Miss Pink Investigates- Part Four Read online

  MISS PINK INVESTIGATES

  PART 4

  GWEN MOFFAT

  © Gwen Moffat 2019

  Gwen Moffat has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2019 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  VERONICA’S SISTERS

  THE LOST GIRLS

  PRIVATE SINS

  RETRIBUTION

  VERONICA’S SISTERS

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 1

  The loose horse scrambled out of the canyon and swung round to face down the slope. A hornet homed in and stung. The horse went plunging across the mesa, startling a jay which took off with alarm calls that could be heard over a mile away.

  Two thousand feet above, on the peak called Angel’s Roost, the commotion alerted a solitary mountaineer who focused her binoculars and, finding the horse and seeing that it was saddled, started to search for the owner. A riderless horse meant that something was wrong, at the least that its rider would have a long walk home. That is when the horse runs back to its stable, thought Melinda Pink, lowering the binoculars in favour of the naked eye – but this horse was standing still. She guessed that it had been tied and had broken loose because it had been stung, or bitten by a rattlesnake. Now it looked as if it might stand until its owner caught up with it. There was another possibility: that it had already thrown its owner.

  She raised the binoculars again, using them at random, panicking because she didn’t know where the horse had come from, then, getting a grip on herself, she came back to the animal and saw that it was staring, head up, towards trees in a shallow canyon: Rastus Canyon; she had contoured round its headwall on her way to Angel’s Roost. There was nothing for it; she would have to go down there, a man could be lying in the bottom with a broken leg, or worse, and he wouldn’t last long on an August afternoon in New Mexico.

  She started to gather up her belongings. She had been here only an hour but the shade under the little pinyon pine looked like a campsite, a touch of humanity on a summit that commanded a view down a canyon to the Rio Grande and beyond, to the desert ranges stretching east to Texas.

  She fastened her rucksack and, straightening her back, she considered Slickrock Canyon below. No cows had ever been there; it was a box canyon and apparently inaccessible. On either side of it long red walls stretched south-east, decreasing in height to a notch like a gunsight that was no exit but the top of a great escarpment above a village called Regis. Slickrock was a true box canyon; at its head, under Angel’s Roost, its walls started from a rock amphitheatre. There were gullies in the walls of course, but they were full of vertical steps and overhangs. It was no place for cows, not even for people, but it must be a sanctuary for wildlife. There was water, that was obvious from the wide ribbon of woodland in the bottom. Momentarily side-tracked, Miss Pink, always eager to explore new ground, studied the canyon walls for a means of descent and to her amazement she found one. There was a system of ledges that might be linked, and a pale speck about halfway up: a lump of quartz? Lime from an eagle’s nest? It was moving. Too pale for deer, and there were no bighorn sheep here. She reached for the glasses and gasped, and smiled. She sat down slowly, no longer in a hurry.

  A figure was walking up the great wall, not climbing but ascending easily on a diagonal line that had to be a rake. This must be the rider, and small wonder that he had left his horse; his progress was easy only on the diagonal. As she watched, his course changed and he went straight up, using his hands and reaching high. He didn’t hesitate so it couldn’t be that hard but despite the lack of technical difficulty the whole route must be extremely exposed. There was no natural parapet, she could see the man’s feet, in orange trainers: curious footwear for a ranch-hand, if he was a ranch-hand. The faded blue jeans were uniform but he wore a white shirt and no hat, and his hair seemed to be long and tied back. He could be a hippie and might have no association with the horse, and this meant she must still go down and look for an injured rider.

  The horse was standing in the shade. The man came out on the rim of Slickrock and started to cross the mesa towards Rastus Canyon. His route would take him quite close to the animal which may have whinnied. She saw them come together, almost like two people, then she lost them in the shade. After a while she glimpsed the man, mounted now, moving steadily along the mesa towards the trail that would take him down the escarpment to the village. No one was injured. She could relax.

  A new perspective opened for her. She had approached her peak by a wide loop to the north which she now saw might not be necessary on the return. If she could get down to the place where the man was reunited with his horse – Midnight Mesa, she saw from her map – she could cut a corner and see new ground.

  At seven thousand feet Angel’s Roost was only a small peak as peaks go in America but the trees were ponderosas with plenty of space between the big trunks. The descent to Midnight Mesa was steep and smooth with nothing more for an aged mountaineer to bother about than the lack of friction occasioned by pine needles. After a thousand feet or so the angle lessened and the ponderosas gave way to stunted oaks and juniper: low but dense enough to block the view. Miss Pink wasn’t worried; the canyons ran south-east and since the most awesome of them possessed an escape route she knew that her only problem, with the temperature well above a hundred, would be dehydration. She went slowly, conserving energy, feeling some trepidation as she looked around her and saw no sign that anyone had ever come this way before, yet knowing that the trail, the long way home from Angel’s Roost, was less than a mile behind her. There was even a highway a further mile or so to the north, probably empty of traffic, but it was always a comfort in a wild place to know that there was a proper road within walking distance, provided you could find it.

  The immediate ground was bedrock interspersed with fine gravel. Rock and gravel were white, reflecting the sun. She swallowed and wished that junipers grew closer together or cast longer shadows. She caught a glimpse of rock on her left, higher than her own level. She glanced right and saw more rock looming. The junipers thinned out and came to an end and she found herself looking down a long and totally unfamiliar canyon to the hazy ranges beyond the Rio Grande.

  She stepped forward warily and took stock. She had come out on a low point with miniature gorges on either side. There was no way she would risk climbing down a vertical wall even if, as here, it was only twenty feet high; you could die as the result of a broken ankle if no one knew where you were, and she hadn’t told the people at her motel of her destination.

  She peered over the edge to see what the watercourses were like. Both gorges looked reasonable, once you were down there, unlike the big retaining wall on one side, the north-east side, which was massive, and undercut above its base. Working it out from the map and what she had seen on her approach to Angel’s Roost this morning she decided that this canyon must be Rastus. There were aspens not far below and their tops were fairly level. That should mean that there were no big drops and she would be able to walk down the creek.

  She retreated for a hundred yards or so, clambered into the little ravine on her right and made her way carefully down the rocks, trust
ing that as soon as she reached the trees the ground would be easier.

  There was fallen timber under the point, bleached white by sun and snow, and wedged in the rocks below the overhanging wall was a rifle.

  She froze, open-mouthed, seeming to hear the sound of her last footstep echo back from the wall. Even the birds were silent, but the stillness was in her mind because after a while she heard water talking in the stones. She picked up the gun, which had bright patches of rust on the metal parts.

  There was a slope of sand and flaking scree below what she now saw was a cave under the overhang and there, protected by the rock ceiling, was a stone wall with windows, and a doorway. She had come on the ruin of a cliff dwelling used by the Mogollon Indians, the people who lived in these canyons before the arrival of the Apaches.

  For a moment she gloated over masonry which had stood for centuries without change. Eight hundred years and there were the same joints and angles in the shaped stone, the same window apertures and doorway, even the same approach – although not quite, the scree was unstable and strewn with detritus: twigs and dead cactus pads and bits of bone. Some carnivore could be in occupation now.

  She put down the gun, picked up a stone and said loudly: ‘Come out!’ – feeling silly until the embarrassment was superseded by a sense of déjà vu. Earlier there had been a horse without a rider and here was a rifle as eloquent of its missing owner as a loose and saddled horse.

  Articles in stream beds have often been carried there by water; not always, but the knowledge gave her the excuse to stare thoughtfully up the gorge and postpone her next move. The rifle was heavy; it couldn’t have been carried far by water and it couldn’t be thrown any distance, only dropped. She had been on the rocky point directly above, she had come down the bed of the creek; the second place she must visit was the top of the big overhanging wall. But the first place – reluctantly she brought her gaze back from the rocks in the gorge – the first place was the ruin.

  She plodded up the scree. There were a few shrivelled cacti on the slope and a curved bone had come to rest against a prickly pear. It was the shaft of a rib. Near the top of the slope were several vertebrae, still attached to each other, their size indicating a large mammal; not as big as a cow or horse, an antelope perhaps, except that this wasn’t antelope country. Mule deer then, and that implied a powerful predator, like a lion. ‘No lion,’ she said aloud, fingering the stone in her hand, ‘would be waiting inside for me.’ She listened for movement, her eyes wide with apprehension, and not without cause. Mountain lions, shyest of the big cats, would certainly have slipped away when they heard her on the point above; coyotes too, but there could well be rats come in to feast on the predator’s leavings and where there were rats there were snakes.

  She reached the ruin and studied a patch of sunlight inside the doorway. All she could see was droppings, possibly those of a ringtail cat. She stamped her feet but she didn’t throw the stone; the gesture seemed aggressive, even paranoid. There was no sound, no reaction to her stamping, and a rattlesnake would have given its warning by now. A thought struck her and she smiled in sudden relief. There was no smell. This place hadn’t been occupied for a long time, the bones on the slope were old.

  She stepped over the threshold and stood aside, concentrating on the gloom. After a few moments the interior became apparent: bulges catching reflected light, bone splinters, a branch, an old boot.

  It was a riding-boot but so worn it could have come from a rubbish tip; the upper conformed to the shape of the wearer’s foot and the sole flapped. She shook it gingerly. Nothing fell out and there was only the faintest suggestion of odour, as one might expect with very old footwear. There was no sign of its companion.

  Looking around, wondering how the branch came to be here, she saw pale nodules near one end, like a fungus. She carried it to the doorway for a better look and nearly dropped it. What she had taken for fungus was the bones of a hand, picked clean of flesh, although not quite: there were brown shreds at the joints and, as she stared at it, a fly landed on a knuckle. There was a slight smell, a processed smell, like pemmican.

  She put the branch back where she’d found it and then she searched the one-roomed dwelling as meticulously as was possible without a flashlight but she found nothing further: no more bones, no clothing, not even a belt. Nor, when she left the cave, did she find anything in the creek bed below the rifle, but she hadn’t expected to. The predators: bears and coyotes, lions, could have taken the rest of the body some distance. Packrats would have removed any rags of clothing to line their nests. Many people who disappeared in forests did so completely: she was surprised that anything had been left here but then she reasoned that, judging from the scraps of dried flesh on the finger bones, the victim had died comparatively recently, long enough for the rifle to rust but not so long ago that scavengers had quite finished with the body. She wasn’t greatly concerned. The lapse of time eliminated horror. And there was a more pressing factor; the incident reminded her that solitary travellers in the wilderness need to keep their wits about them. She intended to get out of this place alive.

  She studied the physical features and fixed them in her mind: the confluence of the two streams, the rocky point and the big wall in shades of red, its rock streaked black with mineral stains and massively undercut. But even from a few yards away you had to look for the ruin although it was in plain view. People searching for the missing man would never have known it was there, let alone that their quarry was inside, unless he shouted, unless they had dogs. Hounds would have smelled him a mile away; further when the body decomposed.

  She turned to the descent but as she started to clamber down a chaos of boulders she kept an eye on the banks, hoping for game trails. Within a hundred yards she came to the end of the big crag and before she entered the first grove of aspens she saw that the canyon broadened and became comparatively shallow. There were still outcrops of rock but they were isolated, giving the rift a more friendly feel than Slickrock.

  The upper slopes were arid however, freckled with pinyon and juniper where even the shade would be hot. The animals had moved down to the creek where they dozed away the daylight hours, scarcely moving as Miss Pink passed by – but she knew they were there. In a place where there wasn’t enough breeze to stir a leaf she would sense the turn of a feathered head, a lift of wings and a settling again as she showed no overt interest, didn’t even look except out of the corner of her eye. At last she saw what she had been watching for: a glimpse of yellow flank as a deer got up and drifted downstream. She climbed the bank and found a game trail.

  She was in mixed woodland, marshy in the bottom where the muddy little path led her through glades of rank grass vivid with lupins and scarlet paintbrush. There was a smell of sap and flowers, of trampled mud and, unexpectedly, the stench of fresh horse dung. She came to an accumulation of droppings about an alder, and stuck in crevices in the bark were coarse brown hairs and pale fibres.

  The horse’s tracks were obvious, deeply indented as it plunged away, not breaking the halter but evidently pulling loose a badly tied knot. It looked as if the animal might have caught a whiff of scent from the ruin; more likely a vulture had carried a piece of flesh to a tree and dropped it to rot in an inaccessible crack.

  The hoofprints led diagonally out of the canyon and she followed, leaving the lush woodland but still in shade because the swell of Midnight Mesa blocked out the light. After a while the angle eased and the sun came blinding through the junipers. Shading her eyes she saw Angel’s Roost above the headwall of Slickrock. The place where one might descend into the box canyon must be across the mesa from here. She resolved to come back: when she was fresh, and there was no necessity to report the finding of a body, or the remains of one.

  She was no longer following a trail, had lost the horse’s track but it was immaterial; on the long whaleback of the mesa the ground was open enough that no one could be lost for long in daylight and the surface was fine for walking, composed
of the familiar bedrock and gravel. She worked south-east between the stunted trees and prickly pear and shortly she came to a duck: one small stone balanced on another. Without pausing she turned left.

  There was still no trail as such, only a line, the line of least resistance, sensed rather than seen. Occasionally she passed other ducks and then, at a steepening in the ground, a neat cairn of single slabs, stacked like plates, that marked the descent into Rastus Canyon perhaps two miles from where she had left it, where the horse had been tethered. The mud of the creek was deeply trampled by shod hoofs.

  There was a mesa on the other side and then a drop to the dry bed of Badblood Wash where she picked up her trail of the morning. This wash led back all the way to the divide, and that in turn had brought her to the foot of the north ridge of Angel’s Roost. Looking up the wash now – a wide swath of sand between banks of scrubby vegetation – she realised that there was little more than half a mile between the head of Badblood and the body in Rastus and she wondered why it hadn’t been found sooner. If it was known that a man was hunting on these mesas the first place to look for him when he didn’t return would be under the cliffs. She frowned and turned to the trail, which was now marked with the signs of cows. She walked slowly down the sand of the wash, staring absently at a troop of gnatcatchers in the mesquite and thinking about closed seasons and poaching. Ahead of her rounded rocks on the skyline indicated the top of the escarpment. She came to it and stopped.

  She had left the woodland behind in Rastus Canyon where it had made a delightful contrast to arid slopes but below the scarp was a contrast that was even more marked: acre upon acre of lush jungle with here and there a glint of water that showed the course of the Rio Grande. To the left loops of the river were lost in hazy infinity and to the south the view was obscured by a bulge in the escarpment, but straight ahead, beyond the hardwoods that resembled a rain-forest, the desert started.