Black Sun Descending

By Stephen Legault

Silas Pearson is plagued by nightmares. In them, his wife, Penelope, who has now been missing for four years, shows him where murder victims are buried across the Colorado Plateau. One such dream leads him to the Atlas Mill tailings site, outside Moab, Utah. There, Silas discovers the corpse of anti-uranium-mining activist Jane Vaughn, who went missing from Flagstaff, Arizona, buried in radioactive waste. Trying to connect the murder with the disappearance of his wife, who was friends with Vaughn, Silas travels across the Southwest to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. He confronts a host of suspects who wanted Jane Vaughn dead and who believed Penelope, too, was interfering with progress on the plateau. All the while, Silas’s nightmares, threaded with snatches of prose from the writings of Edward Abbey, seem to be leading him to some final confrontation—but with what?

This is the second book in the Red Rock Canyon Mysteries, all of which are set in the American Southwest—around Arches, Canyonlands, and Grand Canyon National Parks, and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Touchwood Editions
• Release date: Oct 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781771511001

Book preview

SILAS PEARSON STOOD ON THE edge of the world and contemplated its searing emptiness. It was spring. Again. The afternoon sun was warm but not yet hot; in the distance, in the Henry Mountains and the Abajos, he could see fresh snow clinging to the flanks of the soaring peaks.

The Colorado River lay below him, more than 1,500 feet down sheer walls of Cedar Mesa sandstone and the Honaker Trail Formation. Silas sat down on the edge of naked sandstone that was as red as a dying star, his legs dangling into vacuous space. He looked down from his promontory on the back of the muddy, churning Colorado. The same river that had cut through so much of his world for the last four years. The same river that his wife Penelope de Silva—missing all this time—had loved and admired and fought to defend.

The previous fall Silas had shifted his search from the Island in the Sky, just a few miles away across the junction of the Green and Colorado Rivers, to this corner of Canyonlands National Park. Here, in the Needles, and throughout the adjacent Canyon Rims region of southeastern Utah, he had prowled looking for some sign that Penelope had passed this way whenever the winter storms didn’t close the jarring dirt roads.

Last summer he had come as close as he had ever come to finding a trace of his long-lost wife: her prized journal—Notes on Ed Abbey Country—hidden deep in nearby Hatch Wash. The journal had led him to Josh Charleston and Josh—a misanthropic, brash, and egotistical youth masquerading as Edward Abbey’s character Hayduke from The Monkey Wrench Gang—had revealed Penelope’s purpose for being in the Utah desert in the first place.

A raven drifted overhead, black as obsidian against the pale spring sky. The sounds of the river floated up from far below, like people talking in muted voices. Silas couldn’t see the first rapids of Cataract Canyon, but he could hear them a few miles around the bend in the Colorado, beckoning him to descend. The raven followed the river, and Silas knew that it had a far greater chance of finding his mournful prize than he did.

He fiddled with his GPS unit, too disheartened to call up the day’s progress, let alone the exhausting statistics from the winter’s exploration. He still transferred the data to the gigantic wall maps that adorned his home in the nearby Castle Valley, first cross-hatching in the territory he searched, and then going back to shade it in when he’d completed a second exploration. It no longer brought a sense of accomplishment. It felt like he was slipping deeper into the darkness of a crack in the stone, never to see daylight again.

Silas rubbed his face. His wife had left four years ago on one of her regular backpacking trips into the wild, monolithic country within a day’s drive of Moab, the former uranium mining town now rife with tourists. What Silas learned from the discovery of her journal, and his subsequent conversations with Josh Charleston—if you could call the string of invectives issuing from Hayduke’s mouth English—was that Penelope had been documenting all of the landscapes Edward Abbey wrote about in his twenty-two books. She planned to petition Congress to create the Edward Abbey National Monument, a sweeping undertaking to protect much of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico’s red rock wilderness.

This had brought her into conflict with many of the Four Corners region’s boosters: miners, oil-men, resort builders, off-highway vehicle promoters, dam builders, and the politicians who supported them.

And then she disappeared.

Silas stood up, his back aching, his legs worn out, his feet hot with blisters. He looked at the GPS unit in his hands and considered, momentarily, throwing it into the chasm that yawned before him. Instead he picked up his pack and stuffed the device deep inside, along with his water bottles, trail mix, maps, and first aid kit. He turned his back on the spectacle before him—the sun painting the sheer cliffs above the confluence a delicate burnt umber—and slowly walked back toward his camp.

IN THE DREAM she was drowning, but not in water. Silas could see her, eyes closed, her face a mask of serenity against the flow, but he could not reach her. He never could.

When she opened her eyes he nearly jolted awake; he had learned, over the course of the last year, to remain sleeping. The dreams were his only connection to the hope that he might find his wife.

I have seen the place called Trinity, she said, through the slurry that was enveloping her, pulling the air from her lungs.

Silas remained silent in the dream. He knew if he spoke she would not hear him. He watched her disappear in the flood.

SILAS WOKE BEFORE dawn, soaked in sweat, his cracked hands tearing at the sleeping bag. I have seen the place called Trinity, he said aloud. He punched the sleeping bag away from himself, aware of the cold beyond; he could see that snow had fallen on the tent through the night, its opaque mask filtering the light of morning.

He found his notebook and wrote the words in it. There were dozens of pages of such notes scratched in his rough handwriting. He gathered his clothing and pulled on his pants, shirt, and a down jacket, fitting a wool cap over his ears and pulling a pair of gloves on before carefully unzipping the tent. Heavy, wet snow fell into the vestibule. He pulled on his boots, stiff and frozen. The sweat from yesterday’s hike had turned to ice in the night. He stood, his body creaking like an old wooden door, and gazed about him. He was the only person in the campground in the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park. A few inches of snow covered his Subaru Outback, the small picnic table, and the park entrance road. He walked to the car, retrieved his camp stove, fuel, coffee pot, and box of food, and hurriedly made breakfast, stamping his feet and blowing on his hands as he did. He had no idea where or what Trinity was, why Penelope had told him she had seen this place, or what it meant. He hoped that somehow it was leading him slowly back to her.

THE SNOW THAT had blanketed the area had also fallen in the broad Spanish Valley around the town of Moab. The cliffs that ringed the town were plastered with white, and as the sun appeared over the horizon and warmed them, they appeared to be weeping. Silas didn’t stop in Moab but turned off for Hal Canyon and took Highway 128 east.

He drove up the deep grotto of the Colorado River; where the sun had warmed it the road looked like an oily snake next to the red back of the river. He made the turn onto the Castle Valley road and soon was driving through thick snow to reach his small house. He parked and pulled an armload of gear from the back of the Subaru, then slogged to his front door. Silas opened it, dumped his gear in the kitchen, and without turning any lights on went into the living room. From floor to ceiling on three walls were maps of the Four Corners region. Each of them had sections hatched or colored in. The maps of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, and of the Delores River in Colorado, had curling Post-it notes with the names of the dead Silas had found in those locations the previous summer and autumn. It had been six months since he had last led sheriff’s deputies and the FBI to a body.

I have seen the place called Trinity, he said. He now considered himself a reluctant authority on the writing of Edward Abbey, and this passage sounded familiar. He scanned the maps and then looked at the small bookshelf next to the tiny table with its two chairs. Twenty-two books adorned the shelves. The last time he had pulled a book from this shelf he had called FBI Forensic Anthropologist Dr. Katie Rain at her home in Salt Lake City and directed her to two bodies on the Delores River. He drew a deep breath and reached for Desert Solitaire.

It took an hour, but he found the line in the final pages. He read the stanza in the last chapter of the book. "I have seen the place called Trinity, in New Mexico, where our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb and the heat of the blast fused sand into a greenish glass—already the grass has returned . . ."

Silas searched the room but realized he didn’t have a map of that portion of New Mexico on the walls. Trinity was the code name for the detonation of the first atomic bomb, conducted in the White Sands Proving Grounds, a vast military training and testing facility in the central part of the state. On the southern edge of the proving ground was White Sands National Monument, near where Edward Abbey’s novel Fire on the Mountain was set. Silas ran his fingers through his bristly hair and scratched a week’s worth of gray whiskers.

He went to the back of the house, into the spare bedroom he had converted into a gear room, and opened a bankers box filled with maps. He found one of New Mexico and consulted it. The Trinity site was about thirty miles from Socorro, a small town on the banks of the Rio Grande, south of Albuquerque. It was about a seven-hour drive. He looked at his watch. It was two in the afternoon. He would have to wait until morning. He would use the time to assemble a portable library of Abbey’s works.

HE SAT UNDER the pergola in the backyard. The thatched roof had taken a beating during the most recent snows, and Silas would have to rebuild it. Sometime. He had reread the final chapter of Desert Solitaire twice that afternoon, between repacking the gear in his car for his drive and thumb-tacking a new map to the wall in the hallway outside his bedroom. For four years he had been searching the landscape around Moab. Before his wife had gone missing she had told him that she was setting off on a backpacking trip. When he had absentmindedly inquired as to where, she had said, within a day’s drive of Moab.

Central New Mexico was technically within a day’s drive of Moab, but he had never considered this to be part of his search grid. It was off Penelope’s beloved Colorado Plateau.

Fire on the Mountain rested on the picnic table at his elbow. He didn’t have the heart to read it. When he had been a professor of literature, first at the University of British Columbia in his native Canada, and later at Northern Arizona in Flag, he had learned to detest Abbey’s fiction. He and his wife had often argued about its merits. She thought it raw and unguarded; he considered it amateurish and infantile. He thought about his wife’s journal and its long, detailed descriptions of dozens of places across the vast canyon country. Nowhere was there mention of the White Sands of New Mexico. Was her foray there something new? Had this happened after the misplacement of her prized journal?

He stood and stretched and reached for a can of Molson’s. It was empty. He scooped up the books and went inside. As he heated a microwave dinner and drank another can of beer, he stood in the windows that reached floor to ceiling on the east wall of his living room and wondered what he might find in Trinity. Heat of the blast fused sand into a greenish glass—already the grass has returned . . .

Edward Abbey had despised uranium mining; so had Penelope. She had railed against the vast mining operations that had marred the Navajo Reservation, the riverbanks of the Colorado and San Juan, and the tableland of the Arizona Strip—the northern rim of the Grand Canyon. What she hated most was the waste. All across the Southwest were the remnants of the uranium boom. She said there were rotting vehicles, oil drums, discarded mining equipment, and radioactive heaps of slag—waste rock from mining—poisoning the fragile waterways that ran like capillaries across the tablelands.

The most hated of these waste sites was just three miles from Moab. The Atlas Mill site was the largest wasteland of uranium tailings in the United States, and it was perched on the edge of the Colorado River where it emerged from Hal Canyon. Here, from 1956 through 1970, the Atlas Mill had processed yellowcake uranium, the waste products being stored in unlined pits that slowly filled with river water seeping up through the porous limestone. During those troubled years the Colorado River grew ever more radioactive downstream from the site. It took twenty years after the end of operations at the Atlas Mill for anybody to do anything to clean up the site. In 2000 the US government authorized its cleanup. More than a decade later the site was about one-third of the way through a massive restoration project.

Penelope had considered the Atlas Mill site an emblem for all that had gone wrong with the uranium experiment in the American desert. She had hoped to live long enough to see desert evening primrose bloom on the site once more, but would have been satisfied to see grass grow on the bottomlands of the Colorado where once toxic waste had been spewed.

Silas stood and stared out the window. The sun was down and the color had faded from Dome Mountain. Silas wasn’t sure if he had the heart to drive all the way to New Mexico.

I PROMISED I’D CALL YOU. When I had another dream—you made me promise. Silas sat on a green couch in a warm room draped in sun. Across from him sat Dr. Jessenia Booker, a middle-aged woman, her hair in a short, tight, graying Afro, a pair of glasses perched on the tip of her nose. She wore a plain shirt and a long skirt and had a legal pad on her lap.

So what did you dream?

I . . . Penny was drowning. She spoke to me. She said something that doesn’t make sense.

What did she say, Silas?

‘I have seen the place called Trinity.’

What is Trinity?

It’s where the US government detonated the first atomic bomb. It’s in New Mexico. That doesn’t make sense.

Why?

Because every time I dream about Penelope, she has sent me to some place on the Colorado Plateau. My dreams are always about some place on the plateau.

Like Courthouse Wash.

Or Island in the Sky.

But Trinity?

"It’s in New Mexico. It’s near White Sands. Abbey did write a book about that area. It’s called Fire on the Mountain. It’s a terrible book. I reread it this morning."

And what about the line? Is it from that book?

"No, the line itself is from Desert Solitaire. But that’s not the point."

What is?

The point is, I don’t know if I can do this.

Do what, Silas?

"Do this. This. He looked at his hands as if the answer were contained within them. I don’t know if I can drive all the way to central New Mexico and start all over."

A long silence followed. You don’t have to do anything, Silas.

But she wants me to, Jess.

Is that what you think this is all about? That Penelope wants you to follow her clues?

I have to believe . . .

What do you have to believe, Silas?

That she wants me to find her.

"You want to believe that you can find her."

Maybe I’m wrong. All this time I’ve been thinking that Penny wants me to find her. Now, I don’t know anymore. She wants me to find something or someone.

There was another long silence.

You think I’m crazy.

The woman laughed. It was a kind sound, but her face grew serious immediately after. I’ve had some really crazy people on that couch over the last twenty years, Silas. You don’t rank among them. I do think you’ve got some challenges to work through.

Challenge is a euphemism for problem.

"You have some problems, Silas, but you’re not crazy."

Is there a name for what I have?

"I could pull out my DSM and look it up. I’m sure there is. Maybe you’ve got a bit of post-traumatic stress going on. But I think what you are, Silas, is tired. You’re tired. And I think you’re feeling guilty. And that is playing havoc with your mind."

You think my dreams are my guilty conscious getting the better of me?

What do you think?

I think I need to find my wife. I have to go to Trinity.

Maybe you do. But you’re not going to stop having these dreams until you face what’s causing them head on. You’ve got to stop blaming yourself for Penelope’s disappearance.

I don’t blame myself. Booker looked at him kindly. Silas shuffled on the couch. What if I don’t want to stop having these dreams?

"Well, nobody says you have to stop dreaming about Penelope. But are these dreams what you want to be having?"

Silas closed his eyes. He could feel the skin around them tug and tighten. His face felt like sandstone. I’m becoming this goddamned desert, he thought.

Silas?

She was drowning. He watched her mouth the words again. I have seen the place called Trinity. The water enveloped her. The water was the color of the desert all around him: red. Not blood red, just the same old rust-colored water that he saw every day as he drove down Hal Canyon along the Colorado River. Silas opened his eyes and stood up. The coffee table in front of him jumped as his shins collided with it.

What is it?

I have to go.

The doctor smiled. That helpful, was I?

I think the Trinity I’m looking for is just down the road.

SILAS PARKED ON THE HIGHWAY and watched the operation at the Atlas Mill. A chain-link fence with No Trespassing and Contaminated Area signs stood between him and the tailings from the now-vacant site. Four days a week a train with thirty-six cars of reprocessed uranium waste was shipped north from this location, just yards from the Colorado River, to a final disposal site near Crescent Junction. The mill site contained sixteen million tons of uranium tailings. When the wind blew hard enough radioactive dust from the site powered the desert and high cliffs that bordered the site. For more than forty years radioactive waste had been seeping into the Colorado River and washing downstream.

The cleanup project started in 2009 and, contingent on funding, was expected to last beyond 2025. The mess that took forty years to create would take almost half as long to clean up.

Silas shielded his eyes against the intense glare of the sun and watched the activity around the tailings dump for fifteen minutes before he got into the car and drove back along the Colorado River toward home.

HE RETURNED AFTER dark and parked by the highway, on the east side, as if he were leaving his car before setting off on a walk up Courthouse Wash in Arches National Park. Instead he crossed the deserted road and walked across the scrub desert toward the mill. He had his worn pack on his back and a spade-shaped garden shovel in his left hand. A berm bordered the work site and beyond that was the chain-link fence with its impotent warnings. Looking around self-consciously, he climbed the berm, his boots kicking up a fine red dust that coated the bottom of his pants. When he reached the fence he threw his shovel over and, taking a small nylon tarp from his bag, draped it over his shoulder, climbed the fence, and laid it down over the loose strands of barbed wire at the top. Silas dropped to the far side and retrieved the tarp.

Now where? He stood next to the massive work site. The Atlas Mill waste covered more than one hundred acres and he knew he couldn’t possibly search everywhere. Much of what was on site had been dumped into shallow pits and then covered with fill. He looked at his ridiculous shovel and realized the impossibility of his task.

Silas closed his eyes. In his dream, Penelope had been drowning in the Colorado. He looked toward the river, to where the most active reclamation was underway. That’s where he would begin.

HE RETURNED FOR the next two nights, climbing the fence and evading the nominal security. Each morning, just before sunup, he climbed back over the fence and retreated to his home in the Castle Valley. He decided that three