Sleeping Beauty (46 page)

“Don't you begin to wonder about people's priorities?” Josh asked. “It must be hard to deal with them every day and not pass judgment.”

“Lawyers pass judgment all the time,” Anne said. “I think we're the harshest critics of all because we can't walk away from all the foolishness and lying as if it were a bad play; we have to sit through every last word. We just don't broadcast our feelings; if we're really good, nobody knows what they are. You're the lucky one; your clients have all been dead for four thousand years.”

“Not entirely lucky. Lots of times even a lie would be cause for rejoicing. The silence of the tomb is a definite obstacle to research.”

They smiled together and were silent. Josh refilled their glasses and they sat back in the deep comfort of the couch. Beyond the windows, the lights of Santa Monica were like a mosaic against the blackness, wavering slightly in the mid-September heat; within the room, Anne felt cool air curl softly around her ankles. She sighed. On impulse, she took off her shoes and tucked her legs under her, nestling into her
corner of the couch. “I'm sorry we have to go out,” she murmured.

“We don't,” Josh said immediately. “We could find something here. Mrs. Umiko is off tonight, but we could raid the freezer.” He looked at Anne's red silk dress and paisley silk jacket, her ruby and gold earrings, her necklace of Florentine gold links. “I should be offering you elegance and French cuisine. That's what I planned for tonight. If you choose soup and salad, the best I can do is candlelight.”

“I'll take candlelight as long as it's in this room,” Anne said.

Josh reached to the floor and brought a telephone to the arm of the couch. “I'll call the restaurant. I like your taste; I told you that before, didn't I? This is where I eat when I'm alone. I prefer it to all the restaurants put together.”

“I'm a pretty good cook,” Anne said, “if there's something I can do . . .”

“Not in red silk. Maybe we'll do that sometime, but not tonight. Unless you object.”

Anne shook her head. “It sounds fine.”

“It sounds better than that.” He was dialing the restaurant when the Scarlatti sonata ended. “Would you pick out something else?” he asked casually. In her stockinged feet, Anne went to the cabinet and opened the drawers. Hundreds of discs were arranged alphabetically. She chose Beethoven and Mozart trios, and put them on as Josh hung up the telephone. “Thanks,” he said. And only then, as Anne curled up again on the couch, and the notes of the first trio wove through the room, did it strike her how completely different this was from the evening she had anticipated, or a normal evening at home, when she played her own music in her quiet apartment, and cooked a single dinner in her quiet kitchen, and read or watched a movie in her quiet study. So different, she thought; but how easily and naturally she had slipped into it, and how uncomplicated it seemed.

I'll have to think about that, she reflected. But later; not now. Right now, I really don't want to take the time.

K
eith rushed to catch up with Leo, stumbling over an office wastebasket and jabbing his thigh into a corner of a desk. “Leo!” he yelled as he ran out to the alley. “Hey! Leo!”

Leo stuck his head out of his car. “Something wrong?”

“I want to go, too. Okay?” Quickly, he circled in front of the car and got in on the passenger side. “I want to know what's going on. It's okay, isn't it, Leo? Half the time I feel like everybody around here knows things but me.”

Leo shrugged as he drove off. “You can come, but it has nothing to do with you. You just take care of Tamarack Mountain, Keith; that's all you have to worry about.”

“Well, yeah, but I worry about the company, too, you know. I mean, I own five percent of it that Grandpa gave me, so that makes me an interested party, right? Like if Uncle Charles ever sells it, he needs my, you know, vote. And the company's in deep shit with the water—I know that much—so I figured if they found out what happened, I oughta know about it.”

Leo shot him a quick glance. His sandy hair was neatly combed, his pale, sparse beard neatly trimmed, his plaid shirt neatly pressed. A perfectly presentable, eager youth. It wasn't his fault that Leo couldn't like him. In silence, he drove rapidly through the town. The streets were quiet, now that Labor Day weekend had ended the summer season, and the people who lived in Tamarack strolled on empty sidewalks and pulled into parking places as if rediscovering
their town. The few tourists still there drove into the mountains for the changing colors, browsed in shops for after-season bargains, and sat in outdoor cafés in the warm, slanting sunlight of fall, letting the somnolence of the town slow them down, as it did everyone in the lull before the snows came and the bustle of thousands of skiers. It was a time of year Leo especially loved, when he could imagine the town to be once again an isolated mountain hamlet where everyone knew everyone else and they all worked together to be snug and safe in even the harshest seasons.

But that wasn't what was happening this September. In that beautiful, golden fall, people were fearful, and many were working themselves into a panic. Parents were taking children to their doctors for examinations, meeting in vociferous groups outside City Hall when they went to get water, and writing letters to the
Tamarack Times
demanding to know what the city was doing to protect them. “First the EPA tells us the whole east end isn't safe,” the letters fulminated, “and now neither is our water. Who's in charge around here?”

“Who's in charge?”
It was getting louder. It had started as an anxious question the night at City Hall; now, less than a week later, it was becoming a rumble through the town, building to a roar of worried, angry questions. WHAT'S GOING ON AROUND HERE? WHOSE FAULT IS IT?

And it was easy to find a villain. Leo knew that when bad things happened in a company town, the company always got blamed.

He turned onto the highway that ascended gradually toward the east and Wolf Creek Pass. “So what'd they find?” Keith asked.

“I don't know. Bill called on the car phone and told me he thought they had something to show me.”

“Where?” Keith asked.

“Below the Mother Lode.”

“The old mine? That's nowhere near anything.”

“The drainage ditch,” Leo said. He turned onto a narrow gravel road that zigzagged up a long slope, past old mines almost hidden in brush and gnarled scrub oak trees. A few
minutes later they came to a pickup truck, parked in front of them. Beyond it, the road was blocked by boulders and torn-up bushes.

“Bill,” Leo called, and a tall man a little distance away turned and came to him.

“Glad to see you,” Bill Clausan said as they shook hands. They walked up the slope and joined two other men. “We're sure this is it, Leo. It was a slide, and a pretty good one. Cut through here, crossed the road, and slammed into the drainage ditch.”

“Any idea what caused it?” Leo asked.

“Not offhand. We've been having some earthquake activity the last few weeks, minor stuff, but maybe enough to set this off. This could've been an accident waiting to happen.”

“Keith, go up above and see if you can find where it started,” Leo said. “Maybe you can figure out how it happened. We'll go on down, to the ditch.”

He and Bill made their way down the slope, following the swath cut by earth and rocks as they picked up speed. When they reached the drainage ditch forty feet below, they stood looking at the blocks of shattered concrete. Ethan had built the ditch fifteen years earlier, as part of an expansion of the old water system he had built when he first came to Tamarack. He had built a small reservoir and dam three miles upstream of town, with a pipeline to the water treatment and pumping plant in town. The reservoir was above all the old mines in the area except the Mother Lode, the largest, that once had yielded millions of dollars worth of silver ore. When the miners dug, following the silver veins, they dumped huge volumes of rock just below the opening to each tunnel, where they formed bleak mounds of tailings: black rock and gravel spreading over the green slopes. They weren't beautiful, but the miners were thinking of silver, not beauty. What they didn't know was that they weren't safe, either. They were filled with toxic minerals.

When the miners abandoned Tamarack, water from underground springs flooded the miles of tunnels and flowed out through the tailings, picking up high concentrations of lead, selenium, arsenic, and other minerals before draining
into Tamarack Creek. If it was left alone, the contaminated water would flow into the reservoir and poison the entire water supply. So Ethan had a concrete drainage ditch built to divert the polluted water to a point below the reservoir.

“It did just fine for fifteen years,” Leo murmured, kneeling and running his fingers over the broken concrete. His hand was wet from water spreading through the break, heading downhill, to Tamarack Creek and the reservoir. He stood, wiping his hand on his pants. “We'll get this repaired right away. But the reservoir . . .” He and Bill exchanged a long look.

“We'll have to drain it,” Bill said. “Fifty million gallons of water. And probably dig out some of the mud on the bottom, a few inches down or more; I guess that's up to the testing lab in Denver. Jesus, eight acres of mud to dig up. I can't see it taking less than a month. Maybe two or three.”

Keith came scrambling down the slope, and heard the last words. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “That'll cost a pile. And we gotta keep trucking water in all that time. Wow. What a mess.”

You think the gods are mad at the Chathams and Calders?
Leo had said that in jest, when they'd first discovered the water problem. What the hell was going on around here? There were too many damned crises all at once. It didn't make sense that . . .
Sorry, I'm sounding paranoid.

There aren't that many crises, he told himself. After all, Tamarack's been a resort town for forty years, always growing, and we've had two major problems in all that time: the EPA got interested in us and we had a rock slide, probably because of a minor earthquake. Hardly a reason to think the gods are angry.

“And the newspapers,” said Keith, his words coming faster. “We've gotta keep them from hearing about this, right? I mean, we don't want tourists to know there's like poison all over the place . . .” He saw Leo's face and his voice trailed away.

“Did you find where it started?” Leo asked.

“Straight up, at the bottom of the cliffs. It must've been an earthquake, there's nothing else going on up there. I mean, if
we'd had a blizzard, you know, or lots of rain, I guess that could've done it, but it's September and nothing's been happening.”

Leo kicked a rock and sent it tumbling down the slope. “Let's get the damned thing repaired,” he said to Bill. “Get a crew up here today; at least we'll stop any more of this stuff from going in. And I'll get some pumps from Durango for the reservoir. It'll be easier if we can get it done before it snows.”

They knew they could not; there was always snow by the end of September. But it would melt in the warm days, and it would keep falling and melting until the warm days ended or the snows got too heavy to melt off in one day. Either way, they had to worry about time.
Maybe we ought to sacrifice a goat. Or find some of the old Ute Indians who lived here and ask them to do one of their dances for us
.

Oh, for Christ's sake, he thought impatiently; what the hell's the matter with me? It was an ordinary rock slide. Don't make a Greek tragedy out of it. He walked up the slope, taking long steps amid the rubble of the slide. One good thing about it, probably the only good thing, was that Keith was so interested. Ordinarily he didn't seem to give a damn about the company, and Leo had doubts every day that he'd last long with them. Now all of a sudden he seemed intensely interested, even excited. Maybe he'd work out after all. “Come on, Keith,” Leo said, putting a friendly hand on his shoulder, “let's get back to work.”

*   *   *

“Mr. Durant is here,” Anne's doorman said on the telephone. Anne started to say she would be downstairs right away, then changed her mind. “Ask him to come up,” she said. She never asked anyone to her apartment; even when Josh had brought her home a week ago, after dinner in his apartment, she had not invited him in. But now, she wanted him to see it.

“Good morning,” he said as she let him in. “I'm early; if you're not ready, I'll wait.”

“I just need a few minutes. There's coffee in the kitchen.”

Left alone, Josh found the coffeepot and a mug. Sipping
coffee, he leaned against the kitchen door and gazed at the long living room, with the dining table at one end, flooded with sunlight from a wall of glass. Everything was white. There were a few startling touches of color, but the overwhelming impression was of whiteness: white wood floors painted to a high gloss, white couches and armchairs, white walls, white steel lamps, and steel tables with glass tops. After a minute, Josh was able to focus on the colors: the dining table was dark green granite; on it was a maquette of a Wolock Werner acrylic sculpture. The rugs within the two groups of furniture were Orientals in shades of rose, blue, and green. On the walls were abstract paintings, vivid swirls of color that Josh recognized, by Zorach, Putterman, O'Keeffe, Bartlett, and Rothenberg; all women, he noted.

Anne set her suitcase beside the front door. She wore narrow black jeans and a white silk shirt. “I'm about ready,” she said, and began letting down the translucent, accordion-pleated shades at the living room windows. “Do you want to see the rest of it before we leave?”

“Yes,” Josh said. He followed her past the all-white kitchen into a short hallway, and looked into what was clearly Anne's bedroom: an exquisite room with a pale green needlepoint carpet, a white quilt stitched with white flowers, and celadon-and-white-striped draperies and upholstered furniture. It was a cool, serene room. Josh paused in the doorway, trying to imagine a passionate moment or thought or dream occurring within it. He could not.