Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  “I’m curious to know what drew Sister Sarah to this spot. Why she chose this canyon for her Church of the Spirits.”

  “Probably because it was cheap. A lot of land in this area was cheap in those days. No roads, no utilities. I’d guess it was a pain to live here.” He flipped through the black-and-white photos and paused at a dramatic portrait of Sarah in her white robes, marcelled hair, vampish eyes. She looked more like a silent-movie star, he thought, than a spiritualist. And then he seemed to recall that that was how she had gotten her start. Hadn’t she been “discovered” or something?

  Handing the book back, Sam squinted over at the Winnebago, and said, “I’m looking for our commissioner friend. Have you seen him?”

  “I don’t think he’s home.”

  “Where do you suppose he goes every night?”

  “He’s taking guitar lessons from a retired jazz musician.”

  Sam gave her a surprised look, then saw the wry smile. “Someday, Erica, that imagination of yours is going to get you into trouble.”

  …”My father is a spy and my mother is a French princess who was disowned by her family for marrying him.”

  …”Erica, dear, why are you telling lies to the other children?”

  “They’re not lies, Miss Barnstable. They’re stories.”

  …”Class, Erica has something to say to all of you. Go on, Erica, tell the class you’re sorry for telling lies.”

  “Have you unwrapped the fur bundle yet?” Sam asked, knowing she already had a story for it even though she didn’t know yet what it contained. That was what had gotten her into so much trouble with the Chadwick shipwreck: too much imagination and too much eagerness to know the story. If the facts didn’t tell it, then Erica’s mind did. In her hands a piece of pottery wasn’t just a piece of pottery, it was the anger of a wife furiously working the clay and thinking about her husband making eyes at his brother’s wife— a lazy husband who was no good at hunting so that his wife was forced to labor over pots to trade for fish and meat while her husband considered breaking a tribal taboo that was going to destroy them all. Erica brought passion to her work. No scientific detachment for her. “Look at this!” she would cry, holding aloft a dirty, moldy something, and saying, “Isn’t it great? Can’t you just see the story behind it?”

  The stories didn’t have to be true, merely possible.

  Maybe that was why she was such a loner. Maybe her stories were enough. Sam marveled at the ease with which Erica had moved into the camp, using her few possessions, the way she always did, to transform a tent into a home. She didn’t have a permanent residence; her address was a P.O. box in Santa Barbara. She was incredibly mobile, able to take reassignment at the drop of a hat and often laughingly referred to her “vagabond” life. There was a time when Sam had envied her rootlessness because he himself was tied to a heavily mortgaged home in Sacramento, with his adult children and small grandchildren living a few streets away, and his ex-wife, with whom he remained on good terms, still in the neighborhood, and his invalid mother residing in a nearby nursing home. To be able to just pick up and go anywhere, no explanations, no promises to call or hurry back, had been a midlife dream for him. He had stopped envying Erica, however, one Christmas when they were on a dig in the Mojave Desert and Sam had flown home to spend the holiday with his family while Erica had stayed behind to catalogue bones. He learned afterward that she had had Christmas dinner at the local desert truck stop, sharing processed turkey and canned cranberry sauce with three truck drivers, two California Highway Patrol officers, two young hikers, a local park ranger, and a grizzled old prospector named Clyde. Sam thought it was the loneliest thing he had ever heard.

  He sometimes wondered about her love life. He had seen men come and go in her life, but they never stayed for long. How did the affairs end? With Erica saying, “You have to go now”? Or did her partners soon tumble to the fact that the physical was all she would allow, that her heart was off-limits? There had been a time, when they had first worked together, when he had experienced a brief infatuation with her, but Erica had gently told him that she admired and respected him and didn’t want to risk spoiling their friendship with complications. Sam had thought at the time that she had rejected him because he was twenty years older, but since then he had decided that Erica wasn’t going to let anyone inside her carefully guarded walls. He suspected it was because of her past. No one could say Erica Tyler had had an easy life.

  “I wonder why Jared’s wife doesn’t come to visit him,” Erica said now as she and Sam continued to stare at the dark RV.

  He gave her a startled look. “Jared’s wife? You mean you don’t know?”

  * * *

  “Hi, son, your mother and I were just talking about you and wondering how you were doing.”

  Jared started for the answering machine, then stopped.

  As he dropped his briefcase and car keys on a table, he listened to his father’s voice come through the speaker: “We were reading about you in the newspaper… the work you’re doing there in Topanga. We’re very proud of you.” Pause. “Well, I know you’re busy. Give us a call. At least call your mother, she’d like to hear from you.”

  Jared hit the mute button and stared for a long time at the phone. I’m sorry, Dad, he wanted to say. All the words have been spoken. There aren’t any left.

  Turning on lights and fixing himself a drink, he picked up a fax he had just received from the Congressional Native American Caucus in Washington. But hard as he tried to focus on the words, he finally had to lay the letter aside. His father’s phone call had triggered the pain again, and the anger.

  He began pacing the length of his RV, from driver’s seat to bedroom, pounding his fist into his palm. He needed to go to the Club. He could feel the rage building up in him like lava inside a volcano. Only an hour at the Club, thrashing himself to his physical limits, could vent the power of his fury. But they were closed tonight for maintenance, leaving tigers and tigresses to prowl the streets of Los Angeles in search of outlets for their energies and frustrations. Like most members of the Club, Jared didn’t go there for physical fitness.

  As he looked around at the clutter inside this temporary home/office— the computer that never slept, the bank of phone lines that never stopped ringing, the fax that never stopped spewing out messages, and the papers, stacked, spread, lying everywhere as if a snowstorm had blown through dropping three inches of documents, briefs, memos, letters, deeds, writs— he realized that the motor home, despite its size, was too small to contain both himself and his anger. He grabbed a jacket and flung himself out into the brisk night.

  * * *

  At the edge of the mesa, on a promontory overlooking the ocean, stood a fabulous old Victorian gazebo left over from Sister Sarah’s Church of the Spirits. The builder of Emerald Hills Estates had had it restored and then landscaped the area to make a small communal park for the residents. Unfortunately, the hillside had been declared unsafe and there were warning signs to stay away, so the gazebo was never used. Which was why Erica loved it.

  Ever since she had first started coming here a few weeks ago, she felt a sense of peace in this spot. She wondered if it was because she was away from the camp and her work, beyond the energy and vibes of the enthusiastic volunteers and staff. Or was it simply the ambience of this delicate gazebo, a relic from a more peaceful past, symbol of a simpler age?

  She looked at the book in her hand. What had drawn Sister Sarah to this place? Had she sensed an inexplicable peace on this hilltop, or—

  Erica felt a chill as a new thought suddenly came to her: in those days the canyon wasn’t filled in, the cave was accessible. Did Sarah go inside and see the painting and decide that it was a sign that here was where she should build her church? Sarah claimed to have built her temple of spiritualism in this area because it was conducive to reaching the Other World. But what exactly did that mean? Had she chosen to build her church of the paranormal here because it was called Haunted Canyon?
Was she attracted to the notion that spirits were already supposed to be in residence? Erica had only just begun to read the biography of the enigmatic figure of the twenties, a woman whose face had been known by every person in America, who was seen everywhere in newspapers, magazines, newsreels— a flamboyant personality whose theatrics and mesmerizing voice were the butt of editorial cartoons and social comedians, and yet whose personal life and background were practically unknown. Sister Sarah had sprung out of nowhere, become an overnight sensation, and then had disappeared just as quickly under mysterious circumstances, leaving her church fragmented and in shambles.

  Erica stepped into the gazebo, which shone like a wedding cake in the moonlight, and as she laid her hand on the wood she felt it hum with stories— of stolen kisses and broken promises, of moonlit trysts and séances for the dead. Music and love and disappointment and greed and spiritual contemplation had been absorbed by these old boards over the decades until the gazebo quivered with the remnants of lives that had passed through it.

  Erica looked out at the water and wondered if her mother, wherever she was in the world at that moment— on the Champs Elysées in Paris, on a beach in the Caribbean— felt she wasn’t complete because she had abandoned her child. She is walking through Central Park right now, on the arm of her second husband, a dentist, and feeling that there is a piece of her missing, not knowing that three thousand miles away that missing piece is walking, breathing, dreaming.

  As she pushed her hair back, she realized with a jolt that she wasn’t alone. Someone was already here, on the other side of the gazebo, at the very edge of the promontory. Jared Black! Standing with his feet apart, hands on hips, as if he were having an argument with the ocean.

  He suddenly turned around and Erica was stunned by the expression on his face. It was like looking into the heart of a storm.

  The moment hung suspended between them, like a freak lull in the wind and everything in the night froze for an instant. They had never been alone together. In the weeks since the project began, whenever Erica encountered Jared there were always other people around, issues to deal with and matters to settle. They had absolutely nothing to say to each other in private company. She wondered now which one of them would walk away first.

  To her surprise, Jared turned from the cliff’s dangerous edge and came up the creaking steps of the gazebo to stand beneath the elegant roof trimmed with gingerbread. “Sister Sarah must have preached from here. This structure was designed with acoustics in mind.”

  Erica looked up at the underside of the roof. “How can you tell?”

  “I studied architecture once,” he said, adding with a smile, “back in the Pleistocene Era.”

  The smile shocked Erica, as did the joke. And then she realized that the smile and joke had been forced. He is covering up for something I was not meant to see. The look on his face, his fury at the ocean.

  “I usually have this place to myself,” she said, feeling strange currents in the air and unable to identify them. “The signs frighten people away.”

  “Signs can sometimes accomplish the exact opposite of what they were meant to do.” He fell silent, watching her.

  Erica tried to think of what to say. She had the odd notion that Jared was holding himself in check, that if he let go just a little, if he was negligent in his vigilance for just a moment, he would turn into something he did not want people to see.

  “I’ve been getting calls from Hispanic interest groups,” she said for lack of anything better to say. Ever since the news broke about the La Primera Madre graffiti, Erica was being contacted by people who wanted to come and see it, journalists asking her to comment on what “The First Mother” might mean, Mexican-Americans making a claim of ownership of the cave.

  “We’re the flavor of the hour,” he said with another smile.

  She and Jared fell silent again and Erica thought of a hundred things to bring up that needed to be discussed— her growing concern about the lack of security around the cave, for one— but ultimately all she could do was voice what was foremost on her mind. “Sam Carter just told me about your wife. I didn’t know. I was lecturing in London at the time and was out of touch with the local news. I was sorry to hear about it.”

  His lips formed a grim line.

  “She was so young,” Erica said. “Sam didn’t say how…”

  “My wife died in childbirth, Dr. Tyler.”

  Erica stared at him.

  “We lost the baby, too,” he added softly, turning his eyes toward the dark sea.

  Erica was shocked. Suddenly she felt as if she were standing with a total stranger. “You must miss her.” It sounded lame, but something needed to be said.

  “I do. I don’t know how I’ve made it through these past three years. It just doesn’t seem fair. Netsuya had so much ahead of her, so many plans and dreams. She wanted to redress two centuries of grievances and restore her tribe’s history to them.” He looked at Erica. “She was Maidu. I don’t have to tell you what an undertaking that would have been.”

  As an anthropologist specializing in California natives, Erica was familiar with the story of the Maidu, which was similar to that of every other West Coast tribe. Although they had been unaffected by the Spanish missions, which had spelled doom to the coastal cultures, the Maidu nonetheless met their fate during the Gold Rush, when white men, in their greed for the precious yellow metal, destroyed anything that stood in their way, be it mountains or people. Malaria and smallpox had decimated much of the tribe, and then the miners had driven away game and destroyed fish habitats by using gold-mining techniques that ravaged rivers, killing fish and their spawning beds. Life as the Maidu had known it for centuries winked out almost in an instant.

  “After Netsuya graduated from law school,” Jared continued, speaking to the night, his back to Erica, “she started on a plan to provide housing, senior care, health care, cultural resources, as well as tribal economic opportunities and academic scholarships for her people. But her real dream was to someday see a Native American occupying the office of Governor of California.”

  Erica listened to his words fade away on the wind. When silence followed, and he remained faced toward the ocean, she said, “Netsuya is a pretty name. What does it mean?”

  He brought his gaze back to Erica. She tried to pinpoint the color of his eyes. Steel gray didn’t quite touch it. They were the color of shadows, she thought, and mystery. “Actually, I don’t know,” he said. “Her real name— well, the name she was baptized with— was Janet. But when she took up the cause of her people, she adopted the name of her great-grandmother.” He kept his eyes on Erica. She couldn’t read his expression. There was the anger she had seen since the day he had arrived, but other emotions as well, rippling across his handsome features like the surface of a dark pool disturbed by a breeze.

  She remembered his attitude the day he first arrived here, with a chip on his shoulder, making Erica wonder why he had come with such aggression. She wondered now if it had something to do with his wife. It was well-known that prior to meeting Netsuya, Jared, specializing in property law, had been the legal representative of corporations, heirs, and citizens with land disputes and that it was only after he married an Indian rights activist that he took up their cause. Now it was almost exclusively all he did. Erica imagined some sort of death wish, Jared’s wife telling him to carry on the fight. A ghost was a powerful motivator.

  When Jared leaned against a carved post, folding his arms, Erica was struck by the thought that he was trying to relax, to be friendly. And when he looked up at the stars, and said, “The Maidu believe that the soul of a good person travels east along the Milky Way until they reach the Creator,” Erica refused to let her guard down. Reminding herself that they were still opponents and that Jared’s main reason for being at the project was to take it out of Erica’s hands, she looked at her watch, and said, “It’s getting late and I still have work to do.”

  He brought his gaze away from heaven
and fixed his eyes on a point somewhere out on the black, rolling ocean. Erica sensed that he was weighing something important or wrestling with something internal. When he looked at her, she braced herself. But when he said, “I understand you found something unusual in the cave today,” she had the odd feeling that that was not at all what he had been about to say.

  “You’re welcome to come to the lab and watch while I open it.”

  As they started to leave the gazebo the silence was suddenly shattered by a tremendous roaring sound.

  “What is that?” Jared said.

  They looked up and saw a police helicopter hovering over Emerald Hills Drive, its high-intensity beam focused down on one spot.

  As they ran back down the path and through the compound, they saw a crowd gathered in the street in front of the Zimmerman house. Homeowners— husbands, wives, kids, and pets— holding boxes and suitcases, sleeping bags and pillows. Harmon Zimmerman, wearing an Adidas jogging suit, was shouting at the security guard, who had apparently gotten spooked when he saw all those people streaming through the security gate and so had called the police. Sirens could be heard coming up the canyon.

  “What the hell did you call the cops for, you idiot?”

  “It’s m-my job, sir. It’s what I’m supposed to—”

  “Yeah, it’s your job all right because we hired you, you moron. We’re paying your salary. Why did you call the cops on us?”

  When the flustered guard couldn’t reply Jared stepped in, and said, “The man just told you. He called the police because that’s what he was hired to do. Why do you have a problem with that?”

  Zimmerman turned on him: “And you, hotshot lawyer, between you and that woman” —he jabbed a finger toward Erica— “you’ve managed to drag this out so long that our houses are getting ripped off, our lawns are going to seed. This looks like a freaking ghost town.”