Chapter Seven

THE NEXT DAY CLAIRE TOOK A BREAK AFTER LUNCH and walked over to Lawton Davis’s office. The UNM campus was full of sculptures, some more successful artistically than others. Claire liked the circle of stone obelisks created by a Korean artist in front of the Earth and Planetary Sciences Building where Lawton Davis worked. She knew him by reputation only as a prominent scholar in the field of archeoastronomy. She hoped his ego wouldn’t turn out to be as large as his reputation but knew that was always a possibility in academia.

She found his office number in the directory, walked up a flight of stairs, and knocked on Lawton’s door.

“Come in,” he called.

Claire opened the door and found Lawton sitting at his desk. Instead of the usual framed awards and diplomas, the walls of his office were filled with photographs of the night skies, subtly tinted like the photographs taken by the Hubble Telescope. Lawton himself had the comfortable, rumpled look of an old sweater. His gray hair was long enough to rest on the back of his collar. His amber eyes were full of enthusiasm and light. Claire introduced herself.

“I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time.” He stood up and took Claire’s hand in a combination squeeze and shake.

“You have?” she asked.

“Yes. I admire the work you’ve been doing in collection development. The university needs to continue to expand its rare-book collection.”

“Thank you,” Claire said. “I’ve heard good things about your work, too.”

“Is this visit related to your work?” he asked.

“Not exactly. Have you heard about the woman who was found dead in the basement under the library?” She knew news of the death was likely to have spread all over campus by now.

“I did hear something about it,” Lawton Davis replied, rubbing his chin as if feeling for a beard that was no longer there.

“The police have not been able to identify her. She left no ID. She told a student she met in the library to call her Maia.”

“In Greek mythology Maia is the brightest star in the constellation Pleiades and the mother of Mercury.”

“A Quentin Valor illustration from Thomas Duval’s Ancient Sites was found in the storage room beside Maia’s body. It had been carefully cut out of the Anderson Reading Room’s first edition.”

“Ouch.” Lawton winced. “That hurts. Which illustration was it?”

“Spiral Rocks.”

“Did she take anything else?”

“Not from that book.”

“Odd that she would pick Spiral Rocks. All of Quentin Valor’s illustrations are marvelous, of course. In my opinion he is the premier expedition artist. But if I were going to steal from a first edition of Ancient Sites, I would take an illustration of Chaco Canyon. It’s a far more complex and interesting site. Was she planning to sell the Spiral Rocks illustration?”

“I don’t know. She died of a heroin overdose. There’s always the possibility she was looting valuable books and selling the illustrations for drug money or trading them for drugs.”

“Was the illustration the police found in good condition?”

“Pristine,” Claire said. “The razor-bladed edge was precise and perfect.”

“Well,” he smiled, “at least this Maia was a careful thief.”

“Unfortunately I have no idea how many other books she damaged. I examined Ancient Sites and saw that Spiral Rocks was the only illustration taken from that book, but I can’t go through every valuable illustrated book in the library.”

“Of course not.” Lawton shook his head in sympathy.

“Perhaps you can help.”

“I’ll do whatever I can.”

“I talked to Maia by the duck pond last year and she pointed out the Jupiter-Venus conjunction in the evening sky.”

“Everybody was talking about it. It was a marvelous event, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence when the five naked-eyes planets came together.”

“It was magnificent,” Claire agreed.

“Altogether it went on for several weeks. I photographed every stage.” Lawton pointed to the photographs on the walls. “When I processed the photos, I gave each of the planets a color, so the viewer could identify them as they did their slow-motion dance. Mars, as you might expect, is red. I left Venus as a golden light.”

“The photographs are exquisite,” Claire said, looking at the planets dancing on the wall and the approach-avoidance dynamic as Venus and Mars moved together then parted. “The colors remind me of the photographs taken by the Hubble Telescope.”

“Thank you.” Lawton brushed his hair away from his collar and beamed with a shy pride. Claire was touched; she saw pride often enough in academia but rarely saw anything shy about it.

“It was an absolute stroke of genius for the scientists to color the Hubble photographs,” Lawton said. “It turned the pictures into artwork and made them accessible to everyone.”

“Maia told me that Venus is visible in the daytime to those who know where to look,” Claire said.

“That’s a belief some Indians share,” Lawton said.

“Considering that conversation and the fact that she was found with an illustration from Ancient Sites, it could be that her interest—or her drug connection’s interest—was in archeoastronomy. She was homeless. I doubt she was enrolled as a student, although without knowing her name that would be hard to prove one way or the other. She may have sat in on some of your classes.”

“What did she look like?”

“She wasn’t someone you would especially notice. She was pale. She had good bones. Her hair was light brown. She dressed in a very neat and subdued way. The police have a photo they are showing to people who might be able to identify her. Would you be willing to take a look?”

“When was the photo taken?”

“After she died.”

Lawton grimaced. “I’ve seen many students fall asleep in my classes,” he said. “They may look like they’re dead, but I’m not really keen on looking at photos of people who really are dead. If Maia sat in on a large class I wouldn’t have noticed her, and she would never have been admitted to a small class.”

“Maybe she talked to you at some point.”

“It’s possible. I talk to so many students. I can’t remember everyone. Can you come up with a photograph of her alive?”

“It could be difficult,” Claire said, “if not impossible.”

“The impossible—now that takes a little longer.” He smiled.

Claire, who felt he’d dodged the ball she’d tossed out, wondered if it was photographs of the dead he wanted to avoid or meeting with the police. She moved on to the next subject.

“Would you be able to put together a list of the library’s most valuable illustrated books in the field of archeoastronomy for me? I could narrow my search for missing illustrations by starting with those books.” Claire was capable of compiling such a list herself but knew Lawton Davis could do it better and faster.

“Now, that’s an area in which I can help,” he said. “Consider it done. In its own way Spiral Rocks is quite an interesting site. Very few people have seen it, but that should change soon. Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

“It’s the rare archeoastronomical site that’s on private land. It was owned by a rancher in Colorado until the celestial artist Edward Girard talked him into selling it. Girard has a passion for his work that can make him a very convincing salesman. The sky is his canvas. What makes Spiral Rocks unique from an archeoastronomer’s point of view is that it frames the Maximum Moon.”

“What’s that?” Claire asked.

“The Hopi considered the moon to be a foolish man who wanders around without a home. I’m sure you’ve noticed from watching the full moon rise over the Sandias that it moves north in the winter and south in the summer. Every year it reaches its southernmost point at the summer solstice and its northernmost point at the winter solstice, but those aren’t fixed points. Within those extremes the moon actually has an eighteen-and-a-half-year cycle. It moves north for nine and a quarter years, then it turns south. Its northernmost and southernmost points are called the Maximum and Minimum Extremes. The Anasazi were keen observers of the night sky and they had the advantage of a sky free of ambient light. They were aware of the Maximum and Minimum Extremes. In fact, some of the buildings at Chaco are oriented toward them. The spiral on Fajada Butte has nine and a quarter turns and the Maximum and Minimum Moons cast shadows on it. In an amazing natural occurrence, the Maximum Moon rises right between Spiral Rocks every eighteen and a half years. The ancient peoples observed this and celebrated it, and so does Edward Girard. This year is a Maximum Moon year, and it will take place later this month. It’s the second time that has happened since Girard bought the property. The last time he threw a large party to celebrate. He may be doing it again. He has much more to celebrate, now that he is further along in developing his observatory.

“Girard believes that isolating elements of the sky alters the viewers’ perceptions. For example, we see the sky as a bowl, but if you isolate and frame a portion of it, it appears flat. The planet Venus is the third brightest light in the sky, bright enough to cast a shadow. Girard is building a chamber to isolate its light. His observatory may never be finished. He has a knack for taking on enormous projects but never completing them. Even in an incomplete stage, his observatory is an amazing achievement, one that will inspire people throughout the ages in much the same way that Chaco Canyon has. Excuse me for running on at the mouth.” He laughed. “Obviously this is a project for which I have enormous enthusiasm.”

“Will there be a chamber for observing Venus in the daytime?” Claire asked.

“I don’t know. Offhand I would say that’s not possible, but I didn’t consider many of the things Edward Girard has accomplished to be possible.”

“Do you know him well?”

“Not really. He’s a loner and totally devoted to his work, although he can be charming when he wants to be.”

“Can you tell me how I could get in touch with him? It’s possible there is a connection between his observatory at Spiral Rocks and Maia. If she admired Girard’s work, maybe she was planning on attending the celebration.”

“Artistic men like Edward Girard have groupies and fans even when they totally ignore them,” Lawton sighed. “Unlike us scholarly types.”

Scholarly types had groupies, too, in Claire’s experience, but Lawton Davis might be too self-effacing to be aware of that. The light in his eyes when he talked about Edward Girard’s work bordered on hero worship. It was the artist’s role to act out and express everything more buttoned-up types couldn’t, the artist’s role to be damned for his self-expression as well as to be praised for it.

“Let me see if I can find a phone number or an E-mail address,” Lawton said. “Maybe I can get you an invitation to the Maximum Moon celebration.”

“That would be wonderful,” Claire said. She stood up. “Your photographs are beautiful. Thank you for showing them to me.”

Lawton had a glow on the verge of turning into a blush, but he dimmed the light by saying, “It’s nothing, really. Just a hobby. Wait until you see Edward Girard’s work. Now, there’s an artist.”

******

The next morning Lawton Davis brought his list of valuable illustrated archeoastronomy books to Claire’s office. He also brought along Edward Girard’s phone number and E-mail address.

“I e-mailed him about your interest,” Lawton said, “but I haven’t received a reply yet.”

Later that afternoon Claire took the list to the Anderson Reading Room and began searching the books he’d recommended. In one sense it wasn’t a difficult job; the books were works of art. To spend the afternoon sitting in a beautiful room looking at illustrations of ancient observatories, of stars, moons, planets, and constellations could hardly be considered unpleasant work. But every time she checked an index and turned to a page, Claire had the gnawing sensation she would find it missing. As she worked her way through the books, finding every illustration exactly where it was supposed to be, her ansia abated. Turning page after page and looking at the sky had a tranquilizing effect. By the time she’d finished Lawton’s list she knew Maia hadn’t been systematically looting archeoastronomy books, which made her choice of the Spiral Rocks illustration even more intriguing.

She went back to her office, called Lawton, and gave him the news.

“Excellent,” he said.

Next she dialed Detective Owen’s number. “Professor Lawton Davis from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences gave me a list of valuable archeoastronomy books,” she said. “I went through all of them and found nothing else missing.”

“Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?”

“Yes, although it’s possible she had already looted books in another field and was just getting started on archeoastronomy. Or it could be that Spiral Rocks had some special meaning to Maia. Lawton Davis told me an artist named Edward Girard is turning it into an observatory and is having a celebration there in a few weeks.”

“Oh?” asked Owen.

“Oh,” Claire replied.

“We talked to Seth Malcolm. He admits to talking to Maia but not to giving her his code or letting her into the basement or the Anderson Reading Room.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Not necessarily, although he was right about the Hope Central Shelter. We talked to Christopher Hyde, the director, who identified Maia from our photo. He said she stayed at the shelter a few years ago but started using and had to leave. She stopped using and came back last winter. She left in the spring, possibly because she had started using again. Maia kept to herself, Hyde said. She claimed she hated to be shut up indoors, but he thought she was claustrophobic. The only personal information he ever got from her was that her name was Maia and she’d used drugs.”

“Have you found out who sold her the China White? Have there been any more deaths from it?”

“To both of those questions the answer is not yet. We’re still investigating, but the only crimes we’ve found so far are the sale of the heroin and the damage to your book. No missing person’s report has been filed on anyone who resembles Maia. Unfortunately heroin gets bought and sold all the time. Do books get damaged all the time?”

“I wouldn’t say all the time, but more often than I’d like,” Claire said. “If there are other damaged books in the library I need to know. It would help if I could further narrow my search.”

“Have you thought about other expedition books? Expeditions that didn’t involve archeoastronomy?”

Claire had thought about it. It meant making a list and going through another stack of books page by page, another day shut up in the Anderson Reading Room. But she agreed to start looking through the expedition books. Damaged books were the only legitimate involvement she had in Maia’s death.

“Good luck,” Detective Owen said.

Claire hung up the phone and stared at her books-with-wings screen saver. Books were her passion and her business. She was a librarian and rare-book expert. It wasn’t up to her to find out who Maia was and notify the next of kin; that job belonged to the APD. To them she was just another unidentified homeless person who had OD’d, but she was the only homeless person or addict Claire had ever known. Everyone else she had encountered had a name, a history, an identity, was more than a few snippets of conversation. But it had been years since anyone had called her beautiful. Was it that compliment that connected her to Maia and drove her to find out who she was? Was it because Maia was about the same age as her own daughter and she couldn’t stand the thought of Robin disappearing and dying alone in a storage room with no one to bury her or to mourn her passing? Or was it because she suspected Maia was a sister, another girl who’d longed to escape to the sky?

The books with wings flew across her computer screen—red books, green books, leather-bound books, classic books, forgotten books, boring books, illuminating books. Claire turned off the computer. She had agreed to examine the other expedition books, but she hadn’t agreed to do it today. There were times when even Claire tired of books.

She called Edward Girard and got voice mail in a recorded man’s voice that might, or might not, have been Edward’s. She left a message saying she was interested in attending the Maximum Moon celebration and asking him to call her back as soon as possible.