There were deer tracks though and, if you looked closely and had a mother like Edwina who made a point of such things, you could pick out the faint trails of the ubiquitous desert rodents.
Charlie came upon the stone and mortar parapet without warning. It was only knee-high. She backed away and sat in the middle of the path, head swimming with adrenaline, guilt and sexy superstars long forgotten.
Cavorting around on the expanse of mesa top, she hadn’t kept in mind why this whole area was referred to as Canyonlands.
The drop on the other side of that parapet was a good thousand feet straight down.
If you threw a live body over that parapet, you’d never hear it splatter. Even in tall buildings in New York or mountain overlooks in Colorado, she’d had to sidle up to windows or cliff edges. Charlie never took a window seat in an airplane.
She wasn’t sure if it was natural curiosity or that she always feared she might be missing something, but she sidled up to the parapet by scooting along on her tush. At the bottom of the first thousand feet was a broad benchland with a narrow ribbon of road. The road had another chasm running along beside it with another thousand-foot drop to a mud-cream river that looked about as wide as a string from here.
“Oh boy.”
Sitting down made the parapet more like chest-high. You couldn’t trip over something chest-high and go sailing out into space and plummet in agonized dread for thousands of feet knowing—for what would seem like hours—the sure and final outcome.
Still, this was not a comfortable place for Charlie Greene. She slid back to the middle of the path before she stood.
“I don’t want to startle you,” John B. Drake said behind her, and Charlie whirled to face the red-and-black-plaid shirt. “I assume you’re the agent. I’m John Drake.”
“Yes, I’m from Congdon and Morse.” She wiped the sweat off her palm down the seat of her jeans and shook his hand. “Charlie Greene, Edwina’s daughter.”
He looked as if he’d been born in the faded denims and solid hiking boots. He hadn’t shaved yet and his dark hair needed combing. Guiding her companionably along the path, he said, “I assume you were headed to the Point.”
“The Point … uh, is it … are there sheer drop-offs and cliffs and—”
“The view,” he said, “is what’s known as breathtaking.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Don’t worry, the parapet must be two feet thick. About Edwina, there’s no way to please the lady. I can’t meet her demands and I don’t really need her that much. But I don’t want to hurt the old girl’s feelings. Can you help me make her see sense?”
They had reached the Point, the curved bow of their mesa, anchored in a sea of chasm and plumbless shadow and yawning abyss on three full sides. Charlie turned carefully away from the breathtaking view. “I’m here to help Edwina, Mr. Drake. If I could see a copy of her contract, perhaps we can negotiate something acceptable to both sides.”
“You’re not going to keep up this farce about Congdon and Morse representing Edwina Greene?”
“How about Charlie Greene will represent Dr. Greene?”
“I heard you tell her yourself last night you didn’t think she had a leg to stand on.”
Charlie peered over the parapet, took a glance at the Colorado River so many heart-stopping fathoms away, and turned her back on it. Now if anybody asked her if she’d been out to the Point she could say yes and forestall another trip. A flash of blue caught her eye. Safely back from the edge of anything now, she gestured toward the distant deep azure, evenly shaped lakes in an otherwise dull russet and beige landscape.
“The APC holding ponds,” the director explained. “American Potash Corporation. One of the sponsors of our film. They pump water thousands of feet deep into a mine and when it comes up another hole it’s full of potash. They hold it in those ponds and when all the potash sinks to the bottom and the water evaporates they scoop it out. There’s a display about it at the Visitors’ Center.”
“Potash … I’ve heard of it but I can’t remember why.”
“It’s a potassium compound, used in all kinds of things, but mostly fertilizers. What I wanted to—”
“Mr. Drake, I may not be all that up on location shooting, but I’m surprised Cabot didn’t get the Film Commission to boot you from this site.”
“Oh, he tried.” John B. gave the sky a hard look and a grimace, but turned back to Charlie with the rubbery smile of an actor. “However, the Film Commission doesn’t decide those things on public land.”
This was a state park and the chief ranger at the Visitors’ Center did. And he was much more into environmental documentaries than he was science fiction features. The docs were easier on the fragile landscape he was protecting. “They even buried the last twenty miles of the electrical cable that comes out here.”
Cabot’s crew had just started to move equipment in the day before.
“They use the campsites more for R&R between shoots and to stock supplies anyway. But they did have some problems finding space in Moab for everybody, supposedly,” he said with an edge to his voice that belied his cheerful expression. “Sid Levit and I have known each other for years.”
The Return of an Ecosystem crew had been here four days already and had planned only three but nature’d been uncooperative. “We’ve had problems with thunderstorms and the critters never show up when they’re supposed to. Which is another bone I have to pick with your mother. She ought to be able to flush them for us.”
The cinematographer drove his truck off a cliff the first day. He managed to jump out before it went over, but the production lost some equipment. “We had to rent Earl another truck and fly in replacements. And then along come Animal Aliens and Gordon Cabot. I’m hoping, Charlie Greene, that your arrival signals a change of luck for this beleaguered production and its director.”
Gordon Cabot might need a Sidney Levit to smooth things over, but a good director is charismatic, persuasive, decisive, demanding, wily, and infinitely patient. Able to charm the maracas off a rattlesnake. Drake was really no exception. He had Charlie laughing by the time they reached the campground, had her agreeing to forgo the discussion of Edwina’s complaints until lunch in his motor home, and her tentative acceptance to join him and the crew that evening when they hoped to shoot a sunset sequence.
A slender tawny blonde pouted in the doorway of that motor home as Charlie passed it. And Edwina pouted in her tent trailer over a cup of coffee.
“Let’s go call Libby,” Charlie coaxed. “I know she’d like to talk to her grandma too.”
“What’d Drake have to say?” her mother asked suspiciously as they walked down the road toward the Visitors’ Center. “I saw you two come back from the Point together.”
“We agreed to discuss your complaints over lunch in his rig. That’s when lots of business gets done in this business. And you’re invited. I told him I represent you. But you’re going to have to let me do the talking. He’s twice as clever as he wants anyone to think he is.” But he’s right—this is all a charade.
“You’re the agent, Charlie,” Edwina said and even managed a smile.
The Visitors’ Center was one of those buildings just before the wye in the road Charlie had passed the night before. There were several rangers behind the desk in the lobby, all young and pink with health. One had a loose, silly grin that didn’t disappear when he spoke. His name badge announced him as Tim Pedigrew.
“Radio phone’s tied up for a while,” Ranger Tim told her cheerfully. “We got a new digital but there’s still twenty phones on four frequencies and we got a backlog of calls to make. Come back later this afternoon, why don’t ya? Or if it can’t wait, maybe Mr. Cabot would let you use one of his. He’s rented three cellulars and a repeater from Royce’s Electric in Moab.”
“We are asking no favors of Gordon Cabot,” Edwina informed her daughter as they left the center.
“I wanted to catch her after she got up but
before she decided to go out somewhere,” Charlie insisted. “And I have to get that tire fixed. John B. and Mitch must have phones, too, if Cabot does.”
“Mitch doesn’t, I know. This is his chance to get away from it all. Drake has one, I think. If not, I need a few things in Moab. You can call from there. We’ll tell him our business lunch’ll be late. Those people don’t keep human hours anyway.”
If the director or his blonde were at home they didn’t answer Charlie’s knock. She left a note on his door and they took off in Howard’s Jeep, Charlie driving.
Howard Greene had purchased the Jeep two weeks before his fatal heart attack—which was just under two weeks before Libby was born—and had never traveled in it except for a few forays into the mountains west of Boulder. Since then, Edwina’d rattled it all over the deserts, plains, and mountains of the Southwest but it would always be “Howard’s Jeep.”
Howard had been a good deal older than Edwina and a full professor before his second marriage. Still, Charlie would always wonder if the shock of her pregnancy had in any way helped bring on his coronary.
Because, although Professor Howard Greene had taken little notice of his adopted daughter as she grew up, Charlie certainly captured his attention when at sixteen she announced she was pregnant.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Mae Woods, Irene Webb, Margaret Armen, Wendy Hornsby, Jim Stinson, and Carol and Bob Verhoef for their patience and assistance in preparing this story. Any errors or misinterpretations are mine and not theirs. And David Millhiser for maintaining his sense of humor while driving me all over the L.A. freeway system.
About the Author
Marlys Millhiser is an American author of fifteen mysteries and horror novels. Born in Charles City, Iowa, Millhiser originally worked as a high school teacher. She has served as a regional vice president of the Mystery Writers of America and is best known for her novel The Mirror and for the Charlie Greene Mysteries. Millhiser currently lives in Boulder, Colorado.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1993 by Marlys Millhiser
Cover design by Elizabeth Connor
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1025-2
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