I told her about the melted candle, explaining how I’d found it. She said she thought I was very clever; I decided not to tell her that my methods had been devised by somebody else. I also mentioned my conversation with Robideaux. By the time I was finished with that I had the car nosing up the little hill toward the second cottage near the fork, the one where the elderly woman was still hoeing among her tomato vines.
The woman’s name, according to the intelligence sheets I’d been given, was Ella Bloom. She and her husband had moved here in the late 1950s, after he sold his plumbing supply company in Eureka in order to pursue a lifelong ambition to pan for gold. He’d never found much of it, evidently, but Mrs. Bloom must have liked it here anyway; she’d stayed on following his death eight years ago.
She quit hoeing and glared out at us as she had earlier. She was tall and angular, and she had a nose like the blade of her hoe and long straggly black hair. Put a tall-crowned hat on her head and a broomstick instead of the hoe in her hand, I thought, and she could have passed for the Wicked Witch of the West.
I got out of the car, went up to the gate in the picket fence that enclosed the yard. I put on a smile and called to her, “Mrs. Bloom?”
“Who are you?” she said suspiciously.
I gave her my name. “I’m an investigator working for Great Western Insurance on the death of Munroe Randall-”
That was as far as I got. The way she reacted, you’d have thought I had told her I intended to rape her and pillage her house. She hoisted up the hoe, waved it over her head, and whacked it down into the ground like an executioner’s sword; then she hoisted it again and jabbed it in my direction.
“Get away from here!” she said in a thin, screechy voice. “Go on, get away!”
“Look, Mrs. Bloom, I only want to ask you a couple of questions-”
“I got nothing to say to you or anybody else about them. You come into my yard, mister, you’ll regret it. I got a shotgun in the house and I keep it loaded.”
“There’s no need for-”
“You want to see it? By God, I’ll show it to you if that’s what it takes!”
She threw down the hoe and went flying across the yard, up onto a porch decorated with painted milk cans, and inside the house. I hesitated for about two seconds and then moved back to the car. There wasn’t much sense in waiting there for her to come out with her shotgun; she wasn’t going to talk, and for all I knew she was loopy enough to start blasting away at me.
“Christ,” I said when I slid into the car. “That woman’s not playing with a full deck.”
Kerry had heard it all but she wasn’t even ruffled. “I don’t think so. Maybe she’s got a right to act that way.”
“What?”
“If somebody was trying to turn my home into a cheap imitation of Disneyland I’d be pretty mad about it too.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but you wouldn’t start threatening people for no damn reason.”
“I might, if I were her age.”
“Bah,” I said. But because Mrs. Bloom had reappeared with a bulky twelve-gauge cradled in both hands, I started the car and swung it into a fast U-turn. Kerry might not have been worried, but she’d never been shot at and I had. People with guns make me nervous, no matter who they are.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The cottage on the adjacent hillock was owned by a couple named Brewster, but with Mrs. Bloom and her shotgun nearby, this was not the time to talk to them. The atmosphere in Musket Creek was every bit as hostile as Frank O’Daniel had suggested it would be; bringing Kerry along had definitely not been a good idea. I considered calling it quits for now and heading back to Redding. But if I did, Kerry would never let me hear the end of it-and I couldn’t believe that everybody up here was screwy enough to threaten us. I decided to try interviewing one more resident. If that went as badly as my other attempts had, then the hell with it and I would come back tomorrow alone.
At the fork I took the left branch that led away from town and up into the wooded slopes to the west. The first house we came to belonged to Paul Robideaux; the second, almost a mile farther along, was a free-form cabin that resembled a somewhat lopsided A-frame, built on sloping ground and bordered on three sides by tall redwoods and Douglas fir. It had been pieced together with salvaged lumber, rough-hewn beams, native stone, redwood thatch, and inexpensive plate glass. A woodbutcher’s house, woodbutchers being people who went off to homestead in the wilds because they didn’t like cities, mass-produced housing, or most people.
When I slowed and eased the car off the road next to a parked Land Rover, Kerry asked, “Who lives here?”
“Hugh Penrose. He’s a writer.”
“What does he write?”
“Articles and books on natural history. He used to be a professor at Chico State. Apparently he’s an eccentric.”
“Mmm. How about letting me come with you this time? You don’t seem to be doing too well one-on- one.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea-”
“Phooey,” she said, and got out and went up toward the cabin.
Well, damn! But there was nothing I could do except to follow her, telling myself this was the last time I brought her along on an investigation.
We went up a set of curving limb-and-plank stairs to a platform deck. From inside I could hear the sound of a typewriter rattling away. I knocked on the door. The typewriter kept on going for half a minute; then it stopped, and there were footsteps, and pretty soon the door opened.
The guy who looked out at us was one of the ugliest men I had ever seen. He was about five and a half feet tall, fat, with a bulbous nose and misshapen ears and cheeks pitted with acne scars, and his bullet-shaped head was as bald as an egg. His eyes were small and mean, but there was more pain in them than anything else. This was a man who had lived more than fifty years, I thought, and who had suffered through every one of them.
He looked at Kerry, looked away from her as if embarrassed, and fixed his gaze on me. “Yes? What is it?”
“Mr. Penrose?”
“Yes?”
Before I could open my mouth again, Kerry said cheerfully, “We’re the Wades, Bill and Kerry. From San Francisco. We’re thinking of moving up here-you know, homesteading. I hope you don’t mind us calling on you like this.”
“How did you know my name?” Penrose asked. He was still looking at me.
“The fellow at the mercantile gave it to us,” Kerry said. “He told us you were a homesteader and we thought we’d come by and look at your place and see how you liked living here.”
I could have kicked her. It was one of those flimsy, spontaneous stories that sound as phony as they are. But she got away with it, by God, at least for the moment. All Penrose said was, “Which fellow at the mercantile?” and he said it without suspicion.
“Mr. Coleclaw.”
“Which Mr. Coleclaw?”
“I didn’t know there was more than one. He was in his twenties and the only one around.” Kerry glanced at me. “Did he give you his first name, dear?”
“Gary,” I said. “Dear.”
“Poor young fool,” Penrose said. “Poor lost lad.”
“Pardon?”
“He has rocks in his head,” Penrose said, and burst out laughing. The laugh went on for maybe three seconds, like the barking of a sea lion, exposing yellowed and badly fitting dentures; then it cut off as if somebody
