“Well, it’s pretty country,” said Owens.
“We have a bit of a hike. It’s good you wore the hiking boots.”
“I don’t get why we had to come this far to talk in private.”
“You’ll see.” Bradley got his phone out and found the GPS coordinates he’d surreptitiously recorded shortly after meeting Beatrice. He’d memorized them but this was a double check, and his memory was good. He called Erin, who sounded well. Then Reyes, who was stationed outside Erin’s room at Imperial Mercy: Nothing unusual there in the maternity unit.
He worked on the backpack and took the coiled rope. “Bring your jacket. It’ll be cold and windy up there.”
“You still haven’t told me where we’re going, or why.”
“I’m about to commence. Let’s walk side-by-side. Do you know what Mike is?”
“Well, of course I do. He’s very honest.”
“I’m going to show you what it leads to.”
The angle of ascent was slight at first, and there was a well-worn game trail to follow. The trail gradually vanished and the sand became gravel and the gravel became rocks and the rocks became boulders. They stopped on top of a hillock and looked back at Highway 395 stretching out of sight to the north, and miles east, the acres of bright photovoltaic mirrors facing the cloud-dampened sun, and the dome of the prison tucked into the distant hills.
“I wonder why he never told you about Beatrice,” said Bradley.
“Who is she? Is she meeting us way up here?”
Soon they were climbing between rocks that were far taller than they were, great boulders piled with haphazard grace, some of which looked perilously out of balance. Bradley remembered some of this and he pictured Mike in his bright golf garb, nimbly scaling the mountain ahead of him, chiding him about getting back to the gym. He heard Owens breathing hard and he waited for her to catch up. Even in jeans and hiking boots and a flannel shirt and a ball cap, she was soberingly beautiful. She looked up and smiled. Hard to believe that Owens had once been willing to kill herself, only to be plucked from death and later partnered by Mike Finnegan. They picked their way up around the towering rocks. Finally they found themselves on the small, level plateau. The wind was strong and cold. Owens pulled on the sweater she’d tied around her waist. Bradley looked to where the doleful iron girders of the mine entrance slouched, framing the sudden blackness beyond and below. “We’re here.”
He set the coiled rope and his backpack on the same boulder where Mike had set his cooler, then went to the opening of the mineshaft. He got as close as he could, bracing both hands on the rough rusted girders. “Beatrice! It’s Bradley Jones here. Mike’s partner.”
“Bradley! Are you alright? Is he with you?”
“I’m fine. Owens is with me. She’s another partner of Mike’s.”
“Owens, he never told me about you. You have such a beautiful name!”
Bradley turned and looked at Owens. Her face had gone pale and her lips were parted as if she were about to speak but she said nothing.
“She’s an angel,” said Bradley. “Mike threw her down there ninety-four years ago. In six more, he has to let her out.”
“I’ve never seen an angel.”
“You’re about to.”
“I feel very light and strange right now.”
“Answer her. About your beautiful name.”
“Um, yes, thank you, Beatrice. I was named for the Owens River because my great-grandfather was a fisherman who loved it.”
“I love fishermen and fishers of men. Does Mike know you two are here?”
“No,” Bradley called down. “He’d have a conniption if he knew.”
“That word was so popular a short century ago. I do miss it. But. . why are you here? Did you bring me beer and meat sticks?”
“I’ve got something better.”
“Pork rinds?”
“A rope to get you out.”
“Oh dear. Father in heaven. DEAR FATHER IN HEAVEN! Bradley and Owens, you will be blessed for this! Give me just a few minutes to get ready. I’ve been saving a dress.”
• • •
Beatrice was a filthy bag of skin and bones and she smelled terribly. Her dress was brittle and decaying and had once been some shade of blue. Her skin was startlingly white beneath the ground-in dirt and her reddish brown hair had grown to twice the length of her body. She was tall and her arms and legs were emaciated and her head seemed too large. When Bradley first took hold of her outstretched hand, he thought the bones would break. He guessed her weight at eighty pounds.
They sat on boulders in the cold sunshine, far enough apart so that Beatrice’s stench didn’t offend Bradley and Owens. Bradley broke out the snacks and Beatrice ate rapidly and quickly finished off three beers. Owens ate nothing and said little but Bradley saw that her color was beginning to return and that she seemed deeply troubled. Her posture was different. She kept looking at the angel with a combination of shame and doubt that Bradley had never seen in her.
Bradley couldn’t tell the color of Beatrice’s eyes because the sunlight, after ninety-four years of her going without, was too intense to allow her anything but an occasional, tearful squint. She’d bitten off her nails at about one inch, and sanded them on the rock flanks of the mine, she explained, and she thought they looked pretty good. She had kept her teeth from growing too long for lack of use by gently sanding them with a smooth, hard rock, and she’d brushed them with an unneeded undershirt until it decomposed, then afterward, for a decade or two, with her fingers. Bradley saw that she was vain and proud of her appearance, given the challenges.
They talked a little about automobiles and current events, but mainly Beatrice ate and drank. She lowered the dress modestly but enough to let the sun hit her neck and shoulders. He body hair had grown out in all of the predictable places. After a longish silence she licked the cheese-snack dust off her fingernails, then shaded her eyes with one hand and squinted at Bradley, then Owens. “Let me see if I have this right,” she said. “You, Bradley, are recently partnered with Mike. You are a recent father. Mike of course wants to influence the child, raise him as the son of a devil. Correct?” Bradley nodded, though he had no idea how Beatrice knew this, unless she had the same thought-reading powers that Mike had. “Yes, that’s exactly how I know. You, Owens of the river, have been long partnered with Mike. You have done his asking. You have been loyal. Faultless. Even slavish. Now, Bradley wants to break with Mike and betray him to one Charlie Hood. Some kind of religious leader, I suspect. Oh, a lawman? Then the reason, the real reason that Bradley has brought us all together here, is that he needs our help. Count me in, Bradley. I’d love to go after Mike. But, Owens? I sense your profound divisions. I must assume that Mike has enlisted your help in taking over management of the son, Thomas. So, you are hurt that Mike would strip you from his daily life and assign you to Bradley as a wife, stepmother, and. . guardian. Hurt, because you love him. You truly, genuinely love Mike because he met you at death’s door and pulled you back inside the house of the living.”
“Enough,” said Owens.
“Would either of you like these last few crackers? No? Who is this Hood and why do you believe he can handle Mike? ‘Taking him down,’ as you apparently like to say now, is not going to be easy. He’s as strong as ten men, and you cannot kill him. Just for starters.”
“We can deceive him,” said Bradley. “That’s how we do it.”
“Difficult at best,” said Beatrice. Then she squinted again at Owens and nodded impatiently. Bradley was impressed by the limber velocity of her mind. “But you can deceive him, can’t you, Owens? Because he loves you, too, as you love him. And he trusts you.”
Owens fixed Bradley with another strange stare. “I don’t know. I need time to think.”