Although he was volunteering to be the bait, he wondered if Sam hadn't happily shuttled him off to a secret life in California to get rid of him and to keep him safe. At least here, he and Georges could pore over the Chaperone papers in relative safety. One day, perhaps soon, Raval would tell him everything he knew. It would be fascinating to understand. In the meantime, Sam said, focus on staying alive.
"Your chin is practically on your desk," Jill said. Grady was nursing a cup of coffee. Jill pulled up a chair.
"I'm lost. I broke up with Clint last night."
"You only told him last night? You left him long before that."
"Why am I this way?"
"The reason now lives in the north of our great state, back in the mountains on the Wintoon River."
"I want to be with him."
"The problem is that Gaudet may be watching him. He must know that you're important to Bowden. Do you want to go through that all over again?"
"I understand the reasoning. But I don't have to like it. I just wonder if Gaudet would be right about the 'important' thing. Michael hasn't called or written."
"For God's sake, he thinks you have a boyfriend."
"So what do I do?"
"Sam would say suffer for the time being, but maybe you could write him."
"I want to see him just for a day or two. That's all. Then I can write. I could disguise myself as a boy or whatever."
"Where you gonna hide your chest?"
"Very funny."
"I'll talk to Sam. Maybe a short visit, hair under your hat. We're trying to get a government helicopter to scour the mountain with infrared so we'll know if someone's watch ing. If Sam says okay, take everything you could conceivably need. It's miles from nowhere."
"I'm not just gonna say howdy and have sex," Grady said, catching Jill's drift immediately.
The okay from Sam came more quickly than Grady could have imagined. Sam liked the effect she had on Michael and that, she was told, was the only reason. This was the one time in Grady's life that she had packed in fifteen minutes. It was because the flight departed in two and a half hours. She landed in San Francisco at 7:00 a.m. and took the 8:30 A.M. flight to Eureka. There she rented a car and got soaked in a gray rain that seemed dismal enough that even the dogs looked wet and depressed with their hair plastered to their ribs. The sky was everywhere and nowhere, blurring the green of the trees and reminding her that this was also a rain forest but in the cold, without the womblike warmth of Amazonia.
She drove into the town of McKinleyville and bought a poncho, some gloves, and a stocking cap. She already had a warm coat. Then she drove into the mountains. Nothing had really prepared her for this, having spent most of her life in LA. She had gone on family vacations but they stayed at re sorts and recreation areas in the south of the state or they went back east with money from Aunt Anna for what her mother called cultural experiences. Camping was never sug gested or undertaken, so she knew the vast stretches of mountains and forests that were in the West only through books and television, and they did not convey the feel of the place.
From the plane it had become apparent that California had far more trees than people. Behind the so-called red wood curtain lay miles of rugged, mountainous forest land that was largely unknown to the public. To go there from anyplace that anybody ever heard of, you had to fly in small planes or drive winding two-lane roads.
From Eureka she drove nearly an hour and a half into the mountains, past rivers that cut gorges thousands of feet below the mountaintops. She noticed that the water was crystalline, clean enough to scrub the soul. Trees were massive along the road and there were mosses and vines and all manner of green that she could not name. She had never seen anything like it and she found herself stopping the car and looking into the forest. There were bracken ferns like those she had seen around rural areas, one of the few plants she recognized. The conifers felt so strong and ancient that she got out of the car almost without thinking, as if drawn by sorcery. It was now near freezing and rain had turned to heavy mist, so she grabbed a GORE-TEX parka.
She walked to the forest's edge and looked, straining to see like a child peeking in a stranger's house. She stepped in among the trees. There was brush, but not much. The forest actually looked fairly open. Back nearer the coast, she recalled, it was more dense. Here the lower trunks were clear of branches and grayish green brush had grown up. Moments ago she had been in a rush, intent on being with Michael Bowden, but in this place of quiet and wild, where things were more timeless, it seemed a few minutes wouldn't matter. For a while she wandered down a gentle hill, enjoy ing the unfamiliar mystique of the forest. When next she stopped, she heard a stream and walked on to investigate. What she found was a series of beautiful pools a few feet across and vigorous cascades running between them.
The moss was almost effervescent and the grasses lush. The rocks were white and speckled and, even in the deep of the pools, the water was translucent and small green trout were vividly outlined, the black speckles of their backs plain. Something about the place made her shiver, but it wasn't the cold. Nor was it fear.
A very large tree attracted her attention and she walked to its base. She wondered if it might be a Douglas fir. Sam had told her long ago how the species was named after a Scotsman, a Mr. David Douglas, who was the first white man to publicize its existence. Instead of asking the Indians the tree's name, it was named after Douglas. The forest floor all around looked soft and thick with old needles.
She sat and watched the pools, and in a few moments there was a whirr sound and she realized that a large bird had landed in a nearby tree and she could just see the branches bobbing. On the tree that might be a Douglas fir, there was a giant fungus that looked mushroomlike. She wondered at its age. Something made her suspect that such a fungus would grow very slowly. She wondered how big the tree was on the date of her birth and realized that it had probably changed very little in the last twenty years. She couldn't imagine how old it might be. She imagined bringing Michael to this place and having him explain about the tree, the fungus, and the creatures. Surely, if he had been in these woods only a few days, he would know more than she might ever learn. She knew he was like that.
Near her shoe she spied a small salamander and farther away a chipmunk running over the litter on the ground like a picky shopper at a fruit stand.
Things were so different in the world of men than in the world of giant trees and quiet streams. A couple of weeks earlier, she thought, she might at least consider spending the rest of her life with a working stiff making babies. Then something strange had happened: Michael Bowden had come along.
The tree was not like her life. It never moved.
For a moment she thought she might be nuts sitting here in a forest several hundred miles from her home. This trip could leave her feeling very foolish. She was in love with a man who lived in her mind and now she was on a mission to discover if something in this world, one Michael Bowden in the flesh, might roughly match the man in her head. Of course she realized there was another possibility and that was that maybe he was different from her fantasies but nevertheless destiny's truly intended. Where love was concerned even the most cynical corners of her mind had to yield to a little magic. Looking at the fungus and the tree and the enchantment of the stream, the barely visible sky above, she felt truly insignificant. Still, somehow, people and their thoughts of her and her thoughts of them made her life im portant because most of mankind seemed bound by some metaphysical strangeness sometimes called consciousness or love, and if there was anything else out there in the great beyond, it might also be subject to this same love and this same self-awareness.