“I like them,” the young man said. “They’re good folks, and I don’t want anybody to go up there and make trouble. I mean, what they do is sort of legal now, and it’s a big business around here.” He peered off into the bright morning sunshine heating up the small asphalt parking lot, the grassy field, and the scattered pines beyond.
“I’m interested in any information,” Mitch said, stepping out onto the porch, careful now not to spook the man. “She’s my daughter. My wife and I have been looking for her for three years.”
“Cool,” the man said, shuffling his feet. “I have a little girl myself. I mean, she’s with her mother, and we’re not married—” He suddenly looked alarmed. “I don’t mean she’s a virus kid, no, not at all!”
“It’s okay,” Mitch said. “I’m not prejudiced.”
The man looked strangely at Mitch. “Don’t you recognize me? I mean, okay, it’s been a long time. I thought I remembered you, and now that I see you, it’s all as clear as yesterday. Strange, how people come back together, isn’t it?”
Mitch made little motions of shoulder and head to show he still wasn’t clued in.
“Well, it might not have been you… but I’m pretty sure it was, because I saw your wife’s picture in the paper a few months later. She’s a famous scientist, isn’t she?”
“She is,” Mitch said. “Look, I’m sorry…”
“You picked up some hitchhikers a long time ago. Two girls and a guy. That was me, the guy.” He pointed a skinny finger at his own chest. “One of the girls had just lost a baby. They were called Delia and Jayce.”
Mitch’s face slowly went blank, with both astonishment and memory. He was surprised, but he remembered almost everything, perhaps because it had taken place in another small motel.
“Morgan?” he asked, stooping as if his arms were dragged down by weights.
The man broke into the broadest grin Mitch had seen in months. “Bless you,” Morgan said. There were actually tears in his eyes. “Sorry,” he said, shuffling his feet and backing off into the sunshine. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands. “It’s just, after all these years… I’m sorry. I’m acting stupid. I am really grateful to you guys.”
Mitch reached out to save Morgan from falling off the curb. He pulled Morgan gently back into the shadow, and then, spontaneously, two men who had been through a lot over the years, they hugged. Mitch laughed despite himself. “Goddamnit, Morgan, how are you?”
Morgan accepted the hug but not the profanity. “Hey,” he said. “I’m with Jesus now.”
“Sorry,” Mitch said. “Where’s my daughter? What can you tell me? I mean, sounds like you’ve run into a group of people who don’t want to be found.” He felt the questions lining up, refusing to be slowed, much less stopped. “SHEVA people. Shevites, is that what you called them? How many? A commune? How did you find out I was looking for my daughter?”
“Like I said, the manager in the motel, he’s my girlfriend’s uncle. I deliver hardware to the garage he runs up on North Main. He told me. I wondered if it was you. You made some impression on me.”
“You want to take me out there, just in case I can’t be trusted?”
“I’m pretty sure you can be trusted, but… it’s hard to find. I’d like to take you there, just in case it is your daughter. I don’t know who she is, understand? But if she is out there… I’d like to return a favor.”
“I understand,” Mitch said. “Would you like to take my wife along, too? She’s the famous one.”
“Is she here?” Morgan asked, preparing to be stunned and shy again.
“She’ll be here in a couple of hours. I’m picking her up at the airport in Las Vegas.”
“Kaye Lang?”
“That’s her.”
“Wow!” Morgan said. “I’ve been watching the Senate hearings, the court stuff. When I’m not working. You know, I saw her on Oprah? That was a long time ago, I was still just a kid. But I really can’t promise anything.”
“We’ll go on faith,” Mitch said, happier than he had been in he did not remember how long. “Had some breakfast?”
“Hey, I earn my keep now,” Morgan said, straightening and sticking his finger tips into the pockets of his jeans. “I’ll buy you breakfast. What goes round, comes round.”
In the room, Mitch’s data phone rang. He half-closed the door as he loped to pick it up from the bed. Mitch pinched open the phone’s display door. The call was from Kaye. “Hello, Kaye! Guess—”
“I’m on the plane. What an awful, awful morning. I really need to hold someone,” Kaye said. Her image in the little screen looked pale. He could see a high seat back and people sitting behind her. “I need some good news, Mitch.”
He held back for a second, hand trembling, knowing how many times there had been false hopes. He did not want to add yet another disappointment.
“Mitch?”
“I’m here. I was just going out the door.”
“I just couldn’t stand not talking to you. Flight’s half full.”
“I think we’ve got something,” Mitch said, his voice rough and throat tight around the words. You know it’s right. You know this is it.
“Is that Dr. Lang? Say ‘hi!’” Morgan called brightly from the motel porch outside the door.
“What is it?” Kaye tried to make out Mitch’s expression on the little screen. “Is it a detective? Do we have that kind of money left?”
“Just get here safe. I’ve found an old friend. Or, rather, he’s found me.”
3
Lake Stannous
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
The air fell away from the heat of the afternoon. Through the pines Stella Nova could see thunderheads rising in silent, self-involved billows over the White Mountains. The woods were dry and full of the fragrances of lodgepole, spruce, and fir.
She had finished doing her share of the laundry in the big old concrete washhouse near the center of Oldstock. Now she sat on an empty oil drum beside the long lines hung with sun-drenched linens and underwear and some diapers and work clothes, smelling the laundry soap and bleach and steam, sipping a black cherry soda—a rare luxury here, she allowed herself only one a week—and thinking, kicking her feet back and forth, scuffing the concrete slab around the washhouse with her clogs.
From where she sat, she could see the gravel turnaround beside the old abandoned bowling alley, painted gray decades ago, the paint now peeling; three long dark redwood-stained dormitories that used to house seminary students and pilgrims and a few tourists; and up north of that, the fuel cell and solar station that ran the medical center and nursery. Beyond the station and an old fenced-in compound for storing mining equipment stretched a debris field dominated by a small mountain of tailings. The mountain marked the old mine and made that end of the camp a no-man’s-land of heavy metals and cyanide. No one walked there unless they had to; sometimes after a heavy rain she could smell the poison in the air, but it wasn’t bad enough to make them sick, unless they did something stupid.
In the middle of the last century, humans had mined copper and tin and even some gold at Oldstock, and built a little town—that was where the bowling alley and the seminary buildings had come from. South of town, just off the main road down to the shore of Lake Stannous, you could find weed-grown streets and concrete foundations where houses had once stood, built by Condite Copper Company to house miners’ families. In the woods Stella had come across old refrigerators and washing machines and piles of bottles and bigger junk, abandoned steam and diesel engines like big iron spaceships, squat dark hopper cars, stacks of iron rails orange with rust, and creosote-dipped cross ties glistening with black beads from years in the sun.