Blue Labyrinth

25

Leaving the prison, Pendergast drove south from Indio. It was late afternoon when he pulled his car off the main road and parked beneath the cruel ridgeline of the Scarrit Hills.

He climbed to the crest and gazed eastward. Between him and the dead shore of the Salton Sea lay the Fontainebleau, its gaudy, ragged lines dwarfed by the bleak expanse. All was still. From horizon to horizon, stretching to infinity, there was not the slightest sign of life. He had only the faint moaning of the wind for company.

Now Pendergast looked northward, toward the gullied track that led to the Golden Spider Mine. The ill-disguised tire tracks he had noted the day before were gone, leaving nothing but an apparently unbroken crust of salt.

He walked down the far side of the foothills and approached the resort, just as he had done the night before. His footprints raised plumes of salt dust as he walked. And yet there was no sign of his tracks from the previous evening — the steps leading up to the veranda, and the veranda itself, appeared to have lain untouched for decades.

He turned away from the Salton Fontainebleau and walked the half mile north to the main entrance of the Golden Spider Mine. Its ancient door was half-buried in a wash of salt. Miniature salt dunes, formed by dust devils, were scattered along the gullied approach. It was as it had appeared from the ridgeline: the salt crust seemed undisturbed.

Pendergast scrutinized the entrance from a variety of angles, walking first here, then there, pausing now and then to stare with an appraising eye. And then he knelt and very carefully examined the crust beneath his feet, taking a tiny whisk from a pocket of his suit jacket and brushing the surface — gently, gently — gradually exposing the lighter-colored salt underneath. And now he saw, finally, the faintest traces of activity, so skillfully erased that there would be no way to deconstruct or glean any information from them. He stared for a long time, marveling at the obvious effort, before rising again.

The wind cried and moaned, stirring his hair and ruffling the lapels of his jacket. For the briefest of moments, the dry air was touched by a pleasing scent of lilies.

Turning away from the mine, Pendergast continued north, walking the two miles to the outskirts of the ghost town of Salton Palms. It looked just as it had the day before: broken streetlights, ruined houses, gaping windows, rusting birdbaths, empty swimming pools. But the cobbled-together shack with the tar-paper roof that had stood at the south edge of town was gone.

Pendergast walked over to where it had been — where, just the day before, he had knocked on the rude door and spoken to Cayute. Now there was nothing but dirt and patches of desiccated grass.

It was as if everything — the resort, the mine — had sat here, unvisited, untouched, for years. As if the old man and his worthless possessions had never existed.

It was as if it had all been a dream.

For a brief moment Pendergast swayed, a trifle unsteadily, as the wind worried and tugged at his ankles. And then he turned southward and began the trek back through the salt, dust, and sand to his rental car.