For the next few days, the Phoenix Police went away. I was the sole investigator on the Yarnell case, a sign that they saw me as both incompetent and harmless-not a bad place to be in a large bureaucracy. The only stipulation: I check in with Hawkins once a week. The skeletons case quickly departed from the minute-long attention span of the Phoenix media. Christmas was coming and a new Nordstrom was open in Scottsdale.
I did what I could.
I spent hours looking over old missing-persons reports from the 1930s and early 1940s. I hooked up with an FBI cold-case expert in Washington. I went through reams of old police logs. Anything to figure out whether twins other than the Yarnell brothers could have ended up walled into the basement passage beneath the Sunset Route Hotel.
James Yarnell gave me permission to examine the Yarnell family papers that were boxed up in the archives of the Arizona Historical Foundation and the Arizona Collection at the Burton Barr Central Library. So every morning I stopped off at my office, made myself not look for an e-mail or voice message from Lindsey, and then drove to the library for at least two solid hours’ work. It was like grad school all over again.
The papers told me that the Yarnell family enterprises were complicated even back in the 1940s. The Yarnell Land and Cattle Co. included ranches around the state, citrus, cotton, mining, even development of a “new subdivision outside Phoenix,” which was about half a mile from where my neighborhood sat in the inner-city today. Hayden Yarnell had been about seventy-five years old in 1941, but he had still managed his empire with precise notes and direct orders: when to move a herd to the High Country, how much to price some land near Bisbee, why he thought the company’s offices in the Luhr’s Tower were too expensive. His scrawl across yellowing memos and creaky ledgers was loopy with age and carried the flats and edges of an old fountain pen.
Yarneco was very much a family business back then. Morgan Yarnell, Hayden’s son and James and Max’s father, was a regular cast member in the corporate records. In the 1930s, it looked like he took over the cattle business. Then in 1939, Morgan was named vice president, putting him directly below the old man. Loan documents for farm land around the Valley and railroad shipping contracts were routinely signed by Morgan after 1939. Occasionally in a board document I saw the name Emma Yarnell Tully, Hayden’s daughter, but she seemed to have little to do with the company.
Those same documents might name Hayden Winthrop Yarnell, Jr., Morgan’s brother. His nephew, James Yarnell, called him the “bounder of the family.” But he was a cipher in the corporate records, and appeared little more in the family photos. I looked at a man with a long, weak face, hardly the face of a bounder. He was two years older than Morgan, and as far as I could tell he never married, had no children, and lived off the family fortune.
One afternoon, I came across a slender, vanity-press volume to commemorate Hayden Yarnell’s seventy-fifth birthday. He’d come a long way from the gunfight at Gila City. My finger slid across grainy black-and-white images of the patriarch with the snowy, full head of hair. The fierceness was still in his eyes, undimmed by the stiff white collar and heavy wool suit and decades of comfortable wealth. He looked so out of place, standing in the foyer of his mansion, fingering his watch chain. I wanted to see him as my mind’s eye did-the cowboy, the miner, the quintessence of pioneer Arizona.
The watch chain. My eye lingered.
Here was a family photo, with a caption identifying Morgan Yarnell and his sons, Andrew, Woodrow, Max, and James. It put me back in my chair for a moment, to see the actual faces. The twins were dressed in Western shirts, boots, toy guns, staring menacingly at the camera. Innocent little faces with that long Yarnell nose. Disappeared for half a century, little boys lost.
I’m not particularly good with numbers; that’s one reason I never made it big in the history business, which today emphasizes statistics and social science. But it didn’t seem that Yarneco was doing well in the 1930s. No surprise there, considering the Great Depression was dragging on and the towns and rural areas of the West suffered longer and deeper downturns than many places. Still, a string of tense letters from bankers indicated that even businesses that should have been doing all right were suffering. I had written my Ph.D. dissertation on the Depression in the West, and I knew the dude ranches and fledgling resorts actually helped prop up the Phoenix economy during that time. That was not the case of the resort owned by Yarneco. It was sold in 1939 under threat of foreclosure.
I saw more of Gretchen Goodheart. Every couple of days, she dropped by my office, delivered a new insight, if not a new blueprint, to the underground passages where the twins were walled up. Gradually on the cork bulletin board that sat on an easel in my office we built a little collage of facts. One day she asked if I would go horseback riding with her, and we spent a Saturday out in the desert. She had a quality of depth that was appealing and rare. It was the holidays and I was needy. But I wanted to believe I would have appreciated her in any season.
21
It was nearly nine on Friday night and I stood at the office window, listening to carolers down in a nearly deserted Patriots Square. They sang “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and then “Jingle Bells” before a fire truck went by with siren screaming. I picked up the phone on the second ring, but there was only a light buzz in the background. I was about to put it down when a voice said my name.
“You know who this is?”
“I don’t.”
“Everybody knows my voice. The damned president knows my voice. It’s Max Yarnell.”
I sat down in the wooden swivel chair. “How may I help you, Mr. Yarnell?” He sounded very drunk.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. “I need to see you. Tonight. Can you come out here?”
“Where is ‘out here’?”
He started into directions heading me into the McDowell Mountain foothills in the far north of Scottsdale. I scribbled them onto a sheriff’s office memo pad.
“Mr. Yarnell,” I said. “It’s late, it’ll take me an hour to get out there.”
“Goddamn it, Mapstone, you could do it in thirty minutes. I do. I really need to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“Not on the phone,” he slurred. “Out here, where it’s safe.”
“Safe from what?” I could hear “Frosty the Snowman” wafting through the open window.
“Never mind,” he said. “I’ll call you back.” The line clicked off.
It reminded me of an eccentric old professor at a university where I had taught. At work, he was distinguished and aloof, a giant in his field of research. But he drank alone at home and after the first few glasses, he reached for the telephone-sometimes he called female students he had a crush on, sometimes colleagues he was peeved at. He was quietly pushed into retirement after he made an obscene call to a dean’s wife. I made a note to call Max Yarnell the next day.
When I got the car out of the garage to head home, though, I felt differently. It was nothing as formed or sophisticated as a premonition. Just a murky anxiety. I pulled out the address and drove toward Scottsdale. I slipped onto the Red Mountain Freeway at Seventh Street and shot through the older neighborhoods of east Phoenix, cruising at seventy-five at treetop level. Then the freeway jogged southeast into Tempe, past Rural Road, and I took the connection to the Pima Freeway. That took me north into Scottsdale, the city off to my left, the Indian reservation off to the right. I got onto surface streets at McDonald, put the top down, and drove through north Scottsdale. The night was crisp but I was warm inside my leather jacket.