South Of Nowhere Excerpt

Three vehicles had the bad luck to be atop the Hinowah levee when it gave way.

At the front was a late-model Chevrolet Camaro, nicknamed Big Blue by the woman driving it, Fiona Lavelle.

She was 26 years old and had recently left a teaching job to devote herself to her passion: writing a fantasy novel.

Traveling from Reno to Fresno, for a spa getaway, she had taken this more demanding but picturesque route through the mountains.

In jeans and red crop top under a gray sweatshirt, Lavelle gripped the wheel firmly, her car countering the lashing wind. The vehicle’s engine was big, the body light.

The highway, Route 13, was two-lane asphalt except for the hundred-yard stretch on the dirt levee, where it was surfaced with cinders, gravel and—today—mud.

Guard rails, she thought, mentally putting sardonic quotation marks around the words. They looked like they wouldn’t stop a bike, let alone a muscle car like hers.

A sign on her right, where the town of Hinowah was visible 100 feet below, said SLOW UNPAVED ROAD.

As if one needed the warning.

On the left, where the river raged: No FISHING from Levee.

Odd capitalization.

As the car progressed, bits of stone clicked as the tires tossed them into the undercarriage even at this slow speed. It was an odd counterpoint to the power drumbeat of the rain on Big Blue’s roof.

“Well,” she gasped, as a wave splashed from the river into the air and spattered the windshield.

The Never Summer was relentless, racing downstream, south, a speeding train, nearly even with the top of the levee. The rain had been torrential for the past hour. The velocity of the river had to be twice what she was doing: about twenty miles an hour or so. On the opposite bank was a steep cliff, craggy and dotted with small caves.

She noted an old graffitied heart, in red. LM + DP. 4EVER…

What are you doing? Concentrate on the road.

A flash of light appeared in her rear-view mirror. The headlights of a vehicle behind her.

Was the driver irritated at her slow pace? She was in a sports car, for Heaven’s sake. The underbelly was inches away from the messy ground.

Be patient, she thought to him, automatically assigning a gender.

Unfair, she reflected.

And then noticed that she was wrong altogether. He wasn’t flashing the lights at her. The pickup had hit a pothole and the beams dropped and rose.

“Sorry.” She actually whispered the word aloud.

As she approached the end of the levee, where the slick but dependable asphalt resumed, she began to relax.

The clock on the dashboard read 8:14 a.m.

# # #

The second vehicle on the levee was an F150, piloted by Louis Bell, the self-described “best sheetrock man” in the town of Hinowah, California, if not all of Olechu County. He was listening to Taylor Swift and admiring the bright blue Camaro in front of him, Some Cams came with 600 horses. Man, to hit the Hawk’s Canyon straightaway behind the wheel of that beautiful machine….

Take your time, he thought to the driver. Driving over this crap in a car like that?

Take. Your. Time….

The fifty-year-old, moderately and not irrevocably round, was smoking and would remove the Marlboro long enough to sing along with an off-key but robust voice. He would also occasionally glance up at the low clouds as if that would give him some indication of when the downpour would let up.

What a storm! This part of the state—east central—had been in the grip of a drought for the better part of two years. Not good for the number one producer of fruits and vegetables in the country. Would this cure it? He didn’t think so. He’d heard that downpours made only a small dent, as the water tended to vanish into places where it wasn’t particularly helpful.

On the seat beside him was a McDonald’s bag containing three basic Egg McMuffins. He never went for the fancy things. Simple was better. Normally he had four but was trying to cut down, and was exercising his willpower, resolving not to start on the first until he hit the city limits of Fort Pleasant, the Olechu County seat, about fifteen miles ahead.

Though maybe he would celebrate getting off this damn slippery dirt road over ten stories above Hinowah with half a sandwich. As if having to wrestle the wheel in the muck counted as exercise.

Ah, the games we play…

Bell’s thoughts dipped to the job he was on his way to, plaster boarding one of the multigazillion dollar houses in a new development west of the city. How the hell people could afford them, well, that was beyond him. Maybe some of the new companies moving here from the Bay Area and Sacramento. Then his attention faltered and he was drawn to the rushing water. The Never Summer was showing some balls today. Normally it was a modest stream pacing along a rocky bottom, ten feet below the road he was presently on. You could hike it. He’d even seen mountain bikers make it all the way from Hinowah to Fort Pleasant on the bed.

Tense from the driving, Bell stretched and momentarily laid his right arm across the passenger seatback.

Thinking of a few years ago, he and Nancy, his bride of six months, parked in this same set of wheels, watching the sunset behind Gold Claim Hills. She’d nestled against him, and his arm, on the seat, dropped to her shoulders and he pulled her close. They’d kissed. She said, ‘You know one thing I never heard of?”

“What’s that?”

“Making a baby in a pickup truck.”

He hadn’t heard of that either. But they both decided it was a topic that deserved more consideration.

The recollection—and the smile it engendered—occurred at precisely 8:14.

# # #

The third vehicle on the levee road was a white Chevrolet Suburban, driven by George Garvey, who was glancing at the water cascading out of the bed of the pickup truck in front of him. It never occurred to him—as he’d never owned one—that pickups would have to have drainage. A day like this, they would fill up fast with what was probably a ton of water.

He mentioned this to his wife, Sonja, who looked up from her knitting.

“Hm.”

George was owner and operator of a small business that his great-great grandfather had created and had remained in the family, nonstop, for more than 100 years. He was the frontman and manager; Sonja ran the business office.

George’s eyes strayed from the flooded pickup truck to the dark gray sky, the clouds speeding west to east. “Scudding,” he thought, was the word. They’d had the option of taking interstates and four lanes from Sonja’s mom and dad to the Five and then south. But a family conference had resulted in the decision to take this, a more picturesque route. He negotiated with Google maps and after some minutes—during which the algorithm seemed to ask, “Are you sure?”—they got these directions.

His wife said, “That town we passed, ten miles or so. Hibbing. I’m trying to remember. Wasn’t there another one? And somebody famous came from it?”

“Somebody?” George asked as if it were an insult that she didn’t know instantly. “Bob Dylan.”

“Oh. Sure.”

George called to the most musical of the Garveys, “Kim. Who’s Bob Dylan?”

“Who?” asked seventeen-year-old Kimberly. The blond, more cute than exotic, to Garvey’s immense relief, was examining a chipped nail. Neither she nor her friends could keep all ten tips in pristine polish for more than a few hours.

George—who had been a folksinger years ago—said, “The best songwriter who ever lived.”

“More than Drake or Taylor?”

“Hands down better than them.”

“What does that mean?” Kim asked with teenage exasperation.

“Yes, better than them.”

No response.

Beside her, eleven-year-old Travis was lost in his phone, wired in with Airbuds. He was capable of playing a game and texting simultaneously on a screen the size of a deck of cards.

And, while spelling and syntax were sometimes off, those were intentional; he never mistyped.

Smaller fingers maybe.

Sonya’s gaze now turned from the rustic town of Hinowah, below them to the right, to the river. “Never Summer. Funny name.” She grew quiet. “Honey?”

“What?”

Whispering, “I don’t like the looks of that.”

He too took in the torrent once more.

“I think the level’s gone up just in the last few minutes. It could start coming over the top, it looks like.

“Wish they’d hurry up.” George nodded toward the pickup truck and the blue sports car in front of it.

He smelled the sweet scent of fingernail polish.

Kimberly, the far more energetic—and fidgety—of the children, glanced up. “I’m bored. When’re we going to get home?”

“About one or two.”

A huge exhalation. “It’s like only 8:14.”

And George Garvey marveled at the teenage skill to make a sigh sound like a veritable groan of pain.

# # #

The world changed in an instant.

At exactly 8:15 a.m. the battle between the Never Summer and the Hinowah levee was decided in the river’s favor.

The top two or three feet of the embankment vanished, as if sliced by a huge knife.

The individual with the best view of what happened to the travelers was Louis Bell, in the middle of the procession. Ahead of him, the driver of the Camaro apparently saw the collapse coming. She gunned the engine—the wheels sent up rooster tails as she made an effort to launch the car the ten feet or so to the asphalt, where the levee ended and the highway proper began again.

He didn’t see if she made it, and he couldn’t afford to wait to find out. He dropped into low gear—to get purchase in the dissolving muck beneath him and floored the engine. The truck bounded forward, though only a few feet, before it slowed and began to sink as the river simply washed away the ground beneath the tires. The truck began to list toward the furious river.

Behind him, the Suburban containing what he had believed was a family of four, took the brunt of the disaster. He observed the vehicle rock sideways back and forth and then roll upside down into the river.

Listing harder, he waited for a fate similar to theirs. He tried the handles on either side, but the water and muck held the doors firmly in place.

Louis Bell found himself curiously calm as he considered next steps.

There weren’t many. In fact, he saw only one question: was it better to dive into the river and be battered to death on the rocks lining the Never Summer? Or drown inside the cab of his truck?

Bell debated merely a few seconds before rolling down the window and gazing, as if hypnotized, at the icy tide that flooded over him.

Colter Shaw had his enemies.

In his profession of reward seeking, he avoided bond enforcement—tracking down bail jumpers—but over the years he had located several men and women who emphatically did not want to be found.

Nearly all rewards involving criminals were offered for “information leading to the arrest or capture” of fugitives and felons, with the first word of that phrase always emphasized. The last thing the authorities wanted were private cops like Shaw engaging in tactical work and bringing the bad guys in, zip tied. But whether Shaw simply offered up “information” on the whereabouts of a fugitive or physically took them down himself (he’d been a championship college wrestler), the opponents were not pleased.

And they often held grudges. Some of the more sociopathic ones had actually sent him graphic descriptions of what they intended to do when they were out of prison. One had illustrated the torture, and the drawings were surprisingly good.

The incarcerated also had friends and family who roamed the land freely, often with nothing better to do than track down the man who had sent Papa or Mama, or a sibling, to jail.

So Colter Shaw had created an early warning system of sorts. People he knew—personally or professionally—would be in touch when someone suspicious inquired about him.

Which is why he was presently in his late father’s office in the mountain house of his youth, working his way through 5000 sheets of the man’s notes and correspondence.

He was searching for a reference to a particular individual, and having zero luck.

The lean, six-foot Shaw was dressed for the outdoors, in black jeans, 5.11 tactical boots, and two Ts under a sweatshirt for insulation. It was spring, but April suffered from multiple personality disorder and was still in its March mode, drizzling, cold and windy. None of this would have stopped him from hiking the hundreds of acres that made up the Shaw Compound in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, an activity that was to have been on his agenda today.

But instead, he was chasing paper.

Skimming sheets. And still coming up with nothing.

He tested the coffee. It had lost its last hint of warmth, and he set the mug aside. He’d get more—a pot was in the kitchen—but not until he hit an arbitrary milestone of another half inch of documents.

Stretching, he slumped in a chair with a back in which was carved the face of a brown bear—a grizzly. Young Colter had been fascinated with the bas relief in his youth and had once done a rubbing of it, like people do on the gravestones of the famous dead. The result, on gray newsprint, was presently hanging, framed, on a wall in his home on the East Coast.

He now looked around the room where he’d spent many, many hours with his eccentric father, as he imparted endless rules about survival. Shaw recognized many of the objects and books that had absorbed his attention young, like the chairback: maps, native American weapons, lacquered boxes, books on politics and philosophy, paintings, one of his sister’s model locomotives, a Bowie knife that his older brother and their father had forged.

Some good memories and some tough ones.

Then, it was time to tuck the past away. And return to the hunt for the threat—if indeed a threat existed.

The early warning message had been ambiguous. It was from a political science professor at the Bay Area university where his father had taught, in Berkeley, though not the famed Cal. The professor had been a student of Ashton’s and was well aware of the cranky man’s mission back then—and the enemies he’d made. The text the man had sent today read:

Colter, You should know. Someone called the university, asking about Ashton and his family. Sent to me because I was his student. My assistant took the call. A woman gave the name Margaret. No last name. She knew about the Compound but didn’t know where it was and was looking for it. She wouldn’t leave a number or say why she was interested. Said she’d call back but never did. My assistant said the woman seemed “edgy” and “blunt.” Maybe nothing but thought you should know.

Margaret…..

The name meant nothing to Shaw and, as this had happened just an hour ago, he had not had a chance to pose the question to his mother, who was working in the garden.

He slogged on through the documents—the process slowed by the fact that anything Ashton generated was written by hand.

One preliminary question: who exactly was at risk? He was the logical front-runner, given the number of suspects and escapees he had rounded up. Yet the mysterious caller had been interested not in Shaw himself but the “Compound” and the “family.” Maybe the danger was to someone else: His sister, Dorion, three years younger; his brother, Russell, six years his senior, or their mother, Mary Dove. Or even the Shaws as a whole.

And why might they be targets?

A very likely answer: Because of the patriarch, Ashton Shaw.

It was here to the Compound that Ashton had fled with his wife and children years ago when the man had learned of threats against him due to research he had engaged in. He had poked the bear of corporate and government overreach and corruption, and learned that people were gunning for him.

Ashton had not been able to outrun the threat, though Shaw and Russell had teamed up to make sure that the main actors would never be able to harm anyone again.

But the enemies’ reach had been vast, and it was not impossible that some successors in interest might wish to pay a visit to the Shaw Compound to exact revenge on the family.

More documents. And more after that.

Ashton was the master of what he called the Never Rules, a list of prohibitions he formulated as the consummate survivalist.

Never be without a means of escape, never be without a weapon.

And a vital one.

Never write anything in any electronic medium now or in the future existing.

A rule that he had followed religiously. Hence the twenty pounds of paper before him—covered in handwriting so small it would be described by graphic artists as “mice type.”

Completing his milestone half inch of documents, Shaw ran his hand over his short-cropped blond hair and stretched once again. He glanced out the window to see his mother planting seeds in the half-acre garden. Mary Dove had the touch, and she would be raising a crop large and varied enough to keep herself, family visitors and neighbors in staples for a year. Colter Shaw enjoyed vegetables and fruit as much as anyone. You couldn’t argue with vitamins and whatever else they contained, but tending a plot of dirt from season to season remained an alien mystery to him, as it would to anybody who clocked more than 200K miles, give or take, in a Winnebago every year.

The Restless One….

A slim woman in her sixties with long white hair, today in a ponytail, Mary Dove was pulling off her gardening gloves and walking toward the cabin. He had not yet told her about the call. He would now get a second cup of coffee and ask her if she knew of anyone named Margaret from the days when she and Ashton were in Berkeley, and if so, was there anything concerning about her and her interest in the Compound.

Maybe it was a family friend who’d lost touch. Nothing more than that.

Of course:

Never assume what appears innocent is not a threat.

He heard Mary Dove in the kitchen, the water running, plates clanking. Shaw picked up his coffee cup and started out of the office, happening to glance down at the next sheet of paper on the stack.

He froze.

It was a draft of a letter Ashton had been composing. There were strike outs and additions. The typical edits one would make in an effort to refine the final product.

Unremarkable in every way, except for one word.

Dr. Sheridan Tillis,

Assistant Director of Curriculum

San Francisco Consolidated School Board.

Hello, Sheridan:

Thank you for the recommendations of grade schools for my daughter, Margaret. It was most helpful and I will keep you apprised of our decision. If you can think of any schools in Marin or Contra Costa, as well, they would be appreciated. Please send to the address below. And, again, discretion would be appreciated.

Hope all is well with you and yours.

Kindest regards, Ashton.

The shocking word: Daughter.

All right. Assess.

Shaw had never heard any talk that Ashton had been married before Mary Dove or that he had fathered a child before the marriage. In fact, Shaw knew, they had gotten together when they were young, meeting by coincidence in a prohibited area of a national park.

Was there some explanation that this letter was not evidence of an affair he’d had?

Well, the timing wasn’t going to clear him. The date indicated that it had been written after Ashton had been married to Mary Dove for fifteen years. A child going to grade school at that time meant that she had been conceived well into Shaw’s parents’ marriage.

And the address the recipient was supposed to send the recommendation to was a safehouse in San Francisco whose existence Ashton had kept secret from the family; it had been discovered by Shaw and Russell only recently, long after the man’s death.

And there was that telling admonition regarding discretion.

“Colter, are you all right?”

Mary Dove stood in the doorway.

His heart thudded.

“Fine. A little tired.”

The universal response that people used as a fencing foil to dodge a question. Men, mostly, Shaw believed.

She held a pot of coffee and lifted it. “More?”

Covering the letter as she walked up would be too suspicious. His mother had an eagle eye. So he walked quickly to her instead, and she poured. He liked milk but was concerned if he went to get some from the kitchen, she might wander to the stack of documents. He’d drink it black.

She turned, was saying something about neighbors coming for dinner.

Shaw’s mind was on the letter. “Good,” he said.

Mary Dove laughed.

He raised an eyebrow.

“I just said that we’re not doing mushrooms because Kathy’s violently allergic to them. And you said, “Good.”

“I mean good that you’re not serving them.”

His nieces—Dorion’s daughters—would have responded to his comeback as “lame.”

Which it certainly was.

Mary Dove gave him a questioning look, but let the matter drop. She never pushed. If he wanted to talk to her about something, she knew he would. This was true about everyone in the Shaw family. Of course there were secrets. But if one clearly wanted them to remain hidden, none of the others pried.

It made for a curious but effective genre of familial harmony.

Setting down the coffee he’d lost all taste for, he stared at the letter, flipped through a dozen sheets below, but none were related to the “Margaret” note.

A secret half-sibling….

Mary Dove had been through a great deal in her marriage to Ashton Shaw. She was a talented, in-demand academic, researcher and physician; she’d supported his crusade against corrupt politicians and corporations; and she had endured, if not relished, the move to the Compound, where she, like the children, learned the art of survivalism.

It challenged her body, her spirit, her mind.

And ultimately his actions had left her a widow.

But in her heart, all the offspring knew, she believed in the same values and thought his decisions were the right ones. The couple was one and always had been.

Or so it seemed.

Infidelity?

Beyond the pale.

Another two dozen sheets of paper.

Frustratingly, nothing.

All he knew was her age–mid to late twenties. And probably Anglo, given the name, though an ethnic minority was certainly a possibility.

Assess….

Why not give Ashton’s colleague in Berkeley her full name and relationship and number if there was nothing to hide?

And why not contact Shaw through his website, where people desperate to find missing loved ones posted rewards, which his business associates back in Florida, Teddy and Velma Bruin, monitored several times a day, looking for suitable reward offers. They would have instantly forwarded a message.

What did she want?

Never speculate. Once you have sufficient facts, your process is analysis–not speculation.

Well, the only answer was to go through the entire stack—now “only” seventeen or eighteen pounds of documents—one by one. Looking for “Margaret” or the words “daughter” or “girl” or “child.”

He bent forward and began again when he was interrupted by a text.

It began with the words:

Need help. Now.

He read the full message, and his mind was instantly transported to a different place altogether. His father’s infidelity became a secondary issue, as did Margaret and her mission.

After texting a brief response, he charted a route to the destination provided in the text.

His eyes took in the documents once more, and he came to a decision. Gathering the stack up, he shoved the sheets into an empty orange gym bag sitting under a nearby table. He wouldn’t abandon the search for Margaret altogether. He placed a call to his lawyer, Tony Rossano, whose office was a few miles away. The man sounded shocked at the news, which Shaw relayed nearly in a whisper. The attorney, sworn to secrecy, would continue the search for Margaret in the maze of Ashton’s writing, in Shaw’s absence.

After disconnecting, Shaw collected his black backpack from the floor beside the desk and walked into the kitchen, where he told his mother he had a job and had to leave immediately.

“Oh, well, I’m sorry to hear.”

He told her that he didn’t know how long it would take but to count on his missing the mushroom-free dinner.

They embraced and then he hurried out into the morning.

He fired up the white-and-tan Winnebago and headed down the lengthy drive.

GPS assured him his destination was less than thirty minutes away.

A quick trip.

But as to the question: would he be in time?

That was another matter entirely.

–

Read more from South Of Nowhere when it is released in May 2025.