The disagreement cast a shadow over their vacation. Oahu was predictably beautiful. They hiked Mokuleia, they sunned for blissful hours on the white sand of the hotel’s beach. But Nerissa had seen a side of Ethan (and of the Correspondence Society) she didn’t like and couldn’t altogether dismiss. And although the stars over the North Shore were lovely, she was haunted by what Amélie had said. Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek’d against his creed… And against Amélie herself, apparently. Amélie had been one of the first to die in the murders of 2007.
“Ris, wake up.”
For a moment she thought she was back in Hawaii. But no. She had slept in the car. She blinked her eyes against a gray dawn, hardly tropical. When she sat up, every joint in her body voiced a separate complaint.
Ethan had parked in front of a bungalow on some dusty street near a railroad crossing. She began to ask where they were, then realized she didn’t have to. This was one of Werner Beck’s many so-called safe houses, the address of which he had given Ethan in the letter that had arrived the day they left the farm house. Evidence of heightened radiosphere activity, Beck had written, take all precautions, you can reach me at this address.
And the man just now stepping out the door and down the porch steps was Werner Beck himself. He hadn’t changed much in the years since Nerissa had last seen him. His posture remained militarily erect, though his hair and beard were grayer. He wore loose khakis and an untucked red flannel shirt. And he was cradling a shotgun, though he offered a tight smile when Ethan rolled down the window.
Please let them be here, Nerissa thought. Please let them be inside the house, Cassie and Thomas, and Beck’s son, Leo. Let them be watching from a window. Let them come running out when they see me. She opened the car door. She stood up. Ethan did the same.
“You’d better get inside,” Werner said.
And from the house there was nothing. Only a pale light, an empty porch, a motionless door, the vacant silence.
17
DOWD’S GARAGE
EUGENE DOWD’S SPRAY PAINT HAD TURNED the car Leo had stolen from white to metallic blue. With its windows and trim still masked it looked almost fake to Cassie’s eyes, a trompe l’oeil automobile, a magic trick at the point of unveiling. Dowd said he would give it a buff and a clear coat in the morning—there wasn’t time for anything better, and the only purpose of all this work was to make sure the car no longer fit its original description. A hasty coat of paint and new plates was the best he could do. Then they would have to get on the road.
Of course Cassie wanted him to finish his story about Chile, about the desert called the Atacama and the strange lights he had seen there. But Dowd wasn’t in the mood. Tomorrow, he said. He talked better when he had something to do with his hands. In the meantime he meant to drive his truck into Salina to pick up supplies, and did anybody want to come with him?
Beth volunteered at once. Dowd nodded and escorted her out of the garage.
Cassie, Leo and Thomas adjourned to Dowd’s office upstairs, where the grimy window was orange with the glow of the sunset. They were too hungry to wait for Dowd and Beth to get back, so they assembled dinner out of the leftovers in Dowd’s refrigerator. Leo switched on Dowd’s little transistor radio and let it play for a while—mostly Christmas music, since that was the next big holiday on the calendar. The tinkling bells and choral arrangements were cheerful for a time, but after dark the music began to seem as sad and distant as a signal from a ship at sea. Cassie wondered whether she would ever celebrate Christmas again. Aunt Ris had not been particularly religious, but every December she dragged a dwarfish pine tree up the stairs to the apartment and installed it in a tin basin over a white sheet, where its fallen needles would collect in prickly drifts. Cassie supposed the apartment was empty now—past-due notices in the overflowing mailbox, food rotting in the refrigerator, dust sifting out of the still air.
Leo switched off the radio. Thomas sat glumly at the window. “Wish I had something to read,” he said.
Cassie agreed. Even a magazine would have been better than nothing, but a search of Dowd’s premises had proved fruitlesss. “All we have,” she said, “is one of Uncle Ethan’s books, and Leo’s got dibs on that.”
“I could read it out loud,” he said.
Cassie had to stifle a laugh when she realized he was serious. It seemed comical to her, the idea of chain-smoking Leo Beck reading to them from a work of popular science. But it was a nice thought. (And, come to that, when was the last time she’d seen him smoking a cigarette? He must have finished his last pack, and he hadn’t asked Beth to pick up more.)
Thomas seemed intrigued. “Really?”
“Yeah,” Leo said. “Sure.” He flashed Thomas a smile, then opened the book to its first chapter. “Consider a fisherman—let’s say, a young man who owns his own boat and weaves his own nets….”
In Leo’s sonorous and surprisingly confident voice it sounded more like a story than an essay. Cassie watched Leo’s face as he read, the attention he paid to the text, the way he glanced up from the page to make eye contact with Thomas, who leaned forward with obvious interest. It was a charitable act, she thought. A nice thing to do. Apparently, somewhere inside Leo Beck was a man Cassie might be able to respect.
Dowd and Beth returned after midnight, both of them a little drunk. Dowd left a box of canned goods by the door and brought a few perishables up to the refrigerator in his office. “Supplies for the trip,” he said, and stalked out again before Cassie could ask the obvious question: What trip? Where are we going?
Leo and Thomas and Cassie had already unrolled their sleeping bags on the floor of the office. “You’re closest to the switch,” Leo said. “Will you turn out the light?”
“Okay, but what if Beth comes in later?”
“She can find her way around.”
From downstairs, the sound of hectic laughter.
A few miles down that road—and it wasn’t much of a road, just gravel and dirt blown over with sand—me and Bastián realized we were doing something stupid.
Morning had dawned cold, with a few flakes of snow drifting from a thickly overcast sky. The air in the garage smelled of urethane and stale beer and motor oil. Dowd had stripped the car of its masking and now he had it up on a lift, inspecting the tires and undercarriage in case it became necessary to drive through bad weather. On their way to where, exactly, Dowd still hadn’t said.
Stupid because we didn’t know what we were getting into, and stupid because we’d almost for sure be fired. But it didn’t matter. It was one of those situations where you just say fuck it. Fuck the job, fuck management. The pay was decent but living in a bunk house the middle of the world’s driest desert, staring at the salares and the cordillera all day, makes you a certain kind of crazy. I don’t know about Bastián, but I was ready to go back where people actually lived. See something vertical for a change. Talk to a woman who wasn’t an overseer or a forklift driver.
So we drove on even after the Pisco ran out. Bastián started talking about copper mining. He said he had a cousin who had worked at Chuquicamata and Escondida. What ever these people were doing out here, he said, they weren’t mining copper. To mine copper you need water, but there was no river or aquifer. Big tanks of water had come through our compound, but not enough for serious ore extraction. And if they were doing heap-leaching there would have been bulk shipments of sulfuric acid and chemicals like that. Hell, we should have seen the tailing dams by now. Or at least smelled them. Because we were getting close.