“No? That isn’t what you told the county sheriffs men. According to their report, you were one of the residents who helped dig the firebreak.”
“Is that so?” Robideaux said. “Well, I had to talk to the law. I don’t have to talk to you.”
“That’s right, you don’t. But suppose I told you I can prove this fire was deliberately set. Would you want to talk to me then?”
His eyes got narrow. “How could you prove that? You find something in the debris?”
“Maybe.”
“What is it?”
“I have to tell that to the law,” I said. “I don’t have to tell it to you.”
He took a jerky half-step toward me, the menacing kind. I stayed where I was, setting myself; he was not big enough for me to be intimidated. But if he’d had any ideas about mixing it up, he thought better of them. He turned abruptly and stalked around to the driver’s side of the jeep.
Only he didn’t get in right away. Instead he pointed a finger in my direction and said, “You think Randall was murdered, is that it? Well, why don’t you go sniff around those partners of his? One of them killed him if anybody did.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because nobody here did it, that’s why. There’s nothing for you in Musket Creek.”
“Nothing but trouble, you mean?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
He got into the jeep. Fifteen seconds later he was barreling off down the road, trailing dust, headed toward the pines to the west.
I stood staring after him. And wondering, not for the first time in the past two days, if there wasn’t a lot more going on in this business than I’d first thought.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Kerry still hadn’t come back. Between my search of the fire wreckage and my conversation with Robideaux, over an hour had passed since she’d wandered off. I looked over at the ghosts, but there was no sign of her. Now what’s she up to? I wondered. I shed my trenchcoat, locked it and the wax-laden stone cup into the trunk, used a rag to wipe off my hands, and set out looking for her.
She wasn’t anywhere on the south side of the street. I crossed over, went down a weed-choked alleyway between two of the derelicts. The grass was high back there, a field of it extending thirty yards or so to the creek. A railed footbridge spanned the shallow but swift-moving stream; on the other side, a pair of half-obliterated ruts led up one of the hillocks to a collapsed building at its crest-what had once been a church or a schoolhouse, judging from the remains of a belltower. Pieces of machinery, the segments of a sluicebox, and other broken and rusted mining equipment littered the grass on both sides of the creek. Some of it was so badly weathered and busted up that you couldn’t tell what it had been used for.
An irregular path led through the grass from the footbridge and intersected another path that paralleled the rear of the buildings. I got onto the parallel one and went along calling Kerry’s name. She finally answered me from inside one of the ghosts-the two-storied hotel or saloon. The back entrance wasn’t boarded up the way the front was and the door hung open on one hinge; I went inside.
She was standing in the middle of a big, gloomy, high-ceilinged room. Enough sunlight penetrated, through chinks where the wall boards had warped away from the studs, to let me see what the room had to offer. Not much. A balcony ran around three sides at the second-floor level, with three doorways sans doors 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 topple at any time. So did the crooked staircase leaning in one corner down at this level. The floor looked like what was left of a junk shop that had gone out of business. Some old broken chairs and tables; the rusty skeleton of a sheet-iron stove and its piping; the door to a steel safe, circa 1880, with faded gold lettering on it that said Diebold, Norris amp; Co., Chicago; a native-stone fireplace with most of the stones lying mounded on the hearth; a crudely made hotel reception desk, part of which was hidden by a pigeonhole shelf that had collapsed on top of it; and random piles of dirt and other detritus.
“What’d you do?” I asked Kerry. “Bust in here?”
“No. The back door was ajar. Isn’t this place wonderful?”
“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 an almost-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. It was a room maybe twelve-by-twelve that had probably been built for the hotel clerk’s use. There was 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 or fool’s gold, rocks with designs, rocks that gleamed with mica or maybe genuine gold particles, and curious-shaped bits of wood. 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 furnishings.
“Pack rats,” I said. “That’s who lives here.”
Kerry frowned 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 gold mines up in the hills-not any more. Besides, if anybody had one, what would he want to come all the way down here for?”
“To forage for food, maybe.”
“Hah,” 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.”
“Kerry, I’m on a job. The fun can come later.”
“Oh, you think so? Maybe not.”
“Is that a 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.”
She started back across the hotel lobby, leaving me to shut the door to the pack rat’s nest. 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 cheerful again.
I sighed a little. Being with Kerry sometimes made me feel as if my head were as full of dusty junk as that room inside the hotel. And that no matter how long I tried, I would never quite get it all sorted out and put where it belonged.
