Where Echoes Live (2 page)

A man appeared in the doorway—very tall, lanky, curly haired, and amused. He said, “Lily, you're getting too refined for my taste.”

“Fuck you, you fuckin' tree hugger!”

The man shook his head. “There you go again, sweet-talking me.”

The woman quivered with rage. She stomped her booted foot, then pivoted and strode across the pavement toward the road. As she passed me, I heard her mutter, “Goddamn son of a bitch bastard!”

When I looked back at the trailer, the man was still standing in its door, grinning. He said to me, “You've got to admire her grasp of the English language.”

“Uh, yes. Who is she?”

“Ms. Lily Nickles. The Tiger Lily, they call her.”

“And what was that all about?”

“Nothing much. Lily's just kind of …combative. After you've been around her awhile you realize it's all a front. She figures a prospector has to be tough.”

“She's a prospector?”

“Yeah, Lily's the most die-hard miner in Stone Valley.”

I glanced toward the highway. Lily Nickles was climbing into a dusty tan Jeep parked a few yards from my car.

The man asked, “You looking for someone?”

“Anne-Marie Altman.” I moved over to the foot of the steps. Up close I could see he was about my age and attractive in a hawk-nosed, droopy-mustached way. His dark blond hair curled over the collar of a suede jacket that had seen better days—no, years—and his brown eyes held an intensity that complemented the sharp jut of his profile.

He grinned again. “You must be her detective friend. Sharon McCone, isn't it?” When I nodded, he added, “Anne-Marie's not back from Lee Vining yet.”

“I thought she probably wouldn't be.”

The man came out of the trailer, shut the door, and locked it. As he loped down the steps he asked, “Do you know Anne-Marie wants you to meet her at Zelda's?”

“Yes, she left a note at the cabin.”

“Good. She wants to talk privately with you. Then after dinner we'll all meet back here.”

“All?”

“Well, you, her, me, Ned Sanderman. That's as many as are on a need-to-know basis.”

Odd way of phrasing it, I thought. He made whatever this business was sound like a covert government operation. “Can't you tell me something about it now?” I asked.

“Anne-Marie should be the one to brief you. Besides, I've got an appointment five minutes ago.” He started toward the Morgan in a long, loose stride.

“Hey,” I called, “what's your name?”

“Heino Ripinsky.”

Jesus, I thought, it's no wonder he didn't introduce himself!

Ripinsky must have been used to reactions like mine, because he stopped beside the car, whirled, and leveled an index finger at me. “Don't laugh,” he warned. “Don't you
dare
laugh!”

I controlled the twitching at the corners of my mouth and spread my hands wide. “Me? Why would I do that?”

He
laughed then and got into the Morgan. Over the racket of its engine, he shouted, “You can call me Hy.”

As I watched it roar off toward the highway, I spotted a sticker on the car's rear bumper: Tufa Lake Is for the Birds.

What next? I wondered. I'd been here only a little over an hour and had already encountered three reasonably eccentric characters. Of course, I didn't know why I persisted in the largely false notion that people in small towns should be ordinary; I'd spent a fair amount of time in such places and had found their residents to be fully as peculiar as those of any big city.

I looked at my watch, saw it was only four-forty. I'd spend the next fifty minutes playing tourist, then meet Anne-Marie and find out about this matter that was so serious that only four people were on a “need-to-know basis.”

The area I wanted to explore first was the alkali plain at the south end of the lake, where the tufa towers stood. I stopped for directions at the gas station across from the business complex, then followed the highway out of town for about four miles to where an unmarked, unpaved road branched off to the east and looped around the ashy gray craters. In a recent issue of a California travel magazine I'd read how these “fire mountains,” as geologists have dubbed them, are considered the site most likely within the next fifty years to produce an eruption the size of the 1980 Mount Saint Helens disaster. A 1982 hazard notice of potential volcanic activity issued by the U.S. Geological Survey provoked great outcry in the area, mainly from business people, and the threat of an eruption whose magnitude and timing cannot be predicted hovers like a dark cloud above the craters.

After about a mile, the road swung north again and ended in a rocky turnaround about a hundred yards from the lakeshore. I left the MG there and continued on foot. The ground here was covered by white powder, finer than sand; my athletic shoes raised little puffs of it, and soon the legs of my jeans were dusted. I could smell the lake now: fishy, underscored by a not unpleasant acridness. A chill wind had sprung up, rippling the water. I seemed to be the only person around, although the low growl of an automobile engine on the unpaved road came faintly to my ears.

Ahead of me loomed a petrified forest of twisted, surreal shapes. They stood alone, their knobby limbs raised high, some in interlocking groups—eight, ten, twelve feet tall, stained pink and gold by the setting sun. Clumps of dry vegetation clustered at their bases; ground squirrels darted among them. The cold wind rustled the sagebrush and thistles, kicked up white dust devils, whistled and moaned in the towers' chinks and crevices. The tufa was fully as beautiful as I had expected, but also grotesque and eerie. I felt a chill on my shoulder blades that had little to do with the wind.

Like a child entering the enchanted forest in a fairy tale, I began wandering through the tufa. When I touched a squat, gnomelike formation, its calcified surface rasped against my skin. I pulled my hand back quickly, as if I'd been burned, then laughed at my extreme reaction. The sound bounced back at me from all sides—high-pitched, hollow, and much too loud in the great silence.

Soon I reached the shore. The sun had sunk quickly behind the western ridge of hills, and the water was deep indigo now, faintly streaked with pink. Waterfowl bobbed on its rippling surface, mere silhouettes in the gathering dusk. The offshore islands rose like dark turreted castles.

I knelt down and dipped my fingers into the lake; it was cold as ice. When I raised them and touched them to my tongue, they tasted very salty and bitter. I stood and looked around, trying to imagine the landscape as it had been before man, with typical lack of foresight, began diverting the water of the feeder streams. Where I was standing would have been lake bottom; all the pinnacles would have been submerged, the shoreline somewhere around the outer rim of the alkali—

In my peripheral vision I caught a quick motion some fifty feet away, beside a hunchbacked giant. I peered over there, saw nothing in the rapidly fading daylight. At first I heard only the sigh and whine of the wind; then there came another sound—the scuff of feet running away over the soft powdery ground.

I rushed around the pinnacle. Saw no one, nothing but a more massive formation that completely blocked my view. The scuffing noise had stopped. Only the thistles and sagebrush moved, bending to the wind.

Frowning, I told myself I was being too imaginative. Then the scuffing noise came again, farther to the west in the petrified maze.

I listened as the sound died out. When I'd heard nothing but stillness for a full minute I shrugged and started back toward where I'd left my car. Probably a hiker, I thought, who came out here to enjoy the solitude and was surprised to find another person cluttering up the landscape. Perhaps one of those whom Mrs. Wittington had referred to as “folks who just want to be left the hell alone.” In an area like this—

The roar of an engine ripped through the silence.

At first I couldn't tell where it was coming from. Then I realized it was to the west, the way the footsteps had gone. A squarish shape—some off-road vehicle or a van?—shot from behind an outcropping and sped across the plain toward the junction of the unpaved road and the highway. Driving blind, without even its parking lights.

I ran toward my car, but by the time I got there, the other vehicle had turned north on the highway and pursuit would have been futile. Besides, I thought, what good would it have done? Whoever had been watching me from behind the tufa tower had done nothing threatening or illegal. And whatever made him or her flee probably had nothing to do with me.

Or was this business Anne-Marie had asked me here to look into more serious than I'd assumed?

Zelda's was a combination tavern and restaurant, housed in an enormous and architecturally undistinguished knotty pine structure on the very tip of the point. Now that darkness had fallen, the flashing red-and-gold neon sign atop its roof had been turned on and the parking area was rapidly filling with cars and jeeps and pickup trucks. I'd noticed no other restaurant in town, so I assumed this had to be Vernon's official hangout.

Inside, the building was cavernous and noisy, with exposed rafters, plate glass overlooking the lake, and illuminated beer-sign decor. To the left was a dining room with a dance floor and covered instruments on the bandstand; to the right was a lounge where people stood three deep around the bar. I found Anne-Marie there, defending the second chair at her table from would-be takers. Her willowy body was clad in jeans and a denim jacket; her long legs were propped on the ledge below the wide window. She'd already gotten me a glass of white wine.

“Hey,” she called as I approached, “I'd about given up on you.”

“Sorry.” I slipped into the empty chair. “I was playing tourist and got carried away.”

“I figured as much. How are you?”

“Not bad. You?”

“Tired, but otherwise I feel great. I'm on a crusade, and you know what that does for me.”

Anne-Marie is a veteran of both the fledgling women's movement and the poverty law wars of the seventies; she's happiest when plotting to overthrow the status quo. In recent years, however, she'd languished as All Souls' tax attorney—an area of specialization she undertook more because of the co-op's needs than her own desire. This leave of absence had visibly done her good: tonight her pert blond hair was windblown; her elegant, finely sculpted face was flushed with good health; her blue eyes shone. In the past year or so she'd grown gaunt and hollow-eyed; now she'd fleshed out some, and the extra poundage became her. Seeing her this way made me realize that Anne-Marie had been a very depressed woman before taking her leave. Of course, there had been problems early on in her marriage with Hank, but they'd ironed them out, and after he'd been shot and almost died the previous summer, they'd developed a closeness that was rare even among happily married couples.

I said, “So tell me about the crusade. I stopped by the Coalition trailer and met one of the people this afternoon; he made it sound quite mysterious.”

“Oh? Who?”

“Heino Ripinsky.”

“Ah, Hy. He would.” I was about to ask more about Ripinsky, but she added, “We'll talk about all that over dinner. Right now I want to hear how you've been, what's going on at home.” Prior to coming to Tufa Lake, Anne-Marie had spent a month at the Coalition's Sacramento headquarters and had only gotten to The City, as we San Franciscans egocentrically call it, for one weekend.

“Well, there's not a great deal to tell,” I said. “Hank, of course, has been a grouch with you out of town. We all humor him. Rae—”

“I know what's going on at All Souls; I speak with Hank every other night. What I want to know is what's going on with
you.”

“You mean with George and me.”

She nodded, smiling conspiratorially.

I had been seeing George Kostakos, professor of psychology at Stanford and very possibly love-of-my-life, since July, when he'd returned to me after six months of coping with his estranged—now former—wife's mental breakdown and recovery. The half year before that had been a very bad one: not only had I begun to doubt George's stated intention to come back to me after he put his life in order, but I'd also begun to doubt my willingness to allow him back into mine. But with the resumption of our relationship, my reservations had vanished; I was happier now than I'd been in years. Not that a few dark clouds didn't remain on the horizon….

“Well?” Anne-Marie said.

“Well … he wants me to move in with him.”

“And?”

“I don't know if I can do that.”

“Shar, why not? George is a wonderful man.”

“I don't know…. I guess I need my own space.”

“I'm sure there's plenty of space for both of you in that enormous condo of his.”

“But there's my house—I've finally got it fixed up the way I want it. And Ralph and Alice—”

“Cats? You'd sacrifice George for a couple of
cats?”

I glared at her. One of the few things she and I don't agree on is the merits of the feline species. She's allergic to them and seems to take the wheezing and sneezing they produce in her as a personal affront. “Ralphie and Allie are family,” I said firmly.

  “So take them along. George is a cat person, isn't he?”

“Yes—unlike some people I know. But we're talking outdoor cats here. George's flat is on the second floor, and there's no place for them to roam but a courtyard where they'd dig up the flower beds. They'd go crazy cooped up inside, and they'd drive
us
crazy.”

Anne-Marie raised her eyebrows and sighed. “Why do I feel I'm not getting the whole story?”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

She merely stared at me, waiting.

“All right.” I looked down and began fiddling with my cocktail napkin. “He's also started talking about marriage.”