Cape Perdido

by Marcia Muller

  In New York she wouldn’t have paid the sirens any attention, but here they gave her a convenient excuse to cut the conversation short.

  “Something’s happening,” she said to Erin. “Got to go.” And quickly placed the receiver in its cradle.

  As she stepped outside her motel room, a fire truck streaked by, its lights flashing; a highway patrol car followed. She hurried across the lot and peered after them. To the south the sky glowed red.

  Jessie ran back to the motel and pounded on Fitch’s door. He opened it wearing a bathrobe, his hair matted down on one side. Fumbling his glasses on, he said, “What?”

  “Didn’t you hear the sirens?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “There’s a big fire south of here.”

  “So?”

  “Think, Fitch—what’s to the south?”

  “The . . . my God, the mill!”

  “Throw some clothes on and let’s go see.”

  “Half a minute.” He closed the door.

  Jessie grabbed a jacket from her room, hurried to their rental car, and had it started and turned around by the time Fitch came outside. Before he could get his seat belt latched, she gunned it out onto the highway. Fitch gripped the dashboard, leaning forward and staring at the red sky.

  “Jesus,” he said, “the whole mill must be burning.”

  “And what do you bet it’s arson?”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

  “Fitch? Hello? That mill’s been shut down, unguarded, for five years, and it accidentally catches on fire now? The day after someone sabotaged that water bag?”

  Fitch didn’t reply. When Jessie glanced over at him, she saw he was gnawing on his lower lip; in the light from the dash, he looked very pale.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Don’t drive so fast.”

  Jessie accelerated into the first of the switchbacks.

  “Come on, there’s no reason—”

  Red lights flashed behind them, reflecting off the chiseled slope to their left. Jessie yanked the wheel, and the car skidded onto the shoulder above the cliff, spewing gravel. As she got the skid under control, an ambulance rushed by, siren wailing.

  “Christ!” Fitch exclaimed. “You almost hit the guardrail!”

  She closed her eyes, gripped the wheel with slick fingers, her foot trembling on the brake. “Sorry,” she said. “I’ll be more careful.”

  “See that you are.” Fitch’s voice shook; it was more of a plea than an order.

  Jessie steered back onto the highway and drove more slowly into the next switchback. When they came out on its far side, she could see that fire engulfed most of the buildings on the point; it shimmered and leaped skyward, sending up great clouds of smoke and sparks that the light wind caught and blew inland.

  “My God,” Fitch said. “If they don’t contain it quickly, it’ll spread to the ridge. All that timber . . .”

  Grimly she sped through the last switchback, straightened the car out on the flatland. Ahead she saw flashing red and blue lights and two highway patrol cars positioned at right angles across the pavement. A logging truck and three cars were lined up in front of them, and beyond them emergency vehicles moved.

  Jessie pulled onto the shoulder and got out of the car, not waiting for Fitch. The air was warm and thick with smoke, the flashing lights disorienting. She spotted a knot of people near the patrol cars and moved toward them.

  “. . . never get this load to San Jose by morning if I’ve gotta detour along the ridge road,” a bearded man was saying.

  “What is it?” a woman asked. “Some kind of factory?”

  Jessie skirted them, kept going toward a patrolman who stood in front of the cars. A fire truck was scaling the slope on the eastern side of the highway—a preventive measure, in case the flames jumped the pavement. The patrolman held up his hand.

  “Please step back, ma’am.”

  “Can you tell me—”

  “Please, ma’am, get back in your vehicle.”

  She turned, bumped into Fitch. His mouth was slack, and the dancing firelight reflected off the lenses of his glasses. From behind her came a sound like a subway train roaring into a station. She whirled in time to see the roof of one of the long buildings collapse, a fireball blossoming above it.

  “It can’t be,” Fitch said, his voice close to a sob. “It can’t!” He stared at the flames, running his tongue over dry lips.

  Jessie grasped his arm. “Fitch? What can’t be?”

  “You don’t want to know, Jess. Believe me, you don’t.”

  He started toward their car, but Jessie went after him.

  “You think Eldon hired someone to set this fire, don’t you? Had evidence planted that will incriminate Timothy McNear? He claimed his comment about manufacturing dirt was a joke, but I wouldn’t put it past him!”

  “Leave it, Jess.” Fitch faced her. In the glow of the flames his face was drawn and pasty. “I shouldn’t’ve said anything.”

  “Well, you did, so out with the rest of it.”

  “Not till I speak with Eldon.”

  “We’ll both speak with him. Tonight.”

  Fitch just stood there, arms limp at his sides. After a moment he shook himself, as if awakening from a bad dream. “Okay,” he said slowly, “but we should talk in person, and I don’t know how we’re going to manage that when he’s staying down at Calvert’s Landing.”

  “Why . . . ?” Jessie glanced back at the line of waiting vehicles. “Oh, right, the road’s blocked.” She spotted the bearded man standing by his logging rig and hurried up to him. “You said something earlier about a detour along the ridge. Where is that?”

  “Make a U-turn and take Adams Grade Road—it’s about half a mile up; you’ll see a bunch of mailboxes at its foot. It dead-ends at Crestline, and you follow that south, cut back to the coast highway on Angels Gulch, just above Calvert’s Landing. But I gotta warn you: those roads’re narrow and badly paved. You’d be better off waiting till this mess is cleared up.”

  “Thanks!” Jessie ran back to Fitch. “There’s a detour. Let’s go.”

  Anything, even a narrow, badly paved road, was preferable to waiting.

  JOSEPH OPENSHAW

  Joseph watched as the highway patrolman urged the New Yorkers back toward the waiting line of vehicles, then slipped around the cruisers and stepped over the sawhorse barricade that had been hastily assembled behind them. A truck from the Cape Perdido Volunteer Fire Department—antiquated, like all the emergency vehicles in this poor county—lumbered by. Smoke clogged his nostrils, and when he breathed through his mouth, he coughed. The wind from the west felt superheated and carried with it the shouts of men and thrum of pumps and crackling of flames.

  An ambulance stood on the pavement some twenty yards away; a paramedic had set up a table next to it to dispense bottled water to firemen. Joseph veered over there, peered inside the ambulance. Dave Crespo, a lanky redhead who had played basketball with Joseph in high school, was taking the vital signs of a firefighter in a heavy blue-and-yellow suit. The man’s face was smudged and sweat-slicked, his eyes tearing. Crespo removed the blood-pressure cuff and said, “I think you ought to sit it out for a while, guy.”

  “No can do.” The firefighter thrust his arm back into his sleeve and zipped his suit, clapped Dave on the shoulder, and climbed down from the ambulance. On his way past the table he snagged a bottle of water.

  Crespo spotted Joseph, shook his head. “I tell them to take it easy, but they don’t listen. I never listened when I was a volunteer, either.”

  “Any injuries?” Joseph asked.

  “Not so far.”

  “CDF here?”

  “Not yet. They’re coming up from Signal Port and Westhaven. If they get here soon and this wind doesn’t pick up, maybe they can contain it before it jumps to timber.” The California Department of Forestry’s fire department had the edge on the volunteers: state financed, it was well equipped and staffed by full-time pr
ofessionals.

  “They’d better hurry. Our guys need all the help they can get.” The volunteers Joseph had seen were tiring fast, but like the man who hadn’t heeded Dave’s advice, they wouldn’t rest. Fire was the single largest threat to life and safety in the county; the volunteers would fight it till the last ember was extinguished. “Any idea when this started?”

  “Call came in around eleven forty, from a passing motorist with a cellular. Was going pretty strong by the time our people got here.”

  “Any idea of the cause?”

  Crespo shook his head.

  “You think this could have been arson?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. The buildings are old and dry. A little accelerant poured in the right places . . .” He shrugged.

  “Spread fast, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it did. Makes you wonder.” A pair of firefighters approached, one man leaning heavily on the other, arm around his shoulders, soot-blackened face contorted in pain. Crespo went to meet them.

  Joseph crossed the highway to the chain-link fence surrounding the mill site. It was hot to the touch, and on the slope behind it, men were digging a trench. Beyond them, a yellow-orange pyre burned furiously. On one of the buildings to the north, flames rushed along the roof in a crazy zigzag pattern and shot up the tall smokestack, sparks whirling against the sky. For a short time the stack was a brilliant tower of light; then it shuddered and began to crumble. Joseph thought it cried out, realized it was his own voice he heard, filled with a grief that threatened to choke him. A part of the past was dying, a part of him along with it.

  Sirens sounded behind him—two CDF trucks moving swiftly up the highway from the south. A cheer rose up from the men trenching behind the fence as the trucks sped through the gate by the guardhouse.

  Joseph turned away. A man could stand only so much ruin. As he moved back toward the paramedics, intending to volunteer his services, he caught sight of somebody standing on the other side of the barricade. A man whom he couldn’t see clearly, a man who spotted him at the same time, whirled, and fled.

  Joseph followed.

  STEPH PACE

  Steph stood on the front porch of her clapboard cottage, bathrobe wrapped tightly around her, and watched the conflagration. The house was east of town, on a rise that had been logged off decades ago, and the fire consuming the mill was visible above the roofs of its neighbors. She could hear excited voices—other people on their porches—and see a knot of people in the middle of the street, but she made no move to join them. To her it was not an exciting occasion, or one for sharing.

  She had no doubt the mill would be a total loss. Even if it had been daylight and they’d been able to send out the tanker planes, it would have done little good. The best she could hope for was that no one got killed or injured, and that the flames did not jump the highway into the timberland.

  She laughed—a mirthless, dry sound that hurt her throat. What a way for Timothy McNear to have his defunct mill razed! She wouldn’t be surprised if he’d hired an arsonist to do the job.

  I know what the old bastard’s doing. Standing in that loft of his and watching. But what is he feeling? Does he feel? Once I would have said yes, but now I don’t know.

  The phone rang, and Steph went inside to answer it. Her mother, calling from Westhaven, the southernmost town in the county.

  “Can you see the fire, Steffi? Is it the mill?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Can they save any of it?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “It’s God’s retribution. You know it is.”

  Steph felt her way through the dark room to the sofa, curled up there, and pulled an afghan over her bare feet. “I suppose so.”

  “That man. That evil, evil man.”

  “Mom . . .”

  “You know what he did to Alice. She never would’ve died the way she did—”

  “Ancient history.”

  “Ancient history to you, maybe. But she was my best friend, and she killed herself because of him.”

  “Mom, can we do this another time?”

  “What have you got going at two in the morning that’s so important? Oh!” Her mother’s voice became sly. “Somebody’s with you. Joseph? Is Joseph there?”

  “Joseph is not here. He never comes here. That was all over years ago.”

  “Nonsense. I know he spends time at the restaurant every afternoon, and I know he was at your house last night. Stayed till all hours.”

  “How did you—?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “Dorothy Crane. She’s always looking out her window—”

  “Is it her fault he showed up just when the blackout ended?”

  “Mom, it wasn’t . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing. I have to go now.”

  “Steffi, I’ve always thought you and Joseph would get back together. Don’t spoil it this time.”

  “Good night, Mom.”

  Steph went back outside. The glow wasn’t as intense now, and there was no sign that the blaze had spread to the ridge. Still, she remained on her porch long after the neighbors had returned to their homes and beds. The phone rang twice, but fearing further inquisition from her mother, she let the machine pick up. Yes, it was Mom, sounding mighty irritated.

  I’ve always thought you and Joseph would get back together. Don’t spoil it this time.

  I didn’t spoil it the last time, Mom, and neither did he. You’d be surprised if I told you what did.

  TIMOTHY MCNEAR

  The southwest sky still glowed red, but a call from the county fire marshal had assured him that, while the mill was a total loss, there was no longer danger of the flames spreading into a catastrophic forest fire. Tomorrow he would drive down to the point, meet with officials, and view the ruins. There would be an investigation, and insurance claims to file. But now he sat at his kitchen table, drinking coffee that was not really necessary because shock and rage had sobered him, perhaps for all time.

  The mill had stood on its jut of land since 1862, its natural harbor making it easily accessible for the schooners that plied the coast. There had been boom times when the supply of redwood seemed as inexhaustible as the demand; bust times when its owners had regretted the lack of foresight that had depleted the timber, and the unstable economy that further conspired against them. But over the years, the mill had been a constant fixture of the Cape, its life’s blood. Even after he’d been forced to close it down, it had stood as a monument to the past. And now it was gone.

  Gone, because of one man’s greed and determination to have his way no matter what the cost. He had no doubt the fire had been set on orders from Gregory Erickson.

  Is this what your legacy’s going to be, old man? A heap of ashes and twisted metal? A river where nothing lives?

  No, it isn’t. And damn the consequences.

  The worm has turned.

  JESSIE DOMINGO

  The Tides Inn, where Eldon Whitesides was staying, sat on a bluff above the Calvert’s Landing municipal pier. Its white clapboard facade was brightly lighted even after three in the morning, the floods’ beams silvering the leaves of the tall trees—eucalyptus, she’d been told they were called—that grew around it. Jessie followed a steep driveway that led from the parking lot of the long, dark-wood commercial building at the foot of the pier to the inn’s reception area. The lobby was also brightly lit, and she spotted a young Latino man nodding off behind the desk.

  Fitch said, “Eldon’s in room two-ten.” His voice was strained. He’d said little on the harrowing ride along the dark and winding ridge road, except to caution her repeatedly to hold her speed down.

  She scanned a sign that pointed the way to the various units, then drove to the end of a wing that extended far out onto the bluff. Two-ten would be upstairs, with a balcony that faced the sea—no modest lodgings for the boss, though Fitch and Jessie were crammed into tiny rooms that smelled of Lysol.

  She st
arted to get out of the car, but Fitch put a hand on her arm. “Jess, let’s not do this now. I’ve been thinking we should wait till morning, when we’re both more clearheaded.”

  She shook his hand off. “And do what instead—sleep in the car?”

  “That’s not such a bad idea. I’m exhausted, and you must be, too.”

  “I couldn’t sleep anyway, not knowing what you suspect.”

  “I may be wrong. At least let me explain to Eldon why we’ve come. Don’t go blustering in there making accusations.”

  “All right, let’s go.”

  As they crossed the parking area, Jessie could hear the boom of the surf on the rocks below; the scent of the trees that crowded in beside the building was sharp and their leaves whispered in the light breeze. The units were dark, except for one at the far end whose white curtains were backlit, and when she and Fitch climbed the outside staircase and reached its door, she saw it was Whitesides’s. She knocked, and they waited.

  No response.

  “Maybe he’s sleeping,” Fitch whispered. He looked as if he would welcome any excuse to go back downstairs to the car.

  “With the lights on?” Jessie knocked harder.

  “Jesus, you’ll wake up the entire place!”

  She ignored him, went to the window, and tried to peer around the curtains. All she saw was the end of a beige sofa. She went back to the door, rattled the handle. It turned, and the door swung open into a beige and brown room that was far larger and more attractive than her own at the Shorebird; the walls were adorned with seascapes, and a king-size bed stood in an alcove. The bed was empty, its comforter slightly rumpled; a suitcase sat open on a rack, and a laptop and briefcase rested on a glass-topped table by the window overlooking the balcony. Jessie glanced around; the bathroom door was open, the light off.