Digging Up the Dead

by Jill Amadio

  “I’ve never even caught so much as a glimpse of those animals you told me live on this land,” she complained.

  “The bison are there, all right, but not near the freeways. The camp goes back many miles.” His words were almost drowned out by two teams of military helicopters droning overhead on a training mission as they flew toward the beach. “Looks like the Marines are practicing landings for more deployment to the Middle East.”

  He craned his neck to glance up through the top of the windshield as the noise increased tenfold. “Whoa! Military warplanes. First time I’ve seen them out here. That’s extraordinary.”

  “Why?”

  “We usually see helicopter pilots training at this marine base, not war planes.” They were silent for several miles, Tosca feeling blessed that J.J. had chosen a civilian career despite its dangers on the race track.

  Thatch left the freeway at Route 79 South, then took Route 76 East. As they passed vineyards and wineries, Tosca expressed her surprise, saying she thought all California wines came from Napa and Sonoma in Northern California.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Thatch, “this area here, Temecula Valley, has more than two dozen wineries. We could take a tour sometime.”

  “All right, as soon as I solve Sally’s murder.”

  Two huge color billboards advertising the Pechanga Casino came into view with photos of the resort and casino, showing its warm adobe exterior, and touting its live concerts.

  “Should we stop and try our luck?” she said. “It looks inviting.”

  “Nope. We’re still thirty miles from the mine. The Pechanga is the biggest casino in California built by the Pechanga tribe. Don’t worry, there’s another casino at the foot of a mountain where the mine is. It’s the marker for the turn-off to Oceanview.”

  Tosca was humming “Musetta’s Waltz Song” from one of her favorite operas, La Boheme, when she saw a large, slab-sided red brick building. “Oh, there’s the casino. How ugly! What was the architect thinking?”

  Thatch smiled. “That’s the power station, honey. Look up ahead to the right. That’s the casino.”

  Situated alone in the midst of vacant fields, the massive three-tiered, ten-story palace rose up from its location on the Pala Indian Reservation like an ancient temple arising from the sea. Imposing by its sheer size, the casino was half-moon shaped and dominated the landscape.

  “It’s bigger than Buckingham Palace!” said Tosca.

  ”Like the design? It was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s philosophy of planning structures to be organic and in harmony with humanity.”

  “That sounds poetic, though I doubt you’ve written a poem about his buildings. In any case I don’t see the connection,” she said. “It’s rather stark standing there, but yes, it is magnificent. Are we going in?”

  “Nope. Here’s our turnoff. We’re not far from the entrance to the property where the mine is located.”

  Thatch took the small lane to the left. After driving a couple of miles uphill the paved road turned into a rutted dirt trail with orange and tangerine groves crowding in from each side. A sign warned that the land was private property.

  “Fiddle,” said Tosca, “I was hoping to pick a few oranges.”

  “There’s a fruit stand near the Pala casino, Tosca. We can stop there on the way home.”

  “You’re no fun, Mr. Wyoming.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  A mile farther on they saw a driver in a large golf cart, waiting outside a chain link fence, the gate of which was open. The driver introduced himself as Tom and told Thatch and the three other people already waiting there to follow him in their cars.

  The caravan of vehicles, two of them SUVs, followed the golf cart up the mountain after Tom paused to close and padlock the gate. Tosca looked eagerly around as the trees and brush fell away to reveal a series of surrounding mountains.

  They finally reached a plateau and followed directions about where to park. Tosca made sure she had her parasol, a large-brimmed hat, gloves and a canvas bag containing the box with the Chandelier tourmaline when she got out of the truck. Thatch retrieved two small red coolers from the truck bed.

  “Lunch,” he explained,

  Part of the mountainside had been sliced off to form a large circle containing fifty small, sturdy wooden tables, half already occupied by eager diggers. On each table were a wooden sifting screen placed over a tub of water, a trowel and a bucket. In the middle of the area was a twelve-foot-high pile of gravel. Off to one side was a shaded picnic patio with tables and benches.

  “Tailings again?” said Tosca, pointing at the pile. “You said we were going to find gems, not dig through a ton of pebbles like we did in the Anza-Borrego Desert before finding that poor boy’s grave.”

  “Calm down, Tosca. No need to get all riled up. That’s where the gemstones are, right there in the pile. You just have to sift through and pick them out. But first let’s go find Jeff Stanger, the owner of the mine, and ask him about the Chandelier.”

  The driver told them to choose a table they’d like to work at, and that he’d be back in half an hour to begin a talk on how to screen for gems.

  Thatch saw that the mine owner had spotted him and was walking toward him, hand outstretched, a big grin on his rugged, weathered face.

  “Hey, Thatch, been a long time. And who’s this pretty lady?”

  Thatch introduced Tosca, who took the box containing the Chandelier tourmaline from her tote bag and opened it.

  “Good lord,” said Stanger, a look of wonder on his face. “Where did you come across this? It’s our mine’s most famous piece, a true treasure and almost priceless.” He removed the Chandelier from its box. “I’m sure you know this is the twin to the Queen Mine’s Candelabra. I can’t believe I’m holding it. It was sold way before my time.”

  He turned the gem around and around as Thatch had done when he first held it in Karma’s living room. Tosca was amused by the obvious thrill Stanger took in inspecting it. “Look at the depth of color,” he said, “the striations, the … Did you buy it?”

  “No, Jeff, we’re trying to find the owner,” said Thatch. “There’s an engraving on it.” He indicated the name on the silver base. “Do you know who this Sunida is?”

  “Man, that was many, many years ago. I don’t know if the previous owner even left a file on it. No one’s seen it for decades, and I was told the buyer insisted on privacy. We might have something. Let me check it out in my office. While I do that, why don’t you two grab a table and equipment and join in the fun? Tom’s about to start his spiel.” Stanger strode over to a motor home and went inside.

  Thatch turned to Tosca. “I’ll get the coolers and put them in the shade.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  They set the coolers on the ground in the lunch area, then found an empty screening table and listened to the mining expert give instructions to the diggers, explaining how to fill their buckets from the tailings pile, the way to handle the washing, screening and sifting process, and what to look for. He held up different gems to show their colors and noted that some minerals of the same kind can be black, green, pink or white.

  “When they’re washed off, you’ll be surprised by their colors,” Tom said.

  He finished his talk by telling everyone to bring their buckets and trowels to the tailings pile and take only half a load, because a full one would be very heavy. Tosca gingerly approached the mound and walked all around it.

  “No gems here,” she muttered to Thatch at her side, “just a pile of small grey stones. Looks like a rubbish heap.”

  “Wrong. There’s a piece of black quartz, see it?” He picked out a tiny dark pebble.

  “It’s microscopic, grey and full of dust.”

  “Wait till you’ve washed it, you’ll be surprised. Want me to fill the bucket for you?”

  “Of course not. Thanks, but I can handle it myself.”

  She moved away, dug into the pile and shoveled the haul into the b
ucket. Thatch did the same, grinning all the way back to their table.

  Tosca emptied the contents of her bucket onto the screening tray, which was sitting above a pan of water, lowered it and moved the screen as instructed from left to right, washing the sand and silt off. Thatch helped her pick out the likeliest pieces to be of interest, naming each one.

  “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “Is this an emerald?”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Sorry, honey, that’s green mica. There’s no chromium in this soil, which is what emeralds need, but look at this quartz crystal, it’s beautiful. It’d make a nice pendant.”

  Thatch handed her a one-inch stone covered in clay.

  “Wash it, and you’ll see how pretty it is. It’s white under all the dirt.”

  “Thank you.” She placed the gemstone in her screen that contained some of the tailings she hadn’t yet cleaned, lowered it into the pan of water and again moved the screen from side to side before raising it. She picked up the crystal, exclaiming, “You’re right, it is a beautiful little piece. What luck!”

  Her enthusiasm for going over to the pile and filling her bucket again increased. Thatch advised her to search for pieces with vertical striations and any that looked like small sticks of candy or pencils.

  After they had filled their buckets twice more and repeated the process of washing and sifting, Bill announced a break for lunch, and everyone went over to the patio area and their coolers.

  “What did you bring to eat?” said Tosca.

  “Cornish pasties.”

  “No! Where did you find them?”

  “At an Indian grocery store in Irvine. They were frozen, but they’re made and imported from jolly old England. I heated them up before we left, so they should still be warm.”

  “Probably been frozen for years, but I appreciate the thought. Let’s give them a try.”

  She unwrapped one and bit into the pie crust, which was shaped in a half-circle and fluted at the edges. Gravy, peas and small pieces of meat and potatoes spurted out onto the picnic table, missing Tosca’s T-shirt by inches.

  “Wonderful!” She pronounced the pasties as close to perfect as she’d ever tasted and asked Thatch for the grocery store’s address, adding, “Of course, not quite as good as Mr. Kernow’s shop in St. Ives, but very, very close.”

  As they finished lunch Stanger, waving a slim envelope, called out to Thatch and Tosca to join him in the motor home.

  “Hey, I’m glad I was able to find this,” he said when they were inside. “It was in an old file folder I hadn’t opened in years. Guy by the name of Norman Sanderson bought the Chandelier from this mine three decades ago, according to the receipt, and had it hand delivered to a Sunida Sittikul in Laguna Beach. Is that any help?”

  Tosca whooped with delight. “Our mystery woman who’s connected to our case! This gets better and better.”

  Thatch was more reserved. “Calm down, honey. Don’t go jumping to your usual conclusions here. Jeff, is there an address?”

  “Yep. I guess it’s okay to give it to you.”

  Stanger opened the envelope, extracted a receipt, copied the address down on a piece of paper and handed it to Thatch.

  “I’d be interested to hear more about this when you’ve found the owner,” said Stanger. “Oh, by the way, let me show you a couple of other great pieces we found. I know you’ll appreciate them, Thatch.”

  He went to the back and returned with a crystal the size of a large baking potato, explaining it was the biggest, most lustrous and colorful dark kunzite yet extracted from one of the pockets in the mine.

  “And here’s a classic smoky quartz on microcline,” he said, holding out a palm-sized, two-toned, light and dark green gemstone that glittered in the sun.

  At Tosca’s puzzled expression Thatch explained that microcline was a mixture of minerals that share the same chemistry but have different crystal structures.

  “It’s a semi-precious stone and often pink, brown or green. Many of them are translucent, like this one,” he said.

  They exchanged a few more pleasantries with Stanger and left, Tosca clutching both the box and the paper with the address. Thatch carried a small plastic bag half-filled with the small pieces of black, aquamarine, pink and crystal gems they had found in their buckets.

  “Here, Tosca, these are for you,” he said, handing her the bag after they got into the truck. “Not worth much, but since we can take home anything we find at no cost, you should keep them as a reminder of your mining experience. It wasn’t so bad, was it? Besides, these gems were dug with love.”

  “All right, thank you. I could put them in the bottom of an aquarium, if I had one. But ‘dug with love?’ How elegantly poetic.” Her grin softened the sarcasm as she took the bag.

  “If you don’t like dug with love, how about, ‘the poetry of the earth is never dead’?”

  “Did you just make that up?” said Tosca

  “Keats.”

  “What’s the poem called?”

  “The title is ‘On the Grasshopper and Cricket.’ The context is wrong for the meaning I want to convey about our time today, but I couldn’t resist,” he said. “Keats was referring to how the grasshopper keeps his song alive during scorching summers, and the cricket’s song does the same for the bitter winters, ensuring that the poetry of the earth never dies.”

  “That is truly beautiful. I don’t know much about Keats, except that he was a romantic, short in stature, and died young while living in Rome. Oh, I see some oranges fallen from that tree. Shall we stop and get them?”

  In response Thatch increased his speed down the mountain despite the hazardous ruts in the trail.

  “No trespassing means just that, so no, we are not stopping. I’ll buy you some.”

  “Don’t bother, Thatch. It’s just that forbidden fruit always tastes sweeter.”

  He didn’t reply, and Tosca began to speculate on Sunida’s identity.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Could she be an illegitimate daughter of Fuller’s? A long-lost sister? A secret wife? At least she lives near us in Laguna Beach,” Tosca said, reading the address aloud. “But what a strange last name.”

  “Not strange at all,” said Thatch, slowing down at each sharp bend as they descended the mountain. “Sounds typically Thai to me.”

  “Thai? How do you figure that? Ah, you are fluent in the language, I suppose,” she said, clearly in disbelief.

  “No, but I learned a few words when working security for a U.S. president and his wife on their state visit to Bangkok. One of the Thai reporters, a beautiful young woman, at the press conference had a similar name.”

  “Oops. I am suitably admonished.”

  “There you go again, going all formal on me.”

  They reached the bottom of the mountain. Tosca stared once again at the huge Pala casino before Thatch turned the truck to the right to head back to Isabel Island.

  “Tell me more about the beautiful tourmaline and its twin,” said Tosca, “if you can bear to utter more than a few words.” She punched him playfully on the shoulder.

  “I can talk your ear off about rocks and stones, and I know a little about mineral mining,” he said, “which I learned from Jeff.”

  Thatch told her he’d first met Stanger at a gem show where booths were laden with dazzling minerals and natural gemstones of every hue. The Oceanview booth had as its centerpiece a framed poster-sized, full-color photo of the blazing pink tourmaline crystal that came to be called the Chandelier. One of the largest and its most renowned find since the mine opened in 1907, the tourmaline was famous for its three pipes that resemble holders for tiny candles, although that is equally true of the Candelabra.

  “The Chandelier’s various shades of pink, lavender and mauve are magnificent,” said Thatch. “I was instantly smitten and began going to the local mineral mines for digs. It’s great fun, and a day up in these mountains is a pleasure. It’s an active mine and one of the few that allows t
he public to spend a day digging.”

  “Did you ever find any wonderful gems?” said Tosca.

  “Nope. Some chips of black tourmaline, a chunk of aquamarine, and a few pieces of kunzite, but nothing that was worth much in terms of money. To me, it’s the anticipation, the discovery, not the end result that counts. Plenty of amateurs come here, some regularly, hoping for a big payday. Did I tell you about the Empress of China?”

  “Is that another great find? A piece of tourmaline like the Chandelier?”

  Thatch let out a hearty bellow and shook his head. He took his right hand off the steering wheel and patted Tosca’s thigh.

  “Sorry,” he said, “but I can see why you would think so. No, she was a real person.”

  He told her of a legend, that the last Empress of China, Tzu Hsi, had a passion for pink and red gems. In the early 1900s tourmalines in various colors were being found in the Big Kahuna Zone around Pala mines. Tiffany and other American jewelers sold the crystals for carving to local Chinese jewelers. When the Empress saw the bracelets and necklaces brought to her in China, she fell in love with them and sent her people to the Pala mines to buy up vast quantities of the gemstones. She loved every variation of the color pink and had it fashioned into jewelry, embedded into custom-made ceramic dishes and even into a stone pillow she was said to sleep on.

  “What a fascinating story,” said Tosca. “Do the Chinese still buy from the mines?

  “I doubt it after China became Communist, and luxury was prohibited.”

  “Yes, of course, I forgot, although these days the rich Chinese are buying tons of American real estate. Oh, we’re almost home. What a splendid day we’ve had. Wait till I show these gems to J.J.,” she said, rattling the small plastic bag Thatch had given her.

  They crossed the narrow bridge onto Isabel Island, and Thatch stopped his truck in front of Tosca’s house. As she alighted, prepared to invite Thatch in for a nightcap, she paused and held up her hand.