A Credible Threat (The Jeri Howard Series Book 6)

by Janet Dawson

  “We’re just closing,” she said.

  She had me there. It was now past five. But she hadn’t locked the door yet.

  “Are you Lee?”

  “Yes,” she said, managing to draw the one syllable into a long inquiry.

  “I’m Jeri Howard. Emily Austen called to let you know I was coming.”

  “Yes, she did. But I don’t understand why.” Lee’s eyes were curious. “Perdita sometimes takes longer for her buying trips than originally planned. But Emily seemed rather upset that Perdita wasn’t here.”

  I looked at Perdita’s employee. How much did she know about her employer’s past? Very little, I suspected.

  “It’s probably nothing,” I said. “But wouldn’t Perdita call you if she was coming back late?”

  “Well, usually she does,” Lee admitted. “But she hasn’t this time.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  “North. She didn’t give me an itinerary.”

  “Has anyone else been in here looking for her recently?”

  “You mean people I don’t know?” In response to my nod, Lee shook her head and looked mystified. “Not that I know of. Is something wrong? I wish you’d tell me.”

  “I think it would be better if Perdita told you herself.”

  She looked disappointed, then shrugged and stepped from behind the counter, keys in hand. “I have to lock up now. If Perdita should call tonight, where are you staying?”

  “The Joshua Grindle. But I have a cellular phone.” I wrote that number on the back of one of my business cards and handed it to Lee. She activated the alarm system, then turned out the lights. Once outside, I waited while she locked up the gallery. Then she said good-bye and walked off in the direction of Albion Street. I went back to my car.

  The house where Emily and her aunt had lived, until Emily went to college, was on the north side of the headland, off Heeser Drive, on a short street that dead-ended behind Mendocino’s school. There were half a dozen or more homes on this meadow, all with spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean north from Agate Cove to Russian Gulch and beyond. Most were built of redwood, weathered silver by the elements. Two of them were larger versions of the town’s ubiquitous water towers. One of these, farther west off the dirt road, was Perdita’s. It was three stories, and the topmost room, Emily told me, had been hers.

  The light was fading as I parked my car and approached the house, which was larger than the water tower rooms at the inn. Here the stairs were inside, and there was a deck with a railing on three sides of the structure. The windows were covered with pleated horizontal shades that kept me from peering inside. I didn’t see the Volvo Emily told me her aunt drove. I knocked on the door and called out, but got no response. All I could hear was the crash of waves on the bluffs behind me and the musical tinkling of a wind chime from one of the other houses nearby.

  I scribbled a note on one of my business cards, stuck it into the crack of the door, and headed back to town. I had dinner at 955 Ukiah, seated alone at a table for two, sipping a glass of chardonnay and chatting with the owners’ self-assured daughter, a girl of ten or twelve, who ate calamari with a side of capers and recommended several items on the menu.

  When I left the restaurant I decided to check out the place next door, Sweetwater Gardens, which offered hot tubs and saunas. There was no time limit for the group tub, the young woman at the desk informed me, and clothing was optional.

  It seemed like a Mendocino kind of thing to do. I bought a bottle of mineral water, rented a towel, and went into the communal dressing room to strip and shower. The tiny courtyard was surrounded by a high redwood fence, and the tub itself was up a few steps, one side open to the night. I saw two women there, talking as they relaxed in the water. I discarded my towel and joined them, luxuriating in the hot water, cooling myself down with sips from the cold mineral water.

  On the ceiling above the tub I saw a stained-glass panel in deep blue, representing the night sky, with yellow stars and a yellow moon. I leaned my head back and looked at the real night sky, closer to black than blue, dusted with smaller sparkling dots of stars. Then the two women and I were joined by two men, one bearded, the other German. We politely ignored each other’s nudity as we relaxed in the hot tub.

  Finally all my mineral water was gone. I felt like a lazy boiled shrimp. I clambered out of the tub and showered off the bromine from the water, then walked back to the inn, where I fell into a deep sleep under the white chenille bedspread in my little tower room.

  I woke early the next morning, just past seven, craving coffee, but the inn didn’t serve breakfast until after eight. Once dressed, I set out for a walk. The headlands were shrouded with fog this morning, cottony billows obscuring the roofs and the water towers of the village. I walked down Little Lake Road toward Lansing Street and climbed several concrete steps into Hillcrest Cemetery.

  Old cemeteries fascinate me. The gravestones reveal something about the people who built a town, where they came from, at least. In this cemetery a lot of people came from Ireland, Italy, and the Azores, and there were lots of members of the same families all buried together. I knew at one time there had been a sizable Chinese population here. In fact, farther out on Albion Street was an old Chinese temple, the oldest on the north coast. But there were no Chinese graves here that I could see.

  Interspersed with the older graves I saw more recent ones and located several Paxtons, presumably the family of Perdita’s second husband. Was he buried here? I couldn’t recall the man’s name. At the top of the hill I saw a tall redwood cross and a lovingly tended plot covered with bright spring flowers. Here lay a boy of thirteen, not long in his grave, and very much missed, from what I saw. Others in this cemetery had no one left to tend their graves, like the woman farther down the hill. The rusted remains of an iron fence that once decorated her chipped and leaning headstone were now piled on the weedy site.

  A few paces away I found two stones side by side, both broken off and lying atop the graves they marked, with the stubs of marble at the head of the graves looking like broken teeth. They were the McCartie brothers, John and Jeremiah, and one of them had died in 1876. Weather and time had softened and blurred the words carved on the broken stones, but I could see enough to tell me Jeremiah McCartie had been shot to death in Mendocino. Who was he, and how did he come to that fate here on the rugged coast, such a long way from his birthplace in Ireland?

  I left the cemetery and walked up Lansing, past St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, to Heeser Drive, where I turned left and headed in the direction of Perdita’s house, past the sign that warned me this was a private road. Several of her neighbors were home. In fact, one man looked at me curiously as he exited his house and walked toward his truck. I saw nothing at Perdita’s house that would indicate anyone was there. My business card was still stuck in the door.

  My stomach growled, despite the big meal I’d had last night, so I walked back to the inn, where coffee and breakfast were now being served in the dining room. I helped myself to fruit and yogurt, frittata and muffins, as the assembled guests did the usual check-in with one another. None of the inn’s rooms had phones, so after breakfast I used my cellular phone to call Joe Kelso at the Cloverdale police station. He wasn’t in, but the officer I spoke with told me he was fairly certain Joe had made that phone call to Ukiah.

  I checked out and headed for Main Street. I was in the courtyard between Main and Albion at ten, speculating whether the fog would burn off by noon and waiting for Lee to show up to unlock the doors. Today she wore a long gray skirt and an oversize burgundy sweater, her neck and shoulders swathed with a woolen shawl and a matching cap covering her dark hair.

  “She didn’t call,” Lee said as she unlocked the door. She looked somewhat taken aback to find me on the gallery’s steps. She also looked worried. “It’s not like Perdita not to check in.”

  Where the hell was Perdita Paxton? I felt frustrated as I retraced my steps to Main Street. Should I drive up t
o the sheriffs station in Fort Bragg?

  Deciding to wait a couple more hours, I walked all the way down to the end of Main Street and onto one of the paths that threaded the grassy headlands, making my way down to the edge of the bluff where several large pieces of rusted metal and wood were all that remained of the chutes used to load cargo from the bluff to the old dog-hole schooners that sailed this coastline, with shallows and rocks and shifting sandbars, tackling the bad currents and worse weather. Large wharves were impossible in Mendocino Bay, so the lumber was loaded by means of an apron chute, a wooden slide running from the bluff to the deck of the ship. At the turn of the century they were replaced by wire chutes using heavy cable, and passengers disembarking from a ship would ride a large trapeze to shore.

  At the end of the headland I looked down on the beach where the winter storms had tossed up piles of driftwood. In one inlet a tire floated near an overhang, debris of a less picturesque sort. The rocky sides of the bluffs below me had been polished and smoothed by the incessant waves. They were dangerous, prey to the sneaker waves that could rise suddenly to snatch unwary humans from the rocks. There are several natural bridges at the end of the headland, graceful arches carved by a millennium of wave action, water insinuating itself into the rock, smoothing and polishing, like a fickle hand that has toyed with the land over hundreds of thousands of years, and will for thousands more, until the arch weakens and falls into the sea.

  I stood at the end of the bluff and looked west, out at the gray Pacific Ocean, conscious that there was nothing between me and Japan, nothing but several thousand miles of cold, heaving water. Then I walked all the way around the headland, back to Perdita’s house, stepping onto the redwood deck. I knocked at the door, then circled the house.

  I heard the sound of car tires on gravel and walked back to the front of the house, hoping to see Perdita Paxton’s Volvo. Instead I saw a white sedan, its driver’s side door bearing the wave and redwood crest of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department. The man who opened the door was about my age, six feet tall, with sandy hair and a clean-shaven face. He wore a short-sleeve brown shirt decorated with a seven-point star, green fatigue pants, and a gun strapped at his side. He put his hands on his hips and surveyed me from Perdita Paxton’s driveway.

  “Hello.” His voice was friendly, noncommittal, but there was definitely an official inquiry behind it, as though he were debating whether to run me in for trespassing. “I’m Sergeant Sullivan. Mind telling me what you’re doing here?” One of Perdita’s neighbors who’d seen me at the house last night or earlier today must have called the sheriff’s station in Fort Bragg.

  “My name’s Jeri Howard.” I walked toward him, keeping my hands in the open where he could see them. When I got close enough I saw freckles dusting his cheeks, making him look younger than he was. “I’m a private investigator from Oakland. I’m trying to locate Perdita Paxton.”

  “Got some identification?”

  “In my purse.” I reached slowly and brought out my license, handing it to him. “Joe Kelso of the Cloverdale Police Department was supposed to call your office in Ukiah, to let them know I was coming up here.”

  Sullivan didn’t say anything as he examined my license. Then he reached into the cruiser for his radio. I heard enough of his side of the conversation to confirm that someone had indeed called the sheriff’s station to report me. Finally he ended the transmission and returned my license.

  “Kelso called,” he said. “Early this morning. But I didn’t get the word until now. I’ve been out in the field. So tell me what this is about.”

  Before I could say anything, a Volvo turned off Heeser Drive and came up the road, raising a cloud of dust. It pulled into the driveway next to the cruiser. A woman opened the door and got out, a tall woman whose hair had once been a rich dark red. Now the shoulder-length locks were as gray as the silvered lumber used in constructing her house. An Airedale terrier, female, scrambled out of the car, stopped, took a protective stance, and barked a warning.

  “Steady on, Molly,” the woman said, in the deep raspy voice I remembered so well. She looked regal despite the navy-blue sweat suit she wore, its dark blue color enlivened only by the yellow and red scarf tied loosely around her neck. I saw the same hawk profile, the same sharp gray eyes. Now she addressed the sergeant. “Hello, Neil. What’s going on here?”

  “This woman says she’s a private investigator,” the sergeant began.

  Now the gray eyes narrowed and scrutinized me closer. “Of course. I recognize you now. Jeri Howard. You worked for the Errol Seville Agency. How’s Errol? Are you still with him?”

  “Errol retired. He and his wife moved to Carmel. I’m on my own now.”

  Perdita Paxton smiled briefly and crossed her arms over the front of her sweatshirt. “I assume you haven’t dropped by to see me just because you’re in the neighborhood.”

  “Emily sent me. She couldn’t get you on the phone, so she got worried.”

  “I went out of town for a few days.” Now she frowned. “Why is Emily so anxious to find me?”

  “Richard Bradfield is out of prison,” I told her.

  Her mouth tightened and her eyes hardened into two gray stones.

  “Bloody hell.”

  Thirty

  “IS THAT THE GUY?” SERGEANT SULLIVAN ASKED.

  “Yes, it is,” Perdita said.

  “Guess I need to hear about this.”

  “Indeed you do. Come inside. I’ll make some coffee.”

  Perdita opened the back door of her Volvo and reached inside for a small black overnighter. Then she walked past me and the deputy, up onto the deck. She sifted through her keys, stuck one into the dead bolt, and opened the door.

  The Airedale preceded us into one large space that was both living room and dining room, the floor covered with a thick cushiony oatmeal-colored carpet. The dog made for the large front window, immediately to our right. Beneath this was a small green area rug, frayed at the edges and covered with wisps of black and copper fur. The dog circled, then sprawled on the rug. Perdita set down the bag she carried and opened the pleated ivory blinds that shaded the window, revealing a vista of grassy headlands and the Pacific Ocean, stretching into the blue sky now that the fog had burned off. To the right a series of headlands and pine-covered slopes swept north toward Fort Bragg.

  “May I use the phone?” Sergeant Sullivan asked her.

  “Help yourself. It’s on the desk.” She picked up her bag. “I’ll take this upstairs and be right back.”

  She started up the carpeted stairs, just this side of the far right corner of the room. In the corner itself was the desk she’d pointed out to the sergeant, tucked under the slanting ceiling below the stairs that climbed to the upper floors. The desk looked like oak, with a matching two-drawer filing cabinet, its top serving as a stand for the small laser printer. One end of the desk held a laptop computer. At the other I saw a cordless phone and a small answering machine, its red light blinking furiously from what must have been all of Emily’s calls.

  The sergeant sat down in the padded blue office chair and picked up the phone. While he talked I had a look around. The sofa, low and contemporary in design, angled in front of the window, with low tables on either side holding pottery and an assortment of books. Behind this a small rectangular table, made of polished wood, with two woven place mats, sat in the rear left corner, with several tall bookcases on the wall that was to the left of the front door. The kitchen was at the back, between the stairs and the dining table, a compact walk-through space with white appliances. Beyond this I saw a small utility room, the offshoot I’d seen jutting from the back of the structure. The room contained a washer, dryer, storage cabinets, and a tiny bathroom visible through an open pocket door.

  The place was a marvel of economic and utilitarian design and looked almost monastic, with little decoration, save a couple of prints on the wall and a photograph of Emily on one of the bookshelves. Perdita evidently left the objets d�
��art at her gallery and lived here, solitary except for the company of her dog.

  She came back down the stairs now and walked into the kitchen, where she took a bag of coffee from the freezer, spooned grounds into the filter of her coffee maker and poured in the water.

  “Emily says you built this place when you moved up here.”

  “Yes. My second husband owned the land. We had intended to build a vacation home. The house where he grew up is in the village. But he hadn’t lived there since he left for college. After his mother died, we sold it. It’s a bed and breakfast inn now.”

  “A beautiful view.” I gestured toward the window.

  “Yes,” she agreed, looking past me at the light shifting on the constantly moving surface of the Pacific Ocean. “Emily loves it here.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “It’s quiet and isolated. Much too quiet and isolated, since Emily went off to college.” Perdita stopped. We listened to the water and steam of the coffee maker. The strong smell of fresh-brewed coffee filled the room.

  “It made sense at the time,” she continued. “After everything that happened, I wanted to get away from people. The simplicity of small-town life, a good environment for Emily. Just the two of us, safe from the world outside.”

  “Safe,” I repeated. I wasn’t sure any of us were safe. “Does Bradfield know about your ties to Mendocino?”

  “Maybe. My sister may have told him. Bradfield’s a very clever man. That’s how he’s been able to get away with so much for so long. I’d say we must assume he knows my second husband was from Mendocino, though Mike and I lived in Mill Valley all the time we were married. Mike died ten years ago, two years before Bradfield killed Stephanie.”

  She looked past me at Sergeant Sullivan. “I’m sure you’ve heard that old saying. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. That’s why my neighbors and the Mendocino Sheriff’s Department are particularly diligent about keeping an eye on me and my property.”