Murder on the Horizon

by M. L. Rowland

  “We don’t acknowledge the laws of the federal government,” Lee said.

  “We deny the rights of the federal government to exist,” Jordan chimed in. “This is the people’s land.”

  “Well, if it’s the people’s land,” Gracie shot back, trying to keep her quivering voice from giving her away, “I’m one of the people, too, and you have no right . . . no right . . . to point a weapon at me.”

  “It’s our right as Americans and patriots to bear arms,” Jordan yelled. “As granted us by the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. I’m willing to die to defend my Second Amendment rights. Are you willing to die trying to take them away from me?”

  Gracie figured now was probably not the time to express the viewpoint that when the Founding Fathers constructed the Second Amendment to the Constitution to include “a well-regulated militia,” they weren’t talking about marauding gangs of children armed up the wazoo with AK-47s.

  Her eyes moved back to the big man who was staring at her, head cocked, as if ciphering on something. “Don’t I know you?” he asked.

  “I think I would remember,” Gracie growled.

  “Why are you so hostile?

  “Why? Why? How about going out for a peaceful run with my little dog on a fine morning and finding myself in the middle of the Lord of the Flippin’ Flies? How about having a gun—multiple guns—pointed at me?”

  “I showed you they weren’t loaded,” the man said in a mild voice. “You think we’d give loaded firearms to children?”

  “How the hell do I know what you would and wouldn’t do?” she snapped. She was so out of there she was already one of those little cartoon clouds with the whoosh marks off to the side. “Come on, Minnie.” She backed up another step and turned to walk away.

  “Grace Kinkaid.”

  Gracie stopped, mid-turn. “Wha . . . ?”

  “Your name is Grace Kinkaid. You work up at that camp.”

  Gracie suddenly remembered exactly when and where she had met the big man before. Several months before. Up at camp. At the memorial service of a friend.

  What was his name? An old-time cigarette brand. Pall Mall. Salem. Winston. That was it. Winston. Winston Ferguson. Baxter Edwards’s Uncle Win.

  Gracie remembered him, not only because he was larger than behemoth, but because he had introduced himself as her friend’s fiancé when he had already been wearing a wedding band. And, she recalled, he had asked her, Gracie, if she was married.

  Her eyes dropped to Winston’s left hand, but he was wearing black tactical gloves.

  “You were wearing a nice dress with a pretty paisley scarf,” Winston continued, his tone conversational, as if they were shooting the breeze any old cloudy day. As if she weren’t being stared down by a dozen pairs of eyes, most of which were looking like they wanted to have her as the main course at a wienie roast. “I remember because it’s nice to see a beautiful woman wearing a nice dress.”

  “Uh . . .”

  “What do you do there?”

  “I’m . . .” Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. “. . . the manager.”

  “That’s a pretty big camp,” Winston said. “What is it? Hundred acres? Hundred fifty?”

  “Two hundred ten,” Gracie answered automatically.

  “Two-ten,” Winston continued, standing casually on one leg, semiautomatic rifle cradled in his arms like an infant. “That’s a lot of land. Anyway, I’m really sorry if we scared you. That wasn’t our intent by any means. We’re just playing around. That’s why we come out pretty early in the day—try to avoid running into people. Don’t want to scare anybody.”

  “I’m out of here,” Gracie growled, spinning around and stalking away as quickly as she could with Minnie trotting at her heels.

  “Nice to see you again, Grace,” Winston said to her back.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME Gracie walked in through the front door of her cabin, the adrenaline had bled off, leaving her feeling as if she had been fed through the rollers of a wringer washer.

  Except when she sat down on the couch in the living room, she stood up again. Sat down again. Jumped right back up and stormed back and forth across the wooden floor.

  Minnie had given up trying to follow her around, hopping up onto her end of the couch and keeping an eye on Gracie from there.

  “Those . . . those Neanderthals!” she raged. “How dare they point guns at me? Those . . . goon squad . . . wing nuts!”

  Three times she picked up the telephone to call the Sheriff’s Department to report the incident. Three times she hung up the phone. The last time she had called to report someone’s illegal behavior, that same someone had snuck onto her property and almost killed her dog. No way did she want to risk Minnie’s life—or her own—again. “Forget about it, Kinkaid,” she told herself. “Just don’t jog out that way again.”

  But she couldn’t just forget about it. In fact, she couldn’t stop thinking about it, mentally gnawing on it over and over like a dog with a bone, the images of children with glaring eyes and semiautomatic weapons tumbling about in her head like ice cubes in a blender. The image of Baxter’s face, pale, wide-eyed and afraid. He alone of the children hadn’t pointed his weapon at her. Was he forced against his will to participate in these so-called trainings? Were these types of trainings one more reason for him to want to run away? She now, at least, had a better understanding of any antipathy Baxter harbored for the older boy, Jordan—he was a bully, mean and angry. Whose son was he? Gracie wondered. Lee’s? No. Baxter had said the boy was a cousin. So Winston’s? Or someone else’s?

  Was the group really only “playing around,” as Winston put it, or were they up to no good? Was the group some kind of weird cult, or were they just normal run-of-the-mill American gun owners with nothing better to do on a Saturday morning? How serious would the fallout be if she made a report to the Sheriff’s Department and it turned out to be nothing? Or if she didn’t report it and it turned out to be something horrible?

  “Ralphie, I wish I could talk to you. Ask your advice. You’d help me figure out what to do.” She plopped down so hard onto the couch, she almost bounced Minnie right off. “Sorry, little girl,” Gracie said, putting a hand out to soothe the dog. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Ralph wouldn’t help me figure anything out. He would tell me not to jump to any conclusions. That I’m just being emotional. Not to let my imagination run away from me. Not to do anything impetuous. When the hell am I ever impetuous?”

  Gracie put her feet up on the sea chest, dropping her head back on the couch, trying to remember what she knew about Winston.

  The winter before, her friend Jett had been dating Winston hot and heavy. Then, suddenly, she wasn’t. With no real reason given except to say that he scared her.

  Gracie sat up straight, plunking her feet onto the floor.

  The journal!

  She had forgotten all about it.

  Jett had left Gracie a computer flash drive containing her journal, a sometimes excruciatingly detailed chronicle of her life, including at Camp Ponderosa where she worked as kitchen manager. After Jett’s death, Gracie had handed the flash drive over to investigators. But not before copying the entire journal onto another flash drive of her own.

  But where is it?

  Deeming it too painful to read at the time, but vowing to retrieve it someday and read it all the way through, she had stashed it somewhere. But now she couldn’t remember where.

  She looked down at her watch. “Minnie!” she said, jumping to her feet and bounding up the stairs to the loft. “We’re supposed to be at camp! Right now! Allen’s gonna kill me!”

  * * *

  GRACIE LIFTED A large, square tray of chocolate sheet cake from a shelf in the walk-in refrigerator, backed out into the kitchen, and nudged the door closed with her hip. She set the tray on the butcher-block t
able, picked up a sharp knife, bit the upper corner of her lip, and began slicing the cake into long, narrow rows.

  Allen stood at the huge stainless steel stove on Gracie’s left, stirring a gigantic pot of spaghetti sauce. As always, he was dressed in a bright white T-shirt, blue jeans, and work boots. His long hair neatly braided and tucked up into the hairnet. His blue eyes were reflections of placidity, and even, Gracie decided, serenity.

  “What?” Gracie said, without looking up.

  “What do you mean, ‘what’?” Allen asked.

  “You’re looking at me. I can feel your beady eyes on me.”

  “Can’t I look at a beautiful woman with admiration and awe?”

  Gracie shot him a look. “Baloney.”

  He chuckled. “Was wondering what’s on your mind, sugar pea. You’ve been frowning ever since you got here. I’m concerned for the welfare of the cake.”

  Realizing he was right, Gracie tried to unfurrow her brow and concentrated on keeping her cuts parallel. “What do you think,” she asked, “about people owning a lot of guns and spouting rhetoric about Second Amendment rights giving them the right to bear arms.”

  Allen stopped stirring and set the ladle down. He dipped into the pot with another spoon, took a sip of the sauce, then added a little pepper and garlic powder to the mix. “I think,” he said finally, “that every Tom, Dick, and Jane owning a gun isn’t really the problem. The problem is the few extremists who think it’s their constitutionally guaranteed right to amass as many guns as they want without registering them. People have to register their cars. Have a license to drive. Hell, they have to have a license to pull a damn trout out of the lake. Why shouldn’t they have to register or have a license to own a high-powered weapon?”

  “What about people who don’t think they have to obey the laws of the federal government?”

  “These the same people who use the Constitution to avow their right to bear arms?”

  Gracie looked up at Allen, who shrugged, picked up the ladle, and continued stirring. “Think about it, sweet pea. Can’t have it both ways.”

  Gracie studied Allen for a moment, then asked, “You study to be a lawyer or something when you were in . . . ? When you were in.”

  “Nope. But I did find myself with quite a bit of time on my hands. Did a fair bit of reading.”

  Gracie finished her cut, turned the tray ninety degrees, and stopped again, knife poised to slice the cake in the other direction. Then she laid the knife down and walked over to a dry-erase board on the wall next to the dining room door. She picked up a red marker, and beneath a To Buy list with the single word cinnamon written beneath, drew a picture of the symbol she had seen carved into the tree stump, the diamond with legs with “88” beneath it. “Have you ever seen something like this?” she asked.

  Setting the ladle down, Allen stepped over and stared at the picture, standing close enough that Gracie could smell his Old Spice aftershave. “Where did you see this?”

  “Carved into a tree stump up the hill from my house. You know what it is?”

  “Probably.”

  Seconds passed.

  “Well?”

  “I’m not exactly sure what the symbol is. But H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Eighty-eight stands for HH.”

  “HH.” Gracie stared at him, her face blank.

  “The symbol is white supremacist,” Allen said, his voice bland. “Neo-Nazi. HH stands for ‘Heil Hitler.’”

  CHAPTER

  15

  “IDIOTIC, high-powered-gun-toting, antigovernment whackos right in our nice little backyard, Minnie,” Gracie complained to the dog, who lay on her bed next to her desk in the camp office. “Now neo-Nazis, too?” She rested her chin on her hand. “Or maybe they’re all part of the same group. So much for living in paradise.”

  Gracie fired up the computer on her desk and did an Internet search for the diamond 88 symbol, starting with various combinations of white supremacist, symbol, and diamond. When nothing came up, she thought for a moment, started over and typed in 88 symbol hate. One of the links listed was the Hate on Display page of the Anti-Defamation League’s website. She clicked on the link and studied the page. On the right was a box for View Symbols by Category. She clicked on Neo-Nazi Symbols. The number 88 was at the top of the list. She scrolled down the list.

  There it was: the diamond with legs.

  The symbol was labeled the Othala Rune with a short explanation that, originally Norse, it had been adopted by neo-Nazis and white supremacists to symbolize pride in their Aryan heritage.

  What were the odds that the Othala rune carved into the tree stump was connected to Baxter’s family? That not only were they gun-toting extremists, but neo-Nazis as well? “Better ’n two-to-one,” Gracie whispered.

  For the next half hour, Gracie sifted through the websites of various groups—neo-Nazis, Aryan Brotherhood, skinheads—all with one common theme: extreme rage and hatred.

  Much to her consternation, she discovered a second anti–federal government paramilitary group living in the Timber Creek valley, south of the lake, not far from where Ralph lived. And she learned that a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan resided in one of the towns in the desert an hour’s drive down on the backside of the mountain. And multiple white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups were spread out throughout the entire Inland Empire. A neo-Nazi rally was even scheduled the following Friday in the desert community of Desertview, a ninety-minute drive away.

  Gracie sank back in the chair, feeling unsettled and on edge.

  She had been living in blissful ignorance, with no idea that, all around her, like a mythical leviathan lurking beneath still, dark lake waters, groups of people existed for no other reason than the annihilation of a particular group of humanity. She had never imagined the extent or the sheer variety of people and groups with so much hatred for and the desire to kill others, based solely on race or religion or sexual orientation or anything they believed was different from themselves.

  Fire required three components to burn: fuel, oxygen, and heat. Maybe that’s what happens with some people, Gracie mused. Maybe the inferno that was hatred required anger and fear in order to thrive. While some used logic and knowledge and just plain goodness of heart to douse the flames, others fed the blaze willingly, actively, enthusiastically, wanting to hate, wanting to hurt, wanting to kill.

  Gracie simply couldn’t fathom that level of hatred for anyone.

  She sat up straight in her chair. “Yes, I can,” she said aloud. “Morris.”

  If the blinding red mist of rage that obscured her vision whenever she thought about her stepfather wasn’t hatred, it was the next closest thing to it.

  “That’s different,” she snapped to the room, suddenly irritated and not quite sure why.

  She tapped a fingertip on the desk for several seconds, then clicked on another website.

  She scanned an article about a white supremacist who had murdered his sixteen-year-old babysitter by injecting her with heroin and methamphetamine. Pictures of the man showed him as frightening, glaring, with elaborate tattoos covering his entire body.

  Gracie frowned.

  The Edwards/Ferguson clan had tattoos. Lots of them.

  Gracie started.

  But so did Allen.

  And Allen had known immediately what the symbol 88 meant.

  Don’t jump to conclusions, Kinkaid. She exited the site, leaned back in the chair, and rocked.

  Lots of people had tattoos nowadays. It was way too much of a coincidence that Allen was a white supremacist working right there in camp. It might just mean Allen and the guy in the article had both spent time in prison. Or maybe they just both liked tattoos. And Allen might have seen the symbol in prison as well. Plus he seemed well-read, well-informed. Knowledge didn’t equal guilt. Her labeling Allen a white supremacist simply because he and a white supr
emacist had multiple tattoos was like someone painting her a mass murderer because she and a mass murderer both liked to drink Coors Lite.

  Allen a white supremacist was a ludicrous idea.

  Wasn’t it?

  Gracie leaned forward once again, backed out of all the sites, and closed the browser altogether.

  All this hatred was making her suspicious of someone she liked, darkening her mind, sapping her energy. “I need to do something else,” she said, pushing away from the desk. “Something constructive. Something fun. Something outdoors.”

  * * *

  BALANCING ON THE top step of an eight-foot ladder, Gracie rolled smooth lines of Nilla Vanilla paint along the front boards of the Gatehouse.

  After the mad Labor Day rush, when camp had been bursting at the seams with families and church groups, the number of guests diminished to a less frantic, more manageable level and would remain so for the next six or so months of fall and winter. Now Gracie had time to catch her breath, actually learn the job for which she had been hired, and start on all the ideas and projects she had in mind for fixing up the camp, increasing its business, and improving its bottom line.

  With the approaching winter, outdoor projects took precedence. Deciding the general air of seediness and neglect at the entrance to camp presented a poor welcome to incoming guests, Gracie had placed sprucing up the exterior of the Gatehouse at the top of the to-do list.

  She mowed the small square of grass in front of the building with a push mower, relishing the strain on her muscles. Banging around in the maintenance shop, she had unearthed several cans of unopened paint. After pressure-washing the old and peeling yellow paint from the front of the building, she began painting the exterior walls the Nilla Vanilla, intending Calypso Blue on the trim and shutters.

  There was something Zen-like in birds fluttering and chirping in nearby bushes and trees, the September air warm and soft, the afternoon sun on Gracie’s shoulders and the backs of her bare legs. Physical work was the perfect antidote to thoughts of neo-Nazis and white supremacists and a fire raging down the hill. As Gracie painted, she hummed a little ditty to herself, aware of her mood lightening perceptibly.