The Salt Maiden Read Online Free PDF Page A

stirred inside her, as annoying as it was disconcerting. But Dana knew relief, too, that she still had the capacity to feel it, though both the man and the timing were nonstarters.
    “I want your sister found as much as you do.” His eyes held a quiet sincerity that looked real.
    But so did the mirages that shimmered in the afternoon heat. Thinking of what the Clark Kent woman had said as she was leaving the café, Dana decided it was time to let him know that she might be a long way from Houston, but she was even farther from being a gullible mouth-breather.
    “Really?” She leaned toward him to ask. “Even if Angie was about to stop this county’s latest salt-dome scheme?”

Chapter Three
    Throughout history, salt has meant many things to many people. Some cultures considered it wealth, while others believed it an essential component of religious and magical ceremonies. People worshiped it, fought for it, died for it. And in some civilizations it became a weapon, best remembered in ancient Rome’s legendary destruction of Carthage by the salting of its fields.
    So with such a rich and varied history, why shouldn’t the same salt that’s deprived this community of so much for so long end up being its salvation?
    —Miriam Piper-Gold,
Spokeswoman for Haz-Vestment,
from the transcripts of community meeting 1A,
Devil’s Claw, Texas
    Jay had dreaded this moment, had braced himself for the explosion the way he’d once braced himself for incoming mortar fire. Yet in spite of her narrowed green eyes and angry tone, he realized that Dana Vanover— Dr. Vanover, he mentally corrected—had yet to connect the last dots of the ugly picture that had cost him so much sleep of late.
    She still had not allowed herself to understand that while she’d been looking for her sister, he’d been searching for a corpse—and praying like hell his suspicion would prove false. Inconvenient as it would be if Angie Vanover—or Angelina Morningstar, as she had called herself here—turned up dead, he had made a thorough search. Far too thorough to please his new constituents, many of whom had been showing up most evenings to help with the restoration of Uncle R.C.’s charred home. Over the past few nights their collective disapproval had taken on the bitterness of ash.
    “Don’t know if I’d call the waste-disposal plan a ‘scheme,’” he said cautiously. “I’ve looked over the specs, read up on the science. Haz-Vestment, Inc.’s got no record of complaints. No accidents, no leaks, and a history of positive community involvement. And Lord knows this county’s about due for a little taste of progress.”
    Jay could have said more but didn’t. He needed to find out what Dana Vanover knew already and who had been her source. For sure it hadn’t been any of those who had complained he was squandering county resources on a troublemaking drifter. All week they’d been reminding him of how his deputy, Wallace Hooks, had found “Angelina” passed out in the middle of the road outside of town. The theory was, she’d gotten plastered because no one would sign that fool petition she’d been shoving under every nose in the county. Jay found it easy to imagine she’d moved on after that humiliation and rejection—if someone hadn’t taken a notion to kill her.
    “Waste disposal? What kind?”
    “Low-level radiation. From what I hear it’s mostly medical waste. About as safe as you can get.”
    Dana was shaking her head. “Angie wouldn’t have been won over by any corporate propaganda. About sixteen, seventeen years back, she was wrapped up in some environmental protest group, picked up a few arrests for being part of human chains across the entrances of public buildings and busy intersections, mostly nuisance stuff.”
    “Nuisance stuff,” he echoed flatly, chilled to the bone by the memory of a lone Iraqi woman whose idea of protest involved strapping explosives beneath her traditional black abaya and begging American