“You’re right,” I said. There was nothing else I could say. I’d just done one of the things I swear I’ll never do. I’d made a judgment based on nothing but vague impressions picked up from sources I could neither identify nor remember. And Christopher Nugent had justifiably nailed me to the wall for being a dolt. I deserved it. However, nothing he’d said diminished the possibility of his wife’s being a killer.
“What will you and Megan do now that the Rainer Clinic is closing?” I asked as he carefully replaced the paint balls and gun and locked the closet.
“It’s no secret that Megan never wanted to be a cosmetic surgeon,” he said as we moved back into the kitchen. “But as the only child she wanted to please her parents, especially Jennings. They’re very close. By the time she realized it wasn’t for her, she was through med school and residency, up for board certification. We were already married then, and we talked it over for months. We wanted a family. Sometimes it’s necessary to punt.”
“Punt?”
“Just kick the ball when you’ve got your hands on it rather than throwing for some elaborate play that may not work.”
“I went to high school,” I said. “I know what it means in football, but not what it means in cosmetic surgery.”
“For us it meant going with what we already had. Megan could work at Rainer, even when she was pregnant, and amass enough income to buy our dream, make some investments. I’d stay home and care for the children, doing my own work around those responsibilities. We’ve got a tract of land in Northern California. It’s paid for. We’ll build a house there, maybe have another child. I’ve got some ideas about sustainable forestry I intend to try. We would have moved there within two years in any event. Since you and the police will soon succeed in destroying the clinic’s reputation with this nonsense, forcing Jennings to close, we’ll go now. This house is a rental. We can leave at any time, and Megan’s more than ready. Our only problem is that Jennings refuses to go with us, and I don’t think Megan and the kids will be happy without him nearby. That’s the difficult part.”
I could hear the wind whipping tree limbs outside, its velocity increasing. There are some dramatic, thousand-foot drops on the switchback road down into the desert from Julian. And pickup trucks with camper shells are notorious for blowing off course in high wind. I wanted to get going.
“Thank you,” I told Christopher Nugent. “The police will probably want to speak with your wife at another time.”
The house looked like a rectangular gray balloon full of yellow light as I drove away. Like something about to pull loose from old moorings that could no longer hold it. I wondered how much of what her husband had told me of their “dream” was also true for Megan Rainer. And how much was the desperation of a bright and educated human being trapped for years in a house with small children, ceaseless domestic chores, and no way out.
16
Hangdog
Julian sits on the crest of the long Laguna Mountain Range, so there’s nowhere to go from there but down. Locals refer to a western descent toward San Diego as “going down the hill.” There is no equivalent phrase for the eastern trip down a road called the Banner Grade and into the desert below. I choose to think this lack reflects a sense of mystery proper to the desert. If that’s where you’re going, you probably don’t need to talk about it.
Usually the Banner Grade is a delight. A twisting road through forests of Jeffrey pine and coast live oak near the summit, it then descends through chaparral and finally the rocks and peculiar plants of the desert. Gold was discovered in the area in 1869, and by 1870 there was an influx of prospectors who created the town of Julian almost overnight. Within steep-sided Chariot Canyon off the Banner Grade are seven old gold mines, including the legendary Golden Chariot Mine, from which two million dollars’ worth of bullion was taken before it closed. Golden Chariot and two others, Cold Beef and Golden Ella, are now mined for the granite blasted apart in the search for gold over a hundred years ago. One of the uses for this granite, I remembered as the wind howled down Banner Grade, is the making of tombstones.
“Don’t,” I said to myself as I felt the truck lurch and sway in the wind. Melodramatic thoughts are unwise in situations of danger. But I can never drive the Banner without thinking about the silent honeycomb of mining tunnels, some collapsed now, most blasted shut and forgotten, hidden inside the mountain. Once in a while hikers stumble over a tunnel entrance half buried in rubble. Occasionally these hikers wriggle inside to explore, only to find mountain lion scat near the entrance and a skeleton in century-old rotting leather boots deep inside. The County of San Diego provides these skeletons traditional burial in a potter’s field, and a handful of strangers always show up for the brief ceremonies. But no one ever knows who the skeletons were.
The train of thought seemed appropriate. I was beginning to think we’d never figure out who the Sword of Heaven was, either. None of the four people I’d interviewed seemed capable of murdering anybody, although none of them was exactly a poster child for stress-free living, either. And although Megan Rainer’s paint ball hobby seemed particularly weird for a professional woman and mother of two, I thought my feeling about it probably reflected nothing more than my own bias. Shooting bullets of paint at people in order to capture a flag before they do is definitely on my list of the Top Ten Most Boring Leisure Activities on Earth. But then, I’m not naturally aggressive and/or waiting for the day I can leave a job I don’t like to go live in the woods and raise herbs. Dreams deferred can make people hostile. But they don’t usually make people murderers.
The first teacup-size splatters of rain blew against my dusty windshield ten minutes later. And at the worst possible point along the lonely two-lane desert road between the Banner Grade and Borrego Springs far below. Yaqui Pass. I’d been afraid of this.
Yaqui Pass is a narrow cleft in the seven-mile-long Pinyon Ridge Mountains below which lies the valley I call home. The first non-natives to struggle through it with horses and wagons were the Mormons, followed much later by General Patton’s troops trucking across the desert and down into San Diego as a defense against possible attack by sea during World War II. Yaqui Pass is at an elevation of 1,750 feet. Just a hill, really. Unless you’re looking straight down all 1,750 off the side of a mountain road while driving a pickup with a camper shell in high winds and rain. Under those circumstances the bottom of 1,750 feet looks as bad as the bottom of two miles. Not that I could actually see the bottom through the black torrent lashing my windshield. But I knew it was there.
There’s no shoulder on the stretch of road through Yaqui Pass. There’s not enough room for a shoulder between a sheer rock wall on the north and a sickening drop on the south. You can’t just stop and wait out a blinding downpour because another vehicle coming from behind would be sure to hit you. Pushing you through the cable-strung guardrail to fall end over end through sheets of ebony glass until crashing below into scenic outcroppings of what geologists call crystalline basement rock. I tried to stop thinking about that as I edged along, tacking the truck against the howling wind.
Instead I tried to remember if I’d seen pictures of a mountain-pass saint in any of dad’s religious books I’d loved as a child. None came to mind, and it seemed an oversight. There are saints for wells and gardens, barbers and drunks. Also barren cattle and balding women. Why not mountain passes, I thought, which are traditionally hotbeds of human drama? But there was one mythological figure I was sure I could count on.
“Lilith!” I yelled to an Old Testament figure who’d love a night like this. “My dog’s outside in a chain link run with only a partial roof for shelter, and storms make her nervous. Really, I haveto make it home!”
In the racket outside I imagined I heard the throaty laughter of an ancient demon who hangs out in wild places because she hates hassles. My kind of demon. The laughter was not unfriendly, merely distant. Like the song of coyotes, I thought. And then I was out of Yaqui Pass and on the easier grade down, down t
o the desert floor. In another twenty minutes I’d be home.
When I got there the rain had blown over, although the wind continued and tumbleweeds rolled across the road like stampeding beach balls. One hit the truck as I approached the motel, stuck to the side for a few seconds, and then was blown loose with a sound like ripping silk. About twenty of them were jammed against the chain link surrounding Brontë’s run when I ran to get her before going inside. That’s why I didn’t see the pink froth at her mouth right away. Or the blood on her front paws and chest. I just reached over a mound of prickly tumbleweeds without looking and opened the gate to her run.
“Come on, girl,” I said, turning back toward my front door. “Let’s get you inside.”
It wasn’t until I switched on the lights that I saw pinkish foam hanging from her jowls and a strange look in her eyes. Confusion. Rage. Shame. On the carpet were sandy wet pawprints threaded with blood.
“Brontë, what happened ?” I said, kneeling to inspect her and seeing bloody scratches on her chest as well. No response but that look which in humans is called “hangdog.” In dogs it says “humiliation.” But I thought I knew what was behind it.
“You saw something, didn’t you?” I said gently as I washed her front paws and chest in the kitchen and then smoothed antibacterial cream on the scratches. “In the storm a jackrabbit or a coyote or something came near the building, using it as a windbreak, and you barked until your throat bled, right? You just went bonkers out there, barking and trying to climb the chain link, throwing yourself against the fence trying to get at whatever it was. Tell me I’m wrong. That’s it, isn’t it?”
The dark eyes still had that odd look, but she ate her dinner with enthusiasm as I scrubbed her thready bloodstains out of the carpet. Then she stood by the front door and whined.
“Forget it,” I told her. “You’ve been outside all day, you’re still wet from the rain, and there’s nothing out there but wind and tumbleweeds. Why don’t I put on a nice CD to calm you down? Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel should do it, huh?”
Brontë is fond of opera, and although this one isn’t a favorite, it does seem to put her to sleep. I, on the other hand, can’t hear “The Children’s Prayer” from it without crying because it makes me think about my twin brother. But neither response was going to occur that night. She ignored the music and continued to jitter near the door, whining angrily.
Maybe something was still out there, I thought. Maybe an animal wounded in the storm. A reptile, probably, flushed from a flooded underground lair and now sluggish and nearly paralyzed with chill. Something cold-blooded and thus unable to regulate its body temperature, stunned into immobility by rain, wet ground, and the evaporative effects of the wind. I had it all figured out by the time I pulled on thick leather boots and snapped the clasp of my waist pack.
“Brontë, stay,” I commanded as I opened the door and ducked my head against the wind. In the beam of my flashlight I saw the tumbleweeds massed against the fence, but nothing else. No half-dead snake, no chilled-out chuckwalla, no baby bighorn sheep lost in the storm and bleating to be fed warm milk from the fingers of a rubber glove. There was nothing there.
Dodging tumbleweeds, I walked to the other side of Brontë’s run just to be sure. The flashlight’s yellow beam captured little pictures set in stark relief. A palo verde limb suddenly white against a tangle of shadows. A cracked granite boulder sparkling with flecks of iron pyrite, seeming to float on the blackness behind it. Cholla cactus and rabbitbrush springing up and then falling into obscurity like puppets on a darkened stage. And then I saw it. Or I saw something. A disturbance in the sandy dirt beside the back of the dog run about three feet from the fence. Something had been there, but I couldn’t tell what. The ground was merely disturbed, not smooth like that adjacent to it.
Animals leave tracks. Foxes, coyotes, lizards, even snakes leave tracks. Especially in wet sand. Falling tree limbs and dislodged rocks can also leave marks in sand, but the limb or rock will still be nearby. There was nothing near the rumpled patch of ground. There were no tracks. A chill spread across my eyes, causing them to narrow as I took the little .38 from my waist pack and thumbed the safety off.
Gun in my right hand and flashlight in my left, I moved past the patch of earth somebody had smoothed, staying several feet away. It wasn’t hard to see the footprints leading from behind a creosote bush toward Coyote Canyon. Human footprints. Wearing shoes. The ground was saturated and soft. Somebody had stood there while Brontë barked and flung herself against the fence. Stood there long enough for her to bloody her paws and chest and throat trying to guard her property, which is the nature of Dobies. They’re atrocious swimmers and mediocre trackers even when trained, but a Doberman will guard its home to the death.
“Good girl,” I told my dog somberly two minutes later. “There was somebody there.”
She continued to pace at the door, but she’d stopped whining. The look in her eyes was now expectant.
“Whoever it was has a fifteen-minute start on us,” I said. “There’s no point.”
Hangdog again.
I tried to think like Roxie and the rest of the world, tried to be practical. The person who had stood by Brontë’s run in a desert storm might be some inebriated camper driven out of Coyote Canyon by the rain, and might be a murderer. Sword knew where I lived, had been there before, and seemed to have some special interest in me. Either way, tracking that person into Coyote Canyon in the dark made no sense. There are a million places to hide out there. Hide and wait. Brontë and I would be like cardboard ducks in a shooting gallery. Or worse.
“Absolutely not,” I told her.
Broken spirit, broken dog. A dog who had failed the charge of her breed. Head down, ears laid back. A dog in ruins, and an Academy Award performance. I couldn’t stand it. In her place, I would want another chance, I thought. Sometimes love means helping a good soul save face. Even when it involves a bit of risk. So much for the rational approach. Which just doesn’t work. At least not for me.
“Oh, for God’s sake, all right. Just give me a few minutes to get less white,” I said.
After changing to black pants and shirt I burned a few pieces of typing paper in the sink and ground the ashes to powder in a bowl. Then I stirred in some vegetable oil, making a black paste, and smeared it on my face and the backs of my hands. The process took an extra ten minutes, which was fine with me. Brontë’s spirit was what mattered. I didn’t want to catch up with the prowler. This would be a charade, nothing more.
High clouds were still blowing west over the mountains, obscuring the light from a quarter-moon. Brontë and I had no problem staying in shadows as we sprinted toward Coyote Canyon. I’d taken only the flashlight and gun and could have left the flashlight behind. The prowler’s tracks were clearly visible in the wet desert dirt. Even in the dim light the tracks held deep shadows. It was too easy, I thought. Almost as if whoever it was wanted to be followed.
Brontë moved swiftly across the familiar terrain, seeming to know what she was doing even though she’s no tracker. From time to time she stopped to make sure I was following, then dashed ahead. At the entrance to Alcoholic Pass, which connects Coyote Canyon at its mouth to Rockhouse Canyon on the eastern side of Coyote Mountain, she stopped again. The shadowy tracks, about the same size as my own, vanished into the pass’s rocky, difficult terrain.
Brontë was happy, no doubt having convinced herself in some canine way that she’d driven away danger and secured the perimeters of her territory. I knew she’d be content to go home now. The purpose of the outing was fulfilled. But I wasn’t quite ready to go.
Alcoholic Pass is a jumble of broken rock that can only be crossed on foot. It opens into Rockhouse Canyon, where there is a dirt road. It seemed likely that whoever had been hanging around my place had left a vehicle on Rockhouse Road, hiked through the pass, and returned by the same route. But why?
My place wasn’t broken into, Brontë wasn’t really harmed, nothing was
done. So why would somebody clamber through a desert pass over cracked boulders, stand around in a storm enraging a dog for a while, and then clamber back over the same boulders? The behavior, I thought, was that of a child. That aimlessness.
Maybe it was just the adventuresome child of people camped over in Rockhouse Canyon, I thought. Maybe the child had wandered onto my property and seen Brontë in her run. Most children like animals, especially girls, and I remembered that my feet had been the size they are now since I was eleven. Maybe the child had wanted to pet Brontë or play with her. Maybe the child had stayed near Brontë during the storm in an attempt to reassure her. I conjured up a vision of a big-footed eleven-year-old in jeans, an experienced desert camper whose parents let her roam free out here, hovering near Brontë and whispering, “It’s okay. I won’t hurt you.”
But why would a child erase her footprints?
“Let’s just go a little way in,” I told Brontë.
It was darker between the crumbling walls of Alcoholic Pass. And the wind made strange sounds as it blew through a thousand rocky crevices. At one point it seemed to be the mewling cry of a cat or human infant. At another it was a sucking roar like a huge whirlpool into which only a fool would look. And that fool, I reminded myself, would never be seen again.
The Last Blue Plate Special Page 18