Just as I was about to give in to despair, we came upon something good and hopeful. At first and from the distance, I thought it was some kind of luxury home perched at the top of the highest mountain in the vicinity. As unlikely as it seemed to find a structure like that way out here, I still thought it would be a Good Thing.
As we got closer, I began to be able to make out the building’s details and could see it wasn’t a house. It was some kind of ranger station or forest outlook. A manmade crowsnest the size of a small house, perched on stilts, commanding a view of the forest on all sides. I was so relieved I felt like crying.
Once I was reasonably sure that it was, in fact, some sort of government-built forest lookout — not just a mirage brought on by hours of wandering and a lack of water — I took my sweater from around my waist and waved it frantically over my head. If someone was watching, it seemed like it would be a much better idea to try and get their attention and maybe grab a lift up there rather than walking the rest of the way. After a while with no response, though, I stopped and just kept walking. The waving sweater had produced no results and I’d started to feel sharply ridiculous: like I was trying to hail a cab on Fifth Avenue. I tried not to think about what it meant that no one had responded to my frantic waving. Where there was a human created structure, there would be probably be humans, or at least a telephone or other communication device.
Just trudge.
My step grew lighter as the ranger station got more near. It was still a long way off, but the closer I got, the more detail I could see and I thought the various aerials and satellite dishes I could now make out were a good sign: Not some derelict abandoned in the 1960s, then — something I hadn’t even allowed myself to consider until it was no longer a possibility. But a modern outpost where there would be people and a telephone and water.
The last few hundred yards were the worst. Some lookout, I thought, if they couldn’t even see a lone woman and a dog coming towards them from miles and miles and miles away. Until I had to scale the rocks that looked distressingly like cliffs that led to the peak where the station actually sat, I kept hoping that some ranger — on a white charger or an SUV emblazoned with a forestry service logo — would come barreling down the hill and give us a lift back to his remote post. When this didn’t happen, I plunged ahead, keeping myself going — up, up, up — with thoughts of the water cooler that likely dominated one corner, right next to the telephone, across from the bathroom and so on.
Tycho, for his part, followed valiantly wherever I led though, just occasionally, I’d swear I caught an incredulous glance. Like: this is the craziest walk I’ve ever been on. And, of course, he was right. Crazy didn’t even begin to cover it.
Finally, we scaled the cliff-like face — Tycho hopping and dodging lithely, putting all of his practice from hunting lizards on the Malibu cliffs to good use — me pulling myself from boulder to boulder, ever upwards — until we stood at the foot of the outlook. Attaining our goal made me feel more ridiculous than I’d ever thought possible and even more out of my element.
From what I now saw, the cliff was on one side only: the side we’d come from. Murphy’s Law. On the side directly opposite was a meadow that sloped gently away from us, cut through only by a paved road that ended where I stood: at the outpost’s gangly legs. All we’d had to do to avoid that climb was skirt the cliff face by a couple of hundred yards, and we would have hit the road. A Girl Guide would have thought of that in an instant. But me? I’d just gone ever forward and up.
All of this — road, ranger station, meadow, relative civilization — was the good news. The bad news I could see with my own eyes: there was nothing remotely resembling a motor vehicle in sight. And though I hoped that meant that the rangers worked in pairs and one had gone for a pizza, I doubted it. I just wasn’t having that kind of day.
Although you approached the ranger station — outlook, outpost or whatever it was — via a very lockable looking metal stairway, the gates were open and unlocked. A steel platform at the top of the stairs formed an outlook verandah on all sides of the station itself. I looked out at the darkening landscape, towards what I thought was Camp Arrowheart. If anyone was following me, I couldn’t see them: the world out there looked peaceful. And empty.
The door to the station itself was closed. I knocked and, when no one answered, tried the door. “Please don’t be locked. Please don’t be locked.” I said it out loud, a sort of prayer that I had no real hope of having answered. When I tried it, though, the doorknob turned in my hand and the door swung open. Tycho followed me inside. Things were definitely looking up.
The station was all one room and no one was there. The smell of coffee permeated the place and I could catch the odor of good electronics and slightly musty wood. The water cooler was there, just about where I’d hoped it would be. And more. A porta potty sheltered behind a makeshift screen. A coffee mug stood on a windowsill and, when I checked, I could see the dregs of a recent cup in the bottom. Someone had been here quite recently, looking out at the forest. Though they apparently hadn’t seen me.
I stood at the window and looked back in the direction of Camp Arrowheart: nothing but trees and rocks and no gun-toting madmen in sight at all. I resumed my examination of what I was now sure was a forest lookout.
There was a lot of stuff — mostly machines whose uses were alien to me, but I didn’t care. Everything I needed was here, including a rotary dial phone that looked like it had been sitting there since the 1950s. I put a coffee mug of water down for Tycho and then poured one for myself. By the time I’d half-finished mine, Tycho was looking at me for more, so I refilled him.
I’d just put Tycho’s cup down for a third time and was trying to remember how to use a rotary dial phone when I heard a vehicle approaching fast. I thought about hiding, but a second glance around showed me what I had already seen: a single room. No place to hide. Even the screen around the porta potty wouldn’t provide much protection: especially with all of Tycho’s breathing. Then the sound of rubber on metal and I knew someone was coming up the stairs, and fast. I suddenly wished I’d used the phone before gorging myself on water.
What would it be to die out here? Who would ever know? These were the thoughts I was having as the door flung open on a casually dressed man about my own age with a box in his hand. Miraculously: pizza. I could smell it.
He was clearly startled to see me standing there. And me? I felt like Goldilocks being discovered by a fairly gentle looking bear.
“The… the door was open,” I said awkwardly.
“I usually don’t lock it if I’m not going to be away long. No one comes here this time of day,” he indicated the box, looking slightly embarrassed. “But I got hungry.”
“Pizza in the wilderness,” I must have said it with some wonderment because he chuckled.
“Naw, we’re only five maybe ten miles from Running Springs.” A light seemed to dawn as he said this, and he took in my appearance: which couldn’t, by that point, have been pretty. I’d pulled my hair up during the heat of the day, and limp portions of it had escaped its confines. My face was streaked with sweat, my knees and arms were scuffed and scabbed from close encounters with rocks, and I’d snagged my T-shirt on an especially uncooperative and prickly bush. Nothing revealing, but it would have contributed to what had become a fairly scary ensemble.
“I got lost,” I offered by way of explanation. “I walked here — well ran here — from over there,” I pointed out the window, back towards the way I’d come. “From Camp Arrowheart.”
He looked as though he didn’t fully believe me. “Do you know how far that is?”
I nodded. “Far. Very far.”
He drew me towards a desk, pulled out a map. “Look,” he pointed at a green blip. “That’s Arrowheart.” Then he drew his finger across an ever lightening shade of pale green nothingness, finally resting on a blip so pale green it was almost gray. “And here’s us: Command Peak Tower. That’s… let’s see… six miles,
I guess. Give or take. Not so far, from the sound of it, but not the most hospitable country. Not that way. Why’d you do that?”
“I got lost.” I repeated. “And I think someone was chasing me.” My voice grew quiet with the weight of what I’d seen. “I think I saw someone killed. At Arrowheart. And I think someone saw me. And I wanted to run and get help — I thought I was going back to my car, but… after a while I knew I was lost. And I just kept going.”
“At Arrowheart? There’s nothing there. It’s been closed for years.”
“Yes, I know. But please, call someone. I saw a shooting. Hours ago now,” I said regretfully. It was probably too late to do anything about it, even if there had been time when it first happened. “Five hours ago, maybe a little more.”
I was relieved when he put down his pizza and crossed to the phone. “I think Arrowheart is in Yucaipa’s jurisdiction. I’ll see what they say.” Then to whoever answered his call, “Yeah, this is Morgan Dunsford at Command Peak Tower. No sir, I’m a volunteer fire lookout.” Not a very good one, I thought, the forest could have gone up in flames while he went for his pizza. “I have a woman here claims she walked across from Arrowheart.” Claims? “Claims someone was chasing her and that she saw someone shot. No sir, I don’t know that, let me ask her.”
He turned to me and said: “They want to know, was the person chasing you the same one as got shot?”
I looked at him stupidly for a moment. “No. Different people. One shot. One chasing. He shot at me too.”
He turned back to the phone and the exchange went on for a while in this vein. Judging from Morgan’s side of the conversation, I could tell that this particular wilderness wasn’t exactly a hotbed of violent crime.
“Well,” he said to me as he hung up, “they’re sending someone out there to have a looksee.”
I looked at him expectantly and I guess he could see I was waiting for something more, because he went on. “Well, they’ll call us when they know something, I guess. Likely they’ll want to get a statement or something from you, but Deputy Ganner didn’t say.”
“You have a car, right Morgan?”
He looked at me suspiciously. “Sure,” he admitted.
“Please, can you take me there?”
“I’m not so sure that would be a good idea, miss,” I saw his eyes slide over the pizza box longingly.
“Listen, I have to get back to my car anyway. If the cops don’t want us around, I’ll just get out of the way. My car is there. You can bring the pizza and eat it on the way.”
He finally, if somewhat reluctantly, agreed to take me back to Camp Arrowheart, though not before he’d checked back in with the sheriff’s station and made sure it was OK. As he was getting off the phone for the second time, I saw his eyes scan the horizon and stop. He gave a low whistle and pointed.
“Looks like there might be something to what you said.”
I followed the motion of his hand and his eyes and I saw it, as well. Smoke. Blacker near the base, near the earth. A gray wisp farther up.
“Arrowheart?” I asked.
He just nodded as he applied himself, once again, to the phone. Clearly there were things expected of a fire lookout when fire was actually spotted. With the phone calls made, he grabbed his long-neglected pizza and we headed for the door. I noticed as he left that, this time, he locked up behind himself.
Morgan had a pickup truck and Tycho was forced to ride in the back (“My wife’s allergic.”) which the dog actually seemed to think was pretty fun once I’d shown him where to sit. He noticed right away that he could stick his head over the side and smell all the good fast moving forest smells while barely moving his head.
It turned out that Camp Arrowheart was a lot further via road than it had been the way I’d come: cross country. Five or six excruciating miles on foot, 20 comfortable miles in a car or truck. Though I wasn’t complaining.
Morgan ate his pizza happily while we drove and I helped him with a bit of it. There’s nothing like an unexpected hike and a brush with death, I’d found, to help you work up an appetite. As we drove, Morgan explained that the outlooks in San Bernardino National Forest were no longer staffed by the forestry service. In fact, they functioned mainly as educational tourist attractions, keeping seasonal hours and maintained by volunteers who, like him, committed a certain number of hours each month to help forest visitors look for fires.
“That’s why I wasn’t there when you got there. We close at five. But my wife’s visiting her sister up at Barstow and I thought I’d just have me a little pizza and watch the forest,” he looked embarrassed. “Please, miss, do me a favor?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Don’t tell anyone I wasn’t there when you got there? Or that it was unlocked? I wasn’t gone so long and I really didn’t think anyone would come…”
“Sure,” I repeated. “Anyway, who would I tell?” And I thought about the few minutes I’d been there alone at the lookout before he came back. The feeling of finding sanctuary and the exquisite taste of the water. It had been the most wonderful feeling of rescue, despite the fact that no one was there.
The only way I recognized Camp Arrowheart in the dark was the sight of my car still parked at the side of the road where I’d left it, reflecting Morgan’s headlights, benignly awaiting my return.
I pointed out the camp entrance to Morgan and we bumped along up it. I was glad he had a four-wheel drive: I wouldn’t have wanted to attempt the walk in the dark, even accompanied.
We could smell something amiss before we saw it. The unmistakable odor of roasting wood. The place itself was transformed from the quiet ghost camp I’d visited in the afternoon and was alive with emergency vehicles and the men and women who service them: firefighters, sheriff cars, even an ambulance stood by, unneeded for the moment, but — I imagined — on the scene just in case.
The big lodge I’d walked through with Tycho earlier — the one with the kitchen and the big fireplace — was in flames. As Morgan and I pulled up, we could see that the fire was blazing madly, the firefighters just settling in. And it looked as though the fire had been burning for a while: there was little left to distinguish the building aside from its placement. By the light of the vapor lamps in the back of two of the sheriffs trucks, you could see that a chimney still stood, at least — as well as some of the outer walls — but most of the place was just gone.
I imagined that the wood that had been used to build this place some 80-odd years before wouldn’t have taken much encouragement to go up in flames. And it was clear to me without asking or even looking very far that this fire had been encouraged. After what I’d seen happen here this afternoon, it seemed like too much of a coincidence that the place would have self-ignited.
While the firefighters were dealing with the blaze, the sheriffs were busy with other things. We could see four or six people in the uniforms of the sherif’s department with able-looking flashlights scouting the perimeters of the area and checking through the smaller buildings. Securing the scene. As Morgan and I approached, a couple of them broke off their search and came towards us.
“You Dunsford?” One of the sheriffs asked. They were Mutt and Jeff: one tall and lanky, the other short and with a look about him that said he loved donuts.
“Yeah,” Morgan said. “This is Madeline Carter. She’s the one says she saw what she saw.”
“Have you found anything?” I asked.
The donut guy seemed to look at me for the first time, “Naw. But it’s dark, don’t think we’ll find anything tonight.” He addressed his partner, “Riley, get her statement, all right? And keep the dog in the truck,” Tycho had just jumped down. “We don’t want him messin’ up a crime scene.”
“Do you want me to show you where it was I saw the shooting?”
“Like I said, I don’t think we’ll find anything tonight. But I guess, since you’re here, it couldn’t hurt to know. Just, we can’t get too close,” he indicated the firefighters hard at work. “But
you can show us the vicinity. Point, you know.”
I couldn’t, of course, be precise in showing them. It was, as donut man had pointed out repeatedly, quite dark, even with the vapor lights and by now dying flames. In any case, what I’d seen had been from a distance. They assured me that, if there was anything to see, they’d be able to spot it in the morning.
The statement-taking was about as precise as the search seemed to be. It struck me that Riley kept forgetting to ask for pertinent details, so I filled him in as well as I could, but better than he would have been if left to his own devices.
“Do you guys believe me at all?” I asked at one point.
Riley looked surprised. “Sure. Why not? I mean, there’s no body, there’s no blood, the place is on fire and, from what Morgan says, you walked clean across to Command Peak when there was a perfectly good road to follow, but — hey — what’s not to believe?” Riley said all of this without a trace of irony. It was the only thing that kept me from wanting to hit him.
I told him everything, or as much of everything as I knew. I gave him names, drew what relationships for them that I could. And, apparently, Emily had been right: News of the Langton-related kidnapping hadn’t been broadcast very far out of LA because Riley looked blank when I mentioned the connection, though he jotted what I said down in his notebook.
As he was finishing taking my statement, donut man rejoined us.
“Did you remember to ask what kind of car she drives?” he said, as though I wasn’t standing right there.
“I drive a Chevrolet Malibu.”
“What color?”
“Silver,” I pointed where I thought the road was though, as I’ve proven, my sense of direction isn’t always impeccable. “You probably saw it, you would have driven right past it to get it in here. Why?”
Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money Page 23