When I looked back at the ghost town there was still no sign of Kerry. I wondered where she was. Between my search of the burned-out buildings and my conversation with Thatcher, some forty-five minutes had passed since she'd wandered off. I shed my blackened trench coat, locked it and the waxy stone cup in the trunk of the car, used a rag to wipe off my hands, and set out looking for her.
It took me another ten minutes to find her. She was at the two-story hotel or saloon building; the back entrance wasn't boarded up the way the front was and the door hung open on one hinge, and when I called her name she answered me from inside. So I went in to see what she was up to.
She was standing in the middle of a big, gloomy, high-ceilinged room. Enough sunlight penetrated through cracks in the outer walls to let me see a balcony on three sides at the second-floor level, with three doorways opening off it on the left side and three more on the right; the balcony sagged badly in places and looked as though it might collapse at any time. So did the crooked staircase leaning in one corner down here. As far as I could tell, the only things the room itself contained were a crudely made hotel reception desk, part of which was hidden by a fallen pigeonhole shelf, and piles of dirt and splintered wood and other detritus on the whipsawed floor.
"What'd you do?" I asked Kerry. "Bust in here?"
"No. The back door was ajar. Isn't this place wonderful?"
"Uh-huh. If you like dust, decay, and rats."
"Rats? There aren't any rats in here."
"Want to bet?"
Rats didn't scare her much, though. She shrugged and said, "Somebody lives in this building."
"What?"
"Well, maybe not lives here, but spends a lot of time here. That's how come the back door isn't boarded up."
"How did you find this out?"
"The same way you find things out," she said. "By snooping around. Come on, I'll show you."
She led me over behind the hotel desk, to where a closed door was half-concealed by the fallen pigeonhole shelf. "The door's got a new latch on it," she said, pointing. "See? That made me curious, so I opened it to see what was inside."
She opened it again as she spoke and let me see what was inside. There wasn't much. It was a room maybe twelve-by-twelve, with a boarded-up window in the far wall. Two of the other three walls were bare; the third one, to the left, had a long, six-foot-high tier of standing shelves, like an unfinished bookcase, leaning against it. The shelves were crammed with all sorts of odds and ends, the bulk of which seemed to be Indian arrowheads, chunks of iron pyrite-fool's gold-and other rocks, and curious-shaped redwood buns. An Army cot with a straw-tick mattress, a Coleman lantern, and an upended wooden box supporting several tattered issues of National Geographic completed the room's furnishings.
"Packrats," I said. "That's who lives here."
Kerry wrinkled her nose at me.
"Either that, or a small-scale junk dealer."
She said, "Phooey. Where's your sense of mystery and adventure? Why couldn't it be an old prospector with a gold mine somewhere up in the hills?"
"There aren't any more gold mines up in the hills. Besides, if anybody had one, what would he want to come all the way down here for?"
"To forage for food, maybe."
"Uh-huh," I said. "Well, whoever bunks in this place might just get upset if he showed up and found us in his bedroom. Technically we're trespassing. We'd better go; I've got work to do."
This time she made a face at me. "Sometimes," she said, "you're about as much fun as a pimple on the fanny, you know that?"
"Kerry, I'm on a job. The fun can come later."
"Oh, you think so? Maybe not."
"Is that another threat to withhold your sexual favors?"
"Sexual favors," she said. "My, how you talk."
"You didn't answer my question."
"It was a dumb question. I don't answer dumb questions."
"You're still mad at me, right?"
"I'm not sure if I am or not. It could go either way."
She started back across the floor, leaving me to shut the door to the packrat's nest. And to chase after her then like a damned puppy. Outside, we walked in silence to where the car was parked. But once we got inside she pointed over at the burned-out buildings and asked, "Did you find anything?" and she sounded both interested and cheerful again.
Maybe she kept changing moods on purpose, I thought, just to get my goat. Or maybe when it came to women, my head was as full of dusty junk as that room inside the hotel. Which was probable, considering my track record. I could study women for another hundred years and I still wouldn't know what went on inside their heads.
I told Kerry about the melted candle, explaining how I'd found it. She said she thought I was very clever; I decided not to tell her that my methods had been devised by somebody else. I also mentioned my conversation with Thatcher. By the time I was finished with that, I had the car nosing up in front of the second of the two cottages near the fork, the one where the elderly woman was still hoeing among the tomato vines in the front yard.
The woman's name, according to the information I'd been given by Raymond Treacle, was Ella Bloom. She and her husband had moved to Cooperville in the late 1950s, after he sold his plumbing supply company in Eureka in order to pursue a lifelong ambition to pan for gold. He'd never found much of it, but Mrs. Bloom must have liked it here anyway; she'd stayed on after his death eight years ago.
She quit hoeing and glared out at us as she had earlier. She was tall and angular, had a nose like the blade of a paring knife and long straggly black hair. Put a tall-crowned hat on her head and a broomstick instead of a hoe in her hand, I thought, and she could have passed for a witch.
I got out of the car, went over to the gate in the picket fence that enclosed the yard. I put on a smile and called to her, "Mrs. Bloom?"
"Who are you?" she said suspiciously.
I gave her my name. "I'm an investigator working for Great Western Insurance on the death of Allan Randall-"
That was as far as I got. She hoisted up the hoe, waved it over her head, and whacked it down into the ground like an executioner's sword; then she hoisted it again and pointed it at me. "Get away from here!" she said in a thin, reedy voice. "Go on, get away!"
"Look, Mrs. Bloom, I only want to ask you a couple of questions-"
"I got nothing to say to you or anybody else about Munroe. You come into my yard, mister, you'll regret it. I got a shotgun in the house and I keep it loaded."
"There's no need for-"
"You want to see it? By God, I'll show it to you if that's what it takes!"
She threw down the hoe and went flying across the yard, up onto the porch and inside the house. I hesitated for about two seconds and then moved back to the car. There wasn't much sense in waiting there for her to come out with her shotgun; she wasn't going to talk, and for all I knew she was loopy enough to start blasting away at me.
"Christ," I said when I slid in under the wheel. "The woman's a lunatic."
Kerry wasn't even ruffled. "Maybe she's got a right."
"What?"
"If somebody was trying to turn my home into a gold-country Disneyland, I'd be pretty mad about it too."
"Yeah," I said, "but you wouldn't start threatening people for no damn reason."
"I might, if I was her age."
"Bah," I said. But because Mrs. Bloom had reappeared with a bulky twelve-gauge cradled in both hands, I started the car and swung it into a fast U-turn. Kerry might not have been worried, but she'd never been shot at and I had. People with guns make me nervous, no matter who they are.