“Parker ranch. Nineteen twenty or so.”
Peter looked closer. There was the edge of a low, wood-sided building beyond the house and what looked like an orchard beyond that. “Beth told me a little about it,” he said. “Klein pulled down the old Parker place, didn’t he?”
“Wind pulled it down,” Ackroyd said, sipping from his coffee cup and letting the pause underscore what he’d said. “Klein just had it hauled away. There was a Santa Ana wind back in fifty-seven that blew the roof off the old ranch house. Knocked all the windows out. Wrecked the place. Wind blew for fourteen days. Maybe you remember that one.”
“I would have been seven,” Peter said, “but I remember there was one wind back then that lasted about forever, knocked down some eucalyptus trees in our neighborhood.”
“Force twelve on the Beaufort Scale,” Ackroyd said. “That’s hurricane force—a record breaker for Southern California. Hills were full of wildfires. Fifty thousand acres burned in the San Gabriels. They had to close the streets to the public after the wind blew a man right through a storefront window in Santa Ana. Toppled trees. Millions of dollars in property damage. Old Lydia Parker, of course, had been dead since the late thirties, and her daughter Anne had lived on there alone through the war. She was eccentric, a recluse. Passed on right around mid-century, and the place was abandoned except for the hired man who lived in the bunkhouse. He stayed on until the wind wrecked the place. By then it was beyond repair.”
“So this was after the murder?”
Ackroyd sat in silence, as if the mention of the murder had stopped him cold. “Long after,” he said finally. “Parker’s son was killed in the early twenties. Very bloody, terrible thing. They put a lid on it. These days the press would have a circus with it, but back then things were different. Justice was small time, much more personal. Often much less just.”
“What I heard from a waitress down at Cook’s Corner is that my place sat empty for so long because it was built by the murderer. What was his name? Dr. Landry, I think. That’s why it was cheap. No one wanted to buy a house with that reputation. My good luck, I guess.”
“Something like that. Landry left a certain amount of money in trust, actually, and a firm out in Tustin looked after the place for years, kept it locked up tight. Inflation ate the trust, though, and there wasn’t enough in it to make structural repairs. There were no heirs. It was finally put on the market when the old lease ran out. I suspect that if you hadn’t bought it, the Forest Service would have pulled it down.”
“You’ve been out here a long time. You must have known Landry. What happened to him?”
“Disappeared,” Ackroyd said.
“He disappeared?”
“One day he was gone. Of course he might’ve been gone a month, and nobody would have known. He became a sort of hermit after the murder. A local pariah.”
“And no one knows where he went?”
“Mystery was never solved. Some people think he wandered away into the hills and died.”
“Why didn’t they convict Landry for the murder?”
“Actually, they did convict him. They didn’t jail him, though. Lewis Parker, the murdered man, was his wife’s cousin. Dr. Landry caught them in a … dalliance late one night. Back then you could kill a man for that. It evened the score. Ended Landry’s standing in society, of course, what there was of it. The marriage was what people called ill-fated. Neither one of them did well by it, although she fared the worst.” Ackroyd paused for the space of a long minute, as if lost in thought. “Maybe Landry tried, in his way, to make a go of it. Tried and failed. It was the child that pushed him … that he couldn’t abide.”
“It was Parker’s child?”
“Maybe. People were certainly inclined to think so. He apparently thought so.”
“That’s why you said Landry had no heirs?”
He shook his head. “No, Landry had no heirs because his wife and the boy committed suicide on that same night that he hacked Lewis Parker to death with a shovel. Esther took the boy up onto the ridge….” The old man stood up and turned around, examining the old photographs on the wall again. “The two of them jumped into Falls Canyon.”
Peter was suddenly aware that he old man was crying. He sat in shocked silence. “I’m sorry if …” he started, but Ackroyd held up a hand and stopped him.
“It’s nothing you did,” he said after a moment. “I’m an old man who’s lived here all his life holding on to a handful of memories like a child clinging to an old worn-out blanket.” He sat still, recovering. Then, standing up and walking to the open front door he said, “Esther Landry was my sister.”
2
THERE WAS A CERTAIN COMFORTABLE ROUTINE IN GETTING Bobby set up in front of the television on weekend mornings. He seemed to think that there was a magic in getting things just right, arranging his stuffed animals, wrapping up in his quilt. Beth wondered how long he would be allowed to believe in that magic. Last night he had slept through everything, thank God, even the visit by the police.
“Could you bring me a little smackeral of something?” he asked. Having a “smackeral” of something to tide him over until breakfast was a habit he’d picked up from Winnie the Pooh.
She put a coffee mug full of water into the microwave, and then poured Cheerios and raisins into a cup shaped like a hippopotamus head. She carried it out into the living room and handed it to Bobby, who sat with his legs crossed on the couch, surrounded by the menagerie of stuffed animals and covered by the worn-out dinosaur quilt even though he was already dressed.
“Here you go,” Beth said. “Try not to spill, okay? Especially the raisins.”
“Get cups for everybody, will you?” Bobby asked, taking the hippo head from her.
“Maybe not,” Beth said. “I brought a lot for you, plenty enough to share. And put your shoes on while you’re watching TV, okay? So you’ll be ready to go.”
“Sure,” Bobby said. “You should have seen my dream last night.”
“A bad one?”
“About Dad.”
“Oh.”
“I dreamed that King Kong picked Dad up, you know? And dropped him, like from the top of a building.”
“How awful,” Beth said. Actually she envied him the dream. She hadn’t had any really pleasurable dreams in quite a while.
“Only Dad turned into a yo-yo, you know, on a string, and so he didn’t hit the ground, after all.”
Ah well, Beth thought, so much for happy endings. The microwave buzzer went off, and she went back into the kitchen, leaving Bobby to watch the last couple of minutes of “Sesame Street.” After lifting the mug full of hot water out of the oven, she heaped about twice the recommended amount of instant decaf into it. She stirred it idly, and through the window she watched the wind blow through a distant line of eucalyptus trees. She felt dull, as if she were hung over from the iced tea she’d drunk last night at the steak house.
If Peter had a phone she’d call him up right now and say something to him, although she didn’t know what.
How in the hell had she fallen in love with a man on the rebound, one who was so obviously blundering through an emotional mine field? There was no explaining it. And he danced like—what? There wasn’t a word for it. Dreadful didn’t cover enough ground. It was his eyes that had gotten to her first, years ago—always smiling and cheerful. That was partly it: he was easy to be around, comfortable. And in about twelve thousand ways he was different from Walter, her ex-husband. If Bobby had any dreams about Peter, they’d be good ones.
From inside her house she could see down into the next-door neighbor’s backyard, and right then Lance Klein came out through their french doors and stood by the pool, holding a cordless phone. Beth couldn’t help but like Klein, despite his being a little overbearing. He had called earlier that morning to tell her about how he was going to install new locks on her doors and windows. He was going to loan her the cordless phone, too, with his number in the memory dial. There was no use a
rguing with him.
Everyone, even his wife Lorna, called him Klein, as if he had never had a first-name sort of friendship with anyone. Lorna had been a blond bombshell once, but now she wore her bathrobe until the middle of the afternoon. She was a closet lush, too, probably to put up with his bullying. There was a lot to her, though, and maybe it would have been better if she’d kept her job at the library after marrying Klein. Doing nothing hadn’t seemed to agree with her.
Lorna had told Beth that she herself had miscarried twice and then had never been able to get pregnant again. The doctor, Lorna said, had wanted Klein to provide a semen sample, but he had indignantly refused, and had said, out loud, right there in the doctor’s office, that no one could ever question his manhood. As funny as it was, Beth had wanted to wring Klein’s neck on Lorna’s behalf.
Like Peter, Klein was almost always up for a game of catch with Bobby, and Beth liked him for that, too. Bobby’s father hadn’t ever had time for that sort of thing. And now, thank God, Bobby’s father lived in New Bedford, where he had a real estate license and was married to a woman he had met when he and Beth were still married.
The woman was also “in real estate” as her ex liked to say. He was the king of jargon. The two of them, he and the bimbo, had been fond of having “lock box sex” in houses they were selling for people. They would meet at predetermined houses, let themselves in, and save the price of a hotel. Except that one afternoon the woman who owned that day’s house had got off work early and found them rutting away on the fold-out couch in the den. Before she called the police and the Real Estate Board, she called Beth.
So now he lived back East, and sent child support but no alimony. To hell with his alimony; Beth didn’t want his money when they broke up, and she didn’t want it now. What she wanted was never to see him or hear from him again. She put the child-support checks straight into a bank account in Bobby’s name. He could use the money when he went to college. In a just world King Kong would have dropped Walter onto his head.
Yesterday she had talked to Bobby about his having to come home early from New Bedford. Bobby acted as if it didn’t matter. He was too cool to care. And besides, his father couldn’t help it. He was a busy man, very important, tons of money. He even drove a Porsche.
She didn’t want Bobby spending any time with his father anyway, even though Bobby still maintained some kind of love for the man, despite Walter’s being a treacherous pig. Kids seemed to have that skill—loving people and things for reasons of their own, without any help from anything on earth. But like other kinds of magic it diminished as time passed. It had for Beth. Right now, for instance, Beth would just as soon her ex-husband dropped dead, if only because Bobby was so full of this selfless love, and yet the creep had sent him home early from his Thanksgiving visit.
To top it off, here it was almost two years later, and Walter still had the power to make her this mad. That’s what really makes me mad, she thought, nearly laughing out loud. It didn’t figure. Just yesterday morning she had lectured Peter about figuring out what he wanted, but it was the kind of advice she herself had never been able to put to use.
She wondered what was worse, to be two years out of a bad marriage and still want to murder your ex, or to be consumed with doubt about the divorce. Somehow, whether Peter wanted her to or not, she was going to have to set him up on the couch with a dozen stuffed animals and a hippo head full of Cheerios.
3
THE CABIN THAT PETER SAW THROUGH THE TREES WAS little more than a shack, what the locals called a “tear-down.” There was a mattress spring in the yard, stripped of stuffing and left outside to rust along with empty paint cans and old lumber, all of it overgrown with poison oak and covered in fallen leaves. What had happened to the paint in the cans was a mystery, because the cabin itself clearly hadn’t been painted in years. The old rough-cut siding was full of woodpecker holes, and about half the windows were broken and filled with cardboard and aluminum foil.
Somebody was home, though. The front door was open, and there was a light blue Isuzu Trooper parked outside, nearly brand new and utterly out of character with the cabin. It was possible that Amanda and David had come this way last Sunday if they’d hiked up one of the trails to the ridge. Somebody must have seen them.
His conversation with Mr. Ackroyd this morning was making that harder and harder to believe. So this was it. If nothing panned out here, then he’d pack it in. He walked up the drive, and just then a scrawny little dog crawled out from under the porch and wandered toward him. It was some kind of pop-eyed chihuahua mix with a skin condition and a head the size of a golf ball. There was something weirdly possum-looking about it—maybe its tail, which was hairless except for a patch of fur at the end.
“Sit, Queenie,” Peter said, bending over to pet it, and the dog sat down and raised its paw, then lowered it again without giving Peter time to shake it. It lay down and rolled onto its side, waving the paw in the air in a gesture of friendship. He scratched it behind the ear, and abruptly there was a loud voice from inside the cabin. Somebody was either angry or deaf. Peter stood up. To hell with knocking. Whatever this was, he didn’t need it.
Just then the screen door banged open and a man strode out onto the porch, turning to say one last thing through the open door. Peter recognized him immediately—what’s-his-name, Adams, the man who was “looking for something to buy” at the steak house last night.
“That’s an attitude that some people can’t afford to take,” Adams said, in a tone that sounded as if the statement were meant as a piece of good friendly advice, and not as a threat.
“Shove off!” a voice shouted back.
“I’ll consider …” Adams started, but then there was the sound of something heavy hitting the floor inside, and he clipped off his sentence and stepped quickly down the wooden steps.
“Think about this” the voice said, but whatever it was, Adams didn’t wait to find out. He climbed into the Trooper, started the engine, and drove straight past Peter without taking his eyes off the road. There was fear and hatred in his face, which he seemed to want to take out on the car, slamming away across the potholes and throwing up a cloud of dust and leaves.
“That man’s no damn good, Queenie,” Peter said. The dog watched the car disappear around the bend.
Through the screen door someone shouted, “Freeway!” and the dog trotted toward the porch. A man stepped out and gave Peter a hard look. He was tall and thin, with white hair combed forward to cover a bald spot, although it looked as if it were combed that way by accident rather than vanity, and he clearly hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. His flannel shirt was torn out at the elbows, and he wore it with the sleeves rolled up over long underwear even though the Santa Ana winds had already heated the morning air.
Peter nodded at him. “I think that guy might be trouble,” he said. “I’ve run into him before.”
“Run into him harder next time,” the man said, wiping his mouth with his hand. “So who the hell are you? You want to buy me out, too? I don’t even want to hear a price. I told that till I’m blue in the face to three people now. This cabin’s about all I’ve got. Costs me three hundred a year lease from the Forest Service, and that’s it. No rent. No mortgage. You can’t live that cheap in jail. Why the hell would I sell out? Every damned weekend somebody comes up here looking to buy, but I ain’t selling, and you can tell ’em that.”
“I don’t want to buy your place,” Peter said. “I’ve got one of my own down the road. I was just shooting the breeze with your dog.”
“That’s old Freeway.” The man relaxed, as if he could trust anyone who was a friend to his dog.
“Good name,” Peter said. “I might get a dog one of these days.”
“He’s half purebred. Champion stock. You don’t want to get a whole purebred, though. Their brain’s screwed up from the inbreeding.”
“I’ve always had a mutt,” Peter said.
“And keep ’em in at night if you don�
��t want the lions to eat ’em. It’s all right they stay outside in the daytime, but night’s a different deal. If you do leave ’em out at night, for God’s sake don’t tie ’em up. They ain’t nothing but TV dinners tied up. Lion’ll come down and eat a dog right off the chain, bones and all. Don’t think it hasn’t happened.”
Peter nodded. “I get the picture,” he said, reaching down to pet Freeway again, who lay down and wallowed in the loose dirt. “I wanted to ask you a question if you’ve got a minute.”
“I got all day,” the man said. “That’s why I live out here. That stupid son of a bitch couldn’t grasp that. You know what he did? Turned me in to the Forest Service for all this crap in the yard. I know it was him, trying to wedge me out of here.” He gestured at the mattress springs and paint cans. “None of his damned business, and he calls the Ranger and turns me in. Now I got a notice that I got to clean it up. This morning he walks right in the door, like he already owns the place, and tells me that he knows I got my price, and he’s willing to pay it. He comes around here again I’m going to set old Freeway on him. Freeway ain’t got much hair, but he’s got teeth like a saw blade. Hold on a second.”
He went into the house and then came straight back out carrying two bottles of beer. “Set down,” he said, nodding at two old kitchen chairs on the porch.
“Peter Travers,” Peter said, holding out his hand.
The man shook it, then put the beer into it. “Dooly Bateman. Which cabin?”
“Number twelve.”
“I thought twelve was empty. Has been for years.”
“Not anymore. I bought it.”
“Twelve’s been empty for years.” He scratched his nose, as if he was calculating. “I’ll be damned. Twelve. What’d it sell for?”
“Thirty thousand,” Peter said.
He whistled and widened his eyes. “It don’t seem like they could give it away. Nice place in its day, of course. I always wondered about it. Supposed to be haunted. They say a crazy man used to own it. Old Ackroyd could tell you about it. He’s the only one’s been out here long enough. I don’t guess people want a place like that.”
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