Mother Nature

by Sarah Andrews

  “Yes, as in mentally challenged,” Dexter said, his eyes narrowing. “Mrs. K has looked after him all these years, giving up more than you could imagine, just to keep him out of harm’s way, away from people like you who don’t understand. His father wanted to send him to a home, but no, she wouldn’t send him. That’s what a fine lady she is.”

  Dexter and I had locked eyes. I was afraid to look away, but just as frightened to keep staring. He leaned back in his chair and began to rock slightly, laying his thick fingers on the table and tapping it softly with the rhythm.

  Muller’s voice sounded from the doorway behind me. “Why do you wonder about Matthew Karsh’s hands, Emily?”

  I jumped up and whirled around. “I saw the photographs. Big, nasty finger marks on Janet’s neck, grabbing her from behind like a coward. It looked awful.” My throat tightened. I could practically feel Matt Karsh’s disgusting apelike fingers closing around my neck. The sensation was so startling that I jerked backward, watching Muller watch me.

  “Photographs? Which photographs?”

  I froze, mouth open. Had Murbles gotten to that photographer ahead of the police? That was fast work! “Ah, that amateur photographer who was hanging around the ditch that morning.”

  Muller said, “Is there something more you need to tell us, Emily?”

  “No! I mean, no, I don’t have anything else. But Murbles does. Better yet, talk to the Senator.” I was about to add, He hired me. Ask him. He’s not coming clean with you, and I’m beginning to think he knows more than he’s telling you, but I wasn’t sure what I meant by that, not yet, and running off at the mouth with Sheriff’s detectives is never a good idea. Instead, I just grumbled something like, “Thanks for your time.”

  “The Senator?” Muller echoed.

  “Forget it,” I whispered, and found my own way to the door.

  16

  Back in my room, I punched Murbles’ number into the phone. It rang twice, then Murbles’ irritating voice came on the line.

  “This is Em Hansen. A, you didn’t send the right amount; B, what the hell are you doing, hanging me out to dry with the Sheriff’s detective?”

  “Oh, it’s you. Call me back at a reasonable hour. On Monday.”

  “No, this is a reasonable hour. I’m working, why aren’t you?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. At least he hadn’t hung up.

  “Listen, Mr. Murbles. I am working for the same man you are, trying to find out who killed this man’s daughter. Are you going to support me in this, or do I have to go around you?”

  Murbles snorted.

  “Well?”

  “Miss Hansen, why don’t you just do your job?” He laughed again, louder this time.

  I didn’t like this. He was having a joke, and it was clearly on me. “Isn’t there something else you need to tell me about my job, Mr. Murbles?”

  “Oh, no. You’re doing just fine.” His sarcasm was thick enough to cut with a knife.

  “All right, if you want to play it this way, then listen to this: you owe me for plane fare, food, lodging, and et cetera, and by the time you can FedEx a check to me, another four days’ work. I’ll expect those three thousand dollars by Monday eleven A.M., and it had better be a cashier’s check this time.”

  “And where will I acquire a cashier’s check at this time of night, and how will I express it on a Sunday, Miss Hansen?” he purred, really enjoying himself.

  “Listen, Murbles, if you want to play rough, I’ll call you up each night this time with a full accounting, and you can run to the bank daily. Will that make you happy?”

  The line went dead.

  * * *

  THE BURRITO AND taco chip munchfest wasn’t half as pleasant as I’d hoped. Not after my visit with Dexter and Muller. In fact, halfway through the second burrito I began to feel a little nauseated, so I took the remainder of the food out to the truck for overnight refrigeration. It wasn’t very cold out, well above freezing, but much cooler than my room, which had conspired to overheat.

  I leaned against the truck for a while, feeling the cool air against my face, letting it settle my stomach. I watched traffic groan by on Highway 101, wondering how much too far I’d gone with Deputy Dexter. Even though I seemed to have hit some kind of nerve, it had been reckless to dig into him about Matthew Karsh. What was my problem? Hadn’t Muller said they’d been thorough? That would mean they’d interviewed everyone within sight of the ditch, and all their neighbors. Surely if there had been something to find at Mrs. Karsh’s, they would have found it, wouldn’t they? Or was Dexter hiding something?

  I was normally content to leave police work to the Sheriff’s Department, no matter how irritated I might be with them: they had the training, the personnel, and hopefully the budget to run materials through laboratories, run the routine interviews and detailed checking of leads, not I. But were they really doing those jobs?

  And if so, then what was my job?

  The dampness of the night air began to cleanse my mind of upset and confusion.

  My job was to get inside. To follow those avenues that would only occur to someone with Janet’s—and my—background and training. My job was to think like Janet, to slip the rest of the way into her boots and figure out where she had been those last days, and what she’d been doing.

  I squared my shoulders and headed back into my room to get to work.

  * * *

  A GEOLOGIST IS first and last a scientist. In simplest terms, a scientist is someone who works up a list of possible answers to a question, and then figures out which one is correct. This system used to scrutinize and test possible answers is called the scientific method.

  Possible answers are called working hypotheses. By testing several working hypotheses at once, the scientist avoids spending too much time chasing the wrong one and further avoids getting entranced by a wrong answer that happens to fit most criteria of looking right. By eliminating hypotheses through scientific testing, I would eventually develop a formal theory that could be tested with a special test: in this case, a murder trial. All very neat and logical. Unemotional. Keep me out of trouble.

  So first I needed hypotheses.

  That meant I needed to figure out what the question was. Okay, on the face of it, the question was, Who killed Janet Pinchon? but each hypothesis that might answer this question needed to address subquestions, such as, Who needed her dead? Who had the opportunity to kill her? and so forth.

  The only hard, clear evidence I had was that Janet Pinchon was dead, found in a ditch on Sanborn Road with her bicycle and wearing a bicycling outfit, which, of course, suggested that she had been out bicycling. I didn’t know the official cause or time of death or the place she was killed, and was not privy to information such as fingerprints and blood samples.

  In the photographs, Janet’s bicycling costume was in disarray. This could mean one of several things, that she was a slob (I knew better), that she had been handled sexually by some necrophile who had happened upon her dead body (far-fetched but possible), that she had been sexually assaulted by her killer (most likely), or that her killer had taken the trouble to make it look like the killing was sexually motivated (hold on to that thought).

  Circumstantial evidence was another matter. The circumstances were that Janet was a geologist who had recently been fired from her job installing and sampling wells and doing environmental assessments, that she was single, apparently a loner, and a bicycle freak.

  From there it wasn’t tough to come up with several working hypotheses that would explain how Janet came to be dead. I got a pad of paper and a mechanical pencil out of Janet’s boxes and wrote down my hypotheses:

  1. Accidentally killed by hit-and-run driver, body later shifted in position and abused.

  2. Killed so she couldn’t bear witness to being sexually assaulted, body dumped at separate site to mask evidence.

  3. Murdered for other reason, body dumped at separate site to cover evidence.

&nb
sp; Possibilities one and two are the police’s problem because they had nothing to do with Janet’s occupation, I reasoned, cheerfully delegating them the work. But number three has possibilities for me.

  The possible motivations for killing a geologist could form a long list, all of which seemed to fit in one very obvious category: What the Geologist Knew.

  Well, I didn’t yet know what Janet knew. And maybe someone just thought she knew something.…

  My neck started to ache in a place I had once landed when a horse changed course and I didn’t. I closed my eyes and massaged it. I was getting hopelessly snarled.

  Brushing aside the pages of notes, I clicked on the TV and flopped onto my belly on the bed. After ads for mouthwash, luxury automobiles, a brokerage firm, frozen dessert, and a fitness salon, a sitcom blessed the screen with inane laugh track and hypercute family hanging out in a middle-American living room. Little sister was sassing big brother.

  For some reason, this made me feel worse. I rolled onto my back and stared at the sparkles in the cottage-cheese ceiling of my motel room, wondering what it was about that little sister that made my skin crawl.

  I closed my eyes, opening my mind to another tool indispensible to a geologist: intuition.

  17

  Late in the evening the wind came up. I lay on my bed in the dark listening. It whined like an immense, irritated aunt, complaining, chattering at the window frame, searching out small objects to rattle in its angst, its timbre rising and falling as the sky filled and emptied its ghostly lungs.

  At midnight I took a break from trying to sleep. I put my jacket and jeans on over my T-shirt and stepped outside. The stars had been swallowed by a heavy, dank overcast.

  I inhaled deeply, smelling the air for moisture. By Wyoming standards, those clouds were boxcar-loads of moisture waiting for the tiniest shimmy to rip loose the flood. The muscles of my arms twitched restlessly. Back home I would have been helping Dad move equipment into the barn and check on the animals. I fought off a pang of loneliness. I could still do those chores, but never again with my father. Those days were gone. My mother owned the ranch now. I supposed her name had always been on the deed, along with his, but she hadn’t lifted a finger in decades. What would become of the place?

  I waited awhile, hoping to catch the first drops of rain on my face, but all I felt was a fine wetness. Here in California, weather seemed to lean in gradually, with no consideration for drama. No sudden onset with raindrops the size of sparrows to send you running for cover. Even the wind was muted by Wyoming standards, a nattering old woman with cold hands next to the blue howler that would have blown hay bales sideways and uprooted fence posts back home.

  Yet the air had refreshed me some, in spite of all that worried me. I went back inside, and for a while, I slept.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING was Sunday. At first light, I doused myself in a shower that hit me in the elbow, dressed in a warm sweater and clean jeans, opened the curtains, turned on the TV set to keep me company, and dined on the orange juice and sandwich I’d bought at the Chevron station.

  The first real drops of rain broke free of the overcast at seven. They seemed speculative and uncertain, tentatively sampling the atmosphere to decide if they really wanted to fall through it. Convinced that this chickenshit rain wasn’t going to amount to much, I loaded myself into the little blue pickup for another pilgrimage to The Ditch. It was too early to visit bicycle shops, and maybe I’d catch Mrs. Karsh on her way to church, or even Jaime Martinez.

  As I drove across the Santa Rosa Plain, I wondered what it had looked like before European settlement changed it. I supposed the craggy oaks that studded the pastures and lined the roadway like arthritic sentinels were native, but wouldn’t they have originally formed a continuous wood? And grasses might have grown between them, although I doubted this particular species; the revamping of species populations in American grasslands with the advent of cattle grazing was an all-too-standard story. Here and there I saw trees I knew to be exotics: eucalypts, Lombardy poplars. And the holstein cows were not native, and neither were the sheep I passed.

  The rain blurred my view of the landscape, but when I flipped on the wipers, they only smeared the windshield. The wash button brought no sluice of fluid. I turned off the blades, quitting while I was behind. This rain was landing on clay soil, God’s own raincoat, quick to saturate with the rain. If ever a hard rain were to fall, it would run off faster than it soaked in, and if those man-eating ditches didn’t carry the water away fast enough, the place would surely flood. Pair up them animals and call for Noah.

  About a quarter mile from my last turn, I brought my attention back to the center of the road just in time to swerve and avoid hitting an old man and woman who were marching along the edge of the ditch. He swung a cane, and she, a plastic trash-can liner. I took this all in with the flash of intense concentration that comes with the jolt of adrenaline. I squeezed the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white, forcing myself to concentrate on the here and now.

  I got out of the truck. As I waited for the couple to catch up with me, I looked up at the sodden gray sky and smiled appeasingly. It chose that moment to open up and pelt my face like spit.

  I jumped back into the truck. Drops greased the windshield. Ratta-tatta-tat, down it came, cold and icy, sucking the heat out of the air.

  The older couple closed in from the east, their heads bowed and shoulders now hunched up under their ears, but their pace didn’t quicken. The woman was large and cushiony, the roundness of her face exaggerated by the pointed hood of her robin’s-egg-blue jacket, all pulled up tightly by the drawstring. Her mate jerked along with his teeth clenched, his eyes hooded by the brim of an old cloth fishing hat. As they passed, I rolled down the window of the truck. “Can I give you a lift?” I called.

  The man hoisted a stiff arm in greeting. “No, thanks, we’re dressed for it,” he barked.

  At that moment the woman lowered her bulk toward the ground, snatched a beer can out of the ditch, and flicked it into her plastic bag.

  A woman who combed the ditch for debris? The perfect observer! “Are you sure?” I urged. “Seems right cold out.”

  “No, missy,” the man insisted, waving a hand dismissively. “First good rain of the year. Blow itself out in a minute anyway. A celebration to walk in it.”

  “You live around here?” I begged.

  “Got to keep moving, or the old bones stiffen up.”

  They hitched on by. The woman never looked up from her obsession with the contents of the ditch.

  I pulled the keys, locked the truck, and hurried after them, quickly catching up to their elderly gait. “Do this every day?” I asked, as raindrops splattered me in the eyes.

  “Purt’ near,” said the man, raising a leery eyebrow at me.

  “Get many cans?”

  “Why you care?”

  “I’m new here,” I suggested. “Sorry. Just trying to get to know folks.”

  The man stopped and looked around, gesturing at the surrounding landscape. “Here?” he demanded.

  “Ah, no, I mean new to Santa Rosa.” I smiled, admitting my foolishness.

  The man laughed, not a very nice laugh. “Obviously.” He peered at me suspiciously.

  I let my face fall. It was not hard to look bedraggled; the rain was beginning to plaster my hair to my forehead. “Okay, I’m a friend of Janet Pinchon’s, the woman who died out here two weeks ago, I—”

  “That bicycle girl?” he cried, with alarm.

  The woman tugged at his arm to try to get him moving. “Leave it, Fabio.”

  The man stood still, staring at me. “I knew her. All those questions. Always questions.”

  “Fabio!” his wife barked, swatting him with the bag. “The devil’s business! You’re raving!”

  He shook his head. “Terrible thing: woman dead in a ditch.”

  “Fabio! Not our business!”

  I struggled to hold the man’s attention. “Do
you walk up that road past where she was found?”

  “Every day,” he replied, eyes growing larger as he warmed to the topic. “Start at six, home by seven-thirty. We live just here.” He pointed to a driveway a hundred yards or more away. “Walk up Occidental here to Sanborn, up Sanborn to Hall Road, say our hello to Mrs. Johnston.”

  “Fabio! Sucker for a woman,” the woman nattered. She was running out of steam. I had won.

  “Mrs. Johnston’s getting old,” Fabio continued, warming to his narrative. “Kind of cheers her up, having a visitor.”

  “I’m sure,” I soothed, trying not to stiffen as the rain began to soak through the seams of Janet’s down parka. “Then where do you go on your walk?”

  “Oh, back here along Occidental until it gets to be seven, then back home.”

  “And you didn’t see her body in the ditch? Were you walking on the other side of the road?”

  His eyes went vague. “It wasn’t there.”

  “You’re sure you walked past the place where she was found?”

  “I’m not senile! It was not there when we walked up Sanborn Road. It was there when we walked home.” His eyes filled with suspicion again. “Why you so interested?”

  “Fabio…” His wife’s bag began swinging with increasing menace, describing a larger and larger arc, colliding with the raindrops. They coalesced and skidded down the plastic, drawing paths as long as tears.

  So Janet’s body had not been in the ditch when Jaime came to work; it was dumped only moments before Mrs. Karsh phoned 911. “Did you tell this to the police?” I urged.

  The plastic bag slammed into the old man’s side. “Now you done it, Fabio! You always got to get involved!”

  “Basta rompere i miei colcoglioni!” he bleated. “Holy Mother, woman! You and your secrets! This girl’s a friend of hers!” He spat, a well-practiced gesture aimed at the space between his feet and hers. “I think this of your secrets!” Having settled this argument to his satisfaction, he turned to me and intoned, “We don’t talk to no police,” underlined it with a firm slash of his hand, left to right, murmured, “Excuse me,” turned, grabbed his wife’s arm, and continued down the road, chewing at her in Italian.