Mother Nature Read online

  I made a copy of the map page, which showed the ditch site.

  Luck was with me. Sebastopol published a weekly called the Sebastopol Times & News. I pulled out the first issue published after the murder. I found a short bit buried in a summary entitled “County Sheriff’s Log” for the date of the murder:

  Sanborn Rd.: The body of Janet Pinchon, 24, of Santa Rosa was found with her bicycle in the 7300 block. The Sheriff’s Department is investigating.

  As the Sebastopol Times & News was abundant in such small-town charm, I got to perusing it. The whole paper was only twelve pages long, plus the obligatory advertising inserts. Aside from the County Sheriff’s Log, there was a City Crime Log, a Fire Log, City Government Briefs, Editorial page, several regular columns, a sports and school page, and notices of births, marriages, deaths, obituaries, legals. I learned that there was mounting concern over pedestrian safety in city crosswalks, that local no-growth interests were arguing the fate of a proposed low-income housing development project in the vicinity, that the Analy High School Tigers were doing okay football- and basketball-wise, that three joyous local couples had announced the births of children in recent weeks (two girls, one boy), and that the local Safeway supermarket had chuck roast, lightbulbs, and Huggies on sale. Not exactly a large haul on information, but somehow very soothing.

  Then I noticed a sidebar column entitled “In Brief.” Along with summaries on a quarry accident, a particularly glorious fender bender, and minor outrage over a defaced sign, was one paragraph on Janet:

  ‘ACCIDENT’ BAFFLES SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT

  SEBASTOPOL—The sheriff this week is working to determine the cause of death of a Santa Rosa woman who was last seen leaving her home for an evening ride on her bicycle. The body of Janet Pinchon, 24, was found in the ditch bordering Sanborn Road early in the morning of Nov. 30. An investigation into what at first appeared to have been hit-and-run manslaughter is now being conducted as first-degree murder. Investigators have not yet determined whether Pinchon’s death was caused by heavy blows to the head and body, or by asphyxiation due to strangulation, according to Det. Sgt. Joe Harding of the Sonoma County Coroner’s Office.

  Leave it to a small-town rag to savor the details.

  This account told me several things. It let me know that Janet’s odd roommate, Suzanne Cousins, was the last person who admitted to seeing Janet alive. It gave me a bit more information about the timing of events, and it gave me the name of a person in the Coroner’s Office to approach for further information. That an attempt had been made to make her death appear to be vehicular manslaughter, I already knew.

  I glanced at random through the other logs for the date Janet’s body was found. There was a notation under the Fire Log. Under Miwok Mills Fire District, I found:

  Propane leak, 8056 Miwok Station Rd.; motorcycle accident (moderate injuries), 11287 Trimbe Rd.; medical aid, 7342 Sanborn Rd.; Mutual Aid to Graton Fire Dept.

  This suggested that an ambulance had been called when Janet’s body was found, which meant there was a medic at the Miwok Mills Fire District I could contact. This was good; I began to have a few people I could chase down for further information. In fact, I liked the idea of seeking out the medic much better than making a cold call on the Sheriff’s Department or the Coroner’s Office.

  About then I noted an unease in my stomach, a sensation not unlike the onset of gas. Something was wrong. What? Was it worry over my impending performance in the geology job I had hustled myself into? Was it the fly-on-the-wall sense of dislocation I had arrived in California with, now growing into full-blown anomie? No, those were both there, but there was something else, something about the newspapers.

  It was fifteen minutes later, as I was leaving the library, that I finally sorted out what was wrong. It was so glaringly obvious that I couldn’t believe I’d missed it: nowhere in the spare reporting was there a mention that the dead woman was the daughter of the United States Senator from California.

  8

  The Miwok Mills Fire House was little more than a coffee urn with a garage full of fire engines and rescue vehicles attached. It lay at a crossroads a mile west of the ditch site, tight in by a small cluster of weather-beaten shops and houses.

  At first I thought no one was home at the firehouse. I stood on tiptoes to see over a big sign that read SPAGHETTI FEED SUNDAY NIGHT ALL YOU CAN EAT $10 and peered in through a window, but could see nothing but gloom and hulking fire engines. The sense of vacancy matched the mood of the rest of Miwok Mills, which was comprised of two bars, a convenience store, several large industrial buildings, a few abandoned shops, and a much-vandalized bus stop surrounded by very modest cottage-style houses with picket fences. One of the old storefronts sported new paint and a sign reading, COMING SOON: MIWOK BAKERY AND CAFÉ. Three unsettled-looking Latinos watched me closely from the bald face of one of the saloons, which looked like it had been teleported intact from a Mexican border town: chipped stucco walls in a fading robin’s-egg blue, one tiny window, a dark doorway, and no sign.

  It was getting on for dark and cooling down rapidly. I knocked on the firehouse door again, ready for an excuse to leave, but now a light came on deep inside, throwing an interior doorframe into stark silhouette. A man filled the doorframe and paused, his face engulfed in shadows, his backlit blond curls a corona of light. As he crossed to the door by which I stood, he moved with a lanky grace. He opened the door, looked me up and down, smiled shyly, and blushed. “May I help you?” he asked, shoving his hands into the pockets of his snug blue jeans. He was a tall man. A tall, muscular, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed, damned good-looking man with an unassuming manner.

  It took me a moment to reply, so distracted was I by the wild disorganization of those flaxen curls and the sandy eyelashes that went with them. It had been a long while since I’d noticed a man. I’d been too busy grieving and hiding at home, but here I was out in the world asserting myself again, working on a job. I felt exhilarated and frightened. I wanted to visit with him and I wanted to run for it. I said, “I hope so. I’m looking for whoever went out on a medical call on Sanborn Road a couple of weeks back. I’m … I knew the woman who was killed, and, um, I’m trying to learn all I can about how she died.”

  The man averted his eyes in sympathy. His blush deepened. “I’m sorry—”

  “For the family, sort of,” I prattled on, feeling increasingly embarrassed at my line of falsehoods. “I hate to ask, but it would help everyone get through it. The loss, I mean.”

  The man extended a thick, callused hand. “Jim Erikson. I went on that call. Come in.” He led me back to the tiny office and indicated with a wave of his hand that coffee was mine for the asking. I nodded yes. He searched around awkwardly for a mug that was reasonably clean, filled it, and brought it to me. That left him standing very close to me, but then, it really was a very small room.

  He towered over my five foot five, hunching slightly as tall people sometimes do to try to make themselves appear smaller. The effect was endearing, the more so because he was clearly a very trim, fit individual brimming with physical vitality. I’m trying to say that I liked having him close to me. As soon as I realized this, I stepped back and stared at the floor.

  Erikson twisted uncomfortably and stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

  “So you’re both a fireman and an EMT?” I asked, trying to stick to business.

  “Yes. Most of us are.”

  “So you were the fireman on duty when the call came in for Janet?”

  “On call. It’s an all-volunteer department. I’m an electrician. I work for myself, so I take a lot of early morning and rush-hour duty.” He was staring at my hands now. Unconsciously imitating his posture, I had stuck my hands in my jeans pockets, too. I pulled out my left hand and made a display of scratching an itch on my face, right where the light would prove that I wore no ring on that third finger. “Did someone phone the firehouse here with the report about Janet?”

  Jim’s cheeks once
again grew pinker. “No, it was a typical call, it came through 911—dispatch. Except that it was what’s called a ‘coroner’s call.’ Your friend was already, ah—”

  “Dead. Um, yeah, I suppose she died the night before sometime.” I tried to catch his eye again, but he was staring resolutely at the floor.

  “I think so. I secured the scene until the sheriff and coroner could get there, because we’re a lot closer. When the coroner got there he said she’d been gone awhile.”

  His euphemisms were getting a bit thick. “Listen, I’m not squeamish about this. In fact, I’ve seen the photographs that guy took.”

  “Oh. Yeah, he arrived just as I was leaving.” He frowned, then chanced a quick look into my eyes. “Well, there’s not much more I can tell you.”

  I weighed the wisdom of smiling too coquettishly in the middle of a conversation like this and decided it would fly in the face of the cover story I had fed him. “Was it obvious to you that her death was no accident?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. No, I wouldn’t have thought for a minute it was accidental. The scene was all wrong. The way the bicycle was farther down the ditch than she was, and the way her clothes were all crooked.” He fell silent and shook his head, the pale curls shifting slightly with the motion. Blushing deeply now with the abject embarrassment of one who is telling another something painful and intimate, he said, “And of course, the lividity—that’s a sort of bruising effect that develops after death—”

  “Yes, I’ve seen it before.” I tried to give him a look of reassurance, but his eyes were once again glued to the dirty concrete of the floor.

  “Well, it was fully developed, and on the upper side of her body, not pooled at the bottom like it would have been if she’d died in that position.”

  “I see. One thing I wonder, if she was so clearly dead, then who phoned for an EMT?”

  “Standard procedure. Our district, we roll. Fires, automobile accidents, downed phone wires…” He shrugged his shoulders, pulled his left hand out of his pocket to rub the back of his neck. No wedding ring!

  Smiling foolishly, I sipped my coffee and swallowed, trying to cover my smile with the cup. “Do you know who made the 911 call?” I asked.

  “That would have been Mrs. Karsh.”

  Clearly someone he knew. “Who’s Mrs. Karsh?”

  “She lives right there by where your friend was found.”

  “Did she find her?” I persisted, falling into his use of euphemisms in spite of myself. It was not Janet that had been found, but her body.

  The medic curved his spine in a new kind of embarrassment. “I really don’t know.”

  “She lives in that two-story Victorian with the palm trees, and the stone gateposts out front?”

  “Yeah.”

  I tensed at the thought of that barren expanse of land, the unpainted, derelict house, and the hulking man trying to hide himself behind the gatepost. “I saw a big man there.”

  “That would be Matthew, her son.”

  “Is he as dangerous as he looks?”

  Jim Erikson considered this for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. Everybody says he’s just an overgrown kid.” He chanced a quick smile, now that we were back on what he felt were more neutral topics.

  “Oh. And the sheriff’s deputy,” I added quickly. “What’s his name?”

  He thought a moment. “Dexter relieved me.”

  “Great. And do you know the name of the guy who took those photographs?” I smiled encouragement, and not just to stimulate his memory.

  A thin beeping sound interrupted our conversation. Abruptly Jim Erikson straightened up, all self-consciousness vanishing from his posture. He grabbed at a slim black gadget mounted on his belt, pushed a button to silence the beeps, and pulled it up into the light to read it. To me he said, “Excuse me. This is a call. Um, why don’t you come back another time?”

  “Oh, sure. No problem. I’ll ask Mrs. Karsh.”

  At this, Jim Erikson shot me a perplexed look, then shrugged his shoulders, turned to his dispatch radio, and listened. “Miwok Mills respond,” a squelchy voice barked over the wire. “Truck in ditch, 12775 Oakwood. Man down.”

  Erikson said, “I have to go,” and quite firmly herded me out toward the front door.

  “Thank you for your help,” I said, smiling winningly, but my words were drowned in tooth-rattling thunder as the fire siren roared into life overhead. Jim Erikson wasn’t listening, anyway. He had already jumped into his turnouts and was behind the wheel of the rescue vehicle, firing up its massive diesel engine.

  * * *

  FROM MIWOK MILLS, I followed Occidental Road back eastward, winding down off the line of hills that lay west of the ditch site and the Karsh ranch. The road dipped down into the bottomlands, passing over the sleepy stream—Laguna de Santa Rosa, the Thomas Brothers’ map informed me—that ran between the hills and the turnoff to the Karshes’. I wondered idly why this sleepy, narrow little stream had been named “lake” in Spanish.

  The road was elevated along a causeway to either side of the bridge, which was much wider than the Laguna and passed at least ten feet over it, suggesting that engineers had built the road to stay high and dry during periodic flooding. I slowed, looking around. The design of the causeway and bridge tallied with the architecture of the system of ditches. In my high school geography lessons, California had been held up as North America’s example of a Mediterranean climate, which meant the seasons could be divided into a wet and a dry. The region would receive all of its rainfall in a few short months, saturating the soil. If the area was then visited by a heavy storm, it would flood. The farmers had dug those deep ditches to make certain that their fields drained quickly, keeping their crops from spoiling and their livestock from getting mired. With my geologist’s eye, I scanned the darkening landscape, measuring the breadth of the floodplain of the Laguna de Santa Rosa. A lake it might indeed become.

  It was ink dusk when I drove between the stone gateposts toward Mrs. Karsh’s stark Victorian farmhouse. Ink dusk is a quality of atmosphere that my father would point out to me of an evening, as we’d ride in from tending the herd. He’d smooth his hand across the sky as if painting it with his palm, the better to admire this moment when the sky turned a dark blue that was not yet black. It’s a time when the last bounced light still picks out the larger masses in the landscape such as trees and shrubs clearly, but smaller details are swallowed by the night.

  In ink dusk, the lines of the Karsh farmhouse seemed softer, almost welcoming. I say almost. In fact, it would have taken a much sweeter camouflage to take the eeriness out of that setting, not to mention the memory of that strange man who’d tried to hide his ungraceful body behind the stone gatepost. If I hadn’t known there was a woman inside that farmhouse, I would have delayed the visit to a daylight time or I would have brought someone with me for protection.

  I did drive slowly and cautiously up the driveway, watching for the big man, and for the little one with the battered yellow truck who had fetched him home from the gatepost. I saw no sign of either of them.

  There was only one light on in the farmhouse. I was just deciding to come back by daylight after all when a dim porch light came on at the rear of the house. The front doorway remained darkened. I took a deep breath and continued up the drive, musing that people who put twenty-watt bulbs on their back stoops are either not expecting much company or they’re trying desperately to save funds.

  As I pulled up beside the house, the mass of a square tower came into view just behind it. The light from the back porch threw a ghostly illumination across it. It was more than two stories tall, and no more than twelve or fifteen feet on a side.

  I stepped out of the little blue truck, procrastinating over approaching the door, telling myself that if Mrs. Karsh wanted company at this hour, she’d come outside and meet me. She met me halfway, appearing inside the screened door to the kitchen, hand against the wire mesh as if touching the gathering night. “Can I help you?�
�� she asked, echoing the words I had heard not a half hour earlier at the firehouse. Her tone was distant yet reasonably hospitable.

  “Yes. I’m Emily Hansen,” I called out, unconsciously getting formal with my name to match her reserve. “I’m a friend of Janet Pinchon’s. I hate to trouble you, but I’m trying to learn about Janet. The man at the firehouse said you were the one who called the ambulance.” When she didn’t respond, I added, “Can I ask you a few questions, please?”

  She didn’t move from the doorway. “You’ll excuse me. For a moment I thought you were Janet. But of course, you can’t be.”

  That stopped me for a moment. Why, because I’m the same size? Because I’m wearing her jacket? “You knew her?”

  A pause. “We were—acquainted.” The tone was civil, urgently polite, yet shy and doubtful.

  I moved a few steps closer, oddly drawn to her. I decided to make small talk for a moment, to ease into an acquaintance. “Is that a water tower?” I asked, gesturing toward the square tower.

  Her gaze jerked toward the tower. “Ah, yes…” One of her hands floated up toward her breast in uncertainty. “A tank house. Yes.”

  Wrong question, for some reason. Why? “Would it be better if I came back another time? I realize it’s pretty strange, just dropping in like this.”

  “Well…”

  “I’d have someone introduce us, but I’m not from around here. I’m sorry.”

  Mrs. Karsh at last relented, pushing open the door and stepping to one side. “You’d better come in, Emily,” she said. “You’ll catch your death out there.”

  * * *

  I GET NERVOUS even thinking about that house. I don’t like to remember it, and it’s hard for me still to put my finger on what upsets me so in the memory of that first meeting. Perhaps it’s just that I don’t like to remember how happy I felt at her first faint welcome.

  I was only ever in her kitchen, but a kitchen can tell you a lot about a woman, if you’re paying attention. Mrs. Karsh’s kitchen was what you’d call homey, if you were stretching things. More accurately, it lacked in the niceties of modernization. But here, too, I was thrown off, because it reminded me of my grandmother Hansen’s kitchen up in Casper, and I loved my grandmother dearly.