by Kate Wilhelm
Surprised, she shrugged. She had driven up many times, and down, she told him. She thought her mother had come by road only that first time; after that she had refused, although she also had been afraid of the small rowboat. "I've never been on the road after dark," she admitted. "I doubt that my father ever drove it after dark."
They got out and started toward the cabin door. There was no landscaping here; pine trees, alders, and mountain laurel pressed in close to the driveway, and only the basalt shelf that held the cabin kept the dense growth from enveloping the structure.
The cabin was made of logs, with a shed roof that sloped down low on this side, making the building appear smaller than it was. The basalt formed a walkway from the door, around the side of the cabin, down to ledges that made steps to the water, ten feet lower than the cabin.
Someone had come here around the turn of the century, her father had said, and cleared some forest, used the felled logs, and built himself a hideout. The last of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang maybe. Or a miner looking for gold. Or a runaway Chinese railroad man, or an escaped convict. Over the years improvements had been added: insulation and knotty pine paneling installed, electricity brought in, appliances and furniture trucked in over that incredible road. But none of that had ever mattered to Abby; this was the hideout.
She watched in silence as Caldwell opened the padlock the police had put on the door. It probably was the first time the door had ever been locked.
Her father had added a loft, an aerie, he had called it, cantilevered out over the back, with stout supports anchored to the basalt. "What's an aerie?" she had asked.
"An eagle's nest, or a fort on a mountain, a house on a high point. That's where I'll work."
And the space under it, she had decided, was hers, a fairy cave.
They entered the cabin; it looked exactly the same as always. Knotty pine paneling aglow on the walls, Indian rugs on the floor, throws of many colors on the sofa and an easy chair, a rattan chair. The living room and kitchen made up more than half of the first floor; the rest consisted of two small bedrooms with a bathroom between them, and the staircase to the aerie. There was a television and a CD player; for years all they could watch were movies, then he had installed a satellite dish. Bookcases overflowed, more books stacked on the floor, on tables ... The table that divided the living-room area from the kitchen had a bowl of candy bars on it, just like always. Abby caught her breath and then moved to the middle of the room.
She realized that she had braced herself, had expected to see the chalk outline of a body, bloodstains, something. But there was nothing unusual to see. Everything looked natural, the same as it had been in August, the same as always. But too still, too empty. And the carpet, the stair runner, had been removed.
"I think we should have our lunch," Caldwell said behind her.
She spun around. "Not yet. Where was he? Where did it happen?" She was trembling, and her voice was harsh.
"How we reconstructed it," Caldwell said evenly, "goes something like this. He had been up in the loft. When he came down, he was shot at the bottom; he fell backwards, partway up the stairs. It probably was between one and two in the morning. Halburtson said he got up to go to the John during the night, and his wife roused enough to hear the dog barking. Mrs. Halburtson said he usually gets up between one and two, and the coroner said that's about right. She thought that maybe a cougar or a bear had come nosing around on this side. Their dogs didn't bark, so she didn't pay much attention. It was a cold night; Halburtson closed their window, and they couldn't hear the dog anymore. Not until the next morning when they got up. Then they heard it again. And they could see it from their ramp, running around the house, jumping at the windows, things like that. They tried to reach Mr. Vickers on the phone and got no answer. Finally Halburtson got his boat out and came over to investigate."
Abby was staring at the steps to the aerie. Someone came in and stood about where she was standing now, in the middle of the room, and when Jud reached the lowest step shot him in the face. She jerked away from the spot and she felt the floor tilting, the walls moving inward....
Detective Varney grabbed her, put an arm around her shoulders, steadied her a moment, then took her to one of the chairs at the table. "Put your head down, all the way, to your knees," she said calmly.
A few minutes later, sipping coffee from a thermos, they all sat gazing out the back window at the finger of water. From here it looked blue. Across the half mile to the other shore, they could make out a patch of white, Halburtson's house, and closer, the dark weathered wood of the boat shed.
"What was the arrangement with Halburtson?" Caldwell asked.
Abby was no longer light-headed, and her hands were steady now, but her voice was different, duller, when she answered. "Dad rents—rented—space in the shed for the row-boat. We'd drive out, leave the car, and cross over in the boat. You can see his boat ramp from here. Dad would put the boat in the shed if he planned to be gone more than a day, and we both just tied it to the tree stump to go shopping in Bend, or something like that."
"So theoretically anyone could have driven to his place, launched a small boat, and come across late at night," Caldwell said, still gazing out over the water.
"Not really," Abby said. "He has two dogs, Spook's mother and a littermate, and they're pretty fierce, really good watchdogs. You couldn't get near his ramp at night unless they knew you well. Dad could, and I could, but no stranger, no one else I know."
"There must be other places on that side where you could put a boat in."
She shook her head. "Not up here. This and Coop's place are the only two. You can see how the cliffs rise all around the lake and the woods.... How could you even get a boat through the woods?"
"Don't know," Caldwell said. "I say it's time for a sandwich." He began to unpack a cooler chest and very matter-of-factly handed a sandwich to Abby, then one to the detective.
After a moment Abby began to eat. Coming here, having the lieutenant recount their reconstruction of what had happened, made it real to her. Nothing had been real for the past week; she had felt trapped in a dream, felt nothing real, tasted nothing real, but now it seemed that she had been released from a spell. Someone had come in during the night, had shot and killed her father, and she would do whatever she could to help the police find out who the killer was.
After they had finished the sandwiches and packed up the thermos and cups again, the lieutenant said, "The sheriff found a rifle up in the loft, and Halburtson said your father had a handgun, too. Do you know where he kept it?"
"In the drawer by that end table," she said, pointing.
"Not there now," he said. "Do you know what kind of gun it was?
"A forty-five. I don't know the make or anything." Then, without prompting, she said, "We had another dog before Spook. Mindy, a border collie. A cougar killed her, and he said . he would get the guns, one for downstairs, to have handy, one for the loft that he could shoot from the window if he had to."
Then she was remembering again. He had wrapped Mindy in a sheet, handed Abby a shovel, and said, Let's go. That was all. He led her on a search for deep enough ground for a grave; it had been hard to find a place because it was so rocky and tree roots were everywhere. He carried Mindy in his arms like a baby until they found a spot, then he had dug the grave and they buried the dog. She had helped him pile rocks on the grave so bears or cougars wouldn't dig her up again. They had made a funeral cairn of rocks. They both had cried the day they buried Mindy. Abby had been thirteen.
That was where she would bury his ashes.
"Okay," Caldwell said. "What I'd like to do is just walk through the house, each room, and have you look around, in closets, drawers, like that, and tell us if anything is out of place, or missing, whatever you notice out of the ordinary."
They spent an hour at it: downstairs first, both bedrooms, his closet, her old closet that still had a toy box, then up to the loft, his desk, computers, some fifteen years old, one
very recent acquisition.... Detective Varney had a notebook out and made notes as they moved through the cabin; Abby couldn't imagine what she was finding to note.
"Why so many computers?" Caldwell asked in the loft. There were seven or eight against the walls, on tables.
"He used to write manuals, and he kept them all in case the codes changed, or needed modification, patches. He said obsolete computers were worthless, and he might as well hang on to them. I think he just liked them all."
"You know much about computers?"
"A bit," she said cautiously. In fact, Jud had taught her a lot about computers; she had copy-edited text for him now and then, had learned to read his code, tried out new programs— his first beta tester, he had called her.
"Maybe you can explain something," he said. "I noticed that those pages, maybe the last ones he was working on, are numbered Chapter A-three, one through nine. But there's a big stack, and they don't seem to be in any particular order. Is that his new novel he was working on?"
"Yes, I'm sure it is. That's how he worked. He rarely started with chapter one, page one. He was back and forth all over the place. A-three means chapter A, the third revision. It's not necessarily the first chapter; it could go anywhere. He could have written the first draft months ago, or just recently. You can tell more by looking at the directory, when the sections are dated, but even that won't be conclusive if he was doing a lot of rewriting, backing it up, rewriting again."
Caldwell shook his head. "He worked toward the beginning and the end all at once?"
"I think it was the only way he could work."
He looked dubious, then asked, "Did he always back up to a floppy disk?"
"Always." He had drilled it into her head: save, save, save.
"Okay. Another item, another loose end. No floppy disk was in the computer. We made copies of his hard drive, and I understand that you and his agent, Christina Maas, will be going through his papers. When you do, will you let me know how near finished he was with this project? If you can tell," he added, as if that would be impossible.
"Why?"
"I don't know," he said with a shrug. "Our computer guy says he didn't save or print out what he was working on the last time he used the computer, probably Friday night. At least, the top pages in the stack don't match up with the last file he had open. Our guy found material in the automatic backup file before anyone messed around with the computer. But if your father didn't save and exit properly, who turned the machine off, removed the floppy disk, and why?"
Abby stared at him. "You don't think it was a random act, do you? A hiker or camper, someone like that who came in?"
"Of course not," he said, leaving the loft, starting down the stairs.
After a moment she followed. She had assumed someone had come in from the forest and shot her father, a drug-crazed someone looking for money, for something he could sell, or even just a crazy who saw the light and walked in. The door would have been unlocked.
"So you can't see that anything's been disturbed?" Caldwell said, back in the living room, looking about unhappily.
"No." There were things of Willa's that never used to be there, a painting, a hairbrush, a mirror with a silver frame and handle. She didn't comment on any of those things, and neither did Caldwell, but she suspected that Detective Varney was making careful notes about them all.
"Okay, what I'd like to do is have a little row around the lake, out to the black island, along the opposite shore. You up for that?"
She started to ask why again, but since he never really answered her questions, she simply nodded. "But we should leave by four-thirty, or you'll be on the mountain road in the dark."
"Oh. See, what we figured is that Varney will go ahead and drive out, and you and I will cross over in the boat and take your father's van back to Eugene. And the dog."
Abby looked quickly at Detective Varney, who nodded.
"We probably should clean out some of that stuff from the refrigerator," the detective said, female and practical as well as police professional, Abby thought.
"I saw some paper bags over there," Varney said, pointing. "Want me to haul the perishables out and bring them to your place later this evening?"
"No," Abby said quickly. "No. Just... drop it all off at the Halburtsons, if they want it. Or keep it. Or... dump it somewhere."
It didn't take long to pack things up and carry them to the car, but then Abby said, "Wait a minute." She hurried back inside and picked up the bowl of candy bars and took it out. Caldwell and Detective Varney were at the driver's door, speaking in low voices. He came around the car and took the bowl.
"I'll be a minute," he said.
She understood that she had been dismissed and returned to the cabin. She had never felt lonely in this cabin, never afraid, or even aware of the silence, but suddenly the little building seemed filled with silence and emptiness. She walked to the kitchen counter and gazed out the window. Two bottles of champagne were on the counter. He had planned a celebration. She closed her eyes.
Soon Caldwell came back. "One more thing," he said, and went up the stairs to the loft.
Outside, the car engine started, tires grated on the gravel driveway; it sounded very loud. Proving a point, Abby thought distantly, tracking the progress of the car as it climbed the steep ascent to the forest service road. Caldwell didn't come down until the silence had returned.
"Okay. We'll lock up again and go for a boat tour. I'd like to keep the key another day or two, then I'll hand it over. You finished in here?"
She nodded. Finished.
They walked around the cabin to the natural basalt deck, where the rowboat was moored to a rock on the lowest ledge, inches above the water. The oars were in the boat.
Caldwell examined the ledge carefully. It was above water now, but in the winter rains the water rose to cover the first ledge, and with the spring runoff it came up another foot to the second ledge. He turned his attention to the rowboat; it was ten feet long and lightweight, old but sturdy. Every fall Jud had repainted it, repaired anything he saw amiss. The plank seats had been worn satin smooth.
"If you want, we could get the cushions," Abby said. "We never used them unless we planned to stay out and fish." Or if she drifted out on the water, pretending she was on a cloud high above the earth; or when Jud was drifting and claimed to be writing. He had said he did most of his writing out there on the water.
"It's fine like this," Caldwell said. He was peering at the water now. "How deep is it here?"
"About four feet."
"Looks bottomless," he said.
She began to pull the boat into the water; he watched and didn't offer to help. He was listening, she realized, to see how much noise she made launching the boat. It made a scraping sound that she had never paid attention to, a sound that now seemed very loud. The basalt was smooth, but this was the reason Jud had had to upend the boat year after year and retouch the paint. She unhooked the mooring rope from a rock, coiled it, then tossed it into the boat. "You want to row?"
He shook his head. "No way. I'd just take us in circles, or run us aground." He pointed to a light low on the back side of the cabin. "Did he keep that on at night?"
"It's automatic. Dusk to dawn. He stepped off the end once, and the next day he went to Bend and got the light. Coop has one, too. Same reason. It's hard to see the surface at night against all this basalt, especially if it's raining."
"So it wouldn't be much of a problem to cross over after dark. Just head for the light. Any other lights on up here in the finger at night?"
"No." She stepped into the boat, settled on the narrow seat, and took up the oars; gingerly he followed, evidently uncomfortable as the boat rocked with his weight. She started to row as soon as he was seated.
Abby rowed around the far end of the finger, then down to Siren Rock and the other break in the rimrock to show Caldwell the two places boats could pass from the deep water to the shallow water. She was getting tired, she thought in
disgust. This little bit of rowing was using muscles that had gone soft and lax.
"Okay," Caldwell said, gazing at the cottages along the north shore. "You up for just a little more?"
"Yes. Where?"
She assumed he wanted to go to the state park ramp or the cottages, but he seemed to have little interest in either. "Along the shoreline over there," he said, "on up to Halburtson's ramp. Close in, as close as you can."
He was examining every inch of shoreline, looking for a place a boat could have been put in the water, she realized, and she knew there was no such place. She rowed toward the shore silently. On this side the lava had flowed in narrow streams, and between them the soil was much deeper than on the far side; trees grew close to the water here, some with roots that jutted out over the lake.
"It's only about three or four feet up to land," Caldwell murmured a bit later. "Can you stop here?"