Mother Nature

by Sarah Andrews

“Janet told you what she was working on?”

  “Well, yes,” she said defensively. “Her work was proprietary, of course, but she’d just been home for a visit, and when I asked who her client was, she … told me.”

  Pried it out of her, no doubt. “Then you knew she was working on an assessment for Valentine Reeves.”

  Ms. Torkelson’s reply cut like a saw through wood: “Beautiful Val.”

  “You know him?”

  “Val Reeves? Sure. Sonoma County was in George’s first constituency.”

  “Politics,” I said, again evidencing disgust.

  “That’s all he ever cared about. When I told him Janet had been out fighting the good environmental fight in his backyard, that’s when that bastard started sounding upset! God, but I wanted to kill him!” The line filled with a thick smoker’s cough.

  “And he didn’t come out to help you?” I drawled, certain I was pouring fuel onto her fire.

  “Him? No, he hasn’t bothered to see Janet since the divorce! Why spoil his perfect record? He sent that egregious assistant of his—what’s his name, Mumbles?—to drive me to Santa Rosa, said he would help me, thank you very much, though I told him I could handle it myself.”

  “So you didn’t like Murbles.”

  “What a low form of life that one is, running around doing his filthy spin control. Showed no respect, none. I found my own way home, let me tell you!”

  “And let me guess; he called back ten days later and asked to borrow Janet’s truck.”

  A pause. “Well, what did I care? It was just sitting there on the street collecting parking tickets.”

  I skipped over the fact that I now had the truck and what was left of Janet’s possessions; I didn’t want to distract her with her own shortcomings. “Next question: does Senator Pinchon have any financial connection with a group of investors incorporated as Weather-All?”

  When she was done coughing herself hoarse, Ms. Torkelson said: “Bob Weatherall, that sniveling old sot! Always had some big plan or another to develop some blackberry-encrusted piece of swamp or start some half-assed business. Well, he finally bet it all on a scam to build lawn furniture and it went belly-up and all the big sharks just swam in and gobbled him up, saying they were saving old Bob from bankruptcy. Hah! They bought his soul bag and baggage, and they’ve been using his name for any kind of deal they’ve wanted to pull off ever since.”

  “And your ex-husband is one of the boys hiding under his skirts.”

  From the other end of the line I heard a low, nasty chuckle. And glass clinking against glass, followed by a soft gurgling, a sound I’d know anywhere: Ms. Torkelson was pouring herself a late morning drink.

  “Let me guess again,” I continued. “His connection is something embarrassing to do with campaign funding, or perhaps an investment his constituency would not admire. Money laundering, perhaps.”

  “Right you are. It started twenty-five years ago when George was just a state assemblyman looking for a fast ride upstairs. That son of a bitch took my father’s money and invested it with that den of thieves, and Dad never saw a cent back. A failed investment, George called it. Hah! I saw that money go in as investment and come out tenfold as campaign contributions, then disappear into the price of taking the tart he’s married to now on the campaign trail with him. I married a common con-artist thief, just like his associates at Weather-All, and by God, I divorced him. My father’s dead now and I know I’ll never see a cent of that money for his estate, but if you’ve found something that can embarrass that weasel today, I’d just love to hear it.”

  “Do you follow his voting record?”

  “With zest.” Peals of derisive laughter. “He has the gall to call himself the Environmental Senator. My Janet knew the environment! She said companies like Weather-All shouldn’t build on such environmentally sensitive lands. I told her the skunks will always try to build on the cheapest land they can find.”

  Guessing was getting easy for me, too easy. Ma Torkelson had raised her daughter to serve her well, long on grudge and short on caution, and with an extra twist: growing up with an alcoholic can foster a compulsion to make order out of chaos. It took one to know one; how hard I’d struggled to keep my own family’s secrets secret. Pressing onward, I asked, “How does his claim jibe with his votes on environmental matters?”

  “Votes? Hah! He makes all the right speeches, but he’s right in there with that ‘Pave the Wetlands’ gang. You think they do things out in the open? Hell no, they do all their deals behind closed doors.”

  “So if Weather-All and friends needed to build along, say, the Laguna de Santa Rosa to get a source of water and a sewer tap into western Sonoma County to develop marginal lands, he’d help them.”

  The laughter on the other end of the line spiked into a giddy frenzy.

  “Ms. Torkelson, this isn’t really that funny. I think Janet was killed trying to find out about this connection.”

  The laughter stopped.

  “Ms. Torkelson?”

  When her voice came back on the line it sounded drained of all life. “My God, I never thought—”

  The line went dead.

  I thought of calling back, but knew what I could expect: either sobbing, fruitless grief, or scorching verbal abuse. Instead, I called the next number on my mental list, the offices of Reeves Construction, Sebastopol. When a woman answered, I shifted my voice up a half octave and chirped, “May I speak with Mr. Reeves? It’s personal,” and then, when I heard his voice, I warbled, “Hello, this is Wendy over at Weather-All. Can you help me? I’m new here, and I remember there were special instructions, but they’re all gone right now to a meeting, and I have this check for you, and—”

  “Under no circumstances do you make that check out to me or to Reeves Construction! You make it to the Ferris project escrow account and deposit it directly to the bank. It’s bad enough I have to take your filthy money to get this project going, but I draw the line at selling my soul for it! This accounting is going to be aboveboard for anyone to audit, do you hear?”

  Yes, I heard. These books were to be aboveboard, but his special kickback to Mrs. Karsh was not. But then, that’s the way it is with the self-righteous: they have a way of deciding for themselves what is righteous and what is not.

  I dialed him back. This time, when his secretary answered, I used my normal voice and said, “This is Em Hansen. I need to speak with Mr. Reeves.”

  I was put on hold, and some moments passed before he came on the line. “Ms. Hansen,” he said. Very noncommittal.

  “Mr. Reeves, I know you to be an honorable man. I just need you to confirm one thing: Janet Pinchon told you about that tank at the old Ferris Place, didn’t she?”

  The other end of the line was silent.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” I continued. “I’m guessing it was just after Rauch fired her, and just before she was killed.”

  As Reeves’ silence continued, I said thank you and good-bye and hung up.

  The next call was a bit more difficult to make, as it involved tracking down an old classmate on the East Coast: Marcie Jacobson, the woman who had recommended my services through her father to Senator Pinchon. My grandmother had a number for her mother, who was able to give me Marcie’s work number in Virginia. “Jacobson,” she barked, as she picked up the phone.

  “Hansen,” I barked in reply. “Yes, me; your old schoolmate. I understand you’ve been giving out my name for a certain kind of work.”

  There was a pause. “Oh, Em … yes, my dad asked about you recently. You know, I’d mentioned what you did there in Denver, and…”

  I’ll bet. I’ll bet that grisly bit of gossip kept your tongue wagging all the way through the gin and tonics one evening. “What exactly did you tell him about me?”

  Her tone became more guarded. “Oh, you know … that you were good at finding things out … that kind of thing.…”

  “I think you were a bit more direct.”

  Amused snort. “Li
ke you’re being?”

  “Just tell me which quality interested him the most,” I said, goosing her arrogance toward greater candor.

  Snort, snort. “Oh, let’s see … I think it was a comment I made about where your talents lie.”

  “And where might that be?”

  “I said you drew trouble like a lightning rod.” Self-satisfied giggles.

  I had counted well past five before I had calmed down enough to continue. Then, in a low, even voice, I said, “Marcie, you’re correct, to a certain point. My life has had its difficulties. But the particular trouble I’m in now found me because you sent it. This I resent very, very deeply.” When she didn’t say anything more, I hung up.

  * * *

  I SAT DOWN and wrote out in detail, and with references to each and every source except for Jaki, what I had learned about Janet Pinchon and what I believed to be the cause of her death, right down to the missing photographs and where I thought Detective Muller could find them. Matthew Karsh had killed Janet, I was sure of this now, but he hadn’t acted in a vacuum: he was little more than an instrument of his mother’s rage, which had seeded into madness so slowly that the whole family—no, the whole community—had as slowly come to accommodate it. A community that demoted Matthew’s brutality to the acts of an overgrown child, and considered it private business when Sonja went missing. After all, it takes extra effort to mark the line between sanity and madness, more effort than many of us can spare as we struggle just to get through our days.

  I found it difficult to write out my own miserable experiences. I was rightfully frightened, and angry and embarrassed to admit that my own weakness—my inability to face the changes life had brought me—had propelled me into harm’s way. The difference between Janet’s fate and my own had been luck: Matthew Karsh had removed his filthy paws from my throat a little sooner than from hers, and I had lived.

  I included what I thought was going on between Senator Pinchon and Weather-All, and Valentine Reeves, Mrs. Karsh, her crooked lawyers, and HRC Environmental: a couple of nice little business arrangements, where certain laws, environmental regulations, and zoning ordinances were being bent just a little for the greater benefit of the investors. I wondered if, in their contempt for anything but their own greed and lust for power, they had simply disregarded some of the laws, because after all, a law that didn’t suit them couldn’t be much of a law, could it?

  While Valentine Reeves had (in proposing his development of the old Ferris place) baited the trap that had sprung on Janet, he had neither killed her himself nor consciously suggested to Matthew and his mother that she be killed. I knew this because murder wouldn’t fit with his self-image of enlightened despot, and as I thought of his impeccable clothing and perfectly combed hair, I knew he would never ransack a motel room or mutilate a bicycle. Vanity seldom gives itself over to such outbursts; they’re messy, and hold little appeal for one so comfortably in love with himself.

  I still reeled at the thought of a father who cared as little for his daughter’s life as Senator Pinchon had, or for that matter, Will Karsh, and tried repeatedly to assure myself that my father would never have shown so little regard for my happiness. But little by little I was coming to face the fact that Frida was right: my father had driven me a mile farther down the road to hell with each drop of liquor he’d fetched for my mother.

  At least I could rest my conscience that I wasn’t working for a murderer. Janet’s mother had assured me of that when she told me how little Senator Pinchon had known about his daughter’s life. But while he hadn’t ordered her killed, what she had stumbled into would indeed have embarrassed him, had she lived long enough to make it public. The sweet irony was that in employing me, he had guaranteed that his embarrassment would be delivered.

  * * *

  I MADE THREE copies of my handwritten document, thanked my friend for her help, and got directions to the nearest post office, where I bought four prestamped envelopes. One copy I mailed to Detective Muller, marked “Merry Christmas from Em Hansen.” The second I sent to Elyria, with a brief note suggesting that she’d know what to do if I turned up dead. The third, I mailed to Senator Pinchon with a current bill for my expenses, including replacement of the window of the F-250. The original copy of my tome, I sent to the news editor at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, figuring the PD would know what to do with a story like that.

  36

  Christmas came and went. As I hid out at Frida’s and waited for my letters to find their ponderous ways through the holiday mails, my temper grew short. I kept to myself, ruminating darkly off in my room or out on the porch by myself, rubbing at the fading marks on my throat and snapping at Frida and Kitty and Abe when they asked me innocent little questions, like, “How are you today?”

  Within my growing hermitage, I gradually grew used to Frida’s new life, and to her partner, who was after all pretty easy to like. I would have liked to talk things out with Frida, but the one time I tried to apologize for my breach of manners, she was curt with me: “Em, there’s some things I don’t like to discuss.” So instead we took a longer, less fearsome route to our new state of normalcy.

  I watched the papers for splashy exposés about Weather-All and Senator Pinchon, but nothing happened. Lucky McClintock got sick of hearing from me and quit returning my calls. Detective Muller, while continuing to receive my calls with polite good cheer, was no more forthcoming than Lucy.

  As December and the year ground to a close, it continued to rain; thick gray clouds sliding seamlessly overhead, pelting us with wet. I suffered. It, was like getting wiped with an endless gray sponge. Moisture fell from the sky in pulses, now a thin drizzle, now a downpour, now a needle-keen drifting wet; now, just for a moment, stopping. Frida said she’d never seen so many rainy days together, not in California and not nowhere. Abe sat glued to the Weather Channel on cable TV, watching the satellite images as one frontal system after another bowled rain and wind across the Pacific at us, and reported that it was all because of El Niño, the warm equatorial current that flows across the Pacific. He said El Niño had shifted north this year, pushing air thick with rain up the California coast.

  “Yep, the old pineapple express, hauling rain to you straight from Hawaii,” Kitty agreed. “The ground’s saturated now; there’ll be flooding soon. ‘Bout time we set some sandbags beside the driveway, so the sheetwash won’t gully it out. Pretty soon the tack’ll be growing mildew, and we’ll be treating the horses’ hooves for thrush. What a hoot.”

  I was not as easily amused. I was restless and ill at ease, riddled with exhausting fantasies of getting even with Matthew Karsh. When I could hold still no longer, I swathed myself in oilskins and started exercising horses in the corral, making them lope around to get their hearts beating faster. Little by little I got used to working in the rain.

  A few days before New Year’s, I rode out from the corral in a steady rain astride a nice sorrel named Jack. New grass was sprouting up everywhere, turning the hills from a tired brown to a dazzling green. At first it was an exercise in cold, stiff misery, but the sensual rhythm of Jack’s stride warmed my body and soothed the complaint my little monkey brain had been dishing out, and I kept on riding, forgetting how soft the years of office work had made me. And I caught the mother of all colds.

  When Kitty pronounced my influenza a “healing crisis,” I rolled over and gave up. “What’s that, Kitty, a hint?” I snapped. “You ready for me to leave?”

  “No, but whatever it is that’s eating you is beginning to eat at me.”

  I threw down the cup of herb tea she’d just brought me, spilling it into the saucer. “What could that be, Kitty? Now, let me think. Could it be the assault? Or how about—”

  “How about the way it reminds you of your family?”

  “It what?” I bellowed, not wanting to admit that she was right.

  “Your light’s on at all hours, you’re trying to get out of bed when you’re running a fever, and there’s a weird look in you
r eyes like you’re seeing right through the wall at someone who’s not here. Oh, maybe you’ll be fine for a day or two, then you blow your stack over something trivial, like just now. I asked Frida, and she said that wasn’t like you, that you were more the slow seething type, and as there’s nothing here that should be riling you up like that, I figure you’re being chased by your own shadow.”

  “You take your ten-cent psychoanalysis and shove it!” I hollered, knocking the tea onto the floor.

  “I rest my case.”

  I opened my mouth to order her out of the room, but something in her eyes stopped me. Something more powerful than sympathy: I saw recognition. A chill went up my spine. Burying my head in my hands, I whispered, “What’s happening-to me, Kitty?”

  Kitty sat on the edge of the bed and took my hands in both of hers. “Frida told me about your brother. I think something you’ve tried to forget is coming back to haunt you,” she said.

  “I was just a little kid. How could I remember?”

  “In one way or another, we remember everything. Maybe it isn’t a conscious memory, but we remember sounds and smells, and how things felt. We remember being touched.”

  I shook my head. “Come on, Kitty,” I begged, “my father just died. I’m out of sorts.”

  “I’m sure that helped. Sure, your dad’s gone now, so it’s safe to look at what he wasn’t. And perhaps his death helped break down those walls you built to protect yourself from the past. It’s funny how this works: You need to be strong enough to remember things, yet at the same time something’s got to weaken you enough so you can’t keep it down. Like the trauma you had here in California.”

  “Matthew Karsh attacking me.”

  Kitty nodded. “Has anyone ever done that to you before?”

  I opened my mouth to say no, but there was no point in lying to Kitty. And with that acknowledgment, fear flooded through me, soaking every muscle with a horrifyingly cold weight. I squeezed my eyes shut to push the feeling away. Felt myself choking for breath. Threw my hands to my throat, only to find none there but my own.