The Same River Twice Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE RED ROCK CANYON MYSTERIES

  “Exciting, dense with literary references, and definitely worth a try. Legault’s complex new series will appeal to conspiracy buffs, outdoors enthusiasts, and literary detectives.” —Library Journal

  “A perfect recipe for conflict: big money, business first, abuse of Native rights and history, all resulting in murder … a skillful story [that] marks a series worth investing your time in.” —Hamilton Spectator

  “Legault does a masterful job of making it all so believable. The human landscape in The Slickrock Paradox is littered with characters that are not what they seem to be, such that even the good guys are suspect, right up until the end.” —Rocky Mountain Outlook

  PRAISE FOR THE DURRANT WALLACE MYSTERIES

  “Stephen Legault has proven himself to be one of the most versatile writers currently working in Canadian crime fiction.” —National Post

  “For those looking for a glint of Canadian history set in a riveting narrative, Canmore writer Stephen Legault’s The End of the Line combines the guilty pleasure of a page-turning murder mystery with the brain food found in Pierre Berton’s history books.” —Avenue Magazine

  PRAISE FOR THE COLE BLACKWATER MYSTERIES

  “The Cole Blackwater stories are among the most riveting today, and The Vanishing Track is the best yet in this intensely dramatic series.”—Hamilton Spectator

  For the Colorado River and all

  who love and fight to defend it

  1

  THEY WALKED FROM THE FIERCE heat into a startling coolness. The only colors left in the world seemed to be the raw burnt umber of the cliffs that jutted from the sandy wash and the dazzling blue of the sky wedged between them. The only sound left in the world was the beating of wings: a blue-black raven cutting the stillness with its heavy flapping. The only scent left was the heady perfume of desert evening primrose, lingering in the morning stillness.

  Silas Pearson led the way, moving back and forth along the narrow canyon’s bottom, searching under overhanging rocks, in clumps of salt brush, and in tangles of juniper branches suspended from previous flash floods. Robbie Pearson, his face shielded by a broad-brimmed hat, his eyes shielded by sunglasses, followed, searching the alcoves that his father bypassed. “This place have a name?” he asked, his voice small in the emptiness.

  “Horse Canyon,” said Silas.

  “Everything around here seems to be named Horse.”

  “Most folks around here like horses more than people.”

  They rounded another bend in the canyon, the walls reaching five hundred feet above them, the sky a narrow sliver hedged between varnish-stained walls. The black streaks, a mixture of clay, iron, and manganese oxide, created alternating patterns of bright red with near black. It made the canyon walls appear articulated.

  “You smell that?” asked Silas.

  “Nope.”

  “Water.”

  The canyon floor was as dry as talcum, the red sand ninety degrees where the sun shone on it. They turned a corner and there it was, at the base of an unscalable overhang: a pool of rust-colored water twenty feet across. A little brown bat darted from one shadow to the next. Silas walked past the pool and into the deep recess in the stone behind it. He searched through the jumble of logs wedged there and, finding nothing, sat down in the stillness. The overhang extended ten feet above him and was thirty feet in height.

  “What’s up there?”

  “More canyon. It reaches back another fifteen or twenty miles into the Maze.”

  “What’s the Maze?”

  “Edward Abbey called it Terra Incognito. I wouldn’t go that far. It’s part of Canyonlands National Park. It’s accessible only by a rough Jeep trail. Fifty years ago it was one of the most remote places in the United States. Today it’s more popular. It’s still pretty rough country, but anybody with a good four-wheel drive and a few dozen gallons of water can drive in and camp and explore.”

  “Have you searched there?”

  “I’ve been in twice, both times just to get my bearings, hike out a few of the most common routes.”

  “Can we get up this overhang?” Robbie tilted his head back so he was looking straight up at the pour-off. His hat fell off into the pool behind him. Silas laughed.

  “You’d better get that before it sinks to the bottom.”

  Robbie fished his hat out of the gloomy brown water. He wrung it out and held it in his hand. “Can we get up?”

  “No. But there’s another way. We can go up Water Canyon and over Shot Canyon and come at it from Standing Rock. It will be a haul, but we can do it. We might take our packs and make a few days out of it.”

  Robbie just nodded, put his hat on his head, and started back down the narrow grotto. Silas watched him go, admiring his son’s long stride and lean frame. Silas lingered in the cool of the shade for a few more minutes and then followed Robbie to the Green River.

  LEE’S FERRY, SIX months earlier: he dreamt. She was floating, face down, her dress blooming around her like filigree. The water was as red as the sandstone cliffs that rose up from the river, almost still. She was drifting downstream. Silas stood on the shore, up to his knees in the water, feeling the pull of the current. He watched her glide toward him, bile rising in his mouth, fear coating his throat with something black and raw. When she was close to him he pushed into the current, the water eclipsing his thighs, then his waist. He felt it tug at him, and in the dream he wanted nothing more than to float away with her.

  She was in his arms then, the white dress wrapping itself around him like the tentacles of some leviathan. The water was the color of tomato soup and surged around them. Penelope turned over in his arms. Her face, ghostly white and starkly contrasted against the red river, was waxy and drawn tight against her narrow bones. Without opening her eyes she spoke:

  “All is in flux,” Silas heard, “as Heraclites thought.”

  Was this another Edward Abbey quote? wondered Silas.

  The water surged and he felt his grip failing. Then she was gone, slipping from his arms, down the river, around the bend in the canyon.

  THE CASTLE VALLEY, the month before: his son Robbie had arrived for a visit. Silas stood before his maps, a pile of books on the small table in the living room. Each was a dog-eared, dust-caked copy of an Edward Abbey volume. Silas contemplated the floor-to-ceiling topographic sheets, his finger tracing different canyons as they threaded their way across the Island in the Sky, or through the Maze, and down into the Green River.

  “Have you ever used this stove, Dad?” Robbie called from the kitchen.

  “Yeah, of course,” Silas answered without taking his finger from the map.

  “You don’t have any cooking oil.”

  “I think there’s some in with my camping gear.” Silas picked up one of the books and read the table of contents. “What do you know about Heraclites?” he called toward the kitchen. The sound of sizzling oil could be heard.

  “Not much. He’s famous for a line about stepping twice into the same river.”

  “That’s right. Heraclites said, ‘You cannot step twice into the same river, because other waters are constantly moving on.’”

  “That sounds right. Why?” Robbie’s head appeared at the doorway to the kitchen.

  “I can’t find the sentence All is in flux as Heraclites thought in any of Abbey’s books.” Silas had told his son about his last dream about Penelope. “But I wonder …” continued Silas. Robbie stood watching his father. Silas held up a paperback edition of Down the River, one of Abbey’s collections of essays, published after Desert Solitaire. “I wonder if what she means is to search in a place where Abbey wrote about the same river twice.”

  “Where is
that?”

  “In this book Abbey writes an essay called Down the River with Major Powell, and then a piece called Down the River with Henry David Thoreau. Both are set on the Green River. The same river twice.”

  “What do you want to do?” Robbie was back in the kitchen.

  “Go down the river.”

  THE DAYS TURNED to weeks. They measured time by sunrise and sunset. They made camp, searched for a few hours or a day, slept under the canopy of cottonwoods and starlight, and put the canoe back into the water again. They prowled among the pictographs and granaries of the ancient Pueblo people and walked desert bighorn trails along perilous cliff faces and into box canyons where fresh cougar scat glistened in the blazing sun.

  There was nothing to see. She was nowhere to be found.

  After nearly four weeks they came to Water Canyon, a broad cleft in the sandstone walls just a few miles from where the Green River met the Colorado.

  In the morning they shouldered backpacks and, leaving the canoe tied to a heavy clump of tamarisk on the beach, started to hike up the canyon. They stopped often to search among the jumble of boulders in the canyon floor. There was water along much of their route and they refilled their canteens often. At sundown they sat in the shadow of Chimney Rock, looking out over the Maze.

  “You think she’s in there?” asked Robbie.

  “I have no idea where she is.”

  THREE DAYS LATER, sunburnt, exhausted, and out of food, they crossed the slickrock divide between Shot and Water Canyons, sky-lighting the cairns so they could navigate the drop-off in Water Canyon by moonlight. Two hours later, their feet bloody with blisters, they were on the narrow trail above their camp on the Green River.

  “What is that?” asked Robbie, pointing toward the shore where in the darkness their canoe was tied. They could see a red glow against the sandstone cliffs.

  “I don’t know … but I think it’s a fire.”

  They rushed down the track, fearful that the tamarisk had somehow been set ablaze and their boat would be lost. Instead of brush fire, what they saw on the shore was a campfire, four people silhouetted by its light. A heavy aluminum powerboat was anchored against the sand. Silas could see its hull reflecting the light of the flames. He made out the National Park Service insignia on its side.

  “What’s going on?” Robbie spoke quietly, almost in a whisper.

  Silas said nothing. He walked through the tamarisk and emerged on the sandy beach. He dropped his pack.

  “Silas, that you?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s Stan Baton, Silas.” The Chief Park Ranger for Canyonlands and Arches National Parks.

  “And Special Agent Eugene Nielsen, Dr. Pearson.”

  “If you guys came all the way down here to lock me up, you’d better have brought some beer.”

  “Silas, we’re not here to arrest you,” said Stan. Silas watched his face by the light of the fire. “You want to have a seat here on the rocks? We’ve got some news to tell you.”

  Silas felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. “What is it, Stan?”

  “You wanna sit?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “It’s Penelope, Silas. We’ve found her. We found her body, that is.”

  2

  SILAS PEARSON HAD NEVER GIVEN up. He had come close. More times than he could count he had come to some precipice, some box canyon, some bureaucratic wall. He’d considered surrendering, but he hadn’t.

  “Where is she, Stan?”

  “Sit down, Silas. Let’s talk. Robbie, grab a seat; maybe your dad will too.”

  “Come on, Dad, let’s sit.”

  “I don’t want to sit. Where is she, Stan?”

  “Her body was found in Lake Powell.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No, I wish I was. We found her in Glen Canyon, at the bottom of the Hole in the Rock.”

  “What is that?” Robbie stood next to his father.

  Stan answered: “It’s a man-made ramp, a passageway, that drops a thousand feet from the canyon rim down to the River. The Mormons chiselled it out of the sandstone in 1880 in order to get across the Colorado. Most of it got flooded when they built Glen Canyon Dam …”

  Silas shook his head. “Stan, when … what, I—?”

  “Silas, you look like you’re going to fall over. Sit down. John,” Stan said to one of the other men, “why don’t you get Dr. Pearson a beer. There’s a few in the cooler. And bring him and Robbie those sandwiches we picked up.”

  “This is John Danforth, the sheriff of Kane County. They are sharing jurisdiction with the feds on this. And you remember Tom, my Special Investigator. I’ll tell you everything I can, Silas. Penelope’s body was found about a week ago by a—”

  “And you’re just telling me now?”

  “We didn’t know it was her, Dr. Pearson,” said Eugene Nielsen. Silas looked at him through the flames. “We needed to identify the body before we could alert you. And then we had to find you.”

  Baton continued. “She was found by a party of houseboaters who were on Lake Powell. They were hiking up the Hole in the Rock. The water’s been dropping pretty steady this fall, and it’s at its lowest since the dam was built. It appears as if her body floated up into some logs and then decomposed there. Then the water dropped. The houseboaters found her that way just above the waterline.”

  “Stan—”

  “She was skeletal, Silas. That’s all that was left. She had likely been in the water this whole time, or most of it.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Dr. Rain has her back in Salt Lake City. She’s doing some work with her,” said Nielsen.

  “What work?”

  “We still need to determine the cause of death. We’re running a full battery of tests.”

  “Was she murdered, Stan?”

  Before Nielsen could cut him off, Stan answered. “Yes, Silas. She was.”

  3

  AT NINE O’CLOCK IN THE morning, the jet boat cut across the surface of the Colorado River, the cliffs racing past at thirty miles an hour. Silas huddled in the front seat of the boat wearing a heavy fleece coat, a life jacket, and a wool cap. He craned his neck to look behind him. Stan Baton piloted the boat; Robbie stood next to him. The two men yelled over the growl of the engine. The other three law enforcement officers sat quietly, watching the cliffs, the sky, and him.

  Silas caught one last glimpse as the Colorado disappeared beyond its confluence with the Green and into Cataract Canyon; beyond that were the drowned depths of Glen Canyon.

  “THAT HAD BETTER not be a smile on your face, Agent Taylor.”

  “I would have thought you knew me better than that, Dr. Pearson. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Silas walked up the boat ramp near Potash and set an armload of gear down next to his Outback. Robbie did the same and then returned to the boat to make another trip.

  “Why don’t you let your son hump your gear? You and I need to talk.”

  Silas looked around as if searching for any excuse to avoid this conversation but, failing to find one, simply nodded. They made their way to the shade of a cottonwood and sat down at a picnic table. Agent Nielsen joined them.

  “So, Dr. Pearson, what can you tell us about your wife’s death?”

  Silas looked up, his eyes red from the sun and the wind. He screwed his face into a question and scratched his gray beard, full now from a month on the river. “That was going to be my question.”

  “This is just routine—” started Nielsen.

  “There’s nothing routine about it.” Silas pursed his lips; they were dry and cracked. “I had nothing to do with Penelope’s disappearance and I had nothing to do with her death. The faster you get that through your heads, the sooner we can get on to finding out who really killed her.”

  The three men sat in the stillness under the cottonwood. Taylor cleared his throat. “We need to establish time of death. It’s going to be very difficult given the
circumstances. We have your missing person’s report as a starting point. Dr. Rain will give us more to go on soon. I don’t want to start jumping to conclusions, Dr. Pearson, but I want to look at the possibility that the death of your wife is connected to a few other cases we’re working on.”

  “Darcy McFarland and Kiel Pearce.”

  “You led us to both of those bodies. Darcy McFarland’s murder last summer and Kiel Pearce’s murder in the spring are both open, unsolved. We know that both Ms. McFarland and Mr. Pearce were friends with your wife.”

  “I think Kiel was more of an acquaintance of my wife, but I can’t be certain. Penny had a lot of friends connected with her environmental advocacy that I didn’t know.”

  “We have our own profile of the crimes that suggests those two murders are related. The nature of both crimes gives us reason to suspect that the victims knew their killer.” Taylor watched Silas.

  “What was the work connection between these three people?” asked Nielsen.

  Silas looked over his shoulder at the jet boat and the river beyond it. “That was the connection. The Colorado River.”

  “TRISH, IT’S SILAS.”

  “Is it true?”

  “Yes, it’s true. They found Penny about a week ago. Robbie and I were on the Green River. We just got the news yesterday.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “We’re at home. We’ve got to come into town tomorrow morning for another friendly chat with the FBI, but I thought I’d call and tell you.”

  “Silas, are you okay?”

  “I am. I swing back and forth. It’s a good thing I don’t have any furniture, because sometimes I just want to break something. But the next moment I’m serene.”

  “When Ken died in the spring I wanted to kill him.”

  “It’s still pretty raw, I know. I’m sorry.”

  “There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. He lived life the way he wanted to. It caught up to him.”

  “I miss him, Trish.”

  “Me too, Silas. Come by and say hello if you’re in town tomorrow.”

  “I will.”