Courage Stolen Page 8

  She opened a glass door beyond the bar and led me outside to a swimming pool deck. On the other side of the deck were six empty tennis courts. I’d given country club attire my best shot—loafers, blue khaki pants, a black and red polo, and a light gray jacket, which I wouldn’t need much longer on the beautiful February morning.

  “What are you looking for in a club?”

  “Oh, one with a good golf course and members who aren’t too snobby.”

  She laughed. She had a nice laugh, spontaneous, making her blue eyes sparkle. “We have the former. I can’t guarantee the latter.”

  “I didn’t appear to pass the test when we walked through the dining room.”

  “Oh, that.” She waved a hand back towards the diners. “Don’t take it personally. You know how it is. Once you gain access to something, you want to put up a sign saying ‘closed.’ All of a sudden nobody else is good enough to join. I’ve seen it everywhere I’ve worked.”

  “Have you worked in the country club business long?”

  “My entire adult life. Started as a waitress in college working at Los Altos Country Club in the bay area. Earned my degree in hospitality management, got promoted to bar manager, then hospitality manager. After that I took the same position at Pebble Beach.” She’d probably recited her oral resume hundreds of times in interviews and to club members and new friends, but her enthusiasm and the sparkle in her eye made it seem like she was telling it for the first time.

  “Impressive. Why didn’t you stay at Pebble? Hard to beat the beauty of that place.”

  “Oh, long story. But the short answer is my career was stuck there. My boss and his boss were going to be there forever, and I had ambitions to manage my own club.” There was no bitterness in her voice when she said this. She knew how the world worked and what it took to succeed in it.

  “So you came here.”

  “Not right away. First I worked at Auburn Hills as food and beverage manager for a year before I applied to every GM position I could find in Northern California. A few months later I landed here. It’s been six months now, and I love it.”

  “I can see why. It’s a beautiful club.”

  We walked on in silence, the only sounds the schick, schick, schick of automatic sprinklers beyond the fence and the honking of several geese flying by. I felt comfortable and at peace in a way I hadn’t felt in months. Was it the beautiful setting? Or was it Jolene who made me feel this way?

  “Tell me, Ray, why all of a sudden do you want to take up golf again?” She took us around the pool towards a wrought iron gate at the far end of the deck.

  “I’m recently retired and finding I have a lot of time on my hands.” It was true. At least the recently retired part.

  “Oh my, you’re much too young to be retired.” She gave me a light slap on the shoulder.

  “You’d be surprised. I’m either younger than I look, or you’re just flattering me for my membership fee.”

  “You’re funny.” She smiled at me, and I found myself smiling back at her in a way beyond simple politeness.

  We exited the pool deck through the gate and took a right on the asphalt path winding past the cart shack to the pro shop. She wore low-heeled pumps and walked in them with a grace suggesting she might have been something of an athlete in her youth.

  “What did you retire from?” she asked after a few minutes.

  “College professor.”

  “So you’re good looking and smart.”

  “Now I know you’re just buttering me up.”

  “I am shameless.”

  We wandered through the pro shop, its walls lined with new golf club sets for sale, the main space crowded with racks of outfits, barrels containing drivers, fairway woods, and specialty wedges. Jolene said the shop was more as a service to the members than an actual moneymaker, the sales volume too low, their prices unable to compete with superstores and online merchants.

  “So what do people do here when they aren’t playing golf?” I asked as we exited the pro shop.

  “It depends. About a quarter of our membership is younger families. They use the pool and some of our recreation programs for kids. You know, things like tennis camp, golf lessons, and some social activities. Our members with grown kids or no kids take advantage of everything from tennis to bridge tournaments. There’s a core group of men who play poker on Thursday nights. There’s probably twenty or more guys, and a handful of older women, who just like to sit at the bar and drink.”

  “I guess that’s a sport in and of itself.”

  She gave me a polite laugh. “Would you like to take a tour of the golf course?”

  I would have said no, just a quick look at it would be fine, but all of a sudden I did want to tour the course, to spend more time with Jolene. “Sure.”

  She commandeered a golf cart from the shack, and we soon headed off to the course. No one was at the first tee, where she stopped. The green expanse in front of us was majestic, and I felt a mystic blissfulness wash over me. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much I missed golf.

  “Par four, four-hundred-ten yard, dogleg right, water to the right of the green, number five handicap. A tough starting hole. Not unusual for a Jack Nicklaus designed course.”

  “Are you remembering that from the brochure, or are you something of a golfer yourself?”

  “Four years varsity at Cal State, Monterey Bay.”

  “Nice,” I said. “I played four years at San Jose State.”

  “Go Spartans,” she said, giving me a high five.

  We arrived at the second hole, a par five she said was the easiest on the course. “This hole is more forgiving. Long hitters can get there in two. Overall, the course is a par seventy-two with a rating of seventy-four point seven and a slope of one forty-three.”

  “That’s pretty tough. What do you shoot on it?”

  “I don’t play enough to score well.”

  I stared at her to draw an answer.

  “You’re too much,” she said. “My best round is a seventy-four.”

  “That’s from the ladies tees no doubt.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re one of those male chauvinists.”

  “Quite the contrary. I believe in equal pay for equal work for men and women. And I believe we should all tee off from the same tee markers.”

  She smiled. She had a beautiful smile, one with a bit of mischief in it. “A bit touchy on that, aren’t you?”

  It was my turn to laugh. “I’ve been beaten too many times by good women golfers with a forty-yard advantage. I guess I need to get over it.”

  We spent the next thirty minutes cruising from hole to hole. It was a great layout, set amid legacy oaks, towering green pines, native grasslands, and a meandering creek. The fairways were as smooth as the putting greens on the public courses I used to play. I hadn’t come to join the club, but by the time we’d finished I was considering it.

  The tour ended back where we started inside the clubhouse. The dining room had filled up, the golfers and tennis players now joined by men and women in business attire. Some of the inveterate drinkers Jolene referred to earlier had taken seats at the bar, and the beer, wine, and martinis were starting to flow.

  “What do you think of the club?”

  “I like it,” I said. “What does it take to join?”

  “Twenty-five thousand to join with an equity share. Dues are two-forty a month—that includes unlimited golf—with a food and beverage minimum of sixty dollars a month. You can also choose to spend the sixty in the pro shop if you want.”

  I nodded and thought about the looks I’d attracted in the dining room earlier. “Is there some approval process, club tribunal, or initiation rites?”

  “Yes. Our board of directors will interview you to determine your moral compass. Then, if they give the thumbs up, you’ll pass through a gauntlet of all our members who will swat you on the butt with ping pong paddles.” Her face looked dead serious.

  “Really?”

&
nbsp; She cracked a smile.

  “Is any of that true?”

  “Well, the board does need to approve all new members, but if you’re not a practicing felon then that’s a formality. The paddling part? Only if you want to.”

  “Let me think about it,” I said.

  “Getting paddled or joining the club?”

  “Both.”

  We shook hands and, as we did, she reached out and touched my shoulder with her left hand. An awkward silence followed.

  “I should get going. Thank you for the tour and the delightful morning. I’ll get back to you in a couple of days.” I headed for the front door.

  “Ray,” she said, and I turned back to face her. She took two steps towards me. “I hope you don’t think this is unprofessional of me. I don’t usually do this. But would you like to have lunch sometime?”

  “You mean here at the club?”

  “No. I mean socially, somewhere not at the club.”

  fifteen

  It took an hour through traffic to get to Granderson. After my meeting with Seth Seeger, I had searched the web for someone named Forrester. What I thought would be a needle in a haystack turned out to be quite easy, or at least I guessed as much. Granderson University had a Riley Forrester on its payroll, a tenured professor of sociology.

  He’d published papers in several sociology journals. The titles of a couple of papers jumped out at me: “Eco-terrorism or Justified Resistance” and “Eco-terrorism? A Critical Analysis of Government Attacks on Environmental Activism.”

  The abstract on the first article described Forrester’s paper as rejecting the notion all “ecotage” acts were acts of terror and considering them as warranted acts of civil disobedience. The second article was described as exploring the history of the so-called “eco-terror” movement and why the label was misplaced.

  His name also turned up in a twenty-year-old news item from the Humboldt Beacon. As a graduate student at Humboldt State University, a couple hundred miles north of Sacramento, Forrester had been arrested for chaining himself to a giant redwood tree. His goal was to prevent a developer from cutting down dozens of redwoods to build a housing development.

  I didn’t find anything linking Forrester to the Stone Creek Saviors, though I found a short article in Wikipedia interesting:

  The Stone Creek Saviors is a purported radical environmental advocacy group in Northern California. The group took credit for a 2004 bombing of a dam construction site on Stone Creek in Placer County, California. The dam was being built to divert water to a housing development. A subsequent letter to The Placer Herald newspaper from an individual or group calling itself the Stone Creek Saviors claimed responsibility for the bombing. The group’s aim was “to stop the raping and desecration of the land.” To date, there are no known members of the group, though rumors circulate they have committed other eco-terrorist acts in California but have not claimed credit for them.

  As I made my way to the Social Science Building, home of the sociology department, I thought about my morning with Jolene Gillingwater. If she had not been dating Danny Cashmore, I would have jumped at the chance to have lunch with her. But if she was dating Danny, why did she ask me to lunch? Did she and Danny have different perceptions about their relationship? Was Danny mistaken about her feelings for him? Or did Jolene lack romantic feelings for Danny? Or was she the kind of woman who liked to date more than one man at a time? In the awkwardness following her lunch invitation, I entered her number into my cell phone, told her I’d check my calendar and get back to her. I figured after a few days Jolene would forget about me.

  Forrester’s office was locked, and no light appeared underneath the door. The sociology department secretary said she hadn’t seen him but guessed he might be at one of his favorite haunts, the organic farm co-op on the eastern edge of campus.

  I arrived at the farm where two women were pulling weeds between rows of knee-high plants. Beyond them a thin man in a gray T-shirt and battered blue jeans worked at a huge compost pile with a pitchfork. The two women and I exchanged smiles as I passed.

  “What can I do for you?” the man asked as I approached, his back to me.

  “Riley Forrester?”

  “Yeah.” He was lifting up big forkfuls of debris and turning them over.

  “Do you have a second to talk?”

  “Who are you?” He had yet to even glance my way.

  “My name’s Ray Courage. I’m an investigator. The university hired me to look into an incident over at Sieboldt.”

  He drove the pitchfork deep into the compost, gathering a large mass of the matter, then tossed it back to the center of the pile. He stuck the pitchfork into the ground, wiped his brow on the sleeve of his T-shirt, and turned to face me. He was medium height and build, with a full black beard he didn’t bother to trim. Though not physically imposing, he had an unnerving intensity about him, his dark brown eyes penetrating me with suspicion and contempt. “What kind of incident?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say. I’m not trying to be coy. Just following orders.”

  “Figures. Everything at this university appears to be shrouded in secrecy. Wouldn’t be surprised if the administration worked for the CIA.”

  “I was wondering if you heard anything about what happened at Sieboldt.”

  “You mean the ‘incident’ you or anybody else can’t talk about? Now how would I be able to know anything like that?”

  “Rumors. Talk among your colleagues at the university. That kind of thing. I used to work at a university and know college professors are the biggest gossips on the planet.”

  “I don’t have any colleagues at the university. Bunch of right-wing robots.”

  “I take it you don’t share their ideology.”

  “You take it correctly.” He struck me as a man who liked to use his words sparingly, preferring fragments to full sentences, grunts to actual words.

  “Then why’d you take the gig?”

  “I ask myself that every day. Short answer is because I was told when they hired me they wanted to diversify the politics on campus. So far, that diversity consists of me. And it’s been five years.”

  One of the women came over. She had mousey brown hair parted in the middle and a freckled face. “We finished weeding, Riley. What do you want us to do next?”

  He looked over to his right towards a small house, where a variety of other plants grew in various stages of maturation. “I noticed some snails by the spinach. Can you and Liz find and relocate them?”

  The woman turned to take on her task.

  “What can you tell me about S-SOP?” I asked.

  “Student-run organization focused on environmental education.”

  “What about the Stone Creek Saviors?”

  He looked at me for a few seconds, and I could practically see the wheels turning in his head. He reached over to take the pitchfork into his hands again and began working the pile anew. “Mythical organization. Created by the FBI to demonize all environmentalists. The very same people who first identified global warming.”

  “Al Gore?”

  Forrester didn’t have much of a sense of humor. Or maybe it was just me he didn’t find funny. “No, not Al Gore. I’m talking about Earth First! And all the other organizations championing environmental causes since the sixties.”

  “You said the Stone Creek Saviors were mythical. You mean they don’t exist?”

  He picked up and heaved two forkfuls of organic matter in the pile before he answered. “That’s right. Has anyone ever identified himself as a member? Has the FBI ever identified anyone?”

  “Doesn’t mean they’re mythical,” I said. “Just secretive.”

  “Would you say ghosts, goblins, and Big Foot are secretive? Or mythical?”

  “Point taken. But at the Food Science building firebombing last spring, someone had spray-painted a big ‘SCS’ on the wall.” I was speaking again to his back as he labored on. “The police thought that meant the Saviors were t
aking credit for the attack.”

  “Speculation.”

  “There’s also speculation you’re a member of the Saviors. Maybe even their leader.” It was a wild-assed guess designed to move the frustrating conversation along.

  He stopped working on the pile and pivoted, the pitchfork at his waist, its tines pointed at me. “Who told you that?”

  “Secret.” I kept my eye on the pitchfork and took a step back.

  “That’s bullshit. And it’s slanderous. If I find out who’s saying those things, I’ll sue them for it.”

  “Why would you consider that slander? From your writings, I thought ecotage was a justifiable form of civil disobedience? If that’s what the Saviors are doing, then by your standards it shouldn’t be considered against the law. In that case it wouldn’t be slander.”

  “Are you going to play word games with me? I’m busy here.”

  “Do you mind putting the pitchfork down? It’s loaded and pointed right at me.”

  He lowered the tool.

  “Did you have anything to do with the firebombing last spring?”

  “We’re done here,” he said.

  “Did you sabotage the research work of a certain professor over in Sieboldt a few days ago?”

  “We’re done!” He threw the pitchfork onto the compost heap and stormed off towards the nearby house.

  “What about Thomas Chan?” I shouted.

  If he heard me, he gave no sign of it as he marched on. A moment later, I heard the loud slam of a door.

  sixteen

  As I drove to Davis, I dialed Rubia again and spoke to her on the car’s hands-free.

  “’S’up, professor?”

  “I’ve got some work for you. Actual paying work.”

  “Aye chi mama. I thought I saw a pig flying earlier today.”

  “Very funny.”

  “So what’s up on the gig?”

  I updated her on my visit to Sacramento Oaks and my conversation with Jolene Gillingwater, skipping the parts where she flirted with me and asked me out. I then told Rubia to check into Jolene’s background, specifically to verify the work history she’d provided—Los Altos Country Club, Pebble Beach, and Auburn Hills—and whether she’d graduated from Cal State Monterey Bay.