Black Sun Descending (11 page)

“Not until you came along. Did they question the husband?”

“There are a number of stories where Dallas Vaughn openly speculated on his wife's disappearance, making angry accusations that the sheriff and the
FBI
weren't doing enough to investigate the possible motives for her vanishing. At one point, he even held a news conference to lambaste law enforcement officers and beg the public for leads.”

“So where does this all leave you and me?” asked Hayduke.

“It leaves me wondering why Dallas Vaughn felt the need to be so vocal during the investigation, and it makes me question what Jane Vaughn was working on that brought her to Page. What happened while she was there? That's where
you
come in, so keep digging. I'm going to return some keys to a grieving widower and then drive to Page.”

“If you're going to Page, I want to come! We're partners!”

“No, we're not. I appreciate your help, but we're
not
partners. I'm trying to find my wife, Hayduke. I have a few things I have to figure out before I can go into Page, guns blazing.”

“Guns blazing sounds right up my alley!”

“That's why we're not partners.”

THERE WERE SEVERAL HOURS TO
kill before Dallas Vaughn would get home from work. Silas drove around town in a sort of daze, remembering places from his past as if he were watching a movie of his life through the car window. That was how he ended up winding his way along the road that traced the outer rim of Humphrey's Peak through the pine forest. He had the window rolled down, and the vanilla scent of the woods, warming in the April sun, transported him. He made several turns and arrived, dreamlike, before the house. It had hardly changed in the four years since he had sold it. Through the dense stand of trees he could see that the new owners had painted it, but they had kept the colors muted so that the house would continue to blend in with the landscape. There was a fancy
BMW
SUV
in the driveway, and Silas thought he could hear children playing.

He closed his eyes. The sound of the children made him think of his own boys. Some things, once they were gone, weren't coming back. He wondered how much more of his life he would let slip through his fingers trying to hold on to ghosts.

He sat another minute, remembering the layout of the house and how it felt to come home from a late lecture and find Penelope waiting for him there, and then he turned over the ignition and drove back into town.

THE TRAILER PARK
where Dallas and Jane Vaughn lived was on the opposite side of the city, and it stood in stark contrast to Silas's former home. The trailer park was clean and tidy but cramped. The homes stood check-by-jowl next to one another. Some people had erected miniature picket fences to create the illusion of privacy.

Silas looked at the receipt with Dallas Vaughn's address on it, and after driving around the park twice he found the trailer and parked across the dirt road from it. There was a swingset pushed up against the side of the double-wide unit. The swings occupied most of the unit's driveway, so Vaughn had parked his Dodge Ram on the road. Silas walked past it, noticing the gun racks in the truck, and walked up three steps to knock on the door.

Vaughn appeared there, dressed in work pants and a clean white T-shirt.

“Mr. Vaughn, I've come to return your key.” Vaughn opened the door, but Silas didn't hand him anything. “I wonder if I could ask you a few more questions.”

Vaughn looked behind himself. “I'm just fixing supper for the kids.”

“This will only take a minute.”

Vaughn turned around, went to the kitchen and took something off the stove, and returned to the doorway. He didn't say anything.

“I wonder if you ever heard your wife mention the name Chas Hinkley or Jim Zahn?”

“Never heard of them. They environmentalists too?”

“Not really.”

“Never heard those names. You know, Jane and me never talked much about our work.”

“Why do you think that is?”

Vaughn was silent a moment, studying Silas. “Just didn't see eye to eye on things.”

“Did you disapprove of your wife's work, Mr. Vaughn?”

“That's a private matter. I think I had better get back to fixing supper.” He started to turn away from Silas.

“What did you mean when you said things could be settled up now?”

“Pardon me?”

“When you gave me the key to Jane's office, you said that things would be settled up. What does that mean?”

“Just that we can move on now.”

“It doesn't mean something else? It's a strange choice of words.”

“Pearson, I'm a laborer, not an English professor. I don't choose my words as careful as you do.”

“Did you have a life insurance policy on your wife?”

“That's none of your business.” Vaughn had turned back toward Silas and poked him in the chest with a thick finger. “Who do you think you are? Suggesting that I'm relieved?”

Silas's heart was racing. “I just wonder if maybe you and Jane weren't getting on all that well, and that she was making it tough on you with all her activism. Maybe you just decided that life would be better if she wasn't in the—?”

Vaughn swung a neat roundhouse punch that Silas didn't even see coming. It connected with his cheek and mouth and took him off his feet. He tumbled off the steps and landed in the dirt of the driveway, nearly on top of the swingset. A trail of blood leaked from the side of his mouth and he had to blink to focus his eyes. Vaughn was walking down the stairs as Silas scrambled to his feet.

“You bastard, you had better get off my property or I'm going to kill you.”

Silas tried to leave but Vaughn caught him before he could reach the road, took him by the shirt collar, and was pulling back to hit him again when they both heard the screen door open.

“Daddy?”

Vaughn, arm still cocked to deliver a blow, turned to look over his shoulder. His five-year-old son was at the door.

“Go back inside!”

“What are you doing?”

“Go back inside, Steven. Now.” The wind seemed to leave Dallas Vaughn's sails at that moment. Instead of punching Silas, he gave him a weak shove and Silas fell into the street. He could see several neighbors watching from their tiny yards. Vaughn stood with his fists balled, breathing hard, his face knotted with rage. “If I ever see you again, Pearson, I
will
kill you,” he hissed.

KATIE RAIN SOUNDED GENUINELY CONCERNED
over the crackling reception of Silas's cell phone. “You might have a concussion. Did you call the police?”

“So they could do what?”

“They could arrest Vaughn for assault.”

“The guy has two kids. I'm not going to get him thrown in jail so social services can take his kids away.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“Nothing right now. But I thought you'd like to know what instigated all of this.”

“Silas, I'm not on the investigation team. I'm still working on Jane Vaughn's remains, but when I'm done, I'm heading back to Salt Lake City. Are you sure you don't want to talk with Nielsen or Ortiz?”

“Those guys think I'm involved with this somehow. You should have heard them the other day. They raked me over the coals. They think Penny was some kind of domestic terrorist, that she and Jane wanted to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam. They think my wife had taken a page out of Edward Abbey's
The Monkey Wrench Gang
.”

“Did they say that?”

“They told me Penny has an
FBI
file. What else could it be? I've got my lawyer looking at accessing that file.”

“
You
think Dallas Vaughn had something to do with
his
wife's death?”

“He could have. I've been assuming that Jane's death was related to her work. But maybe it was something as simple as domestic abuse. Or desperation.”

“Let me see if there is some way for me to bring this up with Agent Taylor here in Moab. I might be able to suggest he look at the husband, given the manner of death. It's consistent with many other domestic homicides. What doesn't make sense is why Vaughn would bury his wife at the Atlas tailings site.”

“Yeah, that doesn't really hang together, does it?”

“Unless . . .”

“What?”

“Well, what if he was so angry about his wife's activism and its consequences for his family—you know, no money, and maybe he was getting the gears at work—that he killed her and literally buried her in her work?”

Silas thought about this for a moment. “That
could
be a possibility.”

“Alright, I'll bring this up tomorrow with Taylor and see what he thinks. I'm going to have to tell him you and I spoke. It's the only way this will have any credibility. Where are you now, Silas?”

“I'm on my way out of Flag. I've got to go to Page. A lot of what Jane Vaughn was working on was centered there. But first I'm taking a detour to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. There's something I have to check out.”

“Be careful.”

“You too.” She laughed and they said goodbye. Silas picked up his wife's journal from the passenger seat and opened it to a place that was bookmarked. He read the passage there:

North Rim Fire Lookout. If there was going to be a museum, or some sort of built infrastructure that celebrates Edward Abbey and the National Monument that will one day sprawl across the American Southwest, it would have to be this simple building at the entrance to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. It's the only building he ever seemed to love.

Jane Vaughn spent her life working to protect the Grand Canyon. Penelope had celebrated the work of Edward Abbey by proposing a national monument. Those two worlds seemed to converge at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and the fire lookout where Abbey spent four summers keeping watch over the dark forests that cloaked that landscape. Silas put the car in gear and, head aching, started on the four-hour drive to the Arizona Strip and the North Rim where Abbey's novel
Black Sun
was set.

THE COLORADO PLATEAU IS HIGH
and dry, ranging in elevation from two thousand feet above sea level at the bottom of the gorge of the Grand Canyon to more than twelve thousand feet near Cedar Breaks in western Utah. Its striations of sedimentary stone have been bent, folded, twisted, and contorted into every conceivable shape, and some that simply can't be imagined; they have to be seen to be believed. Among the myriad landforms that mark the Four Corners region the canyons are the most dramatic. Where the Green, Colorado, San Juan, Dirty Devil, and Escalante Rivers snake like bits of discarded wire across the land, they cut thousands of feet into the desert's stone, bringing life to an otherwise desperate land, and form intricately beautiful grottos.

HE WOKE TO
birdsong. Silas had slept next to his Outback on the ground, swaddled in his goose-down sleeping bag, in the Kaibab National Forest. It was not yet light. The air was cool, but not cold; the bite had been taken out of winter. The dawn chorus of the upland forest birds filtered through the pungent odor of the pine woodland. Thirty minutes later he was seated on a peninsula of stone near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. He'd driven into the park and found coffee and a muffin at the North Rim Lodge before making his way along the paved path to where a few dozen silent onlookers watched the day begin. Watching the sunrise over the Grand Canyon was like watching the lights come up at an intricately designed theatrical production. The night's blue veil was slowly pulled back, and minute by minute the striations of stone were cast into brilliance. As the day began the canyon seemed to exhale a deep breath, and on the back of that breeze dark ravens rode the thermals into the sky. Silas closed his eyes and felt the canyon's breath on his face. When he opened his eyes again a raven was hovering just a few feet away, over the drop-off, balancing on the movement of air. It croaked once and glided off into the distance. His coffee grew cold. He felt something wet on his bristly cheek and was surprised to find a tear there. He hurriedly wiped it away. For the first time in four and a half years Silas felt he truly grasped what it was his wife had been trying to do.