Mesa Verde Victim. Scott Graham
the base of the indoor rock-climbing wall.
Chuck Bender wrapped her in a bear hug. “You did fine up there,” he assured her.
“No, I didn’t,” she cried, stomping her foot on the padded gym floor. Tears pooled in her eyes. She wriggled from Chuck’s grasp and tore at the climbing rope knotted at her waist. “I barely got off the ground.”
Other climbers in the gym averted their gazes as Chuck helped twelve-year-old Rosie free herself from the rope.
“Carm’s so good,” she blubbered, her lower lip trembling. She pressed her knuckles to her walnut-brown eyes. “I hate her,” she said to the floor.
“I heard that,” fourteen-year-old Carmelita called from where she clung to molded-resin holds thirty feet overhead, working an inverted route extending across the ceiling from the top of the wall.
Chuck craned his head at her. “Your sister didn’t mean it.”
“Yes, I did,” Rosie declared, looking up. “Well, the good part, anyway.”
“That much would be right,” Chuck told her. He massaged the back of her neck below her mane of curly black hair billowing from the bottom of her climbing helmet. “Your sister is good at this sport. Which is a problem for me, too.”
Rosie’s watery eyes widened. “For you?”
“I’ve always been a rock climber for the fun of it. Nowadays, though, climbing is a big-time sport, with everybody making it into a massive competition. And, like you said, it just so happens Carm’s pretty good at it.”
“Because she’s so skinny,” Rosie pouted.
“Just because,” Chuck said. “But you and I have to remember we’re climbing for fun when we’re messing around down low on the wall.”
She stomped her foot again. “I want to do something else for fun. Something that’s just for me.”
“Hmm.” Chuck cocked his head at her and closed one eye. “I kinda like that idea. Maybe you and I can come up with something different for you to do while Carm’s spending all her free time here at the gym, zipping around the ceiling like a spider monkey.”
“I’m not a monkey,” Carmelita exclaimed from above. Her dark ponytail hung long and straight down toward the floor from the back of her helmet. “That’s racist.”
Chuck grinned up at her. “I said you climb like one. Sheesh.”
Carmelita lost her grip and fell a few feet from the ceiling before her rope caught her. “You’re so culturally inappropriate,” she admonished Chuck as she swung back and forth beneath the holds.
She shook out her chalked hands while the auto-belay engaged and the rope automatically unspooled, lowering her to the ground.
Chuck fixed her with a teasing smile. “Let me get this straight. You’re labeling me a culturally inappropriate white man even though I married a Latina woman and have been stepfather to her two hotshot Latina daughters for the last five years?”
“O . . . M . . . G,” Carmelita announced breathily. “I can’t believe you just called Rosie and me ‘hot.’ That’s so totally and completely wrong.”
“I didn’t say ‘hot.’ I said ‘hotshot.’”
The corner of Carmelita’s mouth twisted. “It still has the word ‘hot’ in it.”
Chuck sighed but maintained his grin. “The two of you are handsome. How’s that?”
“Better. Still judgmental, though.”
“I’m just trying to let you know how proud I am of you.” He spread his hands. “But I can’t win, can I?”
“Nope.”
He glanced at the clock mounted on the wall above the climbing gym’s front desk. “It’s about time to head for home. Mamá will be coming off her shift in a little while. I need to get started on a culturally inappropriate dinner for us.” He dipped his graying head at Carmelita and smiled. “How about tacos?”
She groaned. “You’re awful.”
“Grrracias,” he said, giving the r an extra-hard trill.
“You’re . . . you’re . . . incorrigible.” She added a matching trill to the double r of the English word, offering up the slightest of smiles.
Chuck put his chalked hands to his stomach, leaving matching white prints on his blue T-shirt. “Got me.” He pointed at her shiny black climbing tights. “The way you use such big words, you’re getting to be too smart for your britches, you know that?”
Carmelita’s skin-hugging tights rose to her waist. Her burgundy top featured the Durango Climbing Team logo across its snug chest. The top was sleeveless and cut high across her midriff, baring her flat stomach and the smooth skin of her shoulders.
“That’s my plan for world domination—using my prodigious intelligence to rule the planet,” she said.
“Ooo, scary,” said Chuck. “But I imagine you’ll hold off taking over the world until later this afternoon, after your all-
important run, right?” He reached behind her head and gave her ponytail a yank.
“Hey,” she protested, ducking away. “You’ll get my hair all chalky.”
“Lo siento,” he apologized. “What are you up to now, twenty miles a day?”
“Five. Well, sometimes seven. All on dirt trails to protect my knees. Coach Tania says the climbing-running combo is good—upper body, lower body.”
“Sounds like you’re totally dialed in, as per usual. All that’s left, it would seem, is for you to take over the world and dial things in for everybody else on the planet, too.”
Chuck crossed the room to his soft-sided gear duffle. The navy bag rested on the floor next to Rosie’s purple duffle and Carmelita’s burgundy climbing-team bag. He toweled the chalk off his hands, pulled his fleece top over his head, and changed from climbing shoes into sneakers. He retrieved his phone from the bag. Its screen lit up with text messages the instant he turned it on.
WHAT IS HAPPENING AT YOUR PLACE??? read the most recent text, from Beatrice Roberts, the elderly widow who lived next door to the house Chuck had picked up in Durango’s historic Grid district a decade ago, several years before marrying Janelle Ortega, the then-single mother to Carmelita and Rosie, after a whirlwind romance.
He scanned the other texts in backward time order.
The second-most recent: If this is the phone of Chuck Bender, please contact the Durango Police Department immediately.
Again, minutes earlier: If this is the phone of Chuck Bender, please contact the Durango Police Department immediately.
Ten minutes before that, an initial message from Beatrice: Chuck are you there? Do you know anything about the sirens?
Shoving his phone into the pocket of his climbing sweats and waving for the girls to follow, Chuck sprinted for the parking lot.
* * *
He sped south on Main Avenue minutes later, hands locked on the wheel of his big, blocky, Bender Archaeological crew-cab pickup truck. Carmelita sat opposite him in the front seat. Rosie hunched forward on the rear bench seat behind
Carmelita, peering past her sister’s shoulder. It was midday, the second Saturday in October, the cloudless sky brilliant blue, the temperature edging into the low seventies, the leaves on the cottonwoods lining the primary thoroughfare through town golden yellow.
“What’s going on?” Carmelita demanded as Chuck blasted through a caution light well above the speed limit.
“We’re about to find out,” he said through gritted teeth.
Turning