Sharon Peralta was on the radio, always “Dr. Sharon” to her listeners (why hadn’t I gotten my Ph.D. in psychology?), giving brisk advice to a man who didn’t know how to keep his career and meet his obligations to his seven children; a woman who didn’t understand why her lovers kept leaving her; and another woman who had seduced her brother-in-law. Dr. Sharon handled every caller deftly. She was funny. She was sexy. She had the answers. She was promoting her newsletter and her new book. Hard to believe it was the mousy Sharon Peralta I first met twenty years ago.
It was a good summer day for a drive, provided you were headed in the right direction. In the southbound lanes, the traffic headed toward downtown was a gridlocked disaster. I drove for miles through the new city sprawl, ever spreading-an acre an hour-out into the desert floor and around stark, barren mountains that once stood in splendid isolation. After passing Carefree Highway, the interstate started to climb. Over the next hundred miles, it would vault nearly six thousand feet into the Arizona high country and Flagstaff. My destination was not quite that far, but no matter how many times I drove this route, I was struck by the dramatic changes in the land.
You can drive all the way from the Mississippi River to Denver without encountering more than the undulating sameness of the plains. In the West, the country changes from pines to deserts and mountains to flatlands with amazing suddenness. So the flat cactus-covered desert gave way to sage- and chaparral-covered slopes, ravines and crevices, all pushing upward toward the high peaks to the north. In a few minutes, the massive blue emptiness of the Bradshaw Mountains appeared off my left. This had been mining country a hundred years before, with lots of abandoned shafts to stick a body in. I felt an involuntary uneasiness and checked the mirrors, checked the.357 in the glove compartment.
In about an hour, I took the highway that splits off north into Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona. Another ten miles and the country changed again from the three-thousand-foot high desert to a landscape from another planet, an idealized Mars of exalted red-stone buttes rising above scrub pines and intricate, blown-apart rock formations, all encased by a gigantic, endless cobalt sky. Here was the next Santa Fe or Taos. Sedona, which had not been much more than an isolated artists’ colony when my grandparents would bring me up here as a little boy, had become as rich and exclusive an oasis as you can find in the country. There was now a traffic light below Cathedral Rock and expensive houses sprinkled into the foothills. It all made me vaguely sad.
I stopped at a convenience store where a sign told me Sedona was the home of the annual Jazz on the Rocks Festival, and also that it was at the center of four “vortexes” that provide mysterious, healing energy. I had a vague recollection of a “harmonic convergence” of New Agers here a few years before, when I was still in San Diego and Patty’s wicked wit insulated me from inanities. I asked about the address Townsend had given me, and the clerk pointed me down the highway to a turnoff.
The Blazer’s odometer turned over 2.4 miles as the asphalt road turned to red gravel and finally to dirt, climbing up into Bear Hollow, a narrow upland canyon overlooking Sedona. Greg Townsend’s place was completely concealed in pines and rocks, a modern adobe with the kind of rustic look that can only be had for a lot of money. I parked inside a gate, just behind a silver Porsche 911 turbo. I wondered about strapping on the Python, then decided against it and stepped out onto the pinecones and rocky ground.
“You don’t look like a cop,” came a disembodied voice from a distance. Then, coming closer, he said, “You look more like a college professor.”
Greg Townsend stepped out from behind a boulder and extended his hand. He was tall and lanky, my height, but skinnier, with a full head of graying hair, wire-frame glasses, khaki shorts, and hiking boots. His skin was a golden tan, darker than the color of his shorts. He regarded me with an easy nonchalance in his blue eyes. I pulled out my badge case with my left hand-the nongun hand-and showed it to him.
“I read about you in the Republic,” he said. “I’m impressed.”
“Nothing to be impressed about,” I replied, looking him over and imagining him as Phaedra’s lover. I didn’t like him.
“I went to Brown, but I never much took to the classroom thing,” he said. I didn’t respond. “So you’re a history professor? I trust you have left behind the prison of linear narrative and the Western conceit that there is such a thing as truth?”
Jesus, I thought, is this how he picked up Phaedra? “I think historical questions have historical answers,” I said. “The conceit that everything is relative has led to most of the mass murder of this century.”
“Mmm,” he said. “How did you ever get tenure?”
He extended his arm and we walked.
“Phaedra loved it up here,” he was saying as he led me around the place, from one spectacular view of the canyon below to another. “She was a restless soul. You could see that aura about her. Amazingly creative. Anyway, somehow this place calmed her a bit.”
“When was the last time you talked to her, Mr. Townsend?” I asked. We settled onto a large futon in the main room; it faced a wall of glass and another fabulous view. Around us were photos of Townsend climbing, cycling, and skydiving with various young women. I didn’t immediately see a photo of Phaedra.
“I told you on the phone, it was April, when she moved out.”
“You two had a fight? That was why she moved out?”
His blue eyes flashed for just a moment, and his face became red. “You know,” he said, “I didn’t want to invite you up here, and now you’re asking things that are really not any of your business.”
I thought about playing a tough guy, but I just let it sit for a minute. I could hear a siren down in the canyon.
“You didn’t know Phaedra,” Townsend said. “The negativity just grew in her. She was very difficult, very tumultuous. Of course, she was very bright and talented. They all go together. Such a tortured soul.
“Yes, we fought before she left. But that didn’t seem unusual, because we fought a lot. That was just Phaedra. But the next morning, she was just gone. She never gave me an explanation.”
“Why do you think she left?”
He shrugged. “Maybe she was ready for a change. She lived a very episodic life, Deputy Mapstone. She would go through phases in her clothes: hats and loose skirts one month, tight Armani cocktail dresses the next. People came and went, too, men especially. She never had trouble turning the page.”
“What did her state of mind seem to be?”
“Moody. Sometimes she seemed happy, but lonely, too.”
“And other times?”
“She never reached a oneness with herself. That wonderful state of being I tried to teach her. Why should I know why?” He sounded whiny, like he must have sounded in fifth grade.
“Oh, just because you lived with her,” I said dryly.
“Yeah,” he said, staring past me out the window. “There were times she sounded really down. She could have the blackest moods. And that sister…”
“Julie.”
He looked at me strangely and said, “Very bad news.”
“Did you ever have any sense she might be in trouble?”
He shook his head. We watched as a hawk hunted in a lonely arc down the canyon.
I asked him about how he’d met Phaedra.
“The personals, Deputy Mapstone. Or is it Dr. Mapstone? Professor? Haven’t you tried the nineties way of meeting people?”