Bill Pronzini - The Other Side of Silence

THE OTHER SIDE

OF SILENCE

Also by Bill Pronzini

Blue Lonesome

A Wasteland of Strangers

Nothing But the Night

In an Evil Time

Step to the Graveyard Easy

The Alias Man

The Crimes of Jordan Wise

THE OTHER SIDE
OF SILENCE

A NOVEL OF SUSPENSE

BILL PRONZINI

Copyright 2008 by Bill Pronzini

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
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Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York

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eISBN: 9780802777553

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First U.S. edition 2008

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Typeset by Westchester Book Group
Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

For Marcia

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrels heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

George Eliot

Table of Contents

W HEN GEENA FINALLY LEFT him and filed for divorce, Fallon put the Encino house up for sale and took his last two weeks of vacation from Unidyne. Then he loaded the Jeep Liberty and drove straight to Death Valley.

Will Rodriguez was the only person he told where he was going. There was nobody else to tell, really. He had no close friends except for Will, and theirs was mostly a work-related friendship; and Timmy was three years gone now and his folks both dead, too. Geena could have guessed, of course. She knew him that well, though not nearly well enough to understand his reasons. Shed think the same thing she always did when he went to the desert. And shed be wrong.

October was one of the Valleys best months. All months in the Monument were good, even July and August when the midday temperatures sometimes exceeded 120 degrees and Death Valley justified its Paiute Indian name, Tomeshaground afire. If a sere desert climate held no terrors for you, if you respected it and accepted it on its terms, the attractions far outweighed the drawbacks.

Still, hed always been partial to October, the early part of the month, so in that sense Geenas timing couldnt have been better. The beginning of the tourist season was still a month away, daytime temperatures seldom reached 100 degrees, and the constantly changing light show created by sun and wind and clouds was at its most spectacular. You could stay in one place all day, from dawn to duskZabriskie Point, say, or the sand dunes near Stovepipe Wellsand with each ten-degree rise and fall of the sun, the colors of rock and sand hills changed from dark rose to burnished gold, from chocolate brown to purple and indigo and gray-black, with a spectrum of subtler shades in between.

It had been almost a year since hed last been to the Valley. Much too long, but it had been a difficult yearthe still-painful memories and the dying marriage and a heavy workload at Unidyne. Hed been alone on that last visit, as he was alone now; alone on the last dozen or so desert trips. Even before Timmys death, Geena had refused to come with him anymore. Shed never much cared for desert country, actively disliked Death Valley, and shed used Timmy as an excuse: he was too young, there were too many hazards, he was better off at home with her. After the accident, she hadnt needed an excuse anymore.

Well, he preferred being alone. Had always had loner tendencies, even during his stint in the army and the good early years with Geena before and after Timmy was born. The Valley was a place made for loners. You could share it only with someone who viewed it in the same perspectivenot as endless miles of coarse, dead landscape but as a starkly beautiful wilderness teeming with life. To him it seemed almost sentient, as if deep within its ancient rock was something that approximated a soul.

Hed taken his time deciding where to go first on this trip. The Monument had more than three thousand square miles, second only among national parks to Yellowstone, and all sorts of terrain: the great trough of the Valley floor, with its miles of salt pan two hundred feet and more below sea level, its dunes and alluvial fans, its borate deposits and ancient borax works, its barren fields of gravel and broken rock, its five enclosing mountain ranges packed with hidden canyons, petroglyphs, played-out gold and silver mines, ghost towns.

Most of an evening had been spent with his topos, the topographical maps put out by the U.S. Geological Survey, before he finally settled on the Funeral Mountains and the Chloride Cliffs area. The Funerals formed one of the eastern boundaries, and their foothills and crests were laden not only with a variety of canyons but with the ruins of the Keane Wonder Mill and Mine and the gold boomtown of Chloride City.

He left the Jeep north of Scottys Castle near Hells Gate, packed in, and stayed for three days and two nights. The first day was a little rough; even though regular gym workouts had kept him in good shape, it takes a while to refamiliarize yourself with desert mountain terrain after a year away. The second day was easier. He spent that one exploring Echo Canyon, then tramping among the thick-timbered tramways of the Keane and the decaying mill a mile below, where twenty stamps had processed eighteen hundred tons of ore a month in the 1890s. On the third day he climbed to the Funerals sheer heights and Chloride Cityno strain at all by then.

It was a good three days. He saw no other people except at a distance. Much of the tension and restless dissatisfaction slowly bled out of him. He could feel his spirits lifting again.

Geena was on his mind only once in those three days. Eleven years of marriage, all theyd shared and suffered through, and now she seemed almost a stranger. He didnt blame her for the long-running affair shed finally admitted to, or leaving him to be with the other man; he hadnt been there for her, any more than shed been there for him, in three long years. Maybe things would have been different if theyd had another child, but she wouldnt consider it, kept insisting she couldnt bear another loss after Timmy and the earlier miscarriage. There was a time when hed thought so, but that was long past. The simple truth was, their life together had died when Timmy died. Now that theyd finally admitted it to each other, the only emotions he felt, and was sure she felt, were sadness and relief.

It was the morning of the third day, as he stood atop one of the crags looking out toward the Needles Eye, when he thought of her. There was no wind and the stillness, the utter absence of sound, was so acute it created an almost painful pressure against the eardrums. Of all the things Geena hated about Death Valley, its silencevoid of silence, an early explorer had termed ittopped the list. It terrified her. On their last trip together, when shed caught him listening, shed said, What are you listening to? Theres nothing to hear in this godforsaken place. Its as if everything has shut down. Not just hereeverywhere. As if all the engines have quit working.