by Gwen Moffat
‘It wasn’t any use to the owners. No one survived.’
‘Christ, Julius! How do we know?’ He looked defiant. ‘I like old Asa,’ Charlotte told Miss Pink. ‘I don’t think he did it. And they searched but they never found any of the missing stuff.’
‘Of course not.’ Semple grinned. ‘He hid it in the forest. He’s lived here all his life. You gotta believe it: Fortune robbed those bodies.’
Charlotte looked at him, then away. ‘But he’s not violent,’ Miss Pink pressed.
‘Not as far as we know,’ Semple said heavily.
They ushered her out of a side door to see the larger exhibits. Standing between an old horse-hearse and an ancient Ford Coupé, Miss Pink assured them that she would be back. They responded politely, almost absently; whether she returned or not seemed immaterial to them. She thought that they were collectors rather than curators; the museum, or rather its clutter of artefacts (which she really did wish she had more time to study) fulfilled a need, a gap which might otherwise have been filled by children.
Following their directions she returned to the highway to find the gas station which was a mile south of the Dogtown turn-off. Her tank was filled by a sleepy blonde who had stuck foil stars on her large front teeth. A limpid gaze and masticating jaws gave her a bovine air, strengthened by her difficulty in deducting twelve dollars and eight cents from fifteen dollars, even with the aid of a calculator.
‘You must be Mrs Wolf,’ Miss Pink said chattily.
‘Yeah.’ There was no surprise. ‘How did you know?’
‘The wedding ring. And I stayed in Dogtown.’ In the face of a vacuous stare Miss Pink spoke clearly, trying to drive the meaning into the other’s brain: ‘You’ll get a lot of motorists stopping here to fill their tanks before crossing the mountains.’
‘I guess.’
‘Many foreigners?’
Mrs Wolf blinked. ‘Some.’ She thought about that. ‘How would you know, if they got hire-cars with California plates?’
‘They would talk differently.’
The girl shrugged and seated herself gracefully on a stool. Crossing long brown legs she yawned and picked up a magazine. Miss Pink said: ‘You had an Englishman here some weeks ago. He was driving a pale blue Jeep.’
‘We did? That’s too long to remember.’
Miss Pink went back to her truck, took the petrol cap from the top of the pump where Mrs Wolf had left it, and screwed it on the tank. Metal rang on concrete and she realised that the shadowed bay beside the office was a working garage. A man was in there, under a pick-up. She walked over and coughed. He pulled himself out: a heavy, middle-aged fellow, but obliging.
‘I wonder,’ she said diffidently, ‘if you could take a look at my rear light. It may be just a fuse …’
He came and looked and found the loose wire which she’d just disconnected. He admired the Cherokee, discovered she came from London and stood chatting as if he had all the time in the world. Trade was slow at the end of summer, he told her; it would take up again after Christmas with the skiers coming through to Mammoth. He wasn’t grumbling; he could go hunting in the fall, leave the wife to look after the pumps. It was easy to steer the conversation to the Joplin Trail.
‘This sure is a season for the English,’ he said. ‘They’ll have told you about the others?’ Her hesitation was minimal but he’d seen it. ‘Yeah, they wouldn’t be able to help themselves; they’re a lot of old women up to Dogtown. Got nothing else to do except gossip about each other.’
‘And about the visitors.’ She took a very long shot. ‘What was she really like?’ She said it with the air of one needing to plug a gap and he accepted it as such but he didn’t like it.
He shrugged and looked sullen. ‘She was quite a looker – pale: light skin, blue eyes, big mouth.’ He glanced at Miss Pink. ‘She wasn’t a slut!’
‘Oh no!’ She was shaken. ‘Argent is a discerning man.’
‘Aren’t we all?’ It was bitter, explosive.
She glanced towards the office where Mrs Wolf was hunched over her magazine. ‘Where did they meet?’ She was casual and he replied in kind.
‘God knows. Does it matter? They’re gone.’ Bitterness was replaced by hostility and he threw her a startled look as if a thought had suddenly occurred to him. ‘Maybe you’ll catch them up; you can ask them all about it.’
She drove back past Dogtown on the dirt road that skirted the little community, and headed for the wide mouth of Malachite Canyon. The road began to rise but it was neither steep nor particularly rough and it was followed by a power line. She drove through the little pinyons of the arid lands to big Jeffrey pines, the kind of tree which had provided the timber for Dogtown. Here and there the yellow blooms of blazingstar were bright against the gloom of the forest but most of the flowers were over.
Miss Pink was preoccupied, not so much with the identity of Argent’s companion, and only vaguely with the question of where he had picked her up. Even the reason why there had been no mention of her in Dogtown seemed less important than the motive for Argent’s silence. Why should a woman – an Englishwoman as Hiram Wolf had implied – not why but how – how could she have bewitched the author to the extent that he couldn’t even take the trouble to mail a postcard to his publisher? And where was he holed up at this moment?
She thought of the other side of the Sierras: the great fertile valley of the San Joaquin with its farms and bright little towns, the oilfields in the south, but she couldn’t visualise him in that kind of environment. Beyond the San Joaquin were the coastal ranges with their steep, narrow valleys; beyond the coast ranges was the ocean.
She came to a fork and stopped without thinking, or rather, she thought about the coast. Big Sur: a rocky, sundrenched shore, black cypresses, sea lions and pelicans, the blue Pacific. She could picture him there: in a rented house on Big Sur. She looked up the road ahead; by tonight she might have a hint of which way they had gone: west to the coast, north to San Francisco or – there was a further possibility, a lure for one kind of writer – or south to Hollywood. That wasn’t likely, it would mean breaking his contract – or would it? He was under no obligation to keep in touch with his publisher; he could be fulfilling his contract at this moment, writing the book, doing a screenplay at the same time. She thought about it and shook her head helplessly; he might not be in America at all.
She looked moodily along the fork to her left. Before Hiram Wolf dropped his bombshell she had intended driving up the side canyons: Crazy Mule and Danger, in order to satisfy herself that the pale blue Jeep was not parked at their heads. She was almost certain that it couldn’t be; people must have been in the canyons over the past few weeks, although only a local person would have noticed the continued presence of a vehicle; it would mean nothing to a back-packer passing through.
From the Forest map she saw that the road up Crazy Mule was over four miles in length. Better get it over, close a gap. She turned up the track and almost immediately had to engage four-wheel drive. She saw no recent wheel tracks, only the imprint of hoofs: deer and cows. Once she heard a strange, yet strangely familiar sound. She stopped and cut the engine, straining her ears. Unmistakably she heard the chime of a bell, a cowbell. She got down and stalked the sound through the trees until she caught a glimpse of a red and white flank among the trunks. There was a clash as the cow lifted her head. It regarded her for a moment then blundered away.
She returned to her truck and studied the ground thoughtfully. The fact that there were no tyre tracks wasn’t conclusive; they could have been washed away by summer storms. She drove on. Some two miles up Crazy Mule a deer and a well-grown fawn crossed the track. A second doe appeared, saw the truck and retreated. Miss Pink paused at the place where a narrow path ran down to the creek. A very old cabin stood there, a stovepipe protruding from its roof. There was a chopping block with an axehead embedded in it and a grey towel draped over the shaft. The chimney wasn’t smoking and nothing moved until the second doe appeared f
urther up the track. She slipped across, followed by a skittish fawn.
A mile or so beyond the cabin a tarn showed on the left, reflecting the sky. At its far end the road stopped and a footpath took off purposefully into the forest. There was no sign of any vehicle other than her own, and only a few empty beer cans and the charred circles of old fires indicated that people came here. The lake had an abandoned look, secretive, even sinister. She was about eight miles from Dogtown and too close for comfort to that log cabin which must be occupied by the man called Fortune. Since he didn’t appear to be at home, he could be anywhere, perhaps watching her at this moment. Asa Fortune who robbed bodies. But nothing had been proved; he’d never been known to be violent.
She climbed back behind the wheel and drove down the canyon, a little faster, but that could be explained by its being downhill. And trees were deadly monotonous. She hadn’t even got above them. In fact, she wondered if the timber line at this latitude stretched to the summit of the Sierras, at least to the passes. She knew a moment of panic and longed to be at the top and going down the other side when, presumably, she’d see low ground through the gaps, would see something more than tree-trunks.
There was still no sign of life at the old cabin. Back in the main canyon she turned west but she had gone only a short distance when she came to the fork for Danger Creek, this time on her right, and that was where the power line went. She turned on to a good gravel surface and soon she crossed a cattle-grid to meadows and a monstrosity of a house in bright brown wood with a roof that appeared to be made of tarred felt. It was tall and squarish with windows on two storeys: high windows, arched windows, huge portholes. The corners which she could see were in the form of turrets – angled, of course, but in view of the ostentatious whole, angled only because pine planks can’t be curved.
In the rear there were barns, corrals, a neat new cabin. A big pick-up was in the yard. There had been no mention of anyone living in the canyons other than Asa Fortune. She turned her attention to the meadows and observed that from this clearing in the forest she could see the length of Danger Canyon to its headwall and a saddle between granite towers. That would be Deadboy, some five or six miles distant – air miles of course; a footpath would rise in long zigzags increasing the distance. All trails were graded for horses in this country.
She drove through the pasture to a locked gate. Beyond it the Deadboy trail was wide but unmarked by tyres. She turned round and drove up to the cabin behind the house. At the sound of the engine a man appeared at the entrance to a barn. They approached each other with an appearance of nonchalance, Miss Pink disguising her interest behind a front of good humour which bore just a hint of arrogance.
‘Good morning. Do you have the key of the gate?’
‘It won’t do you no good – ma’am. You can’t drive through.’
‘You mean it’s impossible, or it’s private land?’
‘The trail’s washed out.’
‘I wondered. I saw there were no tracks. I’m following the Joplin Trail – like Timothy Argent.’ She’d anticipated recognition of the name, even a disclaimer, but not the reaction she did get. His jaw dropped then clamped shut – she heard his teeth click – and muscles hardened in his cheeks. He scowled. The silence stretched. ‘Not everyone’s cup of tea perhaps?’ She regarded him benignly but her eyes demanded an answer.
His gaze wandered over the meadows and up towards Deadboy. ‘I didn’t know him,’ he said at last. ‘I met him, he came by, but he was only looking. He reckoned as how the Joplins went up Crazy Mule anyways.’ His eyes lightened a fraction. ‘You been up Crazy Mule, ma’am?’
‘I have. Was he alone when he came here?’
There was a quality of menace about his stillness, about the time it took him to respond. He was a good-looking young man with dark regular features under an old hat, but in the shade of its brim his eyes were flat, opaque, like a lizard’s. There was a snake tattooed on his left forearm. ‘I don’t know nothing,’ he said softly. ‘I’m just the caretaker here.’
‘I see. Who owns the house?’
There was another pause. She knew that he was considering the impulse to tell her to mind her own business.
‘A gentleman from Missouri,’ he said.
She smiled coldly, wondering what he was hiding, or if he had nothing to hide and was merely displaying the backwoodsman’s suspicion of strangers. She turned and walked over to her truck, aware of a cold point between her shoulderblades.
Chapter 5
The route to Breakneck Pass climbed the headwall with tight bends where gravel had collected in long furrows. The Jeep loved the climb: purring up the straight stretches and creeping round the bends so smoothly that Miss Pink had to clamp down on a feeling of euphoria, to remind herself that this was a ranch road and not designed for tourists. There was no parapet, no posts, not even a low bank. Indeed, in places the verge had eroded and there was no warning of the break, not even a marker as would be the case on a paved highway. Here the driver’s concentration must be absolute; one moment of distraction – glancing at the view when on the outside of a bend, following the flight of an eagle – and control would be lost. One wheel too close to the edge and the truck’s own weight would drag it over.
The first elbow was the worst. The road rose slowly out of Malachite Canyon and Miss Pink was prepared for the initial turn because the creek came down the headwall and she could see that there was no track on the far bank – if you can call a slope a bank when it is close to the vertical. But although she anticipated a sharp turn, its constriction took her by surprise and she went too wide and too fast, the tyres scrambling for friction. There was an impression of an abyss below the point of the bend, of dark cliffs above a flash of falling water, then the truck straightened and came back to the correct side of the road.
She was lucky; no vehicle had been coming down. All the same, she took the higher bends with caution, glancing sideways only when she was on a long straight.
She was climbing the timbered spur between Danger and Malachite Creeks. Occasionally there were rock outcrops affording breaks in the forest where she could look east across the desert to a range that must mark the boundary of Death Valley fifty miles away. The depths were blue with distance, the ranges ashen, but near at hand and full in the sun pine needles were a gorgeous green. A few flowers had survived the frosts at this altitude: a sprinkling of yellow composites and clumps of asters like Michaelmas daisies.
Crags gave way to big cliffs that rose clear of the timber, and the trees themselves were tall; there were ponderosas now among the Jeffrey pines. The forest continued right to the pass which was indicated by a sign, otherwise she wouldn’t have known she’d reached it. The road didn’t dip on the other side and the trees were so thick on the level ground that there was no view.
She stopped and consulted the map. No contour lines were marked on it, only a daunting expanse of green (this signified forest, not low ground). Here and there the green was relieved by white patches of private land, but apart from Palmer Meadows, where there seemed to be some kind of community, there was no sign of habitation. There was a network of tracks but any of these could have been washed out years ago (the map was more than ten years old) and it was difficult to tell which was the way down the Pacific slope.
The first fork she came to didn’t appear on the map. She backed up and stopped, studying a surface imprinted with old tyre tracks. The gravel had ended at the pass; here there was only dust. She marked the fork on the map and continued.
She came to a stretch of open grassland. A few cows were grazing along the fringe of the forest where they could get some shade. The altitude was nearly nine thousand feet but the sun was strong enough for her to be glad of shade herself as she ate a belated lunch. The Red Queen had put up corn bread and chicken for her and as she lingered over her meal watched by chipmunks, lulled by the soft chimes of cowbells, she reflected that today was a day to be remembered – at least, this part of it. The mor
ning was a different matter, a very different atmosphere. There was Asa Fortune who, if not at home in Crazy Mule Canyon, could be anywhere, and that in a wilderness she had been thinking of as empty. But it wasn’t empty; there was Palmer Meadows, an unknown quantity, and there was the man who looked after the house in Danger Canyon, who became angry at mention of Timothy Argent. She considered that reaction. Argent, the seasoned traveller, wouldn’t suffer fools gladly, might speak his mind about locked gates, or about anything that riled him. Would he bother to complain about a locked gate? He was on foot; he’d just climb over the obstruction and continue to Deadboy Pass if he felt like it. But he could have had a confrontation with the caretaker elsewhere: in Dogtown, on the road. The travel writer explores people as well as places; after all, he’s going to put them in a book. Miss Pink frowned. She had the feeling that caretaker would not take kindly to being put in a book. Suddenly the day was less halcyon, peopled with speculation, calculation, indecision. Deliberately she honed her mind and concentrated on the place where she was at this moment. Her attention returned to the meadows and she regarded them with technical interest.
Explorers converge. Where there are no trails they gravitate to lines of weakness, where there is water and shelter they sleep; they eat where there is shade. She rose, scattering the chipmunks, and started to look for human traces.
She found nothing. Apart from the boldness of the chipmunks there was no sign that anyone else had eaten food in this place, and only deep ruts in the dried mud of the road showed that people came here at all, and they were ruts that had been made a long time ago, in rain. She drove on, seeing buildings on her right, coming to a board that told her this was Palmer Meadows. On an impulse she left the road and drove the half-mile or so to a cluster of cabins and barns, complete with corrals. There was no sign of human occupation; the cabins were shuttered and no chimney smoked. All the barn doors were closed, and the only animals about were ground squirrels. When she stopped and switched off the engine she found the silence profoundly disturbing.