Mysteries in Our National Parks: Cliff-Hanger: A Mystery in Mesa Verde National Park

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“Oh!” Ashley murmured, dropping lower in her seat. “How…how did she die?”

Lucky answered in a husky voice, “She worked as a magician’s assistant in a big Las Vegas show. She was so good! But one night while they were performing, the magician’s white tiger mauled her. She died from the wounds.” The tears welled up even more, spilling over Lucky’s lower lids, running in rivulets down her cheeks.

“That’s so awful!” Ashley wailed.

Steven Landon reached across the aisle and tapped his daughter’s shoulder. “You need to sit down, Ashley. If we hit any unexpected turbulence, you could bounce right up and slam against the ceiling. People get hurt bad that way.”

As Ashley sank into her seat, Lucky rubbed the tears from her cheeks. “Do you have a tissue?” she asked Jack.

Fumbling in the pockets of his shorts, he searched for something that could wipe up tears. A rumpled Kleenex—it didn’t have to look brand new, as long as it was clean. But all he could find was a cash-register receipt for a Slurpee from 7-Eleven. “Sorry,” he mumbled, with honest regret.

“It doesn’t matter. I just get…emotional…when I think about my mother,” she murmured.

“Yeah. Sure. No wonder.”

Lucky leaned forward, “Excuse me, Jack. I’ll just slip out to the lavatory and get myself a tissue.”

“OK.” Jack swung around and hung his knees over the armrest so that his feet, in their big sneakers, dangled in the aisle. The corners of Lucky’s lips twitched ever so slightly with amusement as she moved past him. When she was gone, Jack smacked his forehead with the heels of his hands. Why hadn’t he stood up to let her get past! That’s what he should have done—stand up, step into the aisle, and get out of her way. He groaned inwardly. How stupid his feet had looked dangling in midair! Why did he keep coming off so geeky?

“Mom, Dad!” Now Ashley was in the aisle.

“Can’t you just sit still?” her father demanded. “You keep bobbing up and down. Your mother’s trying to work out a plan for Mesa Verde. It’s important, Ashley. Some people have even demanded that the cougars be taken out of the park.”

“Taken out?” Ashley cried. “They can’t do that, can they?”

Olivia looked up from a stack of papers she’d been reading and patted Ashley’s hand. “No, but it shows you how scared folks get when they realize the damage a wild animal can do. Anyway, what did you need to tell us?”

“Oh, yeah. Well, it’s about Lucky.” Leaning over her parents and talking in a loud stage whisper, Ashley told them, “I know how you can find out who she is. First, her real name’s Lacey. Second, her mother got attacked by a magician’s white tiger in Las Vegas.”

“Oh, Ashley!” Olivia looked at her daughter.

“A white tiger?” Steven exclaimed, and laughed out loud. “She’s feeding you a story, sweetheart.”

“Honest, Dad! You should have seen her. She was crying and everything when she told us about it. Wasn’t she, Jack?”

Hesitant, Jack nodded.

“I mean,” Ashley went on, “how many people get killed by a white tiger in a big Las Vegas show? It must have been in all the papers, don’t you think? You could check it out real easy, even though it happened—let’s see—at least eight years ago.”

Olivia turned to Jack and asked, “What do you think, Jack? Do you buy into that fantastic story?”

What did he think? He believed it. No one could fake tears like that. Lucky had to be telling the truth. But if Jack admitted that and they were able to trace Lucky’s background, she’d be returned to wherever it was the gang was waiting to hurt her.

“I…I don’t know.”

Olivia sighed. “OK. When we change planes at the Denver airport, I’ll call Ms. Lopez and tell her what you just said. We’ll see what she can find out. Now, kids, let me get back to my reading. I’m almost out of time, and I’ve got to learn everything I can about what happened at Mesa Verde.”

In one of the molded plastic seats in the Denver airport terminal, Jack found the sports section of that day’s Denver Post. Since someone had left it behind, he supposed it was OK for him to pick it up and read it. That evening the Utah Jazz—Jack’s favorite team—would be in the NBA play-offs. Jack read the predictions about who would win, including the Las Vegas odds: four to three, favoring the Jazz in the series.

If gambling odds could be printed in the paper, Jack thought, trying to convince himself, it probably wasn’t so bad that Lucky had played the slot machine. Just that once, when she was little and probably didn’t know any better. Especially since she didn’t have a mother to keep an eye on her.

He checked his watch. They’d be boarding in about twenty minutes, getting onto the smaller plane that would fly them from Denver to Durango. He looked around for his family. His father was watching the news on the television monitor mounted just beneath the ceiling.

His mother was walking toward a bank of pay phones.

Curious, because maybe she was going to call Ms. Lopez about Lucky, Jack made his way toward the phones, sidestepping through throngs of travelers in the busy airport. For a few minutes they kept him from seeing his mother. When he caught sight of her, she was punching numbers into the telephone keypad. Lucky stood close behind her.

Oddly close. Slightly to the side. She seemed to be staring intently at Olivia’s fingers as they dialed.

“What’s she doing?” Ashley asked from right beside Jack.

“Where’d you come from? And what do you mean? What’s who doing?”

“You know who I mean—Lucky. She’s practically on top of Mom, but Mom doesn’t know she’s back there. I bet Lucky’s trying to hear what Mom’s saying on the phone.”

“Mom hasn’t started talking yet,” Jack protested.

“Well, when she starts. I better get over there. If Lucky hears Mom talking to Ms. Lopez, she’ll know I squealed on her.”

Ashley darted through the crowd until she reached Lucky. The two of them immediately walked off together, so if Lucky had been trying to eavesdrop, she hadn’t heard much.

The plane they flew in to Durango had only 21 seats, total, in rows of two seats together on one side and single seats on the other. Ashley sat with Steven, Lucky with Olivia, and Jack was by himself in one of the single seats across from Lucky, with no one to talk to and a lot of time to think.

He took out his camera from his backpack and loaded a roll of film. As soon as they got settled at Mesa Verde National Park, he was going to ask Lucky if he could take her picture. Until now, Jack hadn’t been at all interested in taking pictures of people. Like his dad, he liked to shoot wildlife—with a camera. A couple of times he’d tried to take pictures of football games or hockey, but he never seemed to click the shutter at just the right fraction of a second. His sports pictures always turned out wrong, with one player’s arm across another player’s face, or a blurry streak where someone had raced past his lens.

Now he wanted to photograph Lucky. Watching her out of the corner of his eye so she wouldn’t catch him staring, he thought about how he’d frame her against the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde. He wished he’d brought his photography magazine; it had an article about shooting portraits in a landscape environment.

“Here we are,” Olivia announced as they climbed down the stairs from the plane onto the tarmac—Durango was too small an airport to have a Jetway. “Durango, Colorado.”

“You get the baggage, Jack,” Steven told him.

When they entered the building, Lucky turned around as if she were looking for something. “I have to find a rest room,” she announced.

Pointing to a sign, Olivia said, “Over that way. Don’t be too long, though. We’ll meet you at the rental car desk, and then we’re off to Mesa Verde.”

“You bet. I can’t wait!” With a small wave, Lucky moved quickly down the corridor.

“Hold on, Lucky,” Ashley called out. “I’ll go with you.”

Lucky turned, and Jack saw another whisper of a look—maybe impatience or maybe even anger—pass across her face. “I’d like to go alone, if you don’t mind,” she said sharply.

“Why?” Ashley asked.

It seemed as though Lucky couldn’t come up with an answer. She stared at Ashley, stone-faced, her mouth pressed into a straight line. Olivia, sensing Lucky’s annoyance, cheerily said, “How about this—I’ll go with the two of you.”

A beat of silence, followed by a terse “Fine” from Lucky.

As the three of them disappeared down the hallway, Jack turned the scene over in his mind. The whole interaction between Ashley and Lucky and his mother had been odd. Why was Lucky resisting their company? Suddenly, the answer hit him: She must have wanted to break free and find a pay phone so she could check on Maria. That had to be it. He smiled to himself, warmed by the secret knowledge that only he and Lucky shared. In a way, it was hard being the one person who understood her whole story. The rest of the Landons were bound to find her behavior strange, which concerned him. Still, he’d vowed to keep her secret, and he meant to honor that promise.

For some reason it always seemed to take a lot longer for luggage to be unloaded at a small airport than at a large one. Jack stood watching the empty conveyor belt snake its lazy way around its track until the first bags appeared. A large cooler with duct tape wrapped in silver stripes pushed through the baggage opening, followed by two flowered totes and a green suitcase with wheels. Jack had just spied one of the Landon bags when a “Hey!” behind him made him jump.

Whirling around, Jack almost bumped into his sister. “Ashley, where’s Lucky?”

“Still with Mom. I want to tell you something weird. About Lucky.”

“What about her?”

“I don’t know how to say it. It was just…kind of strange, the way she was acting. For one thing, she kept looking around her all the way to the rest room. Up front, sideways, but she was only moving her eyes, like she didn’t want anyone to know she was checking the place out.”

Jack felt a surge of impatience. “So? Is that supposed to mean something?”

“Well, I’m wondering if she used to live here.”

“That’s not it.” Jack jerked his mother’s suitcase off the conveyor belt and set it down hard.

“You don’t know that,” Ashley said, her voice rising. “And why are you getting so touchy? I thought maybe you’d seen the same thing, and we could tell Mom and Dad and then maybe they could find out if Durango is her real home.”

“What is it with you, Ashley?” he demanded, grabbing another bag. “It’s like you’ve turned into a spy or something. Why don’t you just leave her alone?”

Now it was Ashley’s turn to look at him in stony silence. She might have said more, but right then Steven walked up. “Great. Our luggage made it. You two wait here with the suitcases while I go pick up the rental car.”

“What kind of car did you get, Dad? Is it a red one?” Ashley asked hopefully.

“Yeah. A Lamborghini,” Jack added.

“No, we can’t fit in that, so pick a Rolls Royce,” Ashley joked.

“A Hummer.” Jack was getting into the spirit of it, glad the tension with his sister was melting. “A Hummer with Utah Jazz seat covers and its own television and VCR inside.”

Steven laughed. “You got it. I’ll make it a red one. Meet me out front, guys.”

CHAPTER FOUR

It turned out to be a white Ford Taurus, just like most of the other rental cars—not that Jack had expected anything racier.

Ashley wedged herself into the middle of the backseat between Jack and Lucky. Jack had to peer around his sister every time he wanted to say something to Lucky. That didn’t happen often, because Olivia kept up a steady stream of talk.

“Isn’t this a beautiful place? It’s a lot more mountainous than Jackson Hole, although I think they’re close to the same altitude. Which reminds me, Jack and Ashley, both of you have to write reports since you’re missing school. Ashley, yours is to be on an animal that lives in Mesa Verde, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

Olivia turned around from the front seat. “There are a lot of interesting animals in this park—coyotes and badgers and lots of mule deer and elk. Have you ever stood next to an elk, Lucky?”

When Lucky shook her head no, Olivia slipped right into her lecture mode. She loved to share information about her job at the National Elk Refuge. “Well, let me tell you, they are huge! A lot bigger than you might think. My head stops right at a bull elk’s shoulder, if you can picture that.”

“Mom, I don’t want to do a report on elk,” Ashley broke in. “What else is there? Give me something with teeth.”

“OK, how about a black bear? They have them in Mesa Verde. And, of course, the cougar. Did you know the cougar is also called a mountain lion and a puma? They’ve got several names for the exact same animal. That might be interesting to mention, Ashley, if you do your paper on Felis concolor, which is, as you can probably guess, the scientific name for a cougar.” Olivia was growing excited. “Hey, really, cougars would be great for you to write on, since I’ve already gathered a lot of information. I could highlight some of the data….”

Ashley rolled her eyes at Jack to show she did not want to talk about school reports. Jack agreed. What was the use of getting a couple of days off if they had to worry about homework right from the start? Homework could wait. School would be over at the beginning of June—just two more weeks.

“How do you know about all those animals, Mrs. Landon?” Lucky asked.

“It’s my job. I specialize in endangered and threatened species. You heard about the cougar attack I’ve been called to investigate?”

Lucky nodded. “I heard a little, but not much. What’s going on?”

Running her fingers through her hair, Olivia sighed. “It’s really tragic, Lucky. Last week a little boy was walking with his family down a trail, and he got too far ahead of them. There was a scream. When the parents came around the bend….” She paused, shaking her head. “It’s not the way cougars usually behave. That’s what’s so frightening.”

“Was the boy all right?” Lucky asked.

“He had quite a few bites around his face, but I understand he’ll make it. The park hunted down the cougar and caught it. I was asked to examine it, to check for disease or age or any other cause that could explain such an attack.”

Olivia turned back toward the front of the car but twisted around again when Lucky said, “I bet it took lots of years in school to learn all that you know about animals.”

“Uh-huh. A whole bunch of years,” Olivia admitted. “But it doesn’t seem long when you’re doing something you love.” She paused, then asked, “Where do you go to school?”

Lucky didn’t miss a beat. “Home schooling.”

“Where’s your home?”

Lucky shrugged and smiled. “Wherever.”

“Do you travel a lot?” Olivia pressed.

“Mom!” Jack protested. Talk about a grilling! His mom was sounding like the FBI. Next she’d be pulling out the truth serum. “Lucky doesn’t have to answer that,” Jack said.

“Actually, I’d rather not,” Lucky murmured, very polite and still smiling.