The Bone Fire_A Mystery

Chapter NINETEEN

Saturday Afternoon

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Rose Rodriguez sat in her chair, just trying to feel the solid metal frame that was holding her up. She had her feet planted on the ground in front of her and her hands folded tightly in her lap. She was praying hard.
She didn’t like speaking to groups of people, but she knew her turn was next. They had started with the usual reading of the preamble and the traditions, before moving on to the testimonials and open discussion. The leader of the group had shared his story first. His life sounded full of adventure and travel, even after he started drinking. Rose was jealous. Of his ability to talk so happily and calmly to the group. Like he enjoyed it. Of course, he had been sober for five years. She had been sober for all of three months.
She’d had her last drink the day after what would have been Brianna’s third birthday. Rose had been in the convenience store getting some vodka when she saw the front page of the newspaper in the rack. There was a large photo that showed her and Ashley surrounded by cake, balloons, and people—all there for Brianna. All there praying that she would be found. Rose looked at herself in the photo. She looked like one of the wizened apple-head dolls her grandfather used to make. The caption said the photo was taken the day before. Rose would have to take their word for it because she couldn’t remember. Her drinking and her blackouts had gotten worse after Brianna disappeared. Now here was a picture of her, supposedly crying hysterically over her lost grandchild, and she couldn’t remember any of it. She had gotten her angel of a sponsor that same day.
She said a quick prayer to her higher power in thanksgiving. She knew that gratitude to her higher power and relinquishing control were part of the journey. Because it was when she thought she was in control that she was actually out of it. Only her higher power was ever in control.
She looked around the meeting room to distract herself from her anxiety. It was a conference room in the cancer clinic next to the hospital, which was why she was able to make it. Ashley was still in labor. Rose had debated not going to a meeting today, but her sponsor convinced her, saying, “That’s the committee in your head making decisions instead of you standing back and letting your higher power make them.” So she had Alex and Justin stay with Ashley as she went to the meeting. Now she was glad she had gone, but still nervous. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. Her sponsor’s voice kept running through her head. “You can’t do it on your own. You can only do it in these rooms.”
The leader finished his testimonial, saying, “If I’d never given up alcohol and drugs, I would have jumped off the Taos Gorge Bridge by now.”
The group turned to her. She tried to speak, then had to clear her throat so she could be heard as she said, “My name is Rose and I’m an alcoholic.”
Gil parked the car next to a sign that said VISITOR PARKING, and they got out. They stood and looked around for a moment, deciding which way to go. Gil noticed a sign that said GIFT SHOP. They went inside.
The floors were finished in Mexican tiles. The walls were painted gold and lined with carved wooden shelves that held bottles and pots, boxes and bags. The room smelled heavily of incense. Gil’s police brain instantly thought that they must be trying to cover up the smell of marijuana, until he realized that this probably was one of the few times in his career that he was around incense being used for its intended purpose. Purification. Music came from speakers mounted on the walls. The sound of a string instrument that Gil didn’t recognize rose and fell as drums nodded off and on in the background.
Gil walked over to the nearest shelf and looked closer. Tea, massage oil, DVDs, potpourri, and books. Gil moved toward a circular table in the center of the store. Here was a large framed photo of Donna Henshaw herself that must have been taken at least twenty years ago. It showed the short red hair and crystal green eyes for which she had been famous. Her books surrounded her picture in a loving display. The titles—The Woman Warrior Within You and She Not He—had been popular back in their day. Susan had even read one of them about ten years ago. It had been about women’s empowerment. Susan had made sure Gil knew all the tools needed for a woman to “take back her life.” Gil had even gotten her to laugh a little at Tool Four, titled “The One Tool You Need for Satisfaction.” Gil had made the obvious sexual joke. That had been a long time ago. When the girls were little. When he and Susan still talked about the books they read. When they still had time to read books.
Gil moved toward another shelf just as a woman came out from the back room. She was young. Maybe in her early twenties. Her bright blue eyes matched the cobalt blue of her turban. The effect was almost disconcerting. She was tiny, no more than five feet tall, but her turban gave her at least an extra foot. It also looked like it might crush her at any moment. In her orange sash was tucked a curved dagger.
Before Gil could speak, Joe said from behind him, “Well, hello.” The woman smiled and said, “Blessings and victory be upon you.”
“We’re here to see Donna Henshaw,” Gil said before Joe could start in on anything.
“She is in a conference but should be out shortly,” the woman said, still smiling. Her teeth were perfect, and her skin was a soft dusky white. Gil could see why Joe was suddenly next to him, standing straighter and smiling up a storm.
“Can I help you with anything?” she asked.
“We need to discuss a personal matter with Ms. Henshaw,” Gil said.
“Of course,” she said, eminently serene. “Please let me know if I can be of any assistance. I’m the general manager.” The title surprised Gil. He had expected something more in keeping with a religious group—like yogi or acolyte.
“Is the ashram a business?” he asked.
She smiled. “By the grace of the Wonderful Teacher, we have been blessed. We sell mostly online, although the initiates who come here for yoga retreats do buy a fair amount as well.”
“So what’s your whole thing here?” Joe asked. Gil had to admire his straightforward attitude.
“We are a group of Sikhs who run a center for teaching kundalini yoga, and, of course, we all are still students ourselves of the Guru, victory be upon him.”
“Okay, so I didn’t understand a lot of that,” Joe said, “but I’m going to pretend I did.”
She laughed, which was what Joe had wanted, and he asked, “How did you end up here?”
“I was studying at the University of Connecticut when I heard my yoga teacher speak of the Guru—victory be upon him—and his belief in the woman warrior, so I moved here to further my studies,” she said.
“Is the Guru here?” Gil asked, thinking that he might be a long-shot candidate for Brianna’s father.
“No. He will arrive here in a few weeks for his yearly visit,” she said.
“What were you getting your degree in?” Joe asked, moving closer to her.
“I was studying for a master’s in business finance,” she said, “but I realized that the material instincts of the world were not conducive to my path of light. Here I am free to embody the saint-soldier that is written about in the sacred scripture.”
“Are you like . . . I mean, do you consider yourself a member of the Sikh religion, like, from India?” Joe asked.
“Yes, I am of the Pure Ones, the chosen who began their fraternity in the 1700s,” she said, proudly. By that time, Gil thought, his family had already been living in Santa Fe for almost a hundred years.
“So by ‘pure one’ do you mean virgin?” Joe asked.
“You know what?” Gil said quickly. “We are going to wait outside for Ms. Henshaw. I’m sorry for the trouble. Please just let us know when she can see us.”
Gil sat in the driver’s seat of the car with the door open. The fresh mountain air was crisp and light. A yellow swallowtail butterfly floated past, catching a ride on a slight wind.
Gil was on his cell phone with Adam Granger, who was saying adamantly, “They’re not Sikh. They came with the rest of the Sikhs in the 1970s when my parents came, but they split off from the ashram in Espa?ola at least twenty years ago when I was still a kid. I remember that was a really hard time at the compound. My mom cried a lot.”
Sitting in the passenger seat next to Gil, Joe typed away on his smartphone, where he was supposed to be looking up everything he could find about the Golden Mountain Ashram.
Gil asked Adam, “How are they different?”
“They have some Sikh traditions, like they do meditation and yoga and they’ve all taken Sikh names, but they’re a straight-up cult,” Adam said. “I had a couple of friends who went in, and they were just gone. They were so swept up in it.”
“So they are a fundamentalist Sikh group?”
“Sort of. Sikhs believe in a universal God and equality between the genders, but those guys at Golden Mountain have taken the whole female warrior concept to the extreme.”
“How do you mean?”
“Like they only allow women to join their ashram, but their guru is a guy, which I think just sounds weird. Like he has his own harem or something. On top of that, they do hard-core weapons training. They are told that if they sleep more than six hours a night, they are committing evil. They have to get up at 3:00 A.M. to meditate and chant for four hours, then take a cold shower and eat only certain raw foods. Stuff like that.”
“It sounds almost like brainwashing,” Gil said.
“It is. They really try to stress the ‘us versus them’ concept, where they are the chosen ones and everyone else is an idiot,” Adam said. “Honestly, they’re just a bunch of white people who know nothing about Sikh religion. They’re just making stuff up.”
“Thanks,” Gil said, getting ready to hang up. Then Adam said, “I’d be careful up there, though.”
“Why?”
“They really believe in the warrior tradition of the Sikh, so they’re probably armed to the teeth. Sikhs are famous for their use of weapons.”
Gil laughed. “I really wish I’d called you before I came up here.”
They hung up, and Gil looked toward Joe, who was watching a yoga video on his phone. Gil told him what Adam had said, but Joe didn’t seem to be listening. He was too intent on his video, which he kept his eyes on while saying, “There’s instructions for kundalini yoga online . . . looks like lots of turning back and forth with your arms up and some squatting . . . pretty much it’s slow motion Jazzercise. I could totally do this.” Joe said, turning his torso back and forth in the car, mimicking the movements on the tiny screen.
“What else did you find out?” Gil asked.
“Okay,” Joe said, finally putting down his phone and picking up his notebook. “So there are no complaints or arrests or anything that involves the ashram or Donna Henshaw or the property. They seem to not cause any trouble. They don’t have any concealed-carry gun permits, but as for nonconcealed guns, who knows.” That meant they had no way of knowing how many guns might be at the compound since New Mexico only requires a permit for concealed guns. The women at the ashram could legally buy as many as they wanted to stockpile.
“Oh, here’s one for the Did You Know category,” Joe said. “Did you know that Sikhism is the fifth largest religion in the world? It’s even ahead of Judaism, which is number six.”
“I did not know that,” Gil said. “What else?”
“As far as cults go, these guys hit on every mark,” Joe said, reading off his notebook. “They do mind-altering stuff, like meditation. They follow a strict diet. They believe they are the chosen ones. They create their own words for their practices. Basically, they believe all you have to do is humbly follow the Guru and all the bad things will disappear. Which sounds really nice. There also are several blogs and chatrooms from people who have left the cult. They say that the Guru claims the right to initiate all of them into the sect, which I guess includes taking illegal drugs. Another woman says that members are expected to take part in lesbian activities with other members. This is my kind of cult.”
“Anything else?” Gil asked.
“Yep. Here’s a little-known fact—this ashram is one of seven in Santa Fe, including one in Lamy that has horses. I’m not sure if that means the people meditate with the horses or if the horses are the ones doing the meditating,” Joe said, closing his notebook. “What is it about Santa Fe that attracts these people? And why does it always involve movie stars? We have more celebrities around here than fake tans at a porno convention. Like Ali MacGraw, Shirley MacLaine, Julia Roberts, Jane Fonda.”
“They claim there’s vortexes around the city that open up to another universe,” Gil said, “and then there’s an alien landing pad up here in the mountains somewhere.”
“Cool, dude. Can we go look for that?”
“Just as soon as we find out what happened to Brianna.”
Gil heard someone walking behind the car and turned to see the young woman from the gift shop, who said, “She will see you now.”
Joe and Gil followed the woman to the main house.
“So are you related to the Sikhs in Espa?ola?” Gil asked, wondering how she would describe them.
“They are the White Sikhs,” she said firmly. Dismissively. “They are from the outside and they will always be from the outside.”
“You aren’t?” Gil asked, trying not to sound too challenging.
“Yes, because I follow Guru Sanjam Dev, victory be upon him. He is the first and only true Guru since the writing of the sacred scripture.”
The path beneath Gil’s feet crunched, and he looked down, stopping. The ground was littered with spent cartridges. A few were clearly .22 caliber from a rifle, while another was a .50 caliber, possibly from a machine gun.
“You’ve got shell casings here from some really diverse weaponry,” Gil said.
“The Guru likes us to honor the traditional Sikh warrior code,” she said. “As the scripture says, we accept death, and give up any hope of life.”
“That’s really dark,” Joe said.
“Many of our most famous warriors were women,” she continued. “My own name, Rajindar, comes from Princess Rajindar, who led three thousand warriors to save her cousin after he was captured.”
“So what you’re saying is, don’t mess with Sikh women,” Joe said.
“One of my favorite prayers is ‘May I die fighting with limitless courage,’ ” she said. “Of course, you are warriors, too. I’m sure you understand this.”
“Yeah, I’m not so much about the die fighting part,” Joe said. “I’m more about death by old age.”
“Is the .50 caliber from a rifle or a machine gun?” Gil asked.
“Actually a handgun, the Desert Eagle,” she said.
“That’s a whole lot of recoil to deal with,” Gil said, trying to gauge her knowledge about weapons.
“Yeah, and not much of a magazine,” Joe added. “It has like, what, seven rounds?”
“That’s the same that your Smith & Wesson has,” she said, nodding at the gun at Gil’s waist. Clearly, she knew her guns.
They entered the house through a glass sliding door, and she told them to take off their shoes. Inside was a white room with gold carpets. On a dais covered in heavy red brocade fabric and surrounded by gold pillars was a large book covered in gold cloth. Rajindar clasped her hands together in prayer, then bowed to the dais. Gil wondered if the book was the sacred scripture she had talked about.
They followed her up a flight of stairs to a loft with sweeping windows that overlooked the valley. In the center of the room, a woman in a blue turban kneeled next to a small, low table that held a steaming teapot and cookies covered in sugar crystals. The woman looked athletic and had obviously had plastic surgery. Her cheeks were shiny and tight. Her eyes shone bright green even from this far away. This had to be Donna Henshaw.
“Blessings and victory be upon you,” Rajindar said to Ms. Henshaw, then bowed low.
“Victory belongs to God alone,” Ms. Henshaw said, bowing low in return.
“Hello, Ms. Henshaw, I’m Gil Montoya with the Santa Fe police, and this is Joe Phillips,” Gil said. He normally would have offered his hand to shake, but he thought better of it here.
“Please, I prefer the use of my spiritual name—Mai Bhago Kaur,” she said, smiling. Unlike Rajindar’s, her smile seemed fake. Perhaps it was a side effect of the plastic surgery and Botox.
“Should I call you Mai?” Gil asked as he sat on the floor cross-legged.
“Of course,” she said, “and thank you for honoring me by using my spiritual name. Such a name is a vibrating blessing that summarizes our journey of intent here on earth and strengthens our journey to a higher destiny.”
“Oh, interesting,” Gil said, not quite following. He was about to move on to the next question when Joe interrupted. “Who gives you your name? Can you just pick one? Can I be Lancelot Skywalker?”
She smiled dimly at his attempted humor. “Because of my spiritual path, Guru Sanjam Dev, victory be upon him, gave me my name, but for others you can go to our Web site and for a small offering have your name selected.”
“Seriously?” Joe said, laughing. “You get people to pay for a random spiritual name generator?”
“May I inquire as to why you are here?” she said, looking at Gil, clearly done humoring Joe.
“We were hoping to talk to you about Brianna Rodriguez,” he said.
She nodded. “Of course. Before we get to that, I would like to present you with a small gift for taking the time to visit me in my home.”
“Of course,” Gil said, purposely mimicking her words, thinking she was going to offer him tea and cookies.
Instead, she said, “Detective, I am honored to be the acharya, the meditation teacher, here at our humble ashram. In order to gain this honor, I had to share my gift of purpose with the world, and it is this gift that I now focus on you.”
“Thank you,” Gil said.
“My gift tells me that you are not in harmony with your own subjective reality,” she said, smiling kindly. As a teacher would at a slow child.
“You know, I tell him that all the time,” Joe said.
“We all follow a path of spiritual enfoldment, which at its core reveals that we all are of the same divine essence,” she said serenely. “Detective, I assume you’re Catholic, with all your wonderful saints, who were seekers of the unequivocal truth, as well as your Holy Trinity, which are all located within your own body. We worship not only the sacred light but also the sound, and through this we will find our own personal God realization. Look inside your sacred temple and visit the inner planes to see that this is true.”
“Yes, of course,” Gil murmured, not sure where she was going with this. He added, “Thank you,” when she seemed to be expecting him to say more.
“I am fortunate to have a tincture of ginkgo, saffron, and rose that was placed in darkness and then allowed to absorb the vibratory force of an amethyst over seven days. It will increase your biological energies and encourages the cohesion of cells, organs, and glands. I will give this to you.”
She got up easily, her limbs supple and her muscles taut, probably the effect of decades of yoga. She opened a cupboard and took out a small, dark bottle with an eyedropper stopper. She sat back down and handed it to Gil, who took it. It had no instruction label of any kind. Gil wasn’t sure if he was supposed to drink it, rinse with it, or rub it on.
He set it down next to him and said, “Thank you,” again, realizing that it was the third time he’d used the phrase in roughly two minutes of conversation.