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

a smallish mound of fresh earth on his property. Les's father told them that it was Fuzz's grave, and that it contained a blood-soaked quilt the animal had been wrapped in when it was brought there. For whatever reason, the police did not dig it up.

But it was not only Les's behavior that was changing. In her last weeks Karen exhibited new signs of independence and what could be interpreted as attempts to shore up her flagging self-esteem in the face of her husband's withering criticism. She had enrolled part-time at Sierra College and was talking about starting a career. She had confided in a friend that without such an income she could never afford to leave Les and support her children. And she'd begun inquiring about the legal nuts and bolts of a separation and how to get a restraining order against her husband.

Six days before Karen vanished, her mother drove her to a hospital, where Karen underwent cosmetic surgery to remove the scars on her face and arm and had breast implants put in. Her parents told the police they'd paid for that. Karen spent what is believed to have been the last week of her life in postoperative pain, wearing an elastic brace around her chest. The brace and the pain made it impossible to drive, and she'd been relying on her mother and Les to get her around on errands. Investigators came to believe it was highly unlikely she would have picked this time to leave Les but instead would have waited for a week or two, until she felt up to traveling. She'd made at least one previous attempt to leave, but that time she'd taken the children with her, and people who knew Karen well said she'd never have left them with Les.

In the course of the investigation, it became clear that Karen's mother disliked Les intensely and made no secret of it. If even a fraction of what she recounted about her son-in-law was true, she may have had ample cause. But for the sake of fairness, we must remember her prejudice when we assess her testimony. With that said, Karen's mother told police that during a car ride after the surgery—and she claimed Karen had told her this—Les had driven over a bump and Karen had complained about the pain and asked him to take it easy. At this, the mother said, he caused the car to jerk repeatedly, alternately applying the brakes and the accelerator. And, according to the mother, in the days after the surgery he added a new invective to the stream of verbal abuse directed at his wife: "Old Falsies."

After World War II, dam know-how was a key component of United States foreign aid, and Bureau of Reclamation engineers regularly functioned as overseas advisers to developing nations. By the 1960s big dams were going up all over the world. One of them, the Kariba, in Africa, was completed in 1961. At that time geologists considered the region along the border between Rhodesia and Zambia seismically stable. But as Kariba filled, the area was shaken by a series of earthquakes, which increased in severity to a particularly strong set of shocks in 1963, just as the dam reached capacity.

Later, by the mid-sixties, India finished a large dam at Koyna, in a region one report called "one of the least seismically active places in the world." During its filling, mild earthquakes began to occur, culminating in a magnitude 6.4 shock on December 10, 1967. The dam cracked but survived; however, nearby communities were not so lucky. The collapse of unreinforced masonry buildings in those villages killed at least 177 men, women, and children.

In Greece, the rapid filling of the Kremasta Dam after its 1965 completion was contemporaneous with an earthquake that caused slumps and landslides, damaged over 1,600 buildings, killed one person, and left sixty injured. Similar patterns were noted at a French dam in 1963 and a Swiss one in 1965. And by January 1972, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering released a joint study stating that under certain conditions, large reservoirs had a potential to cause earthquakes as a result of the immense pressures they exerted on what were now understood as discrete portions of the earth's movable crust and, some geologists believed, by injecting the faults with water under pressure.

As investigators reconstructed it, the final rupture in the Dellasandros' marriage occurred around the question of where their children would go to school.

Les was Catholic, and the children were currently attending St. Joseph's School in North Auburn. But Karen wanted them moved to Forest Lake Christian School, in Lake of the Pines. The day before her disappearance she went to Forest Lake Christian to have a look around. An acquaintance later told police she had run into Karen in the schoolyard and had talked with her briefly. She remembered Karen saying that the pain from her recent surgery was considerably worse than she had imagined it would be and that she was very worried about her marriage. The next morning at around eight, Karen phoned Forest Lake Christian and made an appointment to enroll her children later that day. She never showed up.

By that morning, the dam site in the canyon below Les and Karen's house was a great hole in the earth like a strip mine, but it was now strangely quiet there. Gone was the noise of construction equipment; there was only the sound of the river at the bottom. Weeds came up on construction roads along the canyon walls. On the manmade cliffs of the dam's keyways, wooden catwalks and ladders on which workers had swarmed like so many ants were going gray and splintery in the sun. Underneath, the tunnels were abandoned, their interior walls still strung with black rubber electrical cord and, every few feet, a light bulb in a wire shield. But the power was shut off, many of the bulbs were now