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school in one of the homes. Church. You think that's the church?" He pointed to a building. It was the
remains of two upright walls now, and a tumble of timbers and sand piles inside the walls. He had come
to a stop again, this time in the middle of the road, Main Street of old East Shasta, no doubt.
"Fernandez, what are you doing?" Sarah asked finally. They had not entered any of the other buildings,
but approached one or another, stopped to listen, moved on.
"Food," he said then decisively, and turned to go back to the car.
Long black shadows were filling the valley, striping it. The contrast of the dark shadows and the
sun-silvered wood was so intense that the buildings looked like polished silver and jet, and the shadows
of the ruins were grotesque, nightmare buildings.
"You know anything about the commune that was started in here, back in the sixties?" Fernandez asked,
opening the trunk now. He pulled out a cooler, looked around, then shrugged and set it in the shade of
the car.
"Mrs. Betancort started a commune," Sarah said.
"She's dotty, of course, and I suppose always has been. Anyway, she gathered a bunch of people,
convinced them that the world was going to end, or that Jesus was on his way, or something, and that
salvation lay in establishing the commune here. They came out and set up tents, did whatever people like
that do, and eventually moved out again, back to East Shasta for her, scattered to the wind, as far as I
know about the others." She watched him spread a blanket on the ground, and sat on it when he was
through. "Your turn. What do you know about the commune?"
"About like that. Milton Flink, your very own local pharmacist, told me about it. He was here, a teenager.
He said every day about this time, before dark, when the sun was going over the hill there, they heard
ghosts.
Day after day, moaning, wailing, crying, begging for help, he said.
Not loud, he said you had to strain to hear the actual words, but the moans and sobs were clear enough.
They started in the afternoon, sometimes continued all night. Must have been eerie."
"We've been listening for ghosts," Sarah said.
"Right?"
"Yep. Didn't hear one, did you?" "Nope. Sorry. I told you Mrs. Betancort is quite mad.
Everyone except her knew there was no water here, but she insisted on the commune, and believed, or
at least declared that God would reveal water for them to drink."
She gave him the brief geology lesson her father had given her many years earlier, and they looked out
over the pale dry lake examining it for signs of quicksand. If it was there, neither of them knew how to
identify it. The lake bed was a dusty, tan expanse of dirt and sand, with tufts of bitter grass sticking out
here and there, clumps of creosote sage tenaciously clinging to life. Rocks, boulders, sand dunes gave
the lake character, she thought, but did they mean the quicksand was where boulders and rocks were
not? She did not know the answer.
Fernandez handed her a sandwich and they both ate ravenously and drank the beer.
"I suppose that when the police were looking into the disappearance of those students, they did a
thorough job on my uncle," she said, when she had finished her sandwich. She kept her gaze on the lake
bed, her tone noncommittal.
"They did. They checked him for sand from the ziuctch of coast where the boys vanished. Not a trace
on his clothes, or in the car." His tone was as dispassionate and remote as hers had been. They might
have been talking about a historical figure. "They tried to check his alibi at the school, but that was a little
harder, no one saw him and no one should have because his lab was pretty isolated. He used the science
lab computer all that weekend, logged on and off properly, and that was as much of an alibi as he could
come up with. But everyone also agreed that he had no motive for any hanky-panky, and if it was an
accident, there was nothing to link him to them that night. The whole thing was put on hold and has been
there ever since."
She exhaled softly. "There has to be a catalyst, doesn't there?" she said slowly. "Something happened
that set things in motion. The phone call to my father was the result of something else, and the cause of a
whole new chain of events. That's how it works. Cause, effect, more cause, more effect, but never an
act in a real vacuum."
Fernandez stood up and dusted himself off, then held out his hand to help her up. She took his hand and
got to her feet, and for a long moment they did not release each other's hand. Oh, God, she thought
suddenly. Oh, dear God!
His face changed subtly, and then changed again to a mask. For a moment she had seen a man
desperate in his hunger for a woman, not just any woman, hungry for her, and she knew she wanted him
more than she ever had wanted any man. Not just a man, but this man.
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