Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

after the Oroville earthquake. And the rocks under the dam? They're like Swiss cheese ... there's over nine thousand feet of abandoned underground tunnels, drifts, and raises under the dam site, and over a hundred thousand feet of bore holes they made taking core samples."

Morita was looking at me. "You think she's in there, don't you?" I said.

He shrugged.

At that point a blue-uniformed receptionist stuck her head through the door and called Morita to the front counter to talk to a witness who'd come in about another matter. Morita excused himself. I was left looking at the map of those mineshafts and wondering if I'd been feeling a little down when I'd walked in there, or if it had come on during our discussion. Maybe it was just the time of year.

By September the foothills were worn out from the deprivations of the dry season, and everything waited breathlessly for rain. The dusty trails in our canyons were covered with the riverine tracings of whiptail lizards and racer snakes, and although it was still hot, there was a certain aging of the light. The smoke from the burning stubble on the rice fields down in the valley backed up against the mountains, and the lowering slant of the sun through it brought a nameless melancholy to the mornings of the well-adjusted, and to the desperate, more desperation. What had you done, now that the year was three quarters gone? What had your life come to? What of the New Year's resolutions you'd made? The dry weeds stood in silent ranks on the roadsides, the wind didn't blow the smoke away, and at the Maidu graveyard across Auburn-Folsom Road from the Indian Rancheria at the south end of town, bunches of faded plastic flowers and abalone shells from the coast were arranged on the bare humps of red clay between the dry grass. Many of the graves had only the crudest markers, a name painted by hand or applied in adhesive mailbox letters on a ceramic patio tile, laid upon the mound. Others had no markers at all.

Of course, for most of the time there have been human beings that is all we could expect, an unmarked grave. But we want better than that now. We want order, completion, closure, a granite monument, a public mourning, and in the event of some wrongdoing, an orderly assignment of it to the culpable. So when Morita came back, I offered to help. My involvement in the case would never be anything more than peripheral, but for the rest of that fall I did what I could to help them find Karen.

In the photograph they'd used on the missing-person poster, she was pretty, in her late twenties. Her dark, glossy hair cascaded in curls just past her shoulders, and her blue eyes sparkled with intelligence. Her smile was broad and generous, accentuating her cheekbones and perfect teeth and the little dimple in her chin. Morita told me she'd been a stay-at-home mother, but in the photo she wore a navy blue blazer and a high-necked white blouse with a little lavender bow at her throat. She looked like a job applicant, one most of us would have been pleased to hire.

Skyridge, where she'd lived, was a lakefront subdivision still waiting for its lake. The more expensive homes would have a view of the lake whenever it was finished, but Les and Karen's wasn't one of them. Theirs was what real estate agents call a starter home, an arrangement of shed-roofed lean-tos with an attached garage, sheathed in regrooved plywood stained gray with white trim. It was located at the end of a cul-de-sac where the developer had wrung one more awkward lot out of his acreage. The back of the house was hard up against a steep, wooded hillside, and from the west wall the ground fell away into a swale. In the swale was a barbed-wire fence, and on the far side was a cow pasture, and on the far side of that, the Stations of the Cross on the grounds of the Our Lady of Mercy nunnery. At the south end of the same pasture was the Indian graveyard.

Thirteen years after his wife disappeared, Les Dellasandro went to court to have her declared legally dead so he could sell their home. It had been rented out for years by the time I got involved, and the tenants had used it hard. The untrimmed oaks had grown in around it as if in shame, and the garage door sagged under its own weight and the weight of whatever had happened inside it on September, 8, 1982, when the house was new and Karen and Les's kids were little.

In 1966, after the Bureau of Reclamation received a $425 million appropriation to construct the Auburn Dam and the Folsom South Canal to carry the water away, the agency found out that the dam they'd sold Congress wasn't practical. There simply wasn't enough low-value land in the immediate vicinity from which to quarry the huge quantities of fill needed to build it. A 685-foot earth and rock dam of the kind the Bureau had proposed would have required the strip-mining of five square miles to a depth of 30 feet. But the site was right next to Auburn, the county seat of Placer County, and surrounded by residences, cattle ranches, and orchards. So in 1967, after evaluating more than thirty alternatives, the Bureau announced a new, daring design. It would be the largest double-curvature thin-arch dam ever built, 196 feet thick at its base but only 40 at its over-three-quarters-of-a-mile-long crest, a veritable eggshell of steel-reinforced concrete.

There are two basic kinds of dams: gravity dams and arched dams. The dam the Bureau had completed the decade before at Folsom was of the first type, a clunky, 340-foot-high lump of cast concrete with great dikes of earth and stone on either side, holding back more than 326 billion gallons of water by the