And then, three years later, he had come home with all the money he had saved—he wouldn’t tell her how much, just that it was considerable and they wouldn’t have to worry about anything for a long while to come—and they had been married in the little white church near her home in Healdsburg. He had bought the salmon boat and this house in Bodega Bay, and she had never been happier.
But she had begun to sense that something was wrong almost immediately. Jim had changed—in small ways at first, hardly noticeable, and then as the years passed, in progressively larger ways until he became a different man. Where he had always been outgoing, warmly laughing, making new friends, he became introverted, reticent, almost rude at times to neighbors and acquaintances; where he had always been ready to investigate new things and new places, constantly on the move, he became almost a recluse, leaving Bodega Bay only on the rarest of occasions—what was the use of having a home and a business someplace if you were going to be running around the country all the time? They had talked about children before, in their letters and when they were together, and Jim had said he wanted a large family, four boys and four girls; laughingly, “I’m going to keep you barefoot and pregnant, woman.” But when Trina had suggested having a child right away, he had said he’d changed his mind, they should wait for a while longer, and it was the same answer every time she broached the subject to him. Also, there was the fact that he had begun drinking. She couldn’t understand that; he had never been one for liquor, even in high school—when the other boys had gone out on weekend beer busts, he had usually begged off, or if he did go, he was the one who invariably ended up driving the others home. Now he drank heavily, almost habitually, in the winter months, when the salmon weren’t running; in the summer, he put himself into the fishing with a fervor that she thought bordered on the fanatical.
Trina couldn’t understand any of it. Could it have been her? She had asked herself that question an incalculable number of times, and had unfailingly given it the same answer: No. She had been everything a good wife should be, she was certain of that—she loved him, she was interested in him, in what he did and said and felt, she was passionate, trusting, undemanding. No, it wasn’t her; it was something else, something, possibly, that had happened while he was in the Air Force or when he was involved in that business venture in Illinois. But she could never get him to talk about that; he always managed to change the subject when she brought it up. Perhaps that call today had had something to do with it, perhaps ...
An involuntary shudder moved across her shoulders. She wished Jim had not gone to San Francisco, she wished that call had never come. There was something ... something
Suddenly, intuitively, Trina Conradin was more frightened than she had ever been in her life.
4
The fishing shack squatted on the very tip of a narrow point in Duckblind Slough—a subordinate tributary of the Petaluma River several miles north of where that body of water empties into San Pablo Bay, and some thirty miles north of San Francisco. One of three similar structures in the slough—the others were set inland one hundred yards on either side—it was low and box-shaped and seemed to list slightly toward the water, as if the strength of the wind had been too much for it to withstand. It was built of raw, unfinished sawmill planks, covered with tar paper for insulation purposes, and it sat raised some two feet off the thick gray-black mud of the sloping bank, on four wooden corner blocks. Attached to the rear, immediately beneath one of the shack’s two windows, was a short floating dock, tar-papered like the shack itself, that jutted some fifteen feet into the turbid water. Tule grass and cattails and milkweed and tall brown rushes grew densely to the water’s edge; across the slough, perhaps seventy- five yards wide at that point, thick clumps of anise and sage dotted the flat marshland. In the distance, beyond the Petaluma River itself, the rising black oakcovered foothills of the Sonoma Mountains lay brown and desolate against both summer and winter skies.
You got to Duckblind Slough by way of a narrow dirt road leading off Highway 101 north of Novato, in Marin County. The road wound inland for a mile or so, through aromatic eucalyptus and bay and pepper trees, past a club for trap shooters and the Mira Monte Marina and Boat Launch—a small cluster of buildings which catered to outboard boats and fishermen and water skiers during the summer months. At that point, a sign announced that the road would now pass through private property, and that trespassers would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Three miles further along, a second private road branched off to the east, crossing a raised bank of railroad spur line tracks; a wooden gate capped with barbed wire and fastened closed with a chain-and-padlock blocked the road there. Duckblind Slough was another half-mile beyond the gate.
The road ended in a small clearing just large enough for four cars if they were parked carefully side by side. Three separate paths led from there to the shacks. The two inland ones were owned by Sonoma County businessmen, who used them sparingly for bass fishing and duck hunting in season, and who seldom if ever used them at any other time. The one on the point belonged to Steve and Andrea Kilduff.
It was almost four when Andrea brought her little Volkswagen into the deserted clearing. She shut off the motor and sat staring at the wind-bent grass and thinking that she was probably crazy for having come all the way up to this desolate spot instead of simply calling her sister, Mona, who lived in suburban comfort in El Cerrito across the Bay. But the idea of having to answer all the questions Mona and her husband, Dave, would ask, and of having to put up with their three pre-school children whom she normally adored but who would undoubtedly send her clawing at the walls in this situation, had not appealed to Andrea at all. She had wanted to be alone—that was a very necessary part of things—and there was no better place for that than Duckblind Slough, where you were almost literally up a depository tributary without due means of locomotion, as a friend of theirs had laughingly suggested when Andrea told him about the shack’s location. Besides, Steve would never think of looking for her there; Andrea had never really been one for the spartan life. Oh, she had accompanied him up here a couple of times (anything to get away from the impossible rush of the city), but sitting in a rowboat with a five-horsepower motor and putt-putting in and out of sloughs looking for elusive bass and catfish was not exactly her conception of the ideal vacation. Still, the bleakness, the almost atavistic quality of Duckblind Slough in November, had a certain allure for her now. It was the first place she had thought of—the head shrinkers could make something out of that, all right.
She buttoned her cardigan sweater at her throat and stepped out of the Volkswagen. The wind blowing across the marshlands was gelid, making a low, mournful soul song as it played amongst the tules and cattails, bringing the vague smell of salt and an almost tangible smell of things long dead, as if she had suddenly been thrust backward in time to some primeval era.
Andrea shivered, and then smiled faintly. Next thing you know, she chided herself, you’ll be seeing a dinosaur or a tyrannosaur or something come lumbering up to the water to drink, perhaps even to drain the slough dry in its thirst. She shivered again; the thought of all the water being drained from the tributary, of the potential horrors, real or imagined, which lay half-hidden in the sucking mud at its bottom, made a chill twice as cold as the wind’s walk along her spine.
Quickly, then, she opened the trunk compartment of the Volkswagen and removed her two pieces of luggage and a cardboard box of food and supplies she had purchased before leaving San Francisco. She left the remainder of her belongings in the car. She carried the suitcases along the vegetation-choked path to the point, set them on the shack’s narrow, gap-boarded porch, and returned for the cardboard box, hurrying now. When she had completed the second trip, she fitted the old brass key into the lock and swung the door open.
Two distinct odors greeted her: dry rot and the lingering acridity of fish. Both seemed to flow outward in an unseen wave, as if waiting for escape into the free air, and Andrea recoiled slightly, holding the door open, her nostrils flaring with distaste. After a moment, she carried the suitcases and the box of foodstuffs inside. Shutting the door—her desire for warmth was stronger than her aversion to the shack’s smellshe stood surveying the interior. The walls were tar-papered inside as well, and the studs were exposed. In one corner there was an iron potbellied stove which Steve had bought from a junk dealer in San Francisco for fifty dollars three years ago; beside it, stacked neatly against the wall, were a dozen or so circular redwood blocks and some kindling and a pile of yellowed newspapers. A kerosene stove, of the two-burner variety, reposed next to a homemade tin sink in a wood frame. A row of makeshift cabinets hung on the wall above the sink, on both sides of the narrow curtained window there. There was nothing else in the room save for a half-table and two chairs, an ancient wicker chair with a plastic cushion on it, and a folding TV tray sitting off to one side. Through an open doorway leading into the other room —little more than an alcove, really—Andrea could see the wide Army cot that had served as their bed and a scarred, unpainted dresser with three drawers.
