* * *
Before I started back to Ghost Ranch I texted Hannah to have Betty add Momo Morgan to her inquiries. I felt foolish as I thumbed in the name, thinking how far-fetched it seemed that any of this was doing any good. An immediate return text from Hannah Huckleston just added to my feelings of foolishness: “LOL momo morgan now whats going on ;)”
That made me laugh. Before I pulled out of the parking lot, I turned off the phone since I was going back into no-reception land, gathered my CD stash, and cranked up the music to head north on the photogenic drive back to Ghost Ranch. I just wanted to drive. In truth, I wanted to drive very fast, but enough speeding tickets in earlier days had taught me I’d regret it. So I switched past Kathy Mattea’s “455 Rocket,” a country rockin’ number that always seemed to give me a lead foot, to more mellow tunes, and meandered my mature way past Mendanales as the shadows were beginning to lengthen across the highway. The haunting sounds of the concertina in Dave Grusin’s tracks from Milagro Beanfield War, filmed around nearby Truchas, filled the car.
Was Barry Correda a cleaned-up Momo Morgan? From what Regina said, Momo Morgan could be already dead, since he hadn’t been seen in a while, and especially since people were looking him. And even more far-fetched, how could a punk like Morgan not only be hired by an established firm like Binder Enterprises, but be wildly successful at it, too? Barry said that he had real estate roots in New Mexico, but surely Momo Morgan could not have had.
A cheap thug like Momo selling multimillion dollar houses to rich, out-of-state Anglos? I didn’t think so. With that crowd, it was a closed society that only wealth would open—the wealthy would only deal with the wealthy.
All I had was that Regina Baca thought Barry Correda’s photo looked like a Momo Morgan, and that Shannon Parkhurst had made a connection with Andrea Brubaker. But it was more than I knew before.
I stuck in an Enigma CD as I was coming up the valley just before the long climb up the side of creamy pink sandstone cliffs to the Abiquiu Dam turnoff. The lyrics were mostly in French so I didn’t understand the meaning, but I enjoyed it anyway, as the odd combination of Gregorian chants, heavy breathing, and a thrumming beat seemed to power me along the highway. The Rio Chama, gleaming dark green brown in the sun with flashes of silver winking in the light, was winding bucolically through deep green cottonwoods that were just beginning to tinge yellow.
After grabbing my daypack from my room at Ghost Ranch, I headed up the Chimney Rock Trail with my camera to enjoy the early evening light. Concentrating on my footing on the trail, and paying attention to the rabbitbrush, sage, and cactus along the way, cleared my mind. I sat for a long time a warm sandstone perch, looking out over the valley to the west, trying to reconcile how I did so love this landscape, and that it had been a daily struggle for me to live here. Had it been a struggle for Shannon, too? Did life overcome her here? According to Conchita, Shannon “had the joy of life in her,” and that’s not what you would say about someone who is depressed and suicidal. Plus Regina said she’d been handpicked for a prestigious job at an established firm. Shannon’s future seemed bright. Had something changed in her life?
A stratum of clouds was building up in the west, piling over the layered pink sandstone cliffs by the Rio Chama, their white edges shining in contrast to the dark grey nimbocumulus mass behind them. Only a sliver of sunlight poured between a break in the clouds, like a blinding shaft of diamonds spotlighting the yellow-flowering snakeweed and skeletal cholla on the desert floor. It was time to head back before I got caught on a dark trail. I took a couple more photos, and started back down.
My thoughts shifted around with each step. Shannon’s life here did not seem like mine had been—that it had only changed by getting worse. It was true that bad bosses like Chloë Austin had made my life hell, but by then I was already beaten down. My time in New Mexico had been like a bad, boozy marriage that slid into a long, messy divorce. I had been the profligate daughter, spending my alcoholic life like a novice playing five-card stud with mortality. But Shannon’s life sounded like it still had the resilience that I thought I had lost here. I’d heard the dull grey voice of booze telling me my own suicide was the only way out. But I didn’t take that drunk exit, and it was hard for me to believe she would have, either. All these years I had hated myself because I thought I had given up, that I had let myself down, that I had let life beat me here. But something made me get out, move home to Colorado, sober up, rediscover life. Something bigger than myself hadn’t let me give up. Shannon Parkhurst had discovered life and something bigger than herself, too; and in the end, she wouldn’t have given it up.
Just as surely as I knew that, I realized that I was tired of carrying around my elegiac lament for the lost years here. I used all these past failures to doubt my own judgment, to doubt myself, and it was time to let the failures go. Everybody fails, Lily. You’re not a failure now.
The trail at the bottom of the hill was getting hard to see, and it was easy to stumble on even small rocks kicked up in the dirt. As the restless New Mexico wind tugged at my hair, I could hear know-it-all Regina Baca, always needing to have the last word:
“Duh, chica. Get on with it, right?”
Right.
CHAPTER TWELVE