Torched (10 page)

“Stonix is run by a man named Gary Phelps,” Cedar continued, “who’s known for skirting the law. He’s even supposed to have ties to the Mafia. The way he works, the forest will be long gone before anyone starts looking too closely at the rules and regulations. But the lynx needs that old growth for denning and hunting.”

“How do we know the lynx are there?” Coyote asked.

“One of the loggers who works for PacCoast saw it,” Cedar said. “He used to live up in Canada where they do have lynx. He told some of the guys while they were out drinking at the end of the week, and word’s been getting around, even though Stonix has been trying hard to keep it quiet.”

Meadow leaned forward. “We could go to the media. That will force the EPA or the Forest Service to do something.”

“It won’t force them to do anything,” Cedar said. “We can tell the Forest Service, we can tell the EPA, we can tell the media—but we don’t have any proof. And without it, they’ll say we’re lying just to stop the development.”

“Then we set traps,” Coyote said.

“Traps?” Hawk echoed sarcastically. “What, we prove there are lynx there by handing them a dead one?”

Sitting so close to Coyote, I could see the muscles in his jaw clench. “That’s not what I mean. You can make a special trap that catches some of the animal’s fur. Once you have the DNA test done, nobody can deny the results.”

“That would take weeks,” Cedar said. “And we don’t have weeks. The logging will force the lynx out—maybe even make it starve—long before that. So we’re going up in the trees now.”

As soon as I got off the bus, I called the number Richter had given me. A woman answered, simply repeating the phone number I had just dialed.

“This is Ellie. I need to set up a meeting with Richter. I’ve recorded some evidence.”

“Hold, please.” When the woman returned after a couple of minutes, she said, “You will be contacted at this number at eight tonight.”

That evening, time crawled by. I couldn’t concentrate on my homework. Some of my teachers had asked me if there was anything I wanted to talk about. I just played dumb, shook my head and said I had been really busy. That I promised to concentrate from then on.

Finally, I gave up and went into the living room to watch an old rerun of
Star Trek
with my parents.

“Damn it, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a magician,” Matt said, settling down in his recliner. I saw him slip a Snickers bar out of his shirt pocket.

Laurel caught him. “I thought your doctor told you to stay away from that junk! You know what candy does to your triglycerides!” She had finally persuaded Matt to see his cardiologist, and he had come home with a long list of foods he wasn’t supposed to eat. Since he was already a vegetarian, the order to cut out red meat was no problem. Candy, ice cream and chips were another story.

Matt’s good mood vanished. “It’s just a little treat.” He curled his fingers around it as if she might try to snatch it away.

“It’s a seventy-five-cent heart attack.” She crossed her arms.

Talk of Matt’s heart made me look at my father more closely. He looked better than he had the night we had been arrested, but he had aged in the past few weeks. His skin was still sallow and oddly loose-looking. In prison, there probably weren’t candy bars or
Star Trek
reruns. Certainly not Laurel to nag him. And if I was in a foster home in a different city, how would I even get to visit him?

I got up and hugged him so hard that I could feel the bones in his shoulders. “What’s that for?” he asked, looking pleased.

Before I could answer, my cell phone rang, making us both jump. I took it into the kitchen. It was Richter, although he didn’t say his name. He instructed me to meet him at Gabriel Park on Saturday at noon.

“But I’m babysitting then.” I occasionally sat for our next-door neighbor’s child, a curly-haired three-year-old named Cinda Jane.

“We know,” Richter said. “I’ll meet you at the children’s playground.” And then there was a click.

 

“Rock!” Cinda Jane said. She leaned over to pick up a completely unremarkable black rock—one of hundreds along the side of the road—and pressed it into my hand.

“Rock,” I agreed. “But honey, we can’t stop for every rock. We’re late.” My goal had been to be least a half hour early to see if I could pick out anyone besides Richter watching me. Now I would be lucky if it was fifteen minutes.

The good thing about being with Cinda Jane was that she wouldn’t ask questions. The bad thing was that she liked to pick up every pinecone or rock we encountered, admire it and then hand it over for safekeeping. Even though I surreptitiously dropped half of what I had been given, my pockets were still bulging with rocks. In the end, we got to the park only a few minutes before noon.

I had wondered how Richter would manage not to stand out among the parents and kids. Would he bring his own prop child? But instead, five minutes after I arrived, he appeared with a dog, a black Lab. He sat down on my bench, with my backpack between us. Cinda Jane was about fifteen feet away, clambering up a plastic play structure.

“What have you got for me?” he said as he leaned over to rub the dog’s ears.

My words were barely above a whisper as I, too, leaned forward to pet the dog. “I managed to tape the latest MED meeting. Hawk said they had to fight back by any means necessary. And Liberty said that if burning the Hummer dealership didn’t bring change, then maybe they should kill the president of General Motors.”

Richter sat back without saying anything. I had expected him to be excited, but his expression didn’t change. He pretended to watch the children as they played on the swing set. Cinda Jane was now crawling through a turquoise plastic tunnel. On other benches ringing the play area, moms—and a few dads—sat with their hands around Starbucks cups or talked on cell phones.

“And the others?” he finally said, taking a stick of gum from his pocket and unwrapping it. “Did they agree with Hawk and Liberty?”

“No,” I had to admit. “There were some side conversations afterward, but they shut up when I got near. I do know what their next plan is, though. There’s some land near Bend that’s slated for logging. Cedar says someone saw a lynx out there. So they’re going to build tree-sits. They’ll spread them out to try to save as many trees as possible so the lynx has enough forest to den.”

“A lynx?” Richter shook his head. “There aren’t any lynx in Oregon. He just said that so that people would really be committed to staying up in the trees.” He sighed. “You didn’t record anything else?”

Anything else?
“I’ve got a couple of hours recorded, but what I told you was the important part. It’s what you asked for. Proof that they are considering violence.”

Richter shrugged. “But by itself, it means nothing. I need actual plans, not just talk.” In a slightly louder voice, he said, “Would you like a piece of gum?” Before I could answer, he pressed the pack of gum as well as something cool and smooth into my hand. Looking down, I saw it was a watch identical to the one I was wearing. In a softer voice, he added, “Give me back your first watch when you hand me back the gum. It’s a start. But I still need you to get us more.”

I’m never going to be free.
“So everything I’ve done—it’s not enough?” I hissed. “I’m lying to people I care about, I’m helping destroy things, I’m being chased in the middle of the night, and you want me to do
more
?”

He scratched the dog behind its ear. “Look, Ellie, I’m sorry. I know this is hard on you. But you’re our only chance to get inside this group. We need proof. Something that will stand up in court. And you have to get it. That’s the basis of our deal. That means you need to stick with them. If they go up in the trees, you go up in the trees.”

“But I’ve got finals. School isn’t over until next week.”

“School.” His stern expression eased a little. “Sometimes I forget about that. How is that going? How are your grades?”

I shrugged. “Not where they should be. I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

If he heard the sarcasm, Richter didn’t show it.

“And there’s another thing . . .” I hesitated before blurting out, “I’m afraid of heights.”

“Look,” he said, “you have to prove you’re a true believer. I’m not asking you to pretend you’re not scared. But if you want to get your parents off the hook, you’re going to have to bring us more. And to do that, you have to be right in the middle of them. You need to bring me back something I can act on. I want you out there as soon as school is over.”

“Doggie!” Cinda Jane squealed.

She had finally spotted Richter’s dog. She ran toward us, fearless. I wondered if the dog was even his. It was hard to imagine Richter having a personal life.

But with Cinda Jane, he was all smiles. “Whoa, little lady. Don’t run up to a strange dog. First you have to ask me if it’s okay if you pet it.”

She looked at me uncertainly. I nodded. In a small voice, she said, “Okay?”

“Yes, it’s okay,” he said. “Then you should make a fist for him to sniff.” He held out his own fist, and she did, too. Her hand was less than half the size of his. Finally, he let her pet the dog.

He must have a family, I thought, changing my mind. He’s got children, a wife, a life outside the FBI.

Richter stood and showed Cinda Jane what to do if she were ever attacked by a dog. “Pretend you’re a tree,” he told her, and the two of them stood stiff and still, until finally Cinda Jane began to laugh and Richter did, too. The sound was oddly rusty.

 

When I got home, Laurel met me at the front door. “So are you done? Is it finished?”

I had managed to keep my emotions tucked in around Richter, but now tears sprang to my eyes. “No. He said he needs more.”

“The good news is we think the lynx is back in Oregon,” Coyote told Matt and Laurel. Coyote and I were sitting on opposite sides of the couch in our living room. Laurel and Matt were in their matching recliners, Laurel with her macramé—the hippie version of knitting—on her lap. Coyote was there to persuade my dad to let me go up into the trees with the MEDics.

“Lynx?” Laurel echoed. “I didn’t know any lived in Oregon.”

“They haven’t for years and years. But one’s been sighted in a forest near Bend that’s slated for clear-cutting. And Stonix, the company that owns the land, is denying that it’s there at all. If we can’t get the logging stopped, it will drive the lynx right back out of Oregon.”

“So what can you do to stop it?” Matt said. He took a bite of one of Laurel’s millet cookies. Even from across the room, I could hear the millet seeds popping between his molars as he chewed.

“A bunch of us are going out Monday to build tree-sits. Once we’re in the trees, they won’t be able to cut down anything in their vicinity.” Coyote spoke around his own mouthful of cookie.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Laurel asked.

“You wear a safety harness at all times,” Coyote said. “It’s more a matter of getting over it mentally. Once you do, you realize you’re as safe as if you were in this house. And the important thing is that by doing it, we’ll stop the logging.”

Matt leaned forward, enthralled. “Won’t Stonix try to stop you from going up?”

“Well, for one thing, we’re going to do it at night. We’ll bring the platforms, haul them up and get the sits built before they even know what’s going on. And by the time they do, it will be too late.”

“It sounds like you’ve done this before,” Matt said. He looked livelier than I had seen him in weeks.

“Down in Eugene. Last fall.” Coyote licked his finger and used it to pick up some of the tiny yellow seeds that had fallen on the legs of his jeans. “Until it got too cold. And you couldn’t keep dry. Even with the tarps, the rain soaked everything. That’s why it’s good we’re doing this now, when it’s warmer. You can’t imagine what it’s like to live in a tree. It’s like you’re a bird.”

He brushed his knees clean. “As soon as Ellie finishes her finals, we’re hoping you’ll let her come out and join us in one of the sits. She can take the Greyhound out and someone will pick her up.”

“A tree-sit,” Matt said with a sigh. “Damn, I wish
I
could join you guys, but I’m not eighteen anymore. . . .” He sat back, unconsciously putting his hand on his chest. Then he frowned at me. “But you don’t like heights, Ellie.” He turned to Coyote. “Once, when she was little, we went to this amusement park where you climbed all these stairs to go down a huge, wavy plastic slide. She begged to go. But when we got to the top, she just froze. She was too scared to go down the slide and too scared to even climb back down the stairs. I finally had to put her on my lap and slide down, and she kicked and screamed all the way.”

“Matt,”
I said as my cheeks flushed, “I was, what, three or something?”

Coyote sat up straighter. “Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of her, sir.”

I tried to keep my face expressionless. Nobody ever called Matt sir.

To my surprise, Matt nodded approvingly. Secretly, even though that would just make everything worse, I had hoped he might forbid it.

“Besides,” Coyote continued, “these trees have stood for hundreds of years. We’ll build the sit right, and Ellie will wear a safety harness at all times. There’s not really any way things can go wrong.”

 

After Coyote had left, Matt heaved a sigh. “I wish we could do this with you, too.”

Laurel got up and began to pick up empty plates, her movements quick and sharp. “First of all, the climb would be too much for your heart. Second, we can’t get mixed up with anything illegal. Not when the Feds are just looking for an excuse to bust us.”

“What about Ellie?”

Laurel shot me a warning look. “She’ll keep her nose clean. She knows not to get in any trouble.”

Matt laced his fingers across his stomach. “All right, you heard Laurel. Tree-sits, yes. Sugar in the gas tanks of the logging equipment, no.” Then he winked at me.