“Miss.”
“Now, Miz Greene, I understand you drove in last night about twilight?”
“Well, yeah … like, it was dark by the time I reached the campground. What’s happened here?” Ambulances, fire trucks, cars, and pickups lined the road. There was enough excitement for a full-scale disaster. But no sign of a wreck.
“Parker, get a reading on this lady,” the sheriff yelled and a man came to pass a black plastic object, the size of a gigantic calculator, up and down Charlie’s clothes and over her hair. It had various buttons and a small digital readout screen. No ticking, but Charlie had seen something similar in a newspaper photo from Chernobyl.
“Is that a Geiger counter?” she asked, incredulous.
“A trace,” the man announced and hurried off importantly.
At that the sheriff made a worried sound and turned very serious indeed.
“A trace of what? Talk to me.” The hot sun glued Charlie’s bra and jeans to her skin. Mechanical voices spit static chatter on the radios of the emergency vehicles. Edwina stood next to Howard’s Jeep, answering questions from yet another deputy. A steady stream of people rushed to and from something off in the desert. Some wore face masks, others men’s handkerchiefs tied over mouths and noses, banditlike. Some carried stretchers holding covered lumps that could have been bodies badly disjointed. “Sheriff, did you find a mass grave out here or something?”
“See anything unusual on the way into the campground last night?” the little sheriff asked. “Now don’t answer right away, think about it. Try to remember everything you saw. This is important.”
“Well, I had to stop and change a tire and I saw this rat—”
“Rat? Oh, God, no.” His sigh was devastated. He looked at Parker, who’d returned with his funny box. “What’d I tell ya?”
Parker looked horrified.
“Miz Greene,” Sheriff Ralph turned back to Charlie, “what did the rat do?”
“I think he may have been rabid.” She described the rodent’s drunken behavior and Parker groaned.
“This is worse than I thought,” Ralph said with a manly grimace. “Did you smell anything strange at the time?”
“I don’t think so … just … fresh air. We don’t get much of that in L.A.”
“Did you see anything out of the usual in the sky?”
“Stars. City lights and fog and pollution sort of hide—”
“Miz Greene, I’m going to show you something I want you to look at, but mostly I want you to smell it for me. And that’s going to be hard.” He took her arm, much as John B. had earlier on the path out to the Point, and led her off into the bush forest. And then he said in a controlled, personal voice, as studied as Mitch Hilsten’s had been with Edwina at breakfast, “But what I want most is your word that you won’t say anything to other possible witnesses at that campground until we’ve had a chance to question them. Especially not to your mother.”
“She won’t have to, because I’m going with her,” Edwina said right behind them. “I demand to know what’s happening here.”
There was an angry staring match between Sheriff Sumpter and Edwina Greene, but he finally grated his molars in an audible “scritch” and guided them toward the scene of activity.
It didn’t seem like the sort of landscape where anything much could be hidden but it was amazing how soon they were out of sight of the road. Charlie didn’t know what to expect other than a lot of blood because of all the ambulances. Both she and Edwina recognized the smell long before they arrived at the site.
It was just that Charlie couldn’t identify it at first.
Chapter 5
At first, Charlie thought an airliner had crashed without burning. Because of the twisted metal and the covered shapes on the ground.
A lone shoe here, a woman’s purse there, everywhere broken glass flashing back at the sun.
“Reported missing when it didn’t show up at a motel in Moab,” Sheriff Sumpter told them. “Probably wouldn’t have been found yet if it wasn’t for a small plane happening over here at first light.”
Charlie remembered what Rudy Dichtl had said about the shoot out here. “Then this wasn’t the busload of extras from Moab?”
“No, thank God. I got half my family in that scene.”
Still cameras clicked and whirred. One man panned the accident site with a thirty-five millimeter. One put samples of sand in plastic bags. Two worked with acetylene torches and another pried at the wreckage with a crowbar. Several measured things with tape measures and wrote on clipboards. No one spoke much above a whisper. A sheet of gray metal lying up against a crushed juniper had SUNSET TOURS painted across it.
“Tour company claims there were forty-two passengers, all elderly, and the driver,” the sheriff said softly. “No survivors we think. Have to put more of the body pieces together before we can be sure. Hard to tell who’s what in a mess like this.”
You saw them everywhere these days. Comfortable buses hauling groups of retirees, mainly widows, between motel and restaurant stops. Past sights they were now too old really to explore once they had the leisure to do so.
The thirsty sand had soaked up most of the blood and spilled fuel. Charlie didn’t let her eyes dwell long on the remaining dark patches or the things still being removed from the wreckage.
“Figure the bus body was scraped off the chassis and then crushed,” Sheriff Sumpter said. “Might be whatever did this was the same thing made your rat drunk last night. What I can’t figure is the smell. And how that bus got so far from the road without leaving tracks.”
Charlie tried to breathe through her mouth. “Reminds me of chemistry in high school or rotten eggs or a chemical spill or—could it be nerve gas?”
“Nerve gas is odorless,” the sheriff said with patient condescension. “And we’d be too busy dying to stand here talking.”
“Forget chemistry,” Edwina prompted with even more condescension and less patience. “Try biology.”
“Biology’s your thing, I can barely remember chemistry … oh. Right. Your lab at CU. And our basement.”
“What?” Ralph the sheriff demanded. “Tell me.”
“Rats. I knew it was familiar. Rat urine and shit … feces. Only ten times stronger. Wait a minute … a bunch of little rats did all this? Give me a break.”
“She smells rats!” Sheriff Sumpter bellowed at the universe and pumped Parker’s hand.
“Well, I smell a rat,” Edwina said.
And about then, Charlie did too.
He appeared from behind a scrubby bush, leaping. He high-fived the sheriff and Parker and hugged Charlie before she could get out of his way.
“If we can fool them, we got it just right,” Gordon Cabot said. “Anybody knows rats, it’s Edwina Greene.”
Edwina Greene decked him on the first swing.
“Well, I didn’t call him any names, did I?”
“Did you ever stop to think he could sue you like he’s always threatening?” Charlie helped stow all the groceries in the cupboards and crevices of the small trailer. “You’re lucky the sheriff didn’t arrest you on the spot for assault.” Charlie was beginning to feel like her mother’s mother.
I’ve already got a kid. I don’t need two.
Half the pharmacies in Utah had worked to concoct the right smell to convince the extras that the scene to be shot was really that of a tour busload of senior citizens savagely mushed when a UFO accidentally dropped a Porta Potti on top of it. Even though the extras knew better.
And the sheriff had cooperated in staging a hastily arranged run-through of the evening’s shoot to check out on the Greenes what Cabot insisted upon calling verisimilitude.
Charlie found the very thought of Gordon Cabot and that word appearing in the same sentence staggering.
“You see,” he’d explained to her, between legal threats to her mother, “these rats from another planet are looking for a waste-disposal site for their world and what better place than here? High
concept for the ecofreaks, right? But all the rats see anywhere are humans. Who they consider unimportant critters.”
“This would take one frigging giant of a Porta Potti.”
“No problemo, babe. These are giant rats. That’s why they don’t notice the little native rats at first.”
Charlie still smarted from being taken in so easily. If she hadn’t been concentrating on her mother’s strange behavior she’d have picked up on it sooner. Sure.
“Ammonium hydroxide,” Edwina said now, as she straightened up from a floor-level cupboard still holding a roll of toilet paper. “They used a lot of commercial ammonia to make that stink.”
By the time they’d reached the campground, John B. was busy preparing for his own filming. Edwina sent Charlie down to the Visitors’ Center for a bundle of firewood for the grate and their dinner later. Then the two walked across the mesa to a grassy pasturelike landscape where the cast and crew of Return of an Ecosystem were in the midst of a setup for their twilight shoot.
Edwina introduced her to Earl Seabaugh, the director of photography, or DP, and in this nonunion doc also the chief camera operator, as he set up his equipment on a tripod. He had a shaved head, one earring, sea green eyes, a trimmed beard, and the build of a football player. “Hear you almost got peed on by great big rats this afternoon.”
“No secrets out in the wilds either, huh?”
Earl nodded toward Scrag, who stood talking to the blonde Charlie had seen in the door of Drake’s motor home. “Our own desert rat’s been spreading the word.”
Charlie joined her mother, who stood scowling off by herself. Edwina’s social skills had never been great but it was hard to imagine what these people thought of her now that she had this delightful new personality. “Where did all the grass come from?”
“You’ll only find it on this side of the cattle guard. Taken twenty-five years of no grazing to get it this far. Take it another twenty to get back to normal.”
There was plenty of space between clumps, but from a distance the grass looked like a rippling, flowing, solid ground cover. It must drive the cattle on the other side of the fence nuts. It came up to Mitch Hilsten’s knees as he stood patiently while the blonde fussed with his hair, talced the shine from his forehead, adjusted his collar. Earl ran a light meter over him.
John B. loped between his crew and a generator truck where two men had strung cables to lights on a tall grid for the night portion of the sequence. With a hand over his eyes, he checked the position of the sun.
“They’ll record the sound of the wind in the grasses now and Mitch’ll lip sync his speech again later,” Edwina whispered to Charlie. “No wonder movies cost so much. Must already have miles of footage on the sunset colors of that canyon rim and its cliffs behind him.”
“Think we got liftoff,” Earl said and bent to his camera while an assistant standing off to the side swung a handheld up to a pad on his shoulder to shoot at a different angle.
The blond woman held a clapboard ready. She was certainly a Jill of all trades in this production company.
“Her name’s Tawny,” Edwina said under her breath. “Just Tawny, no last name. So she says.”
“Quiet on the set. Roll camera.”
“Rolling.”
“Speed.”
“Thirty-eight takes one—marker.” And Tawny clapped the stick.
Mitch looked small and insignificant in the broad field of grass with the mammoth canyon rim looming from across an abyss beyond it. An endless sky with clumps of floating gray cloud acted as backdrop. Wind ruffled his hair and shirt as it did the grass at his feet.
“Mitch!”
“Wind lays thick deposits of silts and sands on the mesa tops and here a grassland can develop,” Mitch said. “The different textures of ricegrass, galleta, grama, and muhly weave a blanket of subtle, moving beauty that stabilizes the dunes. The superficial roots of these grasses seize the moisture before it can percolate out of reach. Over a hundred years of cattle grazing has all but destroyed the fragile grasslands of this desert plateau.
“But here in the park an experiment is taking place. No grazing has been allowed for twenty-five years and you can see the result. With the return of the grasses there has been a slow but steady return of certain insects, rodents, and small birds. And, with them, their more spectacular predators—the fox, coyote, eagle, hawk, and owl.”
He wore a safarilike outfit, similar to the one he’d worn at breakfast but clearly less rumpled and camp-worn. He looked intense and sincere, his gestures relaxed but his message vital. Yet with just a hint of the sardonic, just enough to remind an audience this message came from Mitch Hilsten. He was alone in this immense landscape with Earl’s camera, seemingly unaware of the handheld and the groups of people behind both.
And the moment he began to speak he was no longer insignificant in the vast landscape—he was the center of it. The natural lighting appeared to be performing for him.
As he explained how the grasses offered seeds to the rodents, their burrows helped give proper texture to the soil layers which in turn helped the grass to grow, the shadows behind him lengthened.
The desert varnish washed blue-black to deep lavender in the depressions on the cliff face of that far rim.
Flat rock walls grew textured and three-dimensional, scarred with crevasse and mystery.
Gray clouds turned pink and deepened to rose.
The grass whispered with excitement now, as if on cue.
“… and, as the sun sets, creatures of the night—which burrow beneath us in daylight to conserve the moisture in their bodies—stir in their burrows. And their predators rise and stretch in anticipation of the night’s hunt. Some take to the sky to begin their search for dinner.”
Charlie shifted her feet uneasily at the thought of all those hungry night creatures stirring under her, reminding herself that documentary or no there was a goodly portion of show biz happening here. God help her, she loved this business. Nuts as it was.
He really was impressive. Even with the force of his words diffused by the wind, his backdrop upstaging him again with its gorgeous color, he still held Charlie captive. He was a presence, a professional at work. The tingle of excitement he managed to create despite a nearly expressionless expression, the inflection even at this distance so right, it was perfect, just …
And then he blew it.
Mitch Hilsten—who had made her forget the trouble at the agency, her worry over her mother and daughter, even her embarrassment at being sucked in by the tour bus crushed by an alien Porta Potti—suddenly became merely another human.
The clouds behind him lost their color, turned gray at his sudden silence.
“Cut!” John B. threw both arms in the air. “Mitch? What?”
Mitch stared at the sky overhead. The assistant camera operator disobeyed and swung his handheld to follow Mitch’s gaze.
Chapter 6
Charlie cringed for a nanosecond, half-expecting an alien outhouse to fall out of the sky.
“I don’t see anything,” Edwina said.
Charlie didn’t either.
“Damn it, if this is a sick joke I’m going to commit some serious murder around here.” Drake stomped off to confront Mitch.
“We can edit out the last frames,” Earl called after him, wiping a sleeve across his forehead and winking at Charlie. He reached for the camera on his colleague’s shoulder. “You’re wasting film, Mike.”
“Sure got dark fast,” Tawny said to no one in particular.
And she was right. Twilight was over. It was night. Charlie’d noticed the suddenness of the same when driving in here the night before.
“All right, children, we’ll pack up the lights and go home,” John B. said, stalking through the grama and muhly grasses. Time for a directorial tirade. Charlie caught the dance of laughter in Earl’s eyes as he pulled a baseball cap out of a pocket to conceal his mirth and naked head. She hoped Edwina would keep her mouth shut.
The wind had gone as silent as the crew, but the generator hummed.
“Never mind that we are nearing budget,” the director emoted. “Never mind that cables are strung and all is ready. Never mind that the night is perfect for the last scene for which we have to pay a superstar on location—”
“Christ, I’m working for practically nothing.”
“You call playing jokes with my budget nothing? The years you took off my life just now, nothing? Is that right, Mitch? I thought we were friends. And all because you looked up and didn’t see anything?”
“What I said was, I saw nothing. That’s not the same.”
But when Charlie and Edwina left them, John B. had everyone back to work as if there’d been no interruption—Mitch Hilsten, bathed this time in a golden glow of false light from the grid, talking earnestly to Earl’s camera.
“Only in Hollywood,” Charlie muttered. She took her mother’s arm when they both stumbled on the uneven ground in the dark and was surprised to feel the bones through Edwina’s skin. “Have you lost weight since I saw you last?”
“Flesh sags with years, Charlie. I’m just getting old. I don’t do it to irritate you. Someday you’ll know.”
Once, Edwina had said, “I hope you have a daughter just like you someday, Charlie Greene. That will be my revenge. Then you’ll know.”
Charlie wished her mother would stop with this “old” business. She never knew when Edwina was making a play for sympathy or when it was time to seriously panic. Charlie’d never heard of aging causing people to take up heavy swearing and get physical. Gordon Cabot must have been off balance when this frail woman knocked him down.
They made their way through the grasslands to the road and along it to the resumption of the stunted forest. Every other shadow-shape was a tree skeleton, twisted and grotesque, trying to snag them like something out of a Disney animation.
But Charlie’s thoughts slipped off to real life—her regret at missing the screening of For Whom the Bell Tolls II back in L.A. tonight. There would be people there she needed to see.