A Dangerous Talent (An Alix London Mystery)

August 7, 2010, Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, New Mexico

“I assure you, I am not dead,” Henry Merriam declared with considerable heat.

He listened to the response with growing incredulity. “Am I…?” He held the telephone out from his face, the better to shout directly into it. “Yes, I’m
quite
certain!”

Loudly enough for Barb, sorting mail at her post behind the reception desk, to overhear. She smiled. It was good to hear him sounding like his old self, feisty and animated. Mr. Merriam had been coming to the summer and fall education programs at Ghost Ranch for almost forty years now, predating all the employees, herself included, and all but one of the faculty. In Barb’s nineteen years there he had signed up for just about everything on the schedule, from “New Mexico Railroad History” to “Playing the Hammered Dulcimer.”

This week it was “Joyful Basketry,” although he’d been anything but joyful since he’d had to place his wife, Ruth, in an Alzheimer’s facility three years earlier. Since then his annual two-week stays here had been more on the order of lonely respites from the awfulness of everyday life, rather than of the joyful learning forays they’d once been. He’d gone from being one of the most engaging of the Ranch regulars, a bright, clear-eyed, courtly old gentleman, someone she looked forward to seeing every summer, to a walking ghost, just another depressed, lonely, stooped old guy who was there because he didn’t know what else to do with himself.

So seeing him come to life like this on the telephone did her heart good. With no phones in the rooms, and cell reception around the ranch dicey at best, Barb was often privy to private conversations when attendees came in to use the pay phone on the wall. Indeed, she had heard more than a few extraordinary declarations.

But
“I am not dead”
? That took the cake.

“I believe I know what was and wasn’t sold in my own gallery,” he was saying, “and I can assure you that never once…I don’t care what the catalog says, I…” He glanced at Barb and rolled his eyes. “I…of
course
it’s important to me, what do you think? If you can’t…all right then, I’ll drive down there myself if I have to and straighten this out. How would that be? Yes, tomorrow, why not?…Very well, two thirty. Yes, yes, I know where to come.”

Shaking his head, he replaced the phone. “Who would believe it?”

“Problem, Mr. Merriam?” Barb asked with a smile. “Anything I can help with?”

“Oh, nothing much, Barb. Just a little confusion. Is the coffee fresh?”

“It depends on what you mean by fresh, but help yourself if you want to take a chance,” she said. “I couldn’t help overhearing. Did you used to own an art gallery? I always thought you’d been a professor.”

“Yes, I was,” he said, taking a cardboard cup from the stack beside the pot and pouring it half full. “But before that, many years ago—
eons
ago, in a previous life—I did have a gallery in Albuquerque, yes.” He paused, remembering. “The Galerie Xanadu,” he added quietly.

“And?” Barb prompted as he absently stirred in Coffeemate.

He returned with a sigh to the present. “And this morning I get an e-mail from an old friend in the business—well, the son of an old friend, but he’s in the business too—and he was considering purchasing a painting for a client in Dubai, and in looking at its history, he saw that it had passed through my gallery in the 1970s. So he wanted to know if I remembered enough about it to have an opinion on it. Well, I remembered nothing about it, so as you can imagine, that got me thoroughly riled up.”

Barb was a bit confused. “Well, after all it was forty years ago,” she said gently. “Nobody can be expected to—”

He scowled at her. “Kindly do not patronize me, young woman. I do not mean that I don’t remember having it. On the contrary, I
do
remember
not
having it. Quite clearly.”

She wasn’t getting any less confused. “Umm…”

“In other words,” he said more kindly, “I am certain that it never passed through my hands. I would not have forgotten it. Not
this
painting.”

“So you mean…well, I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I mean—” He grimaced. “You know, this coffee really is dreadful.”

“I warned you.”

He took another sip anyway. “I mean that I never had the painting, that’s all, and I don’t like somebody saying that I did. So I called to complain.” He smiled a little. “Upon which I was told that I couldn’t be me, because I’d been dead for some considerable time now. And—well, you heard the rest of it.”

“Ah, I see. So you have to go to Albuquerque tomorrow to straighten it out?”

“No, just to Santa Fe. But it means I’ll have to miss my afternoon workshop—it’s the one on decorative oak handles, too.” He sighed. “I’ve been looking forward to that.”

“Oh, I bet Ms. Mayfarth could be convinced to fill you in on what you missed.”

“Do you think so?” he said, brightening.

“I’m sure of it. I’ll speak to her myself. Mr. Merriam? When you told them you weren’t dead…”

He looked at her over the rim of his cup, white eyebrows raised inquiringly.

“Did they believe you?” she asked.

That got the first smile out of him that she’d seen in three years. “If not, they’re certainly going to be surprised when I walk in the door tomorrow, aren’t they?”

How strange it all was. In the old days, when Ruthie was still herself, he used to covet the opportunities to drive somewhere on his own, without an unending stream of directions, instructions, and alerts from the passenger seat. Now he was always on his own when he drove, and he hated it. What wouldn’t he give to have her sitting beside him, informing him that the sign they’d just passed had said fifty-
five
miles an hour, not fifty-
seven
? Or that there was an old pickup truck in the upcoming roadside rest stop that she didn’t like the look of, and couldn’t he see that it might very well pull recklessly out in front of him?

As if responding to her, he took a harder look at the pickup. He was driving south on Highway 84, in the deserty country between Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu, one of the most remote and unfrequented stretches of road in America. It was a route he traveled twice a year, from the airport in Albuquerque, through Santa Fe, and up to Ghost Ranch, and then back again, and if he’d ever seen an automobile in this primitive stop in the middle of nowhere before—it was just barren old pavement with weeds coming up through the cracks, and a few rotting picnic tables—it didn’t come to mind.

He slowed a bit, suddenly cautious, even a little nervous. If Ruthie had really been with him, he wouldn’t have been driving at all—not at eighty-five years old, not after that second heart attack and the coronary bypass. But Dr. Bernstein had told him that he didn’t have to quit altogether; he just had had to keep to moderate speeds and, on longer trips, take frequent breaks to get up and move about a little.

He considered pulling in at the rest stop himself and walking around his rented compact a few times, but the fact was, he didn’t like the look of that pickup either. A hulking, old Ford 250, he thought—his brother-in-law, Walter, had once had one that he used for hauling firewood. This one was crudely painted with orange and blue flames, and with a kid wearing a turned-around baseball cap sitting behind the wheel. When he got closer he saw that the kid, a thin cigarillo jiggling in the corner of his mouth, was talking on a cell phone. At one point their eyes met and the kid gave him what Henry took to be a mocking, smart-alecky smile.

Henry didn’t like that either and stepped a little harder on the gas pedal, taking the speedometer up to fifty-nine. He was glad to see the last of the truck when he rounded a curve and a red-rock escarpment blocked it out behind him. He was approaching the segment of the road that he liked least, a curving, constricted stretch of a mile or so, with a vertical wall of cliff not only pushing uncomfortably in on the left, but limiting vision as well, and on the right a sheer hundred-foot drop down to the winding Chama River, glinting lazily in the sunlight. He slowed again, back down all the way to forty. Every time he’d come this way, for thirty-three years now, he’d been telling himself he would get in touch with the state transportation department and recommend a reduced-speed sign. But of course he never had, and the area remained signless. Probably not enough people drove through here to give it any kind of priority, but then why would they? With nothing much other than Ghost Ranch itself between here and the Colorado—

Coming around one of the many curves, he saw another pickup coming toward him, a quarter of a mile down the road. No, not a pickup—the cab of a semi, a big one. He began to get edgy again. That thing was
wide
, and there wasn’t much room to spare along here. He glanced nervously to his right, looking for a place to pull off, but there was nothing, only the cliff edge, alarmingly close. He slowed some more, and as he did he was surprised to see the oncoming vehicle drift over the center line to the wrong side of the road, heading right for him.

He pressed the horn, a long, loud warning. The truck responded, not by changing lanes, but with a shrill, angry blast of its air horn. It seemed to Henry, in fact, to be increasing its speed, and they were not much more than a hundred yards apart. What in the world was wrong with the driver? Was he drunk? Was this some kind of insane game? He considered braking, but it was too late for that. The truck was bearing down on him like a locked-in missile; it would sweep the Toyota off the road and over the edge as if it were a hay wagon. There was nothing else for him to do but to get out of its way and swing over to the wrong side himself. He turned the wheel to the left and was stunned to run into the side of
another
truck—no, it was the pickup that he had seen at the rest stop. My God, where had it come from? He’d never seen it come up behind him. Instinctively, he continued to try to wrestle the steering wheel to the left, but the little compact was no match for the heavier, bigger pickup, which held its own, keeping perfect pace with him and nudging him toward the edge. His eyes were even with the truck’s side door panel: a circle of flames surrounding a picture of a girl in a bikini—“Bimbi.”

It swerved closer, grinding against the Toyota, nudging it toward the edge.

“Stop! What are you doing?” he screamed, with his heart hammering in his throat, in his temples. “Are you crazy?” The oncoming truck was fifty yards away now, with no chance of it stopping before colliding with him, and no way for it to shift lanes, not with the other pickup blocking it. Despite his struggling to hold the wheel, another sharp thrust from the pickup forced him still closer to the edge. It was hard to…he had to…

His mind jittered, recoiled, shrank away from him. He couldn’t think…

“Ai!” A terrible band, like a belt pulled suddenly tight, squeezed his chest, crushed his ribs, collapsed his lungs. Trucks, road, river, all disappeared behind a film of red. He was aware of the tires leaving the road but continuing to spin, and he waited, straining, for the fall, but he never felt it. It seemed to him as if the car hung suspended, transfixed in space and time. The film of red turned black.

Ruthie,
he thought.