“Let’s go look anyway, okay?” Paul said.

Nate followed with his rabbit and stick, docile enough, as they moved cautiously up the track to the sprawling tent, still emitting the occasional moan.

“Nate’s not well,” Nina said to Paul in a low voice.

“No shit.”

“Someone ought to be helping him. A doctor.”

As if hearing this, and deciding against it, Nate suddenly disappeared.

“Nate?” Nina called.

A tall, tan young man with an ugly pink-nosed white dog built like a tank stepped out of the tent about fifty feet away. He wore the kind of T-shirt her son, Bob, called a wifebeater, white and sleeveless, jeans, and a brown cowboy hat low over his eyes. When he saw them, he seemed to jump back a step, but the dog jumped forward, growling. Thank God, Nina thought, that thing’s on a tight leash. Actually it was a chain, but Coyote was holding it looped several times around his knuckles.

Nina swallowed. Paul liked her to take the lead in these encounters, saying, heck, let the sexists feel safe because you’re a woman. Why not use it to our own advantage, this sexism stuff?

“Your brother trapped a rabbit,” she said.

“So we eat tonight. That’s good.” Next to him, the pit bull at the end of the chain made no sound, waiting. “Meanwhile, I politely say, just the one time, get the hell off our property. Now.”

“Are you Coyote? We’d like to talk to you about Danny.”

“Beat it. Or I let the dog go.”

“We’re leaving,” Paul said. He swung around back toward the road, but did not completely turn his back on the man or his dog.

Nina stumbled behind. As she followed Paul back to the car, she reminded herself, “Stay away from the poison oak,” but really, all she could think about was the muzzle of the pit bull and that poor boy standing by the tent, eyes searching the distance for answers.

“Did you see?” Paul said, as they reached the Mustang, started it up, turned on the AC, and sank gratefully into its leather seats.

“See what?”

“Up in the tree.”

“See what?”

“Nate built a nest up there.”

“No. I was too busy watching Coyote’s fingers on the dog chain. He’s perfect, Paul. He’s got the van. I see him setting the fires and driving away. It’s no stretch of the imagination.”

“So who’s the second dude, then?” Paul said. “The second guy in the van? We’re operating on the assumption that the second guy isn’t Danny.”

“Doesn’t have to be,” Nina said. “Simple. Danny found out from Coyote, and decided to get the reward. He’d know to look for the van up on the ridge.”

“He was going to finger his buddy?”

“His buddy was an arsonist.”

“To tell the truth, no one could be this dude’s buddy,” Paul said. “Drinking partner, yes. But-”

“But what?”

“But who did he drop off on Siesta Court that night? Who’s his partner?”

“Someone Danny hooked him up with,” Nina said, excited. “Another reason to kill Danny.”

Paul patted the baggie in his pocket and said, “Hope this is ash.”

They drove back to the turnoff for the Bucket. The sun was low and the shadows had lengthened, but the temperature was still in the nineties.

“Look for a hole in the fence just before you see the iron gate with a Stone Pine sign.”

They got out of the car, sloppy and tired. “This it?” Paul asked.

“I think so.”

They clambered down a steep path. Following the trail, they wended their way through a fifty-foot grassy field to a fork in the path. “We go right,” Nina said. They crossed one creek, and minutes later, arrived at the rocky shore of the swimming hole Nina remembered so well. No one else had lingered so late in the day. “Oh. It doesn’t look the same.” Floods had devastated the scene, tearing at the protective foliage. “My gosh. It was all hidden! Oh, well. I’m too hot to care.”

She peeled off her jeans, shirt, and underwear.

Paul took off his boxers. He kissed her hungrily. She ran her hands down him, admiring him. High above, on the highway, those who knew to look could see the tiny embracing figures in the twilight next to the pond. Nina felt the heat rising from the stones and a late-afternoon breeze stirring on her bare skin. Birds called to each other in the laurel trees.

They slid gratefully into the Bucket’s gold-and-silver water, and the light split and shattered across its surface, then gathered itself and followed behind as they swam.

14

E LIZABETH GOLD’S SUNDAY TURNED OUT TO be eventful too. After packing her new Subaru with water and sunscreen, she left before dawn that morning, heading east into Los Padres National Forest, to Tassajara Hot Springs. She wanted to get the most out of her visit, and knew she had a two-and-a-half-hour trip on G-16 to get there.

She had a bad taste to expunge after her foray to Siesta Court the night before.

For the first thirty miles, she enjoyed the expanses of yellow and olive-green hillsides, the dry grasses rolling like ocean waves in the hot wind, the occasional ranchito with its grazing horses, then the forest closing in. At the tiny community of Jamesburg the asphalt ended and the warning signs began: TASSAJARA ROAD IS IMPASSABLE DURING WET WEATHER. THE MONASTERY IS CLOSED FROM SEPTEMBER TO MAY, PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB THE MONKS.

As the road climbed steeply and ruts and stones took over, she switched to four-wheel drive, slowed down, and bumped and ground her way the last fourteen miles up Chews Ridge and down into the Tassajara Creek Basin, reminding herself with each teeth-clattering lurch how much she needed this retreat.

Morning’s overcast broke and the sun began to burn hot. After checking in with a friendly student, she strolled around the monastery grounds, starting at the footbridge. She walked the length and breadth of the property, over the footbridge, up the path to the yurt, breathing in the smells of the forest around, enjoying the security of the hills that framed the central clearing.

Since the sixties, Tassajara had undergone a slow metamorphosis and now included, in addition to the redwood cabin complex built in the mid-seventies, bathhouses, plunges and hot springs, stone meditation rooms, and a large dining room and dormitory. Too remote for tourists, this serene paradise was visited only by those seeking peace.

Holding her towel and water bottle and stepping carefully in her sandals, Elizabeth picked her way to her favorite boulder next to the river, where random rocks made art of the landscape. A branch hung down and sheltered a flat spot on this river rock.

She looked up the mountain at the broad scar running all the way down its flank, from the wildfire a few years before that had forced the monks to evacuate. No fire now, just heat, the hillsides shimmering with it.

Today the temperature might top a hundred degrees. She would go inside by 10:00 A.M. During the winter and fall months, the monastery closed to all visitors, while its residents engaged in intensive, ninety-day practice periods called ango. Elizabeth had done that in September. She had mourned a lot and slept a lot. One day she had enough, and went home. Simple, like Zen.

Today, she would return home before sunset. Finding a spot in shade on her boulder, crossing her legs, she sat for a long time amid the disheveled business of her Self, not trying for anything or expecting anything, just sitting. Like a monk of old on a rock above the river, she heard rushing water, allowed patterns of light to drift through her downcast eyes.

Old thought-patterns arose and she let them in.

They had died in a head-on collision in San Francisco. She had been at home, taking a nap. Five years it has been, she thought in wonderment.

She breathed in and out on her rock.

What she couldn’t get over was that at the moment of impact she hadn’t even woken up, hadn’t had enough of a connection with them even to feel them cry out as they left the earth. A certain moment occurred and all she loved was gone. She had nowhere to go and nothing to do and several million dollars from her dead husband. From her dead daughter, May, she had only memories.