Where Echoes Live Read Online Free Page A

profit margin was significant, the per-acre price was less than a tenth of what similar tracts were currently going for.
    Item three: The additional 3,000 acres, which encompassed the original Promiseville mine, had been purchased from Earl Hopwood, a descendant of the family who once owned it. Transpacific had paid Hopwood only $10 an acre—what the BLM charged for federal land and much less than it should have brought on the open market.
    Item four: When Anne-Marie and Ned Sanderman queried people in the area about Franklin Tarbeaux, no one admitted to knowing him. The desert rats who lived in Stone Valley claimed they weren’t aware that anyone had been mining the 700 acres on the eastern side of the mesa above Promiseville, where the old mine was located.
    Item five: Earl Hopwood was something of a hermit; he lived in a cabin at the far end of Stone Valley and prospected up and down the stream that ran through it. When Hy Ripinsky, who had known Hopwood since childhood, went looking for him, he found the old man hadn’t been seen for two weeks or more.
    â€œThat was after Transpacific moved in with their survey crew, fenced the land, and began taking core samples,” Anne-Marie added.
    â€œAnd that’s it?”
    â€œNo. This is the really strange stuff: a couple of days after Ned and I arrived, both Hy’s home and the Friends of Tufa Lake trailer—it’s next to the one we’re using—were broken into. And the next day Ned and I noticed signs of forced entry at our cabins at the lodge.”
    â€œWhat was taken?”
    â€œNothing, as far as we could tell.”
    â€œLots of crime in this area?”
    â€œVery little—mostly drunk driving or fishing without a license, or so they tell me.”
    I set down my fork and waited while the waitress cleared our plates. As she bustled around serving coffee, I thought of the person who had been watching me in the tufa forest. More “really strange stuff” ?
    After the waitress had gone I said, “I suppose in a place like this everybody knows everybody else’s business.”
    â€œYou got it.”
    I sipped coffee, thought a bit more. “What, if anything, does Lily Nickles have to do with this?”
    Anne-Marie looked surprised. “The Tiger Lily? So far as I know, nothing, except that she prospects out in Stone Valley. Where did you run into her?”
    â€œShe was having an argument with Hy when I went to the trailer. He didn’t seem angry or upset; she did.”
    â€œHy’s slow to anger. But when he does, watch out.”
    â€œTell me about him. He kept injecting quasi-military terms into our conversation. And where for God’s sake did he get that dreadful name?”
    She smiled faintly. “From his parents, as is customary. His mother was German, hence the ‘Heino.’ His father was a descendant of Russians who emigrated to Alaska via the Aleutians generations ago. Hy was born in the Central Valley but raised here in Vernon after his mother divorced and remarried. He left for a number of years in the seventies. Some claim he was CIA, and from the way he speaks and thinks, I believe it.”
    â€œNo one asks him?”
    â€œHe’s not a man you question about the past.”
    â€œFrom CIA operative to environmentalist is a long step. How did that happen?”
    â€œWhat little I know comes from Rose Wittington. When Hy returned here he was reclusive at first, stayed out on the little sheep ranch on the road to Stone Valley that he inherited from his stepfather. He seemed to have plenty of money: added on to the house, drove an expensive car, owned an airplane. But he didn’t socialize, even with old friends, and was rarely seen in town.”
    â€œWhat changed that?”
    â€œHe met Julie Spaulding, an environmentalist who’d moved here a few years earlier and founded the Friends. She gradually coaxed him out of his isolation and involved him in