Cold Trail

by Janet Dawson

  “Brian left a note for his wife saying he was going away for a few days and would be back on Sunday. He never came home.”

  “She must be frantic,” Willow said. “But Brian isn’t at the cabin. I went up there as soon as I got back yesterday and checked my messages. You see, I didn’t check the voice mail on my cell phone while I was away, not until I got home. That’s when I got the message from Becca saying that Brian was missing. She thought maybe we’d run off together. That’s Becca for you. She’s such a drama queen. She reads more into me and Brian having coffee than there really is. By the way, I don’t think Becca likes Sheila much. But I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize Brian’s marriage. He and I are just friends.”

  “You said that. So Brian’s not at the cabin. Did you see anything that indicates he was ever there?”

  “I don’t know. I just drove up there yesterday when I got back and heard Becca’s message. I went up again this morning. I didn’t see his Jeep, and the cabin was empty.”

  I finished my lemonade and set down the glass. “I want to take a look. Maybe I can see something you didn’t.”

  Willow nodded. “Okay. That makes sense. You’re the private eye, you can look at it with different eyes.”

  We went back to our cars and I followed her out of Occidental, onto Graton Road. When we reached Hargis Ranch Road, we turned left onto the gravel road. We drove up a gentle slope past the orchard I’d seen on my earlier visit, where windfall apples littered the ground under the trees. When we got to the gate, Willow got out of her Honda and unlocked it. She went through and I followed. She locked the gate again, and we drove up a gently curving hill, through more apple trees, these heavy with ripening fruit. She turned off the gravel road onto a half circle drive in front of the one-story, wood-framed house. It was painted white with blue trim, and it had a wide front porch with an old-fashioned swing hanging from the porch rafters, the kind of swing where one could sit and rock, looking down into the valley with its rolling hills and stands of trees. To the south of the house I saw the brick kiln that Willow had built for herself when she moved into the house. Behind this was the barn she used as a work space.

  Willow parked her car in the drive and got out. She walked to my Toyota and spoke to me through the open window. “The road gets really narrow. We’d better take one car up there.”

  “Good idea.” I unlocked the passenger door. She got in. I drove back onto the gravel road and continued driving uphill. We went through another orchard with trees full of green apples. Then the road curved and led into a forest of pine and oak trees. “It’s rugged country up here.”

  “Yes. My great-grandfather used to log up here. Occidental was a timber town, you know.” She sighed, a wistful sound. “I miss Grandpa. And my mother. She died last summer. Then Rick died in June, just a few weeks ago. Now that Rick’s gone, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with all this land. It’s almost a hundred acres. I’m happy to have the house, after living in a rental for so many years. I built a kiln and I turned the barn into a workshop. I’m so glad to have that, now that I’m doing well with my pottery.”

  “A hundred acres is a lot of land.” I slowed as the car bounced over some ruts. “And a lot of it in orchards, from the look of it.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” Willow said. “You saw all the apples on the ground. Things have been neglected since Grandpa died. I’ve had offers from two wineries. It’s very tempting. They’re offering a lot of money. They want to tear out the trees and plant grapes.”

  The road narrowed, trees closing in on us. “Yes, that’s happening all over the area.”

  “Becca’s after me to turn them down. The wineries use so much water and so many orchards are being torn out. But I’m no farmer. Even if I was, people are getting out of apples as a crop. They’re not getting very much for apples, and lots of money for wine grapes. I’m up in the air about the whole thing.” Willow waved at the thick forest around us. “I was thinking about preserving this part of the land as open space. I wonder if it could be a county park, with hiking trails. There’s a creek up here by the cabin.”’

  “That’s a thought,” I said. “But access would be a problem. People would have to drive past the house.”

  “This road goes farther. It winds around to the north and west, and connects with Green Valley Road. So people could have access that way. But the road would have to be improved, either way. That’s the cabin, up there.” Willow pointed as we rounded a curve. Ahead was the creek she’d mentioned. I drove slowly over a bridge with no railings, my tires rumbling on the rough wooden planks, and we entered a small clearing.

  The cabin looked to be about twelve feet square, with a small porch in front of the door. Off to the right I saw an old wooden outhouse. I parked my Toyota and got out, looking around me. There were no cars here now, save my own, but I saw tracks on the dirt and grass in front of the cabin, indicating the recent presence of several vehicles. Willow had said she’d driven her own car up here, both yesterday and today. What about the other vehicles? Was one of them Brian’s Jeep?

  I walked toward the cabin, noticing cigarette butts on the dirt near the porch. I opened the door and stepped inside. The cabin was a large single room, with no other entrance than this one. There were uncovered windows on all four walls. Directly in front of me was a rectangular table made of lightweight aluminum and two metal folding chairs. The table surface held a grease stain and an empty tuna can that had been used as an ashtray. Next to the table, several wooden fruit crates had been stacked on their sides to create shelves. These were empty, except for a few flakes of something that looked like cereal and a scattering of ground coffee, salt, and pepper.

  Someone had been here, though how long ago I couldn’t tell. And that someone smoked. It wasn’t Brian. Smoking was a habit that neither of us had picked up.

  To my left, I saw two single mattresses, the kind covered with blue-and-white ticking. The mattresses rested on two old iron bedsteads, with knobs at the head and foot. The bedsteads were painted white, but the paint was flaking, showing black metal underneath. There was a rough wooden stool between the beds and another wooden fruit crate on the back wall, the other side of the second bed.

  I moved closer and looked at the mattresses. There was a stain on the mattress on the near bed, a rust-colored stain I examined. Then I backed away and noticed a similar stain on one of the knobs at the foot of the bed. Dried blood, I thought. Not unexpected in a cabin that had been used by hunters. But how recently had the bed knob and the mattress acquired the bloodstains?

  “Did your brother smoke?” I asked Willow, who had followed me inside the cabin.

  “Yes, he did, started when he was a kid.” She looked around and saw the can filled with cigarette butts. “He must have been up here before he died.”

  “That’s a lot of butts,” I said.

  “Rick’s friend Harry used to come up here, too. He’s a smoker.”

  “When was the last time you came here to the cabin, before yesterday when you came looking for Brian?”

  Willow thought about it for a moment. “It was after Grandpa died, which was in January, but before Rick died in June. So I was up here sometime in the late spring, sometime after the rains stopped. That road gets to be a mess when it storms, and in a really wet year the creek floods over the bridge.”

  I paced around the cabin, looking in corners. Then I spotted something shiny on the floor near the front door. I bent down and picked it up, holding it in the palm of my hand. It was a tiny link to a bracelet, and I was betting it had come off Brian’s MedicAlert bracelet.

  I tucked the link into my pocket. Then I turned and looked at the can full of cigarette butts on the table.

  “What kind of cigarettes did Rick and Harry smoke?”

  Willow frowned. “Rick? Marlboros, I think. Harry always rolls his own, though.”

  So Harry’s cigarette butts would be unfiltered, just like the butts I’d seen in the ashtray at Vann’s
Motorcycle Shop. I picked up the tuna fish can and gave it a shake, shifting the contents. There were two kinds of cigarette butts in the can. Two smokers had been in the cabin, and I figured they’d been here recently, in the past few weeks.

  Once again I thought about Rick’s motorcycle accident, the one where his body had supposedly washed out to sea from the bottom of that cliff. And the more I thought about it, the more certain I was that Rick Newman was alive. Unless he’d been the man whose body I’d seen in the Sonoma County Morgue a few days ago.

  I reached into my bag for the picture I’d torn from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the artist’s sketch of the man who’d died on the boat. I handed it to Willow.

  She looked at me, curious. Then she looked down at the picture. Her eyes widened.

  “Oh, my God. That’s Harry Vann.”

  Twenty-Eight

  Willow, stunned and silent, followed me out of the cabin. We got into my car. I turned it around in the clearing and drove back down the gravel road to the house. When we arrived, we both got out. She unlocked the front door and we went inside.

  The house was comfortable, but old and lived-in, needing some updates and repairs. The furniture was a mix of Willow’s things, which looked more contemporary, and old pieces that had belonged to Willow’s grandfather, like the bow-fronted china cabinet with its glass shelves and Blue Willow china, and the faded chintz sofa covered in colorful quilted pillows. The beige carpeting in the living room and hallway was worn in places, and the faded linoleum floor in the big kitchen was coming up in one corner. The appliances were white, the refrigerator a large, bulky side-by-side that made a lot of noise. Next to the fridge was a gas range, an old O’Keefe & Merritt four-burner that was similar to the one my grandmother had in her house.

  Willow set her bag on the counter and opened the refrigerator. She poured iced tea into two glasses and set them on a scarred oak table that held a solitary placemat. We both pulled out chairs and sat down.

  “The man in the picture—Harry—are you saying he’s dead?” Willow asked.

  I nodded. “His body was found Saturday night on a boat that burned at your father’s marina. He wasn’t killed by the fire, though. He was shot.”

  “How do you know all this? And what does it have to do with Brian being missing?”

  “Brian’s MedicAlert bracelet.”

  Willow nodded. “Yes, I saw that he wears one. I asked him about it and he told me he’s allergic to penicillin.”

  “The bracelet was found on the boat, near the body. The band was broken. Because of that, the Sonoma County detectives who are investigating the case thought the body might be Brian, since Sheila reported him missing. I went to the morgue on Tuesday morning to look at the body.”

  “Oh, how horrible for you to have to do that,” she said. “But it wasn’t Brian.”

  “No, I could see that right away. But why was the bracelet there on the boat?” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the link I’d found on the cabin floor. “I think this is a link to Brian’s bracelet. If it is, that means he was at the cabin.”

  Willow took a sip of her tea. “But how did Brian’s bracelet get to a boat at Dad’s marina? What in the world was Harry doing there? Whose boat was it?”

  “According to Tracy, your father’s friend, the boat that burned, and two others berthed at the marina, belong to a man named Lowell Rhine.”

  Willow shook her head. “I don’t know anyone named... Wait a minute. Rhine, did you say? Rick was in trouble a year or so ago, facing more jail time. His lawyer’s name was Rhine.”

  “The same man, I believe. He lives in San Rafael.”

  “Why would he berth his boat in Lakeville?” she asked. “Boats, I mean. You said there were three, including the one that burned. There are all sorts of marinas in San Rafael, if that’s where Rhine lives.” She stopped and snapped her fingers. “Unless Rick talked him into it, or talked Dad into giving him a deal on the berthing fees.”

  That was my theory. I steered the conversation back to the man in the sketch. “When I saw the body in the morgue, I didn’t know who it was. Then I wondered if it might be Rick.”

  “Rick’s dead.” Even as she said the words, Willow looked as though she was trying to convince herself that he was.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  She stared at me. The deer-in-the-headlights look was back again. “I thought maybe, when they didn’t find a body... Yes, I have to say I wondered if Rick and Harry had cooked up something. It’s just like Rick to fake his own death. To get away from whatever idiotic mess he was in. He’s always been involved in a mess, his whole life, ever since he was a kid.” She sighed and shook her head. “Damn it, if Rick’s not dead, that tears it.”

  “It certainly complicates your life. Your grandfather left this land to both of you. What did Rick want to do with it?

  Willow put her face in her hands. Then she dropped them, laying her palms flat on the table. “He wanted to turn it into a pot plantation. There’s a lot of marijuana growing up here in Sonoma County. Like Mendocino County. It’s a big industry. Sooner or later the state will legalize it, I suppose.”

  She swallowed more tea. “Rick had...has this friend, Tony. I don’t know the guy’s last name, or where he lives. Tony grows pot on a large scale, Rick said, and he moved his operations to this part of the county after getting busted last year at another location. Seems he was growing pot in a state park and he got caught.”

  That sounded like the case Donna had worked on, I thought. Could it be the same one? “Was this other location in Sonoma County?”

  “I don’t know,” Willow said. “I’m just telling you what Rick told me. When Grandpa died and we inherited the land, Rick came up with this cockamamie scheme to go into partnership with Tony, using this land. Rick said the farm was ideal for growing pot. They could hide the plants up in the forest, and there’s a water source, with the creek running through. He was going to turn the barn into a processing plant of some sort.”

  “How did you feel about that?”

  “I told him he was crazy. I told him, no way in hell. It’s illegal, and those pot farmers just destroy the landscape with all the herbicides and fertilizers they use. We argued about it. I told him if he planted any marijuana up here I’d turn him in. He was really pissed off about that.” Willow shook her head, her dark curls moving around her face. “Then Rick died. I thought the land was mine, free and clear. So I moved into the house and built my kiln. It would just screw up my life to have him back in the picture.”

  It would certainly screw up the title to the land. “How did Rick meet Harry?”

  “In jail. How did Rick meet anyone?” Willow rolled her eyes. “They met six or seven years ago. They were both doing stretches for drug-related offenses. Which is why the lease on the motorcycle shop is in Carla’s name instead of Harry’s. My ne’er-do-well brother, in trouble from the minute he could walk. Or ride a bike. Truth be told, he and I didn’t get along very well. He was the bad boy and I was the good kid. And who’s my father’s favorite? Rick, of course.” She sounded bitter. “Dad was so upset when we got the news that Rick was dead. He wouldn’t react that way if I died.”

  “When was the last time you saw Rick?”

  Willow got up from the table and walked to the counter to retrieve her shoulder bag. She pulled out a small datebook and opened it, pointing at a Sunday in early June. “Dad’s birthday. We took him out for brunch.” Then she indicated the last Thursday of the month. “This was the day Rick had the motorcycle accident. Supposedly.”

  “How did you find out about the accident? Did the authorities contact you?”

  “Harry called me,” Willow said. “He told me what happened. He wanted me to go to Lakeville and break the news to Dad. Like I said, Dad was really upset, taking it hard. As for me, all I could think was, now I won’t have to worry, the land belongs to me.”

  “Did you suspect that Rick might not be dead?”

  “No
t until now.” She shook her head. “What in the world was he thinking? He must have gotten into something bad, so deep he couldn’t get out, so he decided to escape.”

  Escape. The word echoed through my mind. Escape on a boat? The cabin cruiser that had burned had been used to transport marijuana from Mexico to the United States, according to the boat history. It could certainly go the other way, taking Rick and possibly Harry down to Mexico.

  “What do you know about Harry and Carla?”

  Willow shrugged. “Harry, not much. He’s got a record for drugs and some alcohol-related stuff, fighting, and so forth, just like Rick. Carla’s all right. A little rough around the edges, but I like her.”

  So did I. Now I was going back to Vann’s Motorcycle Shop to tell Carla that her brother, Harry, was most likely dead, shot to death on Saturday night at Newman’s Marina.

  Twenty-Nine

  “You were going to let me go. Just let me go.” He pleaded with the man at the wheel as the vehicle raced away from the burning boat.

  The driver had a gun. He pointed it.

  “Shut the fuck up. I gotta think.”

  The driver sped up the gravel road and jerked the wheel, turning onto the highway. Sirens and flashing lights signaled the coming of the fire department. The driver didn’t say anything else, driving with one hand on the wheel, the other gripping the gun. He didn’t know what time it was.

  The driver just kept driving. It seemed as though they’d been moving for hours. He fell asleep, then he woke up again, confused. They must be in another state by now.

  But they weren’t. As the sun began to rise, he raised his head and looked out, seeing a few landmarks he recognized.

  The driver pulled off the road and pointed the gun at the prisoner in the backseat. “Get down.”

  He obeyed, scrunching down on the seat, but staying high enough to get a sense of where they were.

  The driver guided the vehicle back onto the road. He drove into a town, sleepy and deserted in the early morning hours.