invited me here, and why Kyla is here, too.”
“And me, apparently.”
“No. I asked you to come on account of the body.”
“You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”
Samuel directed the beam of his flashlight toward the dirt wall of the depression. “Shall we?”
He climbed out of the cavity and, reaching down, helped Rosie and Chuck clamber out after him.
Chuck stood with Rosie, facing Samuel, across the depression from the two women. “Tell me what’s going on,” he said to Samuel.
“I don’t know why Barney was killed today.” Samuel paused for a beat. “But I suspect his death might well have something to do with the corpse here in the chamber.”
Chuck turned to Ilona on the far side of the cavity. “Which means Barney’s death might be related somehow to the timing of your arrival here.”
Ilona lifted her chin. “I have no knowledge of this dead man you are speaking of.”
“And I don’t have any knowledge of you. So how about we start with who you are and why you’re here.”
“Yeah,” said Rosie, at Chuck’s side. “Let’s start with that.”
Ilona looked out at the canyon from the mouth of the alcove. The ponderosa pine trees grew tall from the floor of the gorge, their branches lit by the slanting rays of the afternoon sun. Her eyes came back to Chuck and Rosie and she addressed them both.
“I am the head curator for the national museum of my country,” she said. Her command of English was strong. “Six months ago, I received a phone call from here in America. The call was from a woman named Elizabeth Mantry. She told me that her family name—her last name, as you call it—was Cannon when she was a girl, before she married. She lives in the town called Mancos, in the valley outside the national park. She told me she had information about an ancestor of her family, someone who had gone away from his home in the Mancos Valley more than a hundred years ago and never returned. Elizabeth told me she had studied the genealogy of her relatives and found a branch on her family tree that came to a sudden end. The branch was for a young man, a teenager, named Joseph Cannon.”
Ilona glanced down at the dark opening at the bottom of the depression.
“Joseph Cannon was Elizabeth’s great-great-uncle, as I think you call it,” she continued. “He was the brother of Carl, Elizabeth’s great-grandfather. Elizabeth learned all this from Joseph’s journals. Joseph and Carl lived on a farm beside the Mancos River, where they grew food to sell to the gold miners working in the high mountains. One day, Joseph, the oldest of the Cannon children, went away with a man who came to the farm looking for workers.”
The museum curator from Finland lowered her head in acknowledgment to Chuck.
“As you correctly understood, the man who came to the farm was Gustaf Nordenskiöld. You could say that Gustaf is the reason I am a curator. The Nordenskiöld family has a history that goes back and forth between the different countries of Scandinavia. Many families have such a history. Like the
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