Chapter 6: Sleuthing

You're probably wondering what happened at the meeting? Well, I didn't go. I was uninvited!

A couple days after I wrote you, Eric called me at the Clinic to say the group "was not ready" for "someone like me" to come to one of their meetings. Seems the others involved in what ever is going on up there on Altos weren’t too pleased with Eric for inviting me without talking to them first.

He told me they would "hash it out" at their next meeting and he was sure I'd be invited again later. "It's inevitable," he said. "Sooner or later we'll have to let others know."

I couldn't resists asking "Why so secretive, Eric?"

"You'll understand," he said, "as soon as I can tell me more." Then he apologized profusely his jumping the gun and promised to get back to me.

Meanwhile, Rachel, Mark’s head nurse who lives up with Julie up on Altos, seems to be avoiding me at the Clinic. I’m probably just imagining that. I don't know. This whole thing is making me paranoid. I think Gloria is giving me knowing looks, like she wants me to fill her in on whether I followed up on her suggestion to call Eric, but I'm probably imagining that too.

Mark and I had Gloria and Ned and their daughter Carly over for Thanksgiving dinner. We had a lovely time, laughing and joking. It felt like the old days. Even though the lights went out for an hour in the morning, I almost forgot about how bad the economy is and how our community seems to be disintegrating.

When Eric didn't call the day after the meeting my curiosity got the better of me. On my way home that day I saw Julie's daughter Wren walking up the hill toward home, so I stopped to ask if I could give her a ride. There was a stiff chilly wind that day, but she looked at me like deer in the headlights and then blinked. "Aah, no, that's OK," she called out. "I like to walk. Exercise, you know." She gave me one of those shy kid smiles and turned to walk on.

So that night I asked my daughter Chelsea if she and Carly had been up to Julie’s house on Altos to visit with their friend Wren lately. They hadn't. "We don't see Wren much after school any more," she explained. “Wren is always with Brie these days – unless Bacca’s sick again. And no one ever goes to Becca’s house. Her mother’s always too sick to have visitors."

Becca is Ariana and Ian Avery's daughter. The Avery's moved into the tiny log cabin next to Julie’s on Altos about a year ago, right as housing prices started tumbling. Their daughter is one of four tweens who are around the same age: my daughter Chelsea, Gloria's daughter Carly, Julie's youngest daughter Wren, and Becca. Before the Avery's moved here the other three girls were together a lot, often at Julie’s because their house is so large.

Talking with my daughter only piqued my curiosity all the more, so over lunch yesterday I decided to drive up to Altos. It's pretty far up, around the mountain and above the Falls. The road is so windy I thought I could get near enough to the Altos cul de sac to take a peak without anyone seeing me.

Ian Avery works from home and is pretty much a recluse. No one sees him unless it’s to bring his wife or daughter to the clinic. His wife Ariana has lupus. That’s why they moved here. So she could get away from the hubbub of the city and rest. Then last year Becca developed asthma, like so many of the kids have. It’s bad case, too. So I’m sure Ian’s at the clinic more than he’d like.

Given Ian would probably be home, I knew had to be careful not to get too close to the houses on the cul de sac. But it turned out I couldn't get close at all. There was a big black iron gate over the entrance to the cul de sac!!

It looks like it had a solar panel code entry keypad on the right side. There's a natural stone wall running off either side of the gate into the forest. A few yards down from the north end of the wall there's a little path through the forest that the kids probably use as a shortcut around the gate.

But a gate of any kind on a public street is strictly against code here. You can't even have fences or walls around your property without a permit. Is this the big secret they're keeping? But why a gate? Why a wall?

Altos is really more like a long deep U-shaped drive than a typical round cul de sac. There are four houses set back around the very end of the U. They all sit among old growth pines and willows so you can't see much of them from the gate. I could see portions of what looks like six-foot high wooden fences between the houses, though, that go around the to back on the north and south sides of the two end houses.

This is strictly forbidden too without a permit. What in the heck are they doing? I wanted to park the car, get out, and walk around on that little path, but NO! I made a quick U-turn and headed back down the mountain. It was silly, but I felt a kid scared of getting my hand caught in the cookie jar. I held my breath the whole the way down to the nearest cross streets. Blessedly no one was coming or going to Altos.

I tried to think of who lives in the four houses. Julie and her youngest daughter Wren live in the big house on the right with their three housemates - Rachel, Eric, and Lori. Along the bottom of the U are two small log cabins. Ariana and Ian Avery and their daughter Becca live in the smallest one. Raine Harrison and his partner Kali live in the other one next door. Boo and Nessa Bristol live on the left side of the U in a somewhat larger log house with their two little boys, both under school age. Raine and Kali have brought them into the Clinic for the kids' inoculations.

My mind was swimming with questions. Have these families created some kind of compound up there? Is this their answer to the problems we're facing? Walling themselves off from everyone? I tried remembering what I could about the families I didn’t know very well.

Ian's a sandy-haired, nerdy guy, mid-thirties, looks like everybody's best friend. But I know he's not a happy camper. In a small town like this everyone's story tends to get around and it's known that Ian used to be a hot-shot software designer in Santa Monica. He developed the most advanced AI software marketing system in the world. With his program a marketing department could adjust their advertising and promotional campaigns to consumer responses on an hourly basis. His team can provide a continuous live data feed to update their client’s software.

And he made big bucks, too, as did his wife Ariana before her illness. She was an advertising executive. They lived in an architecturally designed house on the Venice canals in LA and Becca attended to a nearby private school. Probably thought they had the perfect life.

But that all changed when Ariana was diagnosed with lupus. At one point she nearly died. The doctor ordered her to get away from the city and to do absolutely nothing but rest.

Fortunately the company let Ian continue working on his project, but only as a contract worker. He works remotely and still gets his health benefits. But instead of overseeing the operation, now he’s a hacker, or code jock as they're called, meeting grueling deadlines instead of setting them and cow towing to a project manager who doesn’t know half as much as Ian does.

Their cabin on Altos is so tiny it looks like an over-sized birdhouse perched up on a rise among the trees. They paid cash for it I think, because getting a loan as a contract worker hasn't been easy for quite awhile. And, of course, Ian has to live with Ariana’s lupus: the unending pain, the emotional ups and downs, the continuing life-threatening nature of the illness, and the lifelong specter of a relapse hanging over their heads. Not to mention Becca's newly acquired asthma.

Also I guess Ariana doesn't even look the same now. It's said she was strikingly beautiful, tall and lithe with long, curly, black hair and chiseled facial features. But the meds she has to take have a lot of side effects that keep her body swollen and puffy and her hair is cut short now and mostly grey with just a few wisps of black remaining.

I’ve met Raine and Kali at Wilderness Society meetings, but I don’t know much about them. Raine is a naturalist and evolutionary biologist, fortyish, with gunmetal gray hair and steel gray eyes. He used to have his own company as a wilderness guide up in Yosemite. But when tourism started drying up a few years ago, he applied for a job with the Forest Service and ended up in the position Julie’s husband Cody had before he died.

Kali's a good ten years younger than Raine. She’s an environmental biologist. They met while she was working for the Forest Service as a consultant, back before the federal cutbacks. Now she volunteers at the charter school.

I know even less about Boo and Nessa. Only that they're from Ireland, both in their late 20's probably, and that Boo (a nickname I'm sure) plays keyboard for a band in LA. But with concert sales plummeting, the band hasn't been touring much. So, I don't know what they do for income. I think they’re renting their house on Altos from a bank because it was in foreclosure and never sold.

There's nothing I can think of about any of these people that explains what I saw today.

Even though the temperature dipped into the low thirties this afternoon, instead of going right back to the office I drove down to the pond below our house. Pulling my muffler and parka tight and tugging my knit cap down over my ears, I sat on a stone bench for awhile and tried to clear my head. The ducks were swimming lazily in circles on the satin grey water, making their little calling sounds.

When I worked from home, before Mark had to lay off staff and needed me at the Clinic, I used to go down to the pond a lot. I should do it more often. It's so peaceful. There don't seem to be any problems at the pond. All is well there with all the living creatures that make it their home.

Why can't we humans live like the creatures at the pond? We're both here in Katani Falls, but there doesn't seem to be any parallel between their lives and ours. Being there I forget about all the worries and confusion rolling around in my head. Is that what I should do? Just forget about the mountain of problems we’re facing? Forget about whatever is going on up on Altos?

No, I don't think so. The ducks don't forget about the coyotes at night. I hear them out there sometimes, crashing into the water, splashing about with yips of marauding coyotes ringing the shores. They don't ignore the danger. We’re like those the ducks, but the coyotes circling our homes are economic. Our community, our families, we’re are all in danger. As real as coyotes in the night. Our food, shelter, heat, medicine ... it's all in jeopardy.

Somehow I felt better when I got back to the Clinic, though. The wonders of Vitamin N, as Gloria's husband Ned used to say about the effects of nature.

When I got home from work Eric called. They'd had a tension-filled meeting Monday night but decided to invite me to meet with the group next week at Julie's. Not at one of their regular meetings, but for a special get-together just with me. I said that would be fine.

Of course, Mark wanted to know who called, so told him I was invited over to spend an evening with Julie and Rachel. He said that was nice. Didn’t think anything of it, but still I find this secretive stuff awkward.

I'll let you know how the meeting goes and what I find out. Meanwhile, hold a good thought for us. I still don't know if this month's medication order arrived at the Clinic and I don't want to ask Mark. It's too stressful.

Until later, Rose.