High Fall (30 page)

Despite its spot in a valley between hills, the town of Conroy was flat and dry and consisted of a clutch of weathered buildings—houses converted into stores—and the low, large stucco rectangles that are home to supermarkets and discount stores. Beyond the two blocks of “downtown” were splatterings of wood and adobe bungalows on lots too dry to sustain grass. For a number of the homes, the landscaping consisted of cars on blocks. Atop the far hill sat a water tower. On the near one was the flag. She headed toward it, eager to see what the monument commemorated.

The hill was thinly shaded by wispy trees. On the ground beneath was grass, sparse and pale, but apparently it was the best that perpetual care could provide. The place was a cemetery. This would be where Greg Gaige was buried.

She stopped the Jeep a block away and sat thinking. Now that she’d found the town, Joyce Hogarth’s directions to the movie location would be easy to follow. It was not yet nine
A.M.
She could get out there, dig up a sample from the dumping hole, and be back before the sun was too hot. She could get to La Jolla by early afternoon, in time to take soil samples to a lab. She could nudge the lab so they’d give them priority. By tomorrow, she could know something. She could …

Her shoulders were hunched up against her neck. She was breathing in shallow puffs. She looked down at her hands squeezed white on the steering wheel, and she had to keep herself from twisting the wheel hard to the right and heading out of town. Away from the cemetery. Away from Greg Gaige’s grave.

No. That, she could not allow herself to do.

Gritting her teeth, she shifted into first and drove the block to the tiled-roofed, single-story white stucco mortuary. The heavy wooden doors were unlocked, and she walked through a beige hallway with a worn brown carpet that reminded her of an arroyo, the dry stream bed of the west in which the only water that flowed was in memory. Here the mourners had flowed to the right, into a plain chapel with worn wooden benches, a place where more than ashes-to-ashes would have seemed ostentatious. The air conditioner rumbled, and the air smelled of freshener.

“I’m Edmund Halsey. May I help you?” a surprisingly cheerful-looking gray-haired man asked. “We don’t get many strangers.”

“I’ve come to see Greg Gaige’s grave.”

“Gaige?”

“The stunt man who died on the movie set ten years ago.”

“Oh, sure, sure. That was before my time, but I can take you to the grave. You a relation?”

She nodded.
Always better to start out as a relative.
It was one of her rules.
Relatives can become very distant cousins if family responsibilities start to press in too close. But nonrelations can never move up to family.

“Well, you’re the first of his family to come by. ’Course we’re pretty out of the way. Still … well, it’s nice of you to stop in. Here, now I’ll take you—”

“I’m sure you’re busy, Mr. Halsey. Could you just tell me where the grave is?”

Halsey hesitated only a moment before saying, “No one is more important than our deceased and those who loved them. But you’d rather be alone. Of course. Many people feel that way. Through the doors, down the path. Once you pass the stone wall, it’s the last grave on the right.” He patted her arm.

Kiernan tensed at the touch but restrained the urge to pull away. She walked outside into the dry heat, along the unshaded path to the low stone wall.

Scraggly desert trees poked up like whiskers on a dead chin. Close up, the grass was even sparser than it had seemed from a distance. The small shade from the trees only made the sun seem stronger. But as if in reaction to nature’s penury, survivors of the deceased had gone all out for stonework: angels, obelisks, mausoleums. Monuments listed families of names. Low, black railings surrounded the groupings. Kiernan was tempted to climb the hill and see what the large monument at the top commemorated, but she knew she was merely stalling. Taking a deep breath, she walked along the wall to the right, past the Montoyas and the Marshalls, the Lesters’ vault with a spray of gladiolus at the door, the Tieros lying in the shade of a granite angel’s outstretched wings. Then the graves, and the grass, stopped. She hesitated, running through Halsey’s directions in her mind, and walked on twenty yards, around an outthrusting of hill to an unshaded spot almost barren of grass. A dirt-strewn metal plaque on the dry ground said:
GREGORY GAIGE
.

Her breath caught. “Not even a birth date.” Trace Yarrow had said the studio wanted a swift and low-key funeral, but this? This was like throwing out the trash!

Despite the heat she shivered, as if her stomach were filled with ice, her lungs shrunken and atrophied. She wrapped her arms across her chest and stood staring at the cracked ground, seeing not it but the macadam of the San Francisco street as she and Greg had walked back from that midnight lunch on the movie set eleven years ago. “What about the future?” she had asked one last time.

She heard Greg swallow abruptly. They walked on, the slap of her leather shoes loud in her ears, the night city suddenly seeming empty of anything but her question and his desperate wish to avoid it. They rounded the corner onto the set. The banks of lights turned the street brighter than day but sucked out the color, leaving a dreamscape from which the giant crane protruded ten stories up.

Greg stopped, put an arm around her shoulder. “It’s like shimmying up that crane. Not many men could do it. Few would want to. But I do, and I want to get to the top.”

“And?”

“And keep adding new tops.”

“And when you have to come down?” she’d insisted.

“I don’t deal with down.” There was no bravado in his voice. In that moment she’d known that he didn’t look down because he couldn’t. Then she’d pushed away the question. From time to time later, she had wondered what he would see down below, from whence he came and would eventually have to go. Would he have seen the competition clambering up? But she had held the question gingerly, looking at it out of the corner of her eyes. Or would he have been so startled he’d have let go and fallen to—she stared at the barren grave—to this?

She turned and started back to the Jeep. Greg’s answer hadn’t been the same as Tchernak’s—that you can’t get to the top if your focus is half on the earth beneath. Nothing so sensible.

She walked faster, and once in the Jeep, she sent up plumes of dust as she headed out of town.

The
Bad Companions
location site was five miles south of Conroy, on a road that had been paved years ago. The surviving hunks of macadam merely added to the height of the ruts. It was impossible to tell whether it had been used in the last year or the last hour. There were no houses or barns alongside, no orchards, fields, or water towers. Just a clump of gray-green bushes and spindly trees at the foot of the hill, where the meager water runoff collected. The road must have been paved, she decided, by Summit-Arts. There was no one else around to care.

She followed the broken pavement around a sharp turn and up a breathtakingly steep hill with hairpin turns much too close together. From each straightaway the view below was of sharp boulders and a single dry stream bed curled near the bottom like the corpse of a snake dried out by the sun. No wonder Summit-Arts had chosen the location for a picture that dealt with death and bondage. It was as close to hell as California could offer.

Atop, the only buildings in sight were a couple of trailers, sagging, rusted, one toppled to the side. They were small compared with those at Gliderport, but it must have been all the drivers could do to get them up that miserable road. No wonder, she thought, they didn’t try to wrestle them back down it afterward.

Feeling overcautious, she parked the Jeep behind a stand of live oak on the far side of the hill from the trailers. The dying rumble of the engine trumpeted against the lone rustle of a leaf as a single bird flitted away. The swish of grasses hinted at unseen rodents. But there was no wind, no distant sound of traffic, no whir from hilltop power lines. The only regular sound was her own breathing.

The trailers sat to the right of the road. No one unfamiliar with the script letters of Summit-Arts Films would have been able to decipher the surviving black smudges amidst the rust and dents on their sides. Starting with the upright trailer, one that probably would have been a small one-bedroom home in a trailer park, she pulled open the door. Inside was air so stale and hot, it seemed unable to move through the doorway. She pulled her head back into the fresh air, took a breath, and peered in. She had suspected the trailer had been left here because of its size. But if the studio had left any furnishing, appliance, knickknack, or decoration inside, it was long gone. Even the interior paneling and walls were missing. The trailer was nothing more than an aluminum box.

A glance through the door of the toppled trailer showed an interior the same but for a doorless wall that divided the main room from another, presumably the bedroom. She poked her head inside and squinted against the dark, trying to discern the walls of the bedroom. There could be something in there, but she doubted it. I am not, she thought, hopping into an aluminum box, a coffin, in the middle of the desert when someone could be following me.

If some building were left here, why couldn’t it have been the barn where the horses were kept, or some scrap from the cabin where Greg died? But she couldn’t expect to have that much luck. After all, she did have the cemetery.

Fifty yards beyond, she found the remains of pole holes, but nothing else of the barn. The ground around was only slightly barer than the hillsides. If there had been horses scraping hooves on the dirt floor of the barn, a decade had done its work in covering up their traces. But the dumping hole—surely that would sport a different surface—lush from the churned earth beneath, or bare from the burn of the toxins. She moved on, fifty feet, then a hundred beyond, looking right and left as she went. But no rectangle of earth stood out.

She felt the cold draft of fear. If she couldn’t pinpoint the hole, she’d be at square one again.

She walked back to the trailers. The sun was getting hotter now. It hit the shiny creases in their aluminum sides and seared her eyes as it reflected off. To the south the surrounding hills were a quarter of a mile away. Closer—halfway between—was a knoll and what appeared to be a sharp, deep valley beyond. The knoll would be where the filming had taken place.

As she neared it she could make out the burnt foundation of the house. Fifteen feet square, somehow smaller than she had imagined. As with the barn, metal poles had been sunk into the ground, and it was to them that the few remains of blackened timbers clung. The rest of the burned siding was gone, and the ground within and around the house was covered with the same variety of dried brown desert grass as the rest of the hills.

If Yarrow was right about the intensity of the fire, she thought, there wouldn’t have been much left when it happened, let alone ten years later. Still, she surveyed the ground, moving toward the house. As she stepped across the line between the corner poles, a shiver traveled deep inside her back. Briefly she wondered, “Is this the spot where Greg was when he realized he couldn’t get out, that he would smolder inside his fire suit? Or was he conscious at all?”

Shaking off the question, Kiernan moved on, across the rectangle to the slope beyond. She had gone thirty feet when she stopped. “So it’s here!” she said aloud.

Running, she came to a nine-by-twelve plot, totally bare. She stepped gingerly onto the bare earth. It felt no different from the hard, grass-covered dirt around it. But then, it had had ten years to settle.

She crossed to the other side with relief, stood on the grass there, and scanned the ground ahead. There were no demarcations other than those caused by the terrain. No road south to the Mexican border, as Jason Pedora had said.

Walking back to the Jeep, she wondered at how little fact was the basis for Pedora’s fantasy. How long had he repeated the story to himself before it blotted out the question of reality?

A motion picture being filmed is a big deal, even in a major city. For Conroy it must have been the event of the decade. Very little that the actors, directors, even the gaffers and accountant did would have escaped notice. Every shirt any of them bought, every stroll they took, every piece of mail that came their way would have been meat for discussion in town. No way could daily trailers of horses from Mexico, driving right through town to the set, have gone unnoticed.

But a couple of trucks from Pacific Breeze Computer would have raised no comment at all.

Feeling better than she had since she’d left the cemetery, she walked back toward the trailers. Maybe one more look inside?

She could hear Tchernak’s appalled voice: “What kind of crazy woman, who knows she may have been tailed, hops into a metal box in the desert?” Dammit, the man was running not only her house but now her mind, too.

Why not give Tchernak this one? Take the safe route for once. She didn’t need a second look. She glanced around her and, assuring herself she was alone, she strode across the mesa to the stand of live oak and pulled a shovel and bag from the back. She headed back to the hole where—allegedly, she thought with a smile—whatever had come out of the Pacific Breeze Computer truck had been dumped.

She checked around her for movement, and finding none other than a slight rustling of leaves, she poked the shovel into the hard earth. There are many things a woman can do better than a man, she thought half an hour and a pint of sweat later, but digging in hard ground is definitely not one.

It was another half hour before she had scraped and dug far enough down to get a decent soil sample, bagged it, and headed back across the mesa to the Jeep.

With relief, she tossed the shovel into the back, climbed in, turned on the engine, and pushed the air conditioner knob to high.

As she eased toward the road, she considered calling Tchernak. If he had the lab ready to move on this soil sample, it could save a day. Still, she thought as she turned onto the road and started down the steep, winding incline, getting proof that the soil was contaminated would be pro forma. What she
needed
was to find out what had happened to Greg. Had he died from the fire, or had he been dead before? For that she needed to see his body. And that, she didn’t want to discuss with Tchernak.