Nature Noir

by Jordan Fisher Smith

  "What kind of rifles did her boyfriend and the other men who beat you have?" I asked him.

  "Like paratrooper rifles—the army kind. Full auto," the miner answered.

  "What does he do for a living? Can you show me the road where he lives?" I inquired.

  "Do I look that stupid? What do you think he does for a living? Something with drugs, that's for sure," he replied.

  When we finished talking, I left the police station and drove back into the canyon to Yankee Jims to look for Rattlesnake Jim. This time I got lucky; his white van was parked by the bridge. I found him down at the river haggling over a small vial of nuggets with the miner who had told me about his kidnapping. Rattlesnake Jim looked nervous when he saw me.

  The gold buyer's story pretty much lined up with everyone else's. He really didn't know whether Mary Murphy had been raped or had gotten scared her boyfriend would find out about Ricky Marks. But there was no question her fear of her boyfriend was justified, he said. That boyfriend was one crazy son of a bitch, or at least whatever he and his buddies were doing down at that old mine, they didn't want anyone to know about it. When Rattlesnake had driven the woman home—and it was way the hell down this dirt road where the old-timers had hydraulic-mined the land into tortured hoodoos and the trees were all twisted—the boyfriend had emerged on the front porch of his cabin and started shooting at Rattlesnake's van before he even knew who it was. Rattlesnake jumped out and threw up his hands, begging for mercy and yelling that Mary was in the van. And then, for all his chivalry, he had been kidnapped and forced to lead the boyfriend and his bunch of vigilantes back to Yankee Jims Bridge, where, with one of the boyfriend's buddies holding a rifle to his head, he had been forced to watch as they shoved Mary into the camp and made her identify Ricky and then beat the poor miner in the face and groin with their rifle butts. And when they finished, they told everyone there to keep quiet or they'd get the same thing. And that was about it, said Rattlesnake Jim.

  In the end Finch wrote a five-sentence report about finding and impounding the wrecked Chevrolet, but by ranger custom, as the one who'd first seen the tip of the iceberg—that squatter's shack up the North Fork—I inherited the rest of this sprawling mess. I was left staring at my notes and wondering what kind of a raid team—ten men with assault rifles, tear gas, a helicopter, police dogs—it would take to even question the boyfriend and not get shot down in some mercury-laced wasteland of an abandoned hydraulic mine up in Dutch Flat. Four days later I wrote it all up, cut a copy to a sergeant of detectives I knew at the Sheriff's Department, and set up a meeting between him and Rattlesnake Jim. In the months that followed, Mary Murphy declined to press charges, and I doubt that detective sergeant or anyone else ever got around to seeing the boyfriend. I went on to other things and tried to forget the scared looks on the faces of Ricky Marks and Mary Murphy.

  When I was growing up in California, schoolchildren were fed a pretty, triumphal account of the Gold Rush. To hear it told, it had been a rollicking good time. Later I learned that for the land, waters, and native peoples of California, and even for most of its participants, the Gold Rush was a disaster.

  By the mid-1850s the American River canyons would have been unrecognizable to anyone who had seen them a few years before. Miners had lifted the river out of its bed and put it into miles of wooden flumes so that open-pit mines could be dug in its bed to recover gold. To get wood for the flumes and waterworks, pit shoring, bridges, and temporary towns along the riverbanks, tall forests of pine on the canyon walls and rims had been clear-cut. As a result of these activities, thousands of tons of topsoil were lost to erosion.

  With the invention of water cannons to blast gold out of higher ground away from the river—a process known as hydraulic mining—the Gold Rush became a water rush. Mining and water companies diverted hundreds of streams into ditches cut across the canyon walls to the mines. By 1867 all of the miners' aqueducts in Placer and El Dorado Counties, placed end to end, would have stretched from there to Minneapolis. For three decades, hydraulic miners committed mayhem in the Sierra. When it was over, 255 million cubic yards of mine wastes and mud had gone down the American River alone, the equivalent of 25 million full-sized semi dump-truck loads. Over a century after they closed, the hydraulic mines remain—miles of barrens bleeding mercury into the river, like the one in which Mary Murphy's boyfriend was probably manufacturing methamphetamine. After the hydraulic mines shut down, for several decades one-hundred-foot-long bucket-line dredges churned the material hydraulic miners had washed into the beds of the North and Middle Forks for gold they had missed, while above them the canyon walls were overgrazed by cattle, mined for limestone, cut over for second-growth timber, and burned repeatedly by human-caused fire. To make the area safe for cattle and just on general principle, mountain lions, bears, and coyotes were tracked down and exterminated.

  In the early twentieth century the water rush continued, now supplying irrigated agriculture, cities, and hydroelectric power stations. Improvements in technology made it possible to build dams that could inundate whole landscapes, and the water and electricity businesses joined forces with the constituency for flood control in poorly sited cities like Sacramento to build them. And so the Gold Rush led to the Auburn Dam and a tradition of valuing what could be extracted from these canyons more than the canyons themselves. Feminist historians have likened it to valuing a woman more for her sexual favors than for her personhood.

  However, most of the human victims of the Gold Rush were men—dissatisfied men; men who left their homes and families in other parts of the world and came to the mountains of California wanting something better. As did people like Ricky Marks and Jerry Prentice in the gold rush of the 1970s and 1980s, the original Gold Rush miners suffered from drunkenness, illness, violence, and poverty more often than they prospered. Historians have estimated that only one in twenty made good. Of the rest, the lucky ones went home empty-handed or found other occupations. The less fortunate contracted cholera, malaria, or other diseases and never went home at all.

  There isn't much left of all the wishes and hopes miners brought to the American River in 1848 and 1849 but a few platforms on the canyon walls and an abiding wildness in the culture of California. In the 1970s the Bureau of Reclamation hired a team of salvage archaeologists to survey those cabin sites, when it seemed their story would soon be lost beneath the waters of the Auburn Reservoir. Digging the telltale benches along the canyon walls, the archaeologists found a lot of broken bottles of the kind that once held whiskey and patent medicines, for all the physical and spiritual ills attending this rough miner's life on the river. I've read the archaeologists' reports, and what struck me was that not a bit of gold was found in the footings of those camps. The gold all left here for a bank vault in some faraway city. What remained in these canyons was a certain way of looking at land, waters, and women and a hollow yearning afflicting some members of every generation that neither gold, nor sex, nor wine or whiskey can repair.

  5 / Rocks and Bones

  WORKING IN THE CANYONS that would be flooded by the Auburn Dam, I couldn't help but become a student of it, in the same way a ranger at a Civil War battlefield can recite the minutiae of Pickett's Charge or the Bloody Road. Soon I knew the story of the dam's political advances and geological defeats, the campaigns to rally its supporters and turn the tide on its critics, and the technical details of what had been done so far in the construction site, which we were required to patrol once a day so the curious wouldn't impale themselves on a piece of rebar or get sucked into the diversion tunnel and drowned. And wherever we went, people asked us questions about the dam.

  One autumn morning I stopped in at the Auburn Police Department to get permission to use their gym for one of my defensive tactics training sessions. While I was there, an officer I knew introduced me to their new guy, Rich Morita, who'd just been rotated in off patrol for his first stint at investigations. We made small talk over Styrofoam cups of weak detective coffee, and w
hen Morita learned that I worked in the dam site, he asked me if I had a few more minutes to talk. I said I did. The officer who'd introduced us drifted back to his desk.

  I followed Morita across the detectives' office to two battered cardboard file boxes on a counter along one wall. He removed a folded piece of paper from one of them and smoothed it out on the counter. It was a primitive computer-plotted map of the lower North Fork and the western edges of Auburn, with a scattering of red stars on it.

  He cleared his throat and began: "I got this from the Bureau. The red stars are old mineshafts."

  "Okay. Go on," I said.

  "On September 8, 1982, a woman named Karen Dellasandro disappeared from her home here"—he dropped an index finger on one of the squiggles of streets in the Skyridge housing development along the canyon rim—"where she lived with her husband and two kids. He was a sheriff's deputy."

  "Right. A sergeant at the jail. I've met him, and I've heard the story—a little of it, anyway," I said.

  Morita corrected me: "He's not with the Sheriff's Department anymore. He transferred to the Southern Pacific Railroad Police, but he still lives around here. Anyway, there was a missing persons investigation by Auburn PD, and over the months that followed it began to be looked at as a possible homicide and focused on her husband as a potential suspect. But here's the problem—"

  "I know," I interrupted him. "No body."

  "Right. No body. She was never found. And no murder weapon or anything else that could bring the case to trial as a homicide."

  "So?" I asked him.

  "Well," he continued, "during the first investigation they tried about everything they could think of to find her, and around Thanksgiving of 1982 they even consulted a psychic. The psychic told them she'd seen Karen's grave around the arch of the dam's foundation, downhill from those radio towers on the hill by the Auburn Dam Overlook—you know the place, less than half a mile from the Dellasandro home."

  "Yeah, I know the place."

  "On the fourth of December, the sheriff's search and rescue team assisted our detectives in a ground search of that area with four of their dogs. It was one of several searches they made in various areas of the county around that time, most on hunches and tips and few, if any, on solid leads. Anyway, I guess by that time there wasn't much construction going on, and—"

  "But a psychic—I mean, that's really grasping at straws."

  "Well," he replied, "it's the closest open land. It's less than five minutes from their house, so he could have left his kids asleep in their beds that first night. The place was deserted once the Bureau people went home at five. And our profiler from the FBI says, based upon what is known about the type of crime, he would have put her body somewhere close where he could keep an eye on her. It's about control—"

  Again I interrupted him. "And of course, once the Bureau gets everything worked out with the dam, the grave goes under a couple of hundred feet of water."

  "That too." He nodded patiently. "Anyway, the psychic said she saw a grave, a mound of earth, I guess—and in the ground search they didn't find anything recent enough to dig up. But they found three old mineshafts, or what they described as mineshafts, and for some reason—maybe they ran out of time, or they hadn't brought lights and caving equipment—they didn't search them."

  "And..."

  "And there's a note in the report ..." He rifled through the stacks of manila folders in one of the boxes. "Well, it's here somewhere—saying the PD was going to come back and look in them later. But I've gone through the rest of the reports, and there's no indication we ever did."

  "I'm getting your drift."

  "Yeah," he said. "That's what I want to ask you. Do you know of any mineshafts on that side of the dam site? They're not on this map the Bureau made for me."

  "Well," I responded, "I don't recognize the particular mineshafts you're referring to, but I can tell you that there are old mineshafts all over in these canyons, and a lot of them are not on present-day maps. And the dam site is full of things that look like old graves—miles of slit trenches the geologists dug and then filled back in, to study potential faults after the Oroville earthquake. And the rocks under the dam? They're like Swiss cheese ... there's over nine thousand feet of abandoned underground tunnels, drifts, and raises under the dam site, and over a hundred thousand feet of bore holes they made taking core samples."

  Morita was looking at me. "You think she's in there, don't you?" I said.

  He shrugged.

  At that point a blue-uniformed receptionist stuck her head through the door and called Morita to the front counter to talk to a witness who'd come in about another matter. Morita excused himself. I was left looking at the map of those mineshafts and wondering if I'd been feeling a little down when I'd walked in there, or if it had come on during our discussion. Maybe it was just the time of year.

  By September the foothills were worn out from the deprivations of the dry season, and everything waited breathlessly for rain. The dusty trails in our canyons were covered with the riverine tracings of whiptail lizards and racer snakes, and although it was still hot, there was a certain aging of the light. The smoke from the burning stubble on the rice fields down in the valley backed up against the mountains, and the lowering slant of the sun through it brought a nameless melancholy to the mornings of the well-adjusted, and to the desperate, more desperation. What had you done, now that the year was three quarters gone? What had your life come to? What of the New Year's resolutions you'd made? The dry weeds stood in silent ranks on the roadsides, the wind didn't blow the smoke away, and at the Maidu graveyard across Auburn-Folsom Road from the Indian Rancheria at the south end of town, bunches of faded plastic flowers and abalone shells from the coast were arranged on the bare humps of red clay between the dry grass. Many of the graves had only the crudest markers, a name painted by hand or applied in adhesive mailbox letters on a ceramic patio tile, laid upon the mound. Others had no markers at all.

  Of course, for most of the time there have been human beings that is all we could expect, an unmarked grave. But we want better than that now. We want order, completion, closure, a granite monument, a public mourning, and in the event of some wrongdoing, an orderly assignment of it to the culpable. So when Morita came back, I offered to help. My involvement in the case would never be anything more than peripheral, but for the rest of that fall I did what I could to help them find Karen.

  In the photograph they'd used on the missing-person poster, she was pretty, in her late twenties. Her dark, glossy hair cascaded in curls just past her shoulders, and her blue eyes sparkled with intelligence. Her smile was broad and generous, accentuating her cheekbones and perfect teeth and the little dimple in her chin. Morita told me she'd been a stay-at-home mother, but in the photo she wore a navy blue blazer and a high-necked white blouse with a little lavender bow at her throat. She looked like a job applicant, one most of us would have been pleased to hire.

  Skyridge, where she'd lived, was a lakefront subdivision still waiting for its lake. The more expensive homes would have a view of the lake whenever it was finished, but Les and Karen's wasn't one of them. Theirs was what real estate agents call a starter home, an arrangement of shed-roofed lean-tos with an attached garage, sheathed in regrooved plywood stained gray with white trim. It was located at the end of a cul-de-sac where the developer had wrung one more awkward lot out of his acreage. The back of the house was hard up against a steep, wooded hillside, and from the west wall the ground fell away into a swale. In the swale was a barbed-wire fence, and on the far side was a cow pasture, and on the far side of that, the Stations of the Cross on the grounds of the Our Lady of Mercy nunnery. At the south end of the same pasture was the Indian graveyard.

  Thirteen years after his wife disappeared, Les Dellasandro went to court to have her declared legally dead so he could sell their home. It had been rented out for years by the time I got involved, and the tenants had used it hard. The untrimmed oaks had grown in around it as if i
n shame, and the garage door sagged under its own weight and the weight of whatever had happened inside it on September, 8, 1982, when the house was new and Karen and Les's kids were little.

  In 1966, after the Bureau of Reclamation received a $425 million appropriation to construct the Auburn Dam and the Folsom South Canal to carry the water away, the agency found out that the dam they'd sold Congress wasn't practical. There simply wasn't enough low-value land in the immediate vicinity from which to quarry the huge quantities of fill needed to build it. A 685-foot earth and rock dam of the kind the Bureau had proposed would have required the strip-mining of five square miles to a depth of 30 feet. But the site was right next to Auburn, the county seat of Placer County, and surrounded by residences, cattle ranches, and orchards. So in 1967, after evaluating more than thirty alternatives, the Bureau announced a new, daring design. It would be the largest double-curvature thin-arch dam ever built, 196 feet thick at its base but only 40 at its over-three-quarters-of-a-mile-long crest, a veritable eggshell of steel-reinforced concrete.