Page 26 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

26.

Dorion Shaw’s phone hummed with a text.

It was from Mary Dove.

Hello, love. Route 44 closed—mudslide. Will be cleared around midnight. Too late for these roads. Days Inn here. I’ll be there for the night. I’ve called the woman you asked me about, Mrs. Petaluma. Twice. No answer. Left messages—English, Ohlone and Miwok. I’ll try again. And let you know if anything changes. See you in the morning. MDMD

The last letters were a joke within the family, the nickname being her initials and her professional designation, as she was a licensed physician.

Dorion texted a cheerful and warm response.

Zipping her windbreaker up against a blustery gust of wind, she walked to the fiberboard table that dominated the main command post tent and regarded the map on the seventeen-inch Dell. The intersection the woman had referred to was about ten miles from the Compound, and it was also on the route that the mysterious and possibly dangerous Margaret would have to have taken to get there if she’d learned its location.

Dorion pictured the improbable scenario: Mary Dove was stuck on the northbound portion of 44, while on the other side of the blockage, one hundred feet away, Margaret waited in the southbound.

And they both got rooms for the night at the Days Inn.

No, beyond improbable.

Perhaps…

Begging the question: Had the half-sister already found the Compound? It would not be easy to track the place down. Ashton had titled the property through layers of offshore companies. But that in itself might be a clue Margaret would capitalize on—a review of local deeds books would reveal a large parcel titled in the name Emerson Trust IV, which would certainly stand out among names of other area property owners like Jones and Smith and Rodriguez.

She turned from these thoughts for a moment and sent texts seeking updates to Eduardo Gutiérrez, Tomas Martinez, TC McGuire and several other townspeople who were designated “evacuators,” including most of the waylaid sandbagging team, pulled off that duty because of the risk of another explosion at the levee. She was pleased to learn that the evac was going well. McGuire reported:

Only had to cuff two, and that got the message across, tho one was the coach of my son’s soccer team. I suspect my boy’ll be sitting out most of the games this season oh well…

She calculated about three or four dozen remainers in the direct path of the flood, Mrs. Petaluma included. These would not be the lazy or uninformed, but those with the iron-core attitude that government should keep its hands off citizens.

Pill for stupid…

Part of her job, though, was protecting even people like that, and once the evac teams were done, she would descend into town herself and make her final pleas.

Her eyes on the hypnotic flow of water over the levee, she placed a call.

Tony Rossano answered. “Dor. All good there?”

She turned from the increasingly fragile earthworks and said, “Peachy. How’s your Ashton homework?”

“I’m into my three-diopter reading glasses. Does anyone have smaller handwriting than your father?”

“Colter comes close.”

“Reminds me of illuminated manuscripts from medieval monks.” A beat. “Dor, look, I knew your father.”

She sensed a defense coming and preempted him. “You’re a lawyer, Tony. If the evidence is there, you go with it. And the evidence shows he had a daughter. And to have a daughter, he needed a lover.”

“Granted. But I was going to say, he wasn’t a serial philanderer. He would have cared about the girl’s mother. There must have been…extenuating circumstances.”

She gave a cold laugh. “That phrase can be used to try to justify almost anything, Tony.”

She thought back to the night of the fight she’d had with Ashton, ending with her father and older brother facing off, a sharp blade between them.

“Let me ask you this,” she said firmly. “You steal a hundred dollars from a bank once, you’re still a bank robber, right? You don’t need to do it a dozen times to qualify.”

A sigh. “The court concedes the counselor’s point. Now, I was about to text you and Colter. I found another letter from Margaret’s mother, Sarah. It’s troubling. I’ll quote it. ‘Ash, I’m moving again. It’s exhausting. But I have no choice. They keep sniffing out my trail. They’re EVERYWHERE.’ That’s in all caps. ‘And I keep thinking about one thing: How did they find the last place I stayed, in San Francisco?’?” Tony paused. “?‘That room we know so well. Someone betrayed me. And I’m going to find out who it was. And then…Well, Ashton, as you know, actions have consequences.’?”

Silence.

“That’s all?”

“It looks like it’s one of a couple of pages. I’ll keep looking for the others. These are just a jumble. He used to be so organized.”

For a brief moment Dorion nearly choked up. She nearly said, “People change.” But she didn’t, for fear her voice would crack. After a moment she managed, “Colter and I were thinking that maybe Sarah killed herself, and Margaret blames Mary Dove. Or she wants revenge against the whole family. Colter, Russell and me too. It sounds like she’s out for blood. It’s not just defense that she’s about. It’s offense too now.”

“Not totally far-fetched. I’ll keep looking.”

After a second Dorion said, “Ashton’s essays and letters, some of it? It’s pretty crazy.”

“Yes,” Tony said thoughtfully, “but not aliens-from-outer-space crazy. There’s a kernel of truth to what he’s saying. Corrupt politicians, corrupt companies, corrupt pharma…But he saw it everywhere. I’m a lawyer and even I don’t think there’s that much evil out there.”

A brief laugh. “We’re out in mining country, Tony. That’s the way it used to work, apparently. You panned through tons of rock and mud and dirt to come up with one nugget of gold.”

“That was your father, true. Though I wouldn’t call the insights he found gold. More like radioactive uranium.”

“I’ll tell you why I called, Tony. If anybody drives to the Compound, they have to go past your place. Any chance you could swing a security camera wide, so you’ll see them?”

“No security cams near the road, but I’ve got a wildlife camera in the back. Motion activated and infrared, so it works at night. And it’s camo, so nobody’d see it. I’ll move it to the front yard.”

“Thanks.”

She disconnected and heard the rattle of her brother’s motorcycle. He arrived at the far end of Route 13 and took the hill down into town. Then he sped through the village and up the hill on this side of the valley.

He climbed off and she joined him, wishing to speak in private about her call with Tony.

She first told him that their mother was safely out of the Compound but had been delayed en route. She would be here in the morning. Dorion then told him about the threatening letter that the lawyer had found. “Sarah was upset and suspicious. Talking about somebody betraying her. Almost like it was Ashton himself.”

“Betraying her how?”

“No answer that Tony found. I asked him to set up a camera on the road to the Compound.”

“Good.” He made a cup of coffee from the Keurig. Dorion declined. He said, “Let’s talk to the others. I’ve found a few things.”

They joined the mayor, Starr, Olsen and TC McGuire. Just then Eduardo Gutiérrez pulled up in his SUV. He would have seen Colter’s cycle, or heard it, and would be curious as to what he’d learned. He joined them too.

Colter said, “We need to confirm something, and if it’s true, we can eliminate Gabris.”

He told them that the developer had reported that Hinowah’s soil was tainted and that he wouldn’t even consider a development here.

Tolifson was frowning. “We did have some issues, I remember. I thought it was limited to Misfortune Row. That was closest to the silver mines.”

As Debi Starr looked at her phone she recited, “This part of Olechu County, including Hinowah, is a designated brownfield. I’m reading from the EPA.”

She was one fast woman when it came to online research.

“Brownfield?” Olsen asked.

Starr said, “Here’s a quote. ‘A brownfield is a property where expansion, redevelopment or reuse may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant or contaminant.’?” She looked up. “There goes your vulture.”

Colter said, “Gabris gave me an idea for another possibility, though. Somebody blew the levee to steal the water.”

Tolifson asked, “Steal it? Who?”

“There’s a fracking operation southwest of town, he told me.” Her brother turned the computer so that they could all see the map. He typed a command and it changed from the basic schematic to the satellite image. You could see the town and, to the west, the copper mine and a farm. About three miles south of the farm was a large rectangle of land that was filled with industrial equipment.

He said, “I looked it up online. American Oil and Gas Extraction Company.”

Tolifson blew a breath from puffed-out cheeks. “Oh, I’ll tell you. Plenty of protests when they leased the land.”

Starr nodded. “The hearings? Anti-frackers painted this gloom and doom. Blowouts from gas explosions, earthquakes. The big issue is the water pumped down to do the fracking. It’s mixed with chemicals to make it a better quote ‘drill’ and after it’s shot into the ground the flowback comes to the surface and the companies have to do something with it—millions of gallons. Lot of it ends up in local soil.”

Dorion had run a cleanup job at a fracking site destroyed by an earthquake—which might or might not have been caused by the well itself. She told those assembled about the job and added, “The company said the chemicals are the same as you’d find in household products. That may be true but they don’t tell you that it also contains diesel fuel, methanol, formaldehyde, ethylene, glycol, glycol ethers, hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide.”

Starr grimaced. “The leases went through anyway, no matter all the protests, and I always wondered if administrative folk got paid off.” She gave a chuckle as she looked at Tolifson. “Not you, Mayor. I’m talking higher up. At the county level.”

Tolifson scoffed and said, “Hinowah is too lowly to even rate a bribe.”

McGuire asked, “Why do you suspect them?”

Colter explained that fracking operations used huge amounts of water.

Dorion said, “An average frack uses millions of gallons. Sometimes up to ten or fifteen—for a single well.”

Eyes on the map, Colter said, “Just a scenario. Thinking out loud. They blow the levee, the water flows down the spillway, into the gulley in front of Copper Peak.” He traced a line. “It hits the copper mine and farm and flows south, ending up here.” He tapped what looked like a dry lake bed right next to the fracking company.

Starr clicked her tongue. “Like a huge spigot, straight from the river to the frackers.”

Dorion added, “And one thing to know: fracking operations can use explosives in addition to the water for drilling. In fact, the process was invented by a Civil War general who saw that the impact of artillery shells released oil and gas from the battlefield.”

Olsen said, “So the fracker could have access to C-four or something else that goes bang.” Dorion noted another smiling glance Colter’s way. Interesting, she thought, before tucking the thought away.

He said, “I’m going to check the place out.”

Starr chuckled. “How’s that undercover thing of yours going to work this time? Tell them you want a barrel of fracked oil as a souvenir of your trip to the Sierra Nevadas?”

“I was thinking—”

“Flaw in the plan,” Gutiérrez said.

All eyes turned to him.

He looked up from his phone. “I’m quoting. ‘AOGE—American Oil and Gas Extraction Company—has suspended its operation in Olechu County, California, citing a miscalculation of the reserves. The equipment will be dismantled and sent to the company’s other facilities in Southern California and Oregon.’?”

She looked up. “So.”

“Square one,” Tolifson said.

Or whatever cliché you wanted to use, Dorion reflected.

But the search for a new theory was interrupted by the curious sight of a shiny black limousine that pulled to a stop above them, on Route 13, parking in front of Colter’s Winnebago, just shy of the shattered edge of the highway.

A businessman sort, about forty, with short perfectly trimmed hair, climbed out of the backseat, bending over to say something to the driver. He stood, fired up an impressive folding umbrella, then, with a frowning glance to the waterfall streaming over the levee, spotted the command post and walked down to it, apparently without a second thought about the mud bath that was staining the shoes that Dorion guessed had to have cost five hundred dollars.