Diane Davidson - The Main Corpse

“Rock slide!” the guard cried as he vaulted back. I swerved instinctively and caught a glimpse of General Farquhar’s grim face. I grabbed his large hand and we leapt. I cried out to him, but my voice was lost in the clamor of exploding earth.

Together we somehow scrambled in the direction we’d come. The deafening noise of snapping trees filled the air. Behind us, rocks thundered on their way downhill. Move, move fast, I commanded my feet. Instead, I slid in deep mud. Mud, mud, everywhere. And rocks. My hand held tight to General Bo’s. We both bounded up, up over rocks and cracking earth. A final fast hurdle brought us onto solid, but still shaking ground. We fell down, gasping. Miraculously, we had been on the very edge of the slide. Thank God. Another five feet forward, and we could have been killed.

How much time had gone by? Ten seconds? I shivered uncontrollably. Beside me, the general winced and cursed softly. I glanced back. Where we had been standing was air.

“General Farquhar, sir!” our guard shouted. The general croaked a response. The guard appeared from within a stand of pine trees. There was mud on his face and uniform. He pulled out a radio and began hollering into it. There was another reverberating ka-boom: A last boulder tumbled into the stream. The same stream that had so treacherously undercut the bank we’d been climbing, no doubt. Again I cursed my own idiocy. After all my warnings to Tom about being careful on the trail! I shuddered. The radio crackled and a high, excited voice showered the brand-new silence with coded questions that sounded like Alpha Bravo Charlie, et cetera, ten four.

The guard spoke into his radio, then told us to stay still, HQ would be bringing a stretcher. Very, very carefully, I touched Bo’s left leg. He cried out with pain.

“It’s just a sprain,” he insisted. He looked appreciatively at the guard. “I should have listened to you.”

The guard turned his glittering dark eyes on me. “During a full moon,” he explained to me in a curt tone which indicated that every moron already knew what I didn’t, “the lunar gravitational pull acts on rocks in the continental crust the way it does on the ocean. Rocks rise in a tide, up to a foot. Plus we’ve had all this rain, and we’re working with explosives nearby, which makes the entire area, especially above a stream, unstable.” He shrugged.

I was soggy with rain and slick with mud. What I needed was a long hot bath – and this guy was giving me a geology lesson. I murmured, “Good Lord.”

“The full moon adds to the earth’s instability,” our guide concluded knowledgeably.

So does explosives testing, I added silently.

A four-wheel-drive vehicle cracked through the undergrowth. The two camo-suited men I’d seen earlier hauled out a stretcher and loaded a protesting General Bo onto it. Then we all climbed into the all-terrain makeshift ambulance.

When we got back to the compound, Bo didn’t ask me to stay, which was fine with me. He was in a great deal of pain and needed attention. And as I said, I needed a bath.

“Call us,” I urged. “Let us know how you are.”

“The ankle will be fine,” said Bo with a rueful smile. His voice turned pleading. “But Goldy, could you please have Marla call me? I want to talk to her about the Eurydice Gold Mine, about any old environmental studies that have been done of that area. Also, I’m wondering about this guy who did the geological study that their ore projections are based on. I’m too tied up to look into these details myself. Would you get her to call?”

“I’ll try.”

He studied my anxious, filthy face. Chocolate cookies, a military compound, weird people, explosives nearby, and a rock slide. Normal excitement for him, maybe, but not for me. His look became indulgent. “Poor Goldy. Ready to go back to Aspen Meadow and your kitchen?”

I decided not to reply.

8

As my van splashed home, I had a hard time blocking out the memory of the ground giving way abruptly under my feet, or the din created by the fall of boulders and trees. I tried instead to concentrate on the swish of the windshield wipers. When I’d left the compound, the dark, lowlying clouds had delivered a furious downpour of icy rain. At least it wasn’t snow. I ran from the van to our porch steps and pushed inside, my heart thumping.

Arch was in the kitchen heating pizza. I was so happy to see him I rushed over and gave him a hug. Jake’s tail whacked the floor happily in greeting. His red-rimmed eyes, furrowed brow, and long, floppy ears made even an old cat-lover like me smile. Jake panted excitedly, and, it seemed to me, smiled back. Maybe we were bonding after all.

“Gosh, Mom, where have you been?” Arch eyed my filthy jeans and jacket. “I thought you hated hiking. Is that where you went with the general, that you wouldn’t let me come because you wanted to check it out first? Hiking? I swear, Mom, you look like you fell into a mud pit.”

“I did, sort o[ And you’re right,” I replied, “I do hate hiking. Unfortunately, that’s what I had to do with Bo Farquhar. Sort of hiking and sort of climbing.” And sort of scrambling for our lives.

“In this weather?” It was hard to ignore his friendly mimic of my voice, but I did. Upstairs, I quickly stripped out of the muddy clothes and ran the bathwater. And to treat myself, I poured in double the amount of perfumed bath salts.

Soon I was back in the kitchen, sipping piping hot Formosa Oolong, snugly wrapped in Tom’s green terry-cloth robe. I tried to think. After a few minutes, I put down my teacup and dialed Tom, only to get his voice mail. I left a message. Somehow I couldn’t imagine going out on my evening catering assignment alone. Not right after I’d survived a natural disaster that had very nearly deprived my son (and his dog) of a mother. Which gave me an idea.

“Arch,” I said. “Macguire can’t help me tonight – “

Arch swallowed his last mouthful of pizza. “Why not?”

This was no time to get into a discussion of why Macguire had chosen this evening to watch all the Die Hard movies so he could learn how to be a policeman. I rushed on with: “Would you please shower and get into a black-and-white outfit so you can come help me tonight? I’ll pay you.”

After we’d negotiated a suitable salary and fed Jake, : we quickly packed up the ingredients for the shrimp pilaf I was preparing for the dinner at the Trotfields’ mammoth house on Arnold Palmer Avenue in the Meadowview area of Aspen Meadow Country Club.

The rain had turned back to mist by the time we set out. On the way over, I asked Arch if anyone had called while I was gone. He said no and wondered suspiciously why I was asking. Of course I wasn’t about to tell him that I wondered how the general was recovering from his rock slide injury.

“Jake wasn’t outside barking, if that’s what you’re getting at. The neighbors weren’t complaining. He’s a good dog, Mom. After what he’s been through, he just needs a lot of affection.”

“I know, I know. That’s why I let him stay on your bed while we’re gone.”

“He probably misses me already.”

“We’re only going to be away a few hours.”

“With Meadowview clients?” Arch huffed. “You’ve got to be kidding. Cook this, clean up that. Call so-and-so and get more chardonnay delivered. Oh, better make that six cases, looks like we’re running out. Then go take Mrs. Smith some aspirin, because she’s got a terrible headache and is upstairs lying down. And you just want to say, ‘Well, if she hadn’t drunk all that chardonnay – ‘ “

“Arch! That has never happened.”

“Just about.” We swung through the elegant stone entryway to Meadowview. Large, pale houses sailed past in the dusk. “These people have too much money,” Arch said. “They are too stuck-up.”