The road that led off State Highway 299 to Musket Creek was not only unpaved; it was rutted, narrow, full of dips and hairpin turns, and so dusty in places you felt as though you were driving through a kind of talcum-powder mist. The terrain was mountainous, heavily forested, with small open meadows here and there that were carpeted with wild clover and purple-blue lupine-scenic, yet without any spectacular vistas. Far off to the east you could see the immense snow-capped peak of Mt. Shasta jutting more than 14,000 feet into the cloud-flecked sky. But that was a commonplace sight in this country; on a clear day, that granddaddy of mountains was visible from just about anywhere within a fifty-mile radius.
Beside me, Kerry kept putting her head out of the open passenger window and sniffing the air like a cat. She was in a pretty good mood today, and she seemed to be enjoying herself so far-living up to last night’s promise. She had insisted on coming along; she hadn’t felt like sitting around the motel alone, she’d said, and she was curious about Ragged-Ass Gulch. So I’d given in and let her come, to keep the peace between us, but I wasn’t sure it was such a hot idea. I kept thinking about Jack Coleclaw’s attack on O‘Daniel yesterday, all the things I’d been told about the “loonies” of Musket Creek. There probably wasn’t anything to worry about; hell, you could classify both O’Daniel and Treacle as loonies, if you felt like it. But it still made me a little trepidatious.
The road seemed to go on endlessly. The car’s odometer showed 7.2 miles when the dusty strip slanted between a couple of high, wooded cliffs and the mountains folded back finally to reveal a little valley down below. And there it was-Musket Creek in all its glory.
The valley floor had a rippled look, full of hillocks, like a bright green carpet that had been bunched in at both ends to make a series of wrinkles. The town-such as it was-lay sprawled toward the far end, where the narrow line of the creek meandered through high grass, wildflowers, and stands of fir trees. Some of the buildings had been built on the hummocks; what looked to be the main street of the old mining ghost town was on flat ground paralleling the creek. Most of the buildings were tumbledown-and off to the left I could see the blackened skeletons of the four that had burned ten days ago-but at a distance the sunlight and the majestic surroundings softened the look of them, gave them a kind of nostalgic quaintness.
Kerry said, “Why, it’s beautiful,” in a surprised voice. “No wonder the people who live here don’t want the place developed.”
“Yeah,” I said.
We went on a ways. Then she said, “Why would anybody in his right mind call such an idyllic spot Ragged-Ass Gulch?”
“Somebody’s idea of a joke, maybe. Miners had oddball senses of humor.”
“That’s for sure.”
When we reached the meadow the road deteriorated into little more than a pair of ruts with a grassy hump in the middle. It angled off to the right and eventually forked; one branch became the single main street of the old camp, passing between facing rows of its abandoned buildings, and the other hooked over and disappeared onto the rising ground to the west. According to the information supplied by Shirley Irwin, more people lived back there in the woods.
The first buildings we came to were before the fork, on a long stretch of level ground-a combination single-pump gas station, garage and body shop, and general store. The garage and store were weathered and unpainted, but in a decent state of repair. A couple of hand-lettered signs hung over the screen-doored entrance to the latter; the big one said MUSKET CREEK MERCANTILE and the little one said BAIT TACKLE • AMMUNITION • GUIDE SERVICE. The garage wall was plastered with old metal Coca-Cola and beer signs. Around back, to one side, was a frame cottage with a big native-stone chimney at one end. The folks who lived in the cottage and ran the businesses were the Coleclaws: Jack, his wife, and their son Gary.
I decided I might as well get my talk with Jack Coleclaw out of the way first, so I pulled in off the road and stopped next to the gas pump. A fat brown-and-white dog came around from behind the store, took one look at the car, and began barking its head off. No one else appeared.
“I’d better do this alone,” I said to Kerry. “You wait in the car.”
“All right.”
I got out, keeping my eye on the dog. It continued to bark, but it didn’t make any sudden moves in my direction. I took the fact that its tail was wagging to be a positive sign and started toward the entrance to the store.
Just before I got there, a pudgy young guy in grease-stained overalls appeared in the doorway of the garage. “Be quiet, Sam,” he said to the dog. He didn’t say anything to me, or move out of the doorway. And the dog went right on yapping.
I walked over to where the young guy stood. He was in his middle twenties and he had curly brown hair and pink beardless cheeks and big doe eyes that had a remote look in them. The eyes watched me without curiosity as I came up to him.
“Hi,” I said. “You’re Gary Coleclaw, right?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’d like to talk to your father, if he’s around.”
“He’s not. He went to Weaverville this morning.”
“When will he be back?”
He shrugged. “This afternoon sometime.”
“How about your mother? Is she here?”
“No. She went to Weaverville too.”
“Well, maybe you can help me. I’m a detective, from San Francisco, and I-”
“Detective?” he said.
“Yes. I’m investigating the death of Munroe Randall in Redding-”
“The Northern guy,” he said. His face closed up; you could see it happening, like watching a poppy fold its petals at sundown. “The fire. I don’t know nothing about that. Except he got what was coming to him.”
“Is that what your father says too?”
“That’s what everybody says. Listen, mister, you working for them? Them Northern guys?”
“No.”
“Yeah, you are. Them damn Northern guys.”
“No, I’m working for the insurance-”
But he had pivoted away from me, was hurrying back inside the garage. I called after him, “Hey, wait,” but he didn’t stop or turn. An old black Chrysler sat on the floor inside, its front end jacked up; there was one of those little wheeled mechanic’s carts alongside, and he dropped down onto it on his back and scooted himself under the Chrysler until only his legs were showing. A moment later I heard the sharp, angry sound of some kind of tool whacking against the undercarriage.
The damned dog was still barking. I sidestepped it and went back to the car. When I slid in under the wheel Kerry asked, “Well?”
“He wouldn’t talk to me. And his folks aren’t here.”
“What now?”
“The fire,” I said.
I drove out along the road again. Just beyond the right fork, two more occupied cottages sat on adjacent hummocks, like odd-shaped nipples on a pair of big breasts. The nearest one had a deserted look, but in the yard of the second, a heavy-set woman of about seventy, wearing man’s clothing and a straw hat, was wielding a hoe among tall rows of tomato vines. She stopped when she heard the car and stood staring out at the road as we passed by, as if she resented the appearance of strangers in Musket Creek.
Kerry said, “None of the natives is very friendly, the way it looks.”
“So I’ve been warned.”
I kept on going along the right fork, through what was left of the mining camp. It amounted to about two blocks’ worth of buildings on both sides of the road, although here and there in the surrounding meadows you could see foundations and other remains of what had once been additional structures. Most of the buildings still standing were backed up against the creek. There were about fifteen altogether, all made of whipsawn boards on stone foundations, some reinforced with tin siding and roofs, a third with badly decayed frames and collapsing eaves. The largest-two-storied, girdled by a sagging and partly missing veranda at the second level-looked to have been either a hotel or a saloon with upstairs accommodations; it bore no signs other than one somebody had painted on its sheet metal roof, advertising Bull
Durham tobacco. Several of the others did have signs, or what was left of them: UNION DRUG STORE, MEAT MARKET, MINER’S HALL; M. SANDERS and SON, BLACKSMITHS; MUSKET CREEK GENERAL MERCHANDISE and HARDWARE, S.WILBUR, PROP.
As far as I could tell as we passed, all their doors and windows were either boarded up or sealed with tacked-on sheets of tin.
Kerry seemed impressed. “This is some place,” she said. “I’ve never been in a ghost town before.”
“Spooky, huh?”
“No. I’m fascinated. How long have these buildings been here?”
“Well over a century, some of them.”
“And people have been living here all that time and nobody ever tried to restore them?”
“Not in a good long while.”
“Well, why not? I mean, you’d think somebody would want to preserve a historic place like this.”
“Somebody does,” I said. “The Northern Development Corporation.”
“I don’t mean that kind of preservation. You know what I mean.”
“Uh-huh. It’s a good question, but I don’t know the answer.”
She frowned a little, thoughtfully. “What kind of people live here, anyway?”
“That’s another good question. I guess we’ll find out pretty soon.”
The four fire-destroyed buildings had been set apart from the others, on the south side of the road. That, along with the facts that there had been no wind on the night of the blaze, that the meadow grass was still spring-green, and that Jack Coleclaw and the other residents had spotted the fire right away and rushed to do battle with it, had saved the whole of the abandoned camp from going up. As it was, there was nothing left of the four structures except stone foundations and timber fragments like blackened and splintered bones, with a wide swatch of scorched earth and a hastily dug firebreak ringing them.
I stopped the car at the edge of the firebreak. Kerry said, “I suppose you’re going to go poke around over there.”
“Yup. Come along if you want to.”
“In all that soot? No thanks. I think I’ll go back and look at the ghosts.”
We got out into the hot sunshine. It was quiet there, peaceful except for the distant yammering of a jay, and the air was heavy with the scent of wildflowers and evergreens. Kerry wandered off along the road; I took out the old, soot-stained trenchcoat I’d worn in Redding, put it on and belted it, and then went across the firebreak to the burned-out buildings.
The county sheriff’s investigators had been over the area without finding anything; I didn’t expect to have better luck, any more than I had at the remains of Munroe Randall’s house. But then, I’d had some training in arson investigation myself, back when I was on the San Francisco cops, and I read the updated handbooks and manuals put out by police associations and insurance companies. I had also had a handful of jobs over the years involving arson. You have to keep checking and double-checking: that’s what detective work is all about.
The first thing you do on an inspection of a fire scene is to determine the point of origin. Once you’ve got that, you look for something to indicate how the fire started, whether it was accidental or a case of arson. If it was arson, what you’re after is the corpus delicti-evidence of the method or device used by the arsonist.
One of the ways to locate point of origin is to check the “alligatoring,” or charring, of the surface of the burned wood. This can tell you in which direction the fire spread, where it was the hottest, and if you’re fortunate you can trace it straight to the origin. I was fortunate, as it turned out. And not just once-twice. I not only found the point of origin, I found the corpus delicti as well.
It was arson, and no mistake. The fire had been set at the rear of the building farthest to the north, whatever that one might once have been; and what had been used to ignite it was a candle. I found the residue of it, a wax deposit inside a small cup-shaped piece of stone that was hidden under a pile of rubble. It took me ten minutes of sifting around and getting my hands and the trenchcoat completely blackened to dredge up the stone. Which was no doubt why the sheriff’s men hadn’t been as thorough as they should have been; not everybody is willing to turn himself into the likeness of a chimney sweep, particularly on a minor fire out in the middle of nowhere.
As near as I could determine, the candle had been made of purple-colored tallow. Which told me nothing much; purple candles were not uncommon. It had probably been stuck inside the cup-shaped stone to keep it from toppling over and starting the fire before it was intended to.
I was peering at the stone, and it wasn’t telling me much either, when I heard and then saw the jeep come up. It rattled to a stop behind my car, and a guy about six-four unfolded from behind the wheel and plunked himself down on the road. He stared over at me for a couple of seconds, shading his eyes against the sun. Then he yelled, “Hey! You there! What do you think you’re doing?”
I saw no point in yelling back at him. Instead I put the stone into my trenchcoat pocket, swatted some of the soot off my hands, then made my way through the rubble and across to where the guy stood alongside his jeep. He was in his forties, beanpole thin, with a shock of fiery red hair and a belligerent expression to match it. Behind him in the jeep I could see a folded easel, a couple of blank three-foot-square canvases, and a box that probably contained brushes and oil paints.
When I stopped in front of him he scowled down at me and said, “What’s the idea of messing around over there? You a scavenger or something?”
“No,” I said, “I’m a detective.”
“A what?”
“A detective.” I told him who I was and where I was from and that I had been hired to investigate the death of Munroe Randall.
He didn’t like hearing it. His expression got even more belligerent; his eyes were flat and shiny-black, like circlets of onyx. “Who hired you? Northern Development?”
“No. The insurance company that carries the policy on Randall’s life.”
“So what the hell are you doing here? Randall died in a fire in Redding.”
“You had a fire here too,” I said.
“Coincidence.”
“Maybe not, Mr. Robideaux.”
“How do you know my name?”
“I know the names of everybody who lives here. The Northern people supplied them.”
“I’ll bet they did.”
“The list includes an artist named Paul Robideaux.” I nodded toward the paraphernalia in the jeep. “I get paid to observe things and make educated guesses.”
Robideaux grunted and screwed up his mouth as if he wanted to spit. He didn’t say anything.
I said, “I’d like to ask you a few questions about the fire.”
“Which fire?”
“This one. Unless you know something about the one in Redding too.”
“I don’t know anything about either one. I wasn’t in Redding when Randall’s place burned. And I wasn’t here when those old shacks went up.”
“No? That isn’t what you told the county sheriffs men. According to their report, you were one of the residents who helped dig the firebreak.”
“Is that so?” Robideaux said. “Well, I had to talk to the law. I don’t have to talk to you.”
“That’s right, you don’t. But suppose I told you I can prove this fire was deliberately set. Would you want to talk to me then?”
His eyes got narrow. “How could you prove that? You find something in the debris?”
“Maybe.”
“What is it?”
“I have to tell that to the law,” I said. “I don’t have to tell it to you.”
He took a jerky half-step toward me, the menacing kind. I stayed where I was, setting myself; he was not big enough for me to be intimidated. But if he’d had any ideas about mixing it up, he thought better of them. He turned abruptly and stalked around to the driver’s side of the jeep.
Only he didn’t get in right away. Instead he pointed a finger in my direction and said, “You think Randall was murdered, is that it? Well, why don’t you go sniff around those partners of his? One of them killed him if anybody did.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because nobody here did it, that’s why. There’s nothing for you in Musket Creek.”
“Nothing but trouble, you mean?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
He got into the jeep. Fifteen seconds later he was barreling off down the road, trailing dust, headed toward the pines to the west.
I stood staring after him. And wondering, not for the first time in the past two days, if there wasn’t a lot more going on in this business than I’d first thought.