Page 90 of South of Nowhere

“The hell was she thinking?” Anger flushed Millwood’s face.

Shaw said, “She did everything right. Just one of those flukes.”

Millwood was silent for a moment, looking at the phone. In a diminished voice he offered, “I don’t know what to say. I wasn’t thinking, jumping in.”

“No, you weren’t.” Shaw’s voice was staunch. This was not a moment forOh, it’s all right. “Now, I’m going to go looking for her.You’re going to get a motel room and take a hot shower. A long hot shower. And stay there and get some rest. Wait until I call you. Understood?”

The man nodded meekly. “Sure, anything, you say.” Millwood shivered. “Mr. Shaw, what do you think happened to her?”

“I can’t speculate. I’ll look for her and the county officers will too. Now, I want to get started. You go get that shower. You need your core temperature up.”

“You?”

“Later.”

A hot shower beckoned irresistibly.

But resist he did.

Now, he needed to follow the first clue as to where Fiona Lavelle—or her body—might be.

A clue he had already spotted.

—

A makeup bag.

About twenty-five feet downstream from the underwater cave.

The dark blue accessory was circling frantically in an eddying pool at the base of the flume.

Shaw was on his bike, driving in low gear along a four-foot-wide path paralleling the torrent, bordered to his left by the towering face of Copper Peak.

After the flume the waterway widened and proceeded west—still quickly but with less frantic energy.

Ten feet later a white sweater sat half onshore, half waving excitedly in the water.

More clothing and a running shoe. And within arm’s reach was a wallet. It contained money and credit cards in Lavelle’s name.

Another item of clothing—a blouse.

And then a windbreaker.

Stained with blood.

The path ended at a cliff, over which the water poured, a smaller version of the Never Summer cascading over the injured levee.

Shaw walked to the edge and peered down at the ground about forty or fifty feet below. He was careful, and kept his center of gravity low. He did not believe in that adage that being on unprotected heights somehow ignited a desire to throw oneself into the abyss.

He did, however, believe in gusts of wind, and today they’d enthusiastically accompanied the rain to Hinowah, California.

He believed too that, though it was unlikely, Bear might be vindictive enough to trail him. TC McGuire had not called to report he had located the man.

A glance back, though, revealed he was safe from the last of those risks.

Looking down, he saw the water cascading into a pool. From there another tributary had formed and flowed on toward Annie Coyne’s farm and Gerard Redding’s mine.

The water was covering a railroad track, and sitting idle on it was a freight train—a long one with oil tanker and coal carrier cars. Three crew members, in orange Carhartt overalls, were standing on high ground, examining the flood and probably debating whether or not to proceed. A true expert in all things train, his sister had explained that today’s locomotives were not powered directly by their diesel engines, but by electric motors; the diesels ran huge generators to provide the juice. Maybe the men were concerned about electrical shorts.

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