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
“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?”
“I answered a couple of ads in San Diego a few years ago. I can’t say I met anybody like Phaedra, at least if her photos don’t lie.”
“Oh my God, she looked much better in person,” Townsend said. “She was the kind of woman who, when you saw her walk past or in an elevator, could make your whole day if she gave you a smile.
“I’ve known a woman or two like that,” I said.
“I’ve never seen anyone who was vibrating as high as Phaedra. She was channeling unbelievable things…” He stopped and looked at me. “But I guess you don’t believe in such things, do you, Professor Mapstone?”
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’” I said.
“The Bible,” he said, and smiled.
I thought, Shakespeare, you dolt. I said, “But I guess I don’t channel.”
“You should. You have quite an aura about you. It would allow you to break free of all the repressiveness of Western civilization and Christianity, which, thank God, nobody believes in anymore.”
“Yeah. The Sedona vortex is certainly more plausible than the Trinity.” He didn’t smile. “Phaedra,” I coaxed.
“She didn’t like to climb. Heights scared her. She read books. Lots of history. You might have liked her.”
He was needling me, but I let him. There was something wrong with Greg Townsend, but I couldn’t tell if it was that vague misfit neurosis that seems to migrate west or if it was something more, something to do with Phaedra.
“I had a place down in the Valley,” he said. “So we started dating down there. It got serious, and we moved in together. Then we moved up here full-time.”
“What do you do for a living, Mr. Townsend?”
“I’m a trust baby, Deputy.”
“Must be nice.”
“Yes, it allows me to do the things I love. I climb at least a dozen fourteeners every year; I fly my own plane; I travel. And I can attract women like Phaedra Riding, to put a fine point on it.”
He smiled a smile of perfect white teeth.
“Did you care about her?”
“Sure,” he said. “We had a lot of fun.”
“I can see you’re broken up with worry about her disappearing,” I said.
