Devil Creek

by Mertz, Stephen

  “I’m here, Del. What is it?” He listened briefly, then he said, “Well, it’s going to have to wait. Haven’t you heard about the fire? Yeah, there’s a fire blazing down the canyon toward Sunrise Ridge right now.”

  There was more frantic squabbling from the receiver that Robin could hear crackling from several feet away.

  Mike said, “Well, what have you found out that’s so important? Uh huh. So why can’t you tell me about it over the telephone? Look, Del, I’ve got to cover the fire. I—”

  Then his expression grew dark as he listened to whatever Del Muskie said next.

  When Del was finished, Mike said, “Okay, I’ll get there as soon as I can.” When the receiver crackled more frantically than before, Mike added, “I said I’d be right up, Del. Yes, I understand that. All right, I’m leaving the office right now. I’ll be there in about twenty minutes. Okay. Okay. Now do your best to calm down before I get there, will you, please? Okay, I’m on my way.”

  He hung up the phone to find Robin making a last check in her compact mirror before leaving here to present herself to the world. Replacing the compact, she said, “I’d better let you get about your business, Michael. I left Paul at Terri Ordway’s house so he could do his homework with Dani. He should be getting home before long. He’s called you on your cell phone today too, by the way.”

  “I’ve been all kinds of negligent today. I’ll get back to Paul on my way up to Missionary Ridge.”

  “But the fire—”

  “I know. It’s in the other direction. But this is something that won’t wait.”

  She said, “Is the busboy at Donna’s really more important than the fire threatening Sunrise Ridge?”

  “That’s what I’m going to find out.” By unspoken agreement, they started toward the door. “According to Ben, the firefighters are just now organizing. I should be back down from Missionary within the hour.”

  They paused just inside the door.

  She said, “Honey, normally I don’t ask where you go and what you do.”

  “I know that. But?”

  She said, “A few minutes ago you gave a pretty good rundown of all the weird stuff that’s been happening. Does your business with Del Muskie … is it the same business that made you late coming home last night?”

  He opened the door, holding it, like the gentleman he always was, for her to pass. “Robin, I have to go.”

  She stepped outside with him. The sun had arced behind the mountains to the west. It was not yet dusk, but the air had taken on the chill of coming evening.

  “Mike, from what I heard, that man has something that he doesn’t even want to tell you over the phone. That sounds dangerous. The thing you’ve been working on for the paper, your investigation of the Sunrise Ridge construction site, and now my slimy ex-husband shows up to replace a project manager who you intimate was murdered—”

  “I didn’t say that, Robin. I said I didn’t like the smell of it. There were suspicious circumstances.”

  She felt her nerve ends starting to bristle again. “Whatever. And now, the busboy at Donna’s is suddenly more newsworthy than a wildfire burning its way down the mountain. Please, Mike. Explain this to me.”

  He touched her lightly on both arms. There was a plea in his eyes. “Honey, I don’t have the time right now. You heard me on the phone. Del—”

  “I heard you. Okay, can I go with you?” It was a question she’d never asked him before regarding his work for the paper, and she instantly regretted asking him now.

  He said, “No, Robin. If there is trouble, I’m keeping you out of harm’s way.”

  “And what about you?” she asked in a burst of petulance. “Will you keep yourself out of harm’s way, or should Paul and I sit up waiting and worrying like we did last night, until you decide to come home?”

  He lowered his hands to his side. “You either trust me or you don’t,” he said, and he walked away, to his Jeep.

  She stood there watching him, waiting for him to turn around, but he didn’t. She watched his Jeep all the way to the corner down the street, where it turned and disappeared from sight. She thought about following him. She decided that she couldn’t do that.

  He’d said, “You either trust me or you don’t,” and she so wished that he hadn’t spoken those precise words.

  Mike had no way of knowing because they had never discussed it, but those were the exact words Jeff always used to say when they were married, when she would find perfume clinging to his shirt or lipstick on his collar. “A friendly hug from a female co-worker after we closed that big deal,” he would say, or some equally stupid excuse. And then he would huffily add, “You either believe me or you don’t,” and that would be the end of the conversation.

  It had gone on like that for half a dozen years, impossible as it was for her to believe in hindsight. Six years of “you either believe me or you don’t,” while she continued ignoring the clues and doubts and suspicions. The person she was today could look back on the person she was then with a fair degree of objectivity. She hoped so anyway. And what she saw was a young mother who knew in her heart that she was married to a philandering husband, but who chose to ignore the clues, ignore the warning flags and her own intuition, in large part because she so wanted her son to have a stable American family. Or was that an oxymoron, and maybe it always had been? But their family was all she had known then. She met Jeff in college, and they were married shortly after graduation.

  The young mother named Robin had been afraid to face the truth, though she’d had no choice after she and Paul came home early, unexpectedly, one day and she had found Jeff in their own damn bed, banging one of the bimbos from his office. Even a scared young mother couldn’t be pushed that far. She and Paul never spent another night under Jeff Lovechio’s roof after that.

  If she had known how good the future would be—the hard times and the cross-country trip from Chicago, bonding her and her son like nothing else ever could; starting a new life in this paradise community of mountains, pine trees and crystal clear lakes; finding new love with Mike—she would have confronted Jeff head-on, the first time the evidence and her intuition merged. But she had been too scared for that, and so it had been six years of “you either believe me or you don’t.”

  Why had Mike had to use those exact same words? And why had it awakened an unspeakable doubt: What if Mike was like Jeff? Maybe all men really were that way. What if Mike had not only used those same words, but had succeeded in conning her, blinding her to the truth of his infidelity, using the same damn words that Jeff had?

  “You either believe me or you don’t.”

  Could she believe her husband any more than she had believed Jeff? Or was he having an affair with a woman who reminded him of Carol?

  She was in her Subaru, waiting to make a left turn at the corner down the street from Mike’s office, when a silver Altima drove by. The blonde woman behind the wheel was looking straight ahead. She didn’t see Robin.

  Robin gave the Altima a half-block lead. Then she steered the Subaru into a right-hand turn, determined to follow the Altima, no matter where it led her.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  When he got to where the county road met the highway, Mike took the turn too fast and almost lost control of the Jeep, sending a spray of gravel behind him. He struggled with the steering wheel to straighten the Jeep from its fishtailing skid. Once he’d straightened out of the skid, he continued on at the same rate of speed.

  He couldn’t help himself. He had to make quick work of acquiring what Del claimed to have, so he could get back to dealing with everything else that had so suddenly screwed up his life that, twenty-four hours ago, had seemed so perfect.

  Feeling this pent-up was something he was not accustomed to. He was a careful driver. He’d covered too many grisly traffic accidents during his early reporter days in Denver. The ones on the freeway were the worst. He always drove at a safe speed because he knew what impacting metal-on-metal and pavement co
uld do to destroy or mangle the human body. Sometimes, those who died instantly were the lucky ones. A moment’s laxness, an instant of poor judgment behind the wheel, could cripple you or a loved one, or a total stranger, for life. But here he was, practically rolling his Jeep because he was in such a hurry to reach Del Muskie’s cabin.

  He felt clearheaded, his reflexes back to normal. Just as today had seen his slide back into his old addiction, so had it brought back the ability he’d always had to recover quickly from the effects of alcohol, no matter how much he drank. Alcoholism was the black lung disease of journalism, but a reporter had to have resilient recovery skills to be an alkie and still show up regularly for office meetings and assignments.

  Part of him resented Del Muskie’s insistence that he drop everything and come running. There was so much else that needed attending to, and yet here he was risking life and limb at the summons of a busboy who lived in the woods. But if what Muskie had said over the phone was true? Mike could hardly not make this trip.

  As the road began climbing, it became washboard-rough. His knuckles whitened around the steering wheel. The forest closed in. The road curved and climbed. The temperature seemed to drop with every bend.

  At one point, a shelf of rock below the road provided a break in the timber and he glimpsed open sky. A smudged gray curtain dimmed the vista.

  Smoke. That was bad. The fire was growing.

  He fed the Jeep more gas.

  He had tried calling Paul twice on his cell phone in the ten minutes it had taken him to get from town to the turnoff, and both times he’d left a voice message to let Paul know that he was trying to reach him. He’d apologized each time for not having called back sooner. Paul was great kid, and deserved far more than a stepfather who didn’t return calls because he was stone drunk

  He had no choice but to slow the Jeep’s ascent somewhat when the road narrowed and grew rockier. Driveways, to mountain homes hidden beyond the dense wall of trees, fell behind.

  Today had been one of the biggest screw-ups of his life. He felt equal guilt for not paying the proper attention to Paul, especially on a day that had seen the unexpected arrival of Paul’s biological father, and for the drinking incident. Paul and Robin both deserved better than that from him.

  At least he had resolved things with Robin. He would do something special for her in the next few days, as soon as things slowed down, for the way she’d handled his fall from grace. What a woman, to forgive him as she had, and to believe him about not having an affair. Yes, Carol had meant the world to him. But there was no one like Robin. He would take her to Cruces, somewhere special, for a nice dinner, something a little more than they could afford.

  He felt guilty about keeping her in the dark about someone shooting at him last night, and about the dynamite Del Muskie said he had for him if only he would make this drive up to see him. But Robin worrying herself sick about him would do no one any good. And yes, there was an element of danger in this. He wished he was packing a gun. If he had confided in Robin, she would really have wanted to be a part of this and then she too would be exposed to danger. He couldn’t bear the thought of that. He was glad that Robin was on the sidelines and out of danger.

  The only unresolved matter?

  Who was the mysterious blonde who had intruded into their lives, so unsettling a strong marriage that he’d found himself rocked off the wagon, and the woman he loved faithfully as much as accusing him of infidelity?

  How off-base he had been, a supposedly rational intellect thrown for a loop because he thought he’d seen a ghost. It shocked him, the way he’d responded. Robin had said that it seemed like the past was coming from beyond the grave to smother them, and she was right.

  Carol and Jeff.

  God knew they were two disparate entities. Jeff Lovechio, living. Carol Landware, God bless her, most certainly deceased. And yet, combined, they represented … what?

  His gut told him that he would know the answer to that question before this day was over.

  And he was curious as hell to learn what Del Muskie said was so important. Del had told him over the phone that he had proof that the Sunrise Ridge project manager, Joe Olson, had in fact been murdered. Del said could provide proof of the killer’s identity.

  Yes, he would make quick work of this visit. Then he would pass on whatever “proof” he got from Muskie to Ben Saunders. That went without saying. There was no reason whatsoever for him to withhold information from the police.

  Christ, what a day.

  He braked when he came to the deeply-rutted path that Muskie had told him to watch for. The path climbed sharply, and there was the cabin.

  It had been a long time since he’d been a soldier in the fields of fire in a place called Vietnam. A real long time. More than thirty since a young infantryman had managed to stay alive by developing that sixth sense which, along with luck, is the wild card in combat, determining who lives and who gets sent home maimed or in a bodybag. He survived then. And that sixth sense, from so long ago, awakened now.

  Something was wrong.

  A makeshift barbed wire gate that been strung up, with a Keep Out sign attached, was tangled upon the ground and there were oversized tire tracks across the sign.

  Mike stepped from the Jeep.

  Given the urgency of Del’s summons, he had expected Del to be waiting for him in the yard, or at least in the doorway of the shack. The cabin door was closed shut. From the road, at a passing glance, the cabin would have resembled nothing so much as a pile of discarded lumber and tarpaper, a dark and inanimate bulk.

  He’d never been here before. It wasn’t that he and Del traveled in different circles. As part of keeping his finger on the pulse of this small community, and because it was his nature, Mike tried to move through every level of the mini-society of Devil Creek. It was that Del didn’t socialize at all except for friendly, idle chatter when he was working at the restaurant or driving the meal wagon for Donna.

  So, while he’d had never been here before, he did know about Del’s two dogs—he even knew their names, Goldie and Benjamin—because Del would often talk about them when he and Mike had their friendly chats while Del bussed the tables around Mike, who come into Donna’s once or twice a week, sometimes with Robin and Paul, sometimes when they were busy with after-school activities. He would stop in for a quick meal and then get back to work at the office. So he knew about the time Goldie had taken sick and the vet, Dr. Arters, had told Del that she wasn’t going to make it, and Del had taken the dog home and nursed it like a baby and brought it back to good health. And there was the time Benjamin outsmarted the animal control officer and escaped “doggy jail,” as Del had laughingly put it. Del was closer to his dogs than he was to anyone else known. But right now, at this secluded cabin site, there was no sign of Goldie and Benjamin.

  Any country dog, especially a pair of them, would be either barking their heads off at a new arrival, or wagging their tails and licking the visitor’s hand off.

  There were no dogs. There was a rundown fence gate. There was no sign of Del. Yeah, something was wrong.

  He thought about climbing back into the Jeep and getting the hell out of there. He owed that to Robin and Paul. But a number of Devil Creek residents had died working at Sunrise Ridge, and now Del claimed to have proof of the identity of Joe Olson’s murderer. No, he could not walk away from this.

  He stepped over the downed gate and tried to look like he wasn’t a bundle of nerves. He sure wished he had a piece. He drew to a stop beside the beat-up Volkswagen van.

  He called, “Del!” It occurred to him that Muskie and the dogs might be nearby in the woods, though this seemed highly unlikely given Del’s desperation and near panic over the telephone. But just in case, he lifted his voice and called again. “Del!”

  There were bird songs in the air, chipper and bright in contrast to the gloom of lengthening shadows. An owl hooted. There was no breeze. Sound traveled easily.

  Except for nature, there
was no sound.

  He advanced, moving on the balls of his feet so as to make less, if any, noise, and ready to bolt in any direction for cover should he need to, those old habits from so long ago kicking in. He gained a single small, square window that was darkly opaque. He leaned close, shielding his eyes against the glass, but it was too dark inside for him to see anything.

  He said, “Damn,” and moved to the door. He knocked several times, not expecting any sort of reply from within, and he was not disappointed. “Del? It’s Mike Landware. I got up here as fast as I could. Let me in.”

  Nothing.

  What daylight that did filter through the trees was shaded from him now by the cabin’s misshapen bulk. He felt the hairs rise at the nape of his neck. As the temperature continued to drop, the bird songs dwindled. The owl was no longer hooting. The air was still.

  He looked around. No other vehicles were in sight except for his Jeep and Del’s battered VW van.

  It was as if the world was holding its breath.

  He took the doorknob and gave it a twist, telling himself that if the door was locked, that would have to be good enough. He hadn’t wanted to drive up here in the first place, not with everything else going on. If the door was locked, he would write this waste of time off to a drunk or drug-addled brain.

  The doorknob turned in his hand.

  He opened the door the rest of the way with the toe of his boot and stood there on the balls of his feet, knees bent, hopefully ready for anything.

  He heard flies buzzing. Flies that should have been searching out the warmth of the fading sunlight with the cooling of the air. But an industrious buzzing, that could be nothing else, emanated from inside.

  He said, “Damn,” again. Then, “Del, are you in there?”

  He didn’t wait for a reply this time. He stepped into the funky, close interior where deep shadow lurked beyond the kitchen area, somehow knowing what he was about to find.

  The body sprawled face down across the wood floor, halfway between a table and a recliner, covered and surrounded by toppled stacks of books, looked like nothing more than a discarded pile of rags.