The Stolen Blue Read online

  THE STOLEN BLUE

  A CLAIRE REYNIER MYSTERY, #1

  Judith Van Gieson

  THE STOLEN BLUE

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2000 Judith Van Gieson.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole

  or in part, by other means, without permission.

  First ebook edition © 2013 by AudioGO.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-470-6

  Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9502-5

  Cover photo © Nuno Silva/iStock.com

  To Dominick

  Thanks to

  Betty Parker and Robert R. White for all the book talk.

  THE STOLEN BLUE

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  MORE MYSTERIES BY JUDITH VAN GIESON

  Chapter One

  A YEAR BEFORE HER MARRIAGE BROKE UP, Claire Reynier began establishing credit in her own name, practicing tai chi, and playing computer solitaire. She discovered that there were three types of hands: the hand that started out promising but fizzled when the card she needed was buried under another card, the hand that started out hopeless and remained that way, and the hand that was a gift of the cards. In the latter case the aces came early, and there was always a space for the kings. On rare occasions they could be won on the first pass through the deck, in which case her computer gave her thirty-five hundred bonus points. These games were difficult because each card could only be turned over once. The games Claire liked best started out badly but by a careful move—letting a black king go by, for example, while waiting for a red—could be rescued and won. She was in the middle of a hand with an uncertain outcome when Burke Lovell called her from his ranch house in the Blue.

  “How are you, Burke?” she asked. The rumor had been circulating around the university library that he was not well.

  “I’m havin’ a little trouble breathin’, that’s all.” His voice, which had once terrorized subordinates, was a hoarse whisper.

  “Is it emphysema?” Preferable, Claire thought, to cancer, the other alternative. Burke had been a heavy smoker.

  “Yeah. They got me on oxygen, but I can still play a hand of Texas Hold ‘Em for all it’s worth.”

  “I bet you can,” Claire said.

  “How’s the new job going?” he asked her.

  “Good. Thanks, Burke.” The first resume Claire sent out once she knew her marriage was terminal and she decided to leave Tucson went to Burke Lovell. He had hired her right out of library school and been her mentor when he was head of the Department of Southwest Studies at the University of Arizona. However, due to a cutback in funds, Burke had moved on to Albuquerque to the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico. He was a giant in his field. No one knew more about the books of the Southwest than Burke. Claire would have liked to have followed him when he went to UNM, but she had a husband in Tucson then and two children to raise. Burke was now retired, but he was still a powerful influence on the Center for Southwest Research. He had found an opening for Claire or caused one—she wasn’t sure which—as the head of collection development. Basically her job was to buy books for the library, a dream spot; Claire liked nothing better than to search for rare books. Unfortunately, the librarian she replaced had been well liked in the department, and she had to tread carefully to be accepted.

  “Do you like New Mexico?” he asked.

  “I do.” Evan, her ex husband, thought it was a lawless, dirty state. But it had a frontier quality that appealed to Claire. It was a good place to start a new life. “It’s cold, though. They have a real winter here.”

  She looked out her window and saw snowpack on the mountains and a dusting on the ground. Every night she’d been burning piñon in her fireplace, but she never felt completely warm.

  “It’s been cold in the Blue, too,” Burke said. “The reason I called, Claire, is I am going to turn my private collection over to UNM.”

  “All of it?”

  “Yup. My kids don’t give a damn.” He paused to clear his throat. “You think you could drive over Saturday to pick it up?”

  “Sure.” Claire had no one to answer to now. Her son was in California and her daughter in Boston. Evan had a newer, younger wife. If she wanted to go to the Blue on two days’ notice, she could go. If she wanted to eat popcorn for dinner and watch a video from bed, she could do that, too.

  “Bring the truck,” Burke said.

  “Of course. See you Saturday.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  Claire returned to her game, but in the course of her conversation with Burke, she had accidentally bumped the mouse and the computer had dealt a new hand.

  ******

  Claire’s truck was outfitted with four-wheel drive and a watertight camper shell; transporting rare and valuable book collections was a significant part of her job. Friday after work she loaded the bed with boxes, tape, and bubble wrap. She wanted to surprise her colleagues with Burke’s collection and didn’t tell anyone she was going to the Blue. It was a luxury after years of having to account for every minute of her time, but it was unnerving that she could disappear for a weekend with no one to notice her absence. The Blue was two hundred and twenty miles away, New Mexico miles with lots of beauty and little traffic. It was the kind of driving Claire enjoyed, and she didn’t consider it a long trip.

  When she got up Saturday morning, gray clouds had gathered around the mountains. She began the day by practicing tai chi meditation, standing with her feet together, closing her eyes, letting her hands fall loosely to her sides in the position known as the infinite ultimate stance. One reason Claire enjoyed tai chi was she liked the names of the positions. It also suited her better than sitting meditation; she didn’t like sitting still. She put her weight on her left leg, shifted to her right, balanced on both, raising her arms to chest level to form one open circle with her arms and another with the palms of her hands. She imagined she was balancing three balls: one between her knees, one in her arms, and the third between her fingertips. She stayed in this position for several minutes, trying to clear her mind of thought. When a practitioner remained still long enough, stillness led to movement. She returned to the infinite ultimate stance, rubbed her palms together until they were warm, and rested them on her eyes.

  She finished by walking through her house followed by Nemesis, her cat, who wanted to be fed. The house was small and had a minimum of decoration. Claire worked with Southwestern art and artifacts all day; she had chosen not to live with them. Her carpet and upholstery were a plain, soft gray that she found restful.

  She fed the cat and left the house. It was snowing again and starting to stick to the street. The air smelled of piñon. Her tires left tracks in the unmarked surface. Once she got to the interstate, however, traffic kept the road clear, a relief since Claire had little experience driving in snow. She took I-40 west and was struck by how drab New Mexico looked without the sun. Gray clouds sat on the horizon. The earth was a dull pink. The new developments under construction beside I-40 exposed their wooden ribs. Cars coming east from Grants or Gallup had their headlights on—a sure sign of bad weather. When she passed through the Laguna Reservation, Claire saw moisture evaporating from the fields and black cattle silhouetted in the mist. At the Stucke
y’s exit, she stopped to get coffee then turned south onto Rte. 117. As she drove past El Malpais National Monument, the clouds began to clear and the sun broke through, illuminating the red cliffs around La Ventana Natural Arch, showing the striations of color and time.

  Claire was unlikely to see another car for seventy-five miles on this lonely stretch of highway. She put a favorite Mozart piano concerto into the tape deck, turned up the volume, and let the music fill the cab. She thought of Mozart as lush green music, but it played well in the desert. The beauty of the setting and the harmony of the music were turning this drive into a peak experience.

  She’d been seeking peak experiences more since her father had died of Parkinson’s disease. She’d searched the Internet for information about Parkinson’s and read that the adrenal gland produces dopamine at moments of heightened pleasure or effort. It was a survival mechanism. Those who produced the most dopamine became the strongest, smartest, bravest, and most likely to survive. Her father’s life had been strong on duty, but lacking in pleasure and adventure. Dopa had been the only drug that had helped him. His death had been slow and difficult—not the way Burke Lovell or Claire herself would want to die.

  She thought about Burke, a brilliant, demanding man whose life had been full of peak experiences, but whose heart had rarely gotten a workout. He’d ignored his children and treated the women he’d been involved with shabbily. He did best with students and proteges who were willing to reflect back his brilliance. Claire had known Burke for twenty-five years. He had started as her mentor, but along the way they’d become friends. Burke didn’t have many close friends, and he valued the relationship with Claire.

  The tape reversed itself. Claire left El Malpais and entered Catron County, cattle country, where the land had been grazed down to stubble. She drove through the sleepy village of Quemado. Sixty miles later she reached the county seat of Reserve. Residents of Reserve, proud of their reputation for being radical and ornery, celebrated the Fourth of July by shooting off their weapons. They tried to pass a law that a citizen was required to own a gun to live there. It was a deeply conservative area, so conservative it made Burke appear liberal, although no one at UNM ever believed that Burke was a liberal.

  Claire went south on Route 180 until she came to Mile Marker 22 and the dirt road that descended into the Blue. Her work took her all over the Southwest, but she knew of no place like the Blue, a settlement of twenty families along the banks of the Blue River surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of national forest. You had to drive through twenty-five miles of forest to get to the valley on a white knuckle road full of switchbacks, ruts, and deep drop-offs, which was exactly how the residents liked it. They made their living as ranchers grazing their cattle on public lands.

  Property rarely changed hands in the Blue. Burke had inherited the ranch from his friend Benjamin deWitt. It was equidistant from Tucson and Albuquerque, and Claire had been there during both of Burke’s tenures. It was an enchanted valley, a remote paradise as long as a person didn’t have to live there alone. Claire was remembering how the valley looked in summer, the intense new greens, the dry dusty greens, when her thoughts were interrupted by a woman in a pickup truck with a rifle mounted across the rear window. The woman came barreling around a blind curve, forcing Claire to pull into the side of the hill. The woman lifted a hand from the steering wheel in a casual cowboy wave.

  Claire lifted a hand back and continued her descent. When she reached the river, she saw collars of ice circling the rocks. The elevation here was seven thousand feet, high enough to give the Blue a real winter. The bare limbs of cottonwoods curved and wandered across the valley like country roads. As she drove through the valley, Claire saw a number of metal mailboxes but few houses. Houses in the Blue tended to be hidden from the road. She crossed a bridge and pulled into Burke’s place, a hotel-sized log cabin. Smoke rose from the chimney and drifted across the roof. Elk grazed in Burke’s field. Usually elk didn’t come this close in the afternoon, but in the winter forage was scarce.

  Burke’s daughter Corinne and his dog Roamer met her at the door. Whenever she encountered Burke’s children, Claire thought of all the times a beautiful woman had a plain-looking daughter and how often a driven, successful parent had a dysfunctional child. Some law of compensation seemed to determine that a parent with too much drive stole the energy from the offspring. Burke’s children weren’t lacking in intelligence, but they all had problems functioning in the real world. Corinne had given up and moved into her father’s house, where she acted as a housekeeper. She cooked for everyone in the house, but rarely took the time to feed herself. Corinne reminded Claire of a piece of dry and gnarled wood washed up beside a river. How old was she now? In her forties Claire guessed. She’d been a teenager when Burke was still at U of A. But her thinness and her poor posture made her look like an old woman. Her hair was pulled into a loose bun. She wore a faded dress and a baggy cardigan sweater with worn patches at the elbows.

  “Good to see you,” Corinne said, giving Claire a bony hug.

  “You, too,” Claire replied. She bent over to pet the dog, a hound with long, silky ears. “How’s Burke doing?”

  “You know my father. His lungs might be giving out, but his mind is as sharp as ever. He’s in the library playing poker with his nurse.”

  Claire followed Corinne down the hallway across the living room and into the library. When he first moved to the Blue, Burke went native briefly and became an enthusiastic hunter. His trophies were mounted on the living room’s log walls: a monumental bison head, a javelina with a long snout, a whitetailed deer, and an elk. A fire burned in the massive stone fireplace, and the game stared at it with fixed and glassy eyes.

  Another fire was burning in the woodstove in the library—Claire’s favorite room in the house. Many people coveted Burke’s ranch with its deep and total privacy, the river flowing by and the elk grazing in the fields. Guests fell in love with the place and never wanted to leave. For Claire, the jewel at the center of the property was the library with windows facing the meadow and floor-to-ceiling books, all of them interesting, many of them very rare. This room contained the story of the Southwest.

  Burke sat beside the woodstove with a blanket across his lap and cards in his hand. The nurse, a stocky woman with skin like hide and faded blue eyes, sat on the other side of the stove. A young woman wearing hiking boots, jeans, and a plaid shirt stood beside Burke. Her porcelain skin contrasted with the dark sheen of her hair. A toddler wearing denim overalls trimmed in plaid played at her feet. He had his mother’s fair skin and dark hair, but the roses in his cheeks were his own. Burke’s oxygen tank was on the floor, and the tubes were hooked up to his nose. Roamer, the hound, followed them into the library and collapsed on the floor.

  “You’ll excuse me if I don’t get up?” Burke asked Claire.

  “Sure,” Claire said. She bent over and kissed the top of his head. His white hair was thin, but his eyes were bright, as if they’d stared into the fire long enough to reflect back the flame.

  “Kass is beating me again.” He nodded at the nurse.

  “No way. You play this game?” she asked Claire. “I could use some relief.”

  “Not very well,” Claire answered. “Lately I’ve been playing solitaire.”

  “She finally got rid of a no-good philandering husband.” Burke said.

  Takes one to know one, Claire thought. Her husband had only done it once that she’d been sure of, but Burke had been a repeat offender during his married years. “If you say so,” she replied.

  “I do.” He sized her up. “You’re still a good-looking woman, Claire. You’ll find someone better.”

  Still? thought Claire. Burke showed no signs of introducing her, so she extended her hand to the nurse and then the young woman. “Claire Reynier,” she said.

  “Kassandra Wells,” the nurse replied.

  “Mariah Geraty.” The young woman’s gaze was steady and her handshake firm.

>   “Mariah is my long-lost daughter,” Burke said. “And that’s my grandson Eric.” He smiled at Eric, and the little boy giggled.

  “I didn’t know you had another daughter or a grandchild, Burke,” Claire said.

  “Neither did I until Mariah tracked me down last year.”

  Mariah put her hand on Burke’s shoulder, and he squeezed it tight. She was an attractive young woman who exuded confidence, the only one of Burke’s descendants who appeared to have his drive. In his waning years fate had handed him a gift, Claire thought: a daughter that someone else had raised.

  Burke waved his hand to dismiss his family and nurse. “Everybody out,” he said. “I need to talk to Claire.”

  When she and Burke were alone, Claire settled into the chair that Kassandra had vacated.

  “I’ve prepared an inventory of the books,” he began.

  There was a manila folder under the blanket on his lap. He pulled the inventory out of the folder and handed it to Claire. She glanced through it quickly. It was a collection any library would be proud to own, and it would be a coup for her to bring it in. Burke’s collection would secure her position at the Center for Southwest Research, although it might also increase the level of resentment. “This is an incredible bequest, Burke. The library will be so pleased.”

  “You will make sure my name is on it,” he said.

  “Of course.” Claire began making her way through the inventory beginning with “A” and the “Edward Abbeys.” Abbey remained a hero to Burke and many men in the West, although in Claire’s opinion his monkey wrench books were sophomoric. It was a subject she’d debated with Burke on occasion, but this didn’t seem to be the right occasion. She noticed an error on the list. “You have a copy of Black Sun here signed and dated March, 1971.” It wasn’t Abbey’s most valuable book, but it was Claire’s favorite, a love story between a park ranger and a college student set deep in the canyons of Arizona.