The Shadow of Venus (6 page)

“I've been wanting to meet you for a long time.” He stood up and took Claire's hand in a combination squeeze and shake.

“You have?” she asked.

“Yes. I admire the work you've been doing in collection development. The university needs to continue to expand its rare-book collection.”

“Thank you,” Claire said. “I've heard good things about your work, too.”

“Is this visit related to your work?” he asked.

“Not exactly. Have you heard about the woman who was found dead in the basement under the library?” She knew news of the death was likely to have spread all over campus by now.

“I did hear something about it,” Lawton Davis replied, rubbing his chin as if feeling for a beard that was no longer there.

“The police have not been able to identify her. She left no ID. She told a student she met in the library to call her Maia.”

“In Greek mythology Maia is the brightest star in the constellation Pleiades and the mother of Mercury.”

“A
Quentin Valor illustration from Thomas Duval's
Ancient Sites
was found in the storage room beside Maia's body. It had been carefully cut out of the Anderson Reading Room's first edition.”

“Ouch.” Lawton winced. “That hurts. Which illustration was it?”

“Spiral Rocks.”

“Did she take anything else?”

“Not from that book.”

“Odd that she would pick Spiral Rocks. All of Quentin Valor's illustrations are marvelous, of course. In my opinion he is the premier expedition artist. But if I were going to steal from a first edition of
Ancient Sites,
I would take an illustration of Chaco Canyon. It's a far more complex and interesting site. Was she planning to sell the Spiral Rocks illustration?”

“I don't know. She died of a heroin overdose. There's always the possibility she was looting valuable books and selling the illustrations for drug money or trading them for drugs.”

“Was the illustration the police found in good condition?”

“Pristine,” Claire said. “The razor-bladed edge was precise and perfect.”

“Well,” he smiled, “at least this Maia was a careful thief.”

“Unfortunately I have no idea how many other books she damaged. I examined
Ancient Sites
and saw that Spiral Rocks was the only illustration taken from that book, but I can't go through every valuable illustrated book in the library.”

“Of course not.” Lawton shook his head in sympathy.

“Perhaps you can help.”

“I'll do whatever I can.”

“I talked to Maia by the duck pond last year and she pointed out the Jupiter-Venus conjunction in the evening sky.”

“Everybody was talking about it. It was a marvelous event, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence when the five naked-eyes planets came together.”

“It was magnificent,” Claire agreed.

“Altogether it went on for several weeks. I photographed every stage.” Lawton pointed to the photographs on the walls. “When I processed the photos, I gave each of the planets a color, so the viewer could identify them as they did their slow-motion dance. Mars, as you might expect, is red. I left Venus as a golden light.”

“The photographs are exquisite,” Claire said, looking at the planets dancing on the wall and the approach-avoidance dynamic as Venus and Mars moved together then parted. “The colors remind me of the photographs taken by the Hubble Telescope.”

“Thank you.” Lawton brushed his hair away from his collar and beamed with a shy pride. Claire
was
touched; she saw pride often enough in academia but rarely saw anything shy about it.

“It was an absolute stroke of genius for the scientists to color the Hubble photographs,” Lawton said. “It turned the pictures into artwork and made them accessible to everyone.”

“Maia told me that Venus is visible in the daytime to those who know where to look,” Claire said.

“That's a belief some Indians share,” Lawton said.

“Considering that conversation and the fact that she was found with an illustration from
Ancient Sites,
it could be that her interest—or her drug connection's interest—was in archeoastronomy. She was homeless. I doubt she was enrolled as a student, although without knowing her name that would be hard to prove one way or the other. She may have sat in on some of your classes.”

“What did she look like?”

“She wasn't someone you would especially notice. She was pale. She had good bones. Her hair was light brown. She dressed in a very neat and subdued way. The police have a photo they are showing to people who might be able to identify her. Would you be willing to take a look?”

“When was the photo taken?”

“After she died.”

Lawton grimaced. “I've seen many students fall asleep in my classes,” he said. “They may look like they're dead, but I'm not really keen on looking at photos of people who really are dead. If Maia sat in on a large class I wouldn't have noticed her, and she would never have been admitted to a small class.”

“Maybe she talked to you at some point.”

“It's possible. I talk to so many students. I can't remember everyone. Can you come up with a photograph of her alive?”

“It could be difficult,” Claire said, “if not impossible.”

“The impossible—now that takes a little longer.” He smiled.

Claire, who felt he'd dodged the ball she'd tossed out, wondered if it was photographs of the dead he wanted to avoid or meeting with the police. She moved on to the next subject.

“Would you be able to put together a list of the library's most valuable illustrated books in the field of archeoastronomy for me? I could narrow my search for missing illustrations by starting with those books.” Claire was capable of compiling such a list herself but knew Lawton Davis could do it better and faster.

“Now, that's an area in which I can help,” he said. “Consider it done. In its own way Spiral Rocks is quite an interesting site. Very few people have seen it, but that should change soon. Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

“It's the rare archeoastronomical site that's on private land. It was owned by a rancher in
Colorado
until the celestial artist Edward Girard talked him into selling it. Girard has a passion for his work that can make him a very convincing salesman. The sky is his canvas. What makes Spiral Rocks unique from an archeoastronomer's point of view is that it frames the Maximum Moon.”

“What's that?” Claire asked.

“The Hopi considered the moon to be a foolish man who wanders around without a home. I'm sure you've noticed from watching the full moon rise over the Sandias that it moves north in the winter and south in the summer. Every year it reaches its southernmost point at the summer solstice and its northernmost point at the winter solstice, but those aren't fixed points. Within those extremes the moon actually has an eighteen-and-a-half-year cycle. It moves north for nine and a quarter years, then it turns south. Its northernmost and southernmost points are called the Maximum and Minimum Extremes. The Anasazi were keen observers of the night sky and they had the advantage of a sky free of ambient light. They were aware of the Maximum and Minimum Extremes. In fact, some of the buildings at Chaco are oriented toward them. The spiral on Fajada Butte has nine and a quarter turns and the Maximum and Minimum Moons cast shadows on it. In an amazing natural occurrence, the Maximum Moon rises right between Spiral Rocks every eighteen and a half years. The ancient peoples observed this and celebrated it, and so does Edward Girard. This year is a Maximum Moon year, and it will take place later this month. It's the second time that has happened since Girard bought the property. The last time he threw a large party to celebrate. He may be doing it again. He has much more to celebrate, now that he is further along in developing his observatory.

“Girard believes that isolating elements of the sky alters the viewers' perceptions. For example, we see the sky as a bowl, but if you isolate and frame a portion of it, it appears flat. The planet Venus is the third brightest light in the sky, bright enough to cast a shadow. Girard is building a chamber to isolate its light. His observatory may never be finished. He has a knack for taking on enormous projects but never completing them. Even in an incomplete stage, his observatory is an amazing achievement, one that will inspire people throughout the ages in much the same way that Chaco Canyon has. Excuse me for running on at the mouth.” He laughed. “Obviously this is a project for which I have enormous enthusiasm.”

“Will there be a chamber for observing Venus in the daytime?” Claire asked.

“I don't know. Offhand I would say that's not possible, but I didn't consider many of the things Edward Girard has accomplished to be possible.”

“Do you know him well?”

“Not really. He's a loner and totally devoted to his work, although he can be charming when he wants to be.”

“Can you tell me how I could get in touch with him? It's possible there is a connection between
his
observatory at Spiral Rocks and Maia. If she admired Girard's work, maybe she was planning on attending the celebration.”

“Artistic men like Edward Girard have groupies and fans even when they totally ignore them,” Lawton sighed. “Unlike us scholarly types.”

Scholarly types had groupies, too, in Claire's experience, but Lawton Davis might be too self-effacing to be aware of that. The light in his eyes when he talked about Edward Girard's work bordered on hero worship. It was the artist's role to act out and express everything more buttoned-up types couldn't, the artist's role to be damned for his self-expression as well as to be praised for it.

“Let me see if I can find a phone number or an E-mail address,” Lawton said. “Maybe I can get you an invitation to the Maximum Moon celebration.”

“That would be wonderful,” Claire said. She stood up. “Your photographs are beautiful. Thank you for showing them to me.”

Lawton had a glow on the verge of turning into a blush, but he dimmed the light by saying, “It's nothing, really. Just a hobby. Wait until you see Edward Girard's work. Now, there's an artist.”

******

The next morning Lawton Davis brought his list of valuable illustrated archeoastronomy books to Claire's office. He also brought along Edward Girard's phone number and E-mail address.

“I e-mailed him about your interest,” Lawton said, “but I haven't received a reply yet.”

Later that afternoon Claire took the list to the Anderson Reading Room and began searching the books he'd recommended. In one sense it wasn't a difficult job; the books were works of art. To spend the afternoon sitting in a beautiful room looking at illustrations of ancient observatories, of stars, moons, planets, and constellations could hardly be considered unpleasant work. But every time she checked an index and turned to a page, Claire had the gnawing sensation she would find it missing. As she worked her way through the books, finding every illustration exactly where it was supposed to be, her
ansia
abated. Turning page after page and looking at the sky had a tranquilizing effect. By the time she'd finished Lawton's list she knew Maia hadn't been systematically looting archeoastronomy books, which made her choice of the Spiral Rocks illustration even more intriguing.

She went back to her office, called Lawton, and gave him the news.

“Excellent,” he said.

Next she dialed Detective Owen's number. “Professor Lawton Davis from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences gave me a list of valuable archeoastronomy books,” she said. “I went through all of them and found nothing else missing.”

“Well, that's good news, isn't it?”

“Yes,
although it's possible she had already looted books in another field and was just getting started on archeoastronomy. Or it could be that Spiral Rocks had some special meaning to Maia. Lawton Davis told me an artist named Edward Girard is turning it into an observatory and is having a celebration there in a few weeks.”

“Oh?” asked Owen.

“Oh,” Claire replied.

“We talked to Seth Malcolm. He admits to talking to Maia but not to giving her his code or letting her into the basement or the Anderson Reading Room.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Not necessarily, although he was right about the Hope Central Shelter. We talked to Christopher Hyde, the director, who identified Maia from our photo. He said she stayed at the shelter a few years ago but started using and had to leave. She stopped using and came back last winter. She left in the spring, possibly because she had started using again. Maia kept to herself, Hyde said. She claimed she hated to be shut up indoors, but he thought she was claustrophobic. The only personal information he ever got from her was that her name was Maia and she'd used drugs.”

“Have you found out who sold her the China White? Have there been any more deaths from it?”

“To both of those questions the answer is not yet. We're still investigating, but the only crimes we've found so far are the sale of the heroin and the damage to your book. No missing person's report has been filed on anyone who resembles Maia. Unfortunately heroin gets bought and sold all the time. Do books get damaged all the time?”

“I wouldn't say all the time, but more often than I'd like,” Claire said. “If there are other damaged books in the library I need to know. It would help if I could further narrow my search.”

“Have you thought about other expedition books? Expeditions that didn't involve archeoastronomy?”

Claire
had
thought about it. It meant making a list and going through another stack of books page by page, another day shut up in the Anderson Reading Room. But she agreed to start looking through the expedition books. Damaged books were the only legitimate involvement she had in Maia's death.