The Last Blue Plate Special (23 page)

“I have a Ph.D. in comparative physics and write abstracts for professional journals,” he explained. “But this is what I want
to show you.”

He unlocked a closet, reached to its top shelf, and withdrew what looked like a big plastic jar of red bath oil beads. The
kind that are usually egg-shaped. The waxy shell melts in hot water, releasing the bath oil inside. These weren’t egg-shaped,
but round. He threw the jar on a battered plaid couch.

“Know what those are?” he asked.

“Bath oil beads?”

“I didn’t think you’d know. Now look at this.”

I wasn’t expecting to see a gun, but that’s what he pulled from the closet next. It looked like an odd semiautomatic rifle.
Lightweight and black with a rectangular bin where a scope would go. It looked real, but there was also something about it
that said
toy.
The cozy room suddenly felt cold.

“I am unfortunately not armed,” I said, backing toward the kitchen door and wishing I’d brought the Smith and Wesson. “The
San Diego police arranged this interview and know I’m here. Put that thing down.”

Chris Nugent shook his head the way people do when confronted with hopeless idiocy. He also put the gun on the couch beside
the plastic jar of red balls.

“It’s a
paint ball
gun,” he said. “Those are paint balls in the jar. At point-blank range that gun will produce a sharp sting and maybe a bruise,
but the paint ball won’t even break your skin. The police who stopped Megan for going thirty in a twenty-five-mile-per-hour
zone in Riverside felt compelled to open her trunk, saw the paint ball gun, and made the same mistake you’ve just made. She
was on her way home from a competition. This was the ‘concealed weapon.’”

“It looks like a gun,” I said. “And what is your wife, a
doctor,
for crying out loud, doing running around with a bunch of dimwit survivalists in camo gear who play soldier by shooting each
other with paint?”

“You surprise me, Dr. McCarron.”

“In what way, Dr. Nugent?” I replied. We were playing doctor.

“It shouldn’t, but prejudice in educated people always surprises me,” he said. “You don’t know anything about this sport or
the people who engage in it, but you think you do. For the record, I tried it once and found it utterly pointless. But Megan
and a lot of other people who thrive on competition and at least the illusion of risk enjoy it. They aren’t a ‘bunch of dimwit
survivalists,’ as you say, but a mix of all sorts of people. Young men, of course, but also bored account executives and sixty-five-year-old
housewives. One of Megan’s paint ball teams even includes a nun who just retired after a missionary stint in Guatemala. We
had her over for dinner. She said paint ball gives her a way to get rid of her aggression. She was, incidentally, the only
survivor of a political raid on a mission school twelve years ago. Two other nuns and twelve students, both adults and children,
were murdered.”

“You’re right,” I said. There was nothing else I
could
say. I’d just done one of the things I swear I’ll never do. I’d made a judgment based on nothing but vague impressions picked
up from sources I could neither identify nor remember. And Christopher Nugent had justifiably nailed me to the wall for being
a dolt. I deserved it. However, nothing he’d said diminished the possibility of his wife’s being a killer.

“What will you and Megan do now that the Rainer Clinic is closing?” I asked as he carefully replaced the paint balls and gun
and locked the closet.

“It’s no secret that Megan never wanted to be a cosmetic surgeon,” he said as we moved back into the kitchen. “But as the
only child she wanted to please her parents, especially Jennings. They’re very close. By the time she realized it wasn’t for
her, she was through med school and residency, up for board certification. We were already married then, and we talked it
over for months. We wanted a family. Sometimes it’s necessary to punt.”

“Punt?”

“Just kick the ball when you’ve got your hands on it rather than throwing for some elaborate play that may not work.”

“I went to high school,” I said. “I know what it means in football, but not what it means in cosmetic surgery.”

“For us it meant going with what we already had. Megan could work at Rainer, even when she was pregnant, and amass enough
income to buy our dream, make some investments. I’d stay home and care for the children, doing my own work around those responsibilities.
We’ve got a tract of land in Northern California. It’s paid for. We’ll build a house there, maybe have another child. I’ve
got some ideas about sustainable forestry I intend to try. We would have moved there within two years in any event. Since
you and the police will soon succeed in destroying the clinic’s reputation with this nonsense, forcing Jennings to close,
we’ll go now. This house is a rental. We can leave at any time, and Megan’s more than ready. Our only problem is that Jennings
refuses to go with us, and I don’t think Megan and the kids will be happy without him nearby. That’s the difficult part.”

I could hear the wind whipping tree limbs outside, its velocity increasing. There are some dramatic, thousand-foot drops on
the switchback road down into the desert from Julian. And pickup trucks with camper shells are notorious for blowing off course
in high wind. I wanted to get going.

“Thank you,” I told Christopher Nugent. “The police will probably want to speak with your wife at another time.”

The house looked like a rectangular gray balloon full of yellow light as I drove away. Like something about to pull loose
from old moorings that could no longer hold it. I wondered how much of what her husband had told me of their “dream” was also
true for Megan Rainer. And how much was the desperation of a bright and educated human being trapped for years in a house
with small children, ceaseless domestic chores, and no way out.

J
ulian sits on the crest of the long Laguna Mountain Range, so there’s nowhere to go from there but down. Locals refer to a
western descent toward San Diego as “going down the hill.” There is no equivalent phrase for the eastern trip down a road
called the Banner Grade and into the desert below. I choose to think this lack reflects a sense of mystery proper to the desert.
If that’s where you’re going, you probably don’t need to talk about it.

Usually the Banner Grade is a delight. A twisting road through forests of Jeffrey pine and coast live oak near the summit,
it then descends through chaparral and finally the rocks and peculiar plants of the desert. Gold was discovered in the area
in 1869, and by 1870 there was an influx of prospectors who created the town of Julian almost overnight. Within steep-sided
Chariot Canyon off the Banner Grade are seven old gold mines, including the legendary Golden Chariot Mine, from which two
million dollars’ worth of bullion was taken before it closed. Golden Chariot and two others, Cold Beef and Golden Ella, are
now mined for the granite blasted apart in the search for gold over a hundred years ago. One of the uses for this granite,
I remembered as the wind howled down Banner Grade, is the making of tombstones.

“Don’t,” I said to myself as I felt the truck lurch and sway in the wind. Melodramatic thoughts are unwise in situations of
danger. But I can never drive the Banner without thinking about the silent honeycomb of mining tunnels, some collapsed now,
most blasted shut and forgotten, hidden inside the mountain. Once in a while hikers stumble over a tunnel entrance half buried
in rubble. Occasionally these hikers wriggle inside to explore, only to find mountain lion scat near the entrance and a skeleton
in century-old rotting leather boots deep inside. The County of San Diego provides these skeletons traditional burial in a
potter’s field, and a handful of strangers always show up for the brief ceremonies. But no one ever knows who the skeletons
were.

The train of thought seemed appropriate. I was beginning to think we’d never figure out who the Sword of Heaven was, either.
None of the four people I’d interviewed seemed capable of murdering anybody, although none of them was exactly a poster child
for stress-free living, either. And although Megan Rainer’s paint ball hobby seemed particularly weird for a professional
woman and mother of two, I thought my feeling about it probably reflected nothing more than my own bias. Shooting bullets
of paint at people in order to capture a flag before they do is definitely on my list of the Top Ten Most Boring Leisure Activities
on Earth. But then, I’m not naturally aggressive and/or waiting for the day I can leave a job I don’t like to go live in the
woods and raise herbs. Dreams deferred can make people hostile. But they don’t usually make people murderers.

The first teacup-size splatters of rain blew against my dusty windshield ten minutes later. And at the worst possible point
along the lonely two-lane desert road between the Banner Grade and Borrego Springs far below. Yaqui Pass. I’d been afraid
of this.

Yaqui Pass is a narrow cleft in the seven-mile-long Pinyon Ridge Mountains below which lies the valley I call home. The first
non-natives to struggle through it with horses and wagons were the Mormons, followed much later by General Patton’s troops
trucking across the desert and down into San Diego as a defense against possible attack by sea during World War II. Yaqui
Pass is at an elevation of 1,750 feet. Just a hill, really. Unless you’re looking straight down all 1,750 off the side of
a mountain road while driving a pickup with a camper shell in high winds and rain. Under those circumstances the bottom of
1,750 feet looks as bad as the bottom of two miles. Not that I could actually see the bottom through the black torrent lashing
my windshield. But I knew it was there.

There’s no shoulder on the stretch of road through Yaqui Pass. There’s not enough room for a shoulder between a sheer rock
wall on the north and a sickening drop on the south. You can’t just stop and wait out a blinding downpour because another
vehicle coming from behind would be sure to hit you. Pushing you through the cable-strung guardrail to fall end over end through
sheets of ebony glass until crashing below into scenic outcroppings of what geologists call crystalline basement rock. I tried
to stop thinking about that as I edged along, tacking the truck against the howling wind.

Instead I tried to remember if I’d seen pictures of a mountain-pass saint in any of dad’s religious books I’d loved as a child.
None came to mind, and it seemed an oversight. There are saints for wells and gardens, barbers and drunks. Also barren cattle
and balding women. Why not mountain passes, I thought, which are traditionally hotbeds of human drama? But there was one mythological
figure I was sure I could count on.

“Lilith!” I yelled to an Old Testament figure who’d
love
a night like this. “My dog’s outside in a chain link run with only a partial roof for shelter, and storms make her nervous.
Really, I
have
to make it home!”

In the racket outside I imagined I heard the throaty laughter of an ancient demon who hangs out in wild places because she
hates hassles. My kind of demon. The laughter was not unfriendly, merely distant. Like the song of coyotes, I thought. And
then I was out of Yaqui Pass and on the easier grade down, down to the desert floor. In another twenty minutes I’d be home.

When I got there the rain had blown over, although the wind continued and tumbleweeds rolled across the road like stampeding
beach balls. One hit the truck as I approached the motel, stuck to the side for a few seconds, and then was blown loose with
a sound like ripping silk. About twenty of them were jammed against the chain link surrounding Brontë’s run when I ran to
get her before going inside. That’s why I didn’t see the pink froth at her mouth right away. Or the blood on her front paws
and chest. I just reached over a mound of prickly tumbleweeds without looking and opened the gate to her run.

“Come on, girl,” I said, turning back toward my front door. “Let’s get you inside.”

It wasn’t until I switched on the lights that I saw pinkish foam hanging from her jowls and a strange look in her eyes. Confusion.
Rage. Shame. On the carpet were sandy wet pawprints threaded with blood.

“Brontë, what
happened
?” I said, kneeling to inspect her and seeing bloody scratches on her chest as well. No response but that look which in humans
is called “hangdog.” In dogs it says “humiliation.” But I thought I knew what was behind it.

“You saw something, didn’t you?” I said gently as I washed her front paws and chest in the kitchen and then smoothed antibacterial
cream on the scratches. “In the storm a jackrabbit or a coyote or something came near the building, using it as a windbreak,
and you barked until your throat bled, right? You just went bonkers out there, barking and trying to climb the chain link,
throwing yourself against the fence trying to get at whatever it was. Tell me I’m wrong. That’s it, isn’t it?”

The dark eyes still had that odd look, but she ate her dinner with enthusiasm as I scrubbed her thready bloodstains out of
the carpet. Then she stood by the front door and whined.

“Forget it,” I told her. “You’ve been outside all day, you’re still wet from the rain, and there’s nothing out there but wind
and tumbleweeds. Why don’t I put on a nice CD to calm you down? Humperdinck’s
Hansel and Gretel
should do it, huh?”

Brontë is fond of opera, and although this one isn’t a favorite, it does seem to put her to sleep. I, on the other hand, can’t
hear “The Children’s Prayer” from it without crying because it makes me think about my twin brother. But neither response
was going to occur that night. She ignored the music and continued to jitter near the door, whining angrily.

Maybe something was still out there, I thought. Maybe an animal wounded in the storm. A reptile, probably, flushed from a
flooded underground lair and now sluggish and nearly paralyzed with chill. Something cold-blooded and thus unable to regulate
its body temperature, stunned into immobility by rain, wet ground, and the evaporative effects of the wind. I had it all figured
out by the time I pulled on thick leather boots and snapped the clasp of my waist pack.