Plymale. The executor of the estate, and the director of the charity foundation, was to be Plymale’s law firm.
She had given Hal Simmons copies of the love letters John had written her, including those discussing her pregnancy, along with the final letter. In that, Clarke said he would be “home tomorrow to hold you in my arms, and take you down to the church and thereby make that little child we have conceived legal and respectable—and to hell with what Daddy Clarke thinks of it.”
Simmons met with the Plymales, father and son. He showed them the letters and proposed a negotiated settlement. The Plymales refused, saying the letters were not sufficient evidence. However, in view of the pregnancy, they offered to increase the ten-thousand-dollar settlement offer to thirty thousand dollars, providing that the fetus would be aborted, and proof of the abortion provided.
Joanna remembered precisely what her mother had written: “Remember, Joanna, the twenty thousand dollars they added to the offer. That was the value they put on your life. Twenty thousand dollars the fee for killing you in my womb.”
Twenty thousand dollars! When she heard that was the estimated value of her father’s diamond, the diamond poor Billy Tuve had tried to pawn for twenty dollars, the irony struck deep. She had laughed and then she’d cried, and then she’d wondered if that had been the very diamond her father had been bringing home to her mother as a wedding gift, and then she had cried again. And now it turned out to be that this diamond, or another one just like it, was leading her to her destiny.
Simmons told her mother that the Plymales probably had the right reading of the laws. They would need more evidence to prove that her unborn child was the product of Clarke’s seed. With some of the money her mother had inherited from her husband’s estate and perhaps the promise of a generous contingency agreement, Simmons retained a national private investigation firm to learn everything possible about John Clarke, his jewelry business, the last months of his life, and the circumstances of his death.
The information had come in slowly. First the knowledge that her father had been bringing a package of specially cut diamonds back to New York from Los Angeles. That information had come from a dealer in Manhattan’s diamond district who had been awaiting them. Seventy-four stones, ranging in weight from 3.7 carats to 7.2, all of them perfect blue-whites, one specially cut for her mother—just as John Clarke had told her in his terminal letter. And in that final letter, her father had drawn a neat little sketch of the gem, showing how the cutter had shaped it for her.
From airline employees in Los Angeles, the agency collected statements confirming that Clarke had boarded the aircraft with the diamond case locked to his left wrist, and that he had fended off security people who wanted to open it for inspection, explaining that those carrying diamonds—like security messengers—couldn’t unlock such cases. The key to do that had been delivered by another messenger to the person who would receive them, count them, weigh them, and sign receipts for them.
From National Park Service employees, guides who worked in the canyon, from Arizona police, from a half- dozen Havasupai citizens who had been involved in recovering bodies and parts of the shattered aircraft, the agency learned that Clarke’s body had not been recovered for identification. They also learned that one of a party of tourists who had been on a guided raft float down the Colorado eleven days after the disaster had seen a body part, a forearm, in driftwood debris below one of the rapids. He had not been able to reach the driftwood through the current but had taken photographs from a nearby outcrop. When a party of guides managed to be back there two weeks later to recover the arm, it was gone, as was part of the collected flotsam the man had seen with it. A search downstream proved fruitless.
The agency reported that the man who shot the photographs was now dead but his family had kept prints and negatives as a sort of macabre souvenir of what had been, at the time, the worst airline disaster in history. Copies were made and provided to Simmons and her mother, and now Joanna kept copies in her purse. They were the only photographs she had of her father. The Clarke family relatives had refused her requests for old family pictures.
In the final report, the agency provided a collection of interviews with a number of people—mostly Havasupai, some Grand Canyon National Park employees, some professional guides, some tourists passing through—who spoke of reports about a man, described generally as having long gray or white hair, being slender, wearing worn or ragged clothing, having claimed to have found a severed arm in the Colorado River, or recovered it from a drift of flotsam. While these stories varied in many details, most of those interviewed agreed that the man had been on what is called the “south side” of the river—below the most tourist-popular South Rim—and downstream from where the Little Colorado River Canyon connects to the Grand Canyon. They also seemed in various ways to suggest that he was a hermit, some sort of eccentric, perhaps a religious fanatic. Two of these proposed that he was a Havasupai shaman who had disappeared about twenty years earlier and was remembered as a visionary with a talent for finding lost children, missing animals, anything lost.
The way Joanna saw it, an important element of these fragmentary “hermit reports” was the mention in three of them that this strange fellow had considered himself either a priest or the guardian of a shrine. One report included his description of what happened when sunlight reached this shrine: “He said when this happened it ‘responded to the Father Sun with a dazzling light,’ but he said this occurred only late in the morning with the sun almost overhead.”
To Joanna, “dazzling light” suggested the sun striking diamonds, which perhaps decorated this odd man’s shrine. But more important was the dating of these third-hand reports. In one the person being interviewed said he had met this hermit only three years earlier. Another had placed his conversation with the man “probably about July, two years back.”
Thus it was reasonable to think he was still alive. And the man who could help her find this hermit was just ahead. The white sedan was slowing, turning down tracks that led to the rim of the mesa, led to the edge of the long, long drop down into the canyon. Probably led to the starting point of the Hopi trail that headed down to the Salt Shrine.
Joanna stopped at the turnoff point, watched and waited until the white sedan disappeared behind a screen of junipers. Then she followed slowly. Give them just enough time to get their bottom-of-the-canyon gear out of the car. Her plan was to get there just before they started their descent. What then? She would decide when she had to.
But there was the white sedan, parked. The two men still in it. The passenger-side door opened, was jerked closed again. Joanna parked, snatched up her binoculars, and stared. Some sort of struggle seemed to be going on. Then it ended. She could make out what must be Tuve’s head against the passenger-side window, and part of the driver’s face. He was talking.
Joanna got out, holding her pistol behind her. She walked slowly to the rear of the white sedan, keeping to the driver’s side, keeping out of the line of sight of the man she presumed was Sherman, glad for the silence of the hiking shoes she was wearing. She could hear his voice now through the open car window, loud and angry. She slid along against the side of the sedan now, seeing Billy Tuve huddled against the opposite door, face down.
Sherman was moving his right hand up and down, a gesture of some sort. He was staring at Tuve, still talking. The right hand held a pistol. Joanna looked down at her own pistol, smaller than the police model Sherman was
