Where Echoes Live

by Marcia Muller

  “Sure—what?”

  “Check around town to see if anyone saw Earl Hopwood after he left Dr. Mahoney’s office on Saturday morning. And then go back to the Friends’ trailer and wait for me. My contact in San Francisco promised to call there if she hears anything more about Ong.”

  “And where will you be if I need you?”

  “At the lodge. I want to check something out, and then I’m going to have a talk with Margot Erickson.”

  Twenty-six

  Rose’s car once again stood in front of the lodge, and lights glowed behind the curtained windows of the public rooms. I left the Land Rover under a willow tree and walked downhill as if I were going to my cabin. When I reached the shelter of the grove, I crossed to the one Sanderman had occupied.

  Its door still stood open, and the key remained on the coffee table. Since Rose hadn’t collected it and locked up, I assumed she was unaware that Ned had left for good. I closed all the draperies, turned on the lights, and began prowling through the rooms.

  Dust lay so thick in one of the bedrooms that I doubted Sanderman had set foot in there. The bathroom contained an abundance of damp towels and a lone aspirin decomposing in the sink. In the larger bedroom the bedclothes were rumpled, the hangers in the closet empty. The wastebasket contained only a menu from the take-out pizza parlor next to the Swifty Mart.

  The living room showed even fewer signs of Sanderman’s occupancy: a blackened light bulb on an end table, a pile of Sacramento Bees next to the woodbox. I peered into the potbellied stove; it looked as if he’d never used it. I lifted the cushions of the couch and chair; not even a stray coin had slipped beneath them. Finally I turned to the kitchen, sure I’d find nothing. Sanderman had been emphatic in his distaste for that room: “I wouldn’t boil water in there; God knows what germs are lying in wait.”

  The room certainly didn’t look unsanitary. Rose Wittington took pride in her cabins; as she’d told me when I arrived, you couldn’t find cleaner rentals. But the kitchen was hard on the eye: the same unfortunate orange tile as in mine predominated; cabinets painted a glossy turquoise clashed violently with it and with the bilious green floor and walls. I shook my head as I looked around.

  Something about the room, besides the decor, struck me as peculiar, but at first I couldn’t figure what. Then I realized that the refrigerator and a metal cabinet were slightly out of position. I went closer and saw scrape marks on the linoleum where they’d been moved. I pulled the cabinet a little farther from the wall, but saw nothing behind it. I took my flashlight from my bag and peered behind the refrigerator. Nothing there, either. Then I began to examine the entire room, beginning with the walls and floor. They were scrupulously clean, but a section near the door to the living room looked even cleaner, as if it had very recently been scrubbed. Rose wouldn’t have done that—she provided no maid service.

  As in my cabin, the door was a swinging one whose mechanism allowed it to be propped open against the kitchen wall. I pushed it shut and looked at the section of floor and baseboard behind it. A brownish substance had seeped into the crack between the linoleum and the board, had dried and caked there, just as the blood had congealed between the floorboards in Earl Hopwood’s living room.

  Even the most meticulous housekeepers miss things, especially when performing a distasteful task that needs to be done in a hurry. Someone had carefully cleaned blood from the linoleum and wall here, but hadn’t taken into account that the sag of the floor had permitted it to flow into the crack next to the baseboard.

  Quickly I stood and surveyed the room. Assume, I thought, that the person who shed the blood was shot. Where would the shooter have stood? There, by the sink, or over there by the refrigerator. Near the end of the counter, anyway. What had the shooter—

  No, Ned Sanderman. Who else? And the victim? Mick Erickson.

  All right, then, what had Ned been doing in the kitchen? Getting a drink for a visitor, perhaps. And where was the gun? On him or somewhere in this room. Regardless, he stood in that general area.

  I remained where I was, scrutinizing the other side of the kitchen. Then I went over there and squatted down to take a better look at the end of the counter. On the curve of the tile at about waist level was a chip. While the ceramic was cracked and marred in many places, those marks were gray with age. This chip was white—new.

  I straightened, held out my hand as if aiming a gun, and measured its height against the counter. Sanderman was no taller than I; he would have held the gun at the same level.

  It fits, I thought. He came in here. Erickson followed. He took the gun out, turned, and fired. But he didn’t brace himself against the recoil. His hand was deflected … like so. The gun hit the tile and nicked it.

  But why had he moved the refrigerator and metal cabinet? He hadn’t needed to do that to clean up the blood. And if he’d been that careful, surely he’d also have noticed the encrustation behind the swinging door. Why else would he have gone to the trouble—

  And then I remembered that Mick Erickson had been shot twice with a .22 automatic. Automatics ejected spent shell casings. What if one of them had landed where Sanderman hadn’t seen it fall, and he’d had to hunt for it?

  I leaned against the counter, considering. The medical examiner had fixed the time of Erickson’s death at around seven on Saturday evening. The lodge was relatively isolated, and with Mrs. Wittington and Anne-Marie in Bridgeport, no one had heard the shot. It would have taken Sanderman some time to dispose of the body, even if he’d merely dragged it down to the lake and pushed it in. Then he’d have needed to park Erickson’s rented Bronco on the highway near Zelda’s, wipe it of prints, and walk back here. Even if that had taken until eight-thirty or nine, it allowed three hours before Anne-Marie had come to get him around midnight—more than enough time to mop up the blood and destroy any other evidence.

  Yet after Anne-Marie’s summons, Sanderman had taken time to shower, and when he’d appeared at our cabin he’d seemed exceptionally alert for a man who supposedly had been fast abed. Alert and somewhat agitated. Why?

  1 thought of those spent shell casings again. There had to have been at least two. A man who was looking for a casing would have moved anything that wasn’t fastened down; the search would have added time to a normal cleanup. And if he hadn’t found one, it might still be here.

  I began a search of my own: first in the more obvious places, then in others that were possible but not probable. Nothing was caught in the faded gingham curtains at the window. The sink’s drain was covered by mesh too fine for anything larger than a crumb to have passed through. The grease trap under the stove burners was empty. None of the drawers contained anything but utensils. The cupboards were bare of all but the basics. I tipped the metal cabinet and shone my flash under it to see if there was a ledge onto which a shell casing could have bounced, looked into the oven, checked inside the fridge. The countertops were clear of everything but a small electric coffee maker like the one in my cabin….

  I looked closer at the coffee maker. Saw that the plastic cap that usually covered the place where you poured the water was missing. It couldn’t have worked too well; a lot of the water would have turned to steam.

  And then I thought, Sanderman never used this, anyway. He probably didn’t even know how it worked, since he didn’t drink coffee or tea. Why would he have noticed this small opening?

  Pulling it toward me, I tipped it slightly and peered into the cavity for the water. At its bottom nestled the gun-metal gray shell casing. A .22 shell casing, I was sure.

  “All right,” I said softly.

  Without removing the shell, I set the coffee maker back in its approximate place on the counter. Turned out the kitchen light and hurried into the bathroom. Most of the towels that hung there were damp from normal use, but there were three large ones draped over the shower-curtain rod that had dried stiff, as if they’d been used with a cleaning solvent. Under the sink I found a nearly empty large-sized bottle of Formula 409.<
br />
  He probably thought cleanser would destroy all traces of blood, but I knew better. A crime lab would have no trouble bringing them out.

  Aware that I had no time to waste, I switched off the rest of the cabin lights, locked the door, and sprinted uphill to the lodge.

  Rose Wittington didn’t want to let me in. She stood behind the closed door and calmly told me to come back tomorrow.

  I shouted that I wasn’t going away. That I needed the phone to call the sheriff. That I knew Margo was in there, and if she wouldn’t talk with me, she’d damned well have to take her chances with the authorities. And then I kicked the door.

  The dead bolt turned and Rose stood before me, a sternly reproving look marring her usually pleasant features. She said, “Keep your voice down, young lady; they’ll hear you clear over in Nevada. And don’t you go messing up my door with those feet.”

  I glared at her and strode inside.

  Margot Erickson huddled on one of the sofas in front of the big-screen TV, a small figure in a blue velvet caftan. The purple-black bruises stood out starkly against her ashen skin. I expected her to bolt, but she seemed incapable of further flight. She stared at me without speaking.

  “I can’t waste time explaining what’s happened,” I told her. “Just listen to my end of this conversation.” Then I went to the phone and dialed the sheriff’s department in Bridgeport.

  Lark was still on duty. She started to tell me something about the lab report on the Hopwood cabin, but I cut her off. “Kristen, I’ve found out who killed Mick Erickson. How soon can you be at the Willow Grove Lodge?”

  Margot started to rise from the sofa. I motioned for her to remain there.

  Lark said, “Not for quite a while, I’m afraid. There’s been a major pileup between here and there on three ninety-five. All our manpower’s been diverted to it, and I doubt I can get through anyway. Tell me what you’ve got.”

  I related what I’d found in Sanderman’s cabin, watching Margot’s expression change from shock to confusion. “He left here between three and four,” I finished, “possibly headed home to Sacramento, but I wouldn’t bet on that.”

  “I’ll put out a pickup order on him. You know his license number?”

  I asked Rose, and she read it off from her guest register.

  “Okay, I’m on it,” Lark said. “Is the crime scene secure?”

  “Locked, and I have the key.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  I put the receiver down and went over to Margot. She had drawn her bare feet up onto the sofa and wrapped her arms protectively around her knees. After a moment she ran her tongue over dry lips and asked, “Mick really was killed in one of the cabins here?”

  I nodded.

  “And this … Ned Sanderman … who is he?”

  “You don’t know him?”

  “No.”

  I sat down next to her. “An environmentalist with the California Coalition for Environmental Preservation. He was involved with Mick and Lionel Ong in the Golden Hills project; he’s probably the one who figured out how they could get hold of the land on the east side of the mesa.”

  She buried her face against her raised knees. “That damned project. It destroyed everything.”

  “Margot, I know that Earl Hopwood is your father and that you assisted on the project in some way. Will you tell me about it—from the beginning?”

  She looked up again. Tears had spilled over, their wet sheen somehow rendering her bruises all the more brutal. Rose pressed some tissues into her hand, then withdrew silently to a nearby armchair and perched on its edge, eyes watchful and concerned.

  Margot said, “All right, but first I want to apologize for what I did to you the other night. I panicked and didn’t realize—”

  “Accepted. Now tell me about Golden Hills.”

  “To do that I’ll have to start years back, when Mick was still trying to please Daddy. Daddy’s whole life had narrowed to Stone Valley and that mine; he was convinced that if he could get someone to work it again, Promiseville would bounce back like it was before. Of course that was impossible—in more ways than one—but to humor him, Mick took some samples and they showed the mine was played out. He didn’t tell him the results, though, because Daddy wouldn’t have believed him, anyway.”

  “When did he and Ong come upon the idea of making it a resort?”

  “Resort?” Rose said.

  I ignored her, concentrated on Margot.

  “I don’t know.” She began twisting the tissues around her fingers. “A couple of Christmases ago Mick talked to Daddy about selling the land. He said he had a client with a lot of money that he wanted to move to the U.S. and put into mining. Daddy was ecstatic, but I didn’t believe Mick. Besides, I’m something of an environmentalist myself, and I knew what modern mining methods would do to the area. But when I tried to bring that up, Mick … told me to mind my own business.”

  Rose snorted derisively.

  “What happened next?”

  Margot discarded the tissues and reached for a pack of cigarettes that lay beside a full ashtray on the end table. She lit one, made a face, and replied, “I don’t know; I decided to stay out of it. What could I do against a company like Transpacific? How could I justify destroying my father’s last dream? Besides, things weren’t going well for Mick: he was horribly overworked, and the final payment to his former wife for the buyout of the business was coming due. He didn’t need any more stress.”

  And that final payment, I thought, gave Erickson a motive beyond simple greed for wanting the Golden Hills project to happen.

  “Eventually,” Margot went on, “Mick realized I wasn’t going to be obstructive, so he asked me to help out on the project. He’d gotten an extension from his ex-wife on the payment and was putting all his energies into getting the company’s billings up. I didn’t feel I could refuse.”

  “How did you help?”

  “With the clerical things. He told me they’d decided they needed to buy additional acreage in order to mine the mesa. A man named Franklin Tarbeaux who’d filed a claim on the eastern side had agreed to patent the land and resell it to Transpacific at a good price. Or so Mick told me. I prepared the applications, consulting with the geologist, and handled all Tarbeaux’s mail.”

  “The mail came to that Transpacific condominium on Telegraph Hill?”

  “Yes. Lionel keeps the building for visiting executives and private conferences.” She looked guiltily away, remembering what had happened between us outside that building, and stubbed out her cigarette. “I had a key to the penthouse and would pick up what mail arrived. Nothing ever came that wasn’t related to the Bureau of Land Management dealings.”

  But her frequent and unexplained presence at the condo had started talk about Ong keeping a mistress there. “When did you become aware that Tarbeaux didn’t exist?”

  “I never knew, not until you asked me about the name and told me Mick had been carrying a second set of I.D. when he was shot. Then I began to figure out I’d been lied to.”

  “And when did your father find out that the mesa was going to be turned into a resort rather than mined?” That, I reasoned, had been the real start of the trouble.

  “About a month ago. He’d been hanging around the mesa, all excited about the new mining venture—making a pest of himself, Mick said.” She paused, seeming to listen to her words. “The man’s dreams had been taken from him, even if he didn’t know that yet, and all my husband could say was that he was a pest.” Her gaze turned bleak, inward. I knew what she was seeing: the callous man her husband had been—or perhaps become—and the sham he’d made of their marriage.

  Margot sighed and reached for another cigarette. Rose made a small sound of protest, but didn’t speak.

  I said, “About your father finding out … ?”

  “Daddy wasn’t much of a miner, but he knew enough to realize something was wrong on the mesa. He gained the confidence of one of the personnel and learned w
hat Trans-pacific’s real plans were. Then he came to the city and demanded that Mick stop the project. Mick threw Daddy out of the house. And that did it for me. I’ve had three husbands, but only one father. I threw Mick out of the house, told him not to come back until he did as Daddy asked.

  “Of course,” she added softly, “he never did.”

  “Your father began making trouble at the mine site, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. They fenced it and posted guards, but that didn’t stop him.” She smiled grimly. “Daddy knows that mesa inside out. There are all sorts of ways onto it—tunnels, shafts—that Transpacific couldn’t begin to know about, much less block.”

  I remembered the old maps on the wall of Hopwood’s “museum,” as well as the newer half-finished one. It probably showed which of the tunnels still existed. “So what did they decide to do?”

  “I guess Mick came up here to try to reason with Daddy. I suspected that as soon as I found out he was shot at Tufa Lake. Why else would he go to such trouble to make it look as if he was in Japan? He knew that I’d interfere if I found out what he was doing.”

  And she’d thought her father had killed her husband. That explained the almost palpable fear I’d felt at her house on Tuesday morning. “Do you know for a fact that he saw your father?”

  “Oh, yes.” Her features twisted, as if in remembrance of real pain. “I found out for sure on Wednesday.”

  “What happened then?”

  She looked away from me.

  “Your father showed up in the city again, didn’t he?”

  She dipped her chin—a small affirmative.

  “He was the one who beat you.”

  No response from Margot, but Rose made a strange sound—half surprise, half denial.

  After a bit Margot said, “He came to the city that afternoon. He’d been shot a few days before—a flesh wound. He told me Mick had come to his cabin Saturday morning and threatened him. Daddy pulled his gun on him, meaning to frighten him, and Mick took it away and shot him and then ran off.”