Mother Nature

by Sarah Andrews

  I sighed. “Arnie, if I had any money in my pockets, I’d offer you an early lunch, but I’m broke. I really need to talk to you. I haven’t been able to find anyone who’ll admit to knowing much at all about Janet, and it’s very important that I do.”

  Arnie’s eyes closed for a moment, as if in prayer. Then he turned toward the back of the shop, motioning for me to follow. He led me past the repair counter, past several bicycles pinioned in repair racks, and back into a storage room. There he reached up to the wall and took down an eight-by-ten color photograph in a cheap frame. It was a picture of five people in gaudy spandex standing with their bicycles held jauntily between their legs, all grinning in the glory of brilliant sunshine. Arnie was second from left. Janet was far right. It was a tender thing to see her alive and smiling.

  Arnie spoke. “The fellow you called Duke took the picture. He’s a funny kid, likes to make up nicknames for himself. He had a crush on Janet, liked to hang around and talk about her while I built the bike.” He smiled. “So I guess you could say he helped.”

  I was still staring into Janet’s smile, kind of falling slowly into the image. I heard Arnie say, “You look like her, you know that?”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Then you didn’t know her?”

  “No.” I was tired of lying. And I was caught in a tide of sadness, irrationally grieving a woman I’d never known. She looked so young and hopeful, so fragile, so earnest; a person I would have enjoyed knowing. Perhaps I was grieving the loss of the opportunity to meet her, to explore friendship.

  Or perhaps I was grieving Janet because it was a simpler, easier grief to feel than the loss of my father.

  Arnie said, “She was a really nice kid.”

  “A kid? Wasn’t she twenty-five or so?”

  “Hmm. Years isn’t everything. Sometimes it takes a person a lot of years to give up certain dreams from childhood.”

  I looked up at Arnie, certain now why he knew everyone and everyone knew him. He was paying attention, for one thing; people would gravitate toward him like sheep crowding into the lee of a hill. “What dreams couldn’t she give up?”

  “She thought that doing right is the point of living.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Arnie’s eyes reflected my sadness. “Not the whole point. And that’s my point. And now she’s dead.”

  “What killed her, Arnie?”

  “You mean who.”

  “Okay, who?”

  It was Arnie’s turn to sigh. “I don’t know, not directly. We used to ride together on an evening out along the Laguna. She loved wetlands more than anything, even bicycles, loved the way the birds dipped in the water and—well, just the quiet, I guess. She’d kid me that I needed her so I wouldn’t get hit, because I dress so darkly, no reflective clothing. Then the last weeks before she was killed, she was really preoccupied. We rode out on a Sunday, and she wanted to go out toward the Laguna. She kept looking for a road up on the hills where she could overlook this place on Ferris Road, wanted to leave the bikes and head through the trees to a look-off, but she never found one.”

  “What was she looking for? Or at?”

  “She said she couldn’t tell me, that it was for her work. I remember her pointing out a bird of prey—it was one of those black-shouldered kites, beautiful birds—it just hovered over the ground, wings flapping like this.” Arnie raised long-fingered hands and fluttered them by his shoulders. “Janet said that bird could see everything.”

  I smiled. In the fat years before I’d been laid off from Blackfeet Oil, I had begun to take flying lessons. My instructor had suggested the Piper Tomahawk, a low-winged trainer, but I had preferred the Cessna 152, with wings set above the fuselage where they wouldn’t interrupt my view of the ground. I loved the freedom of flying, but most of all, I loved the view of the ground, with all its shapes and lines and patterns. How well I could understand Janet’s desire to hover above the land she wanted to study. “Did you ride together the Sunday before she died?” I asked.

  Arnie shook his head, closed his eyes in pain. “No, I was out of town that weekend for a race. She left a message on my machine at home, to see if I wanted to ride with her that Monday, but I couldn’t. I was working late, making up some of the time I’d taken off.” Arnie opened his eyes and looked deeply into mine. He didn’t have to tell me what he was thinking: if he’d been with her, she might have lived.

  “Arnie, Janet was fired. For all we know, she left on that ride early in the afternoon, while you would have been at work, regardless of overtime.”

  Arnie looked straight into my eyes. Words weren’t proof against what he was feeling.

  I changed the subject. “What about Duke?”

  “Timothy Swege.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He doesn’t think ‘Timmy’ is macho enough. He’s tried Thor and Ivan, too, but somehow he couldn’t get them to stick, either.”

  “Oh. Did they ever ride together?”

  Arnie shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “I guess she’d ride with him if he got darned lucky. The roads are public places, after all.”

  “So she found him obnoxious.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “He lives with his grandmother out in Miwok Mills. Kind of drifts around sticking his nose into things. I haven’t seen him lately.”

  “Can you give me his address?”

  Arnie looked into my eyes once more, just double-checking that I was a decent person, then scribbled the address out on a business card from the shop. After that, he walked me out to the parking lot. The heavy gray overcast had thinned, and I could even see a patch of blue sky. As we headed up to the little blue truck, Arnie jerked to a stop as if he’d been tugged from behind.

  “What?” I spun around, startled by his motion.

  His eyes had gone very large, the whites showing all the way around those dark irises. He was staring at the truck.

  Suddenly wary, I backed away from him, pulled out the keys, and unlocked the door.

  Arnie’s eyes grew very narrow. In a voice pitched low in anger, he hissed, “What are you doing with Janet’s truck?”

  20

  I yanked the door open, ripped into the glove compartment, dug furiously through a pile of papers for the registration. Sure enough, the little blue truck was registered to Janet Pinchon, 3006 Via Robles. “Damn him!” I bellowed. “Damn him, damn him, damn him! That son of a bitch had me figured right along!”

  I felt cold from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. The implications of Senator Pinchon’s act were not clear, but it looked bad, very bad. And why hadn’t I looked at the registration? Because I’d been thinking of it as a rental car, that’s why, and I never bothered to look at the registrations on rentals. That son of a bitch, that oozing, pestilent scab of vanity. To set me loose driving his dead daughter’s truck around her town without telling me was deceitful at best, and endangering at worst.

  And now I had a very tall, very fit, very angry man in bicycling spandex gripping my shoulder. It was clear that at that moment this man thought I had killed his friend, or knew who had. “How did you know this was Janet’s truck?” I pleaded.

  Arnie pointed angrily at the back, to a bumper sticker that read Save Mono Lake. “That, and the bicycle rack.”

  “The what?”

  Arnie bent inside the pickup bed and pointed at a metal bar with wing nuts that was bolted inside. “That bar. You pop the front wheel and lock the forks onto the bar.” It felt like his coal-black eyes were drilling holes in my skull.

  To hell with the Senator’s privacy; the man had endangered me. “Arnie, I have to tell you something I’m supposed to keep my mouth shut about. I’m here because Janet’s father hired me. He said he wanted me to find out who killed her. God, what an idiot I was!”

  Arnie released his grip on my shoulder. “Janet hated her father.”

  “I begin to think the feelin
g was mutual. But wait, did she tell you she hated him?”

  Arnie knit his brow. “Not straight out. Just little things she’d say. Like, ‘I’ll show Father what has value,’ in an angry voice.”

  That was an odd statement. “And what does have value?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What was the context?”

  Arnie gripped the tailgate of the truck in frustration. “When we looked out over the Laguna, for instance. And she was reading the paper one time, and she slapped it and said, ‘I bet Dad’s behind this.’”

  “What was the article about?”

  “It was in one of the leftist papers that are printed around here. It was an exposé of some plan to build housing along the Laguna.”

  “What would that have to do with her father?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A housing development would be mandated under county government, not federal. You know he’s a United States Senator?”

  “Yes. It’s funny about that: Janet loved the truth more than anything, but that was one thing she’d lie about. When people asked her if she was any relation, she always said no.”

  “Then how’d you know?”

  “One time, when she was in a really down mood, she told me about it. Said it was embarrassing. Said she wanted to make it on her own merits, and didn’t want to answer for his.”

  “Did she tell you anything else?”

  Arnie shook his head miserably. “No.”

  I stared uncomfortably at the ground. “Were you—ah, special friends?”

  “No. Not that I didn’t wish. Janet was lovely, clear down to her soul. Intense. Kept to herself, except for riding and work. She wasn’t one to say much about herself.”

  I touched Arnie’s shoulder softly. “If it’s any comfort to you, it sounds like she opened up to you a lot more than to anyone else.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS A break in the rain, and I felt a strong need for wide-open spaces. I drove west on Highway 12 toward Sebastopol to the middle of the Santa Rosa Plain and parked the truck, got out and walked along a paved bicycle path that followed the highway along open, level ground. I needed to get away from the truck while I decided what to do about it, get away to a place where I could see people coming if they were interested in making me a target.

  Who had seen me in that truck? Mrs. Karsh and Matthew, Valentine Reeves, Duke. Arnie. Jamie Martinez; maybe that was why he had looked so spooked, and the same went for the rest of them. Had Suzanne Cousins seen it? Yes, but she knew I represented the family, so it might not have seemed odd to her. Why hadn’t she said anything? The people at HRC had seen it—or maybe they hadn’t: I’d never parked it right under their windows. Pat Ryan would have seen it in his rearview mirror as I followed him to dinner, and I’d left it in plain sight in the parking lot when I helped him type his report, but heaven knew Pat was preoccupied, and he might just not have noticed. Jaki? Yes, but I’d come clean with her. And it wasn’t an unusual make or model, or color; not everyone would notice.

  Cars and trucks whizzed by along Highway 12. To the south, the land rolled away in gentle meadows punctuated by spreading oaks that sheltered birds in their branches. I found a bench beside the path and sat in thought, staring upward through the gnarled branches and twigs of an oak tree. The grasses in the meadow were beginning to show a lush green in answer to the rains, and the hills uncoiled beyond the distant oaks like an undulating blue ribbon. The sky breathed dampness in wintery white, but here and there a pale shell-pink tint rode the heavens like an ethereal light. Such splendor, yet so fragile against the cruelty of human designs.

  A beefy young buck on in-line skates careened past my bench, followed by two women shuffling along pushing baby joggers. I bowed my head and concentrated on the ground so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact.

  I thought about Valentine Reeves staring in the window of my—Janet’s—truck. He had certainly recognized the truck, and had bent to confirm his recognition. From there he would have tipped off Mrs. Karsh. She would have told him what I’d said, that I was a friend of Janet’s. Wouldn’t it make sense that I might borrow her truck from the family? But why had the family, which cared so little that it had not yet bothered to pick up her possessions, bothered to collect her truck? Just to leave it by the airport for me? No. There was still an important piece of this picture missing.

  A bicyclist hit his brakes, and then accelerated again in order to miss hitting my feet. I glared at his wheels but resolutely did not look up. This wide-open space was not so wide-open as I had hoped.

  I picked up one of the stiff, dry leaves that had fallen from one of the oak trees that grew beside the bench and crumpled it along its veins, noting how easily it snapped. I was beginning to think that Senator Pinchon and his vile sidekick Murbles had sent me here riot as an investigator, but as a decoy. Leaving me the keys to his daughter’s truck was a setup, I was sure; I remembered that wry, almost contemptuous smile that broke across his face when he had said, “A private vehicle will be available.”

  And I had put the idea in his head. How that must have amused him. Then there was the way Murbles treated me, fending off my attempts to speak with the Senator. Until this moment, I’d written this off to Murbles playing some power game, jealously filtering access to his powerful employer. Now I wondered if he wasn’t following his boss’s instructions within a gnat’s eyelash.

  What did all this mean? Janet had told Arnie she was going to teach her father something about value, or about what to value, and now she was dead. Her teaching was so important that the Senator had not publicly acknowledged his own daughter’s death.

  For that matter, how had he managed to keep his connection to a murdered woman this quiet? And why hadn’t the Good Senator played this occasion to the hilt, sobbing through the newspapers and on national TV, hauling in the sympathy votes hand over fist? That would have held value for him, I thought contemptuously. I could just see the headlines: Senator’s Daughter Slain, Bereaved Father Demands Justice, Anticrime Bill to Follow.

  And the Sheriff’s Department—wait, they knew who Janet’s father was, didn’t they? Or did they? Muller had acted as if he didn’t know who Curt Murbles was, or the Senator, for that matter. Was knowledge of Janet’s parentage something that Muller was withholding in order to be able to spot people with special knowledge of the murder? I didn’t like that idea, as that meant the Sheriff’s Department would be watching me as a possible suspect. Damn. But what if Muller had not in fact met the Senator or Murbles? Surely the Senator had been to Santa Rosa since his daughter’s death, because he had been able to draw a map directing me to the site where she had been found. Or Murbles had.…

  So why was the Senator keeping quiet about his daughter’s death? This question set off a flurry of doubts about the Senator’s and Murbles’ true interests in any information I might uncover. The kindest conclusion I could draw was that Janet’s murder had somehow hurt the Senator right where he lived: on Capitol Hill. And how could I work for a man who might be implicated in his own daughter’s death?

  I couldn’t, but it never occurred to me to quit.

  I hoofed it back toward the truck, stopping some ways out from where it was parked to make certain I wasn’t being watched. I tensed. There was a piece of yellow paper underneath the windshield wiper that hadn’t been there when I parked it. And the binoculars were in the truck, not my pocket, where I could have used them to take a look at the paper before I approached the truck. I actually found myself hoping that it was a parking ticket, but the shape was wrong.

  Suddenly I knew exactly what the paper was about, and who had left it. I closed the final distance to the truck at a run and snatched it off the windshield, cursing myself. The Duke watches your every move, it read, in loopy script.

  Great, a ha-ha note from Timothy “Duke” Swege, the bicyclist who had passed me on the trail while I was so studiously staring at my feet. That little snake. He could have stopped, but no,
how much more amusing to leave the private investigator with her head in the sand and instead pen a little billet-doux to chide her about how unobservant she is. My head began to pound.

  It was high time I chased that knock-kneed spandex freak down and squeezed a little information out of him, but he might be miles away by now in any direction. No, I’d wait until the rain drove him home, because I now knew where that home was.

  I climbed into the truck, still wound as tight as a watch spring. I considered phoning Washington and shouting at Murbles until I felt better, but if he and the Senator had indeed sent me in as a decoy, it wouldn’t do to let them know that I knew. To hell with phoning in every day—I might be a decoy, but I wasn’t a puppet! It was time the tables turned in this game of cat and mouse, time that the Senator started to provide information for me. Because I was too far into the investigation to stop. I would see it through to the end, one way or the other.

  It was time I got Suzanne Cousins to talk, and I now knew how to force her to do so. I stabbed the truck key into the ignition, smiling grimly as the other keys on the chain swung against the dash: if this was Janet Pinchon’s truck, then it followed that one of those keys would open the front door to Suzanne Cousins’ duplex.

  21

  I stood on the stoop of the duplex getting soaked by the rain, which had come back in force. I knocked on the door, hard. No answer. I lifted the ring of keys and got to work.

  Key number one was a nice, hefty Schlage, the wrong make for the lock. It probably opens the front door at HRC Environmental, I thought wryly, tucking the notion away in case I needed to get back into that building.

  Key number two was tiny, and had a small dolphin stamped into it. This one opens HRC’s monitoring wells, I reasoned, remembering the Dolphin brand lock Adam Horowitz had muscled open at the Misty Creek Winery. Good thing I’m not some renegade who likes pouring toxic chemicals into holes in the ground.

  Key number three, a simple old Kwikset, did the trick. I kicked the door wide, all my fury and frustration at being misused, ignored, and kept ignorant rending the last frayed threads of my manners.