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move.”
    “That’s where you’re wrong. It might take only a small amount of energy, if the force was applied in just the right place.”
    Oaktree said: “How do you know all this stuff?”
    “I studied it. I have a master’s in seismology. I should be teaching in a university now. But I married my professor, and that was the end of my career. I was turned down for a doctorate.”
    Her tone was bitter. Priest had talked to her about this, and he knew she bore a deep grudge. Her husband had been on the university committee that turned her down. He had been obliged to withdraw from the meeting while her case was discussed, which seemed natural to Priest, but Melanie felt her husband should somehow have made sure of her success. Priest guessed that she had not been good enough to study at doctoral level—but she would believe anything rather than that. So he told her that the men on the committee were so terrified of her combination of beauty and brains that they conspired to bring her down. She loved him for letting her believe that.
    Melanie went on: “My husband—soon to be my ex-husband—the stress-trigger theory of earthquakes. At certain points along the fault line, shear pressure builds up, over the decades, to a very high level. Then it takes only a relatively weak vibration in the earth’s crust to dislodge the plates, release all that accumulated energy, and cause an earthquake.”
    Priest was captivated. He caught Star’s eye. She nodded somberly. She believed in the unorthodox. It was an article of faith with her thatthe bizarre theory would turn out to be the truth, the unconventional way of life would be the happiest, and the madcap plan would succeed where sensible proposals foundered.
    Priest studied Melanie’s face. She had an otherworldly air. Her pale skin, startling green eyes, and red hair made her look like a beautiful alien. The first words he had spoken to her had been: “Are you from Mars?”
    Did she know what she was talking about? She was stoned, but sometimes people had their most creative ideas while doping. He said: “If it’s so easy, how come it hasn’t already been done?”
    “Oh, I didn’t say it would be easy. You’d have to be a seismologist to know exactly where the fault was under critical pressure.”
    Priest’s mind was racing now. When you were in real trouble, sometimes the way out was to do something so weird, so totally unexpected, that your enemy was paralyzed by surprise. He said to Melanie: “How would you cause a vibration in the earth’s crust?”
    “That would be the hard part,” she said.
    Ride, ride, ride …
    I’m gonna ride that no-good train…
    *  *  *
    Walking back to the town of Shiloh, Priest found himself thinking obsessively about the killing: the way the wrench had sunk into Mario’s soft brains, the look on the man’s face, the blood dripping into the footwell.
    This was no good. He had to stay calm and alert. He still did not have the seismic vibrator that was going to save the commune. Killing Mario had been the easy part, he told himself. Next he had to pull the wool over Lenny’s eyes. But how?
    He was jerked back to the immediate present by the sound of a car.
    It was coming from behind him, heading into town.
    In these parts, no one walked. Most people would assume his car had broken down. Some would stop and offer him a ride.
    Priest tried to think of a reason why he would be walking into town at six-thirty on Saturday morning.
    Nothing came.
    He tried to call on whatever god had inspired him with the idea of murdering Mario, but the gods were silent.
    There was nowhere he could be coming from within fifty miles—except for the one place he could not speak of, the dump where Mario’s ashes lay on the seat of his burned-out pickup.
    The car slowed as it came nearer.
    Priest resisted the temptation to pull his hat down over his eyes.
    What have I been doing?
    —I went out into the desert to observe nature .
    Y eah, sagebrush