The Other Side of Death Read online

  “Hello,” I replied.

  “Wow. Lot of cars here,” he said.

  “Lot of people, too.”

  “You been inside?”

  “Yup.”

  “You must be a friend of Lonnie’s.” The boy’s fingers drummed on the roof of the Nissan.

  “I was.” Compared to him an old friend.

  “I’d like to go in, but I’m not a friend like you. I mean I knew her, but not like a friend, if you know what I mean.”

  He wasn’t exactly articulate, but what could you expect from a cute teenager? “Actually, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I live over there.” He pointed across the wall to a garage-size adobe hovel. “With my mom. She knows the guy who owns this place. Sometimes I work around here and help Lonnie out—did, I mean, I guess. She’s kind of messy.” He gave a tidy person’s shiver of distaste.

  “You knew Lonnie, you can go in.”

  “You mean it?”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Okay. Thanks. Hey, there’s Ci.”

  Ci had come out the door and was standing on the stoop watching us. “Hello, Dolby,” she said.

  “Dolby?” I said. “Your name is Dolby?”

  “That’s right,” he grinned. “I got that name because I sound good.”

  “Dolby, you are going to help me out tomorrow, aren’t you?” said Ci, walking toward us.

  “Hey, why not?” said Dolby.

  I didn’t especially want to talk to Ci, so I said good-bye and left.

  5

  IT WAS ABOUT two-fifteen in the afternoon; there was nothing I had, or wanted, to get back to Albuquerque for, so I drove out to the ruins to see for myself if there was any evidence of a crime. I got on St. Francis, which joins up with highways 84 and 285, the routes north. It also happens to be the road the federal government intends to use to transport nuclear waste through Santa Fe to its burying ground in southern New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, known as WIPP. The people who lived and worked twenty feet from the proposed truck route didn’t like it much; they’d put out signs that said so.

  The road begins to climb when it reaches the white crosses of the National Cemetery. To be buried next to the highway under a white wooden cross is not a bad way to end up, but I’d rather be off by myself somewhere than in a cemetery. On the back road to Chimayo there’s a wooden cross with a white circle around it and a white scarf waving from it like a Buddhist prayer flag. It sits on a knoll surrounded by sky, which beats having your ashes blowing back in the window of somebody’s airplane. I didn’t want to think about what the Darmers would do with Lonnie’s ashes, but that’s exactly what I was thinking about. She had had a mystical attachment to the ruins; it would be the logical place to scatter her ashes—if she had chosen to die there. Her death was a knot that I was struggling to untie. If was the loop at the center of the knot.

  My rental car took the hill like the legger it was, pissing at every piñon; I got stuck in the slow lane, passed and passed again. It gave me lots of time to appreciate the view. The east was layered with colors: golden green piñons, plum-colored mountains whose snowcapped peaks pushed at the limits of white, above them blue sky and white clouds streaked with watercolor gray. At the top of the rise a sign says ELEVATION 7500 FEET and a wide bare view opens up to the north. You see piñons, mesas, mountains one hundred and fifty miles away in Colorado, sky. It’s one of those places where you get the feeling that God speaks; you just hope he’s not calling your name.

  The downhill stretch forced me to keep my eyes on the road and my mind on my driving. It is one of the more beautiful sections of road around here (beauty being a matter of degree in New Mexico). It’s also one of the more dangerous, but that’s a matter of degree as well. There’s a concrete divider to keep you from mixing it up with the oncoming traffic, but the divider isn’t something you’d want to make contact with either. It’s a wall, oppressive and ugly, limiting the room to maneuver. The legger was picking up speed faster than the truck ahead of me so I squeezed into the passing lane. There’s no inspection in New Mexico, no rust either, and vehicles live forever. The truck I passed was an ancient Chevrolet Apache with a mouth full of chrome. It wouldn’t get far in the Taos ugly truck contest—too well taken care of, newly painted turquoise, smooth and rounded as adobe—but it might win a prize for the number of people in the cab. I counted four before my exit appeared and I had to focus my attention on turning off.

  I headed into cave country, into the mesas carved by volcanoes a million years ago. The cliffs here are the pinkish color of Anglo skin with natural indentations that were enlarged into dwellings. People lived in these cliffs for centuries and the ruins are one of the places they settled. The caves there face south to provide warmth in the winter, shade in the summer, and there was a wash that flowed through the valley for water. It was a simple and beautiful way to live and no one has ever been able to explain why the ruins were abandoned. It happened before the conquest, so it’s one thing that can’t be blamed on the conquerors.

  I drove up the winding road and pulled into the parking lot, an unmarked gravel spot. Unless you had hawk eyes or a guide, you’d never find it. To some people that was what made the ruins special, only a select few knew where they were. They are on privately owned land and are fenced, but that hasn’t kept anyone in the know out yet. I parked the car, the only one there, which was how I’d hoped it would be. The ideal way to get here would be on foot or to hitchhike, because a parked car told others where the ruins were and sooner or later one of them was liable to join you, unless, of course, you were like Lonnie and hid your car. But with a car like the legger there was always the possibility you wouldn’t get it back out.

  I checked the clock over the rental-car mirror—two forty-five. It had taken me a half hour to get here. Lonnie left me around midnight, Pete Vigil found the body at eight. Factoring in traveling time, that left seven and a half hours. What else had she done? Where had she gone? To a bar? To see Rick? Or was Railback right? Had she just come here and swallowed Valium? Then where had she gotten the “rough consensual” bruises?

  Before entering the ruins, I walked down the road and found the spot where the Nissan had been parked—a distance, I guessed, of several hundred feet. Since everything in America is measured by football fields, the distance bore some relationship to one, but I couldn’t say what. I saw car tracks that led into piñons, to a place where a small vehicle would be visible from the road, but just barely. There was only one track, the toy-size tires of the Nissan, but there were a whole lot of footprints, some of which looked like Lonnie’s boot, most of which were probably cops screwing up the scene, none of which were Vs. I walked a little farther, didn’t see any more tire tracks or any footprints either, turned around and went back to the parking area where there’s a barbed-wire fence that circles the ruins. The fence was about waist high and wasn’t hard to climb over—sober.

  As I climbed over it I remembered a piece of advice I read when I was in law school. I didn’t find it in the law library either, but on the trail map of the Pecos Wilderness where I used to hike with a boyfriend in the summer. “Leave only footprints, take only pictures,” the map said. “Plan carefully, prepare thoroughly, practice good manners as you travel through the country. Count on no one but yourself.” I wondered if Lonnie had been counting on anyone when she came here. Had it been snowing? Had she or they left tracks in it? Today the path was dry and dusty, patterned by the hieroglyphics of Reebok, Adidas and Nike.

  I walked past some pink, people-size mounds beside the path, came to a place where footsteps have worn a shoulder-deep trench in the soft rock and squeezed through. It was no place for fat people. The Indians who lived here were a lot smaller, more agile and better adapted to the environment than we are. The stone from here on was soft and gray and when you stepped on it it turned to powder. There were white tracks like ghosts’ footsteps all over the cliffs. I followed them and climbed the mesa. Even
if there had been no moonlight when Lonnie was here and if she didn’t have a flashlight, she could have followed the white tracks.

  As I got near the top of the mesa, the only sounds I could hear were my own footsteps, the legs of my pants rubbing together, an occasional squawking bird and the breeze blowing through wind-stunted trees carrying sounds from the past: Indians walking, talking, carrying water and babies, polishing stone, living in harmony. The only records they left were the petroglyphs they scratched in the stone, but it seems like it was a good place to live, the ruins, a place where people were in harmony with the environment and each other. It wasn’t a bad place to die either. If that’s what Lonnie wanted, it was her body and her right—if.

  Once I went to an Indian ceremonial with her at the Puye cliff dwellings several miles down the road. Ceremonials are religious occasions and usually taping and photography are not permitted. At this one tourists were allowed to walk right up and stick microphones and cameras in the faces of the dancers. It seemed like a travesty and we left. Later that afternoon a storm blew up and two Indians on the mesa were struck by lightning and killed. There was a lot of speculation about how a Pueblo Indian would interpret this. The obvious answer was that the gods were angry, but Lonnie thought the people struck by lightning had been chosen.

  Somewhere at the top of the mesa where the path winds through the ruins of a flattened pueblo, I lost it. I knew which way to go, over the top of the cliff and down to the caves. If I followed the edge I’d eventually come to the ladder that led down, but it felt a whole lot lonelier with no path to follow. Drunk or drugged as she may have been, Lonnie had found the place and climbed down, down one of those primitive wooden ladders that lead to nowhere in Georgia O’Keeffe paintings. This one went down to a trail that followed the cliff. It’s a narrow path with a sharp drop-off in places. If you fell here, you could break an ankle and wait until a Pete Vigil happened by or exposure got you.

  With a dry cottonwood mouth I walked out toward the end of the path, toward the place where the cliff comes to a point and the piñons roll away like waves. There’s a deer etched in the stone out here about five feet tall with antlers. Even though it is only a couple of scratches in a soft stone cliff, it has an expression—alert, watchful. In those days there was a relationship between the hunter and the hunted, some point to the killing. Man was still a part of the animal kingdom, a prey as well as a predator.

  I looked at the deer, thought my thoughts, and then there was nothing to do but turn around and walk back. The caves were stacked in the cliff to my right like studio apartments with powdery white foot- and handholds leading up. I found the one I wanted and climbed in, wishing I had some water to unstick my mouth. The petroglyph that had made this cave, in Lonnie’s mind, a power spot had been scratched on the soot-blackened wall. She called it the water bearer. A stick figure held a pot high and poured water from it. The water ran into a stream that flowed to a river. Lonnie thought it was a symbol of distributing something—peace, knowledge or maybe just water in a place where it was needed. It was an image that had been here at least five hundred years, waiting, pouring.

  The cave’s sandy floor was covered with footprints, running shoes, hiking boots, no Vs that I saw, although there were some crescents that might have been made by Lonnie’s boot heel. A couple of charred logs were in the center of the cave. The spot where Lonnie had lain must have been stepped on again and again, because I couldn’t find it. They say a crime scene reflects the personality of the criminal, but here it’s just as likely to reflect the personality of the police. You should keep your hands in your pockets at a crime scene, your feet in place, your eyes open, your mind alert. I stood still and thought about what the scene revealed. The killer, if there was a killer, must have been someone Lonnie knew. Even Lonnie wouldn’t have come out here with someone she didn’t know, although someone might have followed her. That person would have to be what they call an organized killer, one who planned, left few or no marks on the body, and a person who wanted to spend time with their victim. If they came here soon after Lonnie left me the killer had all night and no one within shouting distance. Unless, of course, there was more than one.

  Once I’d done all I could without disturbing the scene I got down on my hands and knees and crawled across the floor sifting the sand through my fingers, turning rectangles and octagons into grains. I was looking for something, but not what got caught in my fingers: a gum wrapper, a nickel, a dime, an empty film canister. I smoothed my hand back and forth across the floor, then ran it around the place where the stone and sand met. It touched something that didn’t belong there. I brushed the sand away and picked it up with the plastic Baggie I’d taken from Lonnie’s kitchen. The object I’d found was a red plastic knob, the kind that is attached to the drawstring of a sleeping bag. I folded the bag over the knob and closed it. As I eased it into my pants pocket, I heard footsteps. I was a woman alone in a lonely place with fear sharpening my perceptions. A long shadow fell across the mouth of the cave and I felt winter all over again. The shadow was followed by a pair of running shoes, jeans, a camera silhouetted against the view.

  “Hey, look at this,” a man said, once, and then once more as his voice echoed around the cave.

  “What?” a woman replied, following him in. “What? What? What?” They were talking about the water bearer, but then they noticed me squatting in the corner.

  “What are you doing?” the guy asked.

  “I dropped a roll of film.” I showed him the canister, wondering if he’d be observant enough to notice I wasn’t carrying a camera.

  “That white car parked by the road. It must be yours,” the guy said. He had been observant enough to notice that.

  “Yeah.”

  “How ’bout that? We got the same rental car.”

  “They’re pretty common.”

  “That’s how we found the ruins, we saw your car. We heard this place was here but we probably never would have found it if it wasn’t for your car.”

  “Great.”

  “Who lived here anyway?” he asked.

  “Indians.”

  “What did they do?”

  “Lived, died,” I said. “Raised kids … walked in beauty.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I have to get going.” I stood up and tried to shake some blood back into my legs while the two of them argued about which film to put in their camera.

  I walked the mile or so to the road, fifteen minutes, maybe, in time; five hundred years in atmosphere. When I got to the parking area I saw the two white Rich Fords parked side by side. I got in mine and drove back down the mesa, squishing the legger’s spongy brakes as it drifted around the hairpin curves. When I got to the highway, I turned right and headed for the Cottonwood truck stop in La Luz to have something to eat and see if anyone could tell me where Pete Vigil lived.

  Truckers love the Cottonwood—the parking lot is always full of diesels with women’s names scrolled across them, not necessarily the same women engraved in tattoos on the drivers’ arms. The waitresses are lush, gorgeous, hot-eyed Hispanic girls. One lesson I learned when I lived in Mexico is that Mexican girls can wear skintight clothes, sulk and pout all day long and no one considers them an easy mark or follows them down the street whispering psst, psst, moneca, little doll, but any blue-jeaned gringa is fair game. Every culture is full of clues; the hard part for the outsider is interpreting them. I parked the legger, went into the Cottonwood, sat down at a plastic booth and ordered a bowl of green chile stew.

  “That chile is hot,” said my waitress implying, maybe, that I would be better off with tuna on white. Her name, Raquel, was embroidered on her shirt.

  “Good,” I replied, “that’s how I want it.”

  “Okay.” It was a simple, two-syllable word but she made an aria out of it, making me wonder if there might be a place for her down the road at the Santa Fe Opera.

  When the stew was ready, Raquel plunked it down on the table. It wa
s hot, the hottest, maybe, I’d ever had and I bet they’d made it even hotter just for me. I’ve had caldos in Mexico that you fish around in with a spoon trying to get ahold of something, anything, that doesn’t have a flaming red chile on it, but I searched for the chiles in this stew and piled them on. They were hot, all right, just like she said, tiny green zingers. My eyes watered and tears dropped in the stew but I kept on eating and weeping, until I’d cleaned my bowl. When I finished I wiped my eyes and blew my nose. The performance made me feel better, but if the waitresses were impressed they didn’t let it show. Raquel brought the bill over and I asked her if she could tell me where Pete Vigil lived.

  “Who wants to know?” she said in a tone that implied tips were of no consequence to her.

  “Me.”

  “Why do you want to see him?”

  “Because a friend of mine died at the ruins last weekend and he found the body.”

  “That puta.” She rolled her eyes. The opera she belonged in was a Mexican soap.

  “You knew her?” I asked.

  “I know her kind,” Raquel said.

  Maybe puta was a synonym for gringa here. I could have responded, “Who are you to say my friend was a whore?” but the green chile stew had taken the fight out of me, I was outnumbered, and besides I’m a lawyer not supposed to let emotion overcome judgment. I’m also a woman with a Hispanic lover who doesn’t like to believe the two cultures can’t find some way to commingle. They say you should never judge anyone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes and who knew what insults gringas had dumped on Raquel? “So do you know where Vigil lives?” I asked.