Rock Bottom (Em Hansen Mysteries) Page 8

  Dell said, “You never know who you’re going to meet in this canyon. I don’t know, Mungo, maybe a bunch of holy folks aren’t as dangerous at the oars as you are.”

  “Praise the Lord and pass that bottle of whisky,” said Mungo, to round of appreciative laughter.

  The hymn was a familiar tune accompanied by some lovely guitar strumming, but I couldn’t catch the words. It sounded like one that my grandmother used to hum, but I couldn’t quite tell; the tempo had been kicked up a bit, which took some of the gravity out of it. Led by my curiosity, I wandered to the edge of our clearing so I could listen.

  As I stepped even farther away from our fire, Julianne crept out of the shadows of the path that led to her tent, clutching a fleece sweater around her bony shoulders. “Have you seen Wink?” she asked. She sounded lost, inconsolable without her paramour.

  “He’s not up here by the fire,” I said, leaving out the next words that came into my head, which were I thought he was with you.

  As if reading that thought, she said dolefully, “He said he’d drop by…”

  “If I see him, I’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”

  “Oh! Oh no, that’s okay!” she said and scampered down the path toward her tent.

  The music pulled at me like a shepherd’s crook. I was particularly intrigued by the instrumental pieces between verses, when only the guitar carried through the dry desert air, filling it like a row of questions that called for answers. I strolled slowly down the trail toward the boxelder tree where Fritz and I had sat spying on the group that had camped there the evening before, wanting this time to see the hands that were releasing such notes from the guitar. But when I arrived at that vantage point, I saw something that surprised me so much that I barely noticed the guitarist: Wink Oberley was standing with the congregation of churchgoers, hands folded humbly in a way that rounded his stout shoulders, voice lifted in song with the others. He had swapped his sagging T-shirt for a short-sleeved plaid shirt that looked most of a size too small for him. It gaped slightly at the buttons, straining to reach around his meaty chest. Seeing him with this group, was such a shock that I gasped.

  Wink’s head snapped my way. He squinted into the darkness.

  I froze.

  After a moment, Wink settled back into his pose, and I turned my attention to the guitar player. It was a young girl, not very many years older than Brendan. Her face was round and plain, but her hair shone like gold in the firelight, and her eyes were soft with the flow of her playing. At the end of one last exquisite phrase in her music she caressed the strings as if the vibration made her heart keep on beating.

  The hymn complete, a tall, angular man with a big Adam’s apple and a conservative haircut raised his right hand, squeezed his eyes shut in concentration, and offered a benediction: “Oh Holy Father, we ask that you guide us in your light and smile upon the work we humbly do here in your name. We who gather in your sacred canyon ask that your blessings be upon us. May we rest in your grace…” The prayer rolled onward, meandering through sprinklings of beseechments and requests for guidance while the gathered flock waited quietly for grace to descend upon them. Twice during this monologue Wink opened an eye and peeked, glancing across the gathering at a woman who was, indeed, wearing sandals that had something of a heel to them. They didn’t appear to be true ankle-breakers, only an inch and a half at worst, but not what I had expected to see at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Footwear on this river was a stiff challenge: The water was cold, so we wanted something that would insulate. At the same time, stepping in and out of the water and dealing with waves that splashed into the foot wells of the rafts kept our feet uncomfortably wet, making it important that whatever we wore drained and dried quickly. River sandals had heavy rubber soles with little or no heels, and the straps across the top had to be waterproof and tough enough to take grit and other abuse as equals to the bottoms. This group had hired a commercial rafting company to do all the cooking and carrying, but still it would be preferable to have something that would withstand walking around on the sandy floor of the campsite. This woman’s sandals had soles so thin that they must have acted like little shovels, scooping up grit between her skin and the skinny leather straps. These pretty little numbers had beads sewn across their tops, and the woman had painted her toenails a luscious bright red, the better to show them off.

  Above the ankles, the woman looked equally out of place: She wore her bottle-blonde hair in a style that must have required ample applications of hair spray and fancy brushing, she was heavily made up, and her aging (though still curvaceous) figure was packed tightly into white capri pants and a stretchy halter top. As she shifted her fingers to adjust their prayerful pose, I could see that the fingernails matched the toenails, and a row of bangle bracelets glinted in the firelight.

  There was the problem of stowage space for clothing worn in camp, even if a person did not find it necessary to wade into the water repeatedly during the evening to get supplies or equipment out of one of the boats. Many in our group had brought a pair of hiking boots or running shoes, but such an item took up a lot of room in the old dry bag.

  For a moment I was less interested in why Wink had decided to catch an evening prayer meeting than how this creature had managed to maintain this effect during her travel down the Mighty Muddy Colorado. How long had they been on the river? I tried to remember what it had said on the bulletin board at Lees Ferry about this group. Our group would row for twenty-one days, the maximum time permitted to transit the 226-mile navigable stretch of the Grand Canyon from Lees Ferry to Diamond Creek, but we were oar-powered, and this commercial trip used motors, and thus could run the distance much faster. Either way, this woman had been on those rafts and camping on the riverbanks for at least three days, and yet she looked like she’d just stepped out of a salon onto a nice stretch of concrete sidewalk. I was downright impressed.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if Wink’s interest in her duplicated my own amazement, but the fourth time he sneaked a look, I noted that he was gazing rather adoringly at her face and not downward at her feet. What exactly was he doing there?

  As the prayer ended with a hearty round of amens and praise-the-Lords, the group stretched and wished each other well and began to stroll off toward their tents. Beyond them I could see their row of boatmen, who had arrayed themselves on the rafts at the foot of their beach. The contrast between the clean-cut church people and their scruffy river guides was more than a little bit comical. Certainly Wink fit in with the river trash rather than the church folk. Had he simply wandered over to visit some old rafting chums and gotten sucked into prayers by happenstance? The man sure was a puzzle.

  Wink said his good nights and began heading my way, so it was time for me to skedaddle. I didn’t want a collision, not with the marvelous Wink Oberley. Flexing my own unlovely river sandals, I stepped quietly off into the tamarisk, but got caught in a prickly bush. As I worked to free myself, a hand closed over my head. I jumped.

  “Snoopy, snoopy,” Wink cooed into my ear, and then, with a mean snicker and a little shove, he let go. “See you in the morning,” he added and brushed past me, heading off in the direction of Julianne’s tent.

  It was several long minutes before my pulse settled and my breathing returned to normal. I did not like being touched by that man, not one little bit.

  Diary of Holly Ann St. Denis

  April 6

  Dear God,

  We’ve been so busy marveling at the majesty of Your Creation that I haven’t had time to write to you, so I’ll try to catch up! We’ve camped for four nights now on beaches in Your canyon, singing hymns of praise to You each and every night. Lord, how I thank Thee for Thy kindness in giving me the gift of music! I feel You in each and every note I play on my guitar.

  The rafts we ride on are these big inflated things with motors on them so we can go a long way or a short way each day as we choose or to get to all the places our geology consultant says we’ve got to see.
One of the boatmen—this real cute guy named Dan—says we’ll “throw it in gear” after Phantom Ranch if we’re going to make the whole 226 miles in the 10 days “Uncle” Terry paid for. Dan says there’s “big” water to come in the next few days and he bets I’ll like it! So far we’ve been over lots of what he calls “little” rapids and God you wouldn’t believe—oh, silly me, of course you would, you made them—how “big” “little” can be!!!

  The thing I like best so far is all the colors and shapes of the rocks and the flowers and lizards and also the Indian ruins. Nankoweap is especially pretty. While our consultant was showing everyone the layers of rock that settled out of Noah’s Flood I sneaked up and looked at the granaries where the Indians stored food in these little storage units they made out of stone. Mom said it was bad to go there because these Indians were probably bad people who were killed in the Flood, but I think she just says that. The Indians must have lived here after the Flood waters receded carving the canyon, because otherwise the waters would have swept away the granaries, right? So they were good people, right? Besides, I think anyone who lived here looking on Your glory every day would find the goodness in them.

  E-mail from Mohave County Coroner Ernest Crowder to USNPS Chief Ranger Gerald Weber

  DATE: April 18, 5:52 P.M.

  SUBJECT: Body now identified as George Oberley, aged 39, late of Rocky Hill, N.J.

  This 175 cm tall white male showed no gross signs of physical illness that would have contributed to his death. As you know, the eyes, parts of the facial flesh, throat, and areas below the life vest had been scavenged by vultures. I observed postmortem lividity on the dorsal skin consistent with the resting position in which it was found. The fronts of the legs and middle abdomen underneath the life vest displayed scraping, suggesting that the body had been dragged across a rough surface. As regards cause of death, I observed two traumas that would cause it, one slowly and the other abruptly. The first was an impact wound to the back of the skull that caused fracturing to the skull, bruising, and bleeding to the skin, specifically the parietal and occipital bones bridging the lamboid suture, slightly to the right of the central dorsal line. This blow had set off bleeding in the brain, which stopped when the second trauma occurred.

  The second trauma was a narrow but deep puncture wound between the fifth and sixth ribs to the left of the spine. The wound terminated in the heart. If this cat didn’t die of massive hemorrhaging caused by this wound I’ll eat my hat, but I’ll run the usual tox screen and examination of internal organs just in case.

  Now, what you really want to know is this: Neither of these wounds would likely be caused by accidental collisions with fixed or floating objects in the river, i.e., in my professional opinion both traumas were delivered by man-made objects that you don’t find floating in the Colorado River and likewise would not find in any of the mats of flotsam that get thatched onto the banks. The puncture wound to the heart appears to be a tidy little knife wound. Blade 3 cm wide and 10 cm long. I realize that doesn’t help you much, as anyone on that river could be carrying such a blade as a pocketknife. The head wound, however, has a more distinctive pattern to it. It is a perfect 3 cm square, delivered by a heavy metal object. Judging by the angle of the blow, my guess is a square-headed tool like a mineral hammer. So that narrows your search to geologists carrying pocketknives. A very tall geologist, judging by the angles of the wounds.

  Have fun, you old coot; this looks like a hot one. Keep me posted,

  Ernie

  APRIL 7: KWAGUNT RAPID

  I’ll have to admit that it was rank curiosity that led me to ride for an hour in Wink’s dory. He may have caught me eavesdropping on that church group, and eavesdropping is, yes, a mild form of spying, but I figured I didn’t have much to apologize for; or at least, nothing worse than the cheek he had displayed by walking right into that campsite and making himself to home with the parishioners. It occurred to me that another hypothesis might also fit the evidence: Piecing together what Faye had discovered at Princeton and Wink’s dalliance in the other camp, perhaps he was one of those scientists who had left reason and the rigors of slowly gathering evidence behind for a literal interpretation of the Bible. So I had an itch to know more, but I should have known better than to try to scratch it.

  It took a little finagling to get a seat in that dory. Julianne had become all but a permanent fixture there, fussing around helping Wink bail because his pump wasn’t working. I dare say that I was not the only one in our group who had noticed that she was receiving him in her tent at night, but as long as she didn’t make a spectacle of herself no one really gave a damn who she slept with, and so far I was the first to argue with her over a chance to ride in that glorified leaking wooden shoe box with pointy ends.

  Wink seemed pleased enough to have me aboard his boat, or perhaps he was just better at the social fake than I gave him credit for. Our conversation started out easily enough. I asked him about his doctoral work: What was the subject matter of his dissertation, and what did he hope to do when he finished it (knowing that he would not)? He launched into an overly technical riff on something to do with Precambrian biostratigraphy (which is the study of what can be deduced from the combination of sedimentary rocks and the fossils within them), all of which sounded reasonable enough, but soon he began to gripe about his professors. “They want to argue with me over this, suggesting that I’m taking too big a risk with my interpretation. Well, I say they should grow a pair. Just because I’ve come up with a new idea that none of them had considered, what gives them the right to tell me to take a less controversial track?”

  “Got me,” I said, doing my best to sound like I believed his bullshit. “You’re kind of outside my expertise there.”

  “I mean, I know I’m older than a lot of their students, so maybe they see me as a threat.”

  That sounded downright paranoid. I peered at him through my sunglasses, deciding that it would be ill-advised to confront him directly with the information Faye had dug up for me. “So tell me about what you did before you started graduate school,” I suggested.

  “Well, I was a boatman here on the river while I did my undergrad, so that took a while,” he said.

  “And before that you were in the army?”

  “Yeah. Yes, I was.” He let that float away.

  “What was that like? Did you do any specializations? I think Tiny said you were in the Airborne Rangers, but maybe I misunderstood.”

  “I was in the Rangers, yes.”

  “Hey, well, that’s some pretty cool stuff. Did you make a lot of jumps?”

  Wink rearranged his face from jolly boat boy to martyr and said, “I wasn’t able to get that far. I had an injury.” He spoke this last word with a sepulchral dip to his voice, to indicate that something very grave had happened.

  “So if you didn’t jump, then you weren’t an Airborne Ranger exactly.”

  “I gave them everything I had, but they set me up.” He headed off into a well-practiced screed on the cruelty of army sergeants. He had taken a fall, poor him, blah, blah about his pain and suffering.

  “Well then, at least you were able to get home safe and sound to your wife,” I said, probing another corridor of the circus fun house in which he seemed to dwell.

  Wink’s little-boy pout grew even more pathetic. “Life can be very difficult with a woman like her,” he began, and in the next few sentences he managed to suggest (but never actually state) that his marriage was a thing of the past and that the woman was being a real tyrant, demanding that he get a job to support her and their two daughters.

  I was quickly growing annoyed with his pity-me attitude and decided to change the subject at any cost. “What’s underneath these hatches?” I asked, reaching for the foredeck lid that I hadn’t been able to open on the launch ramp.

  “Leave that be!” Wink ordered, all trace of the sad little boy instantly vanished.

  My curiosity was now up double-good, so I grabbed the hatch with both hands
and tugged.

  Wink’s hand slammed down on it. “There’s nothing in there you need,” he growled. “All the veggies and other communal gear are in the after hold. You just stay the fuck out of there!”

  “Oh, gosh,” I said innocently, “I was just hoping to get a look at your bilge pump.”

  Wink flipped a switch by his knee, and a grinding sound emerged from under the floor of the cockpit. “Satisfied?” he asked.

  “I thought Julianne said it wasn’t working.”

  “I got it running fine,” he said calmly.

  I studied his face with care, fascinated by how quickly he now rearranged his expression from pissed-off Kabuki to a mask of placid indifference. It was downright scary. I let things ride for a while and watched the canyon walls slide by.

  He said, “I understand you studied with Molly for your master’s.”

  “Yes,” I said. “So you’re thinking that she might get you a job at the U?”

  “Oh, that would be terrific!” he said, his tone suddenly gushing with naive enthusiasm. “I can’t think of anything I’d like better than that! I love to teach. I tell you, what I truly want in life is to make a contribution as a geologist. Consider this canyon, for instance.” He let go of one oar for a moment and lofted that arm in an arch that eloquently took in the sky, the rock walls, the river, and every plant and animal that lived there.

  I thought, Does he really think I’m buying this?

  Wink now widened his eyes to indicate amazement. “I overheard you talking to Brendan about Eddie McKee, the park ranger from the 1930s. Published on everything he saw. A brilliant man. Brilliant, just plain brilliant. Everything he touched, magic. That’s who I want to be like: Eddie McKee. If I could lay down everything I had to walk in his shoes for an instant, I’d do it. I just can’t think of anything greater to aspire to. He took over as chief naturalist here in 1929. The park’s first naturalist drowned in the river, so the job just opened up for Eddie McKee. Everything he did was like that, almost like it was magic.” His jaw tightened now, and his tone took on a edge of sour grapes. “Life just dished things up for him on a platter. He went on to chair the Geology Department at Arizona and then went to the USGS in Denver.”