The Rivers Run Dry (32 page)

But when I walked into my aunt's bungalow, the house smelled of smoke and soot. In the front room, the wall looked as if a black tongue had licked the mantle. Aunt Charlotte was scooping up ashes with an iron hearth shovel. Her face bore a striking resemblance to my father. It was the expression in her eyes, the look of somebody who loved and ached in equal amounts at the same moment.

I stood in the doorway. “What happened?”

She turned to look at me. “I came to check on her. Claire and I pulled up, and the smoke alarms were going off. My neighbor, Mr. Chin, was running down the sidewalk and I ran in here. Claire was with me, screaming about ‘the place of fire' and your mother was ramming the broom handle into the ceiling, trying to destroy the smoke alarms.”

I waited. “Was anybody hurt?”

She shook her head. “The fire department showed up. They found the flue was closed. Your mother was burning things in the fireplace, a lot of smoke. The firemen lectured me and left.”

“I'm sorry, Aunt Charlotte. I—”

“Honey, it's not your fault. It's mine.”

“Yours?”

“I sent Claire over here this morning. It upset your mother. She told me Claire wanted to steal something, so your mother decided to burn it all before Claire could get it. She even burned some of your father's things. Oh, Raleigh, I had no idea she was this bad off.”

“I'll give you money for damages.”

“Don't you dare.” She shook the shovel at me.

Opal, one of the cats, sauntered toward Aunt Charlotte, slow and begrudging, front paws crossing over each other, bushy tail straight and high. Aunt Charlotte picked up the cat, burying her face in the thick fur, murmuring apologies. Opal stared at me, unblinking.

“Where's Mom now?” I asked.

“She went to lie down, in her room.”

I first went to my room to change clothes, my ragged appearance sure to disturb my mother further. As I pulled clean clothes from the chest of drawers, I tried to ignore the newly bare spaces on my walls. I walked down the hallway to her bedroom, knocking on the door. Madame gave a quick bark.

My mother was sitting on the edge of the double bed, staring out the window to the back yard. The breeze outside was lifting brown leaves from gray branches, scattering them across the grass.

“The trees, they look like bare hands,” she said. “Like they're reaching for something.”

“Yes.”

She turned to me, her eyes saturated with color. “Have you noticed how many homeless people there are in this city?”

I nodded.

“They're everywhere, Raleigh. The walking dead, like the people that horrible woman Claire keeps talking about.” She glanced out the window again.

“Aunt Charlotte's staying home for the day. I'll be home this evening.”

She turned. “Come with me to a service?”

“Sure.”

“I found a wonderful place downtown,” she said. “You'll like it.”

I gently closed her door and walked back to my bedroom. The walls offered faded shadows of my father's accomplishments, a series of blank squares to represent his life on earth. When I stepped into the closet, I smelled a damp chthonous odor rising from the wet clothing on the floor. Lifting my face, I spoke to the one who knew everything, the one who knew this mortal life. Who knew love, and how it always brought suffering.

chapter twenty-six

I
t was just after noon when I drove to Issaquah.

Eleven days had passed since my first trip to the small town in the mountains, for what had seemed at the time like a routine call. Today, thin strips of white clouds curled against a blue sky. I heard my cell phone ringing, somewhere, and finally found it locked in the console between the two front seats. I must have put it there last night, before I went up Tiger Mountain. The battery was low.

McLeod was calling.

“Harmon,” he said, “I should suspend you for this.”

Hospital authorities, he continued, had telephoned him this morning after I left. They also faxed him a release to sign because patients who left without permission were no longer the hospital's responsibility and nobody was answering the phone at my house.

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

“You've got a strange way of showing it, Harmon. The whole reason you're working here is because of a disciplinary transfer from Richmond. If this is you understanding, I'm worried.”

“Yes, sir,” I repeated. “Have we received updates on the soil taken from the girl's fingernail?”

“Harmon, I‘m going to turn a blind ear to what just hap- pened at the hospital. You're upset. We're all upset. But this is an order. Stay home. Do not come into the office. This mess was a lot easier to explain with you in the hospital. It looked like we at least tried.”

“I'll stay away from the office,” I promised. “And the soil?”

“Like talking to a wall,” he mumbled. “Yes, the geologist in Spokane faxed in a report last night. Then he called this morning looking for you, something about coal and arsenic. I told him you were out of commission.” He paused. “I'm serious, Harmon. Stay away. I got enough trouble.”

I parked behind the Issaquah Police Department one block off Front Street and found Detective Markel inside, sitting in a makeshift lunchroom—half-kitchen, half-squad room—eating a sandwich. On the table his brown paper bag lay on its side, looking like a rectangular cave as he read a copy of the
Seattle Times.
When I pulled out the chair next to him, he barely glanced over, already looking away when he recognized me.

“When I was fifteen,” he said, “I broke my arm. The doctor wrapped it in a cast and said it'd be six weeks before it healed. Two weeks later I cut it off with pruning shears. Baseball season, I wanted to play.” He lifted his right arm, the sandwich in his hand. “Arm still doesn't work right. What's your excuse?”

In the corner a television sat on a rolling cart in the corner and showed a golden-haired news anchor looking grave and glittery all at once, like the well-paid publicist of the Grim Reaper.

“I keep coming back to the geology around here,” I said. “All the coal and arsenic.”

“If this is about the VanAlstyne case, forget it.”

“Why?”

He grunted. “You didn't hear?”

I shook my head.

“They're suing us. Yeah, that's right. Another juicy lawsuit. Don't look so surprised. You Feds are next.” He bit into the sandwich—I smelled peanut butter—then lifted the newspaper, obscuring his face. I stared at the back of the folded section where a story jumped from the front page, about a South Seattle shooting in which the police were being investigated.

“If the VanAlstynes are suing,” I said, “we've got nothing to lose.”

He rattled the paper. But he didn't lower it. My eyes drifted back to the television, which showed a young black athlete standing like an ebony plank between two white guys in thousand-dollar suits. The black kid was reading from a prepared statement while cameras flashed and the crawl at the bottom of the screen explained his apology for getting into a brawl, an apology that would allow the agents to continue wearing thousand-dollar suits.

The detective lowered the newspaper, his eyes on the TV. He said, “That kid's what, eighteen?”

“About the same age as the VanAlstyne girl.”

He didn't look at me. “What's your idea?” he asked.

The Issaquah public library was two blocks west of the police station on Sunset Avenue, close enough that we walked down the sidewalk, crossing over Front Street.

The librarian was a prematurely gray woman who wore a blue cotton jumper. She nodded vigorously as the detective explained what we were looking for, and we followed her through the channels of books, the bottom of her jumper flapping against her pale calves, a sound like heavy bird wings. She flew through sections of ancient history, cookbooks, and pop psychology where bright bold titles offered stinging rebuke combined with commissioned compassion.
The Idiot's Guide to Self-Help
for instance.

When the librarian stopped, she stood at a bookcase filled with green binders. Tilting her head sideways to read the typed titles inside plastic sleeves, she muttered, “Planning commission. Transportation, arts commission, water use restrictions . . . I know they're here because we received new copies just the other day.”

“These are copies?” the detective said.

“Of course they're copies!” she snapped. “You can't touch the originals. They're down at the state office under lock and key—here we go!” She reached in with both hands, pulling out a four-inch binder and dropping it into the detective's open arms. “The original maps are fragile; you need gloves. Speaking of, are your hands clean?”

We opened our palms, the detective juggling the heavy binder into the crook of his arm.

“All right then,” she said crisply. “But these do not leave the library. Do I have your word, detective?”

He nodded, looking like a schoolboy reprimanded by his English teacher.

“Does the library have a problem with theft?” I asked.

“In this particular case, yes. And I wouldn't have known, but a building contractor came in several weeks ago wanting to check on some land near the Rim. Imagine how embarrassed I was, discovering our maps were gone.”

“Did you happen to get his name?” I asked.

“Certainly. I told him we would call as soon as we replaced the pilfered copies.”

“By any chance, was his name Bill Johansen?”

“That doesn't sound correct. He was Asian.”

The detective said, “Do you know what land he was looking at?”

“The Rim,” she snapped. “Aren't you listening?”

“Right,” he said. “On Squak Mountain?”

“The gentleman wanted to know if the land was solid, or if it was susceptible to cave-ins, from all the mining that went on up there. I knew people were stealing our first editions, our magazines. But coal mining maps? What in heaven's name would somebody want with such things?”

She yanked out another binder, dropping that into the detective's arms too. “You can use the conference room in back. Unless the high school truants are in there. In which case, please arrest them.”

She flapped away.

The conference room was empty but the oak table was covered with truant graffiti. I opened the first binder. The maps offered simple geographic details—creeks, hills, valleys—written by coal miners, not cartographers, whose sole priority was to show where on the mountain the black carbon slumbered and how much was there.

“Muldoon, Dolly Varden,” the detective read aloud. “Dolly Varden? They named a mine after a fish?”

“They probably ran out of names. Look how many coal veins they tapped. Hundreds.”

There were entries from the Carbon Hill Coal Company and the Red Devil Coal Company, the Blue Blaze, the Black Prince. Burn-it, Stoker, Reliance.

“Here's another good shaft,” Detective Markel said. “The Shoo Fly. Imagine working the Shoo Fly Shaft all day.”

“Except these aren't shafts.”

“What are they?” he asked.

“They're tunnels, See how they run uphill? Shafts go down into the ground. Like that grate I fell on over at Cougar Mountain. But these wandering lines on the map, they're creek beds, and these are drift mines beside them. Geologists call them water-level mines. Miners would walk along the creeks, looking for places where the water cut through the ground, exposing the coal beds. Then they'd start digging, tunneling into the mountain and following the coal seam until it ran out. Gravity hauled out the water, keeping the mine fairly dry.”

“What's it mean for us?”

“That scrap of material I found on Cougar Mountain had bituminous coal and arsenic on it. The geologist found the same thing under the fingernail. You don't find it walking through the woods.”

“You think she's in a shaft?” He shook his head. “I told you, the mines are capped. You saw that yourself. The state locked them all up.”

“Yes, the state capped the major mine shafts. But look at these maps. Mining was a free-for-all back in the 1920s. Anybody with a pick and a shovel could walk into these mountains and start digging. And if it turned out the vein wasn't profitable, they just walked away, found another creek. Those abandoned tunnels might not even be on the map, because they weren't considered real mines. Some were just caves.”

The detective ran a hand over his black hair, staring at the map. “We had a big earthquake six or seven years ago. The houses on the hillside collapsed. Nice houses too. But it turned out they were built over mine shafts—okay, tunnels, not shafts—but nobody knew it because the forest had grown over the holes in the ground. And the state didn't have a record of the holes. That contractor the librarian mentioned probably came in to see if he could get a permit to build, depending on the mine situation.”