Murder on the Horizon

by M. L. Rowland

  The previous night and all day at camp she had flinched at every loud noise, twitched at every sudden voice, so hair-trigger jumpy that by the end of the afternoon she was irritating herself and had pushed Allen’s patience beyond the boiling point.

  Exactly what she was expecting, she didn’t know, but she simply couldn’t believe she had opened Pandora’s can of worms with Winston and wasn’t going to pay for it somehow.

  She stepped up onto the front porch of her cabin. Grabbing up a flyer that had been stuck into the crack of the front door, she inserted her key in the lock, pushed the door open, snapped on the light as Minnie ran past her inside, then nudged the door closed with her foot, locking and dead-bolting it behind her.

  In the kitchen, she dumped the mail onto the table and scooped a cupful of dog food into Minnie’s dish. Then picking a Coors Light out of the refrigerator, she popped it open and padded back into the living room, laptop under one arm. In the darkened room, the only light coming from the last gasp of daylight showing through the front window, she sank down onto the couch, put her feet up on the sea chest, and took a swig of beer.

  “I’m lucky I’m alive,” Gracie said to the empty room, still stunned by what had poured out of her mouth at the restaurant the evening before.

  Her intent had been to have a nice, harmless chat with Winston, to get to know him better, maybe prod him a little to see if he would rise to the bait, give himself away, reveal, in some small way, his true nature.

  But she had lost control, allowing her anger and grief over Vivian’s death to take over.

  As a result, what Gracie had gotten wasn’t disclosure of anything to connect Winston or any of the Edwards clan to the Robinson house fire or anything remotely extremist. No hate-filled rhetoric. No strong-arm salute. What Gracie had gotten was the same simmering below-the-surface rage, the same penchant for violence as Baxter’s father’s. What Gracie had gotten was the transformation of a seemingly harmless garden snake into a full-blown basilisk.

  Finished with her dinner, Minnie trotted into the room, jumped up onto a blanket folded up at the opposite end of the couch, curled up in a black ball, and went to sleep.

  Gracie slumped back against the couch, worrying an already-bleeding cuticle with a canine.

  The fact that Winston had called her “Grace Louise,” her mother’s pet name for her, nagged at her. That he had managed to tap her home phone or read her mother’s letters somehow seemed over-the-top. Then how did he know? Maybe it was a mere coincidence that Winston had called her by the name used by only one other person on earth. Maybe it was as easily explained as he had done a search online because he was interested in her as the third mother of his children and had discovered her middle name.

  She sat up again, opened her laptop, then an Internet browser, and typed in Gracie Kinkaid.

  The first several listings were paid advertisements, the first one a site called People Low-k8r. She clicked on the link.

  A page opened with the heading: “We Found Gracie Kinkaid!” Beneath it were the words: “Current Address, Phone, and Age. Find Gracie Kinkaid, anywhere.”

  With a growing sense of unease, she clicked on the link.

  A new page opened displaying multiple boxes and an announcement: “3 people named Gracie Kinkaid in the United States Found!”

  She clicked on the link.

  Three Gracie Kinkaids were listed. She was the third. Beneath the heading were variations of her name: Grace L. Kinkaid. Grace Louise Kinkaid. Gracie L. Kinkaid.

  “Distressingly easy as Sunday morning,” she moaned.

  Farther down the page, her age was listed.

  “Fifty-one!” Gracie yelled. “What the hell!”

  Minnie’s head came up.

  “Sorry, Minnie,” she muttered.

  A third column, Has Lived In, listed Timber Creek, CA, Ann Arbor, Michigan, along with Southfield and Grosse Pointe Farms. Added into the mix was an inexplicable, inaccurate stint in New Port Richey, Florida. Beneath Possible Relations were Evelyn Kinkaid, Michael Kinkaid, Harold Rodgers, and Lenora Rodgers Vander Kamp.

  Gracie clicked the box beneath Phone Number, Address, and Other Details. Several boxes appeared giving her the opportunity to purchase varying degrees of background information.

  She exited the site altogether, feeling eerily exposed and not a little paranoid that someone willing to spend upward of $19.99 could ostensibly gather her address, property records, and, if she had had them, judgments and liens, and a criminal history.

  Gracie leaned back, took another sip of beer, and remembered the article about the identification being made of the owners of the body parts in the desert and the tattoo on the inside of one of the wrists.

  She looked up at the ceiling, trying again to remember exactly what the tattoo looked like. She remembered a skull and crossbones with some illegible script across the top. “‘Anti-’ something,” Gracie said. Along the bottom were three uppercase letters. “Not NRA. But something like it. ANA or ARA . . .”

  She sat up again and typed skull and crossbones tattoo into the Search box on her laptop. Thousands of results came up. She started paging through them, but stopped after only two pages, feeling even more dark and unsettled, and wondering, What’s the fascination?

  She typed in ANA plus skull and crossbones. Again, thousands of results.

  Substituting ARA for ANA produced a similarly daunting number of listings.

  She typed in only the letters ARA, hit Enter, and read down the list that appeared.

  “A constellation. A state in northeast India. A baby’s name. Used in a Japanese phrase.” Somehow she didn’t think any of those were it. She kept reading and stopped at Definition by Acronym. Clicked on it. Read down the list. “American Rental Association. Australian Retailers Association. Automotive Recyclers Association. Alliance for Retired Americans. Anti-Racist Action.”

  Anti-Racist Action.

  She clicked on the link and began reading.

  “The Anti-Racist Action Network is a decentralized network of anti-fascists . . .”

  Antifascist. Could that have been the word at the top of the tattoo?

  “. . . and anti-racists in North America. ARA activists organize actions to disrupt neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, and help organize activities against fascist and racist ideologies.”

  Gracie read faster.

  “ARA groups also oppose sexism, homophobia, heterosexism, anti-Semitism, and the anti-abortion movement. ARA originated from the skinhead and punk cultures.”

  “Has to be it,” Gracie whispered.

  In the Search box, she typed in Anti-racist Action. The window that opened displayed a headline with a symbol of a girl with black hair and a black bandanna over the bottom half of her face, holding a cocked slingshot. On the left side of the page was a square with a skull and crossbones, the word Antifascista across the top, ARA 2013 on the bottom.

  “That’s it!” Gracie exclaimed. “That’s the tattoo.” She looked more closely and realized that the crossbones were, in fact, baseball bats.

  She read about the organization, about its philosophy, its goals, its tactics, all the time wondering whether it was possible the dead people had crossed the Edwards/Ferguson clan in some way and been murdered for it.

  “Okay,” Gracie said, closing her laptop, sliding it off her legs and onto the sea chest. “That’s all of this light, breezy crap I can stand.” She pushed herself to her feet and padded into the kitchen for a cup of chamomile tea in hopes of staving off another night of tossing and turning and staring at the ceiling.

  As the panda mug of water heated in the microwave, Gracie flipped through the pile of mail on the table—electric bill, Backpacker magazine, Outside magazine, and a large envelope. “Jury duty? Again?” At the bottom of the pile was the flyer she had pulled out of the crack in her front door.

 
; She picked it up and turned it over. Her mouth dropped open.

  The flyer was a handmade wanted poster with a glued-on paper target. Staring back at her from the bull’s-eye—taken from her high school yearbook—was a picture of Gracie. Beneath it, in giant cutout letters: WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE! The words or alive had been x-ed out with a Magic Marker. In smaller letters below that: CASH REWORD.

  The microwave dinged.

  Gracie sank down into a kitchen chair.

  Gracie Kinkaid. Wanted: Dead!

  Whoever it was that wanted her dead knew where she lived. But that could be anyone nowadays. She had just witnessed how easy it was to find out all kinds of personal information.

  Would Winston have done this? Somehow it didn’t seem like his style. If he really wanted her dead, he wouldn’t threaten her; he’d just splatter her all over the sidewalk like a beetle.

  Boojum? Why would he want her dead? Or was this a heavy-handed method of warning her off again.

  Gracie studied the poster, amateurish and crudely made with so many misspellings as to have been made by a child.

  Could one of the Edwards children have made it? she wondered. Maybe even Jordan?

  But again, why? What was the message?

  How seriously should she take the threat? If copies had been made and distributed, pretty damn seriously, she decided. Whether the intent was to scare her or to put a genuine price on her head, anyone reading the poster might see it as an opportunity for a little quick cash.

  So what the hell am I going to do about it?

  Even though this was a personal matter, if she contacted anyone in the Sheriff’s Department, it should be her direct supervisor on Search and Rescue, and that was Sergeant Gardner. But if she went to Gardner, he would probably laugh in her face, tell her she was overreacting, being overemotional again, maybe even using it as an excuse to boot her off the team. If she bypassed Gardner altogether, contacting someone higher up the Department food chain or another law enforcement agency altogether, there would be hell to pay with the sergeant, once again, giving him an excuse to boot her off the team.

  She stared down at the poster. Like the phone calls, if the poster’s sole purpose was to scare her, it had worked.

  Gracie jumped up from the table, ran into the living room, and took the steps up to her bedroom two at a time.

  Most of the clothes she wore on a regular basis were already packed and stored in the truck until the fire danger was over. Hauling out the drawers of her dresser, she emptied the remaining tops, bottoms, socks, and underwear into a plastic trash bag. With one arm she scraped everything off the bedside table on top of the clothes—clock radio, five library books, multiple pens and pencils, and a pad of lined paper.

  Ten minutes and three trips to the truck later, Minnie on her bed behind the front seats, the dog bed and food, backpack with laptop and several books, and the trash bag were stowed on the front passenger’s seat. Gracie screeched backward down her steep driveway and roared down Arcturus.

  Sparse traffic on a September night rendered the drive across town smooth and uneventful. Twenty minutes later the Ranger rolled beneath the arched entranceway of camp, down the little hill and across the bridge at the bottom, past the Serrano Lodge parking lot and the carved sign-holding bear, and down the Main Road hill.

  Set back in the trees, three single-wide trailers were visible from the road only as peaked roofs above the tops of the scrub oak. Gracie parked the truck on the road and, in the absolute darkness of nighttime in the mountains, shuffled through the thick carpet of duff and last year’s fallen leaves and stepped up onto the little porch.

  Muffled sounds emanated from the television inside. A dim flickering light showed through the curtains hanging in the fly-specked window.

  She lifted her fist to the door and hesitated. She didn’t like knocking on doors in what was, for all intents and purposes, the middle of the night, but her need to see Allen was greater than the need not to disturb him.

  She knocked.

  A split second later, the window curtain parted, fell back in place, and the door was pulled open.

  Barefoot, dressed in black sweatpants and the perennial white T-shirt, Allen looked out at her, frowning. Then he pushed the screen door open and stepped back.

  She brushed past him into the room.

  The tiny living room was sparsely furnished with cheap thrift shop furniture, but it was neat and clean and surprisingly homey.

  “What’s up, toots?” Allen asked, leaning forward to look into her face, his own cautious, but interested.

  “Someone left me a wanted poster,” Gracie said. “With my own picture in the bull’s-eye of a target. Wanted: dead. I’m moving up to camp for a while. I’ll sleep in the Gatehouse.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” Allen said. “Any idea of who would do such a thing?”

  “A couple of possibilities, but no one person positively.”

  “So what can I do to help you?”

  Gracie stood, arms crossed, head bowed. Then she looked up at Allen and, like one neighbor asking another for a cup of sugar, asked, “Do you have a gun I could borrow?”

  CHAPTER

  26

  GRACIE gripped the butt of the five-round Taurus .38 revolver, left hand cupping the right, and sighted down the barrel to the paper silhouette of a man fastened to a hay bale thirty feet away. The weapon felt heavy, the steel cold, alien, and unpleasant.

  Even though it was still early morning and she was wearing a floppy hat, she could feel the heat of the desert sun beating down on her head and arms. Beneath red earmuffs, her heart whooshed in her ears.

  In the state of California it was illegal for Allen, a convicted felon, to own a gun. Not surprisingly, that didn’t stop him from possessing one. At her request the night before, he had left Gracie standing in the middle of the living room, reappearing moments later with the revolver and two boxes of .38 ammunition in his hands. “Have you ever fired a weapon?”

  “A shotgun. My stepfather broke my mother’s arm, so I shot off his toupee. Kind of a long story.”

  Allen’s eyes crinkled. “Love to hear it.”

  “I’ll buy ya a beer sometime.”

  “Okay, sugar pea,” Allen said. “Here’s the deal. Tomorrow morning, first thing, you drive down the hill to the shooting range in Lucerne and learn how to use this. Agreed?”

  “But—”

  “No buts. No excuses. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  With a long look, Allen placed the revolver and ammunition in Gracie’s hands.

  “Don’t pull the trigger. Squeeze it,” the instructor standing next to Gracie said, loudly enough so she could hear him through the earmuffs. Standing four inches shorter than Gracie’s five-eight and wearing a Green Bay Packers T-shirt and ball cap, he had introduced himself with an Upper Midwest twang and an expectant gleam in his eye as “Jim, but most people call me . . . Jim.”

  When Gracie shot him a smile, he winked at her.

  She liked Jim from the start, feeling comfortable enough to tell him, “I hate guns. They scare me.”

  “You don’t need to be scared. But it is good to respect the weapon and what it can do. If ya ask me, people don’t treat ’em with enough respect. Collect ’em like them stupid plates my wife has.”

  “People in other countries think everyone in America owns a gun,” Gracie said. “That we all walk around with ’em. Like gunslingers. I’ve never even been in the vicinity of a gun firing.” Liar, liar, pants on fire.

  “Don’t be scared. Go ahead and squeeze the trigger.”

  “Is that right? Gun firing? Not shooting.” She knew she was chattering, stalling before pulling the trigger. “Or discharging?” Her arms were getting tired. “Except for a shotgun, I’ve never really even seen a gun up close before. Except maybe a Revolutionary War musket o
r something like that. In a museum.”

  “Squeeze the trigger.”

  “Is that what they used back then, muskets? Blunderbusses? I love that word. It—”

  Twenty feet away, a big-bore rifle boomed, so loud it practically lifted Gracie up off the ground.

  “Holy shit!” Gracie said, pulling off her ear protection and looking over. “That was loud! What the hell was that? A friggin’ cannon?”

  “Concentrate,” Jim said. “Get back in position.”

  “Why am I doing this?” she muttered. “There’s no way I’m ever going to be able to shoot anyone anyway, so why . . .”

  “You carry a weapon so hopefully you’ll never have to shoot someone.”

  “Whatever that means,” Gracie said and lifted the revolver again. She inhaled, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.

  POW!

  The weapon bucked in her hands and she barely managed to hold on to it. “Holy cow, that was loud! My ears are ringing. Even with these ear thingies on.” She squinted down at the target. “Did I hit it?”

  “No. Do it again. This time try keeping your eyes open.”

  “I hate this,” she grumbled. “There’s nothing fun about this.”

  “It’s not a toy.”

  “Yeah, well, the way some people act, you wouldn’t know it.”

  “Try it again.”

  “I don’t get the attraction of these stupid things. Never will.”

  “Let’s give it another try.”

  Gracie lifted the revolver. “I guess maybe it gives people the semblance of power. Or maybe not the semblance.” She looked down the barrel. “Maybe it just gives them power they don’t feel they have otherwise. Some sense of control. This is harder than it looks.” She closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger.

  POW!

  “Did I hit it this time?

  “No.” Jim took off his hat, scratched his head, then replaced the cap. “Okay, Annie Oakley, let’s try somethin’ else. I want you to try shootin’ from the hip. Don’t aim or anythin’. Just pull the trigger. Three times. Bang, bang, bang.”