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

from her home in Placerville. California poppies unfurl their glossy orange petals in the morning light between clumps of blue lupine along State Route 49, two lanes of winding asphalt connecting the string of little white-painted wood and red brick Gold Rush mining towns down the front of the Sierra. After half an hour she comes to the town of Cool, a county fire station and a group of plywood false fronts like a western movie set placed in an expanse of rolling pasture punctuated by stately blue oaks. She turns east onto State 193 at the only intersection in town, past the dirt turnout where scruffy men from the hills sell firewood out of beat-up trucks, advertising their loads with spray-painted signs on scraps of plywood.

Just east of there, Barbara Schoener passes the main gate of a residential development along the south rim of the Middle Fork canyon, expectantly named Auburn Lake Trails. Auburn Lake Trails is one of those gated communities that have turned old cattle ranches into recreational landscapes, with remnants of barbed-wire fences on split cedar posts going to rust and rot between big plywood houses on an aimless network of roads.

There are two more gates into Auburn Lake Trails in the next few miles east on 193, electric ones that can be opened only by magnetic security cards the residents carry. Barbara Schoener parks her car outside the second of these, across a perfectly paved road from the development's water treatment plant.

The woman who gets out of the car is forty years old, athletic, the mother of two children, with shoulder-length reddish brown hair. She wears a pair of blue nylon shorts, a cranberry sleeveless T-shirt, running shoes, a hat, and cotton gloves against the morning chill. She locks the car and puts the key in a little pouch attached to one of her shoes. Carrying an apple and a water bottle, she leaves the road, running down the trail into the neighboring state park.

At first she follows an old dirt road, grown over on either side by Scotch broom and narrowed to a single track. Horses and rain have worn a rut into the center of the remaining path; she places her feet with care. The road descends quickly into a Douglas fir forest, so that only a few feet from her car she is quite alone. Then the trail abandons the road, traversing the canyon side on contour, in and out of the folds of creeks. The trail emerges from the forest onto an open ridge. Far below, the river is spread out in a slow bend, silver against its gray gravel bed. She pauses to look and takes a bite of her apple, breathing deep of the air in which something bright—dust, a bit of pollen—catches the light out over the void. Ahead, entering the forest again, the path bends left into the manzanita.

At five o'clock in the evening, as I drove north on Highway 49 toward the ranger station to go home, the radio dispatcher called me and sent me back across the river into El Dorado County to meet with sheriff's deputies about a search in progress.

When I arrived, the missing woman's sedan was cordoned off with yellow crime-scene ribbon. Sheriff's search and rescue volunteers in orange shirts hustled around a mobile communications van. The wind was picking up. I got my jacket out of the back of the Jeep and shook hands with the officer in charge.

He said that when Barbara Schoener had failed to return as expected from a run, her husband had reported the matter to the sheriff. Her husband knew that she liked to run on this trail, and her car was soon found at the trailhead. She was probably equipped only with light clothing. The deputy and I agreed that I would drive up Quarry Road at the bottom of the canyon. There was a chance I would find her down along the river; when people get lost, they often head downhill until they get to something they can't cross.

It was dusk by the time I got back down to the rusty gate into Quarry Road. I let myself in and idled slowly east with the river on my left, watching the road shoulder on my right—we say "cutting it for sign"—for the lost woman's footprints. It started to drizzle, and I turned on the wipers. About two miles farther on, at Brown's Bar, the road became narrow and bad. The tires began to slip and throw bits of red clay up onto the hood. It grew dark.

This was the reassuringly familiar landscape of my nights—the interior of a Jeep, an exoskeleton of green humming steel, where I was surrounded by heated air and safe from most things, animals and weather, and, compared to a foot traveler, freed from the tyranny of distance. All businesslike: the tan upholstery of my seat, the lower right of its back torn from the constant abrasion of my pistol grips; the flashlight wedged between my right thigh and the radio console between the seats; and from the radio the cheerful blinking lights and a low chorus of calm voices from the rural counties around me, the men and women—police officers, rangers, paramedics, firefighters, pilots of medical evacuation helicopters—who come and go all night cleaning up scenes of chaos and imposing upon them the appearance of order that society requires in order to sleep well.

I turned on the rotating emergency lights on the Jeep's roof, so that if Barbara Schoener could move and was somewhere above me, she would see me coming from a long way off and have time to get to the road. Spokes of red and blue light circled around me, across the slopes of the canyon and the raindrops. I turned on all the spotlights, training them in different directions so I could watch for her, as I imagined it, waving urgently in the darkness. I reached down, punched up the loudspeaker, and pulled