Slickrock Paradox Read Free

which had graced the town’s busy Main Street for more than twenty years.
    Silas parked his car in front of his shop on the nearly deserted street. The narrow adobe building was tucked between two shotgun houses that squatted on the double-wide lot. Next to one of the houses spread an ancient and enormous cottonwood tree, its stalwart arms reaching across all three buildings. At the front door he swept up the pile of flyers and newspapers that had accumulated there. He checked for spiders or scorpions inside the ceramic pot that doubled as a mailbox and grabbed the handful of bills and junk mail. Everything was coated with a fine red dust. He balanced all of this under one arm while he unlocked the glass-fronted door with the other.
    The sign on the door read, “Red Rock Canyon Books. Open when I’m here. Closed when I’m not.”
    Once inside, he found the switch and flipped on the bank of lights that ran down the center of the narrow building. The room was oppressively hot. Silas flicked on the wall-mounted air conditioner as he made his way to the back of the shop. The two long, low outside walls were lined with bookshelves weighed down with thousands of titles. Pot lights created pools of illumination on the narrow, red carpet that ran the length of the store. The ceiling boasted hundred-year-old pine joists, the thatched adobe ceiling visible between them. At the back of the store was a small, ornate wooden desk with a computer on it that doubled as the sales counter, in case someone bought a book.
    Silas threw the flyers in the trash and put the papers down on the desk, amid piles of other paperwork. He sat down heavily in his leather office chair—liberated from his final teaching post at Northern Arizona University—and turned on his computer. While the machine grumbled to life, he scanned the area newspapers’ headlines, including the Salt Lake City Tribune , for relevant stories concerning a mysterious discovery, a crank call to the police about something—anything—turning up where it shouldn’t. There was nothing about a body.
    He checked his email, deleting almost everything without reading it. There seemed to be no trace whatsoever.
    Feeling suddenly weary beyond words, Silas turned off the computer, switched off the air conditioner and the lights and left the store in darkness. He made his way to the City Market for a stack of frozen dinners, then to the state liquor store for a case of Molson Canadian. He left Moab via Highway 191 north. Thirty minutes and he’d be home.
    For a moment Silas slipped into a familiar wistful reverie: He was driving up the narrow, looping road that led from Flagstaff, Arizona, to his home in the woods below the San Francisco Peaks. The sun was setting and the forest was full of long shadows; the vanilla scent of the pines was intoxicating, invigorating. As warm as the days of the autumn semester could be, it was always cool in the evening deep in the woods along the base of Humphrey’s Peak. Soon he’d be home. They might sit on the wide porch a while, sipping gin and tonics; maybe he’d retreat to his library, as he often did, to review notes for the next day’s lecture.
    His wife, however, did not await him at his new home in the Castle Valley. It had been three and a half years since Silas had seen Penelope. It had been three and a half years since she had gone for a hike, somewhere within a day’s drive of Moab, never to return.
    Lost in his dream, Silas took the turnoff to his small ranch house too fast. He kicked a spray of gravel and sand into the defenseless weeds and cactus before driving the track to a single-story, wood frame house that sat pressed against the fifteen-hundred-foot sheer wall of Porcupine Rim. His lights swept across the front of the house as he came to a stop, a cloud of dust swirling up and then settling in the dense evening air. He turned the engine off and sat for a moment, feeling