Thunderhead

Smalls occupied a fanatically neat little office outside the vault itself, overlooking the reading area. He rose as he saw her enter, placing a book carefully on his desk.

“Dr. Kelly,” he said. “Nora, right?”

“Morning,” Nora said as casually as possible.

“Haven’t seen you around for a while,” Smalls replied. “Too bad. Hey, what’d you do to your arm?”

Nora glanced briefly at the bandage. “Just a scratch. Owen, I need to look at a couple of maps.”

Smalls squinted back. “Yeah?”

“In the C-3 and C-4 quadrants of Utah. Kaiparowits Plateau.”

Smalls continued scrutinizing her, shifting his weight, sending a creak of leather echoing through the room. “Project number?”

“We don’t have a project number yet. It’s just a preliminary survey.”

Smalls placed two giant, hairy hands on the desk and leaned over them, looking at her more intently. “Sorry, Dr. Kelly. You need an approved project number to look at anything.”

“But it’s just a preliminary survey.”

“You know the rules,” Smalls replied, with a disparaging grin.

Nora thought fast. There was no way that Blakewood, the Institute’s president and her boss, would assign a project number based on the meager information she could give him. But she remembered working on a project in a different part of Utah, two years before. The project was still current, if a bit moribund—she had a bad habit of not finishing things up. What was the damn project number?

“It’s J-40012,” she said.

Small’s bushy eyebrows raised.

“Sorry, I forgot it was just assigned. Look, if you don’t believe me, call Professor Blakewood.” She knew her boss was at a conference in Window Rock.

Smalls turned to the computer on his desk and rapped at the keys. After a moment, he looked up at Nora. “Seems to be approved. C-3 and C-4, you said?” He resumed his typing, the keys ludicrously small in his hands. Then he cleared the screen and stepped away from the desk.

Nora followed as he stepped up to the vault and swung the door open. “Wait here,” he said.

“I know the routine.” Nora watched as he stepped into the vault. Inside, bathed in pitiless fluorescent light, lay two rows of metal safes, locked doors across their tops. Smalls approached one, punched in a code, and lifted its door. Hanging within the safe were countless maps, sandwiched in layers of protective plastic.

“There are sixteen maps in those quadrants,” Smalls called out. “Which ones do you want to see?”

“All of them, please.”

Smalls paused. “All sixteen? That’s eight hundred eighty square miles.”

“As I said, it’s a survey. You can always call Professor—”

“Okay, okay.” Holding the maps by the edges of their metal rails, Smalls stepped out of the vault, nodding Nora toward the reading area. He waited until she sat down, then gently placed the maps on the scarred surface of the Formica table. “Use those,” he said, indicating a box of disposable cotton gloves. “You’ve got two hours to complete your study. When you’re done, let me know and I’ll replace the maps and let you out.” He waited while she do

Nora sat at the table as he shut first the safe, then the vault, and returned to his office. You’ll know when I’m done, she thought to herself. The “reading area” consisted of a large table with a single chair, placed in clear view of Smalls’s glass-windowed office. It was a cramped, exposed space. Not at all suitable for what she had in mind.

She took a deep breath, flexed her white-gloved fingers. Then, carefully, she spread the maps out on the table, the plastic crackling as she aligned them along their edges. The sequence of 7.5-minute maps—the most detailed U.S. Geological Survey maps made—covered an exceedingly remote area of southern Utah, framed by Lake Powell to the south and east and Bryce Canyon to the west. It was almost entirely Bureau of Land Management country: federal land that, in effect, nobody had any use for. Nora had a good idea of what the area was like: slickrock sandstone country, bisected by a diagonal—trending maze of deep canyons and escarpments, sheer walls, and barren scabland.

It was into this desolate triangle, sixteen years before, that her father had disappeared.

She remembered with painful vividness how, as a twelve-year-old, she had pleaded to go along with the searchers. But her mother had given a brusque, dry-eyed refusal. And so she spent two tormented weeks, listening for news on the radio and poring over topographical maps. Maps just like this one. But no trace was ever found. Then her mother instituted proceedings to have him declared legally dead. And Nora had never looked at a map of the area since.

Another deep breath. This would be the hard part. Making sure her back was to Owen Smalls, Nora slid two fingers into her jacket and removed the letter—the letter she had never allowed from her person since she found it, just nightmarish hours before.

The envelope was discolored and brittle, addressed faintly in pencil. And there, as she had in the glow of the headlights the previous night, she read the name of her mother, dead six months, and the address of the ranch that had been abandoned for five years. Slowly, almost unwillingly, she moved her gaze to the return address. PADRAIC KELLY, it confirmed in the generous, loopy hand she remembered so well. Somewhere west of the Kaiparowits.

A letter from her dead father to her dead mother, written and stamped sixteen years ago.

Slowly and carefully, in the fluorescent silence of the Map Vault, she removed the three sheets of yellowed paper from the envelope and smoothed them beside the maps, shielding them from Small’s view with her body. Again, she glanced at the strangest things of all: the fresh postmark and POSTAGE DUE stamp, showing the letter had been mailed from Escalante, Utah, only five weeks before.

She brushed her fingers along the soiled paper, over the red POSTAGE DUE notice and the badly faded ten-cent stamp. The envelope looked as if it had been wet, and then dried. Perhaps it had been found floating in Lake Powell, swept down the canyons in one of the flash floods the area was famous for.

For perhaps the hundredth time since she first read the letter the night before, she found herself forced to squash a surge of hope. There was no way her father could still be alive. Obviously, somebody had found the letter and mailed it.

But who? And why?

And, more frighteningly: was this the letter the creatures in the abandoned ranch house were after?

She swallowed, throat painfully dry. It had to be; there was no other answer.

A loud squeak shattered the silence as Smalls shifted in his chair. Nora started, then slipped the envelope beneath the nearest map. She turned to the letter.

Thursday, August 2 (I think), 1983

Dearest Liz,

Although I’m a hundred miles from the nearest post office, I couldn’t wait to write you any longer. I’ll mail this first thing when I hit civilization. Better yet, maybe I’ll hand-deliver it, and a lot more besides.

I know you think I’ve been a bad husband and father, and maybe you’re right. But please, please read this letter through. I know I’ve said it before, but now I can promise you that everything will change. We will be together again, Nora and Skip will have their father back. And we will be rich. I know, I know. But, dear heart, this time it’s for real. I’m about to enter the lost city of Quivira.

Remember Nora’s school report on Coronado, and his search for Quivira, the fabled city of gold? I helped her with the research. I read the reports, the legends of some Pueblo Indian tribes. And I got to thinking. What if all the stories Coronado heard were true? Look at Homer’s Troy—archaeology is full of legends that have turned out to be fact. Maybe there was a real city out there, untouched, containing a fabulous treasure of gold and silver. I found some interesting documents that gave an unexpected hint. And I came out here.