The Vanished

used in cold water and got down stiffly and washed the dried blood from the floor where he had lain, where both of us had spattered fluid walking back and forth. When I straightened again, I was breathing asthmatically and my arms and legs felt weak. I wadded everything together and took it out into the fresh clean morning air and dumped it into the trunk of my car.

I slid under the wheel, then, and swung around to the right of the office. There was a dark green Pontiac pulled up in front of number seven; Jardine had finally gotten another customer. Well, maybe things were starting to look up for everybody now.

I drove out to Coachman Road and onto it, passing the Emery farm and seeing no one out and around. I wanted to have a look at Hammock Grove before I saw a doctor; there might be nothing to learn out there, but I was still fresh out of other possibilities.

A couple of miles further along Coachman Road, the firs and redwoods seemed to grow thicker and there was less sunlight filtering through the ceiling of leaves and branches overhead. I had the window down, and the smell of the woods filled the car with a kind of spicy redolence that was a narcotic for the pulsing ache in my head.

Around a sharp bend I came upon a very narrow paved road leading off to the left, and a wooden sign at the junction, reading: HAMMOCK GROVE, and below that: PICNICKING • CAMPING • HIKING. I turned along there, and it was like following a tunnel through the imposing giant trees; it made you feel very small, very vulnerable, passing at the feet of some of nature’s most beautiful creations.

I traveled a quarter of a mile, and then I could see the picnic area spread out in a grotto of sorts, with parking spaces and small stone barbecues and heavy redwood picnic tables and benches. There was a thick double-link chain stretched across the road between two posts at the entrance to the grounds. Beyond that the road twisted and turned and looped back on itself throughout; like the picnic areas and facilities, it was covered with leaves and pine needles and loose topsoil, a result of the heavy winter rains. When spring came, there would be a forestry crew in to clean and rake it out for the influx of weekend Thoreaus and all their screaming multitudes.

I parked nose-up to the chain and got out and stepped over it, letting my eyes make a slow ambit of the area. The bridge Holly had mentioned was on the left, an arched, log-railed affair that spanned a wide, rocky creek; there was a quick stream within its banks now, although I suspected that it would be completely dry during the summer. It hugged the base of a steep, rounded slope grown with wood ferns and spindly firs that formed the left-hand boundary for the grove; deeper in, it hooked around to run beneath a couple of other wooden bridges through the general middle of the grotto-and behind me, it made the curve with the slope to disappear well back among the redwoods.

Except for the raucous cry of a jay somewhere high in one of the trees, it was very quiet. Cool and damp, too, with very little wind. I walked over toward the bridge and looked into the creek, and there was nothing for me to see except rocks and leaves and cold rushing water. There was nothing in the immediate vicinity of the bridge, either; the wind-swept foliage had long since taken care of any traces.

I scuffed through the leaves near the bridge, for no particular reason, but nothing of interest lay beneath the soft, wet covering. I saw that one of the foot trails which cross-hatched the grounds led to a large brown building with green-latticed entrances on either side: the rest rooms. I walked over, thinking that if I had been Sands and I had woken up from a beating in a place such as this one, I would have made for these rest rooms first thing-looking for water, towels, a mirror to check the damage.

There was a brand-new padlock, undisturbed, on the door marked MEN, and none of the frosted windows had been broken or tampered with. I made a turn of the building and looked in at the side designated WOMEN; nothing there, either, except that the padlock was a little rustier. Well, Sands had not made for the rest rooms then, because even if he had found them locked, he could have broken a window to get inside or shouldered one of the doors open without too much trouble.

What had he done, then?

The most logical answer was that he had staggered off down that same road up which I had just driven, and either walked or gotten a ride back to the Redwood Lodge. And if that were the case, I was only wasting my time out here.

I went back and stood at the foot of the bridge. That intuitive sense was working again, and it kept insisting that there was something here for me, something important, and that all I had to do was keep looking in order to find out what it was. I glanced off to my left, and there was an extension of the path coming from the rest rooms; it curved over to run concurrent with the road for some little way. Behind me were two picnic tables set on either side of one of the stone barbecues, and across the bridge in front of me was the slope. The base of it, at the bank of the creek, was fairly level, and contained a path that paralleled the stream in both directions.

The back of my neck felt cold, and I put my right hand up to touch my damaged face. The fingers became immobile. My damaged face, oh Christ, my damaged face! Something dark nudged my mind, and the coldness increased, damaged face, and I was moving up and across the bridge before I even considered it. I looked to the right, deeper into the open grove; then I went off to the left, walking slowly, alternating my gaze with the side of the slope and the creek, not seeing anything, moving on instinct.

The path led me well around the slope and then, gradually, away from it, still paralleling the meandering stream. I stopped and glanced back, and I could not see the picnic grotto or the road or my car from where I was; the trees grew thickly here, and the ground was completely carpeted with wet, aromatic leaves.

I started walking again. Up ahead, beside the stream, was a huge fire-gutted redwood stump. I stopped once more, looking at it, and my eyes shifted then to a cluster of large, porous rocks at the low creek bank just beyond the stump. There were several of them, bunched closely together, and I stared at them and kept staring at them. Something wrong there, something wrong…

And I had it: the biggest of the rocks, maybe three feet in circumference, was bleached gray along the top and stained a much darker color along its bottom surface, as if that part of the rock had lain in the acid soil for a long time before being recently uprooted and partially revolved.

I went over and stood by the cluster, and there was a kind of leaden nausea in the pit of my stomach. I knew what I was going to find, had known from the moment there by the bridge. It took me a scant two minutes to shoulder the rocks out of the way, to uncover the shallow grave which had been dug beneath them-and the ugly, decomposing thing which lay within it.

Roy Sands was no longer among the missing.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The side of his head had been crushed by a blow from some heavy, blunt instrument-very probably the stained and rusted tire iron which lay alongside the body. The condition of his clothes, his flesh, the nesting presence of insects-God!-told me that he had been in there for some time, and even though there was not much left of the face for positive identification, I had no doubt at all that it was Sands.

The nausea came boiling up into my throat, and I turned away and walked stiffly to the blackened redwood stump. I leaned against that and dragged air into my lungs, and momentarily the feeling passed. A couple of blackbirds chattered in a slender thread of sunlight nearby, and then flew off together; it was very still again.

The whole sick business began to take shape in my mind. I knew beyond a doubt now the nature of the thing that had been nagging at me, the thing I had failed to consider because there had been no reason for considering it, the thing that had been subconsciously bothering me all along with its lack of rhyme or reason, its alien presence in the pattern of events as I had uncovered them.

I had been able to find no reason why Sands would have gone to Eugene, Oregon, and that was because he had never gone there. He had not sent those wires, had not been the man who checked into the transient hotel, he was dead then, he was dead and buried under those rocks behind me. The entire thing with Eugene had been a red herring, a fact I had finally guessed when I touched my face there by the bridge. Sands had been beaten by Holly, and it was incontrovertible that such a beating would have left his face as swollen and discolored and marked as mine; but neither the hotel nor the Western Union clerk had mentioned Sands as having looked battered and broken-a fact they could not have helped but notice despite a hat and a muffler and a coat with a turned-up collar, a fact one or both would have related to me.

So it was not Sands they saw, it was his murderer, the guy who had come in here after Holly left.