Mother Nature

by Sarah Andrews

  Upon the death of Dierdre Ferris Karsh, the estate shall pass in trust to my afflicted grandson, Matthew James Karsh, and to my granddaughter, Sonja Ferris Karsh, in even parts. The estate shall be managed in trust by Wilbur Henry Karsh, by his assigned successor, and so in perpetuity.

  I chased back over to the Assessor’s Office and looked up the ownership of the land on which Jaime lived, the old Ferris place, a name Jaki had mentioned and that I now had reason to recognize. Sure enough, that was the forty-acre parcel being held as the Sonja F. Karsh Trust, Dierdre F. Karsh, trustee.

  I was appalled. Never in my born days had I seen a plan so bent on maintaining control of the lives of one’s descendants, even from beyond the grave. He was treating his daughter like a mental invalid. The vision of a stiff and rage-filled old man filled my mind, disdainful eyes bulging and gnarled hands bent in fists. I wondered in what form this specter haunted Dierdre Karsh.

  * * *

  FRIDA WAS TUGGING on my shoulder. “Enough. I’m taking you home and back to bed.”

  I spun around, dropping the photocopied pages of Rheingold Ferris’ will. “No! I’m just beginning to get somewhere!”

  Frida drew me firmly out the door and onto the cement portico in front of the building. “Em Hansen, I’m going to tell it to you straight: I think you’re coming unhinged. You’re talking to yourself. Not generally a habit of yours, is it? Look, your hands are shaking. And just a moment ago, you looked like you’d seen a ghost. That ain’t healthy. Now, come on, before I have to hog-tie you and drag you out that door.”

  I pushed the pages toward her. “No, Frida, look: this will is the key to everything.”

  Frida read it. “And?”

  “This Ferris guy was a control freak. Don’t you see? That’s why Dierdre Karsh is the way she is. And why her disgusting son is the way he is, and why it all happened.”

  “You mean the old man treated her like an incompetent, so she’s raised her son to be one, too?”

  Not exactly what I’d been thinking, but it would do. “Sort of.”

  Frida gave me a long, gauging look. “Em, nothing’s ever as simple as all that.”

  I glared at her. She was right; when stated that simply, all the poisonous subtlety was lost. Frida had never met Mrs. Karsh, or Matthew. She hadn’t heard that sweet, almost seductive tone Mrs. Karsh used around him, hadn’t seen his eyes ignite with free-floating hatred when he heard it. But come to think of it, why had I seen these things if a whole community of people had not? “Okay, then, let me explain,” I began, hoping I could. “Everyone in town sees Matthew Karsh as a pathetic mess. They all seem to think he’s still about six years old; I’ve seen two guys who are downright petite make him cower. But in fact, he’s all grown-up. He attacked me two times I’m sure of, and I feel in my bones that that was him last night in the motel.”

  Frida looked sadly at the bruises on my neck. “Define grown-up. Define attack. No, sorry, it doesn’t fit: if he’s so busy cowering, how’s come he can strangle people? You just said you seen two little guys he was scared shitless of.”

  “Frida, he’s a bully, and that term I can define. A bully is a coward who’s found someone he’s not afraid of. Those little guys were men. I’m a woman.”

  “That’s not brain-damaged, that’s crazy.”

  “I won’t argue that.”

  “Emily, you saw what you saw at that dinner and the winery and at that house, but this business at the motel is another matter. It’s a long way from trying to scare someone to trying to kill them, and Muller’s right, your motel is a long way from where that woman got killed. And make up your mind: is this Matthew guy brain-damaged or crazy?”

  “Why do I have to choose? I’ve seen him with his family; his behavior is blatantly hostile, yet they treat him like he’s just an oversized child. It’s like a bad dream. Ma kind of goes into a trance and talks to him all sweetie-like, almost goading him along, and Dad just trots along behind him hoping he hasn’t done any damage. A more despondent, self-pitying old wimp I haven’t met lately. And that’s being nice. Look at it another way: Dad has everything to gain by going along with the status quo, staying in charge of that trust, not rocking the boat. The only person who’s the least bit direct about things is the redheaded mistress who doesn’t want her deal to go down. You should have seen how she stared me down.”

  Frida sighed heavily. “It’s not that I disbelieve you, Em. Somebody certainly attacked you, and I’m not letting that drop as long as Sheriff is an elected office. But they’ve just told us they didn’t find no evidence, and I don’t believe in conspiracies of silence. Why, if this guy Matthew is that big a monster, is not one resident of this county, who knows him a lot better than you, crying foul?”

  Frida was right, my case was full of holes. My mind wobbled with uncertainty, considering her side of the argument, quickly bogging down in reasonableness. That’s the trouble with being a geologist. Our minds are constructed to spot the errors in our own thinking, and the more certain we become about anything, the more easily we worry that we’ve missed something crucial.

  I thought of Janet, out there alone along the Laguna, trying to document the truth about whatever it was she had been looking for. I could almost see her riding up and back, watching, searching, now stopping to take a closer look. She would have double-checked each datum, confronted each allegation of the use of toxic materials on that property by interviewing the people who had used it. Her very honesty would have drawn her that extra inch closer to harm’s way.…

  Yes, Frida was right, I had not a shred of evidence that Matthew, or for that matter, anyone else I had identified, had attacked me or killed Janet, but somebody had. I kept arguing, if only to delude myself, that I was doing something to track that person down and put him away. Doing nothing was just too painful. “The people who know Matthew Karsh never see him anymore. Or if they do see him, they see the Matthew who freezes when a skinny boy throws a piece of gravel at him.”

  Frida touched my shoulder gently. “Maybe that’s all he is, Em. Just a big cripple who likes to scare little girls. And if Ma seems a little loco, maybe it’s because she’s been cooped up with that kid all them years. Or maybe Granddad knew what he was doing, Em. Maybe she’s non compos mentis.”

  “No, Frida, that’s not my take. A little peculiar maybe, but she’s also shrewd. She suffers in silence, but she gets her licks in: drops the boy off at the winery when she goes to her ladies’ meetings so Pa can spend the afternoon chasing him around through the warehouses.”

  Frida blew a hank of hair off her forehead. “They call that ‘passive-aggressive.’”

  “Fine, passive-aggressive.”

  Frida shook her head, dropped her tone to emphasize that all kidding was over. “Em, you got yourself throttled and now you want to lynch someone. That’s normal, but it ain’t healthy to brew all this up from what little you know about these folks. And you still haven’t shown me why any of these people would want to kill your geologist lady.”

  I sighed, “My geologist lady walked right into the middle of that family and didn’t come out again alive. I feel it in my bones. They’re just not normal folk. Look what Mrs. Karsh’s father did to her: he installed her in a depressing old house, left her inheritance in trust where she can’t control a dime of its income, set up her philandering husband—who he probably chose for her—to administer it, and then, just to really rub it in, he made her trustee of her girlhood home, which his granddaughter will get free and clear as soon as she’s of age. Do the math: that granddaughter was only thirteen when Granddad died; Mrs. K had eight years to gaze at that lovely place across the Laguna, knowing she’s got to take real good care of it for everyone’s little cupcake. Come on, how would that make you feel?”

  Frida snorted. “Jealous as hell.”

  * * *

  IN THE END, Frida won out and took me home. I was beginning to give in to a fatigue so deep I was stumbling, and besides, I couldn’t think just then of
much else I could accomplish, at the county offices or anywhere.

  It had begun to rain. We slopped southward down Highway 101 first to the Wagon Trail Motel to pick up a few of my things, and to arrange to keep the room a few days longer. Packing up just now felt way too difficult, and I was content to leave the little blue truck right where it was. Frida insisted that I borrow one of her vehicles in future. She knew better than to think I had let go of the investigation.

  The manager shook her head when she saw me, taking in the bruises on my neck with proper horror, whispered a prayer, and said there were a few messages for me. Frida grabbed them. “You’ll have plenty of time to worry about these at the ranch,” she said.

  Before we got there, I was asleep, my neck gone stiff as my head bounced against the cool window glass.

  * * *

  FRIDA’S RANCH LAY along a hillside high above the Russian River, the main drainage into the Pacific Ocean into which all other waterways of the Santa Rosa Plain fed. On a topographical map Frida had on the wall of her living room, I could see that the Laguna flowed north into Mark West Creek, and Mark West into the Russian River at Wohler Bridge, a short trestle that joined its banks along a narrow part of its floodplain. Into the Laguna flowed the Piner and Santa Rosa Creeks, two channelized rivers that carried the runoff from the City of Santa Rosa westward across the Santa Rosa Plain. In aggregate, the winding blue lines that marked these drainages looked like the fingers of an open hand reaching in from the ocean. From a glance at the topographic contours, it looked like the floodplain of the Russian River was narrow enough that it would act like a tourniquet, backing draining floodwaters upriver to the Santa Rosa Plain. I studied the relatively flat topography around the Laguna. I had no doubt it could live up to its Spanish name.

  Frida sent me out to my quarters, one of the guest rooms that had been carved out of the loft space above the office in the central barn. “You take a nice, long nap,” she told me. “This rain ought to let up before long, and I have several three-year-olds who need exercising. But you rest first. The way you look now, you couldn’t handle a hundred-year-old mule with the mange.”

  I fell into a deep sleep until late in the afternoon. When I woke up, I ventured into the house, laid out my change of clothes, and drew myself a bath. I undressed my injured body, trying not to see myself in the mirror, but something made me pause before immersing myself in water. It was an old, confused feeling I had not consciously felt in a long time, a mixture of guilt, anxiety, and sadness. It reminded me of being very little and painfully alone. Something had been let loose in the hours since those awful fingers had closed around my throat. Soap and fresh clothing helped dispel the feeling somewhat, but I still felt dirty, as if the marks on my body carried shame.

  Frida banged into the house a few minutes later and shucked off her oilskins. “Still raining. I don’t know about this climate. It don’t rain all summer and fall, and then wham, you get the year’s deluge in three or four months, and it’s all this piss-poor rain. No snow never.”

  “How much precip altogether?”

  “Oh, twenty-four inches, maybe. Some years only twelve. Other years, forty. It all depends.”

  I looked out the windows toward the line of trees that marked the river. It formed only a vague smudge of darkness in the gray mist of falling droplets. “I’ll bet that thing floods if you get that much.”

  Frida nodded. “Yes, damned thing jumps its banks and all hell breaks loose. I met a fellow downriver by Guerneville, said it was his job during floods to poke the couches under the bridge with a stick so they don’t cause a jam.”

  Our conversation lapsed.

  Frida’s was a modest ranch by Wyoming standards, not much more than a hundred acres, and with just a two-bedroom house, but the stables and barns were spacious and in good repair. The porch on the south side of the house was nestled in among white-blooming camellias, and commanded a view of the river, the low-lying vineyards, and rolling hills leading down onto the Santa Rosa Plain. Most important, the horseflesh at Frida’s ranch was superb. She always did know how to breed a winner. Once again, I wondered why she’d left Wyoming. She’d left a full life’s worth of friends and acquaintances behind, and even though the grass was better here and she’d obviously been able to improve her breeding stock of horses, I’d always heard that land prices were sky-high in California, and it couldn’t have been easy to change her base of business. “Frida, why did you move out here? Did it have something to do with your husband dying?”

  Frida didn’t answer right away. She poured herself a glass of water at the sink in the kitchen and took a swig. After a while she said, in a low voice, “Yeah, something like that.”

  It wasn’t like me to ask direct questions of my kin, but I was homesick and my throat ached and if anyone in my family could help me find a new direction in life, Frida could. “You need help with this place? You got, what, thirty head out there; must be a lot of work mucking out all those stables.”

  Frida didn’t turn her head, but I felt her attention on me as she tipped her glass once more to her lips. “Yup. I got help.”

  “Well, I—”

  “I got a couple boys come in, and anyways, I got a partner’ll be back by the end of the week.”

  I had stepped over the line. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize.”

  “It’s just that—”

  Frida’s hands formed fists on the drain board. “Emmy, we all lose our fathers some time or another. I lost mine, and I didn’t like it all that much.” She pitched the rest of the water into the sink, set down the glass, and headed back out to the horses. I didn’t see her again until eight.

  27

  The next day was Tuesday. In the morning I put a call through to HRC Environmental and got Cynthia, who treated me to a loud snap of her gum as she said good morning.

  “This is Em Hansen,” I said, holding the earpiece a bit farther from my head. “I was sorry to have to just leave a message like that yesterday on the answering machine, but it was kind of an emergency, and—”

  “What message?”

  “That I couldn’t make it to work yesterday. And today, for that matter.” I wasn’t certain if I was ever going back to HRC, but I wanted to maintain the option, just in case there was some other smidgen of information I thought I could extort from that closemouthed pack of thunderclouds.

  “I didn’t get no message. We thought you’d just left town or something. Mr. Rauch was real mad, and Adam, he—”

  “But I left a message!”

  “Jeez, I’m sorry. You know, I’m new here, and I wondered why there weren’t no messages there from a whole two days of weekend. Maybe I hit the buttons wrong or something.”

  “Yeah, you did,” I growled. “Well, can you put me through to Rauch? I suppose I’ve got to explain myself now. I’m, ah … ill.”

  “He ain’t here.”

  “Well, hell; can I talk with Pat?”

  “Pat Ryan?”

  “You got any others around there?” I mentally slapped my own wrist. Mouthing off at people never helped in situations like this.

  “Um, he ain’t here either.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “Um, he won’t.”

  “What?”

  “He quit.”

  “Quit? You mean he was fired.”

  “I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

  “You got a home number for him?”

  “No, I’m not allowed.”

  So the bastards had canned him. I ran off and grabbed the phone book in search of a number for Patrick John Ryan. There was no listing in the book or with information, which meant I’d just have to go to his apartment to catch him before he left town. I felt an echo of his guilt, kicking myself just as he had kicked himself for not being in touch with Janet toward the end.

  Just then, Frida came in from the barns. “Morning,” she said, nodding cheerfully. “You look better.”

  “I’m feel
ing fine, actually. I’d like to help you feed the horses, or whatever you need done.”

  “Got it covered. Why don’t you just rest awhile longer? I got the hired hands here, and my boy Abe’ll be out in a few days for Christmas, so I’ve got plenty of help. You haven’t seen your cousin in years, have you?”

  Christmas. It was coming, and too soon. I had to get this investigation wrapped up before the holidays locked the whole town up like a vault. “Well, then, where are those phone-message slips you pocketed at the motel?”

  Frida shook her head and pulled them out of her jacket pocket. There were three, all crumpled up. The first was from Elyria, from Sunday evening, saying call please, giving her home number in Denver. The second was from Pat Ryan, from Monday morning, saying goodbye and have a good life, and giving a. local number. The third, also from Monday morning, was from Curt Murbles, ordering me to phone Washington ASAP. Frida brushed a hank of gray hair off her forehead and mumbled, “I called that Elyria person back for you, so she wouldn’t worry any.”

  I shot her a look and grabbed the phone. Elyria could wait, then, but Pat Ryan might already be on his way to Fresno. I dialed the number and got no answer in seven rings. “Shit, the poor man probably needed someone to get drunk with. He just got fired,” I gloomed.

  “Now, don’t get pissy with me, young lady; you ain’t no candidate for a ritual drunk in your condition.”

  I glared at her. “A good drunk might be just what I need.”

  Frida glared back. “And be just like your mama.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but closed it again. She couldn’t have gotten her point across better if she’d slapped me.

  And she didn’t know that things had changed. That two weeks after my father died, my mother had checked herself into a clinic and dried out, and had gone to AA and stuck with it, and had written me a Goddamned letter of amends. I buried my face in my hands and moaned, “Ma’s sober now, Frida.”