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.”
