Reilly 09 - Presumption of Death (20 page)

“How did we miss it?” Nina said, taking the pitted road too fast, irritated and tired, feeling as dusty as the road. As the afternoon progressed it had only grown hotter. They finally spotted a distant gray tent in a clearing up ahead. Nina parked. Paul jumped out of the car, closing his door silently while Nina pulled socks out of her bag and put them on along with her hiking boots. She also pulled out a long-sleeved shirt, unsnagged her rolled-up sleeves, and buttoned them tightly at the wrists.

“Why are you doing that?” Paul asked her. He had forgotten already.

How infuriating, that he had no such cares. “You can’t see it? Paul, this forest is crawling with it.” Poison oak swarmed up the trunks alongside the road, crossing on the Spanish moss from tree to tree. Clumps of it framed the road and flourished all the way up the hills around them.

They walked up the road toward the clearing, cautious, both wary of the pit bull. Paul held a thick branch. Nina stopped.

“What’s the matter? You see something?”

Long black shadows of the late afternoon made the road ahead look like something out of a fairy tale, where threatening beings wavered, waiting for them, and trees creaked and whispered as they walked by. The silence, aside from the hysterical buzzing of insects, seemed total.

“Know something? I have no idea where we are,” said Nina.

“I’m looking forward to getting the hell back to the river. You can shake your stuff at the Bucket for me alone.”

“I don’t like it here,” Nina said, slapping a mosquito that had crept up underneath her sleeve.

The heat rose up from the road, suffocating in the stillness.

“You want to wait for me in the car?”

She visualized herself in the Mustang, alone with her imagination in this atmosphere. “No.”

“Well, then. Ready?” He waited until she started up again.

An old Chevy van blocked the entrance to the clearing. They walked around it, peering inside. Nina’s heart jumped. It looked like she imagined a kidnapper’s van might look, filthy tan, paneled, full of ratty bits of rug and trash. “Ugh,” she whispered. “Paul, the Cat Lady thought she saw a beige van.”

“I’m looking, I’m looking. Hold my stick.” He brought out his penknife and, glancing at the motionless flaps of the tent, quickly scraped something behind the front fenders into a baggie.

A boy in a plaid lumberjack shirt walked across the muddy meadow toward them, cap pulled low, head down, limp animal hanging by its ears loosely from his left hand, stick in his right, a day pack on his back. A dark stain made a blot over the pattern on the front of his shirt. As he got closer, Nina could see the animal was a skinny gray jackrabbit.

“Who are you?” he asked. Shaking hands didn’t seem like a good plan, so Nina smiled and said, “I’m Nina Reilly and this is Paul. I’m a lawyer. And you?”

“Nate. A lawyer helped my mother once. Look what I have.”

“You shoot it?” Paul said. He was looking for a weapon.

“Trapped it. Trapped it and wrapped it.”

“Make a good dinner,” Paul observed, as if he and Nina routinely ate dead animals for dinner, which they did, but Nina didn’t want to think about that right now.

“My brother makes stew.” He looked confused. “Used to. Not anymore.”

“Let’s all sit down and talk for a minute,” Paul said. “Aren’t you Coyote’s brother? Nate?”

“When I was.” Nate perched on a rock not far from them and plunged the stick into the ground. What he might be thinking, with the eyes she couldn’t see and the shaggy hair and the general air of being off-kilter, Nina couldn’t imagine.

“Have you lived here long?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Uh, just wondering.”

“It snows up on the mountains here, sometimes. Bet you didn’t know that. When it snows I stay in the tent. Bent in the tent. But I don’t know what to do now. He doesn’t like me.” He dropped the rabbit, which plopped to the ground without complaint. Nate pulled on his eyebrow and commenced an alarming series of loud moans.

“I vote we go get Coyote,” Paul said hastily.

“Nate? Nate? We want to see your brother,” Nina said.

More groans. Nate rocked back and forth.

“Where’s your brother?” Paul asked.

“Gone.” Another groan.

“Where?”

He stared at them. “That’s the mystery. My mother told me a story. About a train. Trains are a strain.”

“Let’s go look anyway, okay?” Paul said.

Nate followed with his rabbit and stick, docile enough, as they moved cautiously up the track to the sprawling tent, still emitting the occasional moan.

“Nate’s not well,” Nina said to Paul in a low voice.

“No shit.”

“Someone ought to be helping him. A doctor.”

As if hearing this, and deciding against it, Nate suddenly disappeared.

“Nate?” Nina called.

A tall, tan young man with an ugly pink-nosed white dog built like a tank stepped out of the tent about fifty feet away. He wore the kind of T-shirt her son, Bob, called a wifebeater, white and sleeveless, jeans, and a brown cowboy hat low over his eyes. When he saw them, he seemed to jump back a step, but the dog jumped forward, growling. Thank God, Nina thought, that thing’s on a tight leash. Actually it was a chain, but Coyote was holding it looped several times around his knuckles.

Nina swallowed. Paul liked her to take the lead in these encounters, saying, heck, let the sexists feel safe because you’re a woman. Why not use it to our own advantage, this sexism stuff?

“Your brother trapped a rabbit,” she said.

“So we eat tonight. That’s good.” Next to him, the pit bull at the end of the chain made no sound, waiting. “Meanwhile, I politely say, just the one time, get the hell off our property. Now.”

“Are you Coyote? We’d like to talk to you about Danny.”

“Beat it. Or I let the dog go.”

“We’re leaving,” Paul said. He swung around back toward the road, but did not completely turn his back on the man or his dog.

Nina stumbled behind. As she followed Paul back to the car, she reminded herself, “Stay away from the poison oak,” but really, all she could think about was the muzzle of the pit bull and that poor boy standing by the tent, eyes searching the distance for answers.

“Did you see?” Paul said, as they reached the Mustang, started it up, turned on the AC, and sank gratefully into its leather seats.

“See what?”

“Up in the tree.”

“See what?”

“Nate built a nest up there.”

“No. I was too busy watching Coyote’s fingers on the dog chain. He’s perfect, Paul. He’s got the van. I see him setting the fires and driving away. It’s no stretch of the imagination.”

“So who’s the second dude, then?” Paul said. “The second guy in the van? We’re operating on the assumption that the second guy isn’t Danny.”

“Doesn’t have to be,” Nina said. “Simple. Danny found out from Coyote, and decided to get the reward. He’d know to look for the van up on the ridge.”

“He was going to finger his buddy?”

“His buddy was an arsonist.”

“To tell the truth, no one could be this dude’s buddy,” Paul said. “Drinking partner, yes. But-”

“But what?”

“But who did he drop off on Siesta Court that night? Who’s his partner?”

“Someone Danny hooked him up with,” Nina said, excited. “Another reason to kill Danny.”

Paul patted the baggie in his pocket and said, “Hope this is ash.”

They drove back to the turnoff for the Bucket. The sun was low and the shadows had lengthened, but the temperature was still in the nineties.

“Look for a hole in the fence just before you see the iron gate with a Stone Pine sign.”

They got out of the car, sloppy and tired. “This it?” Paul asked.

“I think so.”

They clambered down a steep path. Following the trail, they wended their way through a fifty-foot grassy field to a fork in the path. “We go right,” Nina said. They crossed one creek, and minutes later, arrived at the rocky shore of the swimming hole Nina remembered so well. No one else had lingered so late in the day. “Oh. It doesn’t look the same.” Floods had devastated the scene, tearing at the protective foliage. “My gosh. It was all hidden! Oh, well. I’m too hot to care.”

She peeled off her jeans, shirt, and underwear.

Paul took off his boxers. He kissed her hungrily. She ran her hands down him, admiring him. High above, on the highway, those who knew to look could see the tiny embracing figures in the twilight next to the pond. Nina felt the heat rising from the stones and a late-afternoon breeze stirring on her bare skin. Birds called to each other in the laurel trees.

They slid gratefully into the Bucket’s gold-and-silver water, and the light split and shattered across its surface, then gathered itself and followed behind as they swam.

14

E LIZABETH GOLD’S SUNDAY TURNED OUT TO be eventful too. After packing her new Subaru with water and sunscreen, she left before dawn that morning, heading east into Los Padres National Forest, to Tassajara Hot Springs. She wanted to get the most out of her visit, and knew she had a two-and-a-half-hour trip on G-16 to get there.

She had a bad taste to expunge after her foray to Siesta Court the night before.

For the first thirty miles, she enjoyed the expanses of yellow and olive-green hillsides, the dry grasses rolling like ocean waves in the hot wind, the occasional ranchito with its grazing horses, then the forest closing in. At the tiny community of Jamesburg the asphalt ended and the warning signs began: TASSAJARA ROAD IS IMPASSABLE DURING WET WEATHER. THE MONASTERY IS CLOSED FROM SEPTEMBER TO MAY, PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB THE MONKS.

As the road climbed steeply and ruts and stones took over, she switched to four-wheel drive, slowed down, and bumped and ground her way the last fourteen miles up Chews Ridge and down into the Tassajara Creek Basin, reminding herself with each teeth-clattering lurch how much she needed this retreat.

Morning’s overcast broke and the sun began to burn hot. After checking in with a friendly student, she strolled around the monastery grounds, starting at the footbridge. She walked the length and breadth of the property, over the footbridge, up the path to the yurt, breathing in the smells of the forest around, enjoying the security of the hills that framed the central clearing.

Since the sixties, Tassajara had undergone a slow metamorphosis and now included, in addition to the redwood cabin complex built in the mid-seventies, bathhouses, plunges and hot springs, stone meditation rooms, and a large dining room and dormitory. Too remote for tourists, this serene paradise was visited only by those seeking peace.

Holding her towel and water bottle and stepping carefully in her sandals, Elizabeth picked her way to her favorite boulder next to the river, where random rocks made art of the landscape. A branch hung down and sheltered a flat spot on this river rock.

She looked up the mountain at the broad scar running all the way down its flank, from the wildfire a few years before that had forced the monks to evacuate. No fire now, just heat, the hillsides shimmering with it.

Today the temperature might top a hundred degrees. She would go inside by 10:00 A.M. During the winter and fall months, the monastery closed to all visitors, while its residents engaged in intensive, ninety-day practice periods called
ango
. Elizabeth had done that in September. She had mourned a lot and slept a lot. One day she had enough, and went home. Simple, like Zen.

Today, she would return home before sunset. Finding a spot in shade on her boulder, crossing her legs, she sat for a long time amid the disheveled business of her Self, not trying for anything or expecting anything, just sitting. Like a monk of old on a rock above the river, she heard rushing water, allowed patterns of light to drift through her downcast eyes.

Old thought-patterns arose and she let them in.

They had died in a head-on collision in San Francisco. She had been at home, taking a nap. Five years it has been, she thought in wonderment.

She breathed in and out on her rock.

What she couldn’t get over was that at the moment of impact she hadn’t even woken up, hadn’t had enough of a connection with them even to feel them cry out as they left the earth. A certain moment occurred and all she loved was gone. She had nowhere to go and nothing to do and several million dollars from her dead husband. From her dead daughter, May, she had only memories.

For a while she drifted around like a wraith. She went to Kyoto and Dharamsala and Mount Kailash and other holy places, avoiding people. She ended up back in the high-rise in San Francisco, seeing a shrink three times a week. May’s last moments came to her frequently in her dreams.

After a long time, Elizabeth gathered herself together again. She still didn’t think she deserved to be alive, but she made a contract with life-to spend it helping others.

And so she went to Africa for two years and gave most of the money to various groups and worked for Médecins Sans Frontières until she came down with dengue fever and had to be airlifted out. She despised herself for her lack of stamina even more, but she stayed in the U.S. this time. She joined an environmental group in Humboldt County protesting logging of first-growth forest there, and for two weeks she even sat in a tree.

During a visit to her sister and a subsequent retreat at Tassajara, she saw Carmel Valley and thought, I’ll build a home there, close to the monastery, close to a place to run to.

Then, when the home was finished nearly two years later, she again looked around for something to save.

Moving into traditional political activism and Valley conservation issues, she worked furiously and gave more money, and soon she was a member of several local boards and commissions that were trying to stop further degradation of the viewsheds and water sources into the Valley.

And finally she decided to get back on the Ph.D. track. Why? Because there were still so many nights when she sat alone in her living room, drinking brandy, thinking too much. She got a Ph.D. committee together and chose a subject, and found it gave her a reason to wake up in the morning.