by Josh Lanyon
The alarm was mutual. I yelped and swung the makeshift pillow of my jacket at my bedmate. The squirrel scampered off in a cloud of newly disturbed dust and disappeared up the chimney of the fireplace at the far end of the room. Coughing, I staggered to my feet and looked about.
Layers of velvety dust covered everything not draped in sheets. Chairs, tables, lamps, most everything was covered in dust sheets. It was like waking up in the middle of a ghosts’ tea party. Cobwebs draped artistically from the blackened ceiling beams.
When I’d finally collapsed on the overstuffed sofa the night before I had been too frazzled and exhausted to notice. In the cold light of day it was clear to me that I’d had some kind of breakdown. Only a lapse of sanity could explain what I was doing shivering in my skivvies in the room that time forgot.
April is plenty bitter in the mountains despite the sunshine and wildflowers. I pulled on Levi’s, shrugged into a flannel shirt. In honor of Jake I fished a beer out of the cooler and swished a mouthful through my teeth as I sat on the ice chest lid considering my surroundings.
The long wide room had a huge stone fireplace at one end. The wooden floors were bare now; I recalled them covered by starkly beautiful Indian rugs. Black gargoyle feet stuck out beneath the dust sheets. If memory served, all those linen peaks and slopes concealed heavy walnut Victorian furniture upholstered in red velvet or smoky-gray tufted satin. Faded drapes framed picture windows and a view that was worth framing. Beyond the trees, in the distance, I could see mountains, still white-tipped with snow. The sky was cerulean -- a word we don’t use much in LA. Not a cloud, not a plane, not a telephone wire to mar that wide blue yonder.
The silence seemed unnatural and would take some getting used to. I heard the sweet trill of a meadow lark, then nothing else. No distant roar of traffic, no voices. Pure silence. I listened to it for some time, waiting for something to break the spell.
Anything.
Then, lubricated by another swig of beer, the wheels began to turn. Already the events of the night before felt like some half-forgotten nightmare -- much the conclusion local law enforcement had come to after they were unable to find any trace of “my” dead body.
“Probably just the way the shadows fall here,” the sheriff had said generously, not giving in to what was clearly his suspicious first thought.
“I’m telling you, it was a body.”
“Coyote maybe,” Deputy Dwayne suggested. “Could have been shot by a rancher and dragged itself off.”
“There you go,” the sheriff pronounced, pleased with this scenario.
“It was not an animal,” I said. “I got out and knelt beside it. It was a man.” I described the man to them for the second time.
“Could be Harvey,” the deputy said reluctantly, with a look to his superior.
“Sure, drunk again. Or maybe stoned,” the sheriff agreed. “I guess that’s possible.”
“Ted Harvey? The overseer?”
“Overseer?” repeated the sheriff. He and the deputy exchanged glances. “Sure, that’s it. Probably came to and staggered on home to sleep it off.”
“Probably puking his guts out right now,” the deputy comforted. He shot a stream of tobacco juice at a mustard flower swaying in the night.
I was shaking my head, and the sheriff said shortly, “Sir, I believe you think you saw something this evening. I don’t think you are deliberately wasting taxpayer money and tying up government officials for nothing ....”
“But?” Call me paranoid but I sensed an implicit threat.
“But you can see for yourself, there’s nothing here. No blood. No body imprint in the sand.”
“There goes the coyote theory.”
They looked at me without favor.
“Whatever it was, it’s gone now,” Sheriff Billingsly said. “Not much we can do about that. Moon’s setting. It’ll be black as a nigger in a coal mine in half hour.”
Charming.
I said, “You could check to see if Harvey made it home. He lives on the property in a trailer, I think.”
“Sir, I don’t have the author-I-zation to waste any more time on this bugaboo. There’s nothing here.”
So sayeth The Law.
They drove me back to the Bronco, advising me to head into Basking and get a room for the night at a motel. Charged to “Drive safe now,” I was left yawning with nervous exhaustion in the glow of their taillights.
I climbed in the Bronco and crept back down the hillside to the ranch, scanning the side of the road for my missing corpse. Like we could have somehow missed it.
Reaching the ranch at last, I unlocked the front door, unloaded my gear and crashed on the nearest sofa. If the missing dead body had been propped in one of the chairs I wouldn’t have noticed.
Four hours later I woke a little stiff, a little uneasy, but almost willing to believe I had been delirious with tiredness the night before. Almost.
Yet sitting there in the spring sunshine I felt oddly calm. Maybe it was the change of scenery. Maybe I was still too tired to feel much of anything.
I considered whether I had any responsibility to pursue the riddle of the riddled corpse. I had called the cops and they had investigated and dismissed the idea of foul play. So that was it, right? Case closed.
But it couldn’t hurt to check one last thing. Just for form’s sake.
Flapping into a shirt I strode outside to the trailer parked back behind the empty corrals. There was a battered white pickup, which I took to be Harvey’s, beside the trailer. I felt the hood. Cold.
I banged on the rusting door of the trailer.
From inside I heard someone speaking, urging quiet.
“Hey! Anybody home?”
The whispering went on.
I tried the door. It opened.
I poked my head inside.
It took only a glance to ascertain the cautioning voice came from the television. An episode of Bassmasters. Ted Harvey might be living here -- it smelled like he had died here -- but there was no sign of him now. There was plenty of evidence he led a rich and full life if the stacks of Playboy, empty beer cans and dirty dishes were anything to go by.
Walking the length of the trailer, I half-expected a body to fall from the closet or slump out of the cupboard-sized shower. But dead or alive, nobody was home. I glanced around for a picture of Ted; there was nothing in the way of convenient snapshots. I turned off the TV, clicked off the still-burning lights. The lamps must have been on when I arrived the night before, but I had been past noticing. I didn’t know what the cops would make of it; blazing lights and blaring TV indicated to me that Harvey had left after dark and unexpectedly.
I stood for a few moments staring out the 2 x 4 window at green hills splotched with snow; snow that was, in fact, white wild flowers. I asked myself what Grace Latham, would do -- Grace being the sleuth creation of Leslie Ford, one of my favorite mystery writers. I guessed that in my position Grace would have done a bit of discreet snooping through Harvey’s personal belongings. Grace’s snooping usually led to Grace getting knocked over the head.
I backed out, shut the door again.
Even if my eyes had been playing tricks on me last night, and I had mistaken a man dead-drunk for a man dead-dead, the drunk had not picked himself up and staggered home.
I retreated to the house, reassessed my options. In the cold light of day my flight from LA seemed extreme. But since I was here, and gas prices being what they were, I decided I might as well make the most of my spontaneous combustion. One thing for sure, I’d probably get plenty of writing done. There didn’t appear to be a viable distraction in a thirty-mile radius.
In the kitchen I boiled a few dishes, scoured the stove and mahogany table, fried up some turkey bacon and the only two eggs that had survived the road trip. While I ate, I made my plans.
For the record, my plans had nothing to do with sleuthing, and everything to do with writing. I’d had enough sleuthing to last a lifetime.
The new y
ear got off to a helluva start with the murder of one of my oldest and closest friends. For a while it had looked like, if I didn’t actually end up a corpse myself, I would spend the next twenty years playing touch-tag in prison with guys who had nicknames like Ice Pick and Snake.
But that was all in the past. I was done with a life of crime -- except the fictional kind.
My own first mystery, Murder Will Out, featuring gay sleuth and Shakespearean actor Jason Leland, was now only months away from publication. I was hammering out the sequel between bouts of writer’s block.
The funny thing was that I’d never suffered from writer’s block until I sold a manuscript. That’s when the creative paralysis first set in.
“You’re probably thinking about it too much,” Jake had commented with that unexpected and irritating perception that made him such a good detective.
* * * * *
After breakfast I climbed back in the Bronco and drove to Basking to pick up some supplies; not that fried eggs and beer for breakfast didn’t make me feel macho as hell, but as a steady diet it gets old fast.
Basking is much smaller than Sonora, which is one of the better known of California’s old mining towns, as well as being the County Seat. This is mother lode country, but nowadays revenue comes from logging, tourism, and agriculture. Mark Twain and Brett Harte made the area famous, though the tourists had yet to zero in on Basking. It was a small town; some buildings dating back to the 1800s, which is old in California. The narrow, steep streets were partially bricked and lined with trees older than the town itself. Glass front windows were painted in old-fashioned script that spelled out things like: Gentlemen’s Haberdashery or Polly’s Confectionery. Victorian clapboard houses had been preserved to doll house perfection in kindergarten colors. .
There were few people about on that Friday morning; a couple of geezers sat outside the grocery store as I climbed the wide wooden stairs to the porch.
“So Custer says to his brother,” one of the wizened ones said to the other, “I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with them Injuns -- they seemed okay at the dance last night!”
The second old timer cackled in toothless appreciation and slapped his knee.
I pushed open the peeling door. A bell rang noisily as I stepped inside the store. The first thing that met my eyes was a gigantic moth-eaten buffalo head mounted over the counter. My gaze dropped to meet that of a lady of about eighty (give or take a decade) calmly eyeing me as she probed her teeth with a blue toothpick.
“Help you, sonny? You look lost.”
I told her what I needed and she directed me amiably down the aisles of pickled calves feet and pork rinds.
“Do you sell Tab?”
“Sonny, I haven’t seen that stuff since the ’60s.”
Coincidentally that appeared to be the age of some of the cans on the shelves in front of me. Food or collectible? You decide.
“Passing through?” the proprietress inquired around the toothpick when I piled my groceries on the counter at last.
“No. I’m staying out on Stagecoach Road
.”
She contemplated me with her gimlet eyes and gave an unexpected cackle that I thought would end with her swallowing her toothpick. “I know you now. You’re that skinny little kid used to come in here with Anna English.”
“That’s me.”
She removed the toothpick and waved it at me to make her point. “Grandkid or something, ain’t you? Only living kin. You’re the one paying that no account Ted Harvey to sit around and smoke dope all day.”
“I’m paying him to look after my property.” Smoking dope was a perk.
“That’s what you think, sonny,” the crone informed me. She began to ring my groceries on an antique register, raising her penciled-in brows at such oddities as smoked almonds and apple-cinnamon instant oatmeal.
“Planning to stay awhile, I guess,” she remarked.
“A week or so.”
“You got company with you?”
“No.” I said it and immediately thought better of it. “Not until tonight.” Why advertise that I was by myself in an isolated valley?
“How come you never came back when your granny passed away?”
“I was eight. I didn’t have my driver’s license.”
This reminded her of all the people who did have licenses and shouldn’t. She treated me to a couple of traffic-death horror stories, finished bagging my groceries and remarked, “You better have a pow-wow with that no-account Ted Harvey. He’ll burn the place down one of these days.”
* * * * *
When I got back to the ranch I had another look for that no-account Ted Harvey. He was still missing.
The rest of the afternoon was spent making myself at home, home on the range. I threw open the windows and doors to air out the place, balled up the dustsheets and attacked the most noticeable cobwebs with a broom that looked like an antique itself. I dusted, scrubbed, swept -- anything to avoid writing. However, the war machine ground to a halt when I reached my grandmother’s study.
There, long forgotten by me, were several glass-front cases loaded with books.
I dropped the broom and approached slowly, my pulse quickening in excitement known only to book lovers in the advanced stage of addiction. Wiping the dusty pane, I peered close. Cloth-bound hardcover, embossed white print and the words, The Bride Wore Black. Cornell Woolrich. A first edition. A rare first at that.
I pulled open the glass door and squatted down. Mysteries. Shelf after shelf of mysteries.
I expelled a long breath. Paperback and hardcover. Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler. All the good old stuff: Hammett, Tey, Stout, Marsh -- a couple of my fave rave Leslie Ford. Young Jim Hawkins couldn’t have been more jazzed at a trunkful of pirate gold.
There were a couple of gothic romances but mostly my grandmother’s taste seemed to lean toward the hard-boiled. No gay mysteries of course. The first “normal” gay detective didn’t come out, literally speaking, ’til 1970 with Joseph Hansen’s Fadeout. Hansen may not have hit the New York Times bestseller list with his Brandstetter series, but he set the standard for the rest of us.
The funny thing was that until that moment I didn’t remember my grandmother being a mystery buff. Now I wondered if her reading habits had subconsciously influenced my own. Lisa, my mother, read nonfiction when she read anything at all.
About five o’clock I tore my nose out of the books long enough to fry up salmon and potatoes just the way Granna had taught me twenty-something years before. Jake would have been impressed. He was under the impression that I would starve to death if I ever lost my can opener.
I wondered how long it would take him to notice I’d left town -- if he ever did notice.
After supper I popped Andrea Bocelli into the CD player, found a couple of hoary logs in the wood carrier and tossed them in the fireplace. Curling up in one of the oversized Victorian chairs, I prepared to spend the evening with Grace Latham. Grace is the quintessential amateur sleuth of her post-WWII era. She’s wealthy, well-bred, and usually way off the mark in her detecting, so don’t ask why I feel kinship with her.
Several blissful hours passed before my concentration was disturbed by the distant grind of a truck engine.
Laying the book aside, I wandered outside onto the long porch that ran the length of the back of the house. In the distance I could see spectral lights drifting down the mountainside -- headlights. That road was the old stagecoach road and it led to this house which had originally been the old stage stop. Shoving my hands into my pockets, I waited. The night smelled of wood smoke and the roses growing wild beside the house. It was biting. I longed for the warmth of the house wafting out through the open door.
As I stood there rocking back and forth on my heels I began to feel very much alone, miles from town, miles from the nearest neighboring ranch, miles from nowhere. The wind through the trees sounded like rushing water, a mournful sound. It was a quarter of a century since I’d bee
n out of hailing distance of other people. City boy, I jeered at myself.
After a time the sound of the engine died away with the lights. That was weird. Were they camping in the woods?
Rustlers? Slim pickings for rustlers these days. Briefly, I thought about investigating. Perhaps here lay the answer to my missing corpse. But unlike my intrepid Jason -- or even good old Grace Latham -- I concluded that night reconnaissance was not a hot idea. Even more briefly I considered calling the sheriffs, but after our last encounter I hesitated to look like the nervous nellie I knew they had pegged me for.
Going back inside, I threw a couple of logs on the fire and returned to my book. But shortly after, the lines began to run together. Worn out by more physical activity than I’d had in a month, I crawled into my sleeping bag and fell instantly asleep.
* * * * *
I woke to the hoot of an owl. For a moment I wondered where I was. The room was moonlit. The shadow of a tree swayed against the wall. I squinted at the red embers in the fireplace, listening intently.
At last I heard it again, the crunch of footsteps on gravel. Rolling out of the sleeping bag, I went to the windows. The night looked like it had been shot through a blue filter for a cheap horror flick.
All was silent. Still.
Had I imagined those furtive footsteps?
Pulling on a pair of jeans, I shoved my feet into shoes and grabbed my flashlight. The air was bitter as I stepped out onto the porch. The surrounding mountains prickled with gleaming arrowheads of pine. Soft-footing it across the porch, I froze as a wooden board cracked underfoot loudly as a bone break.
Nothing moved.
I continued on around the house.
The outlying sheds and barn stood dark and motionless in the moonlight. Frost glittered the rooftops. Quietly I picked my way down the steps. Nothing stirred in the yard. I stayed in the shadows of the house and waited.
Nothing.
Hours seemed to pass while I watched. I was dozy. I was chilled. I told myself that if there had been a prowler he was long gone now. I reminded myself that I needed my rest. I was a writer, not a detective, amateur or otherwise, and this was just a waste of time and valuable sleep.