Fatalis (2 page)

She was still trembling.

It was as though the fast-moving clouds had snagged and torn on the sharp mountaintops. Thick beads of rain fell suddenly, pelting the sandstone crags and beating down the wildflowers and ferns that covered the higher slopes. Rushing water cut deeper into the gullies, washing dirt from the underlying shale and spilling it onto the ridges below.

The rain also pounded the homes scattered through the high foothills. It drummed on rooftops, windows, and decks. It flooded storm drains and garages and uprooted plants.

At one house the rain slashed through the low hedges and dissolved a small, discarded cardboard box that lay beside them. The downpour ate away dog biscuits that were inside the box and washed them toward the house. There, the crumbs mixed with ruddy streams that were swirling off the stone walk, running down the front door, and dripping from the windowsill.

Streams of blood, all that remained of a bobcat on its final hunt.

Jim Grand was having trouble sleeping. Again. Wearing white boxer shorts and lying on a twin bed tucked in a corner of the bedroom, Grand stared up with his arm thrown behind his head. Rain pelted the roof and a streetlight threw gray, watery shadows on the ceiling.

Grand's black Labrador retriever, Fluffy-Rebecca's joke name for the sleek-haired monster-was flopped across the foot of the bed. The dog's legs were pointed toward Grand, his head half off the far corner of the bed. The Chumash had always said that animals were better suited to this world than we were. Fluffy was certainly evidence of that. He was breathing easily, occasionally
woofing
softly from somewhere in dog dreamland.

As Grand watched patterns on the ceiling melt one into the other, he couldn't help but think of happier shadows. The ones he lost when Rebecca died nine months before. Those were the reason he was still awake. He thought of Rebecca at their small home, where they hardly ever were because they were always doing things and going places. On her boat, in their plane, across a restaurant table at the god-awful Chris's Crinkles-she loved the fries, the more burnt the better-at the movies, or beside him in the car on a long weekend, a map in her lap and no destination in mind. Whatever they were doing she was as curious and outgoing and
fun
as the day he met her.

This isn't good
, he told himself. Grand's eyes grew damp. He had to stop this and get to sleep.

The ancient Thules of Alaska believed that spirits existed by feeding on belief and that turning away made them go away. Grand forced himself to think about something else. Like the newly uncovered cave he was going to explore above Arrowhead Springs. Or a student he hadn't thought of in years.

Anything.

But it was night, and because it was dark and quiet his mind went where it wanted to go. Whichever way Grand tried to go his thoughts always cycled back to Rebecca. How the
hell
could he not? The first time Grand spoke to her, that cold day on the beach near Stearns Wharf-when he was gathering shells to make prehistoric utensils and she was bagging kelp for research-he knew they'd be together forever. She was just so happy, bright, and self-effacing.

Except when someone screwed with her fish
, he thought with a smile.

Like the evening she confronted the oceanographer whose deep-sea research with bright lights was blinding shrimp. She threatened to burn his house down if she found one more shrimp with chalky-white eyes and degraded photopigments. Grand was the one with the massive rock-climbing biceps and chest but Rebecca was the scary one when enraged.

And then the smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and the emptiness and tears returned.

Grand turned to his left and looked at the clock on the nightstand. It was nearly one-thirty. He had spent over two hours jumping from one thought to the next. This was going nowhere.

Throwing off the top sheet, the thirty-five-year-old paleoanthropologist sat on the edge of the bed and stared at nothing. Fluffy lifted his large head and looked back.

"It's okay," Grand said softly.

Fluffy continued to look at him.

"Go back to sleep."

At the word "sleep," Fluffy put his head down. He knew the drill.

Grand had hoped that things would start changing when he bought this house on Kent Place nearly six months before. A quiet, dead-end street in Goleta, west of Santa Barbara. A different environment. That should have created new dynamics, helped keep Rebecca in his heart and memory.

He was wrong. Grand desperately missed the house on Shoreline Drive, a sunny Mediterranean his wife had picked out for them and decorated. He'd never had trouble sleeping with her beside him. Though he and Rebecca had a king-size bed, they always ended up in a less-than-twin-size space somewhere around the middle. She loved being rocked by him and lullabied by the nearby sound of the surf. If anything, moving here had left him feeling another degree removed from her and he missed her even more strongly. He could still feel her nakedness and warmth in his empty arms-

He put his strong, calloused hands on his scarred knees. He needed to be rested and clearheaded when he went back into the cave, and sitting here thinking wasn't going to help. Maybe if he weren't in bed where Rebecca's absence was so keenly felt. Maybe then he could sleep.

You weren't there for her
-

Grand pushed himself up and walked into the short corridor with its framed degrees and photographs on the wall, all of them crooked and dusty. The hall ended in a small living room where there were three walls of bookcases, their shelves overstuffed with books, research videos, and artifacts from thirteen years of digs. The front door and windows were behind two of the bookcases. Against the fourth wall was a gunmetal desk he'd taken from the university, a stationary bicycle, a brass floor lamp, a nineteen-inch television, and a secondhand sofa. Everything but the bicycle and lamp was stacked with folders and cardboard boxes. Between the desk and the TV was the door to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen was the bathroom and his den workshop.

Grand turned on the lamp. He wasn't hungry and he didn't feel like going into the workshop or drawing a bath and reading. That left the desk, so he walked over and sat down. But he also didn't feel like editing his paper on the Ice Age caves he'd explored three months before in Greenland or logging on and debating human origins with some armchair academic. So he just stared at his dour reflection in the dark computer screen.

Grand's deepset blue eyes were dark and his wavy black hair could use a trim. He also hadn't shaved in two days. He used to shave every day. The chin was still strong but the long jawline had no meat on it. His face looked thin. Or maybe it only seemed thin because the rest of him was so healthy-looking from all the hiking, climbing, and spelunking he did. It was strange. Hammer the body and it became stronger. Hammer the soul and it grew numb.

Grand shook his head as his eyes drifted from the monitor to the small framed photo on the left, beside the phone.

The picture was of Grand and Rebecca on her sailboat
Kipper Skipper
. He smiled broadly. That had been a perfect day. Great wind but smooth seas, a lot of laughs, and a total surprise when he went into the cooler and came back with tuna sandwiches, iced tea, and a diamond engagement ring. It was one of two occasions he'd seen his stoic little New England Yankee cry with happiness. The second time was when he got a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to explore and map the more remote Chumash caves in the high Santa Ynez Mountains. Even though Rebecca's own funding at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been gutted and her own job was in jeopardy, she couldn't stop hugging him when he got the news. She knew how desperately he wanted to get out of the classroom more and into the field.

Grand felt tears behind his eyes and looked away from the photograph. It was strange. Part of him didn't want to lose the pain, as though by losing it he would also lose the love he still felt for Rebecca. It was a passion he continued to feel, the only one he could express. But he also knew that he needed to let it go. Tears were draining enough during the day. At night they kept him awake, filled his dreams, and left him unrested in the morning.

Grand slid the computer keyboard to the right, then folded his arms on the desk beside the photograph. He lay his head down, shut his eyes, and listened to the rain.

"I'm sorry that you have to see me like this," he said softly, thinking of the photograph. If Rebecca
were
spirit, he wondered what she thought about his suffering. Probably sadness. And what about the little things she'd never have seen when she was alive? Everything from buying products from companies she was boycotting to letting fingernail clippings fly across the room and stay there.

That last, at least, brought him a little smile. If spirits could go
ecch
, she did that for certain.

The downpour caused him to think about the cave and the conditions he'd find in the morning. The mossy rocks on the cliff would be slippery, there might be flash floods from captured rainwater, and rock slides both inside and out were a real possibility. But Grand wasn't worried about that. The danger had always been part of the appeal.

Besides, what was the worst that could happen? He'd be trapped down there and preserved and discovered by some other anthropologist in a few thousand years.

Big deal
, he thought. He'd end his own suffering and he'd make headlines as the Brooding Mountain Man. They'd try to figure out his life and habits from the clothes he wore and the tools he carried. They'd open his stomach and pick between his teeth and try to learn something about his diet. They'd study the fillings in those teeth and the scars on his arms and legs and marvel on how primitive medicine was. But when they found the faded photo slipped into his shirt pocket they'd feel a kinship that spanned every age of human endeavor. They'd know that his ancient man had the capacity to love, and that he'd loved a woman named Rebecca Schuman-Grand.

Grand's tired mind was cycling again but he kept his eyes shut. And as he returned to Rebecca and thought of the picture standing beside him, he no longer felt so terribly alone. The rain turned to sea spray, the desk became a deck, and in a few minutes he was finally able to sleep…

On most days. Senior Structural Engineer Stan Greene and his junior partner William Roche of the California Department of Transportation, Office of Structure Maintenance and Investigations, District 7, would have enjoyed this morning's TroDA-Tertiary Road Degradation Assessment duty. Though the partners had only a rudimentary knowledge of geology, they were already on the payroll. Sending them up for preliminary analysis was less expensive than bringing in a three-hundred-dollar-an-hour UCSB geologist for an opinion. Ordinarily, walking around with a hand in his pocket, sipping coffee and poking dirt roads with toe, heel, or pick, was more fun than being suspended from a windy bridge and taking vertical angle measurements with a Laser Theodolite.

Ordinarily.

Mucking around in thirty-degree temperature at five in the morning on the top of a mountain with a cool drizzle still falling-that wasn't the forty-two-year-old Greene's idea of a fun start to the day. But hundreds of people lived high in the Santa Ynez Mountains. One of them had called the sheriff about a prowling bobcat. After investigating, the deputy had spotted a sinkhole. Greene and Roche were on call; if the only road in and out of the mountains was collapsing, they had to find out where and why and figure out how to fix it.

After getting the call from the assistant deputy district chief, Greene hurriedly dressed and went to pick up the thirty-four-year-old Roche at his foothills condominium. Greene had forgotten to bring his doxepin, the antidepressant he'd been taking since hitting forty, but he'd been feeling better the last few weeks and hoped he'd be okay. The men had driven along rain-slippery roads from Santa Barbara. They beaded up Camino Cielo, the eastern approach to Painted Cave Road, following the snaking dirt road into the mountains. Painted Cave Road itself was little more than a one-vehicle path and Greene took it slowly. During storms, in the dark, branches fell from the overhanging trees and rocks dropped from the ledges, making it especially treacherous.

The men parked their Caltrans van beside the tree-lined ravine. Below them, to the north, the Ygnacio Creek went underground. Up ahead was where the sheriff's deputy had spotted the small sinkhole. They pulled on their orange ponchos, took flashlights from holders on the door, and got out Then they went to the side of the van and retrieved their-large field backpacks. The packs weighed twenty pounds each and contained a small collapsible pick/shovel combination, a digital camera, a hammer, various size pitons, flares, waterproof portable radios, a ten-foot rope ladder, and a first-aid kit.

The men turned on their flashlights and started up the steep, dark hill. To their- right was the tree-lined ravine, which disappeared into the darkness. To their left was a narrow ditch at the foot of sandstone bedrock that rose almost vertically. Greene walked a few steps in front of Roche. The only sounds were the rippling creek below, the rain tapping on leaves, and their boots crunching on the wet dirt The only living things they saw were three-to-five-inch lemony-gray banana slugs inching along the rocks and mulchy sides of the roadway.

"I was just telling the kids that when I was their age I used to play soldier up here," Roche said. "Y'know, we took away a lot of the enchantment up here with all the paving we've been doing. When we were kids it was all mainly dirt. You felt like a pioneer or a soldier behind enemy lines."

"
You
did, Bill. I was busy bringing girls up here to make out."