Where Echoes Live

by Marcia Muller

  MARCIA

  MULLER

  WHERE ECHOES LIVE

  A SHARON MCCONE MYSTERY #11

  For Virginia and William Campbell Gault

  Copyright © 1991 by Marcia Muller

  First AUDIOGO EBOOK EDITION, April 2012

  All rights reserved.

  Cover illustration by Rick Hyman

  Cover design by Violet Kirk

  Digital Editions (epub and mobi formats) produced by Booknook.biz

  More of Marcia Muller’s SHARON MCCONE series are available as ebooks and audiobooks from AudioGO!

  1 Edwin of the Iron Shoes

  2 Ask the Cards a Question

  3 The Cheshire Cat’s Eye

  4 Games to Keep the Dark Away

  5 Leave a Message for Willie

  6 There’s Nothing to Be Afraid Of

  7 Eye of the Storm

  8 There’s Something in a Sunday

  9 The Shape of Dread

  10 Trophies and Dead Things

  11 Where Echoes Live

  12 Pennies on a Dead Woman’s Eyes

  Plus two short story collections: McCone and Friends, and The McCone Files.

  While Tufa Lake and Promiseville are fictional locales, the author has drawn inspiration from Mono Lake and Bodie, California. She wishes to express her gratitude to all those individuals who unselfishly labor for the preservation of such natural and historical treasures.

  Special thanks to Collin Wilcox and Citabria 11659 for their valuable assistance.

  WHERE ECHOES LIVE

  Contents

  Part One: Tufa Lake, California

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Part Two: San Francisco

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Part Three: The Fire Mountain

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Part One

  Tufa Lake, California

  One

  Tufa Lake lies in the high desert of northeastern California, only miles from the Nevada border. The land there is volcanically formed; dark basalt hills surround the lake basin on three sides, and on the fourth is a chain of pumice and ash-shrouded craters. Between them and the shoreline spreads an alkali plain covered by sagebrush and tundra, and the ghostly white tufa towers that stand as mute testimony to man’s greedy abuse of his environment.

  These knobby pinnacles of calcified vegetation—created by mineral-rich underground springs, and once completely submerged—have gradually been revealed as the lake’s feeder streams are siphoned off for the faucets and swimming pools of southern California. Hundreds of them dot the plain, and others form islands where the migrating gulls, grebes, and plovers come to nest, breed, and feast on the plentiful brine shrimp. More often than not the water from which they rise is eerily still, reflecting the colors of the changeable desert sky.

  In spite of the nearby highway and the lakeshore town of Vernon, this is a place of great silence. Standing at the water’s edge, as I did the first time I went there one October, it is easy to imagine how it was a hundred years ago, or how it will be a hundred years into the future. And when a gull cries and launches itself on a steep trajectory into the sun, the sounds reverberate like gunshots off the surrounding hills.

  This is a place out of time—a place where echoes live.

  I turned away from the lake and walked up the rocky slope toward the cabins. There were six of them, plus a main lodge—built of dark brown wood with green composition roofs and shutters, nestled in a grove of cotton woods and willows. The highway ran between them and a sheer hillside; yellow-leafed aspens grew thick in the hill’s deep declivities, like veins of gold that had burst open and spilled down. Although when I’d arrived an hour before it had been warm—much too warm for this altitude in late October—the sun had dipped behind the high peaks and there was now a pronounced chill in the air.

  I went up the steps and crossed the porch of the cabin on the far left. The small living room had the look of rustic summer places everywhere: a rattan sofa and chairs whose flowered cushions were faded and flattened; a potbellied wood stove in one corner; a Formica-and-metal dinette set in front of the door leading to the kitchen. The smell was the same, too: musty with dry rot, stale cooking odors, dead fires, and age. I went to one of the windows that opened onto the porch, grasped it, and heaved it upward. It gave a weary groan, and then a slightly fishy but fresh breeze began to filter inside.

  When I turned, I saw Anne-Marie’s note flutter from the coffee table to the floor. I rescued it, read it again. “Gone down to Lee Vining to talk with some of the Mono Lake Committee,” it said. “Be back around 5:30. See you then at Zelda’s.”

  I smiled at the fact that my friend had omitted both an address and an explanation of what Zelda’s was. Of course it would never have occurred to her that a private investigator wouldn’t be able to figure it out in a town whose population fell short of the 200 mark and whose streets were not numerous. And it was just as well she hadn’t wasted the effort: I’d spotted the restaurant earlier on my way through Vernon.

  Although it was only a little after four, I decided to check the office Anne-Marie was working out of in case she’d returned early. If she hadn’t, I’d do some exploring on my own. I went through the curtained archway to one of the cabin’s two bedrooms, pulled my favorite green sweater from my weekend bag, and traded it for the light T-shirt I’d been wearing. After I brushed my hair and refastened it in its pony tail, I grabbed my bag and car keys and climbed the slope to where I’d left my MG in front of the lodge.

  Mrs. Wittington, proprietor of Willow Grove Lodge, was cutting back some chrysanthemums that grew in a half barrel next to the door of the main building. She saw me and straightened, pushing a soiled baseball cap back from her forehead and propping the hand that held the clippers on one well-padded hip. As she smiled at me, her suntanned face crinkled pleasantly.

  “Everything okay with the cabin?” she asked.

  “Yes, just fine.”

  She nodded in satisfaction. “You won’t find better—and certainly not cleaner—cabins than mine around here. And off season they’re a steal. Your friend was real pleased with the arrangement we worked out. Of course, I was pleased to have her. They bring their lawyer in, it means those people are serious about keeping this place from going to hell.”

  “Those people” were the California Coalition for Environmental Preservation; my friend and former colleague, Anne-Marie Altman, had taken an indefinite leave of absence from All Souls Legal Cooperative in San Francisco to act as their chief counsel.

  I said, “I thought the problem of the water diversions to the L.A. Basin had almost been solved, just as at Mono Lake.”

  “The diversions? Oh, sure. The state’s probably going to pay L.A. for the water they planned to steal from us.” She snorted derisively. “No, that’s not the big problem anymore. It’s the gold mining.”

  “Gold mining?”

  “Out Stone Valley way.” She waved the clippers to the east, toward Nevada. “Was a boom town there in the late eighteen hundreds—Promiseville. Petered out in the twenties. Since then there’ve always been a few prospectors in the valley, mainly folks who just
want to be left the hell alone. But now some foreign company’s got hold of the mineral rights, wants to put in a full-scale operation.”

  “And the people here don’t want that?”

  “Hell, no. Do you realize what it would do to this place? The noise. The processes they use—they’d poison the air. Destroy what God has made. Pretty soon it wouldn’t matter if we won the fight to preserve the lake for the birds, the people who love it. We’d have nothing, and a bunch of damned foreigners would have the gold.” She looked around, her face pulling into mournful lines. “Every night I pray that won’t happen, but I’m not sure the Lord hears me. Wouldn’t that be a bitch, if we saved the water only to lose everything anyway?”

  “It certainly would,” I agreed, appreciating both the irony of the situation and her strange conversational mix of religious references and profanity.

  Perhaps the incursion of the foreign gold-mining interests was the reason Anne-Marie had asked me to come here this weekend. In her somewhat hurried phone call on Thursday— yesterday—she’d said only that some things were going on that bothered her and she’d feel better if I checked them out. When I told her that I couldn’t give her longer than the weekend because I’d used up all my vacation days, she laughed and said, “I’m sure your boss will bend the rules for me if I need you beyond Sunday.”

  I was sure of that, too: Hank Zahn, who is my nominal boss at All Souls, happens to be Anne-Marie Altman’s husband.

  Mrs. Wittington was watching me anxiously, as if hoping for some reassurance. I said, “I’m sure the Coalition won’t allow Tufa Lake to be destroyed after all the efforts to save it.”

  “Good intentions …” She shrugged and turned back to her chrysanthemums. “Well, if you need anything down at the cabin, just let me know.”

  I said I would and went on toward my MG.

  I’d owned the red MG for years, since I first went to work at All Souls. Its appearance stopped just short of being scabrous, but in September I’d had the engine overhauled as a birthday present to myself. The trip to Tufa Lake was the first long one I’d made since then; all the way—from the Bay Area to Stockton, across the fiat Central Valley, into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and across Yosemite—I’d carefully monitored the little car’s performance. The rebuild had been worth it, I’d decided, just as a new body-and-paint job would not be. In my line of work, a spiffy attention-getting sports car is a definite liability.

  As I pulled onto the highway I turned left toward Vernon, a mile and a half away where the ridge of hills curved to the east, creating more flatland between them and the lakeshore. On the outskirts I passed a trailer park and a scattering of small houses, mostly of the prefab variety. Then businesses began to appear on either side of the road: a couple of gas stations, a convenience store, a Laundromat, a take-out pizza parlor, a motel that was closed for the season. Unpaved lanes lined with more small homes meandered toward the hills; a white-steepled church was tucked back at the end of one of them. Beyond a boat-rental yard on the water’s edge, a point of land jutted out; on it was Zelda’s—cocktails, steaks, seafood. And beyond that was a sort of industrial-business complex—insurance brokerage, bookkeeping service, well drilling, real estate—consisting of wide-bodied trailers parked in a haphazard fashion on a large paved area. I left the MG on the shoulder of the road and went looking for the one that served as temporary headquarters for the Coalition for Environmental Preservation.

  It was easy enough to locate, because a banner bearing the Coalition’s emblem—a brilliant orange California poppy— hung from one side. An old mint-condition Morgan was pulled up at the opposite end from the steps. Anne-Marie’s Subaru was nowhere in sight, but I decided to go inside and ask for her anyway. As I approached, however, loud voices came from within, the words indistinguishable but the tones clearly angry. The door burst open, and a woman came through it so fast that she lost her balance and stumbled down the steps.

  She was a little woman in her mid- to late thirties, dressed in rugged denims, work boots, and a heavy wool shirt. Her brown hair was cropped short, and her round face was tanned and coarsened from exposure to the elements. In spite of her lack of stature, the way she gripped the railing and righted herself demonstrated wiry strength. She whirled toward the still-open door, raised a clenched fist, and shouted, “You asshole!”

  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 o
nly 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.”

  Two

  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.