Mother Nature

by Sarah Andrews

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dear Mystery Reader

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Author’s Note

  High Praise for Sarah Andrews Mother Nature

  Other titles from St. Martin’s DEAD LETTER Mysteries

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Dear Mystery Reader:

  Some of my favorite mysteries are those that not only provide top-notch writing and a suspenseful read, but also take me deep inside a lifestyle or profession foreign to me. Sarah Andrews adeptly does this with the fascinating world of geology in her Em Hansen mysteries.

  As a geologist, Em Hansen has one of the most unique occupations found in the DEAD LETTER lineup of amateur sleuths. Em—like author Sarah Andrews herself—is a professional geologist working in the western half of the United States. But the job market for a professional geologist sometimes gets a little rocky, forcing Em to take on odd jobs—jobs usually involving murder. In her latest outing, Em gets involved in the mysterious death of a fellow geologist who just so happens to be the daughter of a prominent California senator.

  With her high caliber writing, an appealing protagonist, and a mountain of critical praise, Sarah Andrews is an author we really believe in and are proud to publish. Welcome to the world of Em Hansen. I’m confident it’s a world you’ll want to return to for years to come.

  Yours in crime,

  Joe Veltre

  Associate Editor

  St. Martin’s DEAD LETTER Paperback Mysteries

  For my parents,

  Mary Fisher Andrews

  and Richard Lloyd Andrews,

  with great love and respect

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank:

  Deborah Schneider, Elisabeth Story, and Kelley Ragland for championing this book during a tough market.

  Mary Hallock, Clint Smith, and Robert J. Bowman for their constructive criticisms of the manuscript.

  Christine Scheib and Damon Brown of EBA Wastechnologies, Santa Rosa, who reviewed the manuscript for technical accuracy, and who shouldn’t be held responsible for any errors that might have crept back in during final revisions. Deputy Sheriff Will Conner of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, who provided coaching and advice regarding scenes involving the Sheriff’s Office, and who likewise shouldn’t be held responsible for the questions I neglected to ask him. Kim Cordell, hydrologist, for explaining the effects of stream channelization on flood dynamics in the Laguna de Santa Rosa.

  Anne McGinley of Action Mortgage, Santa Rosa, for sharing her knowledge of patterns of development and population growth in Sonoma County. Judy Hubbert of Hubbert’s Training Stables, Sebastopol, and horse lover Rhonda Azevedo, for sharing the trials and tribulations of horse ranching in the wet season. Suzi Kaido and Dick Norton of Manzanas Products Co., Inc., for the tour of their plant.

  Certain parties who shall remain nameless, for being such horse’s patoots that they irked me into writing this story. And last but not least, I thank certain other parties who choose to remain nameless, for telling me where a few political bodies are buried.

  1

  I drove first to the roadside ditch where Janet Pinchon’s body had been found lying in a shroud of dry oak leaves. From the airport, the map guided me northward through a fog-bound city made of sherbet-colored boxes crowding hilly streets, across the Golden Gate Bridge through wisps of cloud and thin December sunlight, and up a congested freeway past the far fingers of San Francisco Bay. I was surprised to find California so dim and dank: television had led me to expect a sunshine-and-orange-groves California with tanned gods and goddesses driving convertibles down wide suburban boulevards lined with palm trees.

  From the north end of the Bay, the hand-drawn map the Senator’s assistant had given me led inland over a hilly divide covered with buckskin-colored grass. The odd round rhythm of the hills was broken by tall windbreaks made of eucalyptus trees, and the sky hung low and gray overhead. I drove in silence, my shoulders hunched close to my ears against the chill, wishing the heater in the truck worked better, and ruing the ignorance that had led me to leave my down parka at home.

  Dank. Dim. Gray. It was fitting weather, to visit a scene of death.

  The pint-sized Japanese pickup truck I was driving puttered along in the heavy stream of traffic as I descended now into a broad plain. The gray overcast bent down to swallow the ground, blurring the summits of the hills beyond. How different from the crisp winter openness of my native Wyoming.

  I held the sketch map across the top of the steering wheel and watched for my next turn, U.S. Highway 12, uncertain from the crudeness of the map how far away it might be. Ten miles later, in the middle of a city called Santa Rosa, I spotted it and swung westward through a grove of pink and white oleanders, leaving the city for its surrounding malaise of suburban sprawl. After a few miles, tract housing in turn gave way to a jumble of chain-link fences, disused land, and building supply centers.

  In an effort to avoid being hit by a kid in a jacked-up truck on monster tires who was making a wild lane change, I missed the turn that came after that. I pulled off to the right and waited for a chance to turn around. Almost two minutes passed before I saw an opening in the rush of oncoming cars. I stomped the gas pedal to the floor and bolted forward, inserting the little truck none too deftly between an Izusu Trooper and a BMW, whose driver retaliated by riding my back bumper like a lamprey, giving me the finger. I had been warned about Californians and their love affair with the automobile, but no one had told me that their love was a jealous one, where too many drivers compete for too little road. As I made the turn onto Occidental Road, I saluted him back.

  Occidental Road carried me into softly undulating pasture land studded with spreading oaks, a landscape that held a sad, winter-dead beauty. In places, the gnarled arms of the oaks almost touched over the middle of the road. The dry stalks of last summer’s grass and wildflowers stood like stiff sentries, lining the sodden roadside ditches with a forlorn trash of brown, unlike the fresh contours of snow I’d seen along the Rockies early that morning.

  The ditches worried me. Most roads in Wyoming have broad crowns leading off to wide shoulders banked to guide the runoff away from the pavement. Here there was no shoulder, and the drainage ditches were as deep and steep-sided as Wyoming�
��s irrigation ditches. They were way too close to the edge of the pavement for comfort. I found myself veering toward the center line of the roadway. I’ve had a phobia about ditches like that ever since my older brother drowned in one of the irrigation ditches when I was a child.

  Beyond the ditches, horses stared glassy-eyed over board fences. Some abstract part of my brain marveled at this luxurious use of wood, where barbed-wire would have edged Wyoming’s pastures. This is Em Hansen distracting herself as best she can from a growing sense of panic, I mused bitterly, and it’s not just the ditches that have her tensing, it’s the job. Her arms and jaws are uncomfortably tight and she is barely breathing. Will she survive this latest flight from reason? Stay tuned for further reports.

  I asked myself once more why I’d let myself in for this task. I’m a geologist, I told myself firmly, not a detective. What am I doing here?

  What’s the difference? a hyperrational part of my brain countered. Geologists solve puzzles, too, so what makes better sense than a geologist being hired to investigate the death of a geologist?

  Yeah, but I used to do the geology first. The damned murder investigations were a sideline. Happenstance. Now everything’s ass-backward.

  Tut, tut. Changes, changes.

  Too much had changed in my life of late.

  The sky seemed to press against my head. The landscape looked closed in, the farmsteads stunted and crammed together, and the narrow, shoulderless blacktop seemed to scrape between those ditches. Each bump in the pavement jarred me, reminding me that I should have used the rest room at the airport while I had the chance.

  I cursed the worn suspension on the tinny little truck and glared out the windshield, reviewing the arguments against hiring me that I had laid out to Janet Pinchon’s father: “I don’t know California geology,” I had said, “and besides, if I drove in there in a truck with out-of-state tags, I’d stand out like a sore thumb. Undercover investigators are supposed to blend in, not rent billboard space announcing that they’re in town.”

  “Rent a car at the airport, with California plates.”

  “No, I don’t think you get it. Rental cars look like rental cars. They have little stickers on the back bumper that say Hertz and National. They have velvet seats and weird dashboards, nothing like what a geologist would drive. They stink of interloper. There’s no way it would work.”

  “Then a private vehicle will be available,” he had soothed. For some reason, this had brought an unkind smile to his lips, as if he were enjoying a joke at my expense.

  “And I cost five hundred dollars a day,” I had asserted, certain this would be a suitably indigestible sum.

  “Fine.” He hadn’t even blinked.

  My mouth had gone dry. I needed that money. It had been six months since Blackfeet Oil Company had disappeared into the dark night of corporate raiding, and I’d become nothing but a shiftless mooch on my friend Elyria, unable to find another job in the oil patch, uncertain where else to go or what else to do to make my living. Senator Pinchon had caught me with my last few petro-dollars huddling for cover at the bottom of my bank account. It must have showed on my face, because his smile had grown much wider. He knew he had me.

  It had taken me fewer than twenty-four hours to pack and make plane reservations, and now here I was in California pretending to be a private investigator. At least I’d had the sense to wear wool socks.

  As Occidental Road began a slow descent into a sleepy drainage, I saw my last turn, Sanborn Road, and took it. I drove more slowly now, watching, staring into the ditch on the right. The spot where Janet Pinchon’s body had been found was marked by an X on the sketch map, but the map had been drawn without scale; the seventy miles I’d traveled between the airport and Highway 12 was three inches long on the map, and the six or seven miles I’d driven since covered four. How far along this road was the site?

  I pulled the truck to a stop and fumbled a stack of eight-by-ten-inch glossy photographs out of my attaché, some ghoul’s overzealous imitation of police photography. Amazing, the people who show up at crash sites, but the Senator’s assistant said he had been able to purchase both the prints and the negatives for a surprisingly reasonable sum.

  The area shot was the third picture down, sandwiched between a grim portrait of the sprawled remains and a close-up of the dead woman’s left hand. Holding the area shot up, I let off the brake and rolled slowly along, scanning the roadside, trying to match the fence posts with those in the photograph.

  A truck thundered past me and I swerved, almost sinking a wheel into the ditch. Papers began to spill out of the attaché and onto the floor, slithering sickeningly, underscoring my growing nausea over what I was doing.

  Stopping again, I set the brake and bent to pick up the fallen papers. As I stuffed them back into the attaché, a crisp piece of blue watermarked stationery broke loose from the rest and slid toward my thigh as if attacking me.

  I pushed it away like it was on fire and covered it with a photograph. What I couldn’t cloak was its presence, or the challenge spoken by the familiarity of that slanting handwriting.

  Snatching it back out of the stack, I folded it twice in places where it hadn’t yet been folded, cast about for its envelope, and stuffed it resolutely inside.

  The damned handwriting covered the envelope, too.

  Ms. Emily Bradstreet Hansen, it read, c/o Elyria Kretzmer, 3236 West 30th Street, Denver, Colorado. The return address was even worse, like a fist squeezing my heart: Mrs. C. H. Hansen, Iron Mtn. Road, Chugwater, Wyoming.

  My mother. She had written to apologize.

  Apologize! As if that could bring my father back, or erase all those years of pain …

  I cast my eyes nervously around at the dim landscape, trying to kid myself that I was now far enough from Chugwater and Denver to escape any more letters. Why did Elyria have to go and press this one into my hands as she drove me to the airport? And why hadn’t I just dropped it in the trash as I hurried down the concourse? Elyria was right, I’d have to deal with this someday, but she didn’t understand; too much had changed too fast, and just when I could deal with it the least.

  Hands trembling, I grabbed for the photographs again, put the truck back into gear, and inched along, trying again to spot that place where the body had been found.

  A Cadillac hauling a horse trailer roared around me, oblivious to the axle-eating ditches.

  Was I looking on the correct side of the road? Was there truly anything new I could discover by coming here, two weeks after Janet’s death, when a whole sheriff’s department had already combed the landscape? Santa Rosa had seemed a big and prosperous city, and not so far from the urban wonders of San Francisco that its sheriff’s department would be backward and ignorant. It seemed an increasingly good idea to just give up, maybe take a swing through the nearest town for a bite of the fabled California Cuisine, and head home to Denver.

  If Denver is my home …

  Think positively, I told myself. At five hundred dollars a day, you can hang out for a week and make enough to run away to Mexico. Just go through the motions, bill the old fart, and get gone. He won’t miss the cash. But even as I dreamed this dream, I knew my damned Puritan conscience would never let me do it.

  The message on the blue stationery crowded in on top of this bit of self-defeating virtue, reaching into my brain with long, guilt-provoking tendrils. Puritans. Why hadn’t Mother stayed in her native Boston, and left me to be whelped by someone with a heart? I willed the ditch to command my attention, rolled down the window and glared into it.

  Then I saw the place. A fence post more crooked than the others, right next to a skinny oak. Stopping the truck with its right wheels teetering on the scant three inches of gravel between the pavement and the ditch, I set the emergency flashers and the brake and stepped out, taking the photographs with me.

  The ditch was nearly three feet deep here, the sides extremely steep. Fragments of yellow plastic police cordon tape still fluttered from the
fence above it, but nothing lay within it now but wet grass and a scattering of leaves. Why were these ditches so large, and so deep? I looked up at the clouds. Did the rain come in torrents here, drowning the road ways and fields around them? I held my breath, stiff with fear at the thought of this ditch brim-full of dark, roiling waters coursing past my feet.

  The sound of the idling truck engine consumed the silence.

  Chill air reached inside my jacket, probing with damp fingers down from my collar and up from my waist. I shivered and hunched my shoulders, looked around. I was standing downhill from a ranch that was bigger than its neighbors. Even though there was no livestock in sight, the fields had the awful barren aspect of overgrazing, and stood naked of the oak trees that graced the nearby spreads.

  Well back from the road on a shallow rise stood a large two-story wood-frame house. It jutted bleakly from the dark earth like a shipwreck on a deserted beach, its only companion one forlorn palm tree. The house was older than its neighbors, its boxy shape and ornate trim suggesting the local rendition of Victoriana, but the dry clapboards that shielded its sides were gray with age and lack of paint, and its tall windows stared blankly across the empty landscape. I thought at first it must be abandoned. But then I saw that I was being watched.

  A big bruiser of a fellow. He stood at the head of the lane that led up to the house, kind of lurking behind one of a pair of stone gateposts like it could conceal his mass. There was nothing inconspicuous about his stare, either, even from a hundred yards away.

  Figuring turnabout was fair play, I reached behind the cab of the truck and fished a compact pair of binoculars out of my gear bag. Laying them on the roof of the truck, I focused them in and stared back at him. Even from that distance, I didn’t like what I saw: head drawn down between his shoulders defensively; mean, distrustful eyes, the kind that belong to the sort of overpowered coward folks call a bully; cruel mouth set in a childish pout; filthy work clothes slung over an overweight, sloppy frame. His hair was thinning and I could make out a heavy jaw darkly in need of a shave.