Chuck didn’t chase after Glen. If and when he wanted Chuck to find him again, Glen would make it happen.
Chuck retrieved the empty pasta container and descended the ridge to the trailer. Inside, the girls sat at the dinette table, bowls of cereal in front of them. Fredo rested on the tabletop between the girls’ bowls. Chuck was tempted to question the health aspects of allowing the cat to lay on the dining table while the girls ate, but he knew how far he’d get if he voiced his concerns.
Chuck caught Janelle’s eye as she rinsed her bowl in the sink. “Could I talk to you for a minute?” he asked, tilting his head toward the door.
She dried her hands and grabbed her jacket.
Outside, she asked, “Where’s your mother?”
Chuck led her past the trailer and crew cab to the campground driveway. “You’re not going to believe it.” He described Martha’s return in Nora’s car, and the fact that Sheila was now looking after Harold’s widow. “The two of them are in Martha’s RV,” he finished.
He and Janelle walked toward the back of the campground.
“There’s more,” he said. He explained that he’d tracked the homeless man to the collapsed arch the previous day, and admitted to having been forced by Paul’s well-placed gunshot to meet and speak with Megan’s widower yesterday evening.
Janelle spun Chuck by the elbow to face her. “You should have told me right away,” she said, her fingers digging into his arm.
“I’m not worried. I’m pissed off.”
“I’m telling you now.”
She raised a finger and opened her mouth to respond, but he inserted quickly, “There’s one more thing.”
She paused, her finger suspended in the air. He described his encounter with Glen on top of the ridge a few minutes ago. She lowered her hand as he spoke.
“You say he was silent,” she noted when Chuck finished. “But he told you his name.”
“That was the only word he spoke.”
“Which proves he’s at least capable of speaking.”
“I think he’s frightened.”
“Maybe he’s scared speechless.” Janelle squeezed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. “Too many coincidences. I’m not buying it. It’s all interrelated somehow, it’s gotta be—the seismic truck, Megan’s death, Harold’s accident, the trigger-happy guy you just told me about, and now, Glen.” She lowered her hand and asked, “You know the one thing that’s the continuing thread through every last bit of this?”
Chuck nodded but let Janelle provide the answer.
“Your mother.”
Chuck kept an eye out of the trailer window as he and the girls ate cereal at the dinette table, Pasta Alfredo now in Rosie’s lap. When he caught sight of Sanford and the investigation team members returning to their vehicles in the parking lot outside the campground, he threw on his jacket and jogged to meet them.
He reached Sanford as the chief ranger arrived at his truck. The half-dozen park staffers trailing Sanford dropped their packs to the pavement and stood together at the trailhead, drinking from water bottles. The members of the investigation team wore traditional park-service garb—green slacks and jackets over gray button-up shirts—though in a bow to comfort, their headwear consisted of ball caps rather than the National Park Service’s time-honored Smokey Bear hats made of stiff straw. George stood among the uniformed team members.
Chuck pointed across the pavement at the O&G Seismic manager in his natty hiker’s garb and demanded of Sanford, “What the hell are you doing including him in your investigation?”
“He knows more about seismology than the rest of us put together.”
“You’re letting the fox guard the henhouse.”
“George knows his stuff,” the chief ranger contended. “He feels terrible about what happened. His expertise was critical to us this morning.”
“You mean, he was critical in covering up any role O&G played in the collapse.”
“That’s enough, Chuck,” Sanford warned.
“Fine,” Chuck snapped. He turned his back on George. “What did you manage to find out there?”
“That’s none of your business. You’re supposed to be focusing on the pictograph.”
“I should tell you: I returned to the site of the collapse yesterday—that is, to the scene of the crime.”
Sanford drew himself to full height, still inches shorter than Chuck. “How many times do I have to tell you? We’re not talking about a crime here.”
“If that’s the case, then why don’t you tell me what you and your team—and George, of course—made of the drill hole and blasting powder in the arch?”
Sanford’s eyes bulged. “Drill hole? What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the hole in the fallen block at the far south end of the line of fallen rocks. It’s an inch around and two inches deep. Perfectly cylindrical. It was filled with blasting powder before the arch fell; there are still remnants of the powder around its edge. It’s on the side facing east, away from the flat—the side that, until yesterday, was the top of the arch.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You couldn’t have missed it,” Chuck insisted. “It’s head-high, plain as day, right there in the rock in front of you.”
“We didn’t miss a thing. I’m sure of it. We certainly wouldn’t have missed anything as obvious as that. We surveyed the entire length of the collapse, block by block.”
“That can’t possibly be right.”
Sanford scowled. “Let me ask you this: If you found this supposed drill hole in the arch yesterday, as you say, then why didn’t you tell me about it right away? Why didn’t you take a picture of it with your phone and send it to me as soon as you saw it?”
“I …” When Chuck had come across the hole yesterday, he’d been focused on Paul Johnson—and Paul’s .30-06. By the time Chuck left the arch and headed back to camp, his thoughts had been so tangled that the notion of checking in with Sanford hadn’t occurred to him.
Or, Chuck asked himself, had his subconscious been at work? Was Sanford not to be trusted? The fact that the chief ranger denied the existence of the impossible-to-miss drill hole certainly added a layer of suspicion. But why would Sanford have reason to deny the hole’s existence?
Chuck glanced over his shoulder at George. Was that it? Sanford’s defense of the O&G manager was open and unabashed. But why would either of the men have wanted to blow up the arch? Moreover, how could all the other members of the investigation team have missed seeing the drill hole, too—or, how could Sanford possibly convince every last one of them to lie and say they hadn’t seen it?
Chuck scratched his ear. Sanford was waiting for his answer. All he could come up with was, “Um.”
“You know what, Chuck?” Sanford said. “I think you’re imagining things; you’re seeing things that aren’t real. Besides which, you had no right to go back to the arch, which has nothing to do with why you’re here.”
“Wrong!” Chuck exploded. “The arch has everything to do with why I’m here. You and I both know George and his goddamn seismic people are the ones who brought it down, given the unexploded drill hole you so obviously missed. The seismic work is precisely the sort of thing you’ve hired me to try to stop, for Elsie and her people and everybody else who cares about the destruction of public lands.”
“Quiet,” Sanford snarled. He glanced across the parking lot at George and the other members of the investigation team. “The contract is just between you and me at this point.”
Chuck dropped his voice but made no attempt to hide his anger. “You’ve brought the real culprit right into the middle of your so-called investigation,” he hissed. “And you didn’t even look hard enough to see the drill hole.” He threw up his hands in disgust. “You have to go back out there right now, this instant.”
“We didn’t miss a thing out there.” Sanford folded his arms on top of his round stomach and looked Chuck up and down.
Chuck glared back at the chief ranger, his arms stiff at his sides. Then he blinked, his arms loosening.
The fact was, Sanford and the investigation team could not have missed the drill hole in the toppled arch, and Sanford could not possibly convince all the team members to deny the hole’s existence, either—which meant the chief ranger might well be telling the truth about not having seen the drill hole.
If that was the case, could it be Chuck himself who was mistaken? Was the hole in the arch, in fact, natural?
He knew full well that hard pebbles, when rocked in a circular motion by passing winds over the course of years, commonly gouged cylindrical holes in soft sandstone.
Was that the sort of hole he’d seen in the fallen block yesterday? Had he gotten so caught up in Paul’s conspiracy theories that he’d incorrectly convinced himself the hole was manmade? And had he further convinced himself the sulfurous green residue in the hole was blasting powder, when it simply had been common, bright green, highly odorous juniper pollen?
There was only one way to find out for sure. He had to return to the site of the collapsed arch for another look, and it would be best to do so right away, before park visitors were allowed back into Devil’s Garden—perhaps as soon as the investigation team cleared out of the trailhead parking lot.
Sanford lifted his chin. “You know,” he said, his eyes glinting, “for coming as highly recommended as you did, I’m really beginning to wonder about you.”
“I’m way past wondering about you,” Chuck spat back, masking his uncertainty about the hole in the toppled arch. “I’m fully and entirely suspicious about whose side you’re really on.”
Sanford turned away from Chuck and strode across the pavement to George and the other investigation team members. Chuck observed the chief ranger’s gait. Was it Sanford who’d driven here in the SUV last night and ventured up Devil’s Garden Trail with the flashlight? Chuck shook his head in frustration. He had no way of knowing; he’d been flat on his stomach, hidden in the brush, when the driver had returned to the parked car.
Chuck left the trailhead parking lot and reentered the campground. The German camper who’d lasted out yesterday’s storm in his pint-sized rental car exited the communal bathroom as Chuck passed it.
“Hallo,” the camper greeted Chuck.
They walked together toward their respective campsites.
“You are right,” the German said in his heavy accent. “The weather, it is very much better today.”
“Like I said, it’s the desert,” Chuck replied, wanting only to get away from the man.
The German camper was ruggedly handsome, taller than Chuck and wider at the shoulders. His cascading blond hair matched his flaxen beard.
“I am so liking it here in the desert.” He grinned. “Though yesterday, okay, not so much.”
“There aren’t many better places in the world,” Chuck agreed.
“I can see why the writer Edward Abbey made this place his home.”
Chuck pivoted and ogled the German. “You know who Ed Abbey is?”
“Of course. He is the reason I am here. I know it is late in the season and it is cold and I have only a small tent. But Edward Abbey suffered much more during the time when he was here. It was during summer. The temperatures was very hot.”
“He was a tough one, that’s for sure,” Chuck said.
“Much more tough than John Wayne,” the German agreed.
“Ed Abbey was a real person. John Wayne was an actor who killed Indians in old Western movies.”
“Those type of Western films is very popular where I come from, in Deutschland.”
“What about Ed Abbey?”
“He is more and more popular also in my country. I am a part of the Green Party. We know about him very much. We try to be like him. And so I wanted to come here, where he is.”
Chuck put his fist to his chest and intoned, “Desert Solitaire.”
The camper smiled, his mustache lifting at the sides of his mouth, and put his fist to his chest, too. “Das ist right. Wüste Solitär.”
Chuck held out his fist to the German. “You came to the right place.”
“Ja,” the German said. “Even after yesterday.” He bumped Chuck’s knuckles with his own and walked on down the drive, headed for his campsite.
Chuck stared after the German camper. Another Abbey fan, just like Sanford.
Or was the chief ranger faking it?