Lisa Miscione: Angel Fire

The creative mind by its nature, Lydia had long ago concluded, is restless and cluttered – constantly shifting in thought and action until it settles on something that can engage it for more than a few moments. She read newspapers that way, skipping from article to article, looking for something interesting, something different. She clipped items if she felt there might be something to look at more closely. They collected in piles around her house that she would sort through later to pick out things that struck a chord with her and then read more thoroughly.

She had done little but read since she arrived in Santa Fe over four weeks earlier. Mostly local papers, though. Her subscriptions to national newspapers piled up in her office, her e-mail went unchecked. She didn’t feel ready for another story yet. Not yet. Her last article, for New York magazine, had been about a socialite with Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy who was on trial for poisoning three of her four children. It was a long time before anyone suspected her because she had killed one child in Paris, one in Switzerland, and one in New York City. Esmerelda von Buren, known to her friends as “Esmy,’’ was a most narcissistic and terrifying sociopath. And after dealing with her, her heinous crimes, and the shallow, snobbish world in which she lived, Lydia figured she needed a good two months of doing nothing in Santa Fe before she even thought about writing something new. But some subconscious memory of the articles she had clipped was giving her the buzz, that little edge of excitement she got when she knew something wasn’t quite right, that there was a puzzle in need of solving. And ready or not, she couldn’t resist.

Gathering the articles in her arms, she carried them into her living room. The room, filled with plants and small, potted trees, was flooded with sunlight. The southern wall was completely glass, below which was a precipitous drop into the valley of the mountains. She had an unobstructed view of the landscape, a sight she considered one of the most beautiful in all the world. She had told Jeffrey once that to wake up and see it in the morning gave her faith in the nature of the universe. No matter how wrong so many things were, no matter what tragedy, what chaos existed, this landscape still remained. He had laughed a little, telling her to stick to journalism and leave the poetry to someone else. But he knew what she meant. There was something peaceful about incorruptible beauty. But right now she barely noticed it. She was inside her head.

She placed the articles on her stone coffee table, then walked over the bleached wood floor back to the kitchen for a cup of coffee – very light, very sweet. She walked back into the living room, absentmindedly touching the white adobe wall, blemishing the pristine surface with a three-inch smudge of newsprint. She placed the cup on the table beside the clippings but not before spilling a few drops on the elaborately patterned dhurrie rug. She hunted for a cigarette, then a lighter. Finally, she settled on the plush cream chintz sofa and began sorting.

Like a sculptor searching for form hidden in a lump of clay she flipped through the pieces of newsprint. They must have whispered to her, otherwise she wouldn’t have clipped them. She had found many stories this way, scanning papers and looking for connections other people had missed. She knew it was there, she could feel it.

As she sifted through the pile, she thought of Jeffrey. It was her dream last night that had brought him into her thoughts. He was so intimately connected in her mind to the murder of her mother. She realized it had been five weeks since they last spoke and she desperately wanted to hear his voice. She missed him like she missed the smell of the ocean, barely noticing until she caught the scent once again, and then it could bring tears to her eyes. She looked at the phone and knew he was thinking of her – waiting every day, in the back of his mind, for her to call, only really thinking of her when he was alone in his office late at night or in bed. But some kind of discipline kept her from calling, some need to see how long she could go without hearing his voice. She despised dependence in herself.

One of her shrinks had confronted her about her relationship with Jeffrey, commenting on how complicated it seemed to be and asking what he meant to her. It was an insightful question, but she was not about to share her personal feelings with some stupid doctor, in spite of the fact this was probably the point of therapy. It was complicated; she loved him, she needed him in her life. Maybe it was because she had met him when she was so young, or that he had played a rescuer/ protector role for her initially, but for a long time she had almost hero-worshiped him. He was everything a man should be: strong, brave, honest, honorable, reliable – everything she aspired to be. She considered him to be an omnipresent, omnipotent force in her life, more than friend, more than brother, just everything. But when he had been shot, about a year earlier, something about the way she felt had shifted within her. The thought of him being gone from her life was unbearable and the fact that he had suddenly been proved as human, that he was fragile and mortal like she was, like her mother, had forced her to recognize that she was and probably always had been in love with him. So, of course, she was compelled to get as far away from him as possible without actually putting him out of her life. Love like that was not safe for anyone.

She turned her attention to the clippings. In the pile, she found an article about a trend of people abandoning cars in the desert. One old Cadillac was found with its lights still on, a dirty baby doll in the backseat with its head pulled off. The possibilities intrigued Lydia. Another article concerned itself with the high incidence of methamphetamine addiction among local teens. A housewife had died by hanging herself but the article stated that she’d been found wearing “leather accessories’’ and intimated that rather than suicide, her death may have been “accidental.’’ I guess “autoerotic asphyxia’’ and “suburban housewife’’ don’t go well together in the same sentence, thought Lydia. It was amazing what you could find going on in small towns if you knew what to look for. Lydia was sure there were no idyllic small American towns and probably never had been. Behind the quaint and charming facades of Everytown, U.S.A., there was some ugly rot, some unimaginably twisted lives.

The articles that attracted Lydia today were notable not just for their strangeness, but by their potential connections to each other and the larger force that might be at work behind them.

(August 10)

BREAK-IN AT SURGICAL-SUPPLY WAREHOUSE:

Various Instruments in Small Quantities Are Missing

(August 15)

ABANDONED BARN BURNED, ARSON SUSPECTED

(August 16)

TEENAGER MISSING FROM THE CARE OF FOSTER FAMILY

(August 21)

DRUG-ADDICTED COUPLE DISAPPEAR:

A Long-suffering Victim of Domestic Abuse and Her Husband Missing

And there was one more story that made the back of her neck tingle.

Since she’d arrived in Santa Fe, she had been following a story about a little boy with leukemia, the son of a congresswoman, who had lost his German shepherd, Lucky. The dog had run away from the boy’s father during an evening walk near their home in Angel Fire. As the kid lay dying in his hospital bed, he wanted nothing more than his dog back. Of course, this was the kind of tearjerker that the media jumps all over: dying boy loses his best friend – where, oh where, has my little dog gone? Tripe. Sadly, the boy died before his dog was found.

But according to today’s paper, the dog’s body had been found yesterday morning in a church garden, its belly opened from stem to stern. Lucky’s organs had been removed with precision and skill, with a scalpel. When the blind man who lived at the Church of the Holy Name noticed the smell, he went out to the garden to investigate and fell over the dog’s body. Lydia thought about her daily runs past the church, her imaginings last night about the garden, and about her nightmare. A dark chill climbed her spine and she felt a flutter of fear in her belly.