Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(99)
“Well, hell,” he said, patting her hand. “Why should you be any different?”
48
The landscape opened up before them and they drove into a beautiful little teardrop-shaped valley, maybe three miles long and a mile and a half wide at its bottom, with steep granite ridges like parapet walls, hemlocks and cedars on their lower slopes. The river wandered wide and slow down the middle from a high waterfall at the valley’s top.
Peter overlaid the view with the map in his head, trying to find the features June had drawn at lunch the day before. He found the rocky outcrop on the far left, jutting out above a series of mature orchards. You could see the whole valley from there. The rows of gnarled fruit trees were punctuated by frame structures and a few open meadows. On the other side of the river was the flattest part of the valley where the river had flooded over the centuries and left rich bottomland dirt. Neat fields lay fallow and muddy, waiting for the tractor. Up the road was a cluster of funky-looking greenhouses that June hadn’t put on the map, and a few big structures he couldn’t quite make out. Dark dots smaller than people moved at the margins, maybe calves or newly shorn sheep, grazing.
If you ignored the giant steel gate, it looked just like a nice little agricultural operation.
No checkpoints, no machine-gun towers. No black Ford Explorers, no steely-eyed troops with automatic weapons. No security at all that Peter could see.
No evidence that anything was other than it seemed.
Except for the road. After the steel bridge, Peter had thought the road would revert to dirt. But it turned to concrete and became flat and arrow-straight, a single lane that ran almost the full length of the valley. The concrete alone would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not to mention the labor, the surveying and bulldozer work, two hundred dump trucks full of gravel. A million-dollar road, at a minimum.
“Where does the money come from?” asked Peter.
“I don’t know,” said June. “When I lived here, everything in the valley was old and beat-up and held together with duct tape. He always lived like every nickel was his last. But this road is sure new. And straight. It looks like a runway, don’t you think?”
Peter nodded. That thought had already occurred to him.
It was late morning, after eleven o’clock.
He stepped on the gas and headed up the road. Toward the Yeti’s house and laboratory.
A few figures moved in the orchard, maybe suckering branches or fertilizing. They paused in their work to watch the truck pass. Farther on he saw the partially framed skeleton of a house rising above the tops of the apple trees. The whine of a circular saw and the irregular pop-pop-pop of nail guns sounded faintly through the open windows. A few more low buildings were tucked into the trees, white-painted and steep-roofed like old farmhouses, links in a wide-spaced irregular chain leading toward the head of the valley.
Halfway to the waterfall, they came to the group of greenhouses. They were simple A-frames covered with sheet plastic to collect and retain the heat of the sun. Inexpensive to build, they would shed any snow that might fall. The shorn sheep turned out to be goats of all sizes and colors, nibbling at weeds growing in the margins. A slender young man turned a compost heap with a pitchfork, revealing rich black soil at the bottom. He looked up as the truck approached.
Outside the largest greenhouse, someone had parked a rusty red cargo tricycle, the two wide-set front wheels holding a platform between them. The platform carried assorted five-gallon buckets and gardening tools. “Stop the car, stop right here,” said June, and Peter hit the brakes.
June was out of the truck before it stopped rolling. “Hey, Sally?” she called, walking toward the greenhouse with the tricycle. “Sally Sanchez, you in there?”
The greenhouse door flapped open and a woman came out. The goats all looked up at the sound. She was brown and solid in muddy jeans and a brown barn jacket with her thick black hair up in a loose bun. When she saw June, a broad white smile opened up her face.
“Junebug? Is that you?”
“Sally!” The two women came together in a hug, then separated to look at each other.
The slender young man now stood a few yards away. He wore double-front work pants and a gray University of Washington T-shirt and carried the pitchfork easily in his hand. He didn’t speak but he looked thoughtfully at June and Peter and the green pickup with its mahogany cargo box.
“Look at you, all grown up,” said Sally. She didn’t mention the stitches in June’s lip or the slender young man, who had taken up a deferential position a few steps behind Sally and off to one side.
“You look exactly the same,” said June. She called over her shoulder, “Hey, Peter, come meet my friend Sally.”
Peter had already gotten out of the truck. Now he stepped forward and introduced himself. The air smelled of river mud and spring growth and the rich, loamy compost.
Sally looked him up and down, taking in the stitches in his hair and the medical boot. He wasn’t sure he passed inspection. Sally said, “You two look like you’ve been down a hard road.”
“Car accident,” said Peter. “Both of us. The other car was speeding.”
“We’re fine,” said June. “Peter, I was telling you about Sally. After my mom left, she basically raised me.”
“Don’t look at me for all that,” said Sally. A little spotted goat came up and put its head against her hip. She scratched it absently behind the ear. “All I did was make sure you got fed and clothed.”