An Eye for Gold Read online

  “Please.”

  “I will. And . . .”

  Ava was now watching me with the eyes of an eagle.

  I turned my back to her. I had placed the call in front of her because I wanted her to hear, but not be able to directly question my plans, but I did not want her to hear what I wanted to say next. I whispered into the phone. “I . . .”

  “I do too,” Ray answered, his voice tight with pain.

  I hung up the phone, sat down, and tried to eat the breakfast Ava had left out for me. She came the rest of the way into the kitchen and leaned against the edge of the counter, her arms folded across her chest. And stared at me.

  I forced food into my mouth and chewed. “Well,” I said, keeping my eyes on my cereal, “it worked for Jesus.”

  “What worked for Jesus?” Her tone was classic Ava: even-tempered, excruciatingly polite, and not to be avoided.

  I flushed with embarrassment, uncertain of the sketchy training in matters biblical I had received from my paternal grandmother, and even hazier on where exactly Christ fit within Mormon theology. “Well, didn’t he go into the desert once to reason things out?”

  Ava snorted, as far as she went towards expressing contempt. “Yes. Just don’t let it go forty days and forty nights,” she said, and left the room.

  AN HOUR LATER, I was packed up and giving Ava a civil apology for my abrupt departure when the phone rang. She answered it. “It’s for you, Em,” she said, giving me a probing look.

  I stood in her front hallway, feeling conspicuous. “Hello?”

  “Em, it’s Faye.”

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “I wanted to say how sorry I am for getting crosswise with you about Tom. About this recruitment, and everything.”

  “Oh.” I wasn’t used to people apologizing to me, least of all for being haplessly sucked into a third party’s manipulation games. “So he-told you I reamed him a new . . . ah . . .”

  “Asshole? You did? Well, he probably deserved it. No, I just got to thinking about it, and um, yes, I spoke with him about you a little bit last night, and we had words-—trust me on this—and it just really dawned on me that I was being . . . well, he’s a good guy, but he has his moments when he plays Svengali, and he ought to be spanked.”

  I savored an image of what that might look like, and laughed.

  “So; forgive me, please?”

  “I really don’t think you have much to apologize for.”

  “Oh, yes I do. Hey, I don’t need to build up karma over this, see? So please, accept my apology. Besides, I want us to be friends, and if you’re anything like me, you’d be thinking what a presumptuous shithead I am about now, getting in your face and telling you your business yesterday like I did. I really am sorry.”

  “It’s nothing.” I felt Ava’s eyes on my back.

  “So let’s have lunch again some day soon.”

  The phone was cordless, so I wandered down the hall a bit, trying to give Ava the hint that I wanted a little privacy. “Look, I’d love to, Faye, but I had a . . .” I couldn’t tell her about Ray’s proposal and the ensuing fight with Ava listening. “I’m on my way to Nevada.”

  “Oh, so Tom got hold of you after all?”

  “What do you mean, ‘after all’?”

  “Well, there was that Indian shaman who was trying to reach you.”

  “No, he didn’t call me.”

  “Oh, good, then. For once, he kept his word. I told him to stay out of your business, and he said he would.”

  Faye had a way of staying out of my business that didn’t stay out of my business. I wanted to scream, but I said, “Well, you can pat him on the head. He’s being a good boy.”

  She laughed. “Well, you have a good trip. And hey, take my phone numbers with you, so if that truck of yours breaks down again, you give me a call, okay? You know I always need an excuse to fly somewhere.”

  “That’s absurd. You don’t go flying all the way out to Nevada in a half-million-dollar airplane to fetch some yuk like me whose twenty-five-year-old beater of a truck breaks down.”

  “Em, you’ve forgotten.”

  “Oh, yeah. You get bored.”

  “call me. Humor the poor little rich girl.” She gave me her home number and cell number.

  I said, “There is one thing you can do for me.”

  “Name it.”

  “You read a lot of esoteric stuff. You got a book called Seven Arrows!”

  “Great book. I highly recommend it. But I lent my copy out already.”

  “Oh.”

  “You can get it at any good bookstore. Try Sam Weller’s. They have a great Western Americana section. Or try The King’s English. Lovely little bookstore.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Anything else?”

  There was one other thing. “Yes. You can go back and visit ‘Auntie,’ and ask her if she knows anything about the environmental group that’s trying to block the development of Granville Resource’s new project in the Kamma Mountains.”

  “Okay.”

  I said good-bye to Ava and headed out to Sam Weller’s, where I found a used copy of Seven Arrows, as well as some interesting-looking books on the history of Nevada, both natural and human. Then I got back into my truck and headed west into the Great Basin and whatever capital-I Introspection I might gather there.

  I MADE IT clear to Wendover, where Interstate 80 meets the Nevada border and a phalanx of slot machines, before curiosity got the better of me and I phoned Tom Latimer.

  “I’m just heading out of town,” I lied. “My truck’s all fixed, so I’m going west for a few days to kind of take a break. Just thought I’d say good-bye.”

  “Thank you.” He sounded genuinely pleased that I would call.

  Embarrassment tightened my throat, and I presented the excuse for calling that I had rehearsed over those long miles of salt flat that stretch between the western shore of Great Salt Lake and the border. “And, um, I had some more thoughts about my conversation with Gretchen MacCallum. Thought I’d pass them on to you.”

  “Oh, great. Let me get a notepad ready. Okay, shoot.”

  “Well . . .” I drawled, because I didn’t really have anything specific to report. “I mean, I have a feeling about MacCallum. He’s kind of an interesting sort. I don’t know if that has any bearing on things, but . . .”

  “Interesting how?”

  “Well, just the fact that he’s still employed catches my attention. If you think it’s hard to stay employed in oil and gas these days, you should try mining geology. They call it economic geology, for some reason.”

  “I see. Anything strike you as unusual about Granville Resources, or about the way MacCallum does business with them?”

  “No. Well, it’s very unusual that he managed to accrue two million dollars’ worth of stock. He must be something kind of special, or unusual, to get much stock at all, even as bonuses. I mean, nowadays companies don’t have to offer that much in employee incentive plans. So I got to wondering if he’s got some special deal going.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, I don’t know.” I pulled my punch, not ready to suggest that Gretchen MacCallum’s husband might have a motive for murder. Something in me wanted dearly for MacCallum to be that lone wolf she loved, because then he just might have some answers to my quandaries. “Dirty doings would be your department”

  “And what falls in Em’s department?” Tom inquired. “Well, if he’s just Joe Geologist, then maybe the higher-ups in the company think he’s a golden goose that they have to hold on to.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “It’s less common these days, what with layoffs and so forth, but you used to see this in die commodities exploration business. It’s called the golden handcuffs. If someone’s really hot at exploration, you make it too expensive for anyone else to hire them away. You make him too cozy to leave. You give him stock options, or a piece of the action; some special reason to stick around. Maybe if he leaves, he isn’t vested
in the stock, and he loses it. Who knows? The irony would be that MacCallum doesn’t have to work anymore, not with seven figures in stock, so why’s he still there?”

  “I’ll bet you have a guess.”

  “Yes. Maybe it’s really because he feels loyal to Granville, or to the whole industry. Or maybe he just needs something to do. Or maybe he’s just still working to keep his exploration partner employed.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “It’s just a hunch.” But then I thought about the photograph of the gamblers that MacCallum had hung over his drafting table. “It’s something I’m trying to sort out, I guess. Explorationists are a funny bunch. They’re optimists. In order to go exploring, you have to believe some goody might be out there. I always worked on the exploitation side, not exploration. That’s where you maximize the production of a goody someone else has already found. Someone like MacCallum. A true explorationist is half wizard.”

  “Like yourself,” he chuckled.

  I paused a moment, wondering if he was beginning to butter me up again, or truly paying me a compliment. “No, I make a lousy explorationist. I’m too much of a pessimist.”

  Tom said, “Ah, but that’s what makes you a detective. You may not have visions of goodies that aren’t likely to be there, but you’re spot-on about the nasty things that are. Not many people can stand to look at things that make them uncomfortable. You stare right into them.”

  “I am not a detective,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  Silence filled the telephone. I imagined him writing the numbers one through ten on his notepad so he would not ask me why, if I was not a detective, I was on my way to Nevada.

  I said, “Well, I’d better be going,” wishing he’d come out with the information about the shaman who’d tried to phone me. I began to think that Faye must have misunderstood him. We had met no Indian peoples during our brief tour of northwestern Nevada, let alone a shaman, so why would one know to call the Salt Lake City FBI looking for me?

  Tom said, “Have a good trip. Oh, and one more thing . . . no, forget it.”

  “What?”

  “No, you’d accuse me of messing with you.”

  “Right” It was my turn to count to ten. “Okay, you got my curiosity up,” I said, trying not to sound eager. “But if you mess with me, forget it.”

  “Then I’m not going to say, because this is too far out there.”

  After another ten counts, I said, “You’re good, Tom.”

  He laughed. “I have to be. But scout’s honor, this is legit, no mess.”

  “Alllll right.”

  He chuckled some more, just a relaxed laugh between friends. “Someone called here yesterday afternoon asking to speak with you.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman from Nevada.”

  “Someone I know?”

  “I don’t think so. You know a Paiute shaman named Hermione?”

  I snorted, pretending surprise. “You’re right, that’s pretty far out there.”

  “Yeah, it is. I told her you didn’t work here, but she said she wanted to know how to reach you. I asked her what her inquiry related to, but she wouldn’t tell me.”

  “So naturally, because you’re working on a wee potential fraud case in her neck of the woods, you followed up and did a search on her in your Big Brother database. And?”

  “She lives over on the Pyramid Lake reservation, at a place called Sutcliffe.”

  “ ‘Sutcliffe’ sounds Paiute as all hell. So does ‘Hermione.’ ”

  “Us white folks have imposed a few things on the Paiutes, Em. For all I know, Sutcliffe was a federal agent who pocketed the Indians’ government dole and charged them for the exotic grain seeds they were supposed to magically know how to farm, now that they could no longer pursue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Heaven knows what her Indian name is.”

  “Native American name.”

  “Or whatever appellation does not offend her or her tribe. Or band. Word has it Paiutes consider themselves more an association of bands than a tribe.”

  “Whatever, Tom. But you were about to tell me how she’s connected to Granville Resources, or to the biology of endangered rodents.”

  “Like I say, Em, you have an excellent nose for shit”

  “It has such a distinctive odor.”

  “Well, here’s your answer. She last attracted the attention of federal authorities when she protested the placement of the mill, offices, and mine portal of the Gloriana Mine, which is the mine your friend MacCallum found, and where our friend Patricia Gilmore had her office. Granville complained to the BLM, and the BLM tossed it over to us. That time, the controversy went away on its own.”

  I whistled. “And she wants to speak to me.”

  “She does.”

  “What became of her protest?”

  “They moved the whole works.”

  “How far?”

  “Eight hundred feet.”

  “Sacred ground?”

  “That’s a good guess, Em. I hadn’t thought of that But she never said.”

  I thought a while. Shamanism sounded fascinating, even alluring, but also way over my head and downright scary. I took a deep breath and said, “Don’t give me her phone number. I’m on my way to Nevada to do some thinking, not to get into trouble, and if my sniffer is worth anything, she smells like forty miles of bad road. I am going to Nevada because it’s close by, and it’s big, and it’s open, and because there’s hardly anyone else there. I am going to Nevada to be by myself and figure out what I want to be when I grow up, and if she calls again, please tell her I went the opposite direction and I won’t be back.”

  Tom chuckled appreciatively. “Okay. But what if she’s waiting for you at the border?”

  I glanced nervously around the phone booth, paranoid that he might be right. No one was in sight but a few passing motorists whizzing by on the highway. “What are you raving about, Tom?”

  “She’s a shaman, remember.”

  “Sure. And I’m the reincarnation of Cleopatra. See ya, Tom.”

  “I thought you were Eleanor Roosevelt. Write when you get work.”

  “Will do,” I said, suddenly happier than I’d felt in months. “But right now, I gotta run.” I stared westward toward the rampart of the first mountain range beyond the state border. It was brown and dry, and it danced in the heat. “The desert calls.”

  24

  OVER THE NEXT TWO DAYS, I FOLLOWED LAZILY along the path followed by the 1849 emigrants, indulging my love of Western history. I stopped to examine the Humboldt River near Wells, where the main trace of the emigrant trail swept south from the northeast corner of Nevada. I had, until then, been following the approximate route of a southerly spur that a few hapless emigrants—such as the ill-fated Donner party—had taken across the salt flats of Utah. The main route of the trail, which began at Independence, Missouri, wound westward through a corner of Kansas, and all of Nebraska and Wyoming into Idaho, where it forked, at a southerly swing of the Snake River, into the Oregon Trail and the California Trail. The California Trail descended into northeastern Nevada, then followed the westward-flowing waters of the Humboldt until that river sank into the desert south of present-day Lovelock. There, as I’ve mentioned before, the emigrants staggered, already exhausted from months of travel, illness, and fouled water, across forty waterless miles. If they made it across the Forty Mile Desert, they caught the easterly-flowing Truckee River or Carson River and headed over the Sierra Nevada Mountains into California. Others turned north-west before Lovelock and instead crossed the Black Rock Desert, which took them into California near Mount Lassen.

  I stood on the bank of the Humboldt River, listening to my truck ping as its engine cooled, and thought how different it must have been to pass this way in an ox-drawn wagon. The first emigrants had not even had a trail to follow, only the river and the reports that good farm lands lay farther west. Nevada had not been a state yet, nor had Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Oregon,
or California. Until 1848, California, Nevada, Idaho, and Utah had not, in fact, even been United States territory.

  I tried to imagine the terrain as it had been then, without telephone poles, or pavement, or the distant burger stands and gas stations that marked the edge of Wells, and wished I’d seen it then. I had not forgotten the argument I’d had with Ian Walker over the mining versus environment debacle, and neither had I fully sorted out exactly where I stood on it. I was a geologist and had made a good living finding resources that other people took from the ground, but I didn’t always approve of how that taking was accomplished. And, as Ian said, I drove a vehicle made entirely of mined materials and powered it with fossil fuels, and did not know exactly where those resources came from or if a system of environmental safeguards or employee safety governed their extraction. For all I knew, I was burning fuel purchased from some Middle Eastern male who thought I should be kept ignorant and behind walls or covered by heavy veils.

  Perhaps in an effort to rub my nose in my own unintegrated value system, I stopped again near Elko to take a tour of one of the open-pit mines in the Carlin Trend, perhaps the one I’d seen from the air. I will say again that the mine was huge, and that I was both aghast and impressed; aghast that such a scar had been made on my planet, and impressed that my species had figured out how to do it. There seemed to be a lesson encoded in this dissonance, something about limits, both economic and technological. Certainly the fact that we could, as a species, accomplish certain technological feats did not dictate that we should necessarily carry every one of them out. I was fond of trout and could catch one or two with a fly rod, but even though I would have loved to eat trout more often, I wouldn’t bring in a huge net and haul in every one in the lake. At the same time, I knew I was mixing my metaphors again. Trout are, if properly managed, a renewable resource. Gold is finite and rare.

  I stopped in Battle Mountain to restock my larder and refill my five-gallon water jugs and to purchase an atlas of the back roads of Nevada. And I stopped just about every other place it occurred to me to stop, most of which were just lonesome summits along the highway, where I’d leave the truck and walk out into the desert to kick pebbles around for a while. When I passed through a town large enough to have a good grocery store, I bought a trout or a couple of links of sausage, a potato, and a fresh vegetable, and wrapped them in aluminum foil and put them underneath the hood on the engine block of my truck, and drove until they were cooked, then sat beside the Humboldt River and pretended I was eating something I’d pulled out of an oak barrel on the back of my wagon. I tried to imagine that, like the emigrants of one hundred and fifty years earlier, I was headed for a better life.