Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

three to four thousand square miles of mountains Les knew better than most, having once worked for my own State Parks Department and the Forest Service, even before he patrolled much of that as a deputy.

Karen has not been seen or heard from now for over two decades, and the case sits like a permanent wound on the idea of justice in the minds of everyone who ever worked on it. The evidence custodian at the Auburn Police Department keeps a framed photograph of Karen on a shelf next to her desk and beside it, a bouquet of fresh flowers. Les was never charged and still works as a policeman. He is close to the age now when he can retire on a pension. Karen's mother was so demonstrably bitter toward him that Les eventually got a restraining order prohibiting her and Karen's father from having any contact with their grandchildren. Karen's parents have grown old and the police have taken samples of their DNA, because they probably won't live to see Karen found. For my part, I am haunted by what little I had to do with the case, because I cannot seem to separate it from the feeling I now get whenever I'm around the yawning hole of the dam site.

Just over five years before the National Guard's search aircraft flew over Placer County looking for Karen's grave, similar flights were made by Woodward-Clyde Consultants. That time, they were looking for alignments of topography called lineaments—lines of springs, straight valleys, ridges that suddenly zigzagged, or any other sign of faulting. From the dam site they traced these lineaments south down the front of the Sierra as far as Stanislaus Table Mountain, a volcanic flattop split in two and left like a broken child's toy. To the north, they traced them past Les's jail and up the De Witt Lineament past the court where he would get his restraining order and the judgment allowing him to dispose of his wife's property. From there they followed them north through Spenceville, where the shattered hills had been used for artillery practice during World War II, to the Cleveland Hill Fault, which shook Oroville.

After locating these faults from the air, Woodward-Clyde's geologists dug trenches across some of them on the ground. The point of this was to discern—by looking at soil layers displaced upward, downward, or along the faults—how recent and severe earth movements had been in the last hundred thousand years.

Of the forty such trenches Woodward-Clyde geologists made from Lake Oroville to well south of the Auburn Dam, two run under the beginning and aftermath of the eighth of September. One, which Woodward-Clyde called "St. Joseph's Exploration," was dug behind the Catholic school over which, in Les's account, his final argument with Karen had occurred. The other excavation, which they called "Radio Towers," was made below the antennas where the psychic later directed the Auburn Police to look for Karen's grave. This begs the question: Did the psychic see a grave, or was the malevolent mound of earth she was visualizing a fault trench?

In China one branch of earthquake prediction research has focused on the behavior of animals and people, which by anecdotal accounts seems to change in response to strains accumulating in the rocks along faults. Even now, the largest well-drilling company in Placer County still employed two full-time water witches, men who walk through the knee-high meadows of August and September holding copper rods in their hands until the rods wiggle in a certain way, and then drill there. Admittedly, cracks in the ground and water witching are of little relevance to finding Karen Dellasandro, and these details would interest only poets, park rangers, and anyone else who thinks about the mysterious connections between the land and the people on it. But to such as us, the blood that ran in Karen Dellasandro's veins and the cold water in the ground and the water in the American River are all of the same stuff. Everyone in these hills comes from the ground, and we will all return to it, and maybe for the brief period when we are walking around on it, whether with copper rods, murder weapons, or shovels in our hands, the connection between us and it is stretched but never really broken. And so we know things about the rocks we cannot say except with copper rods, and we yearn to have returned to us people whose presence we feel in the rocks and soil beneath us, and in a story told in whispers around town, like the wind that always comes in late September, just before the first rains bring life back aboveground.

6 / The Bridge over Purgatory

ROBERTA WAS A SHORT, round woman in her mid-fifties who worked the swing shift at our dispatch office in Folsom. She liked to remind me that she had been dispatching for the Highway Patrol the year I was born. When I phoned to ask her to fax a printout on a stolen car or some miner with a price on his head, she would answer, "Radio," as if the word had all of the cutting-edge potency of "biotechnology." Her short hair was copper red and always neatly coiffed. She wore sleeveless floral tent dresses and wouldn't have thought of coming to work without her pale makeup on. Her musical tastes ran toward Ella Fitzgerald and Diane Schuur, and she liked to go to jazz clubs in San Francisco whenever she could.

Roberta and I had our go-rounds, but on a moonlit midnight on some dusty road deep in the foothills with the whiteleaf manzanita crowding around you like an army of ghosts, Roberta's voice on the two-way radio was a dry-martini, worldly-wise comfort. One warm night I was on my way home from Sacramento and stopped at the district office below the dark bulk of Folsom Dam, where the aluminum-sided dispatch office sat under the radio mast in the back parking lot. I was walking from my