Mother Nature

by Sarah Andrews

  After all these years a bachelor, I gone and got hitched the hard way. Well, tonight the most wonderful thing, I held my newborn son in my arms. I saw him born too, all wet and squalling, and I wanted to thank you. If you hadn’t forced my heart open, I never would have let her in, and he’d never have been born. Thank you Emmy, from the bottom of my heart. Thank you again and again.

  Frank

  The letter dropped from my fingers.

  As it spiraled to the floor, the world seemed to spin with it. Frank, who had been my lover, was now a father and husband. My own father was dead, my aunt was gay, and my mother was sober. I wasn’t sure which was the hardest to confront. My mind kept buzzing, churning around and around those things that nag you in the night, like, Was Frank my only chance at happiness? How could Dad go and leave me? How can my mother fail to ruin that ranch? Did I hurt my aunt’s feelings? and finally, Why the hell didn’t she just tell me she was gay? I could have handled it, truly. I just need time to adjust.

  Time to adjust, that’s what I’d been needing, but Elyria had felt she knew better. She’d pushed and pushed, and now here I was more frustrated and demoralized than ever, up to my scalp in pain and bruises, huddling in the dark, scared out of my mind that somehow, somewhere, the monster who had attacked me in the motel was going to finish what he’d started. How could I explain to Elyria, whom everybody loved, what it was like to be hated, to feel those raging fingers close around my throat? No, I told myself angrily, the only one who might truly understand this agony was Janet Pinchon, who lay rotting in an early grave.

  Janet. I had chased her ghost into the same trap that had swallowed her, and in the process, I had lost her. Gone was my sense of closeness to her, my pleasure in avenging her loss. Elyria wouldn’t understand about this, either.

  I pressed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, writhing with anger at Elyria, missing her, wanting to call her, afraid to call her, dreading the loss of companionship that was to come. I wanted to plead with her not to marry Joe, or not just yet, so I could go on living in her spare bedroom just a little while longer, until the weight of all this pain and loss could leave in its own time.

  One thought chased another for hours, until my fear of Matthew Karsh and his mother and whoever else out there might have done what was done to me and to Janet, and my rage at not being believed or helped by the Sheriff’s deputies, and Frida’s little surprise, and all the rest that had happened in recent months became one with my rage and loss over everything else in life. At five A.M., when my eyes snapped open for the hundredth time over some inconsequential noise—the stomp of a horse in its stall, or the clatter of the rain overfilling a leaf-choked gutter and finding a new channel over aging tin—I shrugged Janet’s torn down parka over the flannel pajamas Frida had lent me and made my way down into her office in the dark. By the dim green light on the telephone keypad, I tapped in Elyria’s number and the number of my telephone credit card. It would be six A.M. in Denver, a barely acceptable hour to awaken her, but it was time to talk; no, it was past time, and if I’d been up all night, well then, Elyria could survive without her last hour’s sleep. And maybe she’d understand, and …

  A male voice answered on the second ring, heavy with sleep. “Hello?”

  “Joe. I’m sorry to wake you. I’ll call back later,” I said miserably, and hung up. Thirty seconds later, the phone jangled, echoed loudly by the outdoor ringer that would summon Frida if she were in the paddocks with a horse. I grabbed the phone off the hook and said hello, but heard only a dial tone. The infernal instrument was ringing for the second time before I realized that the call was coming in on the private rather than the office line, and that I had to push the flashing button to get it. By the time I did this and said, hello again, Frida had picked up the extension in the house. She croaked into the line, her voice amplified by the short connection. “That you, Em?” Frida shouted. “What the hell you doing, calling me up at this hour?” Frida never was one to welcome intrusions to her sleep.

  “It’s for me, Frida,” I asserted. “Go back to sleep.”

  “What’s going on?” she insisted, now fully awake and riled.

  “Please go back to sleep. This call’s for me.”

  “Shit!” Frida barked, and hung up.

  “Em?” said a softer voice on the line.

  “Yes, Elyria.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then who called just—”

  “It was me. I didn’t know you had Joe there with you. I’m sorry to have wakened him. And you.”

  “Well, you did, but I’m glad you finally called, damn you. And don’t worry about Joe, he has a breakfast meeting. The alarm would have wakened him any moment. He’s in the shower now. So what is this I hear about someone breaking into your motel room? That’s terrible!”

  “Yes, in a word, it was.”

  “Were you injured?”

  Injured? Was that the word? “Well, some. They took me to the hospital, but let me go a couple hours later.”

  “Who was this creature? Did the police catch him?”

  “No, they didn’t. The problem was, I didn’t see him. But I know who it was,” I added hastily.

  “Oh? How?” Elyria has an organized mind. It likes to file things under Yes or No, but not under Maybe.

  “Well, it’s a long story, but you see, his mother’s trying to sell off his sister’s inheritance, and I pushed a nerve, and he—”

  “Wait, you’re not making sense,” she said, sleep still fogging her mind. “Start over.”

  “I think it’s related to the case I’m working on.”

  “How do you know that?”

  I said testily, “To be honest, I don’t.”

  “Oh.” There was a pause on the other end of the line, then: “So … will you … be out there much longer?” This wasn’t like Elyria, to brush aside something so obviously important to me for whatever was on her mind. Or it wasn’t like the old, pre-Joe Elyria. And she sounded overly encouraging, like she’d really prefer I stayed as long as I could.

  “Don’t worry. Frida’s asked me to stay for Christmas. My cousin Abe showed up, and Frida’s … ah, partner’s back from some trip somewhere. It’s a regular party.”

  “You don’t sound so sure.”

  “Well, Frida’s kind of … I think I put her off somehow. I used to think I knew her.” At least maybe we could talk about this.

  Elyria came back with something soothing and big-sisterly, that sort of “chin up” kind of chatter. Then she changed the subject again and talked about her work for a while, and when I started to sound more pulled together, she ever-so-casually mentioned, “Joe and I are going to his parents’ for Christmas.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “New York.”

  “And you’re going when.” I wasn’t asking her a question. We were speaking on the twenty-third of December.

  “Tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t keep the harsh, disappointed edge out of my voice. “So this is the big trip: he’s taking you home to meet his parents. On the big family holiday, no less. That means he’s proposed, and you’ve accepted. And this must have happened a while ago, didn’t it, because it’s pretty damned tough getting plane reservations into New York on Christmas Eve. So when were you planning on telling me?”

  There was a long silence, and when she spoke again, there was a chill in her voice. “Em, you have at last found your calling. You are a fine geologist, but you are an inquisitor without peer.”

  Now it was my turn to stay silent. Into that empty phone wire I exuded all my pain and disappointment, all my terror of being alone and lost and forgotten, all my fear that in the time it takes to turn one’s back I could be replaced, bumped out of Elyria’s heart—or anyone else’s—by someone more charming and whole. I waited, wishing the voice on the other end of the line would tell me it was all a joke, that it was over now. The soft green light on the telephone’s keypad l
it only a small sphere of the space in which I sat, and at that moment it seemed that was all that was left of existence for me, just one eerie green glow in a cold, empty office. My mind played a little trick then, abstracting me from the finality of that cold ending, by telling me that Elyria no longer existed, that I was holding an empty phone connected to nowhere. I was thinking about hanging the telephone up when I heard her voice, all tiny because I’d let the instrument fall away from my ear: “Em, listen to me,” she scolded. “I can’t be more for you than I am. What I am is your friend, not your umbilicus to the rest of reality. If you can pull yourself together, things will be fine for you and for us, but if you want to keep hanging off your emotional cliff by a thread like this, I’d make a sad waste of my efforts if I tried to save you. You’ve got to save yourself. Em?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Call me when you’re feeling better? Please.”

  When I didn’t say anything more, she hung up.

  Outside, the rain poured down incessantly in the predawn darkness. I sat there awhile longer, staring numbly into that green glow as the phone emitted first a dial tone, and then an odd little voice that said, “If you want to make a call, please hang up and dial again,” and then that nasty beeping noise, and then eventually silence.

  34

  There’s an odd freedom in hitting bottom. It comes with a not unreasoning conjecture that everything will be up from here. Little did I know that I had further down to go.

  That came when I phoned Murbles. “This is Em Hansen,” I informed him, bracing myself for the inevitable joust. “What do you want?”

  “Ah, Miss Hansen,” he began, his voice oddly warm. “Good of you to call. My message is simple. You have not reported to us anything of value. The Senator and I have decided that the line you are pursuing is nonproductive; or worse, your rash techniques are contrary to his privacy. As this smacks of incompetence, we feel we are best served to terminate your employment.”

  For a moment I was stunned, unable to reply. Then I got mad. Seething, spitting mad, one of those reckless mads that comes from having nothing more to lose. I gripped the telephone receiver so hard my knuckles turned white and sparks seemed to fly out of them. “Cut the shit, Murbles,” I hissed. “Just where do you get the idea that—”

  “You were supposed to report to us. Instead, you are out annoying the police.”

  “You’ve been talking to Muller?” I asked, confused by the thought that Muller might have been in touch with them all along.

  Murbles’ voice carried a smirk. “Hardly.”

  “But—”

  “Now, good-bye, Ms. Hansen. And don’t think it isn’t a pleasure to be done with you.”

  The line went dead.

  I sat in stunned silence, trying to absorb what had just happened to me.

  But then my mind started moving again, careening through this newest bit of information like a roller coaster out of control. Of course, what was I thinking of? A slime like Murbles wouldn’t be direct about how he got his information, he would bend rules and cut corners. So he had an informant in the Sheriff’s Department. That figures; such custodians of the law as Murbles and his boss care little for its letter, and prefer to crush its spirit. Murbles sure covered a lot of ground the day he brought Janet’s mother to identify her body, recruiting that contact and hunting down the man who took those photographs. And what did he say? I have not reported anything of value? Does that mean they were uninterested in all that stuff I laid out to Muller and Dexter, that they don’t really care who murdered Janet? Or does he know damned well who killed her?

  I picked up the phone and dialed again. When Murbles answered this time, I said, “Murbles, you put your man on the line or I’m going straight to the media.”

  There was a moment of silence. “And just what could you tell them that was of interest, Miss Hansen?”

  “You left footprints all over this county, Mr. Murbles.”

  Another silence. A second instrument picked up. I heard the Senator’s voice. “All right, Miss Hansen, you have my attention. Now, what exactly are you going to do with it?”

  I took a deep breath and let it fly. “Okay, this is it: I’ve got things pretty well in hand here, but the Sheriff’s Department wants a bit more proof. I’m not certain just yet how I’m going to find that proof, but I’m going to find it, and you are going to pay me for every minute of the time it takes me. The reason you’re going to pay me is because your daughter was murdered, see, and that’s important. It’s not escaped me that finding her murderer is not the real reason you sent me here, but it’s the reason you gave me, and we therefore have a verbal contract that I intend to fulfill. Now, if you’d like to let me in on the big gag, the real reason you sent me here, tell me what mysterious chuckhole in your political roadway I’m supposed to fall into so you can spot the joker that’s really bugging you, well, this is your big chance, because the next time you hear from me, it’ll be to call in my final bill.”

  Senator Pinchon’s voice burst loudly over the line: “You don’t really think you can—”

  “I damn well can. You sent me out here to retrace Janet’s steps. You wanted to know if she’d found your little chuckhole, and if she had, to make sure she hadn’t told anyone about it. You people should be ashamed of yourselves.” With that antiquarian bit of vitriol, I hung up, went upstairs, and fell soundly asleep until ten.

  35

  There is comfort in completing what one has started, just as those who have found the end member of despair and plan to kill themselves seem calmed as they clean their houses to set the stage. It was in this spirit that, on awakening, I came to peace with the notion that, no matter what it took, I would complete the task I had come to California to perform. There seemed, after all, little difference between Janet’s questions and my own, and sometimes, when life begins to look like death, we discover that finding the answers to our questions has become the reason for living.

  Cousin Abe helped me pack Janet’s belongings into her little truck and lash a tarp over the load to keep off the now incessant rain. On my previous visit to that room at the Wagon Trail Motel, I had checked to make certain that nothing had been taken the night of the assault, and it had appeared that nothing had. But this time, as I sorted carefully through books and papers in order to repack them, I saw what I had missed: the eight-by-ten photographs of Janet’s body in the ditch were gone.

  I squared things with the manager of the Wagon Trail Motel. I paid her for the room, encouraging her to charge extra for damages, which I would pass on to the Senator, then made arrangements for her to receive messages for me, along with any further payment envelopes that would hopefully be forthcoming from Murbles. She was pleased to do it. “He was such a cabrón,” she purred, giving the word extra charm with her melodious accent. “If he calls again, I will tell him, ‘Ms. Hansen is away from her room just now.’ I will keep him ignorant.”

  Abe drove the F-250 and I drove Janet’s truck back to the ranch, taking care again to make certain I wasn’t followed. I drove Janet’s truck right into the barn, where it could stay until I could figure out what to do with it. Clearly her family didn’t care.

  Next, I drove to the downtown Santa Rosa Library and paid a call on my blissed-out reference librarian, asking first for biographical information on the renowned Senator for California, George Harwood Pinchon. She directed me to good old Who’s Who for a start.

  George Harwood Pinchon, educated here, worked there, married 1) Lillian Abigail Torkelson, 2) Jennifer LaRue Mason. Married twice? I scribbled down the dates, and calculated Janet’s birth year from her age. Janet was the spawn of marriage number one. Hmm. I dug through the bank of city telephone directories the library housed and found a Lillian Torkelson in San Francisco. It was an uncommon name, and if it was indeed her, she must have retrieved her maiden name upon divorce. And if she felt that way about things, I reasoned, some of Janet’s dislike of Daddy might have been learned from Mama.

&
nbsp; To the pay phone by the door. She answered on the third ring, sounding tired. “Ms. Torkelson?” I inquired.

  “Ye-es, who’s this?” The voice was low and heavy with Long Island vowels, and clotted with cigarette damage.

  “My name is Em Hansen. Um, excuse me, but are you Janet Pinchon’s mother?”

  She replied with a guarded yes.

  “Well, ma’am, this is a long, complicated story, so please stay on the line,” I said, then explained what I was doing and why.

  “That self-serving shit,” she spat, when I added, strategically at the end, that I’d been hired by her ex-husband. I could hear a match strike, and an intake of breath through a cigarette.

  “Tell me about that self-serving shit, Ms. Torkelson. Are you in touch with him?”

  “The only time I’ve spoken with him in the past twenty years other than to ask where my check is was to tell him that Janet was dead.”

  “Was he upset?”

  “Him? He said a few soppy things, you know how those pols are. Then he had the gall to say I’d called at a bad time. I’ll bet he’d have hung up if I hadn’t mentioned that Janet was found murdered by the Laguna, smack in the middle of Sonoma County!”

  I tried to sound suitably disgusted as I asked, “What did he say then?”

  “He asked what she’d been doing there.” Ms. Torkelson sounded impatient. Apparently she didn’t like saying anything that suggested that her former husband was big enough to take even this much interest in his daughter.

  “And?”

  “I said she was living there.”

  “And?”

  “He asked what she’d been doing for a living.”

  “Exactly what did you tell him? I’m sorry to pursue this, but it could be important.”

  I heard a long intake of cigarette smoke from the other end of the line. “I told him.”

  “Told him who she worked for, or on what project?”

  “The latter. He asked who her clients were.”

  “And you knew.”

  “Yes.”