The Vanishing Point
Read The Vanishing Point Online
Authors: Judith Van Gieson
V
ANISHING
P
OINT
A C
LAIRE
R
EYNIER
M
YSTERY, #2
Judith Van Gieson
VANISHING
POINT
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2001 Judith Van Gieson.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by other means, without permission.
First ebook edition © 2012 by AudioGO.
All Rights Reserved.
Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-472-0
Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9509-4
Cover photo © Agaliza/
iStock.com
Vanishing
Point
is dedicated to my former roommate
and longtime friend, Danielle Freeman,
and to the world's best fans,
Katia Kirpane and Gerard Kosicki, with thanks
for sharing the wonder and the journey.
Hundreds of times I have trusted my life to
crumbling sandstone and nearly vertical
angles in the search for water or cliff
dwellings. . . . One way and another, I have
been flirting pretty heavily with Death, the
old clown.
âEverett Ruess
V
ANISHING
P
OINT
Contents
M
ORE
M
YSTERIES BY
J
UDITH
V
AN
G
IESON
Chapter
One
A
RCHIVISTS ARE KNOWN AS THE KEEPERS OF MEMORY
. One of Claire Reynier's jobs at the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico was to preserve the papers, the legend, and the memory of the writer Jonathan Vail. There was little in his own wordsâa few letters, a novel, and a journal that had remained in print for more than thirty yearsâbut volumes had been written about him. Claire liked to think of Jonathan as the literary West's phantom limb. In 1966, when he was twenty-three, he vanished on a camping trip in Slickrock Canyon in southeastern Utah. The journal he was keeping at the time was never found. But, as a brain continues to receive signals from a limb it knows has been severed, people who cared about Western writing continued to receive stimuli from Jonathan Vail. For years after he vanished there were sightings all over the West, in Mexico, and in Canada. His initials were found carved in caves and on canyon walls.
Southeastern Utah is a good place to start a legend: the mesas are vast, the canyons are deep and often invisible until a person stands right on the edge, the rocks are whipped into suggestive shapes by the water and the wind. When Jonathan disappeared, he was young, good-looking, and full of promise, and that was how he remained. Claire knew well enough that while real people show the effects of time, legends don't. She had once been five years younger than Jonathan, but that was long ago. She had recently turned fifty-one. He would always be twenty-three. Eventually she would die and be remembered only by friends and family, but the legend of Jonathan Vail would last as long as people cared to read about the West.
Claire had a layperson's knowledge of Jonathan Vail's work when she came to the center and was put in charge of his papers. She had been a student at the University of Arizona during the years he dropped in and out of UNM. She knew of himâeveryone didâbut they had never met. She read his novel,
A Blue-Eyed Boy,
when she was eighteen and was enthralled by Jonathan's brand of rebellion and his elegant and passionate prose style.
The Vail family had donated the original manuscripts of the journal and
A Blue-Eyed Boy
to the center with the stipulation that they could be read only by scholars. If a scholar wanted to read them, Claire retrieved the manuscripts from their place in the tower and took them to the Anderson Reading Room, where valuable manuscripts were read. Scholars were required to surrender their ID's and put on the white gloves provided by library staff before they were allowed to touch precious pages. After Claire had read
A Blue-Eyed Boy
several times and discussed it innumerable times, she'd come to the conclusion
that
it was a book best read when one was eighteen. The coming-of-age theme would always be of interest, and Vail showed a poet's flair in his descriptions of the natural world, but attitudes that had once seemed bold and flamboyant now verged on self-indulgence. Nevertheless, Claire didn't consider it her job to disillusion a student captivated by the book or the legend, and by now the legend had become greater than the book. The possibility still existed that the mystery of Vail's disappearance would be solved, and Claire listened patiently to all the theories.
The night Jonathan vanished from Slickrock Canyon, he was with his girlfriend, Jennie Dell. Her story, which had remained constant, was that they went to sleep in a cave during a light rain. When she woke up, she was alone, the rain had become a downpour, and the water level was rising rapidly in the narrow canyon. Jennie claimed that it was hours before the water receded sufficiently for her to go looking for Jonathan. By then any footprints or evidence had washed away.
Jonathan was reckless enough (possibly even drugged enough) to have wandered off alone. Slickrock got its name because it turned treacherously slippery when wet. He might have slipped, fallen off a cliff, drowned in the flash flood. He could have been struck by lightning or a rattlesnake. The accidental death theory was popular, but it had never satisfied Claire; she thought that sooner or later Jonathan's bones would have been found. Bones don't lie, and they take forever to disintegrate. Occasionally human bones
were
found downstream from Slickrock Canyon, but DNA testing established that they were not Jonathan Vail's.
He had received his draft notice shortly before he vanished, and some people believed he killed himself in despair or staged his own disappearance to avoid the Vietnam War. Rumors persisted that Jonathan had fathered a child and that he was alive and well somewhere. None of these theories satisfied Claire either. If there had been a suicide, there should have been a body. When he disappeared, Jonathan was a young, acclaimed writer, full of books yet to be written. Claire believed that a writer of Vail's reputation would not have killed himself. She was sure he would have returned when amnesty was granted and continued writing. In her experience writers lived to write. If something had happened to Jonathan in exile, word would have come back.
She thought the most logical explanation for his disappearance was that he had been murdered and the remains buried deep or carted away. Jennie Dell, while never charged with a crime, was still shadowed by suspicion. But the theories Claire heard most often from graduate students had to do with cattle rustlers, drug dealers, Navajo thieves, a rancher who came upon Vail killing his cattle. The fact that the crime was never solved was blamed on the inexperience, incompetence, or indifference of Curt Devereux, the ranger who had conducted the investigation.
Long before Claire took charge of Vail's papers the sightings had stopped, and the initials that were still occasionally discovered carved in the walls of remote canyons were attributed to vandals from
another
era. The number of people who hoped to make their mark by solving the mystery or finding the journal that Jonathan was working on had dwindled to a handful of graduate students at UNM.
When Tim Sansevera, a doctoral candidate in American Studies, showed up in her office, Claire's first reaction was skepticism. Tim's scruffy appearance didn't help. Claire didn't expect anyone with a theory about Jonathan Vail to show up in a three-piece suit, but it wouldn't have hurt Tim's credibility any to have showered and changed his clothes. Although his surname was Spanish, his appearance was Anglo: fair, sunburned skin, pale green eyes, and long reddish-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. Tim wore a dirty T-shirt, torn jeans, and running shoes that had been tinted pink by dust. The hair on his forehead was matted with sweat.
He dropped his backpack to the floor and sat down in the chair across from Claire's desk. “I've been in Slickrock Canyon for a week,” he said. Claire was willing to believe him on that score; he had the rank smell of a person who'd spent a week on the trail. She also knew that a discovery was a discovery wherever you found it. In the Southwest, discoveries were more likely to be made in the dust than anywhere else. “I drove straight here. I didn't even go home first.”
Claire was feeling a tingle of excitement in spite of herself. “What did you find?”
“I was in the side canyon they call Sin Nombre, walking along a high ledge just below the mesa. It's a hard ledge to follow because it's full of rock slides. I'd been there before, but it seemed like the slides had shifted since the last trip. There might have been a hard rain, maybe even a minor earthquake. Anyway, I was able to climb over the rubble, which I never could before. I saw an opening. I climbed in.” With an actor's sense of timing, Tim paused to retie his bandanna.
Claire distrusted his theatricality. What could he have seen? Another set of initials carved in the wall of a cave that might have been opened and closed by rock slides numerous times in the last thirty years?
“I found this,” he said, bending over and opening his backpack. “I brought it to you because the center is where it belongs.” Tim took his find out of the backpack and handed it to her. It was a briefcase made of a thick gray hide and layered with dust.
“Did you open it?” Claire asked.
Tim nodded, focusing his intense green eyes on her.
“What did you find?”
“The journal,” he whispered.
The journal
could only be Jonathan Vail's journal. His last known words. The document that people had been searching the canyonlands for since 1966. The document that just might solve the mystery of his disappearance. Given the remoteness, ruggedness, and dryness of the area in which he had vanished, it was entirely possible that the journal had sat in a cave undiscovered and well preserved for
more
than thirty years.
“Did you read it?” Claire asked, trying to resist the temptation to get theatrical herself.
“I didn't want to get fingerprints on it or damage it in any way. I read the first and last pages only.”
That's what she would have done. Better not to have read the manuscript or even touched it, but for anyone familiar with the Vail legend it would have been hard to resist reading the first page to see if the handwriting was Vail's and the last page to see if the mystery had been solved.
“It's his,” Tim said, radiating excitement like a canyon wall emanates heat. “It's his writing. It's his style.”
Possible, Claire thought, but it wouldn't be the first elaborate hoax perpetrated in New Mexico. She had no reason to distrust Tim, though. As far as she knew, he was a dedicated student. He'd asked to read the manuscript of
A Blue-Eyed Boy
several times, but that wasn't unusual for someone doing a dissertation on the author. Maybe he was radiating too much heatâor was it that the stakes were too high? Claire reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a pair of white gloves. Tim watched as she inserted her hands, smoothing her fingers into place. It was a ritual she enjoyed, a way of showing reverence for something rare and valuable. The contrast between the pristine white gloves and the dusty gray briefcase was extreme.
She undid the zipper carefully, trying not to dirty the gloves, and slid her hand inside, feeling that there was an empty pocket in the side of the briefcase and that the leather was thick. “What kind of hide is this?” she asked Tim. “Buffalo?”