Claire hated to be late, so she tended to arrive early. If it was her first visit, she might be as much as half an hour early, which often left her with time to kill driving around unfamiliar neighborhoods.

Today, she ended up ringing Ada Vail's doorbell at eleven-twenty. The Vails lived in a large house near the country club. The lawn, an intense, clipped green, was surrounded by pyracantha that had been trimmed to form a hedge. At this time of year, it was embellished with orange berries. Claire thought pyracantha was a nasty plant, full of thorns, but planting one beneath the window did keep intruders away. The Vails' street was lined with cottonwood trees that cast deep pools of shadow. It was quiet and verdant, a long way from the dust of Sin Nombre Canyon.

The doorbell was answered by a Mexican maid with features that Claire identified as Mayan.

“Hola,”
she said.

“Buenas dias,”
the maid replied.

“Is Mrs. Vail home?”

“You are Señora Reynier?”

“Yes.”

“Come inside,” the maid replied. “She is expecting you.”

Claire followed the maid into the living room, which had hardwood floors stained so dark they appeared burnt. It was a large room running the depth of the house, from the windows that faced the street to glass doors that opened onto the rear patio. The windows had pale blue velvet drapes that puddled where they landed on the floor. The room was large enough to have several groupings of furniture, each including a white sofa, a pair of matching armchairs, and a polished coffee table. The fireplace had
ceramic
logs and a glass door. While the maid went to get Ada Vail, Claire examined the painting centered over the fireplace, a moody brown landscape by Russell Chatham, a Montana artist she admired. The beauty of the painting and the money it took to buy it prompted the thought that an artist—like an archivist—has to please a few people who have a lot of money, and a writer has to please a lot of people who have a little money. Her job was to please Ada Vail so that the center could keep the journal in its collection and UNM Press could publish it. Although she admired the painting, Claire thought the rest of the room had the effect of new money trying to look like old money. There was too much crystal dangling from the chandelier, too much pale blue carpet with the matching drapes, too many ceramic figurines. It was the House That Felt Had Built.

Claire couldn't decide which cluster of furniture to sit on, so she walked to the rear of the room and stared out the window at the sprinklers watering the smooth-as-carpet lawn. The cushions had been removed from the wrought-iron patio furniture, making it look skeletal and forbidding.

She heard the sound of a wheelchair in the hallway and turned around to see a nurse in a uniform that stretched tight across her hips wheeling an elderly gentleman, presumably Otto Vail, into the room. “Mrs. Vail will be here shortly,” the nurse said.

She wheeled Otto to the one group of furniture that lacked an armchair and left him there to complete the arrangement. Her rubber-soled shoes squeaked as she exited the room, leaving Claire in silence with Otto. Except for blue veins tunneling across the back of his hand, the stroke seemed to have drained the color from him. His thin hair was silvery, his skin the pallid white of flesh that has been wrapped in a Band-Aid or submerged underwater. He had a long, thin face, and his cavernous cheeks made Claire wonder if the nurse had neglected to insert his dentures. He brought silence into the room with him, yet his eyes blazed with an angry blue light. To get closer to his level, Claire sat down on the sofa.

She knew she was talking to fill the void and that even if Otto could hear, he couldn't respond, but the silence was so uncomfortable that she spoke anyway, trying to keep her voice to its normal cadence and pitch. “Hello, Mr. Vail,” she said. “My name is Claire Reynier. I work at the Center for Southwest Research at UNM, and I'm the archivist for your son's collection. A grad student named Tim Sansevera brought me the journal that has been missing all these years. He found it in Sin Nombre Canyon a few days ago. It's a remarkable find.”

Otto Vail looked exactly the same when she finished this introduction as he had when she started. Not a muscle had moved. His eyes continued to blaze. Claire understood there was no way of knowing what a stroke victim heard, yet she felt that Otto had listened to her. Was that her own ego talking or had he made some sign too subtle to be registered consciously? “The center is very happy to have Jonathan's papers. We deeply appreciate the family's generosity.”