Old Chaos (9781564747136) Read online

  It took a while for her to wake O’Neill, which she was apparently supposed to do every hour lest he slip into a coma. Whatever she did was bound to be correct. Kayla was a good nurse, and she was sharper than a tack when it came to reading people. Too sharp, sometimes.

  “C’mon, Charlie, wakey-wakey.” She shook his shoulder, and he groaned. “Time to meet Cousin Robert.”

  “Nnngh.” He opened one bleary eye. “Hi.”

  “Hello.”

  He held up an unenthusiastic hand. “Glad to meet you.”

  Rob took it. It was hot—or his own was icy.

  “Need to talk to you.”

  Now it comes, Rob thought. The favor. “Okay.”

  “You work for the county, right?”

  Rob gaped. “You could say that.”

  “Good.” He blinked hard as if trying to wake up. “Drove out County Road 12 yesterday—’s after midnight—day before yesterday. Beyond milepost 18.”

  “Prune Hill.”

  “That’s it. New houses out there, six of ‘em.”

  “I know the place. What about it?”

  He frowned. “I was working for the state, summer and fall, doing site surveys. Year ago last summer. That hill’s a Class II site.”

  “Class II,” Rob echoed, mystified. “They’re expensive houses.”

  “Matchwood.” His eyes closed. “Match…mmm, mass wasting. High LHA.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Fucking hill’s going to slide over those houses.” He made a face and forced his eyes open. “Sorry, Kayla.”

  “It’s all right,” she said faintly.

  O’Neill tried again. “LHA. Landslide Hazard Area.”

  “Good God.”

  “Yeah. I want to know…weren’t they warned? Should be a notification—LHA Notice—filed with the county.”

  “I see.”

  “Can you check the records?”

  “I…yes. Or have them checked. Can you give me plat numbers?”

  “Prob’ly.” The eyes blinked wide. “Hell, my laptop! My fucking dissertation!”

  “I brought it in,” Kayla said in her most soothing voice. “Calm down, Charlie, and go back to sleep now. I’ll wake you in an hour.” He groaned, but his eyelids drooped. It took Rob a lot longer to go to sleep when he finally made it upstairs.

  IT HAD SNOWED half a foot during the night, but ice was now forming on the new fall like, well, like icing. It was eight a.m., and the house was dark, with Rob sound asleep upstairs, Kayla snoozing in the recliner, and O’Neill on the hide-a-bed. Meg stood at the porch door admiring the snow while her old percolator burbled. The candle on the kitchen table cast dancing shadows outward.

  She supposed her sense of natural beauty must have developed from sights she saw as a child—surf rolling in at Malibu or mornings in the desert—but those sights had not included snow. Her parents moved to California to get away from midwestern winters, and they never went back. On her one weekend at Tahoe in winter, Meg had been too preoccupied with her boyfriend to take in much beyond her nose.

  The snow was beautiful, no doubt of it—a treacherous beauty. Beyond the edge of her garage, she could see the snow-laden hood of Charlie’s pickup poking out through the sleet. She wondered whether she ought to drive the truck to the curb in front of the house. His keys still lay on the kitchen table next to the laptop, so she could do it. But she didn’t want to look at the damage to her garage.

  “ ‘A blanker whiteness of benighted snow.’ ”

  She turned, smiling. “You’re in a cheerful mood. Have I found another English major?”

  Charlie was leaning against the doorway, looking as haggard as a man with an orange beard can look. “That was just Sister Joseph in sixth grade with her long ruler. I used to recite Frost when I had to shovel snow. Bathroom?”

  Meg pointed. When he padded back she said, “How’s the headache?”

  “Better.” He slumped on the nearest chair.

  “Food? Not a greasy breakfast, I think.”

  “I couldn’t keep it down. How about soup?”

  Meg investigated. “Enough left for a cup or two.” She filled a big bowl for him, found a spoon, then rinsed out the soup kettle. Thank God for city water.

  While he ate, she poured coffee for herself and sipped. “Are you living in the camper?”

  “Yes. At that new campground on River Road—at least, it was new when I stayed there a year and a half ago.”

  “I’ve driven past it.” Rob had investigated a killing there last fall. Meg shivered.

  Charlie ate another spoonful of soup. He ate slowly, as if he had to make an effort not to throw up. “It’s a good place—toilets, showers, laundry, a kitchen.”

  “Vending machines.”

  He laughed. “Them, too. The manager lets me use his Internet connection for a modest fee. The place is quiet now, which is what I need. Bow hunters on weekends. Otherwise it’s just me and Bellew—he’s the manager. When I get tired of wrestling with data, we play pinochle or watch DVDs. I introduced him and his lady to the Coen brothers.”

  Meg glanced out the window. “Fargo?”

  “They liked Raising Arizona.”

  “What kind of data? You said something about a dissertation.”

  “I’m almost finished with it.”

  “Geology?” Meg ventured.

  “Yeah, I want the doctorate and the license. That takes time, but I should be done by June.”

  “Why are you here?” Obviously not to bond with Rob.

  “The department gave me a couple of sections of Geology 102 to teach at the Vancouver campus spring semester. I may rent a place in Vancouver or commute. I haven’t decided. I have a community ed class already under way here at the high school. Next session’s on Tuesday.”

  “Let’s hope we thaw out by then.”

  “Amen, sister.” He shoved the bowl away from him.

  “Coffee?”

  “No stimulants, no booze, according to her ladyship.”

  Meg smiled. Kayla, maintaining a professional persona. How long would that last? He was an attractive man.

  “I suppose you wonder why I was looking for Robert.”

  She set her cup down. “Something about a lost report?”

  “My supervisor filed the site analysis with the state, and the state was supposed to send an LHA notice to the county—Landslide Hazard Area notice.”

  “Where?”

  “Prune Hill. That’s what Robert called it.”

  Meg let out her breath in a startled whoosh. “But that’s where the sheriff has his house. We ate dinner out there last week.”

  “The sheriff?”

  Meg described the McCormicks’ new house and watched Charlie’s face.

  Candlelight flickered on lines and hollows. He was frowning. He rubbed the spot between his eyebrows the way Rob did when he had a headache. “If the sheriff’s in on it, the last thing he’d do would be to buy a house there.”

  “In on what?”

  “Suppressing the warning notice.” He drew a long breath. “Maybe there’s no fraud involved. Maybe some clerk in Olympia forgot to file it. No, that won’t fly. The builder has to have a geological survey done before the county approves his plans. There has to be a survey.” He peered out the window. “It’s unrealistic to expect him to do anything about it today, I suppose.”

  “By him, you mean Rob.” Meg’s mind skated in circles. “I ought to call Beth McCormick to warn her.”

  “Whoa! D’you want the developer to file a lawsuit? We have to find out what went on first.”

  “We.”

  “Robert. Somebody.”

  “You say landslide. What can happen exactly?”

  He was silent awhile, frowning. “At best, rocks are going to fall on the road, rocks and mud if it rains a lot. I’m willing to bet it’s been closed before, probably more than once.”

  Meg relaxed a little. “Inconvenient.”

  “That’s the best case. Thi
s area is geologically mixed up.”

  “What else?”

  “The worst case would be mass wasting. The whole hill could slide. It’s a cinder cone sitting on top of layers of ash, over silt and mudstone and rafted boulders and God knows what. Water percolates through to the sandstone beneath it all. The hill has already slumped several times. The Wind River slide area isn’t far from here, and there’s another huge slide upriver that’s constantly in motion. A landslip at Prune Hill would be a slide on top of a slide.”

  Meg gave a nervous laugh. “And it’s twenty-five miles south of an active volcano.” In the decades since the disastrous eruption of Mount Saint Helens, whenever the mountain burped, the small eruption was preceded and followed by moderate earthquakes, usually in swarms.

  “You’re from California?”

  “LA. I survived the Northridge quake. People live with hazards all the time.”

  “I think you’ll agree they should be warned, though.”

  “Yes. If the state hadn’t enforced high standards, that quake would have killed a lot more people than it did. Still, there’s such a thing as crying wolf.”

  “Sure. Which is why I want Robert to check the records—find out what happened to the warning notice—before I start talking about the danger in public.”

  “If the hill goes, those houses will be wiped out.”

  “That’s only part of the problem. A big slide would dam the creek, at least temporarily. When the water broke through, it would flood everything in its path. Bye-bye River Road campground.”

  “And Kayla’s nursing home. And all those fishing cabins built on Beaver Creek.” Many of them were cabins in name only—lodges with three-car garages.

  “It could take out the east side of town, too.” Charlie shoved himself to his feet. “I’d better go back to bed. Thanks for the soup.”

  Meg returned to her view of the ice storm. She was thinking about Beth McCormick, and Peggy and little Sophy. They should be warned.

  Beth was surprised by the thank-you notes she received after her dinner party. Guests usually took care of that courtesy with a phone call, and Maddie Thomas did call. She was polite, as usual, but she startled Beth by offering to conduct a purifying rite for the new house. Though Maddie was a thoroughly modern woman, she had been raised by traditional grandmothers.

  Purification of a new house? When Beth asked why—choosing her words carefully—Maddie just mumbled something vague. “It’s what we do.” Beth thanked her and didn’t dispute the need, but she was baffled.

  From the commissioner she received a formal note on correct, recycled paper. “Lars and I are grateful for your generous hospitality,” the note said. Beth wondered how poor Lars was faring. Kayla sent a chirpy e-mail and Meg a warm one, praising Sophy’s beauty and the quality of the cooking, two sure ways to Beth’s heart. Even Fred, who always talked over or around her, sent an e-mail with his company’s logo and an attached brochure in three colors.

  She also received an attachment from Rob that showed Nancy Reagan gazing adoringly at the late president. Keep up the good work indeed.

  Beth enjoyed a cheerful, mostly maternal relationship with Rob. After Hazel Guthrie’s death, she’d helped him sort through his grandmother’s things. She’d also been able to help him with his daughter. Like a lot of noncustodial parents, he worried about Willow more than he needed to.

  When the child first came north in the summer, his impulse was to drop everything and plan a lot of activities. Since Willow suffered from an overanxious mother, Beth advised him to relax and let the girl decompress. He’d done that, and Beth was happy to see they’d worked through to a comfortable relationship.

  Rob’s almost total lack of ambition was a puzzle to Beth, but she was grateful for his quiet loyalty to Mack. She hoped his relationship with the new librarian would work out. She thought it might.

  As for the crack in the Great Room, new houses had to settle, didn’t they? When Mack called Drinkwater, Fred made a joke about the crack but sent a crew the next day. They plastered over it and left her with another mess.

  After the dinner party, Skip returned to his apartment near the University of Portland where he was a graduate student, but Peggy, who was still on maternity leave, stayed on. Beth enjoyed her company, but she also rejoiced that the house was so large she couldn’t hear the baby crying during the night. She let Peggy deal with her daughter’s colic, which Peggy did with competence and only a few tears.

  At the courthouse, Mack was busy bringing his new under-sheriff Earl Minetti up to speed. As for herself, Beth went back to teaching the remedial English classes she’d been coping with for twenty years. When the ice storm forced the high school to close early, she wasn’t heartbroken. She forgot how isolated the new house was.

  It was Monday before Rob got around to checking what had happened to Charlie’s LHA notice, because he kept having to deal with accidents. The state people responded right away. The original survey, signed by Joseph Knapp, licensed geologist, and Charles M. O’Neill, M.S., did indeed constitute a Class II warning of landslide hazard. Rob called Professor Knapp, who turned out to be head of the geology department at Pullman. A genial fellow, Knapp praised Rob’s cousin as an exemplary graduate student, experienced, looking at a career in hydrology, whatever that might be.

  Rob thanked Knapp. Just in case, he also ran a police check on Charles Morris O’Neill. Nothing questionable turned up. He was who he said he was, born in Chicago to Thomas and Mary O’Neill, B.S. from the University of Wisconsin and the M.S. from Washington State. He had worked in construction off and on, so he probably didn’t object to development on principle.

  O’Neill was teaching a geology class for rockhounds in Klalo and was listed to teach academic classes in Vancouver when the new semester started. He had no criminal record and had served four years in the army without distinction or discredit. He was thirty-three, which meant he was born several years after Rob’s father was killed.

  Thanks to a reserve generator, the courthouse and the annex that housed the county’s emergency and police services had power. After a morning wasted freezing his buns on a logging road north of State Highway 14, Rob set his cousin’s laptop to charge and slipped around to the courthouse to look at the records.

  Slipped was the operative word. When he had crawled up the icy main stairway to the entrance of the Art Nouveau structure, Rob found only two offices open. That meant the records clerk would pay more attention to him than he liked, but he was too impatient to wait. She brought him the relevant documents, including Fred Drinkwater’s approved plan to develop the site.

  Rob double-checked the plat numbers to be sure. The geologist listed in the county’s records was not Joseph Knapp but Martin Woodward of Vancouver, also a licensed geologist. The site was rated as Class III, approved for residential development. Construction had begun the previous May. Rob checked the date of Woodward’s survey. About three months after Knapp’s. He wondered how it had come to replace the original recommendation.

  When he called Woodward, he got voice mail. Rob didn’t leave a message. Frustrated, he settled in to write up the nine accidents he had responded to in the previous seventy-two hours. He called again, before he went out to tend to one last wreck, but still got voice mail.

  It was eight in the evening when he returned to Meg’s warm and welcoming kitchen. The pickup had been removed. Meg’s garage door looked awful but could probably be coaxed to work. He found Meg and Charlie at the kitchen table playing dominoes by lantern light. Charlie thanked him for charging the laptop. He looked better—shaven and wearing a WSU sweatshirt that clashed with his hair.

  Kayla had already slid off to work in her little Civic, they said. Meg hadn’t waited dinner for Rob, but she’d saved some pot roast. He could have eaten roadkill. He took a hot shower while Meg dished up.

  “Have you had time to check yet?” Charlie demanded.

  “Let the man eat,” Meg said. “Your turn.”

 
He grumbled but placed a tile on the Mexican train. Meg laid a double on the train, a double on her own train and another tile on that one. “One,” she announced, smug. Charlie groaned.

  Rob wanted to think through what he should say. The pot roast was caramelized to perfection and the vegetables tender as young love. Meg had made horseradish sauce. He ate, savoring, and edited what he knew.

  The domino game progressed; Meg went out. While Charlie tidied the tiles away, she dished up ice cream that was on the edge of melting, she said, so they’d better eat it. She also set out a plate of cookies.

  Rob smiled at her. “I’d like to see what you serve after earthquakes.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Everything in my freezer is thawing, and you make jokes!”

  “They are working on the power lines. It’s supposed to warm up tomorrow, too.”

  “You believe that?” Charlie ate a cookie.

  “ ‘Hope is the thing with feathers.’ ” Rob stirred his ice cream. “I’ll tell you what I found out, Charlie. Maybe you can fill in the blanks.”

  Charlie pushed his bowl aside, eyes intent on Rob’s.

  Rob mentioned his call to Joseph Knapp in Pullman and described the two conflicting reports.

  “And you couldn’t reach this Woodward?”

  “No. Do you know him?”

  “I don’t, but Joe will.”

  “If a developer disagrees with the state geologist’s conclusions, can he bring in his own man?”

  “He can, as long as the guy’s a licensed geologist.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then the commissioners decide which version to accept, and argue it out with the state.”

  “Sounds like a recipe for corruption,” Meg murmured. Both men looked at her. She went on clearing the table.

  Charlie said, “There’s a lot of that around. It’s worse for archaeologists.” Most counties require the evaluation of a site’s historic significance as well as its physical stability. “The big developers have pet archaeologists on retainer and trot them out whenever an innocent government man finds a village or burial ground.”