I stopped the car at the edge of the firebreak. Kerry said, “I suppose you’re going to go poke around over there.”
“Yup. Come along if you want to.”
“In all that soot? No thanks. I think I’ll go back and look at the ghosts.”
We got out into the hot sunshine. It was quiet there, peaceful except for the distant yammering of a jay, and the air was heavy with the scent of wildflowers and evergreens. Kerry wandered off along the road; I took out the old, soot-stained trenchcoat I’d worn in Redding, put it on and belted it, and then went across the firebreak to the burned-out buildings.
The county sheriff’s investigators had been over the area without finding anything; I didn’t expect to have better luck, any more than I had at the remains of Munroe Randall’s house. But then, I’d had some training in arson investigation myself, back when I was on the San Francisco cops, and I read the updated handbooks and manuals put out by police associations and insurance companies. I had also had a handful of jobs over the years involving arson. You have to keep checking and double-checking: that’s what detective work is all about.
The first thing you do on an inspection of a fire scene is to determine the point of origin. Once you’ve got that, you look for something to indicate how the fire started, whether it was accidental or a case of arson. If it was arson, what you’re after is the corpus delicti—evidence of the method or device used by the arsonist.
One of the ways to locate point of origin is to check the “alligatoring,” or charring, of the surface of the burned wood. This can tell you in which direction the fire spread, where it was the hottest, and if you’re fortunate you can trace it straight to the origin. I was fortunate, as it turned out. And not just once—twice. I not only found the point of origin, I found the corpus delicti as well.
It was arson, and no mistake. The fire had been set at the rear of the building farthest to the north, whatever that one might once have been; and what had been used to ignite it was a candle. I found the residue of it, a wax deposit inside a small cup-shaped piece of stone that was hidden under a pile of rubble. It took me ten minutes of sifting around and getting my hands and the trenchcoat completely blackened to dredge up the stone. Which was no doubt why the sheriff’s men hadn’t been as thorough as they should have been; not everybody is willing to turn himself into the likeness of a chimney sweep, particularly on a minor fire out in the middle of nowhere.
As near as I could determine, the candle had been made of purple-colored tallow. Which told me nothing much; purple candles were not uncommon. It had probably been stuck inside the cup-shaped stone to keep it from toppling over and starting the fire before it was intended to.
I was peering at the stone, and it wasn’t telling me much either, when I heard and then saw the jeep come up. It rattled to a stop behind my car, and a guy about six-four unfolded from behind the wheel and plunked himself down on the road. He stared over at me for a couple of seconds, shading his eyes against the sun. Then he yelled, “Hey! You there! What do you think you’re doing?”
I saw no point in yelling back at him. Instead I put the stone into my trenchcoat pocket, swatted some of the soot off my hands, then made my way through the rubble and across to where the guy stood alongside his jeep. He was in his forties, beanpole thin, with a shock of fiery red hair and a belligerent expression to match it. Behind him in the jeep I could see a folded easel, a couple of blank three-foot-square canvases, and a box that probably contained brushes and oil paints.
When I stopped in front of him he scowled down at me and said, “What’s the idea of messing around over there? You a scavenger or something?”
“No,” I said, “I’m a detective.”
“A what?”
“A detective.” I told him who I was and where I was from and that I had been hired to investigate the death of Munroe Randall.
He didn’t like hearing it. His expression got even more belligerent; his eyes were flat and shiny-black, like circlets of onyx. “Who hired you? Northern Development?”
“No. The insurance company that carries the policy on Randall’s life.”
“So what the hell are you doing here? Randall died in a fire in Redding.”
“You had a fire here too,” I said.
“Coincidence.”
“Maybe not, Mr. Robideaux.”
“How do you know my name?”
“I know the names of everybody who lives here. The Northern people supplied them.”
“I’ll bet they did.”
“The list includes an artist named Paul Robideaux.” I nodded toward the paraphernalia in the jeep. “I get paid to observe things and make educated guesses.”
Robideaux grunted and screwed up his mouth as if he wanted to spit. He didn’t say anything.
I said, “I’d like to ask you a few questions about the fire.”
“Which fire?”
“This one. Unless you know something about the one in Redding too.”
“I don’t know anything about either one. I wasn’t in Redding when Randall’s place burned. And I wasn’t here when those old shacks went up.”
“No? That isn’t what you told the county sheriffs men. According to their report, you were one of the residents who helped dig the firebreak.”
“Is that so?” Robideaux said. “Well, I had to talk to the law. I don’t have to talk to you.”
“That’s right, you don’t. But suppose I told you I can prove this fire was deliberately set. Would you want to talk to me then?”
His eyes got narrow. “How could you prove that? You find something in the debris?”
“Maybe.”
“What is it?”
“I have to tell that to the law,” I said. “I don’t have to tell it to you.”
He took a jerky half-step toward me, the menacing kind. I stayed where I was, setting myself; he was not big enough for me to be intimidated. But if he’d had any ideas about mixing it up, he thought better of them. He turned abruptly and stalked around to the driver’s side of the jeep.
Only he didn’t get in right away. Instead he pointed a finger in my direction and said, “You think Randall was murdered, is that it? Well, why don’t you go sniff around those partners of his? One of them killed him if anybody did.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because nobody here did it, that’s why. There’s nothing for you in Musket Creek.”
“Nothing but trouble, you mean?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
He got into the jeep. Fifteen seconds later he was barreling off down the road, trailing dust, headed toward the pines to the west.
I stood staring after him. And wondering, not for the first time in the past two days, if there wasn’t a lot more going on in this business than I’d first thought.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Kerry still hadn’t come back. Between my search of the fire wreckage and my conversation with Robideaux, over an hour had passed since she’d wandered off. I looked over at the ghosts, but there was no sign of her. Now what’s she up to? I wondered. I shed my trenchcoat, locked it and the wax-laden stone cup into the trunk, used a rag to wipe off my hands, and set out looking for her.
She wasn’t anywhere on the south side of the street. I crossed over, went down a weed-choked alleyway between two of the derelicts. The grass was high back there, a field of it extending thirty yards or so to the creek. A railed footbridge spanned the shallow but swift-moving stream; on the other side, a pair of half-obliterated ruts led up one of the hillocks to a collapsed building at its crest—what had once been a church or a schoolhouse, judging from the remains of a belltower. Pieces of machinery, the segments of a sluicebox, and other broken and rusted mining equipment littered the grass on both sides of the creek. Some of it was so badly weathered and busted up that you couldn’t tell what it had been used for.
An irregular path led through the grass from the footbridge and intersected another path that paralleled the rear of t
he buildings. I got onto the parallel one and went along calling Kerry’s name. She finally answered me from inside one of the ghosts—the two-storied hotel or saloon. The back entrance wasn’t boarded up the way the front was and the door hung open on one hinge; I went inside.
She was standing in the middle of a big, gloomy, high-ceilinged room. Enough sunlight penetrated, through chinks where the wall boards had warped away from the studs, to let me see what the room had to offer. Not much. A balcony ran around three sides at the second-floor level, with three doorways sans doors opening off it on the left side and three more on the right; the balcony sagged badly in places and looked as though it might topple at any time. So did the crooked staircase leaning in one corner down at this level. The floor looked like what was left of a junk shop that had gone out of business. Some old broken chairs and tables; the rusty skeleton of a sheet-iron stove and its piping; the door to a steel safe, circa 1880, with faded gold lettering on it that said Diebold, Norris & Co., Chicago; a native-stone fireplace with most of the stones lying mounded on the hearth; a crudely made hotel reception desk, part of which was hidden by a pigeonhole shelf that had collapsed on top of it; and random piles of dirt and other detritus.
“What’d you do?” I asked Kerry. “Bust in here?”
“No. The back door was ajar. Isn’t this place wonderful?”
“If you like dust, decay, and rats.”
“Rats? There aren’t any rats in here.”
“Want to bet?”
Rats didn’t scare her much, though. She shrugged and said, “Somebody lives in this building.”
“What?”
“Well, maybe not lives here, but spends a lot of time here. That’s how come the back door isn’t boarded up.”
“How did you find this out?”
“The same way you find things out,” she said. “By snooping around. Come on, I’ll show you.”
She led me over behind the hotel desk, to where a closed door was half-concealed by the fallen pigeonhole shelf. “The door’s got an almost-new latch on it,” she said, pointing. “See? That made me curious, so I opened it to see what was inside.”
She opened it again as she spoke and let me see what was inside. It was a room maybe twelve-by-twelve that had probably been built for the hotel clerk’s use. There was a boarded-up window in the far wall; two of the other three walls were bare; the third one, to the left, had a long six-foot-high tier of standing shelves, like an unfinished bookcase, leaning against it. The shelves were crammed with all sorts of odds and ends, the bulk of which seemed to be Indian arrowheads, chunks of iron pyrite or fool’s gold, rocks with designs, rocks that gleamed with mica or maybe genuine gold particles, and curious-shaped bits of wood. An army cot with a straw-tick mattress, a Coleman lantern, and an upended wooden box supporting several tattered issues of National Geographic completed the furnishings.
“Pack rats,” I said. “That’s who lives here.”
Kerry frowned at me.
“Either that, or a small-scale junk dealer.”
She said, “Phooey. Where’s your sense of mystery and adventure? Why couldn’t it be an old prospector with a gold mine somewhere up in the hills?”
“There aren’t any gold mines up in the hills—not any more. Besides, if anybody had one, what would he want to come all the way down here for?”
“To forage for food, maybe.”
“Hah,” I said. “Well, whoever bunks in this place might just get upset if he showed up and found us in his bedroom. Technically we’re trespassing. We’d better go; I’ve got work to do.”
This time she made a face at me. “Sometimes,” she said, “you’re about as much fun as a pimple on the fanny.”
“Kerry, I’m on a job. The fun can come later.”
“Oh, you think so? Maybe not.”
“Is that a threat to withhold your sexual favors?”
“Sexual favors,” she said. “My, how you talk.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“It was a dumb question. I don’t answer dumb questions.”
She started back across the hotel lobby, leaving me to shut the door to the pack rat’s nest. Outside, we walked in silence to where the car was parked. But once we got inside she pointed over at the burned-out buildings and asked, “Did you find anything?” and she sounded cheerful again.
I sighed a little. Being with Kerry sometimes made me feel as if my head were as full of dusty junk as that room inside the hotel. And that no matter how long I tried, I would never quite get it all sorted out and put where it belonged.
I told her about the melted candle, explaining how I’d found it. She said she thought I was very clever; I decided not to tell her that my methods had been devised by somebody else. I also mentioned my conversation with Robideaux. By the time I was finished with that I had the car nosing up the little hill toward the second cottage near the fork, the one where the elderly woman was still hoeing among her tomato vines.
The woman’s name, according to the intelligence sheets I’d been given, was Ella Bloom. She and her husband had moved here in the late 1950s, after he sold his plumbing supply company in Eureka in order to pursue a lifelong ambition to pan for gold. He’d never found much of it, evidently, but Mrs. Bloom must have liked it here anyway; she’d stayed on following his death eight years ago.
She quit hoeing and glared out at us as she had earlier. She was tall and angular, and she had a nose like the blade of her hoe and long straggly black hair. Put a tall-crowned hat on her head and a broomstick instead of the hoe in her hand, I thought, and she could have passed for the Wicked Witch of the West.
I got out of the car, went up to the gate in the picket fence that enclosed the yard. I put on a smile and called to her, “Mrs. Bloom?”
“Who are you?” she said suspiciously.
I gave her my name. “I’m an investigator working for Great Western Insurance on the death of Munroe Randall—”
That was as far as I got. The way she reacted, you’d have thought I had told her I intended to rape her and pillage her house. She hoisted up the hoe, waved it over her head, and whacked it down into the ground like an executioner’s sword; then she hoisted it again and jabbed it in my direction.
“Get away from here!” she said in a thin, screechy voice. “Go on, get away!”
“Look, Mrs. Bloom, I only want to ask you a couple of questions—”
“I got nothing to say to you or anybody else about them. You come into my yard, mister, you’ll regret it. I got a shotgun in the house and I keep it loaded.”
“There’s no need for—”
“You want to see it? By God, I’ll show it to you if that’s what it takes!”
She threw down the hoe and went flying across the yard, up onto a porch decorated with painted milk cans, and inside the house. I hesitated for about two seconds and then moved back to the car. There wasn’t much sense in waiting there for her to come out with her shotgun; she wasn’t going to talk, and for all I knew she was loopy enough to start blasting away at me.
“Christ,” I said when I slid into the car. “That woman’s not playing with a full deck.”
Kerry had heard it all but she wasn’t even ruffled. “I don’t think so. Maybe she’s got a right to act that way.”
“What?”
“If somebody was trying to turn my home into a cheap imitation of Disneyland I’d be pretty mad about it too.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but you wouldn’t start threatening people for no damn reason.”
“I might, if I were her age.”
“Bah,” I said. But because Mrs. Bloom had reappeared with a bulky twelve-gauge cradled in both hands, I started the car and swung it into a fast U-turn. Kerry might not have been worried, but she’d never been shot at and I had. People with guns make me nervous, no matter who they are.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The cottage on the adjacent hillock was owned by a couple named Brewster, but with Mrs. Bloom and her shotg
un nearby, this was not the time to talk to them. The atmosphere in Musket Creek was every bit as hostile as Frank O’Daniel had suggested it would be; bringing Kerry along had definitely not been a good idea. I considered calling it quits for now and heading back to Redding. But if I did, Kerry would never let me hear the end of it—and I couldn’t believe that everybody up here was screwy enough to threaten us. I decided to try interviewing one more resident. If that went as badly as my other attempts had, then the hell with it and I would come back tomorrow alone.
At the fork I took the left branch that led away from town and up into the wooded slopes to the west. The first house we came to belonged to Paul Robideaux; the second, almost a mile farther along, was a free-form cabin that resembled a somewhat lopsided A-frame, built on sloping ground and bordered on three sides by tall redwoods and Douglas fir. It had been pieced together with salvaged lumber, rough-hewn beams, native stone, redwood thatch, and inexpensive plate glass. A woodbutcher’s house, woodbutchers being people who went off to homestead in the wilds because they didn’t like cities, mass-produced housing, or most people.
When I slowed and eased the car off the road next to a parked Land Rover, Kerry asked, “Who lives here?”
“Hugh Penrose. He’s a writer.”
“What does he write?”
“Articles and books on natural history. He used to be a professor at Chico State. Apparently he’s an eccentric.”
“Mmm. How about letting me come with you this time? You don’t seem to be doing too well one-on-one.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea—”
“Phooey,” she said, and got out and went up toward the cabin.
Well, damn! But there was nothing I could do except to follow her, telling myself this was the last time I brought her along on an investigation.
We went up a set of curving limb-and-plank stairs to a platform deck. From inside I could hear the sound of a typewriter rattling away. I knocked on the door. The typewriter kept on going for half a minute; then it stopped, and there were footsteps, and pretty soon the door opened.
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