So much for Herb Jackson, I thought then. Now I could start worrying about the red-haired man again.
What I had said about being afraid he'd drowned was a lie. But he was not a ghost and he had not pulled any magical vanishing act; he was still here, and I was pretty sure he was still alive. It was just that Jackson and I had overlooked something—and it had not occurred to me what it was until Jackson said there was nothing here except tule grass and shrubs and three trees. That was not quite true. There was something else on the islet, and it made one place we had failed to search; that was where the man had to be.
I went straight to it, hurrying, and when I got there I said my name again in a loud voice and added that I was a detective from San Francisco.
Then I said, "He's gone now; there's nobody around but me. You're safe."
Nothing happened for fifteen seconds. Then there were sounds and struggling movement, and I waded in quickly to help him with some careful lifting and pushing.
And there he was, burrowing free of a depression in the soft mud, out from under my rented skiff just above the waterline where I had beached the forward half of it.
When he was clear of the boat I released my grip on the gunwale and eased him up on his feet. He kept trying to talk, but he was in no shape for that yet; most of what he said was gibberish. I got him into the skiff, wrapped him in a square of canvas from the stern—he was shivering so badly you could almost hear his bones clicking together—and cleaned some of the mud off him. The area behind his right ear was pulpy and badly lacerated, but if he was lucky he didn't have anything worse than a concussion.
While I was doing that he calmed down enough to be coherent, and the first thing he said was, "He tried to kill me. He tried to murder me."
"I figured as much. What happened?"
"We were in his boat; we'd just put in to the island because he said there was something wrong with the ignition. He asked me to take a look, so I pulled off my coat and leaned down under the wheel. Then my head seemed to explode. The next thing I knew, I was floundering in the south-side channel."
"He hit you with that fishing rod of his, probably," I said. "The current carried you along after he dumped you overboard and the cold water brought you around. Why does he want you dead?"
"It must be the insurance. We own a company in Sacramento and we have a partnership policy—double indemnity for accidental death. I knew Frank was in debt, but I never thought he'd go this far."
"Frank? Then his name isn't Herb Jackson?"
"No. It's Saunders, Frank Saunders. Mine's Rusty McGuinn." Irish, I thought. Like O'Farrell. That figures.
I got out again to slide the skiff off the beach and into the slough. When I clambered back in, McGuinn said, "You knew he was after me, didn't you? That's why you didn't give me away when the two of you were together."
"Not exactly." I started the engine and got us under way at a good clip upstream. "I didn't have any idea who you were or where you'd come from until I looked inside Jackson's—or Saunders'- boat. He told me he was alone and he'd put in after crayfish. But he was carrying one rod and there were two more casting outfits in the boat; you don't need all that stuff for crayfish; and no fisherman alone is likely to carry three outfits for any reason. There was a heavy sheepskin jacket there, too, draped over the seat; but he was already wearing a heavy mackinaw, and I remembered you only had on a short-sleeved jacket when you came out of the water. It all began to add up then. I talked him into leaving as soon as I could."
"How did you do that?"
"By telling him what he wanted to hear—that you must be dead."
"But how did you know where I was hiding?"
I explained how Saunders had triggered the answer for me. "I also tried to put myself in your place. You were hurt and scared; your first thought would be to get away as fast as possible. Which meant by boat, not by swimming. So it figured you hid nearby until I was far enough away and then slipped back to the skiff.
"But this boat—like Saunders'—starts with a key, and I had it with me. You could have set yourself adrift, but then Saunders might have seen you and come chasing in his boat. In your condition it made sense you might burrow under the skiff, with a little space clear at one side so you could breathe."
"Well, I owe you a debt," McGuinn said. "You saved my life."
"Forget it," I said, a little ruefully. Because the truth was I had almost got him killed. I had told Saunders he was on the island and insisted on a two-man search party; and I had failed to tumble to who and what Saunders was until it was almost too late. If McGuinn hadn't been so well hidden, if we'd found him, Saunders would probably have jumped me and I might not have been able to handle him; McGuinn and I could both be dead now. I'm not a bad detective, usually; other times, though, I'm a near bust.
The channel that led to Whiskey Island loomed ahead. Cheer up, I told myself—the important thing is that this time, 120 years after the first one, the red-haired Irish bludgeon victim is being brought out alive and the man who assaulted him is sure to wind up in prison. The ghost of O'Farrell, the Gold Rush miner, won't have any company when it goes prowling and swearing vengeance on those foggy nights in Dead Man's Slough.
The Ghosts of Ragged-Ass Gulch
1.
The name of the place was Ragged-Ass Gulch.
That was the name the town had been born with anyway, back in the days of the California Gold Rush when gold fever raged up in Trinity County as well as in the Mother Lode and a group of miners discovered nuggets in Musket Creek north of Weaverville. Nobody seemed to know any more why the town that sprang up along the creek's banks had been so colorfully dubbed. But it wasn't unusual for miners, who were themselves a colorful lot, to give their camps unconventional names; Whiskeytown, Lousy Ravine, Rowdy Bar, Bogus Thunder, and Git-Up-And-Git were just a few of their other inventions.
At any rate, Ragged-Ass Gulch had flourished for three or four years, with a population of fifteen hundred at its peak, until the gold in the vicinity petered out and the miners left for other diggings. Then, slowly, it had begun to die. By the mid-1850s, only a hundred or so people remained and the town was renamed Cooperville, after the largest of the families that came to settle there. Those hundred had shrunk to less than thirty by the turn of the century, which made it a virtual ghost town. It was still a virtual ghost town: at last count, exactly sixteen people lived there.
I had my first look at it on a bright morning in mid June. Beside me in the car, Kerry said, "Good Lord, it's beautiful," in a surprised voice. "No wonder the people who live here don't want the place developed."
We had just angled between a couple of high forested cliffs, and down below the mountains had folded back to create a huge park-like meadow carpeted with wild clover, poppies, purple-blue lupine. The town lay sprawled at the back end, where the narrow line of Musket Creek meandered through the high grass and wildflowers. Most of the buildings were tumbledown—and off to the left I could see the blackened skeletons of the four that had burned ten days ago—but at a distance the sunlight and the majestic surroundings softened the look of them, gave them a kind of odd, lonely dignity. Far off to the east, you could see the immense snowcapped peak of Mt. Shasta jutting more than fourteen thousand feet into the dusky blue sky.
"Now why would anybody call a pretty spot like this Ragged-Ass Gulch?" Kerry asked.
"Somebody's idea of a joke, maybe. Miners had strange senses of humor."
"That's for sure."
She put her head out of the open passenger window and sniffed the air like a cat, looking off toward Mt. Shasta. She seemed to have begun to enjoy herself finally, which was a relief. She hadn't wanted to come because she was miffed at me, and I'd had to do some fast talking to convince her. Ordinarily I would not have considered bringing Kerry along on an investigation; my profession being what it was, it was seldom a good idea to mix business and pleasure. But in this instance, there were extenuating circumstances.
When we reac
hed the meadow, the road deteriorated into little more than a pair of ruts with a grassy hump in the middle. It angled off to the right and eventually forked; one branch became the single main street of Cooperville, nee Ragged-Ass Gulch, and the other hooked up and disappeared into the flanking slopes to the west, where I had been told some of the townspeople lived.
The first building we came to was on the near side of the fork. It was one of the few occupied ones in the town proper, a combination single-pump gas station, garage and body shop, and general store. The garage and store buildings were weathered and unpainted, but in a decent state of repair; a sign that said Cooperville Mercantile hung over the screen-doored entrance to the latter, and the facing wall was plastered with old metal Coca-Cola and beer signs. Around back, to one side, was a frame cottage with a big native-stone chimney at one end. The folks who lived in the cottage and ran the businesses were the Coleclaws: one husband, one wife, one son.
I pulled in off the road and stopped next to the gas pump. A fat brown-and-white dog came around from behind the store, took one look at the car, and began barking its head off. No one else appeared.
"I'll go see who's here," I said to Kerry. "You wait in the car, okay?"
"Like a nice dutiful little wife?"
Here we go again, I thought. "Come on, babe, you know this is business."
"It wasn't supposed to be business. It wasn't supposed to be Ragged-Ass Gulch either."
"Kerry . . ."
"Oh, all right. Go on, I'll wait here."
I got out of the car, sighing a little, keeping my eye on the dog. It continued to bark, but it didn't make any sudden moves in my direction. I took the fact that its tail was wagging to be a positive sign and started toward the entrance to the store.
Just before I got there, a pudgy young guy in grease-stained overalls appeared in the doorway of the adjacent garage. "Be quiet, Sam," he said to the dog. He didn't say anything to me, or move out of the doorway. And the dog went right on yapping.
I walked over to where the young guy stood. He was in his middle twenties and he had curly brown hair and pink beardless cheeks and big doe eyes that had a remote look in them. The eyes watched me without curiosity as I came up to him.
"Hi," I said. "You're Gary Coleclaw, right?"
"Yeah," he said.
"I'd like to talk to your father, if he's around."
"He's not. He went into Weaverville this morning for supplies."
"How about your mother? Is she here?"
"No. She went to Weaverville too."
"When will they be back?"
He shrugged. "I dunno. This afternoon sometime."
"Well, maybe you can help me. I'm a detective, from San Francisco, and I—"
"Detective?" he said.
"Yes. I'm investigating the death of Allan Randall, over in Redding—"
"The Munroe guy," he said. His face closed up; you could see it happening, like watching a poppy fold its petals at sundown. "The fire. I don't know nothing about that. Except he got what was coming to him."
"Is that what your father says too?"
"That's what everybody says. Listen, you working for them? Them Munroe guys?"
"No.
"Yeah, you are. Them damn Munroe guys."
He wheeled away from me and hurried back inside the garage. I called after him, "Hey, wait," but he didn't stop or turn. An old Chrysler sat on the floor inside, its front end jacked up; there was one of those little wheeled mechanics' carts alongside, and he dropped down onto it on his back and scooted himself under the Chrysler until only his legs were showing. A moment later I heard the sharp, angry sound of some kind of tool whacking against the undercarriage.
The damned dog was still barking. I sidestepped it and went back to the car. When I slid in under the wheel, Kerry asked, "Well?"
"He wouldn't talk to me. And his folks aren't here."
"What now?"
"The Cooperville fire," I said.
2.
I drove out along the road again. Just beyond the fork, two more occupied cottages sat side by side; the nearest one had a deserted look, but in the yard of the second, a heavyset woman in her late sixties or early seventies, wearing man's clothing and a straw hat, was wielding a hoe among tall rows of tomato vines. She stopped when she heard the car and stood staring out at the road as we passed by, as if she resented the appearance of strangers in Cooperville.
Kerry said, "None of the natives is very friendly, the way it looks."
"I didn't expect that they would be," I said.
I took the right fork that led through what was left of the town. It amounted to about two blocks' worth of buildings on both sides of the road, although on either end and back into the meadow you could see foundations and other remains of what had once been more buildings and streets. Most of the structures still standing were backed up against the creek. There were about fifteen altogether, all made of logs and whipsawed boards, some with stone foundations, a third with badly decayed frames and collapsed roofs. The largest, two stories, girdled by a sagging verandah at the second level, looked to have been either a hotel or a saloon with upstairs accommodations; it bore no signs, and as was the case with the others we passed, its doors and windows were boarded up. Except for faded lettering over the entrance to one that said Union Drug Store, it was impossible to tell what sort of establishments any of them had been.
Kerry seemed impressed. "This is some place," she said. "I've never been in a ghost town before."
"Spooky, huh?"
"No. I'm fascinated. How long have these buildings been here?"
"More than a hundred years, some of them."
"And there've been people living here all that time and nobody ever tried to restore any of them?"
"Not in a good long while."
"Well, why not? I mean, you'd think somebody would want to preserve a historic place like this."
"Somebody does," I said. "The Munroe Corporation."
"I don't mean that kind of preservation. You know what I mean."
"Uh-huh. It's a good question, but I don't know the answer."
She frowned a little, thoughtfully. "What kind of people live here, anyway?"
I had no answer for her. Half of the sixteen residents had been born in Cooperville; the other half had gravitated to it because they liked its isolation. It was up near the Oregon border, three hundred miles from San Francisco, and to get to it you had to take an unpaved road that climbed seven miles off State Highway 3. The tourists hadn't discovered it because it was so far off the beaten track. The residents liked that, too. What they seemed to want more than anything else was to be left alone.
The problem was, they weren't being left alone. Most of the land in the area was government protected—the Shasta Trinity National Recreation Area—but the land on which Cooperville sat was owned by Trinity County. A group of developers, the Munroe Corporation, had begun buying it up during the past year, with the intention of turning Cooperville into a place the tourists would discover: widening and paving the access road, restoring the rundown buildings after the fashion of the Mother Lode towns, adding things like a Frontier Town Amusement Park, stables for horseback rides up into the mountains, and a couple of lodges to accommodate vacationers and overnight guests.
The Cooperville residents were up in arms over this. They didn't want to live in a tourist trap and they didn't want to be forced out of their homes by a bunch of outsiders. So they had banded together and hired a law firm to try to block the sale of the land, to get Cooperville named as a state historical site. Lawsuits were still pending against the Munroe Corporation, but everybody figured it was just a matter of time before the bulldozers and workmen moved in and another little piece of history died and was reincarnated as a chunk of modern commercialism.
One of the residents seemed to have been unwilling to accept that fate, however, and had taken matters into his own hands. Four of the town's abandoned buildings had burned to the ground ten days befo
re, including the remains of a "Fandango Hall"—a saloon-and-gambling house—that the developers had been particularly interested in restoring. The Munroe people thought it was a blatant case of arson, and put pressure on the county sheriff's office to investigate; but the law had found no evidence that the fire had been deliberately set, and the official report tabbed it as "of unknown origin."
Bad feelings were running high by this time, on both sides. And they got worse—much worse. Two days ago, there had been another fire, not in Cooperville this time but in Redding, some forty miles away, where the Munroe Corporation had its offices. The bachelor home of the president of the Munroe combine, a man named Randall who had been the most outspoken against the citizens of Cooperville, had gone up in flames shortly past midnight. Randall had gone up with it. He was not supposed to be home that night—it was common knowledge that he was going to San Francisco on company business—but he'd put off the trip at the last minute. He had evidently been asleep when the blaze started, had been overcome by smoke before he could get out of the burning house. There was no evidence of arson; as far as the local cops were concerned, his death was a tragic accident.
But the other Munroe partners thought otherwise. The Great Western Insurance Company, which carried a hundred-thousand-dollar double indemnity partnership policy on Randall's life and on the lives of the three remaining partners, was also skeptical. Insurance companies are always leery when a heavily insured party dies under unusual circumstances, especially when his business partners are the beneficiaries. Great Western wanted Randall's death investigated for that reason. And the Munroe people wanted his death investigated both to exonerate themselves of any wrongdoing and to find out which of the Cooperville residents was responsible for the fires.
Scenarios - A Collection of Nameless Detective Stories Page 6