“It could be a dead-end, Mr. Runquist,” I said. “The attendant here might have misunderstood her. But I’ll take a look at the house just the same.”
“But I drove up there yesterday; I told you that. There wasn’t any sign of her.”
“You looked inside the house?”
“I didn’t go all the way in, no. I didn’t see any need to; her car wasn’t there.”
“I still want to take a look around. Unless you have some objection…”
“No. God, no. I’m just trying… I don’t know what I’m trying to do. Go ahead, do whatever you think best.”
“How do I get to the place?”
He told me. It wasn’t more than fifteen miles from where I was now and it didn’t sound too difficult to find; I knew the area a little, and his directions were simple enough so that I didn’t even need to write them down.
“Listen,” Runquist said after a couple of seconds’ pause, “if she did go up there Friday night, do you think it was because of Lester Raymond?”
“I don’t know.”
“But if it was, then…”
I did not want to get into it with him; I did not want to have to lie to him. I said, “I’ll call you again later, Mr. Runquist,” and rang off.
Chapter 21
I drove north on Highway 12, through Boyes Hot Springs and Fetters Springs and Agua Caliente-places all well-known around the turn of the century for their mineral baths. Vineyards and low wooded hills took over beyond there; the autumnal reds and golds of the grape vines glistened in the afternoon sun like frozen fire.
Pretty soon the turnoff for the rustic little village of Glen Ellen appeared. Glen Ellen was where Jack London had lived the last years of his life-Jack London, the most famous of all the literary figures who had ridden the rails in their youth, the champion of road kids and gay cats and bindlestiffs. I remembered Arleen Bradford telling me that her father’s favorite book had been The Road, London’s collection of autobiographical essays on his hoboing days. Funny how trains and hoboes kept running through this whole business with the Bradford family and Lester Raymond, interwining now and then, like a peculiar leitmotif. And there was something a little dark and unsettling about it, too, something I did not want to dwell on at the moment.
A couple of hundred yards beyond the Glen Ellen turnoff, I noticed a sign at the edge of a private road that said: VINELAND WINERY PREMIUM SONOMA VALLEY WINES • TASTING ROOM. Runquist’s place. I could see it as I passed by, an old brick building coated with ivy, nestled back in a grove of trees with the vineyards stretching away at the rear.
The turnoff I wanted was a mile or so farther on. Trinity Road. The only road you could take from the Valley of the Moon to the Napa Valley across the Mayacamas Mountains that divided the two-a distance of maybe fifteen miles, I knew, because I had driven it a couple of times in the past. The mountains were heavily wooded, dotted with occasional small vineyards over toward the Napa side, and offered some spectacular views of one valley or the other, depending on which end of the road you were on. So naturally people with money had begun building secluded homes up there several years back; a lot more were being built even in these economically depressed times by people like Hannah Peterson and Harry Runquist.
Trinity Road, a narrow two-laner, began to wind upward almost immediately after I made the turn off Highway 12. There were some switchbacks in it, too, because the ascent was so steep and rapid. I had gone less than a mile when the vista began to open up on my right and behind me as I climbed. It was pretty spectacular, all right. The vineyards, the little villages here and there, and in the distance, rising dark against the sky, the Sonoma Mountains that bounded the valley to the west.
I pretty much had Trinity Road to myself. There weren’t any other cars going in my direction, and I only passed one heading the other way. I kept one eye on the odometer, because Runquist had told me the house he and Hannah were building, or rather the lane that led to it, was exactly 3.2 miles from the Highway 12 intersection. It was the only private road within several hundred yards, he’d said. And to make sure I didn’t miss it, there was a whitewashed gate between two mossy old stone cairns at the foot of it.
I had no trouble; I saw the lane and the gate and the stone cairns as soon as the odometer clicked off 3.2 miles. I slowed, swung over onto it, stopped in front of the gate. Fir and oak trees grew dense and in close to both Trinity Road and the lane here; all I could see ahead and on either side was a narrow ribbon of crushed gravel that curled away to the left, then vanished into the woods.
When I got out and went over to the gate I found that it wasn’t locked, just fastened with a spring-type latch. I swung it open; drove through and kept on along the lane. There was not much point in reclosing the gate while I was on the property.
The lane hooked through the trees for maybe a hundred yards before it emerged into a good-sized clearing. The far left-hand side of the clearing fell away into a long slope covered with chaparral and scrub pine; that was where the house was being built. It was not difficult to understand why Hannah and Runquist had picked this spot. There was a mostly unobstructed view of the valley from Kenwood on the north to El Verano on the south.
I parked on the near side of the house. It was almost half-finished and bigger than the kind you usually saw up in the mountains. Hannah would have insisted on that, I thought, for show, if for no other reason. The side deck was a good twenty feet wide and jutted out over the slope on steel support girders; the railing for it hadn’t been built yet. The back half of the place was still an open mini-forest of vertical beams. On the grassy earth in front and alongside were stacks of two-by-twos and two-by-fours, sheets of plywood, roofing shingles, bricks, and other building materials.
There wasn’t anything else to see from where I was, no sign of anybody or that anybody had been here recently other than the construction people. After a few seconds I got out into a light mountain breeze that carried the smells of pine and chaparral and cut lumber. Some bees made buzzing noises in a patch of clover nearby; birds chattered at each other in the trees. Otherwise, the clearing was wrapped in that soft kind of stillness you only find in the country.
I went over to the rear of the house, up onto the deck. The floor was empty except for a handful of forgotten nails; equally empty were the unfinished rooms inside. I made my way through the forest of beams anyway, past the skeleton of a massive fireplace and into the roofed-over front section. Most of the walls were up in there, and another fireplace was nearing completion in what was probably the master bedroom. A stack of bricks and a wooden mortar tray were on the floor in front of the hearth.
So was a quilted nylon sleeping bag. And a paper bag that had come from Jack in the Box. And an empty half-pint bottle of sour-mash whiskey.
Those things erased any doubt that Hannah Peterson had come up here on Friday night. And it looked as though she hadn’t been alone when she got here; she wasn’t the type to eat fast-food or to drink sour mash straight out of a bottle. Or, as Runquist had said, to spend the night in a sleeping bag in an unfinished house. Unless she was forced to, I thought. Had she spent the night here with Raymond? There was only the one sleeping bag. Well, if she had slept with him she’d done it under duress and it amounted to rape. Whatever else she was, she wasn’t enough of a coldhearted bitch to willingly sleep with the man who’d just murdered her father.
The sleeping bag was zippered all the way open and folded back; I could see without touching it that there wasn’t anything inside. I sat on my haunches and used thumbs and forefingers to open the paper sack. It contained what I’d expected it to-the remains of a fast-food supper. From the feel of the lone french fry, it had been there a while.
I straightened and took a turn around the room. There wasn’t anything else to find in there; or in any of the remaining rooms. The way it seemed, Raymond had spent Friday night here, with or without Hannah, and then beat it sometime yesterday. But Hannah had been back at her place in Sonoma at nine A.M.; if Raymond was the one in the dark-green car that had pulled into her driveway, where and how had he got the car? And what was he doing at her house? And what had Hannah been loading into her Toyota?
I didn’t like the way things were shaping up. It had all appeared to be coming together, and maybe it still was, but I was beginning to get a sense of twists and turns and hidden hazards, like a bad road on a dark night with
