Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

“Yes,” Nadia said, with a contented-cat grin that she directed to Katharine and Michael. “It is.” But as she stared at the scenery passing by, her expression turned sour again. “You didn’t do a very good job of it this time, though. Where are the beaches? Where’s the shopping? What in the world are we supposed to do here? At least Machu Picchu was beautiful, and there were markets. And Egypt was fabulous, even with all those little kids constantly begging us for stuff all the time. And Stonehenge was okay, ’cause we could go back to London. But this place is like... nothing.”

“Nadia!” her husband whispered in reproof. Lon cast a telling glance toward Noriega and the residencia owner who was driving the van. But in the seat between, Michael Peters burst out laughing. “What are we going to do here, Nadia? Gee, I dunno. What can there possibly be to do in a place with so much history and mystery?”

“I know, I know,” she said grumpily. “Look at dumb ol’ statues and stuff.”

Her husband rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Dumb old statues,” he muttered. “Dumb old statues!”

Katharine Peters, feeling embarrassed, glanced at the front seat to see if the driver and their helpful new friend were hearing and understanding what was being said in back. She was relieved when she thought she caught Manuel Noriega with a fleeting grin on his face. It was typical of Nadia Reynolds, Katharine thought, to be able to say even the most superficial, insulting, or outrageous things, and the very people she should have offended would only smile or laugh. It was, Katharine figured, a perk of beauty. Nadia always got away with things, and always would get away with things, because she was so pretty. Even now, Katharine saw Manuel Noriega glance in the rearview mirror at the beautiful, sulky, dark-haired woman in the backseat, and there was admiration in his eyes. But then his gaze shifted so that suddenly he was gazing directly into Katharine’s eyes.

Quickly, she lowered hers, and turned to look at the scenery.

She hated to admit it, but Nadia was right: there wasn’t much to see so far. Once, this island had been a thickly forested paradise; now, she didn’t see a single tree, save for a few scraggly palms near the seashore. When people said the original inhabitants had cut down all the trees, apparently they really meant all the trees. The landscape that stretched up from the road on which they were traveling looked as spare and barren as a Midwestern prairie. Katharine shot a glance at their helpful stranger again, and was relieved to see that he was busy conversing with the driver, instead of paying attention to them. She wondered why anybody would choose to leave a country as lush and beautiful as mainland Chile, and a city as exciting as Santiago, and come to live on an island as haunted, plain, and isolated as this one, even if the ocean that surrounded it was lovely.

The two men up front stopped talking.

“What do you do here, Mr. Noriega?” Katharine blurted into the silence.

He propped his left arm on the seat back and turned around to answer her with his charming smile. “Manuel. Please call me Manuel. What do I do? I’m afraid I do what everybody else does on Easter Island, Senyora Peters. I wait for the airplanes to deliver tourists. And then I offer my services as a guide around the island. If you want me to, I can show you the statues, the volcanos, the quarry, the caves...”

“No wonder you know so much,” Nadia said.

“The caves!” Her husband leaned toward the front seat. “You can show us the caves?”

But Katharine thought, with a start: He called me Senyora Peters. When they had all introduced themselves, in the terminal, they had given him only their first names, since there were four of them and only one of him. But he had just then called her by her last name. She looked around to see if any of the others had noticed — and found Nadia looking back at her, one eyebrow elevated.

Nadia leaned forward and whispered, “How does he know your name? You’d better check your purse, Katy.”

When Katharine reached for her straw bag, Nadia provided cover by exclaiming, “What caves? I hate caves! You all know how claustrophobic I am. You didn’t get me into the pyramids, and you’re not getting me into any caves.”

On the pretext of getting her sunglasses, Katharine examined her purse.

As far as she could tell, everything that was supposed to be there was there. Nothing seemed disturbed, including the personal mail she had brought with her on the trip, intending to find time to pay bills, among other things. She was slipping on her sunglasses just as Manuel turned around again and said, “Pyramids? Stonehenge, Machu Picchu? It sounds as if the four of you travel together a lot, and you go to—”

“The world’s weirdest places,” Nadia interrupted. “My husband just wants to be able to brag that he’s been there, and Michael always thinks he’s going to have some mystical experience, and Katy likes the scenery, and I—”

“Yes,” Michael broke in, with a grin. “Why do you come with us, Nadia?”

“And I,” she repeated, emphasizing the pronoun, “come because I can’t talk them into going someplace easy, like Florida, and I don’t want them to leave me home alone.” She gave them all a half-serious, half-angry stare. “But that does not mean you’re getting me into any cave.”

When they alighted from the van, in the driveway of the sprawling house where they were going to rent rooms, Katy whispered to Nadia, “It’s okay. Nothing’s missing. I feel bad for being suspicious. He’s been so nice to us—”

“Maybe too nice?” Nadia’s tone was cynical again. “Maybe he just knows how to glom onto rich tourists when he sees us.”

“Rich?” Katharine’s grin was rueful. “Speak for yourself.”

She immediately regretted saying it, because Nadia grasped her wrist and gave it a sympathetic squeeze. “Listen, if you ever need anything...”

She left the rest unsaid, but it was all there in the warmth of her eyes.

Katharine felt her face get hot. She shook her head. She felt touched, but also mortified. It was hard to be getting broker instead of getting better off in life. They all knew — though so far not even Lon had said it out loud — that this was probably their last exotic trip together, because it was the last one that the Peterses could pretend to afford, and even this was stretching an already-strained budget to its breaking point.

“We’re fine,” Katharine assured her friend.

Nadia’s gaze was steady and sceptical, but she didn’t say anything more.

Before they could go to the caves, their new acquaintance and newly hired guide insisted they see the most famous lineup of moai on the island: fifteen upright statues of varying heights, all in a single line with their distinctive sway backs to the sea, and one fallen moai lying with its face to the sky.

“They represent chiefs,” Manuel explained, “and members of ruling families.”

“How did they move such huge statues?” Katharine asked him.

Lon laughed. “Mike, here, thinks it was aliens.”

Michael shot him an unfriendly look. “I’m not an idiot.”

Manuel grinned at him. “Don’t worry. If you did think that, you’d have lots of company. And then there are the people who swear that the statues got up and walked here by themselves, by magic. But the most likely explanation is also the explanation for the disappearance of the trees. They used ropes and logs to pull and roll the statues. As they built more and more statues, they needed more and more rope and logs from the trees. Add that to a growing population who needed ever more firewood, harpoons, and boats, and something had to give.”