The Never-Open Desert Diner (28 page)

O
nce, during one of our roadside smokes, the reverend had said that most people associate the desert with what is missing
—
water and people. “They never think of the one thing the desert has more of
—
light,” he said. “So much light.”

All the light in the world won't help a blind man see what's right under his feet. Not Ralph Welper anyway, or those like him. Two weeks earlier he had marched down the road from the archway. I was tidying up the graves and watched him make his way to the house. He must have seen my rig in the turnout.

The oaf stood right on Claire's grave when he told me he was still convinced I knew more than I'd said. I just let him talk. Welper vowed he would find the real del Gesù cello if it was the last thing he did. I thought it would be fitting if it did turn out to be the last thing he did. “And that damn woman, too,” he added.

I asked him if he had any new leads. He said Claire had been spotted in Rome. It took all my energy not to smile. Apparently Claire had joined Elvis on his eternal tour.

“Is that all you came to say?” I asked.

He handed me a box. “I promised Josh I would deliver these in person along with his thanks. They had to do some skin grafts. He's going to be fine. But don't expect any thanks from me.”

I asked him why he was still around Utah and not in Rome. Turned out he was doing his best to stiff the State of Utah for the search-and-rescue costs as he had promised. Dunphy had been smart enough to get him to agree to it in writing. When Welper reneged, as Dunphy suspected he would, Welper's powerful connections had deserted him. The state had filed suit to collect.

“It's a matter of principle,” Welper said.

I agreed that was exactly what it was.

The package Welper had given me contained the CD that Ginny had made, and several more, all cello. A note from Josh repeated his thanks and mentioned that he and his wife planned to return to Utah for a vacation.

“I'm curious,” I said. “Why couldn't Mrs. Tichnor's husband spot a fake cello?”

“Because it was a good copy,” Welper said. “Not expensive but perfect in details that only someone who had been intimate with that particular cello would know. The scrollwork especially. The face and back were distinctive, as if made by two different luthiers, which was true. Experts say the father made the back and the son made the front. He had no reason to think the cello wasn't authentic. Anyway,” he added, “in that pair she was the brains. And for all I know, the real talent.”

Welper had not just been standing on Claire, but the del Gesù cello I'd buried with her. It was still in the special crates she'd shipped it in, and still in pieces set in perfectly molded foam packing. All she had done was take it apart, just like the copy she had made. Tough, close work, though I learned it was done all the time by luthiers who repaired cellos. It just never occurred to anyone she would or could do it with the del Gesù. Each piece of the two cellos had been sent separately through different carriers.

I saw the crates again in Walt's workshop when I went in to dispose of the corpse in his restroom. All I was looking for was something to remember her by. I had unknowingly delivered parts of the del Gesù cello myself. Walt must have known she was coming and helped her arrange to ship things ahead. Using the Korean name of her mother as the shipper was the tip-off that the crates were intended for Claire.

She'd made a small mistake by using the U.S. mail to send the strings. She didn't know Walt rarely checked his mail in Rockmuse.

I never believed Claire had planned to keep the real cello, or harm or destroy it. I had my doubts that moment in the back of the SUV, when I saw her boot stuck where she had kicked in the front of the cello. What I didn't know then was that it had all been a show for Dennis, to make him think she had destroyed what he treasured most. The biggest flaw in Claire's plan had to do with Dennis. She made the fatal error of thinking that because she had loved him, she knew him. She was so certain he wasn't the violent type. Every type is a violent type. Given the right circumstances, Gandhi himself might have attacked someone with a meat cleaver.

When she kicked in the cello, Dennis must have flown into a rage and strangled her. She didn't have a chance to get the truth out. The strong fingers of a cellist must have made short work of Claire's delicate neck. Unaware that she was still alive, or maybe not caring either way, he threw her into the SUV with the pieces of the fake cello and took off across the desert. Who knows why he didn't go back the way he came. Maybe Walt woke up just then and chased him into the desert. Even if Walt hadn't fallen asleep, it all happened so quickly there was nothing Walt could have done. I'd like to tell him that someday, not that he'd listen.

The chances were small I would ever listen to the CDs Josh sent. I would probably always prefer the music Claire heard and I could only imagine. It was something we shared. I didn't want to give that up for something as unreliable as reality.

These days I sometimes catch Bernice out of the corner of my eye. She is sitting in her window booth and staring out into the desert. Like everyone else who knew the story, I always thought it was the vacant and aimless stare of a broken mind. Now I believed she was simply watching the changing desert light move across her dream of Desert Home and a life, a hope, for a child she would never know. It was a life half lived in that distance.

I locked up the house and climbed the hill to the arch. Every time I reached the halfway mark I heard Claire's voice calling after me. I always stopped and looked back. This time would be different. I prepared myself and was determined not to turn around. I did, though. I looked down at the porch and the one green chair, and out over Desert Home, then east toward the sunset reflecting off the mesa.

The first month I drove 117 I decided to go to the end of the road
—
just to say I'd done it. The pavement terminated with an abrupt edge as clean and final as if the asphalt were a piece of blackboard lopped off by a pair of industrial shears. There was no barricade or warning of any kind. The end of my world.

It was the kind of long, average day that an ordinary miracle might slap the boredom off your face.

The sun descended behind me. I got out and leaned against the front bumper and finished a bit of sandwich left over from lunch. The truck idled quietly behind me. I tilted my head and stared up the granite wall. In the blink of an eye I was awash in an unearthly glow. It could have been a minute or ten thousand years. I forgot my name. A gust of wind swirled the light and dust into a rose-colored column that reached steadily upward until it punched a cotton-candy hole through a wide patch of baby blue sky.

Over a hundred miles back to the junction with 191, and I didn't recall any of it. When I undressed for bed that night my boots spilled pink light.

Someday the arch of Desert Home will rust and disappear, along with the house and the streets and the reservoir shimmering in the distance. But the ghosts will be real. Real people once lived there, if only for a handful of sunlit days. I might come to think of them as family someday.

The preacher knew what he was talking about. The desert is home to light.

It has long been my opinion that the writing of a novel is not unlike a marriage, subject to all the ups and downs, unbridled passion, frustration, boredom, literary infidelity, trial separations and, sometimes, red-faced anger and, on occasion, even divorce. I offer my gratitude to the following people who served as confidants, supporters, and counselors, whose assistance took the form of being literary Gandhis, Nazi cheerleaders, and quizzical Zen monks.

Ann Rittenberg, William Kittredge, C. J. Box, Roland Merullo, Karen Kargel, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Scott Gibson, Susan Schwartzman, Tom Barrows, Patti Morris, and Martin White.

Though his name also appears on the dedication page, hardly a day goes by that I don't feel fortunate for the hours of encouragement and invaluable questions and thoughts I received from Sterling Watson. He seemed to know what I was going for even before I did, and then never let me forget it.

Thanks to Sam Manganaro and his staff at Vincent Works in Dolores, Colorado, for their help in researching vintage Vincent motorcycles.

Thanks to all the wonderful writers and friends associated with The Solstice MFA program at Pine Manor College in Boston, Massachusetts, among them: Meg Kearney, Tanya Whiton, Sandra Scofield, Steven Huff, William Hastings, Venise Berry, Robert Lopez, Kerry Beckford, Susan Lemere, Mike Miner, Teresa Sutton, Melissa Ford Luken, Cindy Zelman, Jaime Manrique, Carol Owens Campbell, David Yoo, Rick Carr, Alison McLennan, Joe Gannon, Gabriel Cleveland, Jacqueline Brown, and Dzvinia Orlowsky.

My enduring gratitude goes out to Jack Estes, publisher of Caravel Books, who said yes after so many said no.

My deepest bows to my agent, David Hale Smith, and to all the amazing and supportive people at the Crown Publishing Group, especially my editor, Nate Roberson, who have embraced me, and my work, with such abiding faith and made this beautiful and revised new edition possible.