Chilton steepled his fingers and looked at me over the top. “You do realize that even if you find out what happened to her, you may not find
her
. She vanished over forty years ago. She was in her midthirties then. It’s possible she’s still alive—she’d be seventy something—but it’s easily possible she’s dead. I’m ten years younger, and I’ve buried a fair number of my contemporaries.”
“I know,” I said, and tried to sound mature and well-balanced. “I just have to try.”
“Fine. Let me see what I can do to help you. What do you know?”
“What I remember—which isn’t much—and what I read in the papers.”
“Which isn’t much,” Chilton repeated. “Right. The
Las Vegas Optic
hasn’t always been known for the rectitude of its reporting. Fact is, the man who founded the paper didn’t care much if a story matched the facts. However, when we were covering the story of Colette Bogatyr’s disappearance, we pretty much decided to err on the side of what we were sure about.”
“Good editor?” I asked.
“That, and a story that got stranger the more deeply we looked into it.”
“Tell me?”
Chilton stared down at the files on his desk, but I didn’t think he was really seeing the typescript sheets, nor the newspaper clippings, nor even the sheaf of handwritten notes. I think he was seeing a time when he had been young and optimistic, eager to be the reporter who solved a case that had baffled the police, and so make his reputation.
And here he was, still in Las Vegas, a town that despite some pretty fine pretensions had never amounted to much of anything. Had he ever left? Did those intervening years contain laurels won elsewhere? I didn’t ask. I didn’t dare alienate this man.
“Well,” Chilton began, “you know better than I do that the trail your mother left was already cold before the law got onto it—a month gone she was, and the time might have been longer if one of the maids hadn’t felt something should be said. That she chose to say it to your schoolteacher, rather than the law, seemed strange to me when I first heard it, but it doesn’t anymore.
“You see by the time she disappeared, your mother already had a bit of a reputation about the town. For one thing, no one could quite remember just when she came to town. Folks argued about it, some saying she’d been in residence in Phineas House only for about ten years, others swearing that she had been born there. One thing everyone agreed about. No one ever remembered seeing her in her teens or early twenties. I got a whiff of some sort of scandal, but never could get farther than that.
“Then there was the way Colette Bogatyr dressed—those elaborate, sweeping, somehow old-fashioned gowns she wore even for a trip out shopping. Some of the men thought Colette was living out of her mother’s trunks, putting a good face on poverty. The women knew differently. They knew good tailoring. The ones who knew even more said that the styles weren’t
quite
right, that they didn’t match anything you’d find in Godey’s or the other fashion catalogs from a couple generations back. They said your mother made her own style, and even the most waspish admitted it suited her far better than modern fashions would have done.
“Another mystery associated with your mother was Phineas House itself. In a town where some of the residents can trace their families back to the founding of the town in 1835, there’s usually someone who brags, ‘My grandfather tells when …’ Funny thing. No one remembered when Phineas House was built. It just always seems to have been there.”
I interrupted, “But it’s Queen Anne style. I know Americans are used to thinking of Victorians as old, and they are, compared to lots of what’s around, but Queen Anne is a late fashion, comparatively speaking: late eighteen, early nineteen hundreds.”
“I know,” Chilton said. “I’m just telling you what folks said. I even checked the property registration one time. Some documents weren’t there to find—you know about Las Vegas’s having two governments early on?”
I didn’t, but I didn’t really want a history lesson right now, so I nodded.
Chilton didn’t press me. “Well, as far as I could tell, the property has been in the family for several generations. Colette’s father inherited it from his father, and apparently it was in the family before that. It’s quite possible that the current Queen Anne was built over older construction.”
“That’s completely possible,” I said, thinking of the odd layout of the inside of the house, how spaces didn’t always seem to fit into each other. “I think that was often done when fancier exteriors became the fashion. Even Sears sold kits for adding gingerbread trim to gussy up the average farmhouse.”
Chilton realized we’d strayed off topic. “Anyhow, none of this has much to do with anything, except that Colette Bogatyr was already a lady of mystery when she capped every tale ever told about her by disappearing.”
I decided the reporter was being a bit too polite, sparing me the worst side of the gossip. If I was to learn anything, well, I had to press the issue.
“Seems to me that my mother must have had a reputation for something else,” I said boldly. “I remember her boyfriends. That had to have raised eyebrows, even if she was a widow, maybe even more so, since she had a daughter to raise.”
Chilton didn’t say anything, but he did slide open his top desk drawer and take out a battered tin I instantly recognized.
“Piece of candy?” he asked. “It’s getting harder to find this stuff, so I lay in a supply at Christmastime.”
I smiled and took a lumpy, sugar raspberry. It tasted just like I remembered.
“More coffee?” Chilton asked.
I shook my head. Chilton crunched a bit of brightly colored candy ribbon between his teeth, letting his eyes drift half-shut, as if he might see the past that way.
“There was talk, yes,” he said, “but less than you might imagine. Throughout its history, Las Vegas has been one of the rougher frontier towns. Billy the Kid wasn’t an unknown visitor. Neither were Jesse James and a host of lesser known outlaws. It’s said that Doc Holliday tried to set up a practice here, but even rough and tumble Las Vegas didn’t welcome him. Even during those interludes when the town has tried hard to become respectable, there have been those who don’t forget that one of the first structures taller than one story to be built here was a windmill that for a long time was the town’s favorite hanging tree.
“Maybe if your mother had been slatternly there would have been more animosity toward her. Maybe, she would have awakened resentment if she had worn the finest Parisian fashions or flaunted her wealth or famous friends. Fact is, she did none of that. I’ve already mentioned how Mrs. Bogatyr’s clothing excited curiosity, but not envy. It was like that about the rest of her—she was just so eccentric that even the worst prudes didn’t harp about reforming her. Probably if anyone commented about anything it was that for all she said she was a widow, she still used her maiden name.”
“I think I see,” I said.
I voiced a thought I hadn’t even realized I had formulated until Chilton had started talking about my eccentric mother’s relationship to the rest of Las Vegas society.
“So it wasn’t because my mother was some sort of public embarrassment that she wasn’t found?”
“Oh, no. An honest effort was made to find her,” Chilton said. “If that’s what you mean.”
“I think it is,” I admitted. “I’d read about how the chief of police put himself in charge of the investigation. Two reasons he could have done that: if he wanted to make the best effort to find her—or if he didn’t.”
“Rest assured on that point,” Chilton said. “Chief Garcia did his best to find Colette Bogatyr. How completely he failed remained a matter of frustration to him to the day he died.”
“He’s dead then,” I said.
“Five years ago,” Chilton replied. “At the ripe age of ninety-five. After he retired, we’d still meet and chat, and sometimes he’d mention that case.”
“You were friends then?”
“Pretty much. Sometimes we found ourselves on opposite sides of a story, especially where local politics were involved, but we were both advocates of Las Vegas, believers that she had a future, if only she could stop fighting herself.”
I thought of the town I’d driven through on my way to Chilton’s house of the bits of history I’d heard from Domingo over our morning coffee breaks. It didn’t seem that Las Vegas had much of a future, just a past full of disappointments.
That morning Las Vegas’s history didn’t seem pertinent to my search, so I didn’t ask any of the obvious questions. Later, I’d learn I had been wrong about this, but only later.
“Seems to me that you must know a great deal about what was done. Could you tell me?”
Chilton nodded, and glanced without really seeing down at the notes spread on his desk.
“As you may have seen in the newspaper articles, Colette Bogatyr was last seen driving out of town to the northwest, in the direction of the towns of Llano and Montezuma. Now, she owned a car, but witnesses swear that she wasn’t driving that car, but a neat little one-horse, two-seater carriage she kept for tooling around the countryside. It was one of those things, like her manner of dress, that Colette had done for so long that everyone took it for granted.
“Witnesses all agreed that she was alone. A couple said she seemed tense or anxious, didn’t pass the time of day as she usually would. Most didn’t volunteer anything of the sort. Last person who reported seeing her was a small-time farmer along the road northwest. After that, nothing.”
I had indeed read most of this in Aunt May’s newspaper clippings, then again in the library. I envisioned the map of the area, pinpointing various locations.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. The police questioned everyone along what they figured her route would have been. They learned a few things that didn’t make it into the papers. One was that Mrs. Bogatyr often drove that particular route, and that when she did, she was almost always alone. Sometimes she had a companion with her, but never more than one.”
I frowned. “Could she have had someone with her that day, hunkered down toward the floorboards or something?”
“Not likely. The carriage was a light gig, meant for elegant driving, not for hauling.”
“Was the carriage or horse ever found?”
“Not either. The police did their best to find wheel tracks, but that time of year—late April—there’s often enough rain to make the roads hard to read. Also, back in the late fifties, the locals out that way still used wagons or burros. The tracks of your mother’s gig were just one set among many.”
“I see. Chilton, what’s out that way that she could have been going to visit?”
“I asked myself that. So did Chief Garcia. There were quite a few families living out that way, and then there was the Montezuma Castle itself. At that point it was being used as a seminary for training Mexican priests. Police officers were sent out to all those places, but no one except a few people who happened to be outside working in their yards would admit to having seen Mrs. Bogatyr. A certain reporter replicated the police’s efforts, but he didn’t have any better luck.”
Chilton grinned ruefully and scratched behind his left ear. “I had dreams of breaking the story by talking to the one farmer or housewife or seminarian the police overlooked. I even skulked around, sneaking into stables and sheds, hoping to find the missing rig or the horse that had pulled it, but the fact was Chief Garcia’s men did a good job. I didn’t learn anything because there was nothing there to learn.”
“So my mother simply vanished into thin air somewhere between Las Vegas and the town of Montezuma.”
“Probably nothing so dramatic,” Chilton said. “She could have been overtaken by a vehicle. A truck hauling a trailer could have picked up both her and her gig. No one would have noticed the like along that road. Fact is, trucks are as common as cars. Trailers aren’t a whole lot more rare. The train ran a lot more frequently in those days. It’s possible that she got aboard.
“Thing is, we thought of that, too. Both freight and passenger trains were checked and double-checked, and not a damn thing useful came out of all that work. Trucks were harder to check out, but an effort was made there, too. Just about everyone in the area who had a rig that could have handled both horse and carriage found themselves getting called on by the police. No traces of horse, carriage, or woman were found.”
He held the candy tin out to me by way of commiseration. I took out something flat and multilayered that tasted faintly of cocoa.
“Mira, maybe if the police had known sooner something could have been learned, but a trail a month old is a pretty dead trail—even today when the police can use computerized databases and a bunch of fancy forensics to help. Then, hell … The horse could have been sold weeks before. We’re close enough to the Colorado border that it could have been gotten out of state. It might even have been slaughtered and fed to the dogs. Personally, I doubt that. It was a nice animal, a four-year-old blood bay mare with a white blaze. Good for riding or driving.”
“I remember her,” I said, startled to realize I did. “Her name was Shooting Star. I named her, because of how her blaze splashed into the white on her muzzle. She was a good horse, incredibly steady for her years. Mother would sometimes let me be put up on her. I’d ride up and down the street, proud as a princess. I’d forgotten all of that until you mentioned it.”