by Kate Wilhelm
Then Christina began to spread papers out on the table, and presently she asked if there was any coffee. Later, when Christina began to talk about a tax attorney, Abby shook her head.
"Stop. I don't understand the contract you're talking about, the Hollywood deal you're talking about, subsidiary rights, any of this."
"What it means," Christina said slowly, "is that if these various deals go through, if you approve and sign the contracts, you're going to make a hell of a lot of money. Not all at once, and not until the terms of the will are satisfied about the six-month waiting period, but over the next few years, perhaps a lot of years." She regarded Abby through narrowed eyes. "Jud and I kept in close touch. He said he was wrapping up a new novel, that it would be finished almost any day now. I think he meant it, that the new work was either completed or nearly done. Do you know if it's done?"
"No." Was that what his call had been about, the completion of the new novel? He was always happy when he finished; he always wanted to celebrate, and she had said no, she couldn't make it.
"You have a decision facing you," Christina was saying. "Do I handle the new work, or do you get a new agent?"
Abby had not even thought of getting a new agent, and wouldn't know how to start. "He trusted you," she said. "He wouldn't want me to change anything."
"Good. But you're right, this is too much all at once. I made copies of his files, the royalty statements, our correspondence, and notes about our telephone calls concerning the movie deal I'm working on. I'm going down to L.A. from here to try to get a final contract we can all agree to. I'll leave all the copies with you. Go over the material and whatever you don't understand, jot down questions. I'll give you a call early next week, and then, Abby, if you're up to it, I'll want to look through his past work. He said he had a lot of stuff he never even showed anyone. I want to see it. And I have to read the new novel. He said it was all in the cabin. Can we go there together, go through his papers together, see if there's anything else publishable? The policeman I talked to said there are file cases, and boxes and boxes of papers. We'll have to sort through everything."
Abby nodded. "I'll take you there."
After Christina left, Abby returned to the table and stared at the many file folders the agent had prepared for her. It wasn't fair, she thought. All those years with nothing, no money, no job, nothing, and now, too late, all that money. Jud had never held a job longer than a few months; he had written advertising copy and detested doing it, had written a lot of technical things, manuals, computer documentation, even programs, but only when things got truly desperate, only long enough to pay the electric bill or pay rent for a few months.... When Lynne finally could take it no longer, the uncertainty of a paycheck, or of having heat in the winter, never knowing if there would be enough food next week, next month, she had left him, after years of holding jobs herself, years of bitter fighting.
Jud's first novel had been published in 1989 and had not made him very much money, but the next one in 1991 had made money, and the last one four years ago had made a lot of money and would be making much, much more, according to Christina.
And if the new novel was finished . .. Abby whispered, "It's not fair."
She gathered up the file folders and took them to the guest room, the room she used for her schoolwork and her dissertation, the room her mother had stayed in. She could still smell Lynne's perfume lingering in the air. She put the folders in the desk drawer; no more for now, she thought. She didn't want to discuss any of it with Brice, not yet, not until she had grasped what it all meant. He would take over the management of the money, she knew; that was his specialty, managing money. The thought of making plans for investments, purchases, travel, all the things he would want to discuss, repulsed her. Not yet, not so soon.
She went to his study, picked up the mahogany box and carried it to her room, and placed it on her own desk.
Standing with both hands on the box, she knew that she would find a way to prevent Brice's going to the cabin the following day. She did not want him to go through her father's papers, not until she had sorted them all out. She didn't want him to read her father's short stories, his novel, which might be completed by now. First she had to read the new novel, and then she might decide to bury it with her father's ashes.
3
Brice came home late, looking tired and harried. "The market goes up, they want to sell; it goes down, they want to buy. Those who aren't on the phone yelping are in the office yelping. Buy at ten, sell at noon, buy again at two ... Stacks of unanswered calls to get to ..."
She put her fingers on his lips, aware that he had to talk about the office; he was trying to put the past week behind him, behind them, trying not to think of the coming visit to the cabin. "We have to start getting our lives in place again," she said. "You have to take care of your clients, or they'll do their yelping to the head office, and I have to go to the cabin tomorrow. I'll drive the van home and bring Spook with me. Then we'll have the weekend to get some rest." She began to tell him about Christina Maas, the Hollywood contract she was negotiating.
"I'll tag along tomorrow," he said, interrupting her.
"You'd just be in the way," she said. "There's nothing there for you to do. I'll be safe enough with a couple of cops at my elbow."
His grin in response to hers was weak, but he agreed.
Now, driving on Highway 58, with Caldwell at the wheel, Abby in the front seat, and Detective Varney in the back, they were passing through the small dying town of Oakridge. They had not yet reached the high mountains, but the road was curvy and there was a lot of traffic, people getting an early start on a weekend outing, logging trucks, RVs, commercial trucks. It was one of the most dangerous routes across the Cascades, with fatal accidents year after year; today it would take longer than the two hours Abby had predicted.
"How did your father stumble across such a remote cabin?" Caldwell asked, picking up speed again outside the town, along with everyone else on the road.
"It was his father's. Grandfather was transferred down to Santa Rosa, and he was going to let it go for back taxes, I guess, so Dad bought it for what was owed the state. He spent every summer and most weekends up there when he was a kid. I did, too."
Caldwell muttered a curse as an oncoming driver pulled out to pass; there was nowhere to move over, no room to pass, either. The idiot driver pulled back in line.
Abby had hardly noticed. She was remembering the scene when Lynne learned that Jud was taking over the cabin. "You're paying his taxes! What with? We can't even afford to get our own place."
"I told you, I took the job with Aaronson. Dad will carry a loan for a few months."
"For a lousy cabin you'll get a job! Look at that bathroom! Look at that kitchen sink! We live like dogs, and you want to buy a cabin in the woods!"
"Wait till you see it. You'll love it as much as I do. And Pudding Face here will, too. Won't you?"
Abby had nodded. "Why is it called Two-Finger Lake?" She was coloring pictures.
"Make a fist," Jud said. "Here, put your hand down on the paper first. Now, trace around it with your crayon, all around."
She traced her fist, then looked at him. She was four.
"Okay. Good. Now stick out your first two fingers."
She put out her little finger and her ring finger, and he laughed. "Wrong two. This one, and this one." He touched her forefinger and middle finger, and she extended them, keeping the rest of her hand fisted on the outline she had traced. Jud took the crayon and drew around the two fingers. "And there it is! Two-Finger Lake. See?"
She studied the object they had drawn and shook her head. "It's a rabbit," she said.
Jud laughed. "Damned if it isn't. Okay. It's Rabbit Lake, and our cabin is right here, on the lower ear." The setting for all his novels had been Rabbit Lake.
She had loved it already that day, with as much fervor as Lynne hated it. Neither of them ever changed her mind about the cabin on Rabbit Lake.
&nbs
p; "Did he actually live out there, or just hang out between other things?" Caldwell asked, bringing Abby back to the present, back to the reality of her father's murder.
"For years we just went up for weekends and summers. After I graduated from high school, he moved all the way out." When she married Matthew Petrie, he moved all the way out, she should have said, if she had been more literal about the facts. He had taken an apartment for her sake, so she could finish high school in Eugene, and as soon as she was out from underfoot, two weeks after her graduation, one week after her marriage, he was gone. Within a month he had finished his first novel, and a year later it had been published.
Traffic was slowing now as they climbed into the mountains. There were no more villages, nothing but the road with all-too-rare passing lanes and the mountains from now on. Somewhere up ahead, she knew, there would be a camper laboring up the road, with a line of impatient drivers crawling after it, darting out to pass whenever they thought they could chance it. Caldwell seemed content with the slow going, she thought with relief. Jud had always been a patient driver, too.
The mountains were beautiful at this time of year; sumac, vine maples, poison oak all blazed scarlet, and the cottonwoods were golden against the perpetual dark green of the fir forests with their deep shadows. There had been enough rain that the fire hazard was not high this year, but not enough rain and wind to denude the trees early. Not enough soaking rain to bring up the mushrooms.
Remembering again. Jud had shaken her arm to wake her up early one morning. "Time to go hunting, princess," he said.
She had been sleepy and fearful. Hunting? They had been at the cabin two days, and that night they had to go back to Eugene. Lynne had refused to go with them that weekend. "It's been raining all week," she had snapped. "It'll be cold and wet. I’ll wait here, thank you."
But at the lake the sun had come out, and the following day Abby and Jud had gone hunting, carrying mesh bags they could sling over their shoulders, and they had filled them both with mushrooms. Then they went out in the rowboat and fished, and that night they ate lake trout and mushrooms with rice. They had taken mushrooms back to town with them, but Lynne had refused to touch them.
"You wait for a good soaking rain," Jud had said, "and two days after it stops, the mushrooms pop up like magic. They like to hide underground, but they know exactly when to come up for some fresh air."
They crossed over Willamette Pass, and there was the sign for the ski resort off to the right, and another one for a recreation area, also on the right. Abby said, "The turn to the state park road is just up ahead on the left." It was a dangerous turn; the traffic speed had increased again going downhill, but there were still cars, trucks, campers climbing up from the east. The problem now was not the oncoming traffic as much as the traffic behind them; stopping and waiting for the opportunity to make the turn invited a rear-end collision. They had been driving for two hours and ten minutes when Caldwell entered the road that led to the state park.
"Halburtson's driveway is on the left, just up ahead," Abby said. This road was narrower than the highway, but a good road with pine forest pressing in closely on both sides; it was easy to miss the entrance to Coop Halburtson's place.
"I know," Caldwell said. "We crossed over the lake from there last time. Today I thought I'd drive up, see what that's like." He glanced at her. "The road's passable, isn't it?"
"At this time of year it's okay, unless it's snowed recently. Later you'd need a four-wheel drive, but it would be crazy later even then. We never drove up in the winter. In fact, we hardly ever drove up at all. We used the boat to go across the finger unless we had big things to carry. You'll add another forty-five minutes to the trip."
"I thought we might," he said. He drove past Coop Halburtson's property, and soon after that turned at the entrance to Two-Finger Lake State Park onto a winding lava-rock road with smaller lanes that led to campsites hidden among trees on the right. He passed them and drove to the boat-launching area, where he pulled in and parked. There were canoes, rowboats, even a kayak or two on the lake, nothing motorized. Motor-boats were forbidden here.
"Let's stretch our legs," he said, "before we attack the mountain. Why is the water so black?"
It looked as black as ink, but that was deceptive. From another vantage point it would appear to be almost as blue as Crater Lake. "It's underlain with basalt in places," Abby said.
They walked to a rail and stood gazing at the water, at the surrounding cliffs, the boats. Like most of the state parks, this one was well used year-round; there were a lot of people in the area that day.
"One of the things bothering us," Caldwell said, watching the boats, "is how the killer approached the cabin. Can you see it from here?"
Abby shook her head. "You can see part of the finger, but not the cabin. It's only a couple of miles from here, actually, but the cabin is set back a bit; trees block it from view."
"Two miles," he said musingly. "Why couldn't someone have launched a boat down here and paddled up?"
She had rowed across to the state park many times, and occasionally someone did row up the finger to the end, but only in daylight. She pointed. "See that cliff over there, the basalt rimrock? It goes into the water, just below the surface mostly, but there's a place where it's actually above the water level. You can spot it from here. But just barely. There's a break in the rocks there, at the left of the basalt. At night you'd need a powerful light to find your way through without grounding. There's another break over by the cliffs, and you can't see it at all unless you're out on the water. They're both hard to see in daylight, and invisible at night."
Caldwell was peering at the lake, frowning, but Detective Varney exclaimed, "I see it. A little island, a little black island."
Abby nodded. Siren Rock. Jud had rowed her out to it one hot summer day; about four feet long and half that wide, it rose from the water no more than six inches, black and shiny, as smooth as the back of the Loch Ness monster. She had said, "It's a Siren rock, isn't it? Calling you to the deep water where the fish are." She had been reading a lot of mythology that summer, and Siren Rock the island had become. Jud's first novel was titled Siren Rock.
Their finger was quite shallow, no more than eight feet at the deepest point, but at this side of Siren Rock the basin plunged down eighty or ninety feet, and the water was many degrees colder than in the finger. They always fished in the deep water, and swam in the warm shallow water.
There were no boats visible in the finger, and never any boats in the north finger, which was a spring-fed creek that had spread out fifty feet or more and was hazardous with boulders and blowdowns, unnavigable. It was good for finding crawfish and pretty rocks and places where she used to slide down slippery, moss-covered boulders and splash into tiny pools.
She turned her back on the lake and looked instead at the high mountains.
"Let's move on," Caldwell said. "We brought sandwiches and things. We'll eat when we reach the cabin. I suspected there wouldn't be much in the way of edibles along the way here."
They drove out of the parking area and came to another intersection. "Where does that go?" Caldwell asked.
"East, over to Highway 97, about ten miles, another couple of miles up to Bend. That's where people out here go shopping, rent movies, things like that. The other way goes to the cottages on the north shore of the lake. Mostly summer places or weekend retreats."
He kept driving. Another dirt road angled off to the right, and she said, before he asked this time, "That goes up to a hot spring. It's pretty popular, but tough to get to." It was a deeply rutted dirt road. Most visitors hiked up. The forest service road they were on, only marginally better at the start, became much worse; it went up and down, back and forth, climbed steeply, then dropped just as steeply. It was sixteen miles from Highway 58 to the cabin, and it took at least forty-five minutes to drive there. She had called this the roily-coaster road and had loved it. Remembering. Looking out the back window, she had seen a c
loud of dust billowing after them, and she had decided it was helping out, pushing them up the mountain.
Detective Varney made a soft sound in the backseat and Caldwell slowed even more. Ahead, it appeared that the road vanished into nothingness, another outside hairpin curve.
"I sure wouldn't want to drive this at night," Caldwell muttered. Now and then the lake came into view, but he didn't look down to admire the changing scene, sometimes blue water, sometimes black.
"This is why we use the boat to go back and forth," Abby said.
They came to a one-lane bridge over the north finger, in deep forest now, with no sign of the lake or the cliffs they had traversed.
"It's only a little farther," Abby said. "It's hard to see the driveway until you get right on it."
When they reached the gravel driveway, Caldwell was making the turn before she could tell him now. The cabin was fifty feet lower than the road, with a steep approach. He stopped the car and looked at Abby. "You ever drive up here by yourself?"