13

IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT by the time I got back to the Eagle’s Nest Hotel. The man at the desk was dozing peacefully in his chair. There was no point in waking him, so I sneaked past on tiptoe. When I flicked on the light in my room, it felt as if I were looking at something that I’d last seen, not hours ago, but years. The humdrum ordinariness of it belonged to some far-off part of my life, before—for several agonizingly drawn out hours—I’d been face to face with the possibility of imminent death.

I checked my phone. There was no message from Ruth. I longed to talk to her, to say An experience like that puts things in perspective. It made me realize how much I love you. But it was far too late to ring her, so I had to content myself with a brief text: A bit of an adventure, but back safe and sound. Will call tomorrow. Rx Then I had a shower and collapsed into bed.

I slept for almost eight hours—so deeply, that when I woke I didn’t know where I was. Even after I finally remembered, the world still felt odd, the colors tinted by the sepia tones of a dream that slipped through my fingers when I tried to recall it.

I looked at my phone again. Still nothing from Ruth. I tried calling her. No answer. There was a flutter in my chest that threatened to erupt into all-out panic. I knew I was over-reacting: there’d been an innocent explanation for her not replying yesterday, so there was no reason to suppose there wouldn’t be today. Except that, after having so narrowly escaped disaster myself, I couldn’t help imagining that, by a kind of sympathetic magic, it might have struck her instead.

I deep-breathed to calm myself. I couldn’t afford to waste energy on a chimera: I needed to take stock, decide what my next step should be. For the time being, making another attempt to see Marianne Chess was out of the question. But it struck me that—though I’d been too preoccupied to register it at the time—last night had offered me an alternative.

I shaved and dressed, then stuck the phone under my pillow and headed for the dining room. As I passed through the foyer, the bright woman on the desk beamed at me.

“Well, good morning,” she said. “You look like a guy needed his beauty sleep.”

I glanced at my watch. “Yes, I’m sorry. I’m a bit late, aren’t I?”

She chuckled good-humoredly. “That’s OK. Kitchen’s not going anyplace. Did you get your note?”

“No. What note?”

“Justin should have given it you last night. He must have forgot.” She peered under the desk and pulled out an envelope. “Here you go.”

I carried it into the dining room and sat down. On the front, in printed letters, was my name. Inside was a single sheet of paper. It showed two almost-identical photographs of Stalin, placed side by side. In both of them he was looking into the camera, one hand in his military greatcoat, as he walked beside a canal. The only difference was that, in the first, he was accompanied by three other men—and in the second by only two.

I turned the paper over. There was nothing written on the back except a phone number. I looked at the two pictures again. I was still puzzling over what they meant when the waitress came to get my order.

“Still doing its thing,” she said, nodding out of the window towards the fire. “Last I heard, it was pretty close to Gallico—” She broke off as she noticed the pictures. “Man, that’s weird,” she said, laughing. “What’d he do?” She pointed to the man who only appeared in the first one. “Why’d they Photoshop him out?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But thank you.”

“Huh?”

“You’ve just explained something.”

She looked at me doubtfully. “OK. What can I bring you?”

“Just coffee, please. And a bit of toast.”

“You didn’t care for the cakes?”

“They were great. But I’m running late.”

Fifteen minutes later I was back in my room. Surely there must be a message from Ruth waiting for me, as there had been the day before. There wasn’t. I deep-breathed again, then called the number on the sheet of paper. After a couple of rings a woman answered.

“Yes?”

“This is Robert Lovelace. You left me a note.”

“Oh, yeah, hi, Mr. Lovelace. This is Ripple. We met out at Denny and Oak’s place. But we didn’t really get a chance to talk.” She hesitated. “Me and a friend were hoping maybe we could all get together some time? We’d like to share a few things with you.”

“All right.”

“We were wondering if you’d like to take a ride out to Coyote Fork with us today? What we have to say will probably make a little more sense out there.”

“Isn’t it a bit close to the fire?”

“Last I heard, the fire’s still a ways off. We should be OK.”

“OK, then, yes. Thank you.”

“So how about we swing by the hotel at twelve, and pick you up? Oh, and don’t say anything about this to my mom, OK? Or anybody else?”

I looked at my watch. 10:15. I had nearly two hours. Enough time to try to see the mechanic.

I drove down into Milward and parked in the main street. What would be an appropriate present? A bottle of something seemed trivial. A book was out of the question, because it would mean seeing Breeze. And, anyway, I had no idea what, if anything, he read.

I glanced quickly at the window of Angela’s Dream, making sure I couldn’t be seen from the bookshop. Would he want a dream catcher? A copy of the I-Ching? A lump of hand-made pottery covered in badly-painted leaves?

No.

As I turned away, I noticed the array of pots in front of the plant shop on the other side of Milward Books. I darted past the bookshop and hurried inside. A gaunt woman emerged from the back, wiping her hands on her apron.

“May I help you?”

“I’m looking for a present for someone.”

“A lady?”

I shook my head. “I was thinking of a tree.”

“OK. Well, we don’t have a whole lot of choice, but I’ll show you what we got.”

In the end I settled for a peach sapling—for no other reason than that it looked healthy, and the jaunty rake of its leaves suggested a hunger for life.

I didn’t want to attract the attention of the blond man, so I left the car where it was and walked the few hundred yards to Wreck City. As I crossed the forecourt, I saw a pair of boots sticking out from under a pick-up on the ramp in the workshop. I leaned my head in and said,

“Hello.”

The boots crab-scuttled sideways. A small, pinched face appeared, under a muss of dirty brown hair.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I was looking for Gerald.”

“Gerald Chess?”

I nodded.

“He ain’t here.”

“No, so I see. Do you know where he is?”

He scratched his cheek, smearing it with grease. “Yeah, I know.”

He cleared his throat and spat a gobbet of phlegm on to the oil-stained floor.

“Well, could you tell me?”

He squinted suspiciously at the little tree in my hand. “Boss wouldn’t like it.”

“I shan’t tell him.”

He shook his head, then opened his mouth wide. Most of the top front teeth on one side were missing. He pointed at the gap.

“That’s what you get when you don’t mind your own business,” he said. “Don’t want to lose no more of them. Don’t got enough left as it is.”

And he scuttled back under the ramp.

An hour later, I was standing in front of the Eagle’s Nest, waiting for Ripple. I’d tried phoning Ruth again, but there was still no answer. Perhaps, I told myself, she’d had to delay going to Youngstown to get her mother and was on her way there now. In fact, now I came to think of it, that was almost certainly the explanation. Which meant I had somewhere safe to stow my anxiety for a few hours, while I concentrated on other things. But just to stop myself picking at the scab, I’d left my phone in my room, hidden in the wrapping paper round the peach tree.

I watched the trickle of vehicles turning into the car park, trying to guess which one was Ripple’s. The likeliest candidate seemed to be an old VW camper van, painted bright canary yellow, which stood out of from the crowd of bland modern cars like an anarchist at a Rotary Club meeting. I stepped forward, making myself obvious. But it chugged past me at a snail’s pace, made a complete circuit of the parking lot, and rattled back out on to the road.

Thirty seconds later, a red car appeared. I felt a flutter in the pit of my stomach. It was the same model as the one that had followed me the day before; the same color, with the same tinted glass. It stopped in front of me. The driver’s window whirred open. Ripple leaned out. She was wearing a tight white blouse, turquoise earrings, just enough lipstick to highlight the fullness of her mouth. Her red-gold hair flamed in the sun.

“Hey, there. Ready to go?”

My skin zinged with excitement. I couldn’t help it: it was an autonomous, electric-and-chemical response. I nodded.

“OK.” She leaned across and opened the passenger door. I walked round and got in. The excitement evaporated. There was a figure sitting in the back.

“This is Eric,” said Ripple.

I glanced towards him. The flabby man from yesterday, sprawled across the seat, too bulky for the space. He gave me a watery, embarrassed smile.

“Hello again,” I said.

He raised a hand, then dropped it back on his thigh.

“Buckle up, please,” said Ripple. She waited patiently for the click. As we headed for the exit, she said, “So, how’s it going?”

“OK,” I said.

“You been talking to a lot of people? Denny and Oak and Breeze?”

Breeze, not my mom. Unexpected, and slightly jarring. “Yes.”

“And you went over to her place yesterday, and watched her slideshow?”

I nodded.

“So. Let me guess. Coyote Fork was just the greatest place ever. Until the bad guys sent in Beth McGregor, and she and Joe Chess blew it all apart.”

“Pretty much.” I waited for her to lob the conversational ball back over the net, but she lapsed into silence again, following some train of thought of her own. Finally I said, “But you’re going to tell me that’s the doctored version, are you? The one where Stalin appears with only two men, instead of three?”

Her mouth twitched. “So what’s the deal here? I looked you up. The only stuff I could find by a Robert Lovelace was about Italy. And Moorish Spain. And Lower . . . Normandy, is that right?”

I nodded.

“And eastern Europe. After the Berlin Wall came down. Didn’t really seem like a commune’d be your kind of thing. I mean, Prague, the Alhambra, Coyote Fork?”

“Well, yes, I can see on the face of it that might seem a bit of a departure.”

“It did. So where you coming from?”

“Well—”

“And no horse shit, please. I know what you told them. But then of course you told them that, because it’s what they wanted to hear. Eric and me, we’d like the truth, if that’s OK.”

I rapidly assembled a Frankenstein’s monster, using bits of what I’d said to Breeze and Oak, but stressing that I was approaching the subject with no preconceptions, either positive or negative. She listened bolt upright, hands clenched tight on the wheel, knuckles standing out like a miniature mountain ridge.

“So I’m not here to do a hatchet job,” I said, by way of a punch-line. “But I’m not here to do a whitewash, either. I’m entirely open. I’ll go where the facts lead me.”

I watched her carefully, trying to gauge whether I’d convinced her. She made no response at all until we’d reached the bottom of the hill. Then she nodded and said,

“OK. Well, we’re facts. I guess you could say we’re really the third man. Or part of the third man, anyway. The guy that got x-ed out.”

“Who’s we?”

“Eric and me. And a few others.”

She seemed reluctant to say more. I turned and looked at Eric. On his knee glowed an iPad, an escape hatch into a more controllable world. I smiled and raised my eyebrows. Anyone, I assumed, would have known what that meant: Why don’t you tell me? But he just wriggled in his seat, frowning. We stared at each for a couple of seconds.

Then he mumbled, “It was her idea.”

“Sorry?”

“The two pictures.”

“Oh, oh, right. Well, it was very effective. Got the message across. Without having to spell anything out.”

He was still looking at me miserably, like a dog that knows it’s done something wrong, but doesn’t understand what. As if she knew what I was thinking, Ripple said,

“It isn’t easy for him. It isn’t easy for any of us. But specially not for Eric.” She paused. “Where’d you grow up?”

“In England. As you can probably guess.”

Not the ghost of a smile. “With your mom and dad?”

“Yes. Both.”

“Brothers? Sisters?”

“One of each.”

“OK.” We were on the main street now. She glanced sharply out of the window as we approached Milward Books. “And did you ever wonder if they were your real mom and dad? Or your real sister and brother?”

“Every kid wonders that, don’t they? At some point? You grow out of it, of course, but—”

“Well, we didn’t. Grow out of it. We’re still wondering.” She nodded at the bookshop. “I mean, I’m pretty sure she’s my mom. Like, you know, I came out of her. But my dad—” She shrugged, shaking her head.

“Doesn’t it say on your birth certificate?”

“There’s a name. But I don’t think even she knows if it’s the right one.”

“Can’t you have a DNA—?”

She held up a hand to stop me.

“My dad isn’t the point. The point is, there was someone took care of us. Patti, her name was. I’m guessing Breeze didn’t mention her yesterday?”

“No.”

“No. She wouldn’t. They don’t like to talk about her.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated.” She hesitated. “You ever read Lord of the Flies?”

I nodded.

“Coyote Fork was like that. We were all just roaming around, no grown-ups watching us; they were all too busy building utopia and screwing each other. So you got all these little tribes. And most of the kids hacked it, managed to fit in someplace. But there were some of us that just couldn’t do that. We were always being picked on, given a hard time. And Patti, she wasn’t that old, younger than I am now, I guess, and real idealistic, to begin with, anyway. But when she saw what was happening to us, she didn’t like it. So she let us hang out at her place. Fed us, read us stories, taught us games, gave us toys to play with. Hugged us when we were sad. Protected us against the other kids.”

“So how many of you were there? At her house?”

“Oh, well, you know, kids came and went. But when I was there, most of the time, there were just five of us. Eric and me. Jeannie.” She hesitated. When she went on, there was a tiny catch in her voice. “Starlight. Evan.”

“Evan Bone?”

She nodded. “I guess you could say we were a pretty strange bunch. Well, we would be, wouldn’t we? Load of misfits. Me and Jeannie were close. Eric and Evan were close. And Starlight . . . Starlight was just Starlight. One of those kids who always wants to help mom. So most of the time, she hung around Patti.”

I looked back at Eric. “So what was Evan Bone like? Anything to suggest he’d go on to become—?”

Panic flared in Eric’s eyes for a moment. Then he shrugged and said, “He was smart. Him and me’d mess around with Patti’s Mac, writing code. And mine was OK. I did a couple pretty neat games. But his was way better.”

“What sort of thing did he do?”

“Mostly games. But some other stuff too.”

“Can you elaborate?”

The panic reappeared. He scratched his head. “Excuse me?”

“The games were pretty violent,” said Ripple. “Remember Killer Bee?”

Eric shifted in his seat. “You shouldn’t talk about that. It’s a secret.”

“It was a secret twenty years ago. I don’t think Evan’s going to worry too much about it now.”

“He used some of the code for Global Village.”

“OK. Let’s just say he was angry. Like the rest of us. And was pretty imaginative, the way he showed it.”

She slowed to turn on to a road heading towards the mountains. A couple of hundred yards ahead on the left was a straggling complex of low, whitewashed buildings. A small group of people stood in front of it, some of them holding placards.

“What’s that?” I said.

Ripple shrugged. “Protestors.”

“Against what?”

“Water Company.”

I could read some of the placards now: Fight the Fire. Give Us Back Our Water. This is Your Fire. Only One Earth.

“Welcome to the good old U.S. of A., guys,” Ripple muttered. “It’s a capitalist country. That’s how we do things here. Get over it.” She laughed. “Or start a commune.”

“Slow down!” I said.

She braked. “What?”

I looked back at the little crowd. Yes, there was no doubt about: there, standing slightly apart from the others, were Corinne Ramirez and Gerald Chess.

“Someone you know?”

“I wouldn’t say know.”

“You want to get out and say hi?”

“No. Sorry. Keep going.”

As we picked up speed, she glanced in the rear-view mirror. “You see those guys, Eric?”

“Yeah.”

“So guess what?”

Behind me, an automaton voice said, “They are going to change the world.”

“That’s right. They . . . are . . . going . . . to . . . change . . . the . . . world.”

Eric guffawed—a repetitive ah-ah-ah, which sounded less like amusement than relief. For once, he’d known the right thing to say.

“That’s kind of our catchphrase,” said Ripple. “We used to hear it all the time when we were little, Whoa, man, we’re going to change the world! No offense to your friend, but when someone says that to me now, it brings me out in a rash. Anyway—”

We turned on to a smaller road, bordered by open fields. In front of us loomed the mountains, half-hidden behind a screen of smoke. The fire itself was clearly visible now, eating through a patch of forest to the right of us like paper in a grate. Seeing it again, I suddenly felt a familiar nauseous sense of dread.

“You’re really sure this is safe?”

She nodded. “I know it looks bad. But there’s fires every year. You get used to it.” She made a signpost with her hand, pointing ahead. “We used to call this the home run. Still a ways to go, but from here on in you just keep going straight.” She glanced in the mirror. “You OK?”

Eric murmured something I couldn’t hear.

“He doesn’t like going back,” said Ripple, quietly. ‘Remembering how it was. So let’s not talk about it anymore until we get there, OK?”

“Why’s he coming with us? If he feels like that?”

“I asked him to.”

What, to protect you from me? But then I remembered the way I’d looked at her, and my anger subsided into shamefaced embarrassment.

“You like country music?” she said.

“I’ve never really listened to it.”

She tapped the screen on the dashboard. A mournful guitar twanged through the sound system. A few seconds later a keening woman’s voice rode in over the top of it: The devil in the bottle made me kick my dog.

The next half hour or so was a kaleidoscope of bars and cars, lies and dreams, falling leaves, yellowing pictures, undead memories and broken hearts. After a couple of tracks, I found—to my surprise—that I was warming to it. It wasn’t just about the succession of drunks and drifters who populated the songs, the two-timing preachers, the single mothers holding down three jobs: it was about all of us, flawed and contradictory and at war with ourselves. For a brief moment of grace, the me who missed Ruth, the me who’d ogled Ripple and Ripple’s mother, the me still smarting from the loss of Anne, the me determined to avenge her, while secretly feeling she’d had her come-uppance, could all fraternize, like the football-playing British and German troops at Christmas 1914. And then the record ended, and the truce was over.

“Yeah,” I said. “I do like it. Who was that?”

“Me.”

I glanced at her. “Really?”

She nodded matter-of-factly, her attention on the road.

“That’s what you do?”

“That’s what I do.”

“Are you famous?”

She laughed. “I wish. No, I do OK. Tour a little bit, mostly just around here. Plus I host a local radio show. And write a little bit for other people.”

“That’s impressive,” I said. “It must be hard. If it’s anything like writing journalism.”

She shrugged. “It’s better than waiting tables. And a whole lot better than living at Coyote Fork.” She pulled at the sleeve of her blouse. “One thing I promised myself, when we left. I was never going to look like I just cleaned out a cowshed again.” She eased off the accelerator. The car started to bump and slither over an unsurfaced track. “OK. We’re here.”

Ahead of us was a sagging gate, held in place only by the padlock and chain attaching it to the fence. A notice wired to the front said, Private Property. Keep Out. The land beyond rose steeply, dotted here and there with clusters of brush. At the top was a line of small trees that looked as if it had been torn from a piece of felt and pasted on to the sky. There was no sign of any buildings.

Ripple pulled the car off to one side and stopped. When we got out into the afternoon sun, I saw that Eric was shivering, rubbing his hands up and down his arms as if he were cold. Slung over his shoulder was a canvas bag, from which I could see a corner of the iPad jutting out.

“We don’t have a key,” said Ripple. “We’re going to have to climb.”

The gate swayed dangerously under our weight, but the chain and hinges held. The grass on the other side was thick and unyielding, as difficult to move through as water, so I lifted my feet high as we traipsed up the hill, like a hunter stalking prey. I could hear Eric puffing and kicking and shuffling behind me, occasionally muttering Fuck or Oh, Jesus. A tiny breeze, not strong enough to stir the leaves of the trees, carried a faint sweet smell, laced with smoke, that seemed at odds with the somber stillness of the place.

We were almost at the top when—passing close to one of the tangles of vegetation—I stumbled on something hard. I glanced down and saw a wooden beam, black and checker-boarded with tiny cracks like a miniature brick wall.

“Oak’s house,” said Ripple, turning back.

I squatted down to look more closely. In the surrounding grass were fragments of timber. Under one of them I found a heavy chunk of broken pottery. When I withdrew my hand to look at it—an uneven triangle, the underside still stamped with the concentric lines of the potter’s wheel—my fingertips were black. It suddenly brought home to me that this was a community that hadn’t been allowed to live out its natural span but had come to an abrupt and violent end. And now nature seemed to be continuing the process, snuffing out the evidence of all that complex human experience, reducing it to no more than a few bits of detritus.

“Come on,” said Ripple. “They’re all pretty much like that.”

As we continued up the slope, she pointed out one tuft of scrub after another. “That was Jeannie’s house. Susie’s. Denny’s—the other Denny.” It was like walking through a cemetery, trying to resurrect the dead from their moss-covered tombstones. I simply couldn’t square it with the living landscape I’d seen in the slideshow.

I looked round, searching for Eric. He was a long way behind, ear-buds in his ears, engrossed in his iPad.

“You remember the Fork House?” said Ripple.

I turned back. She’d stopped in front of a large square patch of ground, where a few blackened stumps still showed among the weeds and saplings.

“That’s it,” she said.

“What went on there?”

“It was like the main meeting-place. Generally known as the Fuck House.” She turned and gave me a quick smile. “You going to ask me why?”

Without waiting for an answer she went on. On the brow of the hill were the remains of two houses, separated by a couple of hundred yards that must once have been open ground, but was now being recolonized by young oaks. She picked up a stick. “That”—indicating the one on the right—“was Hambone’s. And that”—panning left—“was Breeze’s.”

“Where you lived?”

“Some of the time.” She continued staring at the ruins for a few seconds, as if they might yield the solution to some age-old mystery. “And some of the time I stayed away.”

There was a thickness in her voice I hadn’t heard before. I waited.

“When I was real little,” she said, “I didn’t even think about it. All the different guys, I mean. You don’t, do you, when you’re a kid? You just assume whatever happens is normal. But then this one time, when I was, I don’t know, ten or eleven, I guess, I’d just got home, and Birch Ogren showed up. He was holding this, you know, this little black book. And he opened it and pretended to look at it, like he was acting, like it was in a movie. And then he said, Oh, right, it’s Wednesday, so it must be Breeze. And him and Breeze both laughed.” She swallowed. “Anyone ever tell you about Birch Ogren?”

“I know he’s an actor.”

“About him at Coyote Fork, I mean?”

“I think he was in a couple of the photos I saw. That’s all.”

“Yeah, they don’t like to talk about him too much, either.” She looked around, automatically, to make sure we weren’t being overheard, even though the nearest other human being was Eric, a quarter of a mile away. “He’s another piece of the third man. A big piece. Except they didn’t X him out to get rid of him. They did it to protect him. Which meant the rest of us had to be X-ed out.” She paused for a moment. “After that, I didn’t like going home. In case he was there. Or Many Rivers. You seen a picture of Many Rivers?”

I nodded.

“He was creepy. He told Breeze that him and her had been soul-mates in a previous life. And when they screwed, their spirits were together again. Then, when I was fifteen, he told me the same thing. And later on I heard he’d said it to pretty much every woman in the commune. All I can say is, he must have had a whole lot of previous lives.” She shook her head. “Anyway, let’s go see Patti’s place.”

She led me into the line of trees running along the ridge. As we emerged, the ground started to drop away, gently at first, then more sharply. At the bottom, a few hundred feet below, elusive as a fish, flashed a silver river, broken here and there by clusters of rocks that churned the water into white foam. The far side of the valley rose even more steeply, the dense cloak of oak and pine punctured by grey craggy outcrops, like bone showing through the velvet on a stag’s antler.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s spectacular.”

Without replying she started down the slope, hands outstretched for balance. I scrambled after her, almost losing my footing a couple of times. After two or three minutes I saw the now-familiar sight of a house’s grave. But this one was different: the earth black and scarred, the scrub and seedlings stunted, as if, even now, they were still in shock from the ferocity of the blaze that had destroyed it.

Ripple stopped before we got there and stood quietly, head bowed, hands clasped in front of her. When I caught up with her, I could see there were tears pouring down her face. She made no attempt to fight them or wipe them away.

“Is this it?” I said. “Patti’s house?”

“Yep.” She reached for a Kleenex and blew her nose noisily. “So how you going to do this book? You going to describe everything, how we brought you here today? Or are you just going to say what we told you? And keep our names out of it?”

“I can keep your names out if you want.”

She sucked her cheeks. “It’s complicated. I never talked about any of this stuff before. Outside of our little gang, I mean. And if you weren’t writing a book about Coyote Fork, I wouldn’t be doing it now.” She sniffed, blew her nose again. “It’s a case of divided loyalties, I guess. I don’t want to see anyone getting badmouthed or ending up in court. But I feel I owe it to Patti . . . and the rest of the guys . . .” She paused. “Yeah, and to Beth McGregor too.”

My heart gave a little skip, reminding me why I was there.

“If everyone buys the idea that it was all her fault, that wouldn’t be right.” She hesitated. “You ever hear of a man called Lenny Drew? A private dick, who came here looking for her?”

I nodded.

“He almost figured it out. But they bought him off, just in time.” She eyed me curiously. “That’s what they do.”

I shook my head.

“Maybe you believe that now,” she said. “But I’ve seen what money can do. People you think are made of steel? They get too close to money, and they melt, just like that.”

“I give you my word,” I said.

She shrugged and turned away, gazing out over the valley. “Evan didn’t want to bring Beth here. He never wanted to come back at all, period. When he went to Stanford, that was it, he said. Hasta la vista, commune. But she insisted. She’d always had a charmed life, so why shouldn’t it go on being charmed at Coyote Fork? Her big thing was, you could be friends with anyone. You just had to make the effort, show you respected them, the way they look at the world. And she hated to admit she was wrong.”

She paused, grimacing, her attention suddenly hijacked by a memory.

“Most people do, don’t they?” I said.

“Yeah, but Beth was something else. She went on trying long after anyone else would have quit. If it’d been me, I’d have been out of there like a shot. Pretty much the minute Birch Ogren showed up, like this.” She stuck her tongue out and panted. “Any time a cute woman arrived, Hambone’d tell him. And if he wasn’t working, Birch’d get his ass up here to join in the fun.”

“What, even if the cute woman was Evan’s girlfriend?”

“Sure. No couples, right? Plus, Hambone and Evan, they were like . . .” She shook her head. “Hambone even hit on Beth himself.”

“Really?”

“I know. But it didn’t seem strange at the time. That’s what Hambone did. He hit on girls. And anyone objected, that just made them bourgeois stooges. So that’s when Beth and Evan came to stay at Patti’s. Because Patti was the one person there stood up to Hambone. Even when he called her a spy, a lying bitch, a reactionary. So he left Beth alone after that.”

She hesitated. I suddenly remembered the picture of Beth McGregor standing with the others in front of the Fork House.

“But not Birch Ogren?” I said.

“No, not Birch Ogren. Birch wasn’t used to women saying no. Specially not at Coyote Fork.” She was quiet for a few seconds. “This isn’t for your book”—she’d stopped crying but was struggling to control her voice—“but he came on to me a few times. I told him, You could be my dad. And I wasn’t just saying that. The way I figured it, there was a one-in-five chance he was. But that didn’t stop him.” She shuddered. “Anyway, yeah, he came after Beth. And that was the problem.”

She edged forward, until she was standing on the edge of an outcrop. “Come take a look at this.” She pointed down the slope. “See that big rock? Right there, where the river forks? Way back, Shoma people used to use that for their puberty ceremony. The girls’d swim across there. And when they reached the other side, they were women. Or that’s what Joe Chess said, anyway.”

‘You don’t think it’s true?”

She shrugged. “The important thing is, Patti did. Joe Chess was a smart guy. He didn’t say much, but he was always, you know. . .” She touched the corner of her eye. “And I guess when he met Patti, he thought, man, this is what I been looking for. Tell her a story like that and she’ll go, oh, my, that’s beautiful. And then tell her, the last time they did the swim, back in the 1800s, there was a massacre, most of the girls were killed, and she’ll say, God, how awful! It won’t bring those poor kids back, but at least we can return the place to you. Which of course was exactly what Joe Chess wanted.”

“But did that actually happen? The massacre, I mean?”

“I don’t know. Hambone looked into it, said it was b.s. But that didn’t stop Patti. She went on saying, we’re living on stolen land, we need to do something. And Joe Chess, now he’s finally found a friend, he’s not going to let her go, so he keeps showing up and bugging her about it. So one day, just after Beth and Evan moved into Patti’s house, we’re all there, them and me and Eric, and Joe’s out on the porch, talking to Patti, and Birch Ogren bursts in and more or less tries to drag Beth off into the bedroom. And she’s shouting, and Evan yells at him to stop, and Birch says, What are you going to do about it?, and Evan’s just like this.” She stood rigid, arms stiff at her sides, mouth slack. “And Joe hears the noise and comes in. And when he sees what’s going on, he grabs Birch by the scruff of the neck and throws him out.”

“Good for Joe.”

She shook her head.

“Not good for Joe?”

“Well, yeah. But the thing was—I’m not blaming him: I don’t think he even knew who Birch was—but that was like it, you know? No going back. Birch was humiliated. Evan was humiliated. Beth was looking at Joe like, you know”—hands together, as if in prayer—“my hero. And, of course, that only humiliated Evan more. By the end of the evening, she’s convinced that Joe is this great warrior, fighting for justice for his people, and that her mission in life is to help him any way she can. And Evan’s madder than I ever saw him. Madder than I ever saw anyone.”

She looked away, watching the video of it in her head.

“So what does an angry Evan Bone do?” I said. “Scream? Throw things?”

“Uh-uh. I never saw Evan cry. Or lose control. Not completely. But he was shaking. And he could barely speak. He shut himself in their room for a couple hours. When he came out, Beth and Joe Chess were still talking. We could see them, out on the porch. And Evan goes out and tells her, I’m leaving. Are you coming? And he’s flexing his hands, like this, like he’s getting ready to strangle her. And she says no, she’s staying. And he turns totally white, death-white. And then he leaves. That’s the last time I ever saw him.”

“Did he actually threaten her?”

“Not in so many words. But if I’d been Beth, I wouldn’t have wanted to be alone with him.”

“And did she go on living at Patti’s house?”

“For a while. But then it got too hot for her. And there was like this civil war going on in the commune. Patti and a couple others thought we should hand it all over to the Indians. And everyone else thought it was a scam, and the Indians just wanted to build a casino here and get rich. And Beth was bankrolling the Shoma campaign by that point. Hiring lawyers, the whole deal. That made her, like, enemy-rich-bitch-in-chief. So she upped and moved in with Joe Chess.”

“And then someone paid them to leave altogether?”

“Not someone. Birch Ogren. That’s what I heard. He was scared that if the campaign went on, all the stuff about him fucking around and raping his own maybe-daughter would come out. So he made them an offer they couldn’t refuse, to go someplace else and stay there. And that’s what they did. And then Birch and Hambone spread this bullshit story about Many Rivers and the spirits.”

“Do you know where they went?”

She shook her head. “But that’s the point when you disappear, isn’t it?”

“Do you think anyone knows?”

She shrugged. “His mom, maybe.”

That is our land you are on. Im tellin you my son is not goin anyplace.

“But you’re sure they did actually leave?” I said.

“What else could have happened? They were abducted by aliens?”

“Somebody might have killed them.”

She looked as if she’d been hit with an air gun pellet. “Killed them? Who?”

I said nothing. But the name hung between us, like a banner trailed behind an aeroplane.

“No,” she said, after a few seconds. “That’s not possible. You don’t know the guy. Crazy, maybe, yeah, but not . . .They left.” She glanced past me. “Where’d Eric get to? I better go find him in a minute. It really freaks him being here. Specially”—jabbing a finger at the ground—“here here.”

“Because it’s where Patti lived?”

She was quiet for a moment. “Because it’s where she passed.”

“In the fire?”

She nodded. “Her and Starlight.”

“Oh, God, I’d no idea.”

“They were the only ones. People said it was karma.”

“Why?”

“Because she was trying to help the Indians.” She blew her nose again. “But Eric just doesn’t know how to process it. You probably noticed: he’s way over on the spectrum.”

“And was Evan like that?”

“Sure. That’s why they were such good buddies. When they were together, they didn’t have to deal with all this messy human stuff that scared them. Because they just didn’t understand it. They could escape into the tech world, which they could understand. ’Cause they made the rules there.”

She started back up the slope. I fell into step beside her.

“So what exactly was Killer Bee?”

She stopped again, debating whether or not to tell me.

“OK,” she said finally. “But you didn’t hear it from me, all right?”

“Fine.”

“So Evan made this kind of virtual Coyote Fork. It was pretty good. No, it was really good, for the time. Totally recognizable. He was always a genius at graphics. And the characters were all recognizable, too. There was Humbone, no prizes for guessing who he was based on. And Ding-Dong. That was meant to be Denny. And a movie star called Bitch, who wore this crazy Hawaiian shirt. Any idea where he came from? The only people who weren’t there were us, Patti’s gang. Or we weren’t there as people, anyway. We were the bees. And the game was, to track down as many of the other guys as you could and sting them to death. Evan was always the winner, of course. He killed the most. All except this one time, when Eric beat him. And he was so happy about it, you’d think it was his birthday.” She paused. “When Evan left to go to college, Eric didn’t know what to do. He brownnosed Hambone, tried to be one of the guys there for a while. But when that didn’t work out, he was just like totally lost.”

She turned and started walking again.

“So what does he do now? Eric?”

“He works in the Milward library. Runs their IT system.”

As we cleared the trees, we saw him, still almost at the bottom of the hill, eyeballing his iPad.

“Oh, Jeez.” She shook her head. “But I shouldn’t be too hard on the guy. If you’re that far over, you just can’t handle stuff the way the rest of us do.”